The Lonely (8 page)

Squirrel

There was one good thing about being stuck beneath this rock: it shaded me very nicely. All of the dirt around my face and hands was cool and sandy and I kept rubbing my cheeks against it, like it could feel me back. I love cold earth in the summertime, morning earth, nice and raw before it begins to bake. I was breathing deeply and letting the little blades of grass that were reaching toward me from below the world tickle and poke at my nose and sleepy eyelids. I didn't really want to close my eyes all the way if I didn't have to in these woods. I didn't want anything around here to think that I was dead yet. But the sun was moving over me and it felt so nice to rest my eyes.

The back of my eyelids looked red, sunlight through flesh. Almost the color of my bandana. Warm and folded flat in my back pocket. I'd been wearing it all the time these days. Or at least carrying it with me, so that if it got windy I could put it on my head to keep my hair from getting all twisted up, or if I'd just eaten a gyro and was feeling really gross I could wear it over my face like a cowboy. It's actually not really red—more of a maroon color. Like a bad bruise, so purple that it's red. Julia hated it and would have teased me for wearing it again. Lev said he thought it was nice.

With my eyes closed, I thought about the day I'd found it. Spotted it between two paint cans at the place where The Father got his clarinet cleaned. While he was busy talking to the man behind the counter, I stood with my back to the cans, right close up so I could touch a little purpled end of the haggard thing. It was soft and thin and cool. I pulled it out gently and stuffed it up the sleeve of my sweatshirt. It tickled the inside of my forearm and stopped my heart from beating so fast.

The man who I was stealing from had a long, thin neck, curved lumbarlike to support his large cranium. He had black hair that stood up straight, and big round eyes that seemed just barely pressed into his head. Bulging. Raindrops held still upon a waxy leaf. I thought about how easy it would be to remove them, flick them off his face like marbles. As he spoke he manipulated a long brush in his hands, dragging his fingers along its short bristles, moving it in and out of a helpless clarinet that I'd just watched him de-skirt and decapitate.

I could never hear his voice. When he opened his mouth all I heard was an erratic clarinet. I hadn't come here very often and after I stole the bandana I never went back again.

As we left through the dinging front door, I couldn't stop smiling. It felt like I had some small creature in my sleeve. A cute little alien that I could teach hilarious and adorable phrases to, like in the movies. And it wouldn't judge me for whatever issue I had—like divorced parents or a disability or something. It would be my best friend.

As we made our way to the car, I noticed that The Father didn't reach for me. I forget when he stopped holding my hand through parking lots. I remember wondering if he still held Julia's, knowing very well that she didn't have a hand for him to hold anyway.

A wheezy squeak blew away my memory, very quiet like a broken toy, somewhere behind my head, deeper in The Woods. I opened my eyes a bit, let them refocus just to be sure I was still alone. But I wasn't alone. A little squirrel was staring at me. Right up close. Well, as close as I'd ever been to a wild rodent. He was gray, with a tail that looked like a wad of cotton candy and a twitchy little nose that couldn't stay still. His eyes were black and tiny and his hands were filled with a fast-food cheeseburger that had a big human bite taken out of it. Someone must have thrown it out of their car.

Carrying the great big cheeseburger was clearly an enormous task for this little squirrel. I could see that he was paranoid that I was going to try and steal it from him. I wished there were some way for me to tell him that I would never, ever hurt him. “Eat it, buddy,” I rasped at the squirrel. “Eat it! And then you won't have to carry it around anymore.” I twisted a bit around the middle so I could see him better and my insides groaned like an old hinge. It was as though my whole body was turning into the same tough wood that my cigar-nub thighs already were. My heart thundered from the effort.

He carried the burger closer to me, arms low, bitty hands stressed to their absolute capacity, his feet shuffling close to the ground under the weight of the once-smooth bun, now freckled with indentations from his clumsy, piercing fingers. The burger's guts were all the brown and white of meat and onion skins, harried by twigs and grass. A smear of ketchup dried into the fur beneath the squirrel's chin. He took a few tentative steps closer, his tapered snout up in the air, suspicious eyes all over and inspecting me. Once he'd decided I wasn't a threat he promptly flopped the burger down and started to feast, tearing off chunks with his quick little claws and then munching them at a million frenzied bites per second.

