Everything That Makes You

by Moriah McStay

  “I hate how you’re stuck in the house. You’ve been in bed all day, haven’t you?”

  He pulled her closer. “Well, I’m not complaining about the bed.”

  They spent the next few hours as they always did—a loose pattern of making out, talking about their day, doing homework, and making out. At six, her brother texted where’s the car? just as Jackson pounded on the other side of the door. He had a unique, side-of-the-fist, angry kind of pound that she’d never heard anyone replicate.

  Marcus gave her a quick peck on the forehead, before sitting up. “Yeah?”

  “Dinner,” Jackson called through the door.

  “’Kay. Be down in a sec.”

  Fi stowed her books in her backpack. Marcus made like he’d help her out, but she shook him off. She didn’t like how he looked, now that she was a few feet away and had a better perspective. He looked paler than when she got there. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  He wagged his eyebrows as he dragged his fingers through her hair, combing it out. “Just dandy.”

  She eyed him a minute before deciding to believe him. At the front door she gave him a quick peck on the mouth. “I’ll call you later,” he said.

  I NEED THE CAR!!! Ryan texted.

  She would have complained about her rude brother, but she glimpsed an irritated Jackson watching them from the hallway and knew it could be worse.

  FEBRUARY

  FIONA

  Fiona was in no mood for Lucy’s rant, but David had gotten sucked right in.

  “Why not dump weed killer right into the Mississippi, then?” Lucy asked, squaring off with him. He sat beside Fiona on the coffee shop’s battered futon.

  “That’s not what I meant,” he said. “But you can’t expect all the big farms around here to go organic. It’s just not practical.”

  “Fiona, does your boyfriend know it’s that kind of thinking that’s destroyed our ozone layer?”

  David had yet to develop the skills to avoid Lucy’s Injustice-Du-Jour debates. On any other day, Fiona would have been a nice girlfriend and helped him out. But today was February 27, the day she was always bitchy—as Ryan had been kind enough to point out last year. Today, it was every man for himself.

  Fiona stood up, taking both her Moleskine and mug. “I’m getting a refill.”

  When she got to the counter, Gwen held out her hand, taking the mug and refilling it without instruction. “Are you coming with Ryan tonight?”

  “Um—”

  Gwen handed the mug back. “My art show?”

  “Oh, right. Your show.”

  “I’ve got three paintings. My teacher thinks a few local art dealers might even come.”

  Gwen went to a high school for performing and fine arts. All seniors participated in a show—which Fiona found equally intriguing and horrifying. “Let me double-check with Ryan.”

  Gwen nodded. “I’m heading out in a minute, to get ready. It’s at six.”

  “Right, I know,” which she didn’t. Nor did she want to go.

  Just then, Ryan walked in and planted a quick kiss on Gwen. He turned to Fiona, his smile fading. “How you doing?”

  “I’m fine. Why?”

  Ryan reached over to pick up the mug of decaf Gwen had already poured. He pointed toward an empty table in the corner. “Come sit with me.”

  She wasn’t sure which was worse—this annual February 27 heart-to-heart with her brother or Lucy’s sermon in the nook. At least she’d get him to herself.

  As she walked behind him, her eyes came level with his shoulder blades, rather than the back of his head. He looked so much older than her now.

  At the table, he studied her over the rim of his mug. “I want to talk about the surgery.”

  Fiona’s breath came out in an audible ooof. “God, why?”

  “Because you’ve gotta make a decision.”

  “Maybe not making a decision is the decision.”

  “Is it?”

  She used her index finger to circle random patterns across the wood. “Why do you want me to decide now? Why can’t it be next year? Or ten years from now?”

  “If you don’t do it soon, you will have to wait. The recovery time is four months, at least. It’s not like you can schedule it whenever you want it. If the donation is there, you’ve gotta be ready for it.”

  “I know.”

