Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

  But college wasn’t real. Derek had gone, for a flicker of a moment. He got out, started a life. And then Orilly, like a strong current, dragged him right back.

  Orilly’s like that.

  Well, for some of us.

  10

  Vanessa

  Locating Cornell’s booth took forever.

  It was in the eleventh row of schools. Eleven rows of booth after booth after booth, half of them deceptively tinted burgundy. The arteries of the expo center’s aisles thick with students. I felt like Theseus, struggling through the labyrinth. But at last I’d found my minotaur: row eleven, booth 3,472,041.

  Along the way, it had been impossible to miss Cece. She flitted from one school to the next, scooping up brochures and cramming them into her bag, then hurrying after Ada. I found Ada’s poise startling. She moved through the crowd with excellent posture, shoulders slim and high and strong, eyes patient and glittering. Cece had very good taste, I had to say, but it was hard to imagine a world in which Ada would ever go for a girl like Cece. Where Ada was practically ready for the red carpet of the world, Cece was already stooped beneath the weight of her bag, lurching around like a mad scientist’s henchwoman. Much as I loved Cece, Ada was simply beyond the girl’s reach.

  Watching Ada move so confidently through the room made me think of my mother. Mom was Asian American as well, and exuded this sense of belonging wherever she went. I didn’t have that sense of self-possession, that’s for sure. While I’d moped around Aaron’s house after we moved in, Mom had dived right into our new town. She’d discovered an unoccupied seat on the city council, ran unopposed, and won. Just like that. For a few months there, her name was all over town, on lawn signs and plywood billboards. ELISE BARTLETT FOR CITY COUNCIL.

  I wasn’t entirely unlike her, at least. Though the mirror reflected my father’s face back at me most days, traces of Mom were there, too. My eyes were deep chestnut brown, like Mom’s. I’d scored one of her two rather winning dimples. But aside from the dark hair, it seemed her Japanese heritage had simply passed me over. I was a quarter Japanese, but you’d never know it. I still looked mostly like him.

  And boy, would he ever be disappointed—no, pissed—to see me here, standing at the Cornell booth at last.

  Good. He deserved it.

  Except the booth was empty. I’d briefly entertained a fantasy of meeting someone important at the booth. An astronomy alum, maybe. They’d spot a glimmer of something that would inspire them to throw a scholarship at me, we’d fall into a stimulating conversation about the Pleiades or something, and—

  A clatter, then a shout, from behind me. I turned and spotted the source of the commotion. Someone at another booth had knocked over a rotating display tower; they straightened up, lifting the tower back into place, and I recognized the red hair.

  Zach started to gather up the brochures and booklets he’d spilled, but a volunteer waved him off. Zach took a step back, bumped into another girl, who yelped loudly. That was unnecessary, I thought. I cursed her from afar. May you always have rocks in your shoes.

  Zach looked as if he wanted to vanish, which wasn’t easy for a flame-headed boy who towered over the other students. But that wasn’t all: He also wore an expression of longing. I looked past him, at the booth’s banner: THE FLECK INSTITUTE OF ART AND DESIGN. The walls were blanketed with student art and photos of the school’s campus.

  I barely knew Zach, but it was obvious he belonged at a school like that.

  His embarrassment won out, and he shrank into the crowd, putting distance between himself and the art-school booth. I watched him go, then turned back to the empty Cornell booth and picked up an information packet. On impulse, I snaked through the crowd and lifted an application packet from the Fleck table, too.

  Cece appeared at my shoulder. “We have to go. I can’t stop stalking her. I’m awful.”

  As we moved toward the exit, I slid my backpack from my shoulder and safely stowed the Cornell and Fleck paperwork inside, two tickets out of this rusty old town.

  11

  Zach

  A girl-shaped shadow fell over my sketchbook, and I squinted up. The sun leaked around a female silhouette. “Hi,” I said, not sure who I was looking at. The girl noticed my blinded state and moved to block the light, revealing a second girl behind her. Vanessa and Cece.

