Emma Cline - The Girls

The possibilities washed past. Why Mitch hadn’t been home. How I could have intersected with what was coming. How I could have ignored all the warnings. My breath was squeezed from the effort of trying not to cry. I could imagine how impatient Suzanne would be with my upset. Her cool voice.

Why are you crying? she’d ask.

You didn’t even do anything.

—

It’s strange to imagine the stretch of time when the murders were unsolved. That the act ever existed separately from Suzanne and the others. But for the larger world, it did. They wouldn’t get caught for many months. The crime — so close to home, so vicious — sickened everyone with hysteria. Homes had been reshaped. Turned suddenly unsafe, familiarity flung back in their owners’ faces, as if taunting them — see, this is your living room, your kitchen, and see how little it helps, all that familiarity. See how little it means, at the end.

The news blared through dinner. I kept turning at a jump of motion in the corner of my eye, but it was just the stream of television or a headlight glinting past the apartment window. My father scratched his neck as we watched, the expression on his face unfamiliar to me — he was afraid. Tamar wouldn’t leave it alone.

“The kid,” she said. “It wouldn’t be so bad if they didn’t kill the kid.”

I had a numb certainty they would see it on me. A rupture in my face, the silence obvious. But they didn’t. My father locked the apartment door, then checked again before he went to bed. I stayed awake, my hands limp and clammy in the lamplight. Was there the merest slip between the outcomes? If the bright faces of planets had orbited in another arrangement, or a different tide had eaten away at the shore that night — was that the membrane that separated the world where I had or had not done it? When I tried to sleep, the inward reel of violence made me open my eyes. And something else, too, chiding in the background — even then, I missed her.

—

The logic of the killings was too oblique to unravel, involving too many facets, too many false clues. All the police had were the bodies, the scattered scenes of death like note cards out of order. Was it random? Was Mitch the target? Or Linda, or Scotty, or even Gwen? Mitch knew so many people, had a celebrity’s assortment of enemies and resentful friends. Russell’s name was brought up, by Mitch and by others, but it was one of many. By the time the police finally checked out the ranch, the group had already abandoned the house, taking the bus to campgrounds up and down the coast, hiding out in the desert.

I didn’t know how stalled the investigation was, how the police got caught up following trivia — a key fob on the lawn that ended up belonging to a housekeeper, Mitch’s old manager under surveillance. Death imbued the insignificant with forced primacy, its scrambled light turning everything into evidence. I knew what had happened, so it seemed the police must know, too, and I waited for Suzanne’s arrest, the day the police would come looking for me — because I’d left my duffel behind. Because that Berkeley student Tom would put together the murders and Suzanne’s hissing talk of Mitch and contact the police. My fear was real, but it was unfounded — Tom knew only my first name. Maybe he did speak to the police, good citizen that he was, but nothing came of it — they were inundated with calls and letters, all kinds of people claiming responsibility or some private knowledge. My duffel was just an ordinary duffel, and it had no identifying feature. The things inside: clothes, a book about the Green Knight. My tube of Merle Norman. The possessions of a child pretending at an adult’s accrual. And of course the girls probably had gone through it, tossing the useless book, keeping the clothes.

I had told many lies, but this one colonized a bigger silence. I thought of telling Tamar. Telling my father. But then I’d picture Suzanne, imagine her picking at a fingernail, the sudden cut of her gaze turning to me. I didn’t say anything to anyone.

—

The fear that followed the wake of the murders is not hard to call up. I was barely alone the week before boarding school, trailing Tamar and my father from room to room, glancing out windows for the black bus. Awake all night, as if my labored vigil would protect us, my hours of suffering a one-to-one offering. It seemed unbelievable that Tamar or my father didn’t notice how pale I was, how suddenly desperate for their company. They expected life would march on. Things had to be done, and I got shunted along their logistics with the numbness that had taken the place of whatever had made me Evie. My love of cinnamon hard candies, what I dreamed — that had all been exchanged for this new self, the changeling who nodded when spoken to and rinsed and dried the dinner plates, hands reddening in the hot water.

I had to pack up my room at my mother’s house before I went to boarding school. My mother had ordered me the Catalina uniform — I found two navy skirts and a middy blouse folded on my bed, the fabric stinking of industrial cleaner, like rental tablecloths. I didn’t bother to try on the clothes, shoving them into a suitcase on top of tennis shoes. I didn’t know what else to pack, and it didn’t seem to matter. I stared at the room in a trance. All my once beloved things — a vinyl diary, a birthstone charm, a book of pencil drawings — seemed valueless and defunct, drained of an animating force. It was impossible to picture what type of girl would ever have liked those things. Ever worn a charm around her wrist or written accounts of her day.

“You need a bigger suitcase?” my mother said from my doorway, startling me. Her face looked rumpled, and I could smell how much she’d been smoking. “You can take my red one, if you want.”

I thought that she’d notice the change in me even if Tamar or my father couldn’t. The baby fat in my face disappeared, a hard scrape to my features. But she hadn’t mentioned anything.

“This is fine,” I said.

My mother paused, surveying my room. The mostly empty suitcase. “The uniform fits?” she asked.

I hadn’t even tried it on, but I nodded, wrung into a new acquiescence.

“Good, good.” When she smiled, her lips cracked and I was suddenly overcome.

—

I was shoving books into the closet when I found two milky Polaroids, hidden under a stack of old magazines. The sudden presence of Suzanne in my room: her hot feral smile, the pudge of her breasts. I could call up disgust for her, hopped up on Dexedrine and sweating from the effort of butchery, and at the same time be pulled in by a helpless drift — here was Suzanne. I should get rid of the photo, I knew, the image already charged with the guilty air of evidence. But I couldn’t. I turned the picture over, burying it in a book I’d never read again. The second photo was of the smeary back of someone’s head, turning away, and I stared at the image for a long moment before I realized the person was me.

SASHA AND JULIAN AND ZAV left early, and then I was alone. The house looked as it had always looked. Only the bed in the other room, the sheets scrabbled and smelling of sex, indicated anyone else had ever been here. I would wash the sheets in the machine in the garage. Fold and slot them on the closet shelves, sweep the room back to its previous blankness.

—

I walked along the cold sand that afternoon, stippled with broken bits of shell, the shifting holes where sand crabs burrowed. I liked the rush of wind in my ears. The wind drove people off — students from the junior college yelping while their boyfriends chased down the ripple of a blanket. Families finally giving up and heading toward their cars, toting folding chairs, the poky splay of a cheap kite, already broken. I was wearing two sweatshirts and the bulk made me feel protected, my movements slower. Every couple of feet, I’d come across the giant, ropy seaweed, tangled and thick as a fireman’s hose. The purging of an alien species, seemingly not of this world. It was kelp, someone had told me, bull kelp. Knowing its name didn’t make it any less strange.