by Jen Brooks
The truth is, I don’t think I believe in Him. All the things people say about mercy and love and a Plan where everything eventually turns out okay don’t seem to apply to the god of my life.
My girlfriend Kylie, my lovely, happy, perfect girlfriend is falling apart. She wants her space. She blew an important track meet. She cried, for God’s sake. I’d never seen Kylie cry until yesterday afternoon.
Real Kylie is out of control. In one day she went from oblivious about my existence to full-blown something, and she can’t seem to decide whether her feelings are bad, good, or otherwise. I can’t decide either.
If I merge them, it will have to be into the real world, but if there is only one Kylie, which one will she be? Will she remember both selves? Will she be happy?
Something else burns through me, as hot as the question of Kylie. Tess had me open a world of my family last night. I didn’t want to do it, but I didn’t think it would leave me as starved for parents as I feel today. Setting aside the fact that I wouldn’t be having any of these world-making problems had they lived, my parents would have given me guidance about post–high school plans or would have written speeches about me when I won awards. If my parents suddenly returned from the dead to help me through what’s happening now, I would expect sound advice, lots of hugs, and the comfort of not being in this alone.
But I am alone.
Except for Tess, whom I’m still not sure about.
Except for Kylie, who needs help as much as I do.
Except for Uncle Joey, whom I know I could turn to because he has been my defender before. It’s just that I don’t make the effort to include him in my life. So he backs way off, and we’re at the point where I can’t imagine talking to him.
I want my dad to come walking out of that church right now, maybe with a candle in his hand and a handwritten note from God saying, Sorry for the ten lost years.
“Please, God. This is the last time I’ll ever ask, I promise.” I force my will into a prayer, concentrate all the imagery I have of my mom and dad and life before death, as if making a world or changing a parameter is anything like praying to the Almighty. “Please, please, God. Give me my family. Give me a life!” Please. Please. Please. Please. Please.
If in answer I saw a burning bush or a cross in the sky, I would fall to my knees. If the ground rumbled beneath the car, I would be impressed. If the church bell tolled once, I would be satisfied. If some passerby suddenly turned to me and shook his head no, I would understand.
But nothing happens. The church doors don’t fling open to reveal Dad with a candle and an apology.
I wait some more, in case miracles take more than a split second, but still nothing happens.
Whatever, God.
It’s time to talk to Tess about merging the Kylies. I have a few questions she sure as hell better answer before I decide what to do. I throw the car into drive and pull out of the parking lot. As I do, a pedestrian in the crosswalk steps right in front of me, so I slam on the brake.
I recognize her instantly. She’s grandmotherly with short gray hair curled around her ears. She wears plain gray pants that don’t reach all the way to her sneakers, and a pair of thick pink socks shows as she steps. A too-big fleece hangs loosely about her arms and torso. She wears a carefully neutral face, and her pace is unhurried.
She stops in the middle of the crosswalk to look directly at me, the driver of the car that might have knocked her flat, and her blue eyes flare with light. Endless sky eyes I last saw when I was chasing Tess at the mall.
I squint away because suddenly I feel like I’m staring into the sun, and when I look up, the crosswalk is empty.
* * *
Tess waits in the driveway next to the car that first gave her away the day she stole my shoes. I still don’t know why she stole them.
“Why are you driving when you can flit wherever you want?” I ask.
“I like my car.” Her voice lowers in pitch, and I think she might actually be attached to her ride. “Get in.”
“Where are we going?”
She ignores me and gets into the driver’s seat. I am sick of her jerking me around, but I need her, so I climb in on the passenger side. She puts the car in reverse and pulls out of the driveway.
“I have a few questions for you,” I say.
“And you will have every answer you need when we get where we’re going.”
I bite off an angry reply and do what any sibling does when he gives up on winning a family argument. I stare out the window and sulk.
After a few turns I have an idea where we’re going. After a few more Tess pulls her car up in front of Kylie’s house. I fill with panic. “I don’t want to merge them yet,” I say.
“Don’t worry, my brave big brother. I won’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. I told you we’re here so you can have your answers. Well, really one answer. The only one that matters.”
“And what answer is that?”
“Whether merging Kylie is the right thing to do.”
She gets out of the car and slams the door so the whole neighborhood will know we’re here. I make a point of pushing my door closed so quietly, all I hear is a click.
“Get a grip, Jonathan. No one can see or hear us.”
Mentally I kick myself. I forgot she could do that. “Is there any way you can turn off the snide comments? Just until this horrible part of my life is over. That would be nice.”
“No problem, Bro. How’s this: I have taken precautions so we won’t be detected. You have nothing to worry your little heart over.”
Damn it, I want to shove her.
We end up at Kylie’s window. Tess reaches into the dirt and pulls out a familiar butter knife even though I have never broken into real Kylie’s bedroom and there is no need for a butter knife to be waiting for us. Tess doesn’t use the knife, though, because through the window we can see Kylie inside. She’s sitting on her bed with a notebook on her drawn-up knees. She’s writing in it. And she’s crying rather hard.
“You have such a way with women,” Tess says.