  Cece leaned forward, inspecting the exposed page of my sketchbook. I’d been working on an insectile oil rig, its spindly legs rising from the sea, smokestacks jutting from its back, between resting wings. Its head dipped forward, jabbing its slender proboscis into the sea, its body full almost to the bursting point. “I didn’t know your drawings were so … political,” Cece said appreciatively.

  “All art is political,” Vanessa said. “Isn’t it, Zach?”

  Cece blew a raspberry at Vanessa. “I’m going to go, uh…”

  Vanessa finished: “… see a girl about a horse?”

  I blinked at Vanessa as Cece departed. “See a girl about a horse?”

  She laughed. “Who knows.”

  “Where I come from, that means you’ve got to pee.”

  “Maybe she does.”

  “You meant something else, though.”

  “She’s got a crush,” Vanessa said.

  I remembered watching Cece inside the expo center. “Right.”

  “On your seatmate,” Vanessa added.

  I pretended not to recall. “Who?”

  “Ada.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  I shrugged.

  “The most stunning girl in school sits beside you for nearly two hours, and you just, what, blanked?”

  “Happens when I draw. Sometimes, at least. You don’t know Ada very well, do you?”

  “I’ve seen her around.”

  “I’ve been in a bunch of classes with her since she moved to Orilly,” I said. “And I don’t think Ada sees herself the way you just described.”

  “Let me see,” Vanessa said, holding out her hand.

  “See … what?”

  She gestured at the sketchbook. “I didn’t see what you were drawing.” I opened the book and showed her the page. “Ah,” she said. “Yes, you were so fixated on drawing Transformers that you didn’t notice the model who sat beside you.”

  “It’s not a Transformer.”

  She dropped the good-natured jabs then and smiled. “I know. I saw your other one, on the bus. The sea, biting back at the town. I didn’t realize you were such an environmentalist. Cece was right—you are political.”

  I didn’t dissuade her of the notion. Better than confessing the truth: I drew the things that scared me. The sea, lurking just offshore, like a lion circling a campsite in the dark. The oil rigs, like war zones our brothers and fathers are drafted into.

  “We’re all environmentalists,” I said weakly. “Or we should be. Right?”

  “Oil companies are going to drain the planet,” she announced, adopting a politician’s tone. “Leave the earth a little shriveled-up raisin, just drifting around the sun. No wonder the ice caps are melting. The ocean just wants to get bigger. It’s coming for us.”

  “Damn the man,” I agreed, perhaps a little weakly. She’d put into words what I put into my art. She had no idea how right she was.

  Vanessa laughed, then dipped closer. “Yeah, but Zach,” she said, “you live in an oil town. All hail our benevolent overlords. Right?” She shook her head. “I mean, shit. My stepfather works for Bernaco. And I don’t know you all that well, but I figure it’s a safe bet your dad does, too.”

  I let that one pass. She didn’t know any better.

  “My brother,” I said. “Not for Bernaco. Just one of the dive outfits.” If I had to wager, her stepfather had never set foot on the rigs. Probably he was an executive. Nice shoes. Didn’t know the heft of a wrench, like Dad had.

  Vanessa nodded, then looked off into the distance. Her gaze settled on something, and her faraway stare m
elted into an almost giddy expression. Fifty yards away, Cece was happily locked in conversation with Ada.

  “I think you just lost your seatmate,” I said.

  “Right on!” Vanessa shouted, loud enough that both Cece and Ada looked up, startled. Cece’s face flushed pink with embarrassment. Vanessa turned back to me. “Isn’t she adorable?” Then she pointed at the bench where I sat. “Scoot, mister.”

  I scooted.

  * * *

  On the bus ride back, Vanessa claimed a window seat and patted the space beside her. We watched as Ada and Cece boarded a moment later. Vanessa shook her head, grinning as the other two girls sat together in the back. “That girl talks a good game,” she said, “about not being tied down.”

  “Cece?”

  “The one and only.”

  “It’s just the first month of senior year,” I pointed out. “I’d be willing to bet most senior-year hookups don’t go the distance.”

