It’s a long, silent ride back to school the following morning. All four of us go together: the Ghost, my mom, Mazzie, and me.
Before she goes inside, leaving me alone with my parents, Mazzie gives my mom a hug. She says to my dad, “I’m sorry about your father, Dr. Kitrell.”
“Thank you,” the Ghost says. He hesitates. “I’m so sorry about the weekend.”
Mazzie only shrugs. “Shit happens. Right, sir?”
For once in his life, my father is speechless. Then—for the first time in as long as I can remember—he laughs.
I don’t know what to say to Mazzie. How does someone apologize for something like this? For the rest of the afternoon, we continue to study vocab words on flash cards, quizzing each other. The only thing that’s different from any other Sunday evening is that Mazzie is nicer than usual.
When Drew knocks at the window, interrupting me as I struggle to recall the definition for “phylogeny,” I can tell Mazzie and I are both grateful for the distraction. I open the window and give him a hand as he climbs in.
“What’s going on?” he demands. “I couldn’t find you, and then yesterday, Mrs. Martin finally told me your grandpa died.” He glances at Mazzie, almost glaring at her. “The two of you went home? For the funeral?”
“My mom showed up out of nowhere, Drew. We had to hurry. It was a really emotional weekend, and I wanted to call you but I was so upset—”
“We’ve been dating for a year, Katie, and I’ve never even met your parents. I can’t believe you would take—instead of—”
“I’m sorry, okay? It’s a four-hour drive, Drew. I barely see my parents. Don’t be mad, please—”
“I can’t believe what a jerk you’re being,” Mazzie interrupts, startling us both.
Drew stares at her. His jaw drops. “Are you talking about me?”
“No, I’m talking about your mother. Of course I’m talking about you. Your girlfriend has to pack up and leave without any notice because her grandpa died, and she has a weekend that, let me tell you, was not pleasant in any sense of the word. And you come climbing in the window like a big angry giant and yell at her because she didn’t think to bring you instead of me. Maybe she didn’t want to bring you, Drew. Maybe she didn’t think that her grandpa’s funeral was the right time to play get-to-know-you with her boyfriend and her family.” She whips “phylogeny” at him, nicking him on the forehead. “What would Jesus think of how you’re acting, Drew?”
There is a long pause in which I know I cannot make eye contact with Mazzie without bursting out laughing.
“Oh, God,” Drew says, “you’re right.” He puts his arms around me. “I’m so sorry, Katie. I’m acting so selfish.”
As I look over Drew’s shoulder, I can see Mazzie making a series of hand gestures in his direction, each one a little more obscene.
“I’ll be here for you,” he whispers.
I nod, unable to suppress my laughter, which I pretend is a sob. I bury my face in his shoulder and hold him tight.
A few weeks later, just after two in the morning, the phone rings in our bedroom. Mazzie and I both sit up; I wonder if she isn’t sleeping well, either.
I’ve turned our answering machine off so that Will can’t leave messages while I’m in class. The phone keeps ringing and ringing. Even though the volume is set to low, each ring feels like a smack that could startle the whole dorm awake.
I finally pick it up with every intention of hanging up immediately, but before I can put down the receiver, I hear an automated voice asking, “Will you accept a collect call from . . .” and then Will’s voice, desperate, saying, “Please pick up, Katie, please talk to me.”
I’m so tired that I can’t think straight. I feel myself trembling at the sound of his voice. Where is he? Is he safe? Are they taking care of him? Why is he awake in the middle of the night?
Mazzie stands behind me. She puts her hand over mine on the receiver, and together we hang up on my brother.
The same weekend, Lindsey has a birthday party at her house for Estella. I feel exhausted from the week. Aside from everything else that’s going on, swimming season is going to start in a few weeks, which means longer practices and less sleep. On Saturday morning, during a flip turn, I smack my big toe against the gutter and crack my toenail in half. A ribbon of blood dissolves in the water behind me as I swim to the opposite end, not realizing what has happened until Solinger is blowing hard on his whistle and Drew is wading over to me, his arms outstretched to pick me up and lead me to the edge.
The last place I want to be is at a party, but there’s no getting out of it. When I tell Estella that my grandpa just died and I’m tired and sad and just not in the mood, she presses her lips together and says, “I didn’t kill him, Katie. You’re coming.” When I don’t say anything, her expression softens a twinge. “It will make you feel better to be around your friends,” she assures me. “You’ll see.”
