Daisy Died

Five pins hovered above the shiny polished wood, hanging from their necks. Below them, their brothers knocked together before bustling into the black pit, disappearing from sight.  

Daisy Miller stood at the tail end of the lane and watched the remaining five settle where 10 once stood. She inhaled slowly, paused a moment, and then swung. 

Crash!  The row of white was torn in two by the hurtling purple blur. Daisy raised her hands in victory and delighted in the sound of her friends cheering behind her. 

“Well done, Daisy,” Matt smiled, beaming at his girlfriend as if she’d just solved world hunger. Next to him, Bex rolled her eyes and Daisy tried to imagine all the things she probably wanted to say- anyone could do that. It was only a spare.  

“My turn.” She rose off the stick brown bench and Daisy took her spot, internally noting how uncomfortable bowling shoes were. Ugly, too. She watched Bex’s knock together since her friend always accidentally got a size too big, and they made the lanky girl look even more awkward than usual.  

Tony smiled at her when she sat down and then turned back to Geoff, gesturing animatedly about the Broncos game they’d watched together the night before. Matt, who still had his arm around Daisy’s shoulders, was watching Bex as she carefully held her orange ball atop her thumb and then released it; watched as it glided down the lane and almost immediately swept into the gutter.   “Damn.” Bex returned to the group and Geoff rose for his turn, cutting Tony off in the middle of a sentence.  

It was an average Saturday night. Other members of Jefferson High School’s senior class drifted in and out of the bowling alley to waste time before a party or to meet someone they hadn’t seen in a while, and maybe even to swing by the group’s table to see how everything was going.  

If Daisy were forced to categorize her friends into different social groups she could do it in an instant: Tony and Geoff were jocks, Matt was a math geek, Bex liked art and music, and Daisy was the holy one who went to church and carried around a rosary. It was a wonder they had even found each other in the first place, but life had been odd and gathered them together like old fallen leaves.  

Geoff bowled a strike. “Eat it, Tony!” he called, and then ran over to give Bex a high-five. Tony passed him five dollars.    

Daisy noticed their positioning like she noticed everything; that there was never enough room for all of them, no matter where they went. Four chairs by the ancient plastic table at the alley; four seats in the roller coaster; four indents in the couch cushions so someone always had to sit on the floor. Five was a weird number for a group of friends. Someone always felt like they didn’t belong.  

Daisy filed this thought under ‘consolation prizes’ in her mind. It was a small advantage to her final act, her grand finale. To know that her friends would finally be an even number. 

It was four o’clock in the afternoon when Daisy Miller’s parents addressed the small group. The three boys had gotten there first.

While the Millers explained their situation to the teenagers in front of them, Mrs. Miller had a vague feeling that something wasn’t right. Soon, Bex Shepard walked in, out of breath, carrying a liter of soda for no apparent reason. Everyone looked up at their old friend.

“Did I miss anything important? I brought soda.”

Bex was a force, but tonight, she felt more like a light breeze, the kind that blows hair into wet lipgloss. Everyone knew she would be late and would have laughed about it in any other circumstance, but tonight it felt cruel of her to commit such an accident against time. Geoff, Tony, and Matt all looked at her with grimaces that differed but were alike in hatred. Such disrespect, they all thought, in one way or another.  

“The meeting started ten minutes ago,” Matt snapped. Bex was silent as she took her seat, hugging the liter against her stomach.  

But the Millers didn’t want to repeat what they’d already said to the three boys, and for that they too hated Bex at that moment. Mrs. Miller kept her attention on the carpet patterns to keep from crying and Mr. Miller shot a glance to Tony, who fidgeted with his hands.  

Tony said it again, with more certainty than the Millers had, and that sent Mrs. Miller over the edge, and etched a frown that looked permanent into the folds of Mr. Miller’s wrinkles. Bex didn’t know how to react. 

“Gone,” she said, not as a question, not as a statement, but as a word with no anchor, floating in the open space. 

“Gone,” Someone repeated, no one really sure who.  

Daisy Miller had disappeared in the night.  

They’d called the police. They’d hired a detective. They’d been out all night, their brights on, searching the streets for anything unusual. But the streets were just asphalt for the parents and the kids sitting in front of them now, slack-jawed, were only adding to the pain.  

No one felt the need to say anything after that anyway, so they went their separate ways, piling into different colored cars and leaving different shapes of smoke behind them. The first thread began to fray.  

The third time that Geoff slammed Tony to the ground that Friday at football practice, Tony landed on his wrist and heard an unfamiliar snap. Matt rushed off his familiar place at the sidelines to find his friends tangled on the ground, but when Geoff jumped up quickly, Tony stayed crumpled on the grass.

“Coach,” he groaned through gritted teeth, “I need someone to take me to the hospital.”

