Notes from Ghost Town (3 page)

My heart drops like a weight.
The party 2nite
—I hate the way parents text. My dad obviously thinks I’m
excited
to spend my Fourth of July at some lame business event with
rich real-estate execs and their boob-jobbed housewives. Of course, he doesn’t know much about what excites me anymore. He hasn’t been around a lot recently; he divides his time between his soon-to-be-wife Heather and his creepy, soon-to-be-condo-complex for rich people, Elysian Fields. His Texas doesn’t drip out anymore when Heather’s around. It gets squinched in, flattened into something else.

A few months ago, when I found out Dad was going to marry Heather—literally, the most boring, Hallmark-card woman on earth—I couldn’t believe it. They’d only been dating a little over a year—met at some support group for people with “loved ones afflicted by emotional instability,” back before the divorce was even official yet. I didn’t even know he’d been a part of the group in the first place.

He and Mom had been separated less than three months and already he and Dingbat were busy falling in love. And then he proposed to her. He called me up on the phone on a Monday morning in January, right before first period—art history—and broke the news in a soft voice, like that would make it easier to take. I had to hang up so I could puke. Until then, I’d still been holding on to this idea that Heather was just a placeholder, a temporary fixture in Dad’s life while he figured out that he could never love anyone but Mom.

My colors were gone at that point anyway, so I stopped painting entirely, shoved all of my art supplies into a big army bag so I wouldn’t have to look at them. Instead of
doing homework, I went to parties and made out with too many angsty art boys to count, before I let myself fail out of school entirely and returned home to Miami. I’ve been back a month and a half; it’s amazing how slow time has gotten, like clocks themselves have learned to work less quickly.

I still haven’t even told Dad about the Gray Space, the color blindness. I keep thinking maybe if I don’t talk about it, the color will come back.

Honnnnnk
. The Mercedes behind me blares its horn. The light in front of me must have turned green several seconds ago. I toss my cell phone onto the coffee-stained passenger seat and put my foot on the gas. “I’m going!” I yell—to myself, to the cloudless, ash-colored sky, to my rearview mirror. “I’m going.”

Heather’s sipping iced tea at the kitchen table when I get home. “Oh, good, you’re back!” she says, her pointy features harnessed upward toward her tight, blond ponytail. She looks almost albino to me—both her hair and skin this mute light gray. “Dave was starting to worry you’d forgotten about tonight. Did you have a good—”

“—yeah. Great.” I mutter, cutting her off as I race upstairs. I hate that she calls my father Dave. Just
Dave
, as though it’s some private club she’s now become a member of.

Back in my room, I try to select my outfit for the night. Dad’s voice runs through my head as I thumb through my
messy dresser drawers, dresses half-cocked off hangers in my closet:
please, Liv, try to tone it down a little for the party, okay? For me
.

This is new, too. This idea Dad’s suddenly developed that I have qualities that need “toning down.” Mom would have defended me—she always encouraged my style. Heather, on the other hand, wouldn’t know creativity if it bit her hard in the ass. What she knows is what other people tell her: saltwater pearls, creamy pastels from Ann Taylor, Coach handbags.

The only good thing to come out of that woman is Wynn, her five-year-old daughter—still, thankfully, too young to be tainted by her mother’s obscene blandness. Wynn’s the only reason I can get dressed and not look like a total fool. A couple of weeks ago, she helped me separate my clothes by color, thinking it was a game. She loved every minute of it, grinning half-toothless as each pile grew.
And what color is
this,
Wynn?
I’d ask as she looked shyly down at the pile.
Blue! It’s blue, Livie!

And, that’s why I’ve got twelve different color labels written out in a five-year-old’s messy scrawl, scotch-taped to the base of each divided section of my closet and dresser. I poke my head out of my doorway and call to her: “Panda! Come help me pick out what to wear tonight.” I hear the rush of her padded footsteps on the carpet as she runs to me and wraps herself around my legs.

“Gwizzly!” She squeals, hugging me tighter. Last time I was home, we discussed what kind of bears we would be
if, one day, aliens landed in South Florida and changed everyone into bears. I’m pretty sure she picked
panda
based solely on my childhood stuffed animal, which I passed on to her over Christmas—Stern gave it to
me
after I got my appendix out in second grade. There was no point in staring at it every night; it only made me feel hollow and alone.

