Immoral Code

by Lillian Clark

  He let go and stepped back, and I said, “We will. Enjoy your and Mom’s test run at being empty nesters.”

  He gripped his heart dramatically. “Don’t remind me!”

  “Right, like I didn’t see the tickets to the show you and Mom are going to in Portland Friday. They’re taped to the fridge with a huge, rather obnoxiously detailed hand-drawn smiley face next to them.”

  “Not to mention what’s written on the kitchen calendar,” Keagan added. The front door opened behind us and my mom came down the porch steps, stopping beside me and looping her arm around my waist.

  “Yeah. ‘NARI GONE WE’RE FREE’? With two exclamation points? Little harsh, don’t you think, Dad?”

  “Hey, at least you didn’t see the calendar in the home office,” my mom said. “With the big red Xs counting down the days? Now that would’ve been uncomfortable.”

  “Har har har,” I said. I squeezed her tight, then leaned down a little (Narioka Diane: 5'9"; Jillian Okada: 5'4" on a super-good-posture day) to kiss her cheek. “Well, have an appropriate amount of fun in your depressingly quiet and lonely, not to mention boring, Nari-less house. I hope you miss me terribly.”

  My mom hugged Keagan. A real, genuinely affectionate hug that he wholly reciprocated, as my mom really and genuinely loves Keagan, like a few shallow steps down from my brothers. It probably has something to do with all the politeness and respect and whatnot. And the fact that Keagan is one of those people. An enhancer of sorts. The kind of person who lifts you up, makes you better, happier, calmer. (That goodness and decency thing I was talking about.) The kind of person who makes you feel like you can do anything, be anyone, because no matter what, he’ll be there, believing in me.

  Round of hugs accomplished, Keag and I got in the car and headed off to pick up the others. I smiled at him from the passenger seat as we turned out onto the road. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” he said. Not an endearment but a statement of fact.

  We picked up Santiago, then Reese, then Bells, then stopped at Walmart for food and gas. Before we got out of the car, I held out my purse. “Okay, pretty people, commence The Fabulous Five Celebrate Life and Friendship and, wow, that’s corny. Can someone please come up with a better title? But also, give me your phones. We’re going off the grid.”

  “Why?” Reese asked, dropping hers into my bag. “To silence any potential snitches?” Santiago, Bells, and Keag followed suit. I kept my prepaid in my pocket. This wasn’t all fun and games. It was also work.

  “Course not.” I shrugged. “I don’t know. I just think it’ll be fun to take a break.”

  “Exist only in the here and now,” Santiago said.

  “Yes! That. No distractions. No disconnect. Just us, together, right now. Think of Keagy’s ’94 Subie like a portal. A time machine.”

  “A schism in the space-time continuum,” Bells said. “A time warp.”

  “Again, yes!”

  “Except for letting our parents know we aren’t missing or dead,” San said.

  “Yeah, except for that.”

  Inside, we split up. Keagan and Santiago went off in search of necessities like propane and dinner and chips and ice and things with nutrients while Reese, Bellamy, and I sought out all things essentially inessential. Like five pinwheels of varying colors, a neon-pink jump rope, a blank notebook and a pack of glitter-gel pens, cheap rain ponchos, a wand-esque toy that lit up to display rainbow stars on the walls. And candy. Lots of candy. Oh, and:

  “Disposable cameras?” Reese asked. “I didn’t even think they made these anymore.”

  “They’re perfect!” I cheered, dumping ten (yes, ten) of them atop the adequately ridiculous contents of our cart. “No deleting, no editing. They’re like tiny time capsules themselves.”

  “Ones we won’t get to open until it’s all over,” Bells said.

  Reese wrinkled her nose. “How ominous.”

  “No,” I said. “She’s right. Whatever happens, we’ll have these on the other side.”

  “Again,” Reese said. “Ominous.”

  “I prefer to think of it as premeditated nostalgia,” I said, then surveyed our bounty. “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, those unicorn ears and horn headbands we saw in the aisle with the light-wand thingy.”

