The Opposite of Everyone: A Novel

by Joshilyn Jackson

  I am running, now, my body pounding toward her of its own volition. My heavy backpack bangs against my spine. I feel cold terror in my long bones, and violence is uncoiling as I come close and closer. She has a round sucker in her mouth. I see the stick poking out, see how it makes one cheek bulge.

  The driver’s-side window scrolls down, and Jeremy, her dead-eyed boyfriend, leans his head out. He calls something to her, pointing down the road at me. She looks at me, and she stops swinging her hand-me-down tennis shoes with all the laces frayed, untied and hanging down in scraggles. She doesn’t try to get up or run or even back away. She waits for me, boneless and accepting.

  That’s how I know it’s all already done.

  Somewhere a chipmunk is yelling his staccato love song, and the sun is warm on my back. I run at Candace because I cannot go inside. I don’t know how I’ll ever go inside.

  Candace looks at me with her bland, blank Candace eyes as I skid to a halt in front of her, dropping my backpack off in a shrug. I’m already slapping her before I hear it thunk onto the asphalt. I keep flailing at her face and head, palms open, but so intense and furious it’s like I have a hundred hands.

  Her shoulders hunch, her legs curl up and in, her hands cover her face, but she doesn’t roll away. She bunches up like a hood ornament and waits for me to finish. She doesn’t understand; I’ll never finish.

  “Hey, now! Stop, now!” Jeremy is yelling. He scrambles out of the car, but I ignore him and keep whaling away at her. I am crying and she is crying out. Her sucker drops onto the hood and rolls away. I see it as a splash of orange falling away in my peripheral vision. Then Jeremy wraps his arms around me from behind, pinning me to his chest. He pulls me back and off her.

  “Stupid—stupid—” I hiss at Candace, too squeezed and clamped by Jeremy to scream it. She shouldn’t be here. They are not allowed to be here. I lash out with my feet, trying to kick her in the face as he drags me backward.

  “Don’t hurt her!” Candace calls to him, uncoiling, worried.

  We are frozen there for a timeless span, Candace watching with her flossy hair in a muss, her eyes stinging with tears. Jeremy holding me, my breath heaving against his restraining arms. He doesn’t let go until he feels the need to beat her leave my body.

  What’s the point? It’s done.

  Kai and I have been here less than a month. She came back from prison different, but hasn’t this always been her way? New location, new Kai. Always before, I changed myself to fit the narrative, the yang to her selected, shifting yin. But we are living under our real names now; her parole ties us to our true history. Karen Vauss sings less, tells fewer stories, drinks more wine than any Kai that I have ever known. Karen Vauss is too broken and world-weary to ditch parole and run.

  I slacken in Jeremy’s arms, and I think, I can do that with her. I can be silent on the sofa and not deviate until Kai does. I can, and I will, because my ever-changing mother is the only presence in my life that has been constant. I wrecked it, sent us both to separate institutions, but I have her back now. I have to let her know that I can stare like a sad-eyed orphan at Marvin, if that’s what she wants. He owns the diner where Kai works. He’s started sending home bacon-stuffed biscuits for me at the end of her shifts, and one morning, soon, I know I’ll wake up and find him in pajamas and bare feet, eating them at our small dining table. I can back her play, if only she forgives me.

  I swear this to myself, though I’m scared to see the Kai who’s waiting for me inside. The truth she knows now may have already changed her. Fine. I am making promises to every god who ever walked: I’ll be her match no matter what it is, when she forgives me.

  Jeremy steps back from me, and I stand trying to stop crying in the road in front of the car. Candace clambers down off the hood and gets her sucker off the curb, inspecting it. She picks away a piece of grass, a bit of leaf. I can see my handprints all on her pale face.

  “You should of took me with you,” she says, as if I could have, even if I’d wanted to. She puts the dirty candy in her mouth. Her eyes are wary and unsorry and something else. Something I can’t read.

  “You should get off of my street,” I say, scrubbing my last tears away.

  “You don’t own it,” she says, but not like it’s a dig. She’s stating a fact. “You don’t own nothin’ here.”

