I’m five feet ten inches of mostly loping legs. The summer before Mom died, a New York guy approached us in Crystal Village and gave her his business card, saying I could model if I rolled back my shoulders. For three weeks, I found Mom staring at that card. We needed the money. No clue what happened to it. What a joke that she even considered it.
Sovern Briggs ≠ fashion. Without Mom to guide me, I wore musty jeans and gray Converse every day. Only my T-shirt changed. And my days-of-the-week underwear. A long-standing joke between Mom and me, she’d first bought them when I was little, to help me memorize the spelling of each day. The tradition had continued, partly because on bad days Tuesday still got me.
In second period, Literature and Culture, I slumped into my smack-in-the-middle seat. This class was social studies and English rolled into one for underachieving upperclassmen. I’d deduced that the middle seat, in any class, attracted the least attention. I was the underachiever of the underachievers. The lowest ratio.
Lindholm stood at the back, adjacent to her desk, talking with Jenny Fowler. Jenny had made the U.S. ski team and was constantly gone to Chile or France or Italy. As the tardy bell rang, I tried to imagine a life with such purpose, and Jenny, tall as me but one-hundred-percent muscle, hurried to her front-row seat.
Lindholm touched my shoulder lightly—welcome back—as she walked up the aisle. A thin paperback book occupied her hands. I shrugged at the ghost of her touch on that shoulder, Handler’s on the other.
Lindholm held up the book: an orangey-red background with a sun setting or rising, I couldn’t tell. Books sped my heart rate. Across it stretched the silhouette of a bird, beak to the sky in flight.
“We’re studying the African-American experience next. This is I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. It’s a memoir by Maya Angelou, one of our most famous African-American writers and poets. She died on May 28, 2014. In December 2014, NASA sent a copy of her poem ‘A Brave and Startling Truth’ on the Orion, a spaceship that went farther into outer space than man has ever gone.”
Poetry didn’t usually do it for me, but that got my attention.
“She was only the second African-American poet,” Lindholm continued, “ever to read a poem at a presidential inauguration. President Clinton’s in 1993. It was titled ‘On the Pulse of Morning.’”
Catchy, that: a morning having life’s rhythm. I brought my free hand to my sling hand and pressed my thumb to my own unworthy pulse. I swallowed back that nicotine craving.
Lindholm would have us up to our elbows in African-American everything, like she had with Native Americans before this. Ask me anything about the Utes in the Rocky Mountain region. According to her syllabus, Asian-Americans were next. Though Crystal High was forty-eight percent Latino, hardly any African- or Asian-American students graced its halls. Lindholm seemed to be compensating for that.
She turned and wrote blue-ink facts about Maya Angelou on the SMART Board: Born 1928 in St. Louis, Missouri. I pulled out paper and started my usual mangled notes. Time was, a voice recorder rested on the front of my desk. Time was, Mom found audio versions of every book we read. My writing stopped as memory took over: me winging that voice recorder against my bedroom wall. Hearing it clunk to the floor behind my dresser. Grief had blocked me from noticing I’d stopped doing those things. I slouched back in my desk, ribs complaining, and traced my mind over the perimeter of who I’d been for the last year.
Crystal High was an open campus. At lunch, upperclassmen could leave school. I had first lunch at 11:00, so I was rarely hungry. I usually just bought an apple from City Market. Despite the storm, I decided to brave the five-minute walk. Though I despised cars, I missed Gage’s heated leather seats as I tugged up my parka’s hood. The recreation path had a direct spur, so driving and walking took the same amount of time, but walking wasn’t considered cool.
When entering City Market, the floral section was right there on the left. For the first time since Mom had died, I wandered through it. I traced a yellow tulip’s curved petal, a daisy’s circumference. I bent and inhaled a faceted rose. I decided to treat myself and buy something from the deli. As
I approached, Gage was standing there with two buddies, so I retreated into the bakery. Camouflaged behind a rack of fancy breads, I watched them stroll toward the doors, deli packages in their hands, headed for his car, no doubt. Gage always ate in his car, and he usually ate chimichangas. I’m attracted to anything bad for me, he’d say, then smirk and pull me close.
