Girl in Snow: A Novel

Day

One

WEDNESDAY

FEBRUARY 16, 2005

Cameron

When they told him Lucinda Hayes was dead, Cameron thought of her shoulder blades and how they framed her naked spine, like a pair of static lungs.

They called an assembly.

The teachers buzzed against the far wall of the gymnasium, checking their watches and craning their necks. Cameron sat next to Ronnie in the top corner of the bleachers. He bit his fingernails and watched everyone spin about. His left pinky finger, already cracked and dry, began to bleed around the cuticle.

What do you think this is for? Ronnie said. Ronnie never brushed his teeth in the morning. There were zits around the corners of his mouth, and they were white and full at the edges. Cameron leaned away.

Principal Barnes stood at the podium on the half-court line, adjusting his jacket. The ninth-grade class snapped their gum and laughed in little groups, hiking up their backpacks and squeaking colorful shoes across the gymnasium floor.

Can everyone hear me? Principal Barnes said, hands on each side of the podium. He brushed a line of sweat from his forehead with his sleeve, squeezed his eyes shut.

Jefferson High School is in the midst of a tragedy, Principal Barnes said. Last night, we were forced to say good-bye to one of our most gifted students. It is with regret that I inform you of the passing of your classmate, Miss Lucinda Hayes.

The microphone shrieked, crackled.

In the days following, Cameron would remember this as the moment he lost her. The hum of the overhead fluorescent lights created a rhythm in time with the whispers that blossomed from every direction. If this moment were a song, Cameron thought, it would be a quiet song—the sort of song that drowned you in your own miserable chest. It was stunning and tender. It dropped, it shattered, and Cameron could only feel the weight of this melody, this song that felt both crushing and delicate.

Fuck, Ronnie whispered. The song built and built and built, a steady rush.

It took Cameron six more seconds to notice that no one had a face.

He leaned over the edge of the bleachers and vomited through the railings.

Last night:

Almond eyes glaring out onto the lawn. A pink palm spread wide on Lucinda’s bedroom window screen. The clouds overhead, moving in fast, a gray sheet shaken out over midnight suede.

The nurse said you threw up, Mom said when she picked him up, later that afternoon.

Cameron nudged the crushed crackers and lint on the carpet of the minivan, pushing them into small mountains with the side of his snow boot. Mom took a sip of coffee from her travel mug.

After the initial drama had simmered down, everyone had gathered outside the gymnasium to speculate. The baseball boys said she was raped. The loser girls said she killed herself. Ronnie had agreed. She probably killed herself, don’t you think? She was always writing in that journal. I bet she left a note. Dude, your fucking throw-up is on my shoe.

Cameron, Mom tried again, three streets later. She was using her sympathetic voice. Mom had the sort of sympathetic voice that Cameron hated—it seeped from her throat in sugary spurts. He hated to imagine his sadness inside her. Mom didn’t deserve any of it.

I know this is hard. This shouldn’t happen to people your age—especially not to girls like Lucinda.

Mom. Stop.

Cameron rested his forehead against the frosted window. He wondered if a forehead print was like a fingerprint. It was probably less identifiable, because foreheads weren’t necessarily different from person to person, unless you were looking at the print on a microscopic level, and how often did people take the time for that?

He wondered how it would feel to kiss someone through glass. He’d seen a movie once about a guy who kissed his wife through a jail visitation-room window and he’d wondered if that felt like a real kiss. He thought a kiss was more about the intention than the act, so it hardly mattered if saliva hit glass or more saliva.

Since he was thinking about lips, he was thinking about Lucinda Hayes and hating himself, because Lucinda Hayes was dead.

When they got home, Mom sat him down on the couch. She turned on the television. Get your mind off things. She emptied a can of chicken noodle soup into a bowl, but over the whir of the microwave, the voice of the news anchor blared.

Tragedy struck in northern Colorado this morning, where the body of a fifteen-year-old girl was discovered on an elementary-school playground. The victim has been identified as Lucinda Hayes, a ninth-grade student at Jefferson High School. The staff member who made the horrific find offered no comment. The investigation will continue under the direction of Lieutenant Timothy Gonzalez of the Broomsville Police Department. Civilians are encouraged to report any suspicious behavior.

