Chapter 2 #2
“Technically, they’re all the men’s room. It’s a frat.” He gestured to the front of his shirt. “Were you still . . . or . . . can I . . .”
“I’m just hiding in here,” I admitted.
He smiled. “Good plan.” He stripped out of his oxford shirt and rinsed it in the sink.
He draped it over the towel rack, as if he was used to being half--naked in front of people all the time.
All I could see, for a moment, was Henry Lavalle, smiling down at me on the bank of a lake.
“Can I tell you a secret?” this boy said.
“I’d rather be hiding in here, too.” He pulled on a T--shirt that had been stuffed in his back pocket like a mechanic’s rag.
“Are you in Sigma Chi?”
He nodded. “Next year, though, I’m moving to Technology House.” He folded his arms. “What year are you?”
“I’m . . . visiting,” I said.
“Nice to meet you, Visiting,” he teased.
“I should go.” I started to dance around him in the small space and opened the door. Immediately the cacophony rushed in.
“Wait.” I was halfway out the door when his hand landed on my forearm. We both stared down at it. “What’s your name?” he murmured.
My eyes met his—-deep blue, the darkest ocean—-and the ground tilted, although I was completely sober. My pulse hammered so loud in my ears I was certain he could hear it. Here lies Eloise Mills, I thought. She died from anticipatory attraction.
“There you are!”
Evie materialized in the open doorway, smiling. “I wanted to run into you, but not to run into you. Please tell me I didn’t ruin your shirt?”
“Nothing a little Tide can’t fix,” the boy said.
I realized two things in that moment: that Evie had been the one to spill the beer on his shirt; and that it was not me she had been looking for.
Evie looked up at the boy as if he’d lit the stars. Then, she turned to me. “This is the guy I was telling you about,” she said happily. “Eloise, meet Adam.”
I have—-well, Nina MacAllen had—-sixty--three dollars. I spend six of it on a pack of donuts and a coffee at an Atlanta grocery mart next to the bus station. I wolf these down standing beside a garbage can. Then I stand on the street, shielding my eyes from an unrelenting sun.
I can see skyscrapers downtown, and the sight makes my stomach flip. At any moment, they could fall.
So instead, I walk in the opposite direction. Homeless men fish for tin cans in trash bins. A woman sits with a listless dog in the shade of an awning. Graffiti snakes across doorways: FUCK YOU J.D.; BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL. I stop in front of one: spiky blue script that reads WELCOME TO HELL.
Just like that, my fingers dissolve. I watch them drip on the pavement, sizzling.
I tuck my hands under my armpits, looking around to make sure no one has noticed.
I walk faster, but that piece of graffiti follows me, appearing on the brick wall in an alley, on the sign outside a pawnshop, on the back of a T--shirt worn by a gas station employee who’s on a smoke break.
WELCOME TO HELL. WELCOME TO HELL. WELCOME TO HELL.
I knew this was coming, didn’t I?
Everything hurts. My blistered feet in their flat sandals and the molars in my jaw and my torpedo breasts, which have leaked circles of milk on my shirt. When I finally see a Vacancy sign in the distance I run, crossing my arms tight as my wrists begin to perforate. I am peeling off layer by layer.
If the clerk at the motel notices that the money I give him for a room is smeared with my own blood, he says nothing. He just hands me a key, which I snatch before the rest of my fingers melt away.
On my way to the room, I pass a maid’s cart and a drug deal happening in the hinged space where an ice machine groans mechanically. The two men who are passing cash and a small baggie turn in unison. I do not make eye contact.
There is a bed with a brown polyester comforter on it, a nightstand with a flickering lamp, and a blind--eyed television. Rhythmic thumps and moans come from the other side of the wall. Yeah, baby. Give it all to me. Fuck, yes.
The fluorescents in the bathroom make me look ghoulish, green. I wrestle off my shirt and shimmy down the straps of my bra. It hurts, God, it hurts. My fingers, what’s left of them, squeeze the sides of each breast, releasing a thin stream of milk into the sink.
Almost immediately, I feel boneless relief. I cannot do the math in my head—-how many hours have passed since Molly last nursed—-but it’s been too long. I keep expressing milk until both breasts soften and I can slip them into the cups of the bra again.
(You are worthless.)
I freeze, afraid to look up.
(You are a terrible mother.)
“She is better off without me,” I whisper, still looking down at my melted hands.
Breath saws in and out of my lungs. Gathering all my courage, I lift my face to the mirror.
My eyes swim in blood. My teeth are rotted. When I lift my hand, I see that the skin is gone.
And then I see Him, grinning beside me. (You didn’t really think you could get away from me, Eloise, did you?) He shakes his head. (Stupid, stupid.)
