Damaged, Page 3

  “Hi, Bill,” I say. As much as I hate serving tourists, I always feel a strange sense of relief when I hear Bill’s welcome. Especially lately, work has become one of the four things I look forward to, besides running, sleeping, and eating. Bill never tries to talk to me about Camille. The tourists don’t even know she ever existed. Here, I can be totally anonymous, someone besides the girl whose best friend died. Here, I’m expected to just do my job, eat as much free food as I want, and listen to Bill’s bad jokes.

  “Don’t sweat on the food,” Bill says. The customers don’t find it as funny as he does. They follow me with their eyes as I throw my bag under the counter, tie my apron around my waist, and wash my hands.

  “How’s tricks?” Bill says.

  “Meh,” I respond. Bill is one of those jolly old guys who it’s impossible not to like. And what’s crazier, he genuinely seems to like people, all people, even the most demanding and ungrateful and untipping of tourists. It’s impossible to not cheer up at least a little when you’re around him, which is part of why I actually like my job, despite the horrible clientele, terrible pay, and the fact that I go home smelling like grease after every shift. It’s nice to be around someone who always seems so genuinely happy to see me. Sometimes I feel like Bill’s the only person in western Michigan who isn’t waiting to see me cry.

  “Have I got a surprise for you!” Bill says. He often speaks with exclamation points.

  “A raise?”

  “Even better!” he says, then calls over to the back of the restaurant, “Hey, Jessie, come over here. I want you to meet Kinsey.”

  From behind the soft-serve machine emerges a mousy girl I think I recognize from school. “Hi,” she squeaks. She squints as she stares at me. “You’re Kinsey Cole.”

  “Yes,” I say. “I know.”

  “Oh my god!” She covers her mouth with her hands and her eyes grow wide. “Is this Camille Hart’s job? Did I take Camille Hart’s old job? Oh my god.”

  There is nothing I can say to make this not suck. Bill swoops in to save the day. “No, no, honey,” he says. “Camille didn’t work here.” He catches my eye and blinks an apology. “In fact,” he continues, his voice so upbeat I can tell this Jessie girl is already forgetting what she was upset about, “it’s just been me and Kinsey the last couple years. But this summer’s going to be busy, I can feel it! And that’s where you come in, Jessie. You’re going to save the day!”

  Since when do we need someone to save the day? Why didn’t Bill tell me he was hiring someone new? Did he actually think I’d be happy about it? All this means is I have to share my meager tips with someone else. And now I have one less thing in my life that doesn’t suck.

  * * *

  If Bill thought hiring someone new would mean less work for me, he was sadly mistaken. Not only did I have to run the register while he was in the back cooking, I also had to train the incompetent Jessie and run interference all night to try to prevent her from knocking things over. For someone so small, it’s pretty amazing how much damage she can do.

  I ride my bike home in twilight, sticky with four-hour-old sweat and French fry grease. My shorts are slimed pink with the remains of a double-scoop strawberry ice cream cone Jessie seemed to have flung across the restaurant at me in an epileptic fit. I have no idea how many times she said “I’m sorry” to me over the course of the night, but I would estimate it to be in the hundreds.

  If I ride fast enough, I can’t smell myself. So I tear through the night, fueled by three hot dogs, two bags of potato chips, a root beer float, and frustration. Bats dance their creepy silhouette against the darkening sky. Something about them makes my heart clench tight with an impending memory, but I push it away before it has a chance to solidify, an action that has become so automatic I barely notice it anymore. In my head, I cross off “work” from the short list of things I enjoy.

  In a few minutes, I will be home. Mom will be working in her studio, one of the few times she doesn’t feel the need to talk to me. I will take a shower, brush my teeth, crawl into bed, and drift away to a place where things are still as they should be.

  Forest. Night. You call bats flying vermin. You are trying to make a joke. But I can’t laugh. Not tonight. I am stone, my jaw cement. I am trying to punish you.

  You say, “Say something, Kinsey.”

  I say, “Something.”

  “Very funny.”

  The lightning bugs are early. You want to stop and catch them but I keep driving. This is not a time for diversions. The night is unsalvageable. You are the only one laughing. You laugh harder to fill up the silence, to make up for me, to make up for him, to make up for the fact that neither of us is trying.

  We should have known. The bats and the lightning bugs making ominous promises, all their dashing and blinking, their violent silence screaming a warning.

  “Kinsey,” you say, but you are not talking to the girl in the car. You are talking to the sleeping girl, the watching girl, the Kinsey of now, the Kinsey outside this memory. I am driving but I am not driving. We are here but we are not here. We are only visitors, tourists. You are taking me on a trip. You are my tour guide. Making me remember.

  “What, Camille?” I say, my voice slicing the dark.

  This is where you take me. The night, dark. The party, painful. Hunter and me, lost in our own silences. He has too much to drink. I stay too sober. I insist on driving. You say I always want to drive when I can’t fix things.

  This is how we cope: You laugh when you get nervous. You laugh when you are scared of the dark. A shadow in the shape of Hunter is slumped in the backseat, nothing more than a mannequin for this memory, a placeholder. He knows so many ways to sleep. I hold on to the steering wheel tight. The whiter my knuckles, the safer I feel.

