by Phoebe North
She grimaces through tears. “Thanks, Mom,” she says, voice heavy with sarcasm.
I laugh a little. I run my hand through my hair. “I was just trying to help,” I tell her. And I realize I’m angry, too, whether at her or the situation, I can’t be sure. “It’s really not that bad, if you don’t smoke it all the time. It can help you be creative . . . ,” I trail off. This feels like it isn’t going so well. “It’s not a big deal. It’s really not!”
“Whatever,” she says, shaking her head. “Drugs. It’s so ridiculous. Could you be more cliché, Vidya?”
That stings. I sit down on the stairs, not answering her for a long time. Annie finally notices my expression, which must say everything about how much that hurt.
“Sorry,” she says. Her face is still teary when she exhales, hard. “I’m just scared.”
“Of smoking?”
“Of the whole thing,” she says. She cracks her knuckles. I flinch at the noise. “I caught Jamie smoking pot in the woods once. I knew that was the beginning of the end for him. He was slipping away from me, and I couldn’t stop it. And then I really lost him—”
Her voice chokes in her throat. I hold out my hand. After a moment’s pause, she takes it and sits on the stairwell beside me.
“I can’t imagine what it’s like to have a brother,” I tell her, “much less to lose one.”
She laughs at that, but it’s not a funny kind of laughter. “It sucks.”
“Yeah,” I agree. My thoughts are turning over and over in my mind. I’m groping through the darkness for the right words, channeling my mother again. When I stroke Annie’s hand, it’s with the same even pressure with which my mom touches me.
“Pot didn’t take your brother away,” I tell her.
She sniffles. Nods. “I know. It’s just . . . we made a promise to each other when we were little kids.”
“When I was a kid,” I start, smiling, “I swore I would never have sex. It just sounded revolting.”
“I’m glad you changed your mind,” she says faintly, then turns to plant a kiss just behind my ear. I lean into it. “But I’m still not sure,” she murmurs against my neck.
I nod. “It’s up to you,” I tell her. And then I add, “No one will be mad at you if you don’t. I won’t be mad at you.”
“But they laughed at me,” she says. I grimace.
“Fuck ’em,” I tell her. She cracks a small smile.
We stay there for a moment in the bright stairwell, breathing together, hardly moving. Then, with a sigh, Annie stands up and offers me her hand.
“Okay,” she says. “I’ll give it a shot.”
I stare at her, numb for a moment. Shocked. It’s not the answer I expected from her. I don’t think it was the answer Annie expected from herself, either. She laughs a little—at me, at herself, I’m not sure which.
“Come on,” she says.
I take her hand and together, we head back into the crowded motel room.
We’re in bed when our motel room door opens, and for a moment all I can see is the sinister shape of Mrs. Kepler’s head as she counts us. Her bun almost looks like a second smaller skull on top of her skull. I hold my breath until my chest aches and it’s not until the door closes and the world is dark again that I take a long, jagged gasp.
“You’re alive,” Annie reminds me, and she’s kissing me, her mouth wet and soft and supple, and I’m not afraid anymore, I’m only leaning into her in the pitch-black blackness. She’s leaning back and kissing me, saying between kisses, “You’re here. You’re not dead, Vidya. You’re alive.”
Sensations wash over me: cold and pleasure and dark and we’re kissing and we shouldn’t be doing this here, with Meg snoring in the bed across the room and Harper probably eyes wide open and listening, but we do it anyway, I touch her, and her body feels like something, and then I realize with a grin in the darkness: she feels like hot.
After, we lie together and my heart pounds up in the darkness. I’m sure everyone can hear it, Harper and Meg and most of all Annie, my blood pulsing, my breath heavy and dull but then I hear Annie next to me. When I look over, I can make out the shape of her by the light of the red blink blinking smoke detector. At first I think she’s crying again and my heart beats for her, but she’s not. She’s curled up in bed, her hands tucked under her chin, and by the light of the smoke detector, she’s laughing, like someone just told her the funniest joke.
