by Karen Rivers
I force myself to look down at my feet. See something. Feel something. Smell something. Touch something. I call that the Four Somethings, and I use them to stave off panic attacks. It doesn’t always work.
The escalator is moving so slowly but my legs don’t want to move to take me up faster. I don’t want to go up. I want to go down. My heart is racing. I have to get out of here; I can hear my own raspy breathing, too fast, too fast. When I get to the top, I’ll turn around and go down the opposite way. I’ll run to the exit, out into the heat. I’ll skip the bus, run home, pounding the ground with my feet (feel something), dripping with sweat (smell something), squinting through the shimmering heat on the sidewalk (see something). I’ll—
“Hey, Sloane!”
On the opposite escalator, I see Soup.
My heart skitters.
He’s pretty much the last person who I wanted to see and the only person I wanted to see. Seeing him makes me hate myself.
I raise my hand in a half wave, force my face into something that might be similar to something friendly but probably makes me look like I’m about to puke.
“No!” he calls. “I mean, wait there! I need to ask you something! To talk to you!”
The escalator pushes me off at the top, my shoelace almost getting stuck in the mechanism. For a second, I illogically picture bare toes getting stuck in the corrugated metal. The crunch of flesh. Blood. Quickly, I aim for a bench, put my head between my knees.
Soup bounds up the escalator.
“Are you okay? What are you doing?”
“I’m not fainting, that’s what,” I say to the smooth brown tiles on the floor. There’s a piece of chewed gum down there. A clump of mysterious hair, like someone cleaned out a hairbrush and just dropped it on the ground. My own ponytail is touching the ground. “People are gross,” I add, lifting my hair up with one hand.
“What?” he says. He drops to his knees, his face peering around my calf. “It’s hard to hear you. Man, it’s filthy on this floor. Good thing this isn’t a hospital.”
I laugh without meaning to. “I don’t think hospitals are that clean either. I saw a doc that did an undercover—” I stop myself. I’m sure he doesn’t care. “Anyway, I’m okay,” I say. “Low blood pressure. I get dizzy.”
“Weirdo,” he says. “But seriously, do you need … something? Water?” He rests his hand on my back gently and I lurch up quickly. His hand makes me think of the softness of chickens. It makes me want to scream.
The world tilts and then rights. Tibetan monks can control the rate of their pulse by thinking about it. I will mine to slow down. Slooooooow. Slow. Come on. “I’m fine. I’m just. I was on my way … I’m going to work out.”
“Uh,” he says. “Is that a good idea? I’m not a doctor, but I feel like fainting and working out are not super compatible.” He sits down next to me. “Did you ever notice that malls smell exactly like hospitals?”
“And schools,” I say. “I think it’s cheap floor cleaner. Why are you so obsessed with hospitals?”
“I wouldn’t say obsessed,” he says. “Well, maybe I’m a little obsessed with smells.” He sniffs my hair. “You smell like shampoo and cigarettes, honey and … Orange Julius?”
“Strawberry,” I say. “Smoothie, homemade, organic. Not a mall drink. This body is a temple!”
He grins. “But you smoke. So your body is a pretty polluted church. And hospitals, malls, and schools all use the same pine-scented crap to remind you that you’re going to die, so you might as well buy more stuff because everything is temporary.”
I whistle. “Dark, dude. That’s really dark. But you don’t buy anything at school. What is school selling?”
He shrugs. “College costs money. They want you to go to college. Spend more. Get into the system.” He leans back and looks at me through half-closed eyes. “Everyone dies,” he says. “Get used to it, Sloane Whittaker.” When he says my name, goose bumps rise on my arm.
“Riiiiiiight,” I say, tucking the hair that’s escaped from my ponytail behind my ears. “Well, I’ve got to go outrun death with some running.”
“A lot of people die on treadmills.” He nudges me with his leg. “Think about it.”
“You are such a ray of sunshine today. What’s going on? You should go talk to your girlfriend. She’ll cheer you up.”
