Belong to Me

by Marisa de los Santos

  In this fantasy, Lake met Teddy Tremain again, but he was a changed Teddy Tremain, older and wiser, a full-fledged adult with a fascinating job, a house close to Liberty Charter, and a love of bike riding and basketball, but with a hole at the center of his otherwise great life, a distinctly Dev-and-Lake-shaped hole. In the fantasy, Lake asked Dev for permission to marry Teddy, and Dev said no problem, and together, they stepped into the hole and filled it. Dev knew this to be a supremely pathetic fantasy, childish and futile. What made it worse was the real longing it sent blazing through Dev’s chest, like a comet.

  Rafferty was gesturing toward a rectangular skylight in the sloped bathroom ceiling, explaining how he’d placed it so that morning sun would slant across you as you showered. Dev thought, drearily, how Rafferty would always have this, at least; even if he lost Lake, he’d have this house, a job that he loved. Maybe he would be okay.

  Then Dev was struck by another thought, and for the first time in a long time, “Rafferty” and “Pleat” slammed up against each other in a nomenclatural fender bender that jarred loose one major “what if.” What if it was an alias? What if he and Lake were just testing the waters, making sure Dev liked Rafferty before they revealed his true identity? He gave Rafferty a surreptitious once-over: the right age, blue eyes, straight medium brown hair, maybe five ten, attached earlobes (Dev’s were unattached, but so were Lake’s, so no problem there), no widow’s peak or cleft chin (ditto Dev). Nothing obvious to cancel him out on the basis of phenotype. But come on, Dev told himself, no way, don’t be a jerk. It was just the pathetic fantasy messing with his mind.

  But he asked anyway. Astronomically long shot or not, what could it hurt? Quickly, before he had time to seriously contemplate this question, Dev asked.

  “Hey, Rafferty, um, you know so much about farmhouses. Where did you say you grew up again? Iowa?”

  As usual, Rafferty didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know if I ever did say, but nope. Wrong belt. Iowa’s corn; I’m Bible. Roswell, Georgia, outside Atlanta.” As soon as Rafferty said this, Dev noticed two things about his voice: it contained a blurry-edged, protracted quality, a drawl that Dev realized had been there all along, and it held the ring of truth. The frail soap bubble of hope, which Dev could have kicked himself for setting afloat in the first place, popped with a splat.

  How is it that he kept getting suckered into this? Into feeling like he had lost something he hadn’t even had? This time, he felt like Rafferty had lost something, too, which made even less sense, but which helped somehow, being disappointed for someone else instead of just for himself.

  After a few seconds, Dev swallowed hard and smiled. “Anyway,” he told Rafferty, “it’s a really, really great house.”

  A couple of days later, when the phone call came from Lyssa’s father telling Dev that she had taken “a hazardous number of her mother’s sleeping pills” and would reside in “a state-of-the-art behavioral-health inpatient facility” (that was how her father talked, like he was reading from an official press release) two hours away for an as-yet-undetermined number of weeks, Dev had seen Lyssa’s number on the caller ID and had strongly considered not picking up the phone, a fact he would feel guilty about almost immediately.

  His guilt expanded exponentially when Lyssa’s father explained that while he himself would have preferred to keep this in the family, Lyssa had requested specifically that he telephone Dev and Aidan Weeks because they were her two “best buds” at school, and she was hoping that once she was allowed to receive phone calls at the facility, they would give her a call.

  But both of these jabs to Dev’s conscience ended up feeling like mere pinpricks in comparison to the third.

  It wasn’t often that Dev became a complete bumbling idiot, if only because, when treading unfamiliar, heavily potholed, potentially idiocy-inducing ground, Dev usually managed to keep his lips zipped. But the terrain of Lyssa’s hazardous pill ingestion and consequent hospitalization was like nothing Dev had ever set foot on, was roughly equivalent, in terms of unfamiliarity, to the surface of Mercury, and just about as hot.

  When Lyssa’s father finally finished his calm, rehearsed-sounding speech and Dev had a chance to get a word in, here’s what he said: “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand why she would do that. I saw her, like, three days ago and she was fine.” He paused. “Well, fine for Lyssa, which I know isn’t all that fine. But she seemed like herself, like she wouldn’t do this.”

