Wintergirls (8 page)

I measure myself; I can’t act or play soccer, and most of them have better grades than me. But I am the thinnest girl in the room, hands down.

There is an awkward pause between stories and the room gets too quiet. Someone farts softly. The heat comes on.

I don’t know how they do it. I don’t know how anybody does it, waking up every morning and eating and moving from the bus to the assembly line, where the teacher-bots inject us with Subject A and Subject B, and passing every test they give us. Our parents provide the list of ingredients and remind us to make healthy choices: one sport, two clubs, one artistic goal, community service, no grades below a B, because really, nobody’s average, not around here. It’s a dance with complicated footwork and a changing tempo.

I’m the girl who trips on the dance floor and can’t find her way to the exit. All eyes on me.

Ms. Rostoff looks at her watch. It keeps better time than the clock on the wall. “All right, girls.”

A drama raises her hand—BMI 20. Maybe 19.5.

Her sneakers are painted, one with an impossibly small checkerboard of a thousand colors, the other with yellow happy faces alternating with black skulls. “Ms. Rostoff?

Can we have a moment of silence?”

Ms. Rostoff calculates. Will our parents scream at the school board if she allows a religious ritual in her office?

Or will they scream if she denies us our freedom of religious expression?

“Is everyone interested in that?”

We nod, the strings attached to our heads twitching.

“Okay then.” She looks at her watch again. “A moment for Cassie.”

Drama and soccer bow their heads. I do, too. I am supposed to pray, I think. I can never tell with moments of silence. They’re so . . . silent. Empty.

Somebody sniffs and pulls a tissue from the box. I peek out through my eyelashes. Mira’s eyes are closed tight and her lips are moving. A girl I’ve never seen before wipes her face with a dirty Kleenex from her pocket.

A soccer player pulls out her phone to read a text. Ms.

Rostoff rubs her artificial nails against her thumb, then checks her watch again.

“Thank you, everyone.”

She proclaims the rules establishes the parameters of our discussion. We will not talk about how Cassie died, or why, or where, or who in this room could have done something to stop her or at least slow her down. We’re here to celebrate her life.

thirty-three calls.

Ms. Rostoff has already arranged for a memorial page in the yearbook, and she wrote an obituary for the school newspaper. The soccer team says they are dedicat-ing the rest of their season to Cassie, both weeks of it.

The theater girls want to take a moment just before the musical starts, when the houselights go out and the stage is black, to light up a single rose in a vase at the center of the stage while the chorus sings “Amazing Grace,” and then the star of the play will read a poem about the trag-edy of dying too soon.

The idea gets trimmed down to the rose in the spotlight for a minute and a mention in the play bulletin.

“What about Lia?” Mira leans forward to see me better. “Do you want to do something special? You guys were best friends.”

Were.

“These are all great ideas,” my lips say. “But I think Ms. Rostoff should talk to Cassie’s parents. Get their opinion.”

Diversion successful. The counselor talks about the family’s loss and how we can support them and how we have to be there for each other and how her door is always open and the tissue boxes always full. Before we leave, the soccer captain reminds the team to wear their uniforms to tonight’s wake. Mira says everyone from the play will go in black.

I am wearing navy blue tights under a stained pair of baggy jeans, a long underwear shirt, a turtleneck, a hoodie sweatshirt I stole from my father’s closet, and my jacket, with a surprise for Cassie buried deep in the left pocket.

And mittens. Not what you wear to a wake.

I tell Jennifer I won’t be home for dinner because I have to do research at the library with stupid primary sources, which means I have to use an actual book that has probably been touched by a hundred thousand strangers carrying God knows what mutant strains of virus.

It is such a bad lie I’m sure she’ll bust me for it, but she’s up to her elbows in papier-mâché helping Emma make a Greek temple.

My car parks at the library. I hurry the two blocks to the church, keeping my head down and my hair in my face. The sun set an hour ago. Cold air blows in with the smell of burning leaves and dead things piled onto bonfires. Red-and-green Christmas decorations are hung on the streetlights and in all the stores.

I can feel the shadows slipping out of the dark, coming for me.

