All That Was

by Karen Rivers

  “Is that before or after he cups your egg head?” I say with a deadpan face.

  She flips me off.

  I get up and take the few steps to the water. I dip my foot in. It’s so much colder out here than at the beach in front of my house. I can’t figure out how that’s possible. It’s all the same water. Piper would probably know—some complicated explanation of thermodynamics or perceived temperature—but I don’t really feel like hearing it. I wade in up to my knees.

  “Watch for jellyfish!” she says. “I’m absolutely not going to pee on you when they sting you, you know.”

  “I am,” I say. “I know. I’ll pee on myself. Don’t worry about it.”

  I scan the surface of the water, but it’s bottle green today and uninterrupted by the fleshy red mass of a lion’s mane. They float up to the top when they die, wash up on the beach, lie there flattened and powerless. But when they aren’t dead, they can lurk below the surface, surprising your bare legs with their sticky long stingers, wrapping your skin with welts.

  “It’s cold!” I call to Piper, but she’s busy typing on her phone.

  “Uh-huh.” She doesn’t look up.

  I take a few more steps. I need to pee and it’s not like the island has a bathroom, so I have to swim whether I want to or not. The last step before soaking my bathing suit is the worst; I can see my legs through the water turning white from the shock of the chill. I take a deep breath, tip my hair back so far that it gets wet, then I dive, suddenly, surprising myself, into the water. I can feel my chest tighten and my lungs constrict from the shock of the frigid water. I swim fast and hard out about twenty strokes. I’m a decent enough swimmer, but not good enough to go very far. I tread water for a few minutes, looking back toward Piper, still hunched over her iPhone. Her shoulders shake with laughter. “What?” I call, but she doesn’t answer. I float on my back, look up at the blue sky. So much blue. Why is the sky blue? I don’t know that either.

  Piper would know.

  Piper knows everything.

  She’s so smart. Or she was. Now I’m not so sure. She seems to be slowly reinventing herself as dumb Piper. Take-my-breath-away Piper.

  I’ve let the current take me a little too far. When I turn back over and start to swim, I have about two hundred yards to cover. It doesn’t sound like much, but I have to swim hard out of the rip, sideways, another hundred yards out of my way. A seal pops out of the water and stares at me, nearly scaring me to death. “Shoo,” I tell it. Its eyes are as black and liquid as oil. It drops below the surface. I swear I feel it brush by my leg. I swim harder. I swim as hard as I can.

  I’m entirely winded when I get back.

  “Hey, I almost drowned!” My chest is heaving. “I got stuck in that stupid current. Thanks for noticing.” I’m furious, even though I wasn’t scared, not really, when I was out there. It’s true that I didn’t call out to her. She could have saved me with the boat. She would have come for me if I’d called her.

  “Huh?” she says. “Oh, sorry.” The casual way she says it means that she’s not sorry.

  “You don’t even know what I’m talking about!” I say. “You weren’t even watching! What if I’d been pulled under? What if there was a jellyfish?”

  “God, Sloane, calm down. You didn’t even yell!” she says witheringly, putting her phone into her bag. “I don’t think you were dying. Look, let’s go in. I have to pee, anyway.”

  “Go in the water,” I say, through gritted teeth.

  She laughs meanly. “Um, no thanks. I’m not six.”

  “Whatever that means.”

  “Listen,” she says. “Tonight, don’t bring up the thing that happened with you and Charlie. I think Soup misses Charlie, but he’s sticking to his guns and not talking to him. You know, because of you.”

  “Because of me? You mean because Charlie wouldn’t take no for an answer? So because of Charlie, that’s what you mean, right?”

  She frowns. “Yeah, Soup’s really mad at Charlie. But the thing is that before you started saying no, you weren’t exactly saying no, you know?”

  My heart skitters in my chest in a way that absurdly makes me think of parrots rising in a flock, against a background of dark green jungle leaves.

  “I don’t know, no,” I say. “I remember. I said no.”

  “You said no, but you didn’t start saying no. I mean, there was a lot of hair flipping and sideways looks and you kept licking your lips.”

