Lakewood - Megan Giddings Page 0,73

up with the curse stuff again. One said it was from the Ojibwe. In this version of the story they had cursed the white men who had forced them off these fields. Their last acts were to pray retribution befell everyone who dared live here. There was a flurry of men interpreting each other: dead girls in streams, unusual amounts of cancer. Their fathers had grown up talking about a man with a dog’s head terrorizing the woods. One said, Maybe these stories are still around because it’s the only way we can talk about the consequences of the past without feeling responsible for our present actions. The rest ignored him.

I got a glass of ice water, went to an empty booth in the back. The drink was so cold it almost made my throat close. I coughed. Pressed it against my cheeks and forehead to cool down. The older waitress there brought me a chocolate donut without asking, put down a carton of skim. I remember you, she said. I smiled at her, though I knew I would have to stop coming back. She would start asking me about my life. Maybe tell people around me.

The old men had stopped talking. They and the woman were looking out the large front window. Some were half-risen out of their seats. I set my water glass down, paid, and went to see what was happening outside. Standing on the sidewalk was the man with dreadlocks who had been protesting two days ago.

His shirt was off. There was a large hole in his torso. His intestines were pink, blood was circulating, there was a yellowish thing visible, maybe his stomach or gall bladder. The top of a bone, light pink and gray. He was shouting, They did this to me, they did this to me. Stop letting them control this town.

I felt faint. My brain was split between fighting my nausea and wondering how it was possible. How did his organs not flop out? How was he alive? His intestines reminded me of hot dogs. And in most contexts, I find hot dogs disturbing. It’s the way they shine, the way they look like human meat. There were more flyers at his feet. His stomach was quivering.

As I’m writing this, my fingers are shaking, my eyes are burning. The anticipation I felt that his organs would fall out onto the sidewalk, that I would see him collapse into a pile of mush or start bleeding out keeps rushing inside me.

I signed up to be in a “memory experiment.” But it’s been so much more than that. We were simply told it’s a small town and people like to talk. The pellets. The cabin. The girl. The pills. My brain. The way they’re making me doubt myself, reality. The secrecy.

It’s torture.

When I got home, I texted you. I called my mom. She didn’t pick up either.

25

Dear Tanya,

I’m in my apartment here after a long evening walking in the meadow with Charlie and Mariah. There were bruises on his arms and feet. He kept saying that he felt great. He showed me his arms and legs. They’re completely hairless now. A pill, Charlie said. I’m so smooth.

It’s a full moon. In the park, Mariah told us she was in these studies because for years she had ruined her life. Stole money from friends and family, ran up credit cards. She was addicted to Adderall, liked uppers in general. When you take enough of them, they can make your hair fall out, your teeth start to get loose, but you can get yourself to do things. I couldn’t stop asking questions, I was amazed at all the things that she said those pills can do. She’s making the money to pay people back. Mariah’s hoping that maybe the money will help rebuild her life in the way apologies couldn’t. Now I realize I was probably being super-rude, but at the time, I couldn’t stop asking. She said she got into crystals, oils, the nature of it all—though these things could be expensive too—because there was so much you had to know. The fiddly details, the focus it took, gave her brain something else to focus on.

Charlie said he was doing the studies because he wanted to go back to school, but his parents couldn’t help him.

We walked in the meadows, in the moonlight the flowers Charlie promised would show up in August were tiny ghosts. I asked them both if they had been tempted at