The Blue Girl (3 page)

I
N MY WHOLE LIFE I
'
D NEVER SEEN ANYONE LIKE HER
, this girl who showed up a few months ago, with skin so blue you could almost see through it and hair that looked like lightning bolts. Well, not lightning bolts exactly, but her hair made me think of lightning bolts, the way it curled at the top and wound around itself and then jutted out the sides of her head, as if she just dove down into the water and shook out her hair.

Now when I see her, I don't know what to look at first, her skin or her hair, which also looks blue even though I know it's not. Actually it looks like hair that's been stripped of all color, the way dark brunettes have to have their hair stripped before becoming blond. Her skin isn't a pretty blue, it's a strange blue, unnatural, not like the sky at twilight or deep like a cartoon, but glowing. It's as if she lights up somehow, like a house you pass at night when the shades are drawn. You start to imagine what
the people inside are like, whether they're watching sitcoms or wanting to kill each other, and you see that flash against the blinds coming from the
TV
screen.
That's what she is
, I think,
a Technicolor blue that lights and flashes when no one is looking
.

Me, I'm always looking, can't stop looking, though I wish I could, I really do. It's not that I meant to follow her that night in August, a few weeks after they took my father away, then brought him back to where he seemed to be slowly going crazy. All I wanted to do was walk. I'd been sitting in that house for weeks where my dad stayed up all night in the living room and played his imaginary basketball games and watched the blank
TV
screen. All I wanted to do was get away. I didn't know how long it would take me, and really, I didn't care. Five miles is about how long it is from here to the lake. I guess I could have taken his car keys. He'd taken me out a few times to drive, but looking at the keys sitting there on the end table next to the
TV
set, always turned off the way it was, I decided I'd rather walk all night than take those keys. Those keys were just about all he had left.

At the beginning of the summer Rebecca turned beautiful, or maybe she was beautiful all the time and suddenly we all noticed. Greg noticed—Caroline's older brother—and
now the two of them sneak off at night and do things to each other out by the lake and sometimes, even, at Greg's house after they think Caroline is asleep. Sometimes Caroline tells me about the sounds they make and imitates them, but I always tell her to stop, because when I hear about Rebecca making those sounds it makes me feel sad, thinking about her brother making his own strange sounds while rocking back-and-forth. And then there's my dad, who almost sounds like he's crying, or like a dog whimpering because you've shut him out of your room—sounds that made me start walking in the first place.

I must have walked for an hour, maybe more, and I got as far as the trees when I saw her coming out of the lake. An old woman held her by the hand and was dragging her back toward a house, a little house I'd never seen before, and having grown up in this town, I thought I'd seen them all. I didn't go any closer—not that night, anyway. I moved back, up toward the road and away from them, the girl soaking wet, the old woman pulling her by the hand. I couldn't hear what the woman was saying to her, and I've since tried to piece it together—something about the water and being good, something about food and not eating—but I don't know for sure what she said. Then for just a second or two, they stopped in the gravel and looked toward the road where I was hiding in the
trees. Suddenly a spot of light hit them while I stood, with the smell of the woods and the lake all around me, and I saw that it was her, the girl they'd all been talking about, blue, and standing just a few yards away in her soaked nightgown.

I didn't get home until just before the sun came up, and I didn't see her again until that day out at the lake. I thought I must have been mistaken, that I hadn't really seen a blue girl. I'd almost forgotten her when the day came, the day she started to drown and I jumped in. It was nothing I'd planned to do.

Now, at night, with my eyes closed, when I smell the little cookie pies my mother is baking in the kitchen, the inside of my eyelids look blue. It's like she inhabits me. I shake my head against the pillow and quietly breathe,
Get out, blue girl, get out of my head
, but she won't go, she can't go. So now I never sleep. Of course I must sleep for a few minutes at a time, because otherwise I wouldn't keep on living. Or I'd go crazy like my dad. And one thing I do know: I am not crazy and I won't ever be.

I wake up with creases under my eyes and blue circles around the sides of my nose. Sometimes I think about telling someone I can't sleep anymore, ever, but then I know they'll start with the questions—questions about my dad
and his games, questions about what it felt like to save the blue girl that day at the lake. If there's one thing I don't want, it's questions. I just know they'll be able to tell that I'm thinking about her, and I don't want anyone to know that, not my teachers and definitely not my mother, who keeps looking at me and asking,
Did you get any sleep last night?

I want to say,
Do you see these blue circles under my eyes?
but since the day the girl almost drowned, I've never said the word blue to my mother. Ever. Even if she were to ask,
What color are your eyes?
I wouldn't say,
Blue
, not even then. Anyway, she's my mother, she knows what color my eyes are. If she didn't, what kind of mother would she be?

I let Buck ask me about the blue girl because he's only eight years old. He listens when he shouldn't, but he knows what he knows, so I'll answer Buck.

Since the day I saved her the only one who seems to care is Buck. No one else cares that she stopped breathing and practically died right there at the lake, and now she just lives in the woods as if nothing happened, as if she never came close to drowning, as if she wasn't even blue. A couple of times the guys at school have talked about going out there and finding her, but it's just talk. They're afraid of her. I'm not. I was a little afraid, maybe, that first time I saw her, that night when the light hit her. But not since I had my mouth over her warm blue mouth and
then, later, when I walked her back up to that little house in the woods.

