by Karen Rivers
“I didn’t say it was a stupid idea. But you hate this kind of thing. We’ll have to talk about the plane crash. When we tell our story, we’re going to be the ones who are different. And they may have good reason to want to touch us. If there are touchers anywhere in Wyoming, they’ll be in this group. Are you sure you want to?”
“I used to be really scared I’d get cancer,” you say. You lean your head against the glass, which feels cool and solid against your skin. “I used to Google things all the time, like ‘Early symptoms of leukemia.’ ‘Do I have lymphoma?’ It seems so dumb now.”
“We could just go somewhere and . . . you know,” he says. “I brought beer and snacks, just in case.”
“I can’t explain it, okay? I just feel like we have to go to this dumb meeting.”
“Okay, okay,” he says. “You win. But if it’s boring, it’s not my fault. Is it going to be like AA?”
“Have you ever been to AA?” you ask. “You’re not an alcoholic.”
“No, but I’ve seen it in movies.”
You roll your eyes. “Well, then, sure. It will be just like that. Styrofoam cups of coffee and Oreos. Do you think that Oreo is the official cookie of AA? They always have them on TV.”
“Do they? I imagine homemade oatmeal cookies with big chunks of grains because someone traded their love of alcohol for a passion for wheatgrass.”
“I definitely don’t think wheatgrass cookies are a thing at AA meetings.”
“Well, they should be. If we come to a second meeting, I’m going to bake some.”
“Since when do you bake? You don’t bake!”
“You don’t know everything about me, Schmidt. I happen to be a great baker.”
“I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“I’ll have to show you one day. I’ll make you a cake. Red velvet.”
“Mmmm, sounds good. But hard pass on the wheatgrass.”
“Nice rhyme, Elyse Fleece. You’ve still got it. But why are you going to this meeting? He’s right, it seems dumb.”
“Just because it’s not something you’d do, doesn’t mean it’s dumb.”
“Hey!” Josh Harris holds up his hand. “Calm down.”
“I am calm,” you say, but your jaw feels clenched. You want one of those beers now. Something. Anything to make you feel looser, more okay in your skin. “Let’s have a beer. If this were AA, we couldn’t, but it’s not, so we can.” You run your fingers through your hair. It feels sticky with sweat or who knows what.
“Your hair looks pretty.”
“Thanks,” you say. It’s nice that Josh Harris compliments you so much, but is it too much? Is it that he doesn’t have anything else to say? You squash that feeling down. It’s not like you’re exactly the most scintillating conversationalist either.
You reach into the back and grab one of the bottles and twist it open, the cap sharp against your fingers. You think about how you pressed your finger against the hole in the glass on the airplane. Why are you thinking about that now? You tip the bottle to your lips and swallow, once, twice, three times, four, five, six, swallowing air that feels like a stone. The beer is too carbonated and burns your tongue and throat, then just for a second, you’re choking, then you can breathe again.
You burp.
“Schmidt,” says Josh Harris. “I can’t tell you how gorgeous you look if you’re belching like Fitzy after chugging a liter of Coke.”
“Sorry. Surprise! I’m not perfect,” you say. “Want one?”
“I’m driving,” he reminds you, primly.
You roll your eyes. “Okay, Mr. Good,” you say. “Be good.”
“You’re not very funny,” he says, but he’s laughing.
“Says you,” you say. “There happen to be plenty of people who find me funny.”
“Like who?” he says.
“Benedict—never mind,” you say. “I mean, people. I don’t know. I bet everyone here will think I’m hilarious.”
“I’m not sure that even you could find something funny to say about a plane crash.” He reaches over and plucks the daisy chain off your hair. You must have put it back on after showering. The flowers look limp and sad. He puts it on his own head. “I am the king,” he says.
You snort-laugh. “I’m supposed to be the weird one in this relationship,” you remind him. “Concentrate on being the normal one, okay?”
“I default to being the weird one, in the eyes of all white people.”
“There will be other black people at school,” you say. But suddenly you’re not sure. Maybe there won’t be. “Almost certainly. Besides which, standing out for being the only black dude in the room is different than standing out for wearing daisies in your hair. Give them back. They complete my look.” You reach for them, but he’s already putting them back. He rests his hand on your head for a minute, two.
“Which floor?” you hear Max say.
“I forget,” mumbles Charlie Martin, who already seems drunk.
“Three,” you say, glaring at Max, trying hard not to move in case Josh Harris’s hand shifts from its current position.
“Almost certainly? Have you noticed how there are very few black people in this whole town?”
“Well, no. Not really. But I’ll take your word for it.”
“I’m the best one, the worst one, the weird one, the only one. Me. You don’t know what it feels like because you’re white.”
“You are the best one. Okay? Even if there are a kajillion other people in the room, white, black, brown, whatever, you are always the best one. The best person.” You chew on your lip. “Definitely the best looking.”
He sighs.
“What? I get what you’re saying. Kath was my best friend forever, remember? I might not be black, but I sure know what it’s like to be, like, followed around a store by a detective who assumes you’re shoplifting because he’s a racist douchebag.”
