“Amma, I just…” But she was already burbling ahead.
“I like our house,” Amma interrupted. “I like her room. The floor is famous. I saw it in a magazine one time. They called it ‘The Ivory Toast: Southern Living from a Bygone Time.’ Because now of course you can’t get ivory. Too bad. Really too bad.”
She stuck the sucker in her mouth and snatched a firefly from the air, held it between two fingers and ripped out its back end. Wiped the light around her finger to make a glowing ring. She dropped the dying bug into the grass and admired her hand.
“Did girls like you growing up?” she asked. “Because they’re definitely not nice to me.”
I tried to reconcile the idea of Amma, brash, bossy, sometimes scary (stepping on my heels at the park—what kind of thirteen-year-old taunts adults like that?) with a girl to whom anyone was openly rude. She saw my look and read my thoughts.
“I don’t mean not nice to me, actually. They do whatever I tell them. But they don’t like me. The second I fuck up, the second I do something uncool, they’ll be the first to gang up against me. Sometimes I sit in my room before bed and I write down every single thing I did and said that day. Then I grade it, A for a perfect move, F for I should kill myself I’m such a loser.”
When I was in high school, I kept a log of every outfit I wore each day. No repeating until a month went by.
“Like tonight, Dave Rard, who’s a very hot junior, told me he didn’t know if he could wait a year, you know, to get with me, like until I was in high school? And I said, ‘So don’t.’ And walked away, and all the guys were like, ‘Awwwww.’ So that’s an A. But yesterday, I tripped on Main Street in front of the girls and they laughed. That’s an F. Maybe a D, because I was so mean to them the rest of the day Kelsey and Kylie both cried. And Jodes always cries so it’s not really a challenge.”
“Safer to be feared than loved,” I said.
“Machiavelli,” she crowed, and skipped ahead laughing—whether in a mocking gesture of her age or genuine youthful energy, I couldn’t tell.
“How do you know that?” I was impressed, and liking her more every minute. A smart, fucked-up little girl. Sounded familiar.
“I know tons of things I shouldn’t know,” she said, and I began skipping alongside her. The X had me wired, and while I was aware that under sober circumstances I wouldn’t be doing it, I was too happy to care. My muscles were singing.
“I’m actually smarter than most of my teachers. I took an IQ test. I’m supposed to be in tenth grade, but Adora thinks I need to be with kids my age. Whatever. I’m going away for high school. To New England.”
She said it with the slight wonder of someone who knew the region only through photos, of a girl harboring Ivy League–sponsored images: New England’s where the smart people go. Not that I should judge, I’ve never been there either.
“I’ve got to get out of here,” Amma said with the exhausted affectation of a pampered housewife. “I’m bored all the time. That’s why I act out. I know I can be a little…off.”
“With the sex you mean?” I stopped, my heart making rumba thumps in my chest. The air smelled of irises, and I could feel the scent float into my nose, my lungs, my blood. My veins would smell of purple.
“Just, you know, lashing out. You know. I know you know.” She took my hand and offered me a pure, sweet smile, petting my palm, which might have felt better than any touch I’d ever experienced. On my left calf freak sighed suddenly.
“How do you lash out?” We were near my mother’s house now, and my high was in full bloom. My hair swished on my shoulders like warm water and I swayed side to side to no particular music. A snail shell lay on the edge of the sidewalk and my eyes looped into its curlicue.
“You know. You know how sometimes you need to hurt.”
She said it as if she were selling a new hair product.
“There are better ways to deal with boredom and claustrophobia than to hurt,” I said. “You’re a smart girl, you know that.”
I realized her fingers were inside the cuffs of my shirt, touching the ridges of my scars. I didn’t stop her.
“Do you cut, Amma?”
“I hurt,” she squealed, and twirled out onto the street, spinning flamboyantly, her head back, her arms outstretched like a swan. “I love it!” she screamed. The echo ran down the street, where my mother’s house stood watch on the corner.
Amma spun until she clattered to the pavement, one of her silver bangle bracelets dislodging and rolling down the street drunkenly.
I wanted to talk to her about this, be the grown-up, but the X swooped me up again, and instead I grabbed her from the street (laughing, her elbow split open and bleeding) and we swung each other in circles on the way to our mother’s house. Her face was split in two with her smile, her teeth wet and long, and I realized how entrancing they might be to a killer. Square blocks of shiny bone, the front ones like mosaic tiles you might press into a table.
“I’m so happy with you,” Amma laughed, her breath hot and sweetly boozy in my face. “You’re like my soul mate.”
