The Survival List

by Courtney Sheinmel

  We’re like funeral VIPs, I thought wryly. If Talley’d been there, I would’ve whispered it to her.

  If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

  If you think of something that you want to say to your sister, and she’s not there, does it even matter that you had the thought to begin with?

  The line of people snaked down the aisle of the sanctuary, everyone waiting to greet Dad and me. I knew a lot of the people, but far from all of them. Those unknowns could’ve been anyone—the Adam behind the voice mail, or Mr. G, who hosted a screening of Grease, and might have hurt my sister in some way. I tried to interview every person whose face I couldn’t place. “How did you know Talley?” I asked. “What’s your name?”

  The answers were mostly “I work with your dad,” and not anything that had to do with Talley.

  “Sloane,” the next mourner said. It was Dr. Lee, my English teacher. She was holding the arm of her husband, Mr. Chan, who happened to be my statistics teacher, but she dropped his arm to wrap me in a hug that lasted several seconds. When she let go, she held my shoulders at arm’s length. “Oh, dear, I am so very sorry,” she said. “This is so hard, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” I said. It came out as a whisper and I cleared my throat. “Thank you for coming. I didn’t know you’d come.” I nodded to Mr. Chan. “You, too,” I said.

  “Talley was in my geometry class,” he said. “I gave the class a practically impossible proof to complete. It was meant to stump them, but Talley pulled it off. I would’ve loved to have seen what she would have become—she was an extraordinary girl, your sister.”

  Talley would’ve corrected him: “Woman.” She was twenty-two years old, and she was not a “girl,” any more than a twenty-two-year-old male is a “boy.”

  “Thank you,” I managed.

  Mr. and Mrs. Hogan approached next. They were the parents of the triplets Juno and I would be babysitting over the summer—the last three weeks of June, all July, and the first week of August. I wondered if the Hogans worried that my sadness might hang like a cloud over Thomas, Theo, and Melanie’s summer break. The kids were only eight years old, after all.

  But if that’s what the Hogans were thinking, they didn’t show it. Mr. Hogan gave my shoulder a squeeze, and Mrs. Hogan patted my cheek. “We’ll see you soon,” she said, and they moved on.

  My closest friends came up in pairs. First Soraya and Rachel, and then our best guy friends, Brody and Zach. And then there was Juno. Finally, Juno. It was just her, not part of a pair, because I was the other half of her pair. Juno reached for me. No, that’s wrong; she didn’t reach. She grabbed. I grabbed back, and we held each other really hard.

  “Cooper didn’t come,” Juno said, talking into my hair. “He really is a jerk, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t care about Cooper,” I said.

  “Me either,” she said. “I only care about you.” She tightened her grip around me.

  Behind Juno’s head, I spotted Dean. Dean of Dean’s lips. The one person on Talley’s list whom I could identify—besides Dad and myself, that is. I shrugged myself loose from Juno and reached out.

  “Hiya,” Dean said, and he pulled me into a hug. When we broke apart, I took a good look at his mouth. The upper lip was bigger than the lower one, and his cupid’s bow was particularly prominent. I resisted the urge to reach out and touch them, these lips Talley had touched about a thousand times and written down on her list. “You take care of yourself, kid, okay?” Dean told me.

  “Don’t go yet,” I said. “I need to ask you something. Did you and Talley . . . did you guys ever go to California together?”

  Dean shook his head. “Farthest we ever got was our road trip to Chicago, because Talley was in the mood for deep-dish pizza. Course, it’s seven hours in the car. By the time we got there, we’d stuffed ourselves full of Twizzlers and Doritos. We had, like, two bites of pizza, then we spent the whole night driving home.”

  “Did she talk to you about it ever?” I asked.

  “What? The pizza?”

  “No,” I said. “California.”

  “Oh, right. Hmm.” He was quiet a few seconds, seemingly giving my question some thought. But in the end, he shook his head. “I can’t remember any conversations about California, to be honest with you,” he said.

