I smile. A little. It sounds cool, though.
Text me right after you get home!
I slide some books onto the shelf, my heart beating as deeply as the timpani across the school as they barrel through Adele’s song.
My mom is not going to be happy about the mean thing I said, or that I’m ignoring her texts, or that I’m planning to come home late, without even checking in, but I need some space to breathe. And to kiss. I hope.
THE LATE AFTERNOON IS my favorite time in Mesa Luna. It’s when the sky starts ever so gently changing its colors, shifting into the prettiest thing I think I’ll ever see in the world. Here, the world around me is messily alive. You haven’t seen a sky until you’ve seen our moon hanging at night. It’s how we got our name, in fact. A couple of miles out of town proper, there’s a flat mesa, and if you’re driving, or just out and about walking, on the right night, it looks like the moon is resting on the edge of the mesa, like a white plate on its rim on a table. Our big, white, beautiful moon hangs so low in the sky it’s like you could reach out and touch it.
It’s not nighttime yet, though. The day is still bright and hot and dusty enough when I get to The Pit, which is what we call Grunyon’s emptied pool and the three home-built half-pipes on the land behind his house. His parents, Louise and Mary, run a coffee shop/diner/bookstore in a series of interconnected Airstreams on the property, which is probably highly illegal, but no one cares, because coffee.
There’s an old eight-room motel there, too, that I think Louise and Mary are hoping to fix up someday, though I’m not sure who would want to stay in Mesa Luna. Tucson is better and not too far, and Sierra Vista has the Golden Corral buffet. We’ve got the moon, though, and The Pit, where I like to hang out and watch the skaters.
Grunyon and Boots and Chunk aren’t at Eugene Field anymore. Boots and Chunk didn’t graduate, but Grunyon did. They’re trying to start a moving company called We Haul All. In the meantime, they skate and get high.
I bury my phone in my backpack. I did take a peek while I walked here: two missed calls, two texts, but I’m determined not to respond for a good couple of hours.
Grunyon pops up over the lip of the pool, blond curls springing from beneath his helmet. “Is today the day, Tiger T? You coming in? Or are you gonna spend another day buried in a book?”
Perched on a rock, I watch skaters rise and fall behind him, a smooth and beautiful wave of bodies. Even the sound of wheels on old pool plaster is cool: a little scrapey, a little promising. Grunyon sinks back down, disappears, pops back up.
“Well?” he says, grinning.
“Not today,” I say with a shrug, like I always do.
Grunyon sighs. He’s teetering on the lip of The Pit, bucking his board a little to stay up and not slip back down. “It’s been years, T. That old arm is for sure healed by now.”
Four years ago, my mother had a boyfriend named Andy. Andy was skinny and funny and I thought things I never should have thought, like whole family and dad. He bought me a skateboard and brought me here and my mom was weirdly okay with it for a while. It’s like maybe she was playing whole family and dad, too.
I don’t really like thinking about Andy, and what happened, and how he left.
I’ve never forgotten how free I felt, those moments I was lost in the air, before my board smacked down on plaster again. Before the very last time, when I landed and my arm shattered.
Lightly, I tell Grunyon, “Books are good. I can live life safely and without peril in a fictional universe.”
“I think your boyfriend’s here.” Grunyon tips his head. “I’ll get you back in this pool someday, Tiger Tolliver.”
My heart does a little jump as Kai sits down next to me. “Hey,” he says, shading his eyes from the sun. “I’ve got bizcochitos. You wanna walk to Thunder and hang out?”
I think I might see the tiniest hint of a blush creeping up his neck.
I think I might feel the tiniest hint of a blush creeping up mine.
I push my book in my backpack. “I’ll go anywhere for cookies. You know me.”
KISSING KAI HENDERSON IS exactly like Cake said it would be.
Plush.
