The First Time She Drowned (10 page)

It was a moment marked only by temporary joy, because even then, I intuitively understood that the cost of being a girl in my house was much, much higher.

BACK IN MY
dorm room, I glance at my schedule for the first time, thinking about what Zoey said, about how shocked she was that I’ve missed so much school. My next class is at 9:00 A.M. tomorrow. I shove the schedule into the drawer where I don’t have to see it, and then turn off the lights and jump into bed and stare into the empty, looming darkness above me. I try to keep perfectly still just as I did when I was a kid, as if to move would invite the ghosts. I imagine them there, under my bed and behind the dresser, throwing their great big shadows across the wall like plant life swaying to and fro at the bottom of the ocean. Waiting for me to go to sleep so they can haunt my nightmares.

Across the hall, Zoey’s music continues to play, so warm and inviting against the silence of my room. I think of the person I was just a short while ago when we were hanging out—a silly college student, a rock star, maybe even someone a little bit happy. Someone with a friend. Before I can stop myself I jump out of bed.

A moment later, I am standing at Zoey’s door, and she is looking at me curiously. I take a deep breath and start coughing again.

“So hey,” I say when my lungs have settled. “My English class is at nine tomorrow. I think I’m gonna go.”

“Excellent!” she says. “We can walk together. I have Statistics then.”

“Great!” I say. “Well, not the Statistics part, obviously . . .” Then I continue to stand there awkwardly.

“Was there something else?” she says.

“No, nope, that’s it.” I start to go back to my room and then stop and make myself turn around. “Well . . . actually, um . . . I was just wondering if you might want a roommate so bad you’d settle for a sick one?”

As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I start to regret them. I don’t know how I’ll manage the constant presence of another person, how I’ll keep my secrets hidden, keep the old me from leaking out.

“Wow, you sure know how to sell yourself,” Zoey says.

“So . . . that’s a no then?”

“Oh stop!” she says. “I’d love a roommate. Go get your stuff.”

• • •

In the morning, my alarm clock wakes me with a start from the first good night’s sleep I’ve had in weeks. Across the room Zoey sits up, glances at the time—6:00
A
.
M
.—then at me like I’m nuts and falls right back to sleep.

“Sorry,” I whisper to her. Today is a big day and I need a few hours to get ready. After a quick shower, I try on my entire closet, which isn’t much, decide I hate everything and put on the least shabby thing I own.

I unpack my makeup and sit in front of the floor-length mirror to begin the slow process of applying my face. Every stroke of color has to be just right, every hair in place, every imperfection covered up.

Five minutes before we are due to leave, Zoey’s alarm clock goes off, blaring rock music and scaring the shit out of me. She gets
up, brushes her teeth in the bathroom, sticks a comb quickly and pointlessly through her hair, steps into her flip-flops and is ready to go.

I apply one final coat of mascara.

“Ready,” I say. I take one last look in the mirror in the hopes that I might hold on to the solid image I see there once I look away.

We head out amidst a day that is clear-skied and early-autumn breezy. When we get to the quad, Zoey spots two of her friends from class. She calls to them and they stop and wait.

“I’ll catch up with you later,” she says to me. “We usually have lunch at The Rat if you want to meet us.”

“Okay,” I say. “Um . . . where is it?”

She laughs and shakes her head. “How about I meet you here around noon and we can walk over together.”

“Okay, sounds good.” I watch her run off toward her other friends, the three of them greeting one another with big hugs. “Wait!” I shout after her, realizing I forgot to ask her how to get to the English department. But it’s too late. Zoey has disappeared inside the building.

I stand alone in the courtyard as groups of students pass me on the lawn, seeming so effortlessly at home with books tucked confidently under their arms and friends by their side. I imagine my mother was like them when she was in school here: popular and full of laughter, navigating her way through this world so easily.

A couple of girls in cute outfits and ponytails approach. I move toward them in the hope that they can point me in the direction of
the English department. One of them looks over at me. I smile and then open my mouth to speak but she gives me the once-over and looks away. In that instant of her dismissal, I am ugly again, suddenly aware of myself in my outdated, oversized clothes.

I push my shoulders back and keep walking, my heart already working to repair the tiny fracture, whether real or imagined. Two guys pass by and look at me in that way like they think I’m pretty, and I feel a sense of vindication, and somewhere just behind that, a sense of emptiness.

