Damaged (7 page)

My slow brain tries to formulate something cruel about being surprised that a loser like Hunter even knows how to read, but before I can say anything, a loud “Shush” comes from the direction of the librarian.

“Did you call me yesterday?” I whisper.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“When I saw you the other day at the beach, I got the impression you needed a friend.”

Something inside me cracks a little, sends a lump to my throat that I have to swallow down. “I have plenty of friends,” I say, but even I know it sounds like a lie.

“Okay,” he says.

“Excuse me.” The librarian coughs from her desk. “Will you kindly take your conversation outside?”

“Yes, ma'am,” Hunter says with a smile. He gives her a military salute, and a tween girl by the magazine racks giggles. I grab my backpack and follow him outside.

“Seriously, why were you looking up exorcisms?” he says as the door closes behind us.

“I wasn't,” I lie. “I mean, I just sort of ended up there. You know how that happens. You start off doing something on the Internet and then somehow you end up in some weird place.”

I am acutely aware of how messy my hair is, how my clothes are stiff with dried sweat and sticky with spilled ice cream, how I must smell like hot dogs. Even though I hated him a moment ago, I am hit with a sudden need to not leave, to stay with Hunter, like despite my lack of sleep over the last few days and the nightmares and hallucinations, I suddenly feel safer than I have in a long time. I start to panic. My chest tightens at the thought of him walking away, of being left to ride home, alone, with my demons.

But just as I recognize that I'm not breathing, Hunter says nonchalantly, “Want a coffee? I'm buying.”

Air enters my lungs, and the pressure on my chest loosens. I nod my agreement, trying not to look too grateful. We walk in silence over to the coffee shop. I try to focus on my steps. I count them instead of thinking about how this was one of Camille's and my favorite places to go, how I haven't set foot in it since she died.

The familiar smell of the café makes me nauseous. I have never been here without Camille. It looks different—less glamorous, more dingy—without her in it.

I order a quadruple iced espresso.

“Whoa, killer!” Hunter says. “That's some serious caffeine.”

“I'm a serious person.”

“Yes.” He laughs. “You are a very serious person.”

We sit at a table in the back. I am grateful Hunter didn't pick Camille's usual table by the front window. She loved being able to see everyone coming and going. She loved everyone being able to see her. Just one of the million ways we were different.

I try to focus on the community bulletin board behind Hunter's head. I count all the flyers I recognize from my mom's weird friends offering massage, acupuncture, private yoga classes, something called Reiki. I feel all eyes in the café on us.

“How do you like being famous?” Hunter says.

“Ugh.”

He laughs.

“You seem okay with it,” I say.

“Why do you say that?” He takes a sip of his hot chocolate. What kind of guy orders hot chocolate with extra whipped cream?

My mouth opens before I have a chance to think about what's going to come out. “Why do you seem so . . . okay?” I hear myself say, and suddenly the air seems so thin, like all the fog that's accumulated over the last few days gets cleared out. All the people in the café disappear and the crappy music fades away, and it is only me and Hunter at this table. I relax and it feels like melting, it feels like losing five hundred pounds, and all I want to do is keep letting go. I don't want to fight anymore.

“I'm a mess,” I whisper, and it feels like I've never said anything truer in my life.

He looks at me from behind the wall of his hair, and there's something in his eyes that goes way deeper than his cool and brooding affect, deeper than his reputation, something sad and old and achingly familiar. He nods but says nothing, and for a second, I feel like I'm looking at him as Camille must have, like she's inside me looking at him through my eyes, and I'm filled with so much warmth all of a sudden, like gratitude that he's looking at me with those eyes, that somehow him seeing me makes me a better person, like how Camille made me better. “I'm a mess,” I say again, and my voice breaks, and for a second I think I'm going to finally lose it, I'm going to break down right here in front of all these people, in this coffee shop, with this sound track of cheesy pop ballads, and I just can't do it, I can't. So I tighten myself up again. I zip up my armor. The air thickens back around us and makes me impenetrable.

“Me too,” he finally says. My mouth can't open in response, so we sit in silence for a while. But it's not an uncomfortable silence like so many others. It's like we're floating. Like we're meant to be here.

