“Hey, Sally,” she said. “Hey, Laura.”
Laura tossed her head and turned away. Now no one was actually looking at Becky, but it seemed as if the entire world were examining her. It seemed as if she’d said the wrong thing and had been somewhere else, not present, in the moments since she’d said it. There was no telling where she’d been or what she’d done there. She only knew that she’d broken the law, poisoned her brain, destroyed her mystique. She wanted to run away and be alone, but if she ran away the others would know she was having a less cool experience than they were, which would be even worse than staying. She needed to be cool, but there wasn’t a particle of coolness in her. She didn’t like being high. In fact, getting high was the most horrible thing she’d ever done to herself. She wished she could undo it, but she could feel that, if anything, she was getting higher. In her mind’s eye, her thoughts were laid out like snacks on a lazy Susan. They weren’t evaporating the way thoughts were supposed to. They just sat there, going round and round, available for second helpings. Why had she had to take a third puff on the doobie? Why even the first? Some evil thing in her, whose presence it now seemed she’d always sensed in herself but done her best to ignore, some vain and greedy and sexual thing rooted in a deeper self-loathing, had seized control of her and made the worst decisions.
But then, unaccountably, came another moment of clarity, another brightening. She saw herself as one of seven young people standing just over the property line of First Reformed. Carol Pinella and Darra Jernigan and Kim Perkins were giggling uncontrollably. David Goya and Laura Dobrinsky were discussing different grades of pot. Sally Perkins, indisputably the prettiest girl in her graduating class, three years ahead of Becky, was staring at Becky with narrowed eyes.
“It was you,” Sally said.
“What?”
“Last night, in Tanner’s van. That was you. Wasn’t it.”
Becky tried to answer, but all she produced was a fatuously guilty grin. It seemed to spread through her entire body. Kim and Carol and Darra were still engaged in their gigglefest, but Tanner’s name had attracted Laura’s attention.
“I saw Tanner last night at the Grove,” Sally explained. “There was somebody in his van with a blanket over her head. She looked totally busted. And you know who it was?”
“The Grove is Becky’s workplace,” David affably remarked.
“It was you,” Sally said.
“I don’t think so,” Becky croaked, aflame with guilt.
“No, I’m sure of it. You were sitting there trying to hide from me.”
There followed a wordless moment. The giggling had stopped.
“You think I’m surprised?” Laura said, her voice flat.
Becky’s gaze had become glued to the stone flank of the church. Everything she was hearing, including I don’t think so, was staying in her head, but in a jumble. She tried to latch on to the words and arrange them in a sequence, but they just spiraled around a central pit of horribleness.
“Hey, you,” Laura said. “Prom Queen. I asked you a question. Do you think I’m surprised?”
The sound of landing snowflakes was oceanic. Every eye was on Becky, even the eyes in the house behind the shrub, the eyes in the trees above it, the eyes in the sky. Anything she could say would be catastrophically revealing.
“What a fucking family,” Laura muttered, jumping down from the ledge.
“Hey, now,” David said. “That’s not cool.”
Some interval of time later, there were still six of them in the snow. Becky found herself consumed by a feeling of intolerable exposure and impending punishment, but each direction she considered turning was the wrong one. Her mind was damaged, she’d messed with its chemistry, and, oh, how she regretted it. She bent forward as if to vomit but instead put her hands on the edge of the ledge and awkwardly, sort of sideways, whoopsie, rolled off it and righted herself. She hurried through the fire door, which Laura Dobrinsky had left wide open.
To her right lurked a hall full of eyes, so she ran up the stairs to the church attic. For a while, in the dark, after the door had fallen shut behind her, she groped along a wall for a light switch, but then she forgot about doing this, only to remember and be struck by having forgotten—it’s because I am horribly stoned. She groped forward sideways, whimpering, an arm stretched out ahead of her. She collided with something sharp and metallic, a music stand, but nothing crashed. In the distance was a glimmer of bluish light. She tried to navigate by it but lost sight of it and questioned its reality. The next thing she encountered was cool and edgeless, extensive, hollow-sounding. It ended in a curving tapered tube. Apparently a hollow horned cow. It proved to be quite an impediment to her progress. An incalculably huge amount of time had passed since she entered the attic, and she had the sudden, clear insight that time couldn’t be measured without light. This seemed to her a crucial realization. She made a mental note to remember it, although she’d already lost her grip on what it meant. If she could just remember the words time can’t be measured without light, she might recapture their meaning later. But into her mind’s eye came an image of quicksand, a hideously vivid image of sand crumbling and sucking itself downward, the instability and insolidity of thinking. Terrified again, she shoved past the hollow cow and thought she was free until it caught her from behind, one of its horns snagging on the pocket of her beautiful merino coat and audibly ripping a seam. Fuck oh fuck oh fuck. She stumbled over a smaller hollow animal, got a lungful of dust, and dropped to her hands and knees. The bluish glimmer had reappeared. It was coming from beneath a door, and she crawled toward it.