Once Edie had decided that I wasn’t homicidal, suicidal, or schizophrenic—I guess that’s the big three you want to avoid if you run a teen shelter—she wanted to call my mom or dad. But I kept stalling. I told her I didn’t want them to know where I was and, besides, they were on a cruise somewhere in the Caribbean. I begged her to please wait until they were back. I implied there were serious reasons why I’d had to leave home. She probably didn’t buy any of it, except for the idea that I was eighteen. And since I seemed so freaking well behaved, she was going to let it slide for a few days and see what developed.
So, I went to my first “life skills” class right after lunch, the first step toward my first fifty-buck MasterCard. Then a volunteer who I guess worked for Edie—she went to UVM and was studying to become a social worker—gave me an Old Navy gift card that some shelter “angel” had donated for emergencies like me, and I went and bought some new underwear and a shirt. Then I hung out in the Fletcher Free Library. (Supposedly, everyone used to hang out at Borders, but then Borders went out of business and everyone migrated to the public library. Further proof why we need bookstores: people who work in bookstores are way less likely than people who work in department stores to get in your grill if you’re a homeless goth kid with a face tattoo.)
Most of the homeless kids at the library would kill time by surfing the computers or they’d find a People or a Maxim or a Rolling Stone magazine floating around in the periodical room, but I wanted to steer clear of news of any kind. I was doing this thing that I know now is called “magical thinking”: if I didn’t see or hear some sort of proof that Bill and Mira Shepard were among the dead up at Cape Abenaki, they might still be alive. And I had overheard enough to know that the official list of casualties was now in the news.
Besides, it was packed in the periodical room. Packed. The place was filled with the usual homeless and patrons, but today there were dozens of walkers as well. And I mean dozens. The lines for the computers by the reference desk were freaking ridiculous. It was like the lines outside the movie theater on the opening night of a new Hunger Games film. So I went upstairs to the library’s poetry and fiction sections. I began thumbing through the collections they had of Emily Dickinson, but I had seen most of them before. I owned two of them. I even owned two of the three biographies on the shelf. So I took a stack of books, including The Journals of Sylvia Plath, and I sat on the floor in a corner by a window. I came across one line in her journals that I wrote on my hand with a ballpoint pen: “Kiss me and you will see how important I am.” It’s not from a poem, but it is poetry. I think it’s a better single line than any lyric that Taylor Swift or Katy Perry has written so far, and I like their songs as much as any teen girl. And it reminded me of one of my favorite things that Emily Dickinson wrote:
The Waves grew sleepy—Breath—did not—
The Winds—like Children—lulled—
The Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis—
And I stood up—and lived—
This is from one of the poems that make me wonder if her life had fantastic secrets she never shared. Tell me the woman who wrote “The Sunrise kissed my Chrysalis” didn’t at least once—and maybe way more than once—wake up in the arms of a man. How could she not?
And when I came across that Plath line that day at the library, I remember thinking how everything in the world is connected. I wanted to write it all down, all the connections, not just ten words on my hand. I wanted—I needed—my journal.
And, of course, I wanted my parents. I wanted Maggie. I needed them, too.
When I left the library to return to the shelter, I went down some back stairs so I didn’t have to pass through the room with the computers and the news and the possibility that I might see Bill and Mira Shepard’s names on a screen or on the front page of the Burlington Free Press.
Chapter 10
One day at the very end of September, nearly nine months before the meltdown, I came to school drunk. I wasn’t as drunk as everyone thought I was, but I was pretty hammered. I’d had a few shots of my parents’ Cutty Sark instead of oatmeal for breakfast. Maybe more than a few. Drank from halfway up the ship’s sails to down below the words “Scots Whisky.” My goal was to get caught, which I did, and make a point to my parents, which I think got lost in all the shouting and the grounding and the embarrassment and my guidance counselor getting all sanctimonious and judgmental.
“You’re a junior, Emily,” she said to me. “Don’t you get it? This is the year that decides, more than any, where you are going to go to college. Why would you do this? Why?”
Well, the answer was pretty simple: so my parents could see what a drag it is to hang around with a drunk. There were probably better ways to convey that message than missing my chair in homeroom when I tried to sit down or crashing into my French teacher in the hallway and sending him into a wall of lockers. I think my breath was flammable.
Just for the record, I meant to fall out of my chair. I did not mean to body-slam Monsieur Poirier into a bunch of metal.
The moon was melting down, a waning gibbous of orange.
It wasn’t really. It was just the moon. But it was tinged with red and no longer full. But that was the first line in the last poem I wrote before Reactor One exploded.
The moon was melting down,
A waning gibbous of orange.
The horizon was lost to the sea.
I wrote it in the middle of May. Obviously there’s more. Probably too much more. I think it’s interesting that I used the verb “melting.” I really was thinking nuclear reactor, not ice cream along the sides of a waffle cone. It was a love poem. The problem was that there was no boy I was in love with then, so the poem sort of sucked. It was about this young couple’s first kiss. Maybe it would have been better if I’d written about how there was no boy in my life that night who I wanted to kiss, and that was the problem. That was the sadness. Maybe the poem was meant to be melancholy.