  “Once you get up to Chicago, you won’t have that chunk of time again for four years. You’ve already got all the credits you need to graduate, you’re already set with college. It’s the perfect time.”

  “Did Mom pay you or something? What’s with the sales pitch?”

  “You’re suspicious, because I want what’s best for you?”

  “How do you know this is best for me?”

  “You want to wallow every February twenty-seventh from now till you die?”

  “It’s one day! Every other day I’m fine.”

  “You’re burned every day, Fiona.”

  “Yet you make a bigger deal about it than I do,” she snapped. “You didn’t get burned, Ryan. I did.”

  Ryan looked at the table. “I know.”

  “So you can’t be all high-and-mighty about what I should do.”

  “I’m not. I just want to help. I want to make it better.”

  Make me better, you mean. “Is it that hard to look at me?”

  It was a hateful thing to say. She was equally pleased and horrified as all expression melted off his face.

  She stood, picking up her Moleskine. “Tell Lucy and David I went home.”

  “I’ll drive you.”

  “I want to walk.”

  “No, let me—”

  She held up her hand and walked out without a glance or a word to anyone else.

  It wasn’t a long walk home—maybe a mile—but it was cold and gray in that way that only Memphis in the winter can be. Not cold enough to justify buying a two hundred dollar puffy down coat, but never warm enough for the bulky sweatshirts everyone made do with instead. And the gray. She hadn’t seen actual sunlight in a month and a half. Maybe vitamin D withdrawal was the real reason she was so foul by the end of February.

  Tossing her hood over her head and pulling the drawstring tight, Fiona bundled against herself and began the trudge home. Gradually the walk warmed her. Cold, clean air filled up her lungs and scrubbed them clean. She unfolded slowly, each vertebra notching itself upright when good and ready. Twenty minutes later, her hood was down, her back straight, her good cheek flushed.

  At some point, Fiona found herself simply standing. A low wall edged the lawn just beside her. She was only a few blocks from home, but she walked over to sit on it. Not moving forward or backward, but sideways.

  She breathed, in and out. She felt the cold, hard stone poke into the cold, hard of her tailbone. She stared ahead at nothing in particular.

  Ryan was right, of course. Everything was horrible on February 27. She was horrible.

  On February 27, she was scarred. Every bit of her—face, heart, soul, brain—was mauled and mutilated. She was nothing but damage.

  She hated it all. Her scars, her self-pity, herself.

  She wanted to be whole.

  She pulled her Moleskine and pen from her pocket and began to write:

  Accidents and incidents / Freak twists in coincidence

  Build me up, like bones and skin

  I want love and sin

  Let me lure you in

  Let me begin again

  But this fate and skin / They trap me in.

  Well, she didn’t write it all at once. There were stops and starts, scratched-out lines, rearranged words. Countless breaths came in and out while the sun dipped away, and the night crept up. She only vaguely noticed the lost light and cold fingers, but this was a perfect kind of trance.

  She looked up when the car honked.

  Ryan screeched to a jerky stop at the curb in front of her and hopped out. “Where the hell have you been?!”

  “Here,”
she said, looking at him with a groggy, afternoon-nap feeling.

  “It’s been two hours.”

  Fiona looked at the—even grayer, like burnt charcoal—sky. “Wow. I didn’t realize—”

  “What are you doing?” he said, in a furious panic.

  She folded the Moleskine, resting it on her knees. “I was walking. And then writing.”

  “It’s a thirty minute walk home—tops—from the coffee shop, Ona. It’s”—he looked at his watch—“six thirty.”

  “Wait, doesn’t Gwen have a thing?”

  “Yes, she does. You’ll notice I’m not there.”

  It was bad, she knew, to feel a little triumphant about this. “What, you thought I was abducted or something?” She pointed to the long row of large, turn-of-the-century houses lining the street. “We’re not exactly in a high-crime area.”

  He sat beside her and pulled at the weeds growing through the cracks in the wall. “Anything could have happened. I didn’t know.”

