OPEN BOOK
FROM THE JOURNAL OF BONNIE GRAYDUCK
If anyone ever finds this, they’ll assume it’s fiction, which is funny, since I don’t even read fiction really, let alone write it. But it’s filled with enough impossible things that it will never hold up in a court of law as evidence to convict me of anything (as if there’s a cop in the world who could bring me in): clearly it’s all just a lot of nonsense, product of an overactive imagination. But it’s important, and I know in a few hundred years my memory will fade and I won’t remember how I got to the place I’ve reached at last, so I thought I’d better write it down, and that requires imagining someone besides me will read it someday, so: hello, dear reader, and this is the story of the best of my life.
The day I saw Edwin for the first time, I stared at the concrete expanse of the runways at the San Jose International Airport while my mom fretted beside me. “You don’t have to do this, Bonnie,” she said. “I’m sure all this unpleasantness will blow over. I mean, no one can really believe you meant—”
“It’s better this way, Mommy,” I said, patting her knee. I still have a hard time believing I share genetic material with someone as flighty and distractible as Miranda Grayduck—but having a mother who loses her train of thought anytime she hears a loud noise or sees something shiny had proven useful over the years. “Just until things blow over.”
“But you haven’t spent any time with Harry since you were twelve years old,” mom went on, digging through her suitcase-sized purse in search of something—who knew what. “You two have barely even talked on the phone if it wasn’t your birthday or Christmas. I know he loves you, but—”
“Are those new earrings?” I interrupted, and Miranda touched her earlobes, smiled, and rattled on about the little shop in Santa Cruz where she’d found them long enough for me to say, “Goodness, I’ll miss my flight. I’ll call you as soon as I get there, I love you, don’t worry, it’s all for the best.”
She spent a little more time rummaging and babbling, but I managed to peel myself away and get my bags out of the trunk, and eventually Miranda took the hint. At least with the security checkpoints she couldn’t come with me to the gate. Once she drove away in her ridiculous yellow hybrid—a gift from my stepfather-to-be—I instantly felt lighter, as if part of me were soaring through the clouds already. I wasn’t particularly excited about spending my senior year of high school in the tiny Minnesota town of Lake Woebegotten with my dad Harry, better known to the locals as Chief Cusack. (As a bastard in the original sense of the word, I’m saddled with my mother’s last name instead of Harry’s. Miranda says Grayduck is a Native American name, but really, doesn’t every other white person in America think they have some Choctaw or Blackfeet or Cherokee blood back in their ancestry somewhere? Or, what were the Indians up near Lake Woebegotten called—Ojibwe?)
Anyway. A little lake town way up north, where I hadn’t even visited in five years, was hardly my idea of paradise, but staying in Santa Cruz had become decidedly uncomfortable because of some recent unpleasantness. It was really just a misunderstanding, or maybe not a misunderstanding, more of a misfortune, since I’d been reasonably sure no one would ever trace the whole thing back to me. And who would have expected anyone to care so much about something so unimportant, someone so insignificant… Oh, well. Just because you’re smarter than everyone else doesn’t mean you can’t make mistakes. Santa Cruz and I just needed a little mutual cooling-off period.
I made a big production out of struggling with my luggage when I got into the airport, and soon enough a scruffy twenty-something with a huge backpack hurried over, gave me his best impression of a winning smile, and offered to help carry my bags. I gave him a half-strength smile of my own, loaded him down with my bags, and directed him toward the desk for my airline. People are willing to do all sorts of things for a pretty girl (I’m not being conceited; I just know my strengths, and being pretty isn’t even the strongest of them), but it’s better if you act like you don’t know you’re pretty. If you position yourself as too sophisticated and cool and aloof, the losers are afraid to approach, but if you act clumsy and lost and helpless, they decide you might be just barely in their league after all: and losers are easy to manipulate. Being cold and distant and perfect has its uses, but it attracts a different sort of prey: smug, confident, arrogant men. Men like that are good if you’re playing a longer game, though. They can pay great dividends, especially if you’re not yet eighteen and can mention your jealous father the cop—even better because it was true, and no reason to mention he was chief of police in Lake Nowheresville, Minnesota thousands of miles away—and statutory rape and oh, didn’t I mention I was underage, oh dear, I thought you knew, I thought that’s what you were into!
But I decided that once I got to Lake Woebegotten I wouldn’t play any of those games anymore. The place was too tiny, anyway, and who would I play with, Norwegian bachelor farmers? Some bald bank manager or the guy who ran the car dealership or the podunk grocery store? No thanks. This was a chance for a fresh start. To simplify and purify my life, and just be The New Girl… which meant I’d probably have my pick of country bumpkin boys. There might be some entertainment value there. I vaguely recalled they grew them big in the Upper Midwest.
I ditched the loser bag-boy at the security line, not even bothering to thank him—no incentive, when I’d never see him again—and breezed through the gates without being groped or bombarded with radioactivity. Having translucent skin as pale as milk (or “the color of lutefisk,” as one of my Minnesotan relatives had memorably said once, shudder) is an advantage in a world of scary foreign terrorists, even with brown hair and eyes to go with the paleness; I don’t look dangerous at all. Which just goes to show how much faith you can put in looks.
Once I got to the gate, I upgraded my flight to first class—it was on Miranda’s credit card, and she’d never notice. She didn’t even look at her statements when they came in the mail, just threw them in a pile for a year and then shredded them. I got on board as soon as the jetway opened, took my seat and my complimentary beverage—I didn’t bother trying to get booze, because alcohol doesn’t do much for me, just takes the edge off the world—and frowned when a businessman sat down beside me. First class was booked solid. Disappointing. Fortunately, the doughy man paid me no attention—gay, probably—and to my surprise he opened his briefcase and took out a book, of all things, not even a Kindle or an iPad, but a big fat hardcover printed on actual paper. There was no dust jacket, but I could read the title: The Historian. Bleah. Who’d want to read about a stupid historian? Or about anything, for that matter, apart from the occasional book of useful non-fiction? Why read about other people’s imaginary lives when you could have a real life of your own?
I took out the MP3 player I’d stolen from Dwayne, my mother’s boyfriend. Dwayne was dreadful, in his late thirties and at the tail end of a career as an arena football player, which was the kind of football you played when you’d never been good enough for the real game or just weren’t good enough anymore. Despite being a cliché jock, Dwayne went to a lot of rock shows and thought he was hip, but there was nothing on his iPod from the past fifteen years, just a lot of grungy alterna-junk from the ’90s. Oh well. Better than listening to the mooing and lowing of the other passengers getting on board and shuffling to their cramped coach seats, to travel in discomfort and misery and empty-headedness like the livestock they were.
I put in the earbuds, scrolled through Dwayne’s playlists—they were named things like “Rockin Good” and “Brutal Jams” and “Break Shit”—until I found something that looked promising. I closed my eyes, listened to some classic rock band called Soundgarden sing about how they were feeling Minnesota, and began the journey into the rest of my life. Once we started taking off, I considered looking out the window to see the world drop away, shrinking until all the people bustling around the tarmac looked like ants, but I didn’t bother. That’s pretty much what people look like to me most of the time anyway: ants.