by Gregory Ashe
Chapter 24, Sunday 11 September
I stood in front of the mirror, brushing my teeth. And then it hit me.
I was out of bed. I had showered. I was dressed. And I was brushing my teeth.
No lying in bed, hanging on the edge of depression, unsure if it was easier to claw my way out, or to claw my way in. No nightmares that woke me and left me screaming in the pillow, so I wouldn’t wake my parents. No cold sweat. No suffocating heat, so that I tore the covers from the bed.
Just sleep. And waking up. Like a normal person.
With a splat, a big strand of toothpaste drool landed on my t-shirt. A green-white line of spit ran down my chin and dangled in the air. I grimaced, rinsed out my mouth, washed my face, and changed my shirt. I couldn’t shake the surprise though; somehow, for the first time in months, I felt almost human.
When I went downstairs, Dad was making breakfast. A plate of pancakes, only a few bites missing, sat on the table. A sure sign that Mom had already eaten and left; sometimes it seemed like she ate even less than I did. When Dad gave me a plate of pancakes, though, I was startled to find myself hungry. Not just hungry. Ravenous. I slathered them with butter and syrup, gobbled them down, and asked for more. No pretending I was hungry to make my parents happy, although I did see Dad smile when he brought me the second plate. I was really hungry. Like I’d finally woken up from a long sleep.
I loaded my plate and Mom’s as Dad finished cooking. He took a plate of food to the table, sat down, and started eating. As I headed out of the kitchen, he stopped me.
“What are you up to today?”
“Going over to see Olivia,” I said.
Dad didn’t smile; he beamed. “Have fun,” he said. “You know, I was thinking one of these days we should go out to eat. It’s been a while since we did that, you know. As a family.” That was one of our family traditions: pick a restaurant at random from the phonebook and, like it or lump it, give it a try.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’d be fun.” And I realized it did sound like fun. Well, as much fun as spending time with family can ever be.
“Have fun,” Dad repeated as I left the room.
I pulled the motorcycle out of the garage and started over to Olivia’s. I felt a lot steadier on the bike today; still a little wobbly on turns, but I was starting to get the hang of it. The thrill of the speed of it, the air rushing past me, narrowing the space between life and death to the slightest differences of degree, of timing, of control. The way the world compressed into a line, the road, hedged by houses and corn the blurred together into streaks of color. When I pulled up in front of her house, I felt a momentary pang of disappointment. The way the houses settled in around me with bourgeois stability.
Mr. Green, who I imagined had to have been an accountant, in this life or another, was working on a row of flowers along one side of his house. He just looked too much like an accountant for him to have had any other job. The sunburn had faded slightly, but the back of his neck was still an angry pink through the peeling skin. He must have heard the bike, because I hadn’t made it halfway up the path to Olivia’s house before he turned and waved.
“See you tomorrow?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’ll be there,” I said. “Still trying to get ready for the competition?”
He just nodded. “See you tomorrow, then.”
By then, I was at Olivia’s front door. I knocked, and the door swung open almost immediately. Shane, wrapped in a blanket, his eyes watery and red, stood inside.
“Hey Alex,” he said. “Come on in; I didn’t realize you were coming over.”
“Sorry Mr. Weir,” I said. “I didn’t call ahead.”
“Not a problem, Alex. And call me Shane.” He coughed, almost falling over, but when I moved to help him he just waved me away. “I’m fine,” he said when he finished. “And I don’t want to get you sick. I’ll go get Olivia; make yourself at home.”
I took a seat in one of the armchairs. Cheryl came through the kitchen, waved, and moved on. Well, at least they didn’t seem angry at me. That was a good sign, right? To judge by my nervous finger-tapping, the way I kept shifting in the armchair, I wasn’t reassured. And then Shane was there, collapsing onto the sofa.
“She’s upstairs,” he said. “Go on up.”
I stood and made my way to the stairs.
“Oh, Alex,” Shane said.
“Yes sir?”
“Sorry to make a big deal out of this, but in our house, we ask Olivia to keep the door open when she has friends over.”
“Not a problem, Mr. Weir.”
“Shane,” he said.
“Shane.”
“There, that’s not so hard.” Then he flipped on the TV, and I felt dismissed, so I headed up the stairs.
Olivia’s door was open, and she was sitting on her bed with a book. I stepped inside. If I’d been forced to imagine what her room was like, I would have come close. But somehow, at the same time, I would have missed it completely. She had the hisptery things I would have expected: a few indie band posters; a record player, complete with record collection; the vintage curtains; even a shelf of tattered paperback classics. But then there was the other stuff that tied it together, making it hers. Paintings—all hers, I could tell by the style; photographs, both black and white and color; and a world map, annotated and torn at the edges, that covered almost an entire wall.
“Hey,” she said, hopping off the bed. She stepped toward me, wrapped her arms around me, and gave me a kiss. The smell of her hair, clean and shampoo-y and girly, filled my nose. The press of her body against me. Suddenly it was very hard to think about the room.
