Cackle, page 21
I teach myself how to make lamb stew. I teach myself how to bake salmon so it’s well-done, the way I like it. There’s no one else to consider, and for the first time, that feels like a gift. I dance around the kitchen to music of my choosing.
One morning, I wake up and there are flowers at the foot of my bed. I don’t know how I know, but I know. I picked them in my dreams.
I take them to school and display them in a vase on my desk.
“Who are those from?” Madison asks, picking fuzz from her glossy bottom lip.
“They’re from me,” I say.
She doesn’t bat an eye. “Nice.”
“You’re a special person,” I say. “Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”
She sits up a little straighter.
“Thank you,” she says, the compliment coaxing a rare smile.
When I get home, my apartment is crowded with flowers. A hundred floating bouquets. Pink and yellow roses, cobalt delphinium, pastel snapdragons, white calla lilies, red carnations.
I pick one of the carnations for Ralph.
“This is for you,” I tell him. At first he’s sheepish, but then he accepts it. He cherishes it the rest of the evening. He carries it with him to bed, cuddles it as he sleeps.
* * *
—
“I grew my own flowers,” I tell Sophie.
We’re in the conservatory watering plants. It’s balmy in here, and the humidity clouds the glass walls, the glass ceiling. Without any view of the world outside, the room is claustrophobic, overcrowded with plants and kneading fists of hot air. I draw a flower in the condensation on a window. It’s gone in seconds, engulfed in fog.
“You did?” she asks, spritzing a leafy fern. “That’s lovely.”
“With my mind,” I say. “I made them appear.”
“Mm,” she says, unfazed. Because, of course, right? No big deal. “Annie, these plants are thirsty.”
“Oh, yep. Sorry.” I lift my mister and begin to spray.
I’ve been useless lately. I can’t stop thinking about the chicken bones. I can’t stop thinking about the flowers. About what else I might be able to do. The possibilities have become the bright stars of my obsessive thoughts.
My questions breed. I can no longer keep up with them. I look at Sophie, too perfect with her hair in a romantic updo, a few strategic curls framing her face, and there’s so much I want to ask her, so many things I want to know that I just can’t seem to articulate.
“It’s all new to me,” I say. “I feel annoying bringing it up, because I know it’s not new to you.”
“Nonsense,” she says, playfully spraying me with her mister. I’m comfortable around Sophie, but not comfortable enough to spray her back. “I’m here for you, pet. Anything you need. Anything at all.”
“How about a haircut?” I ask. I’m joking, though I could actually use a haircut. My hair has been dried out by the weather. It’s coarse and brittle. My ends are atrocious.
“Happy to,” she says.
“Really?”
She sets down her mister and takes me by the hand, leading me up to her bathroom. It’s dark and Gothic, all black marble. In the center of the room there’s a round tub that’s roughly the size of an aboveground pool.
“I never use it,” Sophie once told me about the tub. She refuses to submerge herself in water. I wonder if it’s because the townspeople tried to drown her. She didn’t seem too bothered by the incident when she offhandedly brought it up a few months back. Maybe she was kidding. I don’t want to pry. I figure she must take showers, because she appears very clean and never smells anything but dreamy.
Above the vanity hangs a large mirror with a frame that’s a giant silver Ouroboros. Its fanged mouth is open, and its tail is just inside, closing the circle around the mirror. It’s got big rubies for eyes, like two red golf balls.
Sophie sits me on a black velvet stool and positions me in front of the mirror. She produces a pair of antique scissors. They’re ornate, perhaps Victorian era. But they’re not rusty. They’re freakishly shiny.
“Fancy scissors,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says. “My murdering scissors.”
“Sophie!”
“They’re great for cutting hair as well,” she says, grinning. “Your face, darling. Oh, I’m sorry. Bad joke.”
“No,” I tell her, “it was a good joke. As long as it was a joke.”
“Of course,” she says. “I wouldn’t use scissors to murder someone. Terribly inefficient.”
“I do appreciate your morbid sense of humor, but . . .”
“But what?” she says, beginning to snip away at my ends. “I’m going to cut it dry. I was thinking shorter. Is that all right?”
“I’ve never had short hair.”
“Let’s try it. If you don’t like it, I have a serum. It’ll make your hair grow like that.”
She doesn’t snap her fingers, but I hear the sound.
“Okay,” I say. “Let’s do it.”
Maybe if I look different, I’ll feel different. Why didn’t I think of this sooner?
I’ve been in a good place for the past few weeks, but it’s nothing I can savor. It’s tentative. Regression looms. I worry I’m in constant danger of slipping back into sadness and self-loathing.
Maybe this haircut will anchor me in the embrace of who I’m becoming. It’ll be a visual, tangible change.
“Tilt your head down, darling,” she says.
Listening to the crisp snips of the scissors, I do and watch as my hair gathers on the floor. It’s cathartic.
Sophie begins humming. I’m sure she’s got a gorgeous voice, but I’ve never heard her sing before.
