But I’m made up of all of his matter. I have his hair and his eyes and his skin.
Complex Math Problem: If Dad doesn’t matter, and I’m made up of him, do I matter?
I finally look up from the carpet. “I want to go by myself.”
Mom pauses, a frown pulling her cheeks downward.
“Please,” I say.
And she concedes.
The nurse takes me away, and I glance at Mom before the door shuts. She still isn’t looking at me. She wants to escape this as much as I do, but she holds on out of worry, and I hold on out of heartbreak.
The nurse records my weight and blood pressure and writes numbers on my chart.
The paper crinkles under my weight when I sit down on the exam table.
“Dr. Rodriguez will be in, in a moment,” the nurse says.
My mind is distant, unable to concentrate as the nurse talks, the beige walls overtaking my vision. Now I know why Tom wanted to move to the desert. It’s plain here. A landscape of neutral colors. And always sunny. He wants me to be plain and sunny.
“Do you have any questions?” the doctor asks as she enters.
“Questions?”
Dr. Rodriguez flips through my chart.
Do I have any more questions?
“What did the Little Mermaid wear?”
“Pardon?”
“An algae-bra.”
Dr. Rodriguez sets my chart down. “Are you OK, Esther?”
“It’s a joke. Get it?”
She looks at me as if I’m a pathetic puppy. “Any other questions?”
“Does it ever rain in the desert?” I ask.
“Not very often.” Dr. Rodriguez tells me to take care of myself and to let her know if I need anything in the future.
But I’m not concerned about my future. It’s my past that’s following me.
The pool is warm beneath my body, and while I know I’m lying still, one part of me can’t stop running. Memories aren’t easily forgotten or censored when you’re sixteen. Some days, I’ll just be lying here and the past will creep up behind me and tap me on the shoulder, like a kind librarian. It feels nice, comforting, and before I know it, I’m turning around to stare into golden eyes, wishing I could just ignore him, but knowing that’s impossible. And in that moment, the past becomes the present again.
“Hey, Esther,” he says.
“Yeah, Amit.”
One side of his mouth pulls down more than the other, creating this beautifully crooked smile, and right at the crown of his head, a cowlick forces up a little tuft of hair no matter how often he attempts to flatten it. When Amit moves to smooth his hair, I stop him. I like that his hair sticks up. And even though I’m reaching for something that only exists in my memory, I swear I feel him. I feel the bump on the knuckle of his left ring finger from years of holding a pencil the wrong way. Where other boys have calluses from sports and weight lifting, Amit’s palm is smooth, like silk. I press my thumb directly into its center. It fits perfectly, like I’m a piece of his puzzle.
“What did one algebra book say to the other?” Amit asks.
“What?”
“Don’t bother me. I’ve got my own problems.”
And I laugh and laugh and laugh, until tears stream down my cheeks, Amit dissolving in front of me, the puzzle falling apart into infinitesimal pieces, and I realize I’m sobbing.
6
Music with a heavy beat spills out of HuggaMug Café as I ride up. Through the glass I see Jesús bouncing and throwing napkins around the hut like they are confetti. He sees me and opens the window, out of breath.
“Mon chéri! Back for another iced soy mocha frap?”
“You remember?”
“I never forget a coffee. Wait. Are you crying?”
“No.” I wipe tears from my face. “I have dust in my eyes.”
But my face is swollen. I can feel it. Dust doesn’t do that, but Jesús doesn’t question me further. He just hands me a napkin.
“For the dust,” he says.
“Can I have something to bring me back to life?” I say.
He nods and disappears. Then he returns, and the music is even louder. “Mon chéri, I love this song! We need to dance.”
He climbs out the window and pulls me off my bike. The music is blaring. I don’t know the song, but all of a sudden, I’m dancing in the middle of the street with the boy who brought me back to life, and all of my worries are gone. Jesús twirls me in a circle. I laugh and begin to get dizzy, and the more I laugh, and the dizzier I get, the lighter I feel.
