The Unbearable Book Club for Unsinkable Girls Read online

  Dr. Ramsan took a coil of gauze from a package. “Typically, hallucinations occur with withdrawal rather than occasional use. How much, and how often, are you drinking?”

  “It was only last night,” I said. “My mother probably won’t believe me anymore, but I don’t drink.”

  I sat up, and Dr. Ramsan bandaged my arm. If he had kids of his own, I thought, they were probably mild-mannered boy and girl geniuses, happily doing calculus and physics in the second grade. “What sort of hallucination did you have?” he asked. “Do you mind my asking?”

  “I don’t mind.” I liked Dr. Ramsan. “Two people,” I said. The inside of my head seemed to be coated in an oily fog. “They came out of the trees. And they were either dressed up, or they were wearing costumes—or maybe nightgowns. At first I thought they were characters out of a book.”

  “Go on,” he said, as if he heard this sort of thing often.

  “One of the people was definitely real,” I said, concentrating on Dr. Ramsan’s perfect black beard, like a garden of hair on his chin. “But the other one seemed more … fictional. And when my friend came to get me and bring me home”—I remembered Jeff’s hands gripping my legs—“they disappeared.” I felt for a lump on the side of my head. Maybe I was insane. “Do you think the entire thing was a nightmare?”

  “I don’t think you dreamed you were climbing a tower,” Dr. Ramsan said. “So part of your evening must have been real.” He shined a penlight into my eyes and then noticed my ear. “This doesn’t look good.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” I said, as if my ear—not to mention my knee—were something I had borrowed and was supposed to be taking care of.

  He cleaned the piercing and told me to soak my ear twice a day in salt water.

  “By the way, I’m not usually attracted to danger,” I said. “Up until now I’ve led a pretty boring life.”

  “Boredom is good!” Dr. Ramsan looked pleased. “Boredom is why God invented books. Are you still in your book club?”

  “Yeah. We’re reading The Left Hand of Darkness,” I said. “By Ursula Le Guin. I don’t usually read sci-fi, but I like it.”

  “I will look for it at the library,” Dr. Ramsan said. “In the meantime: ice for your leg, after any activity and at least twice a day. The pool is fine: but no towers, no climbing through windows, no mountaineering, no high-wire acts, no parasailing, no bungee jumping. Am I leaving anything out?”

  “Probably not,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome. Take good care.”

  We shook hands. I went to find my mother in the waiting room.

  On the way home in the car, I rolled down my window, sucked up a lungful of hot, damp air, and said, “I already apologized twice. Maybe you didn’t hear me.”

  “I did hear your apology,” my mother said. “Now I’m hoping for an explanation.”

  “I don’t think I have one of those,” I said. The only explanations I could come up with sounded odd or substandard:

  1) I was trying to live up to my potential as a troubled child in a one-parent home;

  2) I had been pressured by a whiskered man in a bright red uniform;

  3) I was being a jerk.

  “People die from alcohol poisoning, Adrienne,” my mother said.

  “I know that.” We were driving along the world’s curviest road: I felt like I was strapped into a roller coaster. “I don’t drink,” I said. “If I knew how to drink, I wouldn’t have had that much, would I?”

  We stopped at a light. My mother turned the vents in my direction; they exhaled a puff of warm air on my legs. Near the side of the road, an old woman was sitting in a plastic wading pool with a dog, rinsing herself and the wagging, furry animal with a garden hose. “Then what’s this about?” my mother asked. “Was it just a whim? A failed experiment? Was it CeeCee’s idea?”

  That’s a good strategy, I thought. Let’s blame someone else.

  The woman was soaping up her dog; I wondered if she was using shampoo or—

  “Adrienne?” my mother asked.

  “It wasn’t CeeCee’s fault,” I said.

  The light turned green. “I wasn’t suggesting it was her fault,” my mother said. “Still, maybe CeeCee isn’t someone you should be spending a lot of time with.”

  I pointed out the irony of that statement, given that my mother, along with CeeCee’s, had created the Unbearable Literary Society for Impossible Girls.

