Shantallow

by Cara Martin

  We drifted into the food court for a break. Justin’s finger shot out, identifying Tanvi at a table close to the burrito counter. Ashish Kohli sat across from her, wearing a plaid shirt with the top two buttons undone and tenderly holding her hand. A friend might hold your hand that way, if you were dying. As far as I knew neither of them was.

  Tanvi and Ashish took no notice of us in the distance. Their eyes were filled with each other.

  I jerked to attention, twisting my face away from them. Then my entire body. I stalked away from the food court with Justin and Arjun in tow. “That looked incriminating,” Justin noted. “But appearances can be deceiving.”

  And sometimes things are exactly as they appear.

  Ducking into a clothing store, I texted Tanvi to ask what she was up to. Sixty seconds later she replied that she was at the mall with Imogen. “What’re you doing?” she wanted to know.

  “Catching you in a lie,” I messaged. Then I turned off my phone and told my friends I had to go. Be anywhere but where I was.

  I climbed into the Camry, my fists shaking on the steering wheel.

  I peeled out of the mall parking lot and sped in random directions, my brain detonating over and over. Right. Left. Right. Right. Left. Past the movie theater. Beyond the recreation center and library. Navigating a wide circle around the Newtown Creek Park where two hawks soared overhead, scouting for prey — and where I’d curled up on a blanket with Tanvi, believing her feelings were the equivalent of mine. Trusting her more than I’d trusted anyone outside my family.

  Hours later, when I pulled into my Balsam driveway, I couldn’t feel anything or remember exactly where I’d gone. The scenery in my mind blurred together like soggy newsprint.

  Visually, the human hippocampus resembles a partially formed seahorse. Or one that’s curled up and died. That’s what mine felt like as I stepped into the house. My hand automatically searched out my phone in my pocket, switched it on so that it sprung to life. Six messages waited for me. Each of them from Tanvi, saying different things. She was sorry. She didn’t tell me because she knew how I felt about Ashish. She ran into him while at the mall. It wasn’t planned. They were just talking. It didn’t mean anything. She was sorry sorry sorry and she needed me to return her call.

  “I saw you together,” I texted. “You were holding hands.” Nobody holds your hand like it’s a precious, fragile object without the act meaning something. There had to be more.

  My phone wailed between my fingers, like an ambulance siren coming up on your bumper. I ignored it, navigating to Ashish’s Instagram account instead. The most recent posting was a photo of Tanvi and Ash. They were standing, facing each other, noses so close that it would’ve been tough to fit a can of Coke between them. Ashish’s gaze was supremely serene, as if the girl in front of him was the answer to everything and he’d never have another moment’s doubt in his life.

  His caption read: “Never wrong a girl who has your heart. She is precious and rare.”

  Someone called Sarvesh commented: “And gorgeous. What’s she doing with you ;)”

  “You two are too cute together,” somebody else said.

  A third exclaimed: “You better send me a wedding invite!”

  My mom had joined me in the hallway. She’d changed out of her uniform and was wearing jeans and the long V-neck sweater that Natalya had given her for Christmas. “You’re home early,” she observed. “How are Arjun and Justin?”

  I shook my head, stupefied. Tanvi and Ash were together. Everybody knew it. Why was she continuing to lie to me? She easily could have slept with Ashish again already. It was possible that they’d never stopped.

  “What’s wrong?” my mother asked. “You look like someone just ran over your puppy in the street.”

  “Nothing … just … I’m going out again in a second.”

  Patrick from work, Central Foodmart’s laziest stock clerk, was having a party I’d never intended to go to. But I was going now. I couldn’t stand in the hallway all night with Tanvi’s lying texts spitting repeatedly into my phone, insulting my intelligence.

  My phone felt hot in my hand. Like an outdoor ATM during a heat wave.

  I texted Desiree for Patrick’s address. Neither of us liked Patrick. He blamed everyone else for his mistakes and spoke like there was a megaphone superglued to his mouth. Desiree couldn’t believe I was going to his party.

  I couldn’t believe it either.

  I couldn’t believe my relationship with Tanvi had been gutted like a fish in the time it takes to point a finger.

