by Karen Rivers
“Oh.” You try to keep your eyes on his face, but it’s almost shimmering. Josh Harris is asking you for sex. You smile a little, but then the nervousness comes back, wrapping around your neck like a hand. You clear your throat. “Your wish.”
Josh Harris wants to have sex with you, which is mind-boggling, in and of itself! You’d be crazy not to do it! But.
But.
The thing is that you’re just not sure that you’re ready.
“It’s not an exam. You don’t have to prepare. Besides, everyone knows the first time is terrible. It’s supposed to be so that when it gets good, it’s even better than good because it’s unexpected. Like if your parents forgot your birthday one year, and then they remembered the next year, the next year would be so great, right? Don’t overthink it, Schmidt. It’s basically just a bad birthday. Think about it.”
“I know. God.”
“What? Are you mad?”
“Nothing! I wasn’t talking to you. I was just . . . I was thinking out loud.”
Josh Harris reaches out and tucks your hair behind your ear and you kind of want to die because if you die right now, in this second, at least you’re dying happy and in love.
“Loved,” you whisper.
“I really can’t hear you,” he says. “I think there must be something wrong with my ears. Sometimes it’s like there is a roar that only I can hear.”
“That’s because you’re a weirdo,” you say. You reach up and touch your hair in the same way that he just did. You tuck it behind your ear again and again. “Or, you know, because you had a head injury?”
“You’re the one who had the head injury,” he points out. “My leg. Your head.”
“Oh, right. I’m forgetful,” you say. Your heart feels rubbery. You think about a game you used to play with Kath at school recess, when you were in third grade. You had these rubber balls, special ones, and they were tiny and bounced high. There was a game, Seven Up maybe? You had to throw the ball in a pattern against the wall. One bounce, two bounces, no bounces, clapping in between. You’ve forgotten some of them, but suddenly you’re there, on the playground, the familiar bumpy pavement under your feet, the brick wall with one off-color brick that you’d get bonus points for hitting, Kath turning cartwheels behind you, the smell of rain evaporating off the ground in steamy waves.
The sun is in your eyes and it hurts. You blink.
“Are you crying?”
“The sun is in my eyes!”
Josh Harris sits up straight. “It’s night now,” he says, so quietly that you almost wonder if he said anything at all.
“Duh,” you retort. The ground tilts and tips. It’s your ear, that’s all. An inner-ear thing from the crash that you can’t shake that sometimes spins you around.
“If you could time travel . . .” you start, but you let it trail off.
“I’d save my mom,” he says quickly, right away, like it would be bad luck not to say it. “But we can’t change anything. We can’t change what happened to her or to us.” He traces something with his finger in the sky. “Big Dipper,” he says.
“I can never see which constellation is which,” you say. “It’s all just disconnected dots. Like the stars are strangers.” You feel like you’re stalling, because you are stalling. You knew this was going to happen tonight, but you sort of didn’t believe this was actually going to happen tonight, and you aren’t ready for it to happen tonight while at the same time you desperately want it to happen tonight. You clench your jaw so tightly, it hurts.
It might happen.
It might not.
It’s up to you.
You get to decide.
But there is no decision.
“It’s going to happen,” you whisper. You intend for it to sound sexy, but your voice is shaking. In the distance, a car slams on its brakes and the squeal of tires rips through you like a blade. You take a breath and you lean up and over and you kiss him. You kiss Josh Harris. You’ve forgotten how to move your lips, but you’re trying. You are trying too hard. You can feel your effort. It’s making you sweat. Why is it so hard to not be awkward? You’ll never understand. Kath would have been naked already.
“Just take off your stupid clothes and jump him. Don’t make everything into an impossible equation to solve. Life isn’t calculus. Be Nike: Just do it.”
You keep kissing him with your eyes open so you can see his face.
He opens his eyes and he is looking at you, too, but he’s not exactly kissing you back. He’s being kissed, which is not the same thing. His eyes are mirrors and doors and windows and everything to his soul and your soul, and he says, his lips touching yours, “Are you totally sure, Schmidt?”
You breathe him in and you say, too loudly, “Yes.”
The next meteor’s tail fades back into blackness, the stars keep falling, shining, watching, staring, judging how happy you are.
Are you happy now?
Are you still happy?
Are you happy enough for all of us?
If we had lived, we would have been happy.
We would have done everything.
You have to do everything.
For us.
Because you lived.
You have to do it for us.
You are us.
We are you.
You are the everything.
We are watching, watching, watching, wanting.
Josh Harris is pulling at your clothes, untying your halter. You feel the night air on your skin, which is abruptly bare. Your nipples tighten. You fight the urge to cross your arms over your chest, to hide your breasts, which are too white in the darkness. And now his breath is catching and so is yours. Then you are moving again, you are pulling at his clothes and he’s stuck in his shirt and laughing, but you aren’t laughing, you need to get your skin to touch his skin, to remove the night air from between you, to make no space between you. Then he’s free of the shirt and twisting out of his pants and your shorts are gone, too, and you don’t know how to cover all the parts you suddenly want to cover and you can’t stop staring at his penis. You’ve never seen a penis before. You feel yourself starting to hyperventilate. You would rather die than faint right now, but you might faint. It’s complicated.
