Girl in Snow(61)

And then I notice it: in the corner where he used to keep his Hardy Boys collection is a model airplane. It’s hand-painted and landbound in a clear glass case. When we were younger, Zap never expressed an interest in model airplanes, or airplanes at all.

This breaks my heart. I guess that’s the difference between loving someone—really loving someone—and doing it from afar. It’s like, you can know every detail. You can memorize how he sits in class, with his legs all casual out to the sides. You can count the lines on the palm that shoots upward in math class, and you can know those knuckles. But those hands have created something delicate, a miniature and impeccable combination of glue, paint, and sticks. This took care, precision, and a certain level of tenderness—all of which you didn’t see.



A year and a half ago, the Fourth of July. That’s when it really ended for me.

Amy was off with her friends and Ma dragged me to fireworks—I could tell she felt bad for me, but not in a way that encouraged her to be nice. She spent the night telling me how I shouldn’t be wearing such short shorts, they weren’t flattering on a girl my size, and when was I going to start using the gym membership she paid for every month?

The night was thick with mosquitoes. Kids pranced around on the shore of Windfall Lake, waving sparklers and lighting bottle rockets—this was the public part of town, where you went if you didn’t know anybody rich. Ma brought two bottles of champagne for herself, which she stuck in an old cooler from the garage. When she left to find a Porta-Potty, I dumped my soda in the grass and poured a healthy amount of champagne into my cup, which I hid behind my lawn chair. If Terry saw, he didn’t care.

“I’m going for a walk,” I told Ma when she came back. She lowered herself into the lawn chair. Examined her nails.

Jenna Lindhauser was throwing a party. I hadn’t been invited, of course, but I knew where Jenna’s house was, from the carpool schedule years ago. If the lake were a clock, Jenna’s house was at the three—Ma and Terry were at the six. I circled around, winding my way through the treelined suburbs, slapping my arms every now and then to scare the mosquitoes. By the time I reached Jenna’s house, the fireworks had started, cracking and popping over the lake. The side gate was propped open with a slab of concrete; from behind the house came loud music and laughing. It smelled like barbecue. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been invited—no one would notice me. They never did. Maybe that’s why I went to the party in the first place. For that warm, unsettling feeling of fading into the background. Or simpler; masochism.

Zap’s friends sat around a picnic table on the deck. He was probably in the crowd down by the water—the fireworks crackled red and blue and yellow, wilted trees over the lake, doubled in their reflections.

I drained the warm champagne from my cup, thankful for the calm that came over me in its wake. I needed another drink. Jenna’s house was bright lights and marble, and I wound my way through the dining room, then the living room, in search of the kitchen.

On the way, something stopped me. In a small, dimly lit hall off the dining room, animal sounds came from behind a cracked door.

I knew what sex sounded like. I’d watched internet porn (albeit minimally). Soon, I would do it myself: only two months later, I would have sex with a nineteen-year-old named Jason who was staying in our hotel on our family vacation to Ohio. It would hurt, but I wouldn’t bleed. He would pull my hair. He’d make me leave right after because his parents were coming back from the casino. I would never hear from him again.

I didn’t know what I’d find at the end of this unlit hall, but it would be personal, intimate. Something I wasn’t meant to see. I would follow anyway, for the sake of it. That’s what I do. I push people. I make them angry. I do things no one wants.

The door was cracked open, and I peered in through the half-inch sliver.

They were on the bed.

I recognized his toes. The second toes poked out farther than the big ones. And the calluses along the sides of his feet, from years of running in soccer cleats—flat and white, built up along Zap’s bones.

Lucinda was perched on top, wearing only a pair of denim shorts. Her back was smooth. Her shoulder blades had ridges in all the right places, two flat pans covered in soft, doughy skin, and the flawless curve of her lower back. She was tiny around the middle, only a few inches thick in profile. She shook her hair out to the side and lengthened her back, brown nipples hard, cupcake breasts arched to the ceiling.

Lucinda bent her head over him. Fast breathing. Gasps—a moan. Her hair was a sheet of gold as she bobbed up and down, her mouth sliding over him, her legs split to either side like she was going to devour Zap, consume his very being. It was almost pretty to watch. Like an absurdist painting of a crime scene: horrendous and exquisite, so much of both that you can’t look away.

As Zap groaned under the spell of Lucinda Hayes, I stood behind the door, champagne sloshing in my gut, and thought: This is how it feels. This, here—her full lips wet around him, ice-tray teeth and warm tongue—this is how it feels to lose someone.



Now, forty-five minutes after Lucinda’s funeral, Zap presses his palms to his eyes and I shift my weight in his bedroom doorway. There are plenty of things I want to say, but most of them are irrelevant.

“How well did you know Lucinda?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” he says.