I don't know why I saved her. I didn't really have time to think about it. I just jumped into the water—which, as usual, was freezing cold—and pulled her out. I've always hated that lake, and now I just hate it more. The summer people ruin it with all their blow-up toys for their bratty kids and their barbecues and their lawn chairs spread out all over the sand like they own the beach. They come in with their big
SUVS
and their city accents, and they look at us like aren't we so quaint, and they call us townies when they think we aren't listening. After the blue girl came, I stopped caring so much about the summer people. I have other things to think about now. Now when I close my eyes I can still feel how warm her mouth was when I blew into it. And the skin was warm. Who would think skin like that would be warm?

At night Buck comes in my room and, as usual, asks me to tell the story again, about the day I saved her. He's only eight, and you'd think the story would scare him, but he gets this big smile on his face whenever I talk about her and doesn't stop smiling until he falls asleep. He doesn't like Dad's basketball games with the little hoop and the Nerf ball—I know that much because he told me.

Tell me about her
, he said one night when I tried to talk about Dad and the
TV
and how we can never watch it anymore because it's just too upsetting for Dad.
Not about him
.

I think if I keep telling him the story about the blue girl, maybe he'll feel better about Dad and his games, and then maybe he'll get tired of hearing about her, too. But he never does. And the truth is, I haven't gotten tired of telling him about her.

One night when I couldn't sleep, Buck told me about a dream he had where the blue girl came to him and danced with a bag of sugar on his head. My mother uses sugar in those pies of hers, the chocolate ones with the marshmallow filling that she thinks we don't know about, the ones she says she's making for the bake sales at school. She thinks Buck and I don't know about the pies, but we do. We keep that between us.

Buck made me sit on the edge of my bed while he imitated the dance she'd done in his dream with the sugar balanced on top of his head. He was wearing his pajamas with sailboats and they seemed like they were dancing in the water as he danced on my rug, moving his feet forward, to the side, and then back, and then forward and side and back again.

Who taught you to waltz?
I asked him.

He just smiled and said,
Shhh, you'll make me lose count
, and then he held his arms out in front of him as if he was holding a woman, and he waltzed all the way around my room.

When he finished he asked me if I liked his dream, and I said that I couldn't like anyone else's dream—no one could. Most of the time we don't even understand our own dreams—didn't he know that?

Most people don't like their own dreams, Buck. You'll learn that soon enough
, I said.

He put the bag of sugar down on my bedside table and asked if he could lie down with me. I told him he had to promise to put the sugar back in the pantry where Mom keeps the rest of the stuff she uses for those pies: the bags of chocolate and the bottle of vanilla and the cans of marshmallow cream. He grabbed the sugar and ran out the door, holding it out in front of him as if the bag was contaminated. A few minutes later he came back, his face flushed. I rolled over on my side and made room for him in the bed next to me. Looking at the little sailboats all over his pajamas, I started thinking about Dad's basketball games, and the television in the living room.

Do you think we'll ever get to turn it on again?
he asked. I told him I didn't know, but there was a small
TV
in my room, and he could watch that if he wanted to.

No, thanks
, he said.
It's not the same
, and of course he was right.

We could hear Dad's feet on the carpet, and the ping of the wire hanger when he must have missed a shot.

Don't those sailboats ever make you seasick?
I asked. Mom doesn't think of these things. Me, if I have a kid someday, I'll think about whether too many sailboats would make
my
kid seasick, I know I will. And if my kid doesn't like sailboats, I won't make him wear them.

Don't tell Mom but I hate these pajamas, they itch
, he whispered.
I like the color on the sailboats though, because they remind me of you-know-who
.

When he put his head down on the pillow next to mine, his hair smelled like the lake.

Tell me one more time
, he said, as I switched off the light.
I like when you tell me about her in the dark
.

So I told him, again.

I told him about the way the sun felt on my arms that day and about the wind in my hair and how tan I was getting, I could feel it. The sun was on me, and we were laughing, all of us, Caroline and Rebecca and me, because we knew we looked better when we were tan, and what a relief it was that our mothers were going to let us lie in the sun that day.

You know how Mom is about the sun
, I said, and I could feel Buck nodding into his pillow next to mine.

Well, anyway
, I told him,
I was lying on my towel with the sun on my face, leaning back on my elbows and feeling myself getting red
.

All the mothers were after us about the sun, about premature aging and sunspots and skin cancer, because they're getting older, but I don't know why they all cared so much, because as far as I know, at least with our mother, Dad doesn't look at her skin, or at any other part of her. He's too busy playing his games in the living room every night with his Nerf ball. He's like a little kid with those basketball games, that's just how he is now, and there's nothing anyone can seem to do about it.

So there I was
, I told Buck,
getting all this good color when the blue girl started to drown. I could barely see her from my towel since she was swimming all the way out past the buoys where no one was supposed to go, but who was going to stop her? She did what she wanted to do, because people were afraid of her, and they still are. In that way I guess she's lucky. No one bothers her
.

Anyway, the water was bubbling up out past the buoys, when Magda started screaming that there's a girl drowning out there, doesn't anyone see it?

She reminded me of all the summer mothers right then. Why didn't she get up off her ass and jump in the water herself if she was so goddamned concerned
, and Buck always laughs each time I say
ass
and
goddamned
even though I'm careful to add that he shouldn't say those words, and that she's not like those
fat-assed summer mothers, not really, even if she didn't get up that day.

Some of those summer mother are just fat asses
, I said, and Buck laughed again, his sleepy laugh, and then I told him again not to curse.

Promise me you won't say fat ass
, I said, and he said,
O.K
., I promise I won't say fat ass
, and we both started laughing.