Daisy doesn’t put ice in their drinks, even though they asked for ice, specifically. She puts an extra lemon slice in each glass instead. The glasses are warm, just slid out of the industrial dishwasher. She puts the four glasses of lukewarm lemon water on the serving tray, which she balances on the edge of her palm, making sure it wobbles just enough to feel perfect. She holds the tray level with her chin as she spins out of the kitchen. Wobble, wobble, warm water sloshes a bit, puddles on the tray. Daisy remembers, paints on her ugly waitress smile, walks through the cavernous restaurant that smells like burnt cheese. Her shoes squeak, screaming the world false until she stops in front of the table.
They wanted a booth. Four professional and young-looking people, probably in their twenties, ten years or so younger than Daisy. They shift back and forth and the red vinyl seats squeal. Three women, almost identical, except for their hair and skin and eyes and teeth. Daisy wants to fall in love with the buck-toothed girl. Or maybe become her. She even briefly considered putting ice just in her glass. but that would have been too suspicious. She sets the tray down on the edge of the copper table, the three women and one bulky, long-haired man sit straight up and watch their waters being served. They don’t say anything. Their conversation broke apart with Daisy’s approach. Daisy loves this part. You can tell a lot about a person from watching how they take something they don’t want.
The buck-toothed girl looks at Daisy square, her eyebrows dip close to her eyeballs but her mouth upswings in some kind of edgy, Picasso-like smile. Daisy has somehow trained her face to reject the action of blushing, but she does lower her eyes away from the girl’s face, looks directly at her neck, where a jade scarab beetle dangles from a delicate rose-gold chain. Probably fake. But still, Daisy swoons a little.
“Thank you,” the bulky, long-haired man mumbles and takes a small sip of the water. “We’re ready to order, now. I think?”
Two faceless girls nod in agreement. Buck-toothed wiggles her shoulders so the scarab bounces. Daisy passes out the straws from her apron and the buck-toothed girl rips the paper off, stuffs the straw in her glass, pulls the tepid water quickly into her mouth. The muscles in her neck swell and roll like ocean.
They order a bunch of terrible, preservative and cholesterol-filled appetizers and strawberry margaritas.
“At least the long-haired guy has his hair pulled back in a bun, right?” Masterson says. “Means you won’t have to deal with a bunch of fucking hair shit out right on his empty plate when you take it away.”
“They ordered a bunch of apps so he won’t have his own plate,” Daisy says.
Masterson snorts. “Classic.”
Daisy rolls her eyes. Masterson loves saying shit like that. “Classic.” “Bitching.” “Royal.” “Slick.” Masterson literally has rose-colored glasses, like he picked them out at the eye-doctor and everything. He’s a caricature and Daisy doesn’t have time for caricatures so as soon as he opens his mouth again she glides past him and heads back to the kitchen to dump the order.
She chooses a spot where she can lean against a quartered windowpane and also survey the table of four. She has other tables, sure, but they’re all fine, squishing fake food between their teeth and gums and tongues and throats soaking up all the bright and violent sauces.
It reminds her of a carousel, the way the four of them seem to take turns sipping on their pink margaritas. The man fondles the bun at the back of his head often, maybe checking to make sure every hair is where it should be. He rakes his fingers behind his ear, touching nothing. The buck-toothed girl has drained her lemon-lemon water. Daisy considers getting her another.
But before she can, the buck-toothed girl waves at her. She’s unbuttoned her lavender blouse so that one shoulder of the thing slouches off her and reveals a black spaghetti strap. Daisy rolls her back off the windowpane.
“We’re ready to settle up. I think?” The man touches his bun.
The girls nod again. The buck-toothed girl burps and wipes her mouth with the floppy sleeve of her unbuttoned blouse.
“Just the one drink for you all tonight, huh?” Daisy says, and flashes them her most waitressly smile. She practices it every morning in the mirror, the quick flick of the chin down, the dimples shining toward them, the curling of one side of her lips, the dancing, twitching, of her left pupil. Boss said she should practice, because when she was first hired, she would scowl, unknowingly, at every customer. You gotta sell it, the boss said.
