Brutes, p.4
Brutes, page 4
‘Shit, my mom’s gonna see yours at the audition!’
‘Shit!’
They giggle.
Mia wriggles her sunglasses. ‘They’re still having the audition today?’ she says. ‘Are you kidding me?’ She looks at Eddie, who shrugs.
The girl with the gum smiles. ‘Sure,’ she says. ‘Didn’t your mom tell you? Or Stone?—’
Mia rolls her eyes. She holds up the pink lighter and flicks it absently.
‘Get out of here if you want to go,’ she says. ‘No one’s stopping you.’
The girls stop laughing.
‘Go already!’ Mia shouts. A few birds rise up from the trees and we shiver. The girls run off the court, struggling to shove open the rusted wire gate. Mia laughs. They finally get the gate open and scatter toward the highway and the search party, the air wet with their retreating whines.
‘Why does she always have to be so mean?’
‘She’s literally crazy!’
Mia moves over to Eddie. She lifts the long nail again. We suddenly all want one. Britney’s dad used to keep his thumbnail extra long to pick his teeth, but now we see one long nail can be beautiful. Before she can touch Eddie’s skin, so soft-looking we swear her nail will cut through it like a knife through a birthday cake, he moves his head away from her.
‘Don’t,’ he says. He pulls up his shorts.
Mia smiles. Her smile is the scariest thing about her. We remember that when she first arrived with her mom, her mouth was so crowded with teeth it looked like she had two sets growing at once. She had four snaggleteeth, a crossed quartet at the front. We waited for the day she would get braces and be ruined, become like the rest of us. But the rumour was she’d refused braces so intently that she had even bitten Dr Grossman’s hand when he tried to force in the mould. Her mother was so frustrated she wasn’t getting call-backs for photo shoots that it was said she took her to Mexico to fit her for a full set of veneers. Her teeth were perfect when they got back, if slightly too large.
They leave. It is only when they pass the dock that we dare to uncurl ourselves from behind the bougainvillaea bushes, drop down from the banyan like the iguanas in winter when it gets too cold and they freeze. We do not say anything to each other. We cannot admit we are scared, so there is nothing to say. We creep back to the search party and hide among our mothers. We wonder what Mia knows. We feel she wants something from us, a secret, and that she will not be afraid to reach right inside of us to wrench it free.
4
Eddie and Mia were the first couple we ever knew, unless you count our parents, which we do not. It was rumoured that Mia was the one to ask him out, plucking him out of the cafeteria wilderness with a scrunched note, do you like me? Two lop-sided boxes, marked yes and no. He must have checked yes, which we can imagine because Eddie likes everybody and everybody likes Eddie. Some of us even love him. We love him because he is beautiful and we believe in some ways that he belongs to us.
He lives in a top-floor apartment in A block, with his mom, grandma, Andreas and Christian. They moved from Venezuela before Eddie was born. We never see their grandma leave the apartment except on New Year’s Eve when they all march down the three flights of stairs, dragging suitcases. They sit on the curb with the rest of us to watch the theme park fireworks across the lake. Then they take the bags back upstairs. Christian says it is meant to ensure escape and travel for the new year. We have never seen them go anywhere but we do not say this, we understand because being gone is our only wish, we could not say where to, only that we will be happier there than here.
Andreas is a few years older than Eddie and looks just like him, lean and tan and white-toothed, with the kind of frothy hair we dream of lowering our faces into, like whipped cream on top of a pie. By the time he was thirteen, he was bringing girls back to their shared bedroom in the creases of summer afternoons, the door obediently propped open with textbooks. Their living room was always full of our mothers, drinking coffee until they could drink wine, and they took turns to enter the bedroom every ten minutes or so, the frequency depending on whether the girl wore a cross and whether they knew her mother. It meant that Eddie and Christian were left with nowhere to go, with a kitchen full of mothers and a bedroom full of love, and so we opened our doors and let them spread on our couches, taking careful turns on where we sat, measuring the distance between all our legs and how many times we touched knees. They obediently watched the shows we liked, where women played out versions of our lives with more drug use and pregnancy, slammed doors and tongue piercings, where the couple we rooted for always took the longest, most excruciating time to kiss. Eddie always stayed a boy but Christian became a girl and now he is one of us.
And then Mia stole Eddie away from us. She wrote him the note and took him. After that, he never looked at us anymore.
We watched them eating lunch together, Mia and Eddie and Sammy. It was only ever the three of them, they did not seem to need anyone else. In the chaos of the cafeteria, they stayed still and separate, like film stars sitting among a thousand extras. They took small bites and spoke in whispers. We took notes on where they sat at their table as we blotted the grease from our pizza slices. Outside of school, it was difficult for us to see them in real life. They went to the Falls Landing pool to swim and stopped using ours. They took classes at Star Search on the days we were not allowed in the lot. We watched Eddie’s nightly video blog for glimpses. We dissected it religiously. He uploaded photos from throughout the day, then filmed himself in his bedroom late at night. The light of the family laptop threw a radioactive glow over his gorgeous face. He talked for a little while, telling stories we listened to with such intensity that we found it hard to remember afterward what he had said. The best part was when, eyes glazed, he leaned back on his pillow to deliver his signature line into the camera, ‘Good night, sleepy heads.’ We left the link live, closing our eyes and listening to the hum of our mothers’ computers, sometimes even putting our lips to the hot screens, like he could be contained there in the static, the carefully placed pixels. We hated Mia for taking him away. And we loved Sammy, because she had not been chosen. So we chose her.
