Authors: Vahini Naidoo
“And I don’t give a shit.”
“How about two shits? Or three? Come on. Make me a lucky boy.”
And I realize, slightly too late, that this ridiculous conversation has gotten me through the jungle park, gotten
me through without too many dark imaginings, too many memories of Amy’s sunlit brown hair swishing behind tree trunks.
We’re heading toward the river. Over damp earth, as black as ashes. We’re heading through a burned-out world toward the river.
Tristan says, “Do you want me to put you out of your misery?”
Yes. No. Maybe.
He’s either going to tell me where he’s going or reveal that he’s a serial killer.
I don’t think I care either way.
“Yeah, end my pain.”
I say it sarcastically, but I mean it. God, I mean it. If someone could just take it. Take it all away.
The images of Amy’s perfect, twisted limbs. The ache in my chest that’s always there. The thoughts and questions that circle around me, circle behind me, loop about my neck. It’s the thoughts and questions that push me. Off the top floors of barns, off bridges.
Tristan snatches a stick from the ground. He slices it through the white-gray sky so that it’s pointing across the river. At the houses. The abandoned houses, all of them coming apart, unraveling. All of them sweet, rotting wood and pot smoke from the “rebellious” local kids who were too bored at home.
I imagine Amy’s ghost rattling through loose planks inside one of those houses. Dark and dank and deathly.
“Ghost Town,” he says. He drops the stick.
These houses, they’re made of pieces of wood that you can tell were once logs. The planks have been roughed up; long slits slide down their faces. They all look totally washed-out and eroded. Once, twice, three times a year, according to my eighth-grade history class, this place used to flood. That’s why it’s abandoned.
I turn to Tristan. He stands beside me, hands thrust deep into pockets.
“So we stay in Ghost Town. To isolate ourselves?” I ask.
“Yeah, basically.”
“Sounds like fun,” I drawl. “But the local kids hang out here all the time. It’s hardly the most isolated spot.”
He makes a face. “Really? It’s probably rat-infested and crawling with cockroaches.”
I almost retch but manage to stop myself just in time. The thought of insects whispering like ghostly leaves over my bare skin sickens me. The thought of squeaking rats.
He catches my expression and rolls his eyes. “Jesus. You can handle almost killing yourself every day but mention a few cockroaches...Besides, it’s a little late for the kiddies to be out.”
It’s only six o’clock, but he’s right—the younger kids have probably left by now. I wonder how long Tristan intends for us to stay here. Whether there’s a chance of me missing my eleven-o’clock curfew. Whether there’s a chance of Mom actually noticing.
And suddenly I feel cold all over. Because, really, who do I have? Not Dad, who drove away from me the other night. Not Mark and Pet, who can’t even look at me. My mother, surprisingly, is the one person in my life who’s actually trying to help; but she’s so bad at it that I just don’t know anymore. I don’t know whether I have anyone.
“I still don’t understand what the point of this is,” I say.
His shoulders slope up, become hillcrests before they dip back down. “It’s my best guess as to what suicidal people actually feel like: isolated, alone, frustrated. And if you get freaked out enough, you can maybe get some of your memories back.”
He’s tucked the piece-of-hay thought he stole from me yesterday behind his ear. I reach over and recapture it, ignoring the way he flinches. We haven’t known each other long; it’s reasonable that he’s uncomfortable with me getting that close.
I roll the hay between my fingers, roll my thoughts around my brain. He’s right. There’s no way around it.
“Don’t forget tunnel vision. You have to be alone, and you have to have tunnel vision,” I say.
“Maybe we should look this up or something?”
“Later. Let’s go be alone.”
His shoulders rise and fall again. He looks like something out of a cartoon when he does that, what with his carrottopped hair. “I thought we could ease into it. We could stay together for the first hour or so and then split up?”
My teeth grind into each other. “I don’t need you to ease me into it. I’m not that frightened of cockroaches.”
Yes, yes, I am. If we ever do this again, I’m bringing one of those spray insect killer things.
Tristan barely blinks. He looks at the ground. “Right,” he says. “Thing is, I’m kind of afraid of the dark. So it’s not about you.”
