by Karen Rivers
You wish you could analyze the head pat with Kath, but not talking to her is making that impossible, which makes you even more mad at her. Thinking about it, the head pat could even be offensive. You pat dogs. You pat goats. You don’t pat people. That can’t ever be good.
Talk to me! you want to yell at Kath. Turn around and apologize so we can get back to normal! There was a head pat! Did you really have sex? What is happening to us? Girls before squirrels! Duh!
You look at Josh Harris again, the curve of his cheek, the stubble where he’s shaved his head and his hair is trying to grow back. He smells like boy-deodorant and clean sheets and toast. You pull the smell into you and hold your breath and then feel too creepy for words, so you exhale. You could just put your head on his shoulder and fall asleep. You want to do that so bad.
Josh, like you, plays the flute. He plays basketball and he plays the flute. He is six foot something tall and has the most gorgeous lips you’ve ever seen and is the opposite of you in every way, except for that one thing: flute playing. He wears his beauty so casually, it’s like he’s forgotten he has it. Sort of like Kath, come to think of it. They’d look good together. They’d look amazing. You are suddenly even more furious with her, which you know is unfair, but you can’t help it. It’s like your anger is a piece of yarn being pulled from a sweater that keeps unraveling more and more and more. Now everything is a mess and you want to bop her on the back of her dancing head for being gorgeous and self-assured and tall and confident, all things you are not. You stick out your tongue instead.
Josh Harris is wearing an old T-shirt and jeans that he makes look like stuff everyone else would pay any amount of money for, if only it were for sale. Even the flute becomes something brighter than a flute when he blows into it. It’s not just you who thinks so, Mr. Appleby does, too. Josh is better than you by far, even though you—being very small—look like someone who would play the flute, like some kind of elf in a fairy tale. And you practice constantly. He doesn’t. He just plays. Things want to be played by Josh Harris.
“You are too much,” Kath says, in your head. You know her so well after all these years of being BFFs that you don’t even need her to actually say the things you know she would say. It’s like you’ve got a mini-Kath who has taken up residence in your head. “If I roll my eyes much harder I’m going to pull my optical nerves right out of my brain and have to go through life with a glass eye and a lot of resentment.”
Josh Harris’s eyelashes are about a half inch long. You’ve never noticed them before. You sit on your hands so they don’t reach out and touch them. “Schmidt,” you say to yourself. “Keep it together.”
Josh Harris has always been famous in your school for terrible reasons. You hadn’t known him when it happened, but you’d heard about it. Everyone had. A home invasion. His mom, murdered. He did a speech last fall at school about it. Hearing it from his own mouth turned you inside out. He had been playing, he said. A game he played by himself while his parents were in the front room, watching their favorite show on TV. He had heard the glass breaking and instead of running to see what happened, he had hidden in the corner of his playroom behind a huge houseplant. “The leaves were so big, just one could nearly cover me,” he said. “It made me feel invisible. I felt like a superhero, except I could do nothing to save my mom.” Josh Harris has a very meticulous way of speaking that makes you think of bedsheets, cornered perfectly. Before his dad bought the bookstore, he had been a stage actor. You imagine Josh’s dad teaching him to project his voice. You picture them reading out loud from Macbeth in front of a fireplace, his tweed-jacketed dad e-nun-see-ate-ing clearly and little Josh Harris, mimicking that. Basically, you want to climb into his voice and live there.
Josh Harris said that when the police came, he still didn’t move. He waited for his dad’s voice, calling his name over and over again from the stretcher just before he was lifted into the back of the ambulance. His mother was already dead. He said that he went over to where she was lying under a sheet and he lifted it and kissed her goodbye. He was only six! No one is that calm when they are six. No one. But you could believe that Josh Harris was. He’s different. That’s all there is to it. He is a person who would be good in a crisis, able to handle anything, able to survive.
He would always remember to kiss you goodbye.
