The American Girl (15 page)

AUGUST 5, 2015

T
he following day, after I'd cut through all the red tape the doctors had wrapped Quinn in, she moved into my hotel room for what may have been the most high-stakes sleepover party of all time. In the end, although the nuns looked on sternly, everyone seemed fine with the move and the therapist actively encouraged immersive family time as an aide-mémoire, his warnings about her violent outbursts seemingly forgotten. As the nuns of Sainte-Thérèse waved us away, I realized they were probably relieved. Now instead of clogging the parking lot and harassing staff, the media would stalk Quinn here. Now she was my problem. I hovered over her anxiously while she picked a bed and a nightstand in the shiny new twin room the hotel ushered us into. I couldn't help but feel that she was fragile: a china cup with a hairline fissure only I could see.

It turned out that this out-of-hospital Quinn clad in jean shorts and a Fall Out Boy T-shirt was reassuringly like an ordi
nary teenager. After a two-hour shower, she emptied her rucksack onto her bed and within minutes had trailed its contents over the whole room. She plugged the speakers I'd bought her into her iPod and played some god-awful thrash metal band at top volume until a downstairs neighbor banged on the floor. Then, completely without asking, she borrowed my liquid eyeliner.

I countered this performance with what I do best: act like my own kind of old-age teenager. I smoked out the window and stole sips from one of the minibottles of cherry wine I'd picked up at a corner store, staring at the street where people moved happily about their nonweird lives, seemingly feeling no compulsion to be workaholics whose lives literally turn into their jobs every few months.
But, oh
, I told myself cynically,
their carefree lives must be so boring.

Refreshed by my schadenfreude, I turned back to the room to see that Quinn had discovered the wine and was swigging it from the bottle, in a nest of covers and pillows harvested from both beds. She had also found the remote and some steamy thriller to watch on silent while her music blared. In the gentlest way possible, I wrestled the control from her and flicked past the hard-core danger zone and onto a Road Runner cartoon. She scowled up at me, looking alien now that she was lip-glossed and panda-eyed.

“Playing couch commando already?” New Quinn sneered. “We've only been rooming together five seconds.”

I felt as if I'd failed a major auntie test. In my best cool-aunt voice, I said, “I am when you're watching X-rated movies.”

“Prude much?” Her eyes narrowed.

I'd thought she was just acting out, but now it seemed she was doing her best to shock me. I had a belated flash of pity for my mom and the horrors I know I put her through when I was Quinn's age. “Okay, I am when it's a pay channel,” I said, trying to break the awkward atmosphere. “That nice film you wanted to watch about the cop and the hooker with a heart of gold cost ten bucks.” I laughed uneasily.

“Cheapskate.”

I rolled my eyes, handed her the control, and retreated to the window. This was going to be a long day . . . night . . . however long this lasted. I'd heard nothing about Quinn's dad booking her a plane ticket home as yet. He seemed curiously unprotective, uninvolved even, though if he was as detached from reality as my dad, that might explain it. I'd thought this hotel stay would be nice after the way we'd . . . bonded kind of. But as much as she was actually my meal ticket, I guess I was her hall pass out of the hospital. I never really got on with my own sister when we were teens, and I've never wanted kids. So maybe it figured.

A sob from behind me jolted me out of my cynical reverie. “Quinn. Hey, hey . . . what's up?”

I navigated to her over the soft terrain of pillows and clothes and knelt down. She buried her mascara-streaked face on my shoulder. I hugged her. She mumbled something I didn't catch.

“What's that?”

“Sorry . . . [sob] . . . for being an asshole [sob].”

“Hey, hey. You're not an asshole. You're never an asshole. You're . . .” Words that wouldn't embarrass her failed me.

“Broken?” She looked up at me, her face smeary and blotchy and sad. It was all I could do not to lick a hankie and start dabbing.

“No, no . . . not broken. Anyway, there's nothing broken that doesn't get mended somehow.”

“Been watching
Oprah
again?” She raised a Sharpie-lined eyebrow, the hard shell of her cynicism closing over her. She edged away from me again, feral and skittish, teetering on the edge of some deep pit I couldn't imagine.

I sighed, sitting down beside her on the rat's nest of duvets and sheets. “You're right. Things don't get mended so much as they just kind of . . . heal over like broken bones. And you never really forget what happened, because you always feel that lump in the bone. That thing that makes you not the same as you were. How's that?”