It was adorable.

Julia would have loved this so much if she were here. If she were lying next to me the way I loved her to, the soft spot behind her ears soaked in the cool shadow of her lobe. And I'd just left her here with no one to talk to or play with but the squirrels. I deserved this. Being stuck under this rock. I loved Julia and I'd treated her horribly. She was the first person I wanted to see when I found The Terrible Thing, she was the only person I'd be able to talk to, the only person who could understand how terrible The Terrible Thing was. How guilty The Terrible Thing made me feel. The Terrible Thing. Our lipstick game made real. I wanted to tell her that it felt nothing like the game, that it looked nothing like the game; all the details that made it different, made us wrong for even pretending. But she wasn't here, so I made The Terrible Thing go away again.

The Mother loved little critters doing human things too. She once cut out a picture from the paper of a frog on a toy motorcycle and kept it tucked into the mirror on her vanity for years and years. She would have been rubbing her hands together and kicking her feet up and oohing and ahhing over and over again until you couldn't help but laugh.

Suddenly the squirrel shot up straight as an arrow, like someone had flicked a switch in his spine. His ears seemed to rotate in his head, moving around then fixing themselves at impossible angles. He could hear something. But what? I couldn't hear anything but the symphony of woodsy sounds I'd been hearing all morning. I tried to pry into the symphony, pick something unique from the rustling and the tweeting and the crackling. A thread I could follow to a perfectly logical source. But seeing as I had no idea what I was listening for, it was very difficult.

The squirrel's bitsy eyes darted back and forth feverishly. Body so still I could almost see his chest hammering. He seemed nervous. Which made me very nervous. Something was inching toward us and only this little guy could hear it coming, and even if he could warn me somehow there was nowhere I could go.

I looked around as much as I could, beads of sweat growing from my pores like tubers. I couldn't see anything. I closed my eyes tight and tried to listen harder; more shuffling, breathing, the sound of a pair of nervous feet suddenly stopped in their tracks, but I heard nothing and soon grew too scared to keep my eyes closed any longer.

When I looked back, the little squirrel was gone. He'd abandoned me because he was scared and he could. He'd left the remains of his burger splayed out over a placemat of green and yellow leaves. Green and yellow, incidentally the worst flavor of gummy snake ever. And the colors of the June Room. But we won't be sent there for a very long time still. Not until after I ruin us at The Lake House.

Julia Returns After Being Crushed by The Cube

The Parents were bewildered and disappointed and confused. The Mother cried, The Father shook his head, and I still had Julia to face, who'd be furious about my accidentally killing her. I sat alone in my room, “grounded,” which meant nothing to a girl without friends.

I'm terrible at making friends. The worst actually. No one likes me and I don't blame them. I wouldn't like the me that gets introduced to people. I twitch my nose in social situations; suddenly it begins to feel very uncomfortable just sitting there in the middle of my face and I must twitch it. I avoid eye contact. I laugh at things that are sad, like when the fat girl told me that her cat died and all I could do was laugh in her face. Julia doesn't help, either. She's the one who started me laughing at the fat girl. When I asked the fat girl why she was crying and she replied, “my cat died,” Julia popped up behind her and said, “And don't forget, you're fat too.” It was hilarious.

But the lying; the lying is the most embarrassing. Even as I'm doing it, I know it's not going to end well. My hackles swell as I speak, in readiness for the certain onslaught of naysayers. I'm the reason that partners have to be assigned in school instead of chosen, or why teachers have to pick the teams in gym class instead of letting kids separate on their own. Once you've spit something out, you can't eat it back up again. People don't forget.

I picture myself sitting in front of a plate of all of the lies I've told over the years: wet, masticated, homogenous piles like chewed-up mouthfuls of Thanksgiving dinner: mashed potatoes, corn, turkey, gravy. Only instead they're piles of my steaming lies: “I'm going to Paris this summer,” “My mom wrote that song actually,” “I used to be a professional figure skater but my parents made me quit to be a normal kid,” “I have four chinchillas.” I have to eat them all back up again, plate after plate, chunky and oily and burning and slopping on my shirt in a big greasy stain. It's revolting. I usually have to close my eyes and shake my head before that thought fully dissolves. Prickling nausea remains.