After he finished speaking, the entire class was so quiet, you could hear breathing. No one spoke, to avoid sobbing out loud, even the teacher. Everyone, even the Right Max, who almost always had something smart-assy to say, sat in complete silence for at least two minutes, maybe more (it felt like forever), until the bell went and they could leave. Josh Harris looked perfectly fine. He was the only one. Everyone else looked stricken. He didn’t seem to notice. “Yo Fitzy,” he’d said. “Let’s go shoot some hoops.”
You’ve never forgotten that day.
That was the day when you fell in love.
And you haven’t stopped loving him ever since, not for a minute.
That’s how you know it’s real.
You are Elyse Schmidt who loves Josh Harris, period. It’s who you are.
4.
Up until October, Josh Harris was with Danika Prefontaine, who is repulsively, sickeningly blond and bubbly and pretty, like someone from a show on the Disney Channel who can sing and dance and generally look gorgeous in all things, at all times. She plays the oboe. She’s also a cheerleader and has smoothly perfect, glowing skin that must be makeup or a miracle or both. You have no idea what she puts on it to get it like that, but whatever it is, you want it. Probably, it’s nothing. She is just a person who sparkles. Someone said she got pregnant and had an abortion, but people say that about everyone who dates for more than a few weeks. It is obviously never true (that you know of), or at least, rarely. You need for it to not be true about Danika because you need for their connection to not have mattered. Something like that would have made it bigger than it was.
Besides, it’s over. You know that for sure.
Josh Harris is free.
When Josh Harris wakes up, maybe you’ll talk to him. When he wakes up, maybe he’ll grin at you and say, “Oh hey, Schmidt.”
When he wakes up, maybe he’ll notice you, really see you.
Maybe you will even ask him to stop calling you Schmidt. No one sounds pretty when they are being called Schmidt. It sounds too phlegmy. You say your first name out loud. “Elyse.” Elyse is a pretty name. It’s fine. It’s not the best name in the world, but it’s definitely not the worst. You’ve never been an “Ellie” or a “Lisa” or anything, always Elyse.
“Elyse Schmidt,” you say, your voice swallowed up by the roar of the engine and all the plane and people sounds. You make the Schmidt sound like you are choking on a sharp bone. You try it again, like a sneeze. Josh Harris is a heavy sleeper.
Kath kneels up and peers over the back of her seat to look at you and says, “Stop talking to yourself, Schmidt.”
She spits on the Schmidt, speckling your pretty-nerd glasses. The glasses may have been a mistake. “Those glasses are trying too hard,” Kath had said, when she saw them for the first time. “Those glasses say, ‘I am quirky! Love me!’ Too desperate. Also, they are so big, they make you look even smaller, like a shrunken head, and I mean that in the nicest way. You are dwarfed by your eyewear.”
Sleepy, Grumpy, Dopey, Nope-y, you’d thought. “Don’t say ‘dwarfed.’ It makes you sound racist or something.”
“I’m black,” she’d said.
“Well, you can still be dwarfist.”
“But some of my best friends are dwarfs!” She laughed. “See what I did there? Don’t look like that! I’m kidding. God. Lighten up.”
But the thing is that you are pretty short. Four foot eleven and a half. Five feet in sneakers. Just. If you stand up extra-straight.
You kept the glasses, stubbornly, even though she was probably right. Som
etimes you resented when she told you that you were doing it wrong. Like when she laughed at the way you bought a hundred of the same temporary tattoo—the one that said BE BRAVE—and reapplied it every day for a year. When she rolled her eyes at the T-shirts you wore, advertising your favorite YouTube artists’ channels. One day, you might even work up the nerve to have your own, but you can’t figure out the banter part of it, just the drawing.
