Emma Cline - The Girls

As Tom and I walked from the car, I had a flash of hesitation, noticing how Tom’s jeans were too clean. Maybe the girls would tease him, maybe it had been a bad idea to invite him along. I told myself it would be fine. I watched him absorbing the scene — I read his expression as impressed, though he must have been noticing the disrepair, the junked-out skeletons of cars. The crispy package of a dead frog, drifting on the surface of the pool. But these were details that no longer seemed notable to me, like the sores on Nico’s legs that stuck with bits of gravel. My eyes were already habituated to the texture of decay, so I thought that I had passed back into the circle of light.

Donna stopped when she caught sight of us. A nest of laundry in her arms, smelling like the dusty air.

“Trou-ble,” she hooted. “Trouble,” a word from a long-forgotten world. “That lady just nabbed you, huh?” she said. “Man. Heavy.”

Dark circles made crescents under her eyes, a hollow sink to her features, though these details were overshadowed by the swell of familiarity. She seemed happy enough to see me, but when I introduced Tom, she zipped a look at me.

“He gave me a ride,” I supplied helpfully.

Donna’s smile teetered, and she hitched the laundry higher in her arms.

“Is it cool that I’m here?” Tom whispered to me, as if I had any power at all. The ranch had always welcomed visitors, putting them through their jokey gauntlet of attention, and I couldn’t imagine why that would have changed.

“Yeah,” I said, turning to Donna. “Right?”

“Well,” Donna said. “I don’t know. You should talk to Suzanne. Or Guy. Yeah.”

She giggled absently. She was being odd, though to me it was just the usual Donna rap — I could even feel affection for it. Some movement in the grass caught her attention: a lizard, scuttling in search of shade.

“Russell saw a mountain lion a few days ago,” she remarked to no one in particular. Widening her eyes. “Wild, huh?”

—

“Look who’s back,” Suzanne said, a flounce of anger in her greeting. Like I had disappeared on a little vacation. “Figured you’d forgotten how to get here.”

Even though she’d seen Mrs. Dutton stop me, she kept glancing at Tom like he was the reason I’d left. Poor Tom, who wandered the grassy yard with the hesitant shuffle of museumgoers. His nose pricking from the animal smells, the backed-up outhouse. Suzanne’s face was shuttered with the same distant confusion as Donna’s: they could no longer conceive of a world where you could be punished. I was suddenly guilty for the nights with Tamar, the whole afternoons when I didn’t even think of Suzanne. I tried to make my father’s apartment sound worse than it had been, as if I’d been watched at every moment, suffered through endless punishments.

“Jesus,” Suzanne snorted. “Dragsville.”

—

The shadow of the ranch house stretched along the grass like a strange outdoor room, and we occupied this blessing of shade, a line of mosquitoes hovering in the thin afternoon light. The air crackled with a carnival sheen — the familiar bodies of the girls jostling against mine, knocking me back into myself. The quick metal flash through the trees — Guy was bumping a car through the back ranch, calls echoing and disappearing. The drowsy shape of the children, mucking around a network of shallow puddles: someone had forgotten to turn off the hose. Helen had a blanket around herself, pulled up to her chin like a woolly ruff, and Donna kept trying to snap it away and expose the homecoming queen body underneath, the hematoma on Helen’s thigh. I was aware of Tom, sitting awkwardly in the dirt, but mostly I thrilled to Suzanne’s familiar shape beside me. She was talking quickly, a glaze of sweat on her face. Her dress was filthy, but her eyes were shining.

Tamar and my father weren’t even home yet, I realized, and how funny it was to already be at the ranch when they didn’t even know I was gone. Nico was riding a tricycle that was too small for him, the bike rusted and clanging as he pedaled hard.

“Cute kid,” Tom said. Donna and Helen laughed.

Tom wasn’t sure what he’d said that was funny, but he blinked like he was willing to learn. Suzanne plucked at a stalk of oat grass, sitting in an old winged chair pulled from the house. I was keeping an eye out for Russell but didn’t see him anywhere.

“He went to the city for a bit,” Suzanne said.

We both turned at the sound of screeching: it was just Donna, trying to do a handstand on the porch, the flail of her kicking feet. She’d knocked over Tom’s beer, though he was the one apologizing, looking around as if he’d find a mop.

“Jesus,” Suzanne said. “Relax.”

She wiped her sweating hands on her dress, her eyes pinging a little — speed made her stiff as a china cat. The high school girls used it to stay skinny, but I’d never done it: it seemed at odds with the droopy high I associated with the ranch. It made Suzanne harder to reach than usual, a change I didn’t want to acknowledge to myself. I assumed she was just angry. Her gaze never exactly focusing, stopping at the brink.

We were talking like we always did, passing a joint that made Tom cough, but I was noticing other things at the same time with a slight drift of unease — the ranch was less populated than before, no strangers milling around with empty plates, asking what time dinner would be ready. Shaking back their hair and invoking the long car ride to L.A. I didn’t see Caroline anywhere, either.

“She was weird,” Suzanne said when I asked about Caroline. “Like you could see her insides through her skin. She went home. Some people came and picked her up.”

“Her parents?” The thought seemed ludicrous, that anyone at the ranch even had parents.

“It’s cool,” Suzanne said. “A van was heading north, I think Mendocino or something. She knew them from somewhere.”

I tried to picture Caroline back at her parents’ house, wherever that was. I didn’t push much further than those thoughts, Caroline safe and elsewhere.

Tom was clearly uncomfortable. I was sure he was used to college girls with part-time jobs and library cards and split ends. Helen and Donna and Suzanne were raw, a sour note coming off them that struck me, too, returned from two weeks with miraculous plumbing and proximity to Tamar’s obsessive grooming, the special nylon brush she used only on her fingernails. I didn’t want to notice the hesitation in Tom, the shade of a cower whenever Donna addressed him directly.

“So what’s new with the record?” I asked loudly. Expecting the reassuring invocation of success to shore up Tom’s faith. Because it was still the ranch, and everything I’d said was true — he just had to open himself to it. But Suzanne gave me a strange look. The others watching for her to set a tone. Because it hadn’t gone well, that was the point of her stare.

“Mitch is a fucking traitor,” she said.

I was too shocked to fully take in the ugly cast of Suzanne’s hatred: how could Russell really not have gotten his deal? How could Mitch not have seen it on him, the aura of strange electricity, the air around him murmuring? Was it specific to this place, whatever power Russell had? But Suzanne’s gaudy anger recruited me back in, too.

“Mitch freaked, who knows why. He lied. These people,” Suzanne said. “These fucking dopes.”

“You can’t fuck with Russell,” Donna said, nodding along. “Saying one thing, then going back on it. Mitch doesn’t know how Russell is. Russell wouldn’t even have to lift a finger.”

Russell had slapped Helen, that time, like it was nothing. The uncomfortable rearranging I had to do, the mental squint in order to see things differently.