Breaking Read online

  The logical part of my brain knew something like this would happen eventually. Growing up, Mother was always switching me from school to school. I attended three very different prestigious day cares, not to mention a rotating door of private grade schools and junior highs and summer camps. Weston is my second high school, and the place I’ve been the longest. I was kind of hoping it would stick. Silly, silly Charlotte.

  “Did she say why?” I ask, and my voice doesn’t crack. Thank God for small victories.

  “Why?” Rosenthal frowns. A tiny wrinkle creases the skin between her eyes. “Charlotte, your two best friends committed suicide within a month of each other.”

  I stare at the wrinkle. It takes me longer than it should to recognize the look of sympathy on her face. I’m not slow or anything; it’s just not the kind of thing you see at Weston. Pity, yes. But not sympathy.

  “You were in a … a kind of a club with Devon Savage and Ariel Frank. Is that correct?”

  I cringe. I hate the way she says Ariel’s last name. Frank, with a hard k. It sounds like a cough.

  “We were friends,” I say.

  “Friends who were in a club?”

  “God, it wasn’t a club. We’re not seven years old.”

  Rosenthal leans back in her chair and folds her arms over her chest. “How would you describe it, then?”

  I stare at the heavy velvet curtains covering the window behind her head. What is it with fancy private schools and velvet? Velvet and oak and marble and leather. Have there been studies done detailing how these materials are more conducive to an academic environment? Has someone made up charts and spreadsheets and highlighted things with yellow markers?

  “Charlotte?”

  “Ariel liked fairy tales,” I say, pulling my eyes away from the curtains. “She used to joke that we were all like characters from the stories.”

  It wasn’t really a joke. Ariel thought this was brilliant. “Weston looks like a creepy-ass castle,” she used to say. “And we’re the princesses they’re keeping locked in the attic.”

  I don’t know what story she got that from, but it was hard to argue with her. She was charismatic. She made things like pretending to be a fairy-tale princess when you were seventeen sound dangerous and exciting. She’d wake us after it got dark, persuade us to sneak out into the woods with her, and drink stolen wine straight from the bottle. She said our lives were going to be like fairy tales.

  Across from me, Rosenthal nods. She’s waiting for me to speak first. I could outlast her patience, if I tried. Years of wordless dinners with Mother have taught me to be very comfortable with silence.

  “Devon was Snow White,” I say, because I want to get this over with. “It was kind of an irony thing, because she’s—she was black. Ariel thought it was funny.”

  “Who are you?”

  I close my eyes, letting breath escape from my lips in a rush that’s almost a sigh. “Cinderella. Because she had all those animal buddies.”

  Rosenthal stares for a moment, and then understanding passes through her eyes. “Ah, right. Your shelter.”

  I press my lips together, nodding. Weston is in the middle of the woods, and there are stray cats and lost dogs and injured bunnies that find their way onto the grounds. I used to hide them in our dorm until Ariel complained that it made our stuff smell like woodland creatures. Then I went to Dean Rosenthal to see about opening the shelter.

  I don’t tell her the rest of it. That I was Cinderella because Cinderella was loyal and kind and easy to manipulate. That Ariel teased me about it.

  “See how nice she is to those awful stepsisters?” she’d say. “That’s just like you with Dev and me. You never call us on our shit.”

  I clear my throat. “And Ariel was, well, duh, she was Ariel. You know, the Little Mermaid? Because of her hair.”

  Maybe that was why Ariel loved fairy tales. Because of her hair. Her hair was like something of legend, like something old tribes would sit around the fire and tell stories about. It hung past her waist, this cascading wave of red that I swear to God I never saw her brush.

  She called it mermaid hair. She said you don’t need brushes when you live under the sea. We used to hitch a ride to the river after lunch hour, blowing off our afternoon classes. I’d stand on the grass, watching Ariel walk in fully clothed, laughing when the water licked the edges of her skirt. She’d make me dunk my head into the water, and then she’d spend hours weaving my hair into perfect, tiny braids. We’d take them out after it dried and, for a little while, I’d have mermaid hair, too.

