The Elementals (3 page)

“Have you seen her, though?”

She shook her head. “Sorry.” Before I could say anything else, she was gone, gripping Jeni’s picture in her hand.

After that it seemed that whenever I looked up she was watching me from across the dining room. I heard Lauren say she was a sophomore named Coraline Grimm, or at least that was what she called herself. (Anyone who had heard of Neil Gaiman or those brothers who wrote the fairy tales was a bit skeptical.) Once when I got up to go sit with her—she looked so lonely—she swallowed her last sip of orange juice and scurried away.

My English teacher, a grad student named Melinda Story, took the flyer graciously. Her blue eyes seemed to darken with concern and she stroked her long blond braid.

“I heard about this,” she said, with her soft lisp that reminded me of Jeni’s.

I stood frozen, waiting for her to go on.

“If you need to talk, I’m here,” she said.

So all she could offer me was sympathy and the concerned looks that she shot my way while lecturing about
Beowulf
and
The Canterbury Tales
; I needed much more than that.

“If you have any leads for me, let me know,” I said.

There was one other person who stopped with interest to take my flyer—the giant I’d seen the first night we’d arrived. Up close he smelled like nicotine and mold and I saw that the dark shade of his skin was from dirt. He was much younger than I’d thought, only a little older than I was. But being on the streets and perhaps whatever had brought him there had made him look like an aged man.

When I held out Jeni’s picture, he grabbed at it, his hand almost black with grime, darker than the rest of him; he wore a sock that had been cut open to free his shaking fingers. Before I could say anything he was limping away. I ran after him.

“Have you seen her?” I asked. “Do you remember her face?”

He shook his head and made a moaning sound, lifting his hands to either side of his face, as if to ward off a blow. The look in his eyes is nothing I can describe, nor can I forget. It was the way I felt. It was despair.

And after that I did what I had been avoiding—I went to see the police.

Jeni’s missing-persons report had been filed by the San Fernando Valley Police Department even though she had disappeared here. I was interviewed by Detectives Ryan and Rodriguez then.

Was she the type of girl that would have gone out all by herself or do you think she was meeting someone?

This I did not know. She went everywhere only with me and I wasn’t there.

Was she at all sad or depressed when she went on this trip?

I knew this one: no and no. She was giddy, giggly with excitement, saddened only when I called to say I couldn’t go.

Was there anyone she didn’t get along with?

Not that I knew of.

Would she have dressed differently if she was going to a party or to meet a boy she liked?

No, she didn’t dress up. (I almost said
we
and added
except in our dreams of tulle and faded satin.
)

Did she have a boyfriend that you knew of?

No. And I would have been the one to know.

When was the last time you saw her?

This question made me pause to catch my breath as if the pleasant detectives had punched me in the stomach. They waited patiently and told me to take my time.

It was a sunny afternoon. We’d been talking about boys in my room, filling my scrapbook with cutouts of indie film stars and musicians, planning for the trip up north.

“What did the boys look like?” they detectives had asked when I’d calmed down and I showed them. Spiky hair, eyeliner, piercings, tats.

“Why?” I asked. “Is this relevant?”

“Everything is relevant,” they said.

But that was over a year ago and I wasn’t sure the Berkeley campus police would feel the same way, at least not anymore. I knew there was an officer assigned to the case in Berkeley; Ryan and Rodriguez had given me his card.

I wondered at the time I spoke to them how you keep your compassion at a job like that, how you keep from turning as hard as a bulletproof vest. The losses again and again.

Officer Liu met me a few days later at a coffee shop on Shattuck. He looked so young it was disconcerting. I found myself wishing for the broad builds and lined faces of Rodriguez and Ryan.

“So it’s been over a year now,” Liu said, scowling at some paperwork he’d brought.

I nodded and removed my tea bag from the cup. It made a puddle in my saucer.

“And you’re coming to me now because?”

“I’m at school here,” I said.

He nodded. “It’s been a year,” he repeated.

Those were the words I’d been dreading. Why hadn’t I come here sooner? I thought of myself at home—going to school, running, eating, sleeping—how could I have done anything except look for her?

“We’ve done everything we could. Search parties, investigations. The case is still open, though. We’re always open to new information.”

I nodded and looked at the ovoid of his face, not knowing what to say. My cup rattled in the wet saucer when I set it down and some liquid spilled onto the table. I tried to wipe it up with my napkin.