“What is it, darling?” I ask, because I’m stoned and suddenly it doesn’t feel ridiculous to call her my darling, because that’s what she is.
“Oh, nothing. It’s just—it’s just—” More laughter, and now Meg snorts and chokes and sits up, then hisses at us from across the motel room.
“SHH!”
I put a hand over Annie’s mouth. She laughs into it, until finally her breath calms and she’s just panting up into the darkness. When she looks at me, I can see that her eyes are wide open, like it might as well be daylight in that dark, dark motel room, and she’s smiling, still.
“What is it?” I whisper, my mouth very close to her ear.
She looks at me, smiling and blinking, all brightness and day, and as if it’s the happiest thing, the sanest thing, she whispers, “It was never me. It was always Jamie.”
“What?” I whisper back.
“Every single idea I ever had, every law, every vow, every mountain we climbed, every river we named, it was Jamie. I was just the archivist. I was only the archivist.”
My mouth is very, very serious in the darkness, a flat line. “I don’t understand.”
“I was the archivist, Vidya. Even of you. I didn’t dream you up. He did. You were his idea first.”
She’s laughing again, howling into the dark.
“Would you keep it down?” Meg asks, and Annie clutches the pillow to her face and tries to calm her breath, but she can’t, and I can’t, either, not anymore, the tears in the darkness streaming down my face, but I can’t tell you why I cry them.
Twenty
I’M QUIET ON THE BUS ride home. But then, almost everyone is quiet—exhausted or hungover or both. Annie’s got her head on my shoulder. She’s drawing something. Her hands never seem to stop moving. When I glance over, I see that she’s sketched out the bones and body of a hare, sliced open by a familiar knife that sits in the shadowed underbrush. The blood she’s drawing is dark, heavy hatch-marked lines of graphite against the paper. The whole scene is beautiful and disgusting, all at once.
I know how that hare feels. But I don’t tell Annie.
When the bus lets us off in the high school parking lot, both of our mothers are waiting in their cars. Annie grabs me, and I let her, right there, in front of our moms, in front of everybody, and I let her kiss me long and deep to prove to myself that everything is okay.
It’s not.
“You must have had a nice weekend,” my mom says when I hop in the car and slam the car door behind me.
“It sucked,” I say gravely. “We lost.”
“Hmm,” my mom says. “Have you been practicing?”
No, of course I haven’t. I’ve been preoccupied lately.
“As much as we ever practice,” I tell her with a shrug, which I know is a cop-out. I’ve always worked harder at music than Harper and the rest of them, even when it was just me and James and Neal Harriman, making up crappy songs in Neal’s basement. It never really seemed like work to me before. But Annie’s distracted me from that. Made it seem like real things—piano, Madrigals, Brian Wilson—aren’t half as important as the things that are going on inside her head. I start to fiddle with the radio so that I won’t have to explain myself. Mom’s looking at me sidelong, her mouth wry.
“You know, Vidya,” she says as we head out of the parking lot. “It’s time we started visiting colleges. Have you looked at the spreadsheet I made for you?”
I glower at her. “I’m not going to college. I’m going to music school. You must have been talking to Naniji again,” I grumble.
Mom takes my brattiness in stride, though. She just rolls her eyes and lets out a little sigh. “Oh, Vidya,” she says gently.
For some reason, that’s the worst thing she could possibly say to me. I scrunch down low in the seat and try to make myself invisible.
So. Here’s the problem: I love Annie, and I know I love her, but so many things about her make my heart feel sick in my chest.
Alone in my room that night, when I should be practicing piano for the recital that’s coming up, or doing trigonometry homework, or looking at that stupid college spreadsheet my mother made me, I split a piece of notebook paper down the middle.
On one side, I write down the things I love about her. Freckles. Laughter. Boldness. The way she makes me feel like I could do anything. The way she makes me feel like I’m a character in a book.
