The Girls of No Return (10 page)

“And my dad's kind of a lost cause.”

“Of course.”

Gia was staring at me like she was waiting for me to tell her something honest and true, but I didn't know what else to say or how to say it.

And then I did. “Sometimes,” I said quickly, “it feels like the situation with my stepmom and my dad is only the exclamation point.”

“Exclamation point to what?”

“I don't know for sure. Something more real than my stupid home life.” I shivered and hugged myself.

“Where's your mother?” she asked.

“Dead.”

“Oh,” said Gia quietly. “How terrible.”

I kicked at the sand. “Whatever. I didn't know her.” And before she could ask, I added, “Cancer.” It never failed to halt further questions in their tracks.

“It doesn't matter if you didn't know her.” Gia spoke softly. “A mother is a mother. You lose your mother, you lose yourself. Everything else is just confetti.”

Her voice was sad and sure. She knew exactly how I felt. It seemed suddenly too quiet on the beach. I glared at the ground, willing my eyes dry.

Gia was watching the side of my face. I saw her nod, as though agreeing with something she had just thought.

“You're not the only one, Lida,” she said. “You're not alone.”

Gia put her hand on my shoulder and pushed herself up. She left her hand there for a second after she stood, and then she took a couple of steps.

I didn't want her to leave. “Hey,” I said. She turned. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

“Well, um, what's your story?” I was trying to play it cool, but I couldn't stop myself from leaning forward, ready to catch anything she might say.

But she laughed instead. “Storytime's over,” she said. “We'll have to save it for another night.” Gia ran her fingers through her hair. “I'll see you around?” It was dark, but I could still see that she was grinning at me with her eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, “sure.”

I stayed there on the log for what might have been ten minutes and might have been two hours. There were hundreds of questions cartwheeling through my mind, not one of them with an answer. How had she known the way I felt about my mother? I hadn't even told her everything — I hadn't told her anything, really — and yet she still seemed to understand. And what if she was right? What if my mother's absence defined me? What if I was destined to always be just
partial
, like some half-finished sketch of a girl: a misplaced eye, part of an ear, one long arm at a wrong angle?

I felt this strange connection to Gia, like we were tethered together with the finest string. I hadn't felt this way with any of the other girls who'd tried to strike up a conversation with me. They were all too settled in their delightfully delinquent lives. Even their Things fit them too easily, like old sweaters that they'd worn every day for years. Not Gia. She didn't seem to want to be settled. There was nothing easy about her.

Later, I lay on my bunk and imagined how Gia probably brushed her hair before bed: rhythmically, methodically, the hair falling in a soft white current over her hand and the brush. How it must have felt to be that hand, that brush.

I didn't fall asleep until the sky had lightened to pearl gray and the first birds had begun their impatient song.

 

 

Dr. Hemler tells me I can call him by his first name. “Call me Hank,” he says, for what must be the thirtieth time in the year I've been seeing him.

“No thanks,” I say. I remind him, probably also for the thirtieth time, that some people are just born looking like forty-year-old men, and that my guess is he was one of them. “Sorry. You'll always be Dr. Hemler to me,” I say, and he laughs, I think. Sometimes his laugh is more of a choking sound. Then he smiles.

He's always smiling, this guy. Smiled the first time he met me, when I was about a half step away from throwing myself off a bridge. Smiled through my tears, my rants, my long silences. And he's still smiling now, sitting across from me in his mauve wingback chair, casually holding the yellow legal pad on which he compiles his notes about me, week after week. Dad and Terri must be paying him a bundle to keep that noncommittal grin on his face.

“Margaret called again,” I say, and then, before Dr. Hemler can ask, I add, “but I didn't talk to her.”

“You'll have to talk to her eventually,” he says.

“I know.”

He jots something on his legal pad. “Have you started writing it down?” he asks, and I nod, glancing away. “Good,” he says, and makes another mark with his pencil. “That's a start.”

I've been keeping a journal ever since I left Alice Marshall. For the first ten months, all I wrote about were feelings. Sadness, anger, annoyance, guilt, little winks of happiness. I wrote about emotions like they were characters in a story, friends with whom I had long talks on Saturday nights. But, as Dr. Hemler so thoughtfully pointed out, I never connected them to anything real. I never wrote about what happened back there in the woods, never gave these feelings any context. They were characters without shoes, freckles without faces.

Now he says, “How have you found the process of writing about your experience so far? Difficult? Easy? A little of both?”

“Dr. Hemler,” I say, crossing one leg over the other and settling back into the couch where I sit every Thursday from four to five, “it's always easy at the beginning.”

 

 

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS, GIA WAS EVERYWHERE. YES, THE
school was small. Yes, there were only fifty of us, give or take. But there were girls whose names I still didn't know and probably never would. I never saw these girls, even though they might have been standing next to me every night as we brushed our teeth in the Bathhouse.

With Gia, though, it was like I had a heat sensor right between my eyes. Whenever she was around, I knew it long before she even came into view. Sometimes, when she walked into the Rec Lodge or Mess Hall, or when I rounded a corner on the path between the school buildings and saw her standing quite still by a tree, she would already be looking in my direction, like she was expecting to see me. Then she'd smile, so quickly I would almost miss it, and we'd each keep on in our own way.

