Burnout Read online

  “What are you making, Mom?” Tick asked.

  Mom groaned. “It’s either a big fat mess or a mixed-media installation about mall culture and female genital mutilation.”

  “Oh.”

  Mom looked at me and smiled. “You sleep okay?”

  I closed my eyes and burrowed under my pillow. “I still want to sleep more. It’s summer.”

  “But it’s farmer’s market day!” she said, reaching out to pull my long hair from under the pillow so she could play with it. I loved it when Mom played with my hair, but this morning I wished I could just hack it off. “It’s going to be hot today. We can go to the market early, then maybe go to the pool with the Tick’s dad out in Brooklyn.”

  I sat up and watched her closely as I asked, “Can we stay over at Dad’s? Go out to brunch all together tomorrow morning?”

  Tick looked at her, his face full of hope.

  Her smile was a little forced. “Sure. Sounds like fun.”

  “Yeah!” Tick scrambled off the bed. “I’m going to pack!”

  Mom and I both knew she was lying. Spending the night at Dad’s didn’t sound like fun for her, it sounded like murder, and she’d probably end up bailing as soon as we met up with Dad and she’d leave us in Greenpoint and tell me to bring the Tick home tomorrow. But I let myself believe for a second that things were just like they used to be. They used to love each other, I told myself, and sometimes love comes back.

  “I should really get some friends,” I told her, rolling over. “I can’t spend the whole summer with my mom and little brother at the pool. It’s bad for my reputation.”

  I really had only a few friends from school, and they all were taking off for the summer. Eight weeks as camp counselors, or bicycling through Europe, or at their country houses. I think Mom was glad they were all gone. The fact that they were in a different tax bracket made her prickly.

  “You have friends,” she assured me, “but they’re the sort that bail on the city in the summer, so . . .” She trailed off.

  To my mom, bailing on New York City in the summer is a sign of weakness and untrustworthiness in a person. It’s the sign of someone who will steal your dog and tell lies about you. “You don’t abandon your girl when she’s down,” Mom says, making staying in the hot, gross, stinky city overrun with tourists for the summer a badge of loyalty.

  Mom went to help Tick get ready, so I brushed my teeth and washed my face and started kicking at the clothes on my bedroom floor, looking for something that seemed at least a little clean.

  “I hate all my clothes,” I called to Mom, finally picking up a pair of jean cutoff shorts and a tank top.

  “So, do some babysitting and I’ll give you money to get new clothes,” Mom called back. I could hear her trying to get the Tick to brush his teeth.

  “They’d just suck too,” I mumbled, slumping onto my bed and dropping the shorts and top back on the floor. I knew I’d just go to the same stores, buy the same sort of things I had at home already, except maybe a different size because I’d gotten taller. Again. There was no way I could get away from my own lameness. I was hopeless and itchy and I wanted to shake out of my own skin. I’d be stuck with myself all summer, and then when school came, maybe I’d make a halfhearted effort to get a new look, but then I’d go broke or lose interest or get scared and end up looking just like myself. Boring. And giant. There were no makeovers that didn’t involve sawing off a few inches of height and girth that could turn me from an ogre into an imp.

  “Nan, let’s go!” Mom called from the kitchen. I could hear the Tick digging out our stash of canvas shopping bags from under the sink. I was looking in my closet when I caught a glint of light reflected from the back. It was the space reserved for stupid things my mother made me wear. I reached back and yanked a truly horrendous red checked Christmas dress with shiny brass buttons off its hanger and held it up to the light. She’d bought it for me last year, when we were invited to the dean of her college’s house for a holiday party. I don’t know what she was thinking. It was a little-kid dress, even if it came in my gigantic size. I wore it because she paid me $10, but I looked ridiculous, like a grown-up dressed like a little girl for Halloween. What I’d forgotten, though, was that the dress had this built-in black slip with a puffy crinoline skirt, and standing there in front of my closet, I had one of those lightning-bolt ideas that you know might change your life.

