I went back to the cabin. I still had to box up the stuff I didn’t get around to moving when I had Brian’s truck and tidy up the place. There wasn’t a whole lot left to pack. Books and baskets of patterned paper scraps, all your art journaling supplies. I just took that all down to the arts and crafts hall. Figured you wouldn’t mind.
I had to scrape up all the wax from the million little votive candles you’d let melt all over the corner of the sink.
Peel all the magnetic poetry off the mini fridge.
Wipe your kisses off the bedroom mirror where you blotted your lipstick.
And then there was the art still hanging on the walls.
You’d think I’d be sentimental about all this, but by that point, I was exhausted and enraged. It was one of those days when I got all angry instead of super sad.
So I did something horrible. I didn’t mean to. It was just a lapse in judgment. A lack of impulse control.
I completely decimated Winged Embrace.
You know I LOVED that painting. I remember it from the first time you showed me the concept in your sketchbook. You, a dark-skinned and Afro’d grown-up version of one of Henry Darger’s butterfly-winged girls—a Blengin? Is that what they’re called? In your sketch, the boy holding you was just some generic guy. Not me, because when you originally drew it, you didn’t know me yet. I remember tracing my fingers over the boy’s ram’s horns, feeling the indentations where you’d pressed down hard to make them black. I wanted to be that boy for you. I just didn’t know then the crown of horns you’d give me would be so heavy and dark.
Later, when you had taken the sketch and turned it into an enormous painting, I got to be the boy with you in his arms. Well, it’s me, and it isn’t. Wild dark hair and olive skin, yes, but I’m not really that much taller than you, and I’ll never look that good without a shirt. I appreciate the sentiment, though. Really, I do.
So there it was in the empty bedroom today. I couldn’t make sense of how I’d been able to sleep alone under it for months and months and months. It was too big to fit in my car, and I didn’t want to bug Brian again for his truck. I took it down, and I MEANT to just take the frame apart, but I guess I had a temper tantrum instead.
There was a box cutter involved. Rage. Little confetti shreds of canvas. Snapshot bits, my arm, your leg. Mosaicked butterfly wings.
I regretted it instantly.
Later, after I became the Camp Vivian Dumpster Patron of the Arts, I went into the bedroom and started packing all your dresses away.
I found that stripy sweater. Guess they didn’t take it, after all.
I also found A FUCKING BOX FULL OF MONEY, VIVIAN.
Holy shit, V. Good thing your parents didn’t dig too deep in the closet, huh? (Maybe they were afraid they’d find another one of their kids *rimshot*.) But, holy shit. This is a lot of money. Not enough for your surgeries, but still a lot.
Why the hell would you hide something like this from me?
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
May 15 5:49 PM
Your grandpa is amazing. Seriously. GMH. I guess I should admit now that I spied on you sometimes. I heard you once on the phone with him, asking for money to help with the rent. Obviously a lie, since my parents were letting you stay in one of the empty cabins for free, but I figured that you probably just wanted some new clothes or something. Until I found that shoebox, I had no idea that you’d pouty-faced thirteen thousand dollars from him. Jesus. But I know that’s where it must have come from. So today I went to his house and tried to give the money back. And he wouldn’t take it. He told me he didn’t want the hospital to have it. Or your parents. He said I should donate it to the Camp because “those kids need to be loved.” I just lost it, V. I cried all over the place. I haven’t cried like that in a really long time.
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
May 17 7:53 PM
Mom’s lawyer told me not to take any chances with the money I found in your wardrobe. So, I taped the whole box up and mailed it to your parents, despite what your grandpa said. Done. I’m sure that’ll help them keep that tube down your throat for a while longer. Fuck.
But then Jon—that’s the lawyer—told Mom about the money. Yesterday Mom woke me up during one of my marathon sleeping sessions. I’ve been sleeping a lot lately, because what else am I going to do now that my life has become the stuff of TMZ headlines and Lifetime Original Movies? Enroll in GED classes? Find a job? Get harassed by the press?