“I . . .” You start to say something, but you don’t know what it is.
And then he is tracing his fingers over you, over all of you, and you are letting him do that, you are trying not to be scared, and then he is kissing you again and just like that, in an instant, everything is perfect and you aren’t scared.
Not even a bit, you think.
(“You’re a terrible liar,” says Kath. “But it’s pretty normal to be scared. Just try not to think about anything. Try to just feel.”)
“Since when are you a sexpert?” you say. “You didn’t even . . .”
“What?” says Josh Harris, stopping what he is doing with his hand, which is a relief but also you don’t want him to stop.
“Stop, go,” you say.
“Are you okay, Schmidt?” he asks.
“Yes.” You close your eyes. “Yes. I mean it, yes. Really.”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
And then you don’t have to think about anything at all, you just have to feel (Kath is right), at least for now. Then you are on your back and he is inside you, it happens so fast, and it is such a jarring pain. It hurts! You didn’t know, but you did. Then it’s over, but even though it’s over—the part that hurts—a tear rolls down your cheek, which you quickly wipe away so he doesn’t ask you why. Then it stops hurting or you stop caring and you just don’t want him to stop, not now, not ever.
Over Josh Harris’s shoulder, you see another shooting star and then another, like fireworks, like applause.
It is the best meteor shower in history, after all.
In the distance, someone is yahooing. A dog is barking. A siren wails. Something clatters. Someone shouts. An owl answers the siren’s call. The dog’s bark turns to a howl. There’s just so much noise, it’s hard to separate out what each thing is, just a jumble of volume that goes up and down and then stops.
It’s quiet.
The unnaturally green field is holding you up and your bodies are doing what bodies, it turns out, just know how to do. (“See? Press a couple of bodies together, and presto!”)
“Presto,” you mumble. Your body is moving of its own accord. It’s nothing to do with you and everything to do with you.
“You,” mumbles Josh Harris, into your hair. “You.”
“You, too,” you whisper, not quite knowing what he means, but hoping.
It is still so warm and the stars are patterning themselves into new shapes over Josh Harris’s shoulder that you’d draw, if you still did that kind of thing. You would. You’d draw new constellations. You’d draw colors that can’t exist.
And then it stops.
It’s over.
It was everything and it was light in a way you can’t explain and the blanket is damp with your sweat and you can’t wait to tell Kath all of it, everything.
You cough. Ribbit, ribbit. A frog in your throat. “Do you still think we should have gone to the party? Met some new people? Blended in? Practiced normalcy?” Your voice sounds too loud in the stillness.
“Elyse Schmidt,” he says. “Oh my god. You know what? I think I love you.”
You give that a minute to sink in, time to leave a mark, etched permanently into you. “Josh Harris,” you say. It’s all you can say.
Stars flee across the sky, one after another, either trying to get away from you or to come closer. You don’t have to make a wish because all your wishes have already come true.
Or almost all of them.
17.
It’s three in the morning and the front door squeaks when you open it, the screen banging behind you, but no one calls out, no one stirs.
Your parents are asleep. Rumpelstiltskin, the golden retriever you forgot that you had, looks up from his position on the living room couch, blinks sleepily, thumps his tail, and then puts his head back on his paws and sighs. You go over and plant a kiss on his soft, old head.
“I had sex with Josh Harris!” you whisper. You want to say it out loud so you don’t forget that it happened, so you can hold on to it. So much of what has happened After has just slipped away from your grasp. “Rumpelstiltskin,” you say, to remind yourself of his name. The dog opens one eye and stares at you, blinking in the light. “What?” you say. “It was very romantic. Trust me.” He sighs, a long half-snore burbling from his throat. “Be that way then,” you tell him. “You’re a terrible guard dog.”
You take the stairs two at a time. There’s an energy coursing through you. You almost wish a car would fall on someone so you could use this strength to lift it off. If you were on a crashing plane right now, you’d be able to stop it with your mind. The air is solid and moves like something silk wafting around you, like everything that happened, like everything that is happening.
The windows are open in your bedroom. The curtains are lifted by the breeze and then gently sink back into place, pooling slightly on the wood floor. The room is full of the night: velvety darkness, pinpricks of light. You collapse onto your perfectly made bed and the sheets are cool, smooth, soft, tucked tight.
“I slept with Josh Harris!” you tell Orange Rabbit, perched as he always is on the shelf next to your bed. His head leans too far to one side. “This is love. I’m in love! He said he loved me. It’s all I’ve ever wanted. And now I have it.” You consider this while you try to straighten his head, but the stuffing is too loose in his neck to support it. It falls forward. “Well, he said, ‘I think I love you, Schmidt.’ It was close enough.” You hesitate. “Right?”
You pick up your iPhone from beside Orange Rabbit, knocking him onto the floor. You reach down and pick him up. You press him to your nose. He smells like sleep and something else, something like your entire childhood, like everything that’s ever happened to you. You tuck him under your chin.
It’s 3:14 a.m. Pi o’clock, Kath would say. She loves math.
Loved math.
Past tense.
