Never-Contented Things

by Sarah Porter

  Besides, whenever you belittle other people in that way, it’s yourself you make smaller.

  “That’s why I didn’t want to say it. I mean, it wasn’t their fault or anything, but Josh and Kezz were both screwed no matter what.”

  What point is there in arguing over the potential of my lost friends, the one who died and the one who vaporized? Why should I say that they were smart and talented and brave to Xand, who apparently didn’t learn any of that by hanging out with them through long, black-satin nights by the gorge? I knew them, if he didn’t. I know them still in the whisper-story that runs along my days, and I know that their story keeps on unscrolling in ghostly spirals, in countless possible lives they’ll never get to live, long past the point where Ksenia’s spiky blond head stopped beating against my arms and her shattered heart came to a standstill. She had a real future, and she would have defied Xand’s vision of her.

  Xand’s life has been easy, comfortable; his family’s not exactly rich but they’ve never been hurting, either. And even if my situation is similar to Xand’s, I can say truthfully that I never regarded Ksenia and Josh as anything less than my equals. Was Xand just slumming, hanging out with them?

  If he was faking being their friend, he did a good job of it—but that just makes me feel worse.

  I walk out, my pulse racing at the thought that he might follow me again and try to stop me from getting in my car. I don’t allow myself to run, though I really feel like it. My Mini Cooper, a gift for getting into Brown, even custom-painted in my favorite peridot green, is right there in the driveway.

  I get in and start the engine; I don’t look back, and I drive away.

  He’ll tell himself I don’t mean it. He’ll say that I’m just being sensitive—or, oh, excuse me, so terribly oversensitive—in my adorable-but-exasperating way. That I’ll calm down and come around and be coaxed back into sweetness and tenderness, because we both know I have before. But this time I think it’s distinctly possible he’s wrong.

  I turn onto a dirt road through the woods until I reach a hidden hollow, deep in the viscous glow of the honeysuckle. Then I park and flop my face onto the steering wheel and cry.

  Ksenia? Did you know, or at least suspect, that I was the reason Josh ran away? Is that why you timed your suicide just right, so that I would see it? It would have seemed almost preposterous, you poisoning yourself over Josh—like some kind of overblown small-town Shakespearian tragedy—if only you hadn’t actually died.

  I think you did arrange things for my benefit, so that at least a modicum of your pain would be visited on me. You of all people must have known that that’s the kind of visitor who never goes away.

  * * *

  I met Josh and Ksenia when we moved here at the start of my sophomore year. They weren’t the kids I was supposed to be friends with, more or less for the reason that Xand just rubbed in my face again. As a daughter of two professors, I instantly found a clique of the other professors’ kids and the children of lawyers and architects, just waiting to welcome me in. A pair of scrappy, furious, pretentiously alternative kids whom everyone knew were in foster care—I should have smiled at them in the halls, just to show that I was the nice kind of popular, but I also should have kept my distance. Those were the silent rules that tinted the atmosphere in our classrooms: stick with your own kind.

  I’d only been there a week when I first encountered them. I was sitting with my insta-clique, a dozen mixed boys and girls, on benches in the quad, when someone I thought was a tall blond boy walked by, in black cutoff jeans and a flowing black T-shirt. I thought, If he wasn’t so scrawny, he’d be drop-dead gorgeous. I suppose I didn’t make much of an effort to hide the way I was staring, because the guys with me burst out laughing.

  “You swing that way, Lexi?” one of them—I think it was Derrick—asked.

  I don’t care to respond when people refuse to say what they mean. I tipped my head and waited for someone to come out with it.

  “Not that I’ve got anything against it,” a boy named Dylan added, with just enough emphasis to be offensive, “but you really don’t look like a dyke!”

  Now I understood. “That’s a girl?”

  Another peal of laughter. Now that they’d said it, it became clearer to me; her face had a masculine sharpness and definition under the peaks of light hair, but as I kept looking an unexpected delicacy seemed to come out of hiding. She’d sat down on a bench at a distance from us, alone, and fixed a faraway gaze on the trees. She held a book, but she wasn’t reading.

