Burnout (10 page)

I’m not okay. I grip the edge of the counter to keep from falling off the stool. I want the spinning to stop. I squeeze my eyes closed, listen to the water-rushing sound in my head, punctuated by the sound of Edie dropping my glass into the sink. The dizziness fades.

“How’s your friend?” Edie asks. I have to blink a few times against the too-bright light. “She okay?”

I close my eyes again. “I don’t know.”

I’m almost out the door before I turn and ask, “And you’re sure Toad, the kid we used to hang out with, wasn’t with us last night?”

“Sure of it,” she says.

W
e met Toad in the dark of the Sunshine Cinema movie theater on Houston Street at a midnight showing of
The Goonies
. It was November, and even though the days were mild, the night air left Seemy and me chilled and reveling in the hot-fire feel of rum slipping down our throats.

“I’m still cold!” Seemy whispered. “Let me put my hands on your belly.”

“No way!” I laughed, squirming out of reach and trying to keep my voice down. “You have icicle hands.”

“I know!” She was laughing hysterically. “But you’re like a big old bear oven and I’m freezing.”

I laughed about “bear oven” like it was the funniest thing I’d ever heard, even though it sent pinpricks of hot shame into my throat. Seemy took my laughter as permission, and a second later she had her hands under my shirt, pressing her palms against the soft flesh of my stomach. “Stop it!” I hissed, trying to force a laugh, squirming away so hard that I bumped into the person sitting next to me. I turned to him, pushing Seemy’s hands away.

“Sorry,” I whispered to him. Then I hissed “Knock it off!” at Seemy and she started pouting.

The kid next to us leaned over and said, “Don’t stop on my account.”

“Ew, creep!” I said, not even bothering to whisper. I gave him the most evil look I could manage and moved closer to Seemy.

On the movie screen, the Goonies went from the dark of Mikey’s attic to the rainy light of day, and the moment the light hit the theater I saw the kid’s eyes widen as he saw—really saw—Seemy. The very next second his long arm was stretched across me and he was whispering to her, “I’m Todd. Call me Toad.”

Seemy giggled, shook his hand. “Samantha, call me Seemy.” Then she nodded toward me and said, “This is my associate, Nan. Call her Nan.”

Toad grinned at Seemy, barely glancing at me. “We just
met. Not to be rude, but could that be some fine island rum I smell?”

I stared at him in the dark. He was skinny and tall, a little taller than me even, which, for some reason, pissed me off. He had a big face. A horse face, I thought, or even like an elephant because his nose was kind of big. When he laughed, his lips pulled back and showed all his teeth. They were big too, and kind of came together in a point in his mouth, like the bow of a ship.

“Nan?” Seemy was saying. “Can you?”

I looked over at her. “What?”

She was holding out her hand. “The rum?” she asked.

Toad jiggled the soda cup he was holding out, sloshing the ice around. Great. So now we were going to share with this kid. I handed her the rum, she uncapped it and poured some into the cup.

I sat there waiting for the movie to be over, waiting for this toothy kid to be out of our lives.

But he didn’t get out of our lives. He tunneled his way in.

“TOAD!” Seemy and I shrieked, pushing through the crowd on Saint Marks and trying to tackle our new friend Toad as if we hadn’t seen him in months, in years, in lifetimes. Really it’d only been a ten-minute pee break in
Starbucks, but we felt alive with the invigorating chill of fall in New York, and with the long, skinny scarves we had wrapped fashionably around our necks, and with the shots of vodka we’d thrown back in the bathroom.

“Relax, girls,” Toad said, blushing red as a stoplight, trying to dislodge us from his arms, “you’re scaring the tourists.”

“Eh, they can screw themselves back to Ohio,” Seemy said loud enough to make the people around her look away. She laughed, jumping on Toad’s back. He wrapped his arms around her legs and started running down the sidewalk, making them look like a six-foot-something two-headed beast clothed in many shades of black, Seemy’s olive green scarf trailing behind them. I was used to their shtick by now, so I didn’t walk after them, I just sat down on the closest stoop to pick polish off my fingernails and wait for them to come back.

