When Chloe called me in the car that Wednesday on the way to Costco, my boyfriend Damian and I were arguing about whether or not we would be willing to swallow a goldfish for money. “You have no concept of how the real world works,” he said. “That’s pretty fucking pejorative,” I was saying, as my phone lit up with that stupid picture of Chloe’s stupid face, filtered to have giant eyes and little deer ears and white deer freckles on the forehead. She always acted like her filtered selfies were ironic, but I knew she only took them because she thought they made her look hot.
I was surprised that Chloe was calling. We hadn’t spoken in almost two months, for a few reasons. The first was that she had new friends now, the girls she waitressed with three nights a week at the Longhorn Steakhouse. The one Chloe liked the most, Kayla, had a pierced nipple. Chloe showed me a picture after the first time they hung out. I didn’t know that an areola could be that big. I checked Chloe’s face out of the corner of my eye and could tell I was supposed to not make a big deal about it. “Nice,” I said. “Isn’t it so pretty?” she said. “Yeah,” I said. “I like that it’s silver.”
The second reason was that I had been spending more time with Damian, who Chloe said had too much body hair and a weird sense of humor. When I was honest with myself I kind of understood where she was coming from. Damian could be a real piece of shit sometimes and he was four years older than us which, at our current ages, many people found distasteful.
But there were some really good things about him. The best thing was that every Wednesday after he finished work at the local Toyota dealership, he picked me up and took me to Costco even though he didn’t like doing it. He knew it was important to me, and I always bought him one of the quarter-pound Kirkland Signature Beef hot dogs afterwards. People really underestimate the power of positive reinforcement.
◆
When I was a kid, I used to think that Kirkland was a real place. Around that time I had learned the word isthmus and in my head some wires crossed and the two became connected. Kirkland was an in-between place, a land bridge pressed on all sides by the sea, maybe not a nation, but a city-state at least. What mattered was its spirit of abundance. Rolls of paper towels long enough to drape round your whole body, absorbent and bridal, taquitos by the dozen as long and thick as a man’s arm, mayonnaise in gallon buckets like thick white paint. My parents weren’t interested in correcting my misconceptions about anything, so they just let me believe it. They loved going to Costco as much as I did. We went there on rainy Saturdays the way other families go to the movies.
Kirkland was the first of many misunderstandings in my life. For a while I thought that Bon Jovi’s first name was Bon, and once that got cleared up, I thought that was how Al Gore worked too. Like, he had another first name. John Al Gore, or Peter maybe. No one updated me on the pronunciation of indictment, or soldering.
In second grade we had to write a poem about what home meant to us and I wrote about Kirkland. The teacher didn’t know what to make of it because it was actually kind of good, but she was also worried about me. Everyone else had written about their nanna’s kitchen or some other site of a cherished family tradition.
The thing was, she wasn’t our real teacher. She was the teacher they brought in when they fired our real teacher, Ms. Klein, after she had made us play this months-long game where we had a classroom economy and if we got too poor we became homeless and she took away our desks. Frankly, I didn’t mind the game. I started with nothing but then had moderate success selling braided plastic friendship bracelets. Eventually I made enough that I got my desk back, sitting in a chair overlooking the Floor Kids and privately considering becoming fiscally conservative.
Chloe was in my class that year, but we weren’t really friends. She was terrible at the game, refusing to sell her hot dog eraser even when she started losing all her pencils to debt collectors. But she actually seemed happy on the floor. Sometimes she stretched out on her belly to do her work, gently kicking her feet in the air. Weird, I thought, how she didn’t even try. The only time I remember talking to her that year was when I gave her one of my shiny plastic bracelets for free. She had just lost her favorite crayon, Cerulean, and I felt bad about it and offered her one on impulse. “I don’t have anything to trade,” she said. “I know,” I said. She gave one of her quick scrunched-face smiles. “Thanks. You can borrow my hot dog eraser sometime, if you want.” “Thanks,” I said, but I never did.
My parents thought the whole thing was funny. Nothing like the School of Hard Knocks, my dad always said when I complained about something, rapping his knuckles on the spot just above my ear. But when other kids told their parents, those parents felt that it wasn’t age appropriate.
The final straw was actually not the game. It was when Ms. Klein told us she lived on an ostrich farm and that if all of our parents had her over for dinner by Spring Break she would take us there, but then didn’t hold up her end of the deal. That was the disappointment of a lifetime. All year I had been learning facts about ostriches, staying up late looking at pictures of their long, gummy lips. And when no one was around, running with long strides and high knees, my eyes as wide as they could go.