Lucinda’s eighth-grade yearbook photo smiled down from the corner of the television screen, her face flat and pixelated. The remote dropped from Cameron’s hand to the coffee table—the back popped off, and three AAA batteries rolled noisily along the table and onto the carpet.

Cameron? Mom called from the kitchen.

He knew that park, the elementary school down the block. It was just behind their cul-de-sac, halfway between his house and Lucinda’s.

Before Mom could reach him, Cameron was stumbling down the hall, opening his bedroom door. He couldn’t be bothered to turn on the lights—he was ripping the sheets off his bed, he was pulling his sketchbook and charcoals and kneaded eraser from their hiding spot beneath his mattress.

He ripped out the sketchbook pages one by one and spread them in a circle around his bedroom floor. It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the dark of his room, but when they did, he was surrounded by Lucinda Hayes.

In most of the drawings, she was happy. In most of the drawings, it was sunny, and one side of her face was lighter than the other. The left, always the left. In most of the drawings, she was smiling wholly—not like in the yearbook photo, where the photographer caught her before she was herself.

Lucinda’s face was easy to draw from memory. Her cheekbones were high and bright. The lines near Lucinda’s mouth gave her the appearance of effortless happiness. Her lashes were thick and winged outward, so if Cameron skewed the shape of her eyes or set them too deep beneath her brow line, you could still tell it was Lucinda. In most of the drawings, her mouth was open in laughter; you could see the gap between her two front teeth. Cameron loved that gap. It unclothed her.

Cameron pressed his eyes to his kneecaps. He could not look at Lucinda like this because he had missed her most important parts: The way her legs flew out when she ran, from all those years of ballet. How her hair got frizzy at the front when she walked home from school in the heat. The way she sat at her kitchen table after school, listening to music on her shiny pink MP3 player, drumming white-painted fingernails against the marble. He always imagined she listened to oldies because he thought they fit her. Little bitty pretty one. Cameron had missed the way she squinted when she couldn’t see the board in class, the creases at the corners of her eyes like plastic blinds she had opened to let in the sunlight.

He couldn’t look at Lucinda like this because now she was dead, and all he had were the useless things—a smeared charcoal iris. A pinky finger drawn quickly, slightly too thin.

Oh God, Cam, Mom whispered from the doorway. Oh, God.

Mom stood with her hands on the doorframe, taking in his ring of drawings, looking like she might crumple. Her pink, striped sweater looked fake and sad, and Cameron wanted to melt her right into him so she wouldn’t look so old. The way Mom’s hands clung to the doorframe reminded Cameron of when he was a kid and Mom did ballet in the basement. She used the dirty windowsill as a barre and put her Mozart tapes in the cassette player. She whispered to herself. And one and two and three and four. Jeté, jeté, pas de bourrée. Cameron watched through the railing of the basement stairs. Her old back never straightened, and her old toes never pointed, and she looked like a bird with a body of broken bones. It made him sad to watch her dance because she looked so fragile and so expressive and so happy and so fragmented, all at once. Mom looked like herself when she danced; he had always thought so.

Cameron wanted to tell Mom that he was sorry for all of this. But he could not, because of the horrified way she was looking at his collection of Lucinda.

Cameron put his head back on his knees and kept it there until he was sure Mom had gone.

Things Cameron Could Not Think About:

1. The .22-caliber handgun in the lockbox underneath Mom’s bed.

Gandhi was assassinated with a Beretta M1934—three bullets to the chest. Lincoln took a bullet from a .44-caliber derringer. A .30-06 hunting rifle killed Martin Luther King Jr., and John Lennon was murdered with a .38-caliber pistol. The only famous person shot with a .22-caliber handgun was Ronald Reagan, who came out of the ordeal just fine. This made Cameron feel a bit better, like maybe if he or Mom were to use the pistol, the chances of actually killing someone were less than if Mom had, say, a 9-millimeter.