The campus clears as students disperse inside. I stand helplessly in the middle of the courtyard.

“You lost?” someone suddenly says behind me. The unexpected kindness makes my throat ache. I turn to see a guy in surf shorts and flip-flops. He has happy eyes and light brown hair that is slightly wet and sticking out in all directions. Something happens in the space of air between us, like the wind has stopped there. Embarrassed, I look away.

“Nope,” I say like an idiot. “I’m fine.”

He crosses over to me.

“May I?” He takes the schedule hanging uselessly from my hand. “English Lit. That’s my class too. We’re in Johnson Hall. Over there on the left.”

“Right. I knew that.”

“I’m Chris.”

“Cassie O’Malley,” I say with ridiculous formality as I extend my hand.

He looks down at my hand with surprise and then shakes it. “I saw you on the first day by the girls’ freshman dorm.”

“You saw me?” The idea is alarming to me, both being seen unaware and being seen at all. Immediately my guard is up.

“You were wearing winter clothes but had sand on your feet.” He laughs at the image.

“Oh yeah. I’d just come from the ocean.”

“From the ocean, huh? What are you, a mermaid?”

He smiles, and something fast and electrical shoots up me. Startled, I step back. “What are you, a dork?”

There is a moment of shock for us both, and then he looks down at my schedule and hands it to me.

I struggle for a joke or an apology. Instead I pull out a cigarette and light it, cueing him to leave.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you in there,” he says and heads toward the building. At the door he pauses and looks back and holds me in his gaze for a long beat before he disappears inside.

WITH THE COURTYARD
now empty of people, I plop down on a bench and finish my cigarette. I’m going to be late for class, but I’m too busy trying to manage my humiliation to care. I gently remind myself that I’ve had no practice talking to guys who are cute and completely sane, but all that does is remind me that I’m an ex–mental patient with a fucked-up past, which reminds me that no guy would ever like me anyway. Because come on, if you can’t even make your own parents like you, what hope is there for anyone else?

I think of my mother and all her exciting college romances, and I imagine how different she must have been around guys, how cool and self-assured and normal she must have acted. I remember the first time she told me about Dunton. I was around ten at the time, and I had followed her into her art room, where the sharp smells of paint and turpentine surrounded us. I’d always loved to watch her there, sitting at an easel above an old drop cloth. She was still then, and I could sit inside her stillness, feel the frantic batting wings inside me quiet.

That day she was painting the deep end of an ocean with a white ladder descending, and her brushstrokes were little waves that lapped at the canvas with care. I had brought my markers in and sat just inside the door, keeping one eye on my drawing and
the other on my mother sitting in a slow peaceful trance at her easel, brushing blue.

She had her back to me and I didn’t think she knew I was there until she raised her head from her work. “Do you ever feel like you’re disappearing?” she said.

She turned and searched my eyes, and for a moment I felt so understood and loved because that was exactly how I felt, how I had felt for so long that I could not remember when it started or a time when I felt solid. It seemed to me as if my brother, Matthew, was real in the way that love made the Velveteen Rabbit real, whereas only the act of being his shadow had kept me from being erased. And now I thought my mother finally saw it, saw that I too needed to be painted in, made into something visible. So I nodded yes,
yes, I have felt like I was disappearing,
but she had already turned away.

She stood up and went to the window. She took a deep, slow inhale and let it out with a sigh. She said that the light outside and the smell of fall approaching reminded her of college. “I was so happy there,” she said.

“Why?” I asked, because I wanted her to be happy here, not there, and I needed to know what made the difference.

And then all at once she was telling me of her life at Dunton, and so vivid was her detail that I quickly forgot myself in her memories. I could almost see the faded brick buildings of the university and smell the ripened leaves blowing at her back as she darted through autumnal days youthful and free, clutching books filled with the promise of discovery. She talked of being homecoming queen and riding a parade float past streets of screaming fans who threw confetti that fell on her like colored snow. She told me about
all her many boyfriends, the one who buttoned up her coat on a cold day at a football game, the one who walked across the entire campus in a thunderstorm to bring her soup when she was sick, the one who kissed her for so many hours straight that she wondered later if it was really possible to go that long without breathing. And as she spoke, the flush of young love seemed resurrected on her face and in the lilting of her voice so that the room became electrified with her memories.

I sat perfectly still and listened. I loved that she was talking to me and me alone.

