The Boy Meets Girl Massacre (Annotated) Page 9

  I kept quiet.

  Alf and I were playing Crazy Eights in the lobby. Alf sitting with his legs crossed on the floor. I was lying on the piano bench, face down so I could see the cards, my dangling hair circling around our game like an arena, pressure growing on the sore spot when the blood rushed to my head.

  Three days till the party.37 Alf is going to get a bunch of beer soon and hide it in his room until Olivia leaves, then we’ll stock the fridge, set out bags of chips and wait for everyone to get here. The whole thing is gonna take place in Margaret’s suite. The very top floor. It’s still a suite and could probably fit a hundred people, maybe even more.

  It hasn’t been occupied by a real guest in over a year.

  “Alf? Noelle? Can you guys come here a minute?” Olivia sounded sad, worried. I could already see the look on her face from the way her voice sounded and it made me feel guilty.

  We got up and met her in the hallway.

  There it was. The face I’d pictured. Sad. Worried. Uneven eyebrows.

  I don’t know if you noticed, diary, but as soon as I saw that face of hers I started rubbing you in my hoodie pocket and just couldn’t stop, ran my nail along your pages. It felt good to touch you like that when I was feeling so horrible with Olivia’s trembling concern, her fear. And maybe all the answers, maybe all the terrible answers she’d never expect, were just inside my pocket, just inside you.

  “Listen, do you guys know where the cats went?” she asked.

  “The Rat Pack? They’re gone?” Alfred answered innocently. Honestly.

  “I have no idea where they went,” I said. Because I really didn’t have any idea where they’d went. But probably I should have pretended that I didn’t know they were gone at all.

  Olivia turned to me. “Noelle, you realized they were missing too? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Yeah, sorry. I just figured … well, I don’t know what I figured. It’s weird.”

  “It is. Very peculiar. I feel kind of worried.”

  “Oh don’t, Olivia,” Alf assured her. “They’re cats, they do this kind of thing all the time. Once my cat disappeared, right? And he was gone for almost a month. When he came back he was all fat and sort of lazy. We thought he was going to die. Turns out he was a she and she was pregnant! Crazy, right? So then we had a bunch of cats. Eight. Oh, whoops, actually ten but she ate two. Anyway, we had to get rid of a lot of them and I guess we didn’t let her wean properly because after that she ran away again, only that time she never came back.”

  Alfred was struggling. Olivia’s eyebrows were throwing him off. He wasn’t ever going to stop talking unless somebody stopped him. So I did.

  “Anyway, sorry I didn’t say anything,” I interrupted loudly.

  Alf gave me a look of thanks.

  “Well, thanks for that, Alfred,” said Olivia politely. “I mean, I’m sure they’ll come back. It just seems peculiar. Or like you said, Noelle, it’s weird. They’ve never done this kind of thing before. When did you notice it?”

  “Yesterday, I think.”

  And that made her look even more worried, that a whole day had already passed with them missing. So I pulled a hand from my hoodie pocket, from you, diary, and put it on her shoulder.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it,” I said, and squeezed, and her body felt like a bundle of twigs beneath her shirt.

  Actually, I probably would worry about it if I were her.

  Because who knows, maybe I killed them all and buried them in the azaleas.

  Did I, diary? Did I kill them all? You’d be the only one who really knows.

  Her meter was almost all the way to the top so she said, “Okay then.”

  “Sorry, Olivia,” I said.

  “Yeah, sorry, I—” Alfred began, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him from launching into another idiotic monologue. He nodded at me.

  “It’s okay, guys. Look, I’m gonna get out of here. Make sure you take the garbage out before you hit the sack.”

  “We will.”

  “And call me if you find the cats. Don’t worry about waking me up or anything, just call me, okay?”

  “I promise we’ll let you know,” I said.

  And she turned around and left out the back door, probably so she could take one last look around the yard. Poor Olivia. 38

  Alfred and I went back to our card game.

  “That’s weird,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That the cats are gone, obviously.”