“Taking it slow. Party tonight.” One of the faceless girls says this.
“Sure, sure. I get it.”
Buck-toothed scoots her elbows on the table, folds her hands one on top of the other and rests her chin on her knuckles. “You sure do.” She winks.
They rest four credit cards on the tab. Daisy sighs, picks up the pile. Determines to scatter the cards to the wrong people when she returns, even though she knows exactly which card belongs to which professional young-looking person.
Buck-toothed’s red and silver card reads: Amelia H. Gustaf.
“Ms. Gustaf,” she says, as she hands Amelia H. the green credit card.
***
Masterson nods up and down and wags his pinky finger and his thumb in the hang ten sign. Daisy is pretty damn sure the boy has never seen the ocean ever in his life. “Party tonight, flower girl, you up for it?”
Daisy doesn’t have to close up tonight. Good. She doesn’t have the heart for it. The man with the sinking shoulders just sat down, his beard reaching, nearly touching, the counter of the bar. He’ll order bourbon after bourbon and never really look up. He makes her so sad. He makes her so sad she can’t speak to him directly. Blake, the veteran bartender, with her nails so manicured and fake-long she can barely write, takes his order. Sometimes Daisy worries that Blake will be using the bathroom one day and scratch the fuck out of herself with those knives at the end of her fingers.
Daisy checks her watch, a small teal analog with tiny golden numbers. Nine o’clock. She could go home. She could pull out her phone and pretend to look at her calendar. She could lie. The possibilities snowball and blind her, she looks back at the hunched man as Blake brings him his first bourbon on the rocks to nurse and suddenly she can’t stand the thought of being alone so she just shrugs. “Sure. Why not. Where?”
The hunched man takes a sip and holds the drink out, shaking it a little. Blake should have known. The poor, sunken man always wants more ice.
A crowd of waiters and waitresses walk out together with giggles and freedom bubbling from their lips.
The party is at this ugly cinder block of a house. Beige on the outside with a flat-topped roof, Daisy has always wondered if the roof might fall in if it were a heavy enough winter. But winter seems miles away, and Daisy, until now, felt comfortable and free in her Doc Martens, a twenty-dollar short, crumpled black dress, and her favorite bright yellow crop top sweater hugging her arms with its soft, molded plastics.
Free until now because she knows this house, it’s time-frozen right angles, its shambled discoloring, its yawning quiet. This house is a quelled scream. Hush, hush, personified – the house reaches with ugly beige fingers and traps them tight over your mouth. The small restaurant crowd stumbles forward, sheep-like, and Daisy trundles with them, her hands search for pockets she doesn’t have. There is nowhere to hide. She knows this house.
Inside Daisy looks for a bucket of ice, she wants to take an ice cube in each hand and close her fists around them. There are swelling, sweating bodies all around her, increasing the humidity of the place, body odor and deodorant sprays mingle and brush against her like skin, a sense so familiar to a younger version of herself for whom this type of night is made. In a far corner three indistinguishable faces blend and lick and bite each other. In the middle of the rectangular room music flares and those bodies sway and bounce. What a lovely night for them, Daisy thinks, but the music is a bit too loud, too blustery, for my taste now. Without ice to hold, Daisy slips the ends of her sleeves into her palms and holds them tight, admiring the way her fingers just peek out. Is it right, she wonders, to feel dainty, nauseous, and a bit too old for this all at once?
Masterson leans against one of the walls, biting down on one of the temple tips of his rose-colored glasses. He’s chatting up one of the young things. She can see his mouth forming the words, Oh, no shit, right? Royal. Her hair swishes back and forth while her hips move. Daisy doesn’t care enough to find out what type of bullshit Masterson is trying to pull on her. Anyway, he, at least, is harmless.
Daisy tries to imagine the house without any people, any music, any human smells inside it. She closes her eyes, sways a little, pretends to be lit with music. And then the house helps her out. She opens her eyes to a dark place. The screeching of a faucet turns off above her head. An unkind black mold begins as a pinpoint in the ceiling and spreads like vomit to reach every corner.
