The American Girl (26 page)

JULY 26, 2015

Draft Blog Entry

Raphael kept one of his promises to me at least. He took me to the Blavette house so I could pick up my stuff. He texted Noé first to make sure Émilie was out and we drove along the back roads, our eyes so busy checking in the rearview for the police or Séverin's men we never once looked at each other.
We're fugitives now
, I thought, and almost laughed. It sounded so dumb. At his mom's, he lounged out front and I borrowed his keys, the better to creep inside with. I felt like Goldilocks. Or the big bad wolf. I don't know what I'm gonna do with my stuff when I get it. Don't know if I should believe Raphael about my plane ticket. Can't help but think it would be good to get far away from here, though, if I can.

I've just packed up my room when I hear a little noise from down the hall. I freeze, listening. The sound comes again. A
cough or a sob, then a steadier noise like someone crying. My heart sinks. I know at once it's Noémie and I suddenly think about the whole thing from her point of view. It was bad enough when we were all here, but now she's alone with Maman.

In her pale pink bedroom with its airbrushed ballerinas and china unicorns and Channing Tatum pinup pages torn out of teen magazines, Noémie sits on her floral bedspread. Her ballerina books are arranged in neat pastel rows on the pine shelf, the dusty classics stowed underneath:
Madame Bovary, Thé
rèse Desqueyrous, Dr. Jekyll et Mr. Hyde
. After my road adventures, her room seems childlike.

On top of the bookshelf, flanked by rainbow Beanie Babies and an old-school My Little Pony collectible, is a faded photo in a seashell frame. The picture inside shows a beaming, plump little girl, her shiny dark hair falling down either side of her face in long braids. Cheek to cheek with her is a man who looks an awful lot like Raphael, except stubblier, craggier, with streaks of silver in his brown hair.

I walk over to the photo. “You and your dad?”

“Ouais,”
she says, blowing her nose inside the neck of her T-shirt.

I sit down on the bed next to her. “You miss him?”

“Not really.” She shrugs her skinny shoulders. “I mean, it's pretty hard to remember him. It's been a while since I've seen him.”

“That's so awful. I can't imagine not knowing what happened to him. I mean, at least when my mom died, I knew the score.” Awkwardly, I pat her hand.

She smiles sadly and I realize I've lost the script of life and stuff somewhere in the last few days. Reaching into my pocket, I pull out a crumpled pack of American Spirit and offer her one. She takes it, gesturing to the window. We poke our heads out. The rain has stopped and the air smells clean. There are bats flying, or maybe owls. As we smoke, we watch their progress across the mauve sky.

“I think I do know what happened to my father.” Her voice has a hard edge when she says this.

“How come?”

She shakes her head, exhales. “It wasn't just like happy families and then one day, poof! Papa is gone. Things were bad for a long time before that. He had an affair and Maman thought it ended, but . . .”

I feel a chill, thinking of Raphael's bitterness about his family, this place. Thinking of my own teen years, crouching behind doors to overhear snippets of rows, my dad's rumbling drunk logic interspersed with my mom's shrill accusations—
Tell me where you've been!
How could you . . . with her? I hate you!

“Your mom and dad were fighting?”

She nods, looks away, inhales smoke. “And now she fights all the time with me, about not eating enough or not telling her things. Sometimes it is only because I remind her of him, I think. Maman can be . . . You have noticed maybe she will go on the attack if she thinks people are leaving her.”

Abandonment issues, huh? Yes, I had noticed Émilie shouting at Noé constantly and now I know why. The cogs of my mind
grind. “You think she might have done something to your dad?” Is that it? Is the whole family rotten somehow?

“Sometimes. The last time I saw him was before he went to the caves and . . .” Noémie lets out a little sob, then stifles it, looks at me wide-eyed. She takes a last shaky drag, crushes out the cherry, and drops the butt. “There are other times I imagine him happy somewhere in the world with whoever she is. I dream that's how he is living now. I just wish that I knew.”

I offer her another smoke. She takes it, smiles ruefully. “Quinn, listen to me. I am sorry for what I did . . .”

I rub my hand over my face. “It's okay,” I say, “your mom can be kind of . . .”

“Scary.” She takes a deep drag. “Raphael probably takes after her in that way.”

I smoke hard, trying not to give away my own feelings on the subject. “Really, you think so?” I say guilelessly. “I'm sure he doesn't mean to be . . . scary.”

She shrugs, runs a hand through greasy hair. “I know you like him, Quinn, but you do not know him very well.”

I look at her from the corner of my eyes, trying to stop my panic from surfacing. I don't know whether I should own up to what the last few days have been like, or whether she'll just go and tell him. “I know you two have your issues,” I say, deflecting it back on to her.