  As the bus rumbled home, I kept working the oil-rig sketch, and Vanessa alternated between watching me and the scenery as it slid by. “I love it here,” she said.

  “In Orilly?” I sketched a little skiff on the water below the rig, like Ahab and his men recoiling from the great white whale.

  “Like, this specific part of California. This coast.” She drew a deep breath. Wind from the open windows ruffled her hair, carrying the scent of salt and sunlight.

  “I just know Orilly.”

  “You’ve never lived anywhere else?” I shook my head, still sketching, and she abruptly changed the subject. “Giger. Do you know him?”

  “Gee-gur?”

  “H. R. Giger. The Swiss artist. Have you seen Alien?”

  “I, uh, don’t see a lot of movies.”

  “But you know movies exist, right? And you’re aware one of them is called Alien?”

  I wasn’t, but I shrugged as if I was.

  “I saw it when I was seven. My father showed it to me.” She paused as if waiting for a reaction. When I failed to comply, she repeated: “Seven, Zach.”

  “That’s … bad?”

  “It’s, like, seriously R-rated. Like, really gory.” She hesitated again, then went on, maybe a bit underwhelmed by my lack of reaction. “My mom was pissed. Because I was—”

  “Seven?”

  “Right. Anyway—the alien in the movie is based on the designs of this artist. His stuff is really … I don’t know how to describe it. Like, mechanical, but also organic. And kind of creepily sexy? But gross, too.”

  I looked at my drawing, then at her. “And this reminds you of that?” Her turn to shrug now. She seemed suddenly uncomfortable, so I said, “What was your father thinking? Showing you that at—”

  “Seven?” She shook her head. “He wanted me to take sides.”

  “Against … your mom?”

  She looked away, watching the hills drift by. “It’s funny,” she said softly. “I don’t think I realized that’s what he was doing until just now. I thought he was sharing something he thought was amazing, but he was just trying to get under my mom’s skin. Jesus, what a dick.”

  I kept sketching, waiting for her to continue, but she didn’t.

  “I’ve never thought of an oil rig as a creepy-sexy alien,” I said finally.

  Vanessa tapped a metal tube protruding from the belly of the rig, jutting into the sea. Her meaning was obvious. She glanced up at me, about to explain, then stopped: “I’m weirding you out.”

  “Only a little.”

  She laughed. Man, that laugh.

  12

  Vanessa

  Back in Orilly, Zach walked me to the bike rack. Cece drifted off, dreamy-eyed, with Ada, lost in conversation. I fiddled with my bike lock and then turned to him and said, “Want to walk?” He looked uncertain, but only for a moment, and then he nodded.

  I pushed my bike in silence, worried the spell of our bus ride home had been broken. Then, to my pleasant surprise, he said, “Do you ever wonder, like, when you’re old, what it’ll all have meant?”

  “You mean, before I die, will I know what I was here for? What my purpose was?”

  “Sure,” he said. “When you’re sixty, or whatever.”

  “Sixty? Not ninety?”

  “All the men I know die young,” he said.

  I wasn’t sure how to respond to that. “What do you think your purpose is?”

  He shoved his hands into his pockets as we walked. He had a peculiar way of hunching his shoulders, like a turtle slowly retreating into its shell. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe to have a family. Raise good humans.”

  “That’s all? Be a good dad?”

  “That seems like a lot to me. What’s more important?”

  I considered that. “Yeah,” I said, thinking about my father, and about Aaron. “Yeah, okay. I could see that.”

  “What’s yours?”

  “To name something,” I said without hesitating. “To put my name on something that’ll outlast me.”

  “Ooh. Like the floating garbage island in the ocean?” He chuckled. “Seems like that’ll outlast us all.”

  “Ha,” I said. “No. I want to name a star.”

  He cocked his head at me. “That’s ambitious.”

  “Yeah. Maybe. I mean, most stars are just letter-number pairs, right? Like, the most famous stars have name names, and then all the others get catalog IDs. You know the name of the North Star, right?”

  “Polaris?”