  “Have you heard of Crescent Street?” He shook his head. “The Royal Road Diner? The Sunshine Crew? A large gentleman’s sunset?”

  “No.”

  “What about NHL photo revelations?”

  “You mean hockey?”

  “Maybe?”

  “I follow the Red Wings,” he said.

  “Were you guys in touch at all, even just by text?”

  “I talked to her a few months back, for like maybe five minutes? She said she was too busy to chat. Before that, we’d gone over a year.” He shook his head. “She was the most special person I’ve ever known. I never thought . . . I guess special has a way of hiding trouble.”

  I took a deep breath and nodded; yes, it did.

  “I really loved her, you know?”

  “I did, too.”

  “God, I’m so sorry, kid. I’ll see you around, okay?”

  Would I? Would I ever see Dean—or his lips—again, now that Talley was gone?

  “See you,” I said.

  Chapter Six

  THE NEXT MONDAY, ELEVEN DAYS ATD—AFTER TALLEY’S death—seven days after the funeral and burial, Dad decided it was time for him to go back to work and me to go back to school.

  He came into my room that morning to tell me to hurry it up, just like always, as if the events of the past week and a half were merely the stuff of a bad dream, and now we were awake and everything was normal. On normal days, Dad worried that I wouldn’t get outside before Juno pulled up, and then she’d honk and disturb the neighbors. The fact that she never had did nothing to dispel his fear. He didn’t trust her. She dyed her hair a different color every week; she had multiple piercings in each ear, plus a stud in her nose. Her grandmother had died and left Juno a boatload of money. Dad thought she was spoiled and knew nothing about living in the real world; if she did, she wouldn’t have so many holes in her face. “Who you hang out with is who you are,” my dad was fond of saying, and I agreed with him, which is precisely why I loved being best friends with Juno.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Hang on,” I told him. I was standing by my dresser. The top drawer was open and my hand was inside, fingertips grazing Talley’s list. I wasn’t looking at the paper, but I felt like I could feel the words with my fingers, as if Talley had inexplicably written them in braille:

  Ursus arctos californicus

  Crescent Street

  Ulysses

  Lucy and Ethel

  Grease at Mr. G’s

  Bel Air midnights

  NHL photo revelations

  Sunny’s eggs from the Royal Road Diner

  Sunshine Crew

  A large gentleman’s sunset

  Dean’s lips

  Dad and Sloane

  More pie

  I had it all memorized, but the actual list was important to me, because it was Talley’s. I’d planned to leave the list at home all day for safekeeping, but then I began to worry about our house catching on fire.

  That wouldn’t happen, right? That’d be too much tragedy.

  Except I knew there was no such thing as too much tragedy: I lost my mom, and then I lost my sister. And Dad had lost not only them, but also his parents—to a house fire, no less. Still, I decided that a house fire was less likely than the list escaping my pocket while I was at school. I let my fingertips touch Talley’s list one last time for good measure, then I closed the dresser drawer.

  “Sloane?” Dad asked.

  “Yeah. Sorry. When will you be home tonight?”

  “I imagine the usual time,” he said. “Six thirty. Seven. Maybe a bit later. There’s a lot to catch up on.”

  “If
it’s not too late, can we drive out to Wayzata?”

  “Do you know someone in Wayzata?”

  “No, but there’s a Crescent Street, so Talley might’ve known someone.”

  According to Google Maps, the Crescent Street in Wayzata was the closest Crescent Street to our house, out of all the Crescent Streets in the world. I knew that didn’t necessarily mean it was the one from Talley’s list, but it couldn’t hurt to check it out. In fact, it seemed like the hurtful thing to do would be to not go.

  “I don’t follow,” Dad said.

  “It was on her list,” I reminded him.