  Ryan looked tense and edgy, not yet recovered from his ridiculous—but sweet—panic. Fiona’s heart broke a little for him. For the moment, she forgot her problems and stepped out of her mood. She nudged his shoulder with her own. “You’re a mess. Talk to me.”

  He rested his hands in his lap and looked straight ahead, toward the house across the street. “I just get lost in your story sometimes.”

  “Lost in my story?”

  He nodded. “Like . . . there’s this place you’re supposed to be, and it’s my job to get you there.”

  “Where am I supposed to be?”

  He shrugged. “If I knew, I wouldn’t keep screwing it up.”

  “How are you screwing it up?” she asked, thoroughly confused. It was like someone had sliced the pivotal chapters out of the “story” before she even got a chance to read it.

  Ryan’s eyes rested on the house across the street. “How am I not screwing it up? I push you to talk about things you don’t want to. I push David to ask out the girl of his dreams. I push you to do open mic night. I push you into a surgery you don’t want. I just push.”

  Fiona had never thought of it like this. Not at all. “I like that you’re in my story.”

  He shook his head and kept staring across the street. “I think about it a lot—if the accident never happened. Do you?”

  “Sure sometimes, but it’s pointless. I’m not a poor-me kind of girl.” He looked at her then, one eyebrow raised. “Well, not usually,” she said, nudging his shoulder again and acting breezier about the whole thing than she felt. He looked so burdened. “I was little, Ryan. There’s no way to know what I’m missing, or who I’d be otherwise. Stuff happens every day that sets us in one direction or another.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Stupid stuff.” She considered a minute then said, “You have this killer caffeine headache but somebody else gets the last Coke so you do awful on a final. Your class rank gets screwed. You don’t go to the right college, where Mr. Yeah Probably is waiting. So you meet Mr. Well Maybe, instead. He talks you into switching majors so you get a job that doesn’t really do it for you but it takes you out of the country all the time and you—”

  He cut her off. “Your comparing caffeine withdrawal to a face covered in scars?”

  “Half-covered.” She followed Ryan’s gaze back to the house across the street. Light blazed from all the bottom floor windows. Flickering blues of a television created the only light on top. “Anyway, plenty of everyday things can make just as much impact. Remember how you tried lacrosse in fourth grade? What if you’d stuck with that? You could potentially be someone else completely.”

  Ryan shrugged.

  “If we tried to analyze how every little thing changes us,” Fiona continued, “nobody would get anything done.”

  Ryan tipped his head toward her and smiled. It was a small smile—a saddish one—but a smile all the same. “I feel like it’s my job to fix it.”

  Now it was Fiona’s turn with the sad smile. “I thought you said I wasn’t broken.”

  He shook his head. “Not fix you. Fix it.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  He took a deep breath. “Three hundred sixty-four days of the year—I don’t know, you’re Fiona. Fun and sarcastic and just you. This day, not so much. That makes the problem an it, not a you.”

  “So according to this logic, we fix the scars, and my problems are solved?”

  “You don’t think?”

  It was a nice idea, one she probably clung to herself more than she’d like to admit. “There’s some safety in it, this way,” she said. “Like, I can always blame something for all the parts of me I hate. What if I’m just as pathetic with a full face?”

  “You are the least pathetic person I know.”

  Fiona didn’t agree with this at all, but that was a different argument. “It’s a scary idea, carrying around someone else. I’ll be benefiting from someone dying.”

  “You can’t take responsibility for that. That person chose to donate for his own reasons. It has nothing to do with you.”

  “But he—she—chose it for bigger reasons probably. Something more heroic. Not so some girl could be pretty. Or regular.”

  “Who’s to say that’s not heroic? Who says it needs to be? Whoever it is might just have checked the box with a Sure, why not?” Ryan nudged her shoulder. She wasn’t looking at him, but she knew he was smiling. “Not everyone agonizes over every little decision, Ona.”

