By Jillian McManemin
I zipped out of the city and merged onto a tree-lined highway heading upstate. This road led to the manicured, precious towns of the Hudson Valley. Rehabilitation centers hid in the Palisades. Friends I’d acquired spent the better part of their teens and twenties pinballing between them. Sun Valley. Five Winds. Harmony Pines. Their names evoked nature. Images of proud mountainous daughters ascending from addiction together. Flowing rivers. Living simply. Holding hands, restored and onward. Brave pioneers of a cool calm wood. I’d laugh along to stories of sex between patients and memorable quotes by underqualified orderlies. I pretended that I understood. Honestly, I could never relate to taking it that far. What I understood, however, was that the region inspired boredom.
I passed an exit where the road sharply bent. I remembered to avoid it, as instructed by Lauren a year earlier.
“Why are you going so slow?” I had asked her. No one was on the highway. It seemed like we should be going faster.
“People crash here a lot. When I was little, everyone talked about this terrible accident. So, I normally don’t take this exit, but the other one is closed.”
“What happened?”
“Construction, I guess. I don’t know.”
“No. The terrible accident.”
“Oh, it was a limo. All of these kids were in a limo for prom. The driver didn’t slow down, and he made a hairpin turn, and the limo flipped over and exploded.”
“Oh. God.”
“Yeah, but, it was so bad because of how many kids were piled in there. The girls were sitting on the boys’ laps. Their blood alcohol count was through the roof, and I think most of the remains tested positive for coke … It was like a good quarter of the senior class—the athletic ones.”
“What? How many kids can fit in a limo anyway? Wait … How do you test remains for coke?”
“I don’t know how many. A lot. Uhh … blood. You test through the blood … Someone told me that they even found braces wrapped around a tire.”
“Oh c’mon …”
Lauren exaggerated; I never really minded. Reams of colorful stories spilled out of our mouths like streamers. We chain-smoked and decorated each other. When I had met Lauren in New York, we’d gravitated towards one another immediately. It felt rare and special, feeling so intensely that you know someone. When you don’t. But, there were commonalities. Lauren grew up not too far from me, she in the Hudson Valley, and me in New Jersey. During the conversations where we’d map parallels of our lives on either side of the state line, we wondered how we narrowly missed meeting each other. Between exhales, her eyebrows would arch so high that they would disappear behind her wispy brown ‘70s hair. Stevie Nicks was having a pop renaissance.
I imagined twelve- and thirteen-year-old Jillian and Lauren buying beer and wearing jewel-toned eyeshadow. Going to a hardcore punk show in a rundown house tucked in the woods, or in a VFW. Standing against walls with black mold. Arms folded. Watching sweaty boys push each other. Lighting menthols. These images made me uneasy—us as precocious in an unsettling way, together. I was glad we hadn’t known each other then. One of our strongest bonds was the constant conversation about the moments of girlhood that were causing us the trouble we were experiencing as adults. Which of these moments were fun, and which were harmful. We weighed compliance versus culpability, from the fade into adulthood. If we had acted out together then, maybe we would not have had the opportunity for this later analysis, which felt stronger than shared history somehow. Goal oriented, more hopeful for a positive outcome.
Lauren was my most trusted confidant. When she asked me if I wanted to get out of the city for a few days, I was excited to have a respite with her. She exhaled her cigarette and made a safe, slow, turn. “Jilly, braces in the tires …”
Regardless of the truth of that detail, it wasn’t the first time a close friend colored the world to make my skin crawl. Growing up, I was best friends with the daughter of a cop. We met in elementary school and became inseparable. Creating a bubble around our friendship, recess centered on paperback novels. We read anything juicy and digestible, loving subplots of sex scandals, spurned romance, and supernatural powers. We clung to series with female leads and would act out scenes afterwards, reconstructing Laura Ingalls Wilder and pulpy YA novels. One series in particular featured a group of magical twenty-somethings living in Los Angeles. The characters go clubbing. Date. Then fight crime with their bestowed powers. We were obsessed—the characters’ lives were hard, but full of glamour. I was particularly drawn to a rich blonde who would dissolve, after long descriptions of her limbs tingling numb, and go invisible. While other kids climbed on brightly colored plastic structures, Sara and I read in the bathroom. We weren’t bullied. We kept lukewarm social relations with the other children at the latchkey program. Our involvement with after-school sports helped. For the most part.