  “What are you wearing?” Mom laughed when I came out of my room. I spun around, fluffing the black slip’s skirt as I did, ending in a pose that was half superhero, half supermodel.

  “I’m wearing the most awesome dress ever,” I answered matter-of-factly. I’d paired it with a pair of black yoga pants, which I planned to replace with fishnet tights as soon as I could.

  “It’s awfully . . .” Mom faltered, searching for the right word.

  “‘Awfully awesome’ is the phrase you’re looking for.” I spun around again, and the Tick started running around me in a circle, trying to hide under my skirt.

  My mom told me I wasn’t going out of the house until I put on real clothes.

  “These are real clothes.”

  “You can see your boobs.”

  “I’ll put on a bra.”

  “It will show.”

  “Well, then everyone will know I’m wearing one.”

  “You know we’re going straight from the farmer’s market to Tick’s dad’s, so you’ll be on the subway in that.”

  My heart leaped. “I hadn’t thought of that!”

  “But why?” she asked. “Why do you want to wear that?”

  I proudly gave her the only answer I knew she couldn’t argue with. “It’s my ART.”

  The farmer’s market in Union Square happens a bunch of times a week, but we always go on Saturdays. Farmers from the Hudson Valley come down and fill the west side of the park with tables, selling their goods. It’s a crowded mix of veggies dumped into plastic bins and fancy jelly that costs $12 a jar. We always go early, because by midmorning the place is totally clogged with everyone from gourmet chefs to tourists to regular people like us. For some reason that Saturday it got crowded early, and there was no room for the Tick to ride his skateboard without hitting people, so Mom bought us a pint of blueberries and asked me to take him over to the wide steps that line the south side of the park.

  I watched him try to ollie, then I spit blueberries in his general direction, making him cackle like a junior madman, “You missed me!”

  I heard someone else laugh and looked over, and sitting on the steps a few yards away was a girl about my age. Her hair was short, the sort of little pixie cut my big old pumpkin face could never take, and she was wearing this sort of hippie, flowy embroidered dress.

  “Is he your little brother?” she asked, moving closer and sitting down next to me.

  “Yep.” I stole another glance at her. She had a pointy chin, a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks. I thought she smelled like strawberries. “That’s the Tick.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “He breast-fed till he was, like, four,” I explained.

  She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. “Cool dress.”

  I flushed. “Thanks.” I knew she would never have talked to me if I were in my normal boring jeans and T-shirt. “Yours too.”

  “Not really.” She groaned with a smile. “I wish my parents would let me dress like you.”

  I nodded in understanding. “Parents suck. My mom made me get up at eight.”

  The girl laughed again. “I was up at four.”

  My jaw dropped, and I held out the blueberries. “You win.”

  She laughed again, and she had this great throaty laugh that seemed deeper than it should for someone her size. “I’m Seemy,” she said. “Well, really Samantha, but everybody calls me Seemy.”

  She held out her hand and I shook it. “I’m Nan.”

  “Do you live around here?”

  “SoHo. You live upstate?”


  She broke into a huge smile. “Actually,” she said excitedly, “we’re moving back to the city. My parents have an apartment down here, on Avenue B, but they freaked out after 9/11 and bought a farm. The Times wrote an article about them.” She shrugged. “But now they’re going crazy because of all the small-town politics. We’re actually moving back this summer. I’m so excited. I couldn’t take Hick-town anymore.”

  “Cool.”

  We sat there, eating blueberries, watching the Tick, until she looked at her cell phone and said she had to go check in with her parents.

  “We’re moving down next week. Here.” She handed me her phone. “Give me your number, I’ll call you when I get in.”

  And that was the beginning of everything. It was even the beginning of the end. We just didn’t know it yet.

  CHAPTER 7

  TODAY

  I wish I had time to shower in the gym. I want to let hot water run all over me. I want to spread out my fingers and hold my palms up and feel the water pelt my skin. I feel like I could tip my head to the side, let the water stream into one ear and out the other, cleaning out my brain, and then I could think new thoughts.

  But there’s no time for that.

