Anything But Ordinary

by Lara Avery

  As heavy drops began to fall, Bryce couldn’t help but raise her hand to her head. She almost expected it to shock her. But it felt just like it always had.

  “Bryce, get inside!” Her mother called from the sliding door. “There’s going to be lightning.”

  Carter knew that I liked Westerns. She would see him again soon, and again the day after that. At the thought of that, she smiled.

  Sun, exercise, clothes. Bryce went over her list again as she reentered through the French doors. And friends.

  The emptiness she’d felt wasn’t emptiness anymore. It was space to be filled.

  he air wrapped Bryce in a blanket of moisture. The leaves on the oak tree in the Grahams’ front yard stood still, waxy and green. There was no breeze. The lawn was thriving like a football field, so bright it almost looked fake. Bryce wished she could suck up water from the humidity like the plants could. She had stepped outside to wait for Gabby five minutes ago, and she could already use a tall glass of something.

  After Carter walked away yesterday, Bryce had felt powerful. She had felt full of good things. Only good things, she had declared, and she had gone straight inside to call Gabby, eager to tell her that everything was going to be okay.

  Gabby picked up on the first ring. “Bryce.”

  Bryce’s confidence had faltered at the sound of her voice. It was easy enough to forgive her best friend when she was thinking of the Gabby whose perfect fishtail braid she used to mess up, the one who she could tease about being a hopeless romantic because she was too wrapped up in a soap opera plot to notice.

  But this wasn’t quite Gabby. Her voice had an edge now.

  “So what’s the deal with the bridesmaid thing?” Bryce had asked.

  “Oh,” Gabby said, and Bryce could hear the surprise in her voice. “So you don’t want to talk—?”

  She had looked at the storm outside, thinking again of Carter as he walked away. She swallowed her fear.

  “Let’s meet up!” Bryce said, before Gabby could say anything else. “If I’m going to be your maid of honor, I’m going to need a dress, right?”

  They agreed Gabby would pick her up for a trip to the mall. “Just to start,” Gabby had said. “Because you also need regular clothes.”

  “How did you know?” Bryce said.

  “Believe me, I recognized your mom’s old pajama top.” Bryce had to smile.

  A black VW pulled up. Different from the van Gabby usually drove. Used to drive, Bryce corrected herself. But then Gabby honked twice, like she always did, and Bryce made her way down the walk.

  “Hi, gorgeous!” Gabby called as she leaned to open the door. The air-conditioning was blasting. Gabby’s lavender shampoo filled Bryce’s nose, and suddenly they were sixteen again, driving to practice, to a football game, anywhere. “How are you?”

  “Went to Belle Meade yesterday,” Bryce started. “Sydney was hung over, as usual.”

  “Oh god.” Gabby glanced from the road. “Sydney’s one of those girls?”

  Bryce knew exactly what she meant—the girls at their school who mixed vodka into gas-station slushies at football games, who partied every weekend while she and Gabby trained or went to meets.

  Bryce shook her head. “I mean, she wouldn’t be part of, like, Renee Sutterlane’s clique. She’s a little too punk-goth-whatever for that. Those girls always pretended to be Christian.”

  “And they all got pregnant, like, right out of high school,” Gabby said, shaking her head.

  “What? Really?”

  “Renee has two kids now. Kat O’Hare has a baby with Chris Driggs. Kylie Timmons has one with who knows who.”

  Bryce laughed in disbelief. “Wow. That sucks.” She could barely take care of herself, let alone a baby.

  “I don’t know, Bry.” Gabby looked thoughtful. “They look really happy on Facebook. They dress their babies in these cute little outfits.…”

  “Gabbyyyyy—” Bryce chided. “Don’t get any ideas.”

  Gabby pursed her glossy lips. “Come on, wouldn’t it be fun to have an adorable little baby?”

  “No!” Bryce shook her finger at her friend. “Just say no!”

  “Fine,” Gabby said, her lips still pursed, but then she smiled.

  Bryce smiled into the rearview mirror, watching suburbia shrink as they got closer to downtown Nashville.

  Gabby sighed as they pulled up to a red light. “Besides, Greg is not ready to be a father.”

