by Amy Bright
I drank too fast. My six-pack was gone. I told Josh I was going to find a bathroom. I was floating across the carpet, not even feeling the shoulders and knees and elbows digging themselves into my body when I walked through the crowd. A line-up for the bathroom had formed by the kitchen, and the one down the hall by the room that Lee’s dad kept as his office. I was out of it enough that I headed up the staircase, the one that should have had the "Forbidden—No Trespassers" sign up but, with the way my eyes were blurring, I wouldn’t have seen a thing like that anyway.
I used the bathroom at the top of the stairs. There was another one in the master bedroom and another one attached to Lee’s, but I was still sober enough to know that those two were out of bounds. I washed my hands and used the soap pump, this vanilla foam that was the exact same smell as Lee.
She was standing by the bathroom door when I came out. Her dress was short and her legs didn’t stop, not even when they hit her feet, a pair of grey socks pulled up at the bottom of her tights.
"What are you doing up here?"
"Bathroom," I said, jerking my thumb at the door. I was losing it, my tenuous hold on normality.
"No one’s allowed up here. And I didn’t invite you."
"Josh did. He told me to come."
"Yeah, well, I didn’t invite him, either."
It wasn’t the right time to be noticing Lee, her hair falling out of her ponytail and her earrings getting lost in her hair. It wasn’t the right time to lose the lines of communication between my brain and my body. And it definitely wasn’t the right time to lean in and try to kiss her with beer breath and drunk lips, but I did it anyway.
She pulled away.
"Hunter, go home."
"I miss you," I said.
"No, you don’t. You miss Niall. No one’s going to be a stand-in for him. Trust me, no one’s even going to try."
My head was swimming. It was a fishbowl, and I swear I could feel something like a pair of fins rubbing against my brain.
I turned back down the stairs. Lee would stay upstairs until she was sure that I was gone, and then she’d go back down and maybe hook up with some guy and talk about it with her friends in the morning.
I missed the last bus home. I had to walk, hunching my shoulders against the cold.
Frost in the morning.
D E C E M B E R
O n t h e B u s
Lee fell asleep somewhere between Banff and Golden. I didn’t think about how far she’d had to come in just a few days, and how far we still had to go. This was a round-trip for her with just a day in the middle.
It’s selfish to believe that the people you leave behind will stay the same until you come back. But this Lee was the same Lee that I knew from before. She still had shoulder-length hair and it was back in a ponytail. She dressed the same. She still lugged her canvas bag over her left shoulder.
She was still holding my hand when she fell asleep, so I just removed mine and placed hers back on her thigh. Then I went across the aisle and sat with Poppy.
"So," I said, "how’s everything?"
"It’s fine," she said.
"Yeah? You like traveling by bus?"
She rolled her eyes at me. For just a second, they both went zombie white.
Getting her to talk had always been tooth-pulling difficult but, since we’d got on the bus, it had gotten even harder. I was asking all the wrong questions. I was acting like she was five years old. Are you hungry? Are you okay? Do you like buses? Goo goo ga.
I clenched my hands, trying to ask her the thing I’d been worrying about since we left Lethbridge.
"Do you think your mom will have noticed you’re gone yet?"
"Probably not," Poppy said, making it casual. "She was going Christmas shopping all morning. What’s your aunt going to do when she sees you’re gone?"
I shrugged. I hadn’t thought a lot about what Aunt Lynne would do. I’d been living at her house in Lethbridge for the last three months. I didn’t know how she’d react to me being gone. I’d left her a note. A half-assed explanation. Going home to Victoria. It’s Niall. I’ll be back. I had more grace time than Poppy did because my aunt was going to be out until after dinner.
"I guess she’ll call my parents," I said.
"You’re lucky she’s your aunt and not your mom."
"Nah, I kind of wish she was sometimes. She’s pretty good at it."
Even though Poppy played it off, I was still panicked about what her mom would do.