I've had many lies exposed over the years, quite publicly. In other words I'm well known as the weird liar, in addition to being incredibly awkward. So, really, the best I can hope for is that people just leave me alone. Bizarre lies linger in school hallways like an odor, as worried into the air as the smell of pencil shavings. But honestly, I don't really want to get to know most people anyway. Most people are boring assholes. Secretly I am better than everyone.

To me, being grounded means that I just end up sleeping a lot. And after one of my many naps I woke up to Julia scowling at me.

“Julia!” I shrieked, and grabbed her fast as though she might disappear again.

“You killed me!”

“I didn't mean to, Julia, it was an accident.”

“It was an accident.”

“Well, of course it was!”

“Yeah, well, accident or no, you still killed me. Now you're a murderer.”

“Oh I am not.”

“You are. You killed someone.”

“Hardly.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing.”

“No really, Easter, what do you mean by that? That you hardly killed me? Or I'm hardly someone?”

“Julia, please. I'm sorry, okay?”

And I inched closer to her, so she got off the bed and looked out the window.

“Have you seen this?” she asked, gesturing at some-thing outside.

“What?” I got up and looked.

Amelia from next door was in the car with her boyfriend.

Amelia's life was pretty much perfect except for her being boring and stupid and having a face like a primordial dwarf. She had her own bathroom and a pink canopy bed with ruffles along the bottom. It was like one of those beds you see in department store magazines that you can set up whole daydreams around, in which even just circling items longingly in pen is somehow satisfying. When I sat down on it I felt like a princess. Or at least a princess's creepy acquaintance. I'd only seen it once, when the neighbors invited us over to dinner. Really they just wanted to ask The Parents to collect their mail and water their garden while they were on vacation.

Since they'd started dating a year ago, Julia and I had been watching the progression of Amelia and her boyfriend's physical relationship. In horror. Through the backseat windows of his Ford Mercury Sable.

He was a greasy troll of a senior whose early adolescent acne had left him with hoof marks in his cheeks.

“Amelia's really got the worst face I've ever seen,” Julia finally said.

“Her body's okay, though. That's why she's always got a boyfriend.”

“Whenever I can just see her leg or a bit of her hair or shoulder in the car window, she seems much prettier.”

“Yeah. If only she could somehow be just one great eye. Or a bit of long-haired scalp over a shoulder. Instead of her whole gross self,” I replied.

“No wonder serial killers liked to chop up women,” Julia said. “They seem so much better when they're just bits and pieces.”

“I'd rather be one perfect leg than my whole self.”

And Julia laughed.

“I'm really sorry I killed you, Julia.”

“I know.”

“Did it hurt?”

“No.”

“Good.”

We stared for a while in silence as perfect bits and pieces of Amelia appeared and disappeared from the window.

“Maybe we should do Amelia the favor of cutting her up,” Julia suddenly said, her eyes never leaving the car.

I laughed but she didn't. She just kept looking. And I got the feeling I sometimes get. When Julia got ideas that I couldn't say no to. Like the bleached lawns at Phyllis's, or when we were small, hiding from The Mother so long that she cried.

“Maybe it would make Amelia's life easier if she could be just one perfect leg,” Julia said.

And I realized that she hadn't blinked in a long time. Then she placed a hand on the cold glass. Fog formed between her warm fingers.

I crawled back into the bed, pulled the covers over my head, and shoved the heels of my hands into my eye sockets so hard that I got a headache.

Easter Story

“Stop squiggling your toes.”

“I can't help it. Every time you get near them with that marker they go crazy.”

“Well you have to try and stop, Easter, it's impossible to trace a squiggling foot.”

“All right, I know, you're right.”

Easter's eyes narrowed a bit and little creases found their places in her fresh, eleven-year-old skin, her lips stiff as door wedges. This was the face of determination. Julia had a hand wrapped around Easter's left ankle, holding her foot snug to the underside of the dining room table and with a green magic marker in the other hand began to lean forward, a second attempt at producing a permanent record of Easter's foot. Easter could barely stand the excitement. As soon as she felt Julia's breath on the tops of her feet she started squiggling and couldn't stop.

