My only real friend, Candy, loathed Grand Rapids as much as I did. She had moved there from Lansing when she was six. She visited her grandparents in “the capital” on holidays. Lansing was bigger, she said, and her family had lived in a house there. Now, she lived with her father and sister in one apartment and sometimes stayed with her mother in another. Once, after Candy and I got high on Robitussin and came home still tripping a little, I wrote in my diary that I was finally happy, which was sad. It was as if all the miserable things that were happening to me were so bad, they were forming a protective barrier around me, I wrote. Does that make me less sad, being happy about being sad? I’m thrilled to be so incredibly, inconsolably sad, and I don’t want to end up getting happy because of that. Does that even make sense? I don’t know.
I was waiting for someone else to feel the way I did and at the same time hoping it would never happen. Nothing had hurt as bad as knowing that my mother was dead, and every time I remembered it, it was just as bad as knowing it for the first time. It was over, everything, and then it was not, because I would be reminded of this all the time, the feeling of it being over replacing the anticipation of it ending, on a loop, like a joke. Her life is gone; your life is changed. Repeated, until you are asleep, and then you dream every night that she’s alive but somehow not quite; reanimated, and not glad to be back but not upset, either; just there.
I’d thought that moving away from my friends, into a big house surrounded by horses and churches, to a new school full of spoiled blonde ingrates, gave me license to change my look to something more severe. Sheila, my mother, didn’t mind that I’d started lining my eyes and cutting thrift-store skirts short. She appreciated the creativity. And then I lived through the ultimate severity, and so I’d earned an even harsher look. But instead of letting everyone know, I couldn’t tell anyone or change anything. I practiced ways of shoving the information in some jock’s face, “She’s dead, asshole,” but when parents came up in casual conversation, I’d look down instead, all but apologizing for even thinking about making anyone else feel as uncomfortable as I was.
I wondered if I looked like the type of girl who had a dead mother. Another girl in school had a dead father, and she brought it up as if it was her religion. She lived because her father no longer could, the brave man. He had died from cancer, too, like most parents. And when a teacher said her mother-in-law died, the whole class said something about some distant person who had been sick, or the time they’d been to the hospital to see a baby just born, and at that point I would have rather lied than say my mother was dead, it felt so cheap.
The start of Candy and Robert’s relationship was explained to me as something beyond romantic: They each liked one another, but their shyness prevented one from letting the other know. Robert was seventeen, the same age as Candy’s sister. He had a car but was a loner in school. Outside of school, he hung out with kids who had graduated or dropped out.
Candy was different from the girls Robert knew. She didn’t care about vampires or makeup, but she knew about the Faces of Death VHS tapes you couldn’t find in the library or at Blockbuster. She was a vegetarian and loved looking at the potted plants at Home Depot, dreaming of the day she would have a yard. One night, outside of the Liquid Room, Candy said hello to Robert. How did she know about the band that was about to play? Candy knew about every local band. She checked message boards and weeklies and venue calendars and researched names, making lists of the music she liked and writing down the all-ages shows in her own personal planner. She loved this band, she told Robert, in front of the girls with black lipstick, who were just there to be there, which was obvious because they weren’t paying the cover. He smiled, and then they went inside together. While the music played and they looked straight ahead at the stage, Robert felt for Candy’s hand and held it.
I could imagine a boy saving my life. I’d suffered, it felt, a disproportionate amount, and boys seemed to want to deal with that. No boys had ever asked me out though. Neither had they ever tried to hold my hand. I had never gotten a call from one of the boys in my classes, who all had my number since kindergarten because it was listed in the school directory. My friends back in Ypsi had made excuses for me. I was too tall, or too intimidating, or too quiet, they said. I should play sports, they said. And then I moved to Grand Rapids, and I didn’t join any sports, and the boys at my new school didn’t seem to like me, either. Maybe everyone was right.
I sat in my basement room reading paperbacks my aunt had kept since college and staring out the narrow window into the dark woods. I imagined something happening to me, anything, to shock me back into my brain. In one book I read, a group of men found a body in the river. They carried on, discussing what to do next with their disrupted lives. When I got to the end, I felt I’d missed something. What had happened to the body?
Growing up in Ypsilanti felt like nothing until I moved away, and then all the little differences created the city for me. It felt flatter, or maybe that was just our street, and dirtier, in a lively way. There were more people walking around. There were students from EMU everywhere, dressed as one of a few types of hippie or athlete.