“Hey,” I said when she pulled away. “So, how mad are you?”
“I’m not mad,” Olivia said, pulling me to sit next to her on the bed. We had our backs to the wall, her head leaning against my shoulder, slightly uncomfortable, but I was more than willing to pay that price.
“Not mad?”
“No,” she said. “I told you, you don’t have to talk if you don’t want to.”
“Yeah, but last night wasn’t about talking. I just ran off when you were going to show me your art.”
“True. But now you’re seeing some of it, and when I said you didn’t have to talk, I meant right now. You don’t have to explain anything.”
I shifted, sliding my arm around her waist. I didn’t pull her closer; there wasn’t any room, really, to be any closer. But putting my arm around her, it made us a unit, a circle closed against the world. Something loosened in my throat.
“Last night,” I said. It took a moment to shake the sticky words free. “Last night,” I repeated, “I had to go. But I don’t want to lie to you. And I can’t tell you why I left.”
“You can lie a little bit,” she said, and I could hear the edge of teasing in her voice.
“No,” I said, and this time my arm did tighten. “No, that’s something you should know about me. The last time I lied to someone I loved, it got him killed.” And even I didn’t know if I was talking about Christopher or Isaac, but the words kept tumbling out. “I killed him, by lying to him, and I’m not going to do that again. I won’t lie to you, ever. I can’t lie to you. But I can’t tell you why I left.”
“Can you tell me why you can’t tell me?” she asked.
It was a good question, but not surprising considering how smart she was. “It has to do with my family,” I said. “A family emergency, I guess you could say.”
“I kind of guessed that part,” she said.
“Well, you know how every family has its secrets?”
“Sure, I guess.”
“My family kind of has a double portion of secrets.”
“How mysterious,” she said.
The last part was the hardest to say, but I had to say it. “So tell me the truth. Is all of this just too weird? Do you want me to leave? Are you mad I won’t tell you why I left?”
I fell in love with Olivia when she didn’t even pause before answering. “If
I remember correctly, you told me on our first date that the mystery was what made this all worth it. I didn’t agree then, and I don’t really agree now, but I’m not going to make you tell me something that you don’t feel comfortable telling me. So no, I don’t want you to leave.”
“Thanks.”
“You should thank my ex,” Olivia said. “I probably wouldn’t have been like this before Tyler.”
“Why’s that?”
“He was a jerk,” she said. “Possessive, I guess. But it was more than that. Like he wanted to control who I was. Not just control, though. He wanted to know everything about me. I hadn’t shown anyone my art before I started dating him, and when I told him no, he was furious. He basically forced me to show him one day; I cried myself to sleep for almost a week after that.”
“So you broke up with him?”
“No,” Olivia said. “I’m not that smart, Alex.” She sighed and said, “I dated him almost all of last year. But it kind of all fell apart halfway through the school year. I just couldn’t do it anymore; he wanted to know everything, wanted me to have nothing private. It was driving me crazy. So I finally broke up with him.”
I ran my thumb along the side of her thigh and kept silent.
“And he,” she took a deep breath. “He took all my paintings, all my photographs, everything he could find, everything I had given him. And he put it all over the town. Pasted them on buildings downtown. Stuck them up all over the school. I even saw a few in Arcadia.”
I did a little swearing to show her what I thought about that.
“It’s ok now,” she said. “It helped a little, I guess. I mean, I needed to show it to people sometime. But at the time, I thought I was going to die. I almost dropped out of school. A lot of people weren’t very kind to me; being artsy isn’t really cool in West Marshall, in case you hadn’t noticed. I thought my life was over.”
“And then?”
“And then Brady hit Eli with his car,” she said. “And then I realized how immature I was being, sitting around and thinking my life was over just because Tyler had shown other people my art.”
“Wow,” I said. I leaned over and kissed her on the temple. “I’m sorry, though. About all of that.”
“It’s ok,” Olivia said. “The stuff with Tyler really wasn’t a big deal, after all, but I’m still a little shy about showing people my work. As you noticed, I guess. But Brady, I feel bad for him; it wasn’t his fault. We had no idea he had epilepsy. Apparently adult-onset isn’t unheard of, but there was no way anyone could have known. And I don’t know what Brady is going to do now.” She sat up, breaking the loop of my arm, and said, “That’s enough of that. Let’s talk about something else.”
“Well,” I said. “There was mention of showing me some art.”
She jumped off the bed and pulled a shoebox off her desk, then climbed back up beside me. As she took the lid off, she said, “Ok, here’s the stuff I was telling you about. Why I was snapping photos of you on your first day of school. Sorry again about that; I just started taking pictures, I wasn’t thinking.”
