Emma Cline - The Girls

“But Mitch could change his mind, right?” I asked. When I finally looked toward Tom, he wasn’t paying attention, his gaze trained beyond the porch.

Suzanne shrugged. “I don’t know. He told Russell not to call him anymore.” She let out a snort. “Fuck him. Just disappearing like he didn’t make promises.”

I was thinking about Mitch. His desire, that night, making him brutish so he didn’t care when I winced, my hair caught under his arm. His fogged-over gaze that kept us indistinct, our bodies just the symbol of bodies.

“But it’s cool,” Suzanne said, forcing a smile. “It’s not—”

She was cut off by the sudden surprise of Tom, surging to his feet. He clattered down from the porch and sprinted in the direction of the pool. Shouting something I couldn’t make out. His shirt coming untucked, the naked, vulnerable holler.

“What’s his problem?” Suzanne said, and I didn’t know, flushing with desperate embarrassment that morphed into fear: Tom was still shouting, scrambling down the steps into the pool.

“The kid,” he said, “the boy.”

Nico: I flashed on the silent shape of his body in the water, his little lungs sloshing and full. The porch tilted. By the time we hurried over to the pool, Tom already slogging the kid out of the slimy water, it was immediately clear that he was okay. Everything was fine. Nico sat down on the grass, dripping, an aggrieved look on his face. Fisting at his eyes, pushing Tom away. He was crying more because of Tom than anything else, the strange man who’d yelled at him, who’d dragged him from the pool when he was just having fun.

“What’s the big idea?” Donna said to Tom. Patting Nico on the head roughly, like a good dog.

“He jumped in.” Tom’s panic was reverberating through his whole body, his pants and shirt sopping. The wet suck of his shoes.

“So?”

Tom was wide-eyed, not understanding that trying to explain would make it worse.

“I thought he’d fallen into the pool.”

“But there’s water in there,” Helen said.

“That wet stuff,” Donna said, sniggering.

“The kid’s fine,” Suzanne said. “You scared him.”

“Glug glug glug.” A fit of giggling overtook Helen. “You thought he was dead or something?”

“He still could have drowned,” Tom said, his voice going high. “No one was watching him. He’s too young to really swim.”

“Your face,” Donna said. “God, you’re all freaked, aren’t you?”

The sight of Tom wringing the biological stink of pool water from his shirt. The junk in the yard catching the light. Nico got to his feet, shaking out his hair. Sniffing a little with his weird childish dignity. The girls were laughing, all of them, so Nico trundled off easily, no one noticing his departure. And I pretended I hadn’t worried, either, that I’d known everything was fine, because Tom seemed pathetic, his panic right on the surface with no place to retreat, and even the kid was mad at him. I was ashamed for bringing him around, for how he’d caused such a fuss, and Suzanne was staring at me, so I knew exactly what a stupid idea it had been. Tom looked at me for help, but he saw the distance in my face, the way I slid my eyes back to the ground.

“I just think you should be careful,” Tom said.

Suzanne snorted. “We should be careful?”

“I was a lifeguard,” he said, his voice cracking. “People can drown even in shallow water.” But Suzanne wasn’t listening, making a face at Donna. Their shared disgust including me, I thought. I couldn’t bear it.

“Relax,” I said to Tom.

Tom looked wounded. “This is an awful place.”

“You should leave, then,” Suzanne said. “Doesn’t that sound like a good idea?” The rattle of speed in her, the vacant, vicious smile — she was being meaner than she needed to be.

“Can I talk to you for a second?” Tom said to me.

Suzanne laughed. “Oh, man. Here we go.”

“Just for a second,” he said.

When I hesitated, Suzanne sighed. “Go talk to him,” she said. “Christ.”

Tom walked away from the others and I followed him with halting steps, as if distance could prevent contagion. I kept glancing back to the group, the girls heading to the porch. I wanted to be among them. I was furious with Tom, his silly pants, his thatchy hair.

“What?” I said. Impatient, my lips tight.

“I don’t know,” Tom said, “I just think—” He hesitated, darting a look at the house, pulling at his shirt. “You can come back with me right now, if you want. There’s a party tonight,” he said. “At the International House.”

I could picture it. The Ritz crackers, earnest groups crammed around bowls of watery ice. Talking SDS and comparing reading lists. I half shrugged, the barest shift of a shoulder. He seemed to understand this gesture for the falsehood it was.

“Maybe I should write down my number for you,” Tom said. “It’s the hall phone, but you can just ask for me.”

I could hear the stark billow of Suzanne’s laughter carrying in the air.

“That’s okay,” I said. “There’s no phone here, anyway.”

“They aren’t nice,” Tom said, catching my eyes. He looked like a rural preacher after a baptism, the wet pants clinging to his legs, his earnest stare.

“What do you know?” I said, an alarming heat rising in my cheeks. “You don’t even know them.”

Tom made an abortive gesture with his hands. “It’s a trash heap,” he said, sputtering, “can’t you see that?”

He indicated the crumbling house, the tangle of overgrown vegetation. All the junked-out cars and oil drums and picnic blankets abandoned to the mold and the termites. I saw it all, but I didn’t absorb anything: I’d already hardened myself to him and there was nothing else to say.

—

Tom’s departure allowed the girls to deepen into their natures without the fracture of an outsider’s gaze. No more peaceful, sleepy chatter, no balmy stretches of easy silence.

“Where’s your special friend?” Suzanne said. “Your old pal?” Her hollow affect, her leg jiggling even though her expression was blank.

I tried to laugh like they did, but I didn’t know why I got unnerved at the thought of Tom returning to Berkeley. He was right about the junk in the yard, there was more of it, and maybe Nico really could have been hurt, and what then? I noticed all of them had gotten skinnier, not just Donna, a brittle quality to their hair, a dull drain behind the eyes. When they smiled, I glimpsed the coated tongues seen on the starving. Without consciously doing so, I pinned a lot of hope on Russell’s return. Wanting him to weigh down the flapping corners of my thoughts.

“Heartbreaker,” Russell catcalled when he caught sight of me. “You run off all the time,” he said, “and it breaks our hearts when you leave us behind.”

I tried to convince myself, seeing the familiarity of Russell’s face, that the ranch was the same, though when he hugged me, I saw something smeared at his jawline. It was his sideburns. They were not stippled, like hair, but flat. I looked closer. They were drawn on, I saw, with some kind of charcoal or eyeliner. The thought disturbed me; the perverseness, the fragility of the deception. Like a boy I’d known in Petaluma who shoplifted makeup to cover his pimples. Russell’s hand worked my neck, passing along a fritter of energy. I couldn’t tell if he was angry or not. And how immediately the group jolted to attention at his arrival, trooping in his wake like ragged ducklings. I tried to pull Suzanne aside, hook my arm through hers like the old days, but she just smiled, low burning and unfocused, and shook herself loose, intent on following Russell.

—

I learned that Russell had been harassing Mitch for the last few weeks. Showing up unannounced at his house. Sending Guy to knock over his trash cans, so Mitch came home to a lawn junked with flattened cereal boxes and shredded wax paper and tinfoil slick with food scraps. Mitch’s caretaker had seen Russell there, too, just once — Scotty told Mitch he’d seen some guy parked at the gate, just staring, and when Scotty had asked him to leave, Russell had smiled and told him he was the house’s previous owner. Russell had also shown up at the recording engineer’s house, trying to cadge the tapes from his session with Mitch. The man’s wife was home. Later she’d recall being irritated at the sound of the doorbell: their newborn was asleep in the back bedroom. When she opened the door, there was Russell in his grubby Wranglers, his squinty smile.