“I started drinking like crazy after she died,” he continues. “It was too easy, you know? It always has been. I'm a waiter part-time at one of my dad's restaurants, and I just steal bottles of booze from the bar and of course no one does anything because I'm the son of the guy who pays their wages. And I just drink and drink so I don't have to feel anything.” He takes a sip of his hot chocolate. “But it never really goes away. No matter how hard I try to run from it.”

The silence returns. I'm afraid to look up. I'm afraid of seeing my reflection in his glassy eyes.

“Do you think it's possible to die from sadness?” he finally says.

I feel something growing inside me, something warm and solid. Maybe it's gratitude, but that's not strong enough a word. The feeling is fiercer than that. It's like I want to grab myself by the shoulders and shake me. I want to scream at myself,
Why did you wait so long for this?

“I don't know,” I say so softly I can barely hear my own voice. “Sometimes I feel like I'm drowning. I try to move but that just makes it worse. Like it gets thicker and tighter and heavier the more I try to fight it.”

“It,”
Hunter says.

“Her,” I say.

“Yes.”

I look into his eyes. They are deep blue pools I could drown in. “I can't say her name out loud.”

“You don't have to.”

I look down and suck out the last of my coffee. The sound is shockingly loud. It breaks the spell, returns us back to the café. I feel some magic slip away. I want to hold on to that place where we were floating, removed and above all of this, in the silence that was just ours. But it's gone.

“So now what?” I say.

“I don't know,” Hunter says. “Just life, I guess.”

“I don't have one,” I say, shocked by the words as soon as they come out of my mouth. What is it about Hunter that is making me talk like this?

Hunter gives a sad smile. “We can be friends, you know?”

I nod weakly, so wanting that to be true. Maybe we can. Maybe this is a beginning. All the disdain I felt for him, all the judgment, has morphed into something new. I've always thought he was such a loser, not good enough for Camille, somehow beneath us for being so obviously broken. But now, it is those same things that make me want to trust him, that make me think that maybe I don't have to be alone in all this. Because now I am broken too.

“Want to go do something?” he says.

“No,” I say, and I only half mean it. “I need to go home. I need to sleep. I haven't been sleeping.” Something aches in me, wanting to tell him the whole story. But it is not time for that. It may never be time for that.

“Yeah,” he says. “You look like you could use some sleep. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Do you want a ride?”

“I have my bike.”

“I have a really big backseat. You could fit like ten bikes back there.”

“But won't it mess up the leather interior or something?”

“Do I seem like the kind of guy who gives a shit about leather interior?”

I smile, and I swear I hear my cheeks creak from disuse.

“She smiles!” Hunter exclaims.

“I bet you're very proud of yourself.”

“Absolutely.”

We go back to the library to get my bike. The grumpy librarian is hiding behind a tree smoking a cigarette. Hunter lifts my bike into the back of his car no problem. We don't say much on the ride home, but it isn't awkward. The seat is so comfortable, I catch myself nodding off a couple times.

“Give me your phone,” he says when we pull up to my house. “I'm going to put my number in it.”

“I don't have a cell phone.” For the first time ever, I'm not embarrassed saying it.

He leans over me and gets a pen out of the glove compartment. His arm brushes against my chest. He smells good, clean, like expensive soap, so different from how I saw him days ago in town on his skateboard, with greasy unwashed hair and the bottle of liquor in a paper bag.

“Give me your hand,” he says. His hand is warm around mine. It is soft and strong at the same time. He writes his number on my palm.

When I get out of the car, it feels like part of me stays inside with him.

I can tell Mom's home because her purse is on the kitchen table, her shoes are on the floor, and her jacket's hanging off the couch. The house is silent and the door to her room is closed. She is sleeping off whatever she did last night.

I am nauseous with exhaustion and too much coffee. My ankle is throbbing. I swallow a few more Advil and eat a piece of toast. The walls wobble around me.

I know I can't stay up forever. As much as I hate to admit it, my body will always be stronger than my mind. It needs sleep. If I don't let it, it will figure out a way to make me.

Maybe I can just decide to face it. Maybe I can just lie down and close my eyes and wait for whatever happens. Maybe I can let the darkness come and trust that it won't last forever. Maybe I can come to believe that maybe, possibly, things are going to be okay.