  She’s right. We are renters. Kai and I have the dim basement apartment of a three-unit house that is the biggest eyesore in the neighborhood. The rent is low, especially for Morningside, which is not our kind of place. It’s full of blond people who buy name-brand dogs and care about their lawns. But it’s safe, and the schools are good.

  “We got to go,” Jeremy tells Candace, shifting uneasily from foot to foot.

  He speaks only to her, as if the second I stopped hurting her, I stopped being relevant. I look only at Candace, too, as if he stopped existing when he took his arms away.

  “I was going to call,” I tell her. It’s not true.

  I’d hoped that once I was gone, Candace would forget me. She’s such a creature of immediacy, she might well busy herself blackmailing Shar and Karice to be her replacement friends, or swapping Jeremy for someone who had pot as well as candy. If that failed, I’d hope she wouldn’t be able to find me. I told Mrs. Mack and my caseworker and my guardian ad litem that I didn’t want them passing on my contact info, and they said I had that right. But Candace is so good at weaseling and snooping, one big ear pressed to any closed door she comes across, sugar-sticky fingers creeping through other people’s private things. She found me, and she had Jeremy get a car someplace, so she could get to me and ruin me.

  I have myself in hand now. I’m done crying in front of her. I don’t even want to hit her more. Candace is a well with no bottom. I can throw endless sorrow or violence at her. I could even throw in love, if I had any to spare. She would take it all, disappear it down her blank, black mouth hole, as if it were the same. None of it would ever fill her. It would hurtle down and down forever, falling through her endless, hungry depths.

  “Why are you still here?” I ask her.

  Candace gives Jeremy a look, and he walks over and folds himself back into the driver’s seat. He closes the door and sits inside the car, dead eyes front. I watch the window scrolling up, his arm pumping as he works the crank.

  Candace says, “We ran away. Jeremy’s driving me to California.”

  I peer at him through the windshield, not sure what story this boy thinks he’s in. Romeo and Juliet? Bonnie and Clyde? Maybe slouchy boys like him don’t read, so he can’t see how bad it’s bound to end. Does Jeremy even have a license? I think he might still be fifteen, but I’m not sure. Even if he’s legal to drive, there’s no way he bought this car.

  I thump the hood and say, “This is going to land you both in juvie.”

  Candace shakes her head. “We stoled it off some Mexicans. Illegals don’t report.”

  “I report, Candace,” I remind her, frustrated. It’s been her leverage, so how can she not see the irony? “I dial 911, and I report shit.”

  In the wake of this threat, she only sidles closer. “You didn’t take me, but I’d still take you.”

  “Take me where?” I ask, uncomprehending. “You mean to California?”

  She nods, and I realize she is serious. She’s done her level best to trash my life, and her left ear is bright red from where I boxed it. Now she’s inviting me along on her road trip?

  “I hope you die in California,” I say, so cold it barely has inflection. “No, I hope you die on the way and never get there.”

  I grab my backpack and sling it back up on my shoulders. I step out of the road, walking away toward the house.

  She calls after me, “You should’ve seen your mama when I told her. She slapped me, too.” That stops me. Kai in every incarnation is nonviolent. A word person. A charmer who’ll kiss puppies on the mouth. Candace follows me onto the patchy grass of the rental house’s lawn. “They got sea lions out there, did you
know that? They sit up on the same beach as where the people go. I saw it on a video in science class. You can walk right up to them, and they don’t mind it. Don’t you want to see that? Don’t you want to get up close?”

  I understand her then. She didn’t tell Kai for revenge or even out of meanness. She did it because I am a Gotmama, and she can never join my tribe. She’s done this thing to move me into hers. I am floored at how much ugliness can be alive inside simple pragmatism.

  “I hate sea lions,” I lie. The Kai who lives in this house—Karen Vauss—is sour and insular, so I will be, too, and she will forgive me. I can’t see this new us on a beach.

  Candace says, “Well, where I’m going, I’ll see lots of things.”

  “I hate seeing lots of things,” I lie. Karen Vauss rarely leaves the house, so I won’t, either.

  I walk away, heading around to the side door that leads down into our apartment.

