People Like Us(61)
* * *
? ? ?
I BURY MYSELF in bottles of Nyquil, boxes of tissues, and stacks of textbooks for the next week and a half. I have an exam in every class except French before Thanksgiving break, and with my congested and (legitimately) doped-up brain moving at a snail’s pace, it takes every spare moment I have to catch up on my readings and prepare for the tests. The messages don’t stop coming, via email, Facebook, my door, which is so covered in graffiti I can barely see the wood anymore, and now, phone. I tried to make an appointment with my dorm housemother to talk about it, but she was very distant and said she was all booked up until after the break. I even put a phone call through to good old Officer Jenny Biggs at campus police, but she blew me off.
“I’m being harassed,” I told her. “Can I file a report or something?”
She paused for a long time. “To be honest, Kay, there have been so many harassment reports against you over the years, I don’t know that I want to do anything about it.”
She hung up on me.
Nola and I make outlines and flash cards and take turns quizzing each other and using Pavlovian conditioning to try to force information into our brains. When she gets an answer correct, she gets a Skittle. When I get an answer correct, I get a cough drop. I unhook my campus phone and put my cell phone on silent. No one calls me anyway, except with vague threats. My weekly calls home have become even more torturous than usual. They begin with an interrogation on whether games have resumed yet and devolve into ranting (Dad) about the unfairness on the part of the administration of taking sports away from grieving children and fretting (Mom) over how distant and unresponsive I’ve become. I end up shouting that I can’t do anything about the administration, Dad yells that I could start a petition or write an editorial in the newspaper or something, and Mom says she doesn’t know me anymore and when did I become so angry and aggressive? Then I hang up and try to put my phone on silent before I receive a threatening phone call from some random townie promising to kick my ass (yes, the townies are at it, too, now). I will not be spending Thanksgiving with my family, Brie or no Brie.
So it’s an automatic yes please when Nola unexpectedly asks if I’m interested in going to her family’s place in Maine.
She looks surprised when I say yes. “Oh. Really?”
“My family doesn’t do Thanksgiving. I was planning on hiding under my bed and eating pretzels and applesauce.”
She pauses. “Well, we don’t usually do anything fancy, but it’s a step up from pretzels and applesauce.”
“Deal.”
Nola has not only been the sole person to stand by me through all of this, she has also been fiercely protective. I wouldn’t have had it in me to defend myself. Maybe if I didn’t deserve at least some of the hate being thrown at me, I could. But I know people are using the murder as an excuse to vent pent-up anger because of things I did or said to them, maybe years ago. Little things that didn’t seem to matter at the time. It’s impossible to disentangle that. It makes it so hard to fight back. I don’t know what I’d do without Nola. I was pretty horrible to her and she forgave me, proof that I’m not beyond saving. A part of me keeps hoping people will notice this and think, “Oh, look! Kay was a total bitch to Nola and now they’re like BFFs. I should follow her example and forgive Kay, too. How glorious the high road is! Come back to us, repentant Kay! All is forgiven!”
I guess redemption doesn’t work that way.
20
We leave for Nola’s on Sunday evening. The train to her house cuts across the same landscape Brie and I used to take to the coast and then juts up north along the rocky shore where we used to hop on a bus to head south to the Cape. I have always adored the New England shore. My parents used to take me and Todd to the beach in New Jersey every year. The New Jersey beach is down the shore. The sand is a burning golden blanket, and the water is a warm, murky green. I loved our summers down the shore, digging for sand crabs in the frothy surf, chasing the ice cream truck down the hot pavement, and spending hours boiling in the water, forgetting to reapply sunscreen, and emerging at the end of every day burned bright red and untouchably tender.
After he died, though, it was unthinkable to return.
New England beaches are nothing, nothing like any of that. You don’t go down the shore, you go up the coast. The sand is large and prickly and granular and sticks uncomfortably to the bottom of your feet, and the cold, translucent water rinses up over pebbles. If you stay in too long, you start going numb. The colors are gray and bone and a muted medley of sea glass; the only golden you come across at the Cape are the purebreds trotting around the dog parks or at beaches that allow them to frolic in the surf. At least, that’s Brie’s Cape. There are always parts you don’t get to know when you become acquainted with a place through the lens of a specific person. But when we travel up the coast, or bus south to the Cape, that’s all we see. That pastel palette of bone and sea glass, shark-eye gray and ghostly white.
That’s mostly what I see heading up toward Nola’s house, too, only the coast is rockier, and the sea seems angrier, slapping against the sides of cliffs. The sun sinks down into the watery horizon too quickly to put on much more of a show than a couple of brilliant tangerine ribbons, and then we’re left with a sliver of moonlight and the occasional lighthouse sweeping its thin beam back and forth over the water.