“You’re like my sister,” I said. Blasphemy? Didn’t care.
“I love you,” Amma screamed.
We were spinning so fast my cheeks were flapping, tickling me. I was laughing like a kid. I have never been happier than right now, I thought. The streetlight was almost rosy, and Amma’s long hair was feathering my shoulders, her high cheekbones jutted out like scoops of butter in her tanned skin. I reached out to touch one, releasing my hand from hers, and the unlinking of our circle caused us to spin wildly to the ground.
I felt my ankle bone crack against the curb—pop!—blood exploding, splattering up my leg. Red bubbles began sprouting onto Amma’s chest from her own skid across the pavement. She looked down, looked at me, all glowing blue husky eyes, ran her fingers across the bloody web on her chest and shrieked once, long, then lay her head on my lap laughing.
She swiped a finger across her chest, balancing a flat button of blood on her fingertip, and before I could stop her, rubbed it on my lips. I could taste it, like honeyed tin. She looked up at me and stroked my face, and I let her.
“I know you think Adora likes me better, but it’s not true,” she said. As if on cue, the porch light of our house, way atop the hill, switched on.
“You want to sleep in my room?” Amma offered, a little quieter.
I pictured us in her bed under her polka-dot covers, whispering secrets, falling asleep tangled with each other, and then I realized I was imagining me and Marian. She, escaped from her hospital bed, asleep next to me. The hot purring sounds she made as she curled into my belly. I’d have to sneak her back to her room before my mother woke in the morning. High drama in a quiet house, those five seconds, pulling her down the hallway, near my mother’s room, fearing the door might swing open right then, yet almost hoping. She’s not sick, Momma. It’s what I planned on yelling if we were ever caught. It’s okay she’s out of bed because she’s not really sick. I’d forgotten how desperately, positively I believed it.
Thanks to the drugs, however, these were only happy recollections now, flipping past my brain like pages of a child’s storybook. Marian took on a bunnylike aura in these memories, a little cottontail dressed as my sister. I was almost feeling her fur when I roused myself to discover Amma’s hair brushing up and down my leg.
“So, wanna?” she asked.
“Not tonight, Amma. I’m dead tired and I want to sleep in my own bed.” It was true. The drug was fast and hard and then gone. I felt ten minutes from sober, and I didn’t want Amma around when I hit ground.
“Can I sleep over with you then?” She stood in the streetlight, her jean skirt hanging from her tiny hip bones, her halter askew and ripped. A smear of blood near her lips. Hopeful.
“Naw. Let’s just sleep separate. We’ll hang out tomorrow.”
She said nothing, just turned and ran as fast as she could toward the house, her feet kicking up behind her like a cartoon colt’s.
“Amma!” I called after. “Wait, you can stay with me, okay?” I began running after her. Watching her through the drugs and the dark was like trying to track someone while looking backward in a mirror. I failed to realize her bouncing silhouette had turned around, and that she was in fact running to me. At me. She smacked into me headlong, her forehead clanging into my jaw, and we fell again, this time on the sidewalk. My head made a sharp cracking noise as it hit the pavement, my lower teeth lit up in pain. I lay for a second on the ground, Amma’s hair folded in my fist, a firefly overhead throbbing in time to my blood. Then Amma began cackling, grabbing her forehead and nudging the spot that was already a dark blue, like the outline of a plum.
“Shit. I think you dented my face.”
“I think you dented the back of my head,” I whispered. I sat up and felt woozy. A blurt of blood that had been stanched by the sidewalk now seeped down my neck. “Christ, Amma. You’re too rough.”
“I thought you liked it rough.” She reached a hand and pulled me up, the blood in my head sloshing from back to front. Then she took a tiny gold ring with a pale green peridot from her middle finger and put it on my pinky finger. “Here. I want you to have this.”
I shook my head. “Whoever gave that to you would want you to keep it.”
“Adora sorta did. She doesn’t care, trust me. She was going to give it to Ann but…well, Ann’s gone now, so it was just sitting there. It’s ugly, right? I used to pretend that she gave it to me. Which is unlikely since she hates me.”
“She doesn’t hate you.” We began walking toward home, the porch light glaring from the top of the hill.
“She doesn’t like you,” Amma ventured.
“No, she doesn’t.”
“Well, she doesn’t like me either. Just in a different way.” We climbed the stairs, squishing mulberries beneath our feet. The air smelled like icing on a child’s cake.
