Damaged Read online

  I look at Hunter now and everything about him is the opposite of that girl I remember, the darkness to her light. What did she see in him? Was he something for her to fix? To shine and make pretty? Something to make her feel serious, to give her depth? Or was her desire something as shallow as the good girl wanting to take a spin with the bad boy, senior year, a few months before college, slumming it before growing up?

  But she said she loved him. She didn’t tell me much, but she said that. She only ever said that. And maybe that’s the reason she didn’t tell me anything else, because when she looked me in the eye and said, “Kinsey, I think I’m in love with Hunter Collins,” with the most serious, earnest look I’d ever seen in our fourteen years of friendship, I laughed in her face. Because the first thing I said was, “You can’t be serious. Not that loser.”

  Looking at him now, at this brooding, half-drunk boy across the street, I still have no idea what she could have loved. Something inside me squeezes tight, pushes the air out of my lungs. My heart caves in, stops beating, at the realization that there are things I didn’t know about Camille, huge expanses of her insides that she never showed me, a secret life where she was capable of loving this feral creature on the sidewalk, where her love of him meant she must have loved me less. And I hate him for it.

  I close my eyes to make him go away. I count to ten. This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to remembering Camille since she died. Really remembering her. She is suddenly more than a name, more than a timeline and empty facts. I have gone beneath the surface, something I promised myself I wouldn’t do. I let this feeling get too far; I didn’t stop it soon enough. It takes all my concentration to push it away, to clean my mind, to empty myself of these useless feelings.

  But when I open my eyes, Hunter seems suddenly closer.

  His eyes meet mine like magnets.

  I am colder than I’ve ever been.

  I can’t look away.

  The world falls away and there is only us.

  He is standing on the sidewalk with his skateboard in his hand, with the same look on his face I must have on mine, one of surprised terror. The cloud in his eyes is gone. It has been replaced by something even sharper than fear.

  Something has shifted, started, some kind of ticking, a timer; where there once was stillness there is now vibration, tiny unravelings. I have become a time bomb. Something inevitable is going to happen. The bus starts moving and our heads turn, synchronized, our eyes holding on to each other. He starts walking, then running as the bus picks up speed, but he can’t keep up. He jumps on his skateboard but it is too late. The bus turns the corner and he is gone, as easy as I conjured him.

  When he is out of sight, I can breathe again. My body goes back to normal. I have no idea what that feeling was, but it’s over now. Hunter is gone, out of my life. There will be no more surprise rushes of feeling, no more losing control.

  I look up to find a sea of beady eyes staring at me. He was not my apparition. They all saw him too. They saw me see him. They saw him running after the bus. There will be talk, people will speculate about what this means, but I don’t care. These people, this world, will be out of my life soon. They can go on thinking whatever they like while I move on and leave them behind.

  Everyone for miles around knows the story of the accident. Most probably assume we’re some kind of unit now—Kinsey Cole and Hunter Collins, the best friend and the boyfriend. The survivors. But the truth is, that night was the first and only time I ever met Hunter Collins. Being present at the same death did not turn us into friends, did not automatically create a connection where there was none to begin with. It was simply an unfortunate coincidence that we crossed paths at that particular moment. Then our paths went in different directions. End of story. Until now, I suppose. But that was a fluke, never to be repeated.

  It shocks people to discover that Hunter and I are not in touch, that we haven’t latched onto each other for comfort, that we haven’t established some sort of support group where we relive the accident over and over and cry in each other’s arms about how much we miss Camille. Until now, I haven’t seen him since that night and I don’t plan to. Why would either of us make the effort to connect when all it would do is remind us about the one tragic thing we have in common? The logical thing for both of us is to move on and try to forget.

  But I can’t help remembering the night they met. I can’t help thinking I could have done something to stop it. It started out a party like every other party Camille dragged me to so I could be more “social.” She had dressed me up in some of her clothes, none of which looked right. She had been complaining about how sick she was of the boys at our school, how she had known them all since kindergarten, how boring they all were, how shallow. I was trying to be useful, telling her to wait for college. But she was never good at waiting.

