We Can Only Save Ourselves Read online

  “What?” April asked. “Protective? Paranoid?”

  “Angry,” said Bev.)

  They didn’t speak until they reached the school parking lot, the building’s limestone exterior bright against the night, the windows all dark. No lights on inside.

  “Check it out,” said Andrew, pointing at an entire small castle, complete with a knight and sword. “The freshmen’s is actually pretty good.”

  “Where’s your loyalty?” asked Susannah.

  Four homecoming floats, flatbed trucks decorated by each of the classes, sat parked in the circular drive. In the dark they looked eerie, the papier-mâché flowers, the chicken-wire figures, all grotesque and strange. The seniors, who had picked “Anchors Away” as their theme and planned to dress as sailors, in nautical white and navy, had finished theirs just the day before; Alice and Susannah and their classmates had painstakingly attached thousands of paper pompoms to the outside of the truck, all different shades of blue to look like the ocean. Alice had set up a specific pattern, alternating the blues just so. Susannah had thought that wouldn’t look right; the ocean wasn’t so predictable; the color changed depending on the light of the day, but she let Alice do it her way. Rippling in yesterday’s afternoon wind, the pompoms had in fact looked like waves, aqua and indigo, and Alice had been proud, but now they looked cheap and fake. Not like water at all.

  They walked around the floats and stood still, side by side, each focusing on a different spot on the building before them, but Alice tried to see something past the walls, something more intimate. She wanted to look into the beating heart of the school and realized suddenly there probably wasn’t one. It had no heart until she shared hers with it.

  “Here we go,” she said and strode up to the doors, pale hair flying behind her like a comet tail, and yanked on one of the handles.

  “Alice!” Susannah said. The four froze, waiting to see if an alarm would sound, if a pit might open up beneath Alice and suck her into the earth.

  But though nothing happened to her, neither did the doors open. “Oh, Andrew,” Alice called, “your services are required, please.” Cracking his knuckles behind her, Andrew trotted over and knelt down in front of the lock while Alice hovered over him, nibbling at a cuticle, telling him not like that, that can’t be right.

  “Alice,” said Andrew, “I can’t even see what I’m doing with you standing over me.” She held up her hands and took a step back. Ben kept his back to the other three, his hands in his pockets, pretending he wasn’t keeping a lookout.

  “I can’t get it,” Andrew said loudly. Alice slumped against the side of the building, and her flashlight tilted down, creating a yellow oblong on the pavement. She turned her head to the side to see the rows of dark windows lining the side of the building. There was the window she had stared out during her freshman-year English class, and three more down, the one always covered by blinds in her sophomore geometry class. And this one, the close one, belonged to her history classroom. She never paid attention in that class; it was a notoriously easy A. And just this week, Mr. Fielding, a portly, sweaty man, had opened that window. “Damned stuffy,” he’d said. The air rushing in was sweet and cool.

  “Wait,” said Alice.

  “Let’s go home,” said Susannah. “This is getting boring anyway.”

  “The windows!” Alice said. She kicked at the outturned sole of Andrew’s sneaker as he still fiddled uselessly with the lock. He rose and followed her to Mr. Fielding’s window and stood behind her while she reached up to open it. “I need a hand,” she said. As she reached up, her shirt rose a little, too, exposing a band of skin, not just gleaming in the moonlight but the color of moonlight itself.

  “Here,” said Ben, coming up beside her. “I can reach it.”

  “No,” said Alice, “I can do it. Lift me up a little.”

  “Just let me,” said Ben. “It will be easier.”

  “No,” she said. She turned to him, grabbed both his hands and put them on her hips. “Lift,” she said, and he obeyed. But once in his arms and up in the air, struggling with the window, she felt heavier than he expected, and he almost had to put her down. Instead, he shifted his grip on her, so that two fingers of his right hand were on her bare skin. If she noticed or cared, she didn’t say.