Matt and Geoff were sweaty and silent in the car as it hurdled out of the high school parking lot but Tony moaned and whined in the passenger’s seat, clutching his wrist. It was hanging from his forearm at an odd angle and Geoff thanked God that he was driving so he didn’t have to look at the disfigured hand. 

When they pulled into a spot near the ER entrance, Tony had stopped moaning and was leaning against the window, immobile.  

“Tony? Dude, let’s get that hand fixed up.” Geoff nudged his friend’s shoulder and Tony yelped, which made them all jump. 

“Sorry,” Tony cracked the door without looking at them, “I’m a little lost in thought.”

They all were, but especially Matt and Geoff as they sat in the blue plastic chairs, waiting for the doctor to finish wrapping Tony’s wrist. Matt kept glancing up and down the long hallway around him, his eyes stopping at every door, wondering if Daisy was in one of the rooms with her face so disfigured they’d had to classify her as ‘Jane Doe’.  

Geoff, on the other hand, studied the ugly blue and white linoleum. He forced his mind to go blank because otherwise he’d think of blonde hair and flowers with white petals.  

Tony didn’t think much of anything beside his hand until they were all driving home. Matt rolled down the window a little bit and a sheet of rain splattered against Tony’s cheek. 

“Sometimes I think she did it on purpose,” Matt said, his eyes trained on the road now slick with rain.  Geoff made a sound in the backseat, but Tony looked over at his friend wondering why, after days of silence, he’d chosen to say that. 

“She wouldn’t do that.” Tony felt his cheeks warm; his uninjured hand clenched into a fist. “I know her and she wouldn’t do that.”

Geoff made another sound. Matt gripped the steering wheel tighter and Tony saw that his face had grown red too, and the muscles in his neck were tight and bulging. “I think I know her better than you.”

“Knew her,” Geoff corrected, which was the wrong thing to say at the exact wrong moment to the wrong person, who slammed on the brakes and set the car skidding across the asphalt towards the Daimler family’s fence. The Subaru barreled into the wooden planks and sent white pickets flying, eventually sliding to a stop in the muddy, torn-up grass. One of the Daimlers pressed their face against the front window and looked like she might be screaming.  

Geoff and Tony were stunned into silence, not wanting to move, not wanting to say anything to anger Matt. They’d never seen him like this before, huffing and flushed and getting ready to yell and scream and curse. He’d never, not once, gotten into a car accident before and yet there they were today, in the middle of a demolition zone that they themselves created. Despite the rain slamming against the windows outside and the Daimlers wailing as they all gathered on the covered porch, the boys in the car were silent.  

“Get out,” was what Matt finally said. It was such an unexpected thing for him to say; Matt was always trying to stitch things back together when everyone else was tearing each other apart.  No one moved until he slammed his fists against the steering wheel. “Get out!”

So Geoff and Tony, without a whisper of an argument, grabbed their duffel bags and slid slowly out of the car and into the rain, leaving the Subaru behind on the Daimler’s front yard with Matt inside, hunched over the wheel.  

Only two people lived at the Adams estate now that Bex’s father had died, which was odd, considering the sheer size of the place. It was best suited for a family of four.

But Mrs. Adams didn’t have any family except for Bex, who kept herself locked away in the barn most of the time, painting on big white canvases with bright, obnoxious colors. She didn’t bother her daughter since it was healthy for a girl to express herself creatively, and plus, Mrs. Adams didn’t know the first thing about art. She would only get in Bex’s way.  

It was the Sunday after the accident at the Daimler’s when Matt pulled open the ancient door to Bex’s barn, white paint stains all over his clothes. Bex was straddling a ladder, adding red flowers to the top of one of the old wooden walls. Something by the Smiths was blaring through the speakers that she had set up on the floor, which made Matt roll his eyes. Same old Bex, too pretentious to admit that she’d rather be playing N*SYNC instead of the wailing eighties rock she’d told everyone was her favorite.  

He realized that Bex’s was probably a bad place to go, considering the fact that they never hung out alone before. A long time ago, before Daisy, Bex had asked Matt to go to the Freshman Winter Spectacular with her as his date, and he said no. There was just something about her, he thought. Something about her made him say no every time.  

She finally noticed him and smiled wildly from her perch, scurrying down the ladder while he waited for her down below. He surveyed the paintings around the barn and noted that, in all actuality, they weren’t very good, but then felt guilty for saying so since they had all just been through something traumatizing and he hadn’t stopped to realize that maybe Bex was just in a rut.  

“Those are pretty,” he nodded towards the flowers that she’d been painting and she smiled again, wider and more obnoxiously than before.  

“I guess I’m not the only one who’s been doing some painting. How are the Daimlers?”

There was a joke in her tone but Matt couldn’t find the will to appreciate it.  

“They’re glad that I’m fixing for everything, that’s all. I sort of ruined their lawn.”  

