I'd Give Anything

by Marisa de los Santos

  Oh, but that boy, edged in sunlight, being my friend, standing there and being my friend. I ached for a life in which I deserved him.

  Years later, when I remembered that sad, unmoored girl on the porch, I wanted to will her to suck it up, to step forward instead of back, to, yes, keep her secret, but to find a way to reach around it and take hold of that boy.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You can’t or you won’t?”

  “I don’t know. I just know I need to be alone. I’m sorry.”

  For a moment, I saw the old flash of kind concern in his eyes, and then he shut like a box and walked off my porch, and he never came back.

  In one night, one night, I lost all of them.

  After Gray left, I called a summer camp in Vermont I’d gone to when I was eleven and asked them to send me a job application. I trudged through the last months of school—numb even to my own loneliness—graduated, spent all summer with kids, little strangers, taking them on hikes and canoe trips, teaching them the names of trees, tending their minor wounds. By the time I got to college, I wasn’t cracked in a thousand places. I wasn’t hopeless. But I wasn’t Zinny anymore either, Zinny fierce and true, night-jumper, rule-breaker, maker of things never before seen on planet Earth, Zinny who Adela had thought was something to see. I’d learned the beauty of treading the safest path, a path that led me straight to Harris.

  But now, Zinny was back, alive inside the pages of my old journal and inside the head of my daughter.

  And the old secret was back, too, here, in my house, throwing up a wall between me and Avery, reminding me that I was a fool—the worst kind of fool—to believe it had ever left.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Avery

  Avery didn’t find Zinny at the quarry. She didn’t find deep insights in the distance between the quarry’s edge and the water or great truths among the dead leaves she scuffed free and sent flying with her boots.

  But it was late morning; the day was the bright kind of cold, and the air bore the spicy scent of rotting wood and clean dirt and pennies. When Avery had stepped off the bus at the entrance to the state park, she’d felt as if she were planting her boot soles on the soil of a foreign country, a new world.

  That morning, after a silent car ride, Avery’s mother had dropped her off at the entrance to the school, and Avery had walked in, stowed her backpack in her locker, and then, a few minutes later, walked out. No one had stopped her. If anyone—any teacher or parent, or even any other student—had noticed, they probably thought she had been given permission to leave because that’s who Avery was, or had been, a girl who got permission.

  She had never taken the bus before because kids like Avery did not take buses, not even school buses, except to away games or field trips. The bus smelled like diesel fuel, sun-warmed plastic, and air freshener. The driver wore a blue jacket and matching pants and said “Morning,” to everyone who got on the bus, including Avery. Avery focused. She tried to take everything in. A little girl’s plastic hair clips shaped like bees. A woman wearing duck boots just like Avery’s own. A guy listening to music on his earbuds so loudly that Avery could hear it: a beat like a pulse and a tinny voice rising above it. Across the aisle from Avery was a baby who kicked off its tiny sneaker twice and a mother who sighed and picked it up from the floor of the bus and put it back on his foot. Looking out the window, Avery saw a chickadee sitting on top of a mailbox, people running in black running clothes and neon-colored shoes, a couple kissing goodbye on a street corner and going their separate ways.

  Just before her stop, Avery got a text from her mother: I got a call from the dean that you missed homeroom. She said one of the other students said he saw you getting on a bus. What’s going on? Are you okay? Please text me back right this minute.

  Avery considered not answering, but then she sighed and typed in, I’m fine. I needed some time alone. Don’t worry. I’ll go back to school soon.

  Avery could imagine her mother staring at her phone in disbelief at the mind-blowing news that perfect little rule-following Avery was skipping school. She braced herself, waiting for her mother to freak out, explode, demand that Avery tell her right this minute where she was so that she could come pick her up.

  “I won’t,” Avery whispered. “I won’t.”

  Her mother’s text popped up, and it took Avery a moment to fully absorb what it said: That makes sense. I’ll let the dean know you’re fine. See you at 3:00. I love you.