  “Got it!” she said, and then she was out of his arms and into the classroom. He, too, had Mr. Fielding, had noticed the open window the period after Alice’s class. Last week he had watched through that window as Carl Miller leaned against his green Volkswagen Beetle in the parking lot, staring at the school like he was waiting for someone. And he must have been because when Ben looked back, Carl was in the car, next to a blond girl he couldn’t identify—her head was tilted down, hair covering her face—and then they were off, rattling out of the parking lot.

  Ben climbed in, and then Andrew hurtled himself athletically over the window ledge, and when he landed in the classroom, he turned and pulled Susannah up behind him. Alice was standing at the chalkboard, her back to her friends, her hand moving smoothly, the chalk in it like a fairy wand, conjuring letters onto the board. Hello, she wrote in cursive. Her handwriting was neat, all loops and lines. That was it.

  (Now that we know what we know, it seems possible that she was telling the world she was here, seeing if anyone would answer. Did we not give her enough attention? We would have said hello right back, would have waved, would have taken her face in our hands, kissed each of her cheeks, if we had known.

  Or was it a hello you give in passing, a polite acknowledgment that there’s a space you share for a moment before leaving it? Is there not a good-bye implied in every greeting? I’m here, she might have been saying, but not for long. It’s possible—it’s likely—no message was intended, that we’re looking for a meaning that’s simply not there.)

  She went to put the chalk back below the blackboard but missed and bent down to retrieve it, her hair falling like a curtain in front of her face. “Hey,” said Ben when she looked up again. “Are you friends with Carl Miller?”

  She put the chalk back into a narrow groove on the metal shelf, and shook her hair out of her eyes. “Sort of,” she said. “Why?”

  “He’s an asshole,” said Ben. “Let’s go.”

  Alice almost laughed. Carl Miller was an asshole, but no one spent time with Carl Miller because of his manners, his gentility. There was something else a girl was looking for when she got into his car at 12:45 on a Friday afternoon. “I’m right behind you,” Alice said. For a minute, Ben thought she might reach for his hand, and he slowed so she could find it in the dark, but she did not.

  The four of them left the classroom, turned down the maze of halls. Their shoes squeaked and tapped on the linoleum floor.

  The door to the office was unlocked—a miracle, a sign, they thought—but the truth is that it was never locked. They grinned at each other. On Mrs. Turner’s desk sat the box, plain and brown. A diagram of a pencil sharpener was on the side of the box—all the teachers had gotten new sharpeners this year—and it was disappointing to think of the name of a queen languishing in there on hundreds of slips of paper, with “Homecoming” scrawled in ballpoint pen on its outside. The box didn’t even have a lid, just cardboard flaps open and extended, like the arms of a worshipper in church, reaching up to receive some kind of gift.

  “I’ll count,” said Ben, and he pulled out a slip. “Alice Lange,” he read.

  From there, he drew each one methodically, separating them into piles. Alice’s pile was wide at first, encroaching onto those of the other candidates, and then it stayed the same size; it wasn’t every slip or even every other, and then there were fourteen in a row that bore the name of another girl.

  “Let’s go,” said Susannah. “It’ll be better if you’re surprised.”

  Ben stopped counting and looked up at Alice, eyebrows raised, mouth slightly open, waiting.

  “It’s fine,” said Alice. “I don’t care if I win. It’s not a big deal.” Ben dropped a slip
into a pile. Not Alice’s.

  After another minute, he assessed the two biggest stacks, swept the other ones back into the box, and then counted the slips in the remaining piles. Alice was leaning against the desk, her profile facing him, and she held the flashlight up so that it made a big, flat circle on the ceiling. He straightened up and cleared his throat. Alice didn’t look at him. Her ankles were crossed, so dainty, and her head back, the silhouette of her throat a gentle curve.

  “Well,” said Ben. “I think I might have counted wrong.”

  Alice’s chin dropped. The circle of light on the ceiling shifted as she hoisted herself off the desk. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s a silly thing anyway.”

  “Very silly,” agreed Susannah.

  “Are you okay?” Ben asked.

  “She said she’s fine,” said Andrew. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Of course,” she said, turning to Ben and giving him a bright smile full of pretty teeth. “There are more important things, you know?” she said. “Like college or art or philosophy or anything else. Those are things to really care about, I think. Right?”

