Lessons from a Dead Girl (5 page)

I lunge for the magazine, pull it out of Leah’s hands, and manage to shove it under the mattress right as my mother reaches the top of the stairs.

Leah seems surprised, but only for a second. She giggles.

“What are you girls doing?” my mother asks from the doorway.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Well, not
nothing,
Laine,” Leah says.

God, I want to kill her. My heart beats so hard and fast it hurts. Sweat prickles out all over my body, hot and cold at the same time.

“We were playing, right, Lainey?” Leah giggles again and sits on the bed.

“What are you up to?” my mother asks suspiciously.

“Nothing,” I say again. But she’s already caught on.

“Why is the dust ruffle on your bed tucked into the mattress?”

I look. The edge of the magazine is sticking slightly out from under the mattress. I’d shoved it under so quickly, I pushed the dust ruffle in, too.

“What is that?”

“Nothing,” I answer quickly.

Leah giggles again.

My mother pulls the magazine out from under the mattress and looks at the cover. Her mouth drops open. She rolls the magazine to hide the cover. Leah keeps giggling. But she sounds nervous now.

“Where did you get this?”

I don’t answer. Leah can’t stop making those awful giggle sounds.

“Where?!”

Leah laughs out loud. I glare at her. “Shut up!” I scream.

My mother grabs my arm so hard, her fingers dig into my muscle.

I pull away and run out of the room, down the stairs, and outside. Out to the pathway in the woods that leads to the big rock Leah and I used to hang out on when we first became friends. We pretended it was an island and we were stranded on it and had to come up with ways we could survive.

I climb the rock and sit on top of it, hugging my knees to my chest. Through the woods and my tears, I see our white farmhouse. It looks quiet, but I know it isn’t. I watch, waiting for some sign of my mother. Or Leah.

I’ve never felt this ugly or embarrassed — this dirty — in my life. I hate the way I feel. I hate it. I’m a pervert. Why else would my body feel that way when I looked at those pictures?

I will never be able to face my mother again.

After a while, I hear leaves crunching in the distance. It’s Leah. She climbs the rock and sits next to me.

I move a little bit away. “What do you want?” I say without looking at her.

“She found the rest,” Leah says. She doesn’t tell me she’s the one who told my mother where to look, but I’m sure she did. She doesn’t say she’s sorry.

Leah and I sit on the rock and watch the house in silence. Waiting.

Soon the back door opens, and my mother marches to the outdoor grill pit with the cardboard box in her arms. She throws it in the pit and runs back into the house. A few minutes later, she returns with a bottle of something in her hand. It must be lighter fluid. She squirts liquid all over the box, then lights the match. The whole thing goes up in flames.

I watch my mother through the smoke. She steps back and turns away from the heavy grayness, walks back to the house, and disappears inside.

The smell of the burnt magazines reaches our rock.

“Men,” Leah says, shaking her head and wrinkling her nose at the smell.

I turn and watch her look at the scene she’s created. Her eyes are slightly squinted so she has tiny wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. It’s like looking at an adult almost, the way those wrinkles map out across her temples.

She catches me watching her, but she doesn’t say anything. She just keeps shaking her head and looking at the burning magazines. I swear she’s trying not to smile. But then she says without looking at me, “I didn’t think that would happen, you know.”

I’m not sure what part she means — finding the magazines, getting caught, telling my mother where they were, or the way they made me feel.

“You shouldn’t have done it,” I say.

“I know. I’m sorry.” She shifts a little next to me. “Your mom shouldn’t make you feel bad about looking. There’s nothing wrong with it. Besides, I’m sure it’s not you she’s really upset with. It’s your dad.”

I smell the smoke again and hope she’s right. I want to ask her if she felt the way I did when she looked at the pictures, but I don’t dare. I couldn’t bear to be the only one.

We stay there for a long time, not saying anything. Just watching the smoke rise into the sky and disappear.