  “Yeah, it’s weird, but like, they’re cats.”

  “No, I know, but they like it here. And all of them gone. Just weird, that’s all. Why didn’t you tell me when you noticed?”

  “I don’t know. I forgot, I guess.”

  And I couldn’t help it but I raised a finger to the sore spot and started scratching hard. It’d dried a bit since last time so I worked up the scab, slowly separated its hardened perimeter from my squishy flesh, easier around the sides then tougher, more painful in the middle where the scab was deeper. Pulling there produced an eye-watering kind of pain, the sort of wincing that Alf might notice. But I got it off and rolled the scab up between my fingers quickly enough that he didn’t notice.

  But he did notice.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, looking up at my head.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “No, what are you scratching at? Do you have lice, Noelle?”

  “Fuck off, Alfred!”

  “Geez, relax! That isn’t the reaction of someone who doesn’t have lice, you know.”

  “I don’t have lice.”

  “If you say so. Do you wanna make a wish?”

  “What do you mean?”

  And then he reached towards me and pressed his first finger against my cheek and when he pulled it back there was an eyelash perched on the tip, as delicate as a butterfly.

  “You’ve got a wish,” he said. “You can wish to stop having lice.”

  I wished that Sammy wasn’t lying smeared across the basement floor, but I didn’t say that out loud, obviously. I closed my eyes and blew the eyelash into some other dimension.

  “What did you wish for?” Alf asked.

  “I can’t tell you.”

  “I always wish for better-shaped eyelashes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I have very annoying eyelashes. They’re flat, not curved, you know? So when I get one in my eye it really hurts.”

  “Huh! I never realized that before.”

  “Does it look weird?”

  “No, no, not on you, I just, I never realized that eyelashes are probably curved like that so they don’t hurt your eyes if they fall in. They’re kind of eye-shaped, sort of.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s genius.”

  “Ha! Well, yeah!”

  And for a minute I loved Alf for his weird straight eyelashes. And I loved that he consistently wished for the same thing over and over again. Like he believed on some level that there was a system; that if you spent enough time wishing for the same thing it might actually come true.

  “Okay, you’ve gotta tell me yours now,” he said.

  “Quit asking me!”

  “Come on, Noelle, I told you mine.”

  “Okay, I wished that the Manson murderers had cut Sharon Tate’s baby out of her body after they killed her, and that baby was still alive somewhere, a baby boy, raised by hippie murderers instead of super rich Hollywood elite like he should have been, and that one day we meet and fall in love and get married.”

  Alf stared at me and then said, “What the hell is the matter with you?”

  “I told you not to ask.”

  “That’s not what you wished for.”

  “It is too.”

  “Well, I guess you did warn me.�
� Alf was laughing and looking at me in an annoying way. I wanted to escape now. My head hurt. Probably that little baby boy was the only one lucky to die that night, because if he hadn’t, those hippie murderers really would’ve taken him back to their weird ranch and turned him into a monster.

  People shouldn’t be able to turn other people into monsters like that. Kid brains should have some evolutionary safeguard against it. Because it’s not fucking fair. Generation after generation of monsters; monsters who don’t even know they’re monsters. Like Herman. In fact, at this point in human history, I’d say no one in the world is un-monstrous enough to be responsible for molding another human brain. We should all just stop. Fucking Herman monster.

  And then my Herman monster fucked-up brain hurt even more.

  “Okay, I’m tired, Alf.”

  “What? You’re going to bed?”

  “Yeah, I’m still tired from last night.”

  “Come on, Noelle, it’s so early!”

  “I’m sorry, Alf, I’m just really beat.”

  “Fine.” He sounded very disappointed. And maybe a little scared at the idea of being the only one awake and all alone. And it was his turn to have the buzzer in his room, too, so probably he didn’t want to go to bed at all tonight. I should have offered to take it off his hands, like he did for me last night, but I really didn’t want to.

