by Amy Reed
I’m not sure if I nod. I’m not sure what any part of my body is doing.
“But it wasn’t like that,” Cole continues. “I think what Stella loved was Evie’s sweetness. Her innocence, you know? How she was this little blond cheerleader with the football player boyfriend and perfect family, but she wasn’t stuck up about it or anything. She was so generous with her love. So open.”
My head is spinning. The ground has been pulled out from under me and I am falling through space and there is nothing and no one to catch me. Who the hell is he talking about? Not Evie. Not the Evie I know.
He seems to sense my shock. “You’re surprised by some of this?”
“Yeah. Pretty much all of it, to be honest.”
“I guess she changed a lot after she got out of the hospital.”
“That would be an understatement.”
“Makes sense, really. She went through a lot. She almost died, then didn’t. Then her really close friend died. That’ll change anyone.”
We sit there in silence for a while. Cole picks up his doughnut and continues eating.
“She was a cheerleader?” It’s the only thing I can think of saying.
Cole laughs, which loosens the vise grip on my heart. He looks me up and down, at my boots and ripped jeans, my faded thrift store T-shirt and short dreadlocks. “Not quite your usual type?”
“Not really.”
“Yeah, not Stella’s either. But Evie was special, I guess.”
“Is special. She is special.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I have to go to class,” Cole says, standing up. “Been working since eight this morning—now I have to go to three hours of night class. Good times.”
“Thanks for talking to me,” I say.
“Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful. I probably made it worse, huh?”
I look up at him and try to smile. “Yeah, kind of.”
He reaches out his hand and we shake. “Take care of yourself,” Cole says, and walks away.
I sit there for a few minutes, trying to imagine the tough girl I know as a cheerleader, in one of those ridiculous outfits they wear, jumping around with pom-poms, squealing for a football game, or parading through the halls of her high school on the arm of a dumb jock. I can’t help but laugh, and it’s the laughter that saves me, even as I attract a few strange looks, even as a couple people scoot a little farther away from me on the bench. It’s the laughter that keeps me from screaming.
you.
I TOLD YOU VIRTUALLY NOTHING ABOUT MY MOM, ABOUT David. Even though you were the first person I ever wanted to talk to, even though I wanted to pour myself into you. But I knew it would scare you. So I tried to give you myself in little pieces. Certain things had to wait, big things. It never seemed like the right time for those. Something else was going on. You were always upset about something, and it took up your whole world, our whole world. So I told myself, next time. But next time never came.
I know there were things you wanted to tell me, but maybe you didn’t feel the same ripping inside your chest as I did whenever you kept silent. Maybe you were at peace with your secrets. Maybe they didn’t tear you apart. Maybe all that chemo and radiation that racked your body before I met you made your heart radioactive, made it hard and indestructible.
No, you can’t fool me. You’re as soft inside as I am. I know this because I love you. I know this because you did let me in long enough for my heart to get comfortable, long enough to know it was somewhere I belonged.
And now I yearn for that softness inside you. It is somewhere far away from me, guarded by secrets and distance and fear. You are a coward, Evie. Your silence makes you a coward. Did you think I wouldn’t hear you? Did you think your truth would not find a home outside your walls? How could you have not known I was listening? The whole time, waiting for you to speak. The whole time, making a home to keep your secrets safe.
I should have tried harder. I should have done more to pull the truth out of you. I was a coward, too. But that ends now. I refuse to lose you. I will not give up that easily. I will not let you drift away and pretend you did not leave some pieces of you with me.
I want to tell you the truth. I want to tell you everything.
there.
MOM IS SITTING IN THE KITCHEN, LOOKING INTO SPACE, completely still, as if she’s trying to hide in plain sight, like deer that freeze when they hear a noise, hoping their stillness will make them invisible. I have never seen anyone so alone.
“Where’s Dad?” I say, and the air shakes with the sudden sound of my voice. I swear I hear the walls rattle.
“Who knows?” she says without looking at me, with a new edge to her voice that sounds wrong, like it doesn’t belong there. There is something sad, something embarrassing, about the clothes she is wearing—tight black leggings that may not actually qualify as pants, a shirt that hangs so low on her shoulders I can see both bra straps.
“Shouldn’t you know?” I say.
Her head snaps in my direction, a sudden flurry of movement, and now I am the deer, caught, frozen in the headlights coming way too fast in my direction. “Get out!” she shouts, and she is the car speeding toward me, and I know I’m supposed to move, but my instincts are wrong, they’re not letting me move, they want me to stay, to be with her.
“Why?” I say.
“Marcus, go to your room.”
I don’t move.
“I don’t want you here.”
I tell my feet to go, but they won’t.
“Leave me alone!”
And then I do the exact opposite of what I’m supposed to. I start walking toward her, my socked feet sliding across the floor, my body pushing against the force of a magnet turned backward. The closer I get, the stronger it gets, the invisible push of her rejection.
Then a coffee cup flies through the air. I feel its trajectory against my cheek, the displaced molecules of air as it misses hitting my face. Then the smash, an explosion behind me.
Then the stillness again. Mom’s eyes back in her nowhere place. Her backward magnet so strong it pushes me out the door and up the stairs, into my room so far, far away.
