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The Pilgrims Highway goes north to Boston and south to Cape Cod: somewhere new, or the end of the world, which is really just the same thing said twice. But Phyllis told me that a thumb over the white line on Route 53 opens the whole universe like a cracked clam.
“Phyllis doesn’t know about the whole universe,” my mom–I call her Mel, not to her face–told me. But we still picked up Phyl whenever we saw her thumb out on the shoulder.
“Stop!” I yelled. Mel’s breath caught in a high gulp that made her choke on her gum.
“How did you not see her?” But it was a rhetorical question, dare even an accusation, because you would have had to have seen her. Phyllis was all black denim and good luck leather walking backward outside the Walmart on the road going towards the highway going towards home. We had already managed to pass her, and Mel had been accelerating before I shouted.
“You’re right,” Mel wheezed and put on her blinker. The empty sound where the compulsive crack of her gum had been was loud. I turned the heat on high and adjusted the vents, but felt nauseous like a little kid in a shopping cart; she had walked me through the meat section without buying anything.
In my rearview mirror, Phyllis rolled her ankle in her heeled boot waiting for us to pull over. As she walked up to the car, Phyllis had a haze to her movements that reminded me of fairies, but was more likely opiates. Not for the first time, I understood why truckers took her with them when they left town. I felt more calm now that the car was stopped and the hazard lights were on.
“Sorry, didn’t see you,” Mel said through her closed window, pulling a face. I doubt Phyllis even heard her, but I wondered if there were times when she drove by herself that Mel had seen Phyl and blown by her like that. Mel’s guilty eyes were still fixed on the road and watering from her Nicorette gum, which told me that even if she resented stopping, she regretted the attempted drive-by. A daydream callousness that wasn’t hers. An indifference a shade too cool for her skin. She tried it on to see if she could get away with it. It was a botched test, and another–my driving exam–was set for next week. I thought I was beginning to understand.
I gave Phyllis shotgun, but no one had to tell me. I did it on purpose. I jumped down and opened the door for her. At the top of her open purse, the sunlight caught on the cellophane wrapping of the makeup treasure she had unburied (stolen).
“Thank you, baby,” she said in an accent from here. But that wasn’t my favorite part: I moved to my left as Phyllis moved to her right like we were sisters through a mirror. She let out a half laugh and grabbed the tops of my shoulders to steady me with her hands. I let her lead. I liked that. We closed our doors back into the heat.
“Been a while,” Mel said for something to say. We hadn’t picked Phyllis up in a full month, but that wasn’t news. We didn’t see her that much, in general. That was why passing her was such a sin, she was so little of nobody’s problem. Phyllis popped up like Ghost Pipe flowers from the pine needles after a rain: feeding off something that was feeding off something that was already dead. Sometimes, there were bruises–cruelty in the runs of her tights that made me angry and shamefacedly aroused. This time, there weren’t.
“I was in Montreal, or somewhere up with mountains. Got a passport stamp,” Phyllis murmured. She rested her head against the window. In the backseat, I snaked my foot from my shoe and pressed my white-socked heel into the inner seam of my jeans, fantasizing about hurting something big. I flexed my foot around the feeling and looked at Phyllis’ curly net of black hair through the gap between the passenger seat. Mel drove us home, and I wondered if I was complicit with the men that take.
Phyllis was my Mel’s friend from high-school. They were both home-girls in that they never left, but Duxbury was so close to the ocean that it seemed like more of a choice than it was. We didn’t live on the ocean side of town, though. Not that it mattered. It was still gorgeous.
But these were the extenuating circumstances to explain why Phyllis got to be where she was and why no one cared about her. If she had hitched closer to the yacht club, I think the cops would have probably made her stop. As it was, in our pond-scum woods, she was a cryptid, a harpy with clawed feet.
Right before they took my photo for my license, Mel told me about a time she went riding horses through the marshes with Phyllis as girls–the time she got bucked from the back of Diablo. The lady behind the booth told me I had to take off my scarf.
