Emma Cline - The Girls

—

I kept a lunatic calm on my face, afraid someone might be watching me, alert for signs of weakness. Though I’m sure it was obvious — a tightness in my features, a wounded insistence that I was fine, everything was fine, that it was just a misunderstanding, girlish high jinks between friends. Ha ha ha, like the laugh track on Bewitched that drained the look of horror on Darrin’s marzipan face of any meaning.

It had only been two days without Suzanne, but already I had slipped back so easily into the dull stream of adolescent life — Connie and May’s idiot dramas. My mother’s cold hands, sudden on my neck, like she was trying to startle me into loving her. This awful carnival and my awful town. My anger at Suzanne was hard to access, an old sweater packed away and barely remembered. I could think of Russell slapping Helen and it surfaced as a little glitch at the back of certain thoughts, a memory of wariness. But there were always ways I made sense of things.

I was back at the ranch the next day.

—

I found Suzanne on her mattress, bent intently over a book. She never read, and it was odd to see her stilled in concentration. The cover was half-torn and had a futuristic pentagram on it, some blocky white type.

“What’s that about?” I asked from the doorway.

Suzanne looked up, startled.

“Time,” she said. “Space.”

The sight of her brought flashes of the night with Mitch, but they were unfocused, like a secondhand reflection. Suzanne didn’t say anything about my absence. About Mitch. All she did was sigh and toss the book down. She lay back on the bed, studying her nails. Pinching the skin of her upper arm.

“Flabby,” she declared, waiting for me to protest. As she knew I would.

—

I had a hard time sleeping that night, shifting on the mattress. I was returned to her. So alert to every cue in her face that I made myself sick, watching her, but happy, too.

“I’m glad I’m back,” I whispered, the darkness allowing me to say the words.

Suzanne laughed a little, half-asleep. “But you can always go home.”

“Maybe I never will.”

“Free Evie.”

“I’m serious. I don’t ever want to leave.”

“That’s what all the kids say when summer camp is over.”

I could see the whites of her eyes. Before I could say anything, she let out a sudden heavy breath.

“I’m too hot,” she announced. Kicking off the sheet and turning from me.

The clock was loud in the Dutton house. The apples in the netted basket looked waxy and old. I could see photos on the mantel: the familiar faces of Teddy and his parents. His sister who’d married an IBM salesman. I kept waiting for the front door to open, for someone to identify our intrusion. The sun lit a folded paper star in the window so it went bright. Mrs. Dutton must have taken the time to tape that up, make her home nice.

Donna disappeared into another room, then reappeared. I heard the shudder of drawers, of things being moved.

I saw the Dutton house that day as if for the first time. Noticing that the living room was carpeted. That the rocking chair had a cross-stitched pillow on the seat that looked handmade. The wonky antennae of the television, a smell like stale potpourri in the air. Everything was waterlogged by the knowledge of the family’s absence: the arrangement of papers on the low table, an uncapped aspirin bottle in the kitchen. None of it made any sense without the animation of the Duttons’ presence, like the blurry glyphs of 3-D pictures before the glasses knocked them into clarity.

Donna kept reaching to bump something out of its place: little things. A blue glass of flowers moved four inches to the left. A penny loafer kicked away from its mate. Suzanne didn’t touch anything, not at first. She was picking things up with her eyes, ingesting it all — the framed photos, the ceramic cowboy. The cowboy made Donna and Suzanne weaken into giggles, me smiling, too, but I did not get the joke; only a queer feeling in my stomach, the starkness of the hollow sunlight.

—

The three of us had gone on a garbage run earlier that afternoon, in a borrowed car, a Trans Am, possibly Mitch’s. Suzanne turned up the radio, KFRC, K. O. Bayley on the big 610. Both Suzanne and Donna seemed energized, and so was I. Happy to be back among them. Suzanne pulled into a glass-fronted Safeway that was familiar to me, the cant of its green roof. Where my mother shopped occasionally.

“Grubby grub time,” Donna announced, making herself laugh.

Donna hoisted herself over the lip of the dumpster, avid as an animal, knotting her skirt around her hips so she could dig deep. She got off on it, happy to muck around in the trash, the wet squelch.

On the way back to the ranch, Suzanne made an announcement.

“Time for a little trip,” she said, loudly recruiting Donna into the plan.

I liked knowing she was thinking of me, trying to placate me. I noticed a new desperation around her after Mitch. I was more conscious of her attentions, of how to keep her eyes on me.

“Where?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” Suzanne said, catching Donna’s gaze. “It’s like our medicine, like a little cure for what ails you.”

“Ooh,” Donna said, leaning forward. She seemed to have understood immediately what Suzanne was talking about. “Yes, yes, yes.”

“We need a house,” Suzanne said. “That’s the first thing. An empty house.” She flashed a look at me. “Your mom’s gone, right?”

I didn’t know what they were going to do. But I recognized a tinge of alarm, even then, and had the sense to spare my own home. I shifted in the seat. “She’s there all day.”

Suzanne made a disappointed hum. But I was already thinking of another house that might be empty. And I offered it up to them, easily.

I gave Suzanne directions, watching the roads grow more and more familiar. When Suzanne stopped the car and Donna got out and smeared mud on the first two numbers of the license plate, I only worried a little. I gathered an unfamiliar braveness, a sense of pushing past limitations, and tried to give myself up to the uncertainty. I was locked into my body in a way that was unfamiliar. It was the knowledge, perhaps, that I would do whatever Suzanne wanted me to do. That was a strange thought — that there was just this banal sense of being moved along the bright river of whatever was going to happen. That it could be as easy as this.

Suzanne was driving erratically, rolling through a stop sign and gazing away from the road for long stretches of time, caught in a private daydream. She turned onto my own road. The gates like a familiar string of beads, one following the other.

“There,” I said, and Suzanne slowed the car.

The windows of the Dutton house were plain with curtains, the flagstone path cutting a line to the front door. No car in the carport, just a glisten of oil on the asphalt. Teddy’s bike wasn’t in the yard — he was gone, too. The house looked empty.

—

Suzanne parked the car down the road a little bit, mostly out of sight, while Donna went briskly to the side yard. I trailed Suzanne, but I was hanging back slightly, shuffling my sandals through the dirt.

Suzanne turned to me. “Are you coming or what?”

I laughed, but I’m sure she saw the effort it took. “I just don’t understand what we’re doing.”

She cocked her head and smiled. “Do you really care?”

I was scared and couldn’t say why. I mocked myself for letting my mind range furiously to the very worst thing. Whatever they were going to do — steal, probably. I didn’t know.

“Hurry up,” Suzanne said. She was getting annoyed, I could tell, though she was still smiling. “We can’t just stand here.”