by Nick Lake
To Hannah, for always.
To Brooms, for now.
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so.
Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time.
—BOB HICOK, from
“Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem”
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Acknowledgments
Also by Nick Lake
I’m going to be hit by a car in about four hours, but I don’t know that yet.
The weird thing is, it’s not the car that’s going to kill me, that’s going to erase me from the world.
It’s something totally different. Something that happens eight days from now and threatens to end everything.
My name is Shelby Jane Cooper—is, was, whatever.
I’m seventeen years old when the car crash happens.
This is my story.
8…
Chapter 1
When I come into the living room, Mom is not even slightly ready, which doesn’t surprise me. She’s got the TV on full blast; it’s so loud, the ground is vibrating. At the same time she’s got the closed captions on: Mom is a believer in total communication. She’s on the couch, in her pajama jeans, working on one of her cross-stitches. On the screen, it’s news: something about a plane crashing somewhere cold looking; torn metal gleaming in snow. I glance at the closed captions.
… with all 336 passengers lost, the black rocks—black box is yet to be discovered …
This is how they do it, see: there’s an actual person typing this stuff, and when they make a mistake, like saying black rocks instead of black box, they do that line, I don’t know what it’s called, like a long hyphen, and then they correct it.
It’s actually kind of hypnotic, because you start to picture this person, this totally ordinary person, not a presenter or anything, just sitting there and trying to write down what the anchor is saying and sometimes screwing up. It makes the TV feel human, I guess: I can see why Mom likes it.
Black rocks? says Mom, and I didn’t even realize she was watching. I mean, the context alone.
Oh yeah: this is the other reason she keeps the closed captions on. She loves to see how other people do it. Mom’s a stenographer at the courthouse. She spends her whole working life transcribing the words of lawyers and witnesses, so for her, the people who do it on the TV are like unseen competitors.
You coming? I ask.
Where?
I mime the swing, the slight pause when the bat strikes the ball, then the follow-through.
Mom checks her watch, ties off her thread, and wipes her hands on her pajama jeans. Sorry, she says. Got caught up. You finish your essay?
Yes, I say. I have just been typing a three-thousand-word essay on decolonization for her, with a special emphasis on French Indochina. That’s when I haven’t been talking to my online friends on the forums, anyway. I love it: I love how I can talk so quickly, I mean, I can talk at the speed I type, which is super fast. Mom doesn’t know I even HAVE online friends, she wouldn’t let me have Facebook, that’s for sure, but she doesn’t know that you can open a private browser window either, and then no one can see your history.
Okay, clarification: friends might be a stretch. But, you know, I have people I can talk to about TV shows and books that I love. And they know who I am, they welcome me when I log on. I know they could be anyone, they could be fifty-year-old creeps in their underpants, but I like talking to them. So sue me.
And anyway, it’s good for my typing skills, which helps when it comes to the tasks Mom sets me.
Mom is big on homework but she’s also big on typing and writing in general—it’s that total communication thing again, plus I guess she is a stenographer so it’s 110 percent obvious why typing would be important to her. So I don’t just have to do the essays, I have to do them in a set time. This decolonization essay she assigned me yesterday.
Good, she says, about the homework. I’ll read it tomorrow.
She puts aside the picture she’s been stitching. It’s the same as all the others—a Scottish highland scene, purple mountains in the distance, a loch in the foreground. This time, a thistle growing up in the very front, just so you really know it’s Scotland. Not that I believe Scotland really looks like that—I mean, there’s no way any real place has colors like that.
Don’t ask me why Scotland, either. It’s just what she does. Always landscape, never with a person in the frame. She covers the walls, and then when she runs out of space, she starts to throw them out and begins all over again. She orders the patterns from the Internet—for some reason, Scottish landscapes are popular enough that she pretty much never repeats herself.
One day, she often says, we’ll go there. See the mountains for ourselves. The stags.
No we won’t, I always think. We might see mountains, but not these ones. Not these crazy fairy-tale peaks with their bright cotton colors. Still, I would like to go. I’d like to get out of this city in the desert, which is the only place I’ve ever known. To stand in the mountains, smelling the heather and the gorse. Seeing the mist rise off the ground, wreathing the horns of a stag. Hell, seeing mist. The closest we get is that heat shimmer off the roads; off the sand of the desert.
But of course we’ll never go. We’ll never leave the Phoenix area. I have asked a thousand times for a vacation; to go to some other place. Mom always says no when it comes right down to it. We’ve never even been to the Grand Canyon, and you can fly there in like
an hour. There’s a little air strip in Scottsdale—it costs a thousand dollars per person, they fly you up there and all around the canyon, looking at it from above. A day trip. There was a time, when I was younger and brattier, I used to talk about it all the time, ask to go, mention it when my birthday was coming up. Now I know better. Now I know we can’t afford it—and even if we could, the scared look my mom gets on her face when it comes up, I think she’s scared of the plane.