“Miles, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon.”
You’d think if Mom has learned anything during the years since my puberty hit, it would be to knock. Luckily I wasn’t up to anything salacious. But the look on her face still made me feel like I’d been caught in the act.
In the aftermath of my decision not to follow through with your court case, I’d also decided not to follow through with any standard rituals of human hygiene. Mom stood in the doorway, glaring at the mess. Half-unpacked boxes of books, piles of clothes, dirty plates. Amidst it all: the tattooed slob wrapped in semen-and-tear-encrusted sheets that she calls her son.
“Yeah.” I wanted to say something sarcastic, but I figure the less I say to her, the better. I don’t need Dr. Mom analyzing my every word. She can’t do shit for me, and we both know it.
“I need you to help me with one of the cabins. Please.”
I knew going in that it was just an excuse to lecture me, but what was I supposed to do? I always get stuck doing the grunt work, what with me being the manly man around here. But Mom and I did manage to get through, like, forty-five minutes without actually speaking to each other. I mean, besides things like “pass me that hammer.”
But it didn’t stay quiet forever.
“You’re killing me, kid.” We were sitting on the roof patching shingles when she started to worry that we were getting sunburnt. She grabbed the tube of sunscreen stashed in the bottom of her toolbox, and we began slathering it on.
“What’d I do?” I looked around at the tiles, trying to figure out if I’d hammered one on sideways or something.
“The roof is fine. Just . . . you need to talk to me, okay? Why didn’t you say you disagreed with the lawsuit? Or if you didn’t want to talk with me, you could have told your Mamochka.”
“Ohhh.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I went back to hammering, though I’m not entirely sure if there were actual nails involved. I just wanted to hit something. The roof probably was fine, but Mamochka, sneaky Mamochka, thought that since all her mother-birding wasn’t working, perhaps Mom could manage to intimidate something out of me.
“Quit screwing around, Miles.” Mom yanked the hammer away from me, and it flew out of her lotion-slick hands and into the window of the next cabin over. Glass shattered majestically. And, of course, Mom got all Mom-ish, all hawk-eyed and intense. I hopped up, ready to make my escape, all in the guise of having a mess to clean up. But she grabbed the sleeve of my Modern Lovers T-shirt and pulled me back down beside her.
“You two would have done it anyway.” Instead of looking at her, I concentrated on the tiles in front of me. I scraped a fingertip along the edges where the scratchy shingles turned from brownish red to black. My hands looked foreign to me, dirty for the first time in a long while.
I wish it were paint.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe at first. But we had no clue it was bothering you. I mean, you seemed ready. Fine with it, even. Every day, putting on your suit and doing all that preliminary court stuff, and all that paperwork. You didn’t once say you didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do.”
“Because it is the right thing to do. I just couldn’t go through with it in the end.”
“It’s not the right thing if it’s hurting you,” she said. “I swear, it’s like you got the best of both of us, but in the worst ways. You’ve got my sense of duty and your Mamochka’s big heart. You’re such a damn good kid.”
“I didn’t finish high school.” Sense of duty? Ha!
Funny that all this shit had to happen before Mom would ever admit that blowing off high school to draw comics, design coloring book pages, and help my internet-famous girlfriend run a popular website actually turned out to be an okay decision. I got lucky. I mean, how often does a sixteen-year-old have a chance to be art director of an online magazine? At the time, I had every intention of finishing school and doing my thing, but it was a lot of work. I had to choose, and in the end I chose you. I thought everything would turn out all right. “Good to know you think my career choice is slightly better than a drug habit.”
Of course, I’ve now been avoiding that “career choice” for the past year and a half. Lately I’ve been helping out at Mom’s office, filing paperwork and whatnot. I honestly don’t see things the way I used to, and nothing, nothing, is fodder for comics and quirky coloring pages these days. The world simply isn’t a weird and whimsical place without you by my side.
“I know how much pain you’re in. But you’re not processing. You’re shutting down.”