“I told her I was fine, just all nerved up. But Phyllis wouldn’t get back on Buttercup–that was the mare she was riding that day, a much kinder seat than that freaking idiot Diablo–but she wouldn’t get back up in her saddle unless I went too,” Mel held out her hands for my wrap.
I resumed my stance behind the line of tape, my white neck newly cold. The lady opened a drawer to find the digital camera. The scarf was still warm from my throat and Mel put it to her nose.
“She rode us home with me in front and Diablo tied to the back,” Mel said, looking up at me. Behind the raised lens, the clerk told me to move to my left.
“She took care of me when I didn’t know to need it.” Mel breathed into my stuff as if my girl smell was fading, and she wanted to remember me.
At the DMV, the camera flashed like an oath.
I looked at my picture and touched my cheeks that people said were nice. Mel said a woman could have sex with whomever she wanted, but she was a slut if she had sex because she felt sad about something. I could feel with my fingertips the lines raised up around my mouth as if I was smiling, but I was not.
Even though I had the car after school when Berek–my brother–was at practice, I didn’t have anywhere to go. Much like anything romantic, a driver’s license was anticlimactic in its bureaucratic responsibility. But Osbourne’s Country Store had the dark chocolate covered cherries at the register, so that was plan enough. They still cost a quarter like it was Our Town.
Sam pumped my gas for me. Full service and we weren’t even in Jersey. I didn’t feel stuck, just young and here. Waiting on myself. Waiting on time until she was no longer my friend. And then it would be too late. I took too long to decide.
I rang a bell overhead walking out the door as Phyllis jumped down from the passenger seat of an eighteen wheeler pulling lumber. He honked as he drove away, barely stopping to let her out, but she looked okay. I walked toward the car, and she came up to me like I was the north node. I tipped Sam in dollar bills, but I had heard that a lot of cities outside of Boston had gone cashless in the new neighborhoods–not as cool commie-chic as it sounded, though. Actually, the opposite. Goodbye to legal tender and all that was left was tender flesh. Phyllis stood at my passenger door.
“You want a ride?” I asked her, but I knew the answer was yes.
“Thank you, baby,” she said, getting in. Phyllis had to lean toward me a bit to pull on the seat belt that stuck. That was my new favorite part. I saw her breast plate through her skin. Her flesh pulled around it, but not in a harrowing way, just to remind you that she was still bone underneath. Solid seashell. And she always buckled up. This surprised me, but it shouldn’t have.
A woman who lived in cars learned.
“I’m just in from Dallas. You know about mechanical bulls?” Phyllis lit a cigarette and laughed a bark. “I know about mechanical bulls,” she wiggled an eyebrow at me and took a drag as I opened the windows for her.
I turned out of Ozzie’s and handed her one of my candies.
“When’d you get your license, Avery?” Just as Phyl asked, we drove by the boy’s track team turning off of Birch Street. They were a sweating cluster of sinewy legs and broad, straight, shirtless backs. The tallest boy turned towards me and pulled down his shorts to show me his peached ass mid-stride. They must have been from Silver Lake: no one at my high school had that mischief. Besides, I knew all about those boys at my high school, and they didn’t want to show me any ass. I was thought to be sinister by my peers, shrewish at best. And I cultivated that natural dislike because it served purposes that I couldn’t explain. Otherness propelled escape, so I hoped, maybe. Maybe I was just unlikeable. Cherry cream caught in my gum-line in a way that hurt. The boy pulled back up his shorts.
Phyl leaned over and honked my horn teasingly. She was as old as my mother but younger than me still. The last boy laughed as he turned the corner. His jogging partner caught my eye and nodded to him. “Isn’t that the 53 Hooker?” He said, snickering. Phyllis leaned back in her seat. She had heard him. We took our turn.
Phyllis lived in her mother’s house that was set back at the sharp fulcrum between Birch Street and Lake Shore Drive. The turn came up from the pavement hard and the wheel went all the way around to cut.
“When I first got my license, I crashed it straight away. Cracked my head open on a boulder as big as Plymouth Rock,” Phyllis said. She hopped out of the seat and shut the door behind her, leaning through the open window.