I don’t respond because I’m numb with the certainty that every teardrop is my fault. I hoped our time in the bird sanctuary would prevent this.
I recognize the notebook from creative writing, so I wonder if she’s writing a poem. We watch her tears run while she scratches out her thoughts. She pulls on her covers and wipes her nose. Her crying becomes sobs, larger and larger heartbreaking sobs we can hear even through the closed window. Her body convulses with them as she tries to finish what she’s writing. Her face is red and devastated. She glances out the window, and I duck, forgetting I’m invisible, until Tess pulls me up by my collar. Kylie stares, unseeing. Her features untwist, and her sobs reduce to hiccups. She wipes her face with her bare hand and leans back against her pillow. After a while she curls around the notebook and stills.
Tess and I wait. Rather, I watch while Tess acts bored and sits down in the mulch. “Tell me when you think she’s asleep, or if she gets up and leaves,” she says.
“Why?”
“Don’t you want to see what’s in that notebook?”
Oh, yes, I do. “Is it going to give me my answer?”
“I sure hope so. There’s nothing I can say to convince you of what you have to do.”
I realize she’s right again. Kylie herself is the only one who can convince me. In her own words.
So we wait, and I watch what Kylie will do. She looks like a much younger girl all curled up with the notebook, eyes puffy from crying. It’s still afternoon and she’s upset, so I give her fifty-fifty odds on falling asleep. She rolls over and back. Her eyes pop open, and she stares into space a couple of times. She never looks to the window, though.
Tess spends the time plucking especially large pieces of mulch from the bed and stacking them into a pile. It’s the f
irst time pensive silence has fallen between us. I think about spoiling it with my unwelcome questions, but she surprises me by speaking first.
“I have to admit, I don’t get you, Jonathan.” The large piece of mulch she drops onto the pile doesn’t look like it made it all the way through the chipper.
“What do you mean?”
She spares a glance up from her construction. “I mean all the emotional energy you waste on people. Kylie, your family.”
“What do you mean ‘your’ family?”
“You know what I mean.”
“No. I have no idea what you mean.” “Your” is a rather disconnected way to describe a mutual mom and dad, plus herself.
“I mean you think these people will make you happy, but all I’ve seen them do is make you miserable.”
“Yeah, well, I’m miserable only because I can’t have them in the real world.”
“There you go with that ‘real world’ crap again,” she scoffs. “Don’t you see? You could be happy if you made a perfect world. All these things I’ve been trying to teach you have better uses than putting back together a broken Kylie Simms. Now you know how to create and fine-tune the perfect parameters to live in a world just right. You could make an unspoiled Kylie. You could have your family. You could go to college or walk on the moon if you want. Why won’t you let yourself be happy?”
“Because I don’t think that would make me happy.” All my happiness in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend feels great most of the time, but I’ve always known that, just like the difference between Kylie’s compelled love and real love, happiness in a made-up world isn’t the same as happiness earned in the real world. My nagging conscience keeps murmuring that I failed where it mattered and I’m settling for second-best. “Tell me, is that why you’ve hidden yourself from me all these years? Because you’ve thrown away your life for a ‘world just right’? And has that brought you oodles of happiness, Tess? Because what I see before me is a bitter, angry person.”
“Jeesh. Say what you really feel.”
“If living in a cave is so great for you, why come out to help me?”
“That’s the question of the hour.” Her fingers pinch the mulch pieces at the top to balance them. The pile, with its very skinny base, is getting ready to topple over. “Maybe it’s because I know how it feels to lose everything. I know what it is to be damaged goods alone in the universe.”
“But you wouldn’t have been alone if you had come to me sooner.”
“I didn’t know you existed until a few days ago.”
That is a big, fat admission bordering on an actual answer. I’m stunned. A whole new line of questions stretches in my brain. How could she not know I existed? Did she wash up on some foreign shore with a trauma-erased memory? That day she did the incomplete merging with me, were those oddly echoed memories some clue to her story?
“The truth is, Jonathan, you’re the only human being I’ve had any concern for since . . . since I earned my stripes and became a world-maker. I took a chance on you. And you turned out to be a total nut job.”
“I’m a nut job? Take a look in the mirror, crazy-face.”
“Exactly, Big Brother. We’re quite a team.” She annihilates her mulch pile with a swoosh of her hand and stands up. “Isn’t she asleep yet?”
She dusts the mulch off her butt, then crowds me to the edge of the window frame. Together we look inside. Kylie’s arm has slipped a few inches, and the notebook tucked underneath is in danger of plummeting to the floor. For the first time in my life, I’d rather finish a conversation with someone else than rush to be with Kylie.
“I think it’s time,” Tess says.
“We’re not done talking.”
“Yes. We are.”
I try to feel satisfied that she came clean as much as she did. It’s maddening to get so close and have so little by way of answers. I want to know more, but it’s clear she’s said her piece.
Her arms fold in front of her, nonverbally pushing me away as she says, “I suppose you want me to get the notebook.”