“Oh, I wish I were young again,” she said, staring out the window. “My whole life was ahead of me then. There was so much . . . potential. So much hope.”

She put her hands on the screen. I wanted to follow her there, to see what she saw. It
was
possible, I thought, as I waited for her to speak again, to go for such a long time without breathing.

“You know,” she said finally, “I never loved your father. In fact, I wanted to throw up the first time he kissed me. Isn’t that awful?”

I looked down at my hands, to escape both her words and the weight of the betrayal I was committing in listening to her speak about my father that way. But I was bound to him only by pity; I was bound to my mother by something much stronger, something I could feel, even then, tightening around me. I was bound to her by pain.

“I wish I could go back in time and . . . shake myself for marrying him. I don’t know what I was thinking . . . or running from. My parents, probably. And your father was so eager and in love with me, I think I just felt like ‘Here is a man who will never leave
me.’ But it’s not enough, is it? I guess I kept hoping he could be what I needed, even after it was clear there was no hope for that.”

I didn’t say anything. It made me too sad to think about needing something you could never get, about there being no hope.

She turned to me then. “Tell me something,” she said. Her eyes searched my face, feverishly bright. Even from a distance, I could see her need, feel it. I watched her, feeling pinned to the floor as if absorbing the weight of her regret through the atmosphere. “I deserve to be happy, don’t I?”

The question shocked me, the idea that there could be any doubt. “Yes, Mom! Of course!” I nodded furiously, as if convincing her would fix everything, as if the sheer urgency of my want for her to be happy again would make her so.

“You know what?” she said. “You’re right. You are absolutely right.” She got up and shut the window as if to put an exclamation point on some internal decision she had made. She seemed completely light again, full of hope. “You’re a good girl. Thanks for being my confidant. I know what I need to do.”

She walked past me and patted me on the head. “Don’t say anything about this to Matty, okay? It would upset him.”

“Okay,” I said. “I won’t.”

She smiled down at me in the way I had wanted her to for so long, and I was sure I had finally found my way into my mother’s love. So I didn’t understand, as I lay on the art room floor like the sheet that captured her spills, why I suddenly felt like throwing up.

Two days later, my mother discovered she was pregnant with Gavin.

• • •

I stub out my cigarette, go inside and head straight to the bathroom to reapply my lipstick and to tell myself that I don’t care what that stupid surfer boy thinks of me. Already I’m exhausted, like I’m holding my breath underwater, and all I want to do is run back to my dorm room and shut the door so I can breathe again.

Twenty minutes after the hour I sneak into class and take the first open seat near the door.

“You’re late,” someone says, and I turn to see Chris sitting catty-corner in front of me. He smiles and the rest of the room fades for a second, leaving me with only a deafening self-consciousness. I push my seat back and the chair makes a loud, embarrassing screech. The whole class turns.

“Where are your books?” he whispers.

“Bookstore,” I say, and he laughs.

He tears a piece of paper from his notebook and hands it to me so I have something to write on.

“Thanks,” I say. My face is burning.

The teacher, a small round man with a few strands of hair slicked over his bald head, drones on at the front of the class. I try to focus, but it takes so much work just to sit here and not flee, so much mental energy to keep track of each person in the room, to keep my face and body angled in a way that I imagine looks pretty, to be so perfectly in control of myself and my surroundings that nothing gets in and nothing leaks out.

I look around at everyone scribbling like crazy into their
notebooks and I wonder how they have the energy to care about poetry when just surviving takes so much effort. To make matters worse, every few minutes I catch Chris staring at me and my nerves start jangling and my heart pounds loud and fast, beating beyond my chest and into my fingers, my stomach, my ears.

“What?” I mouth.

He puts his hands out and scrunches up his shoulders as if to say, “What?” back.

I face forward, pretend I have no peripheral vision, force myself to listen to the teacher over the surge of blood in my ears. He is quoting “Prufrock”: “‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws.’”

Chris turns around again.

“Seriously,” I hiss. “Why do you keep looking at me?”

He shrugs and the skin on his neck turns red. “I dunno,” he says. “Maybe I like your face.”

And even though I have spent an enormous amount of energy trying to make myself pretty so people will like me, his words are like seawater to the shipwrecked: I’m tempted to drink them in, and at the same time, they feel dangerously deceptive. Because it’s not true, it’s not possible, it’s not my face he likes, it’s the makeup I’m covering it with.

So I go ahead and give him the finger.