  I remember the moment she saw Hunter across the room. I saw the look in her eyes that said she had just made up her mind about something. I looked where she was looking, saw the long-haired, heavy-lidded guy with the beer in his hand leaning against the wall, looking both cooler and more dangerous than any of the guys at school. We both knew who he was. Word gets around when someone new and mysterious shows up. I knew as much about him as she did: recent relocation from Chicago, senior at the high school the next town over, rich, rumors of drug selling, a possible criminal record, a drinking problem, maybe even a violent streak.

  All I did was say, “Camille, no.” But she started walking in his direction. I did not follow, did not grab her arm, did not make up some excuse for why we had to leave. As soon as I saw her plastic cup greet his in its muted cheers, I turned around, left the party, and walked the three miles home.

  But I don’t want to think about that. I don’t want to think about Hunter. I don’t want to think about Camille, but no matter how hard I resist, she keeps trying to come back, even after I took all the pictures of her down from my wall, even after I put away all the things she ever gave me or let me borrow, even after I stopped doing all the things we used to do together, even after I stopped returning her mom’s phone calls. It should be easier to forget. It should be easier to wipe my mind clean. I’ve been able to handle it until now, until Hunter showed up and made his messy appearance in my tidy life. I’ve always been able to fight off the memories before they solidified, but now it feels like a barrier’s been broken, a wall has come crumbling down, and I am suddenly exposed, vulnerable. How could seeing someone I barely know for a few seconds do this? Maybe I’m tired. Or maybe the memories are getting stronger than me.

  The bus drives out of town and into the cornfields. I try to forget how much Camille changed in the three short months they were dating, how she waited so long to introduce us, how suddenly she had secrets. I try to forget how little Hunter tried to win me over the night we finally officially met, how he didn’t seem to care what I thought of him at all. Everyone talked about how he wasn’t at the funeral, just like they talked about how I didn’t cry. I shove all of this out of my mind as the bus pulls up in front of Grandma’s house and I get off. As I walk the quarter mile to my house, I ready myself for another game of avoidance.

  There’s a rental car parked in front of the PEACE DOVE ­POTTERY sign (I can tell it’s a rental because no one actually drives white midsize sedans by choice). Mom has customers. I practice a smile in preparation.

  The bells on the door jingle as I open it and for a moment I feel like a visitor in my own house. I have to act different when there are customers around—friendly—and, quite frankly, I don’t have the energy right now. I want to run through the showroom to the kitchen, shove my face full of cereal, and peacefully study for my last round of tests before it’s time to leave for work.

  As I enter, I am attacked by something fast, white, furry, and yapping. I feel a sting in my ankle as the creature latches onto my pant leg, so I do the only thing any sane person would do in this situation—I
kick. The thing goes flying across the room and lands at the feet of a severely obese woman standing next to an equally obese man.

  “Kinsey!” my mom yells.

  “Snowflake!” the fat woman cries.

  I pull up my pant leg to see two small beads of blood, like the bite of a baby vampire.

  The woman lifts the dog off the floor and starts babbling at it in a baby voice. Mom glares at me, like it’s my fault I was attacked.

  “Sorry,” I say. “Is it okay?”

  “Snowflake is not an it,” the woman says. “Snowflake is a she. Aren’t you, baby?” She nuzzles her chubby face into the evil puffball’s neck.

  “Sorry,” I say again.

  Mom smiles her winning smile and pats the woman’s shoulder. Only I know how much she really hates these ­people. “It’s all right,” she coos. “I think everyone just got a little startled. Isn’t that right, Snowflake?” Snowflake doesn’t answer. “Kinsey, why don’t you go in the back and do your homework, okay? I’ll start wrapping these up. The berry bowl and the two mugs, right?”