We are here in this place where it is always sunset. Not the pretty kind you see on Lake Michigan, not the ones that light up the sky like fireworks. This is a place where everything is blank; it would be white if not for the faint stain of blood.

The nothingness goes on forever. The flatness of the earth turns into an equally flat horizon. There is a line in the distance where below stops and above starts, but no matter how long I walk I can never get there. This is an empty place. A nothing place. A place for waiting.

“Is this heaven?” I say.

“No,” you say.

“Is it hell?”

“No.”

“Where is it?”

“This is nowhere. This is where I live now.”

“I'm scared,” I say.

“You should be.”

I stop walking. I look at you. It is you but it is not you. It is a ghost in the shape of you. It is a body made out of smoke. It is wearing a sheet painted like you, with eyeholes cut out. When I look into the holes where eyes should be, there is nothing.

“Camille?” I say.

The wind shifts and turns hot. The sheet flutters and is gone. I am looking into a nothingness that may or may not be you. The wind whips itself into a wall of fire. I turn around and start running. My heels burn. I follow the horizon. I run to infinity.

“Camille, I'm scared!” I scream. The world is on fire and I can't outrun it. I keep running and going nowhere. This world is a giant treadmill.

“Maybe you need to do something scary,” your voice coos inside my head.

“I don't know what to do,” I say.

“I'll show you,” you say.

“But where are you? I can't see you. How can I follow you if I can't see you?”

Your ghost softens around me. I am effortless. I am your puppet. I am running in air. White space. Infinity. I am held in the space between nothing and everything.

“You can't get away from me,” you whisper inside me. “You can never get away.”

FIVE

I wake up crying. I'm
not surprised. I'm not scared. Light streams through the window and I know exactly where I am. I know exactly where I've been. This is the way it is now. This is the way I sleep.

I don't bother jumping out of bed. I don't thrash around and try to fix it. I don't do anything but cry.

Strange how it is so easy, how the tears know exactly how to flow, despite so long being dry.

Strange how there are things the body remembers despite the mind trying so hard to forget.

Strange how I don't try to stop it, how I don't squeeze the tears back in, how I give myself to the pain, how I let it win.

Strange how I no longer care about winning. There is no prize for not feeling.

There's nothing I can do. The horizon is out of reach. The sky is up and the earth is down and I will never get to the place where they connect.

I can't stop crying. I cry years' worth of tears. I cry for Camille and I cry for me. I cry for everything and everyone I never cried for. I will fill up the nowhere place with my liquid sorrow until it floats us all away.

Camille, why aren't you here? You are supposed to be here. You are the only one who's ever been allowed to see me cry.

I can almost feel my head in your lap, your fingers in my hair, telling me to breathe. I don't breathe now that you're gone. I only suck at air. My lungs only barely lift.

Camille, I don't know how to do any of this without you.

“Kinsey?” Mom's voice from the hall. “Kinsey, are you okay?”

This is the other her, the mom I get only sometimes. “Mom,” I blubber. I don't care that I sound like a child.

She enters my room and comes over to the bed. She sits on the edge and pulls me to her lap. She holds me while I cry, rocking back and forth, saying nothing but an occasional “Let it out” and “Everything's going to be okay.” I don't believe her, but I keep crying. I close my eyes and pretend she's Camille. The longer I cry, the more the world solidifies around me. It is not tilted like before, not out of focus and strange. I don't know how long we're there, but it is somehow long enough for me to run out of tears.

Mom squeezes me after my last sniffle. I sit up, surprised that my head doesn't ache and I don't feel dizzy. I look at her and see the woman I love who rarely shows up anymore. “What do you need?” she says.

“I'm hungry,” I say.

I lie on the couch and watch her make breakfast. She's so graceful in her movements, natural in a way I never feel except when I'm running or playing soccer. But there's a sadness today, a weight to her limbs, a dullness in her eyes. This is the way it usually happens—in pairs; her kindness and sadness are inseparable. She may hug me for the next few days, but I will have to listen to her cry through the thin walls.

I sit down to the elaborate breakfast—tofu scramble, blue cornmeal pancakes, and fresh fruit salad. My mouth waters.

“Coffee?” she asks, and I feel my stomach lurch.

