Fade to Blue

by Sean Beaudoin

  She Came Plummeting Back to Earth.

  She Fell from Grace.

  She Leaped from the Nest.

  Gravity Is Inevitable.

  The ambulance screeched and wailed. It dug ruts across the field. Coach Dhushbak blew his whistle sixty-nine times. There were parents and students crying, parents and students praying, parents and students whispering encouragements, but there was no duct-taping Lake’s spine back together. Not even by the cute doctor with the convertible Saab who wrote prescriptions for birth control and acne gel.

  I popped another Diet Crank, looked at it, and then poured it into a fern in the hallway.

  Almost a year later, when they finally let Lake out of the clinic, she’d undergone a reverse transformation. The rare butterfly-to-caterpillar. She stopped wearing makeup and jewelry. She stopped shaving her legs and her armpits. It freaked all the Kirstys out. The head ones complained, and then lesser Kirstys complained, too. There was a special faculty meeting and Herb had to come to school to remind Principal Whithers about this crazy thing called the Constitution.

  For a while, the new Lake was all anyone in school talked about, until they found a girl named Clarissa, rumored pregnant, actually just Häagen Daz, to dissect instead. But there was a time if Lake McLean did something, no matter how small, everyone else did it, too. Like when she wore a pretzel around her neck on a length of red ribbon and two days later half the girls in school had them hanging in front of their sweaters like tiny beagle turds.

  BZZT, BZZZT.

  I jumped about twelve feet in the air. If I’d had claws, they would have sunk into the ceiling. I didn’t have claws. It was only the bell. I slapped my face a couple of times and then tiptoed downstairs.

  “Yo, Sophie!” Herb said, giving me his grin. He wheeled Lake over the threshold and into the living room. “You girls have a rockin’ time!”

  “You’re the best, Herb,” I said.

  “I’ll be back in a couple hours. I got some deliveries.”

  Herb had started a business in his kitchen, Totally Sweet Rounds, making his own cookies and selling them door-to-door.

  “In the middle of the night?”

  He gave me the double thumbs. “By day I got kids and moms. After dark, all bets are off with the munchies crowd.”

  I crouched so Lake could put her arms around my neck, and then carried her up the first flight of stairs. She weighed less than nothing.

  “Remember that time you wore that pretzel around your neck?” I whispered. Lake’s post-plummet memory could be better, which actually saves her a lot of embarrassment.

  “A pretzel?”

  I held my finger over my lips, taking careful steps by Trish’s room. “And then Dayna and all them wore one, too?”

  “They did?”

  I put her on the bed propped with pillows, then went back down to get her chair, taking the stairs three at a time, bing-bang-bing.

  “Sophie?” Trish called, but I blew by, pretending not to hear.

  After the accident, Lake’s boyfriend dropped her and her ringtone friends dropped her, and Dayna Daynes, her best lifelong blood sister, dropped her. Right into my lap. One morning she showed up on the front step. I was too surprised to do anything but stand there all, “Um, can I help you?” and she goes, “You seem interesting, hon. Are you gonna let me in?”

  We’ve been best friends ever since. I keep waiting for her to ask herself why. She says it’s weird how you can be a completely different person inside and not realize it. I tell her I can’t wait until my Leggy Scandinavian Supermodel bubbles to the surface. She laughs and apologizes about how stuck-up she used to be.

  “Oh, Sophie, I’m so sorry, I was such a jerk.”

  “Yeah, you pretty much were.”

  “Shut up, you’re not supposed to agree.”

  I set her chair back up and she levered herself into it. “So what’s the huge emergency?”

  I opened my mouth but I could feel myself about to cry.

  Lake took my hand and held it. “Just tell me. It’s okay, whatever it is.”

  “The Nurse,” I said.

  “No way! You’re pregnant?”

  “No! The Nurse is after me.”

  Lake burst out laughing. “Oh, my God, hon, you actually had me scared.”

  My expression didn’t change. She stopped laughing. “Yesterday it’s a truck, now today it’s a nurse?”