  “Now that, my dearest Bluebells,” I said, “is exactly the right type of thinking.”

  SANTIAGO

  Feels Like Fire

  Keagan looked through the contents of our cart, lips moving, talking quietly to himself, taking inventory. It was a good thing he’d elected us for this task, as leaving it up to Nari would probably have meant licorice and scratch-and-sniff stickers for dinner.

  I followed him to the drinks aisle and helped him load a couple gallon jugs of drinking water onto the cart’s bottom rack. He took over pushing the cart toward the checkouts, where we’d meet the girls, and said, “It’s like riding in a car with no brakes.”

  I waited. He’d been reticent all morning—Keagan but with the dial turned down. Sometimes getting Keagan to talk about things he’d rather avoid is like trying to swat a fly that’s flitting around your house. No matter how calmly and methodically you approach it, it can sense you coming. No matter how many times I’d skirted this conversation, for weeks, each time he saw it coming and darted away. Finally, I asked, “At full speed?”

  He snorted. “Down a mountainside.”

  “Toward a cliff?”

  “Above a pit filled with the vibrant green flames of wildfire.”

  We parked next to the wall of gift bags and greeting cards across the pathway from the checkouts. “So. Bail, tuck, and roll. Or?”

  “Or…” He pantomimed an explosion.

  “Okay, okay. But what if there’s another option?”

  “What,” he said, cynical, “like Drogon will swoop in to save us at the last moment? Simultaneously setting our enemies aflame?”

  “Aren’t they already on fire in the pit?” I didn’t think I needed to point out that in this scenario Nari was the “enemy.” Or maybe she was the car. Maybe we all were, though of course it wasn’t so simple as that. It never is. Keagan hating this plan but coming along to help us do it, my parents supporting my diving but not my goal of making it to the Olympics. People are complex and irrational and driven and idle and dedicated and changeful and loyal and prejudiced because people are full of contradictions and conflicting ideas and wants and needs and beliefs.

  He shrugged a shoulder, pulled a greeting card from its slot, opened it, then—when a metallic version of “Happy Birthday” started to play—slammed it shut. “Setting them on double-fire, then.”

  I leaned down to rest my crossed arms on the cart’s handle. “Or, you know, it could work.”

  Keagan pulled out another greeting card, this one covered in glitter with a picture of Chewbacca on the front. “Working or not working,” he said quietly, almost to himself, “it all feels like fire to me.”

  BELLAMY

  Experiments in Denial

  “Sea Lion Caves!” Nari called from the passenger seat. We were thirty-three miles and counting west of home on Highway 101, heading down the coast. Nari listed off attractions from the map she’d bought at a gas station while the rest of us voted for which we’d like to see on a scale from one to ten.

  I started the ratings with: “Eight!”

  “One and a half,” said Keagan. “Because of the cave part.”

  “Fourteen!” Reese bellowed.

  “Rules, Reese!” Nari said. “Fourteen is outside the acceptable boundaries of the rating system.”

  “Don’t care. Don’t care. Come on. Sea. Lion. Caves. As in magical caves full of sea lions!”

  “We went a few years ago,” San said. “It’s pretty cool.”

  “No.” Nari whipped around in the front seat, finger
pointed back at Santiago. “No breaking the bubble, Santos! This is 1994. I mean, look at this map! It has folds! It is made of actual paper! You had not been to the Sea Lion Caves in 1994. You had not been born, nay, conceived or even considered in 1994.”

  “Right, right, of course,” San said. “What was I thinking? I’ve never been to see the very-cool-for-a-short-period-of-time-before-the-barking-and-grunting-of-it-all-gets-slightly-boring-but-there’s-an-awesome-statue-and-maybe-we’ll-even-see-a-whale Sea Lion Caves. So, yes, that’s where we should go.”

  “Seconded!” said Reese.

  “Thirded,” said me.