She ballerina-twirls into my room and picks out a clingy strapless dress from the “dark perple” pile, lace-up-the-ankle leather sandals from the “tan” pile, and a necklace of sandalwood beads that used to be Mom’s.

“What are you doing tonight, little bear?” I ask her, studying my reflection in the mirror above my dresser, running my fingers through my wavy auburn hair (now a muddled, murky version of gray), making pouty model faces at my reflection. Wynn imitates alongside me, swishing her ballerina skirt side to side.

“Going to see the firelights with Lisa. But can I come with you instead? Pleeease?” She zips her lips up and stands soldier-straight, eyes wide and pleading.

I pick her up and hug her to me, planting a kiss on her freckled nose before setting her back down. “You know what, Panda? I wish I could come with you. You’re going to have so much fun seeing the firelights. I know it.”

I shoo her back to her room so I can finish getting ready, and watch her swish happily down the hallway.

A few minutes later, Heather calls to me from downstairs. “Olivia?” When I don’t respond, she just keeps
talking. “I’m going to drop Wynn at the Jeffreys’ and head over to the party. Your Dad’s already there.”
Duh
. “So I’ll see you over there in a few minutes?” I hear her sigh, imagine her just standing there, hands on narrow hips, staring up into emptiness, waiting.

“Yes,” I finally shout. “I’ll see you there.”

I give myself a final go-over: push my boobs together in my dress, run mascara over my lashes, spread clear gloss over my full-petal lips.

There’ll be private school boys there tonight—the sons of Elysian Fields’ monstrously rich investors, no doubt—in full-on rich-boy boat-shoed glory. And even if they’re all dick-brains, I still want them to think I’m pretty. I hardly want anything anymore. But I still want that.

The scent of plumeria mingles with other heady, floral smells—white ginger, calla lily, sage—as I shoot my way down less traffic-y side streets to Dad’s party on my bike, trying not to go too fast, not wanting to get sweaty: a difficult task during a South Florida summer. The ocean
whurr-whurr
s as I draw closer to it.

I ride into the parking lot of Elysian Fields only moderately soaked and my heart shimmies into my stomach. Elysian Fields is Dad’s first venture into the wild world of Commercial Real Estate. Raina and I call this place Ghost Town—from the first time we stepped foot on the grounds, something about it set us both shivering.

They started construction about four months before Stern died and Mom was locked up, bail posted at one million dollars, obviously way more than my dad could cough up. Every time I came home from school, I saw more and more of Elysian Fields, and less and less of Mom. That’s all it makes me think of—that sick feeling that hollowed my stomach every time I’d drive past it. The irony is that Elysian Fields is a mere fifteen-minute walk down the beach from our perfect old purple house. Seeing it complete, now, is just that final punch-in-the-gut reminder of how completely gone Mom is from me, from all of us—like it’s actually
her
beneath the grounds. Dad built something huge and ugly and expensive on top of it to obscure her.

Ghost Town, any way you slice it.

My throat aches. If I was with Raina and Stern right now, we’d be listening to Bob Dylan and drinking Miller High Life on the deck of her Uncle Peter’s boat.

Stern
. His name pounds through me like a second heartbeat as I lock up my bike and drag myself toward the spotless glass Ghost Town lobby doors. I miss him. Bad.

I never told Raina about our kiss, almost a whole year ago, even though I tell her everything. But all I’ve wanted to do is make it go away; telling her about it would make the loss somehow bigger.

As soon as I enter Elysian Fields’s Oceanus Ballroom, that new-kid-on-the-first-day-of-school feeling rushes cold through my body. Ghost Town is grand and show-offy inside—all shine, and crystal chandelier, and mute
gray walls. To everyone else, I’m guessing they’re cream-colored.

The foyer is flooded with light. Huge, gleaming windows face the gravel drudge of the parking lot. If only they faced the ocean instead. If only the ocean were on this side of the building, or all sides of the building. If only the ocean would leap up and suck this whole bad juju-ed structure in with it. I run my fingertips along the surface of the baby grand piano they’ve got displayed, uselessly, next to the cushy deep-gray (red?) couches on the other side of the room.