“Tell me a scary story,” a voice lolls. Daisy pulls out of the dark place to see one of the faceless girls melting into the bulky, long-haired man she’d served just a few hours prior. They’re passing a joint around.
“A scary story?” the man says. “I’m not sure I know one.”
Buck-toothed Amelia sits on the floor, against the wall, tapping her fingers on her knees like she’s drumming, until she stops to dig and flick scum from underneath her fingernails.
“Daniel couldn’t pull a scary story out of his ass if a ghost straight-up fucked him,” Amelia says. The other faceless girl, cross-legged and hunched next to Amelia, laughs and spills her drink.
Daisy pools onto the floor next to them. “I know a scary story,” she says.
***
A long time ago a boy lived in this house, and he was so afraid of the world that he built the house inside of him, with his own muscles and tendons and cartilage and circuitry. The house swelled with the boy’s heartbeat. His father was always tired, and his mother worked so goddamn hard it was almost like he lived there alone.
Outside of the house, children made fun of the poor boy, save one girl, who not only pitied him but loved him, because she took the time to know him. Anyone can take the time to know anyone. She didn’t want to know him at first, but the girl’s mother made herself out to be saintly, and so she arranged playdates, and the girl grumbled, but went. You learn a lot about yourself by taking something you don’t want.
She grew to love him. They were children. High school freshman, maybe. So small.
The boys in their class jeered at the boy for not knowing what a blow job was. Gross, right? But the boy cried and cried in the safety of his home, his heart. He prayed to be like them. Even though the girl told him how she loved him, how crude and obnoxious the other boys were, he was sore all over about it and couldn’t shake it, couldn’t shake it, like a fever. It lined his muscles and soaked up all the good parts of him.
Finally he couldn’t take it anymore. He asked the girl to come over one day, they sat in his bed reading comic books. He burned, he held the sheets in his fists, and they came away wet and wrinkled. It disgusted her, but she pretended to keep reading.
His voice carried an ugly tempo, rose and fell sharply, when he asked her to have sex with him, pleaded her, he just had to know, had to feel what it was like. She shook her head so hard her cheeks wobbled, but again and again he asked her, until he threw himself down between her knees and sobbed in her lap like a fucking toddler, and she, she loving him, she grieving for him, didn’t know what to do. He dried his eyes and wiped his snot, sucked on his shaking lower lip.
He threw up all over her afterward. And cried again. This time she left him sobbing into his floorboards and went into his bathroom, first she thought just to wipe herself off but she couldn’t do just that. She turned on the faucet and stepped into the shower and covered herself in soap suds.
“Ew,” said the melty girl, “you said this was a fucking scary story – it’s just nasty.”
“Shut the fuck up and listen.”
The next day at school the boy sat on a picnic table at lunch, the other boys surrounding him like fucking apostles. They giggled when she walked by.
All day she tried to learn while listening to peripheral laughter.
All day the boy shone like a king. He didn’t say a word to her.
At the last bell she walked by his locker, there they all were, gaping up at him, and one boy covered his mouth until he just couldn’t, and laughter burst out from every part of him. She spun around.
“What?” the word hurt in her mouth.
The laughing boy, bent over, shook his head. “Heard you’re not such a great lay.”
The herd of boys roared. The king of them all, his face coarse and scraped red. All the misery and guilt and shame sliced into her, replacing her pity, replacing, for a moment, even her love.
“Me? Me? He fucking puked all over me afterward.”
You can guess how the boys reacted, I’ll bet. They made a definite pariah of him after that. Endless nicknames. They pretended to throw up every time he walked down the hall.
But now he didn’t have the girl for comfort. He’d ruined that and knew it. That poor boy might have been an idiot, but he wasn’t stupid. He tried to call her just one time, to apologize, and just before she hung up on him, she told him that his heart was so cold it might as well be frozen.