  “I do not do that. God. That’s the most annoying thing in the world. You do that. I am not the lip licker here.”

  She stares out to sea, away from me. “I thought you should know, Sloane. Soup and Charlie have been friends for as long as we have and now they aren’t talking and I wonder if you’re—”

  “Shut up,” I interrupt her. “Just shut up.” I close my eyes. I imagine myself hitting delete on the video, erasing what she’s trying to say. “Seriously, shut up.”

  “I’ve already shut up,” she says quietly. “I’m not saying anything.”

  “Great,” I say. “Let’s go. I can’t come tonight, I forgot. I promised Mr. Aberley I’d play Scrabble with him.” I stand up so fast that I’m dizzy, the world loosening its grip on me and spinning me in place. I grab my stuff and cram it into my bag. “I thought you had to pee.”

  “I do,” she says. “Sloane, I’m sorry. Don’t be mad.”

  “I’m not mad,” I lie. “We have to get the boat back.”

  “Fine.” She shrugs, dumping her blue Slurpee into the sand. “That’s just fine with me. I hope you and Mr. Aberley have a great date night.”

  “Hilarious,” I say.

  I shove the boat into the water, not wanting to look back at the island, not wanting to remember how Charlie and I leaned on Seth, how he kissed me and I let him, how I don’t know if I said no too late or if I said it at all, how Soup appeared like a knight on a horse and saved me: Charlie falling into the surf, the look on Charlie’s face.

  Did I say no so that Soup would save me?

  “If no one knows, it didn’t happen,” I mutter.

  Piper gives me a sharp look. “What?” she says.

  “Nothing,” I say. “I didn’t say anything. Forget it. Less talking, more rowing, okay?”

  “Fine,” she says. “Fine by me.”

  NOW

  “If no one knows, it didn’t happen.” That was Piper’s mantra.

  It started with the chickens.

  The class chickens.

  In sixth grade, we had a plot of land beside the track that we spent days digging up and weeding and planting with zucchini seeds. We fertilized and watered. It was better than sitting inside at a desk, better than gym class, better even than art, which was my favorite.

  Then they gave us eggs.

  And the eggs hatched into baby chicks.

  Everyone took turns taking the chicks home on the weekend. They don’t stay chicks for long. By the time it was Piper’s turn, they were really chickens. Small chickens, but definitely not little yellow fluffy chicks. I didn’t like the skin around their eyes, the way it wrinkled like thin paper. The smell of them. They were the only animals that I’ve ever met that I didn’t like. Piper didn’t like them either.

  We squealed a lot and the chickens scattered, as far away from us as possible. One of them stole a sandwich from my hand and I ran the other way. At night, I had a dream that the chickens were pecking the flesh off my bones and I woke up crying. I still have that dream sometimes. I still wake up terrified.

  That weekend, her mom used her passes to fly us to Cleveland. She was a flight attendant; sometimes she got extra passes for these random weekend trips. I can’t remember anything about Cleveland except the swimming pool in the basement of the hotel and the vending machine that was entirely empty except for one row of Cokes, tantalizingly available, but the machine refused to accept coins. We stood in front of it, dropping quarters and nickels and dimes, over and over again, as though if we changed the angle of the drop, we co
uld make the Coke appear.

  The bottom of the pool was gritty, and when we got out, our feet were raw, nearly bleeding. We stayed up all night, whispering and giggling, watching movies on the pay-per-view TV in our own bedroom, bouncing on the beds like littler kids than we were. Outside it poured rain, and in the morning, we ran up and down the street and bought matching T-shirts that said CLEVELAND ROCKS!, gummy candies, and weird, faceless Amish dolls.

  When we got home, a raccoon had gotten into the big crate we were using as a chicken house and three of the chickens were dead, nothing but a smear of blood and a pile of feathers. In our sleepy state, it felt like a dream. Her mom drove us around all evening, out in farm country, until we found a farmer willing to sell us three chickens. They were a different kind, but the same color. Maybe everyone just thought that the chickens had grown and changed again, but I think the teacher knew.

  “If no one knows, it didn’t happen,” her mom said.

  We never told.