  “I don’t know how much you know about Lyssa’s mental health, but she is a fragile young woman. She suffers from multiple anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder among them,” replied Mr. Sorenson, in a pleasant, detached, information-delivering manner, as though he were describing anything. “The monarch butterfly,” intoned a voice in Dev’s head, “migrates close to two thousand miles in a single season. The average ant can carry twenty times its own weight.” Who the hell called their own daughter “young woman”?

  “And she’s gotten physically unhealthy as well, increasingly physically unhealthy, dangerously underweight, which is why we insisted she quit ballet.”

  By the time this bit of information had clicked into place for Dev, Mr. Sorenson had glided well past it. When it did click, Dev forgot he was talking to an adult and cut in with “Wait, you made her quit ballet?”

  “That’s correct.”

  And then Dev said it, didn’t even really say it because it wasn’t even really a word, just a sound: “Ohhhhhhh.” But even as the sound stretched itself out into the empty air between the two telephone receivers, he heard everything it contained and he knew Lyssa’s father heard it, too. “I get it now,” the sound said. “If you made her quit the one thing that made her want to live inside her messed-up body, then it makes total sense that she would try to kill herself.”

  Dev spent the silence that followed wishing like crazy that he could turn back time or snatch the “Oh” out of the air and shove it back down his own throat.

  When Mr. Sorenson spoke again, the press-secretary tone was gone, as though it had never been. He didn’t even sound mad, which is what Dev expected. His voice was plain anguished, a terrible sound to hear.

  “We didn’t know! Our girl was turning into a skeleton. She was going off her meds because of the damn dancing. And we didn’t hear her when she said it was the only thing that made her happy. Who could believe that about their child? Seventeen years old with only one good thing in her life?”

  What a nightmare, thought Dev, to be somebody’s father.

  “Mr. Sorenson?” Dev said carefully. “You wouldn’t have made her quit if you knew. Anyone could see that. You were trying to help her.”

  He meant what he said, but he felt dishonest saying it. Who did Dev think he was, consoling Lyssa’s dad when Dev wasn’t even sure, most of the time, that he liked her? Consoling under false pretenses. It made Dev feel like a criminal.

  “We were. God help us, we screwed up, but all we want is for her to be happy. For her life to be good.” Then he said, “Maybe you can tell her that when you talk to her. I’m sure it will mean a lot coming from you. Could you do that, Dev?”

  “Definitely,” promised Dev. What else could he do but promise? “I will definitely tell her that.”

  For a while after Dev hung up the phone, after his pulse slowed down, he felt basically normal.

  “So, okay,” he said to himself. “So they found her in time, and she’s getting help, so it’ll be okay.”

  And because he realized that he was starving, he walked into the kitchen and made himself his double-decker specialty sandwich—bread, jelly, bread, peanut butter, bread—found a bag of barbecue potato chips, and sat down to eat. Midway through the sandwich and one-third of the way through the bag of chips, the “Lyssa will be okay” certainty and the normal feeling began to be edged out, like a fast-motion eclipse, by an image of her putting the pills into her mouth and swallowing them. There had to be a moment in there when Lyssa had felt the pills, smooth and clic
king, on her tongue and could have spit them out, the whole gravelly mouthful, and she had let the moment go by. That’s what Dev couldn’t get over: she had let the moment go by. She had barreled right past it and had swallowed, swallowed on purpose, in order to die.

  Even though Dev knew death to be a biological fact, he couldn’t imagine really doing it. He couldn’t imagine anyone really doing it, let alone himself, let alone on purpose, and he figured that was the way it was supposed to be: people living their palpable lives in their reliable, breathing bodies, and death unimaginable, a nonfactor. But Lyssa had been able to see it: body dead, life over. She had wanted it, and that made no sense, no evolutionary sense, no any kind of sense.

