This Must Be the Place: A Novel (51 page)

“That’s a perfect example of how sarcastic you are. And how defensive. And how you know everything about everyone. You don’t know a
thing
about me, Dani—or about Eugene, for that matter.”

Oneida hadn’t a clue how any of this was happening, or was even possible, but wasn’t that the way of the world these days? It felt so
good
to be saying all this, like she’d been saving it up for years. And maybe she had; she’d known Danielle Drake since the fourth grade, when Dani moved into the Ruby Falls central school district. There’d been a week or so when Oneida even thought they might become friends, but then Dani was adopted by the kids in the school play, and Oneida didn’t truck with organized productions of any sort. And here they were, after five years of obliquely irritating the shit out of each other, yelling about how deficient the other was as a person, alone in the empty RFH auditorium, high above the stage, surrounded by props and flats and costumes, and Oneida, exhausted, didn’t care anymore. Didn’t want to fight anymore. Not even with her archenemy.

“Dani,” she said, “just—stop. You don’t have to comfort me, but
thank you. For trying. And I’m sorry I said that about you not knowing Eugene. It was mean and I don’t even know why I said it. I can’t help it if I’m—”

She was too fractured. There were too many pieces, and she wasn’t able to choose which she was above all.

I can’t help it if I’m weird.

If I’m mean.

If I’m confused.

If I’m smart.

If I’m doomed.

Dani’s smile was as flat as the horizon. “Me neither,” she said.

They both sank back into their beanbags and stared out into the darkness.

“Anyway, what I meant was”—Dani grinned—“what are we going to do to Andrew Lu?”

I am a spy,
Oneida thought.
I am undercover.

“So this is my house,” Dani said, jiggling her key free from her front door. “Home, sweet bourgeois pigpen.”

I am in enemy territory.

Enemy territory had plush beige carpeting so thick Oneida felt like she was bouncing across it, and an old pair of sneakers, treads matted with grass clippings, floating on a plastic mat like survivors on a raft. Enemy territory had an antique gilt mirror and a small table covered with L.L. Bean catalogs, smelled faintly of chemical vanilla, and—oh dear God—enemy territory had three framed pictures on the wall opposite the mirror: school pictures, from second or third grade, of two boys who must have been her brothers and Dani Drake, missing a front tooth, wearing a pink ribbon in her hair and a sweatshirt with a cartoon Barbie on it.

“You have to understand the status quo if you’re going to overthrow it,” Dani said, tracking Oneida’s gaze.

“Did someone force you to wear that?”

“Hell, no.” Dani dumped her backpack on the floor and used one foot to pry the sneaker off the other. “I loved that bitch for real. Then I
grew up, realized she’s a tool of the patriarchy designed to mutate girls’ conceptualizations of the feminine—and, by extension, themselves—into compliant, big-chested smilers with no genitalia.”

Oneida didn’t have any response to that.

“So then I had a Barbie bonfire in the backyard.” Dani tossed her jacket across a small wooden chair that Oneida was pretty sure was intended only to be looked at, never sat in. “I took pictures, if you want to see. It’s fucking rad what happens to plastic when you add an accelerant. Take off your shoes, OK? My dad’ll shit twice. Hey, Dad,” Dani called into the house. “I’m home. I brought my friend.”

Oneida’s throat caught and she shocked herself with a smile. Dani Drake had called her
my friend
. There were plenty of explanations, plenty of reasons for the choice of words; Oneida appreciated that it was just easier for Dani to call her a friend than to say
my mortal enemy, with whom I’m enjoying a sort of cease-fire while we enact revenge on the jerk who put the boy we both like in the hospital.
But she could have just as easily said “someone from my history group,” and she didn’t, and Oneida knew that what had started in the prop loft was responsible, the same way a plucked string kicks ripples of sound in all directions. In the prop loft, she’d felt one of those painful flashes of clarity that, before Eugene, before Arthur, before Amy Henderson, Oneida had assumed only happened in movies or in books, when characters were thrust into accepting circumstances that existed beyond their control or even their knowledge. The world really did slow to the point where it felt like her skull was a fishbowl, her brain sloshing inside; she noticed everything, from her shirt tag prickling the back of her neck to the scattered costume jewelry on the floor, looping around her feet like plastic seaweed in pink and green and purple. And when Dani Drake said
me neither
, Oneida heard the answer to a question she’d never bothered to ask: they hated each other because they were practically the same person.

“What are you doing home so early?” A male voice floated to them from around the corner. Oneida craned her neck, but all she could see beyond the vestibule was a brick archway, directly ahead, leading to the kitchen, and around to her right, a living room so clean, so sterile, you could perform open heart surgery on the coffee table.

“We skipped out early. We’re miscreants.”

“Don’t tell your mom,” came the reply. “And don’t do it again.”

“ ’K.” She turned to Oneida. “Vengeance makes me hungry. Snack?”

The vengeance Dani spoke of, the revenge against Andrew Lu, made Oneida feel many things, though none of them were hunger. In the prop loft it had seemed a perfect act, its execution as thrilling as it was simple, requiring nothing more than a hall pass and a Sharpie marker. Dani kept extras of both in her backpack. Oneida took the upper corridor, Dani took the lower, and in less than twenty minutes every bathroom stall, in every single bathroom, was branded with the same epithet in faintly odorous, slick black ink:
ANDREW IS A LU-SER
. Her nose still itched from Sharpie fumes. Her gut churned, more from excitement than guilt. She wished she could see Andrew Lu’s face when he realized what they’d done.

She wished she could see Eugene’s face when
he
realized what they’d done.

She caught the peanut butter and chocolate chip granola bar Dani tossed at her with one hand and discovered she didn’t have the stomach to eat it.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” Dani closed the pantry door. The kitchen was full of shining stainless steel appliances and looked as spotless, as pristine as the living room. Oneida was momentarily distracted by Mona’s voice in her head:
An all-stainless-steel kitchen reminds me too much of a morgue.

