“What about the Cousin’s people? What were they doing?”
“Just standing around, shaking their heads, acting like tourists got stabbed in their alley every day. Then about sixteen cops showed up and arrested the townie, and the poor kid was taken away in the ambulance, but there was still blood everywhere, and some folks were throwing up. Literally vomiting all over the place. I was so traumatized, I couldn’t work the next day. I felt like I’d been stabbed. I mean, the way he was crying? Like he hadn’t cried in years, and it was all coming out, and I remembered reacting like that once when my dad told me he hated my paintings. I was making nude self-portraits at the time and he said that my body—”
“But what do you think they were fighting about?”
Thank you, Greta thought.
“No clue,” Onions said.
“I bet it was a turf thing,” said the other one. “The city guy probably wandered in there and asked for a mojito, and the townie was like, ‘Get the fuck out of here, son’—”
“Yeah, well, the townie seemed like a sociopath. Like my dad—”
“But imagine getting stabbed with your own knife, man. I mean, is there anything more humiliating?”
“No,” Onions said, and sniffed.
“I wonder if he’s even alive,” the other one said. “If you lose that much blood, you can’t just add it back. It’s, like, a whole process. Takes weeks, I think. Not to mention the damage to his organs.”
They were quiet for a full minute. Greta noticed she was five minutes late.
“Have you tried the ceviche at Lil’ Deb’s?” Onions said.
“I usually get the Plato Tropical,” the other one said. “With avocado.”
* * *
UPSTAIRS, Om led her into his office and asked why she was limping. Greta told him she’d stepped on glass and that it was still lodged in her foot. He asked that she take off her shoes, and she reluctantly removed her sandals and sat on the pink love seat. Om sat opposite her, gazing at her bare feet. She thought he might examine her foot, or at least comment on the fact that her feet didn’t match. Instead, he got right to it and asked Greta where she’d been on the day her mother killed herself.
Greta cleared her throat. “Some kid got stabbed a bunch of times in the alley next to Cousin’s. Did you hear about that?”
Om held up his hand. “This office is a gossip-free zone.”
“Since when?”
“Today. We only have thirty minutes,” Om said, and looked at his phone. “Let’s focus on you. Take me back to that day. Where were you?”
“Don’t you want some background about my childhood first? My mother? The years leading up to her death? I’ve been in therapy before. That’s usually how it starts.”
He shrugged and reminded Greta that he wasn’t that kind of therapist, i.e., the real kind. He seemed adamant that she tell him what she remembered about that day—what she was doing, wearing, thinking, feeling, where she was in her body—and so she told him the truth, that she’d been hundreds of miles away at a horse camp for girls in the Sierra Nevada, even though she’d never ridden a horse in her life.
“She sent you to camp to make sure you weren’t home,” Om said confidently.
Oh, no, it wasn’t like that. Greta had signed up for the camp on her own, had waited until the last possible minute to tell her mother.
“You don’t seem like a horse person,” Om said.
“I’m not,” Greta said.
She’d only gone because she had a crush on a horse girl named Heather. They weren’t really friends, but they went to the same school and had known each other for years. The school was tiny, private, Lutheran, located in the South Bay of Los Angeles. Compared with their classmates, both of their families were destitute. Heather and Greta were the only seventh and eighth graders to live in an apartment, for example, and to ride the city bus to school, and to have parents who never showed up for anything, including the Christmas play.
Since Heather’s parents were still married, Greta assumed she came from a slightly more stable home, but, as it turned out, Heather simply spent a lot of time in stables. Although she couldn’t afford her own horse and probably never would, Heather spent weekends working for equestrians in Rancho Palos Verdes. Her red hair was so long she often sat on it by mistake. Her teeth, also long, poked out of her mouth, and Greta was captivated by her carpet legs, her nerdy passion, the conservative way she dressed and carried herself, her love of nature and muesli, the corny novels she read, how calm, capable, and unselfconscious she seemed. She belonged to another world with its own rules, and it seemed like a good place to disappear. Greta wanted in, but she needed a foot in the door. So, she pretended she wasn’t in fact terrified of horses and signed up for this camp. She’d seen Heather’s name on the list—the only name—and added her own. The camp was expensive, but she got financial aid through some program, and a month or two later, she was on a bus with Heather and a bunch of other horsey thirteen-year-olds, headed for the Sierras.
Om opened a notebook and began scribbling… a bunch of nonsense, Greta imagined. Shebiscuit. Blinders. Ketamine. My Little Pussy Pony. Sarah Jessica Parker.
They were on the bus for twelve hours. Besides Heather, Greta didn’t know anyone—the other girls were from a different school—and so she and Heather sat together. Heather wore a red bandana around her neck, khaki shorts, hiking boots. Staring at Heather’s thigh hair, she kept imagining Heather’s bush as resembling a red anthill, something she wanted to gently poke with a stick. They bullshitted about school, the teachers they had in common, but very little bonding occurred because Greta pooped her pants about thirty minutes later. Nothing like that had ever happened to her before, so she was in denial about it for hours, until they made a pit stop and she was able to see the mess with her own eyes. She was mortified, of course, forced to bury her underwear in the trash, which seemed crazy to her at the time, and she spot-cleaned her jeans in the sink, which took too long. They were all waiting for her to get back on the bus. Everyone knew what had happened by then. They’d known for hours, in fact, and hadn’t said anything. The shame Greta felt was so intense it gave her what looked like second-degree burns on her face and chest. In hindsight, she should have enjoyed all of this, because as it turned out, she wouldn’t poop again for seven days.
Back on the bus, Greta semi-bonded with a popular horse girl who’d puked into her lunch bag. Puking wasn’t as bad as pooping, though, let’s face it, so Greta knew she’d never make it into the inner circle. Which was fine. These horse girls, Greta soon realized, were kind of humorless and hard to get to know, and they had zero street smarts. For a while during the long ride, a mustached man in a red convertible drove alongside the bus with his cock out and a big smile on his face.
Old-school pervert, Om scribbled. Magnum PI vibes.
Granted, his cock was large, as long and hard as a baton, but you would’ve thought he’d been beating these girls in the face with it. Greta had never witnessed such outraged screaming and crying. The camp counselors were also in a tizzy, falling all over themselves trying to get the guy’s license plate, but Greta barely paid attention. Didn’t these dorks know you weren’t supposed to react? They were doing exactly what the guy wanted. Greta didn’t make any of the girls feel bad about it, however. She wasn’t like that. She tried her best to comfort them. Clearly, they came from entirely different worlds. In Greta’s world, a creep was exposing himself on every corner, in every Dairy Queen and movie theater, hoping like hell to catch your eye and ruin your day. It was just part of life. So, she tried not to judge these horse girls too harshly. For all she knew, the minute she saw an erect horse penis, she might be the one screaming and crying, and maybe these girls would be the ones consoling her.