“Don’t drive too fast,” she said, patting the roof of the car like the hide of an animal.
Around the same time that I drove Phyllis home, Lexie fell on her head.
Lexie was my neighbor-friend. She wouldn’t have been my friend if she wasn’t also my neighbor; I felt that way about it. Anyway, she fell on her head coming down from a high toss at cheer practice and really fucked up her brain. It happened like this; the cheer team had a big meet coming up, but the astro turf was booked by the lacrosse team, so the cheerleaders had to squish onto the old field behind the library. The trouble was that the old field, which used to be John Alden’s farmland in the 1620s, had gone to pasture since the fancy turf was put in over at the highschool. Nevertheless, the girls cleared a perimeter as best they could and got down to it.
When the Tumblers catapulted diagonally over the makeshift field, inciting the group stunts in the center, Lexie was hurled into the air for the headlining high-toss-toe-touch-basket; her legs snapped together after a perfect aerial split, her back arched like a fish bone, but her Base below upturned a loose arrowhead, twisted her ankle and stumbled out of formation at just the worst time. And so it goes: humpty dumpty had a great fall. I had always thought that the terra firma of Massachusetts was funny that way, innocuous but trap-ladden, as if the layers of time marked in crust and dirt flipped over like pages of a broken-spined book, with the dog-eared past tenting the otherwise uniform fore-edge. Berek said they could hear the screaming from across the street.
All the rest of that year, Lexie couldn’t come to school because she had to sit inside with the shades down. I’d go to her house and we’d watch America’s Next Top Model in the dark, but she had to throw up during most of the commercials.
One weeknight late in the school year, while Tyra bitched out a model contestant on the TV, and I tried to work on a physics lab, I heard Lexie making the little hiccupy gurgling sounds from the other end of the couch that I knew foretold a yak.
“Put your feet on the ground,” I said, handing her the empty popcorn bowl that we sometimes used as a puke bucket. She excavated herself from her blanket cocoon and pushed the outstretched bowl away, beelining for the bathroom. I paused our show and looked at my homework, trying not to, but hearing her retch anyway.
A little while later, she fell back on the couch in a huff. I refilled her water bottle and handed it to her.
“You have vomit on your shirt,” I said. And it was disconcertingly green. Usually Lexie was pretty meticulous about brushing her teeth post-barf and changing her clothes, but she had wrestled with a dreamscape migraine the night before and hadn’t fully recovered. The sleep bruises under her eyes were as dark as the maroon discharge oozing through the bandages wrapped cross-laterally around her vulnerable skull.
“Will you go grab me a shirt from the dryer, doesn’t matter whose,” she said, taking off her sour tee without ceremony and throwing it into the popcorn bowl. She didn’t have a bra on and her nipples were darker than I thought they would be; tanned knots against the pine wood of her skin. But her locker-room nonchalance made me feel like a goon for staring. Still, I felt my head nod in my ears and my tongue swell inside my mouth. I all but crawled to the laundry room, staying there longer than I needed to, compulsively pulling apart dryer lint to calm down and stashing some in my pocket for security. But, when I came back with one of her dad’s big Island Creek Oyster t-shirts, Lexie was asleep.
She was still semi-reclined on the corner seat, resting most of her weight on the loose back cushions, but her head was tilted towards her shoulder and her tongue was just visible sticking out a bit past her front teeth. The room was very quiet and growing dark. The light seeping through the curtains was warm and nap-lazy. I sat back down on the couch, picking up my laptop in a meaningless gesture because I could hear Lexie’s breathing deepen, and my mind had already left me to her trance. Turns out, at the bottom of the ocean, there was a topless, sleeping girl surrounded by one million plush blankets.
The Roku pause screen rolled across the TV in shades of violet and pink coral reef. I promise I tried not to, but I did look at Lexie anyway. Her chest puffed out in front of her as her short legs stretched forward on the little part of the L. Months ago, her body had been whittled down to peak aerobic performance. Now though, above the blankets, her skin held to the surface the softening of bottomless popcorn buckets and endless hours of bad TV. Her new cute belly was a small mound of warm sand, the light hair there like a ripple in a watery reflection of a cloud. Her small, wide-set breasts pushed up and out with her inhalation. The veins in my hands contracted and pound; my wrists hurt from new blood. I tossed the t-shirt over her chest and floated up to the surface, the grapes in my lungs already burst around her acid-tinge smell, my body water-logged and decomposing. She didn’t even move.