Anyway, you are only wearing the glasses right now because your contacts got so dry on the way over that by the time you landed, your eyes were as red as ink and all of Paris was a blur of lights against darkness. Part of having Junky Idiotic Arthritis is that your eyes are very prone to uveitis, an inflammation that makes it feel like your eyelids are made of sandpaper, scraping, scraping, scraping. You aren’t really sure what one has to do with the other, but inflammation is inflammation and it sucks wherever it is.
“I hate you,” you remind Kath now. You take off your glasses and wipe them on your shirt. “I’m not talking to you.”
“Well, pith you, Elyse Schmidt,” she says, loudly. “Did you know that talking to yourself is one of the earliest signs of dementia? You should Google it. Pretty soon, you probably won’t remember who I am. But don’t worry, I’ll still feed you mushed bananas and tell someone when you need your diaper changed. Because even though I’m mad at you, I’m—”
“Shhh,” you say, gesturing at Josh Harris.
Josh Harris is drooling. Kath makes a kissing face at him and licks her lips.
Then she stage-whispers, “KISS HIM, YOU FOOL.” There’s something about being on a plane that makes you feel like you aren’t quite yourself. Like you could almost bring yourself to do it, but not quite. “You know,” Kath says, “I was thinking—”
Then, SUDDENLY, with Kath dangling awkwardly over the back of her seat, mid-sentence, the plane TILTS.
All caps, like that.
And Kath disappears.
The interruption is so abrupt that you lose your place in yourself, as though you’re a book that you’ve just dropped on the floor, halfway through a sentence. A book has dropped on the floor, in fact. It must be Josh Harris’s book. You stare at it. Half the cover is missing. Wa a Pea, it says. Then it, too, disappears, sliding away down the row of seats.
Wait, you want to say. Hang on.
Nothing quite makes sense.
The fasten seat belt sign flashes on. Yellow plastic masks drop down from the ceiling with a noise that makes you instantly imagine the phrase “a smattering of applause.”
All the bodies take a second to catch up to what has happened. There is a lot of thumping. A drink cart has smashed into Mr. Appleby. The flight attendant has vanished, as if into thin air.
“HEY,” Mr. Appleby shouts.
There is a silence as the plane seems to hang in midair, entirely motionless, for whole seconds. People are frantically clipping masks to their faces. Kath’s is just swinging. Where is Kath? The plane is distinctly on its side now.
“Kath?” you scream, but your voice disappears into the yellow plastic cup that’s over your face.
It is all happening very fast.
Josh Harris’s eyes are wide open.
Josh Harris is staring at you.
Josh Harris’s eyes are accusatory, as if you, Elyse Schmidt, are causing the plane to tilt and do what it is doing, which is very definitely falling. You shrug by way of explanation, because it is all you can do, but he probably can’t tell that you are shrugging because everyone’s limbs are everywhere, like gravity has given up on the entire cabin full of people. Your arm flaps up on its own accord and you have to force it back to your side. The whole situation feels too surreal to be real. You might be crying. There is definitely no leaf to hide behind right now.
What will Josh Harris do? You don’t want him to die. You haven’t loved him enough yet.
The plane chooses that moment to roll. For some reason, your hair is in your mouth, which means the mask has fallen off. You pull the hair out. The mask is on the ceiling, you can’t reach it, but you’re still breathing. Why is it windy in here? You squint at the hole in the window, in case it has splintered open. It looks intact. Josh Harris is squeezing the life out of your arm. Well, Josh Harris is welcome to break your arm if it makes him feel better, because it doesn’t matter, because you are going to die. He reaches up and shoves the mask hard onto your face, which doesn’t matter either.
You’re going to die. Things are already whitening. You’ll be relieved to faint because then you will be spared the details. That sounds okay right now, given the options.
If you die, your parents will be really upset. That’s an understatement. They’ll be devastated. They will never get over this, you know that as clearly as you know anything. You are their whole life. Well, you and the peaches.
Sometimes the peaches trump you.
Stupid peaches.
But, anyway, without you, they will for sure get divorced and spend the rest of time hating each other. You are the glue that holds them together.
