WHEN THE SCHOOL term began, people avoided Claire and Meg. Everyone was talking about the Story girls and their crazy sister. There were all sorts of rumors, some true, some too far-fetched for reasonable people to believe. Some of the girls’ classmates swore that Elv had been gone all that time because she’d had a baby. Others whispered that she’d robbed a bank, been to jail, that she now met her lover in the church in the town square, willing to defile the altar with black masses, sexual encounters, drug use. Many in town had spied Elv hitching to the train station. That was a fact. They’d glimpsed a car dropping her off in the center of town late at night. When she saw them gawking, she’d laugh and shout, “What the hell are you looking at!” Whoever was standing there staring would slink away, even if it was a well-respected neighbor, someone’s father or mother.
Elv had lasted only two days before she announced she was dropping out of school. She vowed to attend night classes and earn a high school equivalency diploma. After Westfield and all she’d been through, she couldn’t be expected to sit in a classroom with a bunch of suburban kids who thought going to the mall was the high point of civilization. “They’re all talking about me,” she said. “You expect me to sit there and take that?” She begged and pleaded, promising her mother that she would study hard. She’d already read The Scarlet Letter, the book on the list for the GED English class, and had gotten an A on the paper she’d written. She crossed her heart and took a vow to be the best student she could be, but her fingers were also crossed behind her back to negate the lie she told. She hadn’t picked up a book since she’d returned home. There was only one story she was interested in, and only one storyteller.
Meg had read The Scarlet Letter when she was a freshman. This year she was in an advanced English seminar for juniors, assigned Virginia Woolf’s novels. She enjoyed reading To the Lighthouse. It took her mind off Elv and stopped her from obsessing about getting good enough grades to get into Wesleyan. She wanted to be accepted there more than anything. She was desperately afraid of failure, not that she made her fears public. She wished she was as smart as Mary Fox, who had already been accepted early decision to Yale. Everything came so easily to Mary, while Meg had to work for her grades.
The one bright spot was that she was now rid of Elv at school. Those two days when she’d been enrolled had been rough enough—Elv had worn a short black skirt, a shirt that was all but see-through, and her black pointy boots from Paris. Recently, someone had spray-painted a pentagram on Meg’s locker, as if the rumors were about her rather than her sister. Two janitors came down and repainted the locker. Sooner or later people would forget all about Elv. She’d disappear out of their consciousnesses as soon as she disappeared from town, which could not be soon enough, if you asked Meg. Now Meg had lunch with Claire every day in the cafeteria. Just the two of them. They usually had egg salad or peanut butter sandwiches. They had plenty of space. No one sat at their table.
MISS HAGEN SUGGESTED they try family therapy when Annie called to discuss how troubled Elv appeared. They went, but everyone was reticent and uncomfortable. Meg especially was too nervous to say anything. She worried about retaliation. She had to go home with the unfathomable person who glared at her from across the room. Even when asked a direct question, the most Meg would say was “I don’t know.” She didn’t even seem very sure about that. Meg and Claire looked at each other for assurance and sat close together on a couch. Sometimes they held hands without thinking. Then Claire would notice Elv staring. She’d quickly drop Meg’s hand.
The therapist suggested a game of trust in which you closed your eyes and fell back, letting another person catch you. They all refused to play. Only Claire thought it was a good idea.
“Let’s just try it,” Claire urged, but the others shook their heads. Elv rolled her eyes.
“If you’re not going to be involved, I don’t see what I can do for you,” the therapist said to Annie and the girls. Meg agreed. She didn’t believe therapy would do any good. It would never help them to reach a consensus on what their lives had become. She had taken up the premise of individual vision in To the Lighthouse. Everything depended upon a person’s point of view. Even the tiniest detail was subject to interpretation. The old hawthorn tree outside the bedroom window, for instance, was covered with ice early that fall, but sometimes Meg could look at it and imagine it was the chestnut tree in the courtyard of her grandmother’s apartment building. When she saw Claire sitting with Elv on the couch, chattering away as they made necklaces together, she wondered who it was Claire saw and who she imagined.
THAT FALL, EVERY encounter with Elv was difficult for Meg. She realized she was clenching her teeth, that she had several nervous habits. She bit her nails, and she often found she was silently counting to a thousand in order to clear her mind of bad thoughts. She wanted Elv to disappear, be eaten by tigers, live on a ranch where there was no telephone service.
“You know, you really don’t have to study so hard,” Elv told Meg one morning when they happened to meet up in the kitchen. Meg looked up from the table. When she saw Elv, her heart sank. Meg had been eating an English muffin and studying for a Latin test. She’d almost convinced herself that Elv no longer existed. Now, face-to-face, she had no choice but to accept the fact that she was back. Elv was a lot skinnier than she used to be. In the murky light of this overcast morning, she somehow looked more beautiful than ever. She ran off to the city at every opportunity, but she’d also settled in, made the house her own. That still didn’t mean she was trustworthy.