The Wood of Suicides (9 page)

I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe

I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe

I watch the willows weep and cannot breathe

It was the closest that I ever came to versifying my love, though now and again the instinct to express myself in words seemed to grab me by the throat. More than once, I had to stop myself from taking up a pen and making a journal entry in one of my notebooks; emotional expression was for the weak and, besides that, far too risky. I didn’t even consider confessing my predicament to another girl, although I often longed for an ally—a perverse nurse or fairy godmother who would conspire with me to administer him love potions, and kindly lead me to the slaughter.

I had no illusions about my friendships with Marcelle and Amanda. Had I been less shadowy, more open about my aberrations, I might have dispensed with them entirely. As it was, I didn’t have the courage for that; I required a cloak of conventionality. It had been the same before Steadman, when I was a student at Sacred Heart—though as my attendance became poorer and my eating habits more abstemious, the cloak began to slip. Sometimes, I wondered whether I would not be happier forming ties with a different variety of girls: girls who were not so shallow; who weren’t constantly clowning and gossip-mongering; whose IQs weren’t so much lower than my own. Casting my eye across the school grounds, however, the girls who attracted me weren’t the solemn ones, but the shiny ones: the Jessica Brittons, Kaitlin Pritchards, and Jade van Dams of the world.

These girls would’ve sensed in a heartbeat that I didn’t belong among them. It wasn’t only that my GPA was lower than theirs, or that I had an aversion to committees, club memberships, and charitable pursuits. There was also that other thing—the shifty aspect of my admiration, which made me vie for the seat behind Kaitlin in history class, or a position near Jessica in the locker room, where I could get a good view of the hooks of her bra, the curve of her waist, the brown ponytail dangling between her shoulder blades.

I didn’t respect my friends. I maintained a discreet distance between myself and them. Nevertheless, there were times when the intrusiveness I hated them for gave me to celebrate. I’m thinking of that Friday in the sunlight, when Marcelle sat herself beside me and, with childish admiration, began playing with my loose hair—winding it up and fanning it out and holding it up to the light. “Your hair is so pretty, Laurel,” she told me guilelessly, as he stood nearby. My heart practically burst with gratitude. There was also another time, in the middle of a quiet English lesson, when Amanda leaned across the row to tell me in a cool stage whisper, “Lawrence Benning wants to date you.”

“Lawrence Benning wants to
do
you,” Marcelle echoed, at my other side.

“I don’t know who that is,” I said truthfully.

“You met him.”

“Two weekends ago.”

“I don’t remember.” I bit my lip and looked over at Steadman, who was working at his desk, a matter of feet away, feigning disinterest.

“Well, he wants you.”

“Well . . .” I let the word hang in the air, a dreamy suggestion, as I continued to eye my only love, whose shirtsleeves were rolled up, whose brows were lowered, who wore a petulant pout of concentration. “. . . I don’t care.”

Later that lesson, Steadman came by with the mini essays that he had ostensibly been marking. “Beautiful, Laurel.” His dark eyes met mine, as he passed back the meaningless slip of paper. I ignored the page in my hand. I stared after him, repeating his evaluation to myself:
beautiful
.

W
AS
I beautiful? The question merited investigation. In study hall, I spent hours hunched over my textbooks with a compact mirror in hand, ignoring the words before me to examine my face from every angle. Between classes, I visited my reflection as often as I could, as if in danger of forgetting what I looked like. What I saw in the mirror always came as a shock to me—the unblemished skin, the fresh flush of the lips, the somewhat feline features—so that I stood there, intoxicated, for minutes on end.

I was constantly comparing myself to the girls around me and was proud to count myself among the top tier: admirably slim, clear-skinned, with nice hair and no unfortunate facial features. While I didn’t exude sexual experience in the way that Siobhan Pierce or Hannah Williams or even Amanda did (from the very first, I sensed that she was not a virgin—an intuition she confirmed for me on a bus trip to San Rafael), I had a freshness that was far more rare and delicate. In purely physical terms, I wouldn’t have looked too out of place standing next to the prettiest girls in my grade. The white blouses and reddish tartan of our uniforms became me. Never in my life had I felt so genetically blessed.

As one of the blessed, I rejoiced in the defects of others. There were the fat ones, who came in all different heights and colors, and who orbited the school like so many tartan-skirted planets, high socks slicing into the flesh of their calves. Perhaps even more delightfully grotesque, however, were those girls whose irregular features, irksome facial expressions, and general awkwardness combined to make me hate them on sight. There was a junior with large, purplish lips, frizzy hair, and a freakishly long neck who I often saw carrying a violin case on my way to history from my locker. Another had inky eyes, set in a broad, flat face scarred so badly by acne that, from afar, she resembled a burns victim, but also a lion (I think it was her sandy bob cut). Then there was Mitzi Gantz, a girl in my grade whose Eurasian blood, rather than producing a fine-boned, exotic beauty, had created an anomaly: slanty eyes, freckles, and an Amazonian physique, with large bones and no breasts to speak of. Had she carried herself well, she might have been perfectly acceptable; as it was, she slouched and lurked. Her messy, black hair was constantly hanging in her eyes, and she never spoke, unless forced to—at which, a husky, barely intelligible murmur would issue from her chapped lips. “Ugh, that freak,” Amanda was given to saying, whenever we saw Mitzi lurching past. One weekend, we spied her in the company of a white-haired man in a yellow golf shirt and a much younger oriental woman. We could only conclude that these were her parents.