“Sorry,” you say out loud. “Just try harder. Share your interests or something. Be nicer to each other.”
This split second is being held and stretched like taffy and on that long stretched string of time standing still, you can think whatever you want.
I don’t even like peaches, is what you think.
I’m going to die, is what you think, without ever going to Wyoming.
I love you, is what you think.
I’m sorry, is what you think.
You are less scared than you would have thought.
“I love you,” you say directly and loudly to Josh Harris, but he doesn’t hear you. That’s probably for the best. He’s saying something you can’t make out. It might be a prayer.
He pulls his mask off and says loudly, “I do not fear death,” and then he snaps it back on. “I do not fear death,” he keeps shouting, behind the mask. He looks scared. He takes his mask off again.
You shake your head. “Don’t do that!” For some reason, his mouth is open. You can see his teeth, all the way to the back. There are small bumps on his tongue that look like velvet. That’s a weird thing to think about, you think. And then time snaps like an elastic band and the plane is falling or spinning or both and, of course, you are going to die and now you are scared, too.
I don’t want to die, you think, but the thought feels pointless.
I do fear death, you think. (Also, pointless.)
Mom. (Pointless.)
The falling keeps happening. You never got a pony. You never went to Wyoming. You never fell in love. You never decided who you were going to be. You never finished your graphic novel. You didn’t get to live long enough to warrant an autobiography. You never thought of a good name for the YouTube channel that you never started.
There is something like puking and fainting and screaming all happening to you at the same time. The screaming is all around you, like a kind of tornado of sound, and you find yourself willing the inevitable crash to just happen so the noise will stop in addition to the strange pulling feeling that stretches down your spine and up into your brain. You don’t want to die but you don’t want to hear or feel this anymore either. That’s a conundrum. Conundrum is a word that makes you think of umbrellas.
Now is not the time to think of umbrellas, you think. Then you can’t think of anything else: Red, yellow, green, spotted, striped, clear umbrellas cloud your vision. An umbrella with yellow duckies. An umbrella covered in a map of the world.
There is too much air everywhere, whipping around you. You are shivering now, hard, but you’re also hot, sweating. Death is coming like a rapid-fire fever.
You offer up a quick prayer, some kind of barter with God, knowing even while you do it that it’s futile. I’ll do anything? Please? you think, then you say out loud, “Please save Josh Harris. A
nd me. Amen.” But you understand randomness and how this particular bit of randomness means you’re going to die. Randomness is something you can believe in. Death is on its way to you.
Slowly.
Faster.
At a confusing speed.
You are so dizzy.
You will die in a minute. Less.
At sixteen.
Without ever having kissed Josh Harris.
You never thought you’d be a girl whose last thought was about kissing. Or umbrellas. You feel dumb about ever having worried about getting cancer or having Long QT syndrome or Epstein-Barr virus or possibly dying when a spotted eagle ray breached out of the water and hit you in the head while on a boat in Florida, which actually happened to a woman in 2008. You are a little disappointed to be dying in such a normal way. “Plane crash” in no way can measure up to the guy who died when a snake’s decapitated head bit him while he was preparing a meal (of snake) somewhere in China.
“I am going to die in a plane crash,” you say or think or both, who knows anymore.
You can suddenly, clearly see the cover of People magazine, with the class pictures of you and all these other soon-to-be-dead band geeks.
You lean sideways, which is hard because of the way the plane is shaking, like it’s about to tear apart from the inside out. Your masks are gone, you don’t know where they went or when. You put your lips on Josh’s, which is nearly impossible to do, as there is the g-force and the fact that he is shaking almost as hard as the plane itself. His mouth tastes stale, but still, in that split second, you’re glad to have done it.
“Schmidt,” he says. You hear that so clearly, it’s like you are alone, the two of you, somewhere else, and not on a crowded, crashing plane.
“It’s Elyse,” you think you say.