by Sara Wolf
“The death metal fans of the world beg to differ.”
Kayla rolls her eyes, and when the waitress returns with our drinks, she orders spring rolls for us to split. I look around nervously at the decor. The same colorful birds of paradise linger in the vases, and the crystal light fixtures look like seaweed suspended in ice.
“I’ve never been here,” I say. “It’s nice.”
“Oh, don’t lie.”
A cold jolt runs down my spine and into my butt. It is mildly unpleasant. “What?”
Kayla sips her tea. “Jack told me you stalked us on our date.”
“That was only because he was, objectively, a nasty-faced pus-butt bug-eater, and I had to—”
“I know you paid him to take me out,” she interrupts. I gape like a particularly mute fish. “It’s fine. I’m over it. That seems like so long ago.”
“You—” I swallow. “You aren’t super pissed?”
“Why would I be? It was one of the best nights of my life.”
“When did he—”
“The night we broke up. The morning after Avery’s party, when she—”
When she locked Wren and a drugged Kayla in a room. I don’t say that, though, and it really doesn’t need to be said. Kayla shakes her hair out.
“It was when you and Wren went to kick Avery’s ass. Jack and I talked about a lot of things. That was one of them. He came clean.”
“I never did. Shit, I never told you,” I say instantly. “And I’m really sorry—”
“Don’t be, idiot.” She kicks me under the table. “It’s over and it was a long time ago, and anyway I’d forgive you for anything. Short of killing my baby brother. And maybe I’d even forgive you for that, depending on how much he’d spit up on me that week.”
Our spring rolls arrive, and I drown my gratitude in sprouts and poser meat made out of innocent bean curds. Kayla talks about Massachusetts, and all the places she’s going to visit with Wren. The East Coast will suit her—she’s gorgeous and tan and tall, and a big city is all but required so the maximum amount of peons will be able to bask in her splendor as she blooms into the most beautiful woman in the world, and eventually, the queen of Westeros.
“I don’t even like Game of Thrones,” she offers, and I realize I was speaking my thoughts again. “Everyone is too white.”
The books have fewer white people, and she would know this if she read more often.
“I’ve been reading War and Peace.”
Correction: she’d know this if she read better, not-dumb books more often.
“Oh my God, you’re a snob. I’m best friends with a book snob.”
I flip my hair and order stir-fried rice. Kayla orders coconut curry. Somewhere outside, a man yells “FUCK” and another man yells “STOP” but we never see them and keep eating our appetizers gleefully. Life goes on outside the restaurant without us. It is all very dramatic. Kayla picks at her nails, a somber look replacing her faint exasperated joy.
“I’m going to miss you, snob.”
I reach across the table and put my hand over hers.
“I’ll always be with you,” I say. She smiles, and I continue. “As a pair of disembodied eyes. Watching your buttocks with great admiration-slash-envy-slash-protective maternal instinct.”
“Ew.”
“Wren won’t know what hit him when I materialize out of thin air on your first get-it-on night and punch him in the mouth.”
Kayla glares.
“Softly. Sock him in the mouth softly,” I correct. “With my pinkie.”
Our dinner arrives and we eat like starved hyenas, which is an improvement, because on the ladder of voracious eaters teenage girls are just below great white sharks and above starved hyenas, which means we are actually behaving ourselves. The waitress doesn’t seem to think so, and she wrinkles her nose when she takes away our dishes, the rings of food left behind like halos of glory. And indigestion. I duck into the bathroom for a second to wash my face free of peanut sauce. And it’s then the memories come flooding back with a particularly heinous vengeance. Jack leaned against that counter. Jack touched that sink. Jack touched my face for the first time while he stood where the counter and the wall met. Jack’s in every tile of this bathroom, and I can’t escape it.
I don’t want to.
He might be missing, gone from my life like a ghost, but here? He’s still here. I can envision his tall frame here. I can close my eyes and be in the past again.
It’s just a dumb bathroom in a Thai restaurant. But to me, it’s so much more.
I wash my face and stare in the mirror.