  I’d shown the list to Dad on the night Talley had died, when we were both walking around the house like we’d returned to it in the aftermath of war. Our lives had been blown apart, and we were picking up the pieces—picking things up in our hands, examining them as if trying to figure out what they’d once been. I remember that my hands themselves felt strangely heavy that night. They still did all the things hands were supposed to do—they held things, flicked lights off and on, and swiped the tears from my face. But grief made them feel like they were somehow not mine anymore. It was as if they’d been removed and reattached. A part of my body, and yet not. When I held them out in front of me, they looked newly foreign, too. Just like everything else in our house.

  Dad had looked strange and foreign to me as he squinted to read Talley’s list. Then he looked back at me and said he didn’t know what anything was, besides the obvious entries. I watched him refold the list carefully, deliberately, along the creases that Talley had made, before handing it back to me.

  It took him a couple beats to remember the list now. “Right,” he finally said.

  “There’s another Crescent Street in Big Lake,” I told him. “But since Wayzata is closer, I figured we’d start there. If we don’t find anything, we can go to Big Lake. Just to check it all out.”

  “You’re treating this list like it’s some kind of puzzle,” Dad said.

  “It is some kind of puzzle,” I said. “You know how Talley loved to make puzzles for me to solve. There are thirteen clues on this list—fourteen, if you count the initials on the top. Fifteen, if you count the phone number.”

  Adam hadn’t returned my call. Juno pointed out that lots of people never even listen to their voice mails. If Adam had seen a missed call on his caller ID and didn’t know whose number it was, he might just ignore it completely. Just to be sure, I’d also sent a text:

  Hi, this is Sloane Weber. I’m Talley Weber’s sister. Sorry to bother you again, but I really need to get in touch. Please call or text when you get a chance. Thank you.

  He hadn’t replied to the text, either. But I wasn’t ready to give up.

  “I don’t want you to spend too much time on this,” Dad told me. “I know it’s hard to hear, but you may never figure out what Talley meant—if she meant anything at all. She wasn’t in her right mind, and part of getting through what happened is attending to things in our own lives.”

  “Talley being gone is a thing in my life.”

  “I know that,” Dad said. “Don’t you think I know that? When your mother died, I couldn’t let the loss undo me. I was responsible for two young children.”

  “It must have been so hard,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for. You were just a little girl, and you lost her, too.”

  “But that’s the point,” I said. “I was so little that I don’t even remember losing her. I’m not a little kid anymore. I don’t need you to take care of me.”

  “No, the point is that you’re old enough to feel the inertia of grief this time around. But life goes on.”

  “Dr. Lee would cross that line out if you put it in a story,” I told him. “Life goes on—it’s a total cliché.”

  “A cliché is a cliché because it’s something that a lot of people agree on, and so it’s repeated over and over again. I think we can agree that gives the phrase some merit, right?”

  I shook my head. “This is different than when Mom died,” I said. “That was a car accident.” Dad’s eyes flinched involuntarily, as if feeling the pain of impact. “But what Talley did . . . it was a choice. And saying, ‘Oh well. Life goes on’—”

  “I didn’t say ‘Oh well,’ Sloane.”

  “You may as well have. You just don’t want to look too closely at this, but I keep wondering what I was doing at the exact moment she took those pills. Was I still in orchestra practice, or snapping my flute back into its case, or talking to Juno? Whatever it was, it wasn’t important. I should’ve been there to stop her.”

  “Please don’t blame yourself,” Dad said.

  I deserved the blame. But I didn’t tell him that.

  “You’ve got two weeks left of school. There’s never a good time to have an emergency, but with your exams coming up—”

  “Fine. Fine. I’ll go to Wayzata without you, okay? I just thought you’d want to come with me.”

  “Sloane—”

  “I better get outside before Juno honks,” I said.

  Chapter Seven

  “WILL YOU DRIVE ME TO THE CRESCENT STREET IN Wayzata after school?” I asked Juno almost the instant I’d climbed into her car, a 2001 Mustang BULLITT that she’d bought herself for her sixteenth birthday. Juno loved old things, but it wasn’t exactly a steal by the time she paid to get it up to contemporary safety standards—as required by her parents.