  Of course I wanted friends at my new school, and I wanted everyone to accept me. But something about the laughter made me feel hemmed in, breathless, and hopelessly lonely. Why should that girl be any different from how she was, right at this moment? I said, “She’s beautiful.”

  There was a round of scoffing noises.

  “I’m into it,” Dylan announced. “Can I watch?”

  I wasn’t about to answer that. I raised my eyebrows.

  “Don’t be disgusting,” a girl named Lila said, and I looked at her, hoping she might support me and tell him off for making such obnoxious comments. But that wasn’t her intention. “Ksenia doesn’t even shave her legs.”

  It occurred to me then that I didn’t really know any of them, these kids who were pretending to be my friends only because I dressed well, because their parents had met my parents at parties. I wasn’t so certain anymore that I was interested in knowing them any better.

  “Kezzer could be hot if she tried,” Dylan said, defensively. “Tall, skinny blonde? Hell, I’ll shave her legs for her. Or her … you know.”

  “Not a tit in sight, though,” Derrick observed, in a tone that implied Ksenia had personally cheated him by being flat-chested. “And she wouldn’t have any friends at all, if she didn’t come with Josh.”

  “Is Josh her boyfriend?” I asked, and everybody howled again.

  “He’s her foster brother,” Lila explained, taking condescending pity on me. “Just a freshman, but he has a lot of older friends. There are kind of weird rumors about him and Ksenia.”

  “Kezzer!” Derrick yelled across the quad. “Hey, Kezzer!”

  She looked our way. Even from this distance, I could see her disdain.

  “Lexi is new here! She wants to meet you!”

  For a moment I thought she would ignore him, but then she got up off her bench and sauntered over, with deliberate slowness. It gave me time to dread what might transpire once she reached us, but it seemed like anything I did would be interpreted in ways I didn’t mean. Lila giggled nervously.

  Ksenia stopped eight feet back, barely bothering, and met my gaze. “Hi, then,” she said. Her eyes were dirty gray, with hazel rims. She had acne. It was strange to think of this androgynous, pimply girl in cutoffs as elegant, but that was the word that floated into my mind.

  “Hi,” I said. My voice came out so soft that I wasn’t sure she’d heard me.

  “Lexi was just saying how you could pass for smoking hot,” a boy named Adrian put in. “And she was wondering why you ruin it by, you know, pretending to be a guy.”

  “I didn’t say that!” I said, but Ksenia had lost interest in me. She was examining Adrian, that was the only word for it, with a look of drawn-out, casual contempt that sent a wave of fidgeting through the group. My cheeks were burning.

  “Tell her it’s like how you could pass for human,” Ksenia told him at last, in a voice of perfect neutrality. “If you didn’t ruin it by, you know, acting like a little bitch.”

  Then she was stalking away. “Who’s calling who a bitch?” Adrian flung after her, but his face was blotchy red and there was a sweaty, heavy glaze to his eyes. And it came into my mind, as lightly as a breath, that this was a moment of decision for me; that if I left them now, Adrian and Lila and Dylan would never welcome me again, never wave me to their table at lunch or act like I was meant to be one of their number.

  I also realized that it mattered more to me what Ksenia thought than
it did if these kids cared about me one way or the other. I stood and walked after her. Lila called, “Lexi?” once, and then someone hushed her.

  “Hey,” I said, to Ksenia’s black-and-blond back. She pivoted, not rushing a bit, and hit me with the same look of chilly inspection that she’d turned on Adrian. “Hey, I really didn’t say that—what Adrian said. I would never talk that way about anyone. I wouldn’t demean myself with that kind of ugliness.”

  The way she was gazing down at me made me wonder why I’d gone to the trouble of chasing her. Who was she, to put on so much attitude?

  “Okay,” Ksenia said. Even her voice was low and smoky enough to be a man’s. There was an awkward lull in which I was terribly aware of birdsong and gray eyes and shimmering trees.

  “What I actually said was—a compliment. Adrian just distorted that.” Why was I still trying?

