THESE THINGS HAPPEN by JoAnna Novak

Her name was Althea. When she was fifteen, she hosted Soundtrack Saturdays, and once her co‑host, a junior wearing Vans and arm cuffs, stood her by the microphone and knelt under the table, squeezed her birthmarked knee, and ate her out until she came on air, faking a hiccup before a song by Garbage. When she was younger, Althea’s father lavished her: he took her to a bookstore by the riverwalk; taught her words like demilune and gallnut; and whether the gift could be dog-eared or lost in Althea’s mouth like milk or mustard, he hugged her. A wry, tonsured man in rectangular glasses, Avery Zafaris’s embrace was intentional. He respected her; he loved her.
It started when she was six. Her older brother was already out of the house, at boarding school up north by Lake Michigan. He had left crates of toys: plastic chicken legs, plastic hamburgers; a band of scaly dinosaurs. One morning, Althea’s mother found Althea in the den. Posed on the desktop were a stegosaurus, a tyrannosaurus, and two naked dolls between them. The dolls’ legs were wrapped in fabric loops from the potholder kit; their wrists, overhead, were also wrapped. Althea’s mother scooped up her daughter and boxed her son’s toys. Let’s play nice, she said, frowning like an owl. Your father has made you so odd. From then on, Evie Leighton-Zafaris spent her free time with her daughter. They did wholesome things, stewed D’Anjous into pear butter or visited the zoo, where they’d nibble animal fries, salty, soft, shaped like sloth bears, which were actual animals, according to placards, only extinct. If you were too strange, too big, too much, watch out – Evie let Althea deduce that. She’d taught grade-school art, until her daughter was born, and she still painted, fairy lands with spires and turrets, vines twisting over castles. They mesmerized Althea. All the dark corners her mother had missed. In a painting outside the bathroom with the Mickey shower curtain, swaths of fog cloaked the walls of a palace and Althea knew that inside was a dungeon she could only enter with a bloody key. Air sour as boiled eggs. A rank moat swam with bugs. Men dripped molten honey on maidens on the rack, splayed, rag-gagged, gasping for what they craved. Meanwhile, her mother wrote to family, reporting her daughter’s precocities: She invented a board game, Cats’ Mishaps.
Althea’s father was a therapist. Dr. Avery Zafaris was suburban-famous for “The A-Z,” a segment he hosted on WGN that demystified raising adolescents. At his office, he forewent lunch, drafting scripts, to free nights and weekends for family. Then he was his inquisitive self, except wittier, flirtful. He picked up a bottle of sauvignon blanc and Thai: fresh spring rolls; two orders of shimmering, oleaginous pad woon sen – his daughter was hooked. He asked her about tests, and indifferent Althea shared her grades (96, 99), until, finally, kindling her chopsticks, she’d pounce on gossip. In fourth grade, the history teacher hickied Andrea Parsell; in fifth, rat-tailed Zed pinched the choirmaster’s nipple. Althea Elaine, please, her mother said. Her father laughed. Imagine if we had a boring kid, he said. She’s going to be lonely, Evie said. Hey there lonely girl, Avery sang, and Althea joined him in falsetto.
She was lonely for much of school, only too stubborn to admit it. Boredom was a sign of being boring; loneliness followed the same rule. The summer after eighth grade, Althea’s parents enrolled her in day camp by the riverwalk. The camp was called Edgemere, a lush Eden of garths and cloisters behind calligraphic iron gates, perfect for creative starvelings. Three two-week sessions, each devoted to a medium. Photography to start. Althea brought her camera, which, until this summer, had shot aardvarks and ratty little jerboas in Brookfield’s small mammal house. At Edgemere, Althea saw black-and-whites by Ansel Adams and Sally Mann. Learning foreground and background was like uncovering the legend to a map. Your background doesn’t disappear, the teacher explained. It’s muted. Suppressed.
There had not been girls she got along with at school, but at camp Althea met a waify brunette named Natalie who looked like she’d wandered in from Oliver Twist. She had an orphaned, depleted aspect that captivated Althea – ringlets and a pinafore would’ve suited her, this girl, so yearnful, she’d probably gobble an apple down to the core, seeds and all, even if an orchard grew in her stomach.
