The Girls of No Return (11 page)

“Well, you're famous now,” I said. “Resident badass.” I wanted to lean over and nudge her with my shoulder or something, but I didn't feel steady. Sure, she was talking to me now — but how long would that last before she realized her mistake?

“I'll take that as a compliment,” she said. “And here's one in return: I have a feeling that you're something of a badass yourself.”

“Not really,” I said, though I wished it were true.

She considered her cigarette, which had burned down to about a centimeter of glowing ember. “Maybe not in the traditional way,” she mused, “but on a much more . . . intrinsic level. Like you're wounded but fierce. No. Like your wounds
make
you fierce. I've watched you,” she added. “You don't seem to want to have much to do with the other girls around here.” Then she paused. “Not that I blame you. They all seem so — well,
tame
, I guess.” She laughed. “Does that even make sense?”

“Yeah, it does.” I paused, and then kept going. “Their problems are all so obvious, you know? It's a little ridiculous.”

“Yeah. They're trying too hard.” Gia ground what remained of her cigarette into the sand and then flicked it out toward the lake. “So, hey,” she said, “you told me about your mother, but you didn't tell me too much about your dad. Let me guess: You're nothing like him, are you?”

“Not hardly,” I said. “He's . . .”
He's what?
Good with numbers? A practical man? Just plain oblivious? “I think he thinks I'm an alien.”

“That's what I thought,” Gia said, smiling. “Some people take after their parents. Some people are
reactions
to their parents. I think you and I are in the second group.” She dusted her hands on her thighs.

A reaction. That sounded about right. “What's your dad like?” I asked.

“Dave?” Gia shrugged. “He's not a bad guy, really. Just busy.”

I'd always wanted to call my father by his first name, but he didn't like the idea; he refused to answer when I tried, and told me that, as far as I was concerned, his legal name should be “Dad Wallace.” I loved that Gia got away with it. “Does he have to travel all the time for his work?” I asked. “I mean, he's probably got some top secret clearance or something, so can he even tell you where he's going?” I imagined Gia's father's passport, unintentionally left on a table. Gia flipping through it, taking notes.

Gia stretched her arms in the air, and then hugged herself. “Yeah, he travels. But my guess is there's no place that mystifies him as much as his own house,” she said, and yawned. “There's nothing more frightening to a man than a daughter.”

I'd thought I knew what she was talking about, but suddenly I wasn't so sure. “Why?” I asked.

“Oh, that sounded too dramatic.” She laughed lightly. “I meant to say that even the best parents can't understand their own children. You know?”

I nodded. “We're not even on the same page as them. We're not even reading the same book.”

“Right.”

We sat quietly together for a minute or so. I tried to think of things to talk about, but everything sounded childish in my head, so I waited for Gia to keep the conversation going. She didn't say anything, though, and when I glanced at her from the corner of my eye, she was staring out at the water as though she could see precisely what was on the other side. Then she stood up. “Man, all this philosophical talk has tired me out. I'm exhausted.” She held out her hand formally, and I shook it. “Good night, you old so-and-so. Pleasure doing business with you.”

I laughed. “Good night.” I watched as her shadow receded toward the cabins. Then I stubbed out my own cigarette. I held the butt in my hand for a few moments before flinging it into the water.

 

Our nightly smoke breaks were one of the reasons why everyone looked forward to Mail Call so much. We didn't hold out much hope for our letters; Bev read through each one with a Sharpie pen, and she carefully blackened out anything that had to do with drugs or sex or good times in general, so there was only a slim chance of getting any real gossip from the outside world. (She also crossed out anything that would wound us, cruel messages from family or friends we might have hurt before we came to Alice Marshall.) Any gossip we did manage to get was passed around the school like a joint. We had no TV, no radio, and no iPods, so we were hungry for news of any sort. But gossip was a rare and unpredictable commodity. What everyone really wanted, what we looked forward to the most, were the care packages: candy, smokes, maybe a real letter hidden in the fold of a book's jacket flap.

