Wintergirls (6 page)

I roll out of the badlands, past scrub cedar trees and a boarded-up church. Couple of miles later—click on the turn signal, check the mirrors—I turn left into the lot of the Gateway Motel. There are plenty of places to park.

The building reminds me of Emma’s shoe-box diorama. Holes are cut out every couple of feet: fat holes for windows, skinny holes for doors. The peeling stucco walls are stained with rust from the dripping gutters. The office is at the far end, a red neon sign blinking in the window: VACA CY.

I get out of the car, lock the door, and head for the office, avoiding the half-feathered carcass of a bird.

It’s as cold in the lobby as it is outside. The registra-tion desk has a boot-sized hole in it. Behind it sits an old man with a bad comb-over and thick glasses, reading the newspaper. The small TV attached to the wall has a jumpy picture and no sound. A scarred pay phone is mounted above a rack with a few faded tourist brochures for Canobie Lake Park, Robert Frost Farm, and the New Hampshire Snowmobile Museum. There is a door marked PRIVATE and one that says RESTROOM— GUESTS ONLY.

I shouldn’t be here. I should be in Trig. No, History.

I should get back in that car and drive to school, slowing down in crosswalks and stopping at yellow lights. Obey-ing all posted speed limits.

“Yeah?” The man looks up at me and squints. “You want a room?”

I shake my head. “No, sir.”

“Well, what do you want?” His voice is wet with tar.

“Come to see where she died?” Not the voice from the answering machine.

I give a tiny nod.

“Ten bucks for a peek.” He holds out his hand and flips his fingers toward his palm.

I open my wallet. “I only have a five.”

“That’ll do.” After I hand over the bill, he shouts,

“Lie-juh!”

The restroom door opens. The guy who steps out looks a couple of years older than me, and is almost a foot taller, with thick black hair to his shoulders and black-rimmed glasses. His skin is sugar-white and, under a lame beard, his face is broken out like a lava field. He’s wearing steel-toed boots, baggy black work pants, and a Patriots sweatshirt with a rip in the collar. His eyes are the color of smoke and ringed with thick eyeliner. A brown wooden plug fills up his left earlobe.

He waves the silver wrench in his hand and grins.

“You rang, Your Slimeship?”

That’s the voice.

“She wants to see it,” the older man says, sticking my money in his pocket. “Show her.”

The cocky attitude drains away, and his smile vanishes. He sets the wrench on the counter and mumbles,

“Follow me.”

As I leave, the old man calls out, “Don’t be stealing nothing. That’s all motel property.”

We walk past metal doors, 103, 105, 107. 109 is missing the doorknob. 111 is tagged with black spray paint, but I can’t figure out what it says.

The guy stops so suddenly in front of room 113 that I crash into his back.

“Sorry.”

“No worries.” He unhooks a heavy ring of keys from his belt loop, shaking his head. “You here on a bet?”

“Excuse me?”

“A kid came by an hour ago.” He keeps his eyes on his hands, flipping through the keys. “His buddies dared him.”

He holds a key between his thumb and first finger, letting the others slide down the ring. “He wanted to see if there was blood.”

Brown leaves scuttle past us. The wind blows my hair in my face. I tuck it behind my ears. “Were you here . . . ?”

He sticks the key in the lock, his back to me, voice flat as a museum guide’s. “I had the night off. Watched basketball at a bar downtown, then went to a guy’s house to play poker. Won eighty bucks. Gave me a hell of an alibi.” The door squeaks as he pushes it open. “They figured out what killed her yet?”

I shake my head. “I don’t think so.”

The wind gusts again. “I hope it was quick.”

The room behind him is filled with dark. I shiver. That is the last door Cassie walked through. She walked in alive and she walked out dead.

I shouldn’t have come here.

“You have a name?” he asks.

“What? Me?” I shiver so hard my teeth rattle. I don’t know this guy and I don’t know why he wants to talk to me. “Yeah, um, I’m Emma. You?”

“Elijah.”

I wrap my arms around myself. “Was she upset when she checked in?”

He shakes his head. “Didn’t see her until it was too late. I live in 115. When I came back after the poker game, I found the door open and the lights on. I found her.”

I spin away from him, squeezing my eyes shut. Everything in my body hurts, like I have the flu, or the air seeping out of room 113 infected me with something. My heart slams against its bone cage, over and over, blood seeping down to the cracks in the ground.

