The Kissing Booth Girl and Other Stories Read online

  “Well, what do you want to know?” Her voice snaps, dry-stick brittle and hard.

  Jackson can’t speak for his heart lodged in his throat. There’s a magic to watching Kaleidoscope (unless you watch it alone). The people on screen dying and fucking and screaming and weeping, they’re just shadows. It’s okay to watch; it’s safe. None of it is real.

  Motes of dust fall through the light around Carrie Linden—tiny, erratic fireflies. The curtains are mostly drawn, but the sun knifes through, leaving the room blood hot.

  “All of it,” Carries says, when Jackson can’t find the words.

  “What?” He gapes, mouth wide.

  “That’s what you’re wondering, isn’t it? That’s what they all want to know. The answer is—all of it. All of it was real.”

  Jackson flinches as though he’s been punched in the gut. (In a way, he has.) Should he feel guiltier about the cracked light in her eyes, or the fact that his stomach dropped when she said “that’s what they all want to know”? He isn’t her first.

  Carrie Linden’s hands wrap around her mug, showing blue veins and fragile bones. Steam rises, curling around her face. When she raises the mug to sip, her sleeve slides back defiantly and unapologetically revealing scars.

  “Well?” Carrie’s gaze follows the line of Jackson’s sight. “Why did you come, then?”

  She bores into him with piercing-bright eyes, and Jackson realizes—even sitting directly across from her—he can’t tell what color they are. They are every color and no color at once, as if her body is just a shell housing the infinite possibilities living inside.

  “I wanted to talk about the movie. I thought maybe…” Jackson glances desperately around the bare-walled room—nowhere to run. In his head, he’s rehearsed this moment a thousand times. He’s always known exactly what he’ll say to Carrie Linden when he finally meets her, but now it’s all gone wrong.

  I’m sorry, he wants to say, I shouldn’t have come, but the words stick in his throat. His eyes sting. He’s failed. In the end, he’s no better than Justin, or Kevin. He’s not a Kaleidophile, he hasn’t transcended the sex and gore—he’s just another wannabe.

  Unable to look Carrie in the eye, Jackson fumbles a postcard out of his coat pocket. The edges are frayed and velvet-soft through years of wear. It’s the original movie poster for Kaleidoscope, wrought in miniature. Jackson found it at a garage sale last year, and he’s been carrying it around ever since. He passes it to Carrie with shaking hands.

  As Carrie looks down to study the card, Jackson finally looks up. Like the movie, Jackson knows the card by heart, but now he sees it through Carrie’s eyes; he’s never loathed himself more. His eyes burn with the lurid color, the jumbled images piled together and bleeding into one.

  The backdrop is a carnival, but it’s also a graveyard, or maybe an empty field backed with distant trees. A woman studded with fragments of glass lies spread-eagle on a great wheel. Between her legs, Carrie lies on an altar, covered in writhing snakes. Behind Carrie, Elizabeth’s blood-sheeted face hangs like a crimson moon. From the black of her wide open eyes, shadowy figures seep out and stain the other images. They hide behind and inside everything, doubling and ghosting and blurring. The card isn’t one thing, it’s everything.

  “I’m sorry.” Jackson finally manages the words aloud.

  Slowly, Carrie reaches for a pen lying atop of a half-finished crossword puzzle. Her hand moves, more like a spasm than anything voluntary. The nib scratches across the card’s back, slicing skin and bone and soul. She lets the card fall onto the table between them, infinitely kind and infinitely cruel. Jackson thinks the tears welling in his eyes are the only things that save him.

  “It’s okay,” she says. Her voice is not quite forgiving. For a moment, Jackson has the mad notion she might fold him in her bony arms and soothe him like a child, as though he’s the one that needs, or deserves, comforting.

  Instead, Carrie leans forward and opens a drawer in the coffee table, fishing out a pack of cigarettes. Something rattles and slithers against the wood as the drawer slides closed. Jackson catches a glimpse, and catches his breath. Even after forty years he imagines the beads still sticky and warm, still slicked with Elizabeth’s blood.

  Carrie lights her cigarette, and watches the patterns the smoke makes in the air, in shadows on the wall. They don’t quite match.

