The Elementals (8 page)

10. And blood was blood

I stayed up watching TV in the dorm lounge until dawn, then slept the rest of the weekend, hardly leaving my room except to go the bathroom. My forehead pounded with heat and I shivered under the comforter while my empty stomach churned.

As I was going through my bag I found a joint in there; a present from my friends? I tucked it in my drawer where I couldn’t see it. And the blue silk dress was balled up at the bottom of my hamper so it might seem as if that night had never taken place at all.

When school started again I dragged myself out of bed and went, but I was only half-there. I daydreamed about John, Tania and Perry and at night I hid under my blankets and tentatively touched myself. I hadn’t allowed myself to do this for a long time. But now I did it like a starving person taking her first small bite, thinking of the three people in the house, thinking about what would have happened if I’d stayed that night.

After Jeni was gone I stopped wanting to kiss anyone. I didn’t even want to touch my own body because when I did I saw her face and then I just went cold.

But now, in bed, I touched the tender marks on my abdomen. They were still there, too, proof, like the dress and the joint, that I had been somewhere other than my room, the campus, Telegraph Avenue.

I had meant to ask John Graves about the marks. Why were they still there? I had taken off my clothes in front of Tania and she hadn’t seen them, or pretended not to. I had not spoken. It was like I was a girl from one of the Greek myths. But no one had cut out my tongue except for me; if I spoke I’d be the one to lose.

And what would I have said?
Why did your touch leave a permanent mark?
Would that have upset him, pushed him away? What I wanted from him was something bigger and more final than just his gentle, bruising touch. It was escape from a life of pain into one I didn’t understand but wanted. Theirs.

*   *   *

One day I walked up to the front of my English class to turn in the assignment and I heard some stirring behind me. There was a cramping in the pit of my stomach and I reached back to touch the seat of my jeans. Something sticky on my hands.

Someone snickered. The window was open and a cool breeze raised goose bumps on my arms even though my face was flaming. Melinda Story said softly, “Ariel, would you like to leave early today?”

I went to the ladies’ room and put in a tampon but there was nothing else I could do except walk all the way back to the dorms with my sweatshirt tied around my waist. It was just menstrual blood, something my mom had always told me to be proud of, never ashamed, but it seemed like a revelation of everything that was wrong with me. And blood was blood; it made me think of something frightening that I wanted to keep out of my mind at all costs.

*   *   *

Melinda Story stopped me two days later as I was leaving class.

“How are you doing?”

“Fine,” I said. “Thanks for asking.”

“If you want to talk…”

I shook my head. “I’m okay, thanks.”

She leaned her face closer to mine. “There’s a fairly good counseling center here. If you’d like I can help you find someone.”

“Oh, I’m already going, thanks, though.”

Actually, I’d stopped seeing Ronnie Wang. I wasn’t good at hiding my secrets from her. Every time world hunger or environmental disasters made me weep she got more and more suspicious.

*   *   *

In my psych class, before the final, I was going over the mental disorders and reread the definition of schizotypal.

“Odd beliefs or magical thinking, as well as an inability to maintain close relationships outside of the family.” Hadn’t that been me since Jeni disappeared? I thought about John, Tania and Perry. I wondered if I really was ill—not just an impressionable Psych 101 student; that would have explained everything. I wondered again if the people in the house were real at all. The marks were still there on my abdomen but I’d read about people who thought they were abducted by aliens. They found scars on their shins and arms, on the webbing between their thumbs and first fingers. The marks were real to them but who was to say what was real and how those marks had gotten there? And maybe I’d bought the dress at the used-clothing store on Telegraph. It looked more like a rag now than I had remembered it from that night.

I began to read fairy stories ravenously, as if hidden in their pages I would find some clue as to who these people were. I checked
A Field Guide to the Little People
out of the library and stared at drawings of brownies, elves, fae and shape-shifters as if they were real, as if I might recognize in them some reminder of Tania’s neck, Perry’s smile, John’s eyes. Even though the dark stories made me queasy and gave me shivers, I thought they were better than reality, especially when reality was goblins replicating in my mother’s body and stealing my best friend away without a trace.