“Can you please not talk to me about ‘processing’? You’re not MY psychologist, you know?” Even if she was, could she help me? No. She didn’t help you, and I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive her for it.
“No, I’m your mother. And I can see more than anyone that you are falling apart.”
“I’m not falling apart.” I wonder what she’d say if she found out I’ve been IM’ing you all this time.
“I’m dropping the lawsuit.”
You know, I’ve been wanting to hear those words for a while now, but it didn’t make me feel any better. My stupid heart just sank a little bit deeper into my rib cage. Even my unflappable, crusading mother has given up hope.
“Okay, whatever. You do what you think is best.”
“And I want you to promise me you’re going to make an effort to start having a little fun, all right?” She continued like I hadn’t said anything. “Hang out with your buddies. I bet there’ll be some good parties soon.”
Yeah, like my dropout ass would be welcome at a graduation party hosted by those jerks from high school. Probably should have said that to her, but instead I decided to keep on being a dick. “So, I should get wasted and rape somebody like all those other kids who really know how to cut loose?”
“That is not funny. Look, what I’m saying is that right now you’re at a really volatile place. You can either continue this downhill plummet, or you can work through it.”
“In other words, ‘hold it together, son’?”
“No, Miles. I’m not saying you have to hold it together. I’m telling you that you don’t have to hold it at all.”
So, that’s something to think about. I guess.
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
May 20 9:32 AM
Turns out I’m not the only one in this house suffering through these long, sleepless nights. Earlier, I walked outside at four in the morning to find Mamochka on the sun porch. It’s only May, and already it’s hot and humid, sticky, even in the middle of the night.
“Hi, baby boy.”
“What’re you doing up?” I plopped down next to her on the porch swing.
“Do you know much about Iceland?”
“Mm. Iceland is green, and Greenland is icy, right?” I was that loopy sort of tired. “Is this part of your crossword puzzle?”
“No, look.” She was playing some sort of word game on her tablet, but she closed that out and opened up her camera roll. She flicked through a few images. Clusters of houses with colorful rooftops, fields of purple flowers, ice cave. “Look how pretty.”
Pretty isn’t the word I’d use to describe the images, but I knew what she meant. The photos she’d chosen were stunning, intricate. Full of patterns and shapes. They were exactly the sort of images you and I might have illustrated for Mixtape.
“Iceland is green. And in the summertime, nearly twenty-four hours daylight. Would be good for taking photos.” Mamochka leaned against me, resting her head on my shoulder. “You won’t be happy unless you get back to work, my darling. Make something for her. And for you.”
It’s not that I don’t want to make something. I do. I can feel it almost, like this unbearable pressure. It’s in my spine and my arms, my anxious clutching hands. It’s behind my eyes, in my brain. It keeps me from sleeping, then wears me down until sleeping is all I can do.
And, trust me, I am tired of being a sad sack of shit. Really, I am. I know I know I know that I’m miserable and wallowing. I’m really screwed up. And no pretty purple flowers are gonna fix that.
It’s like the other day, when I found all that money. Thirteen thousand dollars stashed away in an old shoebox that nobody even knew about. I had this wild thought that I should just take it. You can’t look at that much cash and not let your mind spin out. Like, I could take this money and I could just . . . go somewhere, or do . . . Something? Yeah, that’s as far as those thoughts got me. Somewhere and something.
Because it doesn’t matter how much money or distance or sunlight I get. All the best parts of me are still going to be chained to that hospital bed.
I said none of this to Mamochka. Just clicked the lock button, and the pixels vanished from her screen.
I went back to bed, and when I woke up a few minutes ago, there was a little package on my pillow, right next to my face. It was wrapped in that brown butcher paper we decorated at Camp a couple years ago. We’d all carved potato stamps and printed our own gift wrap. This was your paper, little rainbows and clouds.