This is the last dinner Kayla and I will have together for a long time. Four months, at least. I leave tomorrow. She leaves a week after. This is where it all stops, and begins again. Nobody knows what will happen, but I’m determined to keep her in my life. I won’t lose her.
Not like I lost Jack.
“Everything okay?” Kayla asks when I come back to the table. “Diarrhea?”
“Oh, constantly. It’s my superpower. Semiautomatic shitting.”
Kayla’s quiet, which either meant she didn’t get my joke or she wasn’t listening.
“You miss him, huh?” she asks quietly.
I know who she’s talking about. It’s hard not to guess when he’s a giant pink elephant all but sitting on our faces. Spiritually. Spiritually sitting on our faces. But I play dumb because that’s easier.
“Wren? Hell yeah, I miss him. I messaged that nerd on Facebook last night and he never—”
“I meant Jack, dummy.”
I’m quiet. Kayla sighs and crosses her arms over her chest as she waits for the check.
“It’s not fair. He just took off and left you.”
I laugh, the sound bitter. “It’s fine. There was nothing between us, anyway.”
Kayla gives me another, sharper death stare. She’d learned from Avery well. “Don’t bullshit me, okay? There’s an entire school that can attest to your mutual attraction. Plus, I’m your best friend. And I dated him for a while. I know exactly how much you meant to each other.”
“Obviously not a lot.” I laugh again. “Since he left so quickly. Without saying good-bye.”
Kayla’s silent, waiting for more. I smile.
“Living is really weird,” I say. “You never get used to it. But it happens anyway. And sometimes you find things that make it a little more comfortable, and you try to hold on to those things, and the tighter you hold, the faster they slip away.”
I look out the window to the dusk-painted main street, gold streetlamps just starting to bloom. I’ll miss this small town. It won’t miss me.
“I think Sophia knew that the best out of all of us. Maybe she was the only one in the world who knew that. Maybe that’s why she just…let go. Because the things she loved were leaving faster the tighter she held on.”
“Isis—”
I turn back to Kayla. “I’m okay, I promise. I’ve just been thinking about her a lot. About what I could’ve done. Gran told me I couldn’t have done anything. But I could’ve. I could’ve just…let go. I could have let Jack go, and maybe Sophia would still be here.”
“That’s not true!” Kayla protests.
“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But the only thing I really know is in that alternate world where I let Jack go, Sophia is more likely to still be alive.”
Kayla flinches. The waitress leaves the bill, but Kayla doesn’t even notice. I motion at it.
“You gonna get that? We can splitzies.”
We split the bill evenly. On the drive home, with the sky as dark and starless as cold ocean water, Kayla finally speaks.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Isis.”
“No,” I agree. “You’re right. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything at all.”
Kayla tries to break the dark ice that’s layered over our conversation, and I try, too. The shadow of Sophia’s death haunts us. Me. It haunts me, and it’s ruining this good-bye,
and I can’t even stop it.
“Look, Kayla, I’m sorry. I’m just…just really sorry. I don’t know when I got like this, and I promised myself I wouldn’t—”
“But it’s easier said than done,” she interrupts. “I know. Wren’s been like this, too. Don’t worry. It’s okay. I’ve had practice handling mopey.”
Her smile is a little drained.
When we pull into my driveway, we sit in the dark car, watching the moths attack the porch light. They throw themselves at it, over and over again, like they want to catch fire and burn.
“I’m lucky I met you.” I smile at Kayla. “And I’m triple lucky you have a thing for insane weirdos. Pretty much won the friend lottery.”
“So did I.” Kayla pouts. “Without you, I never would’ve realized Avery was using me.”
“Jack helped.”
She nods, grinning wryly. “I guess. A little.”
“Do you remember the first time we met at Avery’s party? And he made you cry?”
“Oh God, I was such a crybaby. I can’t even believe how dumb I was. And that was just, like, ten months ago. I could’ve had a baby in that time.”
“A crybaby,” I insert.
“All babies are crybabies,” she counters. I take on a wise old man squint and voice as I postulate.