  Bryce’s chest tightened. She had been lulled by the comfort of Gabby’s familiar smell, the feeling of sitting in the passenger seat. For just a moment, she had forgotten.

  Gabby glanced at her. “I tried to get him to come with us today, maybe try on some tuxedoes, but he said, ‘Nah.’ That’s exactly what he said. ‘Nah.’”

  Bryce’s jaw clenched. The cars around them started to move. This was the part they should glaze over. This was the part that would make her pissed off. But they were going dress-shopping, and he was the groom. Did she think she could avoid it forever?

  They jerked forward. Silence. Greg’s name was ringing in Bryce’s ears.

  Finally, Gabby broke the silence. Her voice was grave. “Bryce, I have something to tell you.”

  Bryce’s stomach was in knots. What now?

  Gabby opened her mouth, but instead of speaking, she hit the CD player’s ON button. A few chords filtered out, and Bryce recognized the song instantly.

  “Yeah, B. Talk your shit,” Gabby said in her best Jay-Z impression.

  Bryce always played the Beyoncé part, because then Gabby could call her “B.” She let out a throaty, “Partner, let me upgrade you,” and immediately giggled with embarrassment. Like most things these days, Bryce was out of practice singing like an R&B star.

  As they pulled into the mall parking lot, Bryce and Gabby danced Beyoncé-style in their seats, swinging their hips and flipping their hair. “Upgrade U” was the first track on their warm-up CD. This was what they pumped from Bryce’s basement speakers as they practiced tucks at her house. This was what they sang to as they rolled into Hilwood High in the mornings. The CD even skipped at the right place.

  Bryce yelled over the Jay-Z part, “Where did you find this?”

  “Are you kidding?” Gabby yelled back between lines. “I would never have let this thing out of my sight!”

  As she nodded her head to the beat, Bryce dabbed sudden, grateful tears with the back of her hand. She smiled at her best friend. A thank-you for this little part of Bryce’s old life, and for letting the subject of Greg drop. They kept rapping and dancing as they entered the mall, doubling over with laughter at the shoppers who stared as they passed.

  An hour later, everything was chiffon. Layers of the light-pink, netlike fabric surrounded Bryce. She climbed through them, the edges of each piece tickling her face. Suddenly she was in the open air again, staring at her own reflection. The dress was very puffy and very pink.

  “I look like one of those shower pouf things.”

  “Let me see,” Gabby said, and pushed her way into the dressing room. She caught Bryce’s eyes in the mirror, and there was an awkward pause. There had been a lot of those since Bryce had filled up her Macy’s bags with T-shirts and Gabby pulled an issue of Modern Bride out of her purse. She had asked if Bryce wanted to take a break while they looked through it, maybe get some Orange Julius. She even offered to take Bryce home to rest, but Bryce was determined not to let the mood fall, not when things were starting to feel normal between them.

  “I just thought it would be interesting.” Gabby twisted a strand of her hair around her finger, looking worried. “You know, different from the average bridesmaid dress.”

  “No, it’s nice,” Bryce said. The top of the dress was pretty. Kind of soft, not too shiny, with a cut right at her bust line. But then it exploded. “Different is good.”

  “But not always good,” Gabby offered quickly. “Here, let’s get it off. Now we’ve narrowed it down. We need something more classic. Maybe
slimmer lines.”

  She stepped out of the dressing room while Bryce wriggled out through the forest of chiffon.

  “See, my…er, dress is really traditional,” Gabby said in the eveningwear section when Bryce emerged, moving through different shades of red. “I was thinking bigger shapes, something more elaborate to provide a contrast.”

  Gabby picked out a long, silky dress in vivid red. She pulled Bryce into an oversized dressing room with an upholstered chair in the corner. “But now that I think of it, maybe consistency would work better. Here.” She laid the dress out on Bryce’s open arms.

  Gabby took a seat, looking at her, but Bryce didn’t move to change immediately. She had changed in front of Gabby a thousand times, but Bryce found herself setting the dress aside slowly and bringing her arms inside her T-shirt before she slid it above her navel, her eyes avoiding Gabby’s.