  “Right, Polaris. But it’s also Alpha Ursae Minoris in one catalog system. And in another, it’s, like, HD889 … something.”

  Zach chimed in. “Not to mention the Mayans, who had different names from the Greeks, who had different names from the Romans, who—”

  “Zach.”

  He stopped walking. “What?”

  “Have you always been this big of a downer?”

  He grinned and looked at his feet. “Yeah, pretty much.” We started walking again, and he asked, “So how come you’re into stars? How’d that happen?”

  “When I was little, someone loaned my father a box of VHS tapes,” I said. “All these old movies and things. And I found this set of tapes labeled Cosmos. Which was this beautiful old miniseries from the eighties. You’ve got Dr. Carl Sagan in this fabulous turtleneck, and you’re on this imaginary spacecraft with him, and … I must have worn those tapes out. My father hated it. Every time he came into the room and saw me watching it, he just turned around and walked back out.” Zach was staring at me, and suddenly I felt my neck grow hot. “What?”

  “I just like listening to you.” He reached for my bike and pushed it awhile for me. When I didn’t immediately start talking again, he added, “Don’t stop. I like listening to you. What was your favorite part?”

  “Of Cosmos?” I said. I thought about it a moment. “There’s this part where he says we’re all made of ‘starstuff.’ I liked that the best. My mom says I wouldn’t shut up about it for months, that I had to tell everybody we met, from the grocery store clerk to the librarian.”

  Zach nodded. “So … if you name a star…”

  I saw what he was getting at. “Then one day that star will die. It’ll explode, and everything it was made of will scatter across the galaxy, and eventually become a part of something new.”

  “Like little Vanessas, kind of. On every planet, in every solar system.”

  “Every planetary system,” I corrected. But then I felt a little embarrassed, talking about things so much older and bigger than us, on this cracked sidewalk, in this little dumb town. “Is that stupid?”

  “No,” he said. He seemed surprised at my question. “No, it’s not stupid.”

  A moment later we reached the corner of Higuera and Marsh. He handed the bike over. “This is, uh, where I leave,” he said. “I can’t be late. For work.”

  I said, “Bye, Zach,” but instead of leaving, he lingered, just a moment longer. Something weird was going on with his face. Like he was trying to hide a smile.

 
“Yeah,” he said. “Um, bye.” The smile zipped to one corner of his mouth despite his best efforts to disguise it. He had a nice smile, when he let it show.

  After he’d gone, I climbed on the bike and cycled up the hill to Aaron’s house. In the garage, I leaned the bike against the wall and waited for the automatic door to slide shut. Even from here, I could smell dinner.

  Enchilada night.

  Damn.

  If there’s one skill Mom never developed, it’s food. Not even food prep, just … food. In general. She’d put pickles where they didn’t belong. Season the wrong things with paprika. Serve up something cozy and inviting, then break out the fish sauce, or olives, or something else completely wrong for the dish. Since I was three, she claimed, I had loved at least one of her meals: enchiladas. “You’d toddle into the kitchen and demand chiladies,” she’d told me a thousand times. “You couldn’t pronounce the word. It still cracks me up.” And maybe the story is true. But a toddler has no idea that enchiladas aren’t usually made with Veg-All.

  Inside, Mom and Aaron were conducting the usual post-mortem, analyzing the day’s battle scars. “Two days of depositions, just erased,” Aaron complained. “Melanie thinks we should switch to a different stenography service.”

  “You can always rerecord depos,” Mom said. She was bent over, peering into the oven, waving one hand dismissively behind her. Satisfied with whatever was happening to the enchiladas, she straightened up and said, “I’ve got you beat. Cornelius Clarke is out.”

  “Already?”

  “Dodged my calls for three weeks, and today his lawyer notified the council that he’s out.” Out meant another major investor had bailed on Costa Celeste, the resort project the city council kept trying to get off the ground. “Just like that.”

  I stood on the stairs, watching them. They hadn’t noticed me yet.

  “You don’t seem upset,” Aaron observed.

  “I mean, Jim called it a week ago. Nobody was surprised. But then, nobody’s happy, either.”