by Amy Bright
"Mi-to-chon-dri-a," Mark said, pronouncing each of its five syllables.
"It’s not in the back of the book," Sarah said.
Travis found it a few minutes later and we tried re-working the definition, changing the order of "a" and "the" to make it look different, not word-for-word.
"I can’t find the answer to number six," Sarah said, and none of us could either. She sighed and went over to another group to outsource the answer.
"So, you have to see Penner," Travis said to me when she was gone.
"Yep. Friday Psych Day."
"You’re seeing him because of what happened to Niall?"
Label the parts of a typical animal cell and show their subcellular components. Mark was looking at me. Both of them waiting for an answer.
"No," I said.
Mark flipped through the pages of his textbook, pretending not to listen. His eyes locked on mine for a few seconds, a "Careful, man, you messed up, getting Travis on your back."
"It doesn’t make sense that you’re still here," he said. "And he isn’t."
Travis had a fist formed nice and neat and, coincidence, I had one, too.
"It’s not like you were the only person who hung around with him," he said. "But you’re the one who fucked everything up."
I punched Travis across the desk just before he got me. Left eye, black, blank, starry. Mark grabbed his other arm to pull him back, but that fist came again and knocked me in the jaw. This crack and my teeth grinding together, one a little loose and sore. My hands were balled up and I was ready to give him something back. Instead, I sank, an overwhelming weight letting go, and let him hit me.
Reed called across the hall and a couple of teachers came in and got Travis off of me. Reed grabbed my arms and the classroom went unfamiliar.
"Hunter," Reed said. "You need to go to the office."
"Yeah, sure," I said. My mouth wasn’t making words the way it usually did. Each one was heavy and weighted.
"Right away," she said. "I’m phoning ahead."
The first place I went was the bathroom. Broken doors and cracked floor. Smell of weed in the air because me and Josh didn’t hide shit. My name was going all over the intercom. "Hunter Ryan to the office, please. Hunter Ryan." It followed me all the way out of the school and into the woods and back to that wall, the one that me and Niall found, the place that felt like flying.
I was in my bedroom on Mom’s laptop, refreshing Facebook, checking out what everybody else was up to—party pictures, updates, and check-ins downtown—and feeling that pit in my chest. It was depressing as hell when I had nothing going on.
The whole day had been like that. I took a nap in my bed, curtains open, sun in, and ate a bag of chips in front of the computer. My black eye, courtesy of Travis, was looking bad and there was no way I was going to school. Instead I checked out Lee’s Facebook profile and looked at old photos from the year before.
The thing about Lee was that I’d known her for forever. Mom said we went to kindergarten together. That was our start point, back when we were five years old. If we had a start point, then we had an end point. Jason Guerra’s party at the end of last summer, just before school started.
A bunch of us went up to his attic, locking ourselves in by accident, after closing up the trap door with its slanted stairs behind us. Lee brought up a bottle of vodka and Josh kept the joints going around in a circle. I was getting shittier and shittier up in that attic. Music was playing on the first floor, but we only got the tail end of it all the way upstairs, the ba-boom ba-boom ba-boom of bass. Locked in and messed up enough that we didn’t care how long we were stuck up there for. Josh pissed out the window and Lee’s friend did it, too, hanging out ass backwards and laughing her head off.
Lee was sitting beside me, our knees knocking and her hand on my thigh, closer and closer to where I wanted it to be. Across from me was Niall, getting quiet, and I should’ve known what was coming and got him out of there. Signs and crossings. Hints and dead giveaway.
"Dude, tell us about that time you wanted to time travel your dead cat," Josh said, killing himself laughing. He was talking to Niall, wanting him to look like a freak in front of everybody else sitting in the attic.
"Come on," Lee whispered to me. "Like we haven’t heard this before."
She grabbed my hand, knit her fingers between mine, and took me over to the far side of the attic, where castaway furniture was stacked seat-to-seat. She grabbed me so my back was making waves with a ratty old couch, turned vertical for storage.
