by Karen Rivers
“I think it would be worse to burn,” you say, honestly. “Quicksand sounds like it would be soft and cool, at least.”
“No way, it would be terrible,” she says. “Anyway, it’s a metaphor. The point is that love is stupid. Don’t ever fall in love. But that’s bad advice because you can’t help it when it happens.”
You don’t tell her that you already are in love. You haven’t fully confessed to her yet your feelings about Josh Harris. (It’s always been Josh Harris. From fourth grade when he transferred into your school.)
From very very very far away you hear Josh Harris’s voice, “Is it happening again, Schmidt? Would you like me to count?”
You nod, or try to. But you want to stay in the memory. There is something here that you need to see. That you want to remember.
You can hear him, slowly, thoughtfully, hitting each syllable individually, as though you are on a playground with a talking tube and he is in the north corner shouting into the end and you are in the south corner, pretending you can hear him. “One, two, three.”
You turn your attention back to Kath on the dock. “Charlie is just so cute, right? And he’s not like the other band losers. Plus, he can see that I’m pretty beyond the braces and stuff. Mom says you should always pick someone who can see beyond the immediate into your beautiful future.”
“She says that?” you say. “That’s weird. She talks like an inspirational cross-stitch.”
Kath shrugs. “I agree with her. Fundamentally.”
“Fundamentally!” You start laughing. Then you’re both laughing, which is how it always is with you and Kath: hilarious.
The memory slides a bit, like a sheen of oil has covered it. You focus on it as hard as you can, holding on to it by clenching your hands. It works.
In the scene, it starts to rain. You remember that rain, how huge each drop was. Then, before you can even comment on the raindrops, the lightning starts forking down from the sky. It hits something—a pole?—at the end of the dock and the whole thing illuminates with a terrifying light that you can feel in your legs, the vibration of a current coming from who knows where. Your hair slowly rises up. So does Kath’s.
“It’s going to hit us,” you say. You grab her hand and both of you are running. Her pulling you. You pulling her. The cabin is too far, so you duck into the haunted boat shack. You’d always called it that, daring each other to go inside, but never doing it. Her brothers used it as a clubhouse, but you’d never been in.
It smells like burlap and tar and paint. The rain hammers on the tin roof. You try not to think about lightning hitting that roof. It’s pitch-black in there. Everywhere you touch feels like it’s covered with cobwebs, thick with dust.
“Let’s go to the house,” you whisper. It doesn’t seem right to talk in more than a whisper in here. Raising your voice would be wrong.
“Too far,” she says. “We’ll get hit by lightning. People don’t survive that. I don’t want to die. Not until I’m old.”
“Where are you? I can’t see you.”
“I’m right here. How do you think you’ll die?”
You shrug. “In an old folks’ home? I’ll choke on my mashed potatoes.” Then, “I’m scared.”
“Me too.”
“What should we do?”
“Mom says that if you ever get scared, you should go to your happy place.”
“Your happy place? What’s that?”
“Like mine would be here. A place where you feel safe, no matter what. Then you, like, go there in your mind and then you start to feel like you’re really there, so you feel safer. Mine is this place: Grandma’s house. What would yours be?”
You think about it for a few seconds. Not the peach farm, where your parents are always bickering. Kath’s house? You open your mouth. “Wyoming,” you say.
“Wyoming!” she repeats. Then you’re both shrieking, howling, repeating it over and over again. Wyoming! WHY oh meeeee! Screaming with laughter, giggling for so long and so hard that you don’t even notice that the squall has passed.
The rain has stopped.
Wyoming was your inside joke.
“Are you back? Because we are very late for English class,” says Josh Harris. His hand is resting on the top of your head. “We should go in.”
“Sorry,” you say. “I was just . . . Anyway, I’m fine now. I’m good. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened.”
The thing is, if Wyoming was just a joke, how did you end up living here, for real?