The bait-and-switch around the ostriches also sucked because the dinner at my house was pretty awkward. I had told my parents it was for extra credit in the World Around Me unit for social studies and that without it I might fail, a fact they did not question. “Make sure she doesn’t block the driveway,” was all my father said, one of the great concerns of his life even though he never left the house after 6pm.
Ms. Klein didn’t warn us that she was vegetarian, so that night she could only eat the string beans and my mom always puts a lot of butter on them, more than most people find appropriate. On top of that, my older brother Raymond was visiting from New York City and he can be kind of a wild card. The way my mom describes Raymond is that he is a “free spirit” who “cobbles together a living” through cat sitting and transcribing, but she doesn’t see how that could possibly be enough in the most expensive city in the country so he probably supplements that income by selling drugs. Hopefully mind-enhancing instead of life-ruining, like psychedelics. That part she told me when she was drunk on a new pear martini recipe she was trying out. She’s always looking for ways to improve upon the martini.
At dinner Raymond wouldn’t stop talking about his current transcribing project, a documentary about an alien encounter a bunch of school kids had in Zimbabwe in the 1990s. “Lots of the kids went on to become addicts and go crazy,” he said. He’d been helping with the documentary for years, but every time they got close to releasing it one of the witnesses would withdraw consent.
Ms. Klein did not seem interested in any of it. She had barely touched her string beans, and the butter was starting to congeal. To transition the conversation, my mom asked her how I was doing in the classroom, but she didn’t have much to say about that either.
My dad jumped in then, talking about his belief that everyone’s essence can be categorized on an x-y axis of hard or soft and mouse or lizard, and explaining which US presidents were which. “JFK– soft lizard,” he said. “Andrew Jackson– hard mouse.”
“Taft?” Raymond asked, like we hadn’t heard all of this before.
“Good question, son,” my father said. “Also a hard mouse. And if we’re ever going to stop climate change, you better believe a hard mouse in the White House is what it’s going to take.”
While he spoke, Ms. Klein kept her eyes down and pressed a green bean hard against her plate as if to wring the excess butter from it, and I recited facts to keep myself calm. An ostrich will hiss when it gets angry. An ostrich, lacking teeth, must swallow pebbles to grind its food. Contrary to popular belief, an ostrich does not bury its head in the sand to avoid predators; she is merely adjusting her eggs. An ostrich is not helpless. An ostrich can kill you with just one kick.
◆
Chloe and I met again when we were 11, in July, when her family moved into the split-level one street over from mine. We had been in different classes every year since second grade and I hadn’t really thought about her. But that summer there she was, sitting on the curb across from our mailbox when I went outside to check if my mom’s Cosmopolitan magazine had been delivered so that I could read it first and then put it back in with the next day’s mail. “No mail on Sundays,” she said from behind me. I had forgotten what day it was.
I couldn’t decide if the girl in front of me, this new Chloe, was hotter than me or not. Her legs were shorter but her tits were bigger, and I had a bad feeling that her face was better than mine. I wanted her to whisper something in my ear. I wanted to cut her hair off. I wanted to watch her suck a slice of lemon and spit the little seeds into my hand one by one.
Chloe considered me too, pausing on my legs. “I live over there now,” she said finally, pointing. “Do you like trampolines?”
“Cool,” I said. “Yeah.”
“Come with me,” she said. Her ass cheeks peeked out from her jean shorts, two pimply little half moons.
She took me to the pharmacy down the street to shoplift laxatives, and cough syrup as an afterthought. We passed the bottle back and forth the whole way home and then lay down on the trampoline in her backyard. The trampoline was covered in gravel and twigs and dead leaf fragments, so once we were high we took turns pulling out the pieces that were tangled up in each other’s hair. The syrup left gritty little particles of something on our tongues and made our breath thick and sweet, our thoughts scattering like fistfuls of pennies in a fountain.
Chloe told me that her daddy had worked in underwater search and rescue for fifteen years, getting dead people out of their drowned cars. Once, he reached into a sunken sedan for four skeletons and a burst of little catfish swam out. When Chloe was born, he moved her and her mother to the driest place he could find, which was here. I could see why he did that. Chloe had that long, long hair that would float up all around her face like seaweed, collarbones that silt would settle into. There are girls you should never let swim.