"God, I’m drunk," Lee said, turning a circle on her toes, my hand holding hers above her head.
"Me, too."
"How much weed does Josh give you?"
"A lot," I said, thinking about the whiff I got walking by my closet, even though it was hidden, Russian-doll style, inside a bag inside an envelope inside a shoebox under a pile of clothes.
"Your brain’s fucked," she said.
"My brain’s relaxed as hell. It’s taking off."
Lee laughed and lined up our hips, hipbone to hipbone, pressing my back firmly against the couch. Pieces of Niall were escaping from the circle, and I was trying to ignore them.
Lee stepped her feet in between mine and we were closer than close. Her hands slid into the loops of my belt, one dipping into my back pocket, the other inching up the bottom of my shirt.
We’d never fooled around like that before, me and Lee, until there was that couch acting like the third person that held me up against her. We made out at the back of the attic, everybody else only a couple of feet away, talking normally and knowing just exactly what we were doing. We pushed down the couch, vertical to horizontal, grungy cushions and dust. Lee was on her back making me the visible one, and I didn’t even give a shit.
"Hey," she said. "I wanted it to be me and you."
"Me, too."
She made a face, knew I was an idiot even behind the smokescreen of drunk. She made out with me anyway, unhooking her bra when my hands stopped working, clumsy and fat-fingered. She laughed into my cheek, going in for a kiss but finding something funny instead. I had my lips on her eyebrow, the most hilarious thing, and I put my tongue under the arch and kissed her there, too.
Niall picked that moment exactly to start swearing at some guy over on the other side of our furniture fort. I opened my eyes, heavy and thick-lidded. Lee kept kissing me, my eyes wide open.
I leaned over the armrest to see who Niall had picked to lose it with. I still don’t know who he was. Just a guy.
"Hunter!" Josh yelled. "Niall’s going crazy."
Lee’s hand slid into my pocket, her fingers pinching my ass. A do-not-move, Hunter Ryan, stay here.
"He’s killing this kid!"
Niall had the guy on the ground, his fist moving in a mechanical up-and-down into his face. I vaulted off the couch and helped Josh pull Niall off him. Someone had the window open and the attic was clearing out, everyone sliding down the roof to get to the ground below.
After, when Niall was calmer, Josh gave me a salute and headed to the window. Niall wasn’t his problem. He was just along for the ride.
"What happened?" I asked him.
Josh looked at Niall. "Doesn’t matter how messed up you are, it doesn’t mean you can do shit like this."
He slid out the window.
That left Lee—fixing her clothes and leaning against the window—Niall, and me.
"You coming, Hunter?"
I looked between her and Niall. I shook my head. "I can’t."
Lee kicked the couch at me and slid out the window. No goodbye.
Me and Niall sat on the floor and smoked a joint.
"What happened?" I asked him.
"I don’t know."
"He say something to you?"
Niall shrugged. "I guess not," he said. "I don’t know."
"Is this because of what happened to your sister?"
He didn’t give me an answer. Whatever made Niall the way he was, he wasn’t tal
king about it.
When the music stopped on the floor below, we went out the window, split at the end of the street and went our separate ways home.
I was thinking about that party when Lee called. I pressed the phone against my ear, feeling the crick work its way into my neck, dig deep, and sit there. I was using the portable from downstairs, my cell phone buried at the bottom of my backpack. I clicked out of Facebook and swiveled away from the computer.
"Josh says you’re back," Lee said.
"I guess."
"Well, what is it? Back or still being an asshole?"
"Back," I said. "Back."
I let the silence climb to reach her end and mine, pooling in the wires and getting our signals crossed. Me and Lee were just radio frequencies finally tuned to the right channel.
"Lee?" I asked. "Why are you calling?"
Lee sighed on the other end of the phone. "I don’t know, okay? I’ve been thinking a lot."
"Do you want to get coffee or something?" I asked her, fumbling. "We could talk."