Kai Henderson and I have been kissing for at least one billion hours under the white and perfect stars of Mesa Luna, leaning against the tentacled beast of a playground structure we all call the Command Center. It sits right smack in the middle of Thunder Park Elementary and has tube slides shooting out in eight different directions and a kind of high gazebo in the middle that you can hide in. Cake and I used to like to huddle up there together and tell each other stories while the other kids ran around at recess.
It took a little bit, and he was more awkward and shy than I would have liked, but I finally just kind of did it myself, because I remembered some girls in the bathroom at Field this one time, huddled up against the sinks winging their eyes with liner, asking each other why girls always wait for guys to kiss them first, to make the first move. And one girl, I think her name was Bettina, gave a sharp laugh and said, “ ’Cuz if a girl moves first, she’s a horny sluuuuuuuut,” and the way she dragged it out made the other girls laugh. One girl sighed, “Yeah, but if the dude goes first, he’s all that, right?”
Maybe there was a dance that night, or a party somewhere, because another girl said, “Fuck that. Ima go get it myself tonight, am I right?” And they all fived down low, by their butts, and bumped hips. They weren’t that much older than me, but they seemed so much more comfortable in their bodies.
I thought of those girls as Kai kind of weaved back and forth in front of me, his hands shoved way down in his jean pockets, and I got a little mad at him, and myself, for always waiting for other people to start doing the thing I want to be doing, like I have to ask permission, so I took matters into my own hands.
I did blurt out, “Can I kiss you?” to be on the safe side, and when I saw his face slide into relief, and start to lean down to mine, well, welcome to Plush Life.
I went out and got it myself.
His lips tasted like sugar from the cookies, which seemed perfect, and the way a first kiss, and all the kisses after, should taste. I’ve figured out where to put my hands, how to press against him slightly, how to breathe, all of it.
I never want to open my eyes again or come up for air. I want to spend the whole summer kissing him. Here, at Thunder Park Elementary.
There are things happening inside me that I don’t even have words for, and I usually have words for everything, even if I don’t say them out loud.
A shiver suddenly breaks us apart. A sharp chill rushes through me, when just a second ago, I was warmer than I’d ever been. My teeth start chattering.
Kai breathes heavily, his eyes unfocused. “What’s wrong?” he asks. “You okay?”
“Fine, I guess. Cold. Weird.” I wrap my arms around myself, but it feels odd, not so much cold, after all, as…well, weird.
The next shiver runs through me so hard it knocks the breath out of me.
I gasp. “Whoa,” Kai says. He steadies my shoulders, his eyes crinkling in concern. “What was that?”
I try to catch my breath. “I don’t know,” I say, wheezing. “Maybe I should go home.”
Maybe it is time to go home and make up with my mother. It’s been all day and most of the night, after all. I mean, I’m not wearing that dress, ever, but still.
I lean down and paw through my backpack for my phone. Four missed calls from my mom, the last one just as we were starting to walk here from The Pit. Two calls from Cake, which is weird, since she usually texts. She didn’t leave messages, which, also weird.
I listen as my mom’s phone rings and rings. Finally, her voice mail picks up. “June here! Tell me something good, or don’t say anything at all.”
“Hi, Mom.” I take a breath. “I’m sorry. I am. I’ll be home soon, and you c
an yell at me all you want, okay?” I slip my phone into my backpack. Done. I’ve had my freedom. We can go back to our beeping, whirring machine now.
Kai’s phone buzzes. It’s been sounding on and off since we got here, but he’s been ignoring it. He takes off the flannel shirt he’s wearing over a T-shirt and wraps it around me. “Here. Just in case.”
He kisses me gently, then pulls the phone from his back pocket.
I turn away, touching my lips with my fingers. I can still feel the heat of his lips on mine. I feel like people do in old books, you know, like when the writer says, “She was stirred by his actions,” or some such thing.
I feel stirred by Kai Henderson. Plush and Stirred. That sounds like the name of a Victoria’s Secret panty line or something. I make a note to mention that to Cake; she’ll think it’s funny.