All the rest of that summer we told our parents we were going to the park and rode our bikes to the public pool, where Chloe was forbidden to go. She didn’t know how to swim but she loved to stand in the water up to her chest, eyes closed. Every so often she would ask me to hold her hands so she could duck her head under. Sometimes she stayed down there so long it scared me and I would start to tug her upwards but she wouldn’t let me until she was ready. “68 seconds!” she said when she finally came up, gasping. Her record was 99, but we agreed to call it 100.
We could do that for hours, me sitting and watching her from the side, trying to turn the pages of my magazines without getting them wet and puckered, our skin so tight with sun it felt like we might crack open, overripe. Then we went back to my house to wait for her hair to dry and her fingers to unprune, for her body to erase the evidence.
In the months before Chloe and I officially stopped talking, I remember thinking that it felt like I was stuck watching her underwater from above, the shape of her always shifting. It used to be Chloe who drove me to Costco every Wednesday in my mom’s car from the time she got her license right up until the summer before our senior year, when she got the job at the Longhorn. I thought maybe once the school year had started she would start showing up again, but she never did, so I asked Damian instead. I would not be her obligation.
◆
You can make yourself fall in and out of love with people pretty easily, I’ve found, if you have a strong sense of narrative arc and choose the right moments.
To make myself love Damian less, I thought about how when we argued he called it “budding heads,” like we were pushing up through the earth and unfurling, spitting mud. How I had discovered that he was throwing every used condom he’d told me he’d take care of out the window of his car, the very window he never let me roll down at speeds over 40 mph because of fuel efficiency. I imagined him reaching for a flash of orange and opening his wet mouth.
To make myself love Damian more, I thought about how he looked in the mechanic onesie he wore to work, gray with the name Dennis stitched on the pocket. As Dennis, Damian was extremely lovable. I also considered how he promised that as soon as I turned 18 in a few months, he’d take me and Chloe to get our first tattoos. I’d known what I wanted for a long time. I wanted mine to say, “Give up the ghost,” with a small tasteful representation of a spirit. Not a Halloween-style ghost, something more subtle, with spidery lines that made me look thin and fragile by association.
It’s something my nanna used to say to me. She hated everyone in her nursing home, and when someone especially frail or demented or whatever shuffled by she would shake her head with disgust and say, “Some people don’t know when to give up the ghost.” She said it a lot, and it really stuck with me. Give up the ghost. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it also makes perfect sense, and I like how it’s from the Bible but also about machines.
And that was the third reason I wasn’t talking to Chloe. It was partly her new friends and it was partly Damian but it was mostly because two weeks earlier, Kayla and the other girls had taken Chloe to get her first tattoo from their friend Rocco, who didn’t care that she was underaged, and gave her a shot of whiskey before and after. She showed it to me the next morning at school. A little ghost outline on the small of her back. That’s why I pressed Ignore on her call.
◆
Inside the Costco, Damian kept trailing me, breathing down my neck. I tried to peruse the inflatables section. There, I am always reminded that we live in the golden age of inflatables. Bounce houses and paddle boards and full-sized hot tubs. You can put air inside of anything these days. “We don’t need a water slide,” Damian said, in response to no one. “You bought that last time,” he said when I stopped in front of a multipack of cropped pastel tank tops, the kind you can never have enough of.
“Respectfully,” I said, “I would like you to leave me the fuck alone now.” I left him sulking in the Personal Care aisle, where a man was reading carefully through the ingredients on a 20-pack of deodorant. He seemed to be checking each individual stick, like any one of them might have a hidden carcinogen snuck in.
I paced up and down the cereal aisle looking at the massive, colorful boxes stacked perfectly like Tetris blocks, then went to the dairy section to get some air. The hum of the giant fridges and the cold they gave off soothed me. The rows and rows of matronly round jugs, color-coded by fat content. I opened one of the huge doors to watch the fog creep over the glass until no one could see my face, drew a C in the condensation. Then I turned to face the blast of freezing air, leaned in to rest my forehead against a sweating jug of 2%, and closed my eyes.
The moment was broken suddenly by the sound of footsteps. From in front of me, not behind. I opened my eyes and saw one of the jugs at my waist move. A pair of hands reaching towards me through the shelves. A man crouched on the other side. I heard myself start to scream. The hands jerked backwards and the milk fell forwards. “Hey,” he shouted. “Hey! Stop!” The jug hit my stomach and then the floor, burst on impact.
