by Tawni Waters
“Okay, Daddy,” I say, slipping out the door. I force myself to walk until I am in the trees, and then I run the rest of the way to the river. When I get there, Xylia’s already sitting on a log by the place where we first said “I love you.”
“Xylia,” I call.
She turns to look at me. She’s crying. “Mara.” She runs to me. Throwing her arms around me, she says, “Oh, God.”
“You okay?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I gotta tell you something,” Xylia whispers. She leads me to the log, and we sit down together.
My skin goes cold. “What?” I ask her.
“Our door got tagged.”
“Ours too,” I say.
Xylia looks scared. “Well, my mom got all upset. She thought I told someone about us. So I told her about Elijah taking the picture.”
I sit bolt upright. “You told her?” I can’t believe Xylia told her mom. I’m dizzy. The very worst thing I could imagine is happening. The world is about to find out what I am.
“I kinda had to. Here’s the thing.”
She stops then. I sit beside her, clutching the log, waiting for “the thing.” She doesn’t spit it out, so finally I ask, “What, Xylia?”
“My mom thinks I’m not safe here. She says these backwoods hicks will hack me apart.”
“Oh no,” I whisper. I know what’s coming. I want to plug my ears so I don’t have to hear it.
“She’s sending me back to San Francisco to live with my dad.”
• • •
Two days later we sit by the river again. Xylia is leaving tomorrow. My heart is broken clean in half, and no amount of staring at round things can keep me from crying. We’re sitting on our log together, holding tightly to one another, as if we’re lost in an angry ocean, and this log is the only life raft we have.
“I thought I was a lesbian before,” she tells me, pushing a curl away from my face. “I knew for sure the second I saw you.”
“I think I always knew I was a lesbian,” I say. “I just didn’t admit it until I fell in love with you.” It’s the first time I’ve ever thought of myself as anything but an abomination. There is a word for the way I am. A pretty word. A word that used to be just a vocabulary word to me, but now represents everything that is beautiful in the world. It means loving Xylia. “Lesbian,” I say again through my sobs.
Xylia squeezes my hand. “I brought you something.” She opens her purse and takes out a stack of CDs. I look at them. Janis Joplin. Bob Dylan. All her favorites.
“Thank you,” I whisper, wondering if I will be able to listen to them without crying.
We kiss a lot there by the river. When we aren’t kissing, I’m resting my head against Xylia’s chest, listening to the pounding of her heart. I hold on to her as long as I can, like maybe I can keep her from leaving.
I can’t. The next day Xylia is gone. The emptiness she leaves behind is too vast for words. I stay up all night, listening to her CDs with my headphones, imagining us dancing to them. Janis Joplin is my favorite. Her voice is like a sledgehammer in the face. Wham! When she sings “Piece of My Heart,” I get exactly what she means.
Xylia has taken more than a little piece of my heart. She’s taken every last bit of it.
• • •
A week after Xylia leaves town I’m still moping. I don’t want to get out of bed. There doesn’t seem to be a point. I miss Henry, too. What I wouldn’t give to get bleached by his dad right now. I call Henry’s cell phone, but his dad answers and says Henry forgot to take it with him to the reservation. He gives me Henry’s aunt’s phone number. When I call, a woman answers. “Can I talk to Henry?” I ask.
Henry gets on, breathing heavy. “Are you moving furniture?” I ask, trying for humor.
“No, I was playing with the dog,” he says. “His name is Alex.”
“That’s an odd name for a dog.”
“I suppose so,” Henry says. It’s awkward talking to him on the phone. Not like when we’re together.
“So how’s your summer going?” I ask.
“It’s moving along nicely,” he answers. “And yours?”
I quickly realize Henry is the world’s worst telephone conversationalist. Most of the time when we’re together, we’re quiet. Silence doesn’t translate well to the telephone. After a few minutes of forced small talk, I make an excuse to get off. I don’t tell him about Xylia being gone. It doesn’t feel like the right time.
Iggy works all the time, and when he’s home, he’s usually too tired to do much but sleep. Whenever I ask him to play checkers with me, fully intending to let him win, he says he can’t. Even my retard brother is too busy for me.