They were partnered for the last project: portraits that revealed a biographical truth about the subject. To prepare, they interviewed each other. The teacher provided a list of questions that Natalie used and Althea didn’t. It was a green, humid day. The girls sat cross-legged under a magnolia on a damp patch of petals verging on rot. Althea wore khaki shorts and her Edgemere tank. Natalie had on a wrinkly hippie skirt that accentuated her stick legs and a turtleneck under her camp shirt. Somewhere in Naperville, an ambulance howled. Althea asked: Is Citizen Kane a film or a movie? What’s your favorite holiday? Why are you wearing two shirts? Natalie put down her notebook, stuck her pen in the spiral, and rolled up her sleeves. The rest of her body froze when she showed Althea her forearms. The skin was hairless, skim-milk pale, and rowed with dried-blood slashes, each as long as a stick of gum. Althea nodded; she ran a pinky over the scabs, one by one. They were rough, like stitches in the mended quilt her mother used on picnics. Then sadness hit Althea with such force that her stomach buckled. Natalie had hidden a part of herself that Althea recognized as haunted and real and beautiful. I’ll take care of you, she promised silently. She tied a blade of grass in a knot and handed it to Natalie. They had all afternoon. After vegetarian corndogs and pudding in the cafeteria, they went to the prop room and Althea photographed Natalie with a calico cat, its one whisker kinked into a question mark.
Althea was eighth in a class of 973 her first year in high school. For her stellar GPA, her father bought her a pair of emerald studs that she never took out – she didn’t have the seconds to waste. Life possessed the monocular quality of a dash. And then, at the beginning of sophomore year, there was Natalie: her family had moved districts. Her locker was in the C Wing by Althea’s, two minutes from the vending machines where Pepsi products were a dollar, and on the way they went by glamour shots of athlete-heroes past – in jerseys, teeny shorts, foot propped on volleyball, elbow on knee, fist under jaw – hissing we survived. For once, Althea had a friend. They met at 7:43 a.m., and the rest of the day the two orbited, detouring their routes between classes so they could be together. They drank so much soda, they switched to diet. They talked close enough to smell the aspartame curdling their breath. There was so much to say and no one before had been right to tell.
Since Edgemere, they had written letters that, on Natalie’s end, grew increasingly personal. Her parents were lawyers, “out of the picture,” in Natalie words; she’d spent her childhood with a neighborhood couple who had a tree house for their grandson Max. He was posset-pallored, with a knack for meanness, Natalie wrote. Not just meanness.
All year Althea and Natalie passed a leopard fur notebook. It was strokable, cheekable, smotherable. Althea wanted to breathe it in, track Natalie’s ruby nail polish streaks, lick the lost molecules of her perfume. It didn’t bother Natalie to write about Max; she just didn’t want to talk about him. Out loud. She didn’t want to pollute the air with his name. She wrote: I am not a victim. These things happen – happened. Much, much, much worse could’ve gone down. It’s not like I’m a misandrist. He had blackmailed her into a game of Truth or Dare that spanned summers, puberty. Dares. Predictable. No one forced me to go to the tree house, she wrote. Fascinated by fluids, he dared her to ingest an array of them, hers, his. Lick this: icepack (melted), armpit (sweaty), hedgehog (mysteriously damp), belt buckle (gold). What Natalie had endured or enjoyed shifted, but Althea never doubted her. How could she? She kept their correspondence with her Edgemere portfolios in a Marshall Fields box, and whenever she went into the box, she was rocked with ecstasy, routine as the carbonation kiss when you open a soda. The details, she couldn’t forget. They popped into her head when she ran laps in gym: He dared me to put a Super Soaker inside me; so, okay. Not okay, Althea insisted, panting the last mile. Fucked. Up. It had happened to Natalie, but Althea was beginning to feel it had happened to her, too. The more she reread the notes, the more the past became hers, a film starring a vaguely pretty any-girl caught in a tree house.