Gage was wicked smart. Made Bs and Cs even though he ditched constantly and never cracked open a book. If he sensed an A was near, he’d botch a test or skip a paper. School for him was a boring game. He hated the thought of college, but his parents were forcing him to go. The first two times, he sat through his entire SAT test, arms crossed. Meditating, he said. Then his dad took away his BMW SUV, so he finally tried and earned two points shy of a perfect score. His dad designed software for Microsoft. Gage lived in a slope-side house on Crystal Mountain and vacationed on their yacht in the British Virgin Islands.
I don’t want anybody telling me how to think, he’d say about college. When he saw in my expression that I agreed, he’d get this sheepish smile, say Come here, and kiss me. Except maybe you, he’d add. A joke, of course, since I rarely talked.
He adored my name. My birth certificate reads S-O-V-E-R-E-I-G-N. I can spell it now, if I concentrate, but it was way too much for a kid with dyslexia, so Mom shortened it to S-O-V-E-R-N.
On our first date, Gage had said, “Sovereign, like autonomous? Like self-governing? Like free? That’s fucking cool!” Most folks had no clue what “sovereign” meant. Gage and Mom might have been chummy if they’d met.
I ordered a Reuben, which took forever because they had to toast the rye bread and melt the Swiss cheese, but it was my favorite. The tables in the deli area were full, so I headed around the building’s side, to this delivery area with a portico high enough for semis. Snow pelted down. My ribs’ stabs made me smooth my pace to a lope, blinking against white. I entered the shelter, flakes weighing on my lashes.
Gage and his buddies looked up. He blew out cigarette smoke and nodded to me through its haze. His buddies glanced between us. Gage tossed them his keys.
“See you in the car,” they said. Their gazes trained on me in challenge as they walked past. Gage and me, we’d hung out full-time, so they hadn’t seen much of him the last few months.
“Hit a tree, huh?” Gage said.
I moved to the stucco wall and leaned against it.
“You do it for me? That’s romantic.” He took a long draw of his cigarette, its end flaring. He reached out and ran his fingers along my healing cheek. I stared at my sandwich to keep from slugging him.
“I miss you,” he said, smoke streaming out with his words.
“Why aren’t you in your car?” I said.
He lifted his brows. “Since when are you a talker?” He squinted at me, then shrugged. “I needed a change.” He looked out at the pelting snow. “I got used to you in that passenger seat.” He pressed his lips together and tapped them with the fingertips of the hand holding the cigarette. Then he offered the cigarette to me.
I shook my head. I wanted to blurt a million cruel things, but I didn’t trust words.
He shrugged, took a draw, stepped forward, and exhaled in my face, all sexy. “I miss you, Sovern. But you’re so pissed all the time.”
My body craved that cigarette down to my toes. My lips craved him more. He took a long draw, leaned forward, and kissed me.
“Tastes good, doesn’t it?”
I forced myself to match his stare.
“Want a ride?”
I longed to say yes, but I thought of Dad and shook my head.
His brows rose in surprise. “See you in Calc.” He strolled around City Market’s corner toward the parking lot.
I studied the sandwich in my
hands. Its delicate cellophane reflected my unlucky face, and I covered it with my thumbs.
6
I slumped on the curb, burning from Gage’s kiss. I tore open the sandwich, determined to be good, but on the third bite, I exploded up and headed into the snow. With no idea where I was going, I ended up on the recreation path that snakes along the river and through town. There’s a short stretch between Crystal Village and school that hugs the banks beneath an arch of regal spruce. It feels protected, safe.
Four inches of snow had covered the path since they’d plowed that morning, and my knees lifted high. At each stab of my ribs, I said, “I can.” I can stay in control. I can hang on to that thread of goodness. I can remember Dad holding me on the couch, holding my hand through the sled’s tarp. I can resist Gage. Gage = smoking, drinking, drugs. “I can. I can. I can.”
I tried to summon Mom’s voice from memory, saying You can right with me, but it wouldn’t come.
Snow raced at my eyes. Hair escaped from my hood and pestered my cheeks. I blinked back tears, stumbled on the path’s edge, and slammed against a tree before I hit ground.