Most days I just wander around the house, looking for something to do. I watch tons of bad TV. Judge Judy and me have become pretty close friends. But Judge Judy just gave some guy the what for, and now old cartoons are on. I don’t want to watch Tom go around chasing Jerry. It stopped being funny when I was ten.
So I stare into the fridge, wishing that something in there looked good to eat, but nothing does. The grapes are wrinkled. The bread looks hard. There’s some leftover chicken, but I don’t want to heat it up. Finally, I go to the pantry, pull out the peanut butter, and dip my finger in. I’m just putting it in my mouth when Iggy walks through the door, home from work. He has lipstick on his cheek.
“Whoa, Iggy,” I say. “Who did that?”
He laughs, blushing. “Rena kissed me when I bagged her bread.”
“She kissed you?” Rena was Iggy’s best friend in class, but I never thought she might have a romantic interest in him. Apparently I was wrong. I close the peanut butter and put it back in the pantry. “Does Rena work at the store?” I ask.
“No, but she visits me.”
It never occurred to me that Iggy might get a girlfriend. I thought once his brain broke, that was it. But here he is. He has a job. He’s making friends. And now girls are kissing him. My brother gets love, and all I get is shit. It doesn’t seem fair.
Closing the pantry door, I turn toward Iggy, forcing a smile. “I guess she likes you, sport.”
“She asked me to go over to her house on Friday and watch movies.” Grinning, he takes off his blue apron and throws it on the counter. His name tag stares at me. HI, MY NAME IS IGGY, it says. HOW MAY I HELP YOU?
I want to say, “You could help me by bringing Xylia back.” But I don’t. Instead I say, “Cool, Iggy! What are you gonna watch?”
“Movies.” He looks at me like I’m stupid.
That irritates me. I’m the stupid one? “Which movies?”
He shrugs. “Beats me.” That’s something Daddy always does. It bothers me when he says things the way Daddy says them.
It’s a good thing Momma comes into the kitchen then, ’cause I’m about to say something mean. “Iggy!” she says right away. “Who kissed you?”
“Rena kissed me when I bagged her bread,” Iggy repeats. It’s like he has a script or something.
“Oh, baby.” Momma hugs him. “Rena’s a real pretty girl.”
Iggy grins. “I know.”
They’re right. Rena is pretty. I don’t know what’s wrong with her, why she’s in special ed. She looks normal. A lot like Iggy, I guess, except her hair is flaming red. She has a boatload of freckles on her nose.
They’d make a beautiful couple, as long as neither of them opens their mouths. It’s a mean thing to think, but I can’t help it. I’ve lost love, and Iggy is finding it.
“Well, at least one of my babies is settling down,” Momma says.
“I’m sixteen,” I say, truly pissed. “It’s a little early for me to be settling down.”
“You’re certainly old enough to date,” Momma says. “What about Elijah Winchell?”
The sound of his name makes me want to snap someone’s neck.
“Elijah is the pimpliest, ugliest, meanest asshole I’ve ever met!” I can’t believe I’m yelling. I’ve never yelled at Momma before. “I’d rather date retard
ed Rena!”
Momma’s eyes go wide. “Mara! Don’t even talk like that.”
I think of all the ugly words I know. “Bitch.” “Whore.” “Slut.” I want to call my momma all those things and more. It’s like there’s a hurricane in my brain. Instead I run to my room. When I slam my door, I hear Momma calling, “Mara! Mara Stonebrook!” Her footsteps pound on the stairs, and she knocks on my door. “Mara, please, talk to me. What’s wrong?”
“Go away!” I scream. “Just get the fuck away from me!”
She does. It’s the saddest thing in the world, hearing nothing now but the summer birds singing outside my window. I bury my face in my pillow and cry.
After that I leave the house early every morning, embarrassed that I yelled at Momma. I spend the rest of my summer days staring into the water, fiddling with Xylia’s ring, which is a little loose, and writing her letters. I slip them into the blue mailbox by the post office, knowing I am risking my life to send them, not caring. My life is over anyway. I call her as often as I can, but it’s long distance, and Daddy gets mad about that. And even when he’s not home, there’s always a chance he will come through the door, overhear our conversation, and kill me. When we do talk, she always begs, “Come see me, Mara.” Like I could. How would I even get there?
