by Karen Rivers
A shooting star carves an arc in the sky above you, leaving a trail of light, a ribbon of blue and red and white light.
“Whoa,” says Josh Harris. “Finally. But is one really enough to make it the best meteor shower ever seen in the state of Wyoming?” He lifts his bottle of beer and clinks it against your bottle of beer. His is almost empty. Yours is almost full. You frown. You completely remember finishing it.
Didn’t you?
This is another complication: Not only do you not remember great swathes of time, things that have happened, but sometimes you misremember what did happen.
Maybe that was a different time.
A different night. A different meteor shower.
Have we been here before? you want to ask. Is this a thing we do? But you can’t because then he will not just think you are crazy, he will know you are crazy. And then he might pull away. He might stop.
And you don’t want this to stop. Not ever.
13.
“Make a wish,” you say. You are on a blanket on a football field with Josh Harris and it is either the same night or a different night. You look down at your legs to see what you are wearing. Shorts. Are they the same ones? You are suddenly exhausted. A possibility exists that this night is repeating, like Groundhog Day.
Would you know if it was?
Does it matter?
You try to smile, make your voice light.
“Come on. Say it with me: Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight . . .”
“I think you know what I wish, Schmidt.” He leans into you, wrapping his arm around you more tightly, pulling your face into his chest. Everything about his chest is muscular, solid, perfect. You tip your face up toward his and he bends his head toward yours and starts kissing you again
“Velvet,” you think. “He has velvety lips.” You giggle. Velvety lips. Like in a romance novel. You can’t wait to tell Kath, to hear her laugh and repeat it. Kath’s mom was always reading those books. “Bodice rippers.” That’s what Kath’s mom called them. “They’re my brain candy.”
“The dead don’t really laugh, you know? We just hang out here, in the sky, hoping not to fall.” Kath. Again. “That’s a dead person joke. Really, we’re not scared of falling. Why would we be? Already dead, remember?”
You pull away from Josh Harris, and then flop over on to your stomach, muffling your sob.
“Hey, come back. Are you laughing?”
“I’m right here,” you say, facedown, not really answering. The blanket is fleece and somehow smells like chemicals. You think of how when you were walking onto the plane in California, you said to Kath, “It stinks in here!” and she said, “Duh, they have to basically detoxify it between flights so they spray it with everything killer. We’re probably getting cancer right now, but totally worth it. Paris!” Then she’d high-fived you, but missed and smacked you in the nose instead.
You try to make yourself stop crying. Why are you crying now when you didn’t cry before? It’s so inexplicable. You breathe deeply (smell) and the sob subsides. Then you sneeze. It’s strange how the air smells so much like gravel, how dusty it seems. It must be the wildflowers.
“Bless you,” says Josh Harris, who is rubbing your back. “You know that people say that because when you sneeze you leave the door open for the devil to come in?”
“Should I let him in? He’s probably good company. Anyway, I’m not laughing at you! I’m laughing with you.” Lying comes easily to you now.
“But I’m not laughing.”
“You should laugh, it must have been funny, whatever it was.” Kath, I’m sorry, it is never funny that you’re gone. “I actually can’t even remember what made me laugh.”
“Kissing is funny to you, I guess.” He makes a face, licks his lips. “I’d like to try again, see if you take it seriously.”
“You’re funny,” you say, pushing him away. “I never knew you were so funny before. Anyway, shhhh. I’m thinking.”
“Thinking about granting my wish?”
“Yup.”
In the moonlight, the field is silvery. A coyote howls somewhere in the far distance. Or maybe it’s a wolf. You’re not sure. Are there wolves in Wyoming? You should probably know this. It’s always good to know what animals are lurking in the dark.
“This is a perfect teen movie, rom-com setting,” you say. “I actually am pretty sure I did see this in a movie once.” You indicate the blanket and the bag of food and the cooler of beer and then gesture at the sky. “Something more should happen here than panic and hyperventilation, I guess.” The howl sounds again. “And possibly a wolf attack.”