  “Oh,” Gabby said, realizing, and busied herself with her purse.

  Bryce had always been modest, waiting to take off her warm-up until immediately before she dove, refusing to be interviewed post-dive until she had put it back on. But ever since her body had failed her, it felt foreign to her. She understood her limbs and back and stomach as a diver’s, as an athlete’s who used every muscle for a certain purpose. When other girls were getting curves, Bryce and Gabby were “manly” together, as Gabby had called it. Built to be slick, aerodynamic, but not really, well, feminine.

  Now neither of them were athletes. Their muscles lay dormant, covered by curves. Why here? Bryce had found herself asking of her newly thickened thighs when she squeezed into Sydney’s jeans, or earlier that day, when she had spilled out of a B cup.

  Bryce stepped into the red dress, looking at Gabby’s turned back with a pang of guilt. I’ve been avoiding mirrors, Bryce wanted to tell her, but she knew that would sound weird.

  Even now, as she stood in the center of her threefold reflection, Bryce blurred her eyes until she was just a long blob of red. “Okay!” she tried to say with enthusiasm. “Voilá.”

  Gabby looked up and gasped. “Bryce,” she said, putting her hands up to her mouth. “You’re stunning.”

  Bryce refocused her eyes and had to admire the shape the dress seemed to bring out. It cinched at the waist, hugging her sides, and sweeping folds of fabric came across her chest, gathering on one shoulder. Gabby always seemed to know what would look good on Bryce.

  “You really are.”

  She looked at Gabby. At the sight of her face filling with a trembling smile, Bryce had to smile back.

  Gabby gave a quiet laugh. “You’re going to steal him back from me in that.”

  Bryce’s stomach balled up at the joke. Gabby drew in a breath but said nothing more, looking at Bryce, searching for her reaction.

  Bryce remembered waiting her turn at the bottom of the ladder at practice as Gabby climbed ahead, wishing with every ounce that she would nail the dive every time. And Gabby always went first in the diving order because she could tell Bryce was nervous, though Bryce never said so. Gabby knew Bryce better than anybody. Some things mattered over time, but maybe this didn’t. Maybe it shouldn’t.

  “Never,” Bryce responded, shaking her head. “Never.”

  hat night, Bryce got out of Gabby’s car, and a deep, melodic buzzing filled her ears. The air belonged to the cicadas now, there was no doubt about that. They were creatures of the summer, sometimes called July flies. Bryce had always liked that name.

  Inside, she found her father snoring on a reclining chair in front of the last inning of a Texas Rangers game. Next to him, on the floor, her mother breathed heavily, doing bicycle sit-ups, an old portable CD player blaring Electric Light Orchestra in her headphoned ears. At least they were in the same room. Her father barely left the den these days, and her mother was always in her office. Sydney was upstairs, music blaring from underneath her closed door.

  Bryce made her way to the basement and tossed her shopping bags onto her bed. Aside from a few dressier diversions Gabby had convinced her to pursue, Bryce had stocked up on her usual V-necks, tank tops, and shorts with pockets.

  She opened a drawer of the oval-shaped dresser, only to see it was full: her diving trophies. She felt a pang in her chest. One by one, she lined them up in height order, hanging medals around the gold cups and cylinders that topped each one.

  When she leaned to shut the drawer, the edge of something silvery caught her eye. As she opened the drawer farther, she gasped. The tiara. Bryce brought out the worn silver crown, delicately woven with light-pink crystals, and let out a laugh of surprise.

  When they were in first grade, the year after Gabby’s father died, Gabby’s mom, Elena, had taken them to a flea market. In one of the bargain bins, Gabby found a tiara. Not just a plastic, painted tiara like you would find in a toy store. A real tiara. The flea market clerk noticed its worth, too, and priced it high. Gabby’s mother refused; money was tight, and Gabby’s birthday had already passed. But Bryce’s own birthday was coming up, and Elena had told Bryce she could pick something out for her present. When she encountered the small, circular package in the brightly wrapped pile of gifts, Bryce didn’t even unwrap it. She immediately handed it to her friend. They spent most of that year playing Princess and Prince, Gabby wearing the crown and Bryce fighting imaginary dragons.