When the song is over, I’m giggling so hard my stomach hurts, and I almost fall over. Jesús catches me in a hug and whispers, “Sometimes, you just need to dance to shake off the dust. And this is the desert. It can get really dusty.”
Another boy hangs his head out the window. “What the hell are you doing? Get back in here and clean this shit up.”
Jesús yells over his shoulder. “It’s called HuggaMug. I’m just doing my job.” He kisses me on the cheek. “I hope I’ve been of service today. Please don’t hesitate to fill out a comment card and remark on my fabulous dance skills. I’m also pretty talented with a frothing wand.”
“Seriously, dude,” the other boy says.
I grab Jesús’s arm before he can walk away. “You have. Helped. Today.”
“Then my job is done.” He winks at me. “Come back and see us soon. I’m here every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.”
“I mean it. I’m not cleaning up your fucking mess, Jesús,” the other boy says.
“I love it when you get all teenage angsty,” Jesús replies. He looks back at me. “He needs to froth some milk, if you know what I mean.”
Jesús goes back into the hut, through the side door, and reemerges at the window. “Don’t be a stranger, mon chéri.”
I climb back on my bike. “Why the French?”
Jesús says, “If this hut can pretend to be a café, I figure I can pretend to be French. It feels better than the reality most days.”
“Then . . . au revoir.”
“Adieu.” Jesús blows me a kiss.
I ride away from the coffee hut without my iced soy mocha frap, but I got what I came for. I feel better.
And the other boy who yelled at Jesús—I think I’ve seen his buzzed head before.
It turns out .9 recurring is totally equal to 1. I’m still trying to wrap my head around this fact when I walk into choir practice on Wednesday. I worked on it all last night.
Obviously, ⅓ × 3 = 1.
And .3 recurring × 3 = .9 recurring.
Also, ⅓ and .3 recurring are the same number.
That means .9 recurring is equal to 1.
Beth looks in my direction and then at the empty seat next to her. I sit down in it.
“You figured it out, didn’t you?” she says.
I nod. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
I was so concentrated on figuring out the problem last night that I didn’t have time to think about anything else. Not the cactus outside my window, or the picture of Amit tucked under my mattress, or how Hannah used to crawl into bed with me when she was cold in the winter. She’d put her freezing toes in between my hot legs, and it drove me crazy, but eventually we’d fall asleep, tangled together. All that has changed. We live here now.
I don’t know how to answer Beth’s question. Thank her for what? For taking me out of the past and giving me a problem I can solve. She might ask more questions.
And she’s grabbing at her cross necklace again.
Ms. Sylvia starts practice with an announcement that next week she’s holding solo auditions for our upcoming Christmas performance. Anyone interested should sign the clipboard she passes around the room. Hannah, who is sitting next to Peter, signs.
Ms. Sylvia says that we’re going to learn the Smashing Pumpkins song “Christmastime” to spice things up a bit, on Pastor Rick’s recommendation. Beth groans.
As we practice, I
see Peter flirting with Hannah, who tosses her long hair like she’s a horse. For the past week, she’s been lying out by our empty pool. Now she has a summer glow in November. She’s a cactus in the desert.
But me . . . I wake up every morning hoping I’ll smell rain, hoping I’ll fill a backpack with school supplies and walk down our street in Ohio to the bus stop. The high school bus comes at six forty-five in the morning, and in the winter it’s always late. Mr. Bob gets nervous driving in the snow. When I finally arrive at school, Amit stands at my locker. He takes my frozen hands, bringing them to his mouth, and blows his warm breath on the tips of my fingers. High school is noisy in the morning, but Amit and I seem to live in a bubble, untouched by the sounds of overly caffeinated teenagers.
The tips of my fingers press together, too warm for their own good in November. I turn to Beth and whisper desperately, “Do you have any more math problems for me?”