  “Hey, you want me to wait?” Candace calls after me, and there is a desperate edge now to her voice. “In case of you need that ride?”

  I don’t turn back. I barely hear her, because I will not need that ride. I am thinking to myself, My mother knows, and so the worst already happened.

  I open the door and look down our dark stairwell.

  I could put my game face on and lie. Right now, it is my word against Candace’s. Kai won’t want it to be true, and nothing helps a lie float like a hopeful listener.

  I hear the shit car starting with a huge chugging noise. Its muffler is dead or dying. It is the roar of another lost girl on the move, hoping to go far enough to get up close to sea lions. Or past that, into the ocean. Or past that, right off the edge of the world.

  I’m so relieved to hear her going that I know I won’t lie. Lies and California are not real. The only real way out is through the truth.

  So the unthinkable has happened—Kai knows I broke our lives. Now I have to go downstairs uninvented and see what happens next.

  I walk down with a changed future only a few steps before me. It is a wall of white without Kai’s handwriting on it. What if Kai hits me? She’s never hit me. She’s never let a boyfriend hit me, either. If she does, I’ll take it, like Candace did. I have earned it. I’ve earned any acts of penance that she might require, and at the end, I will be forgiven.

  I want to be punished, actually. It would feel good to bow to it and say, This is what should happen now. When the awful part is done, she will fold me in her arms. She will say, Baby, baby, we will be okay. Not today, but one day, when I am fully punished and forgiven, she will say these words to me. I know she will, because us, together, is the driving repetition of our incarnations.

  The stairwell is dark, and it is even darker in the large room beyond. It’s a combination den and dining room with a kitchen running in a strip along the back wall. It only has windows on one side. They run in a narrow horizontal line up by the ceiling, and it’s been raining on and off all day. The sun is behind a thick blanket of clouds. I peer into the dim light, seeking her.

  I have been mostly happy here, in this small span of time.

  She is sitting on the sofa. She’s been drinking wine, the purple Kool-Aid-colored kind that comes in a big jug with a round ring for a handle. I can smell its thin, acidic tang. A juice glass sits on the coffee table, a few bright dregs staining the base of it. She’s holding a cigarette that has burned down to the filter and died without her noticing, a tube of untouched ash perched between her fingers.

  I set my backpack down by the front door, and Kai starts at the sound. She sits up straight, and the long ash breaks and crumbles. The big pieces fall and scatter down her front, while some dusty bits drift slower in a gray and weightless haze. Her eyes seek me and find me, tearstained and sweaty from the exertion of beating Candace. Her eyes meet mine.

  I think she tried hard not to believe Candace. Maybe she succeeded, but not all the way. She reads the confirmation on my face. The truth has such a power to it, and it’s already been spoken in this room.

  There is a beat, a single breath that lasts a century, and then there is nothing for me in her expression. No thought, no feeling. Her eyes roll slowly in their sockets, past me, to look into the darkness of the stairs behind me.

  The world’s very tilt changes. I feel it. The whole planet shifts under my feet. The ground is water, and the ocean is the sky. Everything that was once moored now floats. I am drifting, too, helpless in a sea of stories with no current and no wind.

  “Mama,” I begin, but she talks over me.

  “Oh, hello, baby,” she says. Her eyes have become chips of green rock. Her pale face shines, expressionless, like carved marble glowing in the darkness. “Do you want a piece of fruit?”

  “Mama,” I start again. “I’m—”

  “There’s bananas, or I think there’s still an apple,” she says, cutting me off again.

  She notices the filter in her hand and sets it in the ashtray, which is already bursting with a hundred stubbed-out Camels. When we first moved in, there was a dank green basement smell, mossy and thick. Now, the whole place reeks of stale smoke. She brushes at the scattered ash that’s graying out the colors of her skirt, then gets a new cigarette from the pack and lights up. Her gaze slides over me again, and this time it settles on the kitchen.

  “Kai,” I say, urgent.

  I want for her to come at me. I need her to. She could slap me, hard and openhanded, as many times as I slapped Candace. More. She could squeeze me tight enough to shove the breath from me. I want her to scream and flail, to be a raging storm. I want her to be anything that has a chance of being over.