To my classmates in Grand Rapids, I filled out my own perception of Ypsi: Weed was basically legal there and I used to see it sold all over the place—during Hash Bash, clouds of smoke would hover over the city for a week. I was a full-on stoner back then, I’d say, unhappy with the lack of substances in my new school. The exaggerations became my personal reality. I had nothing in common with the kids around me, that was true. I didn’t miss my dad, not really. Or I’d already gotten past missing him. I did miss my old friends, but only until I met Candy. I had thought that the way to be cool was to show the least amount of effort possible, but Candy, the coolest person I’d ever met, did everything, and looked down on anyone who didn’t.
“You should have black hair, like PJ Harvey.”
“Who’s that?” I asked, staring at the ceiling and slowly spinning in a circle before collapsing. The room kept turning in staccato motion, like a grunge music video.
“Are you kidding? Cassie! Cassie!” Candy’s sister eventually came into the room. I was burying my face in a stuffed rabbit.
“You guys,” Cassie said. “Should I be worried right now?”
“Yes,” exclaimed Candy. “Tess doesn’t know who PJ Harvey is.”
“What?” said Cassie. “You need to. You need to right now. I’m going to go put it on in the living room. Come out when you’re ready.”
I wanted Cassie to pick me up, to carry me out. That would be so fun, to get a piggyback ride. The music came on and it sounded like it was coming from headphones wrapped in a paper bag, but also like it was echoing inside of me.
“Cassie, no, you have to start it over.” Candy was running from one corner of their bedroom to the other, tripping over my limp body and falling over the pillows. I stretched to grab her by the ankle, but she was ripping dresses down from hangers in the closet. She found a dark blue satin slip. She never wore underwear and always changed in front of anyone who happened to be around, not holding a shirt over her nipples or putting one skirt over another before pulling it down. Her body was muscly, pale, freckled and veined. It didn’t look good in the clothes she chose to wear, but naked, she was a classic beauty. The blue slip clung to her hips and was loose everywhere else, the straps falling, one and then the other. “Come on, get up,” she said, wide-eyed. I did, and followed her, my head bouncing on the spring of my neck with each step. “Start it over, start it over, please, Cassie, come on.” We were in the living room.
“OK, Jesus, I am.” Cassie hit the back button on the CD player, which was part of a huge system that connected a big screen TV and Blu-ray player to giant speakers in opposite corners. Candy was in the center of the floor, crouched, her head between her knees, her palms flat, perfectly still. Cassie corralled me onto the leather couch, sitting close. Outside, a car passed the building and flooded the room with white light that bloomed on my eyes. As I looked at Candy’s body, a ball in the middle of a carpeted floor, silent and faceless, the thought crossed my mind that she would one day die.
The music started, a one-note bass line and a soft, flaky snare drum that I assumed was my own heartbeat. When the female voice started whispering, “Tie yourself to me, no one else, no.” I assumed it was Candy. I’d expected PJ Harvey to be a man. She stood up one vertebra at a time, facing away from us. One leg crossed behind the other and spun her in our direction. She was breathing heavily on the right syllables, snaking her shoulders. Her hands rose to her face, cradling a trembling mouth. “I’ll make you lick my injuries, I’m gonna twist your head off, see.”
The guitar came crashing in so loud that I jumped, and her arms came crashing down, her hands now fists pounding her hips. I had never seen anyone lip sync the way you’re supposed to do it, like this. The song got quiet again, whimpering, “I beg you, my darling, don’t leave me, I’m hurting,” and soon it got loud again, for longer this time. Her slip fell and exposed a nipple. Cassie got up and reached to fix it, but Candy was shaking her head and bending down as if she really was screaming and soon the whole slip shimmied, so the top was at her waist. For the last quiet verse, she kneeled on the carpet, looking up as if in prayer.
Candy approached me after a pep rally, holding Robert’s hand, dragging him along as she caught up to me. “Wasn’t that stupid?” she asked.
Robert said, “Obviously,” and then Candy pulled her hand out of his and thrust it at me. “Are you new here?”
“You know she is,” said Robert. “Where are you from?”
“Ypsilanti,” I said. Candy was pretty, but it was clear she hadn’t accepted this. Her steps were like a small dog’s. Her head moved quickly, too, making it difficult to make eye contact with her. She looked back and forth between Robert and I, like one of us should do the talking.