By ten o’clock, all I want to do is sleep. Drew holds my hand and takes me up to bed, on Lindsey’s third floor, where there’s one big room set up. It’s like how I’d picture a nineteenth-century orphanage: there are eight twin beds, all made up with worn, matching sheets and blankets, in a row against the wall; a big bathroom; and bookshelves filled with all of Lindsey’s and her sisters’ old books. There are the complete Nancy Drew and Doctor Seuss series, and Woodsdale Academy yearbooks going all the way back to the eighties.
Drew and I go to sleep together in one of the twin beds, wearing nothing but our underwear. Mazzie is in the room with us, a few beds over, her nightstand light burning while she reads Madame Bovary for our women’s lit class, and while I’m lying on my side trying to fall asleep, I focus on her little face, her jaw moving frantically back and forth, mouthing the words as she reads, her narrow shoulders hunched against a pillow, tiny hands holding the book up and far away from her face, almost out of the light.
Every time she goes to turn the page she takes a quick look at me, like she’s checking to see if I’m asleep or not. I know for sure I’m awake because I can feel Drew’s breath on the back of my neck. One of his hands is slung over my waist, his elbow digging into my hip.
I don’t remember finally falling asleep, but when I wake up, in a blink, I’m on the floor and Mazzie is kneeling next to me with a towel in her lap, trying to fit her arms under my shoulders. At first I’m sure it’s a dream because she isn’t saying anything and all the lights are off except the bathroom light, which wasn’t on when we went to bed. I can hear water running. It’s the shower. Mazzie is in her underwear: a little white tank top stretched over her breasts, which are almost nothing; baggy white underpants; and white athletic socks. She isn’t strong enough to pick me up, but she does it anyway, falling back onto her butt a few times until she finally props me up against the wall and puts the towel in my lap. I realize I’m all wet. My thighs are sticking together. Nothing makes sense.
“What’s going on? What happened?” I whisper. My eyes burn as I blink, trying to get them adjusted to the dim lighting. Drew is still asleep. Mazzie has replaced my body with a pillow, and he doesn’t seem to notice any difference. She shakes her head and puts a finger to her lips.
“It’s okay,” she mouths, and takes my hand to pull me up, holding the towel around my waist with her other hand. We go into the bathroom and shut the door. I notice that she’s left another towel on the floor where I was lying.
“What’s going on?” I ask again, looking down at my legs. My underwear is all wet. There’s a smell.
She looks up at me. “You had a nightmare.”
I’m still so confused. “Oh. Okay. Why am I all wet?”
“You were scared. You got out of bed.”
“Why am I all wet?”
“Katie . . . you peed the bed. It’s okay.”
Oh, my God. “Oh, my God. Oh, shit.” I realize that I have to pee, now, badly. I take off my underwear and sit down on the toilet, naked. Mazzie looks away. I’m so embarrassed that I start crying. I feel so dizzy that I have to lean forward and put my head against my knees. When I sit up, I ask, “Does Drew know? Did he wake up?”
“No. Don’t worry, Katie, I’m not going to tell him. He won’t find out.”
Oh, shit. Shit. “What do you mean, he won’t find out?” I’m crying so hard that I’m shaking. I’m so thirsty. “Did I pee all over him?”
“No. Be quiet, Katie. You’ll wake him up.”
“What happened, then? Did I pee on the floor?” I can’t believe this. I haven’t peed the bed since I was a little kid.
“No. You got into bed with me.”
I don’t understand. “I got into your bed? While I was sleeping?”
She nods, still looking away.
“Why would I do that?”
“I don’t know. You wanted to.”
“Did I pee in your bed?”
“Yes.”
“. . . ”
“. . . ”
“I’m so sorry, Mazzie.”
“It’s okay, Katie. Get in the shower.”
“Are you going to tell everybody?”
“I’m not going to tell anyone, Katie. Nobody has to know.”
She’s still in the bathroom with me, taking off her clothes now, and I realize that she’s all wet, too. I wait for her to shower before I get in myself. When the water hits my face, it’s too much. I lean over and gag into the drain, but nothing comes up. I have to sit down. The water hits me right on my stomach. Mazzie throws me a washcloth over the shower door. “I’m going to get the sheets off the bed,” she says, wrapping herself in a clean towel. “I’ll be right back.” She shuts the door behind her.