  I had to admit it sounded astonishingly stupid. “She just sort of… appeared.”

  Lake let go of my hand and rolled back a half inch. “Appeared? Where?”

  “In detention. With my dog.”

  “You don’t have a dog.”

  “I used to.”

  “What happened to it?”

  “It died.”

  “A magic nurse has your dead dog,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

  “She says I have something of hers, but I don’t know what it is.”

  Lake nodded. Outside there were squealing tires and a faint jingling. I didn’t tell her about my father. I already sounded like a lunatic. The rest of the story had to be handed around in little bites, like salmon appetizers.

  “I know I sound paranoid.”

  She didn’t bother to deny it.

  “I’m scared,” I said.

  “Of what?”

  “Pretty much everything. So can you please sleep here tonight?”

  If she stayed over I’d have time to explain about my father, maybe let her read Mr. Puglisi’s essays. I could tell her about Twinkle. Most of all, I could ask her to come to the lab with me tomorrow. I had to go. But there was absolutely no way I could go alone.

  Lake sighed. “Sophie, Sophie, perennially at odds with the world.”

  I sighed back. “Lake, Lake, helping each of us know ourselves better through the miracle of platitude.”

  She laughed.

  Please please please say yes.

  Lake lit an unfiltered Winston and blew the smoke through her nose. “How did I end up hanging out with you again?”

  “I dunno. Court order?”

  She flicked ash in the plant. I waved away the smoke.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Except now all my clothes smell like some guy named Vinnie.”

  Lake held up a pair of thigh-high latex boots. “You’re worried about these?”

  I grabbed them from her. “When the big bomb falls and the zombies are roaming in hungry packs and you and I are hiding out in our well-stocked wheelchair-accessible mountain cave, those boots will be our most important possession.”

  She laughed and put the cigarette out, crushing it between the pages of Spengler’s Beefing Up Your Vocab: 1001 New Words.

  “So are you going to stay, or not?”

  “Why don’t you go get us some hot chocolate,” Lake said, “while I call Daddy.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  OLD SPICE BLUE

  A SNEAKY LITTLE SPICE. BIG SPICE

  I could only hear every third word. Mostly because I was crouched in the dark, listening through the crack in Sophie’s door, hoping for an excuse to be invited in. Um, there’s a fire? Um, do you guys want to order pizza? Um, I just noticed the house’s radon levels are dangerously unsafe, maybe we should all go down to my room? Here, Lake, maybe you should hide under these radon-protective blankets. Me? Oh, yeah, sure, I’ll get under them, too.

  Meanwhile, Sophie kept saying something about a nurse. Something about Lake sleeping over. Yes, please. Then something about Lake calling her father. I flipped a black cape over my shoulder, twisted my pointy mustache, and tiptoed into the basement. I lifted the extension, slowly released the button, easing in mid-ring like the weaselliest weasel.

  “Hello?”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yeah?

  “I’m going to stay at Sophie’s tonight.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “She’s having some problems.”

  “Problems?”

  “Losi
ng it a bit. I get the feeling she wants to go to the lab.”

  “She does, huh? Anything I can do?”

  “No, she just needs someone here with her tonight.”

  “Hey, you think a cookie would help?”

  (Laughing.) “It’ll make her paranoid in reverse. She’ll start to suspect people are plotting to make her happy.”

  (Laughing back.) “We may have to try a new direction.”

  “I know. She keeps talking about how much time she spends on the roof.”

  “That can be dangerous,” Herb said.

  There was a click, and then the line went dead.

  I crept back up the stairs on my belly. My mother was awake and had actually ventured from her room. I slipped behind the couch, peering over the top, imagining myself on safari at the height of lean season. Oh, man, was it hot on the Serengeti. But I was Shotgun Hemingway and Trish was a rare marsupial foraging for fresh socks and Kleenex. The opportunity to study her was too good to pass up. Through the scope of my Enfield .40 caliber rifle (a Cap’n Gaar’s Original Replica Pirate Spyglass) I could see her in what animal behaviorists refer to as the Breakfast Nook. One hand held a saucepan while the other appeared to have trapped and killed a can of tomato soup. She deftly removed red innards from the metallic shell. I could also make out the distinctive crunch of free-range saltine.

