North Fork (3 page)

She had this perfect image. I just realized they've got me doing it, talking about Kristen in the past tense, as though it's true that she's gone. And it's confusing because more than anything, I want her to be alive. The odds are always against what you really want happening, so I find it easier to believe bad stuff. But it makes me feel like I've betrayed her somehow.

She
has
this perfect image. She's way too perfect for me, and I couldn't believe it when she started talking to me in English class. I mean none of those girls ever talk to me. It's like I've got loser stamped on my forehead. It's not that I'm ugly or anything, or at least I don't think I am, though I'm really short, but they avoid me like poison and when I ended up sitting behind her, I expected her to ignore me, and she did at first.

She's tall, at least compared to me. It made it strange when she started waiting for me and walking out of class with me. I feel funny about being short anyway, but walking next to her and being eye level with her shoulder and her being so damn perfect and beautiful made me really want to disappear, but she was too nice. I mean she made me feel like what I said meant something and I was worth something, so I had to act like I was.

It was Smith who got it started. He's our English teacher and he makes us write stuff in a notebook all the time. Besides what we write in class, over the year, we have to write an eighty-page journal about our lives, about the people, places or events that made us who we are. That's part of why I'm writing this; at least that's where I got the idea. We can write it any way we want,
and I hope Smith will read it, even though passing English seems pretty pointless now, but I'm writing it like a memoir to tell my side of the story in case it matters to anyone.

In class Smith makes us write our thoughts about some idea or question he puts on the board, always heavy, like you would actually want to think about that stuff when you're still trying to wake up. There's five or six people, girls and guys, who sit to the right of me. They straggle in late, smelling of pot, and when I'm thinking about what to write I imagine being one of them, trying to sort through and find words to make sense out of a statement like, “Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose.” I couldn't even start.

This one was about truth. “How do you determine truth?” It had a connection to what we were studying that I could sort of see. Smith said the guys we were reading in our textbook were a bunch of outlaws who wanted to overthrow the king. They thought they were right and the king was wrong and the stuff they wrote was them trying to prove that the way they saw the world was the truth. Kind of like me now. I don't want to overthrow the king, just my stepdad, and I sure seem to live in a different reality than the one the cops live in.

Until now, I wouldn't have tried very hard to persuade anyone that I was more right than they are because I hate having someone else's bull stuffed down my throat. I just want to be left alone, only now they think I killed her, and when I pull back and look, it doesn't surprise me a whole lot. When I was with her I didn't feel much need to prove anything, but now I sure as hell need someone to see things my way.

So that morning, the morning I learned she knew I existed, I'm sitting behind her. I haven't talked to her at all, and to me she's Miss Perfect with this squeaky clean, 4.0 GPA life, and I can see over her shoulder that she's got nearly a full page before I get anything down. Her clean, girly, lotion smell mixed with the pot
smell from the stoners is distracting, and even though I hadn't smoked anything, I can't think of what to say. When she started on the second page, I had to do something. Here's what I wrote:

“What is truth? Most of the time life feels like a bad dream that I can't wake up from. Is that reality, or is Kristen's perfect life more real? I suppose what we all do is let our experience guide us. That Patrick guy in the book said that's what he did. Hell, I don't even know if this desk is real or if this assignment is all a dream. Are you real, Mr. Smith, or did I make you up? Was it real when I was a kid and my dad would come home drunk and my mom would scream at him? When I was ten and she took us camping at Deception Pass and I got up to pee and she was moaning in the tent at the next campsite with the asshole who is now my stepdad, was that real? How do we know what's true? You tell me.”

We don't have to hand in our notebook right away, and we can put the stuff we write in class in a special section in our journal. Mr. Smith collects them about once a month. I wonder if he actually reads them. After we write for five or ten minutes, he sits up there on that stool and makes us talk about it. Kristen nearly always has something to say.

“It's like the scientific method,” she said. “You form a hypothesis, then you test it, and if it works, it becomes a theory. If the theory holds and can't be proven wrong, it becomes a law, like gravity.”

“What's a hypothesis?” Smith always makes us define the words. He'll make someone tell him what a theory is and what a law is. Before the “Give me liberty or give me death” guys, we read this play about the Salem witch trials where they hung a bunch of people and a couple of dogs because some girls lied about dancing in the woods, which was against the rules. People were greedy and had things to hide and they believed in the devil and that if you signed his book you could send your spirit out to
hurt people. Smith brings up the trials.

“What was missing in the witch trials?” This was a test question. He calls on one of the stoners and actually gets the answer.

“Evidence.”

“What's evidence?”

He calls on me even though I don't have my hand up. I say, “Proof.”

“Explain what you mean.”

“You know, proof, facts, something you experience. Witnesses, maybe”

“In the play, Goody Putnam experiences the death of her babies, and the court experiences the girls bearing witness to Mary Warren's spirit tormenting them in the form of a yellow bird. Did that prove the accused were witches? Are there witches? Was there a yellow bird? How could you prove your answer? The play was about people who had real lives and they experienced being hanged by their government for the crime of witchcraft. Does that make witches real?”

Kristen says, “They were superstitious and scared.”

“Would they have agreed with that? What causes people—you, for example—to make the leap into accepting something as truth?”

“You have to be able to test it,” Kristen says.

Smith comes back with, “What about things you can't test for yourself? Do we have to test everything?”

“You just go with the way you've been brought up.” This comes from a girl in the front row, a cheerleader who gets good grades and is on the ASB with Kristen.

“Do me a favor, Leslie,” says Smith. “Go back by the door and flip that little plastic switch.”

She does it. The lights go out and the room is dark except for the light coming through the Venetian blinds that cover the single
window.

Smith: “What just happened?”