I shake my head dramatically, passionately no.

I stuff my face with food while Mom picks at hers. She looks up occasionally from her plate and studies me, but she says nothing. I don't look up because I know her sadness is waiting for me and I don't want to deal with it right now. This is the mood that precedes her bouts of apologizing, of rehashing every hurtful thing she's done in the last few weeks. It's more for her than it is for me. She wants to punish herself by remembering. But she doesn't understand that it punishes me, too.

I eat about a pound of tofu scramble, four pancakes, and a heaping bowl of fruit salad. My stomach is full and my eyes are empty and this is the closest to okay I've felt in a while. But I can sense her over there brimming with emotion, wanting me to join her. Didn't she notice that I'm cried out? Doesn't she understand that I've reached my quota for sadness?

I can't let her talk; I know I must speak first. How does a person make conversation with their mother? How do normal families talk?

“How was your date last night?” I say.

“That was two nights ago,” Mom sighs. “It's Sunday today.” It's like it pains her to speak, like she can barely manage these short sentences.

“Oh,” I say. I wonder how long she's been like this. Did she shift during the date? The morning after? This morning? I wonder how much longer I have with this version of her.

“Let's not talk about me. I'm so sick of talking about me.” She stands up, shuffles around the table, and kisses me on the top of my head. She walks to her bedroom, her body moving as if possessed by someone twice her age. She closes the door quietly behind her.

I clean up the dishes and put the leftovers in the fridge. I hum loudly and out of tune to fill up the silence, in case she cries.

I fill up the bathtub with hot water, add some of Mom's handmade lavender bubble bath. I step the foot of my twisted ankle in and feel the warmth enter my muscles, my tendons, my bones, healing me from the inside. I start to lower myself down, anticipating being enveloped by the water, but then I stop, panicked. I stand up, get out quickly from the water. I hold my breath and look at the palm of my hand.

It's still there. Just barely. Hunter's number. Half-wet and starting to shiver, I find a lip pencil and write the number on a tampon box. I get back in the tub, savoring it. Warmth feels so much better the colder you are.

I don't get out until I'm so hot I can't imagine ever being cold again. I wrap myself in a towel and grab the tampon box. I am drowsy with warmth and food, but I know if I don't do it now I may never do it. Camille said do something scary. Do something scary and maybe I won't be so scared.

The living room is quiet and empty as I dial his number on our landline. It only rings once before he answers.

“Hey,” he says, like he was expecting me.

“Hey,” I say, suddenly aware of how naked I am.

Camille, is this okay?

* * *

I wait outside for Hunter to pick me up. The sign for Peace Dove Pottery has been flipped to
closed
all weekend, even though Saturday and Sunday are when Mom makes most of her sales. I figured out a long time ago that I would need a job to make my own money if I was to have any sense of security. Before working at Bill's, I babysat and mowed lawns and cleaned houses, anything to put some money in the bank. Camille always called me stingy because I never wanted to spend any of it, but she didn't have to worry about money as much as me. Her parents weren't rich, but at least they were stable. I have nine thousand dollars saved up, and I'm working as much as I can this summer to build it up even more.

Wait, do I have a job? Was that yesterday I fell apart at work? The last few days are a blur, but I can remember Bill sending me home. I remember hiding behind the hot dog machine. What was I hiding from? Camille? Was I hallucinating Camille? I was supposed to call Bill last night to tell him if I was coming in today. It's after three now. It's too late.

I should be worried. I should be running into the house to call him and apologize and beg to keep my job. But I feel a strange sense of relief, like one less thing is tying me here, like I am that much closer to freedom.

Hunter rolls up in his fancy black car with the tinted windows and I can't help but chuckle. “What's so funny?” he asks when I get in.

“Your car,” I say. “It doesn't suit you at all.”

“I know,” he says. “I should be a banker or in the mafia or something.”

“Or a chauffeur.”

“You look better today,” he says as he pulls out of the driveway.

“Thanks,” I say. “I think I slept for like a whole day.”

“You must have needed it.”

“You have no idea.”

We wander around town for a while, looking in the windows of the tourist shops. I forgot to take any Advil this morning, and there's a dull pain still in my ankle whenever I step on my left foot.