So, SCOTLAND? Scotland is just a silly dream—hers more than mine, but mine too, I have to admit. If only to see what it really looks like.
Mom hauls her ass out of the easy chair, goes to the hall and pulls on a light jacket over her T-shirt and PAJAMA JEANS, and I’m putting that in all caps now in case you didn’t pick up on my subliminal referencing of her disgusting PAJAMA JEANS earlier. Also, in case it wasn’t obvious when I talked about her hauling her ass, she is not the slimmest, whereas I am naturally athletic, and this makes the pajama jeans look even worse. I mean, I love her anyway, she’s got meat on her bones, whatever, but she doesn’t have to wear that ridiculous garment.
Do you have to wear those? I say.
Yes, says Mom.
It’s two in the afternoon, I say. You can’t go out in pajamas.
That’s why they’re made to look like jeans.
They do not look like—
But she’s turned around, so she doesn’t catch that. She just grabs her bag and motions for me to follow. I sigh and shake my head, giving up. I have told her about those horrible pants so many times now, and she just doesn’t listen. It’s almost like she WANTS to look like a loser, so you know, shrug.
No, I take back the shrug. It does bother me.
Because it’s just … it’s just, she looks like a loser RIGHT NEXT TO ME.
So anyway, I pick up my own bag and go out with her onto the warm street.
Keep up, says Mom. And stay close. Sometimes cars come up on the curb and hit people.
I know, I say. I know.
I don’t know—not then, not for sure; I just believe her, like I believe her on everything.
Later, though, I do know for real.
Chapter 2
We live in a three-story apartment building in Scottsdale, Arizona, which is about as high as Scottsdale gets. We’re on Via Linda. That means “pretty road” in Spanish, inaccurately. On the plus side we have a shared pool, which gets cleaned, oh, ABOUT EVERY THREE YEARS, and if you continue walking on Via Linda you get to the desert in about a half hour, which is awesome.
That last bit isn’t meant to be sarcastic, by the way: I love the desert. Whenever I can, I go out there and just climb a hill or something. When I say “when I can” what I mean is, when I can persuade Mom to come with me. From my description of her ass in the pajama jeans you can guess that this is not a frequent occurrence. But sometimes, once every couple of months maybe, she’ll give in and haul herself, sweating, up a hill with me, and then at the top through panting breaths she’ll admit that, yes, it is beautiful.
Anyway, the mountains. There are loads of them. Then you can see to about infinity in every direction, all sandy flatness covered in scrub and cacti, and pale little hills sticking up under the endless wispy-clouded sky.
It’s possible to imagine, then, that you’re standing in five hundred years ago, before the settlers came, when the Apache and the Navajo and the Yavapai wandered the desert. Now they don’t wander so much—they stick to the Yavapai Nation reservation up in the hills near Flagstaff. Not that I’ve seen it—that would mean an actual honest-to-goodness trip, and Mom is never going to sign on for that. I don’t think there’s much there apart from a casino anyway.
Mom and I lived in Alaska till I was four—not that I remember it. South Alaska, not the full-on North Pole. Then we were in Albuquerque for like a year, I only vaguely remember it, and ever since then we’ve been in Scottsdale. Here. Once, I asked Mom why she came south to the desert, and she said, Alaska has fingers of rain and its eyes are always half-closed.
It is maybe relevant that Mom had a cooler of wine on board at this point, but she does say strange things even when she’s sober. For instance, she talks a lot about rain—she says I’m her daughter, and she loves me, and if she wants to keep the rain from falling on me, then what’s wrong with that?
Uh, nothing, I say when she comes out with crap like that, because the important thing is to agree with her.
Although, I kind of know what she means. That is, I only remember Arizona and New Mexico, so I don’t have anything to compare them to, but it’s true that it never rains here and there are no shadows, and you couldn’t call it sleepy or half-awake. It’s light all day, then the land closes its eyes and BOOM, it’s night. It gets cold at night—it’s because of the lack of moisture in the desert. Apart from that it’s almost always warm. Right now it’s spring and it’s like mid-seventies all the time. That’s another thing that Mom likes about it. She says, The cold in Alaska gets into your skeleton, and you can never shake it.