“Do you sing?” I ask her.
“Not with witnesses,” she says. “Do you?”
“No, but I play the guitar. Or I used to. I haven’t in a while.”
“Why not?”
I shrug.
“Hold still,” she says.
“Sorry.”
“That’s all right.”
“I learned to impress boys,” I say.
“Darling,” she says, “you’re in desperate need of new motivation.”
“This was back in high school. Sixteen years ago. But yeah, you’re right.”
My motivation hasn’t changed much since. When Sam and I first met, he mentioned that David Foster Wallace was his favorite author, and an hour later I was in my dorm room reading Infinite Jest. I would have never read a book that long in college on top of all of my coursework had it not been for a boy. I thought it was whatever, but naturally I didn’t tell Sam that. I told him I thought it was brilliant.
And a few years ago, when Sam decided he wanted to take up running and train for a marathon, I was awake at four a.m. right there with him, even in the winter, ready to go in head-to-toe Nike. At the time, it seemed like I was merely adopting a good habit, a healthier lifestyle, but in retrospect it was clearly all for him. To spend more time with him. To support him.
“I want you to play for me,” Sophie says.
“Guitar? Oh, I haven’t played in forever. It’d be terrible.”
“I don’t care.”
“You’ll care. Besides, my guitar is shitty. And I don’t have strings or anything. I’d have to get all new strings, tune it. All that.”
“Too much trouble to go to for your dear friend Sophie?” she asks.
“I mean, if you really want me to, I will. You’re the one with the scissors. Whatever you want.”
“My favorite phrase. Look, pet. Look how beautiful you are.”
She reaches around and lifts my chin. My hair grazes the tops of my shoulders. I swivel my head, shake it back and forth, back and forth. I feel so much lighter. How heavy were my dead ends?
I never realized how much bullshit is bound to the bottom of your hair. How it carries with it the years and experiences, all it has witnessed, has endured. The reason you can’t let go of your past is that it’s still attached. That weight on your shoulders, the strain on your back and neck. It’s your dead ends.
Cut your hair! I’m going to scream it from the rooftops and while running down the street, all across America. Cut your hair!
“I love it. Sophie! I love it.”
“Here,” she says. She takes one of the many crystal bottles from the vanity and pours a drop of yellowish liquid into her palm, then rubs her hands together. She moves her hands through my hair, giving it some texture, some shine.
“You’re the best,” I tell her. “You’re everything.”
“Please,” she says, blushing.
When I get home the next day and show Ralph, he holds his face like Macaulay Culkin did in Home Alone.
“You like it?” I ask him.
He nods. He’s wearing a new hat Sophie made for him. It’s green and pointy and has a teeny pom-pom at the tip. He looks very, very cute.
“You’re such a good boy,” I tell him, tickling his chin. I sit on the couch and he climbs onto my lap. I pet his back with my index finger. I like the way his fuzz feels.
“I’m happy,” I say to him or maybe to myself. Then I say it again because it’s true and because I like the way it sounds.
VALENTINE’S
“There’s something different,” Oskar says, his eyes catching on mine. It’s early the next morning, and he’s rolling up the sleeves of his flannel while the espresso machine whirs behind him.
“My hair,” I say. “I cut it.”
He doesn’t say anything to this, just grunts and begins to steam milk.
“A compliment is common courtesy,” I say, delighted by my own audacity.
“Do you care what I think?” he asks, wiping a hand on his shoulder rag.
“No, not really.”
He grunts again. “Latte?”
“With honey.”
He taps the cup on the counter and pours the milk. Concentration wrinkles appear on his forehead.
“The cut looks good,” he says, still focused on the latte. “But it’s not the hair. It’s something else.”
“Oh,” I say.
He puts a lid on the cup and slides it toward me.
I hand him cash and wait for him to meet my eye again, but he doesn’t. A customer comes in behind me.
“Morning, Ed,” Oskar says. “Usual?”
I walk out to my car, considering the possibility that Oskar was flirting with me. Stranger things have happened.
I sink into the front seat and remove the lid from my latte to sip at the foam.
There’s a perfect heart. He made a heart with the milk.
He was flirting with me!
I’m smug in this belief until I get to school, where there are hearts all over the fucking place. Pink and red streamers. Paper roses. Everywhere.
Valentine’s Day is Friday.
I’d forgotten.
I’m not thrilled to be reminded in this manner.
The halls are unceremoniously undecorated in my wake. Tape unsticks. Streamers rip. A cardboard cupid gets decapitated.
Several students and a custodian bear witness to this mysterious instantaneous destruction.
“Looks like they, uh, need to use better adhesive,” I mumble as I do my best to pretend my subconscious is not wreaking havoc on the hard work of the student council.
I take shelter in my classroom, locking the door while I interrogate my emotional state.
I’ve always fancied myself a gold medalist in mental gymnastics. If there’s something that’s difficult to process, I’ve typically got no problem split leaping right over it. But that’s not going to work anymore, at least not if my avoidance manifests itself in very public supernatural tantrums.