2. Dr. Duncan MacDougall.

Dr. Duncan MacDougall claimed in 1907 that the human soul weighed twenty-one grams. Cameron had read this statistic a few years back, after Grandma Mary died. He calculated exactly where he was at the moment she passed: in the kitchen, washing crusty macaroni off a plate. There had been a functioning body on earth and now there was not—didn’t it have to be subtracted somehow? But after Grandma Mary died, the earth weighed twenty-one grams less and Cameron had gone on washing. Nothing had felt lighter.

Cameron tried to calculate exactly where he was last night, when Lucinda died on the playground. He couldn’t fathom it—like when you tried to remember what you had for breakfast, and in the process of fishing for the truth you only pushed it deeper down, until you could have had pancakes or pizza or a five-course meal, but you’d thought about it so much you’d never know.

3. Hum.

Lucinda was probably there now, standing in front of the blue-painted door, wondering how any place could be so peaceful.

4. The strips of translucent hair on Lucinda’s shins where she forgot to shave.

Before Mom picked Cameron up at school that afternoon, Ronnie and Cameron had walked together to history class. Ronnie wore what he’d had on since last Thursday: A pair of forest-green sweat pants and a plain white T-shirt with yellow armpits. An oversized black ski jacket, unzipped. His head stuck out the top like a cardboard box balanced on a #2-pencil neck.

Dude, Ronnie said. This is some seriously crazy shit.

Police officers milled around at the end of the hall. From this distance, they looked like ants.

Cameron had turned fifteen last month, but he wouldn’t take driver’s ed. He would never learn to drive. He didn’t want to risk getting pulled over and having to look a police officer in the eye. Hey, the officer would say. Aren’t you Lee Whitley’s son?

It didn’t help that they looked similar. Cameron and Dad were both wiry, with long arms that swung when they walked. They had the same light-brown hair. (Cameron grew it out, because Dad had a crew cut.) Pointy nose, pasty skin, hazel eyes. Narrow shoulders, which Cameron hid in various versions of the same baggy hoodie. Knees that bowed in a V shape, pointing naturally inward. Shy feet.

People used to say that Cameron and Dad had the same laugh, but Cameron didn’t like to remember that.

Ronnie had talked all the way to class, and Cameron had ignored him. Ronnie Weinberg was Cameron’s best friend—his only friend—because neither of them knew what to say or when to say it. Ronnie was obnoxious, while Cameron was quiet, and no one else spoke to either of them.

Beth DeCasio, Lucinda’s best friend, had decided a long time ago that Ronnie smelled bad and Cameron was weird. People tended to believe Beth DeCasio. Beth once told Mr. O—Cameron’s favorite teacher—that Cameron was the sort of kid who would bring a gun to school. Aside from dealing with the administrative mess that followed—the interviews with the school psychologist, the calls home to Mom, the staff meeting—Cameron had the same nightmare for four months straight. In the dream, he brought a gun to school and he shot everyone without meaning to. But that wasn’t the worst part. In the dream, he had to live the rest of his life knowing those families were out there, missing their kids. Mom had lots of meetings with the school’s counselors, and after, she’d come home vibrating and angry. Unfounded and unprofessional, she’d say. She’d make Cameron tea and assure him that he would never do such a thing, and besides, it was physically impossible to accidentally shoot a whole school of people.

Cameron still thought about it sometimes. Not in a way that made him want to shoot anyone—still, he felt like a toxin in the bloodstream.

Now, Beth DeCasio walked in front of Cameron, arms linked with Kaylee Walker and Ana Sanchez. She wore purple, Lucinda’s favorite color. This made Cameron think of Lucinda’s diary—the cover was purple suede, with a white elastic band holding it shut. The girls cried, their shoulders hunched, tissues bunched in their palms.