And then Sammy appeared on the wall, alone.
It was the first day of summer. We were sitting on the dock, cross-legged, making a wall of our bodies so one of us could focus the binoculars on the construction site, where Eddie and his friends were smoking weed. The light draped us in our best shades, pastel orange, pink, soft blue. Even the lake shimmered, and seemed to stink less than usual, with just a hint of dumped fertiliser. We felt we could feel every breath of the boys in our lungs, and we sucked in the air like we were starved for it.
‘Sammy’s on the wall,’ said Christian. We all forgot to pretend we weren’t watching and whipped our heads around.
Sammy sat on top of the wall, her legs dangling over the edge. She wore a matching pyjama set, pink and yellow, with a heart patch on the left side of her chest. We watched Eddie’s boys rubbing their heads and yelling. We each took a turn with the binoculars, zoomed in to see Sammy’s bare face, her braces, as she leaned back her head and released ball after ball of spit. We could trace the arc of the spit, how white and waxy it was. Every time another one hit a target, she laughed, covering her mouth. The other boys ran, but Eddie stayed.
He stood still. He stared at her like we did and she stopped spitting. And the next night, they were both back, looking at each other in the same still way. For a few days, they seemed to look at each other more than they talked, but every night they were there again, waiting, and soon they grew louder. He shouted up to her, he gestured wildly in a way we never saw him move at school, on his blog, in the slow, languorous poses he adopted with Mia. He paced and shouted and clutched his heart. He jumped up the wall toward Sammy’s sneaker as though he thought he could reach her through sheer will. She talked, too, silent Sammy, her mouth moving fast. She wriggled with excitement and sometimes threw her head back to the sky like she was about to howl. All the cool quietness we so coveted was gone, but they were as mysterious as ever in this mania, this passion, this unashamed care.
We were shocked.
When we spoke about them, we whispered.
We looked at photos of the three of them on Eddie’s blog, along with everyone else at school. Then we watched the two of them at night. We looked for signs. Our hearts divided. We were moral girls and we did not believe in infidelity. We thought Eddie was beautiful, simple and good, like a flower. We never expected his heart to beat in time with our own affections.
Two weeks before Sammy went missing, Eddie went to Britney’s apartment. Britney sat frozen on the couch, listening as he asked her mom if he could borrow her boyfriend’s ladder, locked up in the bed of his truck below. Britney’s mom said she wasn’t sure, but Britney stood up, rustled around in the boyfriend’s jacket, pulled the key from the ring and, not able to look at Eddie, pressed it into his hand.
‘Britney!’ said her mom, but Eddie was already gone.
We huddled together on the dock that night. We had brought snacks but we were too nervous to eat them. We watched Eddie struggle across the construction site, the ladder precarious on his shoulder. Our hearts hummed together. We felt that we were Eddie, we could sense every lean muscle, every taut nerve ending. We knew it was the first time he’d ever questioned how beautiful he was, or if this beauty was enough, and we questioned it, too, felt the logic of the world hover as though deciding where to fall. The sun shifted over the moon and flooded the construction site with romantic, reddish light. When Sammy appeared, pulling herself over the wall gracefully as a girl rising out of a pool in a movie, she saw the ladder and, before we even had time to let go of our breath, confirmed all we had ever suspected of love. She flung herself down the ladder and collapsed into Eddie’s arms. They fell all over each other like two tongues trying to tie up a cherry stem.
We lowered the binoculars. We flickered our eyes around. We felt embarrassed. We did not know what to say.
After that night, we did not meet again on the dock. We wanted to keep our admiration hidden, our love safe and unexposed. We gathered in one of our bedrooms to watch, and we made sure the door was locked. We took turns with the binoculars. We watched from the minute Sammy flew down the ladder, how she and Eddie held hands and scuttled into the show home. We watched their shadowy routine. Our binoculars glinted as the sky darkened, the lenses catching the security lights as our mothers moved between each other’s apartments. We imagined the Morse code of light in our single window. We wondered if Sammy and Eddie ever saw it, if they wondered what it meant, a message we did not understand but could not stop sending, like a love letter no one would get.
5
When we get back to the construction site, the sun is high and the beer has run out. Kids drop ice cubes down each other’s backs. The church women are covered in dirt from their efforts, and the dirt mixes up with sweat, sticky on their skin. We feel itchy with nerves. Leila screams because she finds a caterpillar crawling up her neck, a white caterpillar with red feet. It bites her and all her hairs stand on end. She is mad at us because she thinks one of us put it there, and Britney probably did. She sits on the top step of the show home with a cigarette and does not offer to share.
Britney pretends not to notice and starts playing a band we love on her phone. She dances around in a circle by herself. We can’t get too close to her, because she likes to hit people in her orbit, and she keeps her hands in fists.