Right now, Mom is mainly trying to shake it by walking surprisingly fast down the street, her ass rippling in her, ahem, pajama jeans. That’s not subliminal anymore, by the way. It’s just description. No one walks in this part of Arizona—no one besides us anyway, because we don’t have a car. I mean, it’s just houses and strip malls.
And even though she’s overweight, she’s twenty feet ahead of me now, passing the Apache Dreams restaurant, a low block of a building with floor-to-ceiling windows. As far as I know it serves mainly waffles, which is a weird thing for an Apache to dream about.
I hurry to catch up. I’ve got jeans on—NOT pajama jeans—and there’s sweat trickling down my back, but it’s either that or show my scars, and I’m not doing that. My hair is pulled back in a ponytail, like always. I am wearing a T-shirt with a band name on it; it’s kind of a joke between me and my mom.
I read a load of books—Harry Potter, Twilight, but also George Eliot, Dickens, Faulkner—whatever. My mom taught me to read when I was, like, four. She’s pretty proud of it, and you know, I don’t really blame her. I’m glad, anyway—reading is awesome. Just escaping into someone else’s life, into another world. In books, everything is possible.
And … it seems that in girl books there’s always some description of the girl so you know what she looks like, but here’s the thing, I don’t KNOW what I look like. I mean, I have seen myself in mirrors, obviously. But okay, you tell me what you look like.
Not so easy, is it?
But, fine, to get it out of the way: I have brown hair. I have eyes. I have a nose, and a mouth. My mom says I’m beautiful, the most beautiful girl in the world, but she would say that, wouldn’t she? I guess it’s possible I’m pretty. I’m five-five. One hundred and fifteen pounds. Athletic, you could say.
Okay?
Moving on.
Ice cream for dinner after, honey? Mom asks when I’m walking beside her.
I nod. That’s what we do every Friday, of course, but she likes to ask, and what does it hurt? Anyway I love Ice Cream for Dinner Night. I always have. Me, I’d happily have Ice Cream for Dinner Night every night, like forever. I think Mom would too, but even though she shops in the plus-size section herself, it’s important to her that I stay healthy.
I like that—even more than I would like ice cream for dinner every night.
I step out into the street to cross over, and there’s a Chevy station wagon I didn’t see and—
—And I told you four hours, didn’t I? That’s only been, like, a half hour, don’t get ahead of yourself.
So Mom reaches out and gets ahold of my T-shirt and pulls me back onto the sidewalk, where I teeter for a moment.
No, Shelby, says Mom, shouts it, actually, which shows that she’s had a shock because she hardly ever uses her voice with me. Shelby is my name—I said that already, I think. Mom named me after a Ford Mustang Shelby GT, because she says it’s beautiful and powerful at the same time, and that’s what she wants fo
r me. Mom’s weird like that—she doesn’t even seem that interested in cars, but you never know what little thing she’s going to turn out to randomly know a load about.
You can never quite get a handle on her, is what it means. And you can never cheat on a test. Or make something up in an essay.
Sorry, I say.
It’s not … it’s not an apology that I need, says Mom. I need to know you’re safe when I’m not there. You’re just always dreaming. You KNOW, Shelby. You KNOW you look both ways before you—
Yes. I know. Then I get pissed, suddenly, like when a house light goes off on a timer. But you’re ALWAYS there, I say. You never leave me alone.
This is true—I mean, I’m homeschooled, so we spend a lot of time together. And no one could deny that Mom is über-protective and kind of scared of everything. When I was a kid she never let me out of her sight; she covered me in SPF-50 if we even stepped outside; she wouldn’t let me ride a bike.
But it’s cruel of me to say it that way, to tell her she never leaves me alone, because it’s not like I mind it—I mean, she loves me and she doesn’t want anything bad to happen to me; I get it. Right at that moment though I just want to hurt her.
Mom takes a deep breath … and says nothing. She just takes my hand and leads me across the road, as if I’m a little girl again. It’s Ice Cream for Dinner Night, she says just to herself, like a calming mantra, but I see it. I see the fear on her face.
Chapter 3
At the batting cages we check in and book a lane. Well, Mom does. And even though it’s the same zit-covered kid who greets us every Friday, she doesn’t look him in the eye—the whole time she’s talking to him, she’s directing her words and her slight smile to the worn carpet on the ground, as if it could answer. The kid hands over a token with a grin.
Lane eight, he says. Have a great time. He’s looking at Mom as he says it, but it’s the counter she nods to as she walks away. The word “shy” doesn’t even begin to cover it with Mom. The way she acts, it’s like everyone could have a knife hidden somewhere, ready to slice her up. I mean, yeah, she’s pretty strict with me, she keeps me safe, but put her in front of any kind of stranger and she just snaps shut, like an oyster.