Usually, Lucinda left her house between 7:07 and 7:18 a.m. Sometimes, her dad would take the morning off from his law firm and they would go to breakfast at the Golden Egg, but this generally happened less than once a month, and Cameron always factored in the odds. It occurred to Cameron now, as Lucinda’s friends cried in front of trophy cases, that this morning had been different, and he hadn’t even known—Lucinda had not been walking down the street, behind or in front of him. She had not brushed her teeth over the bathroom sink, she had not eaten a croissant or yelled at her mom, she had not wrestled her arms into her yellow down coat.

Cameron felt genuinely sorry for Beth, Kaylee, and Ana, though he didn’t think anyone had a right to be sadder than anyone else. A girl was dead, a beautiful girl, and there was tragedy in that. And anyway, some types of love were quieter than others.

I bet it was some kinky shit that killed her, Ronnie said as they took their seats in history class. Like, strangulation or something. Everyone’s talking about her ex-boyfriend, that soccer player—Zap. Douchebag looks like he’s into the nasty shit. He made a choking motion.

Ms. Evans flicked on a movie about the Hundred Years’ War and shut the lights.

Cameron was afraid of the dark. It came down to thinking and unthinking. Once he imagined the possibilities that accompanied absolute darkness, he would convince and unconvince himself of all sorts of horrors: A stroke in his sleep, and the subsequent paralysis. Sleepwalking to the drawer of steak knives in the kitchen. All the awful things your own body could do to itself. He’d twist in circles around his miserable brain until he exhausted himself and fell asleep or lifted the screen off his bedroom window and ran. Neither option helped much.

Excuse me, said a gruff voice from the doorway. The smell—Dad had smelled just like that. Tobacco, coffee, rusty chains. May we speak with one of your students?

Of course, Ms. Evans said.

Cameron Whitley? The police officer was silhouetted in the crack of fluorescent light that streamed in from the hall. You’ll need to come with us.

Jade

I have a theory: faking shock is easier than faking sadness. Shock is a more basic emotion than sadness—it’s just an inflated version of surprise.

The details have been released, the vice-principal says. He claps his hands together, all business. The victim was a student here at Jefferson High, Lucinda Hayes. The ninth-grade class is currently in the auditorium, where Principal Barnes is delivering the news. There will be a memorial service on Friday. Counseling will be available in the front office. We encourage you all to stay alert.

He strides out of the classroom, a swish of khakis.

I pinch the bridge of my nose. I look stupid, but so does everyone else. Half the class looks genuinely sad—embarrassingly sad—and the other half bounces with the sort of glee you only find during a drama like this.

I imagine how the shock must look on Zap, but I don’t dare turn around.

Zap has this way of sitting. He leans back in chairs, spreads his knees wide, lets his limbs do what they want. It’s not arrogant or lazy. It’s intentional. Comfortable. Zap leans back and lets his body occupy that space, as if he commanded the chair to assemble beneath him and it listened.

Today, Zap sits at the broken leftie desk by the window, three rows back. He wears a red sweat shirt and corduroy pants with holes in the knees. They’re too short at the ankles because Zap grew five inches last winter. His glasses are still fogged up from walking across Willow Square in the biting February cold.

These are things I know without looking.

The rest is up to my imagination—how the shock of Lucinda Hayes sits carefully on him. All wrong at first, loose on his frame. But it will sink in. The shock will move from Zap’s shoulders to his neck, to the birthmark on his second left rib. From there it will spread to all the places I can’t see.

Shock is just sadness that hasn’t reached the gut.

Of course, I already know that Lucinda Hayes is dead.

I find out before school this morning, over a naked Toaster Strudel. Ma throws away the frosting packets so we won’t get fat, leaving our strudels an unassuming brown, bare oven tracks running across their backs.

Sit down, girls, Ma says. She taps ash from her cigarette into the kitchen sink. A hiss. In the morning, the wrinkles on Ma’s face are canyons.

Amy totters to the kitchen table and swings her gigantic purse onto my chair. Amy recently decided backpacks were immature for a seventh-grader, so she carries a brown faux-leather purse instead. Her math textbook is so heavy she walks with a limp.