There were no care packages coming in for me, not even straight-up, honest ones with writing paper and gummy bears, pens with their ink cartridges still intact. My father sent me, instead, twice-weekly postcards that he obviously bought at the college bookstore. On the backs of photos of “The Student Union,” “Sunset Over Main Campus,” or “Bruno at Night” (just a black, blank card), he would write messages so mundane it was as if he were challenging himself to lower the bar.

I never wrote back.

I got perhaps the best card a few days after Gia taught me how to roll a cigarette.

Hot summer in Bruno so far. Terri's mowing the lawn, says hi. I might put shelves in the dining room. Nothing on TV. Thinking about you. Dad.

His greatest work yet. It was strange, but my father had somehow figured out a way to imply that the very last thing he would do, after all other options had been meticulously exhausted, was think about his daughter.

It warmed my heart. It really did. It warmed my heart so much that I kind of snorted through my nose.

“What's so funny?” asked Gwen. She had just drained a glass of milk with her dinner, and I could see the faintest white mustache on her upper lip.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Hand it over,” said Boone.

“It's nothing.”

“Give it.” She wasn't going to ask again.

I tried to look bored as I handed her the postcard. She passed the card around the table, letting the other girls read it. I snuck a look over at Gia's table, where she was quietly eating a fruit salad, spearing each piece individually with her fork.

“Is this what we have to look forward to in middle age?” asked Jules, putting the postcard facedown in the center of the table.

“If so, then shoot me now,” said Gwen. “It's a classic — one for the archives.” She looked again at the postcard. “Who's Terri? Your mom?”

“Stepmother,” I said. I ran my fingers over the plastic knife by my plate, feeling its dull ridge against my thumb.

“Where's your mom?” Gwen was apparently suffering from a bout of curiosity.

“Dead. And no, I don't want to talk about it,” I snapped.

The table was quiet for a minute. Gwen blushed, and she looked at Karen.

“Well, anyway,” said Karen quickly, glancing at the card again, “why did he put a period after his name? Does he think he's worthy of his own sentence?”

“Seems fine to me,” said Boone. “At least he knows how to spell.”

I looked at her as she pushed her chair back and rested her feet lightly on the edge of the table. As far as I knew, she had only received one letter since I had arrived. She had walked around for days with it folded evenly in the back pocket of her baggy jeans. Almost the entire letter had been blackened out.

“Girls.” Bev was standing by our table. No one had noticed her walking over, and we all sat up a bit straighter. Jules handed me my postcard silently and then stared down at her plate. Bev looked at Boone with a blank expression on her face until Boone sighed heavily and took her feet off the edge of the table. There was a crack as her chair's front two legs hit the floor. “Thank you,” said Bev. She glanced around our table. “I just came from the Bathhouse,” she said.

Boone groaned.

“I suppose I don't need to elaborate, then,” said Bev. “Boone, thank you for volunteering. Lida, you may assist her. I'll check it again before campfire.” She turned and walked back to the teachers' table.

“Christ,” said Boone. She glared across the table at me. “I hope you have an inner Mary Poppins, Townie. That place is a sty.”

This was going to be just wonderful.

The morning chores were doled out daily by cabin, according to a chart on the giant dry-erase board that hung next to the doors of the Mess Hall. We rotated throughout the week between trash pickup, kitchen patrol, campfire prep, Bathhouse duty, Waterfront maintenance, and the general upkeep of the classroom buildings, which usually just meant throwing away candy wrappers in the Rec Lodge and sweeping the porches of some of the other buildings. Of these chores, Bathhouse duty was the worst. Obviously. We did our chores directly after breakfast, and there was nothing less appealing than pulling the rubber mats from the shower stalls and hanging them outside in the cold morning air, fingers like icicles and the heavy mats slapping against the front of our jeans as we wrestled them over the railing that surrounded the Bathhouse. We felt dirty even before the day had begun.