Whatever or whomever my new friends were I was better for what had happened. I hardly noticed Lauren anymore; nothing she said bothered me. Light looked more beautiful to me than it ever had. Touching the water in the fountain on Sproul Plaza. Shifting through the leaves of Strawberry Canyon when I ran the trails there. Glittering in a metallic haze. I could smell the seasons changing in the air. The breeze from the bay brought salt and minerals. The homeless people were like trees that had come alive to walk the avenue. Everything sounded more intense, too. Drummers on the street sent their beats through my skin. The bells of the campanile made me see streaks of color in the sky. The poetry Melinda Story read to us in class with her soft voice—John Donne, John Milton, John, John, John (did it mean something that they all shared this name?)—sent chills along my spine and made the finer hairs stand up on the nape of my neck. I wept but even that had a heightened air, in spite of what Ronnie Wang believed, as if my tears were for the sky and earth and sea and stars as much as for myself. The only sense that seemed weaker was taste—the only food I wanted was theirs; theirs the only drink that could slake my thirst. I was changing. I was falling apart. Or maybe I was just discovering who I really was.

11. Things that are there that you can’t see

Christmas was coming and I’d be going home for a few weeks. I wasn’t relieved the way I would have thought I’d be. I wished, for the first time then, that Bean was real, that I could have gone home with her to her imaginary house full of imaginary brothers and dogs and good food that no one would force me to eat but that I could enjoy watching them gorge on. No one would be sick and no one would be too beautiful or too desirable and no one would be missing.

During finals week I shambled around in a daze. The light wasn’t numinous anymore by then; it hurt my eyes. The loud sounds made my ears ring. Every muscle in my body was tight, my jaw clenched like a vise and when I had to take tests I broke out in ice-sweats. The sight or sound of Lauren caused the same reaction. On the streets, I startled easily, thinking someone was watching me. The huge homeless man, especially. I saw him more than I would have liked, lumbering by or rocking back and forth on street corners, head cocked to the side, always looking. At night I lay awake, a vision of him looming above me, flexing his hands. What did it mean?

In my notebook I wrote,
The giant is watching.
Then, when that didn’t help me sleep any better, I called Officer Liu.

“There’s this guy,” I said, when I finally got him on the phone. “This homeless guy. Really tall?”

“Burr Linden.” I could almost see the annoyance on Liu’s face, the way his fingers tapped impatiently on his desk.

“Can you tell me anything about him?”

“Is there a problem?”

“Every time I turn around he’s watching me. On Halloween I think he was following me. He gave me this flyer for a party. And now I see him all the time.”

“Burr’s been on the streets for a few years now. Was a student. Then institutionalized. But he walked and no prior record of anything but vagrancy.”

“Was he ever questioned in connection with…”

Officer Liu cleared his throat. “Miss Silverman, I’ve told you, we’re on top of things. Now, if you have a specific incident to report I’d be happy to assist you, otherwise I think this is a waste of both of our time, frankly.”

*   *   *

No help there. So in order to sleep at night I smoked one hit of the joint I’d hidden in my drawer. I didn’t want to use it up—my only proof of the people in the house besides the marks that were still on my stomach—but it was the only way I could rest. When it was almost gone I put the rim of ragged, burned paper back in my dresser. Their mouths had touched it. Their mouths that could provide me with both pleasure and oblivion.

*   *   *

As soon as the last final was over I got on a plane and flew into the Valley and my parents were there at the airport waiting for me.

My mom looked different; right away I knew why they hadn’t wanted me to come home. She was wearing a scarf tied around her head and she’d lost a lot of weight. Her face looked drawn under the makeup she had on; it was rare to see her made up at all. I tried to smile in spite of how hard it was with the lump clogging my throat.

We hugged and I had to struggle not to pull away first. It hurt too much. If I let myself I’d dissolve in her arms and she was the one who needed comforting now. I couldn’t let her see my tears. I also wished that I wasn’t so thin, that I had some cushioning for her, a soft place.