Someone says, “She turned off the lights.” The stoners think that's funny and laugh.

Smith: “So what made the lights go out?”

Someone from the class: “She flipped the switch.”

Smith: “True, but what really happened?”

Me: “Moving the switch opened the circuit, cutting off the flow of electricity to the lights.”

Smith: “Are you sure? She might be a witch who just sent her spirit into the wall and made it get dark.”

I've helped my cousin work on cars enough and paid enough attention in science class to know how an electrical circuit works. In fact, he helped me wire a parallel circuit and a series circuit on a board for the middle school science fair. I say, “It's electrons flowing through a conductor from a generator that excites some gas in those light tubes.”

“Prove it. I want evidence. Have you ever seen an electron?”

Jake the farm boy hollers out, “No, but I pissed on an electric fence once, so I believe in them.” Everyone laughs.

“Witches!” says Smith. Then he says, “Okay, maybe it's not witches, but the explanation for electricity is not something that you can easily witness. We witness and experience the results. They are predictable and repeatable so we accept the explanation as truth, but each of us didn't have to do all of the experiments, follow all the steps, experience the process. We accept a lot of what we consider truth on faith, out of trust in sources that we consider to be authorities, like teachers, our parents, the government, because it helps make our lives easier, more predictable, and we only raise questions when something goes wrong, like when the government arrests our family members as witches, or taxes us too heavily. Then we have to reevaluate what we consider truth.”

“Sounds like devil talk to me.” I said it. Smith laughed. The
bell rang, and as I put my book in my backpack, I felt her standing over my desk, smelled the hint of strawberries, and about froze when it dawned that she was waiting for me.

Usually when I get that fluttery feeling I do something obnoxious, make some crack, but for some reason I didn't. I just acted like it was perfectly normal for her to be waiting, standing above me all tall and graceful, smooth-skinned and olive dark, thick, full-bodied hair hanging to her shoulders, like she could be part Native or Hispanic. I had been staring at the back of her head for days. She wasn't wearing make-up, didn't need to, no zits at all. And those big brown eyes. That's when I noticed the sadness, or at least that's what I decided it was later. At the time I couldn't have explained it. All I knew was that there was something in her eyes that made it safe for me to act like I expected her to be waiting for me, and it changed the fluttery feeling so that the spinning in my head was a rush, a high that I wanted to hang onto, instead of spinning out of control, running from it.

We started talking after class and once in a while we would walk together in the halls. I don't drive for reasons having to do mainly with money and my stepdad, so I hitch rides a lot, or walk, which sucks when it rains. Sometimes when she was going my way, she would pick me up, and we sort of became friends and started talking about the crap that was happening in our lives. Now they think I'm the witch that made her disappear.

I'm the last person to have seen her before that bastard got her. I didn't even say good-bye, so the night she left gets played over and over in my mind. It's the night I met Brad, and it was already quite a night before I got home and learned Kristen was missing. I'll try to tell it the way it felt as it was happening, starting when she dropped me off at the gas station out by the highway.

I start to get out of the car. Josh and Alex aren't far behind us. They'll stop for gas and, if the right attendant is on duty, beer before heading to a party in Bellingham. I talked with them a few minutes ago and said I'd call back if I decide to go. Before my foot hits the ground, I have a near miss with a sticky puddle of chocolate shake. The squashed paper cup warns me in time or I would have messed up my sandals. Kristen has to move the car ahead so I can get out. Then the elevator music hits me. The song blasting through the outside speakers is ancient, about home and love waiting. I'm not ready to go home.

The cashier may be Josh and Alex's guy, and I hand him a twenty. He gives me cigarettes and change. For the moment I'm not broke. I clean toilets and make beds at the Cormorant Inn and the job sucks, but I'd be screwed without it. I focus on putting the money and cigarettes in my purse. The heavy glass door isn't the kind that opens automatically and when I reach where I know the handle should be, my hand is surprised by empty space. I look up and there's this guy in my way. He's wearing a baseball hat backwards. Corny, but he's good-looking. His warm eyes make me forgive the hat and the diamond earring that has to be fake.
He smiles and says,

“Hi.”

Just “Hi,” but he meets my eyes and there's something about the way he says it, and the smile, that makes me lock in and look deeper than I should. I smile back. He steps aside and holds the door open. I can feel him checking me out as I pass and it doesn't make me feel icky. I catch myself smiling at him again.

Outside, I take out my phone. The battery is friggin dead. A few cars are gassing up, but no one I know. No Josh and Alex. So I stand by the rack of exchange propane bottles and light a cigarette, wishing for my own car, but there's no way cleaning toilets and dumping wastebaskets of empty beer and wine bottles and an occasional used condom will get me a car. Aunt Trish's old Granada is so ugly I don't really care that she won't let me drive it. It's that copper color, all faded now. The color was gross even when the car was new, back in the eighties before I was born. I hope someone I know will show up before he comes out.

The station and nearby restaurant are surrounded by fields. There's nowhere to go to avoid him, except maybe to fake a call at the broken phone booth, and I'm not about to do that. They want to make the station look like a circus or some happy place you'd like to go, but instead it feels sleazy, like a used-car lot in the middle of nowhere. Those stupid, bright plastic pennant things flutter and whip, making it sound windier than it really is. They have them strung up between the roof over the gas pumps and the glaring yellow monster sign you can see from the highway. Sticky tire-tread splotches trail across the grimy asphalt from that milkshake I almost stepped in.

Now he's in front of me grinning, not scary at all, and I'm discovering I'm glad to see him even though I don't think I'm his type; my hair is dyed maroon and my nose and eyebrow are pierced. I do like sports. They didn't have a girls' soccer team my freshman year, so I played on the boys' varsity team and lettered.
That helps me with guys.