She’s in the shower and washing her hair when a handful of bars from an old song crams itself sideways into her brain. She tips her head back beneath the spray, grabbing the bar of soap and lathering up.
This moment is so, so far away from nineteen eighties pop.
Emily steps out of the shower and grabs one of the folded towels off the back of the toilet. She dries off, wandering into the room, feeling along the top of the bed with one hand for her clothes. She gets dressed, slides her feet into flip-flops, grabs her phone and her keys. She shrugs into a sweatshirt and slips through the door, running out into the parking lot. She buckles into her car. She sits there for a moment, her hands on the wheel, the tropical rain slapping into the windshield.
Why do I keep thinking about that?
She starts the engine. The scenery spins, dizzying in the sweep of headlights. The road rises up out of the gloom. Yellow lines etched bright into the pavement glow in cones of rain-lashed light.
There was that summer, and the fight I had with my mother”hacking off my hair with a knife while she screamed at me and I threw the hair in her face, me digging my heels in but it didn’t do any good. We left in the morning anyway, and I landed in Massachusetts with hair that looked like it had been stuck in a blender because I refused to let my mother’s hairdresser remedy the situation. For four days straight I refused to leave the house. I bought an electric razor a week after that and tried to shave diamonds into the side of my head, like Cyndi Lauper. I tried dyeing it, too. I think.
She drives toward the western end of the island, wipers scraping water, flicking silver droplets off into the streaming darkness: Thunk thunk, thunk thunk.
I hated it. I hated it the way I’d hated it in the summer of eighty-five but I think I hated it more, truly loathed it in eighty-seven because I’d gotten so much older in the interim. Teen years are like dog years, seven to one and that was more than enough to ripen my disdain. I hated Nantucket because my mother loved it, but I really hated it because her desperation disgusted me, her longing to be “one of them,” to fit in with the old families. Their money had been around forever and would be around forevermore; they paid the natives who fished in the winters to air out their thirty-room cottages before they moved in; they took over the island in their Nantucket Reds and sport coats, their yachts, their sleek imported cars and they could sniff out each other’s colonial Massachusetts blood in a crowded room.
She reaches deep down inside herself, finding the texture of the roads and reading the configurations of buildings; the rises and falls, the curves, a sensation of miles ironed into her stomach. She steers into the corners of the road and thinks about her bullet: ordinary shell, levered out of her chamber and handled without thought. She feels it tumble loose from her fingers, imagines it bouncing on the pine spill. She tries to triangulate its position in her memory. The rain ticks on its brass casing like a clock running down.
I walked around a lot. Restless and prowling those wholesome streets. What else was there to do? Sixteen years old and I couldn’t get into any of the bars, not that I wanted to. The preppy rich kids hated me with my ripped fishnets and high cutoffs and black lipstick. We hated each other with the zeal reserved for the unknown. We each feared somehow becoming the other, that personality was contagious”and I suppose it is at that age, now that I think about it, all of us nebulous things growing out of control, contained and shaped by our families: either for them or against them. They looked at me and feared the shivering cold, the starvation of the outside. I looked at them and the slow chokehold of herd membership tightened like a ghost around my throat.
She sniffles a little, wipes her eyes with one hand. The road keeps coming and coming, unrolling into a narrow throat of brush.
All of my rebellion. All of that effort. Did it work?
She slows the car, pulls it off the road. She pulls off the shoulder. She climbs out into a wet buffeting wind and holds her sweatshirt’s hood tight around her cheeks, climbing up to the road, following the line where the pavement ends. Dune grass whips around her bare ankles. She looks up. There are more lights set back from the road, more people than there were the night before, warm panes of glass floating in the dark.
I’ll get my bullet. I’ll find it, take it down to the beach, rub it all over with the cuff of my hoodie, and throw it into the water. I’ll stand there in the rain and dream of the mainland. I’ll erase my fingerprint from this place once and for all.
Emily walks toward the rambling house, its shingles dull beneath the overcast night. She follows clumps of bleary white beach roses down onto the driveway, old pavement buckled and split by the island winters. She walks onto the grass. The trees crowd together and deepen the dark. Her feet are slow. She touches things as she passes them, guiding herself into the gloom: a sodden petal, a thin branch. Thick pine roots push up through the thin acrid earth. There is little light. Emily takes a deep breath.
There once was a girl on Nantucket.
She holds still, listening to the rain as it drips down through the branches. The humid air smells sweet and raw. Distant waves hiss and rumble, both flattened and stirred up by the rain. She stands in the center of the clearing, letting her eyes adjust. She spies a gleam, then another one. Her pupils loosen up and dark gray light floods her eyes, bringing little bits of shine. She turns in a slow circle. Twigs pop and snap beneath her toes.
Water. Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink.
She studies the trunks of the trees. She walks over to the closest one and rests her hand on its rough wet bark.
There once was a girl. She shaved the side of her head, hacking it down first with a pair of scissors, clots of hair sticking to the porcelain. She looked into her own eyes and tried to make designs and failed because it was a regular shaver and what she wanted was clippers first, then a shaver wielded by delicate and artistic fingers. Her fingers were many things but artistic wasn’t one of them. A couple of half-assed tries and she gave up, shaved an irregular bald spot into the side of her haymop and called it good. She unplugged the shaver, thought it didn’t look half bad: a little gel maybe and a tease, some good spikes worked in, and it was almost cool. She wanted red streaks in it, but on island there was only Kool-Aid and Sun-In. The girl in the mirror, though, she had different thoughts. Part of her, in memory, was still in an alleyway in Nantucket Town. She leaned up against a brick wall, smoking a cigarette and sweltering in the remnants of a tropical heat wave, mouthing the words to one of those pop songs that she secretly loved, explaining to some überprep from ‘Sconset that she doesn’t fuck guys.
Emily shakes her head, measuring her steps, careful not to trip on the roots. The wind blows at her back, racing through her wet hood on its way to the ocean.
But that didn’t happen.
A pinpoint of brassy light. She drops onto her knees.
I was in that alleyway smoking one of those nasty Gauloises Brunes. I was. It was hot out, that much is truth, and there was a jukebox somewhere blasting out ‘I’m Looking For A New Love.’ I knew all the words. I even moved a little to the beat, tapping a foot on the cobbles. I leaned up against the back end of a building, like a prostitute in an old Hollywood movie. But there was no überprep from ‘Sconset.
She brushes light fingers across the ground. She feels her way toward the shine. She touches a candy wrapper, pulling it out of the pine needles.
Was there?
She tucks the wrapper into her pocket.
He asks her: so how do girls do it? Sixteen-year-old Emily holds her cigarette and stares at him, stares directly into his eyes, and in the background of this scene the song changes. It’s just like a cue, so she takes a step back to look him over: tall but not too tall, muscular but no gym-rat, mussed-up brown hair with highlights straight out of a J. Crew catalogue, voice packed full of Massachusetts vowels. The eyes, though. She takes a long drag, slants the stream of smoke upward. Nothing money-bred about those. She transfers her cig to her left hand and crooks her fingers in a come-hither gesture. He bends down. They lick, she says into his ear. That doesn’t sound too hard, he says and her eyebrows go up. You wanna fuck like a girl? He holds her eyes. He’s good at it, even though she keeps trying to duck out from beneath his gaze. He gives her a weird one-sided smile. Why not?
A knife slides beneath her chin. The flat part presses up, its keen edge burrowing close to her skin. She takes in a breath, holds it.
A bullet bounces onto the ground.
“Looking for something?”