  Avery felt a rush of wonder at this answer, but then she regrouped. We are not in this together, Mom, she thought, and I am still mad at you.

  At the quarry, Avery thought to herself that this was the place in the story where you take on a sidekick or meet a cute boy. But she found she liked being alone, filling her own hours in her own way, letting her thoughts loose to wander and loop. Maybe as adventures went, hers was tame. But it didn’t feel tame. She walked around and sat on the cold ground and then walked some more. Once, she lay on her back in the stiff grass and watched a buzzard—huge, with fringed black wings—circling, circling.

  She let her mind circle, too, lightly spiraling inward and inward, until she found, in the center of the circles, her father and Cressida Wall.

  How simple it would have been to believe the rumors, the ones that claimed Cressida had preyed on her father to get money or fancy stuff—a Gucci purse, a dark green Mini Cooper, a new phone—that her own father couldn’t afford because he was a loser or a meth head or bipolar. Or the rumors that said Avery’s dad had paid attention to Cressida only because he was nice and felt sorry for her. But what Avery knew was that her dad had changed. He smiled at her and talked to her tentatively now, like a person who thought he might not deserve to smile at her or talk to her. And he’d lost weight. And he’d gotten fired. And her parents were splitting up. She doubted that those things happened because a man had just been a little too nice to someone.

  How much did the truth matter? Did it actually set everyone free? What if finding out the truth about her father and Cressida meant she couldn’t love him anymore?

  Avery got out the journal and sat in a patch of sun, with her back against a tree, and read it all again. She thought about Zinny, CJ, Kirsten, Gray, and Trevor. Closed her eyes and populated the brown grass at the quarry’s rim with the people from the journal, but when she opened her eyes, they weren’t there.

  Zinny had been a truth-teller, writing down even the saddest, hardest stories, and then, in fifteen minutes, so fast, she’d turned into a person who tore out the truth and burned it and was still tearing it out and burning it twenty years later.

  You didn’t tell someone part of a story and leave off the ending. It just wasn’t right.

  So Avery decided to throw her lot in with the old Zinny. In a scary, exhilarating instant, like Zinny on the edge of the quarry in the black of night, Avery took a breath and jumped. Let the truth come, she thought, no matter what.

  When she got back to school, even though Avery felt as if she’d been gone for hours and hours, lunch was still in progress. Some of the high school kids were sitting on the school lawn, eating outdoors in spite of the cold, and Avery could’ve joined them, but she wasn’t quite ready to be with people. Instead, she slipped among the branches of the row of trees at the edge of the parking lot, the place where Zinny and Kirsten had waited for Gray and CJ to come out of the burning school. The theater wing had been replaced a long time ago, right after the fire, but Avery looked up at its roof and invited sadness in, and sadness came.

  A man died here, she told herself, and his son stood over his body, and a friendship died, too, a special one that should have lasted forever, and people walk by here every day and don’t even know because there is no sign, there is nothing marking the spot.

  But that wasn’t true. She was marking it, Avery Beale McCue, Zinny’s daughter.

  When Avery’s mother picked her up, she said, “Do you want to tell me where you went?”
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  Avery shrugged. “I went to the quarry. I wanted to see it.”

  Her mother said, “Oh! I loved that place so much. But I haven’t been there in twenty years.”

  Twenty years ago, when her mom had turned from Zinny to Ginny.

  “Mom, why did people call you Zinny back then?”

  “Oh,” said her mother, flushing. “Trevor called me that when we were little—I think that’s just how he pronounced ‘Ginny’—and it stuck. But not everyone used that name on a regular basis, mostly just close friends. Other people called me Ginny. And, of course, my mother called me Virginia, always.” She smiled. “How I loved the name Zinny, even though it was weird. Because it was weird.”

  “It was original,” said Avery.

  “Thank you. But ‘weird’ was a compliment to me back then. I loved everything oddball. Z was my favorite letter, probably because hardly anything begins with it.”

  “What’s your favorite letter now?”

