Five fish remain, each held captive in a plastic BPA-ridden bag. How did these fish find their way to the desert?
I can’t answer that. It’s too close to home.
“I’m sorry, little fish,” I say, kneeling next to the table. “We’re more alike than you think.”
“Isn’t it depressing?”
I stand up quickly, my legs numb from squatting.
The girl in front of me holds out her slushie. “Need a sip? It’s hot out.” My mouth is so dry I could sand a table. She shakes the slushie and smiles. “Come on, take it. You look like you need it.”
At the exact same time, we recognize each other.
“The world’s largest vacuum!” I say.
She points at me. “You’re the funny girl!”
I laugh awkwardly and glance at Hannah, hoping she didn’t hear that. Then a stroke of fear hits me as two worlds collide.
“You don’t go to church here, do you?” I ask at once.
“I’m just here for the slushies,” she says. “By the way, thanks for saving my ass with your sister. That was a close one.”
“She’s dramatic. I think she’s just having a hard time adjusting.”
“Right. Because you just moved here.” And then she holds her arms out wide like she’s hugging the world. “Welcome.”
“Just to clarify . . .” I ask again. “You don’t go to church here?”
“God, no. This festival is just better than sitting around thinking about how depressing Halloween is now. It’s like I can see my innocence walking away in the Jedi costume I wore in fifth grade.” She holds up her hand for me to high-five. “I’m Color, by the way. Shaking hands is too adult. I’m not there yet. Go on, give it a whack.”
So I do. Our hands snap midair, sending tingles down my arm.
“Aggressive,” Color says, shaking out her hand.
“Sorry. I haven’t done that in a while.”
“No, I like it. What’s your name, Funny Girl?”
“Esther,” I say, and kind of hope that my hand never stops tingling. For the first time since I started shriveling up in the desert, I feel alive. Eat it, cactus. “Color. That’s an interesting name.”
“I know. It’s kind of weird. But my mom said that the world needs more color, and so she gave the world me, which is actually kind of beautiful.” Color takes another sip. “That’s my mom for you. Weird at times. Beautiful at times.”
I can’t tell by the way she says it whether that’s a good thing or not.
“Seriously, you need a sip of this slushie . . .” Color hands it to me. When I take a gulp, it’s like I’m transformed. Cherry Coke–flavored awesomeness. Color reads my mind. “I know, right?”
I hand it back a bit reluctantly. If I hold her drink hostage, maybe she won’t leave. I need to keep talking to her.
“Do you want to play the game?” I ask.
Color shrugs. “No tickets.” She squats down next to the goldfish. “They always give out fish at these things, knowing full well they’ll be flushed down the toilet within a few weeks. It’s like we’re saying their lives are expendable, purely so kids can win something. It’s so sad.” She takes a pull from her straw. “Don’t you think it’s sad?”
Well, when you put it that way, it’s totally sad, I think.
“I like your short hair, by the way,” Color says. “I meant to tell you that the other day.”
I touch my head instinctively. “Thanks.”
“Short hair is so radical. It’s like you’re fighting the man by looking like a man, but clearly you’re a woman.” She points at my chest. “It’s trippy.”
She takes another pull of her slushie. Or maybe it’s more like a drag. Or a hit.
“Oh my God!” She grabs the bridge of her nose. “Brain freeze! It hurts so bad!” She shakes her head clear. “Isn’t it weird that we know some things will hurt us, but we do them anyway?”
I nod again. I’ve been transformed into a bobblehead.
Color looks at me with her intense gray eyes. I’m mesmerized by the shade. In a place that never sees rain, Color’s eyes are the hue of storm clouds. “You know, I wasn’t going to come to this thing today because that big Jesus statue kind of scares me, but then I thought, ‘Don’t let your fear prevent you from hitting up a radical festival with slushies.’ And it turns out you’re here. That’s like a sign or something.”
“It is?”
“Definitely,” Color states without faltering. “But seriously, death by swirly.” She points at the fish. “Can you imagine? I wish I had some tickets so I could save one.” She takes another drag of her slushie and then shakes the cup. “Empty. So sad.”
“Want to hear another joke?”
“Yes,” Color says ardently.
“How does a fisherman determine how many fish he needs to catch to make a profit?”
“How?”
“By using a cod-ratic inequality.”
She laughs, and it echoes across the parking lot, and suddenly everywhere around me is full of Color. “I don’t get it at all! Which only makes it even funnier!”
I want to ask her a million questions. Why does she clean houses when she looks like she’s my age? How does she really feel about her mom? What’s her favorite slushie flavor? Who does she get her eyes from—Mom or Dad? Will she be my friend?
“I better go,” Color says, sounding disappointed. “But hey, I’ll see you on Tuesday.”
“You will?”
“Yeah, when I come to clean your house.”
And I swear, at this moment, the sky gets brighter and I don’t mind living in a kiln so much.
“Great,” I say.
“Great,” Color says.
Great. Mom can’t get mad at me. Even she said I need to make friends.
One fish remains. I can’t leave it. Death by swirly. It’s too awful. I go to the ticket booth and pay five dollars for twenty tickets.