Last time I was locked up, the hospital shrink
had me draw a life-sized outline of my body. I chose a fat crayon the color of elephant skin or a rainy sidewalk. He unrolled the paper on the floor, butcher’s paper that crinkled when I leaned on it. I wanted to draw my thighs, each the size of a couch, on his carpet. The rolls on my butt and my gut would rumble over the floor and splash up against the walls; my boobs, beach balls; my arms, tubes of cookie dough oozing at the seams.

The doc would have been horrified. All his work, gone, in the endless loop of snot-gray crayon. He would have called my parents and there would be more consultations (meter running, thousands of insurance dollars ticking away), and he would have adjusted my meds again, one pill to make my self-of-steam larger, another to make my craziness small.

So I drew a blobby version of me, a fraction of my real size, fingers and toes accounted for, stones in my belly, cute earrings, ponytail.

He pulled another long sheet of paper from the roll and had me lay down on it so he could draw the outside of me, life-sized. The crayon hugged my bones tight and it made me shiver. He did not dare approach my inner thighs. He did not speculate about the size or condition of my interior organs.

I pulled a magazine off the table while he taped the drawings to the wall. It was a trigger magazine, strategi-cally placed to send sparks into the air that could catch fire and burn clean away the craziness of his patience patients.

Even the ugly people in the magazine were beautiful.

“Look up here,” he said. “What differences do you see, Lia?”

Truth? They were both hideous waxy ghosts on butcher paper. I knew what he wanted to hear. He couldn’t stand me being sick. Nobody can. They only want to hear that you’re healing, you’re in recovery, taking it one day at a time. If you’re locked into sick, you should stop wast-ing their time and just get dead.

“Lia?” he asked again.

The $$$$ were ticking away.

I recited my lines. “The picture I drew is bloated and unrealistic. I guess I have to work on my self-perception a little more.”

He smiled.

I had figured out that my eyes were broken long before that. But that day
I started to worry that the people
in charge couldn’t see, either.

I stop in front of the florist shop. On the second floor, the lights are on in my old dance studio. I spent a lifetime staring into the mirrors up there. I’d flex and leap, and bow and sweep; a sugarplum, a swan, a maiden, a doll. After rehearsal I’d steal my mother’s anatomy book and stand naked in the bathroom, tracing the muscles that swam under my skin, looking for the place where they thinned into tough tendon ribbons anchored in the bones.

The girl reflected back from the window in front of me has poinsettias growing out of her belly and head. She’s the shape of a breakfast-link sausage standing on broom-stick legs, her arms made from twigs, her face blurred with an eraser. I know that it is me, but it’s not me, not really. I don’t know what I look like. I can’t remember how to look.

Gray faces crowd the red leaves. The ghosts want to taste me. Their hands snake out, fingers open wide. I walk quickly, moving out of the reach of their sticky shadows.

As I pass under a streetlight, the bulb pops and I smell burnt sugar. Her.
Her.

I run the rest of the way to the wake, one step ahead of the iron hooks she’s casting.

The line of people waiting to stare at the empty body snakes out the front door of the church and down the steps to the sidewalk. Dark chords from the organ slip into the night, turning our shoes into concrete blocks and pulling down our faces until we look like trees drooping with black leaves.

We’ve all been here before. In fifth grade it was Jim-my Myers, leukemia. In eighth, Madison Ellerson and her parents died in a thirty-car pileup during a blizzard. Last year it was a guy from the tennis team, the one who made State. Didn’t buckle his seat belt, no airbags. When his car hit a truck, he launched through the windshield in a perfect arc until he landed, tangled and speared, in the arms of a pine tree. The line for his wake went all the way around the block.

Walking through the front door, I am hit by the buzz of people talking but trying not to be heard. Parents unbutton their coats and drape them awkwardly over their arms. Sweat beads up on the cheeks of boys, leaning on the walls with their hands in their pockets and their ties loosened. Girls teeter-totter on their highest heels and thank God it is not them in the pretty box up front.

