Emma Cline - The Girls

“What the fuck?” The boy put down his beer bottle, the girl clinging to his side. The boy looked twenty or so, in cargo shorts. High white socks, rosy acne beneath a scrim of beard. But the girl was just a little thing. Fifteen, sixteen, her pale legs tinged with blue.

I tried to gather whatever authority I could, clutching the hem of my T-shirt to my thighs. When I said I’d call the cops, the boy snorted.

“Go ahead.” He huddled the girl closer. “Call the cops. You know what?” He pulled out his cellphone. “Fuck it, I’ll call them.”

The pane of fear I’d been holding in my chest suddenly dissolved.

“Julian?”

I wanted to laugh — I’d last seen him when he was thirteen, skinny and unformed. Dan and Allison’s only son. Fussed over, driven to cello competitions all over the western United States. A Mandarin tutor on Thursdays, the brown bread and gummy vitamins, parental hedges against failure. That had all fizzled and he’d ended up at the CSU in Long Beach or Irvine. There’d been some trouble there, I remembered. Expulsion or maybe a milder version of that, a suggestion of a year at junior college. Julian had been a shy, irritable kid, cowering at car radios, unfamiliar foods. Now he had hard edges, the creep of tattoos under his shirt. He didn’t remember me, and why should he? I was a woman outside his range of erotic attentions.

“I’m staying here for a few weeks,” I said, aware of my exposed legs and embarrassed for the melodrama, the mention of police. “I’m a friend of your dad’s.”

I could see the effort he made to place me, to assign meaning.

“Evie,” I said.

Still nothing.

“I used to live in that apartment in Berkeley? By your cello teacher’s house?” Dan and Julian would come over sometimes after his lessons. Julian lustily drinking milk and scuffing my table legs with robotic kicks.

“Oh, shit,” Julian said. “Yeah.” I couldn’t tell whether he actually remembered me or if I had just invoked enough calming details.

The girl turned toward Julian, her face as blank as a spoon.

“It’s fine, babe,” he said, kissing her forehead — his gentleness unexpected.

Julian smiled at me and I realized he was drunk, or maybe just stoned. His features were smeary, an unhealthy dampness on his skin, though his upper-class upbringing kicked in like a first language.

“This is Sasha,” he said, nudging the girl.

“Hi,” she peeped, uncomfortable. I’d forgotten that dopey part of teenage girls: the desire for love flashing in her face so directly that it embarrassed me.

“And Sasha,” Julian said, “this is—”

Julian’s eyes struggled to focus on me.

“Evie,” I reminded him.

“Right,” he said, “Evie. Man.”

He drank from his beer, the amber bottle catching the blare of the lights. He was staring past me. Glancing around at the furniture, the contents of the bookshelves, like this was my house and he was the outsider. “God, you must’ve thought we were like, breaking in or something.”

“I thought you were locals.”

“There was a break-in here once,” Julian said. “When I was a kid. We weren’t here. They just stole our wet suits and a bunch of abalone from the freezer.” He took another drink.

Sasha kept her eyes on Julian. She was in cutoffs, all wrong for the cold coast, and an oversize sweatshirt that must have been his. The cuffs gnawed and wet looking. Her makeup looked terrible, but it was more of a symbol, I suppose. I could see she was nervous with my eyes on her. I understood the worry. When I was that age, I was uncertain of how to move, whether I was walking too fast, whether others could see the discomfort and stiffness in me. As if everyone were constantly gauging my performance and finding it lacking. It occurred to me that Sasha was very young. Too young to be here with Julian. She seemed to know what I was thinking, staring at me with surprising defiance.

“I’m sorry your dad didn’t tell you I’d be here,” I said. “I can sleep in the other room if you want the bigger bed. Or if you want to be here alone, I’ll figure something—”

“Nah,” Julian said. “Sasha and I can sleep anywhere, can’t we, babe? And we’re just passing through. On our way north. A weed run,” he said. “I make the drive, L.A. to Humboldt, at least once a month.”

It occurred to me that Julian thought I’d be impressed.

“I don’t sell it or anything,” Julian went on, backpedaling. “Just transport. All you really need is a couple Watershed bags and a police scanner.”

Sasha looked worried. Would I get them in trouble?

“How’d you know my dad again?” Julian said. Draining his beer and opening another. They’d brought a few six-packs. The other supplies in sight: the nutty gravel of trail mix. An unopened package of sour worms, the stale crumple of a fast-food bag.

“We met in L.A.,” I said. “We lived together for a while.”

Dan and I had shared an apartment in Venice Beach in the late seventies, Venice with its third world alleyways, the palm trees that hit the windows in the warm night winds. I was living off my grandmother’s movie money while I worked toward my nursing certification. Dan was trying to be an actor. It was never going to happen for him, acting. Instead he’d married a woman with some family money and started a vegetarian frozen-food company. Now he owned a pre-earthquake house in Pacific Heights.

“Oh wait, his friend from Venice?” Julian seemed suddenly more responsive. “What’s your name again?”

“Evie Boyd,” I said, and the sudden look that came over his face surprised me: recognition, partly, but real interest.

“Wait,” he said. He took his arm away from the girl and she looked drained by his absence. “You’re that lady?”

Maybe Dan had told him how bad things had gotten for me. The thought embarrassed me, and I touched my face reflexively. An old, shameful habit from adolescence, how I’d cover up a pimple. A casual hand at my chin, fiddling with my mouth. As if that weren’t drawing attention, making it worse.

Julian was excited now. “She was in this cult,” he told the girl. “Right?” he said, turning to me.

A socket of dread opened in my stomach. Julian kept looking at me, tart with expectation. His breath hoppy and fractured.

I’d been fourteen that summer. Suzanne had been nineteen. There was an incense the group burned sometimes that made us drowsy and yielding. Suzanne reading aloud from a back issue of Playboy . The obscene and luminous Polaroids we secreted away and traded like baseball cards.

I knew how easily it could happen, the past at hand, like the helpless cognitive slip of an optical illusion. The tone of a day linked to some particular item: my mother’s chiffon scarf, the humidity of a cut pumpkin. Certain patterns of shade. Even the flash of sunlight on the hood of a white car could cause a momentary ripple in me, allowing a slim space of return. I’d seen old Yardley slickers — the makeup now just a waxy crumble — sell for almost one hundred dollars on the Internet. So grown women could smell it again, that chemical, flowery fug. That’s how badly people wanted it — to know that their lives had happened, that the person they once had been still existed inside of them.

There were so many things that returned me. The tang of soy, smoke in someone’s hair, the grassy hills turning blond in June. An arrangement of oaks and boulders could, seen out of the corner of my eye, crack open something in my chest, palms going suddenly slick with adrenaline.

I anticipated disgust from Julian, maybe even fear. That was the logical response. But I was confused by the way he was looking at me. With something like awe.