Big Swiss(20)

“It’s unusual for a woman to shoot herself in the head.”

“She was raised in Reno,” Greta explained. “She was familiar with guns.”

“Did she leave a note?”

“I lost it,” Greta whispered. “When I try to imagine it, her handwriting is either blurry or blacked out, like a redacted CIA document.”

“Maybe you should see a hypnotist,” Stacy suggested.

“I’m not sure I want to remember the note,” Greta said. “I’ll certainly never forget the PS.”

“?‘I love you’?” Stacy whispered.

Greta shook her head.

“?‘I’m watching over you’?”

“The PS wasn’t written. It was… a piece of herself.”

Stacy leaned closer.

“I really shouldn’t be telling you this stuff,” Greta whispered. “We just met. I don’t want to scare you.”

“But I’m not afraid of the dahk,” Stacy said. “Rememba?”

She’d found the horrifying postscript clinging to a fold in the curtains. This had been a few days after her mother’s body had been taken away, her room scoured by professional cleaners. But the cleaners had somehow missed the PS, which was strange because it was the first thing Greta noticed. If they’d missed that, Greta could only imagine what a soul-haunting mess the place had been before. The PS resembled a swatch of leather with a long brown hair attached, and the follicle was visible on the back side. Although it hadn’t been your customary lock of hair and was in fact grotesque, Greta stored it in a film canister, like weed. She just couldn’t bring herself to throw it away. But, after she moved to Arizona, she worried that Dusty would discover it, decide Greta was unstable and therefore unlovable, and then drop her off at the nuthouse and never return.

Rather than bury it in the backyard, Greta tried burying it in the trash beneath the sink, even though it obviously didn’t belong there, surrounded by coffee grounds, banana peels, and burned toast, and the bathroom trash wasn’t much better. She knew the kitchen trash would eventually be mixed with the bathroom trash, and all trash was not the same to Greta. She was deeply unsettled by the thought of dirty Q-tips and tampons sharing a bag with rotten produce, chicken carcasses, and this delicate piece of her mother’s body. And so, she’d wandered into Dusty’s garage, opened an old shoebox, and placed her mother’s remains in the toe of a patent leather shoe.

The itching started that night. She wondered if the change in climate had given her dandruff, but there were no flakes, only a crawling sensation that kept her awake half the night. She figured it was lice, picked up from Dusty’s couch cushions. She waited for the lice to die of old age, but they only seemed to multiply.

A week later, Dusty patiently examined Greta’s scalp with the metal comb she used on her cats. She didn’t find anything. Greta passed her the magnifying glass and reminded her that they were the size of sesame seeds, that their eggs looked like specks of dirt.

Dusty peered at Greta’s scalp under the glass. “There’s nothing here,” Dusty said finally. “You must have… phantom lice.”

Stacy gasped. “Phantom lice!”

The phantoms seemed to gather in one place near the back of Greta’s head. They took turns sucking her scalp as if waiting in line at the drinking fountain, and the sucking was incessant. Greta’s instinct was to blast them with heat, so she burned her scalp with a hair dryer for thirty minutes a day, four days in a row, and then emptied a bottle of peroxide on her head and sat in the blazing sun for six straight hours.

“Anyway, long story short, the itch never went away,” Greta whispered. “I’m still scratching that same spot, twenty years later.”

Greta was supposed to be in eighth grade that year, graduating with the same twenty-four kids she’d known since kindergarten. Now she was enrolled at a school called Wallace, which had the look and feel of a detention center. Her closest friends in California had been Chinese and Korean, so she tried to ingratiate herself with the Asian Arizonans, but they were hesitant to accept her. Looking back, it was probably her hair—the peroxide had turned it orange—and her way of wearing fishnets with gym shorts, not a popular look at the time.

Greta started writing stories and passing them to the girls in English class. The stories were inspired by but much tamer than the ones she’d studied in Penthouse, a stack of which she’d found on the sidewalk, in a box labeled “Larry’s business papers.” Greta hated the word “cum,” for example, but the stories still qualified as erotica, with sex between female students and teachers. The girls had sex in various classrooms and closets while Ralph, the janitor, polished the linoleum with an industrial buffer and touched himself. She made sure to include as many sensory details as possible, such as the clicking noise of the slide projector, the smell of Bactine, the last words written on the chalkboard.

The girls were easily seduced, but Greta was more interested in her English teacher, Mr. Galucci. Hopefully, he would intercept one of these missives and see how firmly she’d embraced his lectures on specificity. She’d been flirting with him for weeks, to no avail. When she brought him an African lily, he said, “This is beautiful, but do you know who would really love it? Ms. Garcia, the Spanish teacher.” When she brought him a long rope of red licorice, he insisted on cutting it into twenty-three pieces to share with the whole class. When she offered to rub his shoulders one day, he asked if she was feeling all right and sent her to the nurse, and when he finally confiscated her stories, he delivered them straight to the principal, who suspended Greta for five days.