You could tell he had fallen for Seemy right away, from that first night in the movie theater. They made plans to meet up the next day, and when he saw I was there too, he said, “Oh great, you brought the grim reaper.” And Seemy said, “Nanja’s my best friend! We do everything together!”

We’d been friends with Toad only a couple weeks, and even though I’d kind of hated him at first, he’d quickly
become like an elixir for our rotting friendship. The truth is, the afterglow of our first and only summer together had started to fade. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure Seemy liked me anymore. She had friends at her new school, and even though she called them snobs and only hung out with us, I knew she wasn’t exactly sitting alone at lunch like I was.

Anyway, even I had to admit that Toad was the pick-me-up our friendship needed.

I
hate that I need to find that screw-toothed prick.

He’ll know where Seemy is, even if he wasn’t with us last night. He can tell me that she’s okay. I head toward Saint Marks, and I don’t even notice that I black out until I come to and realize I’m walking in the wrong direction, the sudden sounds and lights and smells of the city making my bones vibrate like I’m a bell that has just been struck. I stop short and get cursed out by the person behind me, who had to sidestep into a puddle. His umbrella pokes me on the top of my head as he stomps by, and I jerk away and dash across the street and almost get creamed by some shitbox car that sounds like it has a death rattle.

I’m scared.

My hands are fists in my pockets, and I concentrate on the feeling of my nails digging into my palms, picturing the eight crescent-moon indentations they’ll leave on my skin.

I think that I might scream, so I duck into the next store I come to. It’s a Ricky’s, the beauty supply store that clears its shelves for Halloween costumes every year. In the days before Halloween the place is totally mobbed, with a line snaking out the door and down the block. Today, though, it’s almost empty. Just a few bargain hunters rifling through the mess that’s left after last night.

“I told you!” the woman behind the counter is yelling to someone when I walk in. The store looks like a herd of wildebeests have torn through it. A few rubber masks hang skewered through the eyes on metal wall pegs, wigs lie in open bins tangled with oversize clown glasses and gigantic plastic bras—boobs included. “I told you it wouldn’t fit!”

Oh, wait. She’s yelling at me. I walk up to the counter. “Excuse me?”

“You’re size XL.”

“
Dude
!” I object loudly, before lowering my voice so other bargain hunters can’t hear me. “You don’t have to, like, announce my dress size to the world.”

“No size extra large in the Slutty Prom Queen costume!”

“Wha . . . ?” I look down at my dress and then at the rack where she is pointing. There are just a few things left on the rack. Slutty Devil. Slutty Nurse. And, with a tag featuring a girl much skinnier than me, Slutty Prom Queen.

“And you can’t return the dress now anyway. You’re wearing it.”

I pull one of the dresses from the rack and hold it up. “I bought this here?”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“Last night! No returns!”

I hold up my hands. “I get it, I’m not going to return the dress that I’m wearing. Can I ask you a question, though?”

She narrows her eyes at me.

“Did I leave my stuff here?”

“No,” she says quickly.

“Are you sure? Don’t you have a lost-and-found or something?”

She bends over a little, opens up a drawer, and then slams it shut. “Nothing in the lost-and-found.”

“Thanks. Was anybody with me? When I came in here on Halloween?”

“Little girl. Bought the same dress.” The woman smirks. “Size small.”

“Did we try them on? The dresses?”

The woman shrugs.

“Can I check the dressing room? For my stuff?”

I don’t wait for an answer; I just duck into the curtained dressing room. The woman calls to me, “Those men you were with weren’t good men!”

The dressing room is empty.

My heart thunk-thunk-thunks in my chest as I duck down to look under the bench. “What do you mean?” I ask.

“You didn’t want to be with them.”

I don’t respond. I’ve found something on the wall. I lay my cheek against it, so my eyes are looking straight across its surface. There’s something written there. Something written and wiped away.

HELP US
. Then there’s a couple letters I can’t make out, and then there’s a number. My cell phone number. I trace the letters with my fingers.
HELP US
.

I rest my head against the wall, tears dripping out of my closed eyes.