Flailing, I strike out one fist toward the mirror, toward his unearthly face. The glass rains down, falling into the sink. A gash covers the side of my hand. One shard sticks out like the fin of a shark.
With detached curiosity I stare at it, flexing my rubber fingers.
(You know what to do, Eloise.)
I cup one hand with the other as blood drips toward my elbow.
It was always going to be like this. I was already gone, even before I left the city.
A sliver of sun through the curtain ricochets off the piece of mirror embedded in my flesh, illuminating like a neon sign.
So I pull it out, and then drag the blade of glass deep across my wrist.
Dios mío.
Flash. Red. Blue. Red.
Do you know her name? Miss, can you hear me?
Hypotensive . . . shallow respirations . . .
Hold pressure to stop the bleeding.
Flash. Pain. A band around my forearm. A boa constrictor, squeezing.
Miss, we need to get you to the hospital.
Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo . . .
Flash. Red. Blue. Red.
Eyes like a thousand needles prick as I pass. Is this my funeral?
“Not if I can help it,” someone says.
Bump, thump. Watch the curb.
Someone leans over me. A woman. Don’t worry. I’ve got you. I try to nod, but her smile becomes a rictus. Those eyes burn demon red.
Doors slam. My scream turns into sirens.
When I wake up, I cannot move my arms. I glance down and see that my wrists are covered in gauze and chained in soft restraints to the metal bars of the hospital bed. Above my head, a grainy television plays Gilligan’s Island.
“Where . . . am I?” I rasp.
A curtain rustles, and a woman in yellow scrubs approaches. She looks at a monitor before glancing down at me. “You’re at the hospital. How do you feel?”
A pulse throbs in my wrists. Like a failure, I think.
“What’s your name, hon?” she asks. “You didn’t have any ID on you when the EMTs brought you in.”
I look at a poster on the wall of a cabinet. grady hospital and georgia—-a perfect match!
“Georgia,” I say. “Georgia . . .” My eyes cut to the Professor and Mary Ann. “Gilligan.”
The nurse makes a note on a chart. “Well, Georgia, you are one lucky woman. You were found by a maid at the motel, and she called 911.”
My gaze rolls to the nightstand beside the bed. On it is a tumbler of water with a straw, and the red ribbon from my hair. I shift, and the restraints snag.
“Oh, that,” the nurse says, as if it’s totally normal to handcuff someone to a bed. “You were scratching like a hellcat when they brought you in.” As she talks, she takes my blood pressure and temperature.
I hold my breath, waiting to hear the voice.
(You can’t even kill yourself right.)
He closes my eyes. He flips through my memories one at a time. I am a bystander, watching my flaws from the sidelines.
When I blink, someone new is in my room, an older man with white hair and dark skin. “I’m Dr. Baxter,” he says. “I’m a psychiatrist here. How do you feel, Georgia?”
Who the fuck is Georgia?
(Not you. You are nobody. You are nothing)
Instead of answering, I feel hot tears slide down my face.
“Were you trying to hurt yourself, Georgia?”
The answer bursts out of me. “Yes,” I say.
“Because you were unhappy?”
“I’m unhappy,” I snap, “because I’m still here.”
He crosses his legs. “What do you mean by that?”
Can’t he tell by looking at me that I’m a shell of myself? “I don’t deserve to live.”
“Can you tell me more about that?”
What am I supposed to say?
The doctor just sits and watches me like he has all the time in the world. My jaw aches with the attempt to keep all these words inside me.
(If you tell him about me, I will kill you.)
I turn to the psychiatrist. “I’m not human anymore,” I say evenly. “And Satan keeps reminding me of that.”
“All right, Georgia,” Dr. Baxter replies gently. “I think I know how to help.”
To Evie’s chagrin, Adam did not kiss her the night of the frat party.
However, he seemed to be happy to spend time with her.
He’d come to our dorm room with coffee milk for us both; when it snowed, he invited us to meet him at the Ratty to sled down Simmons Quad on cafeteria trays.
He took us to the Coin--O--Matic laundromat, where Raymond “Junior” Patriarca had once run the family’s organized crime ring.
I could always feel Evie’s eyes begging me to hang back so she could have more time alone with Adam.
We learned he was a junior, studying engineering: he was from Vermont—-a place I’d never been; he was a confirmed atheist; he was a center for the Brown ice hockey team. He fit in easily everywhere—-with other jocks, with his frat bros, with RISD students.
Evie learned the rules of hockey and started following NHL stats. She told me that their names were biblically predestined: Adam and Eve--ie, although she had always pronounced her name with a short E, not the long vowel.
“What is it?” she asked me one night in our dorm room. “Do you think he wants a girl who’s preppy? Do you think he’s into guys?”
“He’s crazy if he doesn’t want you,” I told her loyally.