  “Kinsey, the next part is going to suck.” This is not what you said then, but it is what you say now.

  “We can stop it,” I say.

  “No we can’t,” you tell me. “It already happened.” Then you laugh. “And you’re supposed to be the smart one.”

  “We just have to try.”

  “But, Kinsey,” I hear your voice say inside my head. “You can’t fix everything. Some things you just have to let happen. Some things you just have to let go.”

  TWO

  Camille.

  It is dark. I can’t breathe. I am hot and sweaty and tangled.

  Someone tied these sheets around me while I was sleeping.

  Camille.

  You were here.

  Was it you who tied me up like this?

  I can still hear your voice. I can hear you saying my name.

  I feel the seat belt across my chest.

  The night in my hair.

  The bugs in my ears.

  My hands squeezing tight.

  The night, ready to explode.

  No. This is my room. I blink. I pull my arm out of the sheet and turn on the lamp. Everything is where I put it. This corner, that corner. The ceiling, the floor. All hard, sturdy, real. Everything where it belongs. The shadows blur the edges, but they are not dark enough for you to hide in.

  Camille. I was sitting right next to you. I could have reached my hand over and touched you. But I couldn’t even look. It was my last chance to look at you.

  No. It was a dream. Just my brain firing synapses. Just electricity, just chemistry. Just something made out of nothing.

  Camille is dead, there’s nothing I can do about it, and I have a history test to study for.

  * * *

  Mom walks into the living room in her bathrobe and slippers, and I’m already showered, dressed for school, and hours into studying for a test I know I’m going to ace.

  “Didn’t you get the memo?” she says as she puts a kettle on the stove for tea. “You’re graduating in a few days. It’s kind of a rule that you don’t have to study for your last tests.”

  “I do
n’t want to mess up my 4.0,” I say, and even though I’m not looking at her, I can tell she’s rolling her eyes.

  “You got accepted to college months ago,” she sighs. “They’re not going to unaccept you because you get a B on one test.”

  I have the only mother on earth who wants her kid to work less hard at school. She’d rather I run off and join the circus. Good grades are my twisted form of rebellion.

  “What are you going to do when you have nothing left to study for?” she says.

  I open my mouth for a witty response, but nothing comes. What am I going to do? My stomach drops at the thought of a whole summer with only work to kill my time. What am I supposed to do with the rest of the hours of the day?

  “Are you going to have any fun this summer?” she says. “You’re eighteen, Kinsey. Do you have any idea what that means?”

  It means I’m technically an adult. It means I’m going to college in the fall. It means I’m getting away from you and this town for good. It means I’m going to be free.

  I collect my things and stuff them in my backpack. “I have to go to school,” I say, not answering her question.

  Mom sighs like I am the world’s greatest disappointment. “How is it possible that I raised such a little Republican?”

  * * *

  The test is easy and I finish long before everyone else. I spend the rest of class alternating between trying not to fall asleep and obsessing about the fact that I have nothing left to study for. I only got about four hours of sleep last night, and it’s hard to keep my eyes open, but ever since my conversation with Mom this morning, I can’t stop thinking about the summer, dreading the endless hours of waiting for my life to start.

  As I’m walking to my last class of the day, one of our old friends, Heather, stops me in the hall.

  “Kinsey!” she says, and throws her arms around me. I try to hug back, but it’s never been something I’m good at. “How are you?” she says. Maybe it’s because I’m so tired, maybe it’s because I’ve accidentally caught some end-of-school nostalgia, but something inside me softens and I find that I actually don’t hate talking to her.

  “I’m okay,” I say. “Just trying to make it through these last days of school.”

  “Yeah, tell me about it. It’s torture, isn’t it?”

  I nod, not knowing what else to say.

  “Do you have any plans for this summer?” she says, the conversation quickly confirming itself as small talk, which most conversations inevitably are, which is one of the main reasons I try to avoid talking to people.

  “Working, I guess. Getting ready for college. What about you?”

  “Same. Hopefully spending a lot of time at the beach. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. A bunch of us are going to the beach after school. Will you come, Kinsey? You can ride with me. Please? I miss you. We all miss you.”

  I don’t even have time to think of a good excuse before “Yes” comes sputtering out of my mouth. Where did that come from? My hand flies to my lips in surprise, as if I just swore in church or accidentally blurted out a big secret. I did not mean to say yes. I do not want to go to the beach with Heather. I do not want to hang out with old half-friends. I do not want to be in the sun and around people laughing.

  “Really?” Heather says, as surprised as I am at my response. “Oh my god, that makes me so happy! I’ll meet you in front after school, okay?”

  “Okay,” I say because I can’t think of a way to get out of this.

  “We’re going to have so much fun!” Heather waves and skips away and I mope my way down the hall to my last class of the day, dreading what I just agreed to.

  * * *

  We’re driving to the beach in Heather’s old Ford Fiesta, windows down and excruciating boy-band music blaring. According to Camille, who learned from the trusty source of her other best friend, the Internet, you’re not really supposed to keep listening to this kind of music after about age thirteen. But here in the country, I guess we’re a little bit slow.

