All That Was

by Karen Rivers

  “What the— Dude, what is your problem?”

  “You’re my problem,” I say. My jaw is clenching so tight, it hurts.

  “Well, I’m not the one who was groping my girlfriend’s bestie while she was getting all hacked up on the beach.”

  And there it is; it’s out there. He’s put it out there. He’s given me my opening. It’s like my hand has ears and a brain of its own because before I can even really understand what he’s said, my fist has flown into his nose, his skin exploding under my hand like an egg in a microwave, the hot splatter of it burning my skin, and then I’m on him and someone is howling and I don’t know if it’s me or him or both of us but my other fist is in the action now and his body is as soft as a pillow, my hands disappearing into him like a faith healer’s who is about to pull out the guy’s appendix without a scalpel and he is everything that is wrong with the world and I will pull out his beating heart, I swear to God. I’m clawing at him until someone pulls me off, until someone pins my arms, until someone stops me.

  Afterward, he’s sitting there with an ice pack on his face, making moaning noises. We’re on the orange vinyl seats in Mr. Stewart’s office and Fatty’s writhing around, his pants making farting sounds against the chair. Honestly, I want to pop him again. “Settle down,” I mutter to him, and he moans louder. What an idiot.

  Then I’m explaining and explaining and explaining and then Mom arrives, and Fatty’s mom and dad. Mom’s crying and I’m explaining (or trying to explain) and Fatty’s parents are staring me down like I’m an animal that needs to be caged up and Mr. Stewart is saying, “We don’t want to involve police, we’d prefer to handle these matters internally” like “these matters” have ever come up before, like he doesn’t simply mean that he’s done with the gawking press and needs the school to revert to what it has always been: a fantasy school for rich, entitled kids; a parent’s dream tuition payment; not a murdered girl and the two messed-up kids she left behind.

  Mr. Stewart keeps clearing his throat, scratching his head, his shoulders covered with the dandruff that his scalp issues in flurries. This is too much for him; you can practically see his eczema flaring under his big white beard. He’s a tall guy, over six feet, but somehow he always looks smaller. Inconsequential.

  Fatty keeps moaning and his mom keeps rubbing his back and his dad keeps giving me a disgusted look. Scorning me in every way. Like he can’t believe I have the nerve to be here, to keep existing. I want to pop him, too. There’s a lot of discussion. Talk, talk, talk.

  I look up. I look around. I want to crawl out of myself, be someone else, go somewhere else, anything, anything but this.

  Then I see Sloane, watching me through the office window, making some kind of gesture with her fist against her chest, then a small smile maybe, I think. Fatty’s chair farts again and I look down at my feet, my untied shoes, one of them splattered with what looks like paint but is really Fatty’s blood.

  When I look up again, Sloane’s gone. I can’t look at my mom. I can’t see her face and what it’s doing. Not right now. I keep my eyes down. Fatty’s family leaves first. Fatty’s hunched over like he’s stepped on a mine and his guts have exploded, except he hasn’t and they haven’t and he’s no soldier and he’s definitely no hero.

  Then it’s our turn. Mom shakes Mr. Stewart’s hand. He says, “We understand that it’s been hard.”

  Mom says, “You have no idea, Mr. Stewart.”

  “I do,” he says. “I think I do. It’s been hard for all of us.”

  * * *

  Mom and I walk slowly to her car, through the stares of the kids in the hall, past the trophy case full of things I’ve never won and never will, through the heavy doors. We trudge silently across the parking lot. Her car is hot on the inside like a greenhouse, the air too heavy to breathe. We roll the windows down, the too-warm air blowing in on us, drying the sweat.

  We don’t talk. Mom lets the radio play soft rock, which scratches the inside of my skull, and I want to put my fist through the radio but I won’t. I’m so angry. I didn’t know it was possible to be this angry. It’s like everything’s come together simultaneously into a hot poker of fury: Piper being dead, Charlie abandoning me, my dad never caring that I exist. A triple whammy of rage connecting the three disconnected things together has turned me into a ball of uncontrollable fury.