I blow into my hands. It shouldn’t be this cold in Mesa Luna in May. Maybe I’m getting sick. Maybe that means Kai will get sick, too, and we can lie around together, huddled under blankets, reading magazines, snuffling together, only I don’t know where we’d do that, since my mom is so difficult—
Behind me, Kai makes a weird sound, like someone’s punched him in the gut.
I turn.
His face isn’t like it usually is, open and goofy and smiling, all Kai-like, glasses slipping down his nose, hair in his eyes.
His face looks like he’s seen a ghost, or been told a terrible secret.
He says my name, and then he says three awful, horrible words that cut through me, make me cry out.
I beat his chest as hard as I can, until my fists start to ache, but I can’t stop making him say those words.
I don’t understand how he can say such cruel words to me, after what we were just doing, after all the plush-ness of us.
Out in the desert, the coyotes start up, one by one, howling and wailing, lonely in the dark, and they do not stop. They don’t stop.
They never stop.
9:21 p.m.
THE WOMAN ON THE bed in the hospital in Tucson is not my mother.
The brightness of the room stings my eyes. There are things hooked up to the person in the bed, the person who is not my mother. Things like tubes, and wires. Things you’d attach to a mechanical entity, a robotic experiment. Not a human being.
There are monitors and shiny lights and I feel like I should be hearing beeps or clicks, see crawling red lines across screens, just like you do on television or in the movies when you know there’s still a chance a person can be saved. In the movies, someone jumps on the hospital bed and starts pumping the dying person’s chest, people shout, metal bins clang, there’s a flurry of noise, and then bam. A red line slinks across the monitor.
But in this room, no one moves. Everyone is silent. Even me, because I cannot breathe.
One hour ago I kissed Kai Henderson in the playground at Thunder Park Elementary School and his lips tasted sweet from the sugary bizcochitos we’d shared.
One hour ago my very first kiss felt plush, just like Cake said it would.
But that’s all gone now, every sugary and plush second stolen. Poof.
Cake’s mother, Rhonda, grips my hand so hard I think it might break, but I don’t care. She can break all my bones if she wants. The pain feels good, because there are tsunamis of things happening inside me that I don’t understand.
Finally, the young doctor in the baggy pants clears his throat. When my eyes meet his, he looks away.
I think I know what he wants me to say but the words seem too unbelievable. The words don’t make sense.
I can’t breathe. I feel like my chest is caving in.
The young doctor says, “I’m sorry. We tri—”
The rest of his words slice in and out of my brain, fragments of sound.
But she was already.
It happens so.
Really isn’t anything.
No predicting something like.
Half-digested bizcochitos splatter down my T-shirt. The doctor winces. A nurse rushes over with a towel, patting my chest.
My chin is dripping. I don’t care.
Someone hands me a scrub shirt. Without thinking, I drag it on over my vomit-stained T-shirt. Everyone looks uncomfortable, and I realize I was supposed to go into the bathroom and change out of the barf shirt and into the scrub shirt maybe, but no one tells me what I’ve done is wrong.
This is wrong. This doesn’t just happen.
Someone comes with a bucket and slaps a wet mop across the floor.
The young doctor walks into the bathroom and closes the door. The nurse says hesitantly, “I’m so sorry. It’s his first…” She turns her palms up.
I say, in a voice I don’t recognize as my own, because it’s something scratchy, and ghostly, and broken, “Mine too.”
Cake’s mom starts bawling, which makes me mad. I should be bawling, not the adult. The doctor comes back out of the bathroom, his face pale and resigned. He gives me a look. The body on the table isn’t my mother, but he needs me to say it is. All of them do.
And I hate them all for trying to make me say it.
For wanting me to say it so they can move on, and save people who can be saved, while I can never move on, not now, and she will never, ever, ever be saved.
My eyes water. My eyes turn into lakes of water, but still I don’t make a sound. I’m like that person on the bed in front of me: a machine, an automaton.
