Emma Cline - The Girls

—

I was so lulled into feeling that the world had winnowed itself around Suzanne and me, that Mitch was just the comic fill — I didn’t even consider other possibilities. I’d gone to the bathroom, used Mitch’s strange black soap and peeked in his cabinet, loaded with bottles of Dilaudid. The enamel shine of the bathtub, the cut of bleach in the air so I could tell he had a cleaning lady.

I had just finished peeing when someone opened the bathroom door without knocking. I was startled, reflexively trying to cover myself. I saw the man sliver a glance toward my exposed legs before he ducked back into the hallway.

“Apologies,” I heard him say from the other side of the door. A chain of stuffed marigold birds swung gently from where they hung by the sink.

“My deepest apologies,” the man said. “I was looking for Mitch. Sorry to bother you.”

I sensed him hesitate on the other side of the door, then tap the wood lightly before he walked away. I pulled up my shorts. The adrenaline that spread through me lessened but didn’t disappear. It was probably just a friend of Mitch’s. I was jumpy from the coke, but I wasn’t frightened. Which made sense: nobody thought until later that strangers might be anything but friends. Our love for one another boundless, the whole universe an extended crash pad.

—

I’d realize a few months after that this must have been Scotty Weschler. The caretaker who lived in the back house, a tiny white-paneled cabin with a hot plate and a space heater. The man who cleaned the hot tub filters and watered the lawn and checked that Mitch hadn’t overdosed in the night. Prematurely balding, with wire glasses: Scotty had been a cadet at a military academy in Pennsylvania before dropping out, moving west. He never shook his cadet idealism: he wrote letters to his mother about the redwoods, the Pacific Ocean, using words like “majestic” and “grandeur.”

He’d be the first. The one who tried to fight back, to run.

I wish I could squeeze more out of our brief encounter. To believe, when he opened the door, that I had felt a shiver of what was coming. But I’d made out nothing but the flash of a stranger, and I thought of it very little. I didn’t even ask Suzanne who the man was.

—

The living room was empty when I came back. The music blaring, a cigarette leaching smoke in the ashtray. The glass door that led out to the bay was open. I was surprised by the suddenness of the water when I went out on the porch, the wall of woolly lights: San Francisco in the fog.

No one was out on the bank. Then I heard, over the water, a distorted echo. And there they were, both of them, splashing in the waves, the water foaming around their legs. Mitch flapping around in his white outfit, now like soggy bedsheets, Suzanne in the dress she called her Br’er Rabbit dress. My heart lurched — I wanted to join them. But something held me in place. I kept standing on the stairs that led to the sand, smelling the sea-softened wood. Did I know what was coming? I watched Suzanne shed her dress, shrugging it off with drunken difficulty, and then he was on her. His head lowering to lick at her bare breast. Both of them unsteady in the water. I watched for longer than seemed right. I was buzzy and adrift by the time I turned my back and wandered into the house.

—

I turned the music down. Shut the refrigerator door, which Suzanne had left open. The picked-over carcass of the chicken. Kona chicken, as Mitch had insisted: the sight made me a little nauseous. The too-pink flesh emanating a chill. I would always be like this, I thought, the person who closed the refrigerator. The person who watched from the steps like a spook while Suzanne let Mitch do whatever he wanted. Jealousy started to oscillate in my gut. The strange gnaw when I imagined his fingers inside her, how she’d taste of salt water. Confusion, too — how quickly things had changed and I was the one on the outside again.

The chemical pleasure in my head had already faded, so all I recognized anymore was the lack of it. I wasn’t tired, but I didn’t want to sit on the couch, waiting for them to come inside. I found an unlocked bedroom that looked like a guest room: no clothes in the closet, a bed with slightly mussed sheets. They smelled like someone else, and there was a single gold earring on the nightstand. I thought of my own home, the weight and feel of my own blankets — then a sudden desire to sleep at Connie’s house. Curled up against her back in our familiar, ritual arrangement, her sheets printed with chubby cartoon rainbows.

I lay in the bed, listening for the sound of Suzanne and Mitch in the other room. Like I was Suzanne’s thick-necked boyfriend, the same ratchet of righteous anger. It wasn’t aimed at her, not exactly — I hated Mitch with a fierceness that kept me wide-awake. I wanted him to know how she’d been laughing at him earlier, to know the exact degree of pity I had for him. How impotent my anger was, a surge with no place to land, and how familiar that was: my feelings strangled inside me, like little half-formed children, bitter and bristling.

—

I was almost certain, later, that this was the same bedroom that Linda and her little boy were sleeping in. Though I know there were other bedrooms, other possibilities. Linda and Mitch were broken up by the night of the murder, but they were still friends, Mitch delivering an oversize stuffed giraffe on Christopher’s birthday the week before. Linda was only staying at Mitch’s because her apartment in the Sunset was crawling with mold — she’d planned on being at his house for two nights. Then she and Christopher would stay in Woodside with her boyfriend, a man who owned a series of seafood restaurants.

After the murders, I had seen the man on a talk show: face red, pressing a handkerchief to his eyes. I wondered if his fingernails were manicured. He told the host he’d been planning to propose to Linda. Though who knows if that was true.

—

Around three in the morning, there was a knock on my door. It was Suzanne, stumbling inside without waiting for an answer. She was naked, bringing a gusty smell of brine and cigarette smoke.

“Hi,” she said, pulling at my blankets.

I’d been half-asleep, lulled by the sameness of the dark ceiling, and she was like a creature from a dream, storming into the room, smelling as she did. The sheets getting damp when she crawled in beside me. I believed she had come for me. To be with me, a gesture of apology. But how quickly that thought disappeared when I took in her urgency, her stoned, glassy focus — I knew this was for him.

“Come on,” Suzanne said, and laughed. Her face new in the strange blue light. “It’s beautiful,” she said, “you’ll see. He’s gentle.”

Like that was the most you could hope for. I sat back, grabbing the covers.

“Mitch is a creep,” I said. It was clear to me that we were in a stranger’s house. The oversize, empty guest room, with its unsavory off-gassing of other bodies.

“Evie,” she said. “Don’t be like that.”

Her nearness, the dart of her eyes in the dark. How easily she pressed her mouth to mine, then, edging her tongue past my lips. Running the tip along the ridges of my teeth, smiling into my mouth, and saying something I couldn’t hear.

I could taste the cocaine drip in her mouth, the brackish sea. I went to kiss her again, but she had already drifted away, smiling like this was a game, like we’d done something funny and unreal. Playing lightly with my hair.

I was happy to twist the meanings, willfully misread the symbols. Doing what Suzanne asked seemed like the best gift I could give her, a way to unlock her own reciprocal feelings. And she was trapped, in her way, just like I was, but I never saw that, shifting easily in the directions she prompted for me. Like the wooden toy, clattering with the silver ball I’d tilted and urged into the painted holes, trying for the winning drop.