Doreen (29 page)

“No!” Doreen swiped her hand across the shelf, sending brushes, bottles, and compacts flying. She paced in front of her bed. She had to think, think! But her mind replayed all the smutty details from Heidi's story, populating them with her own father. What about it was so troubling? Was it the sex? But she hardly knew her father. Why should his choice of lover be so hard for Doreen to take? Was it jealousy? Ugh! Gross! What kind of sicko was she? Doreen hit herself in the forehead, trying to erase the thought.

Anyway, if she asked him he would have his own side of the story. He would say that Heidi was the one who seduced him—she had it in her, after all. But back then Heidi was just a young girl. She was a lost, young girl far away from home. Doreen flung herself onto her bed and sobbed into her pillow. She sobbed for the girl that Heidi was—but mostly she cried for herself.

She, too, had been a lonely, innocent girl in a new place, far from home. She, too, had needed help navigating the unspoken rules and expectations of a society she knew nothing about. Heidi had taught her everything, like her father had taught Heidi. It was sickening! To think that she used that knowledge to get her father to love her. Maybe she hadn't used sex, but what difference did it make? Could she really claim a moral high ground? After Peter? And Biz? Doreen annihilated anyone who stood her way. She'd become what she hated most in the world, a bully. If she had never met Heidi Whelan! But that wasn't it. Heidi could only have done so much for the ugly, awkward girl she was the day she arrived on campus.

Doreen eyed the drawer where she'd hidden the picture. Since the last time she'd seen it, she had given her cousin a concussion and a one-way ticket out of Chandler, Yale, everything she wanted—everything she deserved. Biz had earned her achievements. And what about herself?

Everything Doreen had she'd gotten by lying, manipulating, making every relationship she had disposable. She'd destroyed her friendships with Biz and Heidi—the only friends she ever had. All she had now was a father who only loved her because she was beautiful. Heidi had said it, and she knew it was true. If Doreen still looked the way she used to, Roland would never have come for Parents' Weekend, he would never have bought the clothes and shoes and bags. His daughter? She was nothing but a pretty trinket to him, an accessory for his arm. Just as Heidi had been, and her poor aging mother, her poor, hard-working, loving, discarded mother, alone in Indiana. What a life she'd made for herself! What choices! If only she'd stayed ugly. At least then she would have a soul she could recognize as her own!

Doreen held the picture facedown in her hand. The fear in her heart was so deep and wild, it had a strangely calming effect on her body. Her breath was slow and even and sure, but the fire blazed from her insides. She had to see for herself what she'd done.

One day! It had only been one day! But it was so much worse than she could ever have imagined. Doreen dropped to her knees, her mouth agape at what she saw. Her soul had become a disgusting thing—a creature so wicked and corrupt, so twisted and ugly. It was wretched! Foul! Its eyes had bulged and yellowed, the body writhed in ecstasy, and the tongue, that horrible tongue, it dripped and oozed and thrust itself out of the frame, threatening to spread its scourge to whatever poor sap passed by. Her soul wasn't just sick, it was sickness itself, a disease of evil, a plague on anyone who should come in contact. And she was responsible. There was no one to blame—no one but her own awful self. She tried to breathe, she tried to talk herself out of her fear, but she could neither calm down nor look away. Her fate was printed out in full color. She was doomed to live in this beautiful body, to live with that hideous soul.

“No! No! I won't do it. I won't be this person. I'll be better. Please! I'll be so much better!” She railed her fists against the picture. “No! No! No!” She scraped her nails on the image. Then she began tearing. First into big shards, then into a thousand little pieces. She ripped and ripped, until the image of her soul fluttered all around her like parade confetti.

When pain becomes sound, it can zip through the atmosphere, penetrating eardrums for miles like a radio wave. When Dean Crotchett heard it from his post at his office window, he mistook the agonized scream for the call of a returning hawk. He searched the skies in vain. Roland heard it, too, as he walked toward the dean's office, and the sound was so piercing he momentarily forgot his irritation at being stood up by his own daughter. Jane Vale yelled at her brother to turn down the TV, the sound had disturbed her work on a short story tentatively called, “The Elephant Goes to Town.” And just down the road, at Hamilton County Hospital, in a private room, the sound rattled Biz's aching head as she rested it against her mother's rib cage. Thinking it had emerged from her own insides, in the face of her wrecked life, she nudged even closer to her mother, clinging to her bony frame for comfort.

When Heidi Whelan heard that tortured shriek, she knew exactly what it was and from whom it had come. But she did not change course; she did not look back. She ran and ran and ran. She ran to forget, to start over, to begin again. Liberated from the past, charged by the possibilities of the future, she ran away from her very last lie.

In West Hall, the scream, and the loud crash that followed, alarmed several girls on the floor. They summoned the RA, who arrived with a key to Doreen's door.

There they found, on the floor, a photo of Doreen looking elegant and gorgeous in a red strapless dress. On the bed, hunched over in agony, was a pitted, frizzy-haired, bloated creature, a girl unlike any they had ever seen. Naked, in a pile of ripped purple fabric, she seemed to be suffering from some kind of disease, her skin covered in sores and her hair falling out in fistfuls, making her skull visible in scaly patches. She looked up at the small crowd at the door with terrified, violet eyes.

“Get out! Get out! Get out!” she yelled. “Get out of here! Leave me alone!”

Doreen Gray was never seen at Chandler again.

Biz got into Yale. The dean came, hat in hand, to the Gibbons-Brown family. The girl, he said, was not who they thought she was. She'd lied, cheated, been expelled. He begged for Elizabeth to take her rightful place on the podium as valedictorian. But Biz didn't bother. She got her internship with the photographer, moved to New York, and never looked back. Biza Brown. Maybe you've heard of her?