  The woman narrows her eyes like she’s being tricked. “Yes,” the man finally says, pulling out his wallet, no doubt wanting to get this over with as quickly as possible.

  The door to the kitchen is behind the counter where they’re all standing, so I have to maneuver awkwardly around them. Mom taps away at her calculator, even though she knows this equation by heart. These are her two best sellers: fifty dollars for a bowl with holes in the bottom; twenty dollars each for coffee mugs with her cheesy dove logo on the side. ­Hippies love it because it’s the sign of peace. Conservatives love it because it supposedly has something to do with Jesus. Mom loves it because it’s an easy twenty dollars for something that takes her no time to make.

  I grab a bowl of cereal and pour some soy milk on top, then plop down on the couch in the big open space that is our combination kitchen/dining room/living room. Mom declared our household vegan two years ago, very much against my will. “But I’m an athlete!” I protested. “I’m a growing teenager. I need protein.” Beans and tofu have protein, she said. Tempeh. Seitan. So I supplement my diet of whole grains and organic vegetables with milk shakes and chili cheese dogs at work. Sometimes I eat up to four hot dogs a night. It’s disgusting.

  “Fucking tourists,” Mom says as she enters the kitchen. I can hear their white car crunching away on the gravel.

  “The season’s just starting,” I say. “You can’t be burned-out already.”

  “Like those two even eat berries,” she says. “That bowl is going to end up holding candy or potato chips or whatever it is those pigs eat.”

  “Be nice,” I say. Among other things, my mom is a food snob. This is a strange thing to be when you’re on food stamps and living in rural western Michigan, where most people’s idea of fine cuisine is fried perch or some kind of casserole doused in cream of mushroom soup. She refuses to make anything resembling a casserole. Instead, she experiments with things like massaged kale, toasted quinoa, acai berries, and various other ingredients she has to convince the grocery store in town to order even though she’s the only one who will ever buy them. It’s been sixteen years since she lived in San Francisco; you’d think she would have gotten over it by now.

  “How was school today?” she says in a sarcastic voice. She’s not one for parental conventions like caring how your kid’s day is. She’s standing at her stage behind the kitchen island where she concocts her culinary experiments, like the rest of the room is the audience to her cooking show. The studio is where she makes and displays her pottery, but the kitchen is where she does a different kind of art with food. With all her creativity, it’s pretty remarkable that I got none at all. And she never fails to remind me how much this disgusts and disappoints her.

  “Fine,” I answer.

  “Don’t ‘fine’ me.”

  “Don’t ‘how was school today’ me.”

  She throws some roots and vegetables onto the counter. “I think I’m going to make a stew in the slow cooker. It should be ready in about four hours.”

  “I’m working tonight,” I say, drinking the slimy sweet sludge from the bottom of my cereal bowl.

  “Do you really need to work this much?”

  “Mom, you know I’m saving for next year. I’m going to have expenses.”

  “You and your planning,” she sighs, chopping a purple potato from the garden. “You’re so stuck in the future all the time. Always preparing for the worst. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, you know? If you expect something bad to happen, it will.”

  “Somebody’s got to think about the future,” I mumble just loud enough for her to hear. I walk over and put my bowl in the sink. She chops vegetables violently as I walk away.

  * * *

  It’s 4:41 p.m. when I get on my bike to ride to work for my shift that starts at five. I can usually get there in eighteen minutes if I haul ass, with one minute left to put on my apron and wash my hands. Like many things, I have this down to a science.