  Piper bought into it, that mantra. She said it all the time. Every time something happened, something terrible, even: If no one knows, it didn’t happen.

  I whisper it in the dark now, in my room, the blackout curtains closed. I’m not cold but I’m still shivering in layers of clothes, under the blankets. From far away, I can hear the rise and fall of Mom’s voice and the cops’ voices and the sound of outside trying to come in: a crow cawing, a distant car alarm.

  “No one knows, Pipes, so it didn’t happen,” I say. “Right?”

  I wait for her to answer, but there’s nothing but silence.

  Then she says, Why didn’t you tell them?

  I close my eyes and let the medication gently pull me into a long tunnel of sleep, cushioning me from what I know and what I didn’t tell.

  “Telling wouldn’t make you not dead,” I say.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I’ll tell,” I say. “But not yet.”

  * * *

  “Being pretty is the most boring thing about us,” Piper once said.

  I’m not pretty now.

  Neither is she.

  I am in bed with my lie, which is as cold and real as a corpse, and everything is sweaty and freezing at the same time and she is dead.

  She was murdered.

  He was at the party.

  He took her to the island.

  Our island.

  Did they talk first? Did she think it was something else? Did she reach up and tuck her hair behind her ear, give him that crooked smile, touch the tip of her tongue to her top lip accidentally (on purpose)?

  He was never supposed to matter.

  He wasn’t supposed to be part of our lives, after. That’s why she picked him.

  For me.

  That’s why I agreed.

  For her.

  So why was he there?

  The patches of sand at the beach are so cold and silky. Sometimes, when I run handfuls of it through my fingers, I find smooth white stones. Wishing stones.

  Every time I’ve found one, I’ve rubbed it between my thumb and finger and then I’ve thrown it as far as I can into the waves. I always wish for the same thing.

  I wish for everything.

  My room is too bright and my head is hollow. That’s how it is when a migraine lifts, like my brain is saving room for it, in case it wants to come back.

  A crow caws and caws and caws. The sky outside stays beautifully and obscenely blue.

  * * *

  At one point, Piper was going to make a time machine.

  She got these ideas sometimes.

  “Manic,” Mom said. But Piper wasn’t, not really. She didn’t take medication or anything. It wasn’t like that. But she got overly enthusiastic about certain ideas. Sometimes she’d stay up for days, reorganizing her room, alphabetizing her books. This time, she made a box.

  Inside the box was a jumble of circuits and old keyboards she’d bought at the computer recycling place. There was no way it would have worked or done anything, but when she turned it on, it did hum. It felt peculiarly alive, like it was trying to take you somewhere but couldn’t quite lift off.

  It vibrated.

  Then it smelled like wires, burning.

  Then it quit working altogether, and like everything else she did, she abandoned it before it was complete. It’s probably still in her mom’s basement somewhere.

  She really believed she could go back in time and save her dad, a butterfly flapping its wings and changing history. But what if it misfired? Her dad saved, but the rest of humanity suddenly being extinguished, all at once?

  To me, it’s always seemed like a mistake to mess with things, especially things that are bigger than you, like death and birth.

  “I’m sorry, Piper,” I say. “I’d totally bring you back now if I could make it work.”

  You have to tell, she says. God, you’re so frustrating sometimes.

  “I will,” I lie.

  I stepped sideways, she says. The edge of the boat was there and then it wasn’t.

  I’m crying really hard. “Please stop talking to me,” I say. “Please go away.”

  I can’t, she says.

  “You have to. Go away go away go away.”

  I’d forgotten about Time Machine Piper. I’d let her become Soup’s Girlfriend Piper. I’d started to hate her.

  “If no one knows, it didn’t happen,” I say out loud, and my voice interrupts the silence in my empty room. The curtains lift slightly in the breeze. The window must be open on the other side of them. A bird flies by and the shadow of its wings silhouettes like art against the backlight from the sun.

  It’s eerie how much seagulls’ calls sound like human laughter.

  Or maybe she’s really here, hiding in the curtains, stifling a laugh. The hair on my arms prickles upright—a porcupine, a hedgehog, me.