We go down to the laundry room together, finally, both of us carrying an armload of dirty towels and sheets and our wet underwear. We’re wearing nothing but oversized T-shirts, but at least we’re clean.
Neither of us has any idea how to operate a washing machine. We stand in front of it, gazing at the control dial, contemplating the settings. I never imagined it could be so complicated.
“I think we should use hot water,” she finally says.
“Why?”
“To rinse out any stains.”
“I think you’re supposed to use bleach for that.”
“I don’t think you can put whites and colors in together.”
“Why not?”
“I think they bleed.”
“Doesn’t this thing have any freaking directions?” It does, underneath the lid. We do the sheets first, adding half a bottle of bleach for good measure. We watch the washer fill up with hot water and start running. Mazzie finds a garbage bag and stuffs the towels inside, then puts them behind a stack of boxes so nobody will find them before we get a chance to wash them. I sit on the washing machine and watch her pattering around, getting the bottoms of her feet black with basement dirt. She’s wearing one of my Woodsdale Swimming T-shirts. It’s about two sizes too big for her, and on the back somebody—probably Lindsey—has written Club 813 in uneven bubble letters with white permanent marker. Lindsey’s street address is 813; lately we’ve been writing it on everything, pretending we think it’s a big joke, but deep down I know we all feel like we’re genuinely part of an exclusive club. Mazzie is so petite, so skinny, that when she’s bent over I can see each of her narrow ribs outlined beneath the fabric.
“How long do you think those are going to take?” She means the sheets.
“I don’t know. I have no idea. Five minutes? Maybe ten?”
“Do you think we should wait here?”
“I guess so.” I make some room for her on the washer. “You can sit up here with me.”
We can feel the washer vibrating beneath us. Mazzie reaches up and turns out the light so it’s like we’re not even there.
“When I was a baby,” I say, “my mom used to put my car seat on top of the washing machine when I wouldn’t fall asleep. She says the vibration calmed me down.”
Mazzie leans her head on my shoulder. “Do you feel better now?”
“I guess. I have to put some sheets back on the bed before anybody wakes up.”
“I’ll do it.” Then she asks, “What was your nightmare about?”
I shake my head. “I don’t remember.”
“Not at all? You were trying to say something. You seemed so scared when you woke me up . . .”
In the dark, I think Mazzie might be crying.
“Mazzie,” I say, closing my eyes even though it’s already dark. “You’re my best friend. You can talk to me, you know?”
I can feel her tense up. She doesn’t say anything for a long time. The washing machine switches cycles underneath us.
We sit there for what feels like forever. I wonder what time it is. I am so thirsty that it’s getting hard to swallow. Everything is warm. After a long time the washer gets louder, suddenly, and comes to a halt, and we relax against each other. Even my toes uncurl. I hadn’t realized I was so tense.
She says, “You have to understand, Katie. It isn’t personal. There are some things I’ll never tell anyone.”
“But you can trust me. You know that.”
She reaches up and pulls the light cord. We squint at each other, the room suddenly bright. She looks pale and impossibly tired beneath the bare lightbulb, half moons of darkness beneath her eyes. “I don’t know how you remember all these little details you’re always talking about,” she says. She almost sounds angry.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the way your mom used to put your car seat on top of the washing machine to get you to fall asleep. All the stories you tell, about when you lived in the woods and you’d help your mom make bread or pick blueberries or all those other happy things? I bet you remember all of it, don’t you?”
We are both so silent for a moment, I can hear the house settling above us. “Yeah,” I admit. “I remember everything. But only because I don’t want to forget the way things were, before my brother got sick. I want to remember when we were a family—”
“I never had a family. Not like yours. My parents both worked. Your father disappeared, slowly. You think it’s funny to call him the Ghost, don’t you? My parents were always ghosts.” Her eyes are red. She won’t look at me. “And now my mother isn’t anything. She worked her whole life and went to school and did everything she knew how to do to succeed—my dad, too—and now my mom is just plain dead.” She rubs the bottom of her nose, which is running all over the place. “And you know the worst part about all of it?”
I can barely force the word out. “What?”
“I’m going to do exactly what they did. Go to school, be a surgeon, work so hard that I don’t have time for anything else.” She shrugs. “I don’t know any other way to be.”
