All Unquiet Things (16 page)

Set way up in the foothills, Cass’s house had its own view. By the time we reached the place, the party was in full swing, and one of the kegs was already empty. Adam and Carly went through the door side by side, because this seemed to be the order of things—their scene, their grand entrance, with me trailing behind looking stupid. Once we were in, Carly turned around, as if suddenly remembering me, and announced that she was getting a drink.

“You want one?” she asked, eyes roving, completely uninterested in the answer. She was looking for people she knew, her new friends.

“Carly,” I began, but a look from her silenced me and she traipsed off in the direction of the kitchen. Adam had disappeared into the crowd in the living room, a mass of bodies undulating to the pulsating tune coming out of the state-of-the-art sound system. Cass, our host, came down a flight of stairs and spotted me standing near the front door.

“Uh, Nick, right?” Cass asked, as if we hadn’t gone to the same school for two years. The bastard knew my name.

“Neily,” I said, because making an issue out of it when he was deliberately trying to make me feel unwelcome wasn’t going to do any good. “I came with Carly.”

“Oh, right. You haven’t seen Audrey, have you?” he asked. I shook my head.

“Well … see ya.” He clapped me hard on the shoulder and walked off.

Standing there in the foyer, so far removed from the spectacle that I might have been on the moon looking down at it, I couldn’t help but think how unfair this was. I felt like something brittle inside of me was about to break, like the hull of a
ship ready to cave under the steady weight of a pressing iceberg. I was on empty; I had no more to give. This was the last great gesture, and it was crumbling depressingly.

Carly approached with a red cup. “Natty Light,” she said with disgust. She tipped it toward me, a meager offering. “You want?”

I shook my head. “How long do people usually stay at these things?”

She shrugged and glared. “You’re welcome to leave whenever you want. I’m staying.”

“No, I’ll stay,” I told her, taking her hand. She let me without argument, but she wouldn’t look at me. “Let’s go somewhere quieter.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “You going to take advantage of me?”

“No,” I said slowly, unsure of whether she was kidding. Carly had never before been entirely a cipher to me, but I couldn’t tell if she was being sincere. In mere minutes, she had become inscrutable. I clung to her hand, afraid that if I let her go she would float away. “It’s loud.”

“It’s not so bad,” she said, taking my hand and dragging me into the living room. “Let’s dance.”

We did, and I took comfort in the closeness of her body, the soft weight of her shoulders against my chest. I wrapped my arms around her, buried my face in her hair, and held on.

She pulled away. “Neily, stop it—this isn’t a slow song.”

“So?”

“People are looking at us funny.”

“Who cares?”

“I do.”

My chest tightened. “Carly, what’s going on?”

“Nothing. I have to go to the bathroom. Watch my drink?”

I nodded and followed her as far as the hallway, which had emptied out into the mansion’s many rooms, so I was the only person standing in it. I leaned against the banister and sniffed at the beer. I took a sip. It was disgusting, acrid. The whole scene was foul. But what bothered me most was that Carly wanted all this more than she wanted what we had together. She was changing. Had changed. And that scared me.

After a few minutes Audrey meandered over and knocked my cup with hers.

“Cheers,” she said, her face glistening with sweat, her makeup all smudged.

“Cass was looking for you,” I told her.

“Oh, don’t worry, he found me.”

I smiled for her. “Having fun?”

“Tons. You?”

I nodded noncommittally. “I’m all right. I like this song.”

“Yeah, it’s great.” She sighed and then feigned having just remembered something. “Oh, Carly wanted me to come get you. She said she needs you in the other room.”

“Okay.” I looked around. “Which room?”

Audrey pointed. “Down the hall there’s a bedroom to the left.”

“Great, thanks.” I smiled at her.

The bedroom, like every other room, was packed, and I could hardly make my way through. Cass pushed past me, knocking my drink and spilling a bit on me.

“Hey!” I said.

“Look where you’re standing,” he snapped.

I watched Cass as he walked away, until I noticed who he was walking toward: Carly. When I caught sight of her, it was as
if the crowd had parted and I was standing alone. She had her back pressed up against the wall, and Adam was leaning over her, grinning. She lifted her head and he kissed her, mashing his lips against hers and running his hands up her legs. Then she moved her head and we caught each other’s eyes, and I boiled over.

I grabbed Adam and threw him aside. “What the fuck are you doing?” I shouted, but I could hardly hear myself over the music and the voices.

Adam shoved me hard. “Don’t touch me, Monroe—don’t even think about touching me again.”

Carly stepped between us. “Let me handle this,” she said to Adam. She dragged me off by the arm to a corner. Everyone was staring, eager to hear us over the crushing noise.

“Neily,” she said, her voice void of emotion.

“What are you doing with him?” I demanded.

“I’m with him now,” she said, looking me in the eyes unwaveringly. “Adam is my boyfriend.”

“No,” I said, stupidly. “No, I’m your boyfriend.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

“You
told
me you weren’t cheating. You told me yourself!”

“I wasn’t,” she said. I turned my entire body away from her, desperate to get out of there but unwilling to leave her behind. She grabbed my arm and made me face her. “I’ve been trying to find a way to tell you it’s over, but I just didn’t think you would listen to reason—”

“So this was your solution?” I had a thought. “Did you bring me here for this? So you could break up with me in front of all these people? Is that why I’m here?”

“I tried to warn you,” she said, in a voice so soft I could hardly hear her over the music.

