Emma Cline - The Girls

He shook his head and I saw how his face moved a little with concern for me, an acknowledgment, I thought, of how brave I was. Though I should have known that when men warn you to be careful, often they are warning you of the dark movie playing across their own brains. Some violent daydream prompting their guilty exhortations to “make it home safe.”

“See, I wish I’d been like you,” Claude said. “Free and easy. Just traveling around. I always had a job.”

He slid his eyes to me before turning them back to the road. The first twinge of discomfort — I’d gotten good at deciphering certain male expressions of desire. Clearing the throat, an assessing nip in the gaze.

“None of you people ever work, huh?” he said.

He was teasing, probably, but I couldn’t tell for sure. There was sourness in his tone, a sting of real resentment. Maybe I should have been frightened of him. This older man who saw that I was alone, who felt like I owed him something, which was the worst thing a man like that could feel. But I wasn’t afraid. I was protected, a hilarious and untouchable giddiness overtaking me. I was going back to the ranch. I would see Suzanne. Claude seemed barely real to me: a paper clown, innocuous and laughable.

—

“This good?” Claude said.

He’d pulled over near the campus in Berkeley, the clock tower and stair-step houses thickening the hills behind. He turned off the ignition. I felt the heat outside, the close wend of traffic.

“Thanks,” I said, gathering my purse and duffel.

“Slow down,” he said as I started to open the door. “Just sit with me a second, hm?”

I sighed but sat back in the seat. I could see the dry hills above Berkeley and remembered, with a start, that brief time in winter when the hills were green and plump and wet. I hadn’t even known Suzanne then. I could feel Claude looking at me sideways.

“Listen.” Claude scratched at his neck. “If you need some money—”

“I don’t need money.” I was unafraid, shrugging a quick goodbye and opening the door. “Thanks again,” I said. “For the ride.”

“Wait,” he said, grabbing my wrist.

“Fuck off,” I said, wrenching my arm away from the bracelet of his grasp, an unfamiliar heat in my voice. Before I slammed the door, I saw Claude’s weak and sputtering face. I was walking away, breathless. Almost laughing. The sidewalk radiating even heat, the pulse of the abrupt sunshine. I was buoyed by the exchange, as if suddenly allowed more space in the world.

“Bitch,” Claude called, but I didn’t turn back to look.

—

Telegraph was packed: people selling tables of incense or concho jewelry, leather purses hung from an alley fence. The city of Berkeley was redoing all the roads that summer, so piles of rubble collected on the sidewalks, trenches cracking through the asphalt like a disaster movie. A group in floor-length robes fluttered pamphlets at me. Boys with no shirts, their arms pressed with faint bruising, looked me up and down. Girls my age lugged carpetbags that banged against their knees, wearing velvet frock coats in the August heat.

Even after what had happened with Claude, I wasn’t afraid of hitchhiking. Claude was just a harmless floater in the corner of my vision, drifting peacefully into the void. Tom was the sixth person I approached, tapping his shoulder as he ducked into his car. He seemed flattered by my request for a ride, like it was an excuse I’d made up to be near him. He hurriedly brushed off the passenger seat, raining silent crumbs onto the carpet.

“It could be cleaner,” he said. Apologetic, as if I might possibly be picky.

—

Tom drove his small Japanese car at exactly the speed limit, looking over his shoulder before changing lanes. His plaid shirt was thinning at the elbows but clean and tucked, a boyishness to his slim wrists that moved me. He took me all the way to the ranch, though it was an hour from Berkeley. He’d claimed to be visiting friends at the junior college in Santa Rosa, but he was a bad liar: I could see his neck get pink. He was polite, a student at Berkeley. Premed, though he liked sociology, too, and history.

“LBJ,” he said. “Now there was a president.”

He had a large family, I learned, and a dog named Sister, and too much homework: he was in summer school, trying to get through prereqs. He’d asked me what my major was. His mistake excited me — he must have thought I was eighteen, at least.

“I don’t go to college,” I said. I was about to explain I was only in high school, but Tom immediately got defensive.

“I was thinking of doing that, too,” he said, “dropping out, but I’m gonna finish the summer classes. I already paid fees. I mean, I wish I hadn’t, but—” He trailed off. Gazing at me until I realized he wanted my forgiveness.

“That’s a bummer,” I said, and this seemed like enough.

He cleared his throat. “So do you have a job or something? If you’re not in school?” he said. “Gee, unless that’s a rude question. You don’t have to answer.”

I shrugged, affecting ease. Though maybe I was feeling easy on that car ride, like my occupation of the world could be seamless. These simple ways I could meet needs. Talking to strangers, dealing with situations.

“The place I’m going now — I’ve been staying there,” I said. “It’s a big group. We take care of each other.”

His eyes were on the road, but he was listening closely as I explained the ranch. The funny old house, the kids. The plumbing system Guy had rigged in the yard, a knotty mess of pipes.

“Sounds like the International House,” he said. “Where I live. There are fifteen of us. There’s a chore board in the hall, we all take turns with the bad ones.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, though I knew the ranch was nothing like the International House, the squinty philosophy majors arguing over who’d left the dinner dishes unwashed, a girl from Poland nibbling black bread and crying for a faraway boyfriend.

“Who owns the house?” he said. “Is it like a center or something?”

It was odd to explain Russell to someone, to remember that there were whole realms in which Russell or Suzanne did not figure.

“His album’s gonna come out around Christmas, probably,” I remember saying.

I kept talking about the ranch, about Russell. The way I tossed free Mitch’s name, like Donna had that day on the bus, with studied, careful deployment. The closer we got, the more worked up I became. Like horses that bolt with barn sickness, forgetting their rider.

“It sounds nice,” Tom said. I could tell my stories had charged him, a dreamy excitement in his features. Mesmerized by bedtime tales of other worlds.

“You could hang out for a while,” I said. “If you wanted.”

Tom brightened at the offer, gratitude making him shy. “Only if I’m not intruding,” he said, a blush clotting his cheeks.

—

I imagined Suzanne and the others would be happy with me for bringing this new person. Expanding the ranks, all the old tricks. A pie-faced admirer to raise his voice with ours and contribute to the food pool. But it was something else, too, that I wanted to extend: the taut and pleasant silence in the car, the stale heat raising vapors of leather. The warped image of myself in the side mirrors, so I caught only the quantity of hair, the freckled skin of my shoulder. I took on the shape of a girl. The car crossed the bridge, passing through the shit-stench veil of the landfill. I could see the span of another distant highway, sided by water, and the marshy flats before the sudden drop into the valley, the ranch hidden in its hills.

—

By that time, the ranch I’d known was a place that no longer existed. The end had already arrived: each interaction its own elegy. But there was too much hopeful momentum in me to notice. The leap in me when Tom’s car had first turned down the ranch drive: it had been two weeks, not long at all, but the return was overwhelming. And only when I saw everything still there, still alive and strange and half-dreamy as ever, did I understand I’d worried it might be gone. The things I loved, the miraculous house — like the one in Gone with the Wind, I’d realized, coming upon it again. The silty rectangle of pool, half-full, with its teem of algae and exposed concrete: it could all pass back into my possession.