The Fallback Plan (17 page)

There were cicada husks, dozens and dozens of brown gossamer shells, spread across the bottom of the drawer, thick as carpet. My skin reacted as if brushed by a cold wind.

May stared at me with her wide doll eyes. “Wow!” I finally said. “You got a lot!” She nodded, pulled a polka-dotted diaper bag out from underneath her bed, and began to put handfuls of husks inside it.
They’re dead
, I told myself.
They’re just dead bugs
. But still I felt sick, waiting for one of them to reanimate.

“Come on,” she said, hoisting the bag over her shoulder. “We have to bury them.”

I followed her downstairs, the bag dragging one stair
behind as she took single step after single step, her left hand clutching the railing for guidance.

“Can I help you carry the bag?”

“No,” she said. The gravity in her voice, the fact that she wouldn’t let me help her, and the grim nature of our objective, made me feel like I was witnessing May’s transformation into a stranger. Like a tiny adult had come from the future to replace the little girl I had known.

• • •

The dramatic shift I saw in May, from playful to grave, reminded me of a shift of my own, although mine had been much later, when I was thirteen. I could pinpoint it—that same still seriousness, the watchfulness in the eyes—to the night of Kelly VonderHeide’s thirteenth birthday party.

That night, Mr. and Mrs. V. had pitched a camping tent in the backyard for us. They left some frozen pizzas and a rented VHS tape of
It
on the kitchen counter, and then went to a wedding anniversary party a few blocks away.

I didn’t tell my parents we’d be alone, or else they wouldn’t have let me come.

Kelly lived in the unincorporated part of town, where every house was a variation on a split-level ranch, and residents didn’t have the luxury of sidewalks or a regular police presence. At night, the streets hummed with the sounds of
sparse traffic along the highway overpass, and the laughter of stoned teenagers on exodus to the 7–11 en masse.

Inside the tent, the air smelled like our skin and the bubble gum in our mouths, like cheap baby powder perfume, like five girls on the verge of getting their illicit questions answered.

Summer sat with a bag of Twizzlers in her lap. A Real McCoy tape played from Kelly’s boombox. I hugged my knees and stared at Angela, the new girl, who no one had ever seen wear pants (she wore shorts to gym class, under her long skirt), waiting to see if she’d do something weird and remarkable. Angela fascinated us. We’d convinced each other that her parents were members of a religious cult, and invited her to sit at our lunch table to find out more. But Angela was shy, and adept at dodging our curiosity. Whenever we begged to know why we weren’t allowed to see her knees, she’d blush and shake her head, distract us with offers to share her Capri Sun.

But it was Kelly’s cousin Julia, two years our senior, who was the first one to do something weird and remarkable. Angela and I watched her unpack the cans of Miller Lite and minibar-size bottles of whiskey she’d carried in her overnight bag. Her hair was dark and thick like mine; her skin shiny and porous. It was Julia’s idea that we play Truth or Dare.

“You first,” Julia said, looking at me. “What’s your name again?”

I felt like a deer in headlights, but worse—I was myself in headlights, about to be run over. What was in my overnight bag? A t-shirt to sleep in and a tube of Clearasil.

“Esther,” I said.

“CHESTER?”

“ES-THER.”

“I’ve never heard of that name.”

“She’s Jewish,” Summer said with a smirk, which made me want to hit her, one hit for each time she had come over for Hanukkah dinner, one hit for each latke eaten.

“Esther,”
Julia repeated, “truth? Or dare?”

“Truth.”

She looked ready. “Who do you think about when you masturbate?”

The truth was there was no way to answer in a way that wasn’t self-incriminating. The truth was I thought of Mr. Hanson, our seventh grade social studies teacher.

Mr. Hanson was a Monty Python fan, which gave him the chance to explain, among other things, the Spanish Inquisition. To my parents, when they asked if my bed was made, I’d begun replying, “Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” And I felt that as far as trauma went, Truth or Dare was on par with waterboarding. At that moment, I would have rather been a heretic, had someone put a rag in my mouth and pour the water in, than answer the question.