  I step into her line of vision, but it is as if I am a moving spot of Teflon. Her gaze slides away, unable to pause or stick. She gets up, weaves her way to the stripe of kitchen on the back wall, and starts cutting up the apple for me.

  I don’t remember my mother ever looking straight at me again.

  I’m sure she must have. There had to be times when, by sheer chance, her gaze and my body intersected. It was not a large apartment. But in my memory, her eyes wore out the air around me, year after relentless year. To an outside observer, I doubt that much would have changed, but I knew. I’d been locked outside her story, and the longer I stayed out, the more guilt and fury worked their way under my skin like backward shrapnel, slow-digging their way deep into the meat of me.

  So I remade myself into a creature built to plague her. Paula the slut, the scrapper, the petty criminal, the rebel. I’d come home at four A.M., stinking of boy and beer, and still she looked just past me. She never told me to be any different, the jagged scrape of a thousand guilt and fury slivers rasping on my bones became background music, an ever-present hum. Once I moved to Indiana, I remade myself again: the woman who made good to spite her mother. I let my checks tell that tale for me. The amount on them growing larger with the years, but asking the same angry question. Six months ago, she finally answered: I am going on a journey, Kali. I am going back to my beginning; death is not the end. You will be the end. We will meet again, and there will be new stories.

  Classic, cryptic Kai, speaking just off point, her words sliding over me and past me like her gaze. Why couldn’t she say, Hey, sorry, but I’m dying, and I’m coming to Atlanta. Do you want your little sister?

  Now the only new story I had was the four-month-old police report that pinged on Birdwine’s radar. In it, an ancient eyesore of a Buick with a crumpled hood and a long scraped side came driving in wild loops through Morningside. One good wife of the neighborhood saw the sketchy car pass by, out of place on her street. She also clocked a kid in the backseat, and noted how erratically the female driver wove from curb to curb. She did nothing. Not until the second time it passed, and she worried that her neighborhood was being cased. Then she called the cops.

  A cruiser was dispatched, but by the time it arrived, the Buick had already wibbled off the road and banged into an evergreen in some upstanding citizen’s front yard. The accident happened tw
o blocks down from the lot where our old apartment used to be. If Kai was looking for it as the last stop on her Past Lives Tour, she was out of luck. The whole house had been torn down, and a faux craftsman with three thousand square feet of living space had been crammed onto the lot.

  The driver—Karen Porter from New Orleans, according to her ID—was groggy and disoriented. She’d whanged her head against the steering wheel. She and her child were taken by ambulance to Grady Hospital, where they ascertained that the concussion was the least of her problems. She was in the end stages of lung cancer that had spread all through her—brain, bones, and beyond. The child was treated for a sprained wrist and released to DFCS. The woman remained, drifting in and out of consciousness with limited lucidity. She died six days later.

  I’d accepted that Kai was dead. I’d wept and wept in Birdwine’s arms as we stared out at my city’s skyline. But if this woman was Kai, then my mother had already been cremated; Adult Protective Services, unable to locate a living relative, had done it at the end of May.

  That info came from Birdwine; he’d followed up on the woman while I tried to get a bead on the kid. He thought DFCS would be more open to inquiries about a ten-year-old girl-child from me. I was a female blood relative and upstanding member of the bar, while he was a fired former policeman, emphasis on man, with less than a week sober. Fair enough.

  I spent the better part of two business days poking my way through endless automated menus, only to get a person who would transfer me to another person, who inevitably sent me back into the menu or, if I lucked out, into a voicemail. I recorded a honey-throated message whenever I got the option, building up a solid legion of inquiries.

  Julian, new to red tape, got frustrated fast. He’d quit at the suburban Mellow Mushroom and was both interning for me and looking for another job in midtown. He’d completed his transfer application to Georgia State and was sending me endless links to real estate listings in good school zones that had yards and at least two bedrooms. They all had carriage houses or basement apartments, too. The implication was I’d have a brotherly built-in renter, close enough to help with after-school care. He wanted the both of us to storm DFCS in person, locked and loaded.