  Juno knew all about Talley’s list. Over the last week, Dad and I had been sitting shiva, which is what you do when you’re Jewish and someone in the family dies. You stay home, and people come over to pay their respects. Juno came every day after school. Together, we’d watched two dozen episodes of I Love Lucy, and a few of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air to boot. You’re not supposed to watch TV during shiva, because you’re not supposed to do anything that would distract from your grief. But we were watching because I was grieving, so I thought it was okay.

  “Sure,” Juno said.

  “Thanks. I don’t know what we’re looking for. It could be a house, or a stoop, or a mailbox. I guess I can ring every bell, if it comes to that.”

  “Whatever it takes,” Juno said. “I’ll drive the getaway car.”

  She was looking in the rearview mirror and backing down the driveway as she spoke, which I thought of as an act of incredible coordination. I was convinced I’d never be able to do it myself without crashing into anything, which is why I barely ever practiced driving. The only reason I even had a driver’s permit was because Talley insisted. She told me a story about women in Saudi Arabia who had been prohibited from driving for years. They fought for the right to drive, just like the men could. But now they had the right to drive, I’d told Talley. What did it matter whether I took my driver’s test and got my license or not? So I remained Juno’s passenger, which was totally fine by her. She loved driving.

  I could hear music playing in the background, really softly. Usually the volume was turned way up when I got into the car, and Juno would be jamming out to her current favorite, whatever that was. She tended to fall in love with one band, and then play them in a loop for weeks on end. Unsurprisingly, she preferred the oldies. Right now Fleetwood Mac was the band on repeat. Stevie Nicks was singing—the goddess, Juno called her. Her voice was just a wisp. I knew Juno herself couldn’t hear it.

  But I could. This very song had been playing in Juno’s car that morning, when my phone rang and I ignored the call.

  My breaths were coming quickly. The thing about losing someone you love is that it’s not a one-time shock. It’s over and over and over again.

  “Sloane?” Juno said. “You okay?”

  “I’m scared to go back today. What if someone asks me something, or just, you know, looks at me, and I start crying?”

  “Then you start crying. People will feel bad, and probably offer you a tissue or something.”

  “I’m going to be such a spectacle,” I said.

  “For a few days, y
es. But they’ll get used to having you back.”

  “I guess.”

  “I know it’s hard,” Juno said. “I don’t like going to school on regular days. But I’m really glad you’ll be there today. I hated being there without you. When you got into the car just now, I felt like . . . well, it was like that feeling you get when you’re at a restaurant and you’re really hungry. You’re practically ready to eat your own arm. Then the food arrives at your table, and you take your first bite and it’s even more delicious than you thought it could be.”

  “That’s a good metaphor,” I said. Then I added, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I reached out to turn up the volume on the car stereo a bit, loud enough for Juno to hear. I’d heard her mom say cochlear implants were modern-day miracles. If Juno had become deaf fifty years ago, there wouldn’t have been a surgery for her to have to get her hearing back. But it wasn’t perfect.

  “Once in a million years, a lady like her rises,” the goddess sang. It was a line from “Rhiannon,” a live version. Juno pulled into the school parking lot and slid into a spot in the back row. She always parked in back, because there was less of a chance that someone would squeeze into a neighboring spot, open a door too wide, and scratch up one of the BULLITT’s precious doors.

  Juno shifted into park, but she didn’t cut the engine, not till the song had ended.

  And he still cries out for her, don’t leave me now.

  Chapter Eight

  IT WAS STRANGE THAT EVERYTHING LOOKED THE SAME.

  I’d read lines like that in a hundred different books. Something enormous would happen in the story, and the narrator would be surprised by the sameness of everything around her. Such a cliché. And yet, so true. I expected school to be different, because I was so different, but there were the same flecked linoleum hallways, the same bluish-white walls. The odd sameness of it all made it feel unfamiliar. I felt like I’d landed from outer space and was seeing everything for the first time. There was a sign hanging in the junior hallway. Surely it’d been there all year, but I’d never noticed it before: