seventeen
The Merciful
“I wouldn’t sit there if I were you,” Ronique says when I go to sit in Annabel Lee’s chair. “Quentin Tarantulino is probably still hiding in there.”
“Is that a spider?” I squeak, darting away as if it’s already on me. I swear I can feel its little, jointed legs clawing along my back.
“Obviously,” she says, giving me a look.
“Will stand on business when it comes to Sinners, won’t sit on a chair with a spider,” Annabel Lee says in her usual, zero-inflection tone.
I stare at the offending chair. Of course Annabel Lee doesn’t have a regular chair you’d buy at an office supply store or even a cute one you’d get online for a dorm room.
No, hers is a high-backed, narrow armchair that looks like she found it in a Victorian antique shop and reupholstered it with wine-colored velvet and painstakingly placed a hundred tiny, satin buttons up each side like the ones you might see on the back of a wedding dress.
I don’t know what kind of hiding places a spider could find under it or inside it, but it looks like the perfect place for an eight-legged terror.
“Oh, don’t worry, he won’t bite you,” Annabel Lee says from where she’s sprawled on her bed like an ink stain.
“But if you sit on him and squish him, I might murder you and feed your body to my other pets. They do need their protein. Don’t you, Skelly-Welly?
” She makes her baby voice and rubs her knuckles into the possum’s stomach.
He opens his mouth in a horrifying, feral grin, tongue lolling out and drool trickling from the corner of his mouth.
He’s the very last creature I’d picture with an elegant, mysterious goth girl like Annabel Lee, with her billowing silk skirt and dramatic pose, like a rejected poet who threw herself down and is waiting to perish from a broken heart.
I scoot onto the edge of her bed, and the possum’s legs immediately stiffen as it plays dead.
“Where’s Manson?” I ask.
“He went to get my lifeblood,” she Annabel, throwing a slender, ivory wrist over her eyes. “I wanted to go too but it’s too sunny out.”
“Did your girlfriend break up with you or something?” I ask, shooting Ronique a glance, hoping for guidance, but she’s on her phone, giggling over something. Probably a text from Saint. I want to throw myself down next to Annabel Lee and die with her.
“What girlfriend?” Annabel Lee asks from under her arm.
“The one you went to the Sinners’ Bash with,” I remind her.
“We only hung out once,” she says. “She was hella milquetoast. She probably would have rolled over after three minutes of missionary and turned on the news.”
“I think only men do that,” Ronique says from where she’s perched on Annabel Lee’s desk.
“Trust, girls can be just as bad in bed as guys.”
“Can they?” Ronique asks. “You have all the equipment. You know how to run it.”
“You’d think,” Annabel Lee says with a sigh.
“How can you tell if a girl is bad in bed?” I ask, thinking about the guys. Is that why Saint never wants to do anything, even when Father Salvatore has told us over and over that it’s not a sin?
“If you have to ask, you probably are,” Ronique says.
I’m relieved that Manson arrives just then, so the others are distracted and I don’t have to die of shame. He enters with a grocery bag in one hand and a takeout tray with four cups of coffee in the other.
“I come bearing gifts,” he says. “Period blues, begone!”
“Oh,” I say slowly, nodding as I realize what’s going on with Annabel Lee. She’s still sprawled dramatically across her bed, her billowing skirt spread around her, arm over her eyes like she’s fainted.
“Here, sit up, have this,” Manson says, sliding an arm under her and pulling her upright, holding the wide straw in her huge cup to her lips.
She clutches the cup in both hands like a squirrel clutching an acorn and slurps down half of the coffee, whipped cream, and caramel, then heaves a sigh and slumps against him. “Marry me.”
“I’d be honored,” he says, chuckling before planting a kiss on her head and picking up the bag. “Unfortunately, I yearn for the warm embrace of a man. Preferably a feral yet hot wild man who will whisk me away to his mysterious cottage in the middle of an abandoned forest.”
“Sorry to break it to you, but Tarzan is fictional.”
“Okay, first of all, I was thinking of the Huntsman, and secondly, shut up and take your blueberry muffin and the abomination you call chocolate.” He thrusts a smaller paper bag at her from insider the grocery sack. “I also got takeout. Let’s eat.”
Manson lays out the astrology spread in the center of the bed, Ronique joins us, and we all sit cross legged around the food, opening the containers.
“So, what did I miss?” Manson asks, tearing open a packet of chopsticks with his teeth. “Did Saint give it up yet? If he did, you better not have told them without me.”
“We were talking about whether Mercy sucks in bed,” Ronique says.
