Chapter Thirty
THIRTY
“There’s nothing more dangerous than being noticed by men,” Fish said, even though she herself was really bad at that. Because everyone noticed her, of course. Sometimes, when she was a bit drunk or high, she would lie in bed with the screwdriver in her hand and mumble to Louisa: “You can’t trust them, have you ever seen the floor of a men’s bathroom? And those creatures are actually allowed to make political decisions? And drive cars? Do we really want to put people who can’t even piss straight in charge of all the horsepower in the world? We shouldn’t even put them in charge of one horse!” But when she was sleepy and sad, she would whisper in the darkness: “You can’t trust men, Louisa, they’re far too easy to love.”
Fish was always in love with someone, her crushes were like the drugs she took, happiness on credit. Her heart paid the debt, with interest. The world was too thorny for her, she kept getting scratched. She tried to seem cynical, always telling Louisa not to trust anyone, but deep down Fish’s big problem was that she believed in happy endings. That was why she was so easy to hurt. She fell for men who were geniuses, but quite a few who weren’t, and the kind ones were the worst. They picked her up in their cars and sometimes they gave her gifts. Louisa wished it had only been jewelry or watches, but often they gave Fish something far crueler: promises. They said they would leave their wives or girlfriends, that they would have a life with her, but of course that never happened. While Fish lay asleep beside her at night, it was incomprehensible to Louisa that all the wives in the world didn’t get left for this person. That no one realized she was the best. Or almost, anyway. Okay, maybe not in the morning,
The only bad thing about Fish was that she was terrible in the morning, because she always woke up happy, and that’s a complete misunderstanding of what a morning is. Louisa, who was a normal person, always woke up to find Fish bouncing on the bed as if it was going to be the best day ever. Then she just got sadder and sadder with each hour that passed, until in the evening she was like a wilted flower, you had to make the most of the light if you wanted to see her blossom.
On her eighteenth birthday, early that spring, the sun had shone all day and she had sat on the back of a wobbly old bicycle laughing wildly as Louisa rode her around town, chasing the light as if the shadows had teeth. When the sun was going down and Louisa saw her friend wilt, she did the most magical thing she could think of: she broke into a library. Because that was where all the fairy tales were.
Naturally, Louisa wasn’t as good at breaking into places as Fish was, so in purely technical terms it wasn’t actually a break-in, it was more like them getting shut in on purpose. Which is possibly, in purely technical terms, still a break-in. But it wasn’t the break-in that was the present, it was the plan, when Fish realized how much time Louisa must have spent working out how it was all going to happen. “I didn’t know I took up this much space in your brain,” Fish had said. “You’re everywhere in my brain all the time,” Louisa had replied. “Is that where I left my gloves? I’ve been looking for them everywhere!” Fish had grinned. “Shhh!” Louisa had replied, because they had just heard the security guards.
The plan was as simple as it was stupid: they had hidden in one of the bathrooms when the library closed, in the last stall. But of course the guards had come in and noticed that one stall was locked, and the girls had sat huddled up together on the cramped toilet seat, holding their breath.
First the guard yelled and banged on the door of the locked stall so hard that Louisa wanted to crawl out of her skin. When there was no response, he went and got some tools, then stood outside for several minutes removing the screws, and when the lock clicked Louisa jumped so hard that she almost cried out. The guard threw the door open triumphantly with his fists clenched, and Fish held her hand over Louisa’s mouth, their hearts beating so hard that it was incomprehensible that the guards couldn’t hear them.
“I told you! The lock must have clicked shut by itself!” the other guard had grumbled.
The first guard just stared in surprise at the empty stall.
“I could have sworn I heard…,” he mumbled.
“Come on, I want to get home, the game starts soon,” the second guard said.
So they left. Not to brag, but the plan was so stupid it was genius. Louisa had figured out that if all the doors were unlocked, the guards would check all the stalls, but if just one door was locked, they wouldn’t bother opening the others. Because what sort of idiot tries to hide behind an unlocked door?
“You’re the best, Giant! Have I ever told you that?” Fish had grinned a couple of minutes later when they emerged from the bathroom and wandered out into the dark, empty library. She had lit a cigarette and Louisa had looked prouder than a cat that has just left a mouse in its owner’s cereal bowl.
“I wanted to give you something no man has ever given you,” she smiled, and then Fish had held her hand.
They wandered about in the sea of shelves between waves of books, and Louisa had never been in a quieter space. It was crazy, really, that Fish loved quiet places yet was friends with Louisa, who always needed noise. Who always was noise, actually. If Louisa wasn’t talking she was humming, because she was scared of death and death is silent. But for a few moments even she embraced the silence.
Then they played games. They pretended they were in a zombie film where humanity had been destroyed, and then they switched to hide-and-seek, which was a ridiculously stupid idea because Fish was so good at it that Louisa started to panic. “I give up, just come out!” she hissed desperately into the darkness, only to be met with a “WHAT DID YOU SAY???” when Fish jumped out, frightening the life out of her. Louisa yelped in terror and Fish hissed, “SHHH!” Then they lay on the floor and Fish read out loud, because her favorite thing in the library was the fairy tales, but Louisa’s favorite thing was Fish’s voice.