“Geoff told me. He feels really bad about what he said.”

Matt shrugged. It wasn’t the time to talk about this and she wasn’t the person; if reality chose to be kind to him, then the whole situation would just fold into itself in his memory and disappear, so he’d never have to think about it again.  

For a while, the two of them were silent. Matt knew that he should break the quiet before Bex did, though…she had a habit of being so desperate for noise, that she’d say anything to start a conversation, anything rude or inappropriate or awkward and usually, very random.  He really didn’t want to talk today, however, so he decided to walk around and look closer at the paintings, giving his friend the benefit of the doubt. They were still terrible.  

“I really miss her. I think I might paint her.” And there it was. It was awkward for him, random enough to constitute the word, inappropriate for her to even bring up. Matt knew it wasn’t true. Bex had resented Daisy for stealing the boy she never had an opportunity to seduce and if he had to warrant a guess, wasn’t really all that sad to see her go.  

“I think that’s a terrible idea.” Matt saw a painting of a circus elephant in the corner and started to laugh at the absurdity. When he turned back to Bex, her face had fallen, her eyes were dark and she looked like she might cry. She knew what he meant without him having to say anything.  

“Why don’t you go talk to Geoff and Tony?” She offered. She just wanted him out of the barn at least, which was a first. “Maybe they’ll help you with the fence.”

“I don’t want to talk to them for a while,” Matt didn’t add that he was tired of looking at them; tired of being around them. They had been friends for too long.  

Pretty soon Bex, ever the over-emotional, began to cry silently, especially since Matt was now studying a row of similar paintings and scoffing at them and pointing out their flaws: the misuse of color and the over exaggeration of features.  

“Are you ever going to see any of us after this? Now that Daisy’s gone, you’re going to leave us and-”

“You never liked her,” he interrupted, shoving aside an odd red and pink painting. “You’re glad she’s gone.”

Bex gulped in air and was now sobbing, which she hadn’t done since her father’s funeral years ago. Matt had never seen her eyes that bloodshot before, except for the one time they’d all tried pot and had fallen asleep on the barn floor, everyone tangled around each other.  Now, they couldn’t have been farther apart.  

“The entire group thought I hated Daisy, except for one person,” she managed to get out in between wails, “Daisy. She knew that I loved her!”

Matt couldn’t take it anymore and for lack of a better outlet, threw his fist against one of the taut canvases, punching a whole in the middle of an acrylic poppy and slamming the entire thing against one of the wooden posts.  

“STOP!” Bex ran behind him and wrapped her arms around him from behind; it was her favorite painting and he was slamming it against the post so viciously that she almost thought she heard the wood crack.  

He struggled to get free from her grip and finally wrenched an elbow out of her grasp, which he shoved backwards, straight into her nose. With a cry, she toppled onto the floor, blood pouring out onto her oversized white shirt.  

The barn was suddenly still with what had just occurred and Matt dropped the now shattered remains of wood and cloth onto the floor. Bex rolled back and forth, clutching her nose, screaming at him and no one at the same time. After a while of him just standing there, watching her, unaware of what to do, Bex’s mom tore into the room and crouched next to her daughter.  

“Get out,” she told him. Now that the words were directed at him, he knew how lethal they sounded and he crouched down, wanting to win back everyone’s favor, wanting everyone to remember how good of a guy he was. Remember when I bought your daughter’s movie tickets when she forgot her wallet? He wanted to say, remember when I helped her pass college algebra?

“Get away from my daughter, Matt,” Mrs. Miller commanded.

He left. 

He climbed into his car and peeled out of the long driveway, tearing away from the barn, not knowing when he’d next see it again. 

One day, Daisy thought to herself, I’ll go back.  

But not then. She was rolling down a bumpy highway in the car her cousin had assured her she could use, her Daughters of Christ duffel bag from church camp sitting in the passenger seat.  

She wondered what her friends were doing. She’d never missed her tiny group of confidantes more than in that moment, and felt bad for leaving them behind. She laughed to herself at the thought of them sitting at church together, holding hands and praying for her safe return. Bex had always hated church but maybe she’d finally decide to go. She thought of Tony and Matt holding hands and couldn’t fathom the thought of it. Daisy hoped that, even though she was gone, Tony wouldn’t tell Matt about their Saturday nights in O’Brian field, tangled around each other in the back of Tony’s truck. She wouldn’t want Matt and Tony to drift apart because of her.

She didn’t much think about her parents, only thought about her destination and how much farther she had to go. She felt the tiniest bit homesick and wished Geoff was in the backseat talking to Bex about Dali, and Tony was in the seat next to them smiling at her in the rearview mirror, and Matt was looking out the passenger’s side window, quiet as ever. She told herself that she’d see them again. 

Someday, she thought, but not today. They’d be fine without her.