Before I can respond, she stands up and says, “We should put these sheets in the dryer. It’s going to be morning soon.”
The sheets don’t look quite right to me, but at least they’re clean. We sit on the dryer together, silent for a long time.
Finally, I can’t stop myself. Maybe it’s just morbid curiosity, but I don’t think so. I remember how it felt when I told her about Will. I remember how good it felt to finally tell someone. “Mazzie,” I press, “how did your mom die?”
She pulls her knees to her chest. Staring at the lightbulb, she says, “It doesn’t matter how she died. She’s dead, Katie. She’s never coming back.”
I want her to trust me, to spill herself into me the way I have for her. But I know her well enough to know that if I push any more, she’ll only run away. I guess everybody deserves to have their own secrets, if they really want them that badly.
When we finally get back to the third floor (it takes the sheets forever to dry), I help her put clean sheets on her bed, in the dark. We go into the bathroom and shut the door, and sit on the edge of the tub and run warm water over our feet, watching dirt swirl down the drain, and then we wipe our feet against the bathmat and put on our clean underwear and go back to bed. It’s starting to get light outside.
I have to rearrange myself against Drew so that he won’t know I’ve been gone. It takes a few minutes. I wiggle myself against him and pull both of his arms around me. While I’m trying to get comfortable he gives a little moan in his sleep and wakes up a little bit.
Maybe he can tell something’s different. He blinks in the almost-dark, confused. “Katie? Are you awake?” By now the sun is really beginning to come up, light slowly filling the room.
When I don’t answer, he gives me a little shake. “Hey, Katie. You all right?”
“Drew,” I whisper, almost hoarse from thirst, “will you please, please, please get me a glass of water? I’m so thirsty.”
“Of course, baby.” He strokes my hair. He frowns. “Your hair is wet.”
“I was hot,” I lie. “I splashed water on my face in the bathroom, and I got some in my hair.”
“Are you still hot? Do you want me to open a window?”
“Sure. That would be nice.”
He gives me a gentle kiss on the cheek. His breath is bad. “Did you get a good night’s sleep?”
I nod.
“I bet you feel so much better now.”
“Yes. Drew?”
“What is it, baby?”
“Will you open the window and get me some water?”
Once he goes downstairs, I turn to look at Mazzie. I know that she’s still awake from the way she’s breathing. She has her back turned to me. I get up and stand over her, just watching, until she finally opens her eyes and says, “What is it?”
I sit on the edge of her bed. “I just wanted to, you know, say thank you.”
“No problem.”
I don’t move. She opens her eyes again. “What, Katie?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, when you figure it out, tell me then. I’m trying to sleep.”
“Sorry.” I get into my own bed, waiting for Drew to come back with my water. I want to say more to her, but I know she’ll only be annoyed. So all I say is, “Good night, Mazzie.”
“Good night, asshole. Try not to pee the bed again.”
Drew comes back with a coffee mug full of water and sits down beside me, giving me a shake. “Here you go. I’m up. I’m going home.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem. Hey, do you want to come to church with me later?”
Do I want to go to church with him? “No. Definitely not.”
“All right. Don’t come crying to me when you’re burning in hell.” He acts like he’s only kidding, but we both know better.
“Don’t worry, I won’t.”
He leans over and kisses my forehead. “I’ll call you, sweet pea.”
I do my best to smile. “I’ll be counting the minutes.”
He slams the door on his way out. I can hear his loafers pounding down the stairs, threatening to wake the whole house. Then it’s quiet again. I’m so tired that my eyes are burning; maybe from thirst, too. I drink my water, then go to the bathroom and fill it up three more times before I start to feel better. Once I’m finally in bed again, I push a pillow between my legs and lay facing Mazzie, her back still turned to me.
I’m almost asleep when she says, “So Drew thinks you’re going to hell, does he?”
“Yes.” We’re both so sleepy that our voices are barely more than murmurs. “He thinks you’re going to hell too.”
She doesn’t say anything for a while, and my eyes begin to flutter shut. Then, just as I’m slipping into sleep, she says, “If we both end up in hell, at least we can still be roommates.”
I smile. “Mmm-hmm.”
“Doesn’t sound so bad,” she murmurs. And then she’s out. I lay there for a while, listening to the sound of her breath, and finally fall asleep to the sound of tooth grinding against tooth through a thin layer of plastic, like a purr that I can feel in my whole body.