Althea wrote back and told Natalie how much she loved her. How they would go to the same college in the same Los Angeles and be roommates. They would rent a tiny apartment with only enough room for a queen-size four-post bed, with Velcro handcuffs around one of its posts, and a mirror above it like her parents’, and a mini-fridge for diet Pepsi and whipped cream. They would lure boys into the apartment, boys whose minds they’d blow, boys who’d crawl and beg and weep, who’d buy them fat-free, sugar-free, free, free, free frozen yogurt, with sprinkles, rainbow sprinkles, boys they’d kick out when the sex got old. Strange sensations met Althea when she described this future. She felt disembodied. Heard a ringing in her right ear. Saw peripheral shimmers. Head light as a balloon, she felt as though she were sprinting toward an invisible finish line, sitting in Trig-PreCalc, watching triangle-haired Miss Duke solve for X and Y. She would be sitting there, bouncing her knee and writing in purple pen, until, eventually, her heart would calm down. She’d trace the birthmark on her knee. She’d press her ear: the ringing was gone. So was the shimmer. She looked around and saw only a stack of paper plates for learning Sine, Cosine, Tangent.
She had no trauma to match Natalie’s, no questionable conduct to misconstrue. She thought about being a child: what had occupied her mind, whether her disposition might not have given her an edge, the radiance of madness or daring. What if the old her was gone, lost like the dungeons and captive dolls? Wrecked by normalcy and love, maybe she’d missed out when she could have endured a lot. How many chances did you get to know how special it was to hurt?
Dan Nief was not one of those chances, though Althea and Natalie agreed that going down on a girl was the epitome of baffling. What dizzy magic taught man that cursiving Dropkick Murphy’s lyrics in a girl’s vagina would get him sex? There was something bruinish about Dan. He wore a bumblebee flannel over his arm cuffs, loved the Singles soundtrack, and slurped. He wants me to know he’s down there, Althea said. Um. I do. I know what I taste like, Natalie said after Althea told her about orgasming on WLTL. A sponge wiping up a cutting board of cantaloupe. Mmm, Althea said. Watery.
That became code when Natalie started dating Friel, when Althea moved on to Zerkel. Watery. Handsy. Chokey. Boyfriends came and went, dates over bread bowls, bowling alley coffee, basement math rock. They got almost-serious, almost-exclusive, almost-I-Love-You before Althea and Natalie took over the relationship.
What do you want? Althea wrote in the leopard notebook.
To drink Friel like REGULAR Pepsi, Natalie wrote; :) haha to be so close to a person that even if just for a second you become them.
I <3 you, Althea drew with the eraserhead of her pencil; in No. 2 lead she bubble-lettered: LA.
La apartment, la city, la future, they wrote. They stanched their hunger for la later by laminating the present: It was more exciting recounting what they did than doing it. They spoke under their breath, engendered an aura, the particular haut monde of self-harm, and knew pain was more precious than a junior prom corsage. People say we’re pretentious bitches who ruin boys’ lives, Natalie reported in October, after Althea dumped Zerkel the morning of Homecoming. She was pretzel-legged on the carpet next to Althea in the study grotto of the library, surrounded by college brochures. It’s going around the green room. Althea peeled a string off her celery and dropped it on her tongue. Boasting was boring, she thought. Brag with your body. Bones, cuts, good bruises – best were bruises. Blood maps. Hello, Natalie said, tapping Althea’s knee. Does that matter to you? People are sensitive cunts, Althea said. Most boys deserve ruin. She sucked on her highlighter and tasted her own spit. Nothing will ever be like this, she wanted to say. Instead, she looked at her wish list of colleges. Being a snob means you know you’re attention-worthy, Althea said. She patted Natalie’s head. Supercilium is Latin for eyebrow.
Classmates may not have appreciated the vocabulary, but colleges did. Choices arrived. They’d both applied to schools in Los Angeles, but envelope by envelope their dream of living together dissolved. The definition of pathetic – i.e., queasily codependent – would’ve been applying to only the same places, but with decisions before them – nary a West Coast waitlisting; none, not even in kitty-corner states – it struck Althea that the universe might be against them. They’d been basted together, loosely, swiftly by circumstance; now it would be easy to rip them apart.
I’ll email, Natalie said in August, the day before her parents drove her to Ohio. They were diet-Pepsiing on the catwalk, a tunnel of crisscrosses over the Tri-State, puffing vanilla cloves and blowing sweet smoke into the exhaust-fleeced sky. Their cigarettes crinkled. I’ll email every day. Her voice broke. Every goddamn day.
Let’s be honest, Althea said. I probably won’t.
Stop it, Natalie said. Not funny. She took out a pen and carefully wrote her new address on Althea’s hand.