Talking to Poppy, I had double-vision. There were two of her—the Poppy on the bus, and the Poppy who maybe hated me a little because I’d done a stupid thing the day before. I’d snooped around and found something I shouldn’t have. I opened a box. The one with her dad’s secret folded inside. I wasn’t going to forget her face. Surprised, shocked, hurt.
"Pops," I said, "we should talk about what happened."
"I don’t want to talk right now," she said.
"I shouldn’t have been snooping."
"Hunter," she said. Her pointy knuckles got me in the ribs. I made an oof. "We’re on a shitty bus. We’re on a shitty bus for, like, twenty more hours. Don’t be a jerk."
"Okay, okay," I said.
I faced forward. Looked past the old lady with her beady eyes and crow beak, and up to the front of the bus. A hipster couple sat directly behind the bus driver. They were older than me and Lee, but I wouldn’t call them grown-ups. They held hands over the armrest. The boy had curly hair and the girl had thick bangs that were saved from falling into her eyes by a pair of big-framed glasses. I could see the screen of their MacBook. Some romance movie they were watching together.
"You’ve got enough to eat?" I didn’t know why I brought up food with Poppy, like I could tell if she was okay based on whether or not she was eating enough of the crap junk food we had brought along. She just nodded.
That was my second worry, after what Poppy’s mom was going to do. What if something happened to Poppy while she was with me on this trip? My one decision to take her with us could make everything go wrong. She looked so small and so young in her seat. Those straight-across bangs weren’t helping.
"Hey," I said, "you want to play a game?"
"What kind?"
"See who can spot the first bear?"
"They’re all hibernating," she said. "It’s winter."
"First moose?"
Poppy sighed but looked out the window anyway. All you could see were thick fir trees with their needles pressing into the needles of the tree next door. The way the bus drove along so fast blurred them all together, a mash-up of green that made me kind of vomit-y. The banks of snow were built up high, and we were lucky the weather was holding up on our trip through the mountains. The winter roads that climbed the mountains and then dove back down them again got a little deadly sometimes.
"There," Poppy said. "A moose."
We’d driven past before I could see if it was really there or not.
"Oh, yeah? What’d it look like?"
"Antlers," Poppy said, making pretend ones with her hands and sticking them to the top of her head. "Big ones."
"Cool," I said. "You win."
We both kept staring out the window. I didn’t know if we were playing the game anymore. If we were, we were both losing.
As we slowed down on the highway, Poppy said, "I see another one." Something was on the road ahead, and a man in a bright orange and yellow vest held up a stop sign. We were fifth in a line of traffic.
"See one what?" I said.
"Another moose."
Poppy had her finger pointed and pressing against the window.
I couldn’t see it right away. I thought she was pulling my leg, count to ten and she’d tell me she was joking. But then a couple of branches stopped being branches and turned into the antlers that they were. I could see the big brown snout, those two black eyes, the ears pointing at the sky. The moose stood stock still, staring at the side of the bus.
"Holy shit. That thing is
huge."
"It’s a giant," Poppy said, turning to me with this grin.
We watched the moose until the bus started moving again. Then, it blended back into the forest, still standing in the exact same place as it always had been.
No one else on the bus was looking out the window. They were watching movies on laptops, or reading books, or talking on the phone. A couple of people were sleeping. The moose had stepped out of the woods for only me and Poppy to see. Pointing its antlers in the direction of home and sending us on our way.
M A Y
That morning at school, Lee came around the corner, right toward me. Her hair was down and she wasn’t wearing makeup, the only girl at our school who could pull that off. Hot with embarrassment, I ducked into the bathroom, sat in the stall, and pushed my feet up against the door. I couldn’t stop thinking about the way Lee had looked at me when I tried to kiss her.