“You sound like you know,” she said, catching her lip with her teeth in the gesture of futile stoicism I'd come to feel quite fond of. “I mean did you . . . were you . . . ?”

“Not the same as you. Nothing as terrible, I'm afraid.” As I talked, I brushed a hair from her face. She let me and I relaxed a little. “But you know . . . everyone goes through stuff and thinks things will never go back to normal. ‘I'll never be normal.'”

She rolled her eyes. “What are you going to say next? Hey, but look at me. I'm normal now!”

It was my turn to give her a cynical look. “Do I seem normal to you?”

She laughed a bit too hard at that. “No!”

“Thanks.”

“I mean in a good way. Like you don't seem like a grown-up. It's why I can talk to you, I guess. I don't know if we're always like this . . . close like this . . .”

I thought of the prim single teacher from Connecticut I was impersonating and gulped back the bilious taste of my lies. “Yeah. Always have.”

She leaned her head on my shoulder. “It's just so hard to know . . . I mean, I heard from Dad, like, yesterday, a really short call to tell me about how Meghan and the baby were doing. He asked how I was and stuff, but it was . . . really formal, like he didn't even know me.”

“You mention me?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“He never gave me a chance. It was like he was my parole officer or something. And he could have been, because I don't remember him . . . so . . .” She leaned her face on her arm, stifling a half sob, half laugh. I heard the rest of it muffled by tan flesh. “And I've been texting a girl called Kennedy, who messaged me on Snapchat and says she's my best friend, but I don't remember her either! At first I even thought she was some journalist trying to get the inside scoop on me like just about everyone . . .” She looked up, a catlike gleam in her eyes. “They've been on TV, you know, my buddies back home, telling all about me. Did you know that?”

I shook my head, hoping she couldn't really see through me, even if she looked like she did. I remembered the tragic stuff on her blog: her mother's death, her illness, a phrase about how everything was normal, and then one day everything was broken. I wasn't the only one who'd pored through her virtual life either:
after Quinn's name was released to the media, it wasn't long before they found the more easily accessed layers of her online presence. They followed up the leads provided by tracking down a bunch of people on her Facebook “Friends” list and interviewing them.

The better papers had given only a vague sense of her history for context, implying that it wasn't the first tragic accident to befall the Perkins family; the tabloids were already drawing crude connections between her obsession with all things horror and what had happened to her, as if writing a couple of ghost stories could cause your life to implode. Her BFFs had given mixed reviews. The Kennedy girl she'd been Snapchatting with was sweet and a little tearful when she said she hoped “poor Quinny” was coming home soon; a guy named Zeke I assumed was an ex had taken the opportunity to say that “Quinn was always kinda weird.” He claimed she'd been obsessed with him their junior year. Yes, she had every right to be angry.

I wished I could make up to her for my spying by being honest about myself in return. I wanted to tell her my real life story. How I came from this cheerful home—dad lawyer, mom paralegal, life peachy—until my dad was sued by a former client for malpractice and lost everything, including his mind. But being her fake aunt, I couldn't tell her anything real and we were both too cool to hug. Instead, we ended up bundled up in blankets drinking Cherry B and watching
Buffy
reruns late into the night. All the lying and trauma and possible murder aside, it was actually nice, as if we'd always known each other, as if the lies I'd told her were true.

By one, she'd fallen asleep half on top of me with Dick Van Dyke from
Diagnosis Murder
murmuring in the background. I woke up dry-mouthed and covered her up with a blanket and tried to stop myself thinking that when the truth came out, it would hurt her in more ways than one. I was just dragging myself to bed when there was a knock on the door. This time, it didn't surprise me too much that it was Valentin.

“Bonsoir.”
He smiled sheepishly. The day had been too busy for us to exchange anything but a few formal words and the odd awkward glance. I still didn't know if he even remembered the night before.

“Bonsoir,”
I said solemnly, craning my neck around the door to see Didier perched on a chair playing Sudoku.

“For your security,” said Valentin with a chivalrous wave of the hand.

I nodded, letting our embarrassed silence fill the corridor.

“So.” Valentin leaned on the wall near the door, an awkward attempt at seeming casual. “May I ask if anything's ‘come back' to Quinn?”