“Goddammit, Easter!”

“Don't swear! Mom'll hear,” Easter replied with her feet still pressed against the table.

“No she won't.”

“She will too! She's sitting up there with her crossword. I'm looking at her knees right now.”

“Easter, you're not even talking. No one can hear anything.”

“Okay, right. I promise I won't squiggle again.”

“All right.”

Julia tightened her grasp on Easter's ankle and let her nails dig too deep into the dip between bone and tendon above her heel. That seemed to stop the squiggling. Worked for horses too. Now two perfectly traced feet looked down at them from the roof of their little world beneath the table.

“Good job, Julia. I love them.”

“You're welcome. Okay, now do me.”

But Julia's feet always looked strange when Easter traced them onto the table. Nothing like her feet in real life.

Over the years, Easter and Julia had drawn a full mural on the underside of the dining room table: mermaids, blocks of cheese, dogs serving chicken dinners to their masters, orchards of cigarette trees, pipes, squiggles, plates of spaghetti, a rainbow, snails in too-tight ties performing stand-up comedy routines, little girls sweating buckets with big bows in their hair, tracings of growing feet. They drew vines up the sides of the sturdy wooden legs in green magic marker and rammed colored tacks into the support beams, stuck a few scattered glow-in-the-dark stars in the corners. Sometimes they would acquire bits of ribbon in the strange and mysterious way that houses seem to acquire things like that, and they would hang them from the roof of the table like streamers.

For some reason that they could only guess at, it was warmer under the table. Perhaps it was because The Parents shuffled their legs under there, generating heat, or maybe they were directly above the furnace in the basement. Either way, they never needed socks and would rub their feet together in their pajamas, short pants exposing their delicate ankles. They would attempt to intertwine their toes with little success. Neither of the girls had very elegant feet, though later in life Julia would be able to pluck from a bowl and feed herself long snacks like pretzel sticks and smoke a cigarette down to the middle using only her toes.

And they both felt much prettier. They brought mirrors under there and makeup but not nail polish. The Father had said that it made him nauseous to smell it while he ate and they both decided that that was fair enough. They learned to flip their eyelids in the dim light beneath the table. They pulled each other's fingers to the disgust of The Parents and their own wicked delight. The Parents ate smelly food up above and talked about money. Easter and Julia ate licorice and clipped as many clothespins to their faces as they could.

On special occasions The Parents would lay a dark cloth over the table, and Easter and Julia would enter their fort slowly, dramatically. It seemed a more solemn, beautiful place when the tablecloth quieted everything. Not a place for squealing laughter and violent thumb wars or fights about squiggling toes.

After dinner on those tablecloth nights, The Parents usually went upstairs and left the girls to play, shutting off every light but the one in the bathroom so they could still spot it in the dark. The girls would turn on flashlights and tell stories, illuminating sections of the mural and their own curvaceous faces, letting the light change the look of everything.

Some nights the darkness of The House would sneak under the cloth and fill their wide-awake bodies; previously busy hands were loaded with the mysterious weight of sleep. Easter knew that hands were always the worst giveaway in a pretend sleep attempt, sleeping hands being impossible to fake. She would later learn that the same was true of pretend deaths when she and Julia started playing the lipstick game, and when she'd watch her mother imitate death on Sunday nights in the bathtub. What was that invisible girth that filled them?

So the sleep would fill them up and keep them warm until The Parents emerged from wherever they'd been and carried the two of them to their room, their hands perhaps threatening to fill with wake as they were carried up the stairs.

Many times one or the other had whacked a head while coming out from or going under that table. Easter had a scar on her forehead to remember the time when she took a brisk, routine dive beneath the table and woke up to Julia's deflated, worried face spilling over her.

“Good, you're not dead,” Julia said, and then disap­peared into the basement.

Easter sat up. The Mother had heard it from upstairs and came barrelling down the steps with dye in her hair.

“Easter, my god, what did you do?”

That's when Easter felt the trickle down her forehead, a nimble plop on her upper lip. She tasted it. Like pennies. The Mother shrieked and Easter cried, though it didn't really hurt.