And her own, in reply:
Isn’t that what a kitchen is? Where food goes when it dies?

No, food goes to Valhalla.
Mona, throwing a pillow at her head. Sharing the couch, just watching television, just being friends.
Also known as my belly.

“Seriously.” Dani put down her own granola bar, package opened but no bite taken. “Are you OK? You look like you’re going to, uh—oh, crap, don’t cry.”

Was she crying? Oneida tried to inhale and couldn’t catch her breath. She hiccuped.

“Come on, let’s go to my—my room’s right down the hall. You can cry in there, my dad won’t bother us, you can cry as much as you need to.”

Dani gestured for her to follow down the hall, and Oneida went, still trying to breathe and only catching short breaths that filled her chest without going anywhere. Dani opened a door covered by a Che Guevara poster, and before Oneida had even crossed the threshold she was sobbing, her throat and her chest jerking up and down as her lungs struggled to fill and empty, fill and empty, and the rest of her body, hysterical with impulse, did the only thing any of its warring factions could agree upon: she stood in the middle of the room, her arms wrapped around her stomach, her eyes closed, and she shook and she cried. She was dimly aware that Dani, after shoving her inside, had fled; she was too upset by everything else to care if this meant the fledgling truce was off. She was thinking of Mona, only of Mona. She remembered dancing with her mother, dancing around the kitchen—Mona twirling her out the length of her very short five-year-old arms, spinning her like an ice-skater, dipping her over her knee, all the while singing that old Backstreet Boys song about wanting it that way, even though it ain’t nothin’ but a mistake. For the first time that stupid song, those inane lyrics, made a twisted sort of sense; Oneida didn’t know if Mona had meant it at the time or not, but today—already dislocated by the strange clash of little girl and budding revolutionary that was Dani Drake’s bedroom (canopy bed, piled deep with stuffed animals, the
Anarchist’s Cookbook
peeking beneath a peach-colored dust ruffle)—Oneida heard her mother’s confession: she was someone else’s mistake. She was Mona’s choice, made the way Mona wanted it. There was nothing for Oneida to apologize for. Nothing to feel guilty about. There was only the mystery of why Mona hadn’t told her, the answer to which was contained in the question.

Mona hadn’t told her the truth because she was Mona.

Her mother was afraid—of her. Her mother was a human being, a young one. Her mother, like her, would die one day. Her mother needed to be forgiven for her fuckups. And, perhaps most painful of all, Mona wasn’t her friend, had never been her friend, really—had always been her mother. Would always be her mother, the only one she’d ever had and the only one she’d ever need.

“
Tell me why-ee,
” Oneida sang softly to herself, and laughed hysterically, which made her cry even harder.

“I brought you a paper bag.” Dani had come back. How long had she been standing there, holding out a small brown lunch sack? “For you to breathe into. I used to hyperventilate when I cried, when I was little. I’d get so upset I couldn’t stop myself. Here.”

“Thanks.” Oneida’s breathing was still harsh, still beyond her control. Her glasses were smeary with tears, and she had a bad feeling there was snot and spit all over her face. She hitched her breath and pushed it out into the bag, which inflated with a satisfying crinkle.

“I think we should go see him,” Dani said, and Oneida, focused on her breathing, at first wasn’t sure who she was talking about.

“Oh, right.” The bag swallowed her voice. “I—” Her eyes stung again.

“I thought that’s—why you were—come on, sit down.” Dani steered her over to the bed. “I think nonfamily visiting hours are only until seven o’clock, but I have a plan to get us past—oh, crap, there you go again.” Dani’s face folded and she sniffed loudly. “God, this is so effing girly. I hate this!” she said. “I hate everything about this, about . . .
feeling
. . . all this shit!”

“Me too,” Oneida said, into her bag. She closed her eyes. “I wasn’t crying about him before.”

“What d’you mean?” Dani asked.

Oneida took the bag away from her face. “I was crying about my . . . because. Um.”

She wanted to tell her everything.

It was terrifying. It was new. Dani Drake, unprecedented truce notwithstanding, was a stranger. Recently the enemy. She did not have to forgive Oneida anything or love her regardless—she was other, she was separate, she was an agent of her own desires and motives, and there was nothing Oneida could do to control what Dani would do with the information given to her. There was no protection from her. There was nothing that bound them to each other’s interests, nothing that held them accountable to each other’s feelings or reputations or ability to look in the mirror and like who she saw. There was only the promise and the hope that other people can be good, are good; that other people are the reason we are alive on Earth at all.

Friendship required more faith than any other kind of love, more
faith than Oneida thought she was capable of having. But then she thought,
What the hell is the point of faith if you never take anything on it?

“I was crying because I found out who my real mother is.” She raised the paper bag a little, just in case another attack hit.

Dani blinked. “Wasn’t that your mom—didn’t I meet her at your house?”

“Functionally, yes.” Oneida crossed her legs and sat back against the mound of stuffed animals. One of them let out a baleful squeak. “Biologically, no.”

“No. Way.” Dani crossed her legs opposite Oneida and reached for a large brown bear, loved so hard most of the fuzz had been rubbed from his hide. She folded him in half and propped her elbows on his head. “So where’s your dad?”

Oneida blinked, not sure what to say. Dani took the silence for reticence.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me. I don’t mean to pry, it’s just—you’re dealing with this
on top
of what happened to—you know. I’m impressed.”

“I don’t know,” Oneida said, “who my dad is.” She smiled.

Dani’s cheeks puffed out. She shook her head. “You’re fucking hardcore, Jones.”

Oneida smiled wider. She told her everything she knew.