  Then I’m at home, lying on my bed, the crack in my ceiling the same as it always has been, that crack that I’ve stared at after every terrible thing, and I wonder when I’m ever going to get out of here and when I’m ever going to never be staring at that crack again, tears leaking down my cheeks like nothing could stop them.

  Out the window I can see the willow tree, hanging down over the mostly dead back lawn. The wind makes the branches rustle, lifts the pictures on the shrine, which have all faded in the sun to the point where they just look like white papers, curling at the edges, unsticking from the tape.

  I take out some paints from a bag in my closet. I haven’t painted since before she died.

  I haven’t wanted to paint.

  I pick up one can, then the next. I decide. I hold the can in my hand, close my eyes, conjure up the painting from the vessels on the backs of my eyelids, from everything I know, from everything I’ve seen. I shake the cans and feel the ball bearings in there stirring the paint and I still love that sound and that feeling, I can’t help it.

  I put the paint down and I build a scaffold out of bookshelves, dumping the books onto the floor in big stacks, books I used to read one painful word at a time, like I was decoding what was so easy for everyone else, but I had to read them because they mattered, they had to, or it wouldn’t be so hard. Reading those books made me feel so stupid. Trying to read them, I mean.

  I am stupid.

  I’m not smart.

  Other people decide your life, that’s the truth. They decide who you are. They decide what you deserve. Strangers decide. Your friends decide. Your parents decide.

  I’m not smart enough to not be in love with my dead girlfriend’s best friend.

  Just thinking that makes an electrical current surge through my spine, tingling there. Sloane.

  The top of my desk comes off because it’s an old door balanced on a couple of piles of stacked bricks. I move the bookshelves into position and place the door across the top. When it seems stable enough, I climb up awkwardly, wiggling onto the door on my belly. Then I lie on that door and I paint the crack right out of my ceiling. I cover it with everything I can think of, every place where Piper’s consciousness might have gone: places we went together—the mall, the tunnel, the island—then places she’d want to go but never did, like Europe, New York City, everywhere. I add wildcats with eyes like jewels peering behind buildings that I can only imagine and a volcano spewing fire and a single glittering diamond and a row of skyscrapers against a night sky, the paint falling down on my face like drops of rain so that at the end of the day (the days) when I look in the mirror, my face is freckled with all the colors that I’ve used, black and blue and yellow and red, a million tiny bruises, hiding my face behind them.

  I look and I look, but I can’t see Piper in the picture. I can’t find her anywhere.

  Because she’s gone.

  But Sloane is there, peering out from around a tree, her face freckled with dots, her dark hair stark against the sky behind her, a crow perched on her shoulder with shining eyes like Piper’s, cawing silently into the stillness of the air.

  * * *

  It’s the middle of the night. I can’t sleep. I go outside and I lie back on the hard, dead grass. It smells like hay and feels scratchy on my bare arms, the back of my head. Up in the sky, the night is putting on a full show. Tiny stars behind small stars behind bigger stars behind planets behind moons, wisps of clouds threading their way through and between. What must I look like from up there: like nothing. Less than a piece of dust. It would be like if every ant in the anthill stopped to mourn one ant, squashed under the boot of a
passerby. All of them, frozen in time. I’m not even an ant.

  Half those stars are probably already burned out. We think they’re so pretty, but when they die, the create vortexes. They pull whole galaxies in behind them, extinguishing everything.

  A dog barks in the distance.

  “Good night, Pipes,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

  I was a planet in Piper’s galaxy, and when she went, Sloane and I were sucked into the black hole that she left behind.

  SLOANE

  “Yes?” Mrs. Beadle, the secretary, looks at me over the top of her half-glasses. “What is it, hon? You’re late for class. You need a pass?” Mrs. Beadle has a jar full of toffees on her desk and a tiny terrier in a sweater who sits shivering in a basket behind her, even when it’s not cold. He yips at me.

  “Um,” I say. “Well, I’m back. It’s my first day back since … I thought maybe I should check in?”