  And that was that, majority achieved, despite Keag’s groan.

  While Keagan drove the fifty-plus remaining miles to the Sea Lion Caves, Nari studied her map, doodling on it with one of the glitter-gel pens we’d picked out at the store. Reese crocheted a skeletal creature of some sort for her Etsy store at my right, and San looked out the window at my left. He drummed his fingers on his leg in time with the song playing on the radio, smiled at me when he noticed me looking, and moved his hand to tap the beat against my thigh. I liked it. The casual way he touched me. His smile. My smile.

  It’d been like this for a while. Extra smiles, extra touches, extra looks. Though I didn’t know what it meant yet, what the equation looked like, or what I wanted the answer to be. All I knew was the constant: that we were both leaving for school in the fall. The variables were subjective and hard to define. How I felt. How he felt. How that fit with the other variables of our friendship and the constant of our leaving. But I liked it anyway. I liked San, his calm, his ambition, his hands and shoulders and face. I liked watching him dive, his incredible grace and proficiency. I also liked his combination of humility and confidence. He’d been the best diver on the high school team since freshman year, the best in the state since sophomore year, had been drawing scouts since junior year and secured his place at Stanford before most people in our class began applying for college. Yet when the local paper interviewed him this year before State, he talked more about the team than himself.

  The song changed and Santiago shifted the rhythm of his knuckles against my leg to match the new beat. Considering the context, it felt almost wrong to enjoy this, both San’s touch on my thigh and pretending that we’d stepped out of reality and were on a simple road trip. In social psychology this is called pluralistic ignorance. Except, of course, that in the true definition of pluralistic ignorance, an individual holds a private rejection of a norm they incorrectly assume the majority accepts. In our circumstance, we all agreed to accept a false reality while each knowing that that reality was a construct. All considered, it might’ve been more correct to call our situation an act of intentional collective denial or delusion. Here we all knew, privately, that the game was primarily a coping mechanism but accepted that the others were playing it in earnest, causing each of us to play along in a self-validating and self-perpetuating cycle of denial.

  I’d gotten good at denial. Since I’d called and been hung up on by Robert Foster, since I’d talked with my mom all those nights ago, since I’d texted Nari that I was in, I’d cultivated a solid case of cognitive dissonance. I managed to believe that this was both a doomed idea and a plausible necessity. The likely consequences were dire. But framing it as a necessity let me justify them.

  I’m not proud of that, but it’s how I felt.

  At the Sea Lion Caves we did everything: rode the three-hundred-foot elevator down into the cave to stare at the sea lions, stood at the overlooks to admire the view, watched successfully for whales, browsed the gift shop, bought some fudge, though we had at least four pounds of candy in the car already, and finally, posed at the sea lion statue. Nari flagged down another tourist and handed him one of our disposable cameras.

  “Okay, everyone, look pretty!” she said, and we gathered around the statue, Santiago in the back, draped over the rear of the big bull sea lion, Nari and Keagan cuddled in the middle between the cow and the pup, Reese posed with her elbow propped on the bull’s head while I sat on its back.

  The tourist, a man in his mid-thirties, looked at the disposable camera and smiled. He wound the film with a click-click-click. “Ready?” he asked, holding the viewfinder up to his eye. “Smile!”

  The camera flashed.

  “Take a few more?” Nari asked. “Just in case. Thanks!”

  Twice more, the man wound the film and took our picture. Then we all climbed down off the statue and he handed the camera back to Nari. “Thank you, sir,” she said, and curtsied, holding out the hem of her oversized sweater when she dipped.

  “Now what?” Keagan asked as we walked back to the car.

  “Lunch,” Reese said.

  “Yes!” San and I agreed.

  “Then driving,” Nari said. “Lots of driving.”

  We continued south, waiting to find the strangest, “most intriguing without the threat of food poisoning,” as Reese put it, lunch place. After more than two hours of snacking on Twizzlers and Oreos and chips in the car, Santiago spotted an acceptable option in Port Orford.