Anyway, when I stood on the street outside the entrance to the teen shelter a couple of nights after I arrived, the moon really was poppy, and it was just on the far side of full. It was, obviously, right about where it had been a month earlier when I’d written that poem. So I remembered those words as I stood there, watching the other kids smoke, and I thought of how pretty the sky was over Burlington. The Northeast Kingdom was a disaster—a Chernobyl-sized disaster—but still the sun rose and the moon waned and the sky was impossibly pretty.
And I wondered how in the name of fuck these kids could afford their cigarettes. A pack of cigarettes at the general store in Reddington cost something like eight and a half dollars. That’s roughly forty-two cents a cigarette. You couldn’t shoplift cigarettes, because they were always kept behind the counter. But then I saw what they did and I got it: they passed around the cigarettes almost like they were joints. There were five of us, and the other four girls were passing two cigarettes back and forth.
I was still pretty shell-shocked those days. One minute I was keeping it together and the next I would be in a bathroom somewhere—the shelter, the drop-in, the library, the shopping mall—running the water so no one would hear my pathetic, hiccupping little sobs. There were times when I was practically hyperventilating. I knew by then that my parents were dead. And I knew by then that everyone hated them. I didn’t hate them, of course. I probably loved them more now that they were dead than I had when they were alive—which, because I understood this, didn’t help my frame of mind a whole lot. I also knew that people were seriously exaggerating what my dad did or didn’t do as the plant inched—make that tumbled—toward the precipice; they had to be. By the time my dad went to Cape Abenaki in the middle of the night, it must have been hours since he’d had a drink. It was three in the morning when he went there. He’d gone to bed around eleven. Besides, I don’t think either of my parents had drunk very much the night before. It had been a pretty calm evening.
“Take a puff,” one of the kids said to me on the street. “Go ahea
d.”
I didn’t smoke, but I looked at the tip of her cigarette and it seemed kind of inviting. Besides, I saw no reason not to anymore. I figured I had been exposed to so much radiation that my insides probably glowed in the dark. Lisa’s mom sometimes said to us after we did some crazy shit, “You teenagers think you’re immortal, that’s the problem.” Maybe back before Cape Abenaki we did. I did. But now? I was pretty sure I was the exact opposite of immortal. So I accepted the cigarette, held it like a doobie because I couldn’t figure out how to hold it like Betty Draper on Mad Men or Johnny Depp wherever, and took a puff. I coughed, but not like people do in the movies when they pretend they can smoke. Wasn’t a big deal. Then I took a second drag and blew the smoke in front of the moon.
“Our little Abby is growing up,” Camille said. “No longer just an art nerd. Getting rid of those airs and finally getting real. Trying to be human. Trying to be one of the gang.” She said it with serious condescension and it was edgy and strange. First of all, it was weird to hear her calling me “little Abby.” As far as Camille knew, I was only a year younger than she was: I’d been telling everyone I was eighteen. And I was sort of confused as to why she’d call me an art nerd. It’s not like I was walking around in my black “Dwell in possibility” T-shirt. (Yeah, I had one.) Finally, I had no idea I had been putting on airs. I was trying to be invisible. I wasn’t even around most of the time—which, arguably, might have been part of the problem.
But Camille was the Queen of the Tribe those days. You know that TV show, Survivor? Well, I’d been at the shelter a couple of nights by then and had begun to figure out just how tribal the place was. Just how tribal life on the edge of the streets was. A high school bunch of mean girls is nothing compared to a clique of homeless kids or runaways. We’re talking pig-head-on-a-stick tribal.
“Little Abby: makes me sound like a comic strip kid,” I told Camille. I wasn’t sure what to say, but I had to say something, and this sounded pretty harmless. I was even trying to smile a bit as I said it.
“Oh, you are no comic strip kid. You have serious secrets.”
“Nah.”
“Abby Bliss: What kind of name is that?”
“Scottish,” I answered.
“Made-up, I’d say,” Camille told me, her tone a little accusing, and the other girls nodded and chuckled, their eyes a little wide. Think of those National Geographic or Animal Planet kind of videos: the lion was about to catch and eat the warthog or gazelle.
“Well, Camille sounds pretty made-up, too,” I said. “It sounds like you should weigh a thousand pounds and be singing opera somewhere.” This was, in hindsight, not the smartest thing I could have said. Why I felt the need that moment to in any way challenge Camille is beyond me. Maybe it was because I had tried to dial it down a moment ago by only reacting to the “little Abby” part, and I thought my comic book line was pretty innocuous. You know, it’s like my name was part Li’l Abner and part Little Orphan Annie. And maybe I was suddenly feeling threatened—that Camille was on to me. (Which, of course, she was.) Maybe I thought I needed to be tough to protect myself. But the problem was that I was still an outsider. I wasn’t a part of Camille’s tribe because I was always hiding out in the library. I didn’t even know the names of all the other girls out there on the street with me. And I wasn’t a part of a rival tribe, so I had no one to stand up for me. Still, it’s not like I told Camille to go fuck herself or something. Saying her name sounded like a fat opera singer’s was pretty lame. Not super toxic. At least that’s what I thought. Nope.