There was also a freshman girl, Karen Harmsworth’s little sister. Like Mitzi, she wasn’t entirely ugly. Nonetheless, my aversion to her amounted almost to a passion. Even among the freshmen, she was small. She had a beaky nose and the eyes of a husky dog. Her freckles and pale eyebrows were those of a natural strawberry blonde (Karen’s color), but the hair on her head was solid black and worn in a pixie cut. The shortness of her hair meant her vulnerable nape was constantly exposed, as were her ears. These ears always seemed too red and oddly shaped, as if an animal had been gnawing on them. I once found myself behind those ears and that nape in a toilet queue, and experienced an involuntary shiver of dislike.

It was a relief to come back to my own beauty, after all this. My beauty was youthful and delicate, and didn’t need to be laden with costume jewelry, of the kind that Amanda favored. In fact, my only adornment was a pair of peridot studs, which I had worn ever since my mother took me to have my ears pierced as a sniveling six-year-old. As soon as I was old enough, my mother had also taken me cosmetics shopping, telling me that I was what Mary Spillane would call “an Autumn type with hazel eyes.” I still owned the selection of lipsticks that she’d chosen for me, in warm colors with boring names—cinnamon, burnt sienna, terracotta. I didn’t wear them as they were, but typically blotted my lips after applying them, leaving only a trace of the original color, and escaping the attention of even Mrs. Faherty—one of those deputy types who spoke at assemblies and whose sole responsibility seemed to be upbraiding girls on their dress and comportment.

I was hopeless when it came to arranging my hair, never able to master the intricate braids and twists I saw other girls wearing. Nothing was more charming, however, than the loose, Pre-Raphaelite curls that fell to the middle of my back and needed no arranging. Having seen the way that Steadman looked at me, that day under the willows as Marcelle toyed with my hair, I knew that these curls were among my greatest assets.

I
N
THE
last week of every month, we were given the choice to take a day trip to San Rafael. These trips began at ten
A
.
M
. sharp, when we were expected to have congregated in the main parking lot before a convoy of school buses rolled up. What was meant to be only a thirty-minute bus ride, out of sheer disorganization, always ended up taking longer. In my year at Saint Cecilia’s, I only ever took advantage of three of those day trips. The first of these was in September, my first month at the school.

We sat toward the back of the bus: Amanda and Marcelle together; me in the seat behind next to Karen Harmsworth, who spent the whole journey leaning across the aisle and talking to the Smith twins. Homecoming was a week away and the girls still needed to put the final touches on their outfits. As for me, having submitted to their offer to find me a date—the seriousness of which I didn’t realize until it was too late for me to back out—I had yet to find a dress.

Who my date would be was still a subject of discussion. Leaning over the back of their seat, Amanda and Marcelle chattered away about my options. “The only guy left on the rowing team is Scott Maccoby, and he’s, well . . . a bit of a sleaze.”

Marcelle snorted with laughter: “You would know!”

“Marcelle, shh. It was only that one time and . . . I told you, Marcy, shut it . . . It was nothing, really. Okay.” Amanda rolled her eyes and lowered her voice. “It was a hand-job. But that’s it, I swear. It’s not like I
slept
with him.”

I lowered my eyes and nodded primly, waiting for her to go on.

“He’s not really my type, but you might like him. And he’s friends with Seamus.”

“And Flynn.”

“And Flynn. So if you go with him, we can all sit together. You can always ditch him when we’re there if you think he’s too much of a sleaze.”

All this sounded pragmatic enough, if distasteful. I nodded again. “Fine.”

“But I want her to go with Larry!” Marcelle protested. “Laurel and Lawrence would be so cute!”

“Laurel and Lawrence.
Oh my God, that is cute.” Amanda deliberated. “But he’s not friends with the rowing guys, and they’ll all be at the same table. If only we’d asked earlier, we could have set her up with Xavier. Now he’s taking
Therese
. . .”

By the time we arrived in San Rafael, my pairing with the illustrious Scott Maccoby seemed to have been decided. We alighted from the bus and, after a quarter hour of being instructed on how to comport ourselves, were released until five o’clock—at which point, we were to meet back in front of city hall. How we would pass six hours in that place was beyond me and, by midday, I was already sick to death of the rows of colorful, cheaply made dresses that Marcelle and Amanda suggested to me. When, after another hour of fiddling with shoulder straps and inhaling the close, conditioned air of fitting rooms, Marcelle began to whine outside my curtains about hunger pangs, I decided to abandon the project altogether. My funeral dress would suffice; there was no need to go to further lengths for Trinity boys. I exited the fitting room, coolly handing my rejections over to the pencil-browed salesgirl, who gave me a withering simper. “Nothing to your liking?” As I left the store, flanked by noisy blondes, her eyes burned into my back.

“Pizza?” Amanda queried Marcelle, when we emerged into the sunlight and exhaust.

“Pizza!” Marcelle confirmed. My opinion didn’t matter; they seldom saw me eating.

All through the afternoon, Marcelle was belching, her breath revolting with the smell of second-hand garlic and pepperoni. I had put away two diet colas, ice included, and a half-pitcher of water while watching them consume their lunches—a slow, unsavory spectacle of threaded cheese, swapped slices, finger-licking, and sex-talk—and, as a consequence, was constantly needing the bathroom. On my third or fourth excursion, Amanda let out a massive groan of impatience. I paid no heed; I was lightheaded from too much walking and not enough to eat. Returning from the white fluorescence of the ladies’ room, I was momentarily disoriented by the dimness inside the arcade. It took me several blinks to see that my friends had deserted me.