  She looks at me for a beat too long, then nods once. “You don’t have to do anything, hon,” she says. “Go ahead and get to class. You know your schedule, right?”

  I stand up. “Right. Okay,” I say. “Sorry.”

  I’m not sure what I’m sorry for, not exactly. I don’t move, even though she clears her throat, as though trying to nudge me out the door. I make myself do it. I turn and go.

  Math.

  I have to get to math. I look down at my feet. My sneakers are mismatched: one is purple, one is blue. I didn’t do that on purpose.

  Then I practically smack into him, standing there, at the mural. Not moving. A statue.

  Soup.

  I say something like, “Hey.” And I add his name, and so he knows things have changed, I use his real name. “Philip.”

  He says something. I say something back. I don’t know what it is. I can’t get my eyes off his lips. If I hadn’t kissed him, she’d be alive. Maybe.

  We are saying things to each other, but I don’t know what they are. My phone buzzes. I look at the screen. It’s an unfamiliar number. I press ignore.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” I ask, but there’s a girl clip-clopping by so loudly I think maybe he doesn’t hear me and I feel too stupid to repeat it. Math is upstairs in the other wing. It must be half over. I should go. I can’t stand this close to Soup. I don’t want to make a mistake. Another mistake.

  A text buzzes through. “Hello, Sloane,” it says. I don’t recognize the number, but I know who it is. My heart is doing crazy things, like it can’t figure out how to get back into a proper rhythm. I nearly throw up. “I have to go,” I tell Soup, or at least I think that I do. I say something about math. I feel like I’m talking in the wrong language. I don’t understand myself. The phone buzzes again. “Hello, Sloane” over and over and over again. I start to walk away. I start to hurry. I turn it off while I walk. I make it stop.

  I make him stop.

  I have to tell but I can’t. Who will I tell? Detective Marcus? Soup?

  I’m going to puke. I’m going to be the kid throwing up on my desk but we’re too old for that now. No one pukes on their desk in twelfth grade. Piper Puker, puked a pack of pickled peppers, my memory chants.

  In the familiar classroom, I sneak into my regular seat, perched on the edge of it in case I suddenly have to run out. Poised for flight, I think in my narrator voice, Sloane hides her true fear behind a tough new exterior. Like the chameleon, she can change her colors. She has changed her colors. She is untouchable now. She is fierce and strong.

  I smile a tiny bit. Fierce.

  Alive.

  I try not to notice everyone staring. The desks here are so old they still have inkwells in them, holes that people drop chewed gum and mint wrappers into. I trace my finger over someone’s old initials. The janitors must hate us.

  I touch something. (The carved desk.)

  I see something. (The back of the head of the kid in front of me, a sprinkle of dandruff on his black T-shirt shoulders.)

  I smell something. (Toothpaste, deodorant, dust, and chemicals.)

  I feel something. (Scared.)

  I press my fingernails into my palm.

  The minutes stutter and speed up and slow down and people keep swiveling to look at me.

  Ice runs through my veins. I blink hard.

  What if they let him out?

  What if he’s going to kill me, too?

  “I don’t feel well,” I say out loud precisely as the bell jangles. I jump half out of my seat, dropping things: my phone, my pen, my backpack.

  Miss Draper calls me up. “I put together a package of what you missed,” she says. “Are you feeling okay? You look pale. You may need a tutor to catch up.”

  I smile and nod, even though puke is rising in my throat.

  “Okay,” I say. “Sure, okay. A tutor. I’m sorry, I have to go. I have to go home now.” I grab the papers out of her hand and practically run out the door. I make myself slow down in the hallway; I try to look normal.

  On my way out of the building, I pass the principal’s office and there is Soup, head hanging, his mom next to him, and Fatty, his face looking like a steak, his parents looking self-righteous and indignant.

  Go to hell, Fatty, I think.

  I throw Soup a sign to try to show him that I see him. I get it.

  Soup won’t look at me. Mr. Stewart is scratching his beard. Fatty’s dad looks pissed off.