"No," she said. "I mean, not tonight. This is enough, you know?"
I was trying to fill the gap between us. When it became too much work, I left it and let it fall. It was my fault we were even there at all. Made my bed, had to lie in it.
"I have to go," Lee said. "I just wanted to call. You doing okay? Heard you got into a fight."
"I’m fine," I said.
"Good," she said. "That’s good."
She hung up the phone after that and I was alone in my room again. Except this time I had Lee in my head, Lee in miniature banging on the inside of my brain.
I went to the mirror and checked out my eye. Black and purple and an ugly yellow around the center. Then I fell back on my bed and stared at the ceiling, wishing I could program sleep until Niall woke up.
D E C E M B E R
O n t h e B u s
"Hey." Lee nudged my shoulder with her chin, just waking up. "Where are we?"
"We’re in Golden in a sec," I told her. "We can get off for a couple of minutes, even. Hour nine out of twenty-seven, Lee. We’re getting there."
"’Kay," she said. "Maybe I’ll call my dad."
"Hey," I said, touching her shoulder. "It’s golden Golden."
The bus came to a stop.
"Pops, you want to come?" I asked her, standing up and reaching my arms right up over my head.
"Nah," she said. "I’m good."
"Any requests?" Lee asked her.
Poppy sat carefully, holding her back straight so that it just barely touched the back of the seat. Before she’d been as slouched as a laundry bag full of clothes. She was suddenly princess-in-training, practicing her etiquette and posture. She shook her head. "No, I don’t want anything."
I didn’t want to leave Poppy there, but Lee was already grabbing my hand and pulling, and then we were out the double doors and in the cool, dim air.
I waved at Poppy from outside. She didn’t wave back.
"Come on," Lee said. "I want a second, just you and me."
"That’s new," I said. Lee pinched my wrist, but nicely. My skin went pink and then white again.
She pulled me into a bookstore across the street from where the bus was parked. She wiped her boots furiously on the carpet by the door. Snow was on the ground and had been since Calgary. It was a genuine Winter Wonderland. There was a foot of it here in Golden, fresh and powdery, and you could tell tomorrow was going to be a good day on the mountain. I took a couple of looks over my shoulder at the bus, trying to find Poppy’s face at the window.
"Hunter," Lee said, pulling me to the back of the store, "I need to find something to read for the rest of the way."
"Why don’t you get a magazine?" I was thinking about those Us Weekly magazines Aunt Lynne was always reading. There was some good stuff in there. Celebrities without makeup was my favorite. A lot of those actresses looked rough.
"I read those on the way here. I’m gossiped out."
The store was busy but, at the back, it was just us. Lee thumbed through the fiction section, working her way alphabetically down the shelf.
"Are you going to tell me what’s up with Poppy now?" she asked me.
"Nothing’s up with her. She’s just along for the ride."
"You said you’d explain." Lee pulled a book off the shelf.
How to explain Poppy. I cleared my throat awkwardly. Coughed up a hairball. Frog in my throat.
"She’s twelve," I said. I hoped that would cover it.
It didn’t.
"Exactly," Lee said. "Twelve-year-olds can stay home by themselves. It’s not like you had to drag her along with us. It’s weird."
"I couldn’t just leave her there," I told her, not explaining anything. "You can’t just leave a kid in a big empty house."
"You can if it means not kidnapping her." Lee lowered her voice on the word "kidnapping."
"You know we’re not doing that."
"Even if you don’t call it that, it’s basically the same thing," Lee said. "Her mom doesn’t even know she’s gone. You ever heard of an ‘Amber Alert,’ Hunter? Those things are serious."
"It’s nothing like that," I said. "I know her. And leaving her alone without an explanation would have been worse than taking her with us. So what if we have to explain to her mom, eventually? You have to know that’s better than us leaving her alone."
Plus I messed it all up, I thought. Leaving after finding that box, Poppy’s sad-fish face the last thing I’d seen, wasn’t even a possibility. I couldn’t leave it like that.