  Dev called his mom at the restaurant because that was the first thing he thought of to do, even though he knew the way she worked: when he got upset, she got worried, and when she got worried, she got mad. The only wild cards were how mad and at who; this time it was extremely and Mr. Sorenson. “That man’s got no business burdening a fourteen-year-old kid with his family’s problems”; “I’m sorry about Lyssa, I really am, but you need to just put this out of your head, Devvy, go out and shoot some baskets, ride your bike”; “If we weren’t slammed right now, I’d call that man and tell him how little I appreciate his complete lack of judgment”; and so forth.

  This response wasn’t particularly helpful on its face, and it definitely didn’t answer his question of how Lyssa could want to die, but listening to it, Dev felt a little better. His mom was his mom was his mom. And when he hung up, he realized that while he might not be ready to put Lyssa out of his head, riding his bike and shooting hoops were good ideas, genius ideas actually, so he stuffed a ball into his backpack and took off.

  But when it came time to turn right toward the playground and courts, Dev kept going straight, into Aidan’s neighborhood, flying past pool-table lawn after pool-table lawn, then out the other side because even though he knew he would talk the entire mess over with Aidan before long, he didn’t want to just yet. Pretty soon, he was almost to Cornelia and Teo’s house, and then he swooped left down their driveway and then he was knocking on their door, and even though he wasn’t entirely sure what had brought him there—something different from the spontaneous, homing-pigeon instinct that had made him call his mother, but not that different—as soon as Teo opened the door, Dev knew he had made the right call.

  They went to the playground and shot hoops in the sun, and for half an hour, that was all Dev wanted. Teo was good. Not as quick as Dev, but almost (“You age from the feet up,” said Teo, “consider yourself warned”), and what he lacked in speed he made up for in unpredictability. A tricky, short-burst player who went left when you would have bet your last frigging dollar he’d go right. But overall their games were similar. They were both a little overly ambitious, had fast hands and uncanny peripheral vision and were even built along more or less the same lines: broad shouldered in an angular, skinny-guy way, tall and loose limbed.

  At one point, Teo made a ridiculous shot, a crazy-impossible fall-away, and Dev shouted, “Sweet!” He meant all of it: the shot, the slap of their sneakers on the blacktop, his T-shirt swishing around his torso, the outrageously blue sky, the new, cut-grass tang of summer in the air. And he thought that maybe he wouldn’t tell Teo about Lyssa after all, that playing ball was enough.

  But when they took a break, flopping on the grass and twisting open their water bottles, Dev went ahead and told, about Lyssa and her OCD, about the phone call and what came after, Dev sitting at the kitchen table, trying and failing to comprehend how Lyssa could consider her options and choose to go from being a living body to a dead one.

  “I mean, unless you believe in reincarnation, which I don’t think Lyssa is the type to believe in, and even if you believe in heaven or whatever, this is it, your one, like, terrestrial shot, and she threw it away. No matter how bad things are, how’re you going to throw away your one shot?”

  Teo held the ball between his hands, rotating it thoughtfully, as if he might find an answer for Dev on the other side of it. When he spoke, he didn’t sound like a doctor talking but just like an ordinary person. He said, “It’s hard to say what was happening inside her head. Her brain doesn’t function quite like most people’s to begin with and maybe, under a lot of stress, she just lost the ability to hope.”

  Dev pondered this, hope as an ability. In Dev’s experience, hope was something your brain just went ahead and did, even sometimes against its own better judgment. Hope is the thing with feathers. They’d read that in English too long ago for Dev to remember the rest. Emily Dickinson, who was one wild thinker. He made a mental note to go back and take another look.

  “I guess that’s what’s so hard for me to get, the no hope. To think that, of all the potential scenarios out there, there’s not a single good one? It just seems like we—human beings—know so much, but it’s nothing compared to what we don’t know. The universe surprises us, right? That’s just what it does. So how could she be so one hundred percent positive that nothing good would happen? Because she would have to be totally positive, wouldn’t she? To do what she did.”

  Teo looked up and squinted out across the playground, thinking. “You’d think so. But maybe she didn’t think it all the way through. Her mind might have been moving too fast or have been too disorganized. Maybe she wasn’t even really thinking about death, but just about ending how bad she felt right at that particular moment.”