  “You can see why we’re concerned,” Rosenthal says. “Three girls in a club, and now two of them are dead.”

  I’m still at the river, with Ariel, and her words take a long time to reach me. I blink and sit up in my chair. “Do you think it was, like, a suicide club?”

  “You can see why—”

  “Do you—wait, do you think I’m going to kill myself next? Is that why you’re booting me?”

  “Charlotte, your teachers are telling me you don’t participate in class. You don’t talk to the other students or come down for meals.” She casts another pointed glance at my too-thin frame. “Or eat at all, for that matter. The Med Center’s volunteer coordinator tells me you stopped showing up for shifts, and you seem to have given up on reopening the animal shelter. Your new roommate says you rarely leave your dorm.”

  I place my hand on my lap and curl my fingers into a fist. Screw you, too, Zoe.

  “Since Ariel’s accident last month, we’ve been advised to look for warning signs. Even you must admit that your behavior has been … alarming.”

  I open my mouth to argue with her. There’s no way my mother buys this theory. Mother doesn’t believe in cries for help.

  But my argument dissolves on my tongue like soda fizz. What am I fighting for? This school isn’t right for me. Devon and Ariel could blow off classes and homework, then show up on the day of a pop quiz and answer every question correctly, all while reapplying their lipstick as soon as the teacher’s back was turned. They’d start an essay at midnight the day before it was due and, somehow, hand in something so beautifully written their teachers would feel compelled to read it out loud in class.

  No matter how much I studied, or how hard I worked, I could rarely manage to pull my grades above Cs and Ds. If I’d been any other student, Rosenthal would have expelled me years ago. But she didn’t. Because of who Mother is.

  The only things I ever liked about this place were my friends. Ariel and Devon. Devon and Ariel. And now they’re gone.

  I roll my lower lip between my teeth. Ariel would fight to stay, just because they told her she couldn’t. If I were stronger, I’d fight, too. But I’ve never been strong.

  “I’ll pack my things.” I stand and walk across the room, feeling a little like I’ve left some part of myself behind in that chair. An arm, maybe. Or some fingers. I reach for the door.

  “You know, I did my thesis on fairy tales,” Dean Rosenthal says, just as I’m about to turn the knob. I hesitate, and glance back over my shoulder.

  “I had to research all the original stories that inspired Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm. Fascinating stuff,” she says, pushing her glasses back up her nose. “Very dark.”

  I try to look interested. “Were they?”

  “Oh yes. The original Little Mermaid didn’t actually marry her prince. The story ended with her walking into the ocean and dissolving into seafoam.” Rosenthal frowns, and that wrinkle appears between her eyes again. “You know, I believe Snow White died in the original story, too. She chokes on the apple and it kills her. Did you girls know that? That they both died?”

  “I didn’t,” I say. And before she can say another word, I open the heavy wooden door and step into the hall, pulling it shut behind me.

  Of course we knew they died.

  Chapter Three

  Ariel always said her mother should have been a nun. She went to church more often than she slept. S
he talked about Christ like he was a lover.

  Devon’s mother was a dancer until an unplanned pregnancy made her feet swell two sizes. She always complained that she could never get her body to move the way it did before she had a child. She married rich and blamed her daughter for all those lost years onstage.

  And my mother … well, you’ve already met my mother.

  They never wanted us, so we were each other’s mothers and sisters and family. Ariel taught us all the domestic things her mother thought a lady should know: how to sew buttons back onto our blouses and bake cookies and iron the pleats in our skirts. Devon explained how to tell when you were ovulating and faked my mother’s signature on every less-than-stellar report card. I stole Mother’s booze and showed them both how to take a shot without cringing.

  After a while, we forgot we had mothers. We forgot we had anyone but each other.

  We liked it that way.

