Notes from Ghost Town (6 page)

I hug my knees into my chest. The fray of my cutoffs stick
to my thighs and my dumb Parks and Rec T-shirt seems to choke me, the neck so tight, so high-cut. Annoyed, sick, sticky, I pull the rubber band from around my wrist and move my hair off my neck and into a messy bun.

“You okay, babygirl?” Raina asks. “You look a little pale.” Raina, like Dad, like pretty much everyone, doesn’t know about my eyes. After Dr. Levine’s knee-jerk
see-a-psychiatrist-you-nutjob
reaction, I can’t risk having anyone else know, too. So, I’ll hide it—as best I can, as long as I can.

I don’t know how to respond. All I can think about is last night—alone on the beach, the cold radiating from his fingertips across the sand, from Stern’s fingertips. Why did he seem so
real
?

“I’m just …” Before I can think of a way to complete the sentence, two guys I recognize from some beach parties over the past couple of summers—major burners, always reeking of weed—leap onto the carousel without paying and start pretending to ride separate horses, smacking their sides and groaning, porn-star style. Disgusting.

“Ooh! Go get ’em, girl!” Raina says, thumping me on the back.

I stand up from the bench. The pounding in my head is getting worse. “You have to buy a ticket first!” I call out. “Or you have to get off. Not my rules.” It’s pretty much the same dumb lines every time.

Thankfully, they don’t resist. One of them—short, stocky, greasy-haired, Bob Marley T-shirted—squints at me over his sunglasses. “Olivia, right?” he asks, wiping the sweat
from his forehead onto his baggy shorts. “You party sometimes at Beast Beach, right?”

I nod. “Yeah. I used to.”

“Thought you moved or something.” He pauses. “Did you come back because of your …?”

The other guy coughs; Bob Marley Wannabe abruptly trails off. Mom. He knows. They both know. And it almost seems to give me some weird kind of authority or something: when a girl with a murderer mom asks you to do something, you do it. No questions asked.

“My what?”

“Um. I—I was thinking of something else, sorry …” he answers, his cheeks darkening. Blushing, obviously—it’s good to know I can still tell.

“Enjoy the rest of your visit today, here at beautiful Dovedale Park.” I paste a big fake smile on my face.

They’re still looking at me with a mixture of fascination and fear, like I might suddenly lunge for their throats. “See you around,” the other dude—tall, slouchy, acne-ed—says, and then they turn and hurry away.

The good thing about Michigan was that most people didn’t know about Mom. I told my closer friends—Ty, Ruby, Amanda—but only the bare minimum. I had to admit why I missed two weeks of school, for the funeral, for the grief that came afterward. And when I went a little crazy back at school—oscillating between sudden crying jags, total numbness, and drunken binges that kept me out of school for days—they treated me with gentle indifference. Lots
of encouragement to eat chocolate and cry in bed watching rom-coms.

They had their own lives to focus on, assignments I couldn’t be bothered to do, classes I was too deep-dark-down to attend. Ruby made an entire oil painting of me over the course of a week that I knew nothing about. I was mostly sleeping.

I’d wake up next to boys I’d passed in the halls before whose names I didn’t know. Sometimes, I didn’t remember how they’d come to wind up in my dorm room in the first place, or what we’d done. How far I’d let them go, though I was pretty sure I hadn’t actually gone all the way. Some crazy part of myself was saving it, though who knows why. I knew the only person I wanted to go all the way with was gone forever.

I just didn’t want to think. There wasn’t room to think. Starting that machine meant it would never turn off again, meant it would spin so fast and loud it would just blow up inside my skull.

I move back to Raina, steadying myself beside her on the bench. I feel wobbly.

“Job well done,” she says, patting me on the shoulder. “It’s hard work you do, Olivia Jane Tithe, and there’s no one who does it quite like you.” She leans back on the bench, finishing off her Mountain Dew with an intentionally loud burp. Even her belches are cool. It’s annoying.

“So, did you have fun last night?” Raina asks. “Did you talk to dickbrain Bryce?” She lifts her head suddenly;
her eyes light up, go saucer-wide. “Wait a second … did you hook
up
with someone? Is that why you’re being so weird?”