  I ride a few miles through farmland, then a patch of what’s left of the forest that used to cover this entire area, hearing nothing but the buzz of bugs and the crunch of my tires on the road. In these moments, with my lungs and legs burning, with nothing and no one in sight but road and trees, I can pretend for a moment that I’m somewhere else, somewhere forested and exotic like the Pacific Northwest or Costa Rica. This road could be leading anywhere. I could be an explorer. I could be on my way to discover something no one’s seen before. But then the fantasy is inevitably shattered by the homemade sign for SHERI’S HAIR STUDIO tilting precariously in front of a bubblegum-­pink double-wide trailer. Half a mile farther is a sign for BOB’S COMPUTER REPAIR at the end of a long weedy driveway. There’s nothing exotic in the middle of all these trees, just regular people trying to make a living. Camille and I never had a problem making fun of these roadside businesses and how embarrassingly country they all are, regardless of the fact that my mom’s studio and her parents’ horse-­boarding business are in the same category. This was the only time Camille would come close to showing any meanness—she loved her parents and she loved horses, but she wanted out, same as me. Neither of us was rich. Neither of us was worldly. We were both country girls who desperately wanted to be something else. When things like pizza delivery, high-speed mass transit, corner stores, or ice cream trucks would show on TV, we’d both get quiet, yearning for these urban things as if the tragic lack of them made our lives incomplete.

  Our disdain was always strongest on the way to the beach, when we had to pass through Tourist Hell to get to the part of the lake only the locals know about. We’d hold our breath when we turned right on Lakefront Road, when the forest opened into Sunset Village, which is basically just a string of cheap motels, RV parks, and crappy restaurants lining the shore of Lake Michigan. In Camille’s car, we felt at least somewhat impenetrable, but on my bike I have to dodge ATVs and mothers yelling at screaming children running across the road. This strip serves a very different tourist from the ones in town nearly fifteen miles away. Sometimes these tourists wander that way, unaware of the unspoken segregation, but mostly they stay here. Somehow they know town is for a different kind of clientele, people who do not stay in RV parks or overcrowded campgrounds or motels boasting free breakfast buffets. South of here, it is like a completely different lake, with no public beaches for miles. Instead, there are dunes and forest dotted with vacation cottages, either owned by their occupants or rented for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per night. The word “cottage” is a misnomer, a strange part of Midwestern vocabulary that has never made sense to me. “Cottage” makes me think of something tiny and quaint, like a life-size version of a gingerbread house. But here it means any vacation home, ones with satellite dishes and hot tubs and tennis courts and three-car garages, ones that are ten times bigger than the shack I live in and used only on weeken
ds for a third of the year. As soon as the leaves start turning, all those miles are abandoned, all those beautiful houses locked up, empty until the sun shines again.

  The tourists in Sunset Village will never own cottages. They are lucky to share this cramped, dirty beach with a bunch of other people who will never own cottages. Instead of fine wine, they drink cheap beer in cans softened by beer cozies that read “Beautiful Lake Michigan,” even though their section of it is muddy, oily with speedboat exhaust and sunscreen, and dotted with the occasional floating Band-Aid or lost toy. Instead of drifting along the coast in private sailboats, they rent dune buggies to take out their aggression on the sand. Instead of golfing on perfectly manicured courses, they play miniature golf at Art’s Arcade & Holes. Then, sunburned and beer-tired, they come to my work demanding hot dogs and milk shakes.

  As I coast into the parking lot of Gabby’s Snack Shack, I feel a momentary shock of guilt for looking down on these ­people. It’s my mother’s judgmental voice in my head, not mine. For someone who’s still technically living with her mother and barely making enough money to feed her daughter, she still manages to be a snob about a lot of things. Whenever the topic of Sunset Village tourists comes up, she always gets a disgusted look on her face. She refers to them as “those people.” When I tell her she’s being elitist, she refuses to believe me, as if her liberal beliefs automatically trump her actual behavior. Sometimes she’s just as bad as Grandma.

  I lock up my bike and fall through the door of Gabby’s Snack Shack at exactly 4:56 p.m., a new record. Contrary to the name, there is no Gabby. My boss, Bill, bought the place eight years ago from a guy named Kevin. He didn’t know who Gabby was either.

  “Ahoy there, matey!” Bill says from the cash register, where he is ringing up a very sunburned family.