  Back at the dorm, I pop my laptop open, scroll through a column of playlists, and find one called “for when you’re pissed.”

  I click and music thunders through my speakers. Screaming voices. Hammering drums. There’s no melody or pretty singing or soothing chorus. This is sound for the sake of sound. It’s an assault. I close my eyes and let it course through my veins and rub against my nerves until I’m twitchy and hot.

  Ariel’s voice, whispering in my ear: This is your brain on anger.

  I slide the top drawer of my dresser open and stare down at pile after pile of neatly folded plaid skirts.

  Pack your bags, I think. Take a break.

  I want to yank the drawer out of the dresser and smack it against the wall. I want to watch the wood splinter and crack. I want to fill my ears with the sound of something being destroyed.

  I should have tried harder to stay. Ariel would have come up with just the right argument to change the dean’s mind. I sat there and let it happen. The way I do with everything.

  I remove a stack of skirts from my drawer and place it on my bedspread. A plaid brick of cloth that I will never need outside this building.

  I smooth the skirt on top of the stack with one hand. I have no reason to take them with me. But I pull the suitcase out of my closet and place it on my bed. I fill it with useless plaid, stiff oxford shirts, and scratchy wool vests. I hum to myself as I work, a different song from the one blaring on my computer. The sounds crash together like fighting dogs.

  I finish packing up my dresser and move to my closet. Heavy winter coat, heavier winter coat, heaviest winter coat. Three pairs of clunky black loafers that Devon and Ariel made fun of me for wearing. Three pairs of Repetto flats in cute colors that I bought once I realized the teachers don’t care what’s on our feet as long as our shirts are tucked in. A pink bag filled with lacy black underwear that Ariel made me get for someday. My desk is empty except for dried-up pens and textbooks I haven’t opened in months. I toss them into the trash can.

  Zoe walks in, hears my music, walks back out again.

  Almost done now. Everything I own fits into one suitcase and one weekend bag. Everything except for the little pink bag of underwear. I think about leaving it behind for Zoe. Like a going-away present—French girls like lingerie, right? But then I think of how she told Dean Rosenthal that I never leave my room, and I decide I don’t want to give her a present. I dump the bag onto my bedspread and a tangle of black lace falls out, followed by a tiny glass bottle. The bottle rolls across my bed and drops onto the floor.

  “The hell …,” I say, kneeling. I pick up the bottle and hold it between two fingers. It’s impossibly small, barely as wide as my pinkie, and filled with a clear liquid the consistency of cough syrup. A tiny label dangles from the lid on a thread. I recognize Ariel’s spidery handwriting.

  Drink me.

  The angry music goes silent, replaced by a kind of static. Like bees. The whole room seems to dim and fade at the edges. I press my finger over the label, marveling. Ariel dotted her i with a tiny smiley face. She smeared the e, leaving a trail of ink across the label.

  When someone dies, the strangest things become time machines. You’ll be going about your day, and a sound or a smell or a word will tear you away from real life and send you tumbling back through memories you didn’t even know you had. I stare at Ariel’s handwriting, and suddenly I’m slumped at my desk in math class, doodling a picture of a ladybug in the margin of my notes. She pokes me in the back with her pen and drops a folded piece of paper onto my desk.

  Mr. Dooley is kind of hot, it reads.

  I scribble beneath it. Gross. He’s old. He has nose hair.

  I pass it to her. A second later, it bounces back onto my desk.

  I bet he has a big dick, she wrote, dotting both of the i’s with tiny smiley faces.

  When I come back to the present, I’m sitting on the floor next to my bed, the tiny bottle still clutched in one hand. My cheeks are wet, and my head aches. Music pounds around me, and I swear to God it’s louder than it was before. Like it’s trying to tell me it won’t be ignored. I flick the “drink me” label with one finger.

  I don’t know when Ariel left this for me. It could have been ages ago, back when we first bought the underwear. I was dating Kevin Norbuck then, and the whole point was that I needed cute underwear for my first time. I can picture Ariel sneaking something into the bag, something she thought might make the night more memorable. Sisters do that for each other. She would have wanted me to enjoy my first time.