  “I’m the final girl,” she says. The softness of her voice makes Jackson jump. He doesn’t think she’s even speaking to him anymore. She might as well be alone. (She’s always been alone.)

  “What?” Jackson says, even though he knows exactly what she’s talking about. His voice quavers.

  “It’s fucking bullshit, you know that?” Her voice is just as soft as before if the words are harsher. “I wasn’t a helpless fantasy at the beginning; I wasn’t an empowered hero at the end. I was just me the whole time. I was just human.”

  She stands, crushing her cigarette against the cupped palm of her hand without flinching. “You can stay if you want. Or you can go. I don’t really care.”

  And just like that she’s gone. Jackson is alone with Carrie Linden’s blood-red walls and her battered couch, with her beads hidden in the coffee table drawer, and her autograph on a worn-soft postcard. When she walked onto the screen, Carrie Linden stopped Jackson’s heart; walking out of the room, she stops it again.

  He sees Carrie Linden doubled, trebled—bony-thin hips hidden beneath a bulky sweater; the curve of her naked ass, teased by long blonde hair as she saunters across the screen; a hunted, haunted woman, glancing behind her as she darts into the drug store.

  Jackson has sunk so low, he can’t go any lower. (At least that’s what he tells himself as he leaves to make it okay.)

  At home, Jackson hides the postcard and Carrie Linden’s beads at the bottom of his drawer. He covers them with socks and underwear, wadded t-shirts smelling of his sweat and late night popcorn, ripe with fear and desire.

  It doesn’t matter how rare the postcard is, never mind that it’s signed by Carrie Linden; he’ll never show it to anyone, or even take it out of the drawer. The beads are another matter.

  Everyone knows the opening sequence of Kaleidoscope, but it’s the closing sequence that plays in most people’s minds, projected against the ivory curve of their dreaming skulls, etched onto the thinness of their eyelids. It bathes the late-night stupors of lone losers curled on their couches with the blankets pulled up to their chins against the flickering dark. It haunts midnight movie screens in rooms smelling of sticky-sweet spills and stale salt. It looms large on sheets stretched between goal posts, while orgies wind down on the battered turf below.

  It is the third most famous scene in cinema history. (Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.)

  Carrie is running. Everybody else is dead—Lance and Lucy, Elizabeth and Josh and Mary, and all the other brief phantoms who never even had names. She is covered in blood. Some of it is hers. She is naked.

  Ahead of her is a screen of trees. More than once, Carrie stumbles and falls. When she does, the camera shows the soles of her feet, slick and red. But she keeps getting back up, again and again. The camera judders as it follows her. It draws close, but never quite catches up.

  Carrie glances back over her shoulder, eyes staring wide at something the camera never turns to let the viewer see. (Imagination isn’t always the worst thing.) Carrie’s expression (hunted and haunted) says it all.

  There is no soundtrack, no psychedelic colors. The only sound is Carrie’s feet slapping over sharp stones and broken bottles and her breath hitching in her throat. She’s running for the grass and the impossibly distant trees.

  The credits roll.

  The screen goes dark.

  But Carrie is still there, between the frames, bleeding off the edges, flickering in the shadows. She’ll always be right there, forever, running.

  “Tell it right this time, Mama.” Dizzy nestles her head against my shoulder as I tuck the covers tighter around
us.

  Tell it right, Mama.

  Oh, moon-child, I will. The problem is, there’s never been only one way to tell the tale. This is a story about Silvie, and truth doesn’t stick to her skin. It twists and turns and slides like smoke through my hands.

  “I’ll try, moon-child.” I kiss the top of my daughter’s head, burying my nose in her strawberry-shampoo-scented curls.

  I’ll try.

  I’ve been trying for years, and I’ll try again, for Dizzy’s sake. I’ll unravel the story again, and somewhere among the myriad threads, I’ll find a truth I can offer my little girl.

  It’s hard to know where to begin. I don’t want to give my daughter a story of leaving, but every arrival of Silvie’s is wrapped up with her going away again.

  Tell it right this time, Mama.

  Oh, moon-child, I am telling it right. But the story is different every time.

