And you get so dizzy that you know the world’s going to topple and so are you.
“Come down, Ella.”
And in the deepening night, I make my way back down. It’s not as smooth a process as it was going up. Rough bark scratches my skin. Two of my nails break.
I reach the ground and stand next to Tristan. Our breaths rise in puffs, clouds that intertwine in the evening air. We face the lacy white curtains, and I point at them and say, “What a dick, right?” so that we don’t have to talk about why I was up a tree or his brother anymore.
He laughs, and it’s at that moment that we hear the rumble of an engine. I look at Tristan, look up at the tree, look at the long road ahead. Shit, there’s a police car at the top of it.
“Run?” he asks. As if running away from cops is a decision that needs to be made in a democratic way.
“Hell, yes!” I reply. But then I just stand there, shocked that for the first time ever someone really did call the cops on me.
It doesn’t matter that my insides feel like molasses because the car is moving slowly, like the cop knows it’s Mr. Lacy Curtains who’s narced on us and he doesn’t have to worry.
But Tristan, he’s looking worried. His eyebrows stitch themselves together, and he seizes my hand and starts to run. “Come on, Ella. Come on.”
As we pick up speed, I shake him off. Run on my own. Because on my own is how I do things. But as finger after warm finger slips off my hand, I remember letting go of another hand in another place and time.
Two wrists in the moonlight.
“Starlight, star bright,” says Mark. “Starliiiiight.”
He’s watching us. Me and Amy, standing there with our fingers curled through each other’s. We’re in my garden. In my peripheral vision, I can see the gnome.
“Are you in, Ella?” Amy says.
Doof, doof, doof. The beat of the music makes it easy, so easy for a head to bob up and down in a nod. But I shake off the music, shake my head. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Her hand slides from mine. Finger after finger after finger. And then suddenly my hand is free, all of her warmth and weight gone. My fingers trail through the cool inkwell of evening, feeling disconnected. How long have I been holding Amy’s hand? How long have I been holding on to her?
“I’m going to find more beer,” she says.
And then she is gone.
I’m outside my house again. Breathless from the combination of the memory and the run. Tristan grins at me and pats me on the back. “Are you asthmatic?” he asks. “Or just really out of shape?”
I give him the finger to tell him exactly what I think.
“Careful, Ella. You never know; I might call the cops on you. Oh, these young teenage vandals and their need to climb trees and sing loud nursery rhymes.”
I laugh. “Given that I live here,” I say, pointing to the house, “I think I’m allowed to sing nursery rhymes as loudly as I want.”
“With your voice, I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if the neighbors tried to sue, anyway.”
I’m tempted to give him the finger again, but I resist. Because I am a mature, sophisticated young woman. “I bet your own tones are hardly dulcet.”
He smiles and inches ever so close to me before breaking out into a rousing chorus of “We Will Rock You” by Queen. His voice is surprisingly good. Tuneful and smooth. He sings almost as well as Petal does. Almost, but not quite. Petal’s singing can charm the birds out of the trees and fill you up with the satisfaction you usually only feel after eating Thanksgiving dinner. E’s singing, while lovely, would only ever stir a sad man to tears.
He smirks when he’s done and says, “So, will you let me rock you?”
“Maybe,” I say, pausing for dramatic effect, “if you were the last guy on Earth.”
He raises an eyebrow. “Believe it or not, that’s not what I meant. I was trying to ask whether you want me to help you see how Amy actually felt before she died?”
I look away, straight to the space on my lawn where Amy lost her life. I let my eyes bore into the grass, remembering the way her black hair fanned across it that night. “I still don’t think you know,” I tell him, turning down his offer of help. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Yeah,” he says with a heavy sigh. “See you.”
He tucks his hands into his pockets and wanders down my street. I watch him disappear into the meandering night before I head back inside, let the empty house swallow me whole. Sometimes I worry that one of these mornings it won’t spit me out again.
