Burnout (5 page)

Tick sighed. “Last night I dreamed it was winter and we were putting the plastic stuff on the windows to keep out the wind, except it wasn’t plastic, it was cereal.”

“That was just a dream. It’s still summer for a long time yet.”

“Oh. Okay.”

From the other end of the apartment there was the click and squeak of Mom’s bedroom door opening. “There’s
Mom,” Tick said, smiling. Neither of us moved. We stayed there, looking at each other and listening to the floors creak as she made her way through our apartment. The Tick is six years old and didn’t get the sort of burly physicality that strikes the women in our family. He looks like his dad. Slight, wiry, a smile that seems almost too big for his face. He has our hair, though. Unruly and puffy and sticking out in all directions. Mom did this awesome drawing of the three of us for our Christmas card last year. It’s just our silhouettes, but with our crazy hair you can totally tell it’s us. She called the picture our family crest. The only bummer was that it made the Tick cry because Dad wasn’t in it.

We listened to Mom make her way through our apartment. It took a while because our apartment’s huge, but not because we’re super rich. We’re on the top floor of an old brick building in SoHo that used to be filled with garment shops. Mom and her friends moved in right after college, but she was the only one who would sign the lease. Everyone else moved out eventually, but Mom stayed on, and since the place is rent-controlled, she says the only way she’s leaving is feetfirst. When she and her friends first moved in, the place was a huge, raw, open space. There was a pile of half-finished bras that reached the ceiling in the middle of the floor. They built walls to form art studios and bedrooms, put in a bathroom and a kitchen.
They did everything themselves, even some of the electrical, which is why when you flush the toilet, the light in the kitchen flickers. When everyone else moved out, Mom tore down some of the walls to make a large art studio, three bedrooms, and a giant living room.

The floors slant and it’s drafty in winter and the grout in our bathroom is falling out in chunks and most of our furniture is stuff from flea markets upstate, but Mom says it doesn’t matter as long as it’s clean and filled with love. Barf.

The building owners have been trying for years to get us to move out, but Mom’s got a really good lawyer and says we’re here to stay. They renovated the whole building around us. On all of the floors below us are condos, sleek and clean with metal and glass and “architectural” bathroom fixtures, which means square sinks. On our floor, the top floor, they won’t even replace the lightbulbs in the moldy-smelling hallway outside the elevators. We do that ourselves.

“There you are,” Mom said as she opened my bedroom door. “Did you two keep cool last night?”

She walked over and sat on the foot of my bed, and Tick immediately crawled into her lap. She was dressed already, which meant she’d worked all night without sleeping and then showered and dressed to wake herself up.

“What are you making, Mom?” Tick asked.

Mom groaned. “It’s either a big fat mess or a mixed-media installation about mall culture and female genital mutilation.”

“Oh.”

Mom looked at me and smiled. “You sleep okay?”

I closed my eyes and burrowed under my pillow. “I still want to sleep more. It’s summer.”

“But it’s farmer’s market day!” she said, reaching out to pull my long hair from under the pillow so she could play with it. I loved it when Mom played with my hair, but this morning I wished I could just hack it off. “It’s going to be hot today. We can go to the market early, then maybe go to the pool with the Tick’s dad out in Brooklyn.”

I sat up and watched her closely as I asked, “Can we stay over at Dad’s? Go out to brunch all together tomorrow morning?”

Tick looked at her, his face full of hope.

Her smile was a little forced. “Sure. Sounds like fun.”

“Yeah!” Tick scrambled off the bed. “I’m going to pack!”

Mom and I both knew she was lying. Spending the night at Dad’s didn’t sound like fun for her, it sounded like murder, and she’d probably end up bailing as soon as we met up with Dad and she’d leave us in Greenpoint and tell me to bring the Tick home tomorrow. But I let myself
believe for a second that things were just like they used to be. They used to love each other, I told myself, and sometimes love comes back.

“I should really get some friends,” I told her, rolling over. “I can’t spend the whole summer with my mom and little brother at the pool. It’s bad for my reputation.”