  “Oh. Huh.” Her mother frowned. “I guess I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I used to have a favorite everything. For some reason, it seemed very important to keep track of all the things in the world that I loved best.”

  “Don’t you still have favorite things?”

  Avery wasn’t used to feeling sorry for her mother. It was unsettling. Her mother was protective of her, not the other way around. But suddenly the idea of her mother no longer singling out and labeling the letters, colors, foods, places that were her favorites, the idea that she’d lost interest or that she’d come to feel that one thing was just as good as another, made Avery inexplicably sad.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe if I thought about it I would realize that I do.” She smiled at Avery. “But the only favorite thing that springs immediately to mind is you.”

  “Well, I think you should think about it.”

  “Okay. If you want me to, I will.”

  “Good.”

  Maybe because Avery had planned on staying mad at her mother for much longer than a day and because she felt her anger slipping away, she said, “Mom, can you please tell me what was on the journal page that you tore out and burned? I won’t talk about it to you or to anyone if you don’t want me to, but I need to know. I can’t even explain why.”

  The light in her mother’s face dimmed.

  “Avery, I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  “So that’s it? I can never know? What do you think will happen if you tell me? Will life as we know it end? Will the universe explode?”

  “I can’t tell you because it’s not my secret.”

  “Like only one person owns a secret,” scoffed Avery. “What about Dad’s secret? Was that just his?”

  Her mother sighed. “I see your point. And I hate that I can’t tell you, but I can’t.”

  “The truth will set you free. What about that, Mom?”

  Her mother shook her head. “Not this time. Not this truth.”

  Avery had waited until the lights went down in the auditorium of St. Michael’s School, before she’d gone in to find her seat. She’d told the woman sitting at a table in the school’s atrium selling tickets that she had to leave early, so she needed a seat at the very back, preferably on the aisle. The woman had said, “Well, that’s good because those are the only seats left. Next time, if you want a good spot, honey, you should get here earlier. They’ve probably already dimmed the lights, so you won’t be able to find your friends, either. The curtain’s going up at any second!”

  Not finding friends—or people Avery might know—was the whole point, but she hadn’t told the woman this.

  Avery had begun to investigate Cressida Wall. An outsider might have branded what she’d been doing as “stalking,” but Avery wasn’t obsessed and she wasn’t just idly curious about Cressida, either. She was seeking truth at all costs, and she knew the costs could be big.

  As she had scrolled through Cressida’s social media accounts, Avery wondered at the ways hers and Cressida’s lives had almost certainly brushed up against each other without either of them realizing it. Friends of friends. Sporting events. Academic competitions. There had been that one debate competition, but there had to have been other moments when they’d been at the same places at the same times. In one photo, Cressida had her long, thin, graceful arm slung around the shoulders of a girl Avery recognized as the field hockey goalie for St. Michael’s. Avery wondered if Cressida had been there when Lucretia Mott played at St. Michael’s last November, if she’d sat in the stands with her blond hair tumbling down her back, her makeup light but perfect, wearing tall boots and a scarf, while Avery ran around, red-faced and sweating in her goggles and mouth guard.

  In another photo, Cressida was wearing an apron and grinning behind the counter of a coffee bar. The caption read: “Having a latte fun at my new job!” Avery recognized the coffee bar, although it wasn’t the one she and her friends did homework in on Sunday afternoons. It was a few miles away, and one day about a week after her trip to the quarry, Avery told her mother she was staying after school to make up a test, and instead, she took a bus to Cressida’s coffee shop. On the way, Avery rehearsed nonchalance and sophistication, how her eyes would barely flit over Cressida’s face before she ordered a whole-milk cappuccino, instead of the coffee loaded with chocolate syrup and capped with whipped cream that was her usual choice. She’d brought a thick leather-bound copy of Jane Eyre, one of the books from her grandmother’s suitcase, to read while she sipped her drink and surreptitiously watched Cressida do her job.

