I don’t remember when I met Lucy because it’s like she’d always been there. In my memories I can hardly discern her shape, just a detailed outline. A caricature. All I have is a feeling, a mist. A purple sweatshirt. The haze that lingers in my mind is pure and is still purple.
Purple sweatshirt Lucy had long straight brown hair, a round face with perfect cheeks, and glasses that she spent all day pushing up her nose, more out of compulsion than necessity. That long hair twists around everything I remember, blinds and wraps me up in a moment I can only return to if I inhale deeply with my eyes closed. The smell of lavender and dryer sheets. She had a way about her that was at once so effortless yet so plagued. There were a lot of things about Lucy I didn’t know, things she would never tell me. But knowing I didn’t know was enough. Meandering around our subdivision we talked about life and love and existential loneliness, the kind where you feel like you’re by yourself even if you’re surrounded by people. I don’t remember the routes we took but I remember the cotton candy softness of her presence. When I was with Lucy I floated above the ground.
Convenient and available, Lucy was intoxicating. It’s easy to abuse something that comes too easily to you, like having one too many or running up your credit card. The type of thing that leads to the numbing sort of rationalizing that you are simply a victim of external forces, when in actuality you’re a victim of the very reality you’ve fabricated. You have convinced yourself that you are the special case and the rules apply to everyone but you, and nothing is your fault. But you also know that there’s no hiding long term, and you can chew it up so it hits you faster, but the high only lasts so long.
I could cry until it was all out but I couldn’t give her what she deserved. I wanted to save her from everything but I wasn’t strong enough. My Lucy, I didn’t want to admire her from afar, I wanted to eat her alive. So then I could finally have all of her.
Lucy had two moms and I never met either of them but I felt their presence when we would hide out in her room, avoiding our homework by listening to music we weren’t supposed to and talking about a future that didn’t hurt so much. She was exceptional in so many ways and this was no different. There was a heaviness in her house, unspoken, but I knew it was something to fear. A weighty cloud of expectations, which by that time I had become very adept at noticing. I knew Lucy was safe, but I knew she deserved better. Her moms kept cats and parrots but she had no sheets on her bed. I thought of her falling asleep at night sitting upright in a wicker chair, wearing her purple sweatshirt.
On the days that my dad let me use his car I would take Lucy home from school. She didn’t drive, couldn’t be bothered. Nobody could tell her what to do, and no one tried. A master of silent obstinance, aloof but also simply unmoved in the calmest sense of the word. I followed rules all day long to the letter but what I really wanted was to jump off a diving board with my arms spread wide, to hit the water at full force. Chest crushed, outstretched arms flailing behind me like two broken sails floating in the water. Catastrophic and spectacular.
Lucy lived on Barrie Street and so did I, six blocks apart and on top of a hill. At the bottom of the hill where my house was, there was a highway and a river and a big yellow sign with arrows pointing to the right and the left. You could go east on the highway or west on the highway but you could not go straight into the river. I would drop Lucy at her hilltop house and then take my foot off the gas, coasting the remaining six blocks and gradually gaining speed as I reached the bottom of the hill. Every day thinking that there was nothing keeping me from plowing through that sign and its arrows and plunging my dad’s car right into the icy river. Not God, the law, not my parents’ love or expectations – nothing but me could save me and nothing but me could destroy me. The ultimate existential crisis. I was seventeen.
In English class we had a “cool” teacher who was just out of college and whose disdain for us intellectually inferior beings was palpable. Somehow he leveraged our curriculum into an excuse to play indie movies, the kind I’d later expect to be shown by a college boy from philosophy class as he took credit for the mind-blowing the whole plot was playing in reverse, don’t you understand? moment and expected me to praise him for it. Before he played some bullshit on his acoustic guitar, and before I fell asleep wishing that it all meant something, while knowing it couldn’t possibly.
Lucy’s desk was one seat over and one seat up from mine. Chris – as we were supposed to refer to him – would roll in a bulky television on a cart and as it played whichever awards show darling we were watching that week, in the dark I just watched Lucy instead. When she laughed out loud I laughed. When she was enthralled I watched her even more closely. When she was bored I boredom doodled too, drawing a connecting line between all the freckles on my left arm. When I got home from school my mom was mad about the prism I’d sketched, and I went to my room just like I would have anyway.
One day Lucy was not in her kitty-corner desk and would not be for another five weeks. I didn’t realize the severity of the surgery she was having but they had taken parts of her bones and fused them to her spine along with rods and wires and screws. I couldn’t wait to see her when she came back but when she did she was three inches taller, standing upright and confident as everyone buzzed around her. I was ashamed that I felt like something had been taken from me.
A few months later I moved to another state and I left behind Lucy and her two moms and our hilltop. Neither she nor I had cell phones but that wouldn’t have mattered anyway. When we were together we could stand shoulder to shoulder, one big person made out of two tiny ones. But we could not face Goliath alone, and apart we were like two magnets without polarity, two untethered balloons without gravity to hold us down and together. Nothing to hold us down and together.