  I’ll start with a beginning, not the beginning, but the first time Silvie came back to me.

  Gin wakes to the sound of a stone pinging against her window. Sheets tangle around her legs, but she pushes up the window pane and catches the second stone before it hits the glass.

  “Wake up, sleepy head.” Silvie stands on the gravel drive, her palm full of more missiles to throw. She lets them pour through her fingers with a rattling sound as Gin leans out into the chill.

  “You can’t be here.” Breath curls from Gin’s lips as the words slip free.

  It’s impossible. Except here she is, standing underneath Gin’s window, grinning up at her like nothing happened.

  In the moonlight, her scalp is a field of stubble. The last time Gin saw her, Silvie’s hair hung halfway down her back. The last time Gin saw her, Silvie didn’t even say goodbye. Gin’s mother sat her down and tried to explain, but the words made no sense—hospital, and sick, and going away for a while. Those weren’t words that applied to Silvie and Gin had stopped listening.

  “Are you just going stand there? Come on.” Silvie gestures; Gin sees the bandages wrapped around her wrist.

  A shock travels up her spine. Her mother’s words try to creep around the edges of what Gin knows to be true, and she pushes them away. Of course they’re not true, because Silvie is here, isn’t she?

  “Shh.” Gin glances over her shoulder, sure at any moment her parents or sister will come bursting into her room. “Give me a second.”

  She scrambles into sneakers, jeans, and a hoodie. She’s dressed before she’s fully decided to go with Silvie, but of course, it isn’t a choice, really. Go with Silvie, or get left behind again. Gin tucks the stone Silvie threw at her window into her pocket before climbing onto the roof.

  The shingles are slick with frost, but Gin makes the leap to the tree outside her window and shimmies down. Years of doing just this, jumping down to Silvie in the middle of the night, running away for secret adventures while her parents are sleeping, make her feet sure.

  “Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?” Gin drops down beside Silvie, breathless.

  Despite the chill, Silvie is wearing a hospital gown. It gapes in the back where it’s tucked into her jeans, and leaves her arms bare.

  “Time off for good behavior.” Silvie waves her arm like a trophy, showing the plastic admittance bracelet circling her wrist. “Shouldn’t you be in college?”

  Shouldn’t you? Gin wants to retort, but she holds the words back along with all the other questions she’s afraid to ask Silvie. Where have you been? Why did you leave me behind? Why didn’t you say goodbye?

  “Come on.” Silvie’s fingers are suddenly there, cold and hard between Gin’s as she tugs on her hand.

  “Aren’t you…” Gin swallows, her throat tight.

  “Aren’t I what, Gin?” There’s a thinness to Silvie’s face; her eyes are too big, full of moonlight shine. Her tone is hard.

  More words stick in Gin’s throat. Sick. Suicidal. She shakes her head. Thinking about where Silvie has been makes Gin’s head hurt. She has a vague notion that maybe she has it wrong, maybe she was the one who was sick, not Silvie.

  “Cold,” Gin says, turning away. Better to focus on the here and now. Silvie is back, they’re together, that’s what matters.

  She lets Silvie lead her to the car she claims is borrowed from her brother, which Gin knows means borrowed without asking. Of course Silvie intends to return it, but Silvie’s intentions don’t always match reality.

  “Where are we going?” Gin reaches to crank the heater as Silvie pulls down the road.

  “You’ll see.”

  As she hits the bridge crossing the bay, Silvie opens the glove box. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes and a fifth of vodka. She holds them in her lap, daring Gin to say something.

  Gin keeps her mouth shut. A fluttery, panicked sensation keeps trying to take root in her stomach. She focuses on breathing, on the lights sliding past outside the car. Silvie can’t vanish mid-bridge; as long as they’re driving, they’re safe.

  But as the car slows, the panicked feeling returns, doubled, and then full-force when Gin sees where they are.

  “Muir Woods? Seriously? Are we going to break in? We’ll be arrested.”

  Silvie doesn’t answer for a moment, keeping her hands on the wheel, studying her chewed-short nails and her wrists wrapped in bandages.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye properly last time,” Silvie says.

