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“My daddy was a whimpering sack of a man. He liked to run his hands all over me. When mommy found out, she screamed and screamed until he ran away. She was cold and all bent-like then from stress, but she dressed me up in trousers and sneakers every morning and set me out into the world everyday, well-fed. When she died when I was fifteen of a bad heart, I inherited all this money and was taken in by my Aunt Lory. She told me I could buy anything I wanted with the money: college, or a house, or a car, or three cars.”
Sherry laughed, her face glowing from her little story. She looked down briefly and slid something into her mouth, but I couldn’t see what it was. “But there was only one thing this little boy dreamed of, and that was to make his life real - finally - and become a happy girl.”
Girl? Boy?
My head was stuffed with cotton balls. My makeup was making my eyes dry out and burn. Maybe if I had heard this somewhere else I would have felt moved and scared, or maybe disgusted. Instead I merely felt at peace, like all the lack of normalcy, all the split ends, somehow justified my being there, my own humanity.
“You were born a boy.” I said calmly, my face not my own but another Lacey’s face.
“Born a boy, as a girl.” Sherry seemed perfectly at ease with the conversation and my sober reaction. I tried looking at her newly: her sharp face with the pin nose and bow lips. Where was the male, the XY, in that? But definitions can slip and slide, and my burning eyes only saw Sherry.
“Did it hurt?” I asked.
Sherry laughed hard at this, her eyes tearing up. “Did it hurt? Lace, of all the things you can say and ask, you bitch, you ask if it hurt?” She was reeling.
I still felt wobbly from the alcohol and found this suddenly funny too, and my face split with laughter. “Well, you know…” My hands formed scissors. Snip-snip.
“Oh, lord!” She was gasping for breath, black pencil marks smearing down her cheeks. “Hello, this is some new century, anesthesia? Hello?”
We both cracked up, our hysterics making the car rock.
“Well, I don’t know.” I gasped out, and we laughed and laughed and then the horizon turned pink and purple as the sun came to see what the ruckus was about.
We had both forgotten that Sherry’s guy was disinterested because Sherry understood too much. She was horribly good at scaring the guys away, and too, too pretty.
*
Sherry dressed herself up in parties. Every weekend I went with her to a new house, a new town, a new place. Ana and Bo came with us and the four of us were together always and Sherry ran the show with her boots and glittery eyeshadow.
We all witnessed the best reality television show in reality: Sherry and The Guy, and all of her exploits to get what she wanted.
The best parties were when the guy wasn’t there. She would take her new-penny hair down and we would stake out for adventure.
A month after my first day in the new town, Bo took us all up to a lake house in the Catskills. Somebody he knew was having a “get together”, which translated roughly into a lot of people with substances in a tiny muggy house.
The drive up there was chaotic, everyone yelling out directions and laughing about bears and cougars tanning our sorry, reckless hides. When we arrived, Bo ran up the stone driveway and sang out a song of arrival.
Inside we all sat on the fat plush rug in the living room and waited for someone to light a blunt. It was dark outside, twilight already fading into full night, and Bo had found a flashlight somewhere and was telling ghost stories.
“And no one ever saw them again!” he hissed, the upturned flashlight casting blocks of light and shadows across the handsome slopes of his face. We all laughed at how over-the-top dramatic he was, and he grinned viciously at all of us. He looked over at me suddenly then and gave me a wink, but someone passed me the blunt and I did nothing in response to his gesture.
Inhale. Hold. Exhale. My chest burned brilliantly, and my tongue tasted like smoke. I passed it to Bo.
“How can a ghost hold a knife?” Ana asked, laying on the couch with a bottle of Jack Daniels in her hand. “Aren’t their hands like plasma goo? Or something.”
“They can just move through walls.” Bo said, flicking her in the ear and passing.
“I know that, but I mean in stories, they’re spirits. That’s what they are, idiot. They’re dead people. They can’t hold onto things.”
“Poltergeists can move things.” I offered, already feeling dreamy and thinking of the movie. Remembering that ridiculous part of Poltergeist where the tree ate the little boy. Why did no one but me ever seem to find that ridiculous? How could a ghost even do that? I giggled happily at this.
“Poltergeists aren’t like normal ghosts.” some other girl said, her blonde hair blocking her eyes. “They’re… angry mental energy. Not like… a forlorn spirit.”
