The Girls of No Return (29 page)

Gia wheeled around and faced me. Her eyes were burning and bright. “I don't have to have
everything.
You know me well enough to know
that
. But this is something I need. There's a difference. I would have thought you'd understand.”

“But Ben is Boone's!”
And you are mine
, I wanted to add. “You can't take him away!”

“Don't be stupid! People aren't commodities. They can be with whoever they want.”

My rage was tumbling over itself, spilling into despair. “But they have to know the person first, and everything you said up there is a lie! Everything you ever say is a lie! It's as fake as that stupid drawing you showed me. No one will want to be with you if they don't know you!” I shouted this last part, and then froze, my mouth partly open. I hadn't meant to say that. I didn't even know it was what I thought.

Gia had two crimson patches on her cheeks. Her eyes glinted, and I thought at first that she was about to cry. She was shaking, her hands stunned birds at her sides. I was shaking too. I wanted to swallow the words that I had just spoken, stuff them in my mouth like incriminating pieces of paper.

She took a deep breath, steadying herself. “Lida, I've tried with you. I really have.” Her voice wavered but got stronger as she went on. “I guess it's easy, in a place like this, to think a friendship is different, you know — special — when really it's just based on necessity.” A calm had descended over her face again, and she spoke evenly. “I thought, at first, that you were . . .
more
than you are. I see now that I mistook loneliness —
your
loneliness — as something deeper, more mature.”

She looked straight into my eyes.

Cold, then cold, then nothing.

“I'm sorry,” I said. I spoke so quietly that I wasn't sure she heard me.

“There's nothing to apologize for. You are who you are. I'm only sorry that I didn't recognize this sooner. You're just not . . .” She paused. “You're just not
right
. And I should have seen that.”

Gia turned and began walking down the trail, leaving me cemented there. I couldn't breathe. I listened to her footsteps as they receded around a bend in the trail, and then the breaths started coming, shallowly at first, and then quickening, speeding into one another, each inhalation more frantic than the last. I'd felt this way once before, and the memory of my dad's voice collided with the wretched stillness around me.
She's not coming back
.

I knelt on the ground, curling my arms around my knees, sticking my face into the dark space they created. I closed my eyes as tightly as I could, until orange and yellow spots appeared behind my lids. The pain — the pain rose from somewhere beneath my ribs, blooming up through my throat, down to my gut, spreading heat like a disease to my fingers and toes. If I rocked back and forth, or if I moved at all, I'll never know. The silence was absolute, an emptiness that only made room for the terrible heat pulsing relentlessly through my body. I wasn't thinking, not really. Just one phrase kept repeating in my head until it lost all meaning and became a mother's soothing lullaby.
All wrong. All wrong. All wrong.

When I finally stood again, I had no idea what time it was. Five hours could have passed just as easily as five minutes. My nose was running, and my cheeks were wet; I wiped my face on my sleeve. I walked down the trail toward the school, more certain than ever before that I was the one girl at Alice Marshall who couldn't be fixed.

 

 

A WEEK PASSED. TWO. AND THEN IT WAS THE FIRST WEEK OF
October, that sharp and cold month up in the mountains, when the aspen grove along Red Dot Trail became a bunch of naked stalks and even the fir trees seemed to shiver far above us. If you strained your neck, you could see where the tips of those trees bent under pressure of the wind, a wagging finger:
Oh no you don't
.

It was October, and I couldn't imagine November. Time had stopped for me on the trail from Buckhorn.

I hadn't talked to anyone about the fight with Gia. Hadn't talked to anyone, really, about anything at all. Not Jules, who kept shooting worried glances in my direction, even though she had stopped asking me what was wrong after a week of my silence. Not Gwen or Karen, who seemed to accept my reticence as easily as they'd accepted my sociability. And definitely not Boone.

Look: I'm not stupid. I knew that what Gia had done was wrong. I knew it the way you know
Parents were once my age too!
and
I'll be glad I have these math skills one day
: a fact with no substance. She'd used me; she'd lied and was lying still. But that wasn't what made me cry in the shower in breath-crunching gulps, the pounding water my alibi for anyone who might come into the Bathhouse. It was the sudden lack of her, of
me with her
, a dancing cluster of shooting stars and then — suddenly — nothing, the sky black as dreamlessness. I missed who I was when I was with her: I was
someone
, a photograph in focus. And now I'd lost it all. I spent nights tracing the scars on my hips with the jagged end of a fingernail.

I don't know why it is that, whenever there is one person, only one person, who it pains you to see, she happens to be within your line of vision at all times. That's how it was with Gia. She was
everywhere
. Laughing with the other Seventeens as they walked toward their morning chores. Whispering conspiratorially at her table in the Mess Hall. Standing regally with a secret smile whenever her name was announced during Mail Call. Most often, though, I saw her walking toward, or coming from, the path up to Buckhorn Peak. Once, she caught me watching her go. She didn't smile. Instead, she glanced at me casually and then tossed her hair over her shoulder and glided on, as though I was a deer or squirrel she had momentarily surprised on the trail. My heart swung on a string.

I knew it was only a matter of time before Boone caught Gia heading up to see Ben — or worse, met her up at the lookout. That's why I was through with talking. Nothing good had come of it so far. I had ruined everything the minute I told Gia about Ben. I dreaded what I might say next.

Not that Boone would have listened to me, had I wanted to tell her what happened at the lookout. She had bigger things on her mind.

Boone was going home.