  And on any other night I would have stayed awake with him, I really would have. We stayed up all the time, most of the time even, but tonight my head was too sore. I needed patterned space too bad. I wanted to get back there, back to the basement, to see if Sammy was still alive, to whisper with whatever was down there, to find out what the fuck was going on in patterned space. Who knows, maybe my real eyelash wish came true and everything is actually totally fine in the basement.

  But probably not.

  37 Therefore this entry was written on August 28th, 1999.

  38 Olivia confirmed this conversation during our first interview. She said she’d noticed Noelle had seemed a bit off the past few days, but didn’t connect it with the missing cats. “Why the hell would I?” she said, defensively. It’s clear that Olivia feels a certain responsibility for what occurred here, likely because it was she who’d allowed the party in the first place. It was also she who’d been accountable for the nightshift for so many years before handing it over to “a couple of unlucky kids.” A decision she’d expressed discomfort with from the beginning but felt was forced upon her both by her doctor, who insisted she couldn’t work nightshifts anymore, and owner Anita Fray, who didn’t have a lot of nightshift candidates to choose from.

  Fifteenth Entry

  Fugue states will be shot from Noelle’s point of view. We never actually see her, just the stuff that she’s seeing.

  She wakes me up. It isn’t me. She wakes me up. Because she’s staring at me and I can feel it so hard it wakes me up. It’s funny how someone looking at you can be felt as distinctly as a touch or a grope or a bucket of water splashing over you. How does a body feel a stare? Where does a body feel a stare? Are those unflinching eyes touching me?

  I open my eyes right into hers, mine vertical, hers lying horizontally along the sheets. Big as robin’s eggs and the same kind of wrong blue. As though they’ve been rolled in flour.

  Peeking eyes. Not blinking.

  Over the side of my bed.

  I don’t want to move or scream and startle whatever it is that makes her seem so likely to explode in a puff of flour. I don’t want her to explode in a puff of flour. Her hands grip the side of the bed, nails broken to the slimy quick, the same flour stuck to them. Her lips floured too. All the spots on a person that are usually wet and sharp are floured and dull on her.

  A long stretch of staring because I don’t know what else to do. Then she stands up.

  Long blonde hair and funny teeth that stick out as though they’ve formed around a gag.

  “She could eat corn on the cob through Venetian blinds” my dad said about her once. I hear it in my head now. Margaret and Wink’s famous last victim. I’d brought home a photocopied picture of her from the library. I liked the way she looked.

  And Herman looked at the picture and said that about her.

  About her.

  About this floured woman standing in front of me.

  This floured woman who died so many years ago.

  She’s famous because, according to Wink’s diaries, this floured woman in front of me was the only victim that Margaret herself killed. And Wink said Margaret had tasted her blood and said it was like “sticky hot syrup,” a quote the newspapers went crazy with. Sticky hot syrup. All over Margaret’s fat face.

  The floured woman’s head seems too big for her long neck, which bends forward and bobs like a heavy flower. I can see what causes it to bob like that. And I remember too from the library’s microfilm.

  A long jagged scar across her neck, starting and ending in the warm thumbprints behind each earlobe. A bib of dark red, thick and wet. Sticky hot syrup. She moves her hand down, I think for a second to touch me, and my whole body clenches, blood suddenly ice, but she just grabs the glass on my nightstand and takes a drink and fresh wetness glugs from the slash in her throat, replenishing her bib, like she knows I’m looking at it.

  She offers the glass to me, so I sit up and I take it and I pang my teeth against the rim. It should wake me up but it doesn’t. So I’m either still sleeping or all the way awake. All the way awake in a place where I can see things like this floured woman. The last one to die. The last one to be killed by Wink and Margaret. But mostly Margaret.

  I put the glass down and she reaches out her hand and I take her floury soft fingers and she leads me down the stairs. Quiet so we don’t wake Alf. I hear her say shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh but I can’t see her face because I’m behind her.

  There are people in the lobby. Sitting in the chairs, sipping from white cups. Coffee. A doorman in a stiff uniform. Two pretty women behind the front desk. I hear a harp playing. A long-necked lady harpist pluck-pluck-plucking but I can’t make out her face.