Mom and David are in the living room. They don’t know I am here. I am trying to understand David’s special access to Mom, why she is more his than mine.
She is on her second bottle of wine. She pours him a glass and they say “Cheers.” This is their special time, their bonding time. She says, “Tell me everything,” and he does. He tells her things he doesn’t even tell me—grown-up things, stuff about his girlfriend, about sex, about feeling lost and weak and uninspired. She sits with her legs crossed on her favorite oversized comfy chair, and he lies on the couch, as if she is a therapist and he is her patient. I have watched this scene before. I have watched Mom shine in the glow of being needed. But also something else, almost like she’s bribing him, like she’s buying his attention and time with the wine, like she doesn’t trust him to want to stick around without some kind of incentive.
Tonight they exchange places. Mom finishes the second bottle of wine and starts talking. “Your father doesn’t appreciate me,” she says, slurring her words slightly. “My only job is to get dressed up and be charming at his important functions.” The back of David’s head nods. “I have my own dreams, you know,” Mom says. “Dreams your dad doesn’t give a shit about and are never going to come true as long as I’m married to him.”
She lifts her wineglass and tries to take a sip, but it is empty. She sets it back down on the coffee table, disgusted. “I think I’m going to leave your father,” she says. “I’ll take you with me.”
“What about Marcus?” David says.
She says nothing. I cannot read her face. She is staring into space, into nowhere. She is already gone.
My insides liquefy. I am dizzy, sick. If she ever answers the question, I do not know. I do not wait to find out. I walk up the stairs, the sound of my footsteps muted by my dirty white socks
.
I lie in bed, looking at the glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling that David helped me configure into real constellations. I push the thoughts out of my head of what life would be like without them in it, if I was left in this big house with no one but Dad.
here.
AS SOON AS I WALK THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR OF MY house, I know something is wrong. It smells weird, and it takes me a few moments to realize it’s the scent of something cooking. But even stranger are the sounds coming out of the kitchen—something I barely recognize as my father’s laughter and someone else’s, a woman’s.
I’m not sure what I expected to see when I opened the door, but it definitely wasn’t my dad being spoon-fed sauce by a woman who looks closer to his age than anyone he’s ever dated. She’s black, too, which is a first. Dad’s dated two women since my mom left, both briefly, both in their twenties, one white and one Filipina, I think. Or maybe Vietnamese. She wasn’t around long enough for me to find out.
“You must be Marcus!” the woman says.
“Hey,” I say. I meet Dad’s eyes for a second and am shocked to see them wrinkled in a smile.
“This is Monica,” he says. “My girlfriend.” He sounds so proud of himself, almost giddy, like he’s suddenly thirteen instead of fifty-two.
“It’s so great to finally meet you,” she says, stepping forward and shaking my hand with the one not holding the spoon. “I hope you’ll join us for dinner. I made polenta cakes with sausage and peppers.”
“Monica’s a great cook,” Dad says as he puts his arm around her waist. “She spent her junior year of college in Florence.” She turns her head and kisses him on the cheek, and he laughs, and this is too weird. Even being alone with my crazy thoughts is better than being subjected to this.
“I already ate,” I lie. I still have the doughnut I bought this afternoon in my bag. That will have to be my dinner tonight. No way I’m coming back down here. “I have homework.”
“Oh, darn,” Monica says. Darn? Who says darn? “Well, next time.”
“Yeah, whatever,” I say.
Her smile cracks a little, and I’m surprised I feel bad about being so rude. It’s not her fault my dad’s an asshole. She hasn’t known him long enough.
“Marcus,” Dad says in his judge voice. I wonder if Monica can hear the undertones of hostility, the potential for rage. “Monica worked really hard on this meal. I’ve been promising her dinner with you for weeks now.”
“It’s okay, William,” she says. “Really. We can do it another time.”
William? His name is Bill, lady.
“Fine,” he says. I wonder if she notices the look in my father’s eyes, the one that says I’m going to kill you. “Another time.”
“It was really nice meeting you, Marcus,” she says. “I’m looking forward to getting to know you.” She looks me in the eyes as she says this, and I know in that moment that my dad is in fact serious about her, and she’s serious about him. Maybe he has moved on. Maybe he isn’t still settling for vague versions of my mother, when she was young and beautiful and eager to please, and he assumed that’s all she was.
“Yeah,” I say. “You, too.” And I’m not sure I don’t mean it. As I walk out of the kitchen and up to my room, the floor feels somehow different under my feet, softer and less stable. The walls feel warped. The shadows in the corner are too many shades of gray.
there.
IT IS SATURDAY MORNING. OTHER FAMILIES ARE JUST GETTING up. They are still in their pajamas, in warm kitchens that smell like coffee and pancakes. But in our house, Dad is heading out the door for work. He has been promoted. He is too important to stay home.
He thinks he can sneak out without us noticing. He doesn’t know I’m at my hidden perch at the top of the stairs. He doesn’t know Mom is waking up at this very moment. He didn’t notice her curled up on her chair in the living room. He doesn’t know she’s been there since last night; they’ve had separate bedrooms for nearly a year.