“Kath loved math,” you say out loud, feeling the rhyme click together. “Elyse loves Josh Harris.”
“Is that a poem? It doesn’t rhyme. That’s awful, if it’s supposed to be verse.”
“Only the first part,” you say. “Nothing rhymes with Elyse except fleece.” Fleece is terrible for the oceans, you remember. Something about how it breaks down in the washing machine, filling the ocean with plastic bits. “Elyse hates fleece,” you say, out loud.
The room around you is so still, it feels almost painful.
“Kath?” you say.
You turn on your phone and you dial her number. You let it ring and ring and ring and ring. “Hey, it’s me, Kath, sing me a message, damn it.”
“Hey,” you say, your voice cracking. “Happy pi o’clock.” But it’s not pi o’clock in Cali, it’s 2:14. “I mean, Happy pi o’clock in an hour,” you amend. “I don’t sing, but guess what? We did it! Me and Josh Harris. It wasn’t terrible. You were wrong. It was perfect, everything was perfect.” You pause for a beat, the beat that you hold open for her to reply. “Kath? It did hurt a little. It passed really quickly. The pain part, I mean. After it stopped hurting, it was easy. I didn’t have to think about it.”
Nothing.
You forge ahead. “Anyway, there were literal shooting stars. Not a metaphor. When does that ever happen? It was like a movie or a book or something.” You wait another beat. Still nothing. “And don’t worry, we used something. We aren’t going to be a cautionary tale.” Beat. “And Kath? He said he loves me. Josh Harris! Said that! To me! It’s like, I don’t know, it’s a miracle.” Beat. “I mean, maybe that’s a waste of a miracle, if you think about all the things that miracles should have been used for. I’m sorry. I’m an asshole. I shouldn’t have said that. Erase that bit about the miracle. But anyway.” Beat. “I’m the happiest girl alive. Call me?” Beat. “Love you. I miss your face.”
You tap the red button on the phone and open up the text screen, reading through your last few texts from Kath. “Stop calling him JoshHarris! His name is Josh! Just Josh.” “Related: Why does he call you Schmidt? So unsexy, Nerdball.” “Unrelated: Max says that he likes tall girls but am I too tall? Is that what he means?” “WHERE R U? WAITING IN LOBBY.” “HURRY UP” “JustJosh is tall. Maybe I should steal him from you.” “J/K!” “Srsly, I wouldn’t.” “Or would I?” “Nah, my heart belongs to the Right Max.” “CANT FIND U. R U STILL MAD?”
You’ve read them so many times now that you’ve memorized them:
Stop calling him JoshHarris! His name is Josh! Just Josh.
Related: Why does he call you Schmidt? So unsexy, Nerdball.
Unrelated: Max says that he likes tall girls but am I too tall? Is that what he means?
WHERE R U? WAITING IN LOBBY.
HURRY UP
JustJosh is tall. Maybe I should steal him from you.
J/K!
Srsly, I wouldn’t.
Or would I?
Nah, my heart belongs to the Right Max.
CANT FIND U. R U STILL MAD?
It’s poetic. It’s more of a poem than any poem you know.
“Poems don’t have to rhyme,” you say, out loud, before Kath can correct you from wherever she is now. You shut your phone off.
You wish you hadn’t upgraded it right before the trip. You wish you had thousands of Kath texts to memorize. You would devote your life to it, like those monks who are counting grains of sand on a beach. You would recite them without looking, rubbing each individual word in your mind like it was
a wishing stone that could reverse time and save her.
“Josh Harris is not your type,” you tell your silent phone. “But neither is Max. He’s terrible. He’s not good enough for you. Smelly breath! Predictable future! And he’s too short. You’re not too tall. The problem is him.”
You won’t be able to sleep. There’s no chance. Your body is achy and euphoric, sore in a way that isn’t sore.
Spent, you think.
You look up through the skylights. The stars are up there, but now clouds are starting to thicken the darkness. You take off your glasses and it all blurs together into a gentle haze of graying light.
“I love you, too, Josh Harris,” you say out loud. “But what happens next?”
Your head feels heavy and your breathing feels labored. What next, what next, what next? you whisper. Your voice is gravelly and loose, rolling down a mountainside. You smell the burning fuel.
What now?
What else is there?
You fall asleep that way, Orange Rabbit in the crook of your chin, the iPhone in your hand, open to Kath’s texts. You start to dream. In the dream, Kath is a bat, flapping around in your room, wings beating against the boards. In the dream, you’re laughing. Kath’s tiny face, smiling, hovering. “You know,” she says. “I was thinking—”
18.
This little shopping excursion is part of the Program.
The Program, with caps like that. The Program is the brainchild of Dr. McDreamy, whose name you still can’t remember. The thing is that after you’ve been on a plane that has crashed, you do things like move to Wyoming to join a program run by a man who looks like a doctor on TV. That’s life.
Sometimes it makes sense, at other times not so much.
But here you are.
In a capital-P Program.
Dr. McDreamy is very big on intent.
The intent of the Program is to make you normal again, to undo whatever it was that happened to you—not to your body, but to your brain—when the plane left its flight path and dove, nose-first, into a mountainside.