I was looking as rough as I felt. My sneakers were beat up, scuffed, and discolored from rain and walking home. The rubber soles falling off, the bottoms coming undone. Frayed jeans, the legs wet and grungy. Holey sweater and unwashed shirt. Mom and Dad didn’t have a clue about what was going on with me. They were at work, Dad sitting at his desk and rolling between computer and phone on his ergonomic black leather chair, Mom standing on a yoga mat, adjusting all the women stretching. They were probably figuring that they had done pretty good, all odds against and stuff. Bridget living on her own with a job, and me finishing up high school soon. They saw my friendship with Niall as a blip on the timeline of my life, something that only needed monitoring infrequently. Normal kids, normal life. It wasn’t their fault they didn’t see all the shit that went down with Niall, but they weren’t looking for it and I wasn’t volunteering.
Niall wasn’t a blip. He was my best friend. Even when it was up and down, I still knew him better than almost anyone else. But sometimes it was scary how he could get. He would change in the amount of time it took for you to snap your fingers.
The summer before, we had met up at the fair. I found him in the middle of a group of people, laughing so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. When I joined them, he said, "I was looking for you."
"Yeah. Big place."
"Hunter," Josh said. He bobbed his head at me. "How’s it going, man?" He slipped something in my hand and, without even looking, I swallowed it down.
"Thanks," I said.
"Thanks and twenty bucks," he corrected.
"No cash," I said, holding up my hands.
"You want to owe me?"
I shrugged a yes.
It was six of us there together and we went on every ride. I threw up three times, once in one of those green garbage cans with the opening just wide enough for an empty pop bottle.
Later we grabbed a couple of burgers and ate them at a wooden picnic table. Niall covered for me, doling out twenties that I promised to pay back. It was dark and the overhead lights had all turned on. The music was louder, pumping out of the speakers in a way that I could really feel.
"What was that stuff?" I asked Josh.
He shrugged his shoulders, cracking a smile.
I think a lot of people at school missed his good moments. Niall’s. They didn’t see him screaming his head off on the roller coaster, his teeth showing and his hair covering his eyes. They didn’t see him lifting the safety bar over his shoulders, looking uncertain, wondering if that bar was really going to keep him from flying.
Later that night, when we were all sitting at a table and I was thinking about heading home, Niall went quiet. I felt it growing, the way he could get in the middle of a crowd of people.
"Hey, Niall, you ready to go?" I asked.
Niall stared up at the Ferris wheel, the ride closest to us. He was already gone, sliding comatose, eyes wide open. It wasn’t a lot but it freaked Josh out, the way Niall could just shut down and vacate.
But it didn’t come out of nowhere. I’d been over to Niall’s house and knew I’d be as wrecked as he was if I had to live there. The big empty space where his sister was supposed to be, and his parents turned into shut-ins. Somehow me and Josh had gotten Niall to check back in again, even if it was a little irregularly, but that didn’t mean we could erase everything else that was wrong with his life.
"Dude, why are you doing this?" Josh asked him. "Just be normal. We’re having fun."
Niall didn’t answer. He just slid his eyes from the Ferris wheel to Josh, a heavy dragging that almost made me get out of there.
"No, I’m serious," Josh said. "Forget this shit. It’s only eleven. I’m going on some rides."
"I think I’m going home," Niall said.
"Come on," Josh said, pulling on the back of Niall’s shirt. "Don’t be a dick."
It happened so fast—the hard crack, the wet thump, and Niall’s fist moving back from Josh’s face to his side.
Josh went down hard.
I yelled at Niall, "What’d you do?" But he was already out of there.
I looked at Josh, flat on the ground, a couple of the guys we were with checking to see if he was all right. His eyes twitched open, first one, then the other. I waited to see that he was fine. Then I went after Niall.
When we walked home together, I looked in the window of one of the downtown stores and saw my face looking back. My eyes looked like Niall’s, pupils huge and black. When I turned up my street to go home, Niall said, "You’re as crazy as me." He said it like a compliment. A good thing.
I was thinking about that day at the fair, when the door to the bathroom at Douglas flapped open and Josh said, "Hunter, dude, I know you’re in here."