“You are a perfect girl for one of those rom-coms. I hate those movies, but I don’t hate you. Even though you’re a hot mess.” He flexes his bicep. “I will be your hero! I will protect you from wolves. Or dogs, even. I think that’s a dog.”
“Emphasis on ‘hot,’ right?”
“Uh, totally.” He laughs. He reaches over and lifts up a hank of your hair and lets it spill over the skin of his arm. It gives you goose bumps, a warm feeling low in your belly.
“That’s not your belly.” Kath, again. “Don’t be juvenile. It’s not a secret what happens when you’re turned on.”
“God. Shut up,” you accidentally say out loud.
“What?”
“I mean, just, how can you hate rom-coms? By their very definition, they are happy, nice stories. They are designed to appeal to pretty much every heterosexual human being. Pretty girl. Handsome boy. A wacky misunderstanding. And then they fall in love. What’s to hate?”
“I like it better when there are fast cars or zombies. Remember, Schmidt, I’m a seventeen-year-old boy. So you shut up.”
Your brain makes the jangling sound it makes when something doesn’t fit, a key trying to fit in the wrong keyhole and breaking, loose pieces of metal dropping to the ground. Clank, clank, clank. “Seventeen?” you repeat. Your mouth feels funny. Something is wrong. You just can’t pinpoint what it is.
“Seventeen,” he says. “Did you forget how old we are?”
Your heart is racing.
Sixteen, you think. Sixteen.
But when you were sixteen, you weren’t with Josh Harris. You lived in California on a peach farm. You went to Paris on a band trip.
The plane crashed.
The last year shimmers over the field like a mirage caused by heat.
You lie back down. The stars are still there.
“HEY,” says Mr. Appleby, somewhere deep in your brain.
You close your eyes. “It’s all in there,” Dr. McDreamy murmurs. “Access your memory files. Your brain is a hard drive.” He is awfully handsome, it’s true. He runs his hand through his thick dark hair. “You just have to find it.” His voice is earnest, kind.
“Okay,” you say. “I’ll try.”
Click. There is your fifteenth birthday. There is your cake. There is the party that Kath put on for you, a costume party, roller skates, a cake the size of a table with tie-dyed icing. Kath’s face. Everyone is there. Everyone you know. “Happy birthday, hippie!”
“Short-term memory.” Dr. McDreamy’s voice cuts through the scene like a sword. “Head injury,” he is saying. He sounds so sad, like it’s happening to him, personally. He rests his head in his hands. “Traumatic brain insult.”
Anchor, you think. Or click through your brain’s hard drive. Which is it? What to do?
You are on a football field. You are on a blanket. You are with Josh Harris.
Anchor, anchor, anchor.
If you can slow everything down, then it’s going to be okay. You count to ten, then twenty, then a hundred.
“Schmidt?” Josh Harris says. “Are you freaking out?”
You nod.
“One,” he co
unts for you. He is perfectly patient. Doesn’t he ever get tired of this? Of you? (“Don’t be so manic-dramatic,” Kath says, in your head. “Dramanic. That should be a word.”) “Two, three, four, five.” Josh Harris keeps going and going, his voice low and calm. You focus on his voice and the stars and nothing else. You climb into his voice and pull it around yourself like a blanket. He turns it into a song, strumming the guitar again. “Twelve, thirteen,” he sings.
I am the leaf, you think. You are the leaf.
One of you is definitely the leaf.
“Twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one.” His voice is rushing water, the cooling breeze, the dissipating smoke.
Click: You are sitting in a plastic chair. The chair is a murky yellow color. You are singing. Josh Harris is smiling at you. He is in a hospital bed. An operation. He’s had surgery on his knee. He blows out the candles on his cake.