  “The what?”

  “It’s just a nickname,” I said.

  My mother turned left onto Powell, the street where we lived. She wanted to know if CeeCee and I had gone to a party. She wanted to know if we’d been seeing boys.

  I paused. “No.” Technically, I hadn’t seen Jeff (I’d had my eyes closed), even though he had dragged me into his car. And if he was over eighteen, he didn’t count as a boy. I decided it was preferable not to explain that CeeCee and I had been driving around in a borrowed car without a license.

  We pulled into the driveway.

  “I hope this doesn’t have anything to do with our conversation the other night, when we were playing Scrabble,” my mother said. “You’re only fifteen, Adrienne. That’s very young. I was twenty-eight years old when—”

  “I know how old you were,” I said. “And I haven’t had sex, or anything close.” I remembered CeeCee leaning toward me in the bathroom, the fruit-and-syrup smell of her hair. “I don’t have a boyfriend and I’m not a lesbian, so you can stop worrying about me; I’m probably … frigid.”

  My mother frowned at the steering wheel. “I’m not sure why you’re saying that,” she said slowly. “Do you—”

  “Mom, please. Do we always have to talk about sex? That’s all we talk about anymore.” I unbuckled my seat belt, but my mother grabbed my wrist and kept me in the car.

  “I want to understand what’s going on with you,” she said.

  I pulled away; I felt like a book she was trying to open.

  “I mean it, Adrienne. What are you doing? Who are you turning into?” She was shouting now.

  “Don’t ask me that!” I shouted back. Then I threw up again, barely managing, before I did so, to open the door.

  Maybe because she felt bad for yelling at me when I was clearly in a weakened condition, my mother made a bed for me on the couch. She brought me a can of ginger ale, a pair of aspirin, and a plateful of crackers.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “You’re welcome.” She stuck a straw in the ginger ale. “I need to run some errands,” she said. “And then I’m getting my hair cut. I guess you could spend the day reading. Did you finish The Left Hand of Darkness?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  She brought me a grocery bag, in case I had to be sick. “You’re done with sleepovers for the rest of the summer.”

  “Okay,” I agreed. It seemed we were talking about how to punish somebody else—some foolish, risk-taking person we were both exasperated with and yet fond of. I sure hope the kid straightens herself out.

  My mother handed me the TV controls. “What was that name you used for the book club?”

  I repeated it for her. “We made up a bunch of names,” I said.

  She nodded, then took a sip of my ginger ale. “It’s hard for me to get my mind around the idea that a book club could be a bad influence on a person,” she said. “I don’t want to believe that it can. I remember when you were ten or eleven, I read you To Kill a Mockingbird, and for a year you wanted to be a lawyer like Atticus Finch.”

  I bit the edge off a cracker. “I was ten, Mom,” I said. “I barely knew what a lawyer was.”

  “Of course you knew. You were very bright.”

  I noticed she had used the past tense: I was bright. She probably thought my IQ was diminishing.

  I remembered the guy in Flowers for Algernon, getting gradually stupid. “I don’t think it’s fair for all my role models to be taken from books,” I said. “How am I supposed to stack up against Atticus Finch or Anne Frank?
I don’t know any Nazis. Why don’t you just compare me to Aslan?”

  “I don’t think I’ve been comparing you to anyone,” my mother said. “Where did that come from?”

  “Nowhere,” I said. “Or from the backseat of my brain.”

  The phone rang, and my mother went to the kitchen to answer it. When she came back, she said, “Some people see Aslan as a stand-in for Jesus, by the way.”

  “Perfect.” I bit into a cracker. “I just saw him as a really important lion.”

  “I guess it’s all in how you look at him,” my mother said. Then she picked up her car keys and left me alone.

  I spent an hour or so sleeping and channel surfing and licking the salt from an assortment of crackers. I texted CeeCee: You get in trouble for last night?

  Non, she texted back.

  I told her I was flat on my back with a case of the whirlies. Come over? I asked.

  It took her a while to answer. Busy, she finally said.