  She was pretty sure organ donation didn’t fit in the every-little-decision category, but she didn’t press the point. This back-and-forth with her brother felt too nice, even if the topic was morbid.

  A second television flicked on across the street, in the room just next to the other TV. The lights flickered in unison, like both were tuned to the same channel. “So you think I should have the surgery?”

  A few quiet moments passed before Ryan answered. “I do.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Because you can?”

  What a simple reason—no grand philosophy behind it, no gut-wrenching self-evaluation required. It was easy and obvious and lovely.

  She decided to follow her brother’s lead.

  She rested her head on his shoulder and said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  FI

  When Fi first started dating Marcus, she’d talked to a girl on her lacrosse team who was allergic to everything—peanuts, soy, wheat. Even though her friend joked about her hermetically sealed lunches, she’d told Fi, no, she didn’t count to fifty while washing her hands.

  “So what’s really wrong with you?” Fi asked Marcus, one night later on.

  “It’s just a weird food thing,” he said. He launched into an exhaustive scientific explanation about allergy vs. intolerance vs. sensitivity that made her eyes glaze over.

  While she still didn’t understand it, she was getting better at rolling with it. For example, a few days ago, Marcus had gotten some weird bug, and Mrs. King had imposed a strict quarantine. Since Sunday, they had only talked by phone. She missed his smell and his arms around her and the feel of late afternoon stubble against her cheek, but she didn’t really mind the occasional break. She liked staying up late, curled into her covers and snuggling with Panda, talking quietly about everything and nothing.

  “What’s on your bucket list?” Marcus had asked last night, over the phone.

  “Um, I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it. Go to Paris?”

  “I want to ride a camel to the pyramids in Giza.”

  “A cruise would be good.”

  “Swim in the Dead Sea.”

  “Skydive, maybe?” she said.

  “Have dinner with the president. A photo tour of the Arctic.”

  “Yours are better than mine.”

  He laughed. “I lie in bed a lot. I have more time to think about it.”

  “I want a dog,” she added. “When I have my own place. Mom’s allergic.”

/>   “We used to have a cat. Tanya,” he said. “Dad gave her away when I started reacting to the dander.”

  “Oh. Never mind then. I don’t need a dog.”

  He was quiet a minute. “I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  “Being sick. Screwing up your life.”

  “Because I can’t have a dog?”

  “It’s not fair to you. We’ve never even been to a movie.”

  “We’ve seen plenty at your house. Or started to, at least,” she joked. He didn’t laugh.

  “Okay, sure,” she said. “It sucks we can’t go to the movies or hang out with my friends. But it sucks more that you have to drink those awful shakes your mother makes. That you’re always tired. That you can’t eat anything. That’s what I really hate.”

  She knew that he didn’t believe her, but it was true. She loved being Marcus King’s girlfriend. He made her better. Sometimes she couldn’t believe he’d picked her.

  It was enough, even if it was only covert late-night phone calls.

  All this morning and through school, she felt badly about the conversation. She worried that Marcus worried about her. So this current phone call—which came while she was digging through the fridge—surprised her.

  “Whatcha doin’?” he asked playfully.

  “Just got home,” she said, folding salami slices into her mouth. “You sound better.”

  “Much better, actually. I’m sprung for the afternoon.”

  “What do you mean, sprung?”

  “Want to go somewhere?”

  She froze. This was the kind of list she’d spent hours on, not some far-flung bucket list. Even so, her mind went blank.

  “I was thinking the coffee shop,” Marcus said.

  “Um . . .” Not her first choice. Not her eighth choice, even.

  “My favorite place ever,” he said. “Since I met you.”

  “Well, when you put it like that,” she said. “You talked me into it.”

  “Jackson wants to come, too. Maybe you could bring Ryan? I think they’d get along.”

  Their first time out, and his brother was coming? She would not be snide. She would not be snide. “See you in twenty minutes.”