“Hey!” she said brightly, her voice about seven billion pitches higher than ours.
“Coffee?” I asked.
“Please, yes,” said PJ, leaning onto the counter. “I was up so late after the play last night.”
Her face still had stage makeup on it, smeared in places where she didn’t wash it off all the way.
I made her favorite drink—Girl Scout Cookie—and just as I started handing it over, Heather snatched it away.
“Wait,” said Heather. “In exchange for coffee, can you bring us breakfast sandwiches? I’m starving, and if I have to eat another pastry, I think I’ll kill myself.”
She held the steaming cup in the air.
“Oh,” said PJ. “Sure!”
“Not from McDonald’s,” Heather said. “We want them from Bayside. With bacon.”
“Okay!” PJ started to turn around. She was like Heather’s little servant.
“Wait!” I called out to PJ’s back.
She turned around.
“Coffee,” I said, handing it over.
“Oh,” said PJ. “Thanks!”
She disappeared. Soon, she would be back. She brought us anything we asked for.
I turned to Heather.
“Why are you such a bitch to her?” I asked.
“Because,” Heather said, “everyone needs a friend who makes them feel superior.”
“So mean,” I said.
“Like you’re any better,” Heather said. “Isn’t that why you string Susan along like a little puppy?”
“Susan strings me along,” I said, and immediately regretted it.
“That’s what I don’t understand,” said Heather. “You could choose from so many other people.”
Like who? I thought. Brad?
“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said quickly. “Susan started it. She touched me first.”
This wasn’t necessarily a lie, but it also was.
She looked like she wanted to say something else, but I started making coffee again. We worked for several minutes in silence, and I thought about all the things you can’t put into words.
“Do you think my dad is having an affair?” Heather asked finally. I was grateful to her for changing the subject.
I thought about it. Heather’s parents actually seemed to love each other. I wasn’t well versed on the topic of parent love, but her parents were the only ones I knew who still held each other’s hands in public.
“No,” I said. “He probably just needs to be in the sky. Or, like, feel something new. Anything. Sandra is starting to get older, and it’s killing her. I wish she would take flying lessons.”
“You think that’s all it is?”
I thought of bridge jumping, of flinging myself off Fourth Cliff, and how almost dying or having the possibility of dying but not dying could make you feel real.
“Is that how your hair makes you feel?” she asked. “Or, like . . . is that how it felt kissing Scottie?” For a second, she looked like she might cry, but yeah, right. Not when she was sober. She reined it in.
I touched the buzzed side of my head. My skull, it turned out, was bumpy.
“Kind of, yeah,” I said, “in a way.”
“That makes sense,” said Heather. She reached up and touched one of the rolls of lottery tickets, which seemed to hold all the possibility in the world.
Sometimes, while I drove to school, I would imagine that I won a million dollars and how I would spend the money—a new house for Sandra, a new wardrobe for Susan, a fleet of horses for me—and the money would be gone by the time I pulled into the high school parking lot. I was always disappointed that I’d spent it so quickly, even though it was only in my imagination.
“Heather?”
“What?”
“I can’t do this anymore,” I said.
“Do what?” She raised her eyebrows. I thought she was about to make fun of me, but instead she said, “Be here?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I need to get out of Hopuonk.”
Heather opened the cash register, getting ready to count the money before we started the day.
“Well,” she said, looking directly into my eyes. She held a wad of bills in her hand, and for a second it looked like she was about to hand it to me. “I guess you’d better figure out how to go.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked.
“Just go,” Heather said.
Again, she looked like she might cry. Again, she stopped herself. She coughed—a fake cough.
“Don’t worry,” she said, looking down. “We forgive you.”
The Last Letter
I wrote Johnny Moon one last letter.
It had been years since I wrote, so just in case, I inserted my senior photo in the envelope. It showed me sitting on the seawall at Humming Rock Beach, wearing a black dress that wasn’t something anyone would wear to the beach on a regular day.
I explained the photo to him. I told him that maybe I looked nice in it—I was smiling—but that I wasn’t nice. I was an asshole.
I told him how I kissed Scottie in front of Brad. I told him about how I didn’t stop the other kids from egging Corvis’s house. I told him that I had sex with Susan and probably broke myself.
I told him that Sandra was an asshole too. I told him that she had an affair with Susan’s dad and then he died. I told him that I wondered if Sandra killed him.
Heart attacks have reasons. That’s what they taught us in biology. You can ruin someone. You can ruin yourself.
I asked him to help me. I told him I needed him.
I told him I wanted to fly, like Heather’s dad. I didn’t belong in Hopuonk, and I didn’t know how to get out.
I told him that he was robbed of the Oscar for Mad Monk. I told him that when I watched it in the theater, he made me cry.
I didn’t expect a response.
Well, maybe part of me did.
Please, I wrote. I know I’m yours.
The Cold Coming In
After I finished writing the letter, I brewed two pots of coffee and drank one and a half of them. To calm myself down, I had a glass and a half of Sandra’s rosé. I couldn’t tell if that combination was making me crazy, or if I already was.