  My mom insisted on driving me over to Patrick’s house, a split-level semi with Christmas lights still over the garage and a mob of cars parked up and down the street. Tanvi blinked inside my head when I barged through the front door without knocking, a fog of smoke and hip-hop music enveloping me. In the house people were doing shots and dancing. Or standing around with their spines hugging the walls, watching the others. The music was too loud for talking, and the air smelled like old bingo hall air — dank, smoky, sweat-stained yet spiked with perfume.

  It didn’t matter. I wasn’t there to talk or to breathe.

  Most of the people I edged past were strangers. A few years older than me, like Patrick. That didn’t necessarily matter either. I kept walking, taking in the living room scene as I went. Girls in heavy mascara and cherry-red lipstick. Naked legs under short skirts. Skin-tight jeans and halter tops. Ultrabrite smiles.

  I reached the kitchen next. Several closed-lid Rubbermaid coolers lined the floor, and both sides of the double sinks were crammed to the top with ice. It glistened under the track lighting. Tiny rectangular ice floes, melting imperceptibly. A guy in an orange beanie and a scarf so big that it threatened to swallow his upper body like a boa constrictor was doing a line of coke off the counter while a girl in a denim skirt sat next to him blowing smoke rings.

  “Hey, Misha,” the girl said languidly.

  I zeroed in on her thin eyebrows and freckled nose, realizing it was Margo from work. “Hey, what’s up, Margo?” I bent to pluck a can of beer from the nearest cooler.

  “Some of the people we know from Central are in the basement playing pool,” she offered.

  I thanked her and headed downstairs. If Tanvi thought she could play me and get away with it, she was dead wrong. I was striking back. In the basement I located Patrick and other people from work. A crowd of us played pool and knocked back beer, and then shots, Tanvi holding Ashish’s hand the entire time, their heads pulling together like magnets. Fingers picking at each other’s clothes, making them disappear.

  I talked to girls I knew and girls I didn’t. Short girls. Tall girls. Girls in bare feet and girls in knee-high boots. It took a little time, but in the end I found one. A girl who was looking for the same thing I was.

  Her name was Katrine, and she straddled me on the basement couch, her red hair falling around my face while we chapped each other’s lips. I’d forgotten what it was like to kiss anyone but Tanvi. My body slipped into autopilot, but my mind wouldn’t let go. It was locked on Tanvi, seething and breaking. Still in shock hours later. Stalled. Stuck in a moment in time. The moment where everything I thought I had didn’t mean anything anymore, and she was the reason.

  On the couch I pushed my hands gently into Katrine’s shoulders, forcing her away from me. “Back in a second,” I told her, but I knew I wouldn’t return. Tanvi’s hold on me was so tight that I didn’t really want anyone else, even as revenge.

  “I might still be here,” she said, trying to be cute. She slithered off me, retreating into the shadows.

  Patrick clapped me on the back while I sprinted up the steps to the ground floor. “Having a good time, bro?”

  I nodded with my mouth shut, stomping into the kitchen. The coke was long gone. So were Margo and the guy in the orange beanie and boa constrictor scarf. The ice cubes in the sink had transform
ed into water. I reached in to pull the plug and hung my head over the counter, the pita I’d eaten at lunch making a hasty exit.

  Yeah, I was having a good time, bro. The time of my life.

  And now I was leaving.

  Keion came in his cab when I texted him, like an indie 911. He shook his head at me as I dove into the front seat next to him. “I’ve never seen you in this sorry ass state,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” I told him.

  “Yeah, you do.”

  “Yeah, I do,” I admitted. I’d walked too far out on the ice and realized it could crack under my feet. “But not now, okay? I need to get home.”

  Keion nodded as we pulled away from the curb. “I can see that, all right.”

  I leaned my head back against the headrest and shut my eyes; I’d downed too many shots to keep them open. Sleep curved its velvety black wings eagerly around me. I didn’t fight it.