When she was done, Althea starfished her fingers and looked at it: Ohio zip code, .edu. Inside her skin, her bones became heavy. She stuck her fist in her pocket.
Not on purpose, she said. It’ll just happen. Suddenly, she couldn’t remember how to be a person. She heard herself. Phlegmatic. We’ll trail off or I’ll be dead – I’ll be a beautiful dead princess without you.
I don’t think that’s funny.
What? You went to Florida and didn’t send a postcard. Remember? I got slicey.
If you kill yourself, I kill myself, Natalie said. You can consider that a threat, okay? She dropped her cigarette into traffic. Do you have lip gloss?
Althea took out a tube. Natalie puckered her lips, the only fat part about her, and Althea painted with thick gloppy stokes, until they glistened. Shone, her lips, glassy and wet, they were so, so pretty. Like the chicken pox scar on Natalie’s chin. What were you supposed to do with this, everything you loved about someone? If you were only going to drift apart? Althea turned and looked out at the cars. Eight lanes, nine, with Ogden’s on-offs. Constant, engulfing sound, like jamming your skull in a seashell or becoming the ocean.
Done, Althea said. She bit her tongue and put the tube back in her purse.
See? Perfect, Natalie said, rubbing her lips together. Don’t be all death and gross. I’ll email you, I’ll call you. I’ll send you a million letters. SWAK: Sealed. With. A. Kiss.
How often Althea had wondered if (no, when) this would happen. Here it was. She leaned forward until their sticky lips pressed, closer, touching, vanilla mouths melting on the grave candy of ash and stargazer lilies pulverized in the gloss; she itsy-bitsy-spidered up Natalie’s neck and made a two-handed choker and squeezed her, pulled her, closer. She was moaning, purring, quietly purring in Natalie’s mouth, but it felt obligatory or onanistic or just weird. For the first time in years, Althea wished she were alone. Below, a fleshly truck driver shepherding a blue semi to Wisconsin laid on his horn.

* * *

Althea wrote first. A week into classes, she addressed a lavender envelope to Natalie the Beautiful, W-Box 1362. No reply. When two weeks had passed, she typed a rhapsodic email. There was St. Louis; the Forsyth dorm, brainy barista hunks, stone lions guarding the art museum; scrubby dreadlocked Karen, her RA who had a screed on the abuse of the word GIRL, as in, this is not an all girls’ dorm; the GIRLS comparing stretch marks . . . i.e., NOT a pleasant stairwell activity; all that plus, how lonely she was and was Natalie lonely, or hurting, or remembering all the bad things with Max all over again, too? Big changes trigger things, she wrote. PS. I hate life without you.
The email held its breath in her Drafts folder until one midnight, dizzy after mandatory, suite-bonding Twister, she pressed SEND. Eleven days later, Natalie wrote back:

Althea: Once a portraitist, always a portraitist. (Is that a word?) You should do my satire essay for the comp course I’m taking/being forced to take. It’s called Precept, but that gilds the lily. Sorry about your dorm. I like my all-GIRLS floor. My roommate Heather and I started a tradition called Sunday Tea. We watch Masterpiece Theatre and drink – you guessed it – tea. With whisky. Naughty sotties!
♥
Natalie

       Althea read it twice, nose so close to the computer screen that she smelled static electricity. It was time for lunch, but she skipped the cafeteria, bought a tube of peanuts and a can of diet Pepsi from the Grab-n-Go cart, and went to the art building forty minutes early. She sat on a couch by the elevators, studying the top of her soda, until it was time for class. Then she bent the pop tab back and forth, down the alphabet, and without forcing it, the tab came off at N. She left the peanuts behind a rubbery throw pillow.