“But are all crybabies…babies?”
Kayla courteously punches my arm, then sighs and leans back in her seat.
“Jack was the first one to bring it up. He made me start questioning everything—why I was hanging with Avery, did I really enjoy her company, how much of my feelings were hidden behind the shopping and the gossip. Without him, it would’ve taken me a lot longer.”
“Wouldn’t have killed him to put some damn sugar on it,” I grunt. “Willy Wonka does it all the time, and he’s fine! Possibly homicidal, but fine.”
Kayla laughs and shakes her head. “You know Jack. He doesn’t work like that.”
I smile, the thing a little twisted but still whole. Kayla puts her hand on my shoulder.
“You two are…the same. I didn’t notice it before, but Wren pointed it out to me. He’s right. You two really are the same. So I think— I think even if he’s gone now, he’ll be back. People like you—you don’t find very often. He’ll be back.”
“And when he comes back, I will behead him,” I announce.
“You’ll greet him,” Kayla says sternly. “With a hug.”
“I will greet him with a hug. To his torso. Which will be missing a head.”
Kayla slaps her palm to her face, and I hug her, laughing. Laughing warm. Laughing true. Laughing for the first time in what feels like forever.
I’m not really losing my best friend.
We’re just going our own ways. We’re scattering ourselves to different winds, but we’ll come together again. We are exploring a globe in different directions. Like Columbus and Magellan, boldly going where no stinky sixteenth-century European explorer and his crew of scurvy men have ever gone before! Except one of them died of fever, and, like, mutiny, I think, and the other was pretty much a racist bastard who enabled hundreds of years of genocide, so in a fit of good judgment I decide to nix that metaphor entirely.
“Thank God,” Kayla breathes. “Can you get out now?”
Chapter Five
3 Years, 45 Weeks, 0 Days
I’ve come to the very original and unique conclusion that leaving home sucks ass. No one else has ever, in the history of humanity, come to this conclusion. No one except me. I am special.
“Isis, we’re late!”
And late. I am very late.
Being late doesn’t deter me from being proper about farewells, though. As Mom starts the car, I stand in the doorway and breathe in the musty air of eighteen years’ worth of angst. I didn’t spend all eighteen years here, but all the shit that happened in the last year and a half made it feel like that long.
Good-bye, little room.
Good-bye, girl I used to be.
I hug Ms. Muffin close and pet Hellspawn one last time and leave.
Mom drives slowly and carefully. I sip ginger ale and watch the highway flash by. Suddenly, a terrifying thought hits me upside the head with its sweaty palm.
What the hell did I do with my teenage years?
I didn’t volunteer or play sports. I didn’t become a radical warrior princess on my sixteenth birthday, complete with a talking cat and magically appearing clothes. Hogwarts didn’t even send me a letter, and I haven’t actually forgiven them for that. Wait until I go to London and find Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters and slip through to the other side and unleash my rage. I’ll make Voldemort look like a sock puppet. And I’ll make out with Draco. And I’ll train a bunch of house elves to fan me and bring me grapes—
I stop when I realize I’m writing mental Harry Potter fan fiction on my way to college. Focus! I need at least seven whole focuses if I’m going to make a fabulous impression. Or any impression at all. I’d rather make a bad impression than no impression.
As Mom pulls onto the exit, I sigh.
I didn’t even kiss a boy. For realsies, anyway. Not-drunk.
I did other things. I held hands and hugged. Nameless pretended real hard to be nice using hugs and hand-holding. Once or twice he even hinted he thought I was pretty. But it was an act, just to build me up before he tore me down. And it was all before the big it. Little it. It’s not even worthy of a prefix. It’s just “it.”
I have to leave that behind, too. There’s no room for that. Not if I want to move on with my life. I’ve done my best to bury it, ignore it until it goes away, and it’s sort of worked. I got far enough to sleep in a bed with Jack without freaking out. So I’m getting better, and that’s real good to know.
It gives me a little bit of hope where there used to be none.
Jack helped me realize that I’m not unlovable. I’m not hopeless.