At first, I wondered why she didn't say anything. But it didn't take me long to realize that her silence was protecting me. Because, nine times out of ten, if I was walking anywhere, it was with my cabinmates. And that meant Boone.

Gia and Boone hadn't spoken to each other since the scene outside Circle Share, but the way Boone looked at Gia said more than enough. If the imaginary sensor between my eyes could track everyone's heat, I'm pretty sure it would have melted from the rage that practically sizzled off Boone every time she passed Gia on the school grounds. Boone hadn't said anything about what had happened, and no one in my cabin had dared ask.

So, Gia and I didn't talk during the day. And for almost a week, we didn't talk at night either. There were shadowy evenings when I practically sprinted down to the Smokers' Beach, only to find her talking to another Seventeen — usually one of her cabinmates. She'd raise her eyebrows in my direction in a kind of facial shrug —
what can I do? —
and then she'd look back at the Seventeen, bored but polite. There were other nights she didn't come down to the beach at all.

But I was there every night. Waiting. And eventually, it worked. I felt her coming this time, so it wasn't a surprise when she sat down next to me on my log, grabbed my hand lightly, let it go, and said in a John Wayne voice, “Well, you old so-and-so, how the hell are you?”

“Fair to middlin',” I answered, my own western twang matching hers.

There were only a couple of girls on the beach that night. In Outdoor Ed that afternoon, Margaret had taken us on another grueling flower identification hike, pointing out blue lupine and pink bistort, which looked like sticks of old-fashioned rock candy, and my cabinmates had practically fallen asleep before the door shut behind Bev. It had been a struggle for me to slip on my shoes and come down to the beach — my sleeping bag had never been so inviting — but I'd done it. And now I was glad I had.

“Not smoking tonight?” Gia glanced pointedly at my hands, which were folded on my lap. “That's quite a prim posture you've got going.”

I unfolded my hands quickly. “I'm practicing for Parents' Weekend.”

She laughed. “Shouldn't we all.” Gia reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out her tobacco pouch. “You ever roll your own?”

I shook my head.

“Want to learn?”

Did I ever.

“Okay. So first, take a rolling paper. Here.” She held out a small rectangular package, and I pulled out a paper as thin and translucent as an old woman's skin. “Make sure the crease is sharp. Then grab some tobacco and roll it up tightly.”

I reached into the pouch and pinched off what I thought was a small amount of tobacco.

“Whoa,” said Gia. “You don't want to give yourself lung cancer all in one night, do you? A little less.”

So I tried. I took less, placed it on the paper, rolled it up. Unrolled it. Tried again. And again. By this time, the paper was looking more like a failed origami project than a cigarette. I couldn't get it right. “Shit,” I said, blushing. “You make it look so easy.”

“Here,” she said, “let me.” Gia reached over and lightly pulled the paper from between my fingers, dumping the tobacco back in the pouch. Slowly, she smoothed the paper on the knee of her jeans, and then folded it back along the crease. “Waste not, want not.” She reached inside the pouch and pulled out a new knot of tobacco, rolling it between her fingers as she dropped it onto the paper. Then she ran one finger over it all, making sure it was even. “The last thing you want is a lumpy cigarette,” she said to herself. “Never good.”

Then, holding the paper between index finger and thumb, she rolled the paper again and again in a seesaw motion. She waited until the shape was tight before rolling it one last time and quickly running her tongue over the paper's loose end. Then she pasted that down with her thumb and looked up. “Victory.”

“That was amazing. How'd you learn to do it so well?” Her flawless execution had made my attempt look even more pathetic, and I was glad for the darkness, which hid the red splotches that were traveling down my neck.

“Practice.” She handed me the cigarette. “We'll get you there.”

“Thanks.”

She quickly rolled one for herself and passed me a book of matches that said
Skyline Lodge
across the front. “I collect them,” she explained, “from my travels.”

“Nice.”

We smoked quietly together, the air filling with smoke that smelled of leather and spice, the silence punctuated only by my rasping cough whenever I inhaled too forcefully. Smoking Gia's cigarettes taught me the true meaning of the term “breathing fire.”

I had so many questions I wanted to ask her, but they all seemed stupid when I put them into words in my head. I wanted to know where she was from, why she was at Alice Marshall, what her life was like when she wasn't hidden away near some subalpine lake; in short, I wanted to know everything about her.

But I settled instead for saying, “You really threw Boone for a loop.”

“Who?”

“Boone.” She
had
to know who Boone was by now. “You know, the girl who tried to take your jacket?” Everything I said was starting to sound more ridiculous by the second.

Gia tossed her hair out of her face. “Oh.
That
girl.” She stared out at the lake. “It seemed to me like I messed up her little ritual in some way — like I read my lines wrong.” She looked at me. “I mean, what? Would everyone else have just given her the clothes off their back?”

I smiled. “Pretty much.”

“This place is strange.”