I know that if I were a good person, I wouldn’t be so eager to invade Kylie’s privacy like this. If she wrote something in a notebook, it’s hers to keep or give as she wants. Maybe it really is a poem and she does plan to give it. There certainly is a precedent for Kylie and me to exchange poetry. Unfortunately, I don’t know if I can wait long enough to find out her intention.
“I’ll do it,” I say. At least if I’m going to be a jerk, I’m not going to be a chicken about it.
I put the conversation with Tess aside. She hands me the butter knife, and I slide it through the screen clips and then carefully open the window, hoping I’m still invisible should Kylie wake. I crawl through and rise softly to my feet. Kylie’s room looks nothing like girlfriend Kylie’s room, except for the general furniture arrangement and the corner of track medals and trophies displayed on the far wall. Where my girlfriend has animal posters and historical world maps on her walls, this Kylie displays modern art reproductions like the kind girlfriend Kylie disdained in the Fine Arts Museum. Where girlfriend Kylie’s bed is done up in blue flannel sheets and a homemade quilt, this Kylie has white cotton sheets and a pink satiny comforter. A pink bearskin-like rug shushes my steps as I sneak over to the bed, whereas in my girlfriend’s room, the floor is carpeted in something standard and blue.
Kylie’s fingers no longer grip the notebook, but her arm is still draped over it. Gently I pull the notebook up, slide it from under her forearm. She doesn’t even stir.
I hesitate, not knowing whether I should look at it here, quickly, so I can return it to under her arm, or if I should take it with me and let her wonder what happened to it. I decide to glance at the contents before making a decision, so I fold back the cover and turn a bunch of pages at once, hoping to get past the old creative writing stuff.
Luckily, she’s dated her notes, so I flip as quietly as I can through her creativity and find the poem she wrote about the gravestone right after I mixed up my worlds. Underneath it she’s written, Is the grave for Jonathan’s family?
I flip some more. After some Eckhart notes, there’s a draft of the paragraph she wrote about running on the day we posted our sensory descriptions. Underneath this she’s written, Why can’t I stop thinking about running with him?
I turn through several more sheets of notes and poem drafts, all scratched out too messily to make any sense of, though I do see my name in there. Eventually I get to the last page, the one with today’s date on it. She was not writing a poem. She was writing a journal entry:
Dear Diary,
I have never in my life written something in a diary, but I wish I had. A long time ago, see, someone had something really terrible happen to him, and I wanted to help and I couldn’t. Or rather, I didn’t. I wish I had written down my third-grade thoughts, because I am really curious about them now. What did I think about Jonathan Aubrey? Was it a third-grade crush?
The problem is that something’s happened with me and Jonathan. A part of me feels like I’ve been his friend from third grade until now, even though I know I’ve been no friend at all. I remember being picked by him in fifth grade for teams in tag, and kissing him in spin the bottle in seventh grade, and running with him regularly in high school. The problem is, I’ve never done any of these things. I have never been running (until the other day) with Jonathan. I have never kissed him (until the other day, but he kissed me. Today it was me who started it.) or been on his tag team. Jonathan Aubrey survived a plane crash in third grade, but when he came back to school, he kind of somehow died anyway, and I didn’t know how to deal with that so I stopped trying to be friends with him gave up on him.
But I’m having these dreams where we lie in bed together talking at night. Only, my bed isn’t mine and he thinks he’s my boyfriend. He breaks in through my window, and in my dream I’m happy to see him, whic
h is absurd because it’s like he’s stalking me. When I wake up and he’s not there, I’m disappointed devastated.
In school it’s just as strange. One day he almost bumped into me in the hall. Lilly said he was leaning over like he was going to kiss me. At the time I wouldn’t admit that I was nervous she might have been right, because at the time kissing Jonathan Aubrey was the LAST thing in the world I wanted to do.
Then he got all funny in class about something I wrote and asked to talk to me. Then we went running. Then today. Well, today we went to the bird sanctuary, and I did something I can’t believe I did. I needed him so badly. I need to be with Jonathan. It’s like when I’m not with him, I go to pieces, and that’s crazy because I only just started talking to him a few days ago.
Is something wrong with me? He seems to think there’s something wrong about the whole situation. He’s holding something back. I know I should be careful around him, but like I said, I can’t help how I feel.
The funny thing is, the more I’m with him, the more I think he’s a nice wonderful guy and it’s okay to like him. He’s very likable. It makes me sad he’s such a loner usually. At the same time it scares me that these feelings came on so suddenly, like symptoms of a disease. I don’t think this is what “lovesick” means. Jeez, maybe it is what it means. I’m sick. Am I in love?
I wish he were here right now. Jonathan, I wish you were here.
I close the notebook. Kylie is liking me against her will. That’s clear. It helps that she says she likes me the more she gets to know me, but it feels pretty bad to have someone compare their feelings for you to being diseased.
I shouldn’t be too disappointed. I’ve known from the start that Kylie’s problem is the result of my world mix-up. It just sucks to see it in her words. It sucks more to wonder if she might ever have liked me for real if I’d only tried talking to her. It sucks the most to wonder if the other Kylie, my girlfriend and best friend since forever, would write a similar diary entry if the parameters of her world didn’t make her love me. I can’t stand myself right now.