I scratch out that last one. I put it on the other side, with a question mark after it. On the side with the things I don’t like about her. Her family scares and confuses me. I’m not sure what’s real and what’s make-believe with her. I want Gumlea to be a game. The way James spoke of it, it was nothing more than a fairy tale told on boring family car trips. But Annie makes me feel uncertain. I don’t think it’s real. It’s not. It can’t be real. But she might think it’s real, and she’s lying to her psychologist about that, and that scares me, too.
And then there’s James. The shadow we can never outrun. He’s with us when we’re kissing and when she’s telling me about the fall of Gumlea’s king. He’s with us when I hold her hand, my fingers circling her knuckles, and I find myself thinking of James, and of how she feels like him.
I don’t like how good that feels, how being with her has brought him back from the dead. Some spirits are better left buried, and I don’t believe in spirits anyway. I’d moved on, before I moved on to his sister. And now I’m stuck.
And Annie’s stuck. That’s the worst part, isn’t it? It’s not just that he’s a shadow I’ll never outrun. Someday, I’ll move away from this town. Go to the city. Finally start a band. What will Annie do? Sit here and wait for her brother to come back. I think about her artwork, how her hands are always all silvery from pencil dust, how she’s always drawing, always coming up with these amazing scenes that are like something out of another universe. I think about how nobody ever seems to notice them except me. I think about how even Annie shrugs them off, like they’re not important.
Like she’s not important.
I tear the notebook page into tiny pieces and let them shower down into my trash can along with the stray hair from my hairbrush and a note from Keira that I found in my desk drawer last week and finally, belatedly threw away.
I trudge through the week, acting like it’s nothing that I’m making lists like these—that I’m having doubts like these. I kiss Annie and leave my hand on her leg at lunch and tell myself what matters is how I feel. And in the moment, most moments, I feel good. Mostly.
But sometimes—at Madrigals, when I’m trying to sing and her eyes are shining out at me from across the risers full of love and magic—it doesn’t feel good at all.
She calls me up a few nights later. It’s a Saturday, and I’ve been in my room for hours, trying to write her a song, failing. I didn’t expect her to call tonight. She should be at her dad’s. She never calls on Saturday nights. But her voice is ragged, like she’s been crying for a while.
“Mom says she’s selling the house.”
“What?” I ask. Horrors flash through my mind. I wonder where they’ll be moving to. I always said I didn’t want a long-distance relationship, but that was before Annie, before I felt her soft hip against my belly.
“I can’t believe she’s doing this, Vidya. I can’t lose Gumlea. If we lose the house, we’ll never see him again. This’ll be it for Jamie coming back to us, and she doesn’t even care. He’s gone. Gone.”
“Where are you? Are you at your dad’s?”
“No. I’m at our house. Her house. God, I can’t believe this. She won’t even talk to me about it. She says there’s nothing to talk about.”
“Can you hold on a minute?”
“Yeah.”
I go to Mom and Dad’s room, where they’re both up reading, their toes touching over the sheets.
“Can Annie come over tonight? I think she had a fight with her mom.”
Dad looks at Mom. They nod together.
I put my phone under my ear. “If your mom can give you a ride, you should come over. Spend the night. Get out of there. Get some air.”
There’s a long pause. Annie sniffles.
“Okay, yeah. I’d like that. Sure. See you soon.”
She hangs up. I hesitate for a minute, forgetting that I’m still standing in my parents’ doorway like a little kid who swears she’s just seen a monster under her bed.
“Everything okay, sweetie?” Mom asks. I force a smile.
“Yeah, sure,” I tell her. But we all see right through it. Of that, I’m certain.
An hour later, Annie is sitting on my bedroom floor. She’s taken off her sneakers and left them in a pile by my bedroom door, and she’s clutching an overstuffed backpack to her chest. Her face looks wet, but I’m not sure if it’s from tears or from the rain outside. It’s one of those cold autumn nights that is basically winter. Her hair looks black, plastered to her face.