“Please don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“That thing where you’re like, ‘Some of my best friends are black!’ ”
“Well, they are.” You pause, gulp down the rest of the beer. “Were,” you add, softly.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I mean, I’m not. The fact is that you’re white and I’m not and it’s just easier for you. But I feel like I shouldn’t have attacked you. It’s just strange living in a white, white, white town like this.” He pulls the car over to the side of the road where the shoulder is a wide gravel swath. There is a view from here that is heart-stopping. It’s easy to forget you live in the mountains until you come to the gaps and can see down into the valley. It looks like a green river. The gravel crunches under the tires. There’s a cloud of dust. You cough. Josh Harris leans in to kiss you.
“We’ll be late! Also, I have beer breath.”
“Mmmm.”
“Was that your version of a fight? It wasn’t very fight-y.”
“Yes, we did have a fight, Schmidt. And I won. The part where I won is the most important thing for you to take away from this conversation.”
You shrug. “I don’t mind losing to you,” you say.
“I’m glad you feel that way, Schmidt.”
Elyse, you think, but don’t say. Call me Elyse. If you call me Elyse, everything will be okay.
Josh Harris pulls back onto the road again. You turn the radio on, but the music feels too sharp against your ears, crackling, so you turn it off again and close your eyes. The bottle of beer is cold and beading with condensation between your knees. When did you become a person who drinks beer?
Josh Harris signals and turns into a parking lot. He pulls the car into a parking spot between two trucks. Wyoming—this part of it, anyway—is definitely a truck kind of a place, everyone seems to have one. Everyone except Josh Harris. You feel tinier than usual in your tiny car between the two
big trucks.
An image of a truck shivers into place in your memory, slowly coming into focus.
A red truck.
It is parked beside your barn.
It’s your truck.
You know that’s true and yet, when did that happen?
You are a person who owns a truck.
You are a girl who owns a red pickup truck and lives in Wyoming and wears cowboy boots and has a boyfriend named Josh Harris and a white horse named Midnight. You blink. It’s like your own life keeps sneaking up on you and surprising you, jumping out from behind a curtain, shouting, “BOO!” and you don’t know whether to be afraid or ecstatic.
“Nothing makes sense,” you say, as though Josh Harris has asked a question. “Here goes nothing. We’re here, right? Let’s go in and see what this is all about. If it’s terrible, we can leave. We can go make out somewhere. And have snacks.”
“I sincerely hope it’s terrible,” he says. “This is a bad idea. I’m only going along with it because I like you.” He’s gripping the steering wheel, like he’s nervous or something, but he can’t be, because he’s Josh Harris.
“Settle down there, cowboy,” you say. “It’s just one dumb hour out of our whole forever.” You fling the door open hard enough that it dings the door of the truck next to you, which is rusty. Probably the person who owns it won’t notice the new mark. At least, you hope not. And if they do, so what? What is a ding in a rusty door in the big picture? It doesn’t matter. Not even a little. Not when you consider the things that do: Life. Death. Choose.
You step out into the parking lot. It’s a stage and you are at the center of it. You turn in a circle, dress twirling around your legs, arms reaching up to the big Wyoming sky. Somehow you’re able to see yourself from outside yourself. It’s like a film, you think. I look pretty.
“You look like you’re showing off like whoa. When did you get all LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME? You aren’t the Elyse who I know and love and who I am really mad at right now and forever. You’re some different Elyse. Twinkle-Toes Elyse. If they sold you in a store, you’d come with a free-with-purchase unicorn. Who are you anyway?”
You stop turning, dizzy, but then you start again because Kath is dead and you forgive her for that, for being dead, and you are pretty in your flowery dress and cowboy boots, spinning and spinning and spinning, the Earth turning you around and around even after you’ve stopped moving, a tilt-a-whirl of colors and smells. The air is green and dusty and smells like summer and leaves and gasoline and trees, and below all that, the hauntingly sweet smell of the wildflowers, which are everywhere everywhere everywhere.
You try to stay upright, dizzy like a kid, fighting your body’s urge to just give in and fall. You are in charge here. You tell it what to do. Stay, stay, stay, you tell yourself. You don’t exactly know what you mean by that, but no matter. You make an arc in the gravel with your toe, waiting for Josh Harris to unfold himself from the car and join you. He’s standing by the car now. He’s gulping down a beer in one huge swallow. You can see his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down.
“Cheers,” you call. “To us.” You hold an imaginary bottle up and he tips his empty in your direction, pausing to put it into the back seat when he’s done. A huge bird flies overhead, an eagle or a vulture, you’re not sure which. The wind pushes the branches of the huge trees and the shadows move around you. It seems to take a long time for Josh Harris to join you, or maybe that’s just time playing tricks on you again, stretching like taffy toward the horizon, where the sun is dipping quickly behind the mountains, dropping fast enough that, for a second, it looks like a fireball hurtling toward the ground.
22.
There was this one time, before Paris obviously, when you and Kath won a contest to go on an exchange program with a school in a town in Washington State. You took a train. The ride was the best part of the whole thing, the shimmy of the cars on the track, the way the outside passed by in a blur, the way the whole thing had the vibe of being in an old-fashioned movie: There were waiters with white cloth napkins draped over their arms, a dining car, sleeping bunks. All that was missing was old-timey music, the scuttling sound of a film reel unwinding.