I’m not all ugly.
Or maybe I realized it on my own.
Either way, fighting with him helped me realize lots of stuff. I grew up all kinds of ways.
A sharp pain radiates in my chest, but I brush that dirt off my shoulder and watch Mom’s smile.
“There’s the sign, sweetie. Get the map out, will you?”
Ohio State University looms in white lettering on a big sign on the side of the road. I pull out the brochure map and direct her onto the campus. Trees and rosebushes bloom like crazy, the emerald-green lawn dappled with buttery late-afternoon sun. The buildings are all old brickwork, ivy sprawling across windows, and Roman columns. The dorms are shabbier, but just as big. Hundreds of students are walking around, their parents walking with them, or standing outside the car and hugging them one last time, or helping them carry baggage into dorms.
Mom parks and gets out, and my stomach drops with excitement as I fumble with the door handle. This is it. This is how my childhood ends. Not with a bang, but with a silent scream.
I finger the cigarette burns on my wrist and make sure my sleeve is covering them. I take it back. My childhood ended a long time ago.
Mom can’t really pick up my heavy suitcase or backpack, so I drag them up the stairs and she follows. The room is tiny and whitewashed and on the second floor, right next to the fire escape. There’s no carpet, just cold tile, and the beds are so high up they seem made for, at the very least, Hagrid. Two beds are tucked into opposite ends of the room, a window glaring between them. Two desks are just beside the beds, with ass torture implements of the highest caliber—wood chairs. Two closets wait to be filled with shoes or condoms or failed exams or whatever else college kids fill empty spaces with. Broken dreams, maybe.
My roommate has already claimed the left side, so I plop my stuff on the right. Mom fusses around with the bedsheets she packed and makes my bed. I watch her work, knowing I’ll miss the sight of her doing little things like this. I inspect my roommate’s closet—a guitar, lots of army surplus jackets and hiking boots. She’s littered her desk with silver jewelr
y—studs, rings with skulls, necklaces with spiked orbs of death. Yep. We’ll get along just fine.
Mom finishes the bed, and we walk downstairs and sit on the lawn, soaking in the sun. Mom holds my hand, stroking it with her thumb.
“I’m sorry, Isis,” she tries.
“For what? Not birthing me a week or two earlier? I so wanted to be a Gemini. None of this Cancer nonsense.”
Mom smiles wryly. “No, not that. For…I don’t know. I feel like I didn’t do a very good job. But I suppose every parent feels like that.”
I squeeze her hand. “You did the best you knew how. We both did.”
She nods and squeezes back. “I’m just glad I could be with you for your last year at home. Even if…even if it was difficult.”
I know what regret looks like now. I saw it in every line of Jack’s face at the funeral. I’ll never forget what it looks like, even if the Zabadoobians abduct me and bleach my brain. Mom wears it like a shawl, lightly but drawing it taut. I throw my arms around her and bury my head in her shoulder.
“It’s okay. I had fun. It was hard, but I had fun and I learned stuff, more stuff than I ever learned in my life, so I’m real happy I came to live with you. Thanks for being the best mom ever.”
She puts one arm around me and into my hair and starts crying.
“I love you, Isis.”
“I love you, too!” I laugh, the tears springing up. “I’ll miss you.”
I’ll see her more than Kayla, but it still stings. I’m about as good at good-byes as Tarzan is at wearing clothes.
At least Leo’s in jail. She’ll be safe for a few years.
Mom insisted on giving me the old VW Beetle for college. She’d been wanting to get a different car for a while, and this gave her the perfect excuse. I see her to the Greyhound bus station and wave as it pulls out of the lot. I watch her with a sinking heart that sort of dovetails into a swoop, then lifts up as I drive back to the school again.
I’m alone.
Nobody knows me at Ohio State. I have to start all over. Hundreds of freshmen stream past me on the sidewalks, trampling the green lawn and my pure maiden heart as they look right through me. I’m more faceless than Emperor Palpatine before he took his hood off. A massive banner over the huge glass-walled library reads Welcome Buckeyes!