The moments when the reading material escaped our private world meant trouble. One afternoon, Sara warned me not to finish the latest book we were reading together, an emotionally wrought sci-fi novel. We had a softball game to play later. Sara had finished the book ahead of schedule, as she often did, and called. I ran into the other room to get the cordless phone from my parents’ bedroom.
“Hello.”
“It’s me. Don’t finish the book today.”
“Why? I’m almost done.”
“I’m warning you. Okay? Just listen to me. It’s for your own good.”
We made a pact, which I broke. I sat in the dugout throughout the entire game, crying about the protagonist, dead at the hands of her backstabbing lover. When I went up to bat, I purposely struck out. Sara visited throughout the innings. She kept saying, “I cried too.”
Despite her empathetic nature, one of Sara’s most potent thrills was recounting a story her father told her about an old case he covered during his rookie days, before he ascended rank and his work became a desk job. He spoke of these days often. Sara and I eavesdropped, drank diet soda from the can, and pretended we were in on the jokes. After spying and swimming in their above-ground pool, we would go upstairs and banish Sara’s little sister to her room—a windowless, carpeted space that burst at the seams with Betty and Veronica, Peanuts, Cathy, and Felix the Cat memorabilia.
In semi-wet bathing suits, Sara muted the television, a constant loop of horror movies, and said, “This is nothing. When my father was just starting at the force, there was this bad drunk girl. She was really stupid. One night she snuck out of the house and went to a party. No one liked her, so she drank and drank. Then she decided to walk home all by herself because she was sad. She got lost and walked for hours and hours in the streets crying. Finally she recognized where she was and knew she could get home … if … she crossed the highway. She was smashed to smithereens by four semi-trucks and her blood was everywhere. The cars kept smashing her and smashing her. Only her hair and teeth could identify her.”
Allegedly there were photographs of the scene in the glove compartment of her father’s car. Sara would say, “I’d show them to you, but they’d scar you for life.” But whenever we were in the car, she’d point to the glove compartment and poke me. Hard. I tried to keep up with Sara. During our sleepovers, after the movie, she would sleep soundly as I, wide awake, stared into the dark, concerned about the high potential of brutal cold-blooded murder. What would I do if the killers from the movies or the ghost of the Highway-Girl opened the door? These nights were the origin to my insomnia. I’m sure.
I thought about the Highway-Girl ghost so much as a child that whenever I was in a fast-moving car, I’d see her run, white and shimmery, a hologram with a flowing dress on. I’d see her dodge trucks with the newfound litheness of the afterlife. I’d see her in the rush of trees, animals trailing behind her, providing the guardianship that she never possessed as a human girl. I saw the disproportionate cost of a mistake and the bizarre redemption that could never measure up. Eventually, I realized that I had to summon her to make her appear. I felt less scared knowing I had some control in the matter. I also realized that she was unable to get off any exits. Highway-Girl would stretch out her hand but was never able to reach me before we merged. I had these visions so often that one day I finally asked Sara what the Highway-Girl was wearing when she was run over by the eighteen-wheelers. If Sara told me that she was wearing a white dress, I would know that it was really her. Meaning, I had special powers. After this reveal, I would teach Sara how to see her too and we’d come up with a plan to free her. But Sara reminded me, “Jill, don’t you remember, only her hair and teeth could identify her. How many times do I have to tell you?”
Sometimes there was need for reminder. Before I met Lauren, I had heard a lot about her. My roommate Lucia was excited to introduce us, but wary—with the sense of knowing that bringing certain people together might cause complication. If not on a cataclysmic scale, then the once-separate parts had the potential to form something completely unto its own, eventually having little to do with the originator. Even if the act sparked harmony, there was a small threat to the safety of compartmentalization. Her train of thought was not entirely wrong, as threesomes, even in friendship, can be difficult.