My dad hardly seemed to register that I was there. I’d never felt that from him in my life. If anything, he’d always been too attentive. We joked that they should have named me Miranda, also from
The Tempest,
Prospero’s daughter, not his sprite. The overprotective, bookish Prospero was a lot like my father. He hugged me stiffly and, picking up my luggage, hurried toward the car. The smog was so thick that the sky just looked like a solid wall of pale gray and if you didn’t know there were hills in the distance you would never have believed it.

It made me wonder about other things that are there, things you can’t see.

*   *   *

My parents did their best. They didn’t bring up anything that might be disturbing to any of us, which meant we didn’t talk much at all about anything of depth. If the conversation got tense, my dad asked how things were going with my therapist and left it at that. But I knew they were trying to make the stay nice for me. We pretended to be happy, pretended that everything was fine. We went to movies, out to eat. My mom even took me shopping at the mall on the day of Christmas Eve.

She wasn’t a shopper; that was what Jeni and I did. We spent hours at that mall, seeking clues on how to look cute from the mannequins in the windows and the girls parading around. We sprayed each other with expensive perfume at the makeup counter and ate ice cream and saw movies. We loved being in that enclosed, magical world where it was always daylight, mirrors flashing, it was always sweet-smelling, like sugar and candy and the musks and ambers and roses, jasmines, gardenias of the perfumes. We joked about hiding away in a department store one night and playing there until morning like newlyweds in an enchanted mansion.

When my dad dropped me and my mom off I remembered one reason I preferred going to the mall with Jeni: my mother wasn’t the most discriminating shopping partner. She just told me everything looked great; she loved me too much to really see. Jeni loved me that much as well but she would have gently made suggestions about the most flattering colors and styles.

Tania would have also told me the truth about how I looked, though not as kindly, but she was far away in Berkeley, with Perry Manners and John Graves. More and more, I wanted to be back there. I wanted a taste of that drink again and to feel the way I had when I danced in their parlor with the night swirling around us outside. In my fantasy we were dancing and drinking their brew. They led me outside into the garden and we took off our clothing and rolled in the soft earth, then splashed each other with water from a fountain. We shivered under the moon, still dancing, still drinking. The moon shone through the branches of the trees, patterning the uncut grass with a lattice of shadows. Back inside the house the fire was burning in the fireplace. It heated our chilled, delighted bodies as we lay tangled in front of it and finally slept.

“Ariel?”

A touch on my shoulder pulled me out of my reverie. Anxious eyes watched me from a freckled face. Katie Leiman?

Katie was one of the girls who had gone on the class trip to Berkeley. In fact, she had been Jeni’s roommate on the trip. She had gone to sleep next to Jeni and when she woke in the morning, Jeni and her Hello Kitty purse were gone.

I had gone to see Katie right after we found out. She hadn’t wanted to talk to me. She sat huddled on the edge of her bed with her arms crossed on her chest.

“There’s nothing to tell anymore,” she said gruffly. “I already talked to the cops.”

I realized, then, with a sick feeling in my stomach, that I was actually jealous of her for being the last known person to have seen my Jeni that night. Jeni, who would never have snuck out without me.

Katie had wanted me to stop asking questions and leave and in a way I was glad. I couldn’t look at her.

She never spoke to me at school after that, only eyed me warily like a frightened animal. I thought of a little possum that my dad ran over once. I saw its little snout turned up in fear, its eyes aglitter, before I screamed and the car passed over and it was too late.

Katie went to USC instead of Berkeley. As far as I knew, every kid who had gone on that trip had decided to go to a different school after all.

“How are you?” I asked.

She shrugged. “Okay. You?”

I forced a nod.

“Hey,” she said, glancing nervously back at her friends, who stood chatting obliviously in line at the food court, armed with shiny shopping bags. “I’ve been thinking about things. I wanted to talk to you. Can we talk?”

We exchanged numbers and before I could ask her any more, her friends called to her, leaving me wondering what Katie Leiman had to tell me after all this time. The three girls threw their arms around each other’s shoulders and wandered away.