Laura Lippman - Every Secret Thing

“I bet you are. So here’s what you do-keep a little notebook, jotting down what you eat. You’ll see that you’re taking in more calories than you think. Don’t try to change the way you eat at first. Just observe yourself.”

“Like the woman who watches the monkeys?” Alice had seen a special about a famous anthropologist, although she couldn’t remember when, or what the woman learned from all her notes.

“Yes. No. I mean-take notes for a week or two, and include how you feel when you eat. Learn your own patterns, and then adjust accordingly. Portion control is half the battle. It’s not what we eat so much, but the fact that we eat so much of it.”

Disappointed that she did not have a tumor inside her, with or without fine, silky hair, Alice had never even started the notebook. But now, sitting in this too-cheery diner with Sharon, she considered the idea. Girls in books were always keeping notebooks, or diaries. She could do that, she supposed. But she knew she wouldn’t. Not because she lacked discipline. She had plenty of discipline. But she wouldn’t want to tell anyone, even a book, everything about herself. Before a day passed, she knew she would be hiding things. Because someone else would read it. She had never heard of anyone keeping a diary that someone didn’t read.

“So what’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?” Sharon asked out of the blue.

“Open the door?”

Sharon threw back her head and laughed her startling thunder-clap of a laugh, although Alice had not meant to make a joke.

“Very good. One point for Alice. No, I mean are you going to look for a job, or enroll in summer school? Have you learned how to drive? I could teach you, if you like. You’ll need to know.”

“Why? We only have one car, and my mom uses it for work. She teaches art in a summer program, you know.”

“Well, you may have a job one day, and you’ll need to drive to work.”

Alice thought about this. “I can take the bus.”

“Sure, for now. Depending on where the job is. But don’t you want to learn to drive?”

She should say yes. Yes would be the normal answer, and Alice was so keen to do and say the normal things, the expected things. Which were not, of course, always the truthful things, or the things she really wanted to do. She was back on her ice floe, looking for a place to jump. Or maybe a conversation was more like a game of Twister, which Helen sometimes played with Alice and Ronnie on rainy summer weekends. Right arm-red. Left leg-blue. You had to figure out how to keep your balance, how not to fall over, while still following directions. You could twist yourself up some, but not too much.

“I like those new Volkswagen Beetles,” she offered.

This pleased Sharon for some reason. She squealed with delight, bobbed her head. “Me, too.” Then her gaze shifted and her eyes widened, a sign that Sharon was about to become Very Serious. “What are you not going to do, Alice?”

It was true, Alice thought. Almost no one’s eyes are the same size. And Sharon ’s right eye was a lot bigger than her left.

“ Alice?”

“I’m not going to do anything…bad. Never again.”

“I know you won’t. But specifically, what’s the one thing you should not do?”

Not kill anyone? But not even Sharon would ask Alice such a question. Sharon believed in Alice, always had. You didn’t have to understand a person in order to believe in her.

“I’m not going to”-she struggled, trying to figure out what would be the worst thing she could do-“be idle.”

“That’s a good idea. Idle hands…” Sharon laughed, an apologetic bark, although Alice couldn’t see what was funny. “I think the key thing is that you shouldn’t see, or talk to, Ronnie.”

Alice looked up, amazed. How could anyone think she wanted to see Ronnie?

“Her family moved. My mom said.”

“Yes, but they’re not that far away. They’re just off Route 40 now, in those row houses near the old Korvette’s.”

“Korvette’s?”

“It’s a Metro now. But when I was a kid, it was a discount department store, like Kmart or Target. I bought my first record album there.” Sharon seemed on the verge of going off into one of her long stories about her childhood, stories that mystified Alice, for they seemed to be told to show how much alike Sharon and Alice were. Yet they always ended up proving the opposite.

Luckily, Sharon didn’t succumb to one of her odd reveries this time. “Look-Ronnie had really serious problems. That’s why she went to a different place than you did.”

“Harkness.”

“What?”

“She went to Harkness, right? The one near D.C.” The old grievance still gnawed. Ronnie had gone to Harkness. Alice had been stuck in Middlebrook.

“She started out at Harkness. She finished somewhere else. Anyway, all I’m saying is that she deserves a new start as much as you do. But I don’t think you two can be friends again.”

“We weren’t friends,” Alice said. After all these years, she couldn’t let this pass. She didn’t always mind when people got it wrong and said she killed Olivia Barnes, but she wasn’t going to be known as Ronnie Fuller’s friend.

“Right,” Sharon said, with a bright, placating smile. “Now, are you sure you don’t want a sundae?”

“I guess I will. After all, starting tomorrow, I’m going to be walking a lot.”

“You are? Oh, that’s great, Alice, just great. Really.”

Was it great because walking was good for her, or great because it was Sharon ’s advice? Alice had learned long ago not to ask such questions out loud. But she had never stopped thinking them. Sometimes, she felt her fat was like a cave, and she lived far inside it, watching the world with glowing eyes.

Ronnie Fuller was used to waking in the morning with strange yearnings. She just kept forgetting she was now in a position to do something about them. Some of them, at least.

She had been home for almost a month, for her birthday was in March, a few weeks before Alice ’s, a fact that almost no one ever remembered: Ronnie had a birthday, too, and it came first. Still, even after a month at home, she had to think for a moment when she opened her eyes before she could place herself in the world. Her new room, a middle bedroom with no windows, was dark as a submarine and somewhat plain. Her mother had said Ronnie could do whatever she wanted with it, but Ronnie couldn’t think of what to do.

On this particular Saturday morning, she awoke with a desire for honeysuckle, but it would be another two months before the first blossoms appeared, longer still before they could be sucked. She decided to look for a substitute at the convenience store at the foot of the long, winding hill where her parents now lived. She had the day off, so she walked straight there as soon as she was dressed. After surveying her choices through the fogged glass, she selected a Mountain Dew. She knew it wouldn’t taste like honeysuckle, but the color was close.

The dark-skinned, turbaned man at the counter took her money without comment. “Terrorist,” she said, intending it to be a question inside her head, but somehow it slipped out. That happened to Ronnie a lot. She tried to keep her thoughts to herself, but they made themselves known, which usually got her in trouble. It didn’t seem fair.

“Seek,” he said angrily, pointing to his forehead. “Seek.” Seek what, Ronnie wondered. Sick? Was he saying he was sick? Her mind was so busy turning over those questions that she turned the wrong way leaving the store, walking toward the old house by force of habit. Or so she told herself.