“No, you didn’t. Here’s what that would’ve sounded like: ‘Hey, Neily, just a heads-up—I’m thinking about kicking the crap out of your heart in front of two or three hundred of our classmates!’”

She said nothing.

“God, Carly,” I said, slipping my hand up her neck so that my thumb was resting on her cheek and my fingers were nestled in her hair. “Don’t do this.”

Carly moved away from me, removing my hand from her face and letting it drop. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

I took her hand, but she turned and walked back to Adam, who was glowering at me. When she joined him, he smirked and pulled her into him. As they kissed, cementing my humiliation, Carly opened her eyes and looked at me hard. She was right. There were no words.

I turned and walked away from them, pulling the hood of my sweatshirt up to hide my face from the gawkers as I wound my way through the party. Once I reached the door I took a deep, sharp breath of cold air to stop myself from bursting into tears. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jeans and took off down the street, walking quickly and listening to the screams and laughter of my classmates fade to silence. I was halfway down the block when I heard somebody call my name, but I didn’t turn around.

What happened to me after that? Even I don’t have an easy answer to that question. I know I became intimately familiar with the idea of implosion. My life crashed in around me, connections severed, wreckage strewn everywhere as I lay in the midst of it all, waiting to wake up. Anyone who’s ever had a person disappear from their life knows the feeling. It’s an emptiness that still has boundaries, faint outlines that serve as
reminders that something is missing, and all you can do is try your hardest to pretend like it never was. Carly dropped out of the program the following fall, at the start of our sophomore year; I stayed in, until she died a year later. I wanted to leave immediately—it didn’t feel the same without her; I floundered; I couldn’t do it alone or didn’t want to try—but the idea of sitting in classrooms with her was too much. But then she was really gone, and I could no longer even keep a semblance of normalcy together.

From early childhood, I had been told how smart I was, and throughout my life various people had tried so hard to teach me everything there was to know. But it occurred to me then how negligent they had been in teaching me how to love. I had two examples of love in life—my mother’s, absolute and overburdened, the trial of love; and my father’s, the cold and ambitious pursuit of meaning in love, the desire to turn it into a product with a worth that could be measured. Of the two options, I had skewed toward the former, disappointed with my father’s method, and so I had bestowed a sort of unconditional love on Carly without really understanding what it meant. I wished that just one person had taught me a way to love her less. If I had loved her less, maybe I wouldn’t have hated her so much. And maybe then I could have forgiven her.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

Sophomore Year—End of Summer

T
here are moments in your life that you will remember forever, no matter how bad your recall, no matter how deep you sink into dementia. It amazes me, though, how many of these moments don’t really happen
to
us but happen outside of us, and the moment that we see so clearly in our heads is the one when
we found out
. People in my parents’ generation usually talk about the JFK assassination, remember everything down to whether or not they had their shoes on as they watched the Zapruder footage roll across their black-and-white television screens. People in my generation will almost certainly name September 11, 2001, as their never-forget date, the day their lives changed—the day the world became a scarier place.

My life changed forever on an idle Friday night at the end of summer. My mind was filled with stupid trivial things, like which new outfit I was going to wear on the first day of junior year. I was reasonably happy; I had a great boyfriend, a group of fun, if wild, friends, and though my grades had never been very good, I was planning on trying harder in school, which I was sort of excited about. There was no reason to think that my life wouldn’t continue exactly as it had been, no omen that things were about to take a sharp, devastating turn.

Moving to Empire Valley had been a huge decision for me. Things were difficult with Mom gone. She had tried, with limited success, to shield me from Dad’s exploits, his drinking and gambling and unstable employment. But in the two years since she’d taken off, I had seen everything he was capable of and it was too much for a girl as young as I was. So when my grandparents got together and offered to find us a house and move us to Empire Valley, I accepted on Dad’s behalf since he, in his sober, rational moments, knew how much his relationship with his family had disintegrated and also—I really believe this—saw how much I was suffering.

But it wasn’t an easy choice, mostly because I felt that if my mom were to come back, it would be to Oregon, but also because loneliness terrified me and I had never been the new girl before. I had no idea what to expect.

From the moment I met her, Carly was the most important person in my life. We didn’t have the perfect friendship. We fought a lot, probably more than most people think that best friends should fight. But Carly was loyal, sympathetic, and hilarious. She sensed when something was bothering me, and she knew just how to make it better, carefully drawing me out bit by bit, allowing me my silences but doing her best to
demonstrate unconditional support. We were always trying to entertain each other, creating characters and jokes that went on for two years and never got old. We shared clothes and gave each other advice; we kept each other company during the boring but compulsory dinner parties Mams, the grandmother we shared, forced us to attend. We had different parents, but we might as well have been born sisters.

I remember every detail from that night. I’d had a stomachache earlier and spent most of the day napping, but I woke up around eight feeling much better. It was just about midnight and I was sitting in my desk chair, dressed in my pajamas, painting my toenails a deep purple in honor of the new school year. On the desk in front of me sat a nail file, my iPod, and a couple of half-completed dittos—what was left of my summer assignments, which I had naturally put off until the last minute. When the doorbell rang, I figured it was Dad; he often forgot his keys and ended up getting locked out. Glad to be answering the door at this hour rather than at, say, dawn, I hobbled downstairs, careful not to ruin the polish on my right foot.

But it wasn’t Dad. It was my mom’s mom, Grandma Louise, and her face was unusually grave. She opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

“No,” I said, a bit too loud. I was sure she was coming to tell me Dad was dead; it was the sort of thing I had been dreading for years, as soon as I began to see what a mess he really was.