I really had only a few friends from school, and they all were taking off for the summer. Eight weeks as camp counselors, or bicycling through Europe, or at their country houses. I think Mom was glad they were all gone. The fact that they were in a different tax bracket made her prickly.

“You have friends,” she assured me, “but they’re the sort that bail on the city in the summer, so . . .” She trailed off.

To my mom, bailing on New York City in the summer is a sign of weakness and untrustworthiness in a person. It’s the sign of someone who will steal your dog and tell lies about you. “You don’t abandon your girl when she’s down,” Mom says, making staying in the hot, gross, stinky city overrun with tourists for the summer a badge of loyalty.

Mom went to help Tick get ready, so I brushed my teeth and washed my face and started kicking at the clothes on my bedroom floor, looking for something that seemed at least a little clean.

“I hate all my clothes,” I called to Mom, finally picking up a pair of jean cutoff shorts and a tank top.

“So, do some babysitting and I’ll give you money to get new clothes,” Mom called back. I could hear her trying to get the Tick to brush his teeth.

“They’d just suck too,” I mumbled, slumping onto my bed and dropping the shorts and top back on the floor. I knew I’d just go to the same stores, buy the same sort of things I had at home already, except maybe a different size because I’d gotten taller. Again. There was no way I could get away from my own lameness. I was hopeless and itchy and I wanted to shake out of my own skin. I’d be stuck with myself all summer, and then when school came, maybe I’d make a halfhearted effort to get a new look, but then I’d go broke or lose interest or get scared and end up looking just like myself. Boring. And giant. There were no makeovers that didn’t involve sawing off a few inches of height and girth that could turn me from an ogre into an imp.

“Nan, let’s go!” Mom called from the kitchen. I could hear the Tick digging out our stash of canvas shopping bags from under the sink. I was looking in my closet when I caught a glint of light reflected from the back. It was the space reserved for stupid things my mother made me wear. I reached back and yanked a truly horrendous red checked Christmas dress with shiny brass buttons off its hanger and held it up to the light. She’d bought it for me last year, when we were invited to the dean of her college’s house for
a holiday party. I don’t know what she was thinking. It was a little-kid dress, even if it came in my gigantic size. I wore it because she paid me $10, but I looked ridiculous, like a grown-up dressed like a little girl for Halloween. What I’d forgotten, though, was that the dress had this built-in black slip with a puffy crinoline skirt, and standing there in front of my closet, I had one of those lightning-bolt ideas that you know might change your life.

“What are you wearing?” Mom laughed when I came out of my room. I spun around, fluffing the black slip’s skirt as I did, ending in a pose that was half superhero, half supermodel.

“I’m wearing the most awesome dress ever,” I answered matter-of-factly. I’d paired it with a pair of black yoga pants, which I planned to replace with fishnet tights as soon as I could.

“It’s awfully . . .” Mom faltered, searching for the right word.

“‘Awfully awesome’ is the phrase you’re looking for.” I spun around again, and the Tick started running around me in a circle, trying to hide under my skirt.

My mom told me I wasn’t going out of the house until I put on real clothes.

“These
are
real clothes.”

“You can see your boobs.”

“I’ll put on a bra.”

“It will show.”

“Well, then everyone will know I’m wearing one.”

“You know we’re going straight from the farmer’s market to Tick’s dad’s, so you’ll be on the subway in that.”

My heart leaped. “I hadn’t thought of that!”

“But why?” she asked. “Why do you want to wear
that
?”

I proudly gave her the only answer I knew she couldn’t argue with. “It’s my ART.”

The farmer’s market in Union Square happens a bunch of times a week, but we always go on Saturdays. Farmers from the Hudson Valley come down and fill the west side of the park with tables, selling their goods. It’s a crowded mix of veggies dumped into plastic bins and fancy jelly that costs $12 a jar. We always go early, because by midmorning the place is totally clogged with everyone from gourmet chefs to tourists to regular people like us. For some reason that Saturday it got crowded early, and there was no room for the Tick to ride his skateboard without hitting people, so Mom bought us a pint of blueberries and asked me to take him over to the wide steps that line the south side of the park.