  “Piper?” I say. The silence is so vast. It rustles and sighs. My room is disguised as a ghost.

  “I can’t do this,” I mutter. “Not this time.”

  I take an extra pill. It’s the only thing that I can do. I close my eyes and the pill tastes as blue as a Slurpee and I can feel myself separating from me, vodka-filtered, Instagram-bright. I get my phone out and scroll through my stuff. I like a photo of a balloon. I don’t even like it. I’m losing my grip. I’ve let go.

  And I’m so cold.

  She was probably cold, too, when she died.

  So cold, she agrees.

  “Shut up,” I say.

  I open my messaging app, and before I can change my mind, I type, “Call me.” Then, “Please.”

  I press send.

  BEFORE

  On the day before I lose my virginity to James Robert Wilson, I ask Mom if I can come to her yoga class with her. She’s in the kitchen. I feel nervous, like she might say no. I imagine saying, Today is the last day that I will do yoga as a virgin. I want to know what she’d say.

  Dad brushes by me on his way out the door. “Bye, lovely ladies!” he says. He kisses me on the head and I want to cry. I’m not a little girl anymore, I want to say to him. Dad, everything’s about to change.

  I don’t say anything.

  “Bye, love of my life!” Mom calls after him. Then, to me, “Of course you can come. You’re coming with me a lot. Not that I mind! I don’t mind. But is there something you want to talk about?”

  “I like yoga,” I say. “Sorry. God. I won’t come.” I push my stool back from the counter and stand up.

  “Sloaney.” She puts down her cup of organic mint tea on the counter. “I like it when you come. It’s just that I haven’t spent this much time with you since … oh, I don’t know, was it fourth grade when you started to sleep over at Piper’s almost every weekend? Where’s she been lately? I haven’t seen her around.”

  I shrug. “Busy, I guess.”

  She gives me a funny look. “If you think about it,” I say, “mint tea is potentially pretty gross. I saw a raccoon in the garden last night. What if he peed on that m
int? Technically, that could be raccoon pee tea. I always think that when I drink Mr. Aberley’s nettle concoction. What if?”

  “I washed it!” She sniffs her drink. “Well, it does smell different. Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Aberley sterilizes those leaves. He’s ninety-something! He’d be dead a long time ago if he drank pee tea.”

  “Pee tea?” I giggle. “Pee tea!”

  She laughs. “You make a good point, though,” she says, wrinkling her nose.

  “What are you talking about?” Dad comes back into the kitchen. “I forgot my keys!” I smell sweat and cigarettes, which is probably me, not him. I can’t imagine Dad smoking. I can’t picture him making any bad choices, not ever. He wraps his arm around my neck and gives me a hug. “Do you have my keys, young lady?”

  “Don’t!” I push him off. “I have no keys.” I hold up my empty hands and show him.

  “I don’t understand how you two do hot yoga when it’s this hot,” he says, finding his keys in the cutlery drawer. “Is the air-conditioning broken? It’s a sauna in here.”

  “We’re going out!” Mom says. “It doesn’t need to be on when no one is here. Besides, we’re acclimating for hot yoga.”

  “You two are both peculiar,” says Dad. “Lucky for you, I love you. What are you doing here, anyway?” he asks me. “No Piper today?”

  “Oh my God,” I say. “Give me a break! I’m sorry to be home with my family! I’ll go get ready for yoga, Mom.”

  I storm out of the room and stomp up the stairs hard, each step vibrating the banister under my hand.

  “What is with her?” I hear Dad say. “She doesn’t seem like herself.”

  “Piper has a boyfriend,” Mom says in a low voice.

  I slam my bedroom door before I can hear any more.

  I throw myself onto my bed and pick my phone up from the bedside table, where it’s been charging. Sixteen texts from Piper. I delete them all without reading them.

  My hand is shaking. I open the app on my phone that measures my heartbeat and put my finger over the bright light. I watch as the line weaves up and down: 89, 120, 97, 137. How fast is too fast? I’m breathing fast now, too. If I slow it down, I might stop, so I can’t. If I think about breathing, I can’t do it. I stand up. I sit down.