The beauty of it was, if Bev didn't like what she saw as she roamed the grounds throughout the day — if she found stray life jackets on the beach or the salt and pepper shakers hadn't been refilled in the Mess Hall — she “selected” a couple of girls from the assigned cabin to finish the job right after dinner. The randomness of her selections, coupled with the blaming and cursing that followed in the negligent cabin, ensured that we did our chores thoroughly and efficiently.

The only problem was the Bathhouse. If Bev wandered in after canoe lessons or Waterfront Hour finished, she was likely to find the wreckage of a tsunami. And even though she knew, she
knew
that the mess had only just been made, she would still force two girls from the cabin who had cleaned it so impeccably that morning to go back in and “finish” the job.

While cleaning the Bathhouse twice in one day was unsavory, it wasn't nearly as disturbing now as the fact that I'd be doing it with Boone. Alone. On a good day, she was intimidating. I couldn't imagine what she'd be like when she was irate. And I hadn't yet been alone in a room with her.

Boone and I made our way to the Bathhouse after dinner, each of us carrying a bucket. Boone had the mop and a box of trash bags. I had the toilet scrubber and an assortment of yellowed and flaking sponges.

Inside, the Bathhouse looked like the “aftermath” scene in one of those B-grade horror movies, the one where the psycho comes into the peaceful summer camp and wipes everyone out with a single breath, and they never have time to clean up the mess they were casually making right before they died. The bench in the middle of the room had been tipped on its side. One of the sinks was dripping, and there was toothpaste forming a little beard around the faucet of the other one. The toilet seats had paper stuck to them in places, or they hadn't been flushed. And the floor — well, let's just say that the floor was about ready to birth its own organisms.

Boone shook her head. “What an embarrassment.” She walked to a corner of the room and picked up a soggy towel, letting it drop back onto the floor with a wet thud. “Little rich girls don't know how to clean up after themselves,” she said to herself. “They need a lesson in personal hygiene.”

I didn't know if she was including me in this group, and I didn't want to ask. I had the feeling that some of the messiest girls — I-bankers, for the most part — were going to find gum in their hairbrushes and mousse in their shoes by morning, and I didn't want Boone to think I was one of them.

That's why, when she growled, “You gonna help me clean this craphouse, or what?” I let out the breath that I'd been holding and jumped into action.

We started cleaning, both of us focused on getting the job done as quickly as possible. Thank God we had gloves. After about thirty minutes, we could see that we'd made some progress, but it was still this side of disgusting.

“Makes me want to wear socks in the shower,” I said, and Boone raised her eyebrows.

“Where I'm from, you'd be smart to wear socks in the shower all the time — in the shower, in bed, even in the public pool.”

Where I'm from.
I'd heard her mention “the mill” a few times while we were all eating in the Mess Hall, so I had an idea where she was talking about. Still, I don't know what emboldened me to ask.

“Are you talking about the old lumber mill in Minster?” It was the only mill I'd ever heard of. “Is that where you're from?”

Boone looked up from where she was mopping out the shower stalls, and I was suddenly afraid she'd come at me with the blunt end of the mop handle. But the words were already out there, humid and suffocating in the air.

“You want to know where I'm from,” she said.

I nodded, though not very convincingly.

“Well, Townie, get this: I'm from a joke,” she said. “I'm from a mill town without any mill. Do you know what that does to a place?”

I shook my head. I vaguely remembered hearing that the Minster lumber mill closed down a few years before, but I hadn't thought any more about it since then.

“Take your average mill town,” Boone explained, leaning the mop up against the sink and drawing a large circle in the air with her hands. “You've got your tract houses, you've got your overgrown ball field, you've got your trailers and churches and drunks. Right?”

Her description sounded real enough, so I nodded again.

“Now imagine the town, only take away the mill. Take away the houses, the field, the churches, the jobs. What have you got?”

“Trailers and drunks?” I answered nervously.

“Trailers and drunks.” She pointed her finger in the middle of her imaginary circle. “And it's so goddamned pathetic that it grabs you by the throat and chokes you.” Her voice was husky. She turned and picked up the mop again. “Unless you choke it first.”