“I bet Angela thinks about Annie Casterman,” Summer said, holding a piece of licorice between her teeth
like a cigarette, and snickered. Annie Casterman was a chubby redhead who ate carrot sticks and rice cakes at lunch, which confused us, and led us to believe she went home every day and ate six hundred cookies. “I bet her tits are uneven.”

Angela was so quiet I’d almost forgotten she was sitting next to me. Her face flushed beneath her freckles.

“My dad’s friend Mike,” I lied. “Michael. Mike.”

Kelly squealed. “What does he look like?”

“He’s, like, tall and stuff. He plays the guitar.”

“That’s a lie. She probably thinks about Mr. Hanson,” Summer said. Another hit. We weren’t friends anymore. I didn’t even care that her parents were divorced. I wanted to throw her down a well.

Everyone laughed and clapped their hands. Julia closed her eyes and moaned his name like a porn star. Even Angela giggled, and it was the first sound she’d made all evening. She was wearing socks with ruffles at the top. There was something about her innocence, her inexplicably enforced modesty, that made me want to throw her in front of the headlights next and save myself.

“Your turn,” I told her, hoping my voice sounded as snide as Summer’s. “Truth or dare.”

I think everyone was surprised when she said, “Dare.”

I dared her to go skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool.

• • •

I followed May downstairs and outside, through the tall grass that had grown thick and green after the rainfall. She led me to a patch of dirt in the back, which was partially hidden by some overgrown tree branches. A row of Popsicle sticks marked the spot.

May took a plastic disposable knife out of the diaper bag and began to saw at the earth. When she had made a little hole, she put a cicada inside and gently covered it with dirt. She stuck a new Popsicle stick at the head of the grave.

“You go,” she said.

I buried the next one.

She buried the one after that.

We buried rows and rows of bugs.

Then we stood and brushed the dirt off our knees.

“We made them cozy so they can be sleeping,” May said, staring at the ground.

• • •

Kelly’s backyard was enclosed by a chain-link fence. All the lights in the house next door were out, and the pool water was black and still in the darkness. The sounds of traffic were far away in the night.

“What if I don’t want to? What if they see me?” Angela said. She was no longer laughing, and her soft chin trembled. I thought she might run inside and call her parents to
come get her, but maybe she saw this as a final initiation. If she did it, we’d be her friends for life.

“No one’s even home,” Kelly told her.

“Just do it and get it over with,” Summer said.

“Just do it,”
Julia repeated, and started jogging in place in slow motion. We all giggled. I squeezed my eyes shut and drank the beer Summer had handed me like a peace offering.

Angela went to the darkest corner of the yard and turned her back to us. With her head down, she unbuttoned her dress.
It’s her fault she said dare
, I told myself. After the dress was off, she folded it into a neat square and laid it in the grass. She took off her socks. Her legs were pale and doughy at the top, like a baby’s.

Then she started to climb the fence.

“Wait,”
Julia said, running to her. She grabbed Angela’s arm and made her come back down. “That’s not naked.”

“I was going to take the rest off over there.”

“That’s cheating,” Kelly said.

“I wasn’t cheating.”

A dog barked in the distance. It made the hair stand on my arms. “You have to take everything off,” Julia said, “right now, in front of us.” I looked at Summer. She was drinking and making circles in the grass with her toes. Kelly was watching Julia. Julia was watching Angela. Angela wasn’t looking at any of us. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand and then shimmied out of her underwear.

“And your bra,” Julia said.

We all watched. We tried not to watch. We wanted to watch. We watched. Angela was crying inaudibly. The bra came off. Her breasts were bigger than ours, but not perfect and high like the ones on the women in the posters in our brothers’ rooms, in our fathers’ magazines; Angela’s were soft and uneven like our mothers’. She wiped her nose again, on her bare arm. I felt the circle closing in around her and knew I was part of it. The game was changing. Angela stood frozen like a statue, as if waiting for us to forget she was there.

Julia said, “Hold her arms.”

None of us moved.

“Kelly,
hold her arms
.”

Angela looked up at us, but still didn’t move. Her arms were crossed over her chest. Julia waited until Kelly was behind her, holding her, and then she said, “I’ll be right back.”

While we waited, I hoped a serial killer would target this birthday party and kill all of us, so our parents wouldn’t ever know what we had done. They’d think the killer had made Angela strip and stand in the center of our circle. They’d think we were the victims.

