The loop, p.6
The Loop, page 6
Oh god. I’ve officially snapped. I smell some fruit snacks, and now all is right with the world.
But Lucy decided that the feeling, however irrational, was one worth riding for as long as she could, so she slipped Brewer’s headlamp over her hair, flipped on the switch, and said, “Okay. Let’s party.”
Brewer flinched, and she realized the lamp was shining right into his eyes. “Goddamn, girl. Watch where you’re aiming. Trying to blind me by a big-ass hole in the earth?”
“Oh, sorry.” She couldn’t tell if he was really mad. She tilted the light on her forehead downward and looked up to see Brewer was smiling. Excited.
“Do that an hour from now and it’ll be like shooting rainbows into my brain.”
“Yeah, now that you mention it…” Bucket held out his hand with his palm up. Brewer passed him the keys to the truck.
“I’m trusting you, man. Don’t go grinding my gears. And don’t leave me out here, even if I tell you to leave me out here. Hell, especially if I tell you that. If I try to watch one more sunrise without blinking I’ll be blind for sure. Greg saved me last time. He shook me and said, ‘You can’t stare at the sun. You’re going to go blind.’ Which, you know, totally true. So I’m forever grateful for that. But what if Greg isn’t here to save me this time? Do you think he’s here? I hope he is. Good dude.”
Lucy and Bucket exchanged a look—He’s already starting to trip out.
“Anyway, once more into the breach.”
“What does that mean?”
“No idea. It’s what my cousin says when we’re about to do something crazy.”
Then Brewer walked over to the drop-off, got down on his knees, and steadied the top of one of the ladders.
“Wouldn’t take shit to anchor these with some tie-downs and rebar, but we have to pull these old guys in the morning. Used to be a nice staircase here, but the Forest Service removed it after some dipshits spray painted a bunch of swastikas on the cave walls and left a dead dog down there.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah. They torched a bunch of hibernating bats too, which is super illegal. My aunt said she heard it was Satanists that did it, but I told her it was probably just regular assholes. Maybe the Jessup brothers. Maybe some kids from the Butte. Town’s full of dicks. Close your eyes and throw a rock, right? Anyway, I’ll hold her steady until you’re down.”
Lucy knew that Bucket would probably like a steady descent too, but he was already walking toward the other ladder and starting his climb down. They could both sense that Brewer was doing this for her specifically.
Bucket’s ladder clattered against the stone, loose pebbles tumbling into the cave below. Brewer asked, “You got it, bud?”
“Yeah, dude.”
Lucy recognized Bucket’s flat tone—He’s getting bitchy. Is he nervous? Jealous? What am I going to have to deal with tonight?
She really had no idea, but there was a cool boy with candy on his breath waiting for her, and that was enough to send her down the “Stairway to Heaven.” She steadied her nerves as her legs hung over the drop, and after she found the first rung with her foot, she felt safe. Three rungs farther down and the horizon disappeared from view. She felt the cold and dark of the cave wrapping around her with each step. It was the same sensation she got from diving into the swimming hole out past the Pinewood campgrounds—the warmth was only at the surface, and everything below was beyond the reach of the sun.
Before she knew it, she’d descended thirty feet and was standing on the cave floor. She heard Bucket make landfall to her left. Brewer was already on the ladder above and rushing down.
Lucy aimed her headlamp up to try to help him, and saw a flurry of fast, flitting movement in the beam. Then she heard the high-pitched squeaking sounds and realized she’d never seen so many bats in her life. Maybe a hundred of them swirling up and out into the night, though these were so much smaller than the ones she’d seen darting around the dusky treetops as a child, and they were heading out much later than she thought natural. Something stirred under her skin.
Turn around.
But Bucket and Brewer were already plunging toward the light and sound at the heart of the cave. Lucy imagined the two ladders behind her emitting a keening metallic screech, like the tines of a tuning fork sending out a warning signal, calling out to her, pulling her back. But that felt crazy, and she was tired of feeling that way, so she ignored the bad vibes and joined her friends as they walked toward the bottom of an ancient hole in the world.