  Avery could not have said exactly what insights she thought she’d glean from watching a girl take and ring up people’s orders. Smiling at customers, writing names on paper cups, making change: Was there a method of performing these tasks that would belie—or not—a capacity for manipulation and blackmail, that might betray—or not—the conniving homewrecker lurking within the bright-eyed high school girl? Avery wasn’t sure. Maybe it would be more a gut feeling; Avery would see Cressida and just know whether the rumors about her were true.

  But Cressida wasn’t working behind the register. She wasn’t making drinks in the intricate multistep way that always made Avery long to be a barista (the tamping down of the espresso powder was her favorite part) or bringing out food or busing tables, either. For well over an hour, Avery sat with her book open on the table in front of her, automatically decoding the words in the densely packed sentences of Jane Eyre without comprehending them and sipping her bitter, cooling drink, hoping that Cressida might breeze in with her scarf trailing and her golden hair clouding around her face. But she never did. When she took stock, Avery was happy to find that she was at least a tiny bit more disappointed than she was relieved at this.

  On the way out, she stopped to look at the flyers pinned to the bulletin board by the door, and there, gazing out from one of them, was Cressida, her face smudged and mournful-eyed under the brim of a big, soft mushroom cap of a hat: an ad for St. Michael’s School’s upcoming production of Les Misérables. In eighth grade, Avery had gone on a school trip to see a performance in Philadelphia, so she knew that Cressida was Éponine, brave and hopelessly lovelorn, who got to sing the prettiest song in the show.

  Despite the fact that riding the bus—every aspect of it, beginning with checking the online timetables—made Avery feel daring and capable as few things ever had (and she had enough self-awareness to see the humor in this: Sheltered Private School Girl Rides City Bus!), she had trouble envisioning herself doing it after dark. For a minute or two, she actually considered telling her mother about the play and Cressida and about her own quest for truth, no matter how ugly the truth might be. Weirdly, she believed her mother would probably be understanding and supportive, even though she’d worry, the way she always worried, that Avery might get hurt. It would be just like her to even offer to drop Avery off and pick her up. But then Avery reminded herself that she might never, as long as she lived, learn the story of the torn-out journal page, and she resolved to leave her m
other out of her quest for truth entirely. So Avery had gotten out the cash she’d saved from babysitting and had taken a taxi.

  There in the last row of the too-warm auditorium, a funny thing happened while Avery watched Cressida perform: she forgot why she’d come to watch her in the first place. She forgot to imagine Cressida talking to Avery’s father at work or in a restaurant; she forgot to wonder exactly who pursued whom and why. All she could think about was Éponine and her wild courage and her lost-cause love for Marius. Her voice—Cressida’s voice—was pure and water clear and heart piercing and suffused with sorrow. When Éponine died, in Marius’s arms, tears slid down Avery’s cheeks for the girl dying in the soft rain, all her devotion and valor come to nothing.

  While the actors were still taking their bows, Avery slipped out of the auditorium, went to the restroom, and stood in the last stall for a long time, waiting for the bathroom to empty out and for the clamor in the hallway outside to dwindle. When the school seemed quiet enough, Avery started to open the door of the stall, but three girls came in, talking.

  “She’s so full of herself it’s honestly kind of sickening,” said one.

  “Sarah was way better,” said another.

  “Even if she can sing, she’s still a slut who goes after old men.”

  Avery had heard other people malign Cressida like this, and even though her mom had taught her that the word slut was a weapon in a mean game to hurt girls and keep them from getting too strong and powerful, had taught her to never, ever use it, hearing the word applied to Cressida had mostly brought her relief. Better that Cressida be called a slut than that her dad be called a pedophile. But now, with Éponine’s voice still resonating inside her head, Avery could not reconcile the incandescent girl on the stage with those ugly rumors and that ugly label. She felt the urge to step out of the stall and confront those girls, call them jealous and petty, but she knew how little sense that made: Avery defending Cressida. So she kept quiet and waited until the bathroom door had swung shut behind the girls, then she called the taxi dispatcher, asked that she be picked up a block from the school, and she pushed open the school’s atrium doors and stepped out into the cold air.