  My thumbs hovered, indecisive, over the keypad. Was CeeCee mad about something? I wanted to ask her if she’d seen Wallis. I wanted to ask her if Jeff had carried me—preferably in his arms and not over his shoulder—up to her room.

  Feeling antsy, I got off the couch and tried soaking my ear. Then I tried on the eyeliner CeeCee had given me, but it made my eyes—maybe because they were bloodshot—look as if they’d been surgically implanted in my face. Just looking at myself in the mirror, I vacillated between thinking that my funky new look had potential and understanding that I was stuck in a no-fly zone between ridiculous and bizarre.

  It was time to get out of my own head and into someone else’s. I found my mother’s copy of The Left Hand of Darkness and went out to the front lawn with an oversized beach towel and a bag of ice for my leg. I spread out the towel and lay down. “Hi, Genly,” I said when I opened the book. Soon Genly was explaining both to me and to Estraven, his hermaphrodite frenemy, what it was like to be a permanent member of a particular sex. Turning the pages, the ice bag leaking all over my leg, I tried to imagine the people I knew shifting back and forth: my mother periodically growing a beard and impressive pectorals, and our neighbor, Mr. Burgess, stopping by to complain about his PMS.

  A shadow darkened the page; I turned around.

  Jill was behind me, straddling her bike. “Wow. Something happened to your face,” she said.

  “I dyed my hair,” I told her. “And put on some makeup.”

  She climbed off her bike and let it drop to the ground.

  Inside the novel, marked by my finger, Genly Ai and Estraven were poised at the edge of the Gobrin ice field. I imagined them tapping their feet and consulting their watches, waiting for the moment when I would open the book and allow them to get back to the business of being alive.

  “Did you get grounded this time?” Jill asked.

  “Why do you always think I’m grounded?” Was I grounded?

  “Welcome to the information age. Word gets around.” She sat down in the grass. “You didn’t call me, I noticed. You put on your makeup and trotted off to Wallis’s without me.”

  “CeeCee thought you wouldn’t want to come.”

  Jill spun the wheel of her bike. “Are you going to tell me what happened?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said.

  Across the street, two little girls were prancing through the spray of a sprinkler.

  “How come you’re not at work?” I asked.

  “I was. But then somebody pooped in the pool,” Jill said. “They’re closed for cleaning. My sincere advice to you? Don’t ever put your mouth near that water.” She straightened her businesslike black ponytail. “I figure if I sit here long enough you’ll probably tell me what happened,” she said. “Because you probably want to tell someone. And I’m the only person available.” She combed her fingers through the lawn. “You have a lot of quack grass in your yard,” she said.

  I tried to go back to The Left Hand of Darkness, but I couldn’t read with Jill waiting next to me. “All right.” I put down the book. “CeeCee invited me to spend the night. I didn’t know we’d be going to Wallis’s. But somehow she took Jeff’s car—she must have taken the keys from him earlier—and we drove around and opened a bottle of gin. We were drinking—or I guess I was drinking—and we got a flat, because it turns out CeeCee’s a lousy driver.”

  “What a shock,” Jill said.

  “And we weren’t sure where Wallis’s house was,” I went on, feeling as if I were explaining the evening to myself as much as to Jill, “so we ended up in the dark at the water tower.” I paused, because the rest of the story was unclear. “And for some reason I climbed the tower, partway, and then I fell. And I got sick because of the gin.”

  “We’re talking about puking,” Jill said. She spun her bicycle wheel again. “So after all that, you never made it to Wallis’s?”

  “We didn’t have her address,” I said. “And you know Weller Road. The houses are all stuffed back into the woods. They look almost abandoned—like railroad cars. But we were definitely near Wallis’s.”

  “How do you know?”

  The little girls across the street were squirting each other with water guns.

  I hesitated. “Well, I’m not positive,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure that I saw two people. One was Wallis, so the other one had to be her mother.” I was trying to work through the fog in my head. “They were wearing long dresses that were probably nightgowns.”

  Jill blinked. “Did you talk to them?”

  “Not really.”