“I can’t believe she didn’t talk to you about this first,” I tell her. “I mean, you grew up in that house, right?”
Annie clutches her backpack tighter and nods, sniffling. It’s clear now that she has been crying. For hours, probably. “They bought it six months before Jamie was born,” she says, her voice ragged. “Mom and Dad had rented for years before that but—but my mom was pregnant, and they wanted us to have stability, they said. Like, to live in a normal house. Like a normal family. Like we’ve ever been a normal family. It’s such bullshit.”
She rubs her fist against her eyes. I’m sighing as I sit down beside her.
“I mean,” I say, “I can understand why she’d want to leave now. With the divorce and everything . . .” I trail off carefully. I’m talking around the issue of James, mostly because I’m afraid of what she’ll say if I mention his name. “But you’re fifteen. You’re not some little kid. She should have talked to you about it first. It’s—it’s not respectful.”
Maybe it’s a ridiculous idea, that Annie’s mom would respect her like my parents respect me. But they do. Even when they’re being strict with me about something, I understand it’s because they have my best interests at heart. Maybe that’s why I can’t imagine how I’d feel if they sold our house without talking about it first. They’d never pull the rug out from under me like that—ever.
“Respectful,” Annie says with a snort. “She called up Dad and demanded he bring me home early and didn’t even tell him why. He drops me off and there’s the ‘For Sale’ sign outside and the Realtor sitting in there with Mom, having tea. When I tried to talk to her about it, Mom told me we couldn’t discuss it now because there was company over.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say. “Total and utter bullshit.”
“Totally,” she agrees. “When the old lady saw how pissed I was, she went to the bathroom. And that’s when Mom said she couldn’t tell me before, because she knew I wouldn’t be reasonable about it.”
“It’s not like she even gave you a chance to be reasonable!” I protest, which, okay, feels a little ridiculous because if there’s one word I would never, ever apply to Annie, it’s reasonable. For a bunch of reasons, too many to count.
But Annie just says, “Right?” and kind of laughs softly, despite herself.
“You’ll be okay,” I tell her, taking her cold hand in mine. It feels clammy and halfway dead. “We’ll get through this t
ogether.”
She squeezes my fingers. “You don’t know how much that means to me,” she tells me, then puts her head on my shoulder. I tell myself that maybe it’s true. We will get through this together. We’ll write romantic emails and texts and the distance will feel like nothing in the scheme of things.
“Where do you think she’ll be moving?” I ask her in a soft voice. Annie shrugs.
“Does it matter? I don’t know. Probably Westchester, to be closer to her sister. Westchester. Ugh.”
I laugh a little. It’s a very Annie response. Of course she would hate Westchester. When I’ve imagined a future for Annie, it’s either in the city or somewhere off in the middle of nowhere. Alaska or something. She looks at me, laughing a little, too. And then we’re kissing. Her whole body feels wet and cool and her touch send shivers through me. She puts her cold hands against my stomach, under my T-shirt. I’m covered in goose bumps then, but I don’t care. I wish we could be together like this forever. Kissing and touching, our bodies shivering together, setting off sparks.
The floor is hard under us but I don’t even care. I think, I’m going to make her forget the world is a terrible place, and there, on my bedroom floor, I do—for a little while. Because after, I’m lying there with my head against her belly, my hair a dark tangle. She’s not cold anymore. Our bodies feel almost the same. Warm and raw and bright. But then my gaze lands on her backpack, which has fallen, half-unzipped, on my bedroom floor.
There’s the knife. That stupid knife, the one I chose so carefully, thinking it would be somehow romantic. But of course, the knife had nothing to do with us, not to Annie. It was his profile she drew on the side of the handle, facing her own. Not mine.
There’s other stuff in there, too. Her schoolbag is packed with sticks and leaves and long tangles of twine. I can see the ends of tapered candles, four or five of them. And who knows what else.
“What is that all?” I ask, sitting up. Annie sits upright, too. She’s blushing slightly, reaching for the backpack.