Months later in September, Lexie restarted her junior year with me by a different name.
Lexie before the fall. After, Lex is fine. Thanx. Lex was still a seizure risk, but that was okay because Berek had left for college and I had the car to myself until summer. So I started driving her to school and taking notes for her in our classes. No one had to tell me. We never talked about all the time we had spent together on the couch. There wasn’t really anything to say. I was sentimental, which was fine within the seclusion of my own pervy little mind. Besides, all of her other friends were seniors by then, drunk on weekends and grandiose plans. Lex couldn’t drink with the pills she was on, and I was sort of her only buoy to normalcy, but I didn’t think about it like that. It wasn’t some great big favor, was what I meant: Lex was nicer to me than Lexie had been, and school was always easy for me, anyway. Not that I had ever been tested. I was public school smart: nothing powerful, never cunning. I was fine at math and could be cheated.
And in my sweet-sick mind, like the pleasurable edge of a rotting tooth, Lex gave me something difficult to think about.
“Can you read it off for me? The words are spiking,” Lex said during the last fifteen minutes of AP Lit. Our five classmates were working silently at their desks. The course had largely emptied out after our teacher–who commuted daily from Provincetown–assigned us Maurice by E.M Forster. Parents pulled their kids when the priest from Holy Family wrote an Op-Ed to the Clipper newspaper about hedonism and sodomy being taught to children. Lex had taken up the class because even though she couldn’t read without getting headaches, all the other English courses were newly full-up. And I stayed on because I liked sodomy, and Mel didn’t read the Clipper.
I read to her under my breath, but my voice caught on the line “two men can defy the world,” and I felt the shame of a wet salt trail sting down my cheek. I looked up, blinking. I didn’t think anyone but Lex saw. She pressed the drop that fell onto our notes into the tip of her finger, a smudged puddle of heart blood blue ink, and licked it.
If what Mel said about Phyllis was true, then I knew Lex was a goner. “A head injury like that will scramble a girl sideways,” Mel said, but she was talking about Phyl. Before the crash, Phyllis was a Grade A Good Girl. After, she went bad, turned sour, wouldn’t stop fucking, started hitching, no tomorrow. A woman whose failure we should fear; a mythology made from the skin off her back. Our savior-complex was in her service regularly, easily, painlessly around and around a rosary count. Still, Mel’s face pulled in revulsion when she saw Phyl on the shoulder: the loyalty she couldn’t shake to her friend that died in that crash. The ghost was harder to deal with than the gravestone. Afterall, she ran a risk allowing her daughter around the town trollop. What would I learn? What could seduce me? Worse, what did I desire?
And Lex FKA Lexie, a literal fallen woman. I didn’t mean to laugh. Before, she was this baby carrot girl, a Flyer for the varsity cheer team: all blonde hair ponytail nothing. Lexie had magnetism, and a boyfriend a foot taller than her. Lex had a shaved head and trouble keeping her eyes open.
“I’m going to graduate because of you,” she said, an hour deep into our library session.
Lex slid off her shoes and put her Cinderella feet over the side of her chair, resting them against the tops of my thighs.
“I’m just a scribe,” I said, looking up from our notes at her broken china-doll eyelids, blinking out of time. But I knew she was right. She didn’t know shit about anything I was learning for her. She took advantage of me that way, touching me, in small, unremarkable ways to smooth over the hurt. But maybe it made her feel better to pay me for it.
Lex stared out the window in profile. Her Frankenstein scar faced me. I could feel the arch of her foot kneading the inner curve of my upper thigh, and it was a trap because I liked to be paid. And I was guilty for it. And I was afraid of it. The Nautilus shell of her scar curved around her scalp from her temple to the back of her ear, the purple blood belts finally giving way to the yellow and ivory of her skull. I reached out my eraser top and traced the swirl of her from bow to stern. Lex turned to look at me as her head skin rippled with goosebumps. She breathed in through her mouth so that I could hear it. And I was guilty for it. And I was afraid of it.