Beth thinks for a second, and I can tell by her face that she’s got a lot going on. Today her shirt says: OBEY GRAVITY. IT’S THE LAW. Beth must be smart. Like really smart. And I like smart people, but that darn necklace makes me not want to like her. It makes it so I can’t like her. She probably follows all the commandments, all the rules, and I don’t. Or at least haven’t . . . in the past.
“It’s not really a question, more like a mind bender. Do you think you can handle it?” Beth asks.
I need a mind bender. Please, twist my brain in a new direction.
Beth gets excited. “OK. This is a fact. Most people have more than the average number of legs.”
“Right,” I say.
“But if most have more—then how is it the average?”
My head tries to wrap around what she’s said. How can that be true?
“I know, right?” Beth says. “It’s crazy.”
Then Ms. Sylvia taps her wand on her music stand and clears her throat.
Beth leans in, still smiling, and says, “Do you want to hang out sometime?”
Everything inside my body sags lower, threatening to fall to the floor in a splat. I can practically hear it groan.
Beth grabs at her cross necklace. What if she finds out? Will she tell everyone at church?
Across the room, Hannah flirts with Peter, wiping hair from his forehead. She always has the answers. But when she looks back at me, her gaze is like daggers. Message received.
I agreed to the deal. Tom said if we made a fresh start, we’d all keep our mouths shut, and pretend like nothing ever happened. But when he said it, it felt more like a threat, like if one of our mouths opened, it would all come tumbling down.
I can’t do that to Hannah again. She may not want to climb into bed with me anymore, but I’m the one who made us move. I put her bed in a different city where it’s always sunny and warm.
I can’t be friends with Beth.
Choir practice ends, and I never answer Beth’s question. I feel bad about that. After all, I know how it feels. But I don’t want to disappoint Beth by giving her an answer she won’t like.
Tonight I’ve decided to try singing Smashing Pumpkins with my head stuffed under my pillow. But after just a few minutes, I start to sweat and then to suffocate. Flopping onto my back, I stare up at the bare ceiling.
“Are you sure this is OK?” Amit asks. He’s lying next to me. His body is the exact length of mine.
“No.” I laugh. He would come over when Mom went to her Wednesday afternoon Zumba class and Hannah had ballet lessons. Tom came home from work promptly at six thirty, which meant Amit and I had two hours in the house to ourselves. Freedom at our fingertips. I’d take him up to my room, and Amit would look around, aghast to be in a girl’s room, skittish, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Don’t worry. No one will be home for a while. I just want to show you something.”
I feel Amit turn his head in my direction, as if he’s lying next to me in New Mexico, and not locked in a memory of Ohio. “What do you want to show me, Esther?”
My hand touches the empty side of my bed. “Let’s start with everything.”
“What’s your favorite thing you’ve saved from the landfill?” I ask. Color and I are lying at the bottom of the empty pool on Tuesday. It’s been a week since I saw her last. She glances at me but doesn’t answer the question. She just smiles, like she has a secret, the best kind of secret.
“What do you do out here, anyway?” she asks.
“Nothing, really. I just lie here.” I look at her to see what she thinks, and Color gazes serenely up at the sky. I swear it smiles back. “It’s better than being inside all the time.”
“I get it,” Color says. “My mom isn’t big on walls either. They hold too many things in.”
“And she doesn’t like to hold things in?”
“No. She doesn’t want to be contained.” Color looks at me. “There’s a difference.”
One lonely white cloud hangs above us.
Mom and Hannah are at the grocery store. I asked to stay home, and Mom said that was a good idea, to make sure the cleaning company doesn’t try to steal anything else. I had to control my laughter.
“Can I tell you the truth, though?” Color says, rolling onto to her side.
“Sure.”
“Sometimes I wish my mom would be contained just a little bit. Like just to the state of New Mexico.”
“She doesn’t live here?”