“I can't believe people buy this crap,” Hunter says, looking in a window of overpriced house wares.

“Yeah,” I say.

“My mom buys this crap.”

“Really?”

“I think she likes to keep pretending this is our summer home she's decorating, not where we actually live now.”

I knew Hunter was from Chicago originally, but Camille never told me the details. I don't really blame her, though. I made it pretty clear I wasn't interested whenever she tried to talk to me about Hunter.

“She doesn't like living here?”

“No. I don't know. Maybe she could like it eventually, if she made some friends or had some kind of life. Or if we were here for a reason besides being banished.”

“Banished?”

“My dad pretty much still lives in Chicago. Sometimes he comes by on the weekends. But it's obvious he sent us here to get rid of us.”

I don't know what to say. I barely know Hunter, but he's telling me the kind of thing I wouldn't tell anyone. It's like if I told him about my mom's mood swings, about how mean she can be sometimes, about how sad. I only ever told Camille that stuff, and only late at night, in the dark. But I can tell Hunter wants to talk. For some reason, he wants me to know these secrets. “Why would he do that?” I ask.

“He's a sociopath,” Hunter says flatly.

“Oh,” is all I can think to say.

“He's a control freak. And he doesn't want us interfering with his glamorous life. So he hides us away in the middle of nowhere so he won't be bothered. So he can have his affairs in peace and he won't be reminded every day that his son is a worthless piece of crap.”

There is fire in Hunter's voice. His hands are fists. He is walking fast and I have to jog a little to keep up. I'm suddenly embarrassed for my town, for how small it is, for how little there is to do here.

“This place must be pretty awful compared to Chicago,” I say. He doesn't say anything. “I always hoped I'd end up somewhere like Chicago one day. San Francisco, actually. A real city.”

He stops walking and looks at me so intensely I start to feel a little uncomfortable. “San Francisco?” he says.

“Yeah, it seems like such a cool place. So much culture and history.” I don't say anything about Camille's and my plan to move there together after college.

I don't understand the way Hunter is looking at me, like he's thinking hard, like he's figuring things out, like something very important is happening inside his head.

“I want to talk to you about something,” he finally says.

Uh-oh. Isn't that the kind of thing someone says before they break your heart?

“Okay?”

“It's weird,” he continues. “I was debating whether or not I was going to bring it up. But then you said San Francisco just now. So, I don't know, maybe it's a sign.”

“A sign for what?”

“I'm going to San Francisco. I've always wanted to, but it was always kind of a dream I didn't take too seriously. But after everything that happened, the last couple months, I've been really thinking about it, planning it. I've had my bags packed for three weeks, but something has kept me from leaving yet. Something told me to wait.” He pauses and looks at me as I try to comprehend what he is saying. “Maybe I was supposed to wait for you.”

Images flicker through my head: the Golden Gate Bridge, young hip artists and musicians, bustling sidewalks, palm trees and sunshine and colorful house-studded hills. A whole new world. A whole new life.

There's an electricity in Hunter's eyes. “We could leave anytime,” he says. “We could leave tonight.”

This is crazy. He's crazy. This whole idea is crazy. But something I've realized in the last few days is I'm crazy too. Maybe I always have been, but I've spent so much energy keeping it inside, keeping it hidden. I've always relied on my intricate lists and plans to keep me sane, everything predictable and in control. But what if I did something unpredictable for a change? What if doing something crazy is the sanest thing I can do?

“I assumed I'd go alone,” he says. “Because there was no one else. No one who understood what I had to get away from. But you get it. You
know
. You're the only one who does.”

I am holding my breath. If I breathe, I might blow him away.

“This town, this county, this state. This whole . . .” He sweeps his hands around the sad town full of dusty, abandoned things. “Everything. All of it. It's like it's . . .”

“Haunted,” I say.

“Exactly,” he says. I nod. I feel my heart pumping in my chest. I want to run. I want to run all the way out of here. But I think I want to take him with me.

“I have to get out of here,” he says.

“Yes,” I say. Adrenaline and hope and fear burn in my chest.

“Yes?”

“Yes,” I say. “I want to go. I want to go with you. I want to go to San Francisco.”

I can hear Camille, somewhere far away, laughing.