Girl in Pieces (25 page)

The shift is slow. Linus and Tanner, the waitperson with the neck tattoos, are discussing cover songs. Tanner is a stocky guy with short purple hair and a barky laugh.

Strands of damp hair stick to my forehead.
Cold fish.
That's what Mikey said. Every day when I come here to wash dishes I listen to all of them as they banter and nudge and tease and yell and talk about stupid shit and smoke. I've caught them giving me sidelong glances, curious looks. Ellis always took the lead when we met people at a party or on the street; I was her silent accomplice.
You're so fucking still,
a boy grunted at me in Dunkin' Donuts once, the morning after a long, confusing party. Ellis had dragged us all there, bought a dozen jelly doughnuts and burning cups of coffee. The boy's face was pimply and pale.
What are you—you're like made of fucking stone or something.
He and his friend laughed. Sweet-tasting jelly sat on my tongue like a blob. I reached out and took another doughnut, crushing the gritty dough against his stunned face. His friend just kept laughing as the other boy sputtered and grabbed at his sugary face. Ellis glanced over from the counter where she was flirting with the cashier and sighed.
Time to go!
she called out to me, and we ran.

I've watched Mikey. I watched people in school. I watched everyone at Creeley. I've been watching the people here, and it seems like for some people, making friends is like finding a shirt or a hat: you just figure out what color you want, see if it fits, and then take it home and hope everyone likes it and you. But it's never been like that for me. I've been on the outside ever since I was little, getting angry in school and picked on. Once all that happened, I was damaged goods. There wasn't going to be any way back in, not until Ellis, and we kept to ourselves. I say the wrong thing, if I can bring myself to say anything at all. I've always felt like an intrusion, a giant blob of
wrong.
My mother was always telling me to keep quiet, not be a bother. “Nobody's
interested,
Charlotte,” she'd say.

Ellis was interested. And she brought me Mikey, and DannyBoy.

I take a breath.
Cold fish.
I'm not a cold fish. I just don't think I matter.

I want to make myself matter. And even if Ellis isn't here with me, maybe she can still help me find a way in.

“Hey,” I say, perhaps a little too loudly. My voice is slightly hoarse and I have to clear my throat. “My friend once had this great idea for, like, a country cover of ‘You're the One That I Want.' ”

Linus and Tanner-with-the-neck-tattoos blink at me. The only person I really talk to is Riley, and even then, not much, and mostly on our walks to work. He's been very careful with me since the vomiting incident.

They look at each other and then back at me. “You mean that song from
Grease
?” Tanner folds forks and knives into paper napkins, wraps them tight as sausages.

“Yeah.” I stammer slightly, twisting the hem of my apron. “J-just think about it for a minute. Add some, like, slow strumming, just the guitar and singer, and then at that point in the chorus where they all sing ‘Ooh, ooh, ooh…' ” My face flushes, I lose sight of what I was trying to say, why it was even important.
You have the shittiest singing voice
, Ellis would laugh.
No wonder you like all the music where people just scream.
I turn on the hot water, run a hand under it quickly to force myself back to the present.

“Oh my God.” Linus nods, squints. “Yeah, I see it. I mean, I can hear it.”

Nobody laughed at me. I release my breath. That wasn't so bad. It worked.

“You could do some wicked acoustic licks with that.” Tanner considers and then sings softly, making the
Ooh ooh ooh
sound like
Owh owh owh,
a slow, catlike growl.

Riley shakes his head. “No, no. There is no way to erase the cheese from that song. None.” He slurs a bit and Linus frowns.

She says, “Riley, that's your fourth one this morning.”

“Fifth, pet.
Maybe.
” He lowers his beer can, out of her sight. “Our secret.”

He bumps up next to me, running knives under the hot water, taking longer than is necessary. Linus watches Riley's back like she's willing him to turn around. When he doesn't, she walks off, the screen door clacking behind her as she leaves the café.

Water drips from the wet knives in Riley's hands to the sloppy, dirty floor mats. He stumbles on the mats as he turns back to the grill.

I hesitate when I hear him open a fresh beer. I should go outside and tell Linus this has gone too far, but my feet are rooted to the spot as I listen to him take a large gulp. I mean, what will it matter? She'll send him home, but he'll be back tomorrow. Like Julie said, she'll protect him forever. And what if I do tell Linus? What if I'm the one who gets in trouble and loses my job?

