Emma Cline - The Girls

“It’s not broken,” I said inanely.

“You’re a fucking nutcase,” he muttered. He ran his hands along the body of the bike and held a shard of orange metal up to Peter. “You believe this shit?”

When Peter looked at me, his face solidified with pity, which was somehow worse than anger. I was like a child, warranting only abbreviated emotions.

Connie appeared in the doorway.

“Knock knock,” she called, the keys hanging from a crooked finger. She took in the scene: Henry squatting by the motorcycle; Peter’s arms crossed.

Henry let out a harsh laugh. “Your friend’s a real bitch,” he said, shooting me a look.

“Evie knocked it over,” Peter said.

“You fucking kids,” Henry said. “Get a babysitter next time, don’t hang around with us. Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my voice small, but nobody was listening.

Even after Peter helped Henry right the motorcycle, peering closely at the break—“It’s just cosmetic,” he announced, “we can fix it pretty easy”—I understood that other things had broken. Connie studied me with cold wonder, like I’d betrayed her, and maybe I had. I’d done what we were not supposed to do. Illuminated a slice of private weakness, exposed the twitchy rabbit heart.

The owner of the Flying A was a fat man, the counter cutting into his belly, and he leaned on his elbows to track my movements around the aisles, my purse banging against my thighs. There was a newspaper open in front of him, though he never seemed to turn the page. He had a weary air of responsibility about him, both bureaucratic and mythological, like someone doomed to guard a cave for all eternity.

I was alone that afternoon. Connie probably fuming in her small bedroom, playing “Positively 4th Street” with wounded, righteous indulgence. The thought of Peter was gutting — I wanted to skim over that night, calcifying my shame into something blurry and manageable, like a rumor about a stranger. I’d tried to apologize to Connie, the boys still worrying over the motorcycle like field medics. I even offered to pay for repairs, giving Henry everything I had in my purse. Eight dollars, which he’d accepted with a stiff jaw. After a while, Connie said it was best if I just went home.

—

I’d gone back a few days later — Connie’s father answered the door almost instantly, like he’d been waiting for me. He usually worked at the dairy plant past midnight, so it was odd to see him at home.

“Connie’s upstairs,” he said. On the counter behind him, I saw a glass of whiskey, watery and catching the sunlight. I was so focused on my own plans that I didn’t pick up the air of crisis in the house, the unusual information of his presence.

Connie was lying on her bed, her skirt hitched so I could see the crotch of her white underwear, the entirety of her stippled thighs. She sat up when I entered, blinking.

“Nice makeup,” she said. “Did you do that just for me?” She threw herself back on the pillow. “You’ll like this news. Peter’s gone. Like, gone gone. With Pamela, quelle surprise.” She rolled her eyes but articulated Pamela’s name with a perverse happiness. Cutting me a look.

“What do you mean, left?” Panic was already dislocating my voice.

“He’s so selfish, ” she said. “Dad told us we might have to move to San Diego. The next day, Peter takes off. He took a bunch of his clothes and stuff. I think they went to her sister’s house in Portland. I mean, I’m pretty sure they went there.” She blew at her bangs. “He’s a coward. And Pamela is the kind of girl who’s gonna get fat after she has a baby.”

“Pamela’s pregnant?”

She gave me a look. “Surprise — you don’t even care I might have to move to San Diego?”

I knew I was supposed to start enumerating the ways I loved her, how sad I would be if she left, but I was hypnotized by an image of Pamela next to Peter in his car, falling asleep against his shoulder. Avis maps at their feet gone translucent with hamburger grease, the backseat filled with clothes and his mechanic manuals. How Peter would look down and see the white line of Pamela’s scalp through her part. He might kiss her, moved by a domestic tenderness, even though she was sleeping and would never know.

“Maybe he’s just messing around,” I said. “I mean, couldn’t he still show up?”

“Screw you,” Connie said. She seemed surprised by these words, too.

“What’d I even do to you?” I said.

Of course we both knew.

“I think I’d rather be alone right now,” Connie announced primly, and stared hard out the window.

Peter, fleeing north with the girlfriend who might even have his baby — there was no imagining the biology away, the fact of the multiplying proteins in Pamela’s stomach. But here was Connie, her chubby shape on the bed so familiar that I could map her freckles, point out the blip on her shoulder from chicken pox. There was always Connie, suddenly beloved.

“Let’s go to a movie or something,” I said.

She sniffed and studied the pale rim of her nails. “Peter’s not even around anymore,” she said. “So you really have no reason to be here. You’re gonna be at boarding school, anyway.”

The hum of my desperation was obvious. “Maybe we can go to the Flying A?”

She bit her lip. “May says you’re not very nice to me.”

May was the dentist’s daughter. She wore plaid pants with matching vests, like a junior accountant.

“You said May was boring.”

Connie was quiet. We used to feel sorry for May, who was rich but ridiculous, but I understood that now Connie was feeling sorry for me, watching me pant after Peter, who’d probably been planning to go to Portland for weeks. Months.

“May’s nice,” Connie said. “Real nice.”

“We could all see a movie together.” I was pedaling now, for any kind of traction, a bulwark against the empty summer. May wasn’t so bad, I told myself, even though she wasn’t allowed to eat candy or popcorn because of her braces, and yes, I could imagine it, the three of us.

“She thinks you’re trashy,” Connie said. She turned back to the window. I stared at the lace curtains I had helped Connie hem with glue when we were twelve. I had waited too long, my presence in the room an obvious error, and it was clear that there was nothing to do but leave, to say a tight-throated goodbye to Connie’s father downstairs — he gave me a distracted nod — and clatter my bike out into the street.

—

Had I ever felt alone like this before, the whole day to spend and no one to care? I could almost imagine the ache in my gut as pleasure. It was about keeping busy, I told myself, a frictionless burning of hours. I made a martini the way my father had taught me, sloshing the vermouth over my hand and ignoring the spill on the bar table. I’d always hated martini glasses — the stem and the funny shape seemed embarrassing, like the adults were trying too hard to be adults. I poured it in a juice cup instead, rimmed with gold, and forced myself to drink. Then I made another and drank that, too. It was fun to feel loose and amused with my own house, realizing, in a spill of hilarity, that the furniture had always been ugly, chairs as heavy and mannered as gargoyles. To notice the air was candied with silence, that the curtains were always drawn. I opened them and struggled to lift a window. It was hot outside — I imagined my father, snapping that I was letting the warm air in — but I left the window open anyway.

My mother would be gone all day, the liquor aiding the shorthand of my loneliness. It was strange that I could feel differently so easily, that there was a sure way to soften the crud of my own sadness. I could drink until my problems seemed compact and pretty, something I could admire. I forced myself to like the taste, to breathe slowly when I felt nauseous. I burbled acrid vomit onto my blankets, then cleaned so there was just a tart, curdled spice in the air that I almost liked. I knocked over a lamp and put on dark eye makeup with inexpert but avid attention. Sat in front of my mother’s lighted mirror with its different settings: Office. Daylight. Dusk. Washes of colored light, my features spooking and bleaching as I clicked through the artificial day.