Wintergirls Read online

  Of course I didn’t pick up. She was drunk-dialing, or prank-dialing. I wasn’t going to let her sucker me into being her friend again just so she could turn around and crush me one more time.

  ... body found in a motel room, alone . . .

  I didn’t pick up. I didn’t listen to her messages yesterday. I was too angry to even look at the phone.

  She’s still waiting for me.

  I sit down on the mound of unwashed pajama bottoms and sweatshirts and dig out the phone. Open it. Cassie called thirty-three times, starting at 11:30 Saturday night.

  RETRIEVE VOICE MAIL

  “Lia? It’s me. Call me.”

  Cassie.

  Second message: “Where are you? Call me back.” Cassie.

  Third: “I’m not playing, Overbrook. I really need to talk to you.”

  Cassie, two days ago, Saturday.

  “Call me.”

  “Please, please, call me.”

  “Look, I’m sorry I was such a bitch. Please.”

  “I know you’re getting these messages.”

  “You can be mad at me later, okay? I really need to talk to you.”

  “You were right—it wasn’t your fault.”

  “There’s nobody else to talk to.”

  “Oh, God.”

  From 1:20 to 2:55, she hung up fifteen times.

  Next: “Please, Lia-Lia.” Her voice was slurring.

  “I’m so sad. I can’t get out.”

  “Call me. It’s a mess.”

  Two more hang-ups.

  3:20, very slurred: “I don’t know what to do.”

  3:27. “I miss you. Miss you.”

  I bury the phone at the bottom of the pile and put on a heavier sweatshirt before I head for my car. Winter comes early in New Hampshire.

  005.00

  My timing is perfect, and I wind up in a traffic jam. The cars around me are driven by fat cows and bellowing bulls. We roll along, six mph. I can run faster than this. We brake. They chew their cud and moo into their phones until the herd shifts gears and rolls forward again.

  Fifteen miles an hour. I can’t run that fast.

  Somewhere between Martins Corner and Route 28, I begin to cry. I turn on the radio, sing at the top of my lungs, turn it off again. I beat the steering wheel with my fists until I can see the bruises, and with every mile, I cry harder. Rain pours down my face.

  ... body found in a motel room, alone . . .

  What was she doing there? What was she thinking?

  Did it hurt?

  There’s no point in asking why, even though everybody will. I know why. The harder question is “why not?” I can’t believe she ran out of answers before I did.

  I need to run, to fly, beating my wings so hard I can’t hear anything over the pounding of my heart. Rain, rain, rain, drowning me.

  Was it easy?

  I do not take any shortcuts, I do not forget to turn at the deli on the corner, I do not get lost, not even on purpose. I arrive at school on autopilot; late by their standards, early by mine. The last buses have just pulled up to the front door.

  I get out and lock the car.

  The unforgiving November wind blows me toward the building. Pointy snowflakes spiral down from the cake-frosting clouds overhead. The first snow. Magic. Everybody stops and looks up. The bus exhaust freezes, trapping all the noise in a gritty cloud. The doors to the school freeze, too.

  We tilt back our heads and open wide.

  The snow drifts into our zombie mouths crawling with grease and curses and tobacco flakes and cavities and boyfriend/girlfriend juice, the stain of lies. For one moment we are not failed tests and broken condoms and cheating on essays; we are crayons and lunch boxes and swinging so high our sneakers punch holes in the clouds. For one breath everything feels better.

  Then it melts.

  The bus drivers rev their engines and the ice cloud shatters. Everyone shuffles forward. They don’t know what just happened. They can’t remember.

  she called me.

  I walk back to my car, get in, turn on the heat, and wipe my face on my shirt. 7:30. Emma is done with French now and is unpacking her violin. She’ll spend too much time rosining her bow, and not enough tuning the strings. The Winter Concert is coming up in a few weeks, and she doesn’t know the songs yet. I should help her with that.