“Stop crying,” Summer said. “It’s okay.”

“Yeah, it’s just a game,” Kelly said.

We heard Julia’s footsteps in the grass as she approached. “Everyone move out of the way except Angela,” she called
out. We obeyed. I ran back to the tent. I could have kept running, into the street and home, but for whatever reason I stayed, and watched from a distance. It was my fault this was happening. Angela uncrossed her arms and put her face in her hands as Julia turned on the hose and sprayed her with water, first in the head, then in the torso, then her legs, her hands, the side of her head again, aiming for whatever wasn’t covered, punishing; Angela crouched down into a ball, but Julia just moved closer and closer with the water. “You’re swimming,” I thought I heard Julia say. Angela’s pale skin rippled beneath the force of the spray. Julia held the hose with both hands like a pistol. We watched her get closer; we saw Angela’s tiny hands try to cover her body as she choked on the water, and I couldn’t think of any prayers, not a single one, so I just closed my eyes and recited the Preamble to the Constitution in my mind,
we the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union
, until the neighbors turned on their lights and came outside, because they’d heard all of us screaming.

• • •

After we’d buried the dead, I put my arms out, and May let me lift her.

She laid her cheek against my shoulder and put a thumb in her mouth. I’d fallen in love with this little person because she seemed so untouched and unspoiled, still
small enough to hold. I’d thought I could preserve her childhood by being there beside her, protecting her from harm, giving her the bliss of ignorance, innocence, safety.

But holding her then, in the yard, beneath a sunny sky of racing clouds, I saw I was deceiving myself. I was the one who wanted to regress to some Eden, claim a second childhood by using May as my ticket. I wanted to travel back in time, to before Kelly’s party, and relive the precious ordinariness of all those days I never knew I would miss. I wanted to trade this life for that one.

The simple innocence of my childhood was over and so was May’s, and it wasn’t fair. I wanted to give May’s back to her, and it made me feel sick that I couldn’t. Unlike what had happened at Kelly’s party, Annika’s death was inexplicable, a tragedy without a villain. Like a fire, it had burned May’s entire family. No one could say it had left May untouched because she was too young to even understand, because there we were, standing above our little graveyard.

I shaded my eyes with one hand and looked up to the attic window, to see if Amy was watching us, but I couldn’t tell; the glare of the light prevented me from seeing anything but the peak of the roof, the cable dish, the strange omniscient sky above.

That evening, when I got back home, back to that limbo, I was rocked by a headache that obliterated any rational thought. A heavy fatigue kidnapped my body. I felt too weak to look for aspirin. I just lay on my bed and went over all the roles I’d been cast in.
I can’t do this anymore
, I thought.
Be the confidante, the mistress, the gravedigger, the daughter
. When I closed my eyes, I saw Emily in her white dress. I saw Alice, as illustrated in Wonderland, drowning in her tears, mistaking a mouse for a walrus or a hippopotamus.
Oh, Charles Dodgson! He knew what life is all about
, I thought.
Drowning and mistaking mice for hippos
.

I wanted to talk to someone without actually having to talk to anyone, so I signed into Facebook.

Ximong
is being John Malkovich!

Melissa
is work 10–6, class 7–9, drinkssssssss!

Tierney
is coup de foudre.

Django
is a reptilian humanoid.

Oh, Django—I forgot about him all the time. Not that he was so forgettable, but I remembered him as Bernie Boggs, which was the name he’d had when he transferred to my school in third grade. He looked like his name. Like a round, furry creature from the swamp. My friend Sharon
said Bernie smelled like egg salad, but I doubt she ever got close enough to find out. If any of the girls had to sit next to him in class, or be his badminton partner, we would make a big show of moving our bodies as far out of his sphere of influence as possible.

In high school, he finally grew taller and thinned out, and his single mother remarried, so he was able to legally change his name when his stepfather adopted him. Bernie Boggs became Django Davis, and choosing a slightly handicapped, Gypsy jazz guitarist for inspiration probably saved his life. He grew some facial hair and started dating a girl who wore leopard print pants. After graduation, he joined the army.