The View from the Top (15 page)

“Funny how that can happen.” This was exactly why Mary-Tyler's relationships never worked out. If you could even call them relationships; none of them ever lasted more than a month. There was always
something
that got under her skin.

“But that all seems so superficial, and that's not me.”

Mary-Tyler knew what she meant. For her, those little things always seemed to be warning signs pointing to a bigger problem. “Well, maybe there's more to it than that,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe. I guess there is something else. Something that's been bothering me about him, but it makes me feel bad to admit.”

“What's that?”

“Well, last night we were talking about the future and stuff. And I just ... I realized he's really never going anywhere. I mean, I knew he was planning on staying here, going to Normal Community, living with his mom, working the same job he's had the last couple years over at the bike shop. I knew all that. But somehow I'd convinced myself it was just temporary. That he wanted more.” The sand above her chest rose and fell. “It's just so depressing,” she said, getting a little teary. “He's got big dreams. Big ideas about things that nobody else I know ever thinks about. But he's never going to do anything about them. I just imagine myself coming home from college and I would've changed so much and he'd be exactly the same.”

“Ooh, I know exactly what you mean. He's like those guys who are the epitome of cool until they start showing up at high school parties after they graduate.”

“Exactly!” Anabelle said, cry-laughing. “He is totally going to turn into that guy.” Her eyelashes were wet and clumped together as if she were wearing mascara. “But it's really bumming me out. Because now I'm feeling like I broke up with my boyfriend for nothing.” Her voice sounded like it had been flattened under a house. Like it was the Wicked Witch of the East.

“Well, shit, that sucks,” Mary-Tyler said, trying hard to fight back her envy. It was clear Anabelle had had something special with this boyfriend of hers. She'd found something that Mary-Tyler longed for but never experienced, something that she wasn't even sure was possible between two people.
This is about Anabelle,
she reminded herself,
not you.
“Do you want to talk about it more?” she asked. “Or be distracted?” This was Mary-Tyler's standard question when people told her their problems.

“Um, distract me,” Anabelle said, sounding pleasantly surprised to have that as an option.

Okay, now she had to think of something. Something to make herself sound appealing. And definitely not rich. Mary-Tyler was drawing a blank.
Just say the first thing that comes to your mind,
she thought.

The waves roared, then crashed and sizzled just inches from where Mary-Tyler figured her feet were. She imagined each wave as a hand grasping at her body, trying to drag her out to sea. Right now they were still too far away to reach her, but not for long. Anabelle would be dragged off, too. It was kind of a romantic idea—two sad girls disappearing mysteriously into the sad, sad sea.

Jeez, snap out of it
, Mary-Tyler told herself. There was no need to suck this innocent girl into one of her screwed-up death fantasies.

Mary-Tyler shut her eyes. She tried to picture the shape her body was making in the sand and wondered if there would be a way to make a cast of herself like this sometime—maybe in plaster?—like with the ruins at Pompeii. There, that was it. “You know what this reminds me of?” she asked Anabelle.

“What?”

“Have you ever seen pictures of the people who died by Mount Vesuvius?”

“You mean those people who turned to stone or something?”

“Yeah, kinda,” Mary-Tyler said. “They were buried in ash from a volcano and over time the ash hollowed out in the shapes of their bodies. And then, like sixteen, seventeen centuries?—a hell of a long time later—this guy came up with an idea to fill in the empty spaces with plaster. So now you can see them in the positions that they were buried in.”

“Oh. Yeah, I know what you're talking about. That's pretty creepy.”

“But it's also really beautiful. They're, like, the perfect sculptures.”

“Are you into sculpture?” Anabelle asked with a side-long glance. She sounded disgusted, as if Mary-Tyler had just told her she liked to eat cockroaches.

“Yeah. It's what I spend most of my time doing back home. Why? You seem disappointed.”

“It's just, well, my ex? He's an artist. Paints, writes poetry. And sculpts.”

Great,
Mary-Tyler thought.
You had to go and pick exactly the topic she didn't want to talk about.

“This is kinda embarrassing. I'm not even sure why I'm telling you.” Anabelle shrugged and her shoulder poked through the sand. “Anyway ... I went to his house today. To, like, try to get back together.”

“But he didn't want to?”

“You could say that. I found him building this clay bust of me. The mouth was stuffed, all gagged up with papers. Turns out they were hate poems he'd written for me.”

“Asshole,” Mary-Tyler said, guiltily satisfied. Anabelle hadn't found something special with this guy; she only thought she had.

“Yeah, I know. But it's my own fault. I should've never dumped him. Now I don't have him or the badass guy.”

“Maybe it's not a choice between the two of them. Maybe there's a third choice. Or a fourth or a fifth. Or maybe it's not about having a guy right now. Maybe it's just about having friends.”

“Maybe. But in the middle of all this mess—I'm not sure how, exactly—I managed to lose my closest girl friend, too. I've got nobody.”

“Hey
^!
” Mary-Tyler said, sticking her neck out at Anabelle. “You have me!”

Anabelle turned toward Mary-Tyler, unconvinced. “We just met.”

“How long does it take?”

“I don't know. But you're leaving in a few days, you said.”

“So I guess we'll have to make the most of it.”

Anabelle squinted. “Why do you want to be my friend so bad?”

“Because I'm sick of not having any friends here either, and you seem nice.” Mary-Tyler remembered how Anabelle had snapped at her before. “Well, maybe nice isn't the right word. Interesting.”

“I'll take interesting,” Anabelle said, cracking a smile.