  It isn’t an answer. Unease continues to prickle Gin’s spine, a cold creeping steadily beneath her skin.

  “What are we really doing here?” She looks at Silvie side-wise.

  “You worry too much,” Silvie says, climbing out of the car.

  Gin scrambles to catch up. There really should be someone to stop them, but time with Silvie follows dream logic. Somehow, they’re already past the barricades, in among the trees.

  “Oh.” Gin lets out a wondering breath, and all at once, she forgets to worry or be afraid.

  The woods are different at night. Silence swallows everything and the sky turns a slow wheel above the treetops, only the barest glimmer of stars against the dark. Silvie threads her fingers between Gin’s.

  “See?” Silvie says. “This is the way it’s supposed to be. Just you and me. I’m sorry I didn’t say goodbye last time. I’ll make it up to you now.”

  Gin’s pulse quickens as Silvie leads her deeper among the trees. With Silvie’s palm against hers, she forgets to be cold. Neither of them stumble despite the roots trying to tangle themselves across the path. Then all at once, Silvie stops. The absence of her hand is palpable as she digs in her pocket for the cigarettes and lights one. Gin shivers; she doesn’t remember Silvie smoking before she went away.

  “There are rules,” Silvie says.

  She uncaps the vodka and takes a slug, walking carefully, heel to toe in a straight line.

  “Stay on the path. Don’t eat anything you’re offered, and you can come home again.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Gin stares at Silvie’s back, the fear returning.

  Something is terribly wrong. Silvie’s tone is the one that usually comes before something bad happening—cut class with me, Gin; my parents never check the liquor cabinet; it’s not stealing if we bring it back; just hide it under your shirt and walk out the door.

  “Faeries.” Silvie stops and turns to face Gin.

  Her eyes are an impossible silver in the moonlight. The same trick of light and shadow makes Silvie’s skull visible through her skin. For a moment, Gin scarcely recognizes her. Inhuman. Someone has stolen her best friend and replaced her with something else.

  “I have to go away again, Gin. Just for a little while.” Silvie runs a hand over the stubble of her hair. “Then I can come back again. As long as I follow the rules.”

  She isn’t looking at Gin, which makes Gin want to grab Silvie by the shoulders and scream in her face. Tell me the truth, just for once. No more stories, no more lying. Where have you been? Where did you go? Why are you leaving again? The hospital
wristband shows bright in the darkness. The same words from earlier echo through her head—suicide, anorexia, abuse. But none of them seem right. None of them are Silvie.

  “I will come back. You believe me, don’t you?”

  “I…” Gin wants to say yes, but it sticks in her throat, but no doesn’t feel right either.

  Her eyes sting hot. She thinks of all the stories she and Silvie used to tell as kids, reading Tam Lin and the Faerie Queen and making up their own adventures afterward. Here, in the cathedral stillness of the woods, Gin can believe all those stories are real.

  Should she throw her arms around Silvie, hold on as she changes to smoke and water and force her to stay? Or maybe there’s a magic spell, words to keep Silvie by her side. Words she’s never dared say aloud before. I love you. I need you. Don’t go.

  Silvie is the one who closes the space between them, sudden and almost violent. Her lips on Gin’s taste like the raw sting of cheap vodka, flecked with cigarette ash. Silvie breaks the kiss too soon, leaning their foreheads together so her eyes become all of Gin’s world.

  “I need you believe in me, Gin.” There’s a dangerous edge to the brightness in Silvie’s eyes. The silver is a knife, tucked into her gaze, but Gin can’t tell which way the blade will turn.

  I can’t get caught with this, Gin. You don’t have any priors, you hold it. I promise, everything will be fine.

  Silvie’s charmed bubble has always held before. The blade has never slipped, Gin has never been cut, but this time feels different. Silvie steps back. Holding the cigarette in the corner of her mouth, she unwinds the gauze from her wrist, revealing stitches.

  “Silvie, don’t…”

  Gin tries to move toward her, but some strange force of gravity holds her back. This, too, is like a dream, the kind where none of her limbs will obey her. She can’t reach Silvie, no matter how small the space is between them.

  “Smoke.” Silvie breathes out a stream. “That’s the first offering.”