How easily you vanished if you did not tribe with other girls. Without anyone to talk to, days began to pile up. They never happened. Fall semester, she went to class and took photographs in Forest Park, waiting for the raptor statues to come alive at sunset. She walked the unlit wooded trails and dared the world to send her menace from the bushes. Every time she got back to campus unscathed and climbed those three flights of stairs to her suite, she felt defeated to be alive. She ended the night with a movie. She watched at her wall-facing desk, in front of her hulking computer, blinds up, lights off, door locked. She must’ve replayed the tree scene in Belle du Jour fifty times, but Requiem for a Dream was on when her roommate came in, wearing a Cardinals visor and carrying a jack-o-lantern, while onscreen one woman pegged another with a black dildo. For the rest of college, Althea had a single and on Sunday afternoons, she wrote to Natalie. Natalie, enrobed in bergamot steam, tittering at Masterpiece Theatre, flicking crumpet crumbs off a cardigan. The emails began conversationally, deteriorated into sentiment, and plummeted toward accusations. I love you. I miss you. You’re distant. You hate me. Tell me why. What did I do to you?
She sent a handful but by midterm gave up. She still wrote them, though, to reread with the gluey, sordid fascination of an addict facing the mirror and recounting rock bottom.
Still, that December, Althea went home hopeful. Of course Natalie would call. She would invite her to the bowling alley for hot chocolate, half the cup with whipped cream; she could hear her asking if she wanted to bundle up, take the Metra downtown, watch skaters wipe out on the rink at Navy Pier. None of that happened, and Althea was not surprised, and the more she explored how unsurprised she was, the more it stung. In the shower, she punched her hipbones until the flesh broke out in tiny red fireworks. She was so embarrassed – so stupid.
One afternoon, Althea and her mother went to buy a tree from the Boy Scouts’ lot behind the high school. The sun was muddy pink, and the snow was hardly falling, dissolving before it hit your skin. How’s Natalie? Evie asked, breaking a needle from a Douglas fir. Althea glanced at the machine that squeezed the trees in orange net. In London, she said, clearing her throat. Seeing “The Mousetrap.” That sounds nice, Evie said. She turned down the next aisle of trees and Althea shut her eyes. She did not lie to her parents like this, she omitted things. She felt sick. The ringing in her ear was louder than Mariah Carey octaving on the radio, and over it or through it or despite it, her mother’s voice: Would a blue spruce be too messy, Al? What do you think?
She did not think. She did not think or do much of anything for the entire rest of break. She wore purple fuzzy socks and shunned her parents until, on Christmas Day, the family ate guac, tacos, and mango flan before playing Taboo, a game Althea had been good at since third grade.
Still. It was not in her makeup to stay depressed. She realized this going back for spring semester, when she caught herself feeling clear, revived. She had hope. No matter how many harrowing movies she watched or poison epistles she penned, she had hope. In what? She didn’t know, she didn’t care.
She devoted herself to everything she could accomplish on her own. She bought binders. Threw out razors. Dyed her hair red. Took pictures of graffiti on the campus bridge. Stocked her mini-fridge with diet Pepsi from Schnuck’s. Brought a can-do attitude to isolation, a habit she saw no reason to break. Two years went by like this, an era she dubbed her stoic phase. She ate by herself and kept to herself and studied on her own and touched herself in a way she thought of as fucking herself and felt like a badass, superhero nun.
She was over her. She thought she was over her. March of junior year, she went through her inbox and deleted the few Natalie emails she had once received. They were gone with a click and then everything was weird, like cutting your bangs. She stared at the screen, paused, and took a sip of diet Pepsi. She X‑ed out of her email. After thirty seconds, the word of the day screensavered before her: PULE. There was a woolen clench in her throat, a deep burning hurt in her eyes; she was alone, and she didn’t care if anyone reported her to the Dean of Student Life, if she scandalized the floor, let them hear her, she was a crier. She sobbed, for the first time in a long time. She saw Natalie, pictured her on the catwalk, a blurry wraith with famished eyes climbing a rope ladder tied to the trunk of an oak. Althea pushed her keyboard aside. She leaned forward, aimed her forehead, and threw herself at the desk. Her skull hit. She put her peace fingers between her eyebrows and felt for blood. None. She did it again. Again. And she felt like she’d bash a hole through the particle board if she didn’t see Natalie, so she took the Fields box off the high, deep shelf in her closet next to the tampons and brought it into her bed, where, sickened and touched by the one-track recklessness of her own heart, she pored over the photos. Most of them were from Edgemere – the stuffed cat’s paws crossed in Natalie’s lap, Natalie pouting; the cat perched on Natalie’s head, Natalie rolling her eyes and smirking at Althea.
