Marisha Pessl - Night Film

“ She did.”

“Ashley.”

He nodded and then, hunching forward, grabbed the package of rolling papers off the table, pulled one out.

“Why?” I asked.

“Some kinda sick joke.”

“Then you were friends with her.”

“Not exactly,” he said, reaching across the table for his gray coat, fumbling in the pockets for the pack of Marlboros. “Not friends. More like acquaintances. But even that’s a stretch.”

“Where’d you meet her?”

He sat back down, tapping out a cigarette. “Camp.”

“Camp?”

“Yeah.”

“What camp ?”

“Six Silver Lakes Wilderness Therapy in Utah.” He glanced at me, brushing his hair out of his eyes as he began to dissect the cigarette, peeling the filter away from the paper. “You’ve heard of this first-class institution.”

“No.”

“Then you’re missing out. If you have kids, I highly recommend it. Especially if you want your kid to grow up to be a great American maniac.”

I didn’t bother to hide my surprise. “You met Ashley there?”

He nodded.

“When?”

“I was seventeen. She was, like, sixteen. Summer of ’03.”

That made Hopper twenty-five.

“It’s one of these juvenile therapy scams,” he went on, sprinkling a pinch of the Golden Virginia tobacco along the rolling paper. “They advertise help for your troubled teen by staring at the stars and singing ‘Kumbaya.’ Instead, it’s a bunch of bearded nutjobs left in charge of some of the craziest kids I’ve ever seen in my life — bulimics, nymphos, cutters trying to saw their wrists with the plastic spoons from lunch. You wouldn’t believe the shit that went on.” He shook his head. “Most of the kids had been so mentally screwed by their parents they needed more than twelve weeks of wilderness. They needed reincarnation. To die and just come back as a grasshopper, as a fucking weed. That’d be preferable to the agony they were in just by being alive.”

He said this with such pissed-off defiance, I gathered he wasn’t talking about any of the campers but about himself. I stepped around the white sweatshirt on the floor to one of the beach chairs — the one with pantyhose climbing up the back — and sat down.

“Who knows where they found the counselors,” Hopper went on, tucking the filter into the end, leaning down to lick the paper. “Rikers Island, probably. There was this one fat Asian kid, Orlando? They tortured him. He was some kind of born-again Baptist, so he was always talking about Jesus. They made him go without eating. Kid had never gone ten minutes without a Twinkie in his life. He couldn’t keep up, got heat stroke. Still, they kept telling him to find his inner strength, ask God for help. God was busy. Didn’t have anything for him. The whole thing was Lord of the Flies on steroids. I still get nightmares.”

“Why were you there?” I asked.

He sat back against the couch, amused. He stuck the hand-rolled cigarette into the side of his mouth, lighting it. He inhaled, wincing, and exhaled in a long stream of smoke.

“My uncle,” he said, stretching his legs out. “I’d been traveling with my mom in South America for this missionary cult shit she was into. I ran the fuck away. My uncle lives in New Mexico. Hired some goon to track me down. I was crashing at a friend’s in Atlanta. One morning I’m eating Cheerios. This brown van pulls up. If the Grim Reaper had wheels it’d be this thing. No windows except two in the back door, behind which you just knew some innocent kid had been kidnapped and, like, decapitated. Next thing I know I’m in the back with a male nurse.” He shook his head. “If that dude was a licensed nurse, I’m a fucking congressman.”

He paused to take another drag of his cigarette.

“They took me to base camp in Springdale. Zion National Park. You train there for two weeks with your fellow fucked-up campers, making Native American dream catchers and learning how to scrub a toilet with your spit— real vital life skills, you know. Then the group sets off on a ten-week trek through the wilderness, camping at six different lakes. With every lake you’re supposed to be inching closer to God and self-worth, only the reality is you’re inching closer to becoming a psychopath ’cuz of all the mind-fucking shit you’ve been exposed to.”

“And Ashley was one of the campers,” I said.

He nodded.

“Why was she there?”

“No clue. That was the big mystery. She didn’t show up till the day we were setting out on the ten-week hike. The night before, counselors announced there was a last-minute arrival. Everyone was pissed because that meant whoever it was had been able to bypass basic training, which made Full Metal Jacket look like Sesame Street. ” He paused, shaking his head, then, eyeing me, he smiled faintly. “When we saw her though, we were down.”

“Why?”

He gazed at the table. “She was hot. ”

He seemed on the verge of adding something, but instead leaned forward, ashing the cigarette.

“Who dropped her off?” I asked.

He looked up at me. “Don’t know. Next morning, breakfast, she was just there. Sitting by herself at one of the picnic tables in the corner, eating a piece of cornbread. She was all packed and ready to go, red bandanna in her hair. The rest of us were totally disorganized. Running around like deranged chickens to get ready. Finally we left.”

“And you introduced yourself,” I suggested.

He shook his head, tapping the cigarette on a plate. “Nope. She kept to herself. Obviously, everyone knew who her father was and that she was the little girl from To Breathe with Kings, so people were all over her. But she iced everyone out, said nothing beyond yes, no.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t like she was sulking. She just wasn’t into making friends. Pretty soon there was resentment, especially from the girls, about all the get-outta-jail-free cards she got from the counselors. Every night around the campfire we had to wax poetic about all the shit we’d done to end up there. Burglary. Suicide attempts. Drugs. The rap sheets of some of these kids, longer than War and Peace. Ash never had to say a thing. They’d skip over her, no explanation. The only clue was this ACE bandage on her hand, which she had when she first arrived. Couple of weeks into the hike she took it off and there was a bad burn mark. She never said what it was from.”

I was surprised to hear this. That very burn mark, along with her foot tattoo, were mentioned in the missing-person’s report as her only identifiable markings.

“Two days into the hike we made a bet,” Hopper continued. “First kid to sustain a conversation with Ashley that lasted longer than fifteen minutes would get the two hits of ecstasy one of the kids from L.A., Joshua, had smuggled in taped into the hollow shoelace tip of his hiking boot.” He tilted his head back, quickly exhaling smoke at the ceiling. “I decided to hold back, get my game together, let the others jihad themselves. And they did. Ashley blew them all off. One by one.”

“Until you,” I said.

It was easy to imagine: two gorgeous teenagers finding each other in the wilderness of adolescence, two orchids blooming in a desert.

“Just the opposite, actually,” he said. “She blew me off, too.”

I stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

He shook his head. “About a week after everyone else had crashed and burned, I made my move. Ashley always walked in the back, so I did. I asked where she was from. She said New York. After that it was just one-word replies and a nod. I struck out.”