“Dammit!” I rolled to my knees and pulled my feet beneath me, left palm against bark for balance. A sound—like a plucked-cello-string—vibrated through me. Eighteen vibrations seemed to shimmer out my quill-pocked cheek.
Soft sun. New-green grass. A fly’s zzzzzz.
I lifted my head, blinking. Mom and I strolled toward me on the path. Mom’s arm curved around my waist, and the Sovern in front of me listened as she spoke.
“See?” Mom said. “Always believe you can.”
I blinked. I’d gone insane. The Sovern looked my age, but content. She smiled a little and wore black slacks and a pale blue blouse. A blouse I’d never owned. Her hair weaved a French braid. Mom’s flowery dress billowed against a breeze that brushed warm on my face. A butterfly flitted behind them. Yet this was nothing like images on a movie screen. This was 3-D. Real.
“Mom?” I said.
Her eyes leapt to me, her brown gaze more piercing, more determined, more alive than ever.
Do people really gasp? That’s the only way to describe the sound I made. I stepped toward her, hand reaching.
White blur. Stinging snow. Biting wind.
“No!” I rushed to where Mom and I had stood. Of course there were no footprints. But they’d been so real!
I imagined Mom’s arm around my waist, its comforting friction of embrace. That vision-me seemed to be my opposite. Not just because of the blouse and slacks. Not just because of my tidily braided hair. No, the difference lay in how she held her body. The ease of her step, the suspension of her arms from un-hunched shoulders, and the confident tilt of her chin. On that Sov, these aspects of me were unified and relaxed.
I ran my fingers across my brow. If someone had taken a thousand photos of me over the past year, that brow would be furrowed in 999 of them. Now those furrows were deeper than ever.
Mom had looked right at me. She’d heard me. I considered my wet Converse, my dirty jeans, my empty-sleeved parka, the bulge of my sling, and the scraggly ends of my hair. No doubt my cheeks were chafed from cold, like my hand now stuffing my hair into my hood. I studied my lone tracks, followed them with my gaze to the tree and the matted circle where I’d fallen, and then back down the recreation path till they disappeared around a curve. Each step was long, since I’d lifted my knees. Each footprint solitary. Snow pelted my back, and it seemed the loneliest trail in the world.
I sensed motion and my pulse sped. “Mom?”
Nothing.
A familiar shuffling drew my gaze to the tree’s middle branches. I discerned a different texture: a brown-gray lump peering down at me. I traced the quill-pricks on my frosty cheek.
7
I pressed the code on the Condo’s garage keypad—0501, my birthday—and stormed in. I toed off my soaked Converse and yanked off my socks. My feet were cold red. I hung my parka from its hook. I marched upstairs to Mom and Dad’s room. To their wedding photo on their dresser. In it, they faced one another and held hands with their heads steepled close. They stood a few hundred yards from Emerald West’s ski-patrol office, where I’d waited in my sled for Dad to ski me down.
In the picture’s background loomed Phantom Peak. It was named for how its ridge cast an afternoon shadow on itself that resembled a face. According to legend, that face used to hold a distinct willful expression, but these days, it was open to interpretation. Chuck Murphy, Justice of the Peace, stood before Mom and Dad, holding their vows. Those vows now hung, framed, on the wall beside the dresser. I studied Chuck Murphy’s jolly face and longed to gouge my fingernails into whatever face—God, fate—had stolen Mom.
Mom’s wedding dress was creamy and knee-length, and matching roses lined the fold of her hair’s French twist. I pressed my thumbnail against the thin crescent of scar on her left eyebrow. She’d gotten it tree-skiing with Dad on her first day of ski-patrol training. According to Mom, it had bled a ton, and as Dad applied the bandage, she’d felt an actual spark at his touch.
Even on this wedding day, Mom was just pretty. Thank God you got your father’s looks, she always joked. Yet Mom’s personality gilded her lovely, and at times she stole my breath. She stole Dad’s, no doubt, and it was obvious from the way he looked at her in the photo. He was stunningly handsome in a black tux. The photo didn’t show the two hundred guests watching them speak these vows. I’d have given anything to have sat among them.