Chapter Sixteen
I DON’T MAKE it to school the next day. Hiding in my bed, pretending I’m in another house, on another planet, is much more fun. Mark calls four times and Petal calls six, but I don’t know what to say to them, so I ignore my beeping phone and bury my face in my pillow. It makes it difficult to breathe, and that gives me something to concentrate on.
I spend the day by myself with nothing but the in out in out in out in out in out of my breathing. It amazes me that this is all we need to live, that this unsatisfactory process is all it takes for my body to keep on going.
When it hits three o’clock, though, I get out of my toasty-warm bed. The chilly autumn air hits me, raising goose bumps on my skin. I didn’t go to school. There are no consequences for not going to school. But I have to go to the child care center, because if my mother forces me to go to therapy with Roger, it will give me lifelong emotional scars. And god knows I’ve already got enough of those.
When I arrive, Tristan and Heather are sitting on my favorite destroyed green bench. Talking. He moves his mouth in reply to whatever she’s saying, but he’s staring straight over her shoulder. At me.
Heather turns her head, probably to work out what he’s looking at. She readjusts her floral blouse—how many does the woman have?—eyes narrowing when she sees me. I walk over to them slowly, deliberately. As if the ground beneath me is made of eggshells instead of concrete.
“Hi,” I say to Heather.
Hate twists her face, screws with her features. She taps her watch. Tap. Tap. Tap. And I stand there defiant, because I know I’m two minutes early. “Cutting it close, Ella,” she says finally. “Make sure you’re always on time. Have you signed in at the front desk yet?”
She’s trying to say, Don’t give me an excuse to get rid of you. She’s trying to say, I don’t need one.
Can I really blame her for being so cold? I certainly didn’t need an excuse to fuck up her son’s life. Amy and I didn’t need an excuse to steal his books, to snicker when he walked past, to mock his clothes.
She has every right to hate me.
“I’ll make sure of it,” I say, biting my tongue to hold back an angry reply. “And yes, I have signed in. What would you like me to do today?”
“There’s nothing specific that you can do,” she says, her words clip-clopping out of her mouth. “Tristan’s already going to be supervising the play area.”
I look over to where the kids are sitting. Today instead of playing on the slide or chasing one another around, they’re each kneading a piece of play dough. I guess once in a blue moon Heather decides they need to do an organized activity rather than be left to their own devices. She’s like my mother that way.
“Maybe I could help him?”
“Tristan’s not incompetent. He can manage twenty kids. Why don’t you just make sure that Casey doesn’t get into trouble? No idea why, but she really took a shine to you the other day.”
Heather smiles, skin stretched tight. I don’t respond, keep a poker face. The seconds tick by. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi...Her smile wavers. Before her lips can snap closed, I notice her teeth. Shiny, white. Pointy. She has fangs like a vampire. Like her son, Peter. It was one of the things we mercilessly teased him about.
“Okay. Sure, I’ll make sure Casey stays out of trouble,” I say, even though I’d much rather drive nails through my own palms.
Because spendin
g time with Casey, who shares her doubts and dreams with me—and laughs like my dead best friend—is going to carve my insides out. By the time I leave here I’ll be nothing but a hollow ache.
Shit. Maybe I really should see my mother’s idiotic therapist.
I decide to read a story while Casey shapes her blob of play dough into a slightly more circular blob. I show her the book I’ve chosen. It’s about a beetle’s travels around a school playground or something.
“I’m ten,” she says, picking up her piece of dough and throwing it back down onto the concrete. Splat. “I’m too freaking old for this.”
I should tell her to watch her ten-year-old mouth. But I don’t, can’t, won’t. She needs some way to express her anger. Everyone does.
Instead, I flick open the cover of the book and begin to read: “‘Jonathan scampered through the sea of black school shoes. He wasn’t sure why, suddenly, he was so small compared to his old friends.’”
I pause.