“Did she like you more or less after Marian was dead?” she asked, looping her arm into mine.
“Less.”
“So it didn’t help.”
“What?”
“Her dying didn’t help things.”
“No. Now keep quiet till we get to my room, okay?”
We padded up the stairs, me holding a hand under the crook of my neck to catch the blood, Amma trailing dangerously behind, pausing to smell a rose in the hall vase, cracking a smile at her reflection in the mirror. Silence as usual from Adora’s bedroom. That fan whirring in the dark behind the closed door.
I shut the door of my own room behind us, peeled off my rain-drenched sneakers (checked with squares of newly cut grass), wiped smashed mulberry juice off my leg, and began pulling up my shirt before I felt Amma’s stare. Shirt back down, I pretended to sway into bed, too exhausted to undress. I pulled the covers up and curled away from Amma, mumbling a good night. I heard her drop her clothes to the floor, and in a second the light was off and she was in bed curled behind me, naked except for her panties. I wanted to cry at the idea of being able to sleep next to someone without clothes, no worries about what word might slip out from under a sleeve or pantcuff.
“Camille?” Her voice quiet and girlish and unsure. “You know how people sometimes say they have to hurt because if they don’t, they’re so numb they won’t feel anything?”
“Mmm.”
“What if it’s the opposite?” Amma whispered. “What if you hurt because it feels so good? Like you have a tingling, like someone left a switch on in your body. And nothing can turn the switch off except hurting? What does that mean?”
I pretended to be asleep. I pretended not to feel her fingers tracing vanish over and over on the back of my neck.
A dream. Marian, her white nightgown sticky with sweat, a blonde curl pasted across her cheek. She takes my hand and tries to pull me from bed. “It’s not safe here,” she whispers. “It’s not safe for you.” I tell her to leave me be.
Chapter Thirteen
It was past two when I woke, my stomach coiled in on itself, my jaw aching from grinding my teeth for five hours straight. Fucking X. Amma had problems, too, I guessed. She’d left a tiny pile of eyelashes on the pillow next to me. I swept them into the palm of my hand and stirred them around. Stiff with mascara, they left a dark blue smudge in the hollow of my palm. I dusted them off into a saucer on my bedside table. Then I went to the bathroom and threw up. I never mind throwing up. When I’d get sick as a child, I remember my mother holding my hair back, her voice soothing: Get all that bad stuff out, sweetheart. Don’t stop till it’s all out. Turns out I like that retching and weakness and spit. Predictable, I know, but true.
I locked my door, stripped off all my clothes, and got back in bed. My head ached from my left ear, through my neck, and down my spine. My bowels were shifting, I could barely move my mouth for the pain, and my ankle was on fire. And I was still bleeding, I could see from the blooms of red all over my sheets. Amma’s side was bloody too: a light spray where she’d scraped her chest, a darker spot on the pillow itself.
My heart was beating too hard, and I couldn’t catch my breath. I needed to see if my mother knew what had happened. Had she seen her Amma? Was I in trouble? I felt panicky sick. Something horrible was about to happen. Through my paranoia, I knew what was really going on: My serotonin levels, so jacked up from the drug the night before, had plummeted, and left me on the dark side. I told myself this even as I turned my face into the pillow and began sobbing. I had forgotten about those girls, hell, never really thought about them: dead Ann and dead Natalie. Worse, I had betrayed Marian, replaced her with Amma, ignored her in my dreams. There would be consequences. I wept in the same retching, cleansing way I’d vomited, until the pillow was wet and my face had ballooned like a drunk’s. Then the door handle jiggled. I hushed myself, stroking my cheek, hoping silence would make it go away.
“Camille. Open up.” My mother, but not angry. Coaxing. Nice, even. I remained silent. A few more jiggles. A knock. Then silence as she padded away again.
Camille. Open up. The image of my mother sitting on the edge of my bed, a spoonful of sour-smelling syrup hovering over me. Her medicine always made me feel sicker than before. Weak stomach. Not as bad as Marian’s, but still weak.
My hands began sweating. Please don’t let her come back. I had a flash of Curry, one of his crappy ties swinging wildly over his belly, busting into the room to save me. Carrying me off in his smoky Ford Taurus, Eileen stroking my hair on the way back to Chicago.
My mother slipped a key into the lock. I never knew she had a key. She entered the room smugly, her chin tilted high as usual, the key dangling from a long pink ribbon. She wore a powder blue sundress and carried a bottle of rubbing alcohol, a box of tissues, and a satiny red cosmetic bag.