I turned and ran. While I was running I realized that the man was probably just restocking the milk, just doing his job. But I couldn’t stop, heart pounding, adrenaline still coursing through me. By the time I had slowed myself down, I was back in the inflatables, breathing hard through my nose, trying to shake the unnameable bad feeling. Panic and embarrassment and a gut-level sense that something was wrong. And I thought about Chloe. I was sure she would’ve known immediately what the hands were doing. She wouldn’t have run away. She wouldn’t have made a scene. Next to the kiddie pools I took a deep breath and tried to call her back, but it wouldn’t go through. I never got very good service inside the Costco. It was one of my favorite things about it.
Damian was waiting for me by the exit with a signature Kirkland 100% beef hot dog as a peace offering. “16 grams of protein,” he said as he handed it to me. He had a mind for numbers, mostly nutrition facts. The sun was setting as we made our way across the parking lot, silhouetting abandoned shopping carts and the wholesale gas pumps.
In the car on the way home, I rolled down the window, and Damian rolled it back up. I asked him what he would do if I died in an accident and came back to haunt him. “Could I still touch you?” he said. “That is the stupidest question you possibly could have asked,” I said.
Late that night, I got a call from Chloe’s mom. This time, I picked up, realizing it was the longest I’d gone without talking to her, too. “Is Chloe with you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I haven’t seen her.”
“She didn’t come home from her shift and it seems like her phone is off.” “Have you tried Kayla?” I said. “From the Longhorn?” Part of me, even then, was hoping she’d say, “Kayla who?” but all she said was, “Yeah, the girls don’t know either. They said they’re already home.”
“I can text her,” I said.
“Thanks, sweetie. Call me if you hear anything,” she said, and hung up.
◆
One good thing about me is that I’m extremely adaptable. I can adjust to new circumstances before they even happen. When I start to sense a person pulling away from me, I immediately imagine my life without them. The hobbies and TV shows I could use to fill the time left by their absence. I could take up fencing and win a scholarship to a fancy college, my breasts smushed into hard white pancakes. I could commit to watching every season of The Sopranos so people could finally stop telling me, “You should really watch The Sopranos.” I could become a dowser, follow my quivering rod for miles and miles until it led me to an oasis in the middle of the desert that only I knew about. I would bend down, cup my hands, and drink.
But I had not prepared myself for Chloe’s disappearance, which I found out about two days later on Instagram, through a Find Chloe graphic that Kayla had made featuring a deer selfie, a new one I hadn’t seen before. The last time anyone saw Chloe she was getting into a Toyota Corolla outside the Longhorn on the night that I’d ignored her call. Most people thought she ran away, but I wasn’t so sure. She was always a girl who left, yes, but she was also a girl who came back.
Chloe’s father didn’t know what to do with himself after, no lakes to drag, no depths to dive, and neither did I. I’d figured that in a few months when I turned 18 and got a better tattoo than her, I could finally forgive her, win her back from the steakhouse, promise to take her to the pool. I had not prepared myself for a world where I didn’t get her back.
To try to make myself stop loving Chloe, I sifted through our moments, looking for a handful of them that could bend our narrative arc, or at least end it. The only thing I could come up with was the sight of that ugly black outline on her skin, glistening under the Saran Wrap, and the way she looked when I passed her silently in the hallway at school that last week, bony and distant. But other moments kept creeping in instead, things that made me love her more. Grape breath and her fingers working through my hair, the v of her legs and the o of her mouth when she jumped too high on the trampoline and scared herself, then did it again. The gasp when her hurricane body knocked me flat onto the nylon. “Sorry,” she said, when I pointed at the slick red rug burn on my elbow, and then she licked it.
For the first two weeks after we realized she was gone, people kept asking me if I was ok, and I didn’t really know but I thought I was, except that I was having a very hard time falling asleep. By the end of that first month, more and more I found myself on PornHub, which Damian introduced me to. I would start out watching really basic stuff but as the night wore on, things would escalate and eventually I would find myself watching a gangbang.
I was surprised to find that many of them are pretty lackluster. Those were my favorites, the ones no one seemed excited about, the men standing around waiting their turns and kind of looking off into the middle distance, tugging at themselves half-heartedly. One thing that annoyed me is the way events are always exaggerated in porn titles. Every video has to be some girl’s first time doing something, and it’s always a Huge Success. Just once I wanted an honest title. “Ashley Tries Her First Gangbang and Finds Out There’s a Learning Curve.” That I would like to see.
Porn helped me fall asleep that first month, but then in the middle of the night one night I saw a video called “You’ve Never Seen ROUGH SEX LIKE THIS BEFORE— Real Petite Teen,” on the home screen. I was always curious what Real Petite Teens looked like, how different from me. Chloe and I used to spend hours researching the height and weight and bra size of celebrities on websites that described women in strange, stilted language like, “She possesses a taut figure, which, combined with her tall stature, compliments her semblance as a model!”
