The Best Kind of People (38 page)

Lena took a swig and said, “I dunno. It’s not great when everything is a secret. My grandfather molested me and my sister. My mom didn’t want him to go to jail ’cause he’s so old, right, but it was up to us to decide if we wanted him to. It was so weird. Obviously no one wanted him in jail, he’s so old now. So now we have to have supervised visits only,” she admitted. She said it all so casually.

Sadie tried to just nod and not act horrified the way everyone looked horrified at her when she talked about her dad.

“I guess that’s partly why I like hanging out here all the time with my best gaylord friend. ’Cause I kind of wish an adult had been, like, uh, you’re only ten and so maybe you shouldn’t be the one to decide if an old perv goes to jail. My family are bonkers. I mean, not like I believe in the prison system.”

“You don’t believe in prison?”

“No. I believe in restorative justice. Plus, the system is rigged. If it was full of white people and
CEO
s, I’d be a little less hard on it.”

“But people who do bad shit, what should we do with them? You don’t think people should be held accountable?”

“Of course they should be held accountable.”

“How then? And what about serial killers?”

“Fuck, I don’t know the answer to everything. I just think we should be a little more critical of a fucked-up, racist system.”

She was carving
SADIE
AND
LENA
BEST
FRIENDS
FOREVER
into the wood with her pocket knife. Sadie ran her fingers over the cuts and laughed.

Lena looked up and blushed. “Hey, so let’s go to that party!”

Lena insisted Sadie double her on Sadie’s bike. Sadie had laughed really hard, trying not to fall, as they rode along Maple Street, sipping the whiskey from an empty pop bottle and yelling out the words to “Add It Up” by the Violent Femmes.

That was her last memory, before time stopped making sense.

SHE COULD SEE
she was in a basement, the dim morning light starting to shine through a high window, the related warm glow abrasive against her skin. She was under a blanket. One kid was snoring loudly. She lay still again. There were at least a dozen kids asleep on the floor. She was trapped between the other bodies. While contemplating the situation, still holding on to the guy’s wrist, she pressed her nails into his skin.

“Ow! Sorry,” he said. She’d never seen him before.

“You were
not
asleep just now.”

He sat up, stretching. He took a swig of warm beer, and offered it to her. She grimaced, holding back from throwing up. She heard a girl’s voice across the room, some giggling. It was Lena. “Oh man, that was a night to remember. What I can remember of it, anyway.”

“I thought, because of last night and everything,” he said, “that you would be game. You were moving around like you were awake.”

“What happened last night?”

He blushed. “You don’t remember?”

“No.”

“You guys were making out on the couch!” Lena yelled from across the room. “Man, you were
sooo
faded.” She laughed.

Sadie turned her head, spurring a swirl of nausea, to see Lena roll from a somersault into a handstand, the shirt Sadie remembered leaving the house in falling to cover her face, revealing a grey sports bra. Sadie looked down and realized she was wearing a Thrasher T-shirt, the one Lena had been wearing earlier in the night.

“We traded shirts,” Lena explained. “You really wanted mine! You said it was perfect for your new life as a vagabond.”

“I did?”

Lena laughed as if her blackout was the funniest thing she’d ever witnessed, breaking her handstand and curling into a ball on the floor. Sadie pressed her hands to the carpet, stood up, lost her balance, and steadied herself against the arm of a chair. She found her shoes in a pile by the door, almost all the same brand of sneakers in different colours. Had there ever been water inside her body? Her mouth was a pile of crackers, her skin drying cement. Was there oxygen outside? Would temperature ever make sense again?

“Let’s all go have breakfast!” Lena said.

“Yeah,” said the boy.

Sadie shook her head. “My mom is going to be worried.” She fished her phone out of her skirt pocket. It was dead. “I didn’t mean to stay out all night.”

“Last night you said you were disowning your whole family!”

She headed towards the stairs. Why did anyone ever drink alcohol when it led directly to this feeling?

“You okay? We’re still besties, right?” Lena sounded worried, jumping up and giving her a hug on the bottom step. Sadie nodded
of course
. The boy who was drinking the beer followed her.

“Sadie, right?”

“Yup.”