I groan, stare at my gray hands in my gray lap. My brain continues to shudder painfully in my skull. “No. Ew. Definitely not. Austin Morse was there, and we were drinking on the beach together, but the cops came…. He ran off. I had to hide by myself…. Whatever. It’s—it doesn’t even matter.”

“He ran
off
on you?”

I don’t have the energy to tell Raina that I
told
him to. She leans in toward me, planting both hands on my knees. “Well you be sure to let him know—let
all
those dumb-ass private school boys know—they can’t just mess with you and not suffer the consequences.”

“It wasn’t a big deal. For real. I basically told him to go. But then, later …” I hesitate. Saying any of this out loud, to another person, will make me officially crazy. Raina will call Dad once she leaves the park today. Dad will call the hospital. I’ll go home to find a small army of orderlies standing just behind my bedroom door with a straight-jacket. They’ll load me into a van, lock me in a padded room in the psych ward. And then they’ll all find out that the world’s gone gray and never let me out. Ever again.

“Later …?” She prompts, blinking into the sun.

I inhale deeply, stare at the empty carousel. “Rain, do you believe in ghosts?”

“Uh … random,” she laughs, swatting at a mosquito on
her arm. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“I don’t know…. I just had a weird dream last night,” I lie, crossing my arms in front of my stomach, gulping back the lump in my throat. The way she has of dismissing me makes my blood boil up a little beneath my skin. My head feels all swimmy for a second, so I take a deep breath to push it away and keep going. “This weird dream that I can’t stop thinking about.” Full of nervous energy, I pull the rubber band out of my hair, redo the bun; it’s even messier this time, pieces falling out over my shoulders, sticking immediately to my sweaty neck.

“You know what you need? A
sexy
dream. Maybe tonight you’ll dream that I’m making passionate love with Jonah Twist in the middle of the soccer field. Then you’ll forget all about your nightmare.”

“Ugh.
That
sounds like a nightmare,” I try to joke, but there’s a knot, twisted around my intestines now, and every second I feel it grip a little bit tighter. “Plus, Jonah Twist definitely peaked in seventh grade. He’s been on a downward slope ever since.” I sigh. “It’s very sad. He had such potential once.”

“To each their own,” Raina says. She shrugs and smiles in the wicked way that only beautiful girls can get away with. She stretches in front of me and a few boys I don’t recognize watch her hawk-eyed as she moves; she stares them down and they look away. “So,” she says, looking back to me, lifting one of her ankles behind her head. “Stern’s unveiling is next week …”

My stomach flops down to my toes, bringing my heart with it. “Right,” I mumble.

“It’s some Jewish thing they do at the gravesite. Everyone comes and they say some prayers and—”

“I know what it is,” I say too sharply.

Raina doesn’t react. “So are you going to go? I mean, I know it’s weird, because of …” She trails off.

“You can say it, Rain.”

Raina sighs, standing normally now. “Because of your mom.”

“I think I have to work.” My throat’s all clenched-up, and my words come out like they’ve been pressed between two heavy iron slats. I haven’t seen Stern’s parents since the funeral. I don’t want to see the way they look at me, because I am my mother’s daughter. They blame me. I know that they do.

She nods, but she looks unconvinced. “Yeah. Okay. Work is … important.”

I check the time on my cell phone: 4:30. A short wash of relief. “Sure is,” I say. “But it’s over now! Time to head out.”

“You want to come over and watch a movie or something? Make ice-cream sundaes? Old-fashioned sleepover style?” She lifts her big canvas bag onto her shoulder.

I hug her, because she’s still my closest (living) friend. “Can’t. I told my dad I’d run some errands for him. Ghost Town bullshit.”

“Bummer,” she says. She shoots a final, spiteful glance at Cassidy and her circle. “You want me to come with?”

“I do, but you can’t,” I heave my book bag from the dirt onto my shoulders. “Dad’s been weird about me bringing other people around when he’s not there, and he’s already pissed at me because I ran out on the party early without saying anything.” I look away from her in case she can tell I’m lying. “Call you later?”

“Sure,” she says, as I walk to the small booth to shut the carousel down. The rows of pale lights overhead blink off all at once; the horses go darker beneath them, duller. After I lock the (mostly empty) cashbox inside the booth, I motion for Raina to follow, and we walk to the outside of the fence surrounding the carousel grounds and lock it up, so no one can even try to go inside without my expert ticket-taker supervision. My final end-of-day task.

