Emma Cline - The Girls

She’d heard stories of the session from her husband, so she knew who Russell was, but she wasn’t afraid. Not really. He was not a frightening man when first encountered, and when she told him her husband wasn’t home, Russell shrugged.

“I could just grab the tapes real quick,” he said, straining to look past her. “In and out, just like that.” That’s when she got a little uneasy. Plowing her feet deeper into her old slippers, the fussing of the baby drifting down the hall.

“He keeps all that at work,” she said, and Russell believed her.

The woman remembered she heard a noise in the yard later that night, a thrash in the roses, but when she looked out the window, she didn’t see anything except the pebbled driveway, the stubble of the moonlit lawn.

—

My first night back was nothing like the old nights. The old nights had been alive with a juvenile sweetness in our faces — I’d pet the dog, who’d nose around for love, give him a hearty scratch behind his ears, my coursing hand urging me into a happy rhythm. And there had been strange nights, too, when we’d all taken acid or Russell would have to get in some drunk motorcycle guy’s face, using all his flip-flop logic on him. But I had never felt scared. That night was different, by the ring of stones with the barest of fires going. No one paid any attention when the flames dissolved to nothing, everyone’s roiling energy directed at Russell, who moved like a rubber band about to snap.

“This right here,” Russell said. He was pacing, dinking out a quick song. “I just made it up and it’s already a hit.”

The guitar was out of tune, twanging flat notes — Russell didn’t seem to notice. His voice rushed and frantic.

“And here’s another one,” he said. He fussed with the tuning pegs before letting loose a jangle of strums. I tried to catch Suzanne’s eye, but she was trained on Russell. “This is the future of music,” he said over the din. “They think they know what’s good ’cause they got songs on the radio, but that’s not shit. They don’t have true love in their hearts.”

No one seemed to notice his words unraveling around the borders: they all echoed what he said, their mouths twisting in shared feeling. Russell was a genius, that’s what I’d told Tom — and I could picture how Tom’s face would have moved with pity if he were there to see Russell, and it made me hate Tom, because I could hear it, too, all the space in the songs for you to realize they were rough, not even rough, just bad: sentimental treacle, the words about love as blunt as a grade-schooler’s, a heart drawn by a chubby hand. Sunshine and flowers and smiles. But I could not fully admit it, even then. The way Suzanne’s face looked as she watched him — I wanted to be with her. I thought that loving someone acted as a kind of protective measure, like they’d understand the scale and intensity of your feelings and act accordingly. That seemed fair to me, as if fairness were a measure the universe cared anything about.

—

There were dreams I had sometimes, and I’d wake from the tail end assuming some image or fact to be true, carrying forward this assumption from the dreamworld into my waking life. And how jarring it would be to realize that I was not married, that I had not cracked the code to flight, and there would be a real sorrow.

The actual moment Russell told Suzanne to go to Mitch Lewis’s house and teach him a lesson — I kept thinking I had witnessed it: the black night, the cool flicking chirps of crickets, and all those spooky oaks. But of course I hadn’t. I’d read about it so much that I believed I could see it clearly, a scene in the exaggerated colors of a childhood memory.

I’d been waiting in Suzanne’s room at the time. Irritable, desperate for her return. I’d tried to talk to her at multiple points that night, tugging at her arm, tracking her gaze, but she kept brushing me off. “Later,” she said, and that was all it took for me to imagine her promise fulfilling itself in the darkness of her room. My chest tightened when I heard footsteps enter the room, mind swelling with the thought — Suzanne was here — but then I felt the soft glancing hit and my eyes flew open — it was just Donna. She’d thrown a pillow at me.

“Sleeping Beauty,” she said, sniggering.

I tried to settle back into pretty repose; the sheet overheated from the nervous shuffle of my body, ears suggestible for any sound of Suzanne’s return. But she didn’t come to the room that night. I waited as long as I could, alert to every creak and jar, before passing into the drowsy patchwork of unwilling sleep.

In fact, Suzanne had been with Russell. The air of his trailer probably going stuffy from their fucking, Russell unraveling his plan for Mitch, he and Suzanne staring up at the ceiling. I can imagine how he got right up to the edge before swerving around the details, so maybe Suzanne would start to think she’d had the same idea, that it was hers, too.

“My little hellhound,” he had cooed to her, his eyes pinwheeling from a mania that could be mistaken for love. It was strange to think Suzanne would be flattered in this moment, but certainly she was. His hand scratching her scalp, that same agitated pleasure men like to incite in dogs, and I can imagine how the pressure started to build, a desire to move along the larger rush.

“It should be big,” Russell had said. “Something they can’t ignore.” I see him twisting a lock of Suzanne’s hair around a finger and pulling, the barest tug so she wouldn’t know if the throb she felt was pain or pleasure.

The door he opened, urging Suzanne through.

—

Suzanne was distracted the whole next day. Going off by herself, face announcing her hurry, or having urgent, whispered conferences with Guy. I was jealous, desperate that I couldn’t compete with the fraction of her that was deeded to Russell. She’d folded herself up and I was a distant concern.

I nursed my own confusion, tending hopeful explanations, but when I smiled at her, she blinked with delayed recognition, like I was a stranger returning her forgotten pocketbook. I kept noticing a soldered look in her eyes, a grim inward turning. Later I’d understand this was preparation.

Dinner was some reheated beans that tasted of aluminum, the burned scrapings of the pot. Stale chocolate cake from the bakery with a hoary pack of frost. They wanted to eat indoors, so we sat on the splintered floor, plates crooked on our laps. Forcing a primitive caveman hunch — no one seemed to eat very much. Suzanne pressed a finger to the cake and watched it crumb. Their looks at one another across the room were bursting with suppressed hilarity, a surprise-party conspiracy. Donna handing Suzanne a rag with a significant air. I didn’t understand anything, a pitiful dislocation keeping me blind and eager.

I’d steeled myself to force a talk on Suzanne. But I looked up from the nasty slop of my plate and saw she was already getting to her feet, her movements informed by information invisible to me.

They were going somewhere, I realized when I caught up to her, following the play of her flashlight beam. The lurch, the gag of desperation: Suzanne was going to leave me behind.

“Let me come too,” I said. Trying to keep up, following the swift rupture she cut through the grass.

I couldn’t see Suzanne’s face. “Come where?” she said, her voice even.

“Wherever you’re going,” I said. “I know you’re going somewhere.”

The teasing lilt. “Russell didn’t ask you to go.”

“But I want to,” I said. “Please.”

Suzanne didn’t say yes, exactly. But she slowed enough so I could match her stride, a pace new to me, purposeful.

“You should change,” Suzanne said.