“Is there anything you can tell me about it?” I asked.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Miss Silverman. Since you’re not immediate family there’s nothing more we can disclose. But rest assured this is being handled by experts. We’ll continue to do all we can.”

He paid for my tea and suggested grief counseling. That was the worst part, somehow; I took it as a sign that he had given up.

*   *   *

So I continued to carry the flyers with me, stapling them to the ragged, splintering wood of telephone poles and plastering them on construction-site walls. As if they would help, as if it wasn’t too late.

*   *   *

When my eighteenth birthday came in October I could literally taste the despair on my tongue like the residue of the pistachio frozen yogurt I had for dinner that night. I’d received a card and a bunch of red and white roses from my parents. They were always giving me flowers; every birthday and holiday I got an oversized bouquet. I loved flowers but a part of me wished my parents would stop, because it made me aware of how no one else had ever even given me a single wildflower (except for Jeni—which made it even worse) but I couldn’t tell them about my ambivalence. Besides, at least I could pretend the flowers were from a boy.

“What are you doing tonight?” my mom asked.

“I’m kind of tired.”

“Do you have a friend to celebrate with? Maybe your roommate?”

Yeah right.
“I might go to this dorm party.” I just wanted to get her to stop asking.

But when we got off the phone I decided I really would go to the party in the lounge in case she asked. Even if it was just to try to wash away the taste in my mouth with some free, cheap gin, and to hand out flyers.

Tommy Leeds was there. I’d overheard Lauren say he played bass in a punk band—not that it was hard to guess. Skinny jeans and old-school platform suede creepers that made him appear taller than he was. His almost metallic hair stood straight up in an electric shock and his eyes were always a little red. The plugs stretching out his earlobes gave me a wincing feeling but I also found myself fascinated by them.

Tommy was in my psych class, where I was sure he would recognize me throughout the pages of the
DSM
(paranoid, schizoid, schizotypal, antisocial, histrionic, avoidant, dependent and obsessive-compulsive) if he even knew I existed. This thought confirmed the paranoia at least.

That night he was with a group of guys dressed just like him. They all looked bored.

“Hey,” I said. “I heard you’re in a band.”

He blinked his red eyes at me. “Yeah.”

“What’s your name? The name?” Lame.

“Intrepid.”

“Cool.” I paused, not intrepid at all. “You’re in my psych class.”

“Aw, yeah. Cool. I hate that class. I keep thinking I have all those disorder thingies.”

I felt better then. “Yeah, me, too! I’m totally paranoid, obsessive-compulsive and dependent.”

“Wow,” he said. “For real?”

I realized I’d blown it. “No. I mean it’s just funny how so much of it kind of feels relevant like Ludkin says.”

“Yeah. Whatever. Everyone’s kind of fucked up. Especially in No Cal, man.”

I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. He smelled like gin, clove cigarettes and hairspray—we were close enough, it was hot enough, for me to tell. Maybe I hadn’t blown it. He’d said everyone was fucked up, especially here. I wanted someone fucked up to kiss me on my birthday, to sting my mouth with alcohol and nicotine. It would make things better; they couldn’t get worse.

“Is it less fucked up where you’re from?” I asked him.

“Yeah. Hollywood all the way, man.”

A bang of blood at my temples reminded me of what I was supposed to be doing here at Berkeley, why I had come. It wasn’t about boys, at least not in that way. Kids from Hollywood High had been on the trip with Jeni.

“You weren’t on a class trip here after junior year, were you?”

He squinted at me with his eyeliner. “Yeah. It sucked. You?”

“No. I had a friend who was.”

An Asian girl with long pigtails, a checkered dress and cartoon-sized platform Mary Janes came up to him from behind and kissed his cheek. He flung his body around, grabbed her.

It was no longer about a kiss. I tapped his shoulder.

“Hey,” I said. “Could I talk to you sometime?”

He frowned. “Dude, kind of busy now.”

“It’s kind of important. Dude.”

The girl made a face as if she’d eaten something rotten and dragged him away.

In my notebook I wrote,
Tommy Leeds, Hollywood High. Berkeley school trip. With Jeni.
As if it meant something. As if it were a sign.