  Trish stared at her nails for a while and then seemed to fall asleep. Her pan dropped, scraping across the linoleum. She wiped the spill with her slipper, making an It’s All Just Chinese to Me face. In the dark, she looked especially pale, preserved, almost beautiful. She’d only dated once since Dad, an Adam’s apple-y guy with expensive sunglasses who talked about wedges and roughs and lies. He talked about bringing me over to the course for a few lessons. Trish made an elaborate dinner and then stared into her glass for most of the night. Sunglasses didn’t seem worried Mom was about to go facedown in the asparagus. He demonstrated the proper way to hold a fairway wood using a soup ladle. Sophie leaned over and told him she was wearing a leather thong. He shanked one into the rough. She told him I would rather eat a club deep-fried than hit a ball with it. He sliced one into the pond. Then she told him she was wearing a home-arrest ankle bracelet for selling airplane glue to grade-schoolers. Sunglasses never came back.

  “You’re burning soup,” Sophie said, walking into the kitchen and rinsing two mugs. She poured about nine packets of cocoa powder in each. “How do you burn soup?”

  Trish pushed back her pillow hair, a blot of soup on her forehead. “I got a disturbing call today.”

  Sophie looked over and I had to duck.

  “From a secretary in the principal’s office,” Trish said. “She was not asking me to donate to the library fund.”

  “I swear, it’s like I have this big neon arrow on my back,” Sophie said. “It’s always blinking, ‘Find fault with me. Write me a detention slip.’ ”

  Trish took a spoonful of soup, looked at it distastefully, and put it back in the bowl. “So you’re claiming the punishment is undeserved?”

  “There are wardrobe concerns,” Sophie said. “Coach Dhushbak is a stickler.”

  “Dhushbak?”

  “Dhushbak.”

  Trish pulled her robe tighter. I could see her imagining a dirty locker room, cold and prescriptionless, and having to change into shorts for laps around the soccer field.

  “Besides, um, Mom? That call wasn’t today. It was a couple of days ago.”

  Trish blinked. About eighty-four times. Or maybe it was just one really long one.

  “Today you were supposed to come in. For a disciplinary conference.”

  “I was?”

  “With Mr. Puglisi.”

  “Who?”

  Who?

  “Also? It’s my birthday tomorrow.”

  “Yes, I know,” Trish said, clearly not knowing.

  “Guess what I want for a present?”

  “Things are a little tight at the moment, Sophie. The insurance check is, huge surprise, late again.”

  “That’s fine,” Sophie said, “It doesn’t cost anything. At least not moneywise.”

  Trish switched to her It’s All Just Albanian to Me face. Sophie got up and pulled the yellow pages off the shelf and started leafing through them, stopping to separate D from E (I could just make out Dental Hygienist to Endocrine Glands, joined by spattered oatmeal) and H from I (Halitosis Relief to Indochinese Furniture, joined by a single globule of Smucker’s). She stopped at L and jabbed her finger onto the page, a small square ad that I could just make out with the spyglass. It was the listing for Fade Labs.

  “Anyway, what I want, Mom. Actually, what I need, is to go here.”

  Trish pulled a calcified Kleenex from her robe, unfolded it, and blew her nose. “Mmm-hmmm.”

  “I know we’ve had this talk before. Or tried to, and I know I promised not to bring it up again.”

  “Then don’t.”

  “Mom, can you listen, please, for one second? I’m having dreams. About Dad.” She help up the phone book, pointing. “I need to go. Like, by tomorrow, after school, latest. So I need you to take me.”

  “I’ve already told you—”

  Sophie slammed her fist down. A saltshaker fell to the floor. Trish looked up, shocked. I looked up, shocked.

  “Mom, have you taken stock of our situation lately? I am losing it. O.S. is the size of an aircraft carrier. You’ve slept through a presidential election and half a war. It’s, like, as a family, I don’t think we can keep pretending it’s not a little weird Dad disappeared exactly a year ago on my birthday!”