I nodded. Down to business. “You may.” I peeked inside, where the light of the muted TV flickered over Quinn's sleeping face. I pointed at her silently, indicating that I didn't want her to overhear.

“Well,” said Valentin. “Didier is guarding the door. Would you mind debriefing in my room?”

“Um, no.” I stifled a smile. “We can debrief if you like.”

Valentin said a few words to Didier in French and Didier nodded briskly.

“He has the keycard,” said Valentin. “If anything should go wrong.”

Before we went, I remembered something: Quinn's iPhone, where she'd left it in the bathroom. I ducked back into the room and slipped it in my pocket for the second time, telling myself it was an intervention and not a betrayal.

JULY 19, 2015

Blog Entry

Last night a badass storm punched a hole in the sky, loosing the trapped heat that was choking us all. So when a loud noise woke me at exactly 3:05
A.M.
I thought, at first, it was the thunder calling.

I crept from bed to unbolt the shutters and stuck my head out into the rain. For once there were no cicadas, as if the rain song had pressed their mute button. Eyes closed, mouth open, I soaked my hair and face until the storm eased. I was about to pull them closed again when I heard the noise that must've woken me—a shrill voice, coming from downstairs, then a lower voice, a man's, talking fast and in French. I couldn't hear what either was saying.

For a few moments, the house fell silent. I leaned on the windowsill, my unease growing fresh horns and claws, becoming
the same mean-spirited little incubus it had been before. Someone ran out into the rain—Raphael, his white T-shirt soaked, his face a blur. He climbed on his bike and kicked on the engine. I called down to him and for a brief second he looked up at me, his face tight.

He said nothing. His bike sped into the night and the reek of burned rubber and gasoline beat out the scent of the rain-wet world. A woman ran out after him and, seeing him gone, stopped in the middle of the yard and slowly turned back to face the house. Émilie, just staring up at me.

Now it's raining again and I am typing this on my phone under cover of my covers. Raphael's latest Facebook status says:
Paris j'arrive!
I can't lie that it doesn't hurt to feel he's so excited to leave for Paris without saying goodbye. Nothing about me on there, of course, and he's yet to answer my text checking if he was okay. Whatever he and Émilie argued about was bad enough that he had to climb on his bike in a rainstorm and be free. Or maybe it was me he ran from. Or maybe he didn't run; he just never planned to stay.

The gray light sees my fucked-up night and raises it a shitty day, a lover-left-me-without-a-word day, a homesick day, a nowhere-to-go and nothing-to-do day. In short, all the worst times rolled into one. I don't need to get out of bed to tell you in detail that the world has turned one hundred percent crappy overnight. Outside the window, fir trees and burnt-orange grass are smeared by rain. In the mirror, my hair looks greasy, my skin pasty, and a big zit is ripening on my nose, the kind that however much you squeeze it won't quite pop. Down the road, a small town
looks depressing in the rain. Down the hall Noémie's retching and Émilie's nagging. So if anyone reading this has a helicopter or a Learjet or something, I'd quite like to be airlifted out of my life and dropped into someone else's for a while, thanks.

As if reading my thoughts (or maybe my depressed Facebook status), Kennedy messages,
Hey bro what Up?

Mucho of nada

Uh-oh. Boy trouble?

Can I call?

Late
for basket weaving class -_-. Wish u were here!

Me too
Call later?

Late
r. Miss ur face. Hang tuff! X :p

Later gater X :p

I knew it. She's made new friends, those kind of intense summer friends that totally eclipse your feelings for your BFF.* I fling myself back on my bed, all the better to reach the depths of self-loathing. To hasten the inevitable meltdown, I flick through photos of Raphael taken on my phone, all two hundred and fifty of them. Lucky he didn't look at my phone by accident, realize I was obsessed and climb on his bike then and there. But who can resist taking photos of him when he's so gorgeous in every single photograph? *Kennedy, if you're reading this, it's totally cool you've made new friends. I'm stoked for you, srsly

Down in the kitchen, I mooch, stomach growling, yet not hungry somehow. I make Lipton tea with a slice of lemon, missing the Boston Tea Company shop back home where Kennedy and I—fresh from auditing a freshman psychology class—took online personality disorder tests for every single person we
knew, starting with guys we liked and continuing with our parents, siblings, and friends, performing postmortem surgery on every last party, class, and date in a Freudian psych-fest that was as hilarious as it was brutally enlightening.

