The Quarry Girls(49)
Her hair was still in its partial braid. She looked young from behind, like the Brenda who brought her Tinker Bell night-light to sleepovers until fourth grade.
Like the girl who’d pierced my ears.
We’d all done each other’s three summers ago. We’d been at Maureen’s house, the place we always went to do things we knew could get us in trouble. Our bedroom doors were sacred—none of our parents would enter without permission short of the house being on fire—but it always seemed easier to push against the rules at Maureen’s.
Maureen soaked five safety pins in rubbing alcohol, its glass-edged scent filling the room. She also prepared a bowl of ice cubes. We’d drawn straws: I was piercing Maureen, Maureen was piercing Brenda, and Brenda was piercing me. (One ear so half the work! she’d joked.)
Maureen demanded that her ears be pierced first, and as usual, Brenda and I were happy to let her lead. I dotted a marker speck on each of Maureen’s spongy, peachy lobes, my hands surprisingly steady.
“Look good?” I’d asked.
She flipped the hand mirror to face her, pushed her hair back, angled her head. “Perfect.”
I grinned. What we were about to do was forever. Wherever we went in this world, whoever we met and whatever we became, we would always have this, a permanent connection to each other. I pressed an ice cube on each side of Maureen’s ear, numbing it.
“Liquid courage,” Brenda said, offering Maureen the bottle of crème de menthe she’d pinched from her parents’ liquor cabinet.
Maureen took a swig, keeping her head as still as possible. “Tastes like toothpaste,” she said, her mouth puckering.
We laughed at this, nervous laughter, way out of scale. We were going to stick safety pins into each other’s ears.
“Ready?” I asked, my fingertips growing numb from the cold.
“Yup,” Maureen said, still holding the hand mirror. She was going to watch it happen. That was just how Maureen was. She wasn’t going to miss a thing in this life.
“All right.” I dropped the melting cubes into the bowl. The marker spot on her ear had become a thin black rivulet, but I could tell where it’d started.
“Needle,” I said to Brenda.
She pulled a pin out of the alcohol and solemnly handed it to me. Its sharp scent stung my nose. I pulled Maureen’s lobe taut and swallowed past a wave of queasiness. “Count backward from ten,” I told her.
When she got to three, I punched it.
Her eyes grew large and her hand flew to her ear, feeling gently at the edges of the pin, its tail facing forward, its sharp end all the way through. “You did it!”
She laughed and hugged me before returning to the mirror, admiring my handiwork. “I might just wear the safety pin as an earring. What do you think? Bring punk rock to Pantown!”
We squealed at this.
She ended up wearing those pins up until the first day of ninth grade, when the principal demanded she remove them. She replaced them with prim gold studs, same as me and Brenda wore.
I put on a burst of energy to catch up to Brenda, to remind her of that good day, to convince her that someone whose ears I’d pierced couldn’t be dead, but an ambulance’s shriek had grown too loud, its wailing filling the quarry side of town. The houses were sparse here. Some of the quarries were still being actively mined, fences protecting the snarling machinery, hiding their violence. Others, like Dead Man’s, had been turned into swimming holes and party spots before my time. Dad said he and his friends used to hang out at them in high school.
Brenda veered left off the tar road and onto the gravel that led to Dead Man’s. The air tasted like chalk from all the traffic. The clearing ahead held our green Pontiac and three police cars, their cherries flashing. Behind the vehicles, towering oaks and elms loomed, guarding the quarry. One main foot trail and several smaller ones snaked through the forest, none wide enough to drive on.
When the ambulance was almost on top of us, Brenda pulled off into the grassy ditch. I followed her lead. The hot-red light pulsed on my face, my chest, as the vehicle passed. Brenda covered her ears, but I welcomed the noise. It pushed every thought out of my head.
The same officer who’d pulled up to Sheriff Nillson’s waved the ambulance over to the main trailhead. He was the only other person I could see. The rest of the officers and Dad must have been through the woods, near the quarry.
“They’re not going to let us back there,” Brenda said, her voice high. “No way. Not if there’s a crime scene. I’ve listened to your dad enough to know that.”
“We’ll see,” I said, leading my bike toward the trailhead. I didn’t have any inside information, no plans. It was just that I couldn’t stop moving. I’d slid into a space just outside of reality. A ghost, dazed and gliding through fog. Brenda called to me, shouting my name as I wove around the nearest police car. The dust the ambulance kicked up settled on my skin like ash.
“Hey!” the deputy said, noticing me. He was waiting for the ambulance driver to unload the stretcher. “You can’t come back here. Stay right where you are.”
His words froze me in my spot, and maybe that’s how it was when you were a ghost. Whoever could see you controlled you. I blinked, watching the stretcher disappear down the trail. I recorded Brenda’s grip on my arm as pressure, heard her voice come from very far away.