Playing Keira

by Jennifer Castle

  The only hands I let myself touch are Nate’s, and that’s because I know they are safe. They’re not going anywhere I don’t want them to. I often touch his knuckles and wrists when we’re talking, and he doesn’t take it the wrong way. He has huge hands, and I guess that’s part of what makes him a great swimmer; they’re like flippers, he’s said to me. Our friendship is the kind where he hugs me good-bye. It feels incredible, but I only let it last for a moment or two. When it gets to a third moment, I start to panic. I start to remember.

  I was fourteen, and my dad and I had been living outside Paris for two years while he taught on a fellowship. The fellowship was ending, and it was time to go home. Back to Mountain Ridge, back to the place where I had become the Girl Whose Life Fell Apart in Front of Everyone. My friend Alexandra decided to throw me a going-away party. Alex was the first friend I’d made when I’d arrived at the American school in France, officially American like me but for all intents and purposes, French. She taught me everything I needed to know, including the importance of accessories and how to order at a café so that you didn’t sound like a tourist. My father hadn’t let me go to any parties up until that point, but this one was for me, so how could he say no?

  Olivier was an older boy who lived in Alex’s building, and he showed up at the party. He’d seen me from time to time when I visited Alex, and I’d seen him back. He’d check me out in a way American middle-school guys would never dare, full of obvious wonder and appetite.

  At the party, Olivier waited until the first slow song and pulled me onto the dance floor, and I was so surprised, I didn’t think to say no. He held my hips and I looked around, panicky, to see what the other kids were doing so I could copy them. I reached out and wrapped my arms around his neck like the girl next to me was doing with her partner, and we swayed to the music. He rested his chin on my shoulder; we were exactly the same height. I pressed my face into his neck, and he smelled like the handmade soap shop I liked to stop into on my way to school.

  I was just beginning to relax, to get past the half terror, half thrill of being so close to a guy I barely knew, when the song changed. Without a word, Olivier took my hand and led me to a corner. He put one arm on each wall, and I should have felt trapped but it was a totally exciting gesture, like he was holding up the room for me. Then he kissed me, in front of everyone. Not with a gentle buildup but instantly rough, urgent, with a tongue down my throat. It wasn’t exciting anymore. It was disgusting, and I didn’t want it. I pushed him away but he clung on, as if he knew this was his only chance. Then he let go and laughed, saying something in French about how I was just as he’d imagined, “une Américaine froide.”

  A cold American. That stung, because I felt like all I had inside me was heat. Burning me up, radiating from my fingertips, desperate for somewhere to go.

  What do you do with that kind of fire? When you don’t understand it, and nobody’s shown you how to use it? You can try to put it out, but that doesn’t always work. So you seal it up in some cold, cold metal chamber of your heart. The shiver starts there and moves through your whole body and after a while, you don’t notice it anymore. It just becomes part of who you are.

  When my father and I came back to our lives in Mountain Ridge, the Ice Queen thing served me well. People assumed I didn’t care what had happened, so they stopped caring themselves, and eventually forgot.

  The funny thing about the Ice Queen is that some guys want her. She’s a challenge, or they figure the chill is a small price to pay for hooking up with a person everyone thinks is attractive. The few guys who’ve summoned the guts to ask me out get the answer that my father doesn’t let me date, which is true. I let them think what they want to about Nate and me; they can wrongly assume we are “friends with benefits,” if it makes them feel better about something in the world.

  Lately, I’ve realized that the chamber where I sealed up that fire is not airtight. It has cracks in it. The flames lick out when I least expect them, like this moment with Garrett and his hands.

  If I find my mother in the city, if she wants to see me, maybe she’ll hug me. Maybe she’ll put her hands and arms around me and press them against my body to make sure I’m real, to commit the shape of me to her memory. If this happens, it will be the first time in five years that a parent has held me.

  My dad is not a bad man. He just lacks certain things to give. Don’t we all?

  A cell phone blares into the quiet of the bus, and several heads turn to see which passenger is the bonehead who forgot to turn off their ringer. An elderly man a few rows up scrambles for his phone, answers in what he probably thinks is a whisper but is actually louder than most normal conversations. “What?” he hoarse-hollers. “I’m on the bus!”

  Garrett and I look at each other, and it happens. We laugh. It feels good, like for that one second, we’re friends. Then I reach into my purse to make sure the ringers on both cell phones are turned off. On each of them, there’s a missed call from the same number. I don’t recognize it, but I’m pretty sure it’s the phone at the place I’m supposed to be at this moment. There are no calls from my father, and even though I left him a message about how I didn’t want him to contact me, I was kind of hoping he’d ignore the request.

  I’m careful not to let Garrett see that I have two cell phones. Not sure I can come up with a lie to explain that away.

  We listen to the guy on the phone wrap up his call, and the bus seems even more silent in its wake. Then Garrett turns to me and says, “You know what a Fibonacci sequence is, right?”

  “Of course,” I say, a little indignant. Has he been thinking all this time about another conversation topic? Is he testing that I really am a math major? “I thought you were a journalism guy.”

  He smiles, a mischievous spark in his eyes. “Who was also a high-school mathlete. Besides, writing and mathematics have more in common than you might think.”

  I know this, actually. I would never tell anyone, because of the acute nerdiness of it, but I’ve lain awake at night thinking about the connection. And thinking about how I can never tell my father these thoughts because it would make him too happy, and then thinking about why I can’t tell my father something that would make him too happy.