  Cassie’s at the morgue, I guess. Last night she slept there in a silver drawer, eyes getting used to the dark.

  Jennifer said they’re doing an autopsy. Who will cut off her clothes? Will they give her a bath, strangers touching her skin? Can she watch them? Will she cry?

  The late bell rings, and the last people in the parking lot sprint for the door. Just a few minutes more. I can’t go in until the halls are empty and the teachers have numbed them with boredom so they won’t notice when I slip down the halls.

  I turn around and clear a place in the backseat, shoving all the tests, sweatshirts, and overdue library books to one side so Emma will have a place to sit when I pick her up. Jennifer insists on sticking her in the back. It’s safer, she says.

  There is no safer. There’s not even safe, never has been.

  Cassie thought heaven was a fairy tale for stupid people. How can you find a place you don’t believe in? You can’t. So where does she go now? What if she comes back, eyes on angryfire?

  7:35. Time to go to school and stop thinking.

  006.00

  No Honors Option for me, not this year. I am Contemp World Lit, Soc Sci 12—The Holocaust, Physics, Trig (again), and Lunch. No gym, thanks to a magic note from Dr. Parker. There are asterisks next to my name and footnotes that explain the situation.

  . . . When I was a real girl, my mother fed me her glass dreams one spoonful at a time. Harvard. Yale. Princeton. Duke. Undergrad. Med school. Internship, residency, God. She’d brush my hair and braid it with long words, weaving the Latin roots and Greek branches into my head so memorizing anatomy would come easy.Dr. Marrigan was furious when the guidance counselor kicked me out of Honors and dropped me down to College Track. The counselor suggested that I plan on going to my father’s college, because they had to let me in. Free tuition for faculty kids, she reminded us.

  I was relieved.

  That night Dr. Marrigan told me that I was too smart to be a slacker faculty kid. She wanted to have me privately tested, to prove that I was brilliant and that the school was not meeting my needs. But then I screwed up again and they slammed me back in the hospital and when I got out, I changed all the rules.

  I used to fantasize about taking the Mensa test to prove that I wasn’t a total loser. Maybe I’d score total off-the-hook genius. I’d make one hundred thousand photocopies of the test results, glue them to the walls of my mother’s house, take a bucket of red paint and a thick brush, and I’d write HA! a million times.

  But there was a pretty good chance I’d flunk it. I really didn’t want to know.

  The buzzer sounds. Students float from room to room. The teachers tie us to our chairs and pour worlds into our ears.

  The shades are pulled and the lights are off in the physics lab so we can watch a movie about the speed of light and the speed of sound and some other garbage that doesn’t matter. Ghosts are waiting in the shadows of the room, patient dull shimmers. The others can see them, too, I know it. We’re all afraid to talk about what stares at us from the dark.

  Waves of physics particles stream through the room.

  she called me thirty-three times.

  A ghost wraps herself around me, strokes my hair, and puts me to sleep.

  The buzzer sounds. My classmates grab their books and race for the door. I have drooled on the desk.

  My physics teacher (what is his name?) frowns at me. When he breathes through his open mouth, I can smell the night scum coating his tongue and the sunny-side-up eggs he ate for breakfast. “Are you planning on staying here all day?” he asks.

  I shake my head no. Before he tries to be witty again, I grab my books and stand up. T
oo fast. The floor tries to pull me down face-first, but my night-scummy teacher is watching so I make myself strong enough to float away, stars swimming in my eyes.

  1.2.3.4.5.6.7.8.9.10.11.12.13.14.15.16.17.18.19.

  20.21.22.23.24.25.26.27.28.29.30.31.32.33.

  “Dead girl walking,” the boys say in the halls.

  “Tell us your secret,” the girls whisper, one toilet to another.

  I am that girl.

  I am the space between my thighs, daylight shining through.

  I am the library aide who hides in Fantasy.

  I am the circus freak encased in beeswax.

  I am the bones they want, wired on a porcelain frame.