Lucy got a job at a pizza place and married an older boy named Andy. He wrote her pages of lyrics from their favorite songs and he showed up at the pizza place with flowers, wearing his love on the outside like a neon sign. Then they had a baby and a joint checking account and became the kind of people who put out different decorations for each holiday season. I got a one bedroom apartment in a big city and made friends with the kind of people that cared about how many Twitter followers they had, and who languished in bars after-hours because the staff would let you smoke cigarettes indoors even though they weren’t themselves smokers. The kind of people who asked who my clothes were “by” as though they had been rented and then affixed to my body with flimsy little paper doll flaps. As though we had been painted into the dive bar in which we were standing by an artist both intrigued by and embarrassed for us.
I got up for work and went to work and came home and watched TV and went to bed and then got up for work and went to work and came home and watched TV and went to bed. Nothing was wrong, really, which was kind of the whole problem.
Then one day Lucy came to kill me.
It wasn’t hard to convince her, calling upon her loyalty. Though we had to make appropriate arrangements: no blood, no gore, no fingerprints, no screaming, no havoc, no violence. No paper trail, no surveillance video. No guilt, no regret. Only an abstract idea to grieve, a life snuffed out so mercilessly without anyone obvious to blame. My phone was full of messages from men who brought me Indian food and Hot Cheetos and who cat-sit and who texted me expecting something late at night, but they were all innocent and they never came anywhere as close to me as my Lucy.
And you see, no one would ever suspect her. I was to put on beautiful pajamas, a beautiful silken set of loungewear, place a giant hoodie over them and lie calmly in bed. She’d find the key under a brick next to the bucket where I put out cigarette after cigarette in the cold of the night alone, where I knew no one would look.
She petted my hair and whispered unintelligible but soothing things into my ear and then she pulled the hood of my tattered sweatshirt over my face and killed me. Tight strings. A surefire way to go.
I had fallen asleep every night for years dreaming about dying in my sleep, about all the worried and angry voicemails I would receive if I didn’t show up to work or a dental appointment and how bad those people would feel once they realized I had died and not ignored them but instead had found myself quite indisposed. They would eventually send someone to my apartment and find me peacefully stiff in bed, rigor mortis set in, wearing lovely matching pajamas. With a clean kitchen and all my pictures finally hung, for their final audience. Lucy left me daintily on a pillow, gracefully awaiting my eternal rest. The only sign of trauma being broken capillaries in my face if you looked really closely. That and the fact that I couldn’t move. Because I was dead.
I couldn’t have done it myself. I needed a clear conscience, not to tarnish my reputation posthumously, to give my parents something besides me to blame, and to derive the requisite pity of someone who is inexplicably murdered in their own home. The news would report that there was no forced entry, no fingerprints, probably an angry ex-boyfriend. A random drunk stranger let into the building by an equally drunk neighbor. I was sloppy, stupid, a single woman without the sense to lock her door at night. But it was Lucy who drove 343 miles to kill me, just like I had asked, and then drove home to her pizzeria and her life without me.
I don’t know how long Lucy stayed with me, but she slipped away as easily as she had come. Like a deadly vapor she slowly filled the room, then dissipated as quickly as she had manifested. She left my cat an overflowing bowl of food, because she knew the last thing I wanted was to be discovered with my face eaten off by a starving and impatient animal. No, that would not be poetic, would not be the kind of story my mom could tell her friends. I wanted to die like a spectacle, a goddamn firework display demanding everyone’s attention and awe.
Lucy tossed my key out onto the raging highway somewhere on the interstate, long brown hair whipping around her face in the wind tunnel of the open window.
She killed me so sweetly. The ultimate act of love. She held me while I died, and the last thing I saw was her brown eyes. She wasn’t wearing her purple sweatshirt, but I went to sleep in a purple haze anyway.
Halfway home it felt safe to stop, no unusual credit card charges to be flagged, back where people lived miles apart, kept their heads down and minded their own business. A gas station complex rose out of the cornfields like a giant cement disco ball and as the only person in a fourteen stall bathroom Lucy washed her face, washed under her fingernails, re-braided her hair. And then she walked up and down the aisles, tracing her fingers along the novelty shot glasses and livestock figurines and packages of mini donuts. She bought a strawberry-kiwi Snapple with cash and a postcard with a fish on it that said Havin’ a Reel Good Time! She called her daughter Little Tuna.
Two hours later she pulled into her driveway, slipped in through the side door, took off her sneakers and was tiptoeing across her kitchen when she fumbled and dropped her keys on the tile floor. Andy stirred on the couch, his body doubled nearly in half to fit, dutifully waiting up for her. He loved Lucy deeply, wholly, blindly, probably stupidly. She could have come home with a facial piercing and he either would not have noticed, or would have trusted her decision-making, keeping his feelings to himself.
“Hi Lulu,” he mumbled, half-asleep. “How was Giancarlo’s tonight? It’s been awhile since they’ve made you pull a double.”
Lucy placed the fish card on the fridge with a plastic alphabet magnet, down by her knees at a toddler’s height. She padded across the carpet and plopped down in a chair across from him, finally exhaling. Taking off her glasses, she rubbed her eyes and answered.
“It was dead.”