We stay just beyond her reach and play our favourite game, where we compete over what we would do for the love of someone in the band. We have our favourites but we would take any of them. We are honest that way.
‘I’d let him bite my thumb off,’ says Hazel.
‘I’d let him run me over with a garbage truck,’ says Christian.
‘Set me on fire and bury me,’ says Britney.
Leila hears us.
‘Garbage truck!’ she yells. Leila always decides the winner. We creep up and curl around her feet. Christian sits between her legs and she strokes his hair.
‘Let’s play the girls,’ she says. We all have our favourite character, Mia or Sammy. Leila does the best Mia. Christian does the best Sammy.
‘This town is dead as roadkill,’ he says.
‘We’re gonna nail the audition,’ says Leila.
‘I can’t wait to get to LA,’ says Christian.
Leila raises her phone and we squeeze in, cocking our heads and pursing our lips, shifting our hips to one side. We are careful to not meet the camera’s exact eye so we do not see the reality of our faces. Our eyes search the rest of the frame instead. We see the tall white wall rising behind us, and then we shiver, because, like a ghost, we see a shadow standing on the cusp of the wall, hands outstretched like Jesus, head thrown toward the sky. We shout, and our mothers come running, but before anyone can get close to us we raise our arms and fingers and point to the long line of shadow caused by a girl standing on the wall.
It is Mia.
Every woman, child and dog turns their head toward her.
Seconds pass.
We wait for the thud.
But she does not fall.
We shift, awkward and unsure. What is she going to do if not jump?
A woman yells, ‘Don’t do it, honey!’
Then another, more angry, ‘Get your ass down from there!’
An embarrassed silence falls.
Mia’s mother comes running, her sunglasses pushed up into her hair. She stands at the base of the wall, hitting it with her fists.
Some of us raise our phones, but our mothers catch us and bat them from our hands.
‘How the hell did she get up there?’
‘Get that girl down!’
‘Call 911!’
‘Call the fire department!’
Another silence falls. Even her mother freezes, staring up. There seems to be a telepathic consensus that if we stay still then so will she. Some of our mothers place their hands over our eyes, so we see the whole thing through woven fingers.
The wall is tall but it is not a skyscraper.
‘She probably won’t die,’ Britney whispers.
‘Maybe she’ll break her spine,’ says Christian. His mom is doing night school to become a nurse.
‘Would she have to wear a brace?’ asks Hazel. Hazel has scoliosis and has to wear a brace at night.
‘Shut up,’ says Jody, and we snap quiet.
We wait. We imagine the crunch of bone, the spine folding in on itself, the cartoon thump, the long silence. The church women edge closer to our mothers. We take tentative steps toward the wall.
Sirens swim slowly through the thick air.
Mia seems to hear them.
She rises onto her tiptoes, and we wince in preparation, the scene stretching wide.
We love her for being there even though no one has brought her a ladder. We wish we could bring her a ladder but we are too late.
She jumps up into the air.
We scream.
She does not fall forward, toward the ground, but backward, out of sight.
In the echoing silence, we hear the comic bounce of a trampoline.
Another woman screams, way too late.
The fire engine trundles uselessly past us, coming to a halt beneath her vacated spot. Two men come out in chunky yellow suits. They stare at the wall. After a minute, they knock on it.
The bounces continue. We hear Mia laughing behind the wall.
We listen to the women.
‘That’s the girl’s best friend.’
‘Best friend! She’s dancing on her grave here.’
‘Hey, come on now, there’s no g-r-a-v-e-s here—’
‘The kids are here—’
‘How many beers have you had?’
‘I heard the blonde knows something.’
‘She wants the other girl out of the audition.’
‘Are they still doing it today?’
‘Last I heard.’
‘Well, it wouldn’t be fair on the rest—’
‘It’s a shame. The preacher’s girl had a pretty face.’
‘But that hair!’
‘The blonde’s got big thighs.’
‘Lisa!’
‘What? You can’t pretend on camera.’
‘You know there’s been a ransom note?’
‘Who said that?’
‘Was it Judy?’
‘Judy doesn’t know shit.’
‘The blonde knows something.’
‘No one’s found anything?’
‘A ladder down by the dock.’
‘And some flip-flop in the apartments but they don’t think it’s hers.’
‘They’re going door to door in there.’
‘They rounding up folks in Falls, too?’
‘Please, what do you think?’
‘Is that girl still bouncing?’
‘Rude.’
‘Brat.’
‘Spoiled.’
‘Is he going to get more beer?’
‘Do you need a ride to the mall?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
‘Where is she?’
We know where Sammy is, of course. We always know where Sammy is.
Hazel
I can see my face in the plane window. I am watery, a faint impression losing against the massive sky.
I’ve been ignoring Jody’s messages for months. I tried to get the other girls to come with me, to be a barrier, a buffer, between us, but they are too wary of their own unhappiness to want to be near my brand of heartbreak. Jody was the only one who said to come. It was not a long conversation. Silence pushed to its limits on both sides. We have never been good at talking about our feelings. We are not those types of sisters, or people. Emotions are competitive for us, like everything else.