“He has said that?” Noé sounds stung.

I try to soften my words. “Not exactly.”

She crumples up like a used cigarette packet falling to the
sidewalk. “I am so worried,” she mumbles. “I just sometimes . . . I think my family is very broken. That everything will end . . .”

“End . . . ?”

“Badly, you know. Something terrible will happen, like it did to Papa.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and give her a little squeeze. “You know, I thought that a lot . . . after my mom . . . that I would just stop existing. Or my dad would. I dunno . . . I think it's just how you feel after a train hits your life. It'll be okay.”

She looks up at me with big, brown, wistful eyes. “I do like you, Quinn. A lot. If things had been somehow different I think we would be good friends.”

“That was my fault probably,” I say, reflecting on how my crush on Raphael clouded my judgment of everything here.

She smiles a big, toothy smile and I see something that I've never really noticed in her before—the kid sister, just wanting approval. “Let me show you something.”

On her bedroom wall is a big picture frame with lots of photos of kids our age. They are ranged around a map and their faces are labeled with their names and cute little bios and arrows pointing to where on a map of the world they came from.

“These are all the other ones that came. There were exchanges from all over the world: Russia, China, Ireland, Pakistan, Belgium, Ukraine. There's Dushka and Ruth and Sita and Gemma. Gemma was so nice,” she says, stroking the face of a pretty red-haired girl.

“The other ones? Exchanges?”

“Yeah, they always came from so far away and I would be
friends with them for a while, go to the pool and be happy, enjoy the sun. And then the same thing would always happen. They would like Raphael and Maman would get really mad. And then they always go away from me. This happens every time. By the time you came, I didn't even really want to make friends because I knew I would lose you in the end. Oh, Quinn, I'm so lonely. And so afraid. I just want it to stop.”

A tingle of
the fear
again. “What happened to them?”

She doesn't answer. Her eyes are wide, focused on a point behind my head.

I spin around, expecting to see Émilie, but it is Raphael who stands there, his dark eyes unreadable. He stands in the doorway for . . . I don't know . . . ten seconds. Thirty. Ninety. His face goes dark. His whole expression changes and he looks as demonic as something out of the legends of Les Yeux. Just for a second or two. And then his lips split into that Colgate grin, the one it's impossible to resist.

“Having fun,
mes filles
?”

I smile a little nervously. “Just saying goodbye,” I say.

He grabs me by the waist, leans me low and kisses me, like we're the doomed leads of a film noir. When he's finished kissing me, he looks at Noémie and she looks at him and I look away, because there's some weird vibe between them.

“Everything is ready,” says Raphael.

“Ready?” I say.

“Your bag is in the car.”

I smile nervously and I don't know why. I don't know why I am so scared.

“Well, kiss Noé goodbye,” he says.

I turn to her and pull her close, noticing as I kiss her cheek that she is trembling. We hold each other close for a moment. Then she kisses my other cheek and the first one again, southern French–style, and whispers in my ear, a warning for me only.

“Take care.”

AUGUST 10, 2015

W
e stood in the street, looking up at a bland apartment building. This was the place Quinn had directed us to, seeming to feel her way by some magnetic force rather than exactly remembering it. The closer we came, the more rigidly she sat, hands nervously scratching her thighs until it was hard to believe that an hour before she'd been painting her nails and cracking jokes at my expense. Just before we got here, I'd channeled my inner Steve McQueen and managed to slip the police detail, but now I wondered if that was so smart, after all.

“You sure this is the place?” I asked, casting a nervous glance at the quiet street stretching on either side.

Quinn nodded mutely and reached for my hand. We rode the lift up to the tenth floor. The fluorescent tube light flickered on and off, pulsing between darkness and a vision of our ghost selves back to front in the smeared mirror. Apart from the sound of the pulleys hoisting us skywards, the building was eerily silent—no radios blaring or children laughing or even the sounds
of people arguing. As I thought about it, there hadn't been many people outside either. In the mirror, I saw the hollows of Quinn's eyes, but not the expression in them. Behind her head, vivid fronts of graffiti unfurled like horns. In the momentary darkness, I saw her again, running through the caves, a whisper in the darkness ahead.

I touched her hand. “Who took you here, Quinn?”

She looked at me strangely. “Raphael.”

All down the corridor with its peeling paint, Quinn walked like a small, broken robot, eyes straight ahead, feet moving just a little slow. Disconnected from the world until she found door number twelve. Then she stopped. The door was open a crack.

“This one?” I asked, as if anywhere else in the building showed signs of life.