Lucia often went on long hiatuses with her close friends. There was a certain point of intimacy where she felt like women took something from her. Her paintings reflected this inner thieving world, illustrating a heightened tragic comedy with cartoon figures, bouncing around landscapes that aesthetically managed to pull off being both bleak and a little disco. One of my favorite characters was a sexy Gumby-like figure named Girlfriend. Girlfriend was all lips and moved through situations with the impressive flexibility afforded only by not having any bones. She’d wiggle through scenes, teasing Boyfriend, taking everything he had to offer. When we weren’t working on our projects, Lucia and I spent our time smoking and drinking, discussing either people we were friends with or how we’d run a great sex club.
Lucia’s descriptions of Lauren created quite a setup. Lauren is scary smart. Lauren is a psychoanalyst. Lauren is beautiful. You and Lauren have the same sick sense of humor. You and Lauren are such bad girls. That looks like something my friend Lauren might wear. You’re reading the Story of O? Lauren loves the Story of O. You have to meet her.
At times she’d say we’d make a great power couple. Other times she just described us both as trouble. Again, Lucia was not wrong. When Lauren and I met, we became friends and we slept together. We would play games with each other. These games often involved others and were dares, of sorts. In the bleary hour of three AM, during a conversation with a woman at a bar regarding the woes of new motherhood, Lauren and I enacted our game-playing and decided to take the woman to the bathroom. We three squished into a bathroom stall, where Lauren and I sucked her breasts together.
Afterwards we skipped down the street, laughing about how we’d, analytically speaking, healed essential wounds together. During another game, we made a banker pay to take us to NoBu 57, a famous sushi restaurant in Midtown. I chose the restaurant because their website quoted Kate Winslet saying that it was, “heaven on earth and sex on a plate.” I did this on my phone as Lauren talked to him. Dave. We met Dave at an art party in a hotel. We charmed Dave by explaining to him that we were both marketing students, and that we didn’t like or even understand any of the art we just saw.
During a tasting menu that included Bigeye and Bluefin Tartar, caviar, sea urchin, and warm mushroom salad, Dave simultaneously regaled and admonished us for being, “such girls.”
He paid for dinner with the most crisp and velvety new one-hundred-dollar bills that I had ever seen. When we said goodbye, Dave slipped one of these hundreds into my hand. It felt fake, but the cab driver accepted the bill for the ride back home. Lauren and I went back to my loft, walked by Lucia’s works-in-progress, climbed my steep wooden ladder, and collapsed into giggles. Then fucked till we passed out. After these times, there were a few instances when I tried to date Lauren. On these dates she’d sometimes disappear for a few minutes, and once for a few hours, at a time. One evening, I was reading work at a recently opened magic shop—magic not as in rabbits and tuxedos but sage, parties, and chants to lesser-known deities. This type of magic was in vogue. In between a goddess dance performed by some of the yoga teachers of the neighborhood and a sloppy summoning of Santa Muerte, Lauren evaporated. It was this not-very-dramatic moment when I realized that even in physical proximity there was a possibility that we could be having completely opposite experiences together. When I mentioned having slept together on our way upstate she asked, “Wait … how many times?”
“For a period of time, often. Definitely more than once or twice.”
“Oh. Really? I don’t remember. I was blacked out.”
I felt strange being the only one with the memory, and the guilt. We snorted coke off of each other’s stomachs. Had sex with another friend of ours in the shower. Does she remember that or any of the orgasms? No. Just sweet sleep after the room turned dawn-blue from the morning.
“Did I like it?”
“Yes.”
We both accepted this and moved on. She kept driving and nothing particularly awkward hung in the air. We continued smoking and talking about our other relationships, reminiscing about different details of that time together. Partly because, for as much as I thought about that particular time, my memory of it was criminally undetailed. After a while of this, I asked her, “But do you remember meeting that woman in the bar? With the breasts?”
“Oh god. Yes. I vaguely remember that, Jill.”
As a child, I remember my shoulders relaxing as the Highway-Girl faded. Until Bloody Mary came through the mirror. At the time, I thought the legend was specific to my town. I soon realized the story was everywhere.
Its origins are disputed. Some say the Salem Witch Trials, others Elizabeth Báthory, or the divination rituals of Victorian society girls looking for glimpses of their future husbands in the mirror. According to Alex Mann, Bloody Mary had gone to PS #4. Her mom, who had a fair amount of plastic surgery, had told her so.