She got the news after a grueling day hike with our Outdoor Education class. The long-awaited Solo Trip was coming up, and Margaret was putting all of her classes through what felt like a training for gladiators. We'd just gotten back from bagging Townsend Peak in less than three hours. That's what Margaret had said — “Let's bag this one” — like it was a cantaloupe at a grocery store.

I felt like a baby giraffe by the time we got back to the school, my legs still wobbling from the effort, and I was in such a hurry to get back to the cabin with the other girls and lie down before dinner that I didn't notice Bev waiting for us near the Outdoor Ed building, and didn't hear her ask Boone to hang back for a chat.

But I heard what she said soon enough. Boone came bursting into the cabin, her face red, eyes wild.

“Bitch thinks it's that easy?” she said, almost snarling. “Thinks she can just take or leave me?” She slammed her fist against the wall. The cabin rattled around us. “You can't do that! You can't just take it back!”

“Take what back? What's going on?” asked Jules. She was the only one with the guts to say anything.

“Fuck you,” said Boone. She hit the wall again. “Fuck this.” Boone marched to the door and opened it. She paused there, and I could see through her polypropylene shirt that the muscles on her back were flexing, as though waging war with whatever was roiling inside her. She slammed the door without going out. She took a deep breath and sighed it out heavily. Then she turned to Jules. “Looks like my sentence is up,” she said. “The Great and Powerful Oz has instructed me to go home.”

“Impossible,” said Gwen from her bunk. “You're an institution.”

“No,” said Boone, “you're wrong. The Department of Juvenile Corrections is an institution, and the good folks there have decided that they've spent more than enough of the taxpayers' dollars on the rehabilitation of one troubled Minster girl. They're ready to start fixing another. Probably already told the Mormons to pick someone new. Good-bye, scholarship.” She sounded more like herself, her voice oozing sarcasm, but I could hear a different bass note thrumming underneath the words.

“Oh no,” Jules said sympathetically. “What are you going to do?”

Boone laughed once, loudly, like a clap. “I didn't know I had any options.” She sat down heavily on her bunk.

“Sorry,” said Jules, blushing. “I guess I mean, do you have people to stay with? Does your family know you're coming home?”

“They'll know when they see me,” Boone said.

I wondered whom she was talking about. I knew her brother was in the prison in Kuna, over in the western part of the state, because she'd talked about having visited him there. She still had yet to mention her parents, though, and no one had gathered the courage to ask.

“I leave in two weeks. Two weeks.”

I heard her kick her legs up onto the mattress.

“God,” said Gwen. “Bev is going to start filling our cabin with new girls.” She paused. “And who's going to welcome them to school?”

Boone laughed drily along with the other three. Even I smiled, though my hand flew up to my hair automatically to check its progress, like it always did whenever someone mentioned Boone's antics.

“Someone else will have to take up the mantle, I guess,” said Boone. “What about Townie, here? What do you think, Lida? Can you put on a mean face?” Her relaxed tone sounded forced.

“Lida couldn't be cruel if she tried,” said Karen. “Plus, she's all but stopped speaking, haven't you noticed?”

“That could work in her favor,” said Gwen. “She could never be confronted.”

“Now
that's
tough,” said Boone. “All explosion, no fire.”

“Shut up,” I said, and they did. I didn't even glance to see whatever look Gwen was probably throwing at Karen.
Lost cause
, it probably said.
What a baby.

I hated the fact that my silence was so dramatic. I didn't want to be the center of anyone's attention. I certainly didn't want their pity. I just wanted to sit quietly, huddled into myself. I didn't want to have to say another word. Ever.

“Really, Boone, what are you going to do?” Jules looked concerned. She pulled at the zipper of her sleeping bag: zip up, zip down. “I mean, maybe this isn't ideal, but you know, you could always stay at my house.”

Boone looked at her as though she had just suggested we all drink acid and throw ourselves off a peak. “What, in Denver?” she asked.

“Yeah,” said Jules. “It's kind of a nice city, and there's plenty of extra room in my house.” Her eyes brightened. “You could take care of Westy!”

Boone shook her head angrily. “Don't be stupid,” she said. “I'm not going to take care of your damn dog. Think about it. Can you really imagine me at your house? With your parents? Can you?”

Jules blushed. “They're nice people,” she said softly. “I'm sure they would be very welcoming.”

Boone moved until she was standing directly in front of Jules's bunk. She leaned forward. “You're here,” she said quietly. “How welcoming is that? Parents who really love their kids don't toss them into the woods for months or years. No thank you. I don't think I need your kind of family.”

Jules looked down at her sleeping bag. I knew that she could have told Boone the truth, that
she
had sent herself to the school, but she didn't say anything.

Boone ran her hand over her face. She suddenly looked very, very tired. Slowly, she reached down and touched Jules on the shoulder. “I'll go back to Minster,” she said. “They'll hear me coming from a mile away.” She left her hand on Jules's shoulder for another minute, and then she walked over to her bunk and lay down. I could hear her feet kick at the wood at the end of the bed, and I imagined Boone on a horse, hurtling over dirt and rocks, the sound of the hoofs louder than whatever she could scream.

It was funny — everyone at school was upset about Boone's encroaching departure. Even people like timid Miss Flynn moped around with a halfway devastated look on their faces, like we were losing our star player, which I guess we were. Apparently, everyone had forgotten the mice in their beds, stolen clothes, and toothpaste in their shampoo bottles. They were willing to forget everything, I think, if she just wouldn't leave. I could still recall what Chandler said to Macy on our overnight.
She's fierce
. Boone was the bad one. She set the bar high. Maybe everyone was afraid that we'd become
good
if she left.