I dropped my feet from the door, came out of the stall, leaned against the counter, and smoked up with Josh, the two of us getting comfortable before we started talking.
"I was thinking," I told him, "about that night at the fair."
Josh rubbed his chin and let out a bark of a laugh.
"Crazy Niall," he said. "What a dick. Knocked me right out. But he got back what was coming to him." Josh repaid him a couple of nights later and, after that, there was no more Niall and Hunter and Josh. Josh bowed out, just like Lee had. What happened to Niall was just a couple of months later, over Christmas holidays. "He was so much work," Josh said. "Everyone always had to figure out how to act around him, so it didn’t set him off."
"Doesn’t mean it’s okay, what happened to him."
Josh smoked the rest of the joint without offering it back to me. He was about to head back to class when he turned around, remembering that he had a gift for me. I took the pills. Josh gave me an army salute and went back into the hallway. A couple of seconds later, I followed him.
At lunch, I sat at a table with Josh in the cafeteria, eating greasy burgers and soggy fries. It almost felt like old times. It wasn’t just me and Josh at the table. It was us and everybody we knew, the table full and cool, with people swiveling their heads to check us out. Josh made sure I was taken care of, leaving me in the conversational hands of Jordan before he hit the vending machine for a Coke.
"Long time, no see," Jordan said. "You doing okay?"
"I’m fine."
"You done hanging out by yourself?"
"Looks like it."
Jordan snorted, kicked back a couple of fries. "Seriously, though, you’re back now?"
"Yeah."
"Watch it, hey? You’re not the only one messed up by what happened to Niall."
I had known Jordan since I started high school, a big guy with the football thing going on, freezing his ass off on Friday nights out on the field behind the school. We didn’t have much to say, not before and not now. Jordan zipped and unzipped his backpack, checked his phone, and then put an ear bud in his right ear, and, what do you know, I was sitting to the right of him. He waited a couple of minutes before he grabbed his stuff and peaced out of there.
"See you in class, man."
"Later."
Josh nodded at me from across the table, his nod syncopating with the
sound of the bell ringing. I left for Chem. There was a single narrow window at the back of the small classroom on the second floor, a whiteboard, projector, desks, and tables filling up the rest. Chem was quizzes and tests, questions and answers. It was sitting at the back of the room being bored, watching the clock, and listening to its painfully slow tick-tock.
"Settle down. Get out your books and let’s start."
Ms. Reed had her go-to sentences for starting the class, and that was the nicest.
"Hunter," Ms. Reed said. "Nice to have you with us."
So maybe I had been skipping a bit. Leaving school after lunchtime. Nice of her to notice.
"Thanks."
"We’ll talk after class. Okay, everyone, page one hundred and fifty-five in your textbook. Let’s go."
Ms. Reed turned her back to us about a quarter of the way through class to write on the board. She drew a flow diagram and boxed off the labels that explained how all of the parts worked together. Everyone copied it down. When Reed made a mistake, her easy swipe of the eraser across the white board was a whole lot neater than my scratched-out pen and mess of a page. After that, Reed divided us into groups to do a worksheet, a "find the answer in the text book." She numbered us off—one, two, three, four—and sent us to different zones. Two lucky groups hit pay dirt and got sent to the library, where the librarian stayed in his office and didn’t check on noise or production levels.
My group was Mark and Travis and Sarah. We sat at a table, two across from two, books open to different pages. They talked and flipped through, looking for answers, reluctantly bringing me into the fold.
"So, you’re sticking around all day now," Travis said. He had been sitting at the other end of the table at lunch, and I figured he had been keeping an eye out. "You back or something?"
"I guess."
There wasn’t much eye contact. What did I have except empty spaces and empty places?
"I don’t even know how to pronounce this word," Sarah said, pointing at mitochondria. It was in her Bio textbook, and she was working on the homework for Kesler’s class from that morning. We followed her lead and dragged out our papers and textbook from the morning’s Bio class, and covered them with our Chem textbooks, the spines pointing out.