There’s an accusation laced through those words. He’s telling me not to think everything’s about me. Thanks, Tristan.
“Okay,” I say, feeling winded.
It hurts because he’s goddamn right. I could have stopped her—maybe not that night, maybe not the week before or the month before. But years ago, ninth grade when she started losing weight. I could have taken her to McDonald’s and sat her down and bought her a Big Mac and said, “It’s cool. You can eat processed shit once in a while because it feels good.”
We could have laughed and thrown fries at each other. I could have recommended her to my mother’s therapist or something.
I could have. But I didn’t.
“You okay?”
Tristan’s looking at me, and the shadows of the night are crisscrossing his face so I can barely make out his features. I like it this way, because I can imagine for a second that he’s Mark, Petal, Amy.
“I’m fine,” I say.
And then he starts grinning his head off. And even in the dark I can see his white teeth, the moonlight bouncing off them. A manically grinning grenade and I are about to walk into an abandoned house teeming with cockroaches. Wonderful.
Just. Fucking. Wonderful.
I think I preferred jumping off shit.
We decide on the house that’s the most dilapidated looking. Or, at least, I decide on it.
He doesn’t seem too happy. “You know,” he says as we traipse up the front steps, “there are probably more cockroaches in this one.”
“Shut up, Tristan.” My shoe hits the wood and crunches into something. I scream, but the sound thuds into the wooden front door and gets lost in the house. When I lift my foot, it’s not a cockroach or a rat.
It’s a fucking bag of chips.
Tristan’s cracking up. He’s nearly falling off the stairs, and right now I could push him.
I don’t even bother glaring at him. “Let’s go inside. Maybe your hair can be a torch or something.”
He laughs. “Hey, don’t bring my hair into it.”
I push at the door, but it’s jammed. Apparently, the neighborhood kids have also noticed that this is the most dilapidated house around. Apparently, no one wants to hang out here, in this particular house, except me.
The isolation is already creeping into my bones.
And I want it to creep farther. I want it to creep so far that it reawakens my memories.
So I step back and kick at the door. It shudders, but it’s made of sturdier stuff than I thought and doesn’t give way. Dirt shakes itself from the deep wrinkles that score the wood.
“Nice. Try and break down the door, Ella. Good luck. Why don’t we just go through the window?” Tristan jabs his finger.
My gaze slides to the side of the house. The window is an opportunity in this rotten wall of wood. I jump off the side of the stairs—not quite high enough to feel like a Pick Me Up. But high enough that I laugh when I land.
High enough that I feel giddy.
Tristan hauls his butt down the stairs, step by step by
step. He doesn’t even take them two at a time. It’s as if he’s trying to show me the proper way of doing things. Like he thinks I don’t know how to walk down a freaking staircase.
But it’s hard to be pissed at him when I feel so heady with pain shooting up from my ankles. I’m submerged in knee-high grass. It swishes and sways against my calves, breezing across my skin as I wade through it to the window. The frame is empty except for a few jagged pieces of glass.
I punch them out. They topple into the grass at my feet, and Tristan kicks them away into the darkness.
“Watch it,” he says. “Don’t cut yourself.”
“I wasn’t intending to.”
I wrap my fingers around the sharp metal frame of the open window. Rust flakes off it and falls down my arm like dried blood. I shudder. This is so disgusting. If I were one of those girls who cared about her nails, I wouldn’t do this.
“Are you going or what?”
I flip Tristan off with my free hand. Flipping each other off is going to become a tradition with the two of us, I can tell.
“I’m going.” I stop giving him the finger and swing my other hand up, curl my fingers over the rotting wood wall. Heave-ho. Like a sailor. I haul myself halfway up. My feet scrabble against the wall. My arms burn. The wood splinters.
I scramble, shinny up the wall, and fall over the ledge. Rotting wood splinters beneath my fingers, crashes onto the floor with my body.
“Oof.”
The rancid, sweet-and-sour smell of rotted wood hits my nostrils. This is the smell of death. This house hasn’t been stepped in for how long now, ten years? Twenty?
“Are you okay?” Tristan has the gall to sound concerned.
“I’m giving you the finger again.”
But I’m shivering against the floor and feeling the grime beneath my fingers. Feeling the pain in my stomach where it smashed into the wood.
