snaggletooth magazine

What Happened to Gerald

After the act, in the telling, it sounds much worse. In fact, it sounds horrific to Lorraine as it escapes out of her mouth.

“Wait, so you’re saying you killed Gerald?” Julie says, her face contorting into a question mark.

“Yeah. I mean, I just - yeah.”

“How? I just don’t really understand.” Julie takes a breath pausing. “I guess it doesn’t make sense to me.”

“It doesn’t make sense to me either,” Lorraine says as she encircles her thumb and pointer around her wrist, squeezing.

And it didn’t. Lorraine couldn’t wrap her mind around or even guess at her motivations for what she had done. She actually couldn’t even remember doing it. She tried to recall if the incident had been something planned, or why she had decided to bring Gerald outside. But the more she strained, the more confused she became. If she had premeditated her actions, that probably would mean she was crazy, she figured. She wasn’t crazy, so maybe the decision—the decisions?—had been on a colossal whim?

Although, Lorraine wasn’t exactly an on-a-whim type of person. Although she reminded herself, there was that time sophomore year she signed up for scenic painting. That had been on a whim, but it had also been a disaster. Most unplanned things were disasters. Everything Lorraine did was premeditated, written down in her faded purple planner. Each task written down was completed without fail, and hardly anything occurred that wasn’t penciled in between the dotted lines in the weekly to-do list categories. If she woke up sick and Wednesday’s square said she was biking for forty-five minutes at the gym, it didn’t matter, she was going no matter what.

Lorraine was tired.

She remembered the day that Julie and Summer had brought Gerald home for the first time. It had been a Sunday afternoon, and the grayness outside and the looming week ahead were weighing on Lorraine as she sat in the common room of their apartment. Julie and Summer had been at Walmart and apparently, that’s where they picked up Gerald. Gerald was beautiful, clearly able to dominate any space they occupied, nothing like Loraine had ever seen before. Her roommates were constantly thinking about guys, and supposedly Gerald was a tool to get guys into their apartment-- specifically Jack Sinclair and James Gordon. Lorraine didn’t quite follow their logic. If Julie and Summer couldn’t get the guys into their apartment without Gerald, then something was probably off about the whole thing, she concluded.

Lorraine thought about Jameses and Jacks too, but not quite as often as her roommates. Her thoughts seemed to circulate in a never-ending pattern of questions she believed guided her along her chosen path. What work did she need to do to maintain her A in her Latin America History class? Would her GPA drop if her group members forgot to do their part of the assignment? Would they have bananas in the cafeteria? How many calories could she save if she swapped the splash of skim milk in her coffee for unflavored Almond milk? The answer to the last question was approximately 10, but it was probably safer to go with no milk at all.

“Lorraine, what did you do to him?” Summer’s slightly nasally voice refocused her attention on the current situation. She took a deep breath, avoiding the other gazes in the room, preparing herself to call her struggling memory to the surface.

“I ate him,” Lorraine said, almost disbelieving herself.

“What? What the actual fuck Lorraine?” Lorraine wasn’t sure if it was Julie or Summer who said it. She ran her fingers through her dark brown hair, removing a loose strand and flicking it to the floor.

“You never forget anything,” Lorraine’s mother often said to her in awe when Lorraine could recall who had sat next to her in her 6th-grade math class, or what she had eaten for breakfast the past Friday. But lately, Lorraine found that she had holes in her memory. There were fuzzy moments scattered amongst her trips to class, visits to the gym, and occasional attendance at theater parties with Julie and Summer, where she didn’t know what she was doing, what she had done.

Two Mondays ago, she had been sitting with her friend Jane from German class, studying for their quiz in the Modern Language Lounge. Jane had a bag of Sour Patch Kids in her bag which she had been eating while they went over conjugations. Lorraine, though, hadn’t been able to focus on the studying, only thinking about the sugar-covered gummies Jane periodically put into her mouth and speculating what size pants her friend wore. It was probably a 4, a 4 tall because Jane was 5’10’’, Lorraine had decided. When Jane left to go fill up her water bottle, Lorraine took the bag of Sour Patch Kids. She knew Jane would have offered some to her if she had asked, but she had to take them.

She wasn’t quite sure about the details of what happened once she took the Sour Patch Kids. Had she eaten them? Did she put them back? At what point did she leave? Did Jane find out? As far as she knew Jane acted friendly the next morning in class and Lorraine couldn’t see any hint of suspicion in her eyes. All Lorraine could remember about the incident was the weight she felt in her stomach afterward and the need to get rid of it, the need to regain herself.

“Were you mad at us or something?” Julie asks, and Lorraine stops thinking about what happened with Jane.

“I know you’re going through a tough time, but this seems bizarrely personal,” Summer adds.

“No. No, it wasn’t about you two, it wasn’t really about Gerald, just like you know. I was having a not great day. That was the day I found out.”

“Why, then?” Summer asked. Lorraine knew it was definitely Summer speaking this time.

“I mean I didn’t want either of you to know that I had done anything to him.”

“No, not the outside porch thing, I mean why did you eat him? Why did you eat a plant, like a non-edible plant?” Summer cocks her head and flashes a concerned look at Julie. 

“Umm, I’m not sure, I just did.” 

“I’m sorry to say it Lorraine, but this is just really weird. I think you seriously need to talk to someone, like I just don’t really know what to say here.”

After Lorraine’s brother Anthony had punched a hole through the wall that divided their living room from the dining room, making a jagged half-moon crescent, Lorraine’s mother had suggested Anthony go talk to someone. He had said no and that was the end of it. Actually, he had then punched her mother, and her mother had filed assault charges, and Anthony had been taken away last week, and that was the end of it. “So little self-control,” her father would say, shaking his head, the three prominent wrinkles on his forehead pinching together.  

Lorraine hardly posted anything on social media, but she was well aware, and well attuned, to what everyone else posted. She watched people making eggs benedict, people’s morning ab routines, and boys riding their longboards in California. An artsy Instagram account Lorraine had followed had posted that with a pencil drawing of a sad-looking girl wrapped in the words, “The more pressure she placed on herself to fit into her expectations, the further she burst apart when she inevitably didn’t fit.”  Lorraine hated things like that, hated when people’s words tried too hard to explain, to understand. But for some reason, she had screenshotted it and saved it to her photos. A vague resonance stirred in her every time she read it.

“I’m sorry,” Lorraine says, not meeting anyone’s eyes. Her voice began to quiver a bit, breaking apart between her words. “I wish I hadn’t done it, I’ll buy a new plant,” she says, scraping her fingernails down the side of her cheek, finding some wetness. Maybe she was crying? “Can we just forget about it?”

“Umm ok, I guess, but like I don’t really think I can, Lorraine. How do you forget something like that?” says Summer, probing Lorraine with her eyes. 

The memory, the truth of what happened, which had been seeping through the walls in her mind for the past few minutes, came flooding, splashing into Lorraine’s consciousness.

She had eaten Gerald, her roommate’s medium-sized succulent, the plant which had become the focal point of their apartment. She had torn off every single leaf and then she had eaten maybe half of them, chewing the bitter green flesh, and then thrown up, made herself throw up. Taking the torn-up plant in her hands she had gone outside and thrown Gerald’s remains in the February snow beneath their porch. And then, she had made herself forget. 

Now, confronted with the truth, Lorraine felt the fear - the fear of everything else that could be true. ★

Margy Schueler is a senior English and Psychology double major from Colorado Springs, CO. After Bates she is going to St. Andrew's University in Scotland to do a Master's degree in Victorian Literature. Some of her favorite things are books, running, oatmeal, giraffes, hiking, and spending time with her friends and family.