It’s about Lucinda, Ma says. I’m so sorry, sweetheart. She’s—she’s passed away. Ma sighs in her pitying way (usually reserved for the post-office attendant and the boy in Amy’s class with recurrent cancer).

Amy’s bottom lip quakes. Then a shrill, gravelly cry. She stands dramatically and backs into the sliding door, spreading her pink-painted fingernails against the glass and suctioning them there like starfish.

Ma puts out her cigarette on a pizza-stained paper plate and crouches in her sweat pants next to Amy, who slides to the floor. Ma strokes her hair, unknotting the tangles inconspicuously.

I’m so sorry, honey. They’ll make an announcement at school today.

Ma is sorry for Amy. She is not sorry for me. I’ve never cried like that, so frantic and choked. I’m not trying to be brave or stoic or anything. I’ve just never liked anyone enough. Ma knows this. She glares at me, Amy’s head still in the crook of her elbow. A runny line of snot drips from Amy’s nose onto Ma’s freckled arm.

Jesus, Jade, she says, shifting her gaze to my stomach, which pudges out from the bottom of my Crucibles T-shirt, bare under my unzipped army parka. Go put on a real shirt. You’re taking your sister to school today.

I lean over the kitchen counter, resting my elbows on an outdated phone book.

Emotions shouldn’t have names. I don’t know why we bother talking about them, because emotions are never what they’re supposed to be. You could say I feel ecstatic, or guilty, or disgusted with myself. You could say all of the above. Amy sobs, but I identify only this foreign lightness: like someone has sucked the weight from my legs, taken the terrible thoughts out of my head, softened some sharpness jabbing at my ribs. I don’t know.

It’s so calm.

Are you even human? Amy asks.

Madison Middle School is a rectangle in the distance.

Alien, I say. Surprise.

You’re not even sad.

Yes, I am.

You’re not. Ma says you have serious issues with ‘empathy’ and ‘self-control’ and ‘sad tendencies.’

The word is ‘sadistic,’ I tell her.

Lucinda is dead, she says, and you don’t even care.

Amy hitches up her purse and her leopard-print coat spreads open in the front. Amy wears a 32AA bra, and no matter how she is feeling, Amy is always quite cute. It’s the product of a fortunate combination: Amy’s red hair and the millions of freckles that dot her cheeks like grains of sand.

It’s pretty fucked up, Jade, she says. She pauses before the word fucked to consider. We’ve known her our whole lives, and now she’s dead, and you’re not even pretending to be sad.

I pump the tip of my tongue through the silver loop in my lip. I do this when I want someone to stop talking. It always works.

Amy stomps ahead, hugging herself close, shoulders bobbing as she stifles more sobs. Always the drama queen. She’s never been close with Lucinda, only Lucinda’s little sister, Lex. When we were young, Ma subjected us to weekly playdates—Lex and Amy would spend hours playing princesses in the Hayeses’ basement, while Lucinda and I were forced to sit there awkwardly until Ma came to pick us up. Lucinda would braid friendship bracelets, and I would read comic books, and we’d pointedly ignore each other while our sisters played make-believe. Lex and Amy used to be inseparable, but now they only hang out when Ma arranges it.

I wonder how Amy would feel if I died. Maybe she’d sleep in my bed some nights. Maybe she’d make a blanket out of my old T-shirts, which she’d keep in a box to show her children once they turned sixteen. Maybe she’d feel relieved. I’m suddenly aware of the ten feet of space between us, the four sections of sidewalk that separate Amy and me. I almost run to catch up with her. But just as unexpectedly as it comes, the desire passes again, leaving a faint, pulsing hatred somewhere I can’t touch.

WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY BUT CAN’T WITHOUT BEING A DICK

A Screenplay by Jade Dixon-Burns

EXT. PINE RIDGE DRIVE—BROOMSVILLE, COLORADO—EARLY MORNING

CELLY (17, slouched, dyed black hair), and SISTER (13, her opposite), walk to school. Celly hums a bouncy, upbeat song.

SISTER

Are you even human?

CELLY

Alien, surprise.

SISTER

You’re not even sad.

CELLY