  I need to wash up quickly and check in at the main office so I don’t get marked absent.

  I pull the plastic shopping bag of gym clothes from my locker and bring it with me to the girls’ bathroom.

  I should call Mom. But if I call Mom, things are going to break open and spill out and she might not like what she sees when she studies the entrails. She’s going to want me to answer the question that I don’t even want to ask.

  What happened to me last night?

  I take off the MTA jacket, hang it up on the hook on the back of the stall door, and start digging through the shopping bag. I first put on the black yoga pants I wear for gym, and then reach back in to get my T-shirt and sports bra, but neither is there.

  “Oh man,” I groan, remembering I brought them home last week to wash. I’ll have to stick with the pink dress. At least I have a pair of sneakers. I put them on, gather the shopping bag and the jacket over my arm, and walk out to the row of sinks and mirrors.

  And then I drop everything onto the floor and lurch toward the mirror because I see now there is something scrawled in black marker across my chest.

  HELP ME

  The letters are uneven and messy, sloping down at the end, like they were scribbled in a hurry. I run my fingers over the words, and the skin feels bruised, like whoever wrote them was trying to carve them into my skin.

  HELP ME

  The tile floor starts to tip and sway, and I grip the edge of the sink and squat down, resting my forehead against the cool porcelain until the world steadies itself again. “Why is this happening to me?” I whisper, staring at the pipe that curves under the sink and into the wall. “Why is this happening?”

  I don’t want to stand back up; I don’t want time to start again. I want to stay here, under the sink, until my own inertia seeps into the rest of the universe and nothing ever moves forward again.

  But then my thighs are starting to cramp and my fingers are starting to hurt from holding on so tightly to the sink, and so I pull myself back up and there I am again, in the mirror.

  A second later I’m tearing off a sheet of paper towel, soaking it in the sink, and wiping it across my chest. The letters stay. I wipe again, harder this time, but all that happens is the skin around the letters gets red and raw.

  HELP ME, the words say. “I’m trying!” I hiss, pumping soap from the dispenser onto my hands and soaping up my chest, wiping again, groaning when I see it’s not coming off. The fact is I wrote on myself. Even if I don’t remember it, I can guess why I did it. I can guess that last night, alone for the first time in months in our empty apartment, I freaked out and cut open the futon in my room, which Seemy and I covered in duct tape last summer. Before we covered it, we stuck a fifth of whiskey in the cushion “for emergencies.” I could say I forgot about it after the Nanapocalypse, but that’d be a lie. I knew it was there, and even if I never planned on drinking it, I liked having at least one secret from Mom left. Last night I cut the futon open, pulled out the bottle, drank myself sick, and then went out on the town. Found a costume. Some face paint. And then when I stumbled home, I bet I went into the bathroom and screamed at myself in the mirror for being so pathetically weak and then scrawled these words across my chest before drinking some more and going back out.

  “Congratulations,” I say to myself in the mirror. “You’ve ruined everything.”

  Dr. Friedman said sometimes when you find yourself in a mess, you have to clean up what you can and leave the rest as a lesson learned.

  I pry open the paper towel dispenser so I can take out the whole roll, then climb up onto the left-hand sink, stick my feet into the sink on the right, and set my sneakers on the shelf below the mirror. I pull the yoga-pant legs as high up as they can go, and crank as much soap as I can out of the dispenser and go to work washing the filth off my legs and feet. I get the water as hot as I can stand it; block the drain with my heel so the sink fills up. I let the water drain just before it reaches the rim, and start to scrub. The water swirls black in the sink. I scrub and scrub and scrub, scrub it all away until the skin on my feet and legs is pink and tingling.