He laughs, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Not that I notice. I don’t think Soup is cute. He’s Piper’s boyfriend. He’s Piper’s new best friend. I remember to be annoyed with him: I hate him.
I don’t hate him.
But I don’t have a crush on him anymore. Not since he started going out with Piper.
It ended then.
It did.
Even though Soup Sanchez has it all going on. Dark sense of humor. Artist. Smiling eyes. Quirky. Weird fashion sense. Odd enough to be interesting while still pulsing with street cool. Better yet, he doesn’t know it. He has no idea that he’s attractive. He hangs out with Fatty and Charlie and he probably thinks they’re the good-looking ones: all-American, athletes, fast car-driving loudmouths. Future Frat Boys of America.
He’s so wrong.
He’s different and so much better.
I hate myself.
“I really, really have to go,” I tell him. “The treadmill is calling my name.” I put my hand up to my ear like I’m hearing it, then I feel stupid and pretend to be scratching my head instead, which is worse, because I probably look like I have lice. I don’t know what to do with my hand, so I let it drop down by my side, awkwardly, like it’s not really part of me.
“Right,” he says. “I wanted to talk to you about Piper’s birthday. See if you want to plan something? Like, I don’t know, a surprise? A party? She loves parties. You guys are good at parties.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Sweet,” I say coolly, like I’d forgotten, which I hadn’t. “First birthday that you’ve been together. Don’t mess it up. You know she has high standards.”
“I know! That’s why I need you to do it right,” he says. “She’s…” His voice trails off.
“I’ve known her for a long time,” I say. “I know what she’s like. Anyway, you have to figure the gift out for yourself, Ponyboy. I’ve got the party covered.”
“Ponyboy?” he says, and I should have known he wouldn’t get the reference. I’d thought he was interesting enough to have read The Outsiders, but I guess if it’s not on YouTube, he probably hasn’t heard of it, just like every boy, ever.
“I’m more of a Sodapop,” he says. “Or maybe I’m Bob?”
“Makes sense,” I say, relieved that he knows the characters, after all. I don’t know why it matters, but it does. It really does. “Piper is Cherry, then, and I’m what’s-her-name, the friend.”
“Marcia,” he says, nodding. “Nobody remembers Marcia’s name.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get stabbed, Bob,” I say.
“Everyone secretly has a crush on Marcia,” he goes on. “She’s really the hot one. But no one can see past Cherry’s blinding obviousness.”
I blush. For a second, I can’t talk, which is ridiculous, like this whole ridiculous conversation is ridiculous. “Everyone?” I say at the same time as I say, “Ridiculous?” So what comes out is something like, “Ridicu-one?”
He stares at me, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. He’s not very tall when he’s sitting down, one of those guys who has all his height in his legs. I look into his eyes, which are brown and laughing. At me. I force myself to look somewhere else. Anywhere else. At his knees. At my own knees. “Are you blushing?”
“No!” I say. “Anyway, reading The Outsiders doesn’t make you cool. You have to do more than that to win me over.”
“Do I need to win you over? Besides, who says I read it?” he says. “It was a dope movie, though.”
“Duh,” I say. “Figures. I really have to go.” I grab my gym bag and stand up. My arm feels like lead, the bag too heavy to carry the entire way to the locker ro
om. My legs feel shaky and strange, like they always do after a panic attack. “Paint her a picture,” I say as I walk away. “A portrait, you know?” I know that’s what she wants, and I just handed it to him and she’ll think he thought of it himself and go even more crazy for him. The perfect gift. She’ll love it. He’ll probably even get her to finally get naked. They’ve been together now for over a month. Long enough. Most boys don’t have that kind of patience, at least not the ones that I’ve met. You wouldn’t catch Charlie Nevers waiting three weeks or even three days. Fatty is basically a date rapist in the making, always talking about girls like they’re only alive to be used for sex. I remind myself that Soup is friends with those idiots. And staying friends with them is an act of misogyny, if you think about it.
At the very least, it makes him an idiot, too.