I took the photo to Mom’s side of the bed and lay down in her place. I ran my finger over her image. Just half an hour ago, the vision of her had seemed so real.
“Help, Mom. Are you out there?”
Insanity. That’s what was going on. Gage + nicotine withdrawal = me over the edge. I felt myself soar over Pride’s edge, counted—one, two, three, four, five, six—and laughed that desperate kind of non-laugh.
The picture fell to my chest. My left hand was tired from doing everything. I tilted up my palm and scanned its lines. Was my life’s path graphed out there? Did a hash mark show where Mom died? Could there be another hash marking her return? I turned my head into Mom’s pillow and sniffed, but a year of laundry had erased her honeysuckle scent.
“Help, Mom. Anything?”
It felt like my ears bled, I listened so hard. I heard Gage instead: I miss you. I shook my head. Gage represented all the wrong things I’d done over the last year. Gage + me = hurting Dad. I had to move on. I concentrated on the photo again till Mom and Dad turned blurry and sleep took me.
My sophomore year, Handler told Mom he thought I was gifted in math. All I knew was that right after Mom died, the patterns I’d seen my whole life turned intense. As a junior, I was taking Advanced Placement Calculus, which was the equivalent of Calc 1 and 2 in college. The next year I’d take an online Calc 3 class Handler found at Stanford.
“You could have eight college credits,” Mom had said when he’d first laid out the plan.
I’d scowled at her. Just the word “college” summoned a vision of me flailing through a maze of books. But I took Calc after all because, well, math was my thing. It structured life into vivid sense. I hoped, wherever Mom was now, this one talent made her grin.
The first day I walked into Calc, Gage had already claimed my seat in the middle. Only two open seats remained: the first row, or directly in front of him. No way was I sitting in the first row, so I slid into that dangerous desk. His scrutiny singed my back, but I was too proud to move.
The first month, we didn’t talk, but each day Gage turned me molten. In reality, I was probably just a narrow back with unbrushed hair. Then Kenowitz caught me doodling as he solved a problem on the SMART Board. Handler had sent out word to keep an eye on me, for sure. All my teachers were watching me close.
“Sovern, are you getting this?” Kenowitz said.
Mom’s abs
ence had been practically pulling me under that day, so I glowered and nodded. I’d already gone through the entire book the first week of class.
“You can solve this problem, then?”
I shrugged.
“Will you show us?” Disbelief laced Kenowitz’s smile. He was a cool teacher, really; I just have this way of confounding people. Of catching them off-guard and making them act ways they don’t usually act. Ways they’re ashamed of later. I don’t mean to, and it’s kind of hard to watch. Friendships are a struggle. I avoid people mostly.
Kenowitz handed me the black marker, and I stepped to the SMART Board. About two minutes later, I’d solved the problem, skipping a step by using a different approach than the clunky one taught in the book. When I turned around, Kenowitz’s mouth hung open. In fact, fifteen zero-shaped mouths faced me. And one smirk: Gage.
The quest over, I lost my composure. My cheeks flamed. I sat down.
Kenowitz stepped to the board, considering me. He pressed his lips and scanned the room. “Well, people,” he said. “Let’s try the next problem using the method Sovern has shown us.”
He turned to the board. Everyone started writing. I felt a pencil—a finger maybe—rustle my hair’s ends along my back.
“Genius,” Gage whispered.
The next day, when I sat down, he said, “Briggs. You’re named for a two-masted ship. Me, Brogan, I’m named for work boots. The lace-up kind.”
I turned in my desk, disbelief all over my face.
“Yeah, a ‘brig’ is a jail, but it’s also a wind-driven ship. A beauty.” For once, he wasn’t wearing his hat, and his blunt fingers tucked his shoulder-length hair behind his ear. A lock of it fell forward, showing his ear’s tip, and something about that blunt-fingered movement and that sliver of ear was so alluring I actually salivated. My zigzag smile must have looked ridiculous. A sliver of ear + agility with words = I don’t have a chance.
Life at the Speed of Us Page 4