  “Right,” said Ben.

  “See?” Alice said. “Some adventure, though, huh?”

  And they all agreed yes, it was, they’d never forget it, the walk in the dark, crawling in through the window. But as they made their way back out of the building, Alice was thinking about the votes in their stupid box, so many pieces of paper that didn’t say her name, how foolish she’d been, and then she thought of the man with the camera.

  I’ll see you again, he’d promised.

  And she had stupidly spent her whole day expecting she would. Like a child, a little girl, not a queen at all.

  They crossed into Fielding’s classroom and one by one they slipped out the window, landing like cats on the grass. Ben pulled the window down behind them. Like they had never been there.

  The floats loomed in front of them. An ocean, a rose garden blooming pink and red and green (THE JUNIOR CLASS: A ROSE AMONG THORNS), a farm with misshapen animals and a giant farmer (HOMECOMING HOEDOWN), the papier-mâché Camelot the freshmen had made (A KNIGHT TO REMEMBER). When they reached the senior float, Susannah and Andrew kept on going, but Alice stopped and touched the blue paper waves, and Ben joined her, touched her lightly on the elbow.

  “Hey,” he said, “are you sure you’re okay?”

  “I was thinking about things,” Alice said. The man, the fire, the night. The game, the box. An ocean that wasn’t really an ocean at all. She looked at Ben, then toward Susannah and Andrew. “Don’t you ever feel like doing something?” she asked. “Something surprising?”

  “No,” said Andrew.

  “I’m leaving,” Susannah announced, but she didn’t move. She thought of her friend’s fist flying into the soft gut of a little boy, years ago. He deserved it, Alice had said. She’d laughed when Randy Neely cried.

  “I get it,” said Ben. He stuck his hands inside his pockets like he was cold, although there was only a slight chill in the air. But he felt something in his pocket, a tiny rectangle. “Here,” he said to Alice. He took her hand and pressed the matchbook into it. She looked up at him with wide eyes, and then she nodded and took it from him.

  “What is that?” asked Susannah, taking a step closer. Andrew grabbed her arm because he wasn’t going to stop whatever was happening, and they watched Alice hold the matchbook up and examine it, like she was looking for flaws in a diamond. She pulled out a match. She struck it.

  The flame looked tiny, only big enough to light a cigarette or a birthday candle. She held it to a blue pompom, then to a white. (The white had been Alice’s suggestion. “Like the crest of waves,” she had said.) Now they burned orange and bright.

  “Holy shit,” said Andrew. Flames devoured the ocean, each lick of fire a hungry mouth.

  “Run,” said Ben, and they did: Susannah, stepping on an untied lace; Andrew, fast, arms pumping; Ben, first two steps backward, staggering before turning around to catch the other two, calling to Alice; Alice last, worried she would burn it all down, the floats, the school, the books and ungraded tests and essays inside, worried also that she wouldn’t, but oh. What a beautiful thing it was to burn.

  Chapter Four

  WE KNOW BAD things happen in the world, that they always have, that they’ll continue to do so. We also know that we can’t stop them, and this knowledge is almost worse than the bad things themselves. That’s what we’ve learned from Alice Lange. Sometimes the darkness wins. It creeps in like a thick, gray fog, covering everything as we stumble around, and when it finally lifts, we see what it has done, what it has taken from us and what it has left behind.

  Before Alice, there was another girl. Rachel Granger. This was whom Millie was thinking of that night, when she said it wasn’t safe to be out wandering alone in the dark. Her mother had only talked about Rachel to her husband, changing the subject when Millie walked into the room, but she’d picked up on the story, had known there was something, someone out there, to be afraid of, and the idea of it lodged itself in her brain.

  Rachel wasn’t from our neighborhood, but she lived only a few miles away. Like Alice, she was here and then gone. As far as anyone knows, this is what happened: on a Friday, she went to watch the football game at the high school, and left early for some reason. Her friends say the strap on her shoe had broken and she didn’t want to walk home, and she said she would catch a ride from someone. Unlike Alice, she was found. Here and then gone and then here, in one sense, again. Strangled, left near a park we never visit, but one Rachel probably did, only a few streets over from her house.