I sit at my desk, running the sleek, blunt ends of my hair through my fingers. I close my eyes.
I grant myself permission to think about Sam.
I think about our first Valentine’s Day together. We decided to stay in and order Chinese food. He said it’d be romantic to spend it at home, where we were most comfortable, but I wondered if he’d waited too long to get a reservation. I wasn’t disappointed. Not really. I liked to be home with him.
After we finished eating, I went to dive into the box of chocolates he got me, but he insisted we have fortune cookies.
When I cracked open the first cookie, I realized why.
He’d written the fortunes. They said things like I love your smile and You’re the funniest person I know.
“How’d you do that?” I asked him, amazed.
“There’s this thing called the Internets,” he said, grinning. “You can get anything on there.”
I saved the fortunes. I still have them. They’re in an envelope in a folder. Also in that folder are my passport, birth certificate, and Social Security card. It makes me sad that I ever chose to store those fortunes alongside the most crucial pieces of evidence of my identity, to think that I once considered them of equal importance.
I don’t anymore. I really don’t.
“I bet I’m still the funniest person he knows,” I say.
I breathe into the thought. It’s the sweetest peach. When I open my eyes, I find a small crystal bowl of gummy peach rings there on my desk right in front of me.
I pop one into my mouth.
Now that I’m thinking about it, Valentine’s Day doesn’t scare me.
* * *
—
I spend the week planning my solo Valentine’s Day. I decide to make myself beet salad, mushroom risotto and a chocolate layer cake. I decide to wear my comfiest pajamas and watch the Anne Boleyn documentary that’s been in my queue for months.
I stop in the Good Mug every morning, interested to see if Oskar is consistent with his latte art. He is.
On Thursday, he asks, “Do you have plans for tomorrow?”
I inspect him for the slightest hint of emotion, for the anticipative twitch of an eyebrow, a nervous slip of the fingers, something, anything. Any microscopic clue to his motivations.
I get nothing.
I decide to be honest.
“Yes,” I say.
Still nothing.
“I’m making dinner.”
Nada.
“How about you?”
“Alone?” he asks, sweeping some coffee grounds off of the counter with the heel of his hand.
“Sorry?”
“You’ll be alone?”
There’s no pity in his tone. Only mild curiosity.
“There something wrong with a person choosing to spend Valentine’s Day in their own company?”
He looks up at me, his eyes so blue I’m defenseless against them. They demoralize me. Hold my exhale hostage.
My insides pickle as I wait for him to speak.
Is he going to ask me out?
“Sophie,” he says. “I didn’t know if she ever let you be alone.”
Seconds pass, flat and colorless. I listen to the slow clap of my heart.
Oskar does not relent. I seem to have unwittingly entered a good old-fashioned staring contest. His eyes are merciless.
The understanding expands, and with it my embarrassment, occupying every last crevice of my existence.
Oskar was never flirting with me. He doesn’t give a shit if I spend Valentine’s Day sobbing into a self-bought Whitman’s Sampler repeatedly viewing The Notebook or having an orgy with street magicians I met on Craigslist. His interest in me is purely related to my association with Sophie.
He’s engulfed in his vendetta. I see it now. It hangs around him, a red agony.
“Sophie is my friend. My best friend,” I say. I’ve never said it out loud before.
I travel back to the moment I met her, across the street in Simple Spirits. I remember how gorgeous she looked, how I was in awe of her. If someone had told me then that she’d become my closest friend, I’m not sure I would have believed them. I definitely wouldn’t have believed the rest.
But . . . who knows?
Maybe the hardest thing for me to believe would have been that Sophie would want to be my friend. That she would take a special interest in me, take me under her wing. Maybe that was the most severe bend in my reality. After that, it was easy to believe in magic, to accept that ghosts are real and to play with cute spider accomplices.
“She’s no one’s friend,” he says.
I look down at the ring she made for me, the pale pink stone with its starry glint. I think of the things she’s given me, the things she’s shown me. I can’t listen to anyone speak badly about her.
Also.
I have to believe in her. I have to believe she’s good and right. Because I’m like her.
Because the coffee cup that was just on the counter is now floating into my outstretched hand.
Oskar goes rigid. His jaw unhinges just a little, just enough that I don’t need to squint, I don’t need a microscope to confirm his dismay.
The cup arrives in my hand. I summon a lid.
“You know, all Sophie does is try to help people, and you and everyone else in this town just want to blame her for anything that goes wrong. It wasn’t her fault that Helen left.”
He winces when I say Helen’s name.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I say. I decide I don’t feel like paying. I turn to leave.
“She’s a plague on this town!” he shouts, thick, ugly veins swarming his neck.
Really? A plague?
I sip my coffee and give him a sweet church smile.
“Then move,” I say.
I step out onto Main Street and walk to my car with my shoulders back, my head up, a regal posture. But on the drive over to school, my confidence begins to pill like a cheap sweater.