  Or she could have left it for me during that last month.

  I lean beneath my bed, fumbling around for the booze I hid there. My fingers brush glass and I pull out a half-full bottle of fifteen-year-old Glenfiddich. Ariel and Devon could never handle hard liquor, but Mother doesn’t stock much else, so I’ve been trying to develop a taste for it. I unscrew the cap and take a deep swig. It burns down my throat. I cough. Angry music blares around me. My ears feel like they’re bleeding.

  Ariel was a different person during her last month on earth. She was mean. Not catty or sarcastic like she always was. Just mean. She stopped laughing at my jokes and listening to my stories. She’d say something cruel to see if she could make my face crumple. She never could, but that just made her try harder. Devon was the same. Worse, sometimes.

  They were into something, but I don’t know what. They’d whisper, then stop as soon as I stepped into the room. I’d wake up in the middle of the night and Ariel’s bed would be empty, sheets tangled and kicked to the floor. I’d know without going to Devon’s dorm that hers would be empty, too. The next day, I’d ask them where they went, and they’d lie, right to my face.

  You must’ve dreamed it, they’d say, smiling these strange smiles that didn’t meet their eyes.

  I turn the itty-bitty bottle in my fingers, watching the liquid coat the sides of the glass. I take another drink of scotch, and this time I don’t cough. The liquor feels like velvet heat as it slides down my throat. I haven’t really eaten anything today, and I’m already feeling a little drunk.

  I always wanted to know what had happened to them. What they were doing that they didn’t think I could handle. And now they’re gone. And I’ll never know.

  Drink me.

  Music screams from the computer behind me. I imagine it filling the air with zigzagging lines, like in a cartoon. I pinch the tiny cork between two fingers and then—pop!—the bottle’s open. My head feels soupy and warm from the scotch, so I take another drink.

  It’s probably nothing, I tell myself. Maybe a little GHB—Ariel knows how stiff and nervous I get. She probably wanted me to keep calm for all the sex I never did get around to having.

  Still, there’s something about the bottle that makes me think it’s more than that. The mystery of it. The little “drink me” label, like in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ariel didn’t just love fairy tales; she loved all children’s stories. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz, and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Anything where the hero finds a secr
et entrance to another world. Anything about running away.

  I picture her grinning at me from across the room, a wicked glint in her eyes.

  Come on, Char, she’d say. I dare you.

  I dare you. She got me with that every time. It persuaded me to follow her out of our room after curfew, to sneak into secret parties in the boys’ dorms, to explore the woods late at night.

  My head hums. Scotch burns the back of my throat. I roll the delicate bottle between two fingers, watching the syrupy liquid coat the glass. I lift it to my nose and sniff, but it smells like nothing. I should dump it out. I should throw it away.

  “Here goes,” I whisper. I lower the bottle to my lips, and I tip it back, hoping it leads me down the rabbit hole.

  Chapter Four

  Sometimes I say the word “family” over and over. Until it loses all meaning.

  Family. Fam-ily. Fa-mil-y.

  Family used to have a purpose. Parents taught their children to walk and talk and behave. Fathers hunted bison and made fire and fought off predators. Mothers tended to the babies and cooked the bison meat and, I don’t know, gathered berries and shit.

  But now we have Seamless and nannies, so what’s the point? Why do we need family anymore?

  Ariel said we were family. Her and Devon and me. She said we had to look out for one another. At first, I thought that just meant that she wanted someone to lie for her when she didn’t show up for homeroom. But then, during lunch last year, Jennie Lawful said I had a butter face, and Ariel slapped her so hard that her hand left a mark on Jennie’s cheek. After that, Jennie was dead to us. We’d pretend we didn’t hear her when she spoke. We didn’t see her in line at the water fountain or save a seat for her during lunch. She simply vanished.