It’s my safe place, you remember yelling at your mom and dad. I have to move there. It’s the safe place.
“Don’t get hysterical. It can still be your safe place. It’s your safe place and our private joke. One thing can be both, you know. Two things can be true at the same time.”
“No, they can’t,” you tell her.
“Excuse me?” the teacher says. “Did you have something to add, Miss Schmidt? About War and Peace?”
“War and Peace?” you say.
“The book that we will be studying this term. It’s quite famous. You may have heard of it.” She laughs. “You seemed eager to say something. Have you read the book? Would you like to tell us about it?”
“Um,” you say. “Well, I haven’t read it.” You sneak a glance at Josh Harris. “But I think it’s about war? Then, a bunch of romance. And then at the end, there’s peace.”
“No spoilers.” The teacher smiles. “I think you might be right. But let’s find out, shall we?” She starts handing out copies. “Ultimately, you know, it’s a love story. One character, a good man, loves another, a good woman. But then her goodness is tested. It becomes a philosophical question: When do people stop being good? It is indeed about a war, but it’s mostly about people. I hope you like it because it will take a long time for us to get through.” She approaches your row with the remaining pile of books. Each one is old and obviously has been read before. The one that you are given has half the cover torn off.
Wa a Pea, it says. You smile, even though you feel like crying.
Poppy, sitting next to you, leans over. “Your book is torn,” she observes.
“Thank you, Captain Obvious,” you reply, turning your body slightly away from her.
“No need to be so rude,” she says. “You Americans.”
You shrug. You know there’s no point engaging her, but you don’t know how you know there is no point. She’s from England and you’re from California. There isn’t a possibility that your paths have crossed before.
Right?
“You’re seriously so dumb sometimes. Lovable, but dumb. Like a golden retriever. Remember that one we used to walk after school in third grade for a dollar? Old Rump? What a weird name for a dog. And man, those people were getting a good deal. Anyway, don’t sweat it. You’ll figure it out. Just like scientists figured out that dinosaurs had feathers, so they were really just incredibly creepy and gigantic birds who died out because they were too ugly to continue to survive. Plus, the feathers were too feeble to be useful due to the fact that dinosaurs were the size of trucks and the feathers were not.”
“That makes no actual sense. You’re starting to ramble,” you say out loud. “Are you nervous?”
Without remembering how or when you left class, finished your day, packed your backpack, and drove home, you suddenly are at home, on the front steps, pushing open your front door and waving at Josh Harris, who beeps his horn cheerfully twice. So you aren’t driving your truck, but you look around the side of the barn and it’s still there. You walk over to it and open the driver’s door. It looks clean. The keys are hanging on the visor.
“Soon,” you tell it. “Just not yet. What if I forget how to drive while I’m doing it?”
From his paddock, Midi whinnies at the fence. “I’ll be there soon, boy,” you tell him. “We’ll go look for the little people
.” Midi understands what you mean, always, even when you don’t understand yourself.
That’s the thing with animals, you think. They aren’t unpredictable at all. Except for cats, which is why they are so scary. Josh Harris doesn’t get it, and that makes you sad. Animals know what you’re thinking, even before you know yourself.
Midi trots over to the barn. He knows you’ll be back. He knows where you’ll go. And he’ll know to bring you back here, even if you lose your way.
Especially if you lose your way.
26.
You trudge back through the dirt and gravel and mud to the front door of the house, kicking your shoes off this time so you don’t track mud over your mom’s carefully polished floors. The house always smells like wood soap and wax.
You forget about Poppy as soon as you get inside. And Kath. (Inasmuch as you can ever forget Kath. Which is impossible.) Rumpelstiltskin comes over, tail wagging, and licks your shoe energetically. “No licking, Rump,” you tell him, rubbing his soft ears, letting him do it anyway. You bend over and sniff his head, breathing deeply. He smells like Orange Bunny, soft and safe and sleepy.