Finally, I whisper to the room, in my new and ghostly voice, “This isn’t happening.”
Cake’s mom, Rhonda, murmurs, “Oh, Tiger.” Wipes her face. Nudges me forward.
I let go of her hand and step closer to the body on the table. The woman smells clinical. Medicinal. Like sanitizer or something. She has the same spiky blond-and-silver hair as my mother, but it’s flattened on one side, and there’s a welt on her cheek, like she fell and hit something.
My mother smells good, like the oatmeal soap she uses in the shower. Like patchouli. Like the cinnamon she sprinkles in her morning coffee.
This person is different. This person died alone and has bruises, and must have been so, so frightened at what was happening, and she was alone when it happened, and I would never, never, never, not in a million years, have left my mother to die alone.
That’s the sort of thing a bad daughter would do.
I open my mouth to tell them this, all of them, the youngish doctor with the stubbly face, the nurse with the rubber duckies on her shirt, Rhonda with her eye makeup smeared from crying, just like mine is smeared from crying.
I open my mouth to say: That is not my mom. My mom is June the Strong. My mom drives the book bus, and makes jams and jellies from chiles and cactus, and read every single one of the Harry Potters out loud to me, long after every other kid’s parent had given up, because those books were long, right? But my mom used to be a librarian, and she loved me, you see, she always said she would never lea—
What comes out of my mouth is not those words. What comes out of my mouth is garbled and croaky, because I screamed so hard at Kai under the blazing stars at Thunder Park Elementary when he wouldn’t stop saying those horrible three words to me that my throat is raw and swollen.
Your mom. Died.
Just like that. A pause between word number two and word number three.
The word I try to say, the word that chokes out of me, is No.
The nurse with the duckies on her shirt puts her hand on my arm.
I don’t understand what’s happening. Your mom can’t be alive one minute and then the next…not.
Those things, I’m like those things you use to stoke a fire, what people used to use, those things with handles that kind of look like water bottles. Bellows.
My chest heaves up and down, like a bellows.
I want my mom to get up off that fucking table and hug
me as hard as she can, even if it hurts me.
She doesn’t.
“Mom,” I say. “Mommy, please.”
I push her shoulder. The shoulder flops back, scaring me.
“Is that supposed to happen?” I whisper. No one answers me.
The nurse beside me says, “Honey.”
“Don’t say that,” I bark, scaring myself even more. “That’s something a mom says. And my mom is there, and you are here.”
The nurse takes her hand off my arm.
Behind me, Rhonda takes a giant breath. “Yes,” she says desperately. “This is June Frances Tolliver and she lived at 344 Morales Road.”
Lived. Not lives.
My mother is past tense. A kind of cement fog settles over me. I can feel everyone in the room start to breathe again, a giant wave of relief.
There’s a great flurry of activity then, with nurses and attendants suddenly appearing and the doctor murmuring on his phone and no one remembers me. No one asks me anything else.
I turn and walk back into the waiting room in a daze.
Cake is waiting with two chocolate bars and a cup of soda. She must have gone to the vending machine. She’s been crying, so there are black eyeliner streaks through her pale makeup, like tire tracks. Her Princess Leia buns are mussed, strands of purple hair clinging to her black sweater. Her dad’s in the corner, talking with a frizzy-haired woman who seems very interested in me, taking notes on a clipboard, looking me up and down. She seems familiar to me somehow, and then I suddenly remember her, from when I first got here, and everything was blurry and there was so much talking, and moving around, and she’d asked me, a total stranger, “Where’s your dad, dear? Is he here?”
I say, in my new hoarse voice, “Where’s Kai?”
Cake answers softly. “He left.”
I say, “He left?”
She nods. “He left.”
“He just left?”
Cake’s face scrunches up. “Stop saying that. It’s freaking me out.”
How to Make Friends with the Dark Page 4