“The colonists were actually the first to use the wampum as currency. It held memory for the Iroquois Confederacy–it wasn’t for trade.” I put my pencil to my lip for something to bite and cleared my throat, referencing my laptop instead of our racist textbook. In the tribes, the Quahog beads were sacred. They were precious and hard wrought, intrinsically valuable outside of barter.
“But we will sell anything,” Lex said.
Genuinely, I wanted her to learn. I wasn’t trying to brainwash her. Me and my big bad gay agenda. So I started recording explanations that went along with our homework to send to her as MP4 files that she could listen to on her AirPods after class. A week later, Lex told me that she thought the audio lectures were working. She said she liked to listen to my voice as she fell asleep. That hurt my feelings, but I didn’t know why.
After the library, I drove us home. Her house was just down the hill from mine, and I always parked in my driveway, so that when I drove her, I was technically just driving myself, but she was there. And I was here, waiting on her until she was no longer my friend.
My key was still in the ignition when Lex unbuckled her seatbelt and leaned towards me, catching me on the lips. My eyes fluttered. Her tongue touched mine. I let it. I made a noise like overwhelm but good. Her hands were in my hair. My fingertips touched the plush of her buzz cut. I pushed it the wrong way for sharp velvet so that she could feel it at the root. A sound came from deep in her mouth, and I could taste it. My tongue got greedy. She moved as if to get over the center console, and then I pulled away. Her eyelashes brushed my cheeks.
“I’m different now, you know.” She stayed close to my face, and her lips were wet. I was panting and embarrassed.
“I know.” But I whined. I ripped out of my seat before she could open her door and ran inside my house. I left the car unlocked with the taillights on.
After that, I started avoiding taking Lex to and from school. I left earlier on either end so that we wouldn’t meet each other unexpectedly. I ignored her in English. There were a lot of open seats to put distance between us. I mean, we weren’t ever really friends. A week into my Lex embargo, I looked over the dash, and my empty passenger seat told me that I hadn’t seen Phyllis in a few months longer than usual. I wiped my lips on my sleeve to erase the memory there. I really thought about unbuckling my seatbelt and flooring it into a tree.
I alerted my Mel that her Phyl was missing, but she didn’t seem to mind. I went to Phyllis’ mom’s house, but no one came to the door when I knocked. I didn’t know what to do, so I just stood there with my hand on the knocker, holding still. The moss covered roof looked like a map of the world, and I realized that I had never traveled far from what I knew. I thought maybe secrecy was not the same thing as shyness, but that they were sisters in a mirror trapped by glass on either side. I knocked three more times, but I knew no one was coming, so I let my hand fall.
Back down Phyllis’ mom’s driveway, growing between the branches of two small oak trees, a moth’s nest rested in ghost white webbing. The caterpillars wriggled over one another within the semi-transparent netting of their home, finding the best burrow to cocoon in and grow.
When I was a girl, I would take damp sticks and hit the webs down. I liked seeing the bugs fall, but really, I was just afraid of change.
That night, I dreamt that the world opened up and swallowed Phyllis like an oyster eating sand. She became this beautiful pearl in that shell, pressed on the bed of the oyster’s tongue and released. The Birth of Venus, but nothing happened. There were no heralds or angels. She might as well have been picked up by a gull and dropped on a rock. And I woke up missing her, and I went to school.
Lex stood at my bumper after the last bell rang, but before I could leave without her. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her rounded shoulders were turned out, and she was standing with one thick little hip cocked. She looked so bitchy, but so sturdy, so much like Lexie that I laughed aloud.
“Why are you such a fucking cunt?” And I knew she meant it, too, because strong emotions cost her a lot of cognitive energy. I stopped laughing.
“My mom’s friend died. I liked her a lot.”