  In some other place, Tanvi stared at me with eyes like a starless night sky. “Shantallow,” she said, her cheeks slick with blood and her lips not moving. “Run.” My shirt was torn at the elbow. It flapped as I ran, my ribs twitching underneath my skin, clawing me from the inside.

  “We should have reached a road by now,” Tanvi said. Misery bent her voice, like a branch drooping under the weight of too much snow. “How can there be no road?”

  I jolted myself free from sleep. Keion’s eyes were on the road ahead. “Shantallow,” he hissed. “We shall all be changed.” Sharp fingernails scraped violently against the passenger side of the car. Keion grinned maniacally, his teeth broken and gray. Only he wasn’t Keion anymore. My father was at the wheel. Soil spilled from his mouth. Chunks of his skull were missing, the glare from a passing car illuminating the clumps of raw, uneven flesh left in their place.

  “Hey, hey!” a voice called. “Wake up, Misha.” A car horn blared. It sliced through my fear, hurling me back to the world. My head knocked back against the headrest, Keion’s right hand closed firmly around my arm. “Whoa. You were having a night terror or something. I couldn’t wake you up. You damn scared me.” He promptly released his hold, his right hand joining his left on the wheel.

  “I’m okay,” I said unconvincingly. “Must’ve been all the beer.”

  We were back in Balsam, a couple of blocks from my house. Keion sighed through his teeth, his concerned eyes worse than any lecture. Thirty seconds later we veered onto my street. About six houses down from mine a guy with his hood up sat on a neighbor’s steps, hunched against the wind. He cocked his head in my direction as I exited the car, like we knew each other.

  Keion called after me, “Be good, Misha. Call me if you want to talk.”

  I was as shaky as hell, freezing on the inside. The dream had been so real that I easily might have thrown myself from the car to escape it. One of my hands flew instinctively up in the air to wave off Keion, my feet pausing until the cab was gone and then padding me over to the neighbor’s front yard like they had their own ideas about what was supposed to happen next.

  “Thought that was you,” the guy said from the stoop. He tugged his hoodie down, revealing a familiar face. Black, maybe nineteen years old, maybe twenty-two. I’d never known exactly in the first place. I couldn’t remember his name, either. Craig, Greg, Kevin, Gavin. Something like that. We’d run into each other a couple of times on big jobs last summer. He’d worked with another Golding Green Thumb crew.

  “You live out here too?” I asked. My dad’s fucked-up face flickered behind my eyes. I grabbed the railing to steady myself.

  “Nah. Closer to Bishop. I’m just waiting for a friend to get home. My mom locked me out for missing curfew.” I nodded dazedly, feeling as if I’d never be warm again. “You look spooked, man,” he added. “You all right?”

  “Been better,” I confirmed. “I got mixed up with one of those rich Newtown Creek girls — you know, the kind of people whose lawns we slogged over all summer because they’re too uptight-rich to bother their asses doing it themselves.”

  “Oh yeah.” He chuckled dryly. “So this girl was slumming with you?”

  “And then she figured it out. Screwed me over with her ex.” I knew how pathetic I sounded, but once I kicked into gear I couldn’t shut up. My lips kept flapping open in the wind, telling him how out of my league Tanvi was with her perfect house, rich parents, even wealthier restaurateur grandparents, and Harvard ex-boyfriend. It was better than ranting about my psycho dreams.

  “Her grandparents own Molto Troppo?” he echoed. “I’d rather have a Big Mac than the pseudo-Italian microwave shit they serve in that place. You should’ve dumped her before she dumped you. Don’t sweat it, though. A girl like that isn’t worth the trouble. You need someone who will have your back. Someone who’s for real.”

  I nodded, wishing I could take back all my sloppy, self-pitying words. “It’s gusty out here, man,” I told him. “You want to wait in my house until your friend shows?”

  He slipped his phone out of his hoodie pocket to glance at the screen. “No, I’m good. He should be here soon. Thanks, though.” He swung his hood back into place while I turned to go.

  The night didn’t feel over. The last thing I wanted to do was to sleep. But I was worn out through and through. Still soaked in alcohol too, regretting everything but the first two beers. Inside the house I collapsed on the bed in my clothes and fed my earbuds into my ears.