“Too obvious!” he calls after me, but I’m pushing through the gym door, the glass door squeaking loudly, the sound of the gym’s loud music pouring out onto the mezzanine. It’s pretty easy to pretend I didn’t hear him. It’s pretty easy to pretend that I don’t care. I stopped caring the very second they hooked up.
I did.
I really did.
* * *
It started in May. Summer, the season, began early. The sun seared everything with a sharp, unrelenting heat. It felt cosmic, like everything was heightened because this summer would be our last school-vacation summer. Everything felt huge and glittery and important and life-changing.
We went to the beach a lot, on our lunch break, after school, our skin browning dangerously under the UV rays, highlights in our too-long hair.
We sifted sand through our fingers, feeling the silky luxuriousness of our lives.
“Every grain of sand represents a possible future,” said Piper. “Think about it. We can do anything. We can be anything. We can choose anything.”
I blew a few grains of sand off my already-golden-brown knee. I took in a deep breath and felt like I could float away, light as a balloon. Everything felt so possible.
“You just blew away the future!” She laughed. “Those might have been our best ones.”
“Goodbye, futures,” I said. “I never liked you anyway!”
She laughed harder. When we were eight or nine, her mostly absent dad gave her a lobster for her birthday. The lobster was small and blue and cute. I was so jealous. My parents said no to a fish tank, no to any pets. My dad has allergies, but no one is allergic to a lobster. “Too much trouble,” they said. “We wouldn’t be able to travel.”
But we never traveled. Mom’s job kept her schedule full six or seven days a week. “One day,” they promised. “You’ll see.” I could have had a lifetime of dogs and cats, hedgehogs and ferrets. I could have at least had a fish or a bird, a lizard. I would have even taken a snake.
The lobster came in a clear plastic cube. He looked like a toy, but when she ripped off the paper, he waved his little claw like he was saying hello. “For your tank,” the card read. Piper’s dad left the fish tank behind when he left her mom for “some skanky ho.” Piper’s words, not mine. I always kind of assume that there are two sides to every story, and I’ll never know the skanky hos her dad was with, because he’s dead now.
Either way, I try not to judge.
The fish tank had been against the wall of her room forever and the fish themselves never changed, ghostly white and huge and blank and slow. A man came to take care of the tank once a week. The fish seemed to never be quite alive, but never dead either. They spent their days swimming so lazily they could have been drifting on the current from the pump, aimlessly bouncing from one end of the tank to the other. The lobster, I supposed, was meant to make the tank cuter and more kid-friendly, to make it hers.
“It looks like a spider,” she’d whispered to me. “I don’t want it.”
“What will you name it?” I’d said, desperate for something of my own to name. Anything. A puppy. A mouse. A ghost.
“Dad,” she’d said. “I’m going to name it Dad.”
That night, while we slept, the fish became something we didn’t expect: murderers. In the morning, all that was left of the lobster was the shell and the claws, lying scattered across the bottom of the tank like a massacre. The fish had no teeth. They must have suctioned onto his body so hard that he was torn apart. I can remember the terror that had gripped me when I looked, how my heart had stuttered in my chest and I had tried not to faint or throw up or cry or all three.
“Oh no,” said her mom. “Oh, that’s terrible. Your father is an idiot. What was he thinking?” She hugged Piper tightly, even though Piper struggled to get free. She wasn’t sad, I could tell. Just relieved.
“We’ll have a funeral,” her mom said.
We took the lobster’s remains to the beach and threw them into the waves. “Say a few words,” said her mom.
“Well,” said Piper. “Goodbye, Dad.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I never really liked you anyway.” I choked on my shocked laugh, and when her mom finally walked away, we doubled over, clutching our sides. “WE NEVER REALLY LIKED YOU ANYWAY!”
The lobster wasn’t replaced.
That was a long time ago. We were just kids.
And now we’re on the cusp of adulthood. Childhood seems like forever ago, like something that has nothing to do with me anymore.