Instead, I help him. When his hands start getting too loose and slices of bread start slipping to the floor, I just pick them up and throw them away, and he starts over. When the orders come faster and he gets overwhelmed, I help him do plates, flip home fries on the grill, dish out scrambled tofu, and toast bagels. Be nice, right? He did give me this job. Not a
cold fish.

And that afternoon, I get a brown paper bag filled with a turkey and Swiss sandwich on an onion bagel, with mustard and mayonnaise, and a slice of stale lemon cake carefully wrapped in foil. There are tiny flakes of ash in the sweet yellow icing, but I just flick them away with a finger before I take a bite.

It's so hot outside, the sweat is pouring from my face when I get inside the library. I spend some time mopping up in the bathroom. My room was too hot, the building too noisy with people running fans and coolers and playing music too loud.

At the computer, I type in
Ariel Levertoff + artist.
A bunch of articles come up and some galleries that sell her work. I scroll through, not sure what I'm looking for, until I see one article titled “Death and the Disappearance of Ariel Levertoff.” It's a long article, in some fancy art magazine, with tons of huge words and a black-and-white photograph of Ariel and a little boy with dark, dark hair falling in his eyes. They are surrounded by paintings. He holds his hands up, happy. They drip with paint. Ariel is laughing.

Her son died of a combination of pills and alcohol. His body was found in an alley in Brooklyn.
Alexander.
He'd flunked out of school, he was bipolar, she'd lost touch with him and even hired a detective, but she couldn't trace him. She'd canceled shows, stopped painting.

He disappeared on her. They found him on the street. A little hole starts to burn inside me.

I wonder suddenly about her paintings, the tiny, tiny shafts of light in all the stormy dark. She said in the gallery that sometimes a painting of just color can tell a story, too, just a different one. Is her son the dark or the light in the paintings? Which one is Ariel? I'm struggling to understand, but it's hard, so I click off the article. I miss Ellis so much it's like a huge dark cavern inside my heart. That must be magnified a million times for Ariel when she thinks about her son.

Is my mother at all frantic, wondering about me? Or is it just another day for her, every day, one where I'm gone and not her problem anymore? Was she relieved to hear from the hospital, even if she didn't come right away? Does she ever think about the times she hit me?

She would get even madder after she hit me, holding her hand up like it burned, staring down at me. Because I tried to hide, especially when I was small. It's how I first learned to be small, scrabbling away under a table, or finding the corner of a closet.

Was she worried I would tell, in the hospital? I look away from the computer, down at my lap, at my fingers busily pinching my thighs to keep me from floating.

Before I can stop myself, I'm opening up my email and I'm typing in her address, or at least the last one I know she had. I write:
I'm okay.

My finger hovers over Send
.
She would want to know, right? That I'm at least alive out here?

She knows Mikey's number. They talked in Minnesota. But she hasn't called him, or anything, to see how I am.

Sometimes when Fucking Frank was very high, he would tell us, all of us in the house, “Where are Mommy and Daddy now, huh? Are they at the front door, begging you to come home?” Smoke would drift across his face, his eyes burning like coal in the white plumes. “I'm what you have now. I'm your fucking family and don't you forget it.”

My mother hasn't called Mikey. Or Casper. Or done anything. Mikey's leaving. Ellis is a ghost. Evan is all the way up in Portland. I delete the email to my mother.

I'm utterly alone.

Mikey leaves in the middle of the night a week later, the end of June, parking the band van outside my building at two a.m.

He knocks softly on my door, calling my name. When I open the door, he says, “We have to leave early. It's crazy, we're on a weird schedule to make the first show tomorrow.” He's jittery, excited. I can feel the nervous energy coming off him.

He puts a piece of paper on top of the card table. It's got his cell phone number, Bunny's and Ariel's numbers, and his tour schedule. “I know you don't have a phone, but maybe you can use Leonard's or the phone at work if you have an emergency, okay? And you can email me from the library.”

Mikey bends his head close to me, so that I can almost feel his cheek against mine.

“This is really going to be something, I think,” he chatters. “I think we've got a line on doing a record at a studio up in Northern California, too. I mean, that would be fucking awesome, right, C?”

I duck my face, but he catches me in his arms. I count to twenty, very slowly, in my head. He kisses my forehead.

Keep your shit together and stay strong,
he whispers in my ear.