“Most people would call me nice or good. I'm pretty tired of being thought of that way.”

“Well, to me you're interesting.”

“What's so interesting about me?”

“When I met you, you were just a head in the sand. You're still a head in the sand.”

“That's true.” Anabelle giggled. “You have no idea what I look like down there. I could have the body of a fish.”

“You mean, like a mermaid?”

“No, an actual fish.”

“That would be rad. I mean,
cool.
Or
groovy. Wicked.

Whatever the hell you locals say around here.” Mary-Tyler pictured Anabelle's head on top of a mass of shimmery scales with fins and gills. ”I guess there are no secrets with what I look like. You saw me get in. In all of my jiggling glory.” As Mary-Tyler said it, she knew it was a weirdly aggressive thing to say. She hated when girls complained about their weight, and didn't like for other people to know she had body issues.
Please don't tell me I'm not fat,
she thought, bracing herself for Anabelle's response.
It'll just make me feel worse
.

Suddenly it felt as if someone had thrown ice cubes against Mary-Tyler's big toes. She looked up to see that the water had exposed them with their chipping black polish, like little sand creatures burrowing for food. She watched the waves lapping their way up the slope. How many more would it take for her whole body to feel encased in ice? Maybe just one big one.

Anabelle finally spoke. “Tell me more about those ash people,” she said. “About how they're the perfect sculptures.”

“Oh, right.” Mary-Tyler was caught off guard, not only because Anabelle hadn't said anything about that weight comment but because she'd actually been paying attention. At school, kids basically saw Mary-Tyler as a receptacle for gut-spilling. They
never
asked her questions. Maybe this actually was the start of an honest-to-God friendship. “They're perfect sculptures,” she explained to Anabelle, “because they're so natural. There's no stupid forced pose or facial expression. They're just
reacting.”
Mary-Tyler tried not to wince as another freezing-cold wave encapsulated her foot. “I've always wondered what pose I'd be in if I were caught in a volcano.”

“Or caught in the sand at the beach?” Anabelle gestured at their hidden bodies with her head.

“Yeah, well, that's what was making me think of it! Because if we could figure out a way of getting out of here without disrupting the sand, we'd have perfect molds of our bodies at this moment.”

“Would that be
rad
or what?” Anabelle laughed. It was a deep laugh, reaching way down past her vocal cords and into her chest. Way too deep for the small girl that suddenly came bursting out of her sand grave and jumped around in the foamy surf.

The girls decided to get dinner over at the seafood shack on the boardwalk. Anabelle was the only one with money since she'd been wearing actual clothes with pockets, so she bought them a bag of lobster bodies—the cheapest thing on the menu. They sat across from each other at one of the patio picnic tables, watching as people packed up their beach gear over on the sand.

Mary-Tyler had no clue what to do with a lobster that was missing its claws and tail, but she tried to play it cool and pretend like she was a lobster aficionado. It didn't really matter, though. Anabelle wasn't paying one shred of attention to Mary-Tyler; her head seemed to be somewhere else entirely as she tore into her first lobster body. After cracking the thing in half, she started scooping out tiny bits of meat with her fingers. She looked like a predatory bird dismantling its prey. And she didn't even seem grossed out by the green stuff that was dripping onto her plate.

Mary-Tyler eyed her lobster bib and shell crackers, tools she'd become accustomed to using when eating lobster. She didn't like the idea of breaking this creature's chest open with her bare hands—it felt a little like surgery. And not just surgery, but malpractice. But to use the crackers felt a little like eating with a fork at a Chinese restaurant.

Okay, she
thought.
Just do it and get it over with
. She cupped the smooth bright orange body in her palms and lined her fingers up against the slit down the middle, just like Anabelle had, and gave it one big snap. Warm lobster juice ran down her wrists. She dropped the open body on her plate and stared at its insides, completely oblivious as to where to find sustenance in this thing.

Anabelle was picking off the legs methodically one at a time, giving them a single twist at their bottom joint. Mary-Tyler couldn't imagine doing that to her lobster; it looked too violent, like an ancient torture method or something. Yes, she knew the thing was dead. But still.

Anabelle finally broke out of her lobster-dismantling trance. “I've been doing something really bad,” she said without looking up.

The statement startled Mary-Tyler. Anabelle had said it with such gravity that it made her wonder if Anabelle also fantasized about dying. “What do you mean?” she asked, realizing she was hoping Anabelle was suicidal, which was a really weird thing to hope about someone. Especially someone you liked.

Anabelle slowly sucked the meat out of one of her legs. “I can't talk about it.”

“C'mon. No, you have to. You must've wanted to tell me if you brought it up.”

“Sometimes when I think too much...” There was a clicking sound in Anabelle's throat and then a loud sigh. “I hurt myself,” she whispered.

“Wait, what do you mean?” Mary-Tyler asked quietly.

“It's different at different times. But, like, today I was punching a brick wall.”

Mary-Tyler looked at Anabelle's hands. Her knuckles were covered in tiny scrapes.

“Sometimes when there's nothing else to hit, I hit myself. I know, it's awful. But I get some sort of perverse pleasure out of doing it. Or, I don't know, it makes me feel worse. And somehow I actually like making myself feel worse. Sounds ...” She looked up, as if searching for the right word. “Fucked up, doesn't it?”

“No, no, I get it,” Mary-Tyler said. “I'm that way, too.” Her heart pounded furiously with the knowledge that she was about to reveal a secret—about her disturbing thoughts, about the incident this morning in the pool.