  Ksenia shrugged. “He would.” She gave me a kind of half nod, turned, and walked away again. Her long, knobby legs were covered in ivory down, just like Lila had said. She was poised, blade-sharp, and merciless, and I was bitterly sorry I’d left my group for her—even though, if I was honest with myself, I didn’t like them at all.

  Before she’d gone five steps a chubby boy with a frizz of blue-streaked black hair came bouncing up, flung an arm around her, and sent her spinning. She laughed—who knew she was even capable of such a thing?—and I realized this must be Josh. Then he caught sight of me and beamed. “Hey. You just have to be new here, right? Because I know everybody.”

  “I’m Lexi,” I said. He was plastered in sparkly makeup, and his halo of black and blue tufts fluttered absurdly. Did he think he was auditioning for some ’80s glam-goth band? “I like your hair.”

  That was all that was necessary, as I discovered, for Josh to adopt me as his new best friend—especially once the gossip reached him about how I’d stood up for Ksenia. Xand heard the story too; we’d met in passing before, but we only really talked when he approached later that day to tell me I’d done the right thing. “Derrick and Dylan are kind of my friends, but I know they can be immature jerks sometimes. I just wanted to apologize for how they were acting.” Maybe it wasn’t so much, in retrospect—but since Xand was the only one of the popular kids who made an effort, it felt like a lot at the time.

  After that, it was always Josh beckoning me to sit at his table. Always beaming and enthusiastic and so delighted to see me that it took a little getting used to.

  And just as Derrick had said, Ksenia came with him, as a kind of bonus, though I could never quite shake the impression that she was my friend—how should I put this?—indirectly. She hugged me when we met, and she was loyal enough to cold-shoulder anyone who annoyed me, but she never revealed the slightest vulnerability, never once cracked her facade.

  It got old.

  “You can’t blame Kezzer,” Josh would say, whenever I brought it up. “It’s seriously harder for her than anybody knows but me. She totally likes you, Lexi.”

  * * *

  I finally lift my head off my crossed arms, and gaze around at the dense emerald glow under the vines. I can’t go home, not when Xand might still be there waiting for me; I might need a few days, or a few weeks, before I can bear to speak to him again. One thing I’m sure of: I will never again allow anyone to tell me that I should not feel this ache, this regret. Even if Josh and Ksenia had more reasons to be angry at the world than I could ever understand, they never seemed to take the view that Xand does: as if it were improper, indecent, for a girl with my luck to feel anything negative. They had a way I liked of not making any assumptions about who I should be, or what I was supposed to feel. Both of them would have met my grief with a natural, easy acceptance, and neither would have ordered me to get over it.

  First I call my dad, tell him I’ve broken up with Xand, and ask him to let me know if the coast is clear when he gets home. I trust him: he’ll leave all the metaphoric windows open for my words to blow through, but he won’t pressure me to confide in him before I’m ready. I know he won’t ask questions or say anything except “Of course, sweetheart.” And that’s what he does.

  Then I drive again, heading into town, into the golden plunge of the sun. I want to find somewhere so quiet and remote that no one will glance my way or try to speak to me, where I can let my thoughts sail away on the streaking colors of the sunset. I stop once, pulling over at the Bagel-Fragel for a fragel—a cinnamon-raisin bagel fried like a doughnut and rolled in cinnamon-sugar—and tea. I can’t go to the gorge, because that’s one of the first places Xand will look for me, if he’s looking, but maybe I can find a corner to myself in the university’s rose garden.

  I turn the corner onto Grand, and that’s when I see something that should be impossible. Though on reflection it’s not entirely impossible, even if I’d come to believe we’d never see him again.

  Joshua Korensky.

  At least, someone with a shape like his is walking along, a block ahead of me—a figure with those wandering curves that you could only really describe as voluptuous—and hair layered platinum over dark brown, the way Josh’s was when he disappeared, though knowing Josh he would have changed his hair at least three times by now. Someone who’s wearing a hoodie with black stars that I could almost swear I remember. But whoever it is, I’m looking at them from behind. Probably I should assume that it’s a stranger, even a woman; maybe a university student, one who happens to have Josh-like hair and similar taste in clothes.

