Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me

This bar has coral walls. All the glasses and salad plates and flatware are shades of green. Malachite, jade, forest. Ersatz fog curtains down from the ceiling. Bea can’t tell if this place is supposed to be snobby or sexy. One of her strict aesthetic beliefs is that you can have luxury or the curled toes of desire, but never both. A couple she can’t see is saying the names of drinks back and forth to each other as if that equals a conversation: Feel Better Tonic, Dreamkiller, French 75, The Queen’s Nectar.

Her friend Jessica chose this place; she’s always looking to go places that will make her seem more interesting for the internet. Jessica is always twenty minutes late and Bea never mentions that fact. Her silence is one of the ways she expresses to Jessica how important their friendship is.

Corduroy pants brushing against each other. The raps of expensive shoes on the bar’s wood floor. The booth groans as a man slides in and sits across from Bea. She makes immediate eye contact, expects him to mumble, look surprised, and disappear.

Instead, he smiles. Settles in. Bea looks down. Pretends her fingernails are articulate: They speak calculus, whisper gossip, remind her to make necessary grooming appointments. The man takes Bea’s hand. His fingertips feel like a custard sweating in a hot kitchen.

Bea yanks, but he grips harder. Leans forward. Bea smells myrrh, lemongrass, the cardboard-and-leather-scent-of-online-shopping, coffee breath.

He says, “I’m going to kiss you.”

Bea twists her hand free.

“I’m a good kisser,” he says. “Give me fifteen seconds. I’ll even set the timer on my phone.”

Vesper.

“Please leave me alone.”

Manhattan.

When he smiles again, she can see the cracks and crevices of his lips.

*

For the entirety of Bea’s seventh year, her next-door neighbor, Matt hated her. He would have sleepovers with her brother, come into her room, and shake her awake. He would sometimes pour water into Bea’s nostrils. If she was on her side, her ears.

Other times, Matt would whisper anxieties: The old woman from across the street is going to poison you. Your friends told me you smell like shit and all the other kids call you poopy diaper. You’re ugly. Do you ever notice that white van following us to school? The man in it is planning on kidnapping you. He’s going to change your name to Mary and you’ll never see any of us again. No one likes you. Not your mom and definitely not your dad or brother. A ghost lives inside you and that’s why Stacey’s dog is always trying to bite you.

In these days, there were discrete hair pulls, an outstretched foot, hands ripping Bea’s homework out of her bag and tearing it or throwing her lunch into the school dumpster. Her friends asked her what it was like to have a boy love you so much. It’s why he’s acting this way they said in earnest daisies-and-valentines voices.

They refused to listen when Bea said that’s not true. He hates me.

Despite the weeks and weeks of this, Bea refused to snitch. She muttered to herself something their mother had said after complaining about work. Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.

Bea looks down. Pretends her fingernails are articulate: They speak calculus, whisper gossip, remind her to make necessary grooming appointments.

The hairs on Bea’s arms stood up whenever she echoed her mother’s words. The syllables were dum dums and candy bars that fought off the intense displeasures of surprise spelling tests, being told when to wash the dishes now, and Matt’s attacks.

One summer day, they were at the pool. For once, Bea and Matt were friends. They made up different jumps, splashed, and raced. Her brother sat on a beach towel reading a book about two boys who solved mysteries. Bea agreed to be the terrible lobster queen and Matt was the knight saving his kingdom with a pool noodle. Bea, 15. Matt, 22.

Then, they were seeing who could hold their breath the longest. Bea put her face beneath the water for Round 2. It was cool down there, and the chemical smell of chlorine made Bea feel strangely hungry.

One of Matt’s hands were on her shoulders. Then fingers and the sun on Bea’s braids. Eyes stung. Feet and hands stretched, but couldn’t connect with the concrete poolside. Almost-death has a stillness. It comes when a part of you, Bea understood, a part that you never knew existed, stretches out inside your body and begins to crawl away. She could feel every branch and opening in her lungs.

Bea’s mother snatched her up. Lightheadedness, breath, eyelashes fluttered. The sensation of a cumulonimbus cloud entering your mouth and then shoving itself—ice and lightning and immense weight—millimeter by millimeter out of Bea’s nasal passages.

Her mother’s book was in the pool, saturated, and expanding into trash.

“What’s wrong with you?” her brother asked Matt.

Everyone else was frozen. Their green and black and mirrored sunglasses capturing the scene.

Matt cried, wiped his nose, and said, “It was a game.” He sobbed. “We’re having fun. She likes it.”

*

The man reaches again for Bea. She leans away. He laughs. Maybe he thinks—and she knows the lie is for herself, not to be generous to him—that he’s building something with her, something cute they’ll tell people while he carves up a chicken and Bea pours everyone a little more wine.

Fog. “It’s always New Year’s Day,” a woman says.

Bea’s heart is clanging, her mouth is dry, her feet still.

Later, Bea will want to say she slapped him. Thrilled herself with the force of her fingers and palms, the snapback of his face. How surprised and scared he was to see that she was a person. Bea wants to say she screamed. She wants to say, I cut a hole in the restaurant, split the booth in half. It was a slice I realized I could step into. I pushed and crawled, fingers jellying, legs stretching and contracting.

Inside it was darkness, and silence, then a rush of scent. Juniper, roses, chlorine, the smell of fall coming on an early September, the smell of someone else’s sick and menstrual blood in a bathroom stall. A velocity that made her shut her eyes.

Bea will want to clear her throat here. She will reach up to feel her face and throat, and wish they felt soft and new and never been touched with unkindness. Bea will keep talking. Her voice hesitant and pitched high. And then I opened my eyes and I was alone again in the booth. I looked around and there were no other people in the bar.

You’re safe now, said the jade plates. The coral walls sang a lullaby I had never heard before. They held out their varnished fingers, waited to see if I wanted to be touched. It was so beautiful it hurt and I let out a breath that I hadn’t known I had been holding. A bar cart rolled out, a glass on its surface. The liquid inside it was clear and icy and an orange hibiscus flower floated on top.

You can eat it or put it under your ear or let it stay it the ice, the cart said, her voice a whisper. Whatever makes you feel good. The booth with its firm wood arms brushed my hair back into place. It promised to take me when I was calmer to get a new shirt.

You’re safe now, said the plates, the walls, the glasses, even the golden chandelier that I hadn’t noticed before. Bea will pause here. She will breathe and push back the burn in her eyes.

You’re a person, the candles told me, she’ll finally say. Bea, you’re a person, said the crisp white napkins. You’re not like us. You’re a person. Their voices were even, deep.

And as Bea picked the flower out of the glass and chewed on the orange petals, she said, “I wondered if that would ever feel true again.”

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