* * *
As far as lemons-to-lemonade scenarios go, maybe having your eye gouged out in a violent attack was worth it if it earned you a harem of sympathetic drunken cheerleaders. Lucy could see the jealousy on Bucket’s face, watching as Jake Bernhardt sat by the party fire like a one-eyed king on his Coleman ice chest, Lisa K on his lap and Tiffany Pedersen rubbing his shoulders and three other members of the cheer squad listening intently to whatever he had to say. Their faces were all sympathy and sweetness. Jake was damaged, a survivor. And even after everything that happened, he had come out to celebrate with his friends. So brave.
“That eye patch is a pussy magnet, Lu. What’d that guy even do? Act like an asshole and then get beat? How is that—”
“What? Fair?” Lucy could barely hide her annoyance. She had almost fainted when she saw Jake, and even now seeing him reminded her of too much. She thought about Chris Carmichael and Mr. Chambers and how neither would be the hit of the party any time soon. She thought about purple smoke and collapsing faces and at last the gravity of her decision to come to the party had landed and sat like a stone on her chest. And here was Bucket, thinking he’d trade an eye for a series of sympathy lays.
The worst part, what she didn’t even want to acknowledge, was that even if Bucket had been the one assaulted, he wouldn’t be in the same situation. He’d be One-Eyed Sandy to them. An easy punch line. Another thing to make him an Other.
Lucy placed a hand on Bucket’s back. He was right. “Fair” wasn’t part of the equation. Bucket looked over at Lucy, and she nodded at him. They were back on the same track.
Meanwhile, Brewer had jumped their track, derailed by his mushrooms and the excitement of finally arriving at the party. Lucy felt a little embarrassed by the way his attention had her head swimming.
What was that? What did I think was happening there?
Shortly after they’d found the first big opening in the cave—a sandy circle surrounded by stone, with a small wood fire and a gathering of students at its center—Brewer had looked from his hand to the fire, then back to his hand, then shook his head as if coming to an important decision. Then he leaned in toward Bucket and Lucy, voice lowered to a conspiratorial whisper, and said, “One hundred fifty thousand years of animals falling through that skylight up there.” He pointed up to a hole in the domed cave, which could barely be seen if you didn’t notice the smoke escaping though its eye. “Bear, horse, elk walking around and then, Whoops! and they’re down in the cave on broken legs, looking for a way out. That’s why the Native Americans called this the Skeleton Cave before white guys rebranded it. Supposed to be cleaned up, but I can feel the bones, y’all. The bones are still here.”
He looked to his hand, seeing some power there. “The vibrations are the same. This is a magnet.”
And with that, he was gone.
Lucy looked around for him for a while, staying stationary by the fire but tracking for movement and watching as more and more kids from school came fumbling over the rocks with coolers and cardboard half racks of lite beer. None of them were Brewer.
“He’ll come back around, Lucy.”
“Who?”
“Brewer.”
“Oh, I don’t care.”
“That’s cute. Maybe your white knight can hold the ladder for you again on the way up. Watch out, though—you can tell he wants to bury his face in your ass.”
“Shut up.”
“You shut up. I’m just fucking around.” He bumped her with his shoulder. “Besides, he has to come back. We have his truck keys.”
“You really know how to drive stick?”
“Barely. But Brewer would think he’s flying a fucking bone-hunting spaceship, so…”
“Yeah. It’s the right call.” Lucy looked around the cave and tried to ignore the looks of surprise and glares of resentment she caught when she accidentally made eye contact. This was not her crew. Nobody from band. Nobody from speech class. A ton of kids from the Butte. A few older guys she recognized from the skate park. Loads of girls from cheer squad and dance team, filling their phones with firelit duck-lipped selfies in preparation for the glorious day when everyone’s service finally worked again. A dark shape was high up the rocks near the cave wall, already hunched over, vomiting. Short hair, so not Brewer. Probably some Butte kid who’d shotgunned his sixer right when he’d shown up. She imagined how he’d probably felt minutes ago, his belly swelling with beer, his friends yelling, “Whooo!” as he chugged. He composed himself then stumbled back to the party. He nudged a friend, who tossed him a fresh beer and yelled, “Rally, bro!” The boy muttered, “Yeah. Rally,” in response, then lifted the new beer with a shaking hand and started the process anew.