Maybe she has already started drinking this morning. Maybe she is still drunk from the night before. She is on the floor now, hanging off him, pulling on his coat, trying to keep him from walking out the door. She is crying and I can understand only half of what she’s saying. The only thing I’m sure of is that I can’t un-see any of this. I cannot un-feel this embarrassment, this combination of sadness and disgust. I want to look away, but I can’t.
Mom is on her knees, her face blotchy and wet with tears. She cries, “You’re going to see her, aren’t you?”
My father looks down at her coldly, his dark brown skin so smooth and untroubled, as if he cannot be bothered by her antics. The scene looks like something out of a play, staged for ultimate dramatic effect, my father and mother actors cast as husband and wife, but who barely know each other in real life. The contrast between them is so great. The contrast is all they are.
I wonder in this moment who I resemble more—my mother or my father. I am undeniably black, though I am much lighter than Dad. My hair is kinky like his, but I have Mom’s green eyes and straight nose, am thin and lanky like her, not stocky and broad shouldered like Dad. But then there are the other, deeper traits. Am I the serious, driven, unfeeling man towering above my mother, or the needy and erratic woman on the floor next to him?
I feel David slide next to me at the top of the stairs. We sit there for a moment, listening to Mom beg, listening to Dad bark, “Renae, pull yourself together. This is pathetic.”
David puts his arm around me. He says, “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Our parents don’t notice us come down the stairs. We walk right past them, through the kitchen, and out the back door, and we drive away in Bubbles, David’s new vintage Mercedes station wagon, not talking, not needing to talk.
I know where we are headed as soon as we get off the freeway, even though it has been a few years since Mom has taken us there.
We sit on a piece of driftwood, the beach empty except for a couple of seagulls. David pulls out a pipe and fills it with sticky green herb, lights it with a lighter, and inhales. He hands the pipe to me and I put it to my lips, giddy to be joining him in this secret. It feels like some sort of initiation into manhood, like our dysfunctional family’s weird version of a bar mitzvah. David puts up his hand to block the wind, lights the bowl for me, and I inhale and cough, surprised that the smoke does not taste minty. We pass the pipe back and forth until all we have left is ash. David blows and it floats away on the wind, breaks into particles, smaller and smaller, and is swallowed into the bay.
I don’t know if I’m high, but I know something is different. I am sitting next to my brother and we are somewhere no one can find us. Mom probably forgot this place exists. Now David and I have something that is just ours. In a couple of months, summer will be over and I will finally be a freshman at Templeton with him, a senior. David and I will share the same world. He will take up the space where I hold my worries. He will be so big, he will crowd everything else out.
“I don’t feel anything,” I say.
“You will,” David says, looking out across the water. He picks up a rock and throws it. “And then none of this shit will matter.”
here.
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I EXPECTED TO FIND, BUT I WENT BACK to the beach. Maybe I thought there’d be a clue. Or maybe I thought the clothes Evie took off before she entered the water would still be there, piled on a piece of driftwood, her phone charged and tucked safely in her pocket. Maybe I thought they would be untouched, unbothered by human hands or the weather, that I could bury my nose in her shirt and still smell her. But every sign of Evie was gone. Someone had probably thrown away her clothes, taken her cash and whatever else they could use out of her wallet, and hacked her phone to sell. The beach was just a beach, covered by rocks and seaweed and what seemed like more garbage than usual.
I found nothing. I am running out of ideas. So now here I am again, waiting for Evie’s sister outside her school, even though she made it clear that
she wasn’t interested in seeing me again. But I have to know how Evie’s doing, and after trying the hospital and Cole, this is the only thing I can think of besides going to her house.
“You again?” a sharp voice says behind me, and I turn around to find Jenica.
“How is she?”
Jenica sighs. “You can’t keep doing this.”
“I don’t have a choice.”
“You could choose to leave us alone.”
“That’s not an option.”
“You know my parents hate you, right? They’re never going to let you see her.” I open my mouth to protest, but she keeps talking. “They think you got Evie hooked on drugs. They wanted to press charges, but she convinced them not to.”
My heart jumps. Evie was thinking about me. Talking about me. Defending me. I still exist.
“We smoked a little pot, that’s all,” I say, only partly lying. “We drank a little.” She was drunk when I left her that afternoon, but that was all her doing. I left her at home, where she was safe. I didn’t know she would go back to the beach. I didn’t know she’d go swimming.
Jenica blinks and says nothing, and I’m not sure if she believes me, if she’s convinced of my innocence.
“Did you tell her to call me?”
“She couldn’t even if she wanted to. She got sent straight to rehab as soon as she got released from the hospital. The only people she’s allowed to call are my parents.”
“Rehab?” I say. “For smoking pot and drinking?”
Jenica stares at me for a long time and I can’t quite read the look on her face. “You don’t know?” she finally says, and her face softens with a wave of emotion. It could be compassion. It could be pity.
“I don’t know what?”
“Oh, wow.”
“I don’t know what?”
What else didn’t Evie tell me? Is there anything real about the girl I fell in love with?
“She had a ton of opiates in her system when you brought her to the ER,” Jenica says.