  Dev considered this. “So if someone had been there, right at that particular moment to help her calm down and think straight, maybe she wouldn’t have gone through with it. I feel like I’d give anything if I could have been there and stopped her.”

  Teo nodded.

  “But you know what? Not because she’s my friend. Because the crazy thing is that I’m not even sure she is my friend.” He hesitated, then said, “I don’t like being around her all that much, to tell you the truth. She makes me nervous.”

  Teo smiled. “Yeah, I can see how she might.”

  “Sometimes, and I know how mean this is, I even feel resentful. Like, why did she choose me to be comfortable with, or whatever? Why couldn’t she have just left me alone?”

  Why had he said that? Dev sat with his elbows on his knees, staring down at the stony dirt and the tufts of grass. He liked Teo and Cornelia, a lot. They were the easiest adults to be around he’d ever met, even easier to be around than Rafferty because they were happy. You could tell how much they enjoyed living their particular lives, and Dev really, really wanted them to like him, which made showing Teo the weaseliest, whiniest, meanest aspects of his personality, the parts he showed almost nobody, a highly counterproductive thing to do. Stupid ass, he told himself. Stu. Pid. Ass.

  But Teo just pointed out, in his regular voice, “You haven’t told her to leave you alone, though. Even though you could have.”

  Dev looked up, startled. “I guess I could have.” He shook his head in disbelief. “How come I never thought of that? That’s weird, isn’t it?”

  “Not so weird,” said Teo, and the frank approval, the straight-up liking in his eyes when he said this made Dev feel sort of shy, but at the same time, great, better than he’d felt even during the ball playing.

  Teo grinned at Dev. “I guess Lyssa’s one of those surprises you were talking about. The universe throwing you a curveball. Maybe it’ll all make sense someday.”

  “Or not,” joked Dev. Then he leaned back to face the radiant, wide-open sky. “Thanks a lot, Universe,” he said.

  The phone call that would change everything happened on the last day of school, and although, following the phone call, it would be a while before Dev could appreciate its ironies or joke about them with anyone, once he could, it would strike him as pretty freaking apt that the phone call of his life (okay, so he was only fourteen, but if this phone call wasn’t the phone call of his life, he didn’t want to know) was actually a missed phone call.

  “The bell tolled for thee,” A
idan would say, “but you were too busy scraping dog shit off thy shoes to get it.”

  Which was basically what happened, and by the time Dev got through the front door, dropped his overstuffed, ten-ton backpack (gym clothes, notebooks, yearbook, random last-day-of-school detritus) in the hallway, and got to the phone, it had stopped ringing and was sitting there, mute, no message light blinking. Ordinarily, Dev would have just picked up the phone and called Lake without even bothering to check the caller ID, since whenever she wasn’t at home when he got back from school, she employed her spooky mind-reading skills to call him within four minutes after he walked through the door, but in addition to treading on dog shit, Dev was also treading on a cushion of start-of-summer, Clare-imminence air, so he checked. On the off chance that it was Clare wanting to celebrate the last day of school via telephone with Dev, even though he knew Clare’s school had gotten out four days earlier, he checked.

  It wasn’t Clare. If it had been Clare, the name on the screen would have been HOBBES, V C (Clare’s mother’s name was Viviana Clare, a fact that pleased Dev, primarily because anything having to do with Clare pleased him, but also because it was a cool name) followed by a number with the area code 434, but even though he knew this, for a crazy, sentimental second or two he thought maybe it was Clare, calling out to him, because what it said on the screen was this: DEVEROUX.

  For several bewildered seconds, all Dev could do was stare at the phone, then he shrugged and said, “Nutty,” turned around to walk away, made it about four feet before curiosity got the best of him, turned around again, grabbed the phone, and called DEVEROUX back.

  A woman answered, picked up after half a ring, and instead of saying hello, said, “Ronnie?” in such a hopeful voice that Dev sort of hated to set her straight.

  Feeling vaguely dumb, he said, “Uh, no. I think you must have just called me by mistake. I saw the name on the caller ID and, well, my name’s actually, weirdly enough, Deveroux, uh, Tremain, so I figured I’d call back.” Dev paused, the dumb feeling snowballing at warp speed. “And, you know, see.”