Ana laughed from the couch. “This is just dumb-”
“Here.” Sherry exhaled, a lovely cloud of gray smoke that whirled around all of our heads. Her voice was low, too low for a girl, but still very pretty. “I’ll tell you assholes a real ghost story.”
“A real one?” Ana smirked.
“That’s what I said, right?” Sherry sat up straight, passing and then taking the flashlight from Bo. She shone it up toward the ceiling and her coppery hair glinted fiery red. Her catty eyes fell on each one of us, and people began to giggle.
“Oh, Sherry you are too much!” a bespectacled girl with jet black hair said gleefully. Someone shushed her, and all of our attention was captured.
“This was told to me by my cousin’s cousin.” Sherry declared, smiling wickedly. “She used to live, a few years ago, in this gigantic old house. It once had been her grandmother’s and was ugly as sin, all wood boards and cracking white paint. But the house isn’t really the subject here. Off in the fields behind the house, behind the gardens and the gates, was a shabby little house built for servants to stay. A foray of trees had grown around it in all the years it had been abandoned, and it only had one window that looked out into the woods. My cousin’s cousin found this servant’s house and decided to clean it up and re-sheet the beds in there so that her and her friends could sleepover and party there, away from the eyes of everyone else.”
Everyone was quiet, smiling and sneering, sitting in the circle in the living room.
“Well, the first night her and her friends stayed there, they had two six-packs and stayed up late being smartasses. But eventually they ran out of things to do and so drifted off to sleep. One of her friends woke up though in the middle of the night, probably needing to upchuck or something, and noticed two red orbs of light very far off in the distance out the only window in the little house. She sat in her bed, watching the lights move from side to side in the woods, blinking out every now and then. It was only when they began to get a little closer that she realized that they were eyes.”
She widened her eyes; someone shrieked, someone laughed.
“She was too terrified to move. She quickly whispered for someone to wake up, and only my cousin’s cousin did. She pointed out toward the single window and they both looked out to watch the red eyes of the - the thing wander around in the distance. They decided it wasn’t headed toward the servant’s house, that it was just wandering around, and that if they kept quiet and kept the lights off it wouldn’t know they were there.
“Just after they said this, one of their friends’ cellphones went off. It lit up and vibrated on the floor of the house, making loud quick ricochet noises on the old wooden boards of the house. Everyone in there woke up, and my cousin’s cousin and the friend that had been awake looked out the window in shock, wondering if the noise in the dead silence was loud enough for the thing to hear.
“When they looked out the window, there pressed up against the panes right outside was a withered brown face with red eyes, gaping in at them. The two of them began to scream wildly, which brought everyone else’s attention to the leering face in the window. The creature began to scratch at the window pane, and the girls continued to scream. This attracted the attention of the family dog back at the house, and it dashed from its doghouse, bellowing out as at it darted for the servant’s house.
“This distracted the creature for a moment and it stopped scratching. My cousin’s cousin and her friends took this opportunity to dash out of the servant’s house and back toward the main house, scrambling up the porch and locking the door behind them.
“They were unable to sleep all night and kept peering horrified out the windows, but they did not see the horrible brown face or the red eyes again. When the sun rose and morning came, all of them felt a little braver and decided to go back to the servant’s house to see if there was anything to prove what they had seen the night before.
“When they got there, they all stood in horror at what they saw. The entire servant’s house was splattered with dried blood, and the slaughtered body of the family dog lay by the doorway, ripped apart and eaten by something.”
She finished, looking at all of us with wide eyes and her smile gone. Everyone was silent for a moment, thinking up witty responses or genuinely freaked out, when something slammed against one of the living room windows, howling madly and scratching at the glass.
We all jumped up and screamed, but it was just the bespectacled girl’s boyfriend, grinning wildly in at us, some of his friends behind him laughing hysterically at the chaos that had been caused inside as everyone stood on the couch or ran into another room.
“Bryce, you ass! You jerk!” the bespectacled girl shrieked, jumping down from the couch, throwing more insults at him with a few other people.
Ana had run toward the doorway when he had first hit the window, and Sherry hopped up, chasing after her and calling “Come on! Come on!”
Bo and I followed them out the door, all of us laughing and Ana slightly embarrassed, her round face a purplish red. We ran down the driveway and toward the deck at the lake, where an inflated yellow raft sat on the water’s surface. Sherry trotted along the flimsy wooden boards of the deck, looking back at us with a wild, exhilarated look on her face.