He paused on the landing. “It’s all cool, right? It’s all good.”

“What is?”

“You know, what happened last night?”

“What?”

“You said you had a boyfriend, so I get it. I won’t say anything. I just, you know, you were crying and stuff, and I wanted to make sure it was okay.”

“Why was I crying?”

“I don’t know. You wouldn’t stop. It was a bummer. You walked up and, like, grabbed me and kissed me and then you, like, cried and threw up.”

“Alcohol is a depressant, dude,” Lena said.

Sadie was looking at him, trying to steady his face, but the room spun. She bolted for the door at the top of the stairs and threw up all over a tulip garden. A mom with a stroller watched her from the sidewalk. The boy ran up behind her.

“Are you okay? I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, okay?” He gave her a big hug. She came up to his armpit, and he smelled awful. “You put your number in my phone, so I’ll text you. You’re so much fun!”

She pulled away, repulsed, pulling a bit more carpeting off her tongue and hoping she wouldn’t throw up again.

“Totally, text me or whatever,” she said, backing away. She got to the sidewalk and tried to orient herself. She reached into her pocket for the koala eraser and it wasn’t there. Exhaustion turned into a loud sound, an alarm.

She ran back into the house and pushed the boy out of the way to get downstairs. She rolled over the remaining sleeping bodies, looking for the eraser. She ran her hands over every inch of the basement carpet. She crawled around on the filthy bathroom floor. At this point she was crying uncontrollably.

“It’s an
eraser
?” Lena asked, giving her a look that said,
So what the fuck?
from the doorway of the bathroom.

“It’s sentimental!” Sadie yelled, but what she wanted to say was that it was the only thing keeping her safe. She realized it was stupid, but she believed in it. She had believed in it for years.

“It means something to me!” she yelled again. Everyone who was still lying on the floor woke up. They looked at her as if she were a crazy person.

“You’re losing it, dude. Stop screaming, we’re all a little rough here,” said the beer guy.

“Go die in a fire,” Sadie said, wishing she could punch him in the face. She needed that eraser. She slumped down against the wall and closed her eyes. She felt her father’s arms around her, the way he smelled as he carried her out of the school on the day of the shooting.

She heard the boy laughing. “Who the fuck
is
this chick? She’s hot, but she’s fucking nuts.”

Sadie snapped out of it, ran upstairs, grabbed her bike from where it was inexplicably splayed on the front lawn. She tried to bike away, but her chain had fallen off. She dropped the bike and kicked it like a toddler.

“It’s okay, Sadie, I’ll fix it,” Lena said, appearing like an apparition. Sadie curled up on the ground.

“Who the fuck is that guy?”

“Mike, remember? You were super into him last night. He’s harmless.”

“I don’t remember anything,” she said, “after we got on our bikes.”

Lena furrowed her brow, giving the chain one final yank and running the pedals around to test it. “Shit, girl, that sucks. You feeling bad because of Jimmy?”

“I feel bad because I messed around with someone and I don’t remember it at all!”

“Oh, you never blacked out before?”

“No.”

“Well, you’ll know for next time, I guess,” Lena said, handing her the bike, “not to mix booze and pot.”

“Yeah,” she said, getting on, trying to focus on the horizon. She was almost too sore to sit on the bike seat, and she stopped several times on the side of the road to throw up. Her knees were stuck with clumps of gravel, some cutting her skin. She heaved and sobbed. This was his fault, she thought, lying down on her back as if she were making a snow angel. She wouldn’t be here, wouldn’t be feeling so terrible, if George wasn’t in jail, if he hadn’t done the things he was accused of. Maybe people are often terrible, she thought, feeling the wind of passing cars and sitting up, pulling at strands of long grasses, trying to hold back another round.
Fuck my dad. Fuck him
, she thought.

SHE FOUND THE
front gate ajar and a police car denying her the gratifying downward roll towards the garage. “Mom!” She dropped her bike, double-jumped the front step, running straight into Joan, quite alive and furious, flanked by Jimmy, Clara, Jared, and Andrew, and a silver-haired cop who regarded Sadie with a grunted “This must be her?”