  Bryce hung it on one of the tallest trophies, happiness swelling inside her. She’d invite Gabby over one of these days and casually motion to the dresser. She couldn’t wait to see the look of surprise on her friend’s face.

  There. She stood back. The monochrome room felt more like hers again, the sparkling tiara and gilded plastic of each prize adding a gold glow to the gray corner.

  Just little things, Bryce thought. She could move things little by little to get them back where they were supposed to be. Right? The coma was big. Not diving was big. The wedding would be big. But she could inch back in small ways, running errands with Gabby, talking to Sydney, taking back her room.

  Like that window. Her mother must have cracked it to air the room out, and the cicadas’ sounds floated in, their buzzing now hard and wild as the night grew darker. Bryce walked over to it and pressed on the frame, bringing the glass pane down.

  And there it was. Her face reflected against the darkness, surprisingly clear. It had changed along with her body, in many of the same ways Gabby’s face had changed. More defined features, vague lines that appeared when she moved her formerly round cheeks.

  As she was about to turn away, Bryce noticed a light come on at the back of the property. Someone was in the barn.

  She made her way outside. The night dripped with insect noise, and she could feel the tall grasses break beneath her boots. The buzzing was so loud now—she couldn’t remember a time when the cicadas made so much noise. When she approached the barn, she saw a bike leaned against the red-painted doors. A familiar-looking bike. Bryce went inside.

  He sat facing away from her on a wooden sawhorse, a camping lantern sitting on the floor beside him.

  “Greg,” she said.

  He turned, his mouth opening in surprise, as if he hadn’t expected to see her there.

  “What are you doing here?” Bryce found her fists tightening, but not in anger. It was to get a grasp on what was happening. Her head began to spin.

  Greg turned all the way around. His eyes bored deeply into hers. “Same thing I’ve been doing here forever.”

  The memories flooded her at the sight of him, biting his nails, his long legs on either side of the sawhorse.

  They crashed into her like rapid-fire waves: he and Bryce, on the same seat, legs intertwining. Bryce sneaking up on him as he faced away from her, kissing where his shoulder met his neck. The taste of his mouthwash. Climbing aboard her dad’s propjet, seated beside one another, pretending to fly. Planning where they would go. Curling up in sleeping bags and falling asleep together, waking up just in time to sneak back into the house, the sky turning pink.

  But now the wooden beams had a
layer of dust an inch thick. The plane her father had been building was covered with an old blue tarp, his tools all put away. He used to work on it every day during his lunch hour. He was going to finish before Bryce went off to college. He had promised. It stood hulking, unfinished, beside Greg like the skeleton of some big animal. It was déjà vu, but all wrong.

  “I came here when I was missing you,” Greg explained quietly.

  “Oh,” Bryce muttered, imagining him wandering around the dark barn by himself. Her head sparked in pain. She had seen that in her vision, hadn’t she?

  Greg stood up. “I missed you every goddamn day. I felt like…” He swallowed. “I didn’t really get the chance to tell you at the restaurant.”

  Bryce breathed through her nose, thinly and calmly, as her eyes darted from his thick-lashed eyes to his broad chest to his veined forearms, twitching as he settled against a beam.

  She tried to keep her voice steady. “Then why did you…give up on me?”

  Greg stopped. His eyes turned to the ceiling for the answer, but when they returned to meet hers, they had the same pain she had seen when he was here alone. “If I had known for a second that there was a chance you were going to wake up, I would have waited. You know I would have.”

  “They said I wasn’t going to,” she filled in quietly.

  “They said you would never wake up,” Greg echoed. “So I just sort of clung to the memories.”

  Bryce nodded, thinking of one unseasonably warm Saturday night when she and Greg had lain next to one another with their hands behind their heads, Bryce in a sports bra and basketball shorts, Greg in his usual Carhartts cut off at the knee. “How do blind people dream?” he had asked her.

  “I don’t know,” Bryce said slowly, pondering. She was staring at the slant of the barn ceiling, fading into darkness at the top. Occasionally the dark would rustle with the flight of bats or barn swallows. The light of their lantern only reached so far.