I watched him try to ollie, then I spit blueberries in his general direction, making him cackle like a junior madman, “You missed me!”

I heard someone else laugh and looked over, and sitting on the steps a few yards away was a girl about my age. Her hair was short, the sort of little pixie cut my big old pumpkin face could never take, and she was wearing this sort of hippie, flowy embroidered dress.

“Is he your little brother?” she asked, moving closer and sitting down next to me.

“Yep.” I stole another glance at her. She had a pointy chin, a spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks. I thought she smelled like strawberries. “That’s the Tick.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“He breast-fed till he was, like, four,” I explained.

She pulled her knees up and rested her chin on them. “Cool dress.”

I flushed. “Thanks.” I knew she would never have talked to me if I were in my normal boring jeans and T-shirt. “Yours too.”

“Not really.” She groaned with a smile. “I wish my parents would let me dress like you.”

I nodded in understanding. “Parents suck. My mom made me get up at eight.”

The girl laughed again. “I was up at four.”

My jaw dropped, and I held out the blueberries. “You win.”

She laughed again, and she had this great throaty laugh
that seemed deeper than it should for someone her size. “I’m Seemy,” she said. “Well, really Samantha, but everybody calls me Seemy.”

She held out her hand and I shook it. “I’m Nan.”

“Do you live around here?”

“SoHo. You live upstate?”

She broke into a huge smile. “Actually,” she said excitedly, “we’re moving back to the city. My parents have an apartment down here, on Avenue B, but they freaked out after 9/11 and bought a farm. The
Times
wrote an article about them.” She shrugged. “But now they’re going crazy because of all the small-town politics. We’re actually moving back this summer. I’m so excited. I couldn’t take Hick-town anymore.”

“Cool.”

We sat there, eating blueberries, watching the Tick, until she looked at her cell phone and said she had to go check in with her parents.

“We’re moving down next week. Here.” She handed me her phone. “Give me your number, I’ll call you when I get in.”

And that was the beginning of everything. It was even the beginning of the end. We just didn’t know it yet.

I
wish I had time to shower in the gym. I want to let hot water run all over me. I want to spread out my fingers and hold my palms up and feel the water pelt my skin. I feel like I could tip my head to the side, let the water stream into one ear and out the other, cleaning out my brain, and then I could think new thoughts.

But there’s no time for that.

I need to wash up quickly and check in at the main office so I don’t get marked absent.

I pull the plastic shopping bag of gym clothes from my locker and bring it with me to the girls’ bathroom.

I should call Mom. But if I call Mom, things are
going to break open and spill out and she might not like what she sees when she studies the entrails. She’s going to want me to answer the question that I don’t even want to ask.

What happened to me last night?

I take off the MTA jacket, hang it up on the hook on the back of the stall door, and start digging through the shopping bag. I first put on the black yoga pants I wear for gym, and then reach back in to get my T-shirt and sports bra, but neither is there.

“Oh man,” I groan, remembering I brought them home last week to wash. I’ll have to stick with the pink dress. At least I have a pair of sneakers. I put them on, gather the shopping bag and the jacket over my arm, and walk out to the row of sinks and mirrors.

And then I drop everything onto the floor and lurch toward the mirror because I see now there is something scrawled in black marker across my chest.

HELP ME

The letters are uneven and messy, sloping down at the end, like they were scribbled in a hurry. I run my fingers over the words, and the skin feels bruised, like whoever wrote them was trying to carve them into my skin.

HELP ME

The tile floor starts to tip and sway, and I grip the edge of the sink and squat down, resting my forehead against the cool porcelain until the world steadies itself again. “Why is this happening to me?” I whisper, staring at the pipe that curves under the sink and into the wall. “Why is this happening?”

I don’t want to stand back up; I don’t want time to start again. I want to stay here, under the sink, until my own inertia seeps into the rest of the universe and nothing ever moves forward again.