*   *   *

After I left the dorm that night, I went roaming the streets like a little lost cat. I almost wanted to mewl and howl in the cold.

That was when I saw three people walking together, holding hands. They were in costumes and carnival masks—the men in ratty old tuxedos and the woman in a corseted dress made from bits and pieces of lace and velvets. They paused when I passed and I saw their eyes watching me through the masks that looked as if they had been made from tree bark; I felt a chill run through my body, then a wave of heat. It was the most alive I’d felt in a long time, almost as if they had kissed me as they passed, put their hands beneath my clothes. The kiss, the touch that I’d always wanted and hadn’t even known how much I did. I thought of the Baudelaire poem marked by Jeni’s postcard in my book; it evoked the same kind of indescribable enchantment these three people made me feel.

I didn’t want to think about Tommy Leeds anymore and how he had been on the trip with Jeni, maybe seen her, maybe spoken to her. I wanted the world where these three lived. I wanted some kind of escape.

But by this time they were already gone, down the street. I turned back to look at them and one of them, the tallest boy, was looking back, too. Sliding ice lovingly down my shirt with his gaze.

Someone else was watching me, too; I saw that when I turned back around. The giant I’d seen on the first night with my parents. He swung his head back and forth slowly, like a pendulum, his eyes flickering at me from among the rags that swaddled his head.

I went to my room and pushed a chair up in front of the door. As I undressed I caught sight of myself in the mirror. The red and white roses my parents had sent watched me uneasily from a vase on the dresser.

I’d always kind of liked my breasts, since they’d arrived, a little late but with certainty—more than any other part of my body. But my breasts, though smallish, were very round and tilted up nicely, with large areolas. I lifted one arm and pressed two fingers against the soft tissue, feeling for lumps like I’d learned from the pamphlet my mom sent me with a note that read,
My doctor thought you should have this—it is only a precaution.

I heard a key in the lock and the rattling sound of the chair by the door. I dropped my arms to my side and grabbed my shirt, held it to my chest.

“Don’t let me interrupt you,” Lauren said, sweet as pie.

Embarrassed as I was, part of me was relieved I’d been interrupted from my search for tumors; I didn’t want to know.

4. House of Eidolon

I was eighteen and I’d never had sex with anyone; I’d never even kissed a boy yet. I’d kissed one person, though. When we were fifteen, I kissed Jeni.

We were in my room, braiding each other’s hair, filling scrapbooks with photographs, 3-D stickers, pressed flowers and birthday party invitations, listening to Tori Amos, “Bells for Her.” We were discussing boys, what our first kiss would be like. We both had a crush on Brandon James. We liked them dark and brooding—indie, emo types—which was one reason we hadn’t found boyfriends yet; our taste was a little too “champagne” for our school, as Jeni said. But, that night we were talking about Brandon and how we were scared we wouldn’t know how to kiss right if we had the chance. We’d stolen wine from my parents’ liquor cabinet and I took a sip from the bottle and handed it to her and said, “Want to practice?”

It wasn’t the kind of thing I usually did but the music and the wine had gotten to me. And I loved Jeni. There were so many reasons to love her. Her baby dimples, the way she rolled her eyes when I put myself down, slapped my hand, and said, “Oh my god, you shut your face, beautiful!”

That night in my room she giggled, leaned over and tilted her head to the side. She smelled like bubblegum and wine. I pressed my lips to hers. They were so soft, it was like kissing a peony.

If I thought of it, even almost three years later, my lips still buzzed gently with memory.

*   *   *

Now, in the dorm lounge, I took a plastic cup and filled it with punch. Sick, and not the good kind, as in,
awesome-sick
. The cheap liquor under the sugary taste burned my throat but I downed the whole thing anyway. Then I had another. It seemed like everyone had found their group by this time but I stood alone by the large window, looking out at the town below. The streets formed neat rows, a quiet grid of trees and low buildings. I squinted, trying to imagine a girl walking out of the opposite dorm and into those streets. I filled my cup a third time. I hadn’t eaten much dinner and the alcohol raced through my blood but it didn’t make me any braver. And still no one spoke to me. The dormies were dressed up like vampires, clowns, football players, cheerleaders and ghosts. It was Halloween. I didn’t wear a costume. Only jeans, a hoodie and a T-shirt with the name of Jeni’s and my favorite band—Halloween Hotel.