The Girls of No Return (21 page)

“I know I did,” I said. “She's . . . It's . . . I just don't like to talk about it, you know? It's just . . . too
big
to explain.”

“Is it?” she asked. Then her expression softened. “Okay,” she said. “But you didn't have to lie to me. You never have to lie to me. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I mean, I wouldn't. I won't.”

She kept reading, past what I'd said about my mother. She read about the things I'd done to myself and why I'd done them. She turned each page carefully, as though she was afraid of ripping the paper. She read it all. Then she closed the journal and handed it to me. She looked out over the lake, focusing on something just out of sight. We sat like that for a few minutes.

Gia finally broke the silence. She tilted her head. “What about friends?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

She tapped the cover of the book lightly with her index finger. “I mean, you don't mention any friends in here, not even before you started to . . .” She cleared her throat. “Didn't you ever have any?”

My face flooded with embarrassment. “I thought maybe you could tell,” I said, lifting my palms up helplessly. “No friends.”

“That's hard to believe.” She reached up and squeezed my shoulder. “I mean, I knew you didn't feel at home in high school, but — none? Really?”

“None.” I'd always felt that, in high schools and junior highs across the country, it's as if there's an unmarked date in the school calendar by which time everyone needs to have found their people. Unmarked because unspoken. And if you miss that date, if you're absent, say, and you don't know that the deadline for finding people is
today
, then that's it. You're shit out of luck.

And I must have been absent that day. Oh sure, I knew a few other gangly and awkward girls to nod to in the halls, could even sit silently near them while I ate my lunch, trying not to make any noise when I took my sandwich out of its plastic wrap. But that was as far as it went. I never found my people. No one ever found me. And who are you, if you're no one to anyone?

I knew that it was normal to feel awkward and out of place in high school. Made-for-TV movies and sappy books with watercolor paintings on their covers assured me that everyone goes through this, everyone thinks they don't belong at some point. But I knew something else. I knew that, after a minor public humiliation or two (a de-pantsing in gym class, the wrong outfit on School Spirit Day), the heroines of all those movies and books found their place. They found their people. They looked back on the hell that had been their lives and realized that they had
learned
something from it. They were better people for having been outcasts.

But what about the girl who was so forgettable that her own mother couldn't remember to call? The girl who was so wrong, so incongruous with the world that the woman who
made
her had to leave?

Gia stared at me intently for a long minute. Finally, she set the journal down between us. “Can I see?” Her eyes traveled down the length of my body.

“No,” I said quickly.

“Okay, Lida.” She reached over and touched my hand, which was still wrapped around one of my knees. “I had no idea.”

The water slapped against the dock more insistently, and I peered across the lake at the dusky cloud that was just edging over the granite cliffs. I shivered. “Oh, you know,” I said, “maybe I was just bored.” I tried to keep my tone light. “Or fucked-up.”

“No.” Gia tapped the journal again. “This is real pain.” She stared at me, blinking, and then she shook her head lightly and smiled, letting me off the hook. “Well, you definitely tried, didn't you? That takes imagination, at least. It's pretty impressive.”

Her hand was still on mine.

“Thanks?” I laughed nervously. “Actually, I think it's kind of embarrassing. It's not like I
did
anything, really. Now, it just seems a little silly.”

Her gaze was level, probing. “There's nothing silly about it.” She squeezed my hand once and let go.

I let out a long, relieved breath. “Sorry,” I said, talking quickly. “I don't know why I'm so nervous. It's just that I've never told anyone about it.” I paused. “Hey — don't tell anyone, okay? I'm not . . . It's not . . . something I want to share.”

“It's in the vault,” Gia said, pointing to her chest. “Where all secrets stay hidden.” She grinned.

When Gia smiled at me like that, my whole body heated up a few degrees. “Okay,” I said, hoping she didn't notice the ridiculous blush that I could feel spreading down my neck. “Now you.”

“Sure thing.” Gia rocked forward and reached into the back pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a single sheet of paper that had been folded into a perfect square. Slowly, she unfolded it and set it on the dock so that the pencil drawing was facing me.

It was a sketch of the school grounds. The cabins were little boxes wearing lopsided, triangular caps. Gia had drawn pointy waves where Bob was supposed to be, placed symmetrically around a long rectangle that I assumed was the dock. Each tree looked exactly the same as the next: a child's rendition of a Christmas tree. It was the picture I had wished I had drawn when Amanda first told us to share our maps: a picture of nothing.

“You didn't expect me to take this seriously, did you?” Gia said. She laughed at my silence. “Look, Lida, I think it's great that you listened to Margaret and mapped your world.” She put her hand on my knee. “I really do. It's just not quite my style.” She sat back and studied me. Raising an eyebrow, she said, “Don't be upset.”

I stared at the picture. I had the urge to rip it up and throw each tiny shred in the lake. Instead, I said, “Why would I be mad?”

“I don't know,” she said. “Look — I don't want to demean what you've done.” She pointed to my journal, which lay on the dock between us like a gaudy, embarrassing hat. “If I had something like that to tell, I would. Believe me, I'd tell you.”

“So do it anyway,” I said, surprising myself. “Tell me something about your world.” I wadded up her drawing in my fist and pitched it in the water.

She watched as the ball of paper bobbed on the lake's surface, slowly absorbing the water until it began to sink. She tilted her head, her eyes half-closed. When the paper was no longer visible, she opened them again and looked at me. “You already know everything.”

