The Princesses of Iowa (40 page)

Halfway down Main Street the sky started spitting rain. Two blocks later, there was a deafening
CRACK
of thunder. And then it started hailing. We princesses jumped out of our chairs and tumbled down the float, running for cover. The football boys followed suit, and frazzled elementary school teachers herded their charges toward any shelter they could find. Up and down the street, garage doors opened and neighbors called to the children through the blinding rain and stinging hail. I followed the other girls toward the lights of the gas station.

Inside, it was surprisingly still. Customers stood frozen, listening to the snare drum
rat-a-tat
of rain on the metal roof. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and behind the register a woman clicked her teeth as the hail bounced against the plate-glass windows. My hair lay heavy and wet against my neck, and my heart pounded from the run. A second later, the door pushed open again and Lacey fell breathlessly into the store beside me.

“Hey,” I said.

She leaned her cane against a donut case and stood on one leg while wringing her wet hair like a dish towel. She must have lost her earmuffs in her flight.

Another crash of thunder shook the windows, and Lacey and I both jumped. I grabbed her cane and handed it to her. “So . . .” I said. “Was it everything you always dreamed it would be?”

Lacey glanced at me. Her mascara was running down her face in dark streaks, and I realized that mine was probably just as bad. We both reached up to run fingers under our eyes at the same time, using each other as mirrors, just as we’d done a thousand times before. For the first time in weeks, I smiled at her. She shook her head and smiled back. Outside, the ridiculous papier-mâché beehive float listed to the side, slumped over the edge of the flatbed trailer, and finally collapsed in the street.

I started my sister’s eulogy a hundred times. A hundred lines scribbled, a hundred lines scratched out.

Nothing was right. Nothing would do. I tried exercises from Mr. Tremont’s class:

An hour later I was lying on the floor of my bedroom, staring at the ceiling and remembering how I used to imagine it was the floor. You would have to climb over the walls above the doors to get in and out of rooms. You could sit on the ceiling fan like a merry-go-round, and the ceiling lamp would be like a little electric campfire where you could warm your hands in winter. The ceiling was so appealingly bare, without rugs or furniture. It invited you to roller-skate across it, do cartwheels, have a ceiling dance party, make ceiling angels.

I was losing my mind.

Downstairs, my mother’s heels clicked across the floor, back and forth, back and forth, as she paced and talked to her sorority sisters from Northwestern. She’d been on the phone all afternoon. When one sister got tired of talking to her and hung up, she dialed the next one. Her voice curled up through the vents like smoke, the words indistinct but the tone perfectly clear: both her daughters had failed her, she’d failed as a mother, nobody loved her and she’d die alone.

My mother’s voice floated up again, and I scooched across the floor on my back and slid under the bed. It was built higher than a normal bed to fit a rolling trundle under it, but for some reason I’d never actually gotten a trundle. Underneath it was like an abandoned fort, dusty and stuffy and littered with objects that had fallen behind the bed or gotten kicked under it. I sneezed once and hit my head on a spring, but then settled down and breathed deeply. It was quiet. Peaceful.

Mirror and I used to lie under our parents’ bed, side by side, on our backs, staring up at the dusty bedsprings. Later they traded in their bed for a Japanese-style bed that was too close to the floor to hide under, and Miranda and I grew up and stopped hiding together, and then we stopped talking.
I remember my sister, hiding under the bed with me. . . .

I closed my eyes.

I wished I could stay under my bed forever. Or fall asleep and wake up to a world where people were good and things weren’t so complicated. My stuffed dog, Zeke, was half under the bed, and I pulled him in with me, hugging him against my chest.

I remember the accident today, how real it felt even though I knew it wasn’t real, how bitterly, horribly, awfully real it seemed, and Ethan was dead, and Mirror was dead, and how could they be dead when there’s so much I never told them. . . .

I remember the accident last spring, how we dragged Nikki away from the party and threw her in the back of the car and drove away under the bloodred moon, and we both stayed silent when she awoke in the backseat all alone, surrounded by glass and blood and blame, and we raised up our heads for a moment to see that she was alive and dropped them back into the cold, wet grass. . . .

“Paige?” My sister’s feet appeared beneath the bed skirt. “Are you here?”

“Yeah.”

“Where? Under the . . . ?” Her feet moved slowly toward me, and then she knelt down, pulling at the sheets. “Oh, hi.”

“Hi.”

“Scoot over.” She lay down and squeezed under, next to me. “Hi, Zeke.”

My mother’s voice haunted the pipes.

“Mom just asked me if I’ve ever tried meth.” Mirror sighed. “This week sucks. Remember when we were little and I used to sneak into your room when they were fighting?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

I remember . . . there was no way we could beat her mother home but Lacey tried anyway, muttering about how Brenda was always late coming back from the casino and we could still make it. I couldn’t tell if she was drunk or not; she didn’t seem drunk, but she rarely did. When Nikki drank, she got loud and happy and giggly and clumsy. When Lacey drank, she got quiet and dangerously thoughtful.