  When I get close, they step back. The cameras in their eyeholes record the zit on my chin, the rain in my eyes, the blue water under my skin. They pick up every sound on their collar microphones. They want to pull me inside of them, but they’re afraid.

  I am contagious.

  I tiptoe to the nurse’s office, hand on the wall to keep me vertical. If I run or breathe too deep, the cheap stitches holding me together will snap, and all the stickiness inside will pour out and burn through the concrete.

  The nurse ruffles her feathers when I slink in. She turns down the radio, cool jazz, and looks me over, hands on her hips, eyes sad and friendly.

  “I thought you might stay home today,” she says. “It’s got to be a shock. Cassie was real close to you, wasn’t she?”

  “I don’t feel good,” I say. “Can I lie down for a while?”

  “You know the rules.”

  She is a crafty witch in nurse’s clothing.

  “Okay.” I sit on the chair next to her desk and let her take my temperature and blood pressure.

  She wraps the cuff around my arm bone. “Are you still being weighed regularly?”

  “Once a week. I’m fine. I don’t need to step on your scale.”

  “You don’t look fine.” She jots down my numbers. “If you’re going to stay here, you have to get something in your system. If you don’t, it’s back to class.”

  Do I want to die from the inside out or the outside in?

  She opens up a carton of orange juice, pours it into a paper cup, and hands it to me as she removes the thermometer. “I’m serious.”

  I take the cup from her.my hand does not want this my mouth does not want this.

  The nurse wants this and I need to hide. I force it down.

  The door opens and two guys walk in; one bleeding from his nose, the other looking a little freaked out at the sight of blood. The nurse makes the bleeder sit with his head tilted back and his buddy sit with his head between his knees so he doesn’t pass out.

  I throw the paper cup in the trash can, take the newspaper off her desk, and retreat to the cot at the far end of the room.

  “You’ll drink another one in fifteen minutes,” the nurse says. “Or you can have a lollipop: grape or lime.”

  “Right.”

  I pull the little screen in front of the cot, sit down, and search through the newspaper. Local section, page 2. The article runs for a couple of inches, next to an ad for fur coats, thirty percent off.

  Police are investigating the death of 19-year-old Cassandra Parrish, of the town of Amoskeag, NH, whose body was discovered early Sunday morning in a room of the Gateway Motel on River Road in Centerville. Authorities were called to the scene at 4:43 A.M. by the motel employee who found the body. Preliminary indications suggest Miss Parrish may have died of natural causes, but police have not yet ruled out foul play or drug use.

  “We’re still gathering information,” said police spokesperson Sgt. Anna Warren. “We’ll have a report about the time and cause of death when the coroner finishes the autopsy.”

  Miss Parrish, known to friends as Cassie, was a popular athlete and member of the theater club at Amoskeag High. Her father, Jerry Parrish, is the principal of Park Street Elementary School, and her mother, Cindy, is active in school and community affairs. Amoskeag Superintendent of Schools Nelson Bushnel said the Parrish family’s loss was “heartbreaking.”

  “Cassie was what we all want our children to be: bright, hardworking, and kind,” said Bushnell. When asked to comment on reports that Miss Parrish had a troubled background, he said, “Most teens today struggle with something. Cassie had made great strides in embracing a healthy life. The last time I talked to her father, he said she was trying to choose between studying psychology or French literature in college. Her death is as tragic as it is shocking.”

  Autopsy results are expected later in the week. Funeral plans were incomplete at press time.

  I lie down on the cot, the paper pillowcase crackling in my ears like radio static.

  The buzzer sounds. The hall fills with a river of bodies and voices whispering that Cassie was murdered/no, she hung herself/no, she smoked or snorted her way to the Final Exit. She’d try anything once, did you hear about the time under the bleachers/at the mall/at summer camp? She drove herself into a speeding train/jumped without a parachute/strapped on a weight belt and dove into the ocean.

  She offered herself to the big, bad wolf and didn’t scream when he took the first bite.