  We didn’t know her, but we felt we knew her face almost as intimately as our own children’s because it came to us in our homes, every night on the news for a week, bright and large and blurry. Rachel Granger had big eyes and a blond bob, and she held a few strands back with a barrette so that her face was open and clear.

  What we couldn’t see of Rachel, we filled in with our own children’s features, their preferences, their mannerisms. It hurt to imagine her as our children, our children as her, but we couldn’t stop ourselves. We couldn’t see her hands in her picture, but Christine Pittman’s mother knew Rachel had short, strong fingers like her daughter’s, hands meant for catching and throwing. We couldn’t hear her voice, but Millie’s mother thought she looked like a girl who would be in choir, probably a soprano, like Millie was. Susannah’s mother pictured Rachel in a soccer uniform and that short blond hair pulled back into a stubby ponytail, with the same wispy flyaway pieces of hair that sprang from Susannah’s head after a long game.

  Worse, though, was what we could see and hear: her mother’s hair, also blond but darker, coarser, her voice gravelly with grief, her hands empty. When Rachel Granger’s image came on TV, we watched. When her mother came on, first begging for her daughter to be returned, then begging for something no one could give her, we turned off the TV. It’s time for dinner, we told everyone. For homework, for a bath, for bed.

  Alice Lange left us in broad daylight. She was not frightened when she left. She did not think of Rachel Granger. Because she was getting into the car of someone she knew, because her shoes were not broken, because she was Alice Lange, and we’ve always told her she could do anything.

  We thought we would see Alice Lange’s face on the news one day. We haven’t yet, but who knows? Maybe one day we’ll turn on the TV, and there she’ll be, an imperfect, blurry-edged picture of her lovely face smiling at us, and we’ll grieve her again, what the darkness took from us.

  Chapter Five

  THE MORNING AFTER Alice struck that match and began to burn her world down, Bev hosted a Tupperware party. At this party we would hear about the fire, how Millie and a few others went down to the school first thing in the morning to put a few last-minute touches on the float and discovered the corpse of a brittle, black beast in its place. How they circled around it in shock. “It’s ruined!” Stephanie Masters wailed. “Who w
ould do this?”

  “The stupid freshmen,” said Matthew Flanagan.

  What we didn’t hear then: how Millie glared at the remains of the float, remembering the night before in Ben Austin’s backyard, the adventure she had turned down, Alice Lange’s smile, Good night, Millie, she’d said, like Millie was a baby who needed tucking in. What we heard only later: how Millie looked at Stephanie and said, “It wasn’t the freshmen.”

  But on our way to Bev’s house, we didn’t know any of that yet.

  We hadn’t planned to walk over to the party together—we were all just leaving our houses at about the same time—but we looked like a parade ourselves, heading in happy twos or threes down the street. We were empty-handed except for our purses, all of us but Charlotte Price, who despite Bev’s insistence that she had everything under control, carried a golden pie in a white ceramic dish. She and Mags Rollins walked together and speculated about Bev’s sudden desire to sell Tupperware. “You know her husband makes beaucoups,” Charlotte said to her. “More than Gary even! She doesn’t need the money. And she’s got the baby on the way. She should be busy enough.”

  “It’s just a reason to throw a party,” Mags said. “She probably won’t even make any money. Not real money, anyway.”

  “Oh please,” said Charlotte, lowering her voice. They were very near to the house now, and to their right Mrs. McEntyre was pulling her front door shut behind her, Sweetie barking from inside. “We’ll all buy something from her because that’s the nice thing to do,” she said.

  Of course we would. We take care of each other here. We support each other. If one of us wants to sell plastic containers, then we’ll each take two. That’s what makes this a special place. That’s what makes us—we hesitate to say “better” because that kind of arrogance is unappealing—special, too, more so than other people living in other places. We bring pies even when we aren’t asked because we know each other’s weaknesses as well as strengths; we know, for example, when a certain hostess might forget to provide something sweet for her guests.