Click: “Make a wish,” someone says. You blow out a single candle jammed into a yellow cupcake. Is it a hospital? You remember nothing of that. Not at all. But in the scene, there is a patch on your eye. You feel relieved. It’s fixed! The view out your window was of pine trees, in the far distance, a crashing surf.
Click: Josh Harris sloping through the door, ducking to not hit his head. The way he sits in the visitor’s chair, his body making a triangle shape with the floor.
Click, click, click.
The files are all there, you remind yourself. Just stay calm and look for them.
Click: A lake. You are wearing a bathing suit, floating on a plastic inflatable mattress. The mattress is clear plastic, with rainbow colors underneath.
You blink. Why that mattress? Why now?
“It’s just a metaphor,” you say. Your voice doesn’t quite sound right. “I mean, a memory.”
“Okay,” Josh Harris says. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle at the corners. The crinkle is everything.
You breathe in and out, slowly. “I was just having, like, a flashback. I guess. Not the crash, but this air mattress. A lake.”
“We’re both messed up. It’s the price we pay for choosing to live.” He picks up your hand. He traces your life line with his pointer finger. “Life is complicated. And strange. And then there’s death. I do not fear death.”
“Don’t say that,” you say.
“I do not fear death,” he says again, and he smiles right at you and kisses you. You taste toast. “I do not fear death,” he says, right into your mouth.
“Stop,” you say, and you stop his voice with your tongue.
When you both pause for breath, Josh Harris tilts his face up and looks toward the moon. You wish you had a camera to capture it for Instagram, for the world to see how beautiful he is. It makes you gasp. In the moonlight, his face looks like it’s been carved out of marble.
“I think you think you’re the only one who feels broken. I am, too. I have such bad nightmares. I hardly sleep. I’ve had them for years, so it’s not new, just different.” He smiles crookedly. “Ghosts visit me at night, I guess.”
“You are too good-looking to be haunted,” you tell him. You don’t want him to tell you about his dreams. You don’t know why you don’t, you just don’t. You want him to stay perfect and to be your safe space. Maybe that’s it. You’re selfish. You’re a terrible person. “Your skin is stone-smooth. Like a granite countertop. If you were a house, you’d be expensive.”
“That makes no sense,” he says, but he smiles anyway. Who doesn’t like being told they are beautiful? His teeth are as white as bone in the moonlight.
“Nice teeth, too,” you say. “You could do ads for toothpaste or something.”
“Yours aren’t so bad either.”
“Liar!” you say. You run your tongue around your too-small, slightly gappy teeth. “I need braces.”
“Let me look more closely,” he says, pretending to examine your mouth. And then he’s kissing you again. You feel yourself relax. When he’s kissing you, you’re fine. You are present. You are yourself.
The sky stretches and sighs above you. Two meteors and then three, then four shoot across it. “Did you see that one?” you say. “Wow.”
“Yes,” he says. “I see what you see.”
You both lie back, hands entangled. You search for something to say. It was easier when you drew it, when you filled in both your speech bubble and his. In real life, he sometimes says things that you don’t know how to respond to exactly, so you let them sit there, unanswered. In real life, you blurt dumb things. “You’re a really good kisser.”
“Thank you.”
He is sometimes so polite that his politeness is almost rude. His manners are also his armor that prevents you from getting too close to his heart.
“Terrible, Schmidt,” says Kath. “That’s like the most sophomoric poetry I’ve ever heard. Never say that out loud. Hard eye roll. Hey, can you roll a glass eye? Asking for a friend.”
“Stop,” you try to say, but nothing comes out.
“You fetishize manners. Have you ever thought of that? You always like those English actors. And they might be rude as anything, but the accent gives the illusion of properness. Right? And Josh is kinda strange with the way he talks. Like he’s onstage. Like he’s EEE-NUN-SEEE-ATE-ING. I’m just saying, there’s something off about your taste, Nerdball.”