“God,” Piper said, rolling over in the sand. “The future. I feel like it’s now. The future is all over us. This is it. Every choice we make could change anything. Everything! We’re free!” She flung her arms wide, accidentally punching my nose.
“Ouch!” Tears sprang to my eyes. “Jeez, that hurt!”
“Sorry,” she said. “What was your nose doing there?” She got up, wobbly in the sand. Then she did a dance, her old ballet school training showing through. “We have it all!” she shouted to the waves.
I smiled because she was right.
I was happy.
She was happy.
In that moment, anything and everything felt possible. We had each other, and we could do anything. We could be anything. We could be everything.
And we would be.
We just knew it.
* * *
I took a long sip of my spiked blue Slurpee that tasted like drinking a summer sky, sweet and vast and forever. We lay down on our backs, the sand already summer hot. We stared up at the white clouds drifting by. Piper hiccuped. “I feel kinda drunk,” she said drowsily.
“The sun plus alcohol is a bad combo,” I said, but I was too lazy to move or to stop drinking.
“Do you ever think we should have less of a plan?” Her voice was slurred. “Less specitifity. Specifis … Specif … Oh, you know what I mean. I can’t talk. Blergh.”
“Specificity? Less?”
“I don’t know!” she said. “I want to be surprised, you know? Like maybe not filmmaking, maybe fashion or…” She hiccuped so deeply, it sounded like she was going to puke. “Real estate.”
“Real estate?” I was laughing, belly-hard. I could barely talk. “Real estate?”
She squinted at me. “Houses are nice.”
“Houses are nice,” I agreed. “I guess. But nope, not for me. You could, though. I’m going to be a filmmaker. I decided a long time ago. You know that.”
“No houses,” she said sadly.
“Why are you talking about houses?” I was still giggling. “You’re hilarious! You can have a job with houses! The world is your oyster!”
“I like those tiny houses,” she said. “Sooooooo cute.”
“You are blotto. You need to stop drinking.”
“Okeydokey.” She poured her drink out on my bare leg.
“Hey!” I jumped up. “That’s cold! And sticky!”
“Oops,” she said.
“Look.” I sat down again. “Filmmaking is all I ever wanted to do.” I reached into my floppy beach bag and took out my camera. I zoomed in on her face. “Tell me what it is that you’ve always wanted to do.”
“
I do don’t love it, too,” she said, sticking out her tongue and smiling. “I mean, I don’t do love it. I love. I mean…” She was laughing, tears running down her cheeks. “I love you. When I grow up, I want to be you.”
“I love you, too,” I said, “but I don’t think being me is a good career choice.” I clicked the record button off. “Europe is big. Anything could happen. And then I have film school, but your slate is pretty much wide open. You can do anything.”
“I hope we’re not murdered on a train,” she whispered.
“Well, duh,” I said. “I hope not, too.”
A bee buzzed lazily and slowly across my field of vision. I watched as it landed on my blue, sticky leg. It crawled slowly, its feet like tiny wings brushing my skin. Then, faster, it made its way off, into the sand and away, out of sight. “Fly, little bee,” I said.
“You don’t know how to make movie films,” she said, suddenly not laughing at all. “Not real ones. What if it doesn’t work out?”
“That’s mean,” I murmured. “I don’t know everything yet, but I’ll learn. And you’ll figure out something, too. Right?” I closed my eyes. The sun was so warm and perfect on my face. “We’re going to have a great time.”
“Maybe I’ll apply to film school, too,” she said doggedly, not letting it go.
“Hmmm?” I was sleepy, the alcohol catching up to me all at once, the conversation suddenly exhausting. I replayed what she’d said in my head. I sat up, sand raining from my hair. “Seriously? You’re joking. It’s my thing. You don’t want to make films. You’ve never said.”
“I do! I totally do.”
“So what are you saying? Are you kidding?” I felt uneasy. The sun was behind her, so it was hard for me to see her face. “Piper?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She hiccuped again. “This drink is so gross. Why do we drink this?” She burped. “Let’s talk about boys.”