  ... body found in a motel room, alone . . .

  The boys are gone. The nurse takes the newspaper away and spreads a thin blanket over me.

  “Can I get another one?” I ask. “I’m cold.”

  “Sure thing.” She walks to the supply closet, her shoes squeaking on the polished floor.

  “Have you heard anything about the funeral?” I ask.

  “The superintendent’s office sent an e-mail,” she says. “The viewing will be Wednesday night at St. Stephen’s. They’ll bury her on Saturday.” She walks toward me, her arms loaded down. “Get some sleep now and remember: you’re drinking more orange juice when you wake up.”

  “I promise.”

  She covers me with all of the blankets she has (five) and the jackets from the lost-and-found box, because I am freezing. I drift into the armpits of strangers, tasting their manic salt, and sleep to forget everything.

  007.00

  Emma is buckled in the backseat watching a movie on the DVD player in her lap, eating potato chips and pounding a Mountain Dew slushie.

  “Don’t tell Jennifer,” I say.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Seriously. She’ll yell.”

  “I heard you. Don’t tell or she’ll yell.” Emma’s eyes are glued to the screen, the chips moving one at a time into her mouth on a pink conveyor belt.

  We’re lost. Again. My father doesn’t want me to get a GPS because he says I have to learn how to get around on my own. How can I figure out where I’m going if I’m lost all the time? I’ll ask Jennifer. Christmas is coming.

  We pass a dying barn with a shattered roof, and a stained mattress shoved up against the speed-limit sign. Wouldn’t you notice if a mattress fell off your car? Maybe it was in the back of a truck loaded down with everything a girl owned, taking her to some guy she met online. She promised him her body and soul. He promised her three meals a day and a house but said the place could use more furniture. He didn’t stop when the mattress fell off. A new wife deserves a clean bed, that’s what he always said.

  Maybe a leather-covered biker girl, butch and strong, is coming down the road a mile or so behind me. Any minute now, some idiot will cut in front of her and she’ll swerve and the bike will flip and send her screaming because she forgot her wings again and gravity never forgets

  and then she’ll hit

  that nasty mattress. And yeah, she’ll wind up with three broken ribs, a fractured femur, and a strained neck, but the ambulance drivers won’t ever mention that. They’ll always talk about how the stained mattress at the side of the road saved that chick’s life.

  The smell of Emma’s potato chips is doing this to my brain.

  By the time I find the Richland Park fields, practice has already started. Emma wants to stay in the car until the end of the movie.


  “You need to get out there,” I say.

  She groans and closes the player. “I hate soccer.”

  “So tell them you want to quit.”

  “Mom says the season is almost over and I’m not allowed.”

  “So get out there and play. Have fun.”

  She looks at my eyes in the rearview mirror. “Nobody ever kicks me the ball.”

  Emma is a mattress who got thrown off the truck when her parents split up. I can’t remember the last time her father called. Jennifer is determined to carve her into the perfect-little-girl who will turn into the perfect-young-lady whose shining accomplishments will prove to the world that Jennifer is the absolutely perfect mother.

  It’s not like you can blame a mattress when people don’t tie it down tight enough.

  I open my door. “Come on. I’ll kick the ball to you.”

  She closes the player and tosses it on the seat. “No, you said you have homework.” She suddenly can’t get out fast enough. “Bye, Lia. Drive safe.”

  It takes a couple of heartbeats to figure out what just happened. One. Two. Three. The smells are messing with my neurons again.

  I roll down the window. “Emma. Hang on.”

  She slowly walks back to the car, hugging the soccer ball tight. “What?”

  “I changed my mind. I want to watch you practice. Where should I sit?”

  Her eyes fly open. “No, you can’t.”

  “Why not? Other people are watching.”

  “Um, it’s just . . .” She looks at her cleats and mumbles. “You can watch from the car. It’s warmer.”

  There are shouts from the field, nine-year-olds psyching themselves up for the kill. Travel soccer is intense.