“Mom?” you call. “Dad?”
“We’re in the kitchen!” Mom calls back.
You follow the sounds of music and the smell of cooking around the corner to the huge chef’s kitchen, which came with the house. It’s your dad’s dream kitchen, based on some mash-up of cooking shows and House Hunters. Everywhere there is granite and subway tile, huge expanses of surfaces. It’s as big as the garage in your old house.
The counter is covered with food in various stages of being chopped and diced. You think of the peach farm, with the chipped blue counters, the way the dishwasher door opened right into the island and you had to stand next to it to put dishes in. You feel a pang of homesickness.
“We’re playing Chopped,” says your dad. He’s grinning from ear to ear. Even your mom looks happier than usual. “You’re the judge.”
“Are you two drunk? What is happening here?” You survey the mess, an open bottle of wine and two half-empty glasses, various things that look like candy and cheese curls and assorted vegetables all heaped in bowls. “Did you two have a simultaneous nervous breakdown while I was at school? This is all very weird.”
“No, so much better than that,” your mom giggles. “We’ve decided to share each others’ interests. And your dad is interested in cooking. So we’re preparing dishes with the same ingredients, and then you taste them and say who wins. That’s a game he watches on TV. Whoever wins gets to decide what we do tomorrow.”
“Wow,” you say. “I was only gone for six hours. And aliens had time to land here and do their whole body-snatching thing and replace my real parents with happy people who do stuff together? Is this a thinly disguised cry for help?”
But it’s hard not to get swept up in their good mood. “Oh, you have a doctor’s appointment in thirty minutes,” says your mom. “Dad will drive you so that I can get ahead with my Oreo-and-ghost-pepper flan.”
“That sounds completely disgusting, by the way,” you call, on your way up to your room to drop your stuff. You pause on the stairs. “A guy died in California during a burger eating contest when a ghost pepper ripped a hole in his throat. An actual hole! This weird dessert better not kill me.”
You go up the rest of the stairs, dump your schoolbag on your bed, and go into the bathroom to wash your face. Your skin is completely, perfectly, dreamily clear. Your face has almost a luminous quality, a shimmer, like you’ve artfully applied highlighter, but you haven’t. You aren’t wearing any makeup. You reach up slowly and touch it. It’s as smooth as silk.
It’s possible that you’ve never looked this good, or maybe it’s a symptom of only being able to see out of one eye. Or maybe the other eye is messed up, too, and is just making everything look better than it is, including you. Tentatively, you open your eye wide and touch the glass eye with your fingertip. It’s as smooth as ice, a marble that looks like the planet Earth, all blues and greens and browns and white. A whole world there, where your eye used to be.
“Where I used to be,” you whisper. Something hurts somewhere. It’s your stomach or your chest, like a bruise being pushed hard. “Who are you?” Then, “Don’t get crazy.” You stick out your tongue at yourself. “Crazier,” you amend.
You let the hot water run over your hands for a minute, then two. The heat feels nice. Your Junky Idiotic Arthritis hasn’t been bad all summer, now that you think about it, but suddenly—it must be because the weather is changing, autumn has crept up on you—it throbs. The dampness in the air is inside you somehow, making your knuckles ache. The feeling is like when you have cramps with your period, a pain that you manage to completely obliterate from your memory in the four or so weeks between periods, but then when it starts again, it’s so crushingly and depressingly familiar, so oh-this-again, you want to cry. You flex your fingers a few times. You’ll have to dig out the paraffin bath from wherever you unpacked it.
The thing is, you don’t remember unpacking it.
You don’t even remember packing it.
You sit down on the edge of the bathtub, staring at your hands. When was the last time you used it? California? You don’t remember ever seeing it here. On the other hand, you also don’t recognize the shoes that you’re wearing, Converse decorated with a pattern of the galaxy. They look new.
“It’s getting worse,” you acknowledge out loud. “It’s getting bad.”