The air in Washington was so sharp—it was a bad winter—that it felt like blades in your lungs. Every breath hurt. An ice storm coated everything in a layer of glassy coldness in a way that was both beautiful and scary. Every detail was encapsulated, frozen literally and metaphorically. Even the memories you have now of the experience are blurred slightly by half an inch of ice and magic.
You’d been expecting snow—the fluffy, snowman-building, snow-angel type—but it didn’t snow at all, the whole time you were there. Instead, ice ice ice was everywhere. “Ice ice, baby.” Kath was singing and skating on the sidewalk, making it look like a real rink and like she was an Olympian, twirling, her red coat spinning out around her legs. On the first night, you were woken in the middle of the night by the sound of a huge branch, weighted down by its icy coating, breaking thunderously off a tree in the backyard of the house where you were staying, and crashing mercilessly through the roof of the garage. The woman who owned the house had seven cats, who were constantly slinking around your legs, purring. Your first worry, when you heard the crash, was that they had all been killed. It wasn’t rational, it was just the first thing that popped into your mind, half-asleep and startled.
You’re allergic to cats.
When you arrived, the woman had said, “There were nine this morning but the vet put two of them down this afternoon.” You hadn’t known what to say to that, exactly, so you’d giggled, while Kath had hugged the woman and patted her back while she cried. Kath always knew what to do, while you hovered in the background like a gremlin, laughing inappropriately and cruelly.
The lady—you can’t recall her name—showed you and Kath to your room, which was wallpapered in thick velvety floral prints, dusty cobwebs hanging in the corners of the ceiling. The beds were high and looked like beds out of a Victorian novel. There was a fireplace in the corner, and the air smelled like old, dead flowers. Cat hair covered everything. You took antihistamine after antihistamine and maybe you were slightly stoned by the medicine and that’s why everything seemed both so funny and so surreal.
When the lady left the two of you alone, you and Kath climbed down the fire escape and wandered into town, where you ate at a restaurant named Piggy and pretended to be from another world. “Mars,” Kath said.
“Not actually habitable,” you said. “I read it in a book. But Jupiter—”
You’d both gotten the giggles so bad that you nearly peed your pants, although in hindsight, what was so funny? Why not Jupiter? You know that in Wyoming there was a landing strip, specifically built for natives of Jupiter to land on when they arrived. The Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport. “You laugh, but I’m going to move there one day,” you’d said.
“To Jupiter?” She’d barely been able to get the words out.
“No! Duh, Wyoming. How can you not love a place that is so welcoming to Jupiterians?”
“I don’t think that’s a word,” she’d said. “I worry about you, kid. But, if anything, they are Jupes, you Jupe.”
“You’re the Jupe,” you’d said, and stuck out your tongue.
“I’d die before moving to Wyoming,” she’d said. “Why Oh Me.”
“That doesn’t even make sense,” you’d said.
Something passes through you that feels like an electric current, snaking from your brain and down your spine. Why Oh Me. Two memories layer over each other like ice on the leaves outside.
I am the leaf, you think, inanely.
Ice forms on your skin. It’s so cold. You’re shivering. But you shouldn’t be cold. You’re in the parking lot of the survivors’ meeting in Wyoming. Somewhere on the other side of the mountains in front of you is the Greater Green River Intergalactic Spaceport.
You shouldn’t have spun.
Not so much.
Not like that.
Not like rolling.
You touch the folds of your cotton dress. Touch, you think. Touch touch touch touch touch touch, and you must look crazy, grabbing at your own dress like that, but you can’t stop. The fabric is too soft to feel like anything, it’s not enough, so you reach down and then you have a handful of gravel and you press it hard into your palms until it hurts and you can be okay again. You close your eyes, you concentrate on Washington, on Kath, on the memories frozen into your mind.
Everyone in Washington was wearing Gore-Tex and looked like they would only use mascara or highlighter or even lip gloss if threatened at gunpoint. You and Kath looked really overdressed. “For this, I did my hair?” she’d snorted. She’d had her hair braided before you left Cali, a billion teeny tiny braids snaking over her skull and held in place with shiny turquoise beads.
She looked amazing.
Always.
Of course she did.
She was wearing a floral dress. Much like the one you have on now, come to think of it.
Exactly the one you have on now.
But that’s impossible.
The fabric gets blurry in front of your eyes. You scratch one sharp piece of gravel into your palm until it draws blood. Why is Josh Harris taking so long? You can’t see what he’s doing. Your eyes are blurred, you must be crying, but you have to stop crying. Being sad is a choice. Everything is a choice.
Choose.
“Hurry up!” you try to say, but your voice, like you, is trapped in ice. Most things, you can’t remember. Now you are having a memory that you can’t escape.
Help, you try to say. Something is happening.
“I think you’re glamorizing that memory there, Schmidty. It was so cold it hurt. All we wanted to do was go home. Like, it was actually painful to be there. It wasn’t all good times and giggles, although my hair did look magnificent.”