By the end of summer it’s like everyone but me forgot Xylia ever existed.
CHAPTER 20
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY of school, and my new teacher, Ms. Elibee, is going on and on about new beginnings. I must have thought the same thing when I woke up, because I bothered to shave my legs and put on a skirt, which I never do. But now that I’m back at school, I think Ms. Elibee’s full of shit. School’s just like I remembered it. It even smells the same. Chalk dust, plain old dust, and kids who haven’t figured out that they should be bathing once a day. The only thing that ever smelled good in this place was Xylia, and now she’s gone. I miss her flowery smell. Hell, I miss everything about her. I’ve never felt more alone.
As I shuffle to my desk, people look at me with mean eyes and whisper. No one talks to me. It was always like that, but I didn’t used to care. I only care now because it makes me feel even more alone.
I write Xylia every day, but it’s not the same as having her around. In my first letter I told her that if she wanted to write me back, she should send the letters to Henry’s, because of Daddy. But I haven’t seen Henry since the day at the river, so I don’t know if she’s written me back or not. I miss her so much that some days I want to die. Especially today.
“Okay, let’s get started,” Ms. Elibee says.
Ms. Elibee isn’t like Mr. Farley. This is her second year teaching, and she’s young and pretty. She talks with a twang that says she isn’t from around here. She reads Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus,” one of Xylia’s favorites. Her voice sounds like music, and you can tell by the way she weighs each word that she loves them. The last part of the poem pretty much sums up how I feel about Xylia. I stare down at my textbook, read the lines of the poem over and over again. Though I am old with wandering / Through hollow lands and hilly lands, / I will find out where she has gone, / And kiss her lips and take her hands. . . .
We discuss it for a while. Ms. Elibee tells us Yeats wrote it about a lady named Maud Gonne. He wrote most of his best poems about her. She was his muse, but she didn’t love him back. This makes me so sad. It makes me even sadder that I have my muse, and she does love me back, but I still can’t be with her.
Finally we get a break. I lock myself in a stall, sit on a toilet, and cry. I look at Xylia’s ring. “I will find out where she has gone, and kiss her lips, and take her hands,” I whisper. It is a promise. To me. To God. To everything and everyone. I wipe my eyes with some toilet paper and blow my nose. Then I leave the stall, ignoring the girls who stand at the mirrors, glossing their lips.
As I walk back down the hall, I glare at the stupid banners. WELCOME BACK SCINTILLATING SCHOLARS AND DANCE THE NIGHT AWAY AT THE HOMECOMING EXTRAVAGANZA. I know they were drawn by Martha Pinkerton, who prides herself on her ability to use words with more than five syllables and wants to be a news broadcaster, but she won’t be without dental work, because she has tiger-striped teeth from a fever she had as a baby.
I pass Mr. Pauly, who has a scar on his chin that looks like a goat. He smiles while he empties the trash cans. I suspect he’s pleased to have access to people’s deepest, darkest secrets. I don’t have the heart to tell him that this isn’t the CIA. He’s not going to find top-secret files, only plastic wrappers slimy with mayonnaise and maybe an apple core or two. All in all, except for my pretty teacher, high school is the same old everything, and I’m sorry I shaved my legs this morning.
At lunch, instead of going to the cafeteria, I wander to a grassy corner in the school yard, right by the tulip beds. I’d rather starve than deal with the kids staring at me. Plus I just can’t stand to look at the table where me and Xylia used to sit, laughing and sharing secrets. Plopping myself down in the cool grass, I reach into my backpack for the orange I put there this morning.
“Hello, Mara Stonebrook.” Elijah Winchell stares at me like the guy in The Silence of the Lambs looked at people he was about to eat.
“Fuck off,” I say, peeling the orange.
“You have a good summer?”
“Yeah, I guess,” I say. “I only killed twenty people though, which is kind of a step down from my usual summer crime sprees.”
His mouth drops open, like he actually believes me. Hellfire flares in his eyes, and I can tell he’s itching to tell me I’m bound for hell. An abomination and a murderess? Score!