“I checked for a pulse,” he continues. “Called 911.”

“Stop it,” I whisper.

He regurgitates his chewed story for me, another paying customer feasting on the dead blonde. Step right up to the freak show, make a video with your phone, blog the blood. Tighten the wire noose hiding under your collarbones.

I open my eyes and turn back around. He’s inside, in the shadows, reaching for the light on the dresser.

“I said stop it,” I say loudly. “I don’t want to see any more.” I walk away, legs shaking. “I have to go now.”

“Hey,” he calls after me. “Come back.”

I hum to myself to drown out his voice.

“Hey!” he shouts. “Do you know a girl named Lia?”

I stop, hand on the car door. “What?”

He jogs up to me, stopping a few steps in front of the dead bird. “I’m looking for somebody named Lia. She might go to your school.”

“Why?”

He crosses his arms over his chest and shivers once.

The wind has shifted to the north. “I’m just trying to find her.”

The bird flutters its wings, bones rattling like dice.

“Sorry,” I say. “Never heard of her.”

The movie theater is empty except for me in the back row and three nannies moms with sticky kids up front. The projector’s light traps a galaxy of swirling skin flakes and popcorn husks in the air. Anime shape-shifters battle bad guys on the screen, a cheap Japanimation matinee.

I open the bag from the drugstore.

Two of the nannies moms talk to each other, while the third argues on her cell. The kids bounce up and down on the seats. Above them, robot monsters are destroying a village. The big-eyed heroes turn into fox-people who shoot fire from their paws.

I take the box of razor blades out of the bag.

::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/

stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

A purple robot monster throws a truck at a fox-boy.

The speakers vibrate thunderechoes when the truck crashes into the ground. The kids in the audience aren’t even watching. They’re fighting about their popcorn and candy, and whining about going to the potty.

The box opens and the razors slide out, whisper sweet.

Used to be that my whole body was my canvas—hot cuts licking my ribs, ladder rungs climbing my arms, thick milkweed stalks shooting up my thighs. When I moved to jenniferland, my father made one condition. A daughter who forgets how to eat, well that was bad, but it was just a phase and I was over it. But a daughter who opens her own skin bag, wanting to let her shell fall to the ground so she can dance? That was just sick. No cutting, Lia Marrigan Overbrook. Not under Daddy’s roof. Bottom line.

Deal breaker.

The fox-heroes on the big screen turn their eyes into lightning. They grit their teeth and wince when the monsters throw them against the mountain, but they always, always get back up, retie their red scarves and laugh.

All of the badness boils under my skin, stingy ginger-ale bubbles fighting to breathe. I unbutton my jeans, slid-ing the zipper open one tooth at a time. I twist to the right and push down the elastic band of my underpants. My left hip arches up, glowing blue in the movie light.

::Stupid/ugly/stupid/bitch/stupid/fat/

stupid/baby/stupid/loser/stupid/lost::

I inscribe three lines,
hush hush hush
, into my skin.

Ghosts trickle out.

The shape-shifters put on jet packs and follow the monsters to an asteroid. A nanny mom drags the kid who has to pee to the lobby.

I put the blade back in the box, and the box back in the bag and press my hand against the wet cuts until the credits roll. Just before the lights come up, I stick my fingers in my mouth.

I taste like dirty quarters.

After a day lost in a nightmare, the car takes me away from the movie theater, the drugstore, and the motel that grinds up girls into bite-sized pieces. We roll back to the highway and into the hills, climbing up to the McSame houses of Castle Pines, back to the house of my father set in the clouds.

The three of them are sitting around the dining room table, candles jumping to the harpsichord music drifting from the speakers. The air is damp with dinner—leftover turkey, stinky Brussels sprouts, salad, whole grain rolls, and cheesy potatoes, Emma’s favorite. A family meal to remind us that we are a family. We are not a reality show (yet), or strangers sharing a house and splitting the bills.

We are not a motel.

There is an empty place across the table from Emma—plate, paper napkin, stainless-steel fork, knife, spoon. Mom got the good silver when my parents split up.

It came from Nanna Marrigan, who said that food served with cheap utensils tasted tinny. She was right.

Daddy looks up, a piece of turkey dangling from his fork. “You’re late, kiddo. Have a seat.”