“I’m from Lansing,” she said, “originally.” Her dress shifted as she swung her arms too fast, exposing a large enough window of skin to confirm that she was not wearing a bra. Her whole body was dusted with freckles and her skin was so pale it shone bluish on her wrists and sternum. Her favorite dress, the one she was wearing when we met, was made of white and metallic thread. It was too big and had been washed too many times. It apparently had no nostalgic or special value; it was just a dress that didn’t give her away as uninterested in fashion. She wore no jewelry, no nail polish. Even shoelaces were too busy for her. She wore patent leather boots that zipped up the sides. She’d bought them at a thrift store and didn’t know what brand they were. Robert wore combat boots with eighteen eyeholes. He bought all his clothing from the army surplus store.
I saw Candy again in the hallway the next day. She asked me where I lived. I told her my aunt and uncle’s address, since I couldn’t say much more about the area. She laughed and ran away, disappearing into a classroom. That Sunday, when my aunt and uncle and the cousins and I were returning from church, there was a CD jewel case on the doorstep. It said, in permanent marker, “For Tess,” inside of a heart. Everyone made a huge deal about me having a secret admirer, and then I opened the case to find a handwritten playlist on a torn piece of paper marked with the words, “From Candy.”
“Who?” asked my uncle.
“A girl in my school,” I said, blushing.
No one said anything. I went down to my room.
In all my favorite movies, I wrote in my diary, someone has just died before it starts, or the trouble is covering up a death, or by the end, death is imminent. My mother has died, and so the movie has started. I’m like Cinderella because everyone else has money. I live with my new family who has a second home and a boat on the lake in town, like everyone else in my school. Are princes politicians?
On the first Monday of our summer break, I got my aunt to pick up Candy from her apartment and bring us to Meijer. I tested my aunt, throwing a box of black hair dye into the cart. She looked pained but said sure, as long as we didn’t make a mess. We could do it in the bathtub, and it was my bathtub now, anyway, I said to Candy in the back seat of the car, while my aunt closed the trunk and walked around to the driver’s door.
Once home, we took the potato chips and the dye out of the brown bags on the counter and ran to the basement, tearing each open on the carpeted stairs. Candy reached into her backpack and pulled out two bottles of Robitussin Cough & Cold she’d stolen without me noticing.
We made a mess, staining the edges of the sink and rugs with dark purple drops of dye, as thick and toxic as the syrup we drank. The bowl of the sink would definitely be stained near the drain. It didn’t matter because no one other than the cleaning lady ever saw this room. There were three other bathrooms in the house. Anyway, I didn’t really get in trouble, just humiliated. If they did ever confront me about leaving food in my room or leaving the lights on, I would look away, implying that some things should be taught to girls by their mothers.
Candy ran upstairs and asked one of my cousins for Saran wrap as I sat on the lid of the toilet trying not to move. She ran back downstairs, saying that my cousins had looked at her as if she was an alien. “The older one is kind of hot,” she said.
“Disgusting,” I screamed.
My swirl of hair was dimensionless in the mirror yet it dripped iridescence in the sink. Candy wrapped it in pink plastic film and scrubbed drops from my shoulders, forehead, and ears.
We put towels on the couch and watched TV for twenty-five minutes and then I went back to the bathroom to rinse. I tried with the faucet but found the shower head easier to manage, so I undressed completely and stepped into the tub. The bottom filled with black that thinned to violet and magenta in beautiful streams and I yelled that it looked crazy. Candy opened the bathroom door. “Let me see it,” she said, pulling back the shower curtain. I instinctively backed away.
“What? Let me see it,” said Candy, pretending she meant the dye. The water was hitting Candy in the face. She was squinting and shaking her head, a clown getting sprayed with seltzer. She stripped quickly and got in with me. I’d seen her naked plenty, but never in a shower, her skin lacy with soap. We kissed for what felt like a long time, and then she hopped out, wrapped herself in a towel, and disappeared. The cough syrup started to hit. When I got out, ruining a white towel by wrapping my hair in it, the room was a curtain of falling colors, pink like the syrup and the Saran wrap, purple like the dye when it hit water, yellow like the edges of the stains it left. Candy was sitting on the couch, standing on the steps, and laying in my bed. I tried to explain that I couldn’t tell which one was the real her. The Candy sitting on the couch frowned, offended, which gave me my answer. “Don’t worry,” I said, stumbling toward her. “I feel great.”
If you like this article, please subscribe or leave a tax-deductible tip below to support n+1.
No comments yet. Be the first to comment!