Her cranium throbbed. Eventually, cried out, she swept the photos into the box and closed it. The electricity was leaving her blood and her blood was now just liquid in her brain. A benumbed comfort descended, and she remembered how she had adored blackouts and power outages as a child, dreamed of a life lit by kerosene lamps and rocky road ice cream you had to eat before it melted in the freezer. She blew her nose and put away the box.
It was senior year when she decided she was ready. She could experiment. All art students exhibited in the senior show. Althea had read about the Karen Carpenter movie Todd Haynes made with Barbies and, after much hunting on the Internet and pestering of the media librarians who sat like eager puppies behind the elliptical desk at Olin Library, she obtained a pristine VHS that she watched in one of the basement screening carrels, wearing a pair of headphones that smelled not-unpleasantly like Orange Crush. Shortly after that, to the surprise of her parents, she took a five-hour train home. They were in the process of moving; Avery had retired, and they’d bought a two-bedroom condo that was a walk from the Music Box Theater and a short drive to the parish where Althea’s brother was priest. While her parents were picking up Thai, Althea went down to the basement. On the built‑in benches that lined the walls, cardboard boxes printed with calla lilies, each neatly labeled in Evie’s print, held the aftereffects of the family. Patrick’s Toy’s. Althea’s Toys. Baby clothes 12–18 mos. She found the dinosaurs and her old dolls under a pod of stuffed seals and an ancient can of sweetened condensed milk.
There were the same noodles that night, and the easy prattle made her feel like an alien; Vouvray was the new Sauvignon Blanc. When’s the screening? Evie asked. Middle of May, Althea said. Her mother licked a peanut off her lower lip. You know we’re going to Le Puy then? What? Your brother’s parish’s pilgrimage. Avery refilled everyone’s wine. He had started, she noticed, wearing a silver bracelet. The Sisters of St. Joseph were founded in Le Puy, France, he said. They saw women whose poverty was so threatening, they were desperate. They’d resorted to prostitution. The Sisters offered the women sanctuary. They shared the scripture and they taught them a skill. Tatting. In other words, making—. Lace, Althea said, brusquer than she meant. I know what tatting means. We’ll be there through the middle of June, Evie said. It’s good that you’re here. We wanted to . . . well, we didn’t want to ask over the phone. Althea speared her chopstick through a scallion and dragged it around on her plate. Would you be disappointed if we weren’t at graduation? Althea looked around the room. Her mother’s latest painting hung on the wall across from the short end of the table. It was a departure, Evie had said earlier: a thatched-roof cottage before a misty pond where four swans glided. Of course not, Althea said. I don’t even really want to walk. She sipped her wine. In that bucolic cottage, there were rapist farmers, she decided. Pitchforks, hoes, shovels . . . the poor swans. She listened to her mother explain serendipity (France! Coinciding with their thirtieth wedding anniversary!) and waited to feel angry. Anger is good, her Lighting II professor said, anger you can use. If she had wanted her parents to ask about her idea for the film, if she had wanted them to know what she was obsessed with, she would’ve been angry. She didn’t, so she wasn’t. Her parents were thoughtful people.
The next morning, she left, her backpack too lumpy to wear. She sat in the business class car of a train to St. Louis eating cold spring rolls and storyboarded the entire ride. She glanced out the window at the shadowy, scarecrow towns in southern Illinois. She caught herself stuck there, grinning at her own reflection in the window, her mouth rictal and awkward, criminal, like someone hatching a heist. She felt giddy off the fumes of staged retribution.
The film came together quickly. She had taken a few classes. She knew basic animation and editing. To obtain footage, she did not need much more than a room with a door and a table, conditions she found easily: she did all of her shooting in an old halfway house that the Art Department had nicknamed the Hatch and repurposed into a student workspace. Her name was chalked on the door of an area with walls the color of strawberry milk and a concrete floor. The door had a padlock. She left the dinosaurs, the dolls, equipment, small props, and the Fields box inside her studio.