Lee snuck a peek out the window at the bus.
"How do you even know a twelve-year-old kid well enough to be worried about her?"
"We’re homeschooled together," I told her. "The whole time I’ve been in Lethbridge, three whole months."
"That still doesn’t explain why she’s here," Lee said, crossing her arms in front of her chest.
"I know," I said. "I can’t really. She’s going through some stuff, I think." And I want her here, I thought. I didn’t want to do this on my own.
"You think her mom will send the police? When she sees she’s gone?"
"No," I said. "No."
But I didn’t know. Give or take an hour, which was when Poppy’s mom would get home to that empty house. I didn’t know what she was going to do when she found it sans Poppy. How long would it take for her to guess that Poppy was with me, just like she was every day? How long would it take to call the Greyhound? How long would it take for them to catch up to us? It was my fault she was here, instead of at home where she should be. It was selfish all the way through. She was here because I wanted her to be.
The cover of the book Lee held under her arm was dark navy blue with geometric shapes intersecting in the middle. It looked like something that would be in class sets at Douglas High. Read chapter by chapter over the course of the entire year. It took a billion years to read a fiction book in English class.
"We better go," she said.
Then she did something that hadn’t happened for more than a year. She leaned right in and touched her lips on mine and held them there. As quick as she did it, she moved away, heading to the register to buy her book. Almost like it was unreal, I put my hand to my mouth, feeling the warmth.
J U N E
A couple of days after I talked to Lee on the phone, I left for school an hour early. The damp climbed down into my chest and took a seat. The fog was burning off the ocean but, twenty minutes earlier, it would’ve been a wall of blindness shielding the island. I got on a bus and took it into Oak Bay, watched the wave of big house, big house, mansion, big house, mansion, mansion. Lee’s house was out of the way, the opposite direction from Douglas. She would get into her car every morning and gun it so she would get there just a couple of seconds before the bell rang. I knocked on Lee’s door and waited on the front steps.
I had only seen her once that whole week. Wednesday in the hallway. I was standing at my locker, spinning the dial, and th
ere was the back of her head, walking away from me. No Lee at lunch, not sitting on the other side of Josh at the cafeteria table. No waving at her in the parking lot after school, hoping for a ride home. She called to check on me once and then it was like she realized she’d overstepped. Time to back off again.
Opening the door, Lee’s mother said, "Hunter. We haven’t seen you for a while." She traveled all over the place with her husband, so it made sense that she didn’t know shit about the parties that went on when they were gone.
"Yeah, well, it’s been busy."
"Are you here for Lee?"
"Is she still around?"
Mrs. McKenzie retreated into her house, leaving me in the entranceway, the door still cracked an inch. The straps of my backpack were hanging one over each shoulder. I let one go, shouldering it all on the left.
"What are you doing here?" Lee had her feet planted hip-width, one hand rumpling the bottom of her sweater.
"Morning," I said.
"Hunter, I didn’t say you could do this. We didn’t talk about you coming over here."
"I know. I thought maybe we could drive to school together or something. Talk in the car."
"Not a good idea."
"It’s what, five, ten minutes to get there?"
"You should’ve called."
"If I called first, you would’ve told me not to come over. Come on. Five minutes."
Lee looked behind her into the house. Without saying a word, she walked back down the hall. The faint clink of dishes hitting together barely made it all the way to the front to reach me.
I felt like an asshole, throwing the other strap of my backpack over my shoulder again, working out the bus schedule in my head to figure out if I’d miss first period. I closed the heavy door behind me, erasing the inch Lee left behind, and headed down the driveway.
"What the hell, Hunter?" Lee said, popping her head out the door. "Just give me a sec."
She followed down the front steps after me, heading for her car. She stuck the key in the driver’s side and mechanically opened the passenger door. I climbed in, stuffed my backpack by my feet, and seat-belted myself in.