“What are we doing?” Ana gasped, putting her hands on her knees.
“Going out on the lake. No ghosts can get us out there!” Sherry trilled, jumping at Ana and poking her stomach.
“Oh, shut up!” Ana snapped, laughing then and looking warily to the raft.
Sherry climbed deftly onto it, rolling over and jiggling the boat, causing ripples to spirit away across the lake. Bo hopped in beside her, the entire raft quaking in protest, and the two of them laughed.
I looked over at Ana. She didn’t look at me and wrinkled her nose up into her face. But she climbed in the raft anyway.
“Lace, come on!” Sherry leaned over onto the deck and grabbed my hands, pulling me slowly down with them. I sat down beside her as she pushed against the deck, sending us spinning and twirling away from land.
The night sky was cloudy, but there were patches of clear sky where four or five stars would flicker in and out. Sherry snuggled into the rubbery surface, smiling up at the bruise-blue clouds.
“Now this is nice and quiet and serene.” she said, her hands folded behind her head.
“Since when do you like that?” Ana asked, fishing out a cigarette.
“Tonight, I do.”
Bo sat on the other side of me. He looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. It was a little chilly on the lake and little puffs of breath came from our lips.
I flipped my head over to face Sherry. “Why are you so attracted to your guy? Why is he so… necessary?” I asked, my question making her sit up and her eyes spark with animation.
“Because his voice gives me chills. Because I can’t stop from imagining what it feels like to have his skin against mine. I feel a hopeless need to throw my body against his!” she laughed, thrilled.
“Yeah, but he’s not going for that.” Ana blew out smoke.
“Don’t you think it’s bad to open yourself up so completely for somebody like that?” I asked, drawing my legs up to my chest.
“Brr, don’t be so cold, Lacey.” Bo jeered, putting his hand on my shoulder. “People do what they want sometimes; it’s liberating.”
“And I never said I wasn’t a dinner plate offered up for the devouring.” Sherry looked sadistically sweet, her head leaning over the side of the raft.
“It’s all words.” Ana whispered under her breath, and only I heard her. I looked nervously from Sherry to her, Bo watching me. His hand was still on my shoulder.
“You know,” Sherry perked up then, picking her head up from over the side. “That whole cremation thing has become popular nowadays, right?”
“Holy macabre!” Bo said, holding his hand up now.
“Science has made it possible that they can take the ashes of a person and put them in a diamond. For a loved one to wear around on a ring.” She held her one hand out delicately, flexing her fingers. “People become merely accessories.”
She leaned over toward me, still holding her hand out. “Lace, would you wear me on your finger?” She snatched up my hand, spanning out my fingers so each thin little appendage fanned in front of her face. “I would go lovely with this little hand of yours.”
“You know it.” I joked, uncertain.
“I hope you’re not serious.” Ana murmured. “It’s hard to tell with you sometimes.”
“And I’ll wear you, Ana, from my ears in some big gorgeous earrings.” Sherry cooed, leaning toward her other friend. “So I can always hear these remarks of yours.”
“So that means she’s going to die before you?” Bo pointed out.
“Hm. That doesn’t seem right does it?” Sherry bit her lip and smiled. She leaned her head back over the side of the raft again, her red hair falling in the water.
*
Back in the lake house, we all sat in one of the bedrooms.
“Lace, be a dear and tie this for me.” Sherry asked me. I sat beside her and tied the thin string tight around her upper arm. Ana passed her the needle.
I breathed in and out slowly, standing up and opening the window. The night air rushed in like a ghoul. I felt like I was standing above the ground, my hair like licks of fire around my head. Bo took my hand, pulling me away from the window and down to the floor. He looked like a cat, his lips split in a smile.
“You’ll let the ghosts out.” he said, or I thought he said. He probably said something else. He looked very, very pink.
People moved. Sherry broke a lamp and slept by my side.
*
At dinner sometime during the next week, my dad worked late and one of my brothers was at an after school program. My mom made spaghetti.
“You’ve changed, Lacey.” she said during dinner.
I looked over at her. I felt like I could see every pore on her face. The wrinkles around her eyes made her look like a zombie. Even her lips were creased with lines.
Of course I’ve changed.
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There's more to the story. I'll post it some other day.
