Winona’s been grounded ever since the brownie incident.
An incident, that’s what Jon’s calling it, rather than what it actually was — the worst birthday ever. Since she’s not allowed to use her car, Jon has been driving her to school, and since she’s not speaking to him, she just endures his all-news-and-traffic radio for the duration of the twenty-minute car ride, wondering why adults like listening to the same thing over and over. Traffic every five minutes. Newsflash: not much changes. What neither Jon nor Trish seems to realize is that being grounded isn’t much of a punishment for Winona, or really any other teenager. If they really wanted to punish her they would make her do something, like actually do something. She renegotiated the retention of her phone and laptop under the guise of educational necessity, so she was perfectly content and her life went on in the same boring way it had before. She came home, watched YouTube, did her homework while watching YouTube, doom-scrolled her way down rabbit holes that started with a variety of innocuous self-help, makeup or gaming tutorials. What her father doesn’t realize is that she doesn’t really have friends. Yes, she knows people, but other than Jay, no one really thinks of her as a friend. She’s awkward; she says what she thinks and realizes that people other than Jay, and maybe now Ash, find that unsettling. So in that way being grounded is less of a punishment and more of a relief.
She spends her time working in her mother’s art studio out back. It’s a glorified shed, rustic but equipped with everything she needs — a small table, an armchair and good lighting. She hadn’t created anything since the installation, but last week after spending hours watching stupid videos, she went from zoned out to zenned out and found herself inside the kind of boredom where her thoughts weren’t her own and new ideas seemed to pass through her until they took hold in the back of her throat, in the pit of the stomach, an urgent calling to do something.
She found a vintage TV in the free section of Craigslist and when no one was home, she convinced Ash to go with her to pick it up because safety. They drove to East Vancouver and, to Ash’s surprise, dismembered the TV in the alley behind where they picked it up. All she needed was the wooden shell and screen, and so with his help she gutted the electrical components, sorting them into use and throwaway piles. “It’ll be an expression of how we consume ourselves, you know like the individuals feeding on themselves, echo chambers and ignorance.” Ash nodded but she knew he didn’t quite get it, so she pulled out her phone and showed him her rough sketch. “Inside will be a head that I’ll mold out of these electrical components, and when you look at it, you’ll see your own reflection superimposed on the junk head. Get it?”
“Yeah. Garbage in, garbage out.”
“Exactly,” she said, shoving stripped wire into her bag. “We are what we watch, what we consume. I suppose it’s similar to the other installation. I’m thinking of it as a series.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
She looked up at him with a pensive expression. “Not sure, really. Isn’t making it enough?” As she said it she realized she was asking and stating the thing at the same time. Was it enough for it to exist without a purpose, and if it was, could that be true for people too? It was then that she decided she would model the head after her own, and now that she’d been working on it for a week it was finally starting to look like something.
She’d started with a mannequin’s head whose face she melted off. She rebuilt it with metal and plastic and is now sewing in long thin black wires with stripped copper ends into the skull. By the time she looks up, hours have passed the way they always do when she’s being creative. When she was working on her installation, life around her seemed to stop and now as she sits, stretching her back, she wonders if it was that creative flow that made her miss all the signs. Jay was with her the whole time, and she was with him, but maybe neither of them were there. She was buried in creation; Jay, in undoing. She didn’t see his texts that day until it was too late. By the time she replied he was already gone. Though she’s memorized them, she reads them every morning as if her attention now could make up for it. They were just regular what are you doing, want to chill later, need to talk texts. There was nothing to suggest that he would do it. They’d talked about killing themselves but maybe he always knew she wasn’t serious because sometimes he talked about the future — hers, not his.
Like little girls imagining their weddings, she’d spent hours fantasizing about her perfect funeral and had told him about it. It was something she started to do after her mother died, and though most would think it morbid it gave her a sense of peace, reminding her that eventually her life, like all stories, would be made clear at the end. When Jay died she added new layers to her imagining and now sits down cross-legged, eyes closed, disappearing into a Gothic cathedral with limestone arches and a ribbed interior that makes her feel like she’s been swallowed by a gigantic whale. She wears her black A-line mini dress with the Peter Pan collar and combat boots. Her face is powder-shimmered in pink and silver sparkles; she’s wearing false eyelashes, bright red lipstick and black extensions brushed straight over her chest. She’s Snow White meets Wednesday Addams meets a Tim Burton Claymation character. People cry. Jon’s grief is obscene. They play all of her favorite songs, and when they play “Try Not to Breathe” by R.E.M., everyone rises up from their pews and dances in two rows as if they’re at a ball in one of Jane Austen’s books. They twirl down the aisles, spinning partners and holding hands, and as the last pair approaches her casket, Jay floats down the aisle wearing a navy blue Regency coat with gold buttons and a silk ascot. He takes off his top hat and bows. Her soul slips out of her body, takes his hand, and she too dances through the aisles singing along with them. Her mother, no longer cancer-ridden, sits, yellow-haired and angelic in an Empire-cut gown, in the back pew and together with Jay they drift above the chapel and into the sky.
When she opens her eyes, she stares at her reflection in the screen, her image floating above the circuitry of herself. She hasn’t quite achieved what she’d hoped and takes a modeling hammer, tapping the center of the screen until veined cracks spread out over the surface and she is rendered an abstraction, a cubist reflection, a ghost in the machine.