I leave my jacket on, unzipped. For the first time in weeks, I am almost warm. Plastic candles with orange bulbs flicker along the dark windows. The line moves along at a steady pace, like we’re filing in to a concert or a football game. When the soccer team walks by the casket, the captain hands a team ball signed by all the girls to Cassie’s father. He gives it to a man in black who puts the offering in with the corpse, gently, so she doesn’t wake up.

It’s called a wake, but nobody really wants the dead to rise.

The closer I get to the coffin, the hotter it is. Brown-edged chrysanthemum petals drop loudly from the wreaths that are perched on metal holders. I’m wilting, too, and my head is filling with rusty nails. I shouldn’t have worn jeans.
Idiot.

There is a gap between me and the guy ahead of me, a space big enough for four people. A lady behind me hisses, “Move up.”

Suddenly the organist stops playing. People stop in mid-murmur. The organist reaches for something above her and a whole stack of books falls to the floor, echoing across the marble like a gunshot. People jump.

I can see the bottom of the box now. The soccer ball rests next to a folded black T-shirt from the stage crew.

Cassie’s feet are hidden under a white velvet sheet, toes sticking straight up. I hope they put warm slippers on her, and comfy socks. I hope they left on her toe ring.

The music starts up again, a long, trembling minor chord.

The guy in front of me walks over to Cassie’s parents. Her mother sobs and he puts his arms around her.

He’s an uncle, the fun one, the one who taught us how to water-ski. He is crying, too, groaning. They are the only two people in this whole hot, crowded, dead-petal church strong enough to say and do what we are all thinking.

My turn to stare. My turn to rape the dead.

Sleeping Beauty is wearing a sky blue dress with a high neck and long sleeves. Her hair looks like an over-brushed doll’s wig, tired yellow with faded red highlights coming through. She is not wearing any earrings or her silver bell necklace, but her class ring was shoved on her finger. Her nose piercing and acne scars are hidden under the foundation plastered on her skin. They used the wrong shade of pale.

I want to take off her dress and see if they unzipped her belly. I want to look inside. She would, too, because that’s all we ever talked about, the hidden creatures with itchy wings and antennae that poked us and sent us stumbling to the bathroom, Cassie to the toilet so she could get rid of it all, me to the mirror so the girl on the other side would keep me strong and steel-ribbed.

They should have put her crochet needle in the box next to her, and yarn so she’ll have something to do in Eternity. Some Gaiman, Tolkien, Butler, a few tabloids, mints—peppermint, not wintergreen—her swimming ribbons and Girl Scout badges, the posters from the plays she was in. I bet she’d like a box of cereal to munch on, too: comfort food for the ride.

Her mother sobs louder than the organ.

I reach into my jacket pocket and pull out the small disk of green see-glass, born in the heart of a volcano, ca-pable of showing the future. I stole it from Cassie’s room when we were nine, but I could never make it work, no matter how the stars lined up.

I slip the magic glass into her frozen hand.

Cassie’s fingers curl around it.

My heart stutters.

She squeezes the green disk tightly, then she blinks—

once, twice—opens her eyes wide, and looks straight at me. She reaches up and touches her hair. It comes out of her head like dandelion fluff. A few strands float up to the real candles burning at the head of the box. They ignite like sparklers.

I cannot breathe.

Cassie sits up slowly. She holds the magic glass up to her blue eye, looks through it and laughs, a low, dirty sound that only came out at two or three o’clock in the morning. She pops the glass in her mouth and swallows it, then wipes her mouth with her hand, staining her fingers with wax and blood.

She frowns and opens her mouth—

—no. She is not sitting there. She’s not there at all.

There is no blood, no cloud of doll hair burning up in the candle fire.

I blink. She has disappeared from the coffin. The soccer ball rolls backwards. Her feet aren’t there to prop it up.

I blink.

She’s still gone, the white velvet sheet thrown to the side like she didn’t hear the alarm go off and now she’s going to be really late and her dad will take the car away again and she’ll have to drive with me, and that’s a little scary.

The organ music pours down and floods the church.

The line behind me mutters. People have places to go and things to do and the new episodes come on in half an hour, and besides, they are all much too polite to notice that the coffin is empty. The fun uncle is buttoning up his coat. The space in front of Cassie’s parents waits for me.