  Should I be comforted by the thought that possibly, imaginably, it could be my lost friend? I’m not, at all. Because if I have every reason to dream of Joshua alive and well, to see my dreams reflected on the mirror-bright streets—that would take one of them off my conscience, at least—in a way it’s even more terrible than it would be if he had died.

  If that is Josh, he let everyone go wild searching for him, and he let everyone despair of finding him again. He let the Delbos and his best friends weep themselves sick for over nine long months, when he could have just picked up the phone. And he let Ksenia die.

  There isn’t much traffic. I coast along at the speed of sleep, keeping pace with that Josh-ish figure, and watching for the moment when he, or she, will turn and betray an identity.

  Whoever it is, they’re twisting from side to side, staring in the faces of passersby who never seem to return the look. If that’s Josh, then why aren’t those people staring, crying out and reaching for him? In nine and a half months, has everyone forgotten how we all searched for someone with precisely that hair, that shape, that height?

  I think I understand, or at least I imagine an explanation, as I slide up the sun-lacquered streets: it’s him. He’s come back to our town looking for Ksenia, because knowing how he felt about her, it just isn’t possible that he could have stayed away forever, not if he was still on Earth. He has no idea what happened, and he’s waiting to see her at any moment. He’s unraveling every skein of light, sure that the shining thread will lead him straight to the one he loves.

  Of course, if she’d lived, she would have been long gone by now. What would hold Ksenia here without him? But maybe that hasn’t crossed his mind.

  He stops at the corner, turns and looks both ways—almost, though not quite, at me. Round brown eyes, glitter-rimmed; creamy cheeks; full pink mouth; a slightly hooked nose. And I can say that I have positively identified Joshua Korensky, who should be ashamed to show his face within a thousand miles of this place, where his every step tramples Ksenia deeper into her grave.

  I roll down the window. Honk and shout his name. He ignores me.

  So he came to find her, hoping he wouldn’t be recognized. Then shouldn’t he have made some effort at disguise, put his hood up, at least? Nothing is making any sense.

  He crosses the street and heads up—of course, I see it now—Whistler Drive. I’ve avoided this street ever since Ksenia died, but now I turn and follow, scanning for a parking place as I go. I’ll chase him down on foot, and we’ll see if he can keep
pretending I’m invisible once I’m directly in his path. There’s a spot free almost immediately, but to pull into it I have to look away from him.

  Just for an instant, I swear it.

  But an instant is too long, because when I look around Josh has vanished all over again.

  Right in the middle of a peaceful block of low houses with flat, bare lawns stretching down to the street. It’s completely devoid of tunnels, of dense shrubbery; anywhere at all that someone playing fugitive could hide.

  I get out of the car and stand there, watching the emptiness of the evening. Sprinklers toss their shredded rainbows in midair, someone laughs in the distance, and the shadows stretch like webs across the light. “Josh?” I call. “Joshua? It’s me.”

  But there’s no answer, and why would there be? How can Josh reply, when Xand is right and I’ve driven myself half-crazy by convincing myself that I’m responsible for everything that befell the two of them? I’ll probably see Ksenia next, shrugging and speaking in bitter monosyllables; Ksenia, refusing to let anyone get close to her except for Josh, her one and only true exception.

  I climb back into my car, and sob my way in circles around the block.

  an orchestra of breaths and bells

  It isn’t until I’m in bed that night, watching the dusty pink haze of streetlamp light on my ceiling, that my feeling of airless, gasping insanity recedes enough that I can think at all clearly. I turned off my phone earlier to quiet the chiming persistence of Xand’s texts, but now I turn it on, just in case there’s a message from someone else. If I really saw Josh today and not some wafting mote of delirium, then I’m certain he saw me too, and he heard me yell his name. But no, of course not; there are a dozen texts from Xand, and three voicemails, and that’s it.

  Through my vent I can hear Marissa acting out different roles in her current daydream, her soft little voice leaping into higher and lower registers as she switches characters: a girl pirate, a talking octopus. It’s a lovely sound, Marissa playing out her fantasy theatre in the quiet of her lilac room, though sometimes I find it just a touch disconcerting. I try not to listen, so that she can have her privacy.