My mom never says a word to me about the magazines. But a few weeks later, my parents have a bunch of friends over for dinner. They’re all sitting at the long harvest table my parents use in the dining room. Leah’s spending the night, and we’re spying on them from the top of the stairs. It’s late, and dinner has been over for a while. They’re drinking and laughing and sharing old stories about all the so-called crazy things they did when they were younger.

When he was fifteen, Mr. Murphy stole his dad’s truck and took it to the drive-in and got caught making out with his girlfriend. Mrs. Carey almost got kicked out of college for smoking pot in her dorm room. “I only hope my own kids don’t put me through what I put my parents through.” She laughs.

“Amen to that,” my dad says.

Then my mother, who rarely speaks at these gatherings, suddenly pipes up. I can tell she’s been drinking because her voice is louder than usual and a little slurred.

“Lainey and Leah certainly got started recently,” she says.

Leah grabs my arm, and we exchange surprised looks. We lean closer to the top stair so we can hear better.

“Did I tell you what I caught them with?”

“Uh-oh,” says Mr. Murphy. “They didn’t get into your Scotch, did they, Stan?”

My dad chuckles nervously. “Honey, I don’t think Laine would be thrilled to have you tell this story.”

“Or out
him,
” Leah whispers. I put my finger to my lips to shut her up.

“Oh, she doesn’t care,” my mom says, like it’s no big deal.

I wish I could dash down the stairs and scream at my mom to shut up before it’s too late. But I want to stay invisible, too. I don’t want to exist.

“Lainey and Leah found Stan’s
Playboy
s and had one up in Lainey’s room,” my mom says, as if she’s telling one of a hundred innocent family stories. “I couldn’t believe it! I guess they’re at that
curious
stage.” She laughs.
Everyone
laughs.

My cheeks burn. Leah shakes her head.

“Poor girls,” my mom continues. “I guess I overreacted a little.”

“A little?” my dad says. “She burned all my magazines!”

They laugh again.

“My boys got into mine last year,” Mr. Sloane says.

“Ha!” Leah whispers in my ear. “Those Sloanes are cute. Now we’ve got the goods on them.”

“Yeah, but it’s
normal
for boys to look at that stuff,” I whisper back.

“It’s normal for girls, too. God, Laine.” She inches closer to the top of the stairs to hear more.

“Kids are curious,” says Mrs. Carey. “When our Sarah is older, I’m going to buy her
The Joy of Sex
and tell her everything she wants to know.”

“Well, after what Laine and Leah saw, I’m going to have to ask
them
,” my mother jokes. “
I
didn’t even know Stan had those magazines,” she whines.

I am never speaking to her again
, I vow. I slide back into the hallway and tiptoe to my room. Leah follows and shuts the door behind her.

I sit on the bed and squeeze my pillow.

“You know why she told, don’t you?” Leah asks, sitting next to me.

I shake my head.

“She wants them to tell her it’s OK. That we’re normal. And I bet she wants to get back at your dad, too.”

I throw myself backward on the bed and hide my face in my pillow. “I bet they all think we’re perverted,” I say into my pillowcase.

“Oh, Laine,” Leah says, as if she’s my big sister. “Lighten up. You’re reading way too much into this. Here’s the deal: your mom only told so she could get back at your dad and
maybe
because she was a little worried about us. But now her friends are all going to convince her we’re just ‘curious,’ so she’ll feel better.”

I roll over to face Leah. She has the strangest way of knowing things — hidden things — about people. Most of the time it scares me, because it’s usually me she’s seeing through.

“That’s all we are, right?” I ask. “Curious?”

“Of course,” she says. She grabs my old Curious George from the bookcase and sits him on her lap like a baby. “Everyone does it. My mom even showed me and Brooke my dad’s stash. She told us any time we were curious, we could look. How else are you going to learn? They don’t teach it at school. They don’t teach us anything we really need to know. They don’t teach us crap.”

“But did they — you know — make you feel funny?”

