Suddenly her face lifts and smacks against the window, right on the sore spot. They must have gone over a bump, or maybe a pedestrian.
She sits up again. Nursing her cheek with her hand, she looks at the back of her friends’ heads bouncing slightly with the spring of the road beneath them. One very large head towering over a tiny one. She’s sorry she resented Di. She knows her pity is just a well-fed form of concern.
How did she ever find these two? What makes them stay? What keeps them from triggering the ejector seat right now, and propelling her up out of the car, into the sky, and out of their life?
They want to go to war on her behalf. It’s not just anyone who will do that.
Beddy begins to tear up. Not for her predicament, which is still dense and unknowable, but because she is loved. Her friends love her. She doesn’t deserve it, but there it is. They love her despite her worst instincts, despite her darkest darkness. Despite her self-harm, her rage, her suicidal tendencies, her homicidal fantasies, despite her freckles, her vitreous floaters, her continuing disappointment of a body and the disappointing way she views her body, despite her habits and neuroses and fuck ups and shit shows. Despite all things public and private. They really see her. The molten core of her, glowing in her darkness. They love her despite her, and this is the most touching thing in the world, and she weeps silently at the unfair beauty of it.
What did she do to deserve them? What could she ever do to thank them? “I love you’s” are inadequate.
She closes her eyes again and leans her head back against the headrest. She imagines their love for each other filling the car, pooling around their feet as a pink potion of a gas, rising to their torsos.
The steep climb in the road tells her they’re here. She yawns to clear her ears, even though it is not so high in altitude that she needs to. She wipes her tears on her sweatshirt sleeves.
The car comes to a stop. The engine shuts off. A rustling of keys, then a loud bang. She opens her eyes.
Connie’s door rests against the car next to them.
Di starts arguing with Connie outside of the car, but she can’t focus on their words. She is back here, a place where she vowed never to return.
Osmond Junior High.
“…not their fault. You should leave a note.”
Beddy considers staying in the car, where she won’t absorb it all, the smells the sights the psychic residue, but she’s afraid to be alone. She gets out of the car.
“Yes, Diana. But look. Watch me. At the same time, I’m not writing one, and I’m moving on with my life.”
Sense memory is ruining her. Every smell is unsettlingly distinct. The cut grass. The refuse overflowing in the parking lot bins. Each step, memories prick and cling like nettles. Embedding themselves again.
She feels faint, and yet her feet carry her deeper into campus. She imagines Void’s mouth at the center, grown tall as the gym roof, drawing her body in like so many strands of sentient spaghetti. She can see the tips of the buildings bending toward the center.
She can feel the levees of her mind giving way.
“We need to get inside now,” she says. But she must be too quiet, because they don’t seem to hear. She turns around. They’re nowhere to be seen. Her feet keep taking her deeper, even as she’s partially backwards.
Where are they taking her? Is it masochistic curiosity? The body avenging an ancient grudge against the brain? After all, it has had to follow wherever the brain sent it, so a reversal of fortune is only fair. She turns back around to avoid falling down and being dragged.
The deeper she goes, the darker it seems to get, the more baleful the clouds above her become. Is she being led any place in particular? Her memories here are uniformly bad, but is there one that stands out among the others? She has done her best over the years to isolate them, contain them. But here they are, in their natural habitat, and she is walking right into it.
Of course, this is not the house of only her memories. She wonders how many atrocities happened here, the sum total of emotional carnage.
A hand on her arm. It will be herself as a pre-teen, here to lead her down the corridors to the truth. She turns.