“Remember,” I whisper. I wait for the memories to come. “Remember,” I say again. I tap my head against the wall, hoping to jog something loose. Nothing. “Remember,” I say louder, and this time my head makes a thunking noise when it hits the wall. “You have to remember!”
Thunk.
“Remember!”
Thunk.
“Remember!”
Thunk.

“You okay in there?” the woman calls.

My head hurts. This is stupid.

“Okay,” I mumble, “okay.”

The woman behind the counter calls out to me as I leave, “How is your friend?” but I don’t stop. I just push open the doors and walk away as fast as I can.

I have to find Toad.

S
eemy stretched her bare arms out and held her palms up to the sky, spinning in a circle. “It’s crazy warm out! That was the longest winter ever in world history, period, forever, the end.”

I smiled sleepily, watched her spin from where I sat on the top step of the fountain in Washington Square Park. She was right, it had been a long winter. Wet and cold and disgusting and never ending. It barely snowed at all, just weeks and weeks of overcast, freezing, windy days and the occasional mix of sleet and freezing rain that made rivers and lakes of slush in the streets.

It was like the weather had tried its best to scrub out
all memory of me and Seemy’s summer together, until all I felt when I looked at her was cold. Our friendship had been shoved into the margins since Christmas. On week-nights we both had to be home by seven, and to Seemy that meant we had to spend the few hours of freedom we had freezing our asses off on Saint Marks Place with Toad, maybe drinking if she had anything, but mostly just wandering from store to store, coffee shop to coffee shop, never inside long enough to really warm up. And even though she complained about the cold outside, she couldn’t stand to be indoors. “If we were upstate,” she’d say, “we’d be out hiking in the woods right now.” She’d go off on how the city was unnatural, on how it felt like we were all going to snap our tethers to Mother Nature and go flying off into the universe. Toad would say, “Yeah, man, you’re right.” But he’d say that for anything Seemy said.

I barely ever saw her on weekdays anymore. Weekends I’d still go along with it, mostly because I didn’t have anyone else to hang out with. My old friends from school didn’t want anything to do with me. And I acted like I didn’t want anything to do with them.

But then there was a Tuesday in March, the first really warm day of spring, when Seemy called me after school and said we should meet up, and the air was so warm and it felt like the tiniest whisper of summer and I couldn’t say no.
There was hope in the air. The sun was so warm I dozed off for a second, woke up when Seemy screeched, “TOAD!” and I watched her leap up and try to climb him like a bean stalk. He was smiling this goofy, big-toothed smile, and his nasty black cargo pants were paired with a clean olive green T-shirt, no jacket. His long, pale arms glowed in the sunlight like the skin under a picked scab.

“Let’s go,” Toad said, balancing Seemy on his back. “I have someplace special to take you guys. Even
you
, grumpy face.” He nodded to me with a snaggletoothed grin.

“Where, where, where?” Seemy squealed, wiggling down and then hopping in a circle around him.

“It’s a surprise,” he said, “a
good
surprise.” He looked genuinely excited, but he jutted his chin out a little when he looked to see if I’d follow, like he expected me to rain on his parade.

“Let’s go,” I said, stepping off the fountain.

We walked for a while, all the way up University to Union Square, where we pooled our money to buy apple cider doughnuts at the farmer’s market. We kept heading north and then turned left on Nineteenth Street. By this time we were thirsty, so we used Seemy’s credit card to buy the first iced coffees of summer, even though the sun was getting low and the air was starting to chill so much I kept having to switch hands to keep my fingers from going
numb. I felt this sort of hope for the future. It was nice to be walking along with two friends in the almost-warm air, eating doughnuts and drinking iced coffee and joking and teasing and yelling and scaring the other pedestrians.

We walked past Seventh Avenue, then Eighth, and then the buildings started to get nicer. There were a lot of brownstones with huge windows, giving us glimpses of their fancy interiors.

“Toad,” Seemy asked, “are you about to tell us that you’re secretly rich or something?”

“Nope, even better,” Toad said, then he laughed. “Well, maybe not better, but almost as good.”