“What are you doing?” Hannah asks when I return.
I hand her three tickets. “I want to play.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Just answer the question, Esther.”
“I thought you were the one with all the answers, Hannah.”
She hands me a fishing pole, grudgingly. “You are so annoying.”
It takes eighteen tickets for me to win. When I do, I jump up and down. It’s like I’m back on our old trampoline, cool Ohio air breezing through my hair. Hannah hands over the last fish.
“You have to say it.”
Hannah groans. “And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
5
The one pet store in Truth or Consequences is in the one strip mall, next to the one Chinese restaurant, which is next to the one empty Blockbuster.
I buy a fishbowl, a bag of colorful stones, and a canister of fish food. Tom said that if I want to have a fish, I have to take care of it myself, which means paying for it. Then Mom slipped me twenty dollars and said, “Tom is ridiculous sometimes.”
The store is loud with chirping.
“Have you ever been to California?” I ask the cashier.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
“It’s pretty far from here.”
I put everything in my backpack.
“It’s a thousand miles,” I say.
“You planning to go there or something?” He points at my baby-blue cruiser bike parked in front of the store. It only has three speeds. “Might take a while.” He has a goatee, gray hair, and a red apron covered in cat hair.
“No. But I’ve already come thirteen hundred miles. What’s one thousand more?”
“If you say so.” He looks at me with a confused expression. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”
I shake my head. “There are cracks at public school. It’s too easy to fall.”
“What does that mean?”
It’s just so loud in here. I cover my ears. “Where is all that noise
coming from?”
“My canaries. You want to see ’em?”
“No, thank you.” I leave the pet store immediately. But even outside, the chirping is still in my head.
Complex Math Problem: Esther is aware that California exists. Tom thinks California is in the past. Mom knows better. But canaries caught in a cage can’t fly west. How long will it take for Esther to free herself?
I decide to try coffee. I’m just so damn tired. I ride my bike to the one coffee hut in town, a place called HuggaMug Café. It’s meant for cars, but I ride up to the window and say, with emphasis, “Beep!”
A boy with light-brown hair, perfectly waved over his forehead, opens the window and looks down at me.
“Well, this is a first.”
“I’d like a coffee,” I say.
“Just a coffee.”
“Yes.”
“You look more interesting than just a coffee,” he says.
“I do?”
“I’m kind of a matchmaker when it comes to this stuff.”
“You are?”
He nods. “You look like an iced soy mocha frap to me.”
“I do?”
“Do you trust me?”
“That’s kind of a loaded question.”
“I’m kind of a loaded person.”
“Well,” I say. “Since I’ve never had coffee before, I guess I have to trust you.”
“You’ve never had coffee before?!” He leans out the window. “How do you survive?”
He asks earnestly, so I answer the same way. “Barely. I barely survive.”
“Oh, mon chéri, let me bring you back to life. Wait here.” He closes the window.
I put the kickstand down and wait. A few minutes later, he reappears in the window, holding a large drink.
“Time to start living again,” he says and hands it to me. I take a sip, and it’s the most delicious thing I have ever tasted. He grins widely, exposing a perfect set of white teeth. “Am I good or what?”
“You’re good.” I take another sip, then I catch his name tag and spit some of my delicious drink out. “Your name is Jesus?” I yell, a little too loudly.
He groans. “The accent is so faded, you can’t see it.” And then the boy who brought me back to life leans out the window and kisses me on the cheek. “It’s actually pronounced Hey-soos. My name is Jesús.”
“You saved a fish!” Color drops the vacuum and runs over to my windowsill. “You did it, Esther!”
“I don’t know if I saved it so much as I put it in another container.”
Color waves off my comment. “The whole world is one big container. Everyone’s a hostage. That’s life.”
When she puts it that way, I don’t feel so alone.
“What did you name it?” she asks.
“I didn’t think about that.”
“Names are important, Esther. My brother’s name is Moss, and he’s a total fungus.” She plops down on my bed.
“You have a brother?”
Color nods, and I can tell by the gentle expression on her face that she really does love him, so I don’t bother telling her that moss is actually a plant, not a fungus. She lies back on my bed with a harrumph and pats for me to lie next to her. And then we just stay there for a while, staring at the ceiling.
“You need some glow-in-the-dark stars,” she says. She rolls to her side and props her head in her hand. “So you finally cleaned your room.”
I hope she keeps talking. I like that Color says things that are unpredictable, which makes me feel more awake, like I’m actually living, not just surviving.
“OK,” Color says, “I have to tell you the truth.”
“Are you sure you want to do that? You don’t really know me.”
“You saved a fish, Esther. That says something.”
And I believe her. “Go for it.”
“Your sister wasn’t completely wrong about me,” she says. “I kind of steal stuff from people’s trash. I’m a klepto-dumpster-diving-maniac. But it doesn’t feel like stealing, because people are getting rid of the stuff in the first place. It’s more like I’m saving things from being lost in a landfill, forever. Doesn’t that sound horrible? Lost in old Band-Aids and Styrofoam cups that never decompose. I figure it’s part of my job as a cleaner. But I only take from people I know.”