I carefully peeled off the wrapping, and the first thing I saw was a four-pack of SD cards, which made me immediately feel guilty because I haven’t even touched the very fancy, very expensive camera my parents got me for Christmas. Underneath the memory cards was a blank book, one of those Moleskine sketchbooks with the thick, buttery pages that I really like.
And tucked into the sketchbook was a photo of me and you. We were wrapped up in each other, and I was grinning as you kissed my cheek. We were holding a copy of the anthology we’d put together, a real-life copy of the best articles, art, and tidbits from Mixtape Mag. Our book, hot off the press.
Damn it, Mothers. Right in the feels.
Underneath the photo was an airline voucher to Keflavik, Iceland, round trip. A Post-it note on top said NONREFUNDABLE. Mom’s handwriting. Big, bold letters.
So, yeah. It looks like I’m going to Iceland. In, like, a week and a half.
Chapter Three
Miles Away to Vivian Girl
May 22 6:54 PM
Just so we’re clear—because I wasn’t even sure myself at first—my parents are sending me to Iceland alone. I was worried for a minute they’d decided to shut down Camp so we could have some happy-go-lucky family retreat. Camp is still on, my moms are still running the place, and I’m glad. I am a little nervous, though, about going somewhere so far away on my own.
I went to see Brian at the restaurant earlier. His parents pretty much have him managing the place now that he’s graduated. It means he’s busy a lot, but on the plus side, he did give me a shit-ton of free cheese fries.
“How was prom?”
“Kind of a bust. You think it’s going to be a big deal, but then you get there and it’s just another stupid high school dance,” Brian said. “Terrible music. Lots of twerking. People crying.”
“And graduation?”
“Terrible music. Lots of twerking. People crying.”
“Ah, good,” I said, and I found myself smiling for the first time in a while. “I was afraid I was missing out.”
I told him about the trip. Figured he might want to come along.
“Iceland?”
“Yeah, man. Supposed to be really pretty right now. So, do you want to go? There’s probably still time to get you a ticket.”
“That’s really cool, man. But, I can’t. I gotta adult.”
�
�No! You can’t do this to me, Brian. Please don’t do this to me. You can’t adult.”
“I know. I know. Trust me, nobody regrets this more than me. But, look.” He waved his hand around, gesturing to his recently inherited kingdom of fry cooks and oil vats. “Someday all of this will be mine.”
I groaned and speared a few more fries with my fork. “I never thought I’d say this, but I miss high school. No. Not that. What I really miss is being small enough to ride in the shopping cart at the grocery store. Those were the days.”
He smiled and stretched his gigantic arms across the back of the booth. I bet Bri doesn’t even remember riding in a shopping cart. His limbs were probably too long at age three. “No, man. You’re gonna have a hell of a time in Iceland. You know what I’ve heard about that place?”
“Uh, that it’s green and Greenland is icy?”
“Nah. I’ve heard it’s super easy to get laid. There’s even this website that gives you tips on how to get Icelandic girls to go home with you and stuff. I’ll have to send you the link. Also, I saw this old interview with Quentin Tarantino where he said pretty much everyone there is really, really hot. Like, even the girls working at McDonald’s. I wish I could go!”
“Yeah. But wouldn’t Megan be pissed if you went off to screw some Nordic women with me?”
He sighed. “Man, Megan dumped me.”
“What?” I said. “When?”
“Like three months ago, maybe. She met this guy at her fancy new bank job. I don’t know.”
“That sucks, man,” I said. They’d been together since freshman year. “I’m sorry.”
He shrugged.
“Why didn’t you say something? Even though I’ve got all this shit going on, you know you can still talk to me, right?”
“Your phone can place outgoing calls, too, Miles.”
Ouch.
After I left the restaurant, I had to run a few errands for Mamochka. When I got home, Brian had already sent me the link to the How to Hook Up with Icelandic Chicks website. And an 8tracks mix entitled “Music to Lay Your Lady (or Man or Whatever Miles Is Diggin’ These Days) Down To.” What a bro.
Miles Away from You Page 2