She leaned forward over the steering wheel, as if it would help us go faster. We were already doing 75 down a two-lane country highway and I wanted to warn her about deer and coyotes and raccoons who might appear in the headlights at any moment, eyes reflecting the light like spooky beacons. Last year a boy hit a deer on this same road and completely totaled his car and broke both arms where he tried to protect his face from the air bag. He didn’t come back to school after that, and people mostly forgot about him, but something about the story haunted me, and I strain my eyes for hints of suicidal woodland creatures.

Everything feels abstract, like I’m not 100 percent in my body.

“I can’t fucking believe you,” Lacey suddenly says. We’re close to home now, turning onto the winding road out to Sauvignon.

“What?” you ask, and then blush as it all rushes back and you’re embarrassed that you already let yourself forget. No, not “yourself”: myself. I can’t hide behind you, it wasn’t you. It was always me.

I kissed Prescott. I’d never kissed anyone but Jake in years, and the worst part was I liked it. He was a good kisser, attentive and fully present, like the kissing was enough, was more than enough, like he’d be happy to stay there kissing me all night and never complain that we weren’t going any further.

But it was wrong. I should not have kissed Prescott. I love Jake. “I love Jake,” I say.

“What?” Lacey asks. “You take Jake for granted. You’re disgusting. You don’t even deserve him.” Her fingers are white around the steering wheel and her foot smashes down on the accelerator and the needle inches toward 80.

“And you do? Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Yes!” The word explodes out of her. “I do! I wouldn’t fucking cheat on him, that’s for sure. I would know what I had and I wouldn’t just throw it away.”

She’s staring through the windshield like she could burn a hole through it with her eyes, and I’m suddenly filled with this crazy rage, like all these little hints she’s dropped all spring and all the times I’ve bitten my tongue to keep her happy suddenly just swell up inside me and I just reach over and grab the tiny millimeter of flab under her upper arm that she’s totally self-conscious about, and I pinch it as hard as I can. “Ow! You bitch!” One of her hands flies off the steering wheel and punches me in the leg. “Fuck!” I punch her in the leg, an eye for an eye, and she reaches out to block my arm and suddenly everything is bathed in light. Her arms, my arms, the steering wheel, the gear stick, all become strange puppets in the garish light, and Lacey’s face is a mess of shadows and geometry and fear, because it’s a car coming straight at us, out of nowhere a car, and Lacey wrenches the wheel as hard as she can and we go spinning off the road . . .

and hit the ground, bouncing, rolling. The windshield is gone and Lacey is gone and then I’m gone, flying through the open door and landing, finally, a hundred yards away, a collection of limbs and bones and skin, and the car slides to a stop with the sound of screeching, crunching metal.

I don’t want to remember.

I don’t want to remember how small Nikki looked when we finally found her smashed behind the front seat, unconscious. Or the silence after the crash, when I held my breath as long as possible, listening for Lacey and Nikki, and the forest held its breath with me, the leaves hanging silent on the trees and the animals stopped in their paths and the rain paused on the tips of branches, everything silent and still and then the sound of sobbing from the road above.

I don’t want to remember kissing Prescott just because I was bored and drunk, and how Lacey stood over me, smirking, and held it over my head like a bully the whole way home, taunting and threatening and driving too fast around the curves. . . .

I remember wanting to smash Lacey’s face in, wanting to push her out the door, wanting to hurt her, destroy her, shut her the hell up, punish her, punish her. . . .

. . . I remember grabbing the steering wheel . . .

. . . twisting it . . .

I grabbed the steering wheel . . .

. . . twisted it . . .

. . . I was the one . . .

. . . spinning out of control. . . .

                                                             
I wanted to hurt her — to stop her — push her out the door — make her shut up about her brother and Jake and the whole awful night — to stop —

I was the one . . .

. . . wrenched across the road, the world upside down, waiting for the terrible crash. . . .

      
My fault.

All my fault.

Oh God.

Oh my God.

I pushed against my sister.

“I have to get out of here!” My fault. All my fault.

“Paige, what’s wrong?”

“I can’t — I have to go! I have to get out of here!”

I slid out from underneath the bed, got up, and ran.

I ran down the stairs, grabbed my bag, grabbed my keys, ran out the front door to my car, and then stopped. What was I doing? I couldn’t drive, I could hardly see straight. But I needed to escape, to outrun the voices in my head. I needed to fly. I ran into the garage, grabbed the bike I’d ridden all over town back in middle school, before Lacey told me it made me look like the witch from
The Wizard of Oz.
Good. Maybe I’d be sucked up into a tornado.

The physical exertion felt good, punishing and true, and I rode faster than I’d ever gone in seventh grade, as if I could outdistance my own terrible thoughts. I didn’t want to remember. For months I’d blamed other people for my own mistakes. First Nikki — how I’d resented her while cooped up in the breathless Paris apartment all summer, bouncing the crying baby in my arms while Mrs. Easton lay crumpled in her bed, holding pillows over her head.
If only Nikki hadn’t gotten in the car, if only Nikki weren’t so careless, if only she weren’t such a stupid drunk, I’d be home with them right now, stretched out beside Lacey at the pool, driving around the countryside with Jake under the glittering Iowa stars.
Then I blamed Lacey, who’d chased me from the party with her awful accusations and her constant air of waiting for me to trip up so she could pounce. She lied to Nikki, she pulled Jake away, she never told the truth about anything. It was her fault, Nikki’s fault, but never my own, no, because Princess Paige was perfect.