The school had holiday decorations up. With the spirit of Christmas, Ella, always a brown-noser, came to school with her chest puffed out. She said she had spoken to her mother, who denied the existence of such a ghost and the existence of ghosts in general. Ella had also been told that Alex’s mom was not the type of character to listen to. That she was “a whore.” Ella brought judgment along with her mother’s Christmas cookies. We snacked and listened to Ella’s plan to debunk Alex. Her fearlessness sprang from her mother’s love. Ella bit the head of a reindeer. Her mother died not too long after that holiday season. She worked in the Trade Center.
I felt hot and itchy waiting for recess. I thought about faking sick, but I knew that would be impossible. Plus, I wanted to save face around Sara. She seemed unfazed by the whole thing. Bored even. When the bell rang, we collected inside of the bathroom. A girl named Debby asked who would be first. When Alex suggested that it should be her, she shook her head and shrank against the wall. The plastic barrettes in her hair made noise like chimes made out of seashells, and the bottom of her sneakers lit up red with each step backwards. Naturally, since Ella instigated the activity, it only made sense that she would go first. “Fine,” she said. We all stepped out of the bathroom and turned the lights off on the way out.
“BLOODY MARY. BLOODY MAAAAAAAAAA—”
Ella burst out of the bathroom screaming and ran down the hall without stopping. We stood, a mixture of laughter and feeling uncomfortable.
“I’ll go,” Sara said coolly. I wanted to grab her and tell her that she didn’t have to. That we could go eat lunch instead. Her arms were crossed across her chest. A copy of Word Does Travel stuck out of the pocket of her oversized hoodie, our latest inappropriate romance novel about an underground sex cult of housewives set in 1950s rural Illinois. She strutted into the bathroom, and shut the light herself. We huddled by the door.
“BLOODY MARY.”
“BLOODY MARY.”
“BLOODY MARY.”
There were no screams. Slowly, Sara opened the door. Her mouth was wide open but her shoulders were relaxed. I could tell she was faking. “Well! Did you see her?!” Alex shouted.
“Yes, Alex. That was fucked up. I think I’m scarred.”
Alex’s jaw dropped. Sara walked away and I followed her. When we rounded the corner, she scoffed, “God. Alex is such a stupid liar. It’s all fake. My father says her mother’s a whore. That whole Bloody Mary story is practically exactly the same as Nightmare on Elm Street. We should watch that later …”
I lost a lot of sleep after Nightmare on Elm Street and even more after The Silence of the Lambs. The morning after that movie my mother noticed that I had been permanently altered. Every landscape became populated with ghosts and killers. The capacity of my imagination was fueled by the long wakeful hours of the night. Now I had that feeling again, and the lack of sleep, which I hoped that driving upstate would somehow cure. I hadn’t seen Lauren for the better part of a year. She had relapsed and relocated, relapsed and relocated. I’d tried to help. Or that’s what I thought I was doing when I swept her apartment for alcohol. I missed a bottle hidden in the toilet tank. A classic hiding place. Basically, a refrigerator. Mostly, I thought it would help when she left Brooklyn. I think it did. For a while.
The last time I heard from her, she called and told me she was working on a farm and sleeping with a man who cut down trees for a living. He was helping her find an apartment. The favorite of the few available was a studio in the attic of a large house that was painted and entirely furnished in purple. I imagined her going to and fro, the purple apartment to a stable. Kneading cow udders, hair standing on end from the big electric lightning storms of the summer. Inherent good. Even when she told me how stupid she really thought the tree man was, I somehow thought that was good too. Manageable.
I sat on my stoop in Brooklyn and described who I was sleeping with to Lauren: I called her “The Bartender.” “She’s got a ‘Hail Satan’ tattoo on one thigh and the ‘Rape of Persephone’ on the other. I know it’s ill-advised …”
About a month after the phone call, Lucia claimed Lauren was missing. I hadn’t heard from her. But “missing”? I just trusted that she was picking Gala apples, running her fingers over fresh speckled eggs and having calloused fingers run over her skin. These images curdled. Rotten apples. I imagined all of the ways she could hit rock bottom and questioned her ability to survive it. This time around. The formerly idyllic scenery turned into a landscape for her body to wash up on. Thin wet leaves from the riverbed’s slick mud stick to her from the late-night stroll that turns into a late-night fall. Hudson River currents are strong. They flow in different directions simultaneously, and like the cliffs surrounding it, the river’s depth is sharp and sudden. The river is brackish, both fresh and salty, and no matter the season, slate-gray and torrid.