I finish securing the u-lock in the gate and Raina walks me out to the parking lot where my banana-seat road bike is locked to a stop sign.

“Oh, shit,” she says, looking at her phone. “I forgot Parker’s parents are out of town tonight; he might be having people over. So definitely text me later, okay?” She pulls me into a tight hug before we split mid-lot en route to our separate vehicles. “Miss you already!”

“You, too,” I say, watching her turn her key in the lock, wincing as she ducks—all that dark, slender height—inside her hot car (deep-dark blue—only a memory now, too difficult for me to distinguish from straight black), long velvety braid snaked down her back.

Thunk-thunk-thunk
goes the hammer inside my skull.

*   *   *

Eight days
. My heart pounds as I ride up the long lily-lined drive that leads to Ghost Town, my book bag accumulating little lakes of moisture where it presses against my back. I stand up to pedal as the hill goes steeper, sweat rivering down my arms and forehead and neck.
Eight days
. I wonder what she does all day long in that cell. I wonder if she’s angry we couldn’t come up with the million dollars in cash required to bail her out while she waits to go right back in again, though I can’t imagine her expecting us to have even a hundred grand lying around for a bond.

I lock my bike to a lamppost in the parking lot, lift the accordion file, full of receipts, from my book bag, various mind-numbing legal contracts, account statements—I stopped snooping quickly after I discovered that everything inside interested me about as much as the Pythagorean theorem—and hug it into my chest, walking toward the gleaming entranceway.

I reach for the keys inside the side pocket of my woven purse, turn the lock open, walk inside.

“Dad?” I call out—I’m supposed to meet him here with the files, help arrange his office for a meeting he’s got in an hour, and set up drinks. No answer. The air-conditioning gusts and my skin pricks up with gooseflesh as I walk to stand in the center of the lobby. It smells like new construction, that over-cold insulation smell that some basements carry, though the light pouring in from those huge
square windows makes everything slightly more inviting. I hurry forward, turning left down a short hallway that leads to Dad and Ted Oakley’s administrative office, wondering if I’ll find one of them inside, immersed in work. I knock softly. Silence.

I don’t have the key to his office, so I lay the files outside his door.

My phone buzzes in my pocket; a text from Dad:
Still in a meeting with the caterer. Sorry, darlin’. Be there soon and we can start setting up!

Typical. Dad is caught up in more wedding preparations with his bride-to-be, while his own flesh and blood waits it out in a place he knows she hates. But Heather’s his priority now, not me.

I walk back into the lobby. If I have to wait, at least there’s AC. It’s the one thing this place has going for it, as far as I can see.

I notice a folded up piece of paper by the entrance. I pick it up—it’s crisp, lightweight—and unfold it once my butt is planted on the cold floor, my back pressing comfortably against the wall just left of the entrance. It’s a computer printout, some kind of CAD architectural plan.

I smooth out the creases with the side of my palm, running my fingers over the straight lines, the angles that make up the hulking, hideous structure, the complex of brick and mortar and faceless glass before me. It’s all I have now to glom onto—shapes and angles. Structure. I stare at the curves of the piping system, snaking through
the walls, along the ceilings of each room, little rectangles drawn around the places they intersect.

Snaking through the walls. Snakes in the walls.

Something catches in my throat. Impulsively, I reach for a pencil, and quickly begin sketching, eager to change the pipes into something else. I surround them with looping, wiry vines, big, heavy, drooping flowers, petals, bird’s wings, spiny feathers.

My body seems to disappear beneath me. The pain in my head slinks away and, with it, all the things mucked up inside. I’m breathing fully again. My hand sweeps and licks and dances of its own accord.

Freedom. Just a lick of it, but, still. I can almost smell Mom’s version of the sea, feel the vapory gods she always told stories about descend from the heavens and cradle me up inside their arms. And then Stern creeps up again from somewhere inside of my head. I see the smile on his face, the ocean swelling beyond us. How we used to swim together, late nights. His body next to mine. The way I’d always know he was there before I even saw him coming:
don’t you cry for me, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my kneeee
.

“Man, that’s so beautiful.” The voice startles me and rolls my stomach back into knots.

I don’t get a chance to turn around to see who it is, because, the next time I blink, he’s moved, crouched right beside me on the marble floor.