  Keagan parked and we climbed out of the car, stretching, yawning. “Why do I still feel like I’m going sixty miles an hour?” he asked.

  “You’re velocitized.”

  “Veloci-what? Footnotes, Bells. Please.”

  “It just means that you were driving long enough to become accustomed to your velocity,” I said. “Thereby altering your perception of your true speed.”

  “Delightful,” Nari said, pulling out a disposable camera. She waved it around, urging us to pose in front of the little fish-and-chips shop. The coast dropped off behind it with the ocean stretching out in a gray mass beyond that. She snapped a few of the four of us making stupid faces, pointing to the restaurant’s sign with exaggerated smiles, then stopped us as we made to disperse.

  “Wait.” She dropped the disposable into her purse and pulled out three of our phones.

  Santiago frowned. “What are you—”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nari said, smiling. “We just need a few.” She snapped candids and a few posed pictures, despite our lack of enthusiasm, with Reese’s phone, then San’s, then mine.

  “For?” Keagan asked as she dropped one phone back into her purse and started up with another.

  “Posterity! Nostalgia! Our parents!” she cheered, then shrugged. “And proof of our Totally Innocent Spring Break Redwoods Camping Trip aka our alibi.”

  KEAGAN

  Love’s Not a Changeling

  The bubble had burst.

  But it was a ridiculous bubble anyway, right? Except that it wasn’t. It was a fun bubble. I liked it inside the bubble. It was simple in there, small and cozy without the need for alibis and that pesky threat of imminent doom.

  We piled out of the restaurant and back into the car, stopped for gas, paid for from our crime-spree slush fund, and were on our way.

  With a hundred and thirty miles left till we got to the campsite Nari had picked and reserved for us, we passed the time playing car games, making faces and posing for the disposable camera pics one of them always seemed to be taking, and trying to keep up pretending it was 1994, or now but without cell phones.

  Reese was narrating some story, supplemented primarily by Bells and Nari, about the infrequently glimpsed fae world that had, just had, to live in the trees. Something about queens and lost princesses and dark magic and how they were probably watching us, keeping track of our progress down the road because Reese was really a changeling and her people were preparing to call her home.

  “I could be a faerie,” she said. “Check out my ears.” I glanced in the rearview mirror at her as she gestured to the pointed shape of her ears, pulling her bright red hair back from the side that wasn’t shaved to show off both.

  “Absolutely,” Bellamy said beside her. “And then there’s your c
olorfulness.”

  “And your willowy-ness,” San added. “Wait, is ‘willowy’ offensive? I just mean how it’s like you started off normal and five foot something and then someone grabbed all your limbs and pulled.”

  “Hey!” Reese said, half laughing, and I heard her punch Santiago’s shoulder followed by San responding, “Ow.”

  “They’re probably waiting for graduation,” Nari said. “So they can free you publicly and make a truly epic scene.”

  “Now that is an idea I can get behind,” Reese said. Then she said something else, followed by San saying something more, but I tuned them out and concentrated on the curves of the road, the gray light from the overcast sky, the intermittent views of the water, the bugs occasionally splatting on the windshield, the other cars filled with other people probably not on their way to commit multiple felonies, and how Nari had squeezed my hand in her driveway that morning and the way she’d said “I love you.” We said it all the time. “Love you” when we hung up the phone, when we left each other’s houses or at school or wherever, when we cuddled close on the couch in her basement watching bad movies and good movies and also when we breathed each other’s breath beneath the blankets in my bed. I love you. It was always so easy, like saying “hi” or “bye” or “what’s up, other weirdo who matches the inner weirdo of my heart and soul.”

  But this morning when she’d said it, it hadn’t felt like any of those sorts of easy. It’d felt like she was saying it just to make sure I’d say it back.

  REESE

  Friendship the Color of Foreboding

  Inarguable facts:

  (1) Nature is beautiful.