She took Easter by the arm, grabbed the keys, and within ten minutes they'd checked in at Emergency and were both crammed into a small hospital bathroom while The Mother washed the dye out of her hair over the sink. Easter stood on the lid of the toilet, her right hand holding a square of gauze to her forehead and her left hand clipping together the two corners of Mother's towel, which she'd wrapped around her shoulders to protect them from dye.

“Oh god, Easter,” The Mother moaned, “we're going to get the plague in here. Do you know what happens to people who spend more than fifteen minutes in a hospital bathroom? You don't wanna know. How's your head?”

“It feels fine.”

“Good. Couldn't you have just waited ten more minutes before bonking your head on the table? We're going to get the measles in here. Or the flesh-eating virus. Goddammit, Easter, we're going to get the flesh-eating virus now. Do you know what that is?”

“I could make a pretty good guess, I think,” said Easter.

“Don't be smart, young lady.”

When the doctor finally called them in, he asked Easter a number of questions.

“What's the first thing you remember when you woke up?” was one of them.

“Julia,” I said.

“Julia.” He scribbled it down. “Who's Julia?” His eyes still down on his paper.

The Mother cleared her throat, an attempt to indicate to Easter that she should shut up about Julia, but Easter didn't realize that because she was still too young to know that sometimes people cleared their throats to get other people to shut up or change the subject or act differently than how they'd just been acting.

“Julia is my sister.”

“Your sister?”

“Yeah.”

“I didn't know you had a sister.”

“That's because she doesn't,” piped The Mother. “Julia is her … her imaginary friend, I guess you could call it.”

“How old are you, Easter?”

“Eleven.”

“Eleven, hm? That's a bit old for imaginary friends, isn't it?”

Before Easter could correct him, tell him that Julia wasn't imaginary, The Mother pried a spot for herself into the questioning:

“It's perfectly normal,” she said.

“Is that a professional opinion?” The doctor seemed annoyed.

And The Mother went quiet again.

“So you see Julia all the time?”

“Not all the time. But most of the time.”

“Like I'm standing here now?” the doctor continued.

The Mother wanted to intercept all of his questions, but he held a hand out to quiet her.

“Mm hmm.” He nodded and scribbled and nodded and scribbled.

The doctor knew, now. He knew about The Lonely. Perhaps he could prescribe a Julia for The Mother, so that she wouldn't have to be lonely anymore either. Not that Easter wasn't lonely. She had it just like The Mother did, but Julia made it so much more bearable.

He suggested that they speak in private, he and The Mother. So they got up and left Easter alone. She sat high on the gray patient bed, moving her feet in circles, paper sheet crunching beneath her thighs. She hoped and hoped to the rhythm of her stirring feet that a Julia for The Mother came in an easy-to-swallow pill form.

While they were gone, Julia walked through the door. She'd put on a white coat and grabbed a clipboard from somewhere and imitated a doctor:

“Just as I suspected,” she said in a deep voice, pretending to pore over the clipboard.

“What?”

“You're retarded.”

Easter laughed and said, “Shut up, Julia.”

“Seriously, though,” Julia said, suddenly very serious, “I'm not feeling very well.”

“What's wrong?”

Julia lifted the white coat and revealed a pattern of angry boils on her once-creamy thigh.

Easter recoiled slightly and said, “Julia, what did you do?”

“I don't know! There's this too, though.”

And she pulled off a shoe to reveal a missing pinky toe.

“I think you've got the flesh-eating disease. The Mother said we could catch it in here.”

“Ah fuck, Easter, you just had to go and whack your head.”

“I'm sorry!”

“Well, I guess it'll be nice to have less body to worry about.”

“That's awfully optimistic.”

And then Julia coughed and gore splattered across the crispy clean sheet over the hospital bed. Easter picked up a chunk of it and squished it between her fingers.

“I'm no doctor, but I don't think this is a good sign,” she said.

“No?” Julia laughed.

Then, with a crunch, she hoisted herself up next to Easter on the bed.

“They're talking about you in there, you know.”

“They're talking about you, Easter.”

“Well, yeah, but only because of you.”

And suddenly The Mother stormed back into the room and pulled Easter off the bed and pulled her to the car. They never saw that doctor again. And Julia's flesh-eating-disease death was certainly her most gruesome.