Marie-Helene Bertino - Safe as Houses

…

Vanilla authorities connected Ian’s death to Katie Freeman immediately, though they could not figure out the specifics. We were questioned several times but our interviews yielded nothing. Who could ever believe the truth? That there was a boy with special gifts who wanted to help a stranger?

Hundreds of students attended his burial. When it was over, Corrina, Marigold, and I went to the room Corrina and I now shared and made a bong out of an apple. We were super high when Sara stopped in to say that she was sorry Ian was dead. Behind her, a rugged ROTC major shuffled in flanked by girls from the softball team.

Look at this douche clown, said Marigold.

He introduced himself as Charles Locke. On behalf of the Young Republicans, he said, I want to express our condolences.

Thanks, Chuck, said Marigold.

It’s Charles, Charles said.

I introduced myself and we shook hands.

He said, I thought I knew everyone on this campus, but I don’t know you.

Later, I realized my journal was missing. We looked everywhere.

Poetic justice in a way, Corrina said. The end of an era.

…

Sara’s article was the cover of the Wafer the next day.

The turkeys, the church, and the Freeman girl — my journal linked us to everything. Though they couldn’t figure out how we could be responsible for it, our involvement was enough reason to blame us for everything. Plus, there was that we dressed weird. Corrina was expelled. Marigold was expelled.

I was allowed to remain. This was because, the administration said, my notes proved without question I had no abilities. I should be thankful they had decided to act from the most forgiving part of themselves. This is after all, they said, America’s most holy campus.

In senior year I bore the glares of campus alone. I felt I deserved it. It was punishment for being powerless, boring as milk, for getting my friends expelled. When Charles Locke crossed the invisible picket line against me to ask me out, I bored him too. He considered himself a man of the people. On our first date he told me he planned to own a place where all people could go and feel safe.

Like a library? I said.

The night before Marigold and Corrina left town, the three of us parked on west campus under the willow trees. We sat on my hood and watched the track team compete in the last event of the year. Bright pennants, yells, overlaughing.

Corrina would do her senior year at a girls’ college several hours away. Marigold was taking a gap year. He would spend it on the floor of his sister’s dorm room in California, surfing and getting tan.

Corrina didn’t want to hear me say I was sorry anymore. Don’t agonize over it, Van. It was a matter of time before they pinned us. The journal just sped up the inevitable.

Marigold lit a cigarette. It’s probably better to leave like this than to have to go through the trauma of Vanilla graduation.

Corrina stood up on my hood. She cupped her hands over her mouth and in the biggest voice she had, yelled: Hey! Vanilla! You can go down on me!

No one heard or looked over.

Marigold said, Does anyone else want a motherfucking drink?

I’ll drive, I said.

…

Sometimes I drive to Erie, Pennsylvania, to go to Freeman’s Bookstore on the lake. I like to talk to the owner, Katie Freeman, who opened the store a few years after graduating college. She says she likes that the town’s reference point is the lake — the moments after sunset when it shimmers like a flat plane of stars. She never thought she’d get to do anything like go to college or open a bookstore because of what she refers to only as childhood health concerns. I don’t press her for details and she doesn’t ask why I never buy anything.

The day after I sit with Ian in the field is the last time I visit her. When I enter, she waves to me from behind a crowd of tourists. I consider several books on California before choosing the one that seems the most friendly. Katie rings me up.

I’m going to California, I say, and she says, Good for you.

It’s about time, I say, I took a trip.

How long will you stay?

I think I’ll stay for a while. I look out the window to where my two packed suitcases sit in the Toyota.

She’s a good winker. Brave, she says.

She hands me the receipt and the change. The change is in my hand. The book is in the bag. She is on one side of the counter and I am on the other. We smile at each other. She says, Good luck.

In my car, I pull the seat belt over my shoulder. I wait for cars to pass so I can enter the highway. For a moment, in my rearview mirror I watch Lake Erie have a conversation with the sky. I choose a tape and slide it into the player. The music hasn’t started but already I want it louder.

…

It was my second day at Vanilla University, and up until that point my journal had been filled with such nonshocking observations as, My roommate is a journalism major from Michigan, and, The milk dispensers in the cafeteria look like cow udders! All I knew about Vanilla was what I found in the introductory pamphlets they sent incoming freshmen. A town of ten thousand, Vanilla experienced humid summers and snowy winters. Its most notable feature was Vanilla University, from which it gained its name.

He was reading under a tree on Nietzsche Field and I was walking by, wondering how long it would take me to feel comfortable in this new place and wishing I could be someone who said to cute boys, Hello, what are you reading?

He called out to me, What are you doing?

I’m just taking a walk, I said.

He said, Just taking a walk. What I had thought was a pear near his elbow was a hummingbird. He said he was from a place called the Northeast Kingdom in Vermont and I said it sounded beautiful and he said it was mostly just fields like this one, only bigger and lonelier. He told me he was waiting for two people named Corrina and Sam, that they had been thinking of going for chocolate-chip pancakes.

Nietzsche Field was overrun with late-season marigolds. He said, Someone should make a bracelet out of these. I didn’t know what to say to that. I didn’t know where Vermont was. I had never eaten chocolate-chip pancakes. I hadn’t even known you could put chocolate chips in pancakes but it suddenly seemed so obvious. I wanted to eat chocolate-chip pancakes with him and his friends. It felt strange to have overwhelming desire center on a group of people I didn’t know.

Do you mind if I sit with you? I said.

He said, I’d be offended if you didn’t.

We leave the crystal collar on the Pomeranian. The iPad and the laptops, we leave. We leave the crumpled fifty, the coins in the dish.

We steal the dish — a ceramic art-class concoction that brags, Daddy . We steal the macaroni valentines. The calico cookie jar and the framed cross-stitch, we smash. “Friends Are Flowers in the Garden of Life” preens the embroidered pillow before we gut it with kitchen shears.

Mars steals what’s pinned to the refrigerator by magnets shaped like wine bottles. He slides soccer schedules and report cards into one of the pillowcases.

“Amanda is screwing up math. Bunch of notes from her teacher.”

I flip through a self-help book on the Andersons’ counter: Coping with Care Giving; Woman as Tree . The book is swollen with countless reads in the bath, or maybe tears. “She probably watches too much television like every other kid in America.”

Technically, Jill Anderson and I have never spoken. She belongs to the gym I joined two weeks ago. Untechnically, we’ve spoken several times. Jill Anderson likes to catalog her life to a friend while they run-walk on treadmills, so I know the Andersons will be at Casa de adventuras in Mexico until Friday. I know her neighbor Dorothy is walking Jill’s Pomeranian twice a day and that Dorothy once asked Jill’s husband to borrow five hundred dollars, placing the husband in what Jill called an “off-putting situation.” I know almost every inch of her house, built to look like a suburban Parthenon, minicolumns and all.