The whole building was keycoded, but she didn’t like being away from her project. She did not like returning to her dorm, work unfinished. She couldn’t rest. She couldn’t sleep. In bed, she found herself thinking about Edgemere, and Natalie, and the baked smell of summer grass, pudding in the cafeteria, plaiting blades of grass. Then she would wake up, in a morning she’d arrived at as though by redeye. Dreamless, direct. If she got to the Hatch late, she’d catch other people talking in the kitchen, where the Mr. Coffee was always juiced. The sociable art students needed to go on, sound smart to raise themselves onto that shaky platform of confidence and focus: That’s mischaracterizing her. She’s not dark at all. Everything’s dark. Not especially. Read Mulvey: you can’t escape girls on film being girls caught on film. Scopo – wrong. Althea slipped into her studio and shut the door. There was a stuffed tabby on her worktable and she put the animal on her head. She faced the tripod and closed her eyes. His name was Max, she said in her best Natalie voice. Truth or Dare?
A week before the screening, Althea went to the mailroom and found a slip in her mailbox; at the window, she traded it for a package, a padded envelope larger than a newspaper. There was no sender listed and her own name was typed out in a coltish, serif font. She opened it in her room, took out the contents, and leaned it against her headboard. She sat at the foot of the bed and looked at it. From another room on the floor, she heard the opening of “Eight Days A Week.” It was a color photograph inside a sharp-cornered black frame. A lawn rolled out, sumptuous as a bolt of green velvet. In the foreground, a robin perched on the bowl of a concrete birdbath, its crescent breast glittering with water. Beyond that, Althea recognized a Skip-It, tossed in the grass like an oversized bubble wand. In the background, there was an enormous tree with a vast branch span and a castle sprouting out of the leafy cleft in its trunk, red and yellow pennants garlanding the ramparts. Two children stood in front of the trunk, holding their hands up in a Victory V. The boy was a buzz cut smudge. The girl could best be represented by a sparsely whiskered calico cat. The note on the back was typed in the same font as the envelope label, on a piece of paper smaller than the package slip. Parents sent this from neighbors. Me and the Monster. Thought you’d want to see him after all these years. The Beatles became Pearl Jam. Althea slid off her bed and opened her email. It was the only thing to do.
For the screenings, Althea dressed up in a vegan leather skirt that hit just above the knee and an utterly Natalie turtleneck. She hurried across campus. Her Chelsea boots clacked through the portico and down the wide stairs, and she thought how she sounded like a person of distinction coming, even if she was hugging her elbows. It was a warm, purple night, with a perfect half moon pinned to the sky. A word for twilight, she thought, head ducked. Crepuscule. A voice in her head said, Use it or lose it, babe. She pressed the emerald in her ear and walked toward the contemporary art museum, an angular, glassy building that looked like a skyscraper deconstructed and reassembled by chance.
She went inside. With its vaulted ceilings and stark walls, the foyer usually gave off a discomfiting austerity, but now the space glowed with champagne. The graduating artists, their housemates and classmates and parents and siblings and professors and boyfriends and girlfriends from other states and countries thronged around tables of cheese and fruit and crackers and, off to the left, a cake stand of Peeps. Althea scanned the crowd, caught the eye of no one she knew, and held her mouth firmly shut. She got a glass of red wine and went into Theater B. Her director’s chair was marked, the second seat from the left end of the front row. There would be a Q&A to follow each film. She picked up the program and read her name, Althea Zafaris, “These Things Happen.”
With the program to her chest, she stood there, looking back at the fifty chairs that soon would fill. A windbreaker here, a hobo bag there, the sort of weathered suede satchel she’d never been able to pull off, and soon, if she trusted the email, the ticket number, the train schedule, the arrival time, that element of grace that glanced on the world, Natalie. What would she look like, how would she smell, where would they begin, and why would they end, this time? A strange laugh tickled Althea. She saw a shimmer – she was staring into the projector. She turned around and imagined her dolls, their hair moussed, their nipple-less volcano breasts and placid crotches encompassing the screen. And then, what they’d force on the men. The men, the dinosaurs: the power of the zoom was that, close enough, a hole was a hole and anything going in it too rough was torture. In her head, Althea rehearsed the answer to the only question she was sure someone would ask her: How can this be true? She could almost hear the wheedling voice of ignorance, fat on Ritz and amity. When I was a girl, I practically lived at my neighbor’s, she would begin. There was a boy. Max. She cracked her knuckles and sat down, crossing one leg over the other, so the knee with the birthmark was on top.

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JoAnna Novak is the author of the novel I Must Have You (Skyhorse, 2017). Her stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Fence, Subtropics, The Journal, and BOMB.