“Oh,” Lex yawned involuntarily. “Sorry,” she said. She stepped toward me and her one eyelid sagged in that way that I think about when I am calm. She fiddled with the end of my backpack’s pull strap.
“Can you drive me home, please? The bus smells like peanut butter,” she said, and I realized that to fight her was to fight the tide turning over–to pull against a full moon.
I unlocked the car and got behind the wheel. We pulled out behind the buses. Still— “Do you think that if you hadn’t broken your brain….” I said but didn’t, keeping my eyes on the road.
“No, because I wouldn’t have acted on it. But I was always going to change my mind about something at some point.” Lex gave me the truth and yawned, leaning her forehead against the window, as if it didn’t matter.
“Why are you such a fucking cunt?” I said, mimicking her Lexie voice. Not so transformed.
“You’re a worm.” But she said it nice, pushing my shoulder, teasing. I thought of all the caterpillars I had killed with the blunt edges of broken branches and hadn’t thought of twice, at the time. Now, I am so very sorry.
Lex fell asleep by the time we got to the first and only stop light on our route. I wasn’t watching the road. I was looking at the way her breath made circles on the glass when the light turned red. I caught it quick, but it was a short stop. My tires screeched and my right arm shot out in front of Lex. She didn’t open her eyes, but her fingers touched my forearm, resting my hand against her thigh.
“Careful with me,” she whispered.
Lex came to my door the next morning with flowers and my Mel answered. I wasn’t expecting her: it was a Saturday and besides, Lex had never knocked on my door before.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Lex said and Mel tilted her head in confusion.
I moved under Mel’s arm and out the door.
“Don’t worry, they aren’t for you,” Lex said of the flowers as she walked back toward my car.
“I’ll be home later,” I said to Mel, turning to shut the door after me. Mel grabbed my wrist.
“Avery. Don’t drive too fast,” she said, but her eyes were talking to me more. I waited until she let me go, and I imprinted the feeling of her hand on my wrist like a bracelet with no clasp.
“Where is your mom’s friend buried?” Lex asked from my passenger seat as I turned the ignition.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone has found the body, but I’m not sure I would hear about it. She wasn’t like a real friend. It’s more myth based. Like an old wives’ tale.” I felt self-conscious. It wasn’t easy to talk about the shadows made of some women, or the shadows they, in turn, cast.
“Tell me,” she said, so I did. By the time I had finished, I had driven us all the way to Plymouth Rock by accident. Something in my mind connected Phyllis with the monument, maybe because they both felt eternal to me, historic and important, something to be proud of, or rather, some piece of information good to hold onto. The rock had 1620 etched on its face to commemorate the year of the pilgrims’ landing. It lived in a columned cage of stone and iron: a literal pet rock.
“That’s annoying,” Lex said after I had finished what I knew of Phyllis’ story. We looked down into the enclosure. At its base, the tired beast sat on damp sand with a grated moat-way to allow the tide in and out. During a big full moon, it would be completely submerged under churning salt water. A crack in the middle split the carved 16 from the 20.
“All she did was change. I wish someone cared to know more about her in her after,” Lex said as I looked out at the sea and thought of wooden boats and long voyages.
“This rock isn’t even the real thing. They just sliced the top off a random boulder and called it glory, did you know that? And honestly, to cut it down to such a puny size, what’s the point? The pebbles in Colorado could beat this bitch up,” Lex said, kicking the iron fencing. And I loved her feeling that the history of the world was a stone caught in her shoe.
“That’s why they have it in a cage, to protect it,” I said.
“You know, we don’t actually know if she’s dead, right? She might just be out doing her thing. Have you ever been to Denver?” Lex asked.
“I’ve never been west of Rochester,” I said.
“Wanna check it out? We could catch some big rocks. Maybe, have a look around? Ride a mechanical bull?” Lex asked, turning toward me. She threw her bouquet unceremoniously into the enclosure, right on top of Plymouth Rock. The crack in her head split her eyes on either side, and I said goodbye to everything before.
Route 3 takes you south to 44 that takes you west to 95 that takes you to Providence then thereafter New York, then thereafter, then thereafter.