Color shakes her head. “Not right now. She kind of comes and goes. She’s taking care of my grandma in Denver at the moment. I know, sounds like a really nice thing to do, right? But really she’s just scamming on my granny’s money because Granny’s too old to know any better.”
“You live with your dad, then?”
“God, no. He lives somewhere in Scotland. My mom promises I’ll meet him one day, but I don’t know. She’s not so good with promises, so we’ll see.”
“Who do you live with, then?”
“It’s just me and Moss.” Color points up. “That cloud looks like one of those half-horse, half-people things.”
I feel myself staring at Color too long. She lives alone with her brother. And no dad, just like me. “A centaur,” I say.
“Yes! A centaur.” Color is bright in the sunshine today, even when she talks about sad things, like missing parents and scamming money off old people. “So did you think of a name for your fish yet?”
“Not yet.”
“It’ll come to you, Esther.”
We lie there for a long time without saying anything. It’s comfortable. The centaur gallops away. I don’t want to move from this spot. I know what it feels like to be abandoned, to feel like no matter how hard you hold on to something, it all turns to sand in your grasp. And if Color is lonesome, I want to just lie here and make her feel full. Make her feel whole. I grab her hand. She flinches, but then she interlaces her fingers with mine.
When Mom knocks on the sliding glass door, it surprises us both. We sit up.
Mom sticks her head outside and looks at us suspiciously. “Esther, help me unload the groceries.”
I dust the paint chips off my butt. The pool needs to be resealed if it’s ever to hold water again. Color laughs and wipes more flecks from my back, the part I can’t reach or see, and I do the same for her.
“So we should hang out sometime,” Color says as she climbs the ladder. I think I might burst. I wait for Tuesday all week. It’s the only day when living in the desert doesn’t make me feel shriveled up.
Complex Math Problem: When one broken piece joins together with another broken piece, is it considered whole again, even if the edges don’t match up perfectly?
Mom watches me through the sliding glass door.
“I’d love to hang out,” I say.
Color gets excited. “This Friday. You know where the Blockbuster is?”
It’s a small town. I already know where everything is. “Yes.”
“Meet us there,” Color says. “Seven o’clock.”
Color and I walk throu
gh the open sliding door. She says to Mom, “You have a really nice house.”
Mom says, “Thank you.”
“And I totally get why you don’t fill the pool,” Color adds. “Safety first.”
Mom turns to me with one of those looks that speaks. It says, Listen up, Esther. “That’s right,” she says to Color. “Safety first.”
It’s not until Color leaves that I realize she said to meet us.
7
My eyes catch the boy with the buzzed hair running down by the river and I chase after him. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because he works with Jesús. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen him running before. Maybe it’s because this is a small town, and I barely know anyone, and for some reason I feel like I know him. He looks so familiar. I jump on my bike and ride up next to him.
He glances back at me. “What are you doing?”
“I saw you the other day,” I say. “At HuggaMug.”
“So?”
Good question. So what?
“Don’t be mad at Jesús. He was just trying to cheer me up.”
The boy with the buzz haircut is running really fast, and I have to pedal hard to keep up with him.
“Jesús knows I can’t stay mad at him.”
The boy’s legs move so swiftly I barely believe someone can run at this speed. He’s practically floating just above the ground. And he’s not even winded.
“I see you running a lot,” I say out of breath.
“So?”
At least he’s consistent.
“What are you running from?”
He stops abruptly and puts his hands on his hips, his breathing more labored now. I skid my bike to a halt.
“Who said I’m running from anything?” he asks.
Good question. Why did I put it that way?
“Isn’t everyone running from something?”
He looks me up and down with intense gray eyes. He’s wearing one of those wicking shirts that clings tight to his chest. He’s thin but muscular.
How do I know him?
I feel sweat drip down my back and also collect around my ears. Inadvertently, this boy has gotten me to work out, just what Mom wants me to do.
The Infinite Pieces of Us Page 4