Hearing nothing created a world of phantasms and paranoia: Lauren facedown in the purple apartment. After slipping on the purple tile in the purple shower. Meeting unscrupulous characters, like a man that might strangle her too hard during sex. Not looking both ways before crossing a dark country road. Hit by the car of an unsuspecting driver who would claim, “She came out of nowhere.”
I was scared for her and of her. When she had relapsed in Brooklyn, I watched her crawl on bits of broken glass. Lose her job and apartment. She recovered. Her strength scared me the most. It seemed unsafe for her to attempt to survive her expansive threshold—which is something about her I admired. A light summer rain began to fall on my car as I thought how, conversely, Sara tested her threshold in a controlled space. Where nothing was at stake, just the sleep of her friend. The myth of her father’s heroism wore off naturally as Sara aged. Her father retired and worked at the airport. Sara married a big man who lifted weights. Her twistedness unknotted as she settled down and had a baby. I’m unsure if she watched scary movies anymore.
I realized I was driving twenty miles per hour under the speed limit. Cars were honking at me, so I sped up. Last year, when Lauren and I went upstate, we visited her friend Kris, who lived in a small rented house with her Chinese-crested dog named Foo. Kris had moved out of Brooklyn to get sober. She spent time in one of the nature-named rehabs, then in a halfway for women, and then to the little white house, with her little hairless dog. Foo came from a breeder in the area. It was completely dysfunctional as a companion, but very funny, and that had potential. Foo was a gift Kris bought herself.
We arrived during the annual late-summer festival. There were white plastic tents pitched in muddy grass. Locals sold baked goods, candy apples, kettle corn, and hippie-ware, like curly-moon wind-chimes, incense, and books on chakras. Lauren and I got into town and dropped our bags at Kris’ house. She left the keys under a wet potted plant. We skipped to town and talked about having a kid—half boy and half sunflower—that we would name Hana God. He’d be miraculously unspoiled. A flute player. We walked through town and met Kris after her shift at the diner. It had been her most lucrative day of the six months she’d worked there.
The plan was to do not much. We made a picnic on the living room floor, lit candles, and played Scrabble. As Lauren won the rounds, Foo stood barking into the air. It started to pour. Foo sang along to the big wet drops. The rain didn’t stop for the entire next day. Kris had to go back to the diner in the morning. When Lauren and I were left alone with Foo, we sang along with her. Three howling creatures sounding good.
I didn’t expect to see Kris when I walked into that diner again. Although, I imagined I would. I knew it was ludicrous. I didn’t know if Kris was still renting the little white house. I remember hearing she got rid of the dog though. In my fantasy, she was still there, looking healthy and slightly altered. Her hair would be longer, or she’d have big silver jewelry on. I would walk in and she’d be surprised and happy. She’d put down her carafe of coffee and hug me. I would sit at the counter, order pancakes, and talk. She’d tell me that Lauren and Foo were waiting at the house. That they were all glad I was visiting, that everything was good and that they’d been enjoying the seasons changing. She’d tell me that they had stories about boys they were excited to tell me and ask if I’d stay the night or the weekend.
“The weekend,” I’d say. It was silly to think all of these things. Even sillier to have driven all of this way. Kris wasn’t there. I felt disappointed as her image faded. Flyers for the late-summer festival were taped to the windows. There was a volunteer signup sheet. I sat at the counter and ordered pancakes anyway. They tasted the same as last year’s, sweet and too buttery. I ate them slowly and had three refills of coffee. I kept the pancakes on the plate for as long as I could, pushing them through pools of syrup—the excuse for me sitting at the diner for what was now a couple of hours. Those pancakes wilted quickly in their cold wetness. The waitress asked me intermittently, “Are you still working on that?”
“Yes, still working.”
I finally gave up the sticky sweet plate and paid as the light changed. The sun set behind the Catskills. I decided to get back on the highway. The air was cooler.
