Bright Young Women(43)
“That picture was taken after a long day,” I said defensively. “Partly I was just tired.” Tina was reading too much into things, looking for some kind of psychological underpinning in places where, yes, it was, but only coincidentally.
Tina pursed her lips and nodded. She wouldn’t argue with me, but she didn’t believe me either. “What’s the rest?”
“Huh?”
“You said partly. What else is there?”
“I wish you’d knock it off,” I said, to my own absolute shock. I never spoke to people like that. I hated to hurt people’s feelings, to make anyone feel bad even when they deserved to feel bad. I started to apologize, but Tina shook her head vehemently. No. No. No.
“I’m the one who should be apologizing. You are so right. Frances is always warning me not to do this to people. Analyze their every breath when I don’t have all the information. Plus, who wants to feel like they’re being studied? It’s annoying. I’m annoying.” She could laugh because she knew it wasn’t true. Still, I was amazed that she’d taken my outburst in stride. It wasn’t like I had never been critical of someone, but I was used to seeing that person crumple in agony and realizing it just wasn’t worth it to be so honest. People were too easily destroyed.
“It’s just,” Tina continued, “I’m studying this stuff, you know? Why people are the way they are and how I can help them, and it’s like I’ve seen the light, or I’m seeing it, at least, and it’s helped me so much, and I want to help everyone around me too.”
Allen came into the room then, carrying a place mat, napkin, fork, and knife. He went about setting a place for Tina at the head of the table. “She doesn’t need a fork and knife for a sandwich,” I snapped at him. I knew he knew she didn’t, that he was only doting on her, and I wanted him to feel as stupid as I did for thinking Tina was here for any reason other than to psychoanalyze my mind. I walked over and collected the silverware, and that’s when I realized—he had set down the crude portrait he’d drawn of me as the place mat.
“You are in big trouble,” I hissed.
“I couldn’t find the place mats!” Allen cried. He sounded sincere, but I was too mortified to give him the benefit of the doubt. “Here, I’ll turn it over if it bothers you so—”
I snatched the drawing off the table and tore it to shreds, right in front of Allen’s veined, anemic face. He screamed like I used to, right before the nurse stuck the rubber bite block between my lips. “I hate you!” he cried. “I hate you so much!”
“Good!” I shouted.
Allen started to sob. “I’m telling my dad! He hates you too! Everyone hates you! Grandpop hated you!”
I raised my hand and experienced the almost erotic pleasure of Allen cowering. But before I could deliver the blow, Tina grabbed my wrist, the pads of her fingers pressed into the flare of my pulse. I hadn’t even heard her come up alongside me, and a strange, thrilling second passed, one in which I allowed her to restrain me.
“You’re better than they are,” she said into my ear. I had no idea who they were, but somehow I knew she was right.
Allen turned to her, tears running down his face and snot puddled in the bow of his lip, and he spit on her. He spit on her. Tina looked down at the glob of saliva on her soft cashmere sweater, then back at me, aghast. What the hell are you doing here? I swore her expression said.
“I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” I growled at Allen, seizing him by the back of the neck and forcing him up the stairs. “You are going to take a time-out until you calm down.”
Allen was inconsolable, wailing that he hated me, he hated Tina, he was going to tell, and I would be sorry. I shoved him in my bedroom and slammed the door. When I came back downstairs, the scraps of Allen’s drawing had been thrown in the trash, and Tina had left without me.
PAMELA
Tallahassee, 1978
Day 8
Two days after Denise’s funeral, a few of the Turq House guys came over to clean up the blood. One of the officers recommended a solution of two parts bleach, one part water, with a wink, as though he were letting us in on the secret ingredient in an old family recipe.
The room that Eileen and Jill shared was a nightmare. I never got over it. How the girls in the bloodiest room were the ones who survived.
There wasn’t much to do in Denise’s room, though I spent the longest in there, hiding anything that might embarrass her in front of all the cute shaggy-haired boys who would have jumped at the chance to take her out, open the car door for her, buy her dinner, go home and tell their friends—I kissed Denise Patrick Andora. Guys included her middle name when they talked about her, like she was the serial killer.
The tube of hair lightener that she used on Abbott and Costello—right sideburn was Abbott, left Costello, and don’t you dare mix them up—went in a drawer, along with the pair of pantyhose that had seen better days, left to dry on the inside knob of the door. The photographs of friends and prints of surrealist masterpieces I left hanging above her bed, but I took down the astral page she’d torn out of that month’s Cosmopolitan, from the comprehensive booklet the editors put together every January to help readers plan “the best year of their lives.” I removed the tack and sat cross-legged on Denise’s bed to read her horoscope. In June, Denise was supposed to reorganize office procedures, slipping into her boss’s shoes as if they belonged to her (which soon they would). According to her planetary prophecy, she would find herself in Lisbon or Madrid come September. Her most dynamic day of the year was still ten months away. I began to vibrate, inwardly, a buzzing under my skin that I can only describe as the instinct to kill. There was something about Denise’s excitement for a future she would never get to experience that made me murderous with grief. I couldn’t stand the idea of anyone coming into her room and pitying her, or, worse, judging her for having the audacity to make plans when she should have known God would laugh. That was a real thing people said down here, but fuck God for laughing and fuck Cosmopolitan too. I was a Virgo, and nowhere in my horoscope did it foretell any of this.