Your voice is absorbed by the plants, the greenness of them, which suddenly reminds you exactly of the sunroom at Kath’s house, where her mom grew orchids, hidden among all the vines. You pick up a leaf from the closest plant. “I am the leaf,” you whisper. Leaves are never scared. So why do you feel scared?
“I do not fear death,” says the leaf.
The leaf is dark green but pink-veined; you crumple it between your fingers, tearing it into bits.
Kath’s mom shimmers into your memory. “That’s a nerve plant,” she says. “One of my favorites. And it won’t kill the cats if they eat it, and they eat it all the time. Nontoxic. It’s a good quality in a houseplant.” Something brushes by your leg: a brown cat, spotted, moving fast. You reach down for it before you realize that it isn’t there.
You sneeze once, twice, three times.
“This isn’t good,” you say out loud. You can’t start imagining cats. That would be crazy. Where is the line between sane and insane?
You have a feeling that you keep moving it, inch by inch.
Because you’re happy.
You are.
You are happy and you are going to hold on to that happiness with your aching hands for as long as you can. You flex your fingers again.
From downstairs you hear your dad calling you. “We’ll be late, hon! Step it up! Dr. McDreamy is waiting.”
“I’ll be right there!” you call. “I just need to grab something.”
You go through your closet and into your secret room. You reach out and touch the peach scarf, hanging in the window. The autumn sun is filtering through, a more faded sun than it has been all summer, more watery. Cooler. You take the scarf down. The colors are as vibrant as the day you bought it; it’s been undamaged by the sun. You press it against your nose, like maybe you’ll be able to smell Paris, but it smells like you, shampoo and something sweet, coconut and vanilla. You wind it around your thumb once, twice, three times. You watch the skin on your thumb turn white, then start to go purple.
Josh Harris was sleeping on the plane.
You were drawing in your sketchpad.
The yellow masks dropped.
“Pith you, Schmidt,” Kath said.
The room tilts, just like the plane did. You lean over for a minute, bent double, until it rights itself again.
You go to the desk and open the drawer under the shelf where the mason jars hold
your collection of pens: rows and rows of black pens, organized by thickness of the nib. You haven’t drawn anything in so long. When did you last draw? You pick up a pen and hold it. The weight of it feels unfamiliar in your hand.
You haven’t.
Not once.
Not since Before.
You frown. You look around the nook that you’ve set up. You did this, didn’t you? It looks like something you would have done. It couldn’t possibly have just been here, waiting for you, with all your things. Your heart thuds hard against your breastbone.
“HEY,” says Mr. Appleby.
You look down at your hand, expecting the pen, but your hand is holding your sketchpad: ME AND JOSH HARRIS: A LOVE STORY, your favorite pen tucked into the coil.
Well, no, it’s not. It can’t be.
That would be ridiculous.
It burned in the plane. You did not take it with you when you rolled. It wouldn’t have been possible. Your empty hands, grabbing at the gravelly mountainside while you rolled rolled rolled.
You’re hallucinating or dreaming or both. You rifle through the pages in the sketchbook and they are all there. You fight the urge to scream.
“It is what it is,” you say. “Is what it is what it is?” Your heart is going too fast now. You sit down. Kath used to hate it when you said that.
“It’s just a completely redundant phrase,” she’d say. “Everything is what it is. You know which other phrase I hate? ‘Everything’s cracked, or else the light couldn’t get in.’ ”
“I don’t think that’s a phrase. Isn’t it a line in a song or something?”
“It’s a phrase. Trust me. And it’s stupid. Because obviously not everything is cracked. Some things are just dark.”
“Kath?” you say now, out loud. You hesitate, and then you stuff ME AND JOSH HARRIS: A LOVE STORY, which can’t exist, but does, into your bag. You stand up.
Your brain makes the jangling keys sound. It can’t be the same sketchpad; it is the same sketchpad. Two truths. Something is a lie.