This is the beginning of Isolation Stage One, and it is cold and wet, made of echoes and silence.
Until Tristan decides to follow me into the dark.
To my relief, my grenade companion is not graceful, either. The advantage of being a whole head taller than me doesn’t help him. He looks like he’s constipated as he tugs himself through the window.
Wood splintering, breaking.
We’re breaking this abandoned house down. This abandoned house is breaking us down.
My mouth tastes as foul as the smell in this house. I can’t see Tristan’s face, but I can tell from the way he’s singing “Shit. Fuck. Crap” again and again, words like a
dog chasing its own tail, that he’s not exactly enjoying this, either.
Isolation sucks.
And we’re not even totally isolated.
The window is still open. A square of dull moonlight carves a path through the room, and dust motes dance in the beautiful light. Like Amy’s beauty, I think. Dancing, whispers and smiles on the surface. But the inside must have been like this: black and hollow. Eaten away by termites and dust.
When she was tangled in my weeds in front of the gnome, her lungs might have collapsed like this house’s staircase. Her heart might have splintered like this wood. I’ll never know what happened to Amy physically. But emotionally?
I reach out and shut the window.
Click
.
As if reading each other’s minds, Tristan and I both turn our backs on the window and face the dark.
Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.
W
E ARE CURLED
against the wood like commas.
Something creeps over my sneaker, and I shake my foot. The scream that tears from my mouth is swallowed by the hands I have wrapped around my head. I lift my head from my hands, swallow away the dryness in my mouth. Tears prick the backs of my eyes like needles.
It doesn’t matter. It’s dark. He can’t see me.
I say, “Since when have we been friends, anyway?”
I feel his eyes boring through the stench of sweet-and-sour rot. Focused on the blurry shape of my face in the darkness. “We’re friends?” Soft voice. Sweet voice. It only adds to the general feeling of sweet sickness in this room.
I’m shivering and I’m shivering and I’m shivering, and he must be able to hear me in the dark or something. Because he’s there suddenly, and his arms are around me
and he’s warm and the air is cold. I should twist away. I should tell him to fuck off. I should do
something
to show that I’m okay and that I don’t need his help.
But it’s like I’ve already decomposed. I’m crashing into his shirt. I’m crying into the soft material, letting my tears soak him.
Where were you? When Amy died? Ella?
Everyone asks me all the time.
I don’t know what to say. I can never answer their questions.
Tristan doesn’t move. Just lets me cry into his shoulder with his hands limply at his sides. It’s only when I start to shift, to move that his hand touches my back, and he pats me awkwardly. “It’s okay, Ella,” he says, his voice strangled. “Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.”
The tears are hot, sliding down my cheeks. I brush them away quickly. “No! We’re doing this.”
I’m inside Amy’s mind. This is where I want to be. This is where I want to stay. This is what I need to understand.
Heavy breaths, colliding like cars crashing on a dark winter’s night.
His fingers, combing through his hair. Raspy laugh.
“Fuck,” I repeat, “since when were we friends, anyway?”
I can feel his face against my shoulder. He smiles into
my hair, and it’s like sunshine in the dark. “Since I decided to be a dumb shit,” he replies, “and become insanely into friendships with bitchy, hot girls.”
I don’t bother to be self-deprecating. If he wants to call me hot, that’s his prerogative. I detach myself from his shirt, though. “So—”
“So we’re totally alone in the dark,” he says.
“Dear lord. How the hell do I know you’re not some pervert?”
“Because I wouldn’t be so up-front about wanting to get into your pants if I were.”
I can hear the laugh sitting beneath his voice. It tastes like popcorn and the sky. Isolation isn’t working, because Tristan is here, and he shouldn’t be here. I’m supposed to be alone, the dark weighing in on me, suffocating me.
“We have to shut up,” I say. “You have to shut up. You can’t speak—” I swallow. “We have to be alone.”
“Well,” he mutters, “that was a convenient change of topic.”
I stifle a laugh and turn my back on him, pretend he’s not there. His breathing still crashes around me. Waves against the shore. He wants to speak; I know he wants to speak. Because I do, too. Words leap to my lips every ten seconds.