Okay. So the story’s about a kid who gets transformed into a beetle. It’s like Kafka’s Metamorphosis, except it’s clearly aimed at scaring the crap out of kids.
“‘Jonathan decided he’d hide in the—’”
“Stop reading.” Casey’s voice rings out, quiet and loud, all at once. Her fingers have quit shaping the green play dough.
Snap. I close the book cover.
I can’t refuse Casey. Just like I couldn’t refuse Amy. “Why?” I say. “What’s wrong with the book?”
Her pudgy fingers lay into the dough again, pulling it in and out and in and out until it looks so grotesquely weird that I think this kid could have a career as a modern artist. “That beetle, right?” she says, flicking a piece of hair out of her eyes. “He, like, crawls all over the teacher’s blackboard and stuff and no one smashes him or anything. And then he saves some other beetle, and ‘the Forces of Good’”—she brings her green, dough-covered fingers up to form quote marks—“turn him back into a boy again.”
She stabs her fingers into the play dough and looks up at me. There are purple bruises painted beneath her eyes. “I mean, as if that story could have a happy ending. That beetle would have been squished, you know? The ending is always too happy in books.”
I blink.
Well, look at that. The kid’s a nihilist. A nihilist who likes to dream of the future.
She grabs a stray stick from the ground and thwacks it into her creation. Then she slides some of the gunky green dough off the stick so that it’s partially camouflaged within her little blob of dough. She smiles. Rocks back onto her heels and surveys it.
The girl should forget her lace-dress-clad mechanic dream. She’s definitely a crazy modern artist in the making.
Explosive Boy’s walking around now, asking the kids what their blobs are meant to be. It turns out that most of them have been molding their nightmares.
“The bogeyman.”
“A haunted house.”
“My neighbor. Swear to god, he weighs, like, three hundred and fifty pounds.”
My stomach twists as Explosive Boy wanders closer, closer, closer to Casey. His shadow blossoms over the gravely concrete where we’re sitting. I look up. The sun ignites his hair from behind, turning it a stunning shade of pinky orange.
“What have you made?” Explosive Boy asks Casey. He’s got that quiet kindness I noticed in him on the first day. I still think it’s weird as hell that he can be this person, this Kid Whisperer, this guy who hands Kleenex to crying girls he doesn’t know.
I don’t get how he can be that person and still smell like gunpowder, still have the kind of temper that flares up into a bonfire. The kind of temper that made him punch one of my best friends earlier this week.
“Casey?” Tristan prompts when she doesn’t reply. “It’s okay,” I say. “If you don’t want to tell us what it is—”
But her lips are moving; it’s just that her words are too quiet to break out into the world.
“Pardon me,” Explosive Boy says, and I jump a bit because, seriously? Pardon me?
“I couldn’t quite hear you,” he’s saying to Casey. “Could you please repeat yourself?”
“It’s me,” Casey says, soft but audible. “I made myself.”
Tristan’s whole face unravels. He looks winded, his shock spilling into the air. “It’s very...” He trails off, unsure of what to say. “Very good,” he finally manages.
“Abstract.” Why I’m helping him out, I don’t know.
Maybe it’s because I’m thinking that Casey has more in common with my dead best friend than a laugh.
“Yeah,” Tristan says. “You could be a great. Like Picasso.”
Casey flicks her fringe out of her brown eyes. She gingerly lifts her green creation. “Did Picasso look like this, too?”
My heart breaks, because she’s ten and this question is real.
“Yeah,” I say. “But you’re way prettier. Unfaithful self-portrait, much?” Too loud. Too cheery. Too warm. My voice is so fucking unnatural.
I’m blaming it on Tristan’s hair.
“Thanks,” Casey says, tossing me the word like a dog bone. Like she doesn’t believe it at all.
My attempt to comfort her crashes, burns, and dies.
“I need the bathroom,” she says, standing. She wanders off toward the building behind us.