  Next thing I knew, Tanvi was glaring down at me from beside my bed. Sunlight passing through the window etched a fuzzy halo around her head. Her dark hair twisted partially around her neck, and the skin under her eyes was puffy and raw. “Congratulations,” she said, bitterness clogging the air. “You win.”

  “What?” I mumbled, lips heavy from sleep. “What are you talking about?”

  “I saw the photo from last night,” Tanvi said. “On Snapchat. You and whoever that girl was.”

  I pushed myself up on my elbows, the color draining from my face, leaving me a ghost. I felt it happen and saw the evidence in Tanvi’s eyes. I was a dead man.

  “You didn’t know there was a photo?” she continued.

  That prick Patrick. It must’ve been. Or someone else from work, thinking they were being funny.

  “You and Ashish.” His name collapsed into rubble on my tongue. “You started it.”

  “And you thought you’d end it.” A punishing smile hollowed out Tanvi’s face. “Mission accomplished. I thought we were better than that. I thought all the time we spent together since last summer, all those things we told each other, really meant something.”

  My arms hung apologetically at my sides. “I don’t know what the photo from last night looks like, but we just made out. I’ve never seen that girl before in my life, and I couldn’t take it any further … because of you. You’re the only girl I’ve ever been with for real.” I shook my head, my vocal cords slashing themselves into threads. “I would never have done that if I hadn’t seen you two together. I saw his Instagram — the things people were saying. You looked like you were about to kiss.”

  “There was no kiss. People don’t know a thing.” Tanvi rubbed her eyes, bolts of agonized, jagged red forming inside them. Forked rivers of disappointment. “All we did was talk. I would never have cheated on you, Misha. You didn’t even give me a chance to explain. You just believed the worst right away.”

  “You still care about him,” I countered. “You can’t tell me that you don’t.”

  “I’m not going to try to tell you anything. We’re done. Don’t call me. Don’t come by. I don’t want to see you anymore.” Tanvi spun and tore out of my room, her steps urgent and self-assured. The smell of grapefruit wafted behind her, killing me quietly.

  Hot on her heels, I shouted, “Wait! Don’t act like this is all on me. What happened with that girl didn’t mean anything. Less than you holding Ashish’s hand.” My soc
k feet hit cold pavement as I followed Tanvi outside. “But it won’t happen again, I swear.”

  Her pace accelerated. I lunged and cried, “Wait, goddamnit it. Wait.” My fingers shot out and closed around Tanvi’s arm, holding her in place from a step behind. The fabric of her coat bunched underneath my hand. “Can’t we even try to fix this? After all these months together you’re just going to let go like that?”

  “You did,” she said, refusing to turn and face me.

  I held on a second longer. Then another. Feeling how alive Tanvi was. The strength coursing through her bicep from hours of volley-ball. Beyond that, from the sheer force of her will. A girl who could make her guardians second-guess their own wisdom. A girl who could stop you in your tracks and re-chart your course. Match you thought for thought, word for word, step for step. A girl who could decide to love you, and then stop — like you’d been nothing all along.

  But strong as she was, I was stronger. I could keep her there. Make her listen. Swing her around on my driveway and force her to look me in the eye.

  Tanvi would struggle.

  She wouldn’t just give in.

  She wasn’t afraid of me. She’d never had to be.

  Blood rushed through my ears. My heart pumped out cold hate, circulating it throughout my body. It filled my mouth, and it tasted like venom, yesterday’s beer, and the things you promise yourself you’ll never do. The fingers of my free hand crunched into a fist. The smell of Tanvi’s skin turned my stomach. Still I held on, transferring the feeling through the fabric of her coat, wanting her to know it was there.

  Without blood, you die. It’s essential.

  Hate only kills, even when it tricks you into believing otherwise.

  That morning in March was the start of our demise. There was no one chasing us, no wounds to show for it. Overhead the sky was a gentle, washed-out blue. The trees on my street were spindly, adolescent and few. Aloof bystanders with no desire to hurt us. But Tanvi and I might as well have been standing, quaking, in the clearing from my dreams.