  Trish got up and poured her soup into the sink. “I’m too tired for this.”

  “Yeah, it’s exhausting,” Sophie said. “Flipping channels.”

  Trish turned, angry. Her eyes were suddenly clear. The fog was gone. Her robe was smooth, her hair miraculously less dented. It was times like this, as she emerged from the depths of Trishdom, that I recognized the mom I grew up with.

  “I have no magic answers. Your father didn’t leave anything behind but dirty underwear and unpaid bills. People make decisions, and usually they’re not thinking about how those decisions affect the rest of us. That’s the way the world works. Or the way it doesn’t work. So, here we are, you and I, left to wonder. That’s it.”

  “Fine,” Sophie said. “But I still need a ride to the lab. Will you be there after school or not?”

  “Fine,” Trish said. “Happy birthday.”

  Sophie grabbed her cocoa mugs, spilling some on the floor, and marched back up the stairs. Trish turned, wiped the spill with her slipper, which was too soggy to absorb it, and drifted toward her room.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SOPHIE AND LAKE

  THE HIGHER YOU GO, THE HIGHER YOU ARE

  Okay, I’ll stay,” Lake said as I slid back into my room. “On one condition.”

  I put the mugs down. “What?”

  “You take me out on the roof with you.”

  Spilled cocoa dribbled down my leg. “No way.”

  Lake started to gather her things. “Okay. If you’d be so kind as to dial for me, I’ll let Daddy know he should start warming up the van.”

  “You don’t understand,” I said quietly. “It’s a tiny space. And I can barely pull myself up.”

  “Then you better figure out a new method,” she said, winding hair around one finger.

  “But if you fall—”

  “It won’t be the first time.”

  She was testing me. Fine. We were always doing what Lake wanted anyway, the mall, the park, the pool. For once, there was something that I knew about, that was just mine. And it was weird and dangerous. And she needed my help to do it.

  “Ding-dong,” I said, and pushed open the window. A cool night breeze blew in from three stories down. “Elevator’s here.”

  By putting Lake out first and holding the trim, I was able to squeeze behind her. I stood with one foot on the edge of the sill. There was no room for my o
ther foot. She didn’t look so confident as she watched me getting ready to swing up and grip the eaves. It was a one-shot. If I missed, there would be no reaching back.

  “Wait!” Lake said, but I’d already let go. I could see black sky between my fingers as they cobbled against the shingles, digging frantically for a grip. My left hand slid, tearing off some skin, but the other held. I pulled myself up the rest of the way.

  “Sophie?”

  I let out a little yell of surprise, scraping my boots back and forth. A couple of shingles came loose and crashed onto the rocks below.

  “SOPHIE!”

  I peered back over the edge, laughing.

  “You… asshole!” she said.

  “You still want to come up here?”

  She looked down. You could just make out the dumb little statues Trish had put along the walk, a rabbit, a clown, and a lantern-holding jockey.

  “You might clear the jockey,” I encouraged. “But you’ll never make it to those comfy shrubs.”

  Lake reached up, her mouth set. I lowered the belts I’d stuffed into my waistband. She looped her arms in. I pulled enough so she could grab the eaves, then adjusted position, dragging until she wedged her butt against the two-by-four.

  “Oh, my God,” she said.

  “What?”

  “This is the single greatest thing ever.”

  Lights twinkled all the way out to the strip malls along the highway. Cars rumbled slowly through town, their high beams vibrating, like pigs sniffing for truffles.

  “My father used to bring me up here and point out constellations,” I said. “He’d go ‘We’re in the sky together, sweetie. I’m the string and you’re the kite.’ ”

  “That is so… disgustingly sappy,” Lake said.

  “There’s way worse I haven’t told you.” I laughed. “You have no idea.”

  “Maybe it’s not me you should tell.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

  Lake leaned back and crossed her arms. “It’s all right to see someone, you know.”

  “See?”

  “Like a doctor. Pills and stuff.”

  “Unbelievable,” I said. “Even you?”