“Are you alone?” the robot voice droned before I could turn the volume down. The video started immediately, no exposition, and it was kind of grainy, but my stomach dropped because the girl in it looked just like Chloe, long hair wrapped up in some guy’s fist, something familiar about the curve of her ass cheeks.
After that I stopped watching porn and started calling Raymond, who was always awake. At first he was surprised to hear from me but then I think he started to look forward to it. Recently there had been renewed interest in the alien encounter documentary. Sometimes he put me on speakerphone while he worked, so I could hear the testimonials too, a cat always yowling in the background.
“Do you believe them?” I asked him late one night, about three months after Chloe’s disappearance, the posters of her face on telephone poles tearing loose at the corners. He paused, let the clip run out. “I don’t know if what they say happened actually happened,” he said. “But something did.”
◆
The one really good thing our bad teacher did before she got fired was let us raise ducklings in our classroom. First she brought in the eggs, and they sat in a big incubator on the windowsill, and sometimes she took us into the dark bathroom and held a light up behind an egg so it glowed pink like an eyelid and you could see the little duck curled up inside there.
After they hatched, we could sign up to take the ducks home for the weekend. There, we put them in our Barbie cars and held them too tightly in our hot little hands so they squirmed and fought against us and shit wet sticky puddles out of fear. One point of tension was that we all had an obvious favorite duck, the runt, and the only one that was brown. On Friday afternoons we took turns smushing our cheeks against her beak. “I’ll miss you sooooo much, Coco,” we said, and wept.
The Monday before spring break we shuffled into the classroom and found our teacher sitting at the desk with the blackboard empty behind her.
“Class,” she said. “I have some hard news.”
She wouldn’t tell us whose house Coco had died at, but we all knew it was at the twins’, Tiff and Tate. Tate had warts on his hands, and right before the Halloween parade Tiff had thrown up her cereal in our classroom, pink from strawberry milk.
The classroom fell into chaos. Tate wouldn’t look up from his hands, and he kept denying that he knew anything more than we did, even when I got him alone during Speech Therapy. We were friends while we were sitting on the exercise balls in there, working on his r’s and my s’s. Or at least comrades. “You can tell me what happened,” I said. “It’s just me.” He looked away and ate a large Tootsie Roll so slowly that he was unable to speak for the rest of the period.
After that, no classroom ever had ducks again. The next year the new teacher raised butterflies from chrysalises, which might have been exciting if no one knew ducklings had once been on the table. The chrysalises rocked and shivered close to their hatch date like twitching eyelids. When they finally emerged, a dark red liquid leaked out onto the white cotton floor of their nursery, like our mothers’ menstrual blood. “It isn’t blood,” the teacher said so many times that no one believed her. “It’s completely normal.”
◆
The day that Ms. Klein told us that Coco was dead, I wasn’t sad because I was sure that it wasn’t true. Coco, I knew, had merely escaped, strayed too far and lost the path. Probably she was in Kirkland, doing her feeble little waddle through the smooth cropped grass of a golf course and into a manicured water feature with a giant fountain in the middle. Strong enough, now, to handle the currents it created.
What I’m trying to say is that sometimes, even now, when I can’t sleep, I imagine all the places Chloe could be, her narrative arc climbing or flattening or starting its slow descent. The moments that have gathered to make up her life.
She is flying down the highway in that Toyota Corolla headed for the coast, some steakhouse at the beach where all the salt has to be mixed with yellowed grains of rice, where one day a busboy will come up behind her at the end of her shift as she’s wiping down tables, point at the ghost on her skin, say, “What does it mean?”
Or she’s in front of the red eye of a camera, straddling her fake stepdad and arching her back and moaning one more time, with feeling, and maybe for a second she wonders about the thousands of people who might see the video, and if one of them might be me.
Or she’s in Kirkland, too, on the isthmus. Effortlessly thin, barefoot in a grove of trees, all of them lemon, all of them grown from seed. She is splashing out into the weed-choked waters where little by little she’s teaching herself to swim, ducking beneath the surface and starting the slow count backwards from 100, each number a bubble silver on her lips.
And some nights I’m sure she never left at all, not really. She’s on the ostrich farm just outside of town, the one I never got to see. Each morning she flings open the barn doors to release the towering birds, a hiss in her throat, and all day she walks beside them in great clouds of dust searching for the perfect stone to swallow, some new way to have teeth.