  I try to give my face the same scrubbing treatment, but it doesn’t work as well. Some of the white comes off, but it leaves a sort of glowing shadow on my skin, and the black stays stuck to my lips and eyes. There was a time I would have been flat-out thrilled to look like this, but I never had the guts to push it this far. Seemy used to roll her eyes at me, leaning in to block my view of myself in the mirror in the bathroom at Duke’s or wherever we’d gone to put my makeup on. “Just leave it,” she’d say as I wiped at my face with toilet paper, “it looks good. Fierce. You’ll ruin it!” Sometimes she’d call me a coward. She’d say, “I thought you were this badass, but you’re totally not. You’re, like, the least scary person I know.” And she’d say this to me while wearing glitter on her cheeks and a kid’s superhero cape. To her I became like an uncooperative Barbie doll.

  I wish she would get out of my head.

  I hold out my arm and rinse off the four cuts and flinch at the pain as the water runs over them. I can’t stop staring at the way they curve from my inner elbow to my wrist. Four rivers on a map to my memories. I pat them dry with a paper towel and put on the MTA jacket, covering them up.

  CHAPTER 8

  REMEMBERING

  Tick and I shared the sill of one of the oversize windows in the den, watching the street below for Seemy and her parents. The windows are big enough for us to stand in, starting just a foot from the floor and ending ten feet up, almost to the ceiling. Mom hates it when we stand in them, because the windows rattle in their casements when it is windy. She worries that one day the windows will come loose and plummet to the sidewalk below while we cling to them with white knuckles, our eyes closed against the glass so we won’t see what’s coming. It was 9 p.m., past Tick’s bedtime, but Mom said he could stay up until Seemy got here.

  “It’s finally getting dark,” Tick said, leaning his head against the glass and looking down at the sidewalk below. “I hate going to bed when it’s not dark.”

  “Me too.”

  “Is that them?” He pushed a finger against the glass, and down on the street I saw Seemy walking with two people I had to guess were her parents. They were looking at the building numbers as they walked, and I was suddenly embarrassed to be watching for them. I stepped quickly off the ledge and flopped onto the couch.

  As soon as I did, the intercom let out its dying landlord-won’t-fix-me buzz. Tick jumped off the window ledge and ran to our front door.

  “I get to open it when they come up!” he announced, already holding the doorknob. “Come on, Nan! Get the intercom!”

  My mom came out of her studio, wiping her hands on the hem of her smock. “Is that them?”r />
  “Yes,” I groaned, getting off the couch and walking over to the door. I paused with my hand on the intercom phone. “Can everyone please just relax and not embarrass me?”

  My mom crossed her eyes, stuck out her tongue, and then said, “You’re the one wearing a Halloween costume.”

  I realized I was wearing the same slip dress as the day I met Seemy, and suddenly I wished I were wearing something else. She’d seen me in this already, but there was no time to change.

  I picked up the intercom phone and held it away from my ear so it could crackle and pop and snap without making me go deaf. “What’s up, Chuck?” I spoke loudly so he could hear.

  “The Turbin family is here!”

  “Thanks, go ahead and send them up!”

  Ten minutes later we were all sitting in the den, Seemy and I sharing the oversize armchair with the seat cushion so worn it could swallow you whole. I kept sneaking glances at her, since I hadn’t seen her since the first time we met at the farmer’s market. We’d talked on the phone once, when she called to tell me she was moving down this weekend, and then here she was. In our apartment. For real. It felt like my summer and the new me were both finally starting. Our moms were sitting across from each other on couches. Seemy’s mom perched on the edge of our worn plaid couch, and my mom lounged back in the mismatched leather one. Seemy’s dad stood, and Tick was curled up under the coffee table, asleep. It had gotten dark out, and I was glad my mom insisted on turning on only two of the lamps. It made the room cozy, and it kept some of the threadbare spots on the furniture from showing.

  “We so appreciate you taking Samantha in for the night,” Seemy’s mom finally said. She was fine boned, like Seemy, but taller, with long, shiny black hair, flowing clothes, and the sort of artsy jewelry they sell in the glass cases in the gift shop at the Met. “We didn’t anticipate the move taking so long today, and her bedroom isn’t set up at all.”

  My mom remained reclining back, like she was the queen of Sheba. People with money always make her a bit crabby. “It’s no problem,” she answered with a slow smile, “we’re happy to have her.”