“Don’t worry, she’s the main character, so she isn’t going to die! The main character never dies in fairy tales!” Fish explained when she read one that she particularly liked.
She was wrong. Because in their fairy tale it was Fish who died.
When they got hungry during that night in the library, they drank Coca-Cola and ate muffins in the deserted cafeteria. Fish pointed out that, in purely technical terms, it wasn’t theft: “We’re in a library, aren’t we? So it’s a loan.” They would probably have stayed there all night if Fish hadn’t gotten curious and opened a door that said “Emergency Exit.” Then the alarm went off. Louisa had been in the bathroom, and came rushing out with her pants around her ankles to point out that that hadn’t been the smartest thing to do. Then Fish muttered: “I just wanted to see where it went!” When Louisa demonstratively pointed to the sign that said “Emergency Exit,” Fish said: “Okay, but exit to WHAT?”
Considering that they were geniuses, they weren’t always geniuses, those two, so it was lucky that they were good at running. At least they were once Louisa had pulled up her pants.
On the way home they held hands tightly, and when the first light of dawn burned in Fish’s eyes, she said: “If I live until I’m eighty, it won’t matter, because this is my now forever.” That’s what Louisa misses most, because every day may not have been the best day, but with Fish at least you knew that the day had a chance.
“You mustn’t be frightened of death, Giant!” Fish had said when they had almost reached the foster home, and then she had pointed at the sky: “Look at the sun, do you get how crazy it is that it rises every morning? Do you get that, Giant? How crazy it is that we are here?” Then Fish had growled and howled and made faces at Louisa to show how insane it was that a human being could do all that, how impossible a body is. “Isn’t it like, totally unbelievable that we even exist? So it won’t be a tragedy when we don’t exist anymore! It’s just cool, really cool, that we happened at all.”
Almost every night since she died Louisa has woken up screaming into the darkness: “I give up! Just come out!”
The curse is the same for everyone who has loved someone who died of an overdose: we think that if we could just have been with our human every moment of every day, then it would never have happened. It never stops being our fault.
Louisa and Fish had a life together, but at the end they also had two separate lives. Louisa tried to be like the girls at school, doing her makeup like them and dressing like them, but of course they just laughed. The clothes they wore didn’t even come in Louisa’s size. She envied their self-confidence most of all. They knew who they were, because they had families, they had inherited a belief that they belonged in every room they walked into. Louisa felt like a rat born in a laboratory. The girls came back from school vacation talking about trips and restaurants and visits to the sea. They could all swim, and they could roller-skate and eat with chopsticks. One of them asked Louisa if she liked “sashimi,” and Louisa thought it was a cool new band, so she said: “Yes! I listen to them all the time!” Their laughter was like shotgun pellets.
Once she got invited to a birthday party, by mistake, of course, someone’s mom had asked all the girls in the class without checking if they were all the same. But for a few hours it was still great, they drank Coca-Cola and watched films and gossiped about boys, Louisa didn’t say a word but still felt almost normal. Then someone’s wallet went missing and everyone looked at her. The wallet reappeared, it had fallen behind a bed, but by then Louisa had already seen what she was in their eyes: not one of them, not really. She stopped trying after that, loneliness was better than disappointment.
Fish tried to belong in other places. She stopped going to school, disappeared into dark alleyways and down into black holes instead, finding older friends in a fog of bottles and pills. Sometimes Louisa felt hurt that she wasn’t allowed to go with her, but Fish joked: “Who’s going to look after me tomorrow if we’re both hungover?” When she got back to the foster home at night she would only get undressed if all the lights in the room were switched off. She slept in long-sleeved shirts. One time she said: “I don’t want you to see the worst of me, Giant. I just want to be the best version of myself in your brain.”
Fish hated reality too much to bear it, trying to save her was like catching smoke with a net. The girls shared a bed but still slipped away from each other. Soon after Fish’s eighteenth birthday, the adults at the home found all the gold jewelry and watches in her backpack. Of course Fish refused to say where she’d gotten them, so the adults called the police. One of the necklaces had come from one of the kind men, but it actually belonged to the man’s wife, and after he gave it to Fish he had reported it stolen to get the insurance money. The police had started an investigation. Fish wasn’t allowed to stay in the foster home, the adults there didn’t want to be responsible for her. So she got swallowed up by the town and the night. Louisa wanted to run away with her, but Fish forbade her, because Louisa was still only seventeen and the police would look for them. God, how Louisa hates herself for doing as she was told. The last thing Fish did was kiss her on the cheek and promise: “Don’t worry. Everything’s going to be fine. Our fairy tale has only just begun.”
A few nights later a cleaner arrived at the library, just as the sun was rising. She found Fish curled up on the floor among the fairy tales. The policeman who called the foster home said the doctor had declared it an overdose, but said that Fish had drifted off peacefully in her sleep. Her body full of happiness on credit.