She gives me a strange look, and I immediately wish I’d kept quiet. I just let her in on a secret I don’t understand and that I’m afraid of. I wait for her to decide what she’s going to do with it.

But in the end she simply shrugs. “That’s normal, too, Lainey. Don’t worry about it.”

She tosses George on the bed as she gets up and walks over to my mirror. “I keep telling you, Lainey. You need to lighten up. You take everything way too seriously. All the wrong things, anyway.”

She pulls her hair back with her hands, piling it on top of her head, then looks at herself from side to side to study her profile. “There’s a lot more serious stuff to worry about,” she says, still looking at herself. “Trust me.”

At the end of the school year, Leah sends out invitations to a swimming and slumber party for her closest friends. It’s early June, and the water is sure to be freezing. But Leah says anyone who won’t go in the water is a wimp, so none of us complain.

We meet at her house on Saturday afternoon. The Greenes’ house is on a small private lake that can only be used by residents who live on the road that surrounds it. There’s a beach house and a raft you can swim to.

None of the girls act surprised when Paige Larson gets dropped off in a rusty Ford pickup, even though we’re all in shock, which I’m sure is exactly what Leah was going for.

I don’t like it. I have a bad feeling.

Paige Larson isn’t popular. She’s hardly even known, except to be made fun of for coming to school wearing the same thing almost every day. Or smelling like stale cigarettes and sweat.

Paige Larson doesn’t say much. I think she tries to stay invisible. She hasn’t lived here that long, and no one knows where she came from. I don’t think anyone has ever asked.

Not long after she moved here, Paige and Charlie Briggs were paired up as lab partners in science. Charlie is another kid no one really likes for the same reasons they don’t like Paige. He smells and he’s poor. I hate to admit that those are the reasons, but I know it’s true. Paige laughed because Charlie dropped the earthworm they were dissecting and he screamed. When she opened her mouth, her lips stretched out across her brown and yellow teeth. She quickly covered her hand with her mouth, but it was too late.

“Look at Paige’s teeth!” Charlie squawked — probably because he wanted to divert attention from his own embarrassing scream.

Everyone started urging her to open her mouth. “Come on, Paige — show us!” they taunted. Paige looked like she was going to cry. She pushed back her stool at the lab table and took off for the bathroom.

Ever since that day, Paige only smiles with her mouth closed.

She smiles that way now as she says good-bye to her mother.

“Be good,” her mother says in a gruff voice. Paige nods and watches her mother drive away. She looks scared. I don’t blame her.

“Hey, Paige,” Leah says, almost skipping over to her. “Ready for some fun?”

I catch the other girls exchanging looks. I’m sure, like me, they’re wondering what the joke is.

“Let’s go, girls!” Mr. Greene calls from his giant SUV. We climb in with our towels and flip-flops, nudging each other and giggling.

At the beach, Leah parades around in her new white terry-cloth robe that her mother gave her for an early birthday present. All the girls carefully take off their clothes and pull self-consciously at their new bathing suits. I frown at the thought of revealing my faded hand-me-down suit that Christi wore two summers ago.

Paige stands off to the side, smoothing the sand with her toes.

Leah notices her the same time I do. “What’s wrong, Paige? Didn’t you bring a suit?” she asks.

They stare at each other. Paige seems to say something, even though no words come out. Leah nods, then turns to her mother.

“Doesn’t the beach house have extra suits?” she asks.

“Of course,” says Mrs. Greene, almost too sweetly. “Come with me, Paige. I’m sure we can find something that will do.”

The other girls look curious, but they don’t ask Leah why she invited Paige to the party. It’s clear Leah has chosen Paige to be in our group, and none of us are going to risk Leah’s disapproval by making some snide comment.

That’s when it occurs to me that when I first became friends with Leah, I wasn’t all that different from Paige. I didn’t have any friends. I was quiet. Unpopular. We weren’t as poor as Paige seems to be, but we obviously didn’t have anywhere near what the Greenes did. Back then, no one seemed to like me any more than they like Paige now.