The vacuum is still running.
“I just needed you to know. And now that I’ve said it out loud, I feel better.” Color grins. “OK, what about you? Tell me something about Esther.”
For a second, I’m thrown. People usually tell me about me—Mom, Tom, even Hannah. They tell me what to do, when to do it, how to do it.
I get off the bed and open my closet, exposing stacks of unpacked boxes. And then I lift my bed skirt, and Color sees the full extent of what I’m hiding.
“I didn’t really clean my room. I just hid everything.”
She laughs, jovially and loudly, with her entire body, and I swear the sound fills the hole in my chest where the wind blows through at night and echoes, lonely.
“Well, if you ever want to get rid of anything, I’m happy to take on the burden,” Color says when her giggles have calmed. And with a glance at the clock in my room, which reads 2:30 p.m., she stands up quickly. “Crap. I better get back to work.” She pauses. “Wait. Shouldn’t you be in school or something?”
“Technically,” I say. “I am in school.”
“You’re homeschooled!” Color is a ball of excitement again, and my room fills with her energy. “That’s so awesome. What grade are you in?”
“I’m a sophomore.”
“Me, too! So have you ever gone to a regular school?”
Words clog my throat. I nod, once.
“Which do you like better?” she asks.
“Regular school,” I say, unwilling to say more but unable to hold back a wave of memories. The smell of dry-erase markers. Organizing a backpack for the first day. Holding a hand as I walk the halls between classes. I can practically feel Amit’s fingers laced between mine.
Color places her hand on my arm. “They just teach us lies in high school anyway. You’re not missing out.”
“I’m pretty sure it’s the same at my house,” I say. “What about you? Shouldn’t you be in school?”
Color goes back to the vacuum and moves it back and forth over a spot she had already covered. “I go half a day three days a week so I can work in the afternoons. The school calls it ‘Skills for Living Co-Op.’” She shakes her head. “Let’s just say with my mom, knowing how to clean up other people’s garbage comes in handy.”
I want to know more about Color and her high school and her family, but Mom knocks on the door and pokes her head in my room like a turtle.
“We need to leave in five minutes,” she says. “And don’t forget your water bottle.”
“Got it.”
She notices my clean room. “You finally put everything away. I knew it wouldn’t take too long. It feels good, doesn’t it?” But she closes the door before I can answer.
Color gives me a knowing smile, puts her earbuds back in, and continues vacuuming.
I pull a box of my old sports equipment from the closet—tennis racket, soccer ball, softball, and an old pair of adjustable roller skates, the kind that strap on to your shoes. I just want Color to have something. “Here.” I hand her the roller skates.
“You opened a box for me?”
I guess I didn’t think about it that way, or any way at all.
She hugs the skates to her chest. “I promise I’ll take good care of these, Esther.”
“I know.” I smile. “You’re saving them.”
Color cringes. “Used Band-Aids. So gross.”
The magazines at the doctor’s office are dated. I pick one up and thumb through old gossip. Then I put it back down. My hands feel dirty just from touching the sticky cover, and I rub them on my legs, which won’t stop shaking, even though Mom has put her hand on my thigh at least one hundred times
since we’ve been here.
“It’s just a checkup,” she says. “A . . . precaution.”
That’s a lie. This is a punishment. A way for her to remind me what a doctor’s office smells like, how cold the tile is on your feet, how embarrassing it is to wear a gown that opens in back. How alone and unprepared you feel with your feet nestled in stirrups. Mom wants to make sure I never want to be here again. My doctor in Ohio said it was over, and this is Mom’s way of clarifying the point here in New Mexico.
She doesn’t tell me to relax or take a deep breath. With her hand on my thigh, Mom stills my shuddering body. Like gravity reminds you that the earth is always beneath your feet. The earth will always hold you, even when other people won’t.
But it doesn’t feel like that right now. It feels like I’m out of my body and floating, but it’s not a serene hovering. It’s more chaotic and unpredictable. At any moment, I might collapse.
I can’t bring myself to look at Mom. Mom can’t even bring herself to look at me. We both stare at the dirty stack of magazines and the green carpet that resembles fake grass. Every few minutes the phone rings, and the receptionist acts angry that it does.
“I spy with my little eye,” Mom whispers, leaning into me. It’s the game we always played in the pediatrician’s office when Hannah and I were young. Mom would keep us occupied, looking around the room for colored objects, while we waited for the doctor or when we had to get a shot. “Something . . .” But this isn’t the pediatrician’s office, and Mom doesn’t have time to finish.
“Esther Wyatt.” The name echoes in my head. I slowly glance at the nurse. “Esther Wyatt.”
Mom stands and slings her purse over her shoulder.
“Esther Ainsworth. My last name is Wyatt,” Mom says. “I’m remarried.”
Ainsworth is my dad’s last name. I am made up of all things Dad. But he doesn’t matter anymore. That’s what Mom said twelve years ago when I asked her where Dad went. I was four.
“He doesn’t matter anymore.” Those were her exact words.
The Infinite Pieces of Us Page 3