You press your fingers into your ears but you can still hear her and you don’t really want to block her out at all, so you take your fingers out again and press your arm over your mouth and into your sleeve and you whisper, “Sorry, sorry, sorry.” A whole slurry of sorries, but Kath can’t hear you. Obviously.
Kath is dead.
“Kath is dead,” you say, but Josh Harris is playing his guitar again and he misses what you said, which is lucky, because then he doesn’t have to respond.
14.
“Ahhhh, did I just see another one?”
“No. I mean, maybe. But I missed that one.”
Your white hair is spreading all around you on the plaid blanket (also Instagram-worthy, you think), your arm over your good eye. You move your arm so you can see the sky. There are more stars in Wyoming than there were at home. You wish the party music would be turned down, the ongoing drone of the bass keeps vibrating through you, there’s a squeak of strings, people laughing too loud. The party you were supposed to go to. The one where all the kids who will be at your high school are drinking and getting high. You can’t imagine how that would have gone if you’d just showed up at some stranger’s house with a six-pack of Heineken. Suddenly, you feel confused, like you’ve missed a step and are falling down the stairs: Why are you here in Wyoming? How is this going to go?
“Are you going to play football? When we start back to school?” It’s not really what you mean to ask. What you want to ask is, Are you going to be normal? Blend in? How do we do this?
Normal.
What does it even mean?
Josh Harris shrugs, which you can feel more than see. “I’m not that interested in sports anymore. They don’t feel important to me. Also, there’s my knee. Sports are like something for people who never have anything to worry about. But maybe basketball. I still love basketball. Do they even play basketball in Wyoming?” He shoots a fake hoop. “I miss basketball and Fitzy.”
“Yeah,” you say. You clear your throat. “I get it.”
“What do you miss, Elyse Schmidt?” he says.
You think about it:
You don’t miss anything.
Do you?
“You miss me, you jerk. Duh.”
“Obviously,” you mutter.
You miss having an unrequited crush on Josh Harris. Having a requited crush is better and worse at the same time. Paradox, you think. Or something like that. Instead of being your background music, now he’s your full symphony. But you have to be his, too, and you don’t quite feel like enough somehow.
“I miss being able to see out of my right eye,” you say, finally. You can’t seem to say Kath’s name but you know that she knows. She has to know.
“Yes,” he says. “I can see that.” He grins. “Do you see what I did there?”
“Ha ha,” you say. “You’re hilarious.”
“I hope you think so.” He nudges you. “Girls like funny guys. I’ve heard that.” His laughter rolls around him, doughy and stretchy, a loaf of unbaked bread. You are struggling to picture him having a conversation with Danika Prefontaine, ever, much less being in a relationship with her. He’s so peculiar. The way he talks. Kath is right. Something is off. Not in a bad way. You like peculiar, so that’s fine. You can relate to peculiar. But you can’t understand how she did. No one is more normal than Danika Prefontaine. Well, was.
Now she’s dead, just like all the others.
“Dead is the new normal. Dead is all the rage. Everyone is doing it.”
“Kath,” you blurt. “I miss Kath. It’s crazy how much I miss her.”
“I know.”
“You don’t, though. You can’t know.”
“Why not? I miss Fitzy.”
“You were ‘buddies,’ it was different.”
“You think that your friendship with Kath was better because you are girls?”
“I know that sounded terrible. I’m sorry. I’m a jerk. Just because I survived a plane crash doesn’t mean I’m a good person. I should warn you right now that I don’t think I really am a good person, actually. I just gave you evidence. I get that you miss Fitzy. Of course, you do. I’m just . . . I guess everyone thinks what they have is more intense or better than what everyone else has.”
He stares at you, unblinking. “Maybe I’m not good either,” he says.
“Ha! You’re Josh Harris. Trust me, you’re good.”
“Why do you think that? You don’t know what I think about most of the time. You don’t know. You just think I’m good because my mom died and that seems heroic to you, but I was just hiding. I wasn’t a hero.”