She blew up at Art Basel one year, and then everyone wanted her photographs. Celebrities begged to put her work on the walls of their mansions. The Standishes bought one for their glass house in Hawaii. Roland's dealer Benedict Ruehl called and called, but Biza refused to sell to him. Anyone but him, she told Eloise. She wouldn't have any more pictures in the hands of that family. She was afraid of what would happen.

Heidi Whelan went to Northwestern. She made new friends there, nice people who'd never heard of her, who didn't know the difference between Yonkers and Yorkville. She studied art and literature and began writing little reviews for the paper that became longer reviews, more involved. The faculty advisor encouraged her and suggested journalism school. There was still a place in this world, he said, for people with refined taste and a sharp wit. Who had time for boys now, she wondered, when there were so many beautiful things to see? She went to black-and-white movies, to the ballet. She read sentences that made her believe.

Artist and critic. Their paths were destined to cross again. And so they did, years later. The occasion was Biza's latest solo exhibition at Peek Gallery. Having come from Venice, most of the work arrived at the gallery already sold, but that did not keep the mob away. The glitterati shoved past one another, their outfits appropriately flamboyant, their glasses of bubbly held high overhead as they moved through the space.

Heidi arrived in black. Biza recognized her immediately. They hadn't seen each other in such a long time; they'd gotten older. Heidi was impressed with her old friend's elegance (she wore Marni and tights, fabulous), her comfort in her own body. Biza found in Heidi a gravitas she didn't have as a girl. She was also more available, she gave more of herself away to the world, as if she'd opened her hand to let whatever she'd clung to flutter away. It made her more beautiful than ever.

Biza introduced a sinewy, tattooed woman as Agnes Chase, her fiancée. Of course, Heidi knew her work. She complimented her on her recent exhibition in Berlin, and Agnes accepted the praise but insisted it was Biza's night. They were sweet with one another.

Agnes was no beauty. She had big teeth and a long upper lip, and could have been twenty years older, an age that showed itself in the corners of her eyes, sunspots on her skin. But she was quick to laugh and beamed with pride for her future wife. Heidi could see what was sexy about Agnes, and she saw, too, that Biz was happy.

It was all very polite and cordial. The artist was congratulated for her work, her success, the critic for her sharp eye, her reliability. They asked after one another's family. Heidi's father had finally retired. Her mother was trying to convince him to move to Florida, but he wanted to travel, see the world.

“They seem happier and more in love than ever,” said Heidi. “It's really remarkable. How's Ad-rock? Married with children?”

Biz nodded, three kids in Connecticut. The babies had crazy names. Biz laughed when she recited them, but she loved her nieces and nephew, doted upon them. Mumzy spent most of the year in Paris.

“Roland died,” Biz said. “I don't know if you heard.” Heidi nodded. She'd seen the write-up in the
Times
. Liver disease, it said. Booze, Heidi had assumed, surprised at how sad it made her to think of a man who once meant so much to her, drinking himself to death.

Neither woman mentioned the girl they'd known briefly all those years ago, the name neither had spoken aloud since. But her presence loomed larger and larger over the conversation, until neither could bear it anymore. With empty promises to call, to write, to get together, one roommate left to get back to her party while the other escaped to the street.

Heidi lived in a nondescript studio in a nondescript East Side neighborhood. She had work to do, but the night was so cool and nice, she thought she would walk home. It would give her a chance to think about Biz—Biza—about time and art, and about how she might write up the show. She was on assignment for a new job, and she had to make it great.

“Excuse me,” someone said, brushing past Heidi en route to the gallery. The voice sent a chill through Heidi's body. She spun around to find the source—she saw a flash of a red coat. Could it be? What had she seen? She would know that voice anywhere; she had heard it for years in her dreams. Heidi shoved her way through the crowd, looking for a girl in a red coat, but she came up short. She ran back into the gallery, but she saw nobody.

“Heidi? Are you okay?” It was Agnes. “You look white. Biza. Biza!”

Biz heard her name and came over. Heidi looked pale.

“I thought you left. What happened? You look like you've seen a ghost!”

Heidi grasped Biz's hand. She looked deep into her eyes. “I saw . . . I could swear I saw . . .” But she didn't have to say anything more. Biz knew. “But then . . . when I came, she was gone!”

“It happens to me a lot.” Biz patted Heidi's hand. “It happens all the time. But then, it's never her.”

“So you haven't seen her? I thought maybe through family.”

Biz shook her head. “Nobody knows where she is. Nobody's heard a word from her.”

Heidi was beginning to calm down. Doreen wouldn't be a girl anymore, she'd be a grown woman. She gave a little laugh, trying to break up the tension. “Sorry, I—working too hard, I guess. Not sleeping enough.”

“You're okay?”

“Yeah. Sorry. Enjoy the party, just . . . hey. Listen, Biz.” Heidi could feel something rumble up from the depths of her body. An old shame, one of the many that she carried around with her. “I wanted to come see you,” she said, her voice barely a whisper. “In the hospital and then later, too, but after everything, I thought you would be better off without me. I figured I'd caused enough damage, you know?”

“I didn't blame you. Really.” Biz sighed. “We all needed a fresh start.”

Heidi's smile was filled with warmth and gratitude. “Well, congratulations again. I'm proud of you.” She pressed Biz's hand between her own and slipped out the door.

“What was that about?” said Agnes. She kissed her lightly on the lips.

“Mm? Oh, it's—it's a long story.” Biz rested her head on the spot below Agnes's shoulder that always gave her comfort.

“Tell me about it someday?”

“What? Oh sure. I'll tell you all about it someday,” said Biz. “I promise.”

Forgive her, Agnes. Everybody lies sometimes.