No wonder the bats left.
“How long do you think we’ll be here, Bucket?”
Bucket was looking across the fire. Ashley Jorgensen had arrived, which meant Bucket wasn’t thinking anymore; instead he was dreaming about a world where Ashley was really attracted to him instead of playing him for help with math homework. Lucy knew Ashley only dated older guys, either snowboard bums or guys from the community college, but Bucket couldn’t get over a text Ashley had sent. It read Thinking about U, and included a dimly lit shot of herself in a short gray tee and white sleep shorts. Lucy supposed it was a more romantic message than Thinking about passing precalc without learning anything. At least she’d sent him a jerk-off fantasy. Others had taken more from him, and been less kind.
Still, she knew that his brain disappeared whenever he saw Ashley, so she wasn’t surprised he’d failed to hear her.
“Bucket?”
“What?”
“You wanna look for Brewer and head out, maybe, or…” She let the question drift off. Bucket was staring, laid low by fantasy. He was useless to her so long as the Idea of Ashley held sway. “Never mind, dude. And it’s creepy when you stare like that. You’ve got to work on intermittent glancing or something.”
“Sounds good.” It wasn’t much of a response, but the best she could hope for from a guy suffering dick-borne deafness. “I’m going to see if Tim Arnold has a couple of extra beers I can buy off him. You want one?”
She considered saying yes, but the situation already felt beyond her control. She couldn’t imagine piling any other complications into the evening, and her tolerance was negligible. She pictured herself in one of the corners of the cave, throwing up while people by the fire laughed at her lightweight status. Maybe someone would even snap a pic and run it through a funny filter that gave her giant eyes and a dog nose, or turn her into a cautionary three-second slow-motion puke clip. LoogieLosesIt.gif.
“No. I’m good.”
“Suit yourself, Lu. But I think we earned this. We earned something, at least, after the last couple of weeks. The world owes us. I’m going to have some fun tonight.”
And with that, he was gone.
One boy hunting bones, the other hunting fun, and Lucy left to herself without a friendly face in sight. She watched the fire for a moment, zoning on the tiny wavering cities falling to ash at its base. Then, as she had learned to do as a child, she became a ghost and wandered among the living.
* * *
The Hendersons encouraged Lucy to embrace her heritage, whatever that meant. They wanted her to take enough Spanish classes to retain her grasp on the language, while she did her best to bury her accent and speak clear, overenunciated English. They connected her with a school advocate to help her with the cultural and linguistic transition, but Lucy stopped meeting with her once she realized how those visits made her feel alien, as if she were a different species needing special handling. The Hendersons even offered to travel to Peru with Lucy after her senior year, to help her reconnect to her “motherland” and revisit the places she managed to remember from her parents’ near-vagrancy, like Pucallpa or the outskirts of Lima. She knew they meant well, but what they didn’t understand is that the moment they adopted her she placed her past in a small box in her heart, and locked it, and said, That time is done.
Because Peru, to her, was not her culture, or a land to which she felt some intimate connection aside from a few pleasant sense memories. Rather, it was the awful and perpetually unsure world her parents had created for her there. Her Peru was knowing that nobody was waiting for you when you needed them. It was knowing that you found your own food in the morning because not even slapping your parents would rouse them, and by evening they’d be gone again, so dinner was on you too. It was a school system that grew tired of trying to save her from her home and let her fade away so they wouldn’t have to face the shame of their failure. It was a place where nothing was solid, and often the only joy was found in drifting through the city as a hungry ghost.
