Heather(46)

“Fuck that,” Callie says to herself. She tries to imagine Annabelle and Sabrina Riley’s teenage years. No internet, no cell phones. Just two girls trapped in this house with the magazines they thought could tell them the rules of being women in this world.

She opens the doors to a hulking wardrobe, which is empty save for a few metal hangers and improbably, a single dress pressed to the side. Pink, sweetheart neckline, with a frothy bundle of fabric flowers at each shoulder. Callie can’t help but touch the bodice, which is stiff with wires and scratchy tulle.

Under the bed, a cardboard box. Iris, it says, written in marker on the side. She nudges it into the light with the toe of her boot, lifts the lid. Inside, a doll. Mice have made its hair into a nest so it is mussed and matted, woven with scraps of paper. There’s a second box under the bed labeled Hannah but she doesn’t open it. The dead, unblinking eyes of Iris are enough to give her the creeps.

She moves on to the next bedroom. Annabelle’s.

They are mirror images on each side of the wall. The same twin bed and wooden nightstand in ballet-slipper pink. Another wardrobe like Sabrina’s, with its carvings of fairies and vines. The same hooked rug on the floor. The desk in this room is tidy and when Callie opens a drawer she finds notebooks. Stacks of yellow Post-it notes. And in the bottom drawer, an SAT prep book. She flips it open, each test problem solved in delicate but deliberate pencil strokes.

On the shelf above the desk there’s stacks of textbooks, piles of spiral-bound notebooks. A yearbook, green cover with gold foil accents. 1989–1990.

Callie cracks it open, scans the rows of black-and-white pictures of kids that still have baby fat in their cheeks, mouths crammed with braces. She finds Sabrina Riley first, looking not much happier than she did in her mug shot, a little softer, rounder in the cheeks, the same hungry gleam to her eyes and point to her left incisor. That foxlike face. A tangle of necklaces against her chest, above the lacy edge of a push up bra. Next to her, a girl with slightly darker hair smiling with her mouth closed. Her face is wider than Sabrina’s, and their expressions set them apart, but the similarity is striking, as though there was a printing glitch and two photos of the same student appeared in a row.

“There you are,” she whispers.

Callie flips to the back of the book, where there’s an insert of creamy blank pages. They are pristine, save for a single note written on the third one.

Annabelle,

Thank you for all of your hard work on the yearbook committee this year. I hope you are pleased to see your work on these pages. Where would we be without your layout skills? You are a star and I’m so excited for all of the things in your future.

Enjoy your summer, Miss Hamilton

She doesn’t know what makes her do it, but she finds Jenna among the freshman. She’s skinny, with narrow shoulders and a big, guileless smile that makes Callie’s chest ache.

She snaps the yearbook shut and tucks it under her arm.

Callie closes her eyes. For a second she can almost see it. Two girls, racing down the grand staircase, too young to notice the rot seeping in, the mold along the walls and the stains on the ceiling, the disorder coming for them. Two girls, playing games in the woods. One another’s worlds. She hears their laughter, their shrieks of fear and outrage and delight. Making dolls out of pine cones. Turning stones into jewels in the palms of their hands. Shrouded in their girlhoods for a little while longer.

Then, two girls just a few years out of playing games, of imagining things in the woods and winding through the trees. They learn what it feels like to be touched by someone: sometimes transcendent, sometimes a kind of theft. Girls trying to decide who they might want to be, aiming themselves toward the futures they want, or think they should want. All those gaunt-cheeked models on Sabrina Riley’s wall. Annabelle and her fastidiousness, trying so hard to be good.

When she opens her eyes they go to the edge of the desk, the yellowed blotter, the cup of pens. And then she sees it. A little row of ridges along the top slat of the desk chair. Callie traces her finger just below the marks. But she knows what they are the second she lays eyes on them.

Teeth marks.

Three overlapping rows, wavelike frills where the blue-painted wood gives way to the raw stuff at its center. The yellow pine exposed where someone bit down on it again and again.

In a room this orderly, this controlled, it stands out. Practically gives off a vibration, the way the photo of that broken amber bracelet does. A story there, and with it comes a shiver, the sensation of information passing through her skin.



* * *



Back in the car she has to steady herself with a few deep breaths before she can drive away. The disorder of the house has shaken her, the idea of the girls living there, doing what they had to do to survive their teenage years. Sabrina, working, then acting out, stirring up trouble, playing boys off of one another to feel something, not love, but connection, need. Maybe it helped mask the trouble all around her, the kind she had no control over. Callie had been the Annabelle type. The one who thought that if you can be really good you can make the bad in your life right.

She turns out of the Riley driveway and loops around to the street that backs up to their house so she will pass Jenna’s childhood home on her way back to her cabin. Someone has written out a Bible verse in black spray paint on a big piece of plywood and propped it up in the front yard. The person Callie wants to tell most about it is Jenna, who liked to recount the various ways she got kicked out of Sunday school when she was a kid. Chewing bubble gum, singing “Wild Horses” at the top of her lungs, draping her coat over her head and pretending it was a habit. Jenna had always had a rebellious streak, a disdain for authority—blamed it on her ancestors, who came to the Pines in the 1700s from the Philadelphia Quaker sect they abandoned when they couldn’t stick to the Friends’ code. It wasn’t until later though, that it seemed to alchemize into self-destruction. That the pride in her rebellious nature shifted into something more like shame.