“You think I’m fat?” she asked me.
And then one of her girls asked me that too: “You think Camille’s fat?”
Camille was big, but she wasn’t fat. She had hair that was usually red, but she had bleached it white with peroxide and was moussing it up into a pompadour. She had blue eyes that lots of actresses would have killed for and whole constellations of freckles (which, I gather, she hated) on her cheeks and arms. She was built kind of like some of the girls I knew who started the first-ever girls’ rugby team at Reddington: a little burly but really just athletic. You know, solid. Strong. Most of those kids started that team because they thought it would look good on their college applications: It was feminist. It was out of the box. It was funny. “No, of course not,” I tried to reassure Camille. “I don’t think you’re fat.”
“But you think I have a fat person’s name.”
I did, that’s true. But that doesn’t mean Camille is a fat person’s name. And I know it probably sounds now like I’m a fatist—you know, that I have something against fat people—but I’m not. It’s just that the name Camille sounded to me that night like an opera singer’s, and opera singers are often men and women of a certain size, if you get my drift. Besides: we all bring associations to names. We just do. You say Camille, I think opera singer. But maybe you think tiny eighty-pound Olympic gymnast because you once knew a girl named Camille who could rock the parallel bars or do backflips.
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “But I think there’s a very famous opera singer named Camille.” This was somewhere between a lie and a guess.
“You think?”
I shrugged. I looked at the other girls, but none of them was going to be of any help whatsoever. “Look, I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean anything.”
She glared at me and then dropped the cigarette butt on the sidewalk. “Where do you go during the day? You tell me the library, but no one ever sees you there.”
“I am at the library.”
“No you’re not.”
“I am. I’m upstairs. In the fiction section.”
“With the made-up shit?”
“I guess.”
She seemed to think about this. “You know what I should do?”
I shook my head.
“I should call those numbers you made from my phone. See who picks up. Maybe then we can learn whether Miss Abby Bliss is a lot of made-up shit. Maybe we’ll learn if you really have any reason to be so high and mighty.”
My stomach lurched when she mentioned the calls I’d made on her phone. I hadn’t thought about whether someone might wonder who I was calling and try the numbers. That first morning, I hadn’t understood the politics of the shelter—the fact that I was a newbie and needed to fly way under the radar. I guess Camille must have thought I was pretty ballsy when I asked to make those calls on her phone.
“I don’t think you’re fat. I think you’re pretty. And I like the name Camille,” I told her. I figured it would be way worse to beg her not to call those numbers—you know, draw attention to it. That might make it absolutely clear that I had something to hide. But I know my voice must have sounded pretty pathetic and beaten and small. Already I was wondering if somehow I could steal her phone for a minute and delete those calls from its history.
“How much do you like me?” she asked.
“I like you,” I said, not actually answering her question.
“Then kiss me,” she said, and she turned the side of her face toward me. She tapped her index finger on a little Rorschach of freckles just below her cheekbone. “Kiss me right here.”
I saw the other kids were staring at me pretty intensely. Two were smiling just the tiniest bit. They loved this. It was even better than lion-devours-gazelle because it was right in front of their eyes. So I kissed Camille exactly where her finger had been. It was a pretty dry peck, but it was all she really wanted. This was just about making sure everyone knew I was her bitch. I figured that would be it. Nope. She reached her hand out and began to finger the earring dangling from my right earlobe. Remember that antique necklace I told you about? The Danish one made of moonstones that my mom loved? Well, these earrings weren’t antique, but they were made of moonstones and silver and by the same jewelry company. My parents had gotten them for me for my sixteenth birthday. They were kind of valuable and meant a lot to me. I know they were my favorite pair of earrings I’d ever owned.
“I sure do
like these earrings,” Camille said, trying to hit that perfect tone between seductive and bullying. I knew where this was going, but didn’t say anything. I’d been wearing those earrings, except when I showered and slept, since Reactor One had exploded. I put them under my pillow when I went to bed at the shelter, because I knew someone might try to steal them. But I had never imagined that someone might try to take them from me while I was actually wearing them. I mean, who steals your earrings right out of your ears? No one at Reddington Academy, that was for sure.
“I think we can be friends, Abby Bliss. But you need to show me a little love, too,” Camille murmured.
I didn’t want to give them up, but I also didn’t want her to call the numbers I had left on her phone. At the very least, I needed to stall for time so I could try to delete them. (I would expend a lot of effort at the shelter stalling for time—especially when I was trying to prevent Edie from calling my pretend parents or the high school in Briarcliff.) So, I didn’t even wait for Camille to ask: I pulled the hooks out of my ears and dropped the earrings one at a time into her hand. I didn’t cry—I almost did, but I didn’t—and I’m very glad about that.
But you know what? When I look back on that moment now, I kind of wish I had gone up to Camille a few days later, when I was on my way out the door of the shelter, and gently touched one of the earrings in one of her lobes and said, “Those earrings, bitch? Pretty fucking radioactive.”
I got no great insights into life the one time I did windowpane. They—well, Andrea—said most of the time I was just curled up naked on the floor of the shower, super depressed. But I also don’t think it messed up my brain any more than it already was.