If Mom were here she’d open the lid, and the second her fingers found the notes, this stuffy rich-person parade would abandon their prime rib to crowd behind her and listen, transfixed. Pure magic.
They all want to leave the Gray Space, Liv
, she’d tell me.
They don’t realize they’re dead until they remember what it sounds like to be alive
.

I spot Dad near the buffet with Ted Oakley—a family friend who fronted the money for this whole shining-new mess, and dragged Dad into it all in the first place when Dad’s work as a builder dried up in tandem with the Miami housing market. I zigzag my way toward them through rows of pristinely set tables and high-backed chairs, tailored business men in near-identical button-ups, arm in arm with their spray-tanned, pulled-and-pinched wives.

I half trip over an errant dinner napkin, balled up on the floor, and catch Bryce Gregorhoff smirking at me from
a table nearby, where he is sitting with Austin Morse—Ted Oakley’s double-douche-bag stepson.

One glance tells me they’ve been talking about me. Olivia Tithe: daughter of a murderer. Art school dropout. General deviant. Several other Finnegan Prep boys look briefly over at me, too, giving me the once-over and turning around.

Bryce and Raina hooked up at a private school party a couple of months back. She called me the same night, wincing, saying he shoved his hands down her pants for about ten seconds, during which time Raina just felt like a couch he was scouring for loose change. I turn my back to their table, pulling out my phone to text her:
Edward Crotchhands is here. He wants you to come visit
.

The biggest, loneliest part of me hopes she’ll respond with something like:
Miss you, Liv! This really sucks without you
.

But when my phone buzzes in my hand, her text says:
Nooooo! The twat-mangler!!! Told Tif and Hil all about it and they’re dying
. Now that Raina’s on the swim team, the “cool kids” have started noticing her. She’s got new things to think about that don’t involve me. Like Tif, and Hilary.

Dad spots me and hollers across the room from his table: “Olivia Jane! We’re over here!” Which makes the boys look back at me again and laugh. I shoot them a
fuck off
look, walking quickly away, heels clicking on the shined-up parquet.

Ted Oakley stands from the table, smiling broadly.
“Olivia. It’s so good to have you back home. You look great.” He pulls me in for an over-long hug. He smells good, in a comforting, old-man way—like expensive aftershave and even more expensive booze.

“She looks
skinny
, is what,” Dad says. “Take my plate, and then get seconds. I mean it!” he says, pushing it gently toward me as I sit down beside him. That’s another thing that’s happened since the world went gray: food tastes different. I didn’t even realize how much better the sun-bright yellow of a pepper made it taste, or the vermillion of a tomato sauce on ravioli, which now looks washed-out and disgusting.

I push the plate away. “I’m not hungry, Dad. Ate a huge sandwich for lunch.” I feel my face flush again as I say it. I can’t tell him that the Gray Space affects everything, takes away my hunger, my senses. I want to tell someone, badly. But I can’t risk it. Can’t risk Dad thinking that his only daughter is on the road to Crazy-Town, that same road his own ex-wife walked down.

Would he ditch me, too, if he knew? Send me away somewhere?

No. He can’t know.

He and Ted share a glance—that silent
oh, teenagers!
exchange that’s somehow infuriating and reassuring at the same time.

“You know, Austin’s somewhere around here….” Ted says, scanning the crowd. “Have you two gotten a chance to touch base yet?”

“No, I haven’t seen him,” I lie, forcing a forkful of arugula (stone-colored, to me) into my mouth so as to spare him the awful truth: we are not two people who “touch base.”

Austin’s always been somewhere in my life, floating just beyond reach. We played as little kids, but by the time we were in elementary school, he’d already started at an expensive prep school while I stayed put at the public one. Our differences have always been abundant and clear: he’s a spoiled, self-involved dickbag whose mom and stepdad are richer than god, and I’m a weird art-chick whose mother went bat-shit and murdered her piano prodigy student.

Never gonna happen.

I spot Heather pushing toward our table with her pointy Chihuahua grin, blond hair bouncing.

“Well, that’s my cue,” I say, not caring how rude I sound. I scoot out of my chair just as she reaches us.

“Olivia! Where are you off to in such a rush?” Heather asks, adjusting her probably-pink shirtdress nervously as she watches me pull away.