“Mara Stonebrook, you’re a devil.” He storms away from me so quick, he smacks into Henry. Henry’s glasses fall on the sidewalk. Elijah doesn’t say he’s sorry.
“You okay?” I jump up. Henry lifts his glasses and cradles them in his delicate hands. They’re cracked.
“I’m fine, thank you.” Squinting, Henry looks at me. “Oh, hello, Mara,” he says. His eyes look small without his glasses. Small and sad. “I couldn’t tell it was you.”
“Wow, you really are blind,” I say.
He smiles. “I am, in fact, nearly legally blind.”
“I missed you, kid,” I say, hugging him. “I’m sorry that asshole busted your glasses.”
“I missed you too,” Henry says. “And it’s all right. I’m fairly certain my father’s medical insurance will pay for new ones.” He tucks the broken glasses into his pocket. “Mind if I join you?”
“Sure,” I say.
We sit down.
“How was your summer?”
He shrugs. “Good, I suppose. I can’t say I’m a huge fan of the res, but I love the ceremonies. They were fun.”
“What are they like?”
Henry looks off into the distance, seeing, I imagine, nothing but blurs. “It’s like hearing the heartbeat of the earth,” he says finally.
I smile. Leave it to Henry to say something like that.
“Oh, I almost forgot.” He pulls a stack of letters out of his backpack. As soon as I see the handwriting, I know who they’re from. My heart catches in my throat. “These are for you.”
“Thanks,” I whisper. With trembling hands, I take them from him and set them in the grass beside me. I lift the first one from the stack and rip it open slowly, even though I’m dying to know what it says. I don’t want to ruin Xylia’s handwriting on the front. On the back she’s drawn a million flowers, all different colors, with crayons.
Dear Mara,
I miss you every day, so much. I miss my mom, too. I wish both of you could have come back to San Francisco with me. The two of you are the only things I miss about Barnaby though. Okay, I lied. I miss Henry, too.
I stop reading to tell Henry that Xylia misses him. “I miss her as well.”
I start reading again:
Today, I was sitting by the ocean thinking of you. A toddler was standing in the waves holding a purple balloon, and it was so perf
ect, so ethereal. I wanted to take a picture of the moment and send it to you, so I did. I thought if you could see this place, you’d fall in love with it, and you’d come running to me. So many people here are like us. They read poetry books. They wear flowers in their hair. And no one cares if you’re a lesbian. It’s almost perfect. The only thing missing is you. I told Dad all about you, and he said I should ask you to stay with us. He said you could stay as long as you wanted. Will you come? Please say yes. We can love each other all we want here. There are great colleges here too. Maybe we could get an apartment together when we graduate. Think about it, please?
XOXOOOOXXXXXOOOOOO,
Xylia
The picture she described is attached. She’s right. San Francisco looks like heaven. I stare at the outline of a toddler standing under an endless, misty sky. For a moment I thrill at the prospect of running away. Then I remember there’s no way I can go off to San Francisco with Xylia. For one thing, my parents would never let me. For two things, if I left Iggy, he’d be dead.
I must look like I’m going to cry, because Henry hands me a handkerchief from his pocket.
I laugh right through my tears. “Who but you would carry a handkerchief?”
Henry laughs with me. “No one, I suppose.”
Later, I’m walking home from school. I can almost feel the warmth from Xylia’s letters seeping through the canvas of my backpack. I’m going to sit by the water and read every one, savoring every word. Beams of sunlight burst through the evergreen branches overhead. The grass smells extra sweet. As I pick my way through the bushes that line the river the water calls my name more clearly than it ever has before.
There’s a shuffling in the bushes behind me. I spin, but I see only a raven flitting off through the branches. I laugh at myself for being so jumpy.
The river’s warm this time of year. During fall and spring, it’s so cold, your brain freezes if you stick your head in. But in late summer, it’s just perfect. Humming a little tune my momma sometimes sings about a chameleon coming and going, I sit on the log where me and Xylia said good-bye. I take off my sandals and wet my feet. Then I reach into my backpack and pull out Xylia’s letters. The bushes behind me rustle again.