God, Kennedy, I wish you were here with me so we could do an autopsy on this. Or if it's not quite dead yet, at least measure its sputtering pulse. If you were here, I could shake off this mood with some biting sarcasm, then we'd laugh about the Blavettes until we cried, while the huge metal urns of chai farted perfumy steam and our bone cups clicked genteelly on our saucers.

The rumble of another argument breaks my train of thought. I'm so used to this now that I know the chords, riffs, and bridges like I know “Born Under a Bad Sign”: Émilie's voice grinding on and on, a monotone lecture delivered in rapid French, kept just low enough that it should be out of earshot (but of course it's not), Noémie's voice chiming in, gravelly with tears, the loud slam of a door and something smashing, more shouting, fists on the wall. I feel so sorry for Noémie. At least Raphael can run away from it when he wants to.

My tea has a greasy skin on it, a baby-oil slick reflecting the day outside. I don't want to be here anymore. I'm actually thinking about cutting my trip short, phoning up Dad and falling on his mercy. Please, Daddy.
Please
. And I do it. I actually dial the number of the hotel room in Tahiti, simultaneously preparing a speech and bracing myself for Meghan to answer. But she doesn't. And he doesn't. The phone rings and rings with no answer.

Footsteps on the stairs. Madame Blavette. She's swathed in a flannel bathrobe, her hair unwashed, in pins, and she looks ten
years older. She sets her cup in the sink with the other cups. “I am making chicken escalopes for dinner. Will that be fine with you, Quinn?” Her voice is brisk.

“Of course.” I smile the tight fake smile of the terrified.

“Yes, you Americans really like your food.” She smiles, flicking her eyes over my tits, my hips, as if to imply I should probably eat less. “I know you like your food even more than the other girls I have hosted.”

Let it go. Let it go. Let it go.

“
Bon.
Well, I hope you find things to do in this rain. There are books if you like reading books. Or perhaps you can just play with your phone all day.”

Something snaps in me. “I was phoning my dad.”

“Why?”

I'm amazed at her tone. She sounds almost paranoid.

“Because I miss him.”

“Well, fine, but calling Tahiti? Surely your phone bill will be—” she waves her hands frantically as if the melodramatic word she's searching for is wafting through the air around her “—astronomical!”

“He asked me to keep in touch.”

She raises her eyebrows, shrugs, reaches for a heel of stale baguette on the counter behind her, breaks off a dry crust, and sucks on it like a rusk. “You know, Quinn, woman-to-woman. Fathers . . . I mean, they say these things, but they are not like mothers. Chitchatting to their daughters is not high up on their list, especially when they have gone to Tahiti with a young woman
barely older than their daughter,
hein
.” She raises a neatly waxed eyebrow.

I hear a smash, feel wet soak through my hiking socks. But it's not until I see Émilie on bended knees with the brush and pan, sweeping up shards of china, that I realize I've broken her mug.

“Sorry,” I mutter, kneeling down to help her. “My hands shake sometimes because of my . . .” I'm about to say “medication,” but I stop myself. Because she doesn't need to know about that when she already knows about Meghan. And come to that, how does she know about Meghan? “Dad ignores me in favor of his trophy wife” isn't exactly the kind of thing you list on a cultural exchange application.

“Ouch,” says Émilie. She stops brushing and sucks her thumb. When she pulls it from her mouth there's a bead of blood forming around a tiny shard of china. She pulls it out and sucks at the blood, her dark eyes watching my face.

“Sorry,” I say, though I don't know why I'm saying sorry over and over.

She straightens and pulls her thumb from her mouth, dabbing it on her dressing gown and making tiny red marks. “It's okay,” she says slowly, as if she's trying very hard to keep her voice level. “I have had exchange students here ever since my husband was taken from me. I have them because the school has shut for two years now and a single mother must support her family somehow. And always it is the same. Fine for a week, two. Then they fight with my daughter and they flirt with my son.”
Her eyes meet mine. “It is a hard thing to understand, perhaps, that a boy like him, with a shining future ahead, would not be interested.”

“I think he gets on with
me
,” I say weakly, stopping myself before my voice gives too much away.

“That is funny,” she says, “because he told me he was leaving to get away from you following him around like a puppy. I begged him not to, of course . . .” Smiling, she stamps on the pedal bin step and dumps the china shards with a tinkling crash. “After all, he is my baby.”