Joan hugged her in a way that was meant to be painful. Sadie, still fogged by the hangover, was slow to realize that she was the emergency, that the
something terrible
which had occurred was that she didn’t tell anyone where she was going.

“Oh my god, you smell like garbage,” Joan said, drawing back to scrutinize her appearance then hugging her tightly again, “literal garbage.”

“Why are you freaking out?”

“Uh, you went for a bike ride and never came home!”

“None of our friends knew where you were. No one! Everyone online is, like, posting about you being a missing person,” Jimmy said. “Where were you? We thought a crazy person who was mad at your dad had kidnapped you!”

“Well, obviously I’m fine. I just went to my friend Lena’s friend’s house to watch a movie and we fell asleep by accident.”

The cop sighed, and took his leave.

“Who the heck is Lena? I’ve never heard of her,” Joan said.

“She used to go to Avalon,” Sadie said.

“That makes no sense,” said Jimmy. “Is that a
hickey
on your neck?”

She grabbed her neck. “No, of course it isn’t.”

“Why didn’t you text? We must have sent you fifty messages,” said Andrew.

“My phone died. I’m so sorry, guys, I didn’t think you’d notice.”

Joan’s face paled. “You didn’t think I’d notice that you’d disappeared?”

“No, I dunno. I wasn’t thinking,” she said, wishing she could make them all go away, before sprinting to the downstairs powder room and heaving, though there was nothing left to come up.

FORTY-TWO

CLARA AND JOAN
lingered at the Book Nook, waiting for the real estate agent to arrive, running their hands along the New & Noteworthy display table. Joan picked up a copy of
Father Father
by Kevin Lamott. The ending was made up, since the verdict hadn’t happened yet, but the book still had a “Based on a True Story” tag line. Joan held the book open so hard that she accidentally tore a page. She knew she wouldn’t recognize herself in its pages, but she wasn’t recognizing herself in her own life right now either.

“I read the advanced copy we got at the magazine. The father character gets ten years in jail. The daughter becomes a drug addict with a lesbian lover. The mother moves into a trailer just like Julie Cooper on
The O.C.
”

“Who?”

“Never mind. The son stays a lawyer but starts visiting a dominatrix to deal with his guilt, because the ‘Andrew’ character is straight. It’s ridiculously terrible,” said Clara. “The masses will fucking love it.”

“Should we buy all the copies, so no one can read them in Avalon Hills?” Joan asked Clara, half hysterical-sounding.

“No, just let it die, and feel comforted that hardly anyone reads anymore,” she said.

“You’re a journalist,” Joan said.

“I’m an illogical sadist,” Clara said. She picked up a copy of Joan Didion’s
The Year of Magical Thinking
and handed it to Joan. “This is a book that will speak to you,” she said, bringing it up to the cash.

AN HOUR LATER,
Joan was following the real estate agent around a condo. The agent was perky, with red highlights in her shiny brown bob, and Joan hadn’t listened to a thing she’d said as she monologued her way through the two-bedroom space. The walls were a bright kind of white. Absent. Anywhere. As they stood together on the expansive balcony, surrounded by tasteful potted rubber plants, Joan could see the lake in the distance, and the hospital only a few blocks away. She wanted to buy all the furniture in the condo too, she wanted all new things, and she didn’t want to think about it and what it meant. She didn’t want to use the salad spinner they’d had since the 1980s, the thick cutting board they’d received as a wedding gift.

“Sign them,” Clara said when the real estate agent handed over the papers.

Joan put them in her purse.

“Joannie, come on.”

“You know I’m giving up the last instalment in my trust if I do this.”

“Only if you get divorced,” Clara said, “and would that be so bad? It’s just money.”

“If only Dad were alive to hear you say that.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I worked hard for that house, the kids were raised there, and it’s not fair that I should be the one to move.”

“He may not fight you on it. What has he said so far?”

“He has no idea,” Joan admitted.

“No matter what happens at the trial, he won’t be in jail forever. You’re going to have to face this, and make some concrete, practical decisions. This is a good one. If he stays in jail, you have an investment property. You can afford it.”

“For now,” she said. “I guess.”

They thanked the realtor and left, opening a bottle of wine when they got back to the house and sitting on the dock.