She nodded. “Why don't you film it?”

I shrugged. “Okay.” Who was I to argue after all that I'd already filmed? I went to Video on my phone and pressed Record, pushing the door open with the toe of my boot. We tiptoed in, past the grotty kitchen, the lino blackened with mold and half ripped from the floor, the stove scattered with cigarette butts. The place had been abandoned for a while by the look of things.

I turned to Quinn. “You okay, kiddo?”

She didn't answer. I touched her arm.

She jumped as if I'd burned her and turned from me. “In here,” she said hoarsely.

I followed after her through the doorway. Pressed close in the half dark, I could hear the raspy catch in her throat. We came into a small, dark room with a single bed. Sheets of torn paper
lay on the floor around it, along with pages torn from porn magazines. Quinn crossed the room and perched on the edge of the bed. She stroked the mattress as tenderly as she might touch a lover. “He brought me here.” She looked up at me, her eyes wide.

“Why?” I said, even though I could guess.

“He stayed here sometimes,” she said listlessly, as if the words didn't mean much of anything, “after his college kicked him out.” She flicked a nervous glance up at me. “We smoked a bit.” She gulped. “I think there were other people, too, and we drank, took pills, danced. I can remember it seemed like fun for a while.”

She stared at the window, where one clean square of sky hung like a topaz amid the grime of old newspaper pasted to the glass. That bright square shone down on the sad scene and made it all somehow bleaker.

I looked for an equally clear spot on the boards in front of her, knelt down, and looked up at her. “What happened next?”

She frowned, her eyes flicking to the right, straining to remember.

“He said we should play a game. He really liked games.” She broke off, rubbing her face so hard I thought she would scratch it again. I pulled her hand away. She stared at me, suddenly intent. “It was kind of like strip poker . . .” Her eyes blurred. She looked up at the topaz square. “And we were just messing around, snapping pictures of each other . . . and that was when I noticed it.”

“What?”

“The wall.” She pointed behind my head.

I turned around and it was hard to believe I hadn't noticed
it before. Taped all over it like wallpaper were photos of girls, some blurred close-ups, smiling or blowing kisses, others more intimate, topless or nude, posing as if they were auditioning for a men's magazine. On some of the photos were words written in Sharpie pen. Taking a step closer, I saw that each photo had a caption:
The Russian Girl, The British Girl, The Italian Girl.
I let my eyes scan over the wall, looking for another photo I thought might be there. It didn't take me long to find it. Quinn stared at the camera, smiling vaguely, her eyes heavy-lidded, half aware. In another she sat cross-legged on the floor. This one was captioned in Sharpie like the rest:
The American Girl.

“It's like he was collecting them,” I said, half to myself.

“He said I was special, that he loved me,” said Quinn, staring at the photos. “But it was just what he said to all of them . . .”

“Some of them look . . . kind of familiar,” I said, peering at the wall.

“Some of the others were exchanges, too.” She walked up to the wall and touched a photo of a girl with red hair. “Gemma . . .” She went to another. “Ruth.”

I remembered where I'd seen them before: a bunch of photos in Noémie's room at the Blavette house, a cheerful map of cultural exchanges, little bios glued underneath.

“The weird thing is that we all must have come in this room at some time or other, but we were all too out of it to notice each other.”

“Too stoned on pills,” I said, thinking back to her blog.

“Too in love,” she added bitterly, kicking the papers around our feet.

One landed on my shoe. I bent down and picked it up. It showed a crude drawing of a dinosaur shaded in Biro, the way you might do a doodle in the middle of a boring class. Looking closer I saw a list scrawled in blocky writing. My French was just good enough to guess at it.

     
•
     
Play the game

     
•
     
Take the photos

     
•
     
Collect the money

The last item grabbed my attention.
Collect the money.
Stella Birch had told me Raphael was blackmailing her, though she wouldn't say why. I translated the scribbled title:
Things that will un-fuck the situation.
This was Raphael's planning document.

I made a pile of everything on the floor and stuffed it into my bag. There might be something in here that would lead us further along the trail. One page gave me pause: a photo was stapled to it. Well, two halves of a photo, torn in the middle. It was old and crumpled, but I'd seen it before at the Blavette house—the Blavette family before Marc left. It was easy to recognize them, even though Émilie and Noémie had their eyes scribbled out until they looked black and Marc had big fat tears drawn onto his face. Across the bottom of the photos,
assholes
was written in big block letters.

“This is disturbing,” I said, pointing at the photo.

She took it from me. “Yeah, he really hated his family,” she said. “He blamed them for everything that was bad in his life.”