This house. His frosted heart. It was all he had left. So he became even more a part of it. He took a shit load of his mother’s sleeping pills, followed by a shit load of Tylenol, so there was just no chance. He turned the faucet on. Took the pills. Turned the faucet off right before he fell asleep. He fell asleep in hot water and died in vomit, yellow acid bile, and frigid water. His mom didn’t find him until the next fucking morning, when his body was blue and the water was thick with cold.
He’s here, still, in this house. Messes with the faucets, especially. His ghost is yellow, especially around the eyes, not white or translucent like you’d think. He hates nights like this, when all the kids who would have hated him congregate, party, drink, fuck. He’d vomit all over all of it if he could. His parents couldn’t sell the place. I’m not sure they even tried. His mom just split, couldn’t take the constant invasion of his memory. His dad moved into a little apartment, doesn’t ever come around here. Spends most of his time holed up in a bar, drinking bourbon with too much ice.
The people around here, they say the poor boy’s ghost is just waiting for the girl to come back to him. Did she ever? Maybe. My guess is, if she ever came back here, if she ever comes back here, it’ll be when she plans to stay.
***
“That story was fucking bonkers,” the melty girl says.
The bulky long-haired man absently strokes the girl’s hair that flows across his lap. Daisy stares him down until he blinks and gives him a quick grin.
“Hey,” the melty girl says, “you were our waitress today, weren’t you?”
“Wow,” Amelia says, “well fucking done, Tracy, you’re a right private eye.”
Daisy gets up and both her knees crack. “That’s all I got, kids. Have a nice, whatever this is.”
Amelia gets up too. Daisy starts and so does Amelia. Daisy takes long strides to the door and feels the younger girl eating up her steps.
“Where’d you get that story from?” Amelia asks when Daisy puts her hand on the knob. So close to out the door.
“Shit, I don’t know,” Daisy lies. “You been around this town long enough you’re bound to pick up a whole bunch of nonsense.”
“Sure, sure.” Amelia touches Daisy on her elbow and gestures back toward her friends. “Night’s still young, though? I’m bored sick of those three over there. Wouldn’t mind spending time with someone who’s got stories like you.”
Daisy looks down and finds a bucket of ice with champagne bottles inside it, right next to the door. She grabs two ice cubes and looks at them, their proportions, the missing, chipped away pieces. “That wasn’t there before,” she says.
Back in the corner, the long-haired man tugs on the buttons of the blouse belonging to the one melty, faceless girl. But now her features come into a shocking frame, the roundness of her jaw and fullness of her pink cheeks, the freckles dotting her nose and the three identical, sapphire earrings speckling the edge of her earlobe. She bats at the man’s hand, shrugs it away, but it returns, over and over. Daisy imagines stalking back toward them and kneeing the long-haired fucker in the face. Imagines his broken, squashed nose. Imagines him leveled, imagines the quiet shock this dying house will hold, imagines ten people taking photos and posting them to flood the world. The girl bats his hand away, then wraps her arm around his neck, pulls herself up, embraces him. His cheeks lift while his nose buries itself in her collarbone. Daisy remembers now. That man doesn’t know any scary stories.
The ice should have melted in her hands by now.
Amelia wraps her fingers around Daisy’s elbow, leans in toward Daisy’s ear. Daisy can hear how wet her mouth is. “Stay, please, stay,” Amelia H. Gustaf whispers, and with her words, Daisy knows the house won’t let her leave this time, its fingers are busy sealing the door shut tight. If she’s honest, she’s known that from the start. She lets her hand slide from the door knob and feels a warm tear on her cheek. A ragged sigh turns into a cough turns into a child’s laugh, and for the first time in years nothing feels false. She can feel her heart at rest.
The jade scarab resting on Amelia’s chest glows and seems to light up every millimeter of her skin. Her face is contoured and shiny. Her smile is polite but hungry. Her eyes, her eyes, such a beautiful hazel, greens and grays splattering through the irises, the rims of which are golden yellow, like a promise.
*****
Katherine Ellison graduated from the Johns Hopkins MA in Writing Program this past December, and lives in the woods of southern Vermont. She was recently accepted as a candidate in the Bennington College MFA program and will begin work there in January 2025. This is her debut publication.