I had borrowed the car from Hailey, “The Bartender.” I told her that I was taking a trip upstate to visit my friends who lived in a little white house with a weird little dog. I had planned on taking the train, but she offered. I had a car when I was a teenager. I was so reckless in that car so many times that when it finally died I decided to not test my luck by getting it repaired. I was already living in Brooklyn, and at eighteen felt lucky I’d never had an accident, when there had been so many opportunities for it. I’d race and do tricks while drinking in the driver’s seat. Throw the car into neutral and spin and spin and spin, yank the e-brake and throw the wheel all the way to the right or left. Slip down the hill during a blizzard on mushrooms. Try to outpace the boys in the cars with more power. I kept on, even after the crash in my town.
Sara rang my bell in her varsity cheerleading jacket and sweatpants. She hadn’t called before she came over. It was a Sunday. We must have been sixteen. She was crying and white. Very early that morning there was a fatal car crash on Anderson Avenue. Six of her friends, football players and cheerleaders, flipped in an SUV after excessively drinking in the underground parking lot of a nearby high-rise. The driver was going too fast and lost control. The car flipped onto a front lawn, crushing a white picket fence. Part of the fence was found in the skull of the boy who died. It was what killed him. After the crash, RJ, a popular and good-looking linebacker, tried his best to pry his friends out but was unable to get everyone. He saved two girls who ran bloody through the suburbs, abandoning RJ with the dead boy and the driver. RJ underwent a host of surgeries to recover, including facial reconstruction. This is why the girls had run from him. RJ was horribly disfigured. Nearly half of his face had been sliced off from the window, like a razor. The girls were ashamed, especially in the shadow of his heroism. The driver went to jail. I’m unsure if he is still there, although it is possible. He was eighteen and the dead boy was fifteen, the youngest in the car. As a teenager, I drove by the broken fence and the dark-dark skids for months. I thought about the Highway-Girl for the first time in years, wondering if she ever got tired of the repetition.
I took the last exit and got on the bridge to the city. As I neared Brooklyn, I made plans to meet Hailey at the bar we always went to. We hugged. Her perfume was sweet, masking the smell of tomato sauce that lingered on her clothes after she’d get off a shift at the restaurant. We sat on stools and she asked me if I had a good time with my friends upstate. I lied and said “Yes.” I was too embarrassed to admit that I’d made the whole thing up and took the trip alone to spend time with my rambling inner monologue. We drank gin. According to her, those who drink gin were more likely to have psychopathic tendencies, such as a lack of empathy and general Machiavellianism. She laughed and pointed to her leg, which was covered in a white square bandage. Another tattoo.
“Let me see it.”
She peeled back the tape. A skull with a hat that faded into pirate ships was rendered in grayscale. The figure wore a dead bird around its neck with a chain.
“The bird …”
“It’s an albatross. This is The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”
She told me the story of the Mariner. He killed an albatross on a whim. After realizing that his impulse had been a mistake, his guilt rose like white-hot heat and he was yellow-bellied haunted-sick, inspiring the sea to rot slimy around him. Water water everywhere and not a drop to drink. A ship fades in from the mist, two characters, Death and a woman called “the Nightmare Life-in-Death” are on board. Death and Life-in-Death throw dice. Hailey pulled dice out of her pocket. I had seen her do this before. One night she bet the bartender our considerable tab and won. He lamented losing to her twice. As she threw dice on the bar, she explained that Life-in-Death won the soul of the Mariner. He got to live but had to watch the crew die. Each sailor that died cursed the Mariner with his eye. The Mariner’s glittering eye was how he compelled those to hear the tale as he wandered and repeated it for eternity, neither as a ghost or one who is living. At the end of our affair, the tattooed bartender would get back together with her tattooed boyfriend. We would be drunk on gin, and I would yell at her in the street, not caring about the spectators.
Tonight it was late when Hailey and I drove to my place. The Moon was at its edge.
Jillian McManemin is a performance artist, filmmaker and writer. She has performed and presented work at Anthology Film Archives, the MET Live Arts, Dixon Place, Invisible Exports and the Knockdown Center. She starred in the The Cruel Tale of the Medicine Man, the film won best feature at the Coney Island Film Festival in 2015 and the East Village Queer Film Festival in 2017. She recently completed Confederitis, an experimental feature-length film with her collaborator Rbt.Sps. Her critical writing has appeared in Hyperallergic and Art511 Magazine.