“I’m sure you don’t,” Manson says, giving me a sympathetic smile. “But we all start somewhere. If you want to tell us about your escapades, we can give you pointers.”
“Can you not?” Annabel Lee drawls. “I really don’t want to hear about whatever weird shit my cousin’s into. Just do your Kegels, and I’m sure he’ll be happy forever.”
“What are Kegels?”
“Oh, you sweet summer child,” Manson says. “I neither own nor rent in V-town, and even I know that.”
“Guys can do them too,” Annabel Lee says, as she pinches a bite of greasy noodles between her chopsticks.
“What?” Manson demands. “They can? What am I supposed to be tightening? Oh my god, am I bad in bed?”
Suddenly we’re all laughing, and this time, I’m laughing too, and it feels so easy, so right, that my throat closes up and I miss Eternity so badly I can’t breathe.
Along with the ache of longing and loneliness, though, there is the usual guilt.
Guilt that I made other friends, and she didn’t.
Guilt that I know that if she were here, I would be with her instead, and I’d miss this.
That I’d be missing out on the friends who are here, and that makes me feel sad too, even though I probably wouldn’t even know they existed if she were here.
She was like Annabel Lee, not in any tangible way, but in the way that she was the beating heart of the group.
That’s why it all fell apart without her. She would never have let that happen. She would have bridged the gap, held us together, never let anything come between us. That’s why, when something finally did, it was her.
Her disappearance shattered us, and even now, it’s what brought us back together.
By some unspoken, maybe even unconscious agreement, we had designated her the key.
It’s the same in this group. Manson brought me into the group, but it’s Annabel Lee who approved the addition.
I know it, and they all know it, even if they don’t say it.
Manson dotes on her, and Ronique is jealous when someone else gets close to her because she knows that Annabel Lee is the keystone, the one it’s all built upon.
And there’s only one keystone in every group.
“Don’t look so glum,” Manson says, handing me a carton of fried rice.
“You’re still brand new. You’ve slept with one guy.
You have plenty of time to improve. Plus, you still have the guy, so you can’t be too bad.
I’ll do my man Kegels and you can do your lady Kegels, and we’ll both get better every day. ”
If only they knew.
They think I’ve only been with Angel. They don’t know about Father Salvatore fucking me with that statue the first time.
They don’t know that he ordered my brother to take me, and he did, as painfully as he could possibly make it, claiming me in a way no one else ever had.
They don’t know that Angel told me to go to Heath and make up.
They don’t know what happened on Christmas Eve.
And because I don’t like to think about that either, I don’t tell them.
Instead I listen to Manson lament how he can’t find a good boyfriend and Annabel Lee assure him that no one is good enough for him anyway; Annabel Lee contemplate whether to go out with the ‘beefcake’ who asked her to hang out this weekend; and Ronique complain about her dry spell.
That one comforts me a little, since it means she and Saint aren’t sleeping together, even if they’re still seeing each other.
By the time we’re done eating, they’ve moved on to the topic of spring break, and I help clean up and accept the coffee Manson got me. A while later, someone taps on the door, and Angel pokes his head into the room.
“Hey, sexy,” he says. “Want to come hang out with us?”
“Who’s ‘us’?” Ronique asks, giving me a resentful look. “Saint said he wasn’t going to the movie because he had homework tonight.”
Angel wraps a protective arm around me and levels Ronique with a cool look. “Saint’s a big boy. I’m sure he can keep track of his own dick.”
“Well, if he’s done with his homework, maybe I’ll come too,” she says. “Surprise him. What are you guys doing?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” Angel says. “If he said he’s busy, take the hint. He obviously doesn’t want to hang out with you.”
“You don’t have to be rude,” Manson says.
“And you don’t have to be so damn pretty, and yet, here we are,” Angel says, flashing Manson a grin.
I didn’t think it was possible to ruffle Manson, but he seems at a loss for words.
“Oh, let them go,” Annabel Lee says with a wave of her hand. “We need to plan our Ostara festivities anyway.”
As we leave the dorm, I scold Angel. “Don’t be mean to my friends. They’ll be all I have if… You know.”
“No, I don’t know.”
“If we break up,” I mutter.
“Why would we break up?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Stuff happens.”
“We’re not breaking up,” he says. “Ever. You’re my girlfriend, and I love you, so get used to it.”
“You… You love me?” I ask.
“Of course I do,” he says. “I’ve always loved you, M.”
“Oh,” I say faintly, forgetting all about my friends.
He loves me.
Angel North loves me.