I thumbed through the pictures. It was like seeing the other half of a coin, compared to the paintings I had seen. Or rather, it was like seeing the yin to the yang, the white to the black. Her painting at the cemetery, like the paintings that hung on her wall, had approached something impressionistic while remaining her own style: quick strokes of paint on the canvas, hinting at something larger, working together to provide a glimpse into the scene, penetrating in its very superficiality. The photographs, though, betrayed none of that haziness; no touching-up, no adjustments. Just light and the filter and the lens. Brutally clear, the photographs seemed somehow to capture just the right moments in time, moments where a thought, or an emotion, or a glimpse of personality emerged from the subject frozen in time. On their own, they were beautiful; juxtaposed with her painting, they were incredible.
There were plenty of them; I knew almost all the people in my grade, even if only by sight, and I spent the most time with those. Mary, wearing a soccer uniform, no longer looking stout and slightly out of place, but competent, her foot drawn back in an expert kick, forever suspended behind the waiting soccer ball. Shawn, after a football game—the huge lights casting long shadows over his face—tired, hair sweaty and plastered to his head, helmet dangling from one hand. He was smiling, in spite of the scoreboard in the background that showed West Marshall losing. Ashley—beautiful, too tan Ashley—sitting at a desk, an almost librarian-style pair of glasses perched on her nose as she compared two different texts. When I came to Mike, my fingers tightened reflexively. Mike, handsome and tall, bending over to talk to some kids at a football rally.
And then there were the pictures of me. All from that first day of school in the lunchroom. Me staring into space—I realized, with a flush, I had been staring at Mike when she took that picture—my hair wavy and in disarray. Painfully thin, my cheeks almost hollow, and with dark circles under my eyes. Hungry eyes, I realized. And another, where I was looking right at the camera, and there was a little color in my cheeks in the picture, and I couldn’t tell if I looked angry or shocked. Probably a little of both. And then another, although it took a moment for me to realize it was of me. Just my hands, captured in the moment where they flexed to tear a piece of crust from a sandwich, but there was something in the stiffness of my fingers that said I was in pain.
“This is how you saw me?”
Olivia nodded, taking the pictures and flipping through them. “I don’t know,” she said. “I thought so, that first day. You seemed like you were ready to curl up and die. Or like you already had died, and just didn’t know it.” She shuffled the pictures together and put them back into the box. “But you changed so quickly; I’d see you, and you seemed like you had more purpose, some sort of drive. And now you seem happy, at least to me. I guess I just needed to get to know you better.” She gave a shrug and a laugh. “That’s the funny thing about the camera,” she said. “It almost always tells a lie, but that’s kind of what art is all about.”
It hadn’t been a lie, though. I remembered that day, and I remembered the days and nights before it, when I had been waiting for life to end, like the snuffing out of a solitary candle, like the last strugglings of a cut flower. I just hadn’t realized how obvious it had been, how I had looked. It made me slightly ashamed of myself, but I wasn’t sure why.
We spent the rest of the day together, relaxing in her room, laughing, talking, kissing—although that last part was perhaps more discreet than normal, since we had to leave the door open. It was hard to remember that I had been that person in the photograph; hard to remember that he had existed at all. I wouldn’t have believed it myself, in some ways, except that I still carried part of him, part of that hollow, hungry shadow, branded on the back of my brain. But while I was with Olivia, I could pretend it wasn’t there, and that things were normal, and that I was always happy like this.
When it was time for me to go, she walked me downstairs.
“I wanted to tell you,” Olivia said. “I’m going to help curate an art show. In Arcadia.”
“That’s amazing,” I said.
She blushed and smiled. “Yeah, I’m really excited about it. But it means I’m going to be gone a few afternoons a week. And probably most Saturdays.” She could see the disappointment on my face, I guess, because she added, “Don’t worry, it’s just for the next month or so. It’ll be over right before Homecoming, so it doesn’t change our plans at all.”
I forced a smile onto my face. “I’m really happy for you, it sounds great. Are you going to be showing any of your stuff?”
With a tight-lipped smile, she nodded.
I leaned in and kissed her; it seemed the best way to say congratulations.
“Sorry!” Cheryl’s voice cut between us. I pulled back with a flicker of disappointment. “Sorry,” she said again. “I was just getting a glass of water.”
My face was hot, but I said, “Not a problem
, Mrs. Weir.”
Olivia had a bit of a blush as well, but she just said, “Where’s Dad?”
“He was feeling a lot better all of the sudden, so he went to work. I told him to take another day to rest, but he said he needed to stay on top of things there.”
“I better go,” I said. “My parents have been freaking out a little bit about the motorcycle. I don’t want them worrying about where I am.”
“Go,” Olivia said. “Thanks for everything.”
I kissed her again, just a peck because her mom was still there, and then I was out the door, heading home. As I turned onto the highway, moonlight and asphalt blazing out in front of me, I realized, all of the sudden, what I was going to do with my newfound free time. And my heart started to beat a little faster.