“I stayed after to work on a project. Can I eat upstairs? I’m buried with homework.”

Emma bounces in her chair. “I made the potatoes, Lia. Almost by myself.”

Jennifer nods. “Please, Lia. It’s been a while since we had a nice dinner.”

My stomach tightens. There is no room inside of me for this.

“I used the peeler and a knife.” Emma grins so hard the glass drops hanging from the chandelier shake.

“Mommy shredded.”

“That’s awesome.” I pull out my chair and sit. “If you made them, they’ve got to taste good.”

Dad swallows and winks at me.

“Can I have the salad?” I ask.

He passes me the casserole dish filled with gravy and leftover turkey. I have to use both hands to hold it because it weighs more than everything on the table plus the table itself, plus the chandelier and the custom-built cabinet that holds Jennifer’s collection of glass figurines.

I set the dish next to my plate. The triangle DadEmma-Jennifer locks in on my hand reaching for the fork. I pull out a full-fat slice of baked flesh, gravy-blooded (250), and let it fall on to my plate.
Splat.

I hold out the dish to Jennifer. “Want another piece?”

She sets it in the middle of the table and steers the conversation back to Emma’s problems with long division.

Dad doesn’t even try to hide the fact that he’s staring at my plate.

I take a whole wheat roll (96) out of the basket and two buttery Brussels sprouts (35), even though I hate them. In jenniferland I am An Example and must take at least two bites of everything. I set the roll on the edge of the plate, Brussels sprouts at two and four o’clock, equidistant. I stand up so I can reach the cheesy potatoes and plop a disgusting orange spoonful (70) next to the turkey.

Just because I dish it out, doesn’t mean I have to swallow it. I am strong enough to do this the potatoes smell so good stay strong, empty empty the potatoes smell strong/

empty/strong/breathe/pretend/hold on.

I fill the rest of the space with salad, taking extra mushrooms and leaving the olives in the bowl. Five mushrooms = 20. Eat five magic mushrooms and drink a tall glass of water and they bloom in your belly like fog-colored sponges.

Strong/empty/strong.

Jennifer asks Emma what forty-eight divided by eight equals. Emma bites her roll. Dad nods at my full plate and says he’ll quiz Emma after dessert. “Even history profs have to know how to multiply and divide, Emmakins.”

I spread my napkin in my lap, then cut my turkey into two pieces, then four, then eight, then sixteen white bites. The Brussels sprouts are quartered. I scrape the cheese off a sliver of potato—which will not kill me, potatoes rarely cause death—and shove it in my mouth and chew, chew, chew, smiling across the acres of tablecloth.

Dad and Jennifer watch the division on my plate, but they don’t say anything about it. When I first moved in, this would have been called “disordered behavior” and Jennifer’s voice would pitch up high and Dad would twist his wedding band around and around his finger. Now it falls under the category of “battles not worth fighting, because at least she’s sitting at the table eating with us, and her weight hasn’t dropped into dangerland.”

I drop my left hand to my lap, under the napkin, under my waistband, and find the three scabby lines, drawn straight and true. With every bite I press my fingers into the cuts.

“You did a great job,” I tell Emma. “The potatoes are amazing.”

As Dad complains about a professor from Chicago who just published a book that is exactly like the one that Dad is writing, I skate the food from the one o’clock position to the two, then the three o’clock edge of my plate. I squeeze the gravy through the tines of my fork.

Jennifer asks Emma to divide one-hundred-twenty-one by eleven. Emma can’t.

I chew every bite ten times before I swallow. Meat in my mouth, chew ten times, lettuce in my mouth, chew chew chew chew chew chew chew chew chew chew, soggy Brussels sprout, mushroom cap, chew, chew, chew. I sip the milk, staining my top lip white and proving that we are all just fine.

“Can you figure out one hundred divided by ten?”

asks Jennifer.

A tear rolls down Emma’s cheek and splashes on her cheesy potatoes.

Dad pauses his rant and holds up his hands. “No tears, Emma. Lia had a hard time memorizing this stuff, too, but she got it in the end.”

That’s my cue. “You know what saved me?” I ask.

“Calculators. As long as you have a calculator, you’ll be okay. Trust me, math is not worth crying about.”

Jennifer shoots me a steplook, sharper than normal, and pours another glass of water. “Didn’t you have a test today?”