I fold my hands and lean forward so that I’m staring at my lap. At the ground. I try, through the sheer intensity of my gaze, to burrow my way into the asphalt. To bury myself. In the ground. Where Amy is.
I could find her.
And then someone’s hand is on my shoulder, the fingers so sharp they send volts of electricity spiraling through me. One, two, three, four, five.
It’s him, of course.
Hey there, Tristan.
“Are you thinking about her?”
I put myself together, stitch a smile across my face. “Yeah, I’ve been getting all reflective about how very fucking awesome Heather is.”
He frowns. “Be serious.”
“Well, who did you mean?” I ask, pretending to be shocked by his response.
“Amy. You know, you don’t have to do this—”
“Oh,” I say, “but I do. These children need me.”
And something in my voice, something about my playful tone, must get to him. Because he doesn’t bother with more words. Just sighs and leaves me there, still holding the fucked-up creation that’s supposed to represent Casey’s self.
Thankfully, Casey comes back from the bathroom before I can unleash my wrath on a defenseless blob of play dough. She resettles herself on the ground beside me. We both watch Tristan’s retreating back. “When my dad acts like that,” she says, “my mom always asks him why the fuck he has PMS.”
It surprises me how easily her lips curved around the word. It surprises me that the word, the Big Bad word that Heather banned me from using in front of these kids, fits like a glove in Casey’s mouth.
It surprises me, even though it shouldn’t.
Amy was like that, too. She had parents who dropped those words all over the house. Amy’s home was a land mine of bad language. Arguments would break out in the kitchen while we were watching the Disney channel.
Goddamnit
Absolute shit
Go fuck yourself, Ted.
Sometimes Amy was the one at the center of all the angry words.
That fat bitch.
And she never knew that I knew that when she buried her face in the imported cushions, she was crying.
“Casey,” I say, “you shouldn’t use words like that.”
She looks up at me. “Why?”
“Because,” I say, pretending to be the wholesome girl I’m not, “they’re bad.”
But Casey has decoded the lack of conviction in my voice. She smiles, and she looks so much like Amy. She stands, holds up her blob of a creation, and opens her mouth nice and wide, ready to defy me.
“Casey, please don’t,” I say quickly. “H
eather will kick me out of here if you say that loud enough for her to hear.”
Snap. Her mouth closes. She must like me then. A grin breaks loose on her face. Her eyes sparkle, like an actress in one of those old movies. “Fuck,” she whispers conspiratorially, and she’s so pleased with herself.
Pink runs across her cheeks, makes the purple beneath her eyes less noticeable. Her whole posture changes: shoulders rolled back, straightened. Her nose gets tipped up in the air. Her profile is sharp and brimming with life against the endless sky.
“I like that word,” she says.
I resist the temptation to hug Casey, to try to squeeze out the things that haunt her. I close my eyes against the sight of this girl who is so much like my best friend.
And because I can’t take it anymore, I say to Casey, “I have to go.” I whisper, “Good-bye.”
And then I’m crashing back into the building and through the automatic glass front doors. Out onto the street. Hopefully my mother’s “donating” too much money for Heather to fire me over this.
The wind bites into me, and I feel even colder than usual. I wrap my arms around myself and slowly begin the walk home.
Chapter Seventeen
MY MOTHER HAS left my breakfast on the kitchen counter. A slice of toast slathered with avocado and a tall, skinny glass of orange juice. I slide the plate away from me. Eye it suspiciously. I can’t remember the last time my mother made me breakfast. Or the last time there was orange juice in our house.
And fuck, she’s even left me a note on the fridge saying that she’s glad about my progress at the child care center. Guess Heather hasn’t told her about yesterday’s walkout yet. My mother hopes—or so her neat handwriting tells me—that I have a nice day. At school.
I snort. It’s a Saturday. Mom’s seven-days-a-week job means she sometimes loses track of the time.
Well, never fear, Mother, I’ll have a nice day. Just not at school.
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