  “So they were just standing around in their nightgowns,” Jill said. “What was Wallis’s mother like?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “It was dark. But I woke up at one point and it seemed like she was taking care of me. You know what it was like? It was like that scene in A Wrinkle in Time where those nameless creatures find Meg and they touch her with their tentacles and end up bringing her back to life.”

  Jill nodded slowly. “Wallis’s mother touched you with her tentacles.”

  “I didn’t say she had tentacles.”

  “Okay.” Jill asked me what CeeCee’s reaction to “Aunt Beast” and Wallis had been.

  “I don’t think she saw them,” I said. “She went to meet Jeff so he could change the tire. And when she got back, Wallis and her mother had disappeared. I guess they went—”

  “Poof: back to their railroad car,” Jill said. “And left you choking on your vomit out in the woods.”

  I hadn’t thought about that. But they had probably known that Jeff and CeeCee would be driving me home. I decided not to mention the possibility that Wallis’s mother had been holding a gun. “Forget the railroad car,” I said. “Forget the whole thing.” I moved the melted ice off my leg. “How did you even know I was out with CeeCee last night? How do you always seem to know what I’ve been doing?”

  Jill pulled up a dandelion puff. “Duncan got a phone call last night. He lives next to Jeff, and Jeff needed a ride somewhere because two girls absconded with his car.”

  Duncan—a grade ahead of us—had gone out with Jill for a few months; they were still friends. “Duncan texted me about it this morning,” Jill said. “He told me to make sure I was never alone with Jeff. He calls Jeff ‘the eel.’ ”

  “He doesn’t seem that bad,” I said, remembering that CeeCee had predicted I would kiss him.

  “Jeff does what CeeCee tells him to do.” Jill stood up. “Who knows what the two of them have going on?”

  The little girls across the street had gone indoors. I told Jill what my mother had said about the Unbearable Book Club: that we were the only group she had ever heard of who could experience book club membership as a negative influence.

  “I think she’s right,” Jill said. “By the way, do you have anything to eat? Maybe a hamburger? That’s part of the reason I stopped by. I’m really hungry.”

  I hadn’t eaten anything but crackers all day and my stomach felt like an empty cavern. “What do you want? F
rozen waffles? Noodles?”

  “No, I’m craving meat,” Jill said.

  “Meat?” I grabbed her arm so she could help pull me up. “You’re a vegetarian.”

  “That’s only at home,” Jill said. “I took a stance, so, you know, I feel like I should stick with it. But I really like meat, so I eat it as often as I can at other people’s houses.” She chained her bike to the metal railing by the front steps and we went inside. In the kitchen, she turned the radio to a country station and opened the freezer. “Aha: this looks promising.” She held up a package of frozen sausage, then rummaged through the cabinets for a frying pan. On the radio, a singer howled out his love for a cheatin’ wife.

  “I hope your mom knows that not everyone in the book club is a criminal,” Jill said. “I mean, look at me: I have an actual job, and I don’t steal cars or trespass in the middle of the night or have a drug or a drinking problem.”

  “CeeCee doesn’t have a drinking problem,” I said. “She didn’t drink. I’m the one who got drunk.”

  “Go ahead. Defend her,” Jill said. “Just don’t fool yourself into thinking that, outside this book club, you’re going to be friends.” She dumped the entire package of links into the frying pan. “I sincerely hope you have maple syrup to go along with this sausage.”

  I gave her the syrup.

  Jill wielded a metal spatula against the spattering links.

  “Do you still want to be a nurse?” I asked. There was something disturbing about the idea of waking up in a hospital bed with Jill’s face being the first thing you’d see.

  Jill said she did.

  The voice on the radio clawed its way through an octave.

  “But how can you already be sure of that?” I asked. “I mean, you could join a motorcycle gang or hitchhike to Alaska. We don’t have to graduate high school and head straight to college.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Jill said. “We are the people who go on to college. That’s what we’ve been raised for.”

  “You make us sound like farm animals,” I said.

  Jill nudged the links around in their cauldron of fat.

  I got two plates from the cupboard. “You made sixteen sausages,” I said, staring into the pan.