  And a woman sits at the piano bench but she isn’t playing. I can see her face better, but just barely. It looks like nylon pulled over a sharp skull. I can’t see her eyes but I know she’s staring at me. A man sits next to her. He’s pulling up her skirt. The floured woman tells me not to look. That it’s private. Then she leads me to the basement door, down the steps slowly so anything could grab my ankles but I don’t think anything did and she says shhhhhhhhhhhhhh again but maybe not because I’m still behind her and can’t see and she could be someone else now for all I know, the harpist maybe, or worse.

  Then we’re standing in the main room.

  And again we’re not alone. There are OTHERS down here. Faces scribbled out in spots but I can see enough to know which are lonely hearts girls and which were once hiding. Some walking around, some sitting on the dryer, on the floor. I see eyes in the shelves. Behind paint cans and gardening tools. I can hear footsteps upstairs, creaking ceiling, dust falling, real weight pressing down on the floors above. The OTHERS are everywhere. They’re always everywhere.

  And I’ve got a plastic bag in my hand. I open it and look inside at some wet cat food, a water bottle, and a flashlight.

  Then the floured woman’s blue eyes again are in mine. She’s leading me down one of the dark hallways and then suddenly she’s not. And I’m alone standing here, not even knowing which way to step. But I remember the flashlight and I take it out and cast a cone of light down the hallway and it moves as erratically as a pixie along the walls and everywhere and I think maybe this too should wake me up because I know at one point I laid the light across my own face trying to see what was going on in there, in my head. Wake up, Noelle, wake up and run away. Wake up wake up wake up. But I am awake and I feel good, comfortable, floating through the moistwarm cake of patterned space.
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  The OTHERS urge me in the right direction down the hall by making bad sounds in the wrong direction. Bad sounds like we’re gonna lick you and bite you slowly and stick our claws into your soft little body. But still trying to be nice, to be my friends. Trust us. Whispering. TRUST US AND WE WON’T EAT YOU. And it’s getting louder so I walk faster.

  Then I hear groaning and I don’t wanna go towards the groaning either but it seems better than the bad sounds the OTHERS are making. So I keep going and I find a door and they want me to open it so I do and this is where the groaning is coming from. A sound that can’t be from anywhere else. With all of the soundproofing and the thick walls of the hive-like basement where it seems OTHERS crawl about like bees all the time.

  My frenzied cone of light falls on what groans. Here lies Sammy. In my spotlight. And I nearly expect him to leap up and start dancing like the Michigan Frog, top hat and all.

  Sammy is in ecstasy. Floating through patterned space. His single, cloudy yellow eye staring up fishlike and stupid and happy.

  Staring like the woman’s floured eyes. Those must be the eyes of patterned space. Staring empty feeling good eyes.

  The blood smeared around him is all black. Fur around the living eye all wet.

  I put my flashlight down on the floor so its light falls against Sammy and our shadows are projected onto the wall.

  On the wall we’re massive.

  On the wall I see the floured girl’s shadow.

  On the wall I’m not alone with Sammy.

  But in the room I am. Alone. All alone.

  My shadow reaches for him, pries open his little mouth and scoops some of the cat food into it, press it into the back of his throat so his muscles consume it involuntarily, then sprinkle in water and stroke his exposed belly.

  His paws, curled like dried potato bugs, twitch slightly. I touch one and it’s so soft.

  He groans again and I put my hand around his still-warm throat and think about killing him. I know I need to kill him. Suck him out of patterned space and into death’s unknown calm. I know this is wrong. I know it. I look at the wall and see my enormous shadow with its hands around Sammy’s neck and it looks right. So I say it out loud I think. Kill Sammy. Kill Sammy. But then I hear the whispering of those outside others. OTHERS. OTHERS telling me to let go of his throat. Trust us. Or else. Then her eyes are watching me. I’m looking into them somehow. They assure me patterned space is what he wants. My little friend deserves to be alive with them.