Emma Cline - The Girls

I looked down, trying to discern what had offended her: my cotton shirt, my long skirt.

“Into dark clothes,” she said.

The car ride was as slurred over and unbelievable as a long illness. Guy at the wheel, Helen and Donna beside him. Suzanne sat in the backseat, staring out the window, and I was right next to her. The night had dropped deep and dark, the car passing under the streetlights. Their sulfur glow gliding across Suzanne’s face, a stupor occupying the others. Sometimes it seemed like I never really left the car. That a version of me is always there.

Russell stayed at the ranch that night. Which didn’t even register with me as strange. Suzanne and the others were his familiars, loosed out into the world — it had always been that way. Guy like his second in a duel, Suzanne and Helen and Donna not hesitating. Roos was supposed to have gone, too, but she didn’t — she claimed, later, that she’d gotten a bad feeling and stayed behind, but I don’t know if that is true. Did Russell hold her back, sensing a stubborn virtue in her that might yoke her to the real world? Roos with Nico, a child of her own. Roos, who did become the main witness against the others, taking the stand in a white dress with her hair parted straight down the middle.

I don’t know if Suzanne told Russell I was coming — no one ever answered that question.

The car radio was on, playing the laughably foreign soundtrack to other people’s lives. Other people who were getting ready to sleep, mothers who were scraping the last shreds of chicken dinner into the garbage. Helen was jawing away about a whale beaching down in Pismo and did we think it was true that it was a sign a big earthquake was gonna happen? Getting up on her knees then, like the idea thrilled her.

“We’d have to go to the desert,” she said. No one was taking her bait: a hush had fallen over the car. Donna muttered something, and Helen set her jaw.

“Can you open the window?” Suzanne said.

“I’m cold,” Helen whined in her baby voice.

“Come on,” Suzanne said, pounding the back of the seat. “I’m fucking melting.”

Helen rolled the window down and the car filled with air, flavored with exhaust. The salt of the nearby ocean.

And there I was among them. Russell had changed, things had soured, but I was with Suzanne. Her presence corralled any stray worries. Like the child who believes that her mother’s bedtime vigil will ward off monsters. The child who cannot decipher that her mother might be frightened, too. The mother who understands she can do nothing for protection except offer up her own weak body in exchange.

—

Maybe some part of me had known where things were headed, a sunken glimmer in the murk: maybe I had a sense of the possible trajectory and went along anyway. Later that summer, and at various points throughout my life, I would sift through the grain of that night, feeling blindly.

All Suzanne said was that we were paying Mitch a visit. Her words were spiked with a cruelty I hadn’t heard before, but even so, this was the furthest my mind ranged: we were going to do what we’d done at the Dutton house. We’d perform an unsettling psychic interruption so Mitch would have to be afraid, just for a minute, would have to reorder the world anew. Good — Suzanne’s hatred for him allowed and inflamed my own. Mitch, with his fat, probing fingers, the halting, meaningless chatter he kept up while looking us over. As if his mundane words would fool us, keep us from noticing how his glance dripped with filth. I wanted him to feel weak. We would occupy Mitch’s house like tricky spirits from another realm.

Because I did feel that, it’s true. A sense that something united all of us in the car, the cool whiff of other worlds on our skin and hair. But I never thought, even once, that the other world might be death. I wouldn’t really believe it until the news gathered its stark momentum. After which, of course, the presence of death seemed to color everything, like an odorless mist that filled the car and pressed against the windows, a mist we inhaled and exhaled and that shaped every word we spoke.

—

We had not gone very far, maybe twenty minutes from the ranch, Guy easing the car along the tight dark curves of the hills, emerging into the long empty stretches of the flat land and picking up speed. The stands of eucalyptus we passed, the chill of fog beyond the window.

My alertness held everything in precise amber. The radio, the shuffle of bodies, Suzanne’s face in profile. This is what they had all the time, I imagined, this net of mutual presence like something too near to identify. Just a sense of being buoyed along the fraternal rush, the belonging.

Suzanne rested her hand on the seat between us. The familiar sight stirred me, remembering how she’d grabbed for me in Mitch’s bed. The spotty surface of her nails, brittle from poor diet.

I was sick with foolish hope, believing I would ever stay in the blessed space of her attention. I tried to reach for her hand. A tap of her palm, like I had a note to pass. Suzanne startled a little and jarred from a haze I had not noticed until it broke.

“What?” she snapped.

My face dropped all ability to costume itself. Suzanne must have seen the needy swarm of love. Must have taken the measure, like a stone dropped in a well — but there was no sound marking the end. Her eyes went dull.

“Stop the car,” Suzanne said.

Guy kept driving.

“Pull over,” Suzanne said. Guy glanced back at us, then pulled into the shoulder of the right lane.

“What’s the matter—,” I said, but Suzanne cut me off.

“Get out,” she said, opening the door. Moving too fast for me to stop her, the reel snapping ahead, the sound lagging behind.

“Come on,” I said, trying to sound bright with the joke. Suzanne was already out of the car, waiting for me to leave. She wasn’t joking.

“But there’s nothing here,” I said, circling a desperate look at the highway. Suzanne was shifting, impatient. I glanced to the others for help. Their faces were lit by the dome light, leaching their features so they seemed as cold and inhuman as bronze figures. Donna looked away, but Helen watched me with a medical curiosity. Guy shifted in the driver’s seat, adjusting the mirror. Helen said something under her breath — Donna shushed her.

“Suzanne,” I said, “please,” the powerless tilt in my voice.

She said nothing. When I finally shuffled along the seat and got out, Suzanne didn’t even hesitate. Ducking back inside the car and closing the door, the dome light snapping off and returning them to darkness.

And then they drove away.

I was alone, I understood, and even as I tended some naïve wish — they would return, it was only a joke, Suzanne would never leave me like that, not really — I knew that I had been tossed aside. I could only zoom away, to hover up somewhere by the tree line, looking down on a girl standing alone in the dark. Nobody I knew.

There were all kinds of rumors those first days. Howard Smith reported, erroneously, that Mitch Lewis had been killed, though this would be corrected more swiftly than the other rumors. David Brinkley reported six victims had been cut up and shot and left on the lawn. Then the number was amended to four people. Brinkley was the first to claim the presence of hoods and nooses and Satanic symbols, a confusion that started because of the heart on the wall of the living room. Drawn with the corner of a towel, soaked in the mother’s blood.

The mix-up made sense — of course they’d read a ghoulish meaning in the shape, assume some cryptic, doomy scrawl. It was easier to imagine it was the leftover of a black mass than believe the actual truth: it was just a heart, like any lovesick girl might doodle in a notebook.