She’d learned to be small and fast, so anyone who might try to stop her movement wouldn’t see her for long. If someone stared, then she’d stare back and say, “I’m hungry,” and that made her disappear again. Soon the only people who spotted her were those with bad intentions, and she’d learned to spot them too, and to flee.
She learned to listen, and found entertainment in the lives of others. She heard their stories floating from windows and felt she soon understood the city better than most. She fell asleep under cantata shrubs outside the nursery of a new baby named Sandro, stealing his lullabies for herself. She woke at dusk with tears in her eyes.
She learned which stores would look the other way if a ghost suddenly fled their store with a piece of fruit. She found the nooks and tuckaways in the city where the other ghosts would congregate and share what they had found. The memory of these riverside and concrete hiding spots was the only thing—aside from her favorite fruits—that she missed on occasion.
The truth was that Peru was gone, and the worst of it—that life of never-knowing, her parents’ fighting, the accident, the orphanage—was something Lucy had turned into an abstraction. So when the Hendersons pushed her to “embrace her heritage,” she felt they didn’t understand—her heritage was a dangerous feeling in her heart that she did her best to reduce to a permanent ache, and she feared that if she embraced it she might burn to death, like her parents.
The only thing she allowed herself were a few memories—the feeling of the river current, the taste of fruit, the beauty of the highland orchids—and her ability to disappear into the world of ghosts.
* * *
It was harder to fade from view in the East Bear Caves. First, Lucy was wearing a headlamp. Second, the terrain felt alien and unstable beneath her feet. What had Brewer said as they climbed over rough rock on the way down to the party?
“These are all old lava tubes, even the caves on the north side of town. Don’t know if you’ve ever fallen on lava rock, but I learned to ride my bike on this shit, and when I wrecked, it felt like I was rubbing a cheese grater on my knees. So plant each foot nice and steady and keep your hands ready to brace your fall because this stuff shifts all the time.”
Lucy pulled up her hoodie and tucked her hair inside. She killed her headlamp and gave her eyes a moment to adjust. People’s faces were moving shadows in the firelight. Within a few strides, she had found the darkness beyond the light of the fire.
She closed her eyes and tuned her ears to the noises of the cave: explosions of laughter, drunken proclamations, competing stereos playing hip-hop and pop-country. The distant, repetitive slap of somebody getting fucked from behind, the sound louder as the couple’s excitement overrode their desire for keeping their quickie on the low. The rattle of the aluminum ladders in the distance, new revelers pouring in. Woooo noises of growing frequency and volume, spreading like a sonic virus.
The party was heating up.
And what are you doing, creeper? Hiding again? Backing away? No wonder they treat you like you’re weird. You’re fucking weird. Go hang out by the fire. Talk to somebody. Laugh at some dumb jokes. Hit up Bucket for a beer, if he scored some. Come on!
But it was too late—Lucy had heard something else bouncing from the walls of the cave: the sound of another girl dropping her volume to dish in confidence. Lucy took it as both a challenge to her abilities as a ghost and an opportunity to learn some intriguing gossip. A game.
She crept closer. Three girls passing a glass pipe and butane lighter, shooting the shit. She had to get in range to hear what they were saying without the flickering light from their smoke session reaching her. When she felt she was close enough she squinted and aimed her ears, using her hoodie to press them forward. I’m batgirl, she thought. Please, god, don’t let them see me.
“… so anyway, I say to her, ‘Life hack, bitch: don’t have a fucking baby. He doesn’t give a shit about you anyway. You think he can pay for a kid working night security at the furniture store? He can’t even buy decent condoms.’ And she’s not a hundred percent sure she’s pregnant. She says her body feels different. So the next morning she hits Fred’s Pharmacy and took care of it, but then I talk to her a few days later and find out that maybe it didn’t work, and maybe it wasn’t even Ayden’s baby. If there was a baby at all.”