  Math is the answer, I think.

  I must catch up on math, I think.

  The derivative of us is Piper, I think.

  I push through the doors and start walking home. The sky is streaked loosely with white clouds. The leaves on the tree are edging toward yellow and orange from green. For a second, I’m surprised.

  The season is changing.

  Without Piper.

  Well, duh.

  * * *

  I take my phone out of my bag and call my mom.

  “Sloane?” she says. “Are you all right? Why are you calling me in the middle of the day?”

  “I…,” I start. “I think I’m getting a migraine, so I’m going home. I wanted to tell you, to let you know, not to make you worry.”

  She sighs. “Too soon, huh?”

  “Mom, it’s just a headache. No big deal.” But saying it has brought a headache on and maybe it is a big deal. My brain clenches and tightens and then begins to slowly ache and flicker.

  A car slows next to me. I glance at it, but I don’t recognize the driver. He grins at me. A man. A boy. He whistles. I pick up my pace and he honks and squeals away.

  “What was that?” Mom asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, breathing faster, speed-walking now. Everyone is a James, potentially.

  Right?

  Especially James.

  But he’s in jail.

  He’s not ever going to get out.

  Or is he?

  You have to tell, hisses Piper. You have to tell them about James Robert Wilson.

  “It won’t make any difference!” I say. “They know he did it! He’s going to jail! It doesn’t matter what I say!”

  “You’re cutting out, Sloane. Sloane? What are you saying? It didn’t make sense. What won’t make a difference? Honey? Oh, it’s getting worse. Call me when you get home so I know you’re safe. Elvis is there today. Elvis can call if you need him to.” She shouts the last part, like that will help me to hear her.

  “Mom, you sound fine to me. I can hear you. Don’t shout! And I don’t need the housekeeper to dial a phone for me.”

  But she’s hung up already.

  I switch my phone off and try to remember how to keep walking, but my stupid shoes are hitting the ground too hard, jarring me all the way up to my pounding heart, and the lights of the descending headache are flickering across my vision like jumped film and Piper isn’t here to help me and I have to get home. My phone buzzes but I don’t reach for it. I can’t. I won’t. Not now. Not ever.

  SOUP

  I went on my dad’s Facebook page again last night. I scrolled through his n
ew pictures. He’s posted photos of his drum kit and the playlist. He posts photos of the crowds: musician’s-eye view. There’s nothing about his photos that tells me who he is or why he didn’t know about me.

  Or that he did know and didn’t care.

  I need an answer so badly, I feel like something inside me is pulled taut, vibrating.

  There are no answers on his wall.

  I keep looking. Reading post after post after post. I don’t know what I’m expecting him to type that will change anything.

  I don’t know who I’m expecting him to be.

  * * *

  I water the lawn. It’s amazing how quickly it’s coming back to life, greening up. It’s been raining, too. The rain has changed everything. The air. The season.

  The wind blows the spray back over me, freckling me with a cool mist.

  I go back inside. I can hear Mom getting ready for work, the sound of her hair dryer going off. “Going to school, Ma!” I yell.

  “Don’t hit anyone!” she calls back.

  “Ha ha, funny,” I say.

  “Seriously,” she says, stepping out into the hall to give me a quick hug. “Don’t look for trouble.”

  “Like I have to look for it,” I go. “It finds me, Mom. I can’t help it.” I try to make it into a joke by making a gun with my finger, but I don’t even know what I mean by that. I put my hands back down by my sides.

  “I know, I know,” she says. “Hurry up, though, you’ll be late.”

  “Going.” I grab my backpack and my board.

  “I love you,” she yells.

  I lift my hand in response. My car mocks me from the driveway. I don’t know what’s wrong with it. It won’t start. Won’t even turn over.

  Just one more thing in my life that’s dead.

  After school, maybe, I’ll take it apart again.

  I roll slowly down the sidewalk, my old skateboard bumping over the ruts and cracks, the sidewalk skittering under my wheels. I feel the vibration in my teeth.