  I’m crammed in the backseat with Erin and Lacey, two girls who, even after all these years going to the same school, I still have a hard time telling apart. No one’s even vaguely trying to include me in the conversation, which centers around figuring out whose parents are going to be out of town when during the summer, and who they can get to buy booze for the parties. I stick my head out the window, trying to get some relief from the suffocating heat. The road buzzes by below me, and for a moment I feel turned upside down, like I’m no longer inside the car or touching the seat.

  I’m floating. I’m hurtling through space.

  I’m falling.

  I close my eyes. I hold my breath.

  I brace myself for impact.

  But nothing. I feel the seat, my feet on the floor, and my hand on the door. I open my eyes. I’m still in a car with these girls. They’re still planning their summer full of parties. I’m not quite sure what just happened, but I know I need some sleep.

  We take the shortcut to avoid Tourist Hell and reach the turnout to the secret beach. Technically this is state park land and should be accessible to everyone, but some brilliant soul put up a PRIVATE PROPERTY NO TRESPASSING sign on the dirt road to this beach a few years back, and no one wants to remove it. Only locals know the sign is a fake, and we plan to keep it that way. Families with kids usually clear out by the late afternoon because everyone knows that’s when the teenagers come. And the good kids leave before it gets dark, because that’s when trouble—or fun, depending how you look at it—starts.

  Like at school, the beach is separated into cliques. Everyone knows the crowd I’m with gets the spot under the big tree closest to the water. There are already a few people over there with blankets and towels spread out. Other groups dot the beach with umbrellas and chairs they stash permanently in the back of their cars all summer. Heather and the other girls chat in front of me as I follow them to the tree, a feeling of dread spreading in my stomach. What did I get myself into? I’m nearly ten miles from home, with no car and no bike. Even if I wanted to walk home, I’m wearing flip-flops and carrying a bag full of books.

  The people on the blankets smile at me and say hi with high-pitched, overexcited voices, unable to hide their surprise. I never understood what Camille saw in these ­people. They’re nice enough, but so incredibly boring. After the football season’s over, the guys don’t do much but get drunk and talk about the football season. And the girls don’t do much else besides talk about each other and hang out with the boys. I think Camille was starting to figure this out toward the end, when she was dating Hunter, because she stopped hanging out with them so much. But then again, she also stopped hanging out so much with me. Who knows what she was really thinking?

  If Camille were here, she’d tell me I’m being judgmental, that I’m looking for differences in people instead of similarities, that I am setting myself up for alienation. She loved words like that—“alienation.” She’d deliver this diagnosis with a straight face, totally serious, and it would be impossible for me to say something cynical and snarky in response. She cared so much, I had to take her seriously. I couldn’t shrug her off like I did everything else.

  The thing is, she truly believed people are good. All of them. She believed we are all born with good hearts, but sometimes the world beats people into acting against their nature. Even mass murderers. Even rapists and baby killers. Even my mother. Camille believed my mother loves me and is proud of me, but she’s so sick and badly medicated that she doesn’t know how to show it. Camille could convince me of a lot of things, but she never got very far with this particular theory.

  Camille was going to study psychology at U of M. She wanted to be a therapist. She would have been a great therapist. She could have helped so many people.

  Stop it. What am I doing? What is wrong with me the last couple of days? I can’t let these thoughts
in. I can’t let the sadness of missing her slither its way into my consciousness and make me lose focus. If I let it in, it will push everything out. If I let it in, it will take over and never leave.

  “Want a beer?” one of the boys asks me.

  “No thanks.”

  That’s the longest conversation I’ve had in about half an hour.

  I sit in the shade and watch the girls pull their shirts off. When it gets hot, girls here wear bikinis to school underneath their clothes. I have a feeling this doesn’t happen in most parts of the country.

  “You’re not wearing a suit?” either Erin or Lacey asks me.

  “I didn’t know I was going to the beach when I was getting dressed this morning.”

  Camille always said I have a way of making everything sound bitchy.

  While the people around me talk, pop open beer cans, and lather sunscreen on each other, I look around the beach. Despite the heat, despite the sunshine, there is something gloomy in the air. The trees seem closer, more towering, leaning in as if to smother us. The end-of-the-year excitement has a sinister tinge to it. But everyone is smiling and laughing like they don’t even notice, and maybe it is all in my head. Maybe everyone really is as happy as they seem. Maybe the sun is shining just to shine, with no ulterior motive.

  I look around at the other huddles of people. Some of them are going off to college in the fall like me. Some are moving to Grand Rapids or Traverse City or even Chicago right away, eager to accept the first minimum-wage job they can find. Many are sticking around here and going to the local community college. Some will work for their family’s farm or business in town, getting ready to take it over someday. Still some haven’t even thought that far ahead. I don’t know how anyone could consider staying here or, even worse, not think about it at all. How can anyone just let life happen to them like that? How can anyone stand not being in control? That’s how you get trapped. That’s how you wake up thirty years later and realize you haven’t gone anywhere or done anything. That’s how you get to the end of your life and realize you’ve wasted the whole thing.