I don't know anything
, I thought. “Tell me something I don't know.” I sounded belligerent, almost angry. I felt stupid. Stupid for writing everything down, stupid for sharing it with Gia. My little story was probably as dramatic to her as a trip to the grocery store, all of it printed so carefully in that goddamn purple unicorn journal.

Gia looked back at the beach, where the two girls were pointing at something on one of the poster boards and laughing. “Something you don't know.” Her eyes shifted from side to side, as though she was sifting through images in her head. “It's not like I have any one Thing,” she said slowly, choosing each word carefully. “So there's not much for me to talk about. What particularly do you want to discuss?” The voice of a mother, humoring her difficult child.

“I don't know,” I said, fumbling. I took a deep breath. “Okay. Easy. Why are you here?”

Gia smiled. She stood up and stretched her arms to either side of her, turning toward the lake. “It's beautiful here, isn't it?” She looked down at me and then squatted so that her face was only a foot from mine. “Fine. Get ready to be amazed.” She laughed. “I'm at Alice Marshall because the other schools I attended were bad fits. They couldn't give me what I needed.”

“What couldn't the other schools give you?” I met Gia's gaze, pressing on. “What did you need?”

“Oh, you know. An adequate education, for one. Not that I'm getting that here.” She smiled and shook her head. “I don't know — all the other girls had these
issues
, you know? Teachers too. No one took the time to get to know me. It was kind of like the thing with Boone. Making assumptions before they even met me.” Gia shrugged her shoulders. “Nothing huge, Lida. No big crisis. They were just bad fits. Sorry to disappoint.” She jostled me with her elbow.

It was all I was going to get. I shouldn't have been surprised. The funny thing was, Gia might have thought she was really telling me something about herself. But these stories didn't tell me anything about the way she felt at night, when she stood completely alone on the beach and looked toward the thin black line of shore that rimmed the other side of the lake. Or how she felt when she came upon a rabbit's delicate bones on Red Dot Trail, bleached and picked clean by other scavengers. Or what images filtered through her mind just before sleep, when the body has little resistance to the memories and desires that are kept at bay in the waking hours. And that —
that —
was what I really wanted to know.

I sighed, defeated. “Can you tell me anything else?” I asked, trying one last time.

Gia pointed to her chest and smiled at me. “The vault, Lida. The vault.”

The bell rang, signaling lunch, and I stood and dusted off my hands on my knees. I grabbed the journal and stuck it in the waistband of my pants, like I'd seen Boone do.

“Well,” I said lamely, “lunch.”

Gia laughed. “Astute observation.”

We started down the dock. I turned to head toward the Mess Hall when I felt Gia's hand on my arm.

“Hey,” she said. “Wait. I have something for you. Come with me.” She walked briskly toward the cabins, and I followed.

All of the cabins at Alice Marshall looked exactly the same: one room, nondescript bunks, splintered dressers. But when Gia turned on the light in her cabin, I recognized her bed, on the bottom of one of the bunks, immediately. She didn't have a sleeping bag. A luxurious silk comforter lay across it, with three thick pillows propped up along the wall as though it was a couch or a daybed. Next to the head of her bed, she had set up a little nightstand out of an upended apple crate, where I could see a hairbrush, a notebook, and a tiny framed photograph.

“Nice thinking,” I said, walking over and touching the nightstand. “Where did you get this?”

Gia waved my question away. “Let me find what I'm looking for.” She walked over to one of the dressers and started rummaging around, pulling out each drawer and rifling through them. It was clear that she had an entire dresser to herself.

I picked up the framed photograph and studied it. The picture had been taken in front of the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, from a far distance. Two people stood at the base of the tower. They were both wearing black. One of them was Gia — it was clear from the blond hair that, even at such a long distance, managed to take up so much of the frame. The other person, slightly taller, was more indistinct. Was it a man or a woman? The more I looked at the photo, the blurrier it became. I set it down.

“Here.” Gia held something out to me, grinning. “I just think it would look better on you.”

It was one of her T-shirts, the one I'd noticed early on. I'd complimented her on it since then. The shirt was dark green and sheer, with a large gray feather falling diagonally across the front. It had looked fantastic on Gia — a little rock and roll, a little “Who the hell cares?” — and I had said so. Now she was holding it out to me.

“I can't,” I said. “It looks so good on you.”

“Take it, Lida. It's just your style. Besides,” Gia added, “if I
really
miss it, I can always go back to the store later and get another, can't I?”

I took the shirt and held it in my hands, running my thumb over the thin material. No one had ever shared clothes with me before. “Thanks,” I said quietly.

“Forget about it. It's yours.” Gia looked at me and shook her head, smiling. Then she walked back to the door of the cabin and held it open for me. “Come on. We're going to be late for lunch.” She winked at me. “And I wouldn't want to get you in trouble.”

 

 

I SPENT THE NEXT COUPLE OF WEEKS ALTERNATELY MEETING
up with Gia on the Smokers' Beach and stepping carefully around Boone. I still didn't want to hear what she had to say about Gia. Also, I didn't want to have to admit to her — or anyone — that Gia didn't tell me
anything
when we shared our maps with each other. I tried to muffle the drumbeat of anger that sounded every time I thought about Gia's drawing: those boxy houses and chicken-scratch trees.

Luckily (or not so luckily), something else was coming up that kept me from dwelling on it too much. Parents' Weekend. An event as tantalizing as used Kleenex. A weekend when, according to the girls who had been here the longest, the school transformed into a sort of rustic dude ranch where no one meant anything they said. I knew if I said anything at all, even if it was a lie, my dad and Terri would probably be ecstatic.