  Garrett takes my pause as a sign to continue. “Mathematics deals with patterns and symmetry, right? A good piece of writing has both, especially when you think about a poem or, for someone like me, a really tight, well-structured nonfiction piece. And then there are all those symbols in math. One thing stands for another. There are symbols in writing, too, but we don’t call them that; we call them metaphors and stuff.”

  I wonder if this was something my parents talked about, discussed in bed at night or at dinner with friends. I wonder if this was the thread they grabbed on to, delicately yet firmly, when everything else about them was so different.

  “I can see that,” I finally say to Garrett. Right now, it’s so much easier to let him think he’s introduced me to a whole new concept.

  “What’s your favorite example of the Fibonacci?” he presses gently, curiously.

  I glance out the window, as if the view of the Lamps Plus we’re now passing will help crystallize my thoughts. “Pineapples,” I say. In a Fibonacci, each number is the sum of the previous two, so it goes one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, etc. Count how many scales make up one diagonal row on a pineapple, then count them on a row going the other direction. Almost always, the first row will have thirteen scales and the second will have twenty-one. Fibonacci numbers, in sequence.

  “Mmm,” he says, and I’m not sure if he’s imagining the sequence or the taste of the actual fruit. “Nice. Why’s that your favorite?”

  “I don’t know. I guess with the pineapple, it’s an example of how something seems totally random, then mathematics shows you how it’s not random at all but was actually planned out carefully by something.” I think this is so amazing that occasionally, when nobody’s looking, I’ll stand in the pro
duce section of the supermarket, running my fingers over the pineapples, and just count. “What about you?” I ask Garrett.

  “Well,” he says, looking down, almost ashamed, “it’s cliché, but I’m going to go with the spiral dimensions of a nautilus shell. The Fibonacci sequence is explaining the pattern that makes it beautiful. I wish all beauty could make such sense.”

  I stare at him, thinking, Who is this guy? He looks back at me and doesn’t glance away. It happens in a single electric flash, but something changes.

  “Sorry,” says Garrett, dropping his head back. “I know it’s way early in the morning for this kind of conversation.” I would like to tell him that it’s never too early for this kind of conversation, especially when you’ve been hoping to have this kind of conversation with someone for years, but instead I just say, “I don’t mind.”

  “This is, like, geek small talk,” he says. “Or large talk, as the case may be.”

  We both laugh awkwardly, then fall silent as we watch more chain stores and shopping centers slide by the window. Sometimes I think about a single store, and all the people who work in it. How they’re like a little community all their own, with dramas and politics and traditions. How that store may be the place an employee has worked at for ten years. And it goes right by us in the blink of an eye.

  Then I think of my mother again, about where she has been working since she left. Maybe it was at one of these stores. Maybe she was not well enough, mentally, to teach anywhere. She struggled with severe depression for most of her life and all of mine. The day after my thirteenth birthday, two years and two months after she left, my father sat me down and laid out her history for me. Because, as he said, I was old enough to understand. Like it’s a natural, simple part of puberty: you grow taller, you get your period, and it suddenly makes perfect sense why your mom could seem like your best friend one day, an alien the next.

  When I think of her not being well enough to teach, I get nervous. She could be not well enough to . . . well, to be herself anymore. With me.

  Stay distracted.

  “What have you written about lately?” I ask Garrett. I’m just keeping things balanced here: he asked me about math; I’ll ask him about journalism.

  “I just finished a piece about a local woodworker who carves carousel horses.”

  “Is there a big demand out there for wooden carousel horses?”

  “Read my article and find out. It’ll be in the Signet next week.” He pauses, considers something for a moment. “I’m not sure what I’ll do next. I heard there’s a documentary film crew shooting in town, so I was thinking of checking that out.”

  Something inside me drops off a cliff.

  I have to admit I hadn’t anticipated this, although I should have. Okay, think. Would Rayanne know about the movies? Yes. Rayanne is totally plugged into that stuff.

  “Oh yeah,” I say. “They’re shooting Five at Sixteen.”

  “What is Five at Sixteen?”

  I’m always surprised when people don’t know. Insulted, even. Which is psychologically problematic.

  “It’s a series. Five at Six, then Five at Eleven. Now sixteen. They’re following five kids growing up in Mountain Ridge, doing a new movie every five years. I haven’t seen them myself, but my roommate is a film major and she’s written a paper about the first two.”

  It’s astonishing, really—the level of detail I can achieve in my bullshit.

  There is no roommate, and of course I have seen them myself. I am one of those five kids.

  Did I really think I could not be, even for just a little while?

  As my father likes to tell it, the filmmakers chose me when I was six years old, out of dozens of my kindergarten schoolmates, because clearly, they were doing something right in the parenting department. He and my mom were two academics devoted to raising a child with the perfect combination of elements, and they were honored to share their experiences. The truth was, he was honored; my mom hated it, but went along because in the end, she always went along. As for me, well. Even then, I knew being chosen had very little to do with me, and a lot to do with my family. Two brilliant academics, my father African-American and my mother about as white as you can get.

  Sometimes I think my first ideas about myself formed when I was watching my parents talk about me in Five at Six. Now, of course, I’ve got the added bonus of my mom bailing on us in front of a film crew and then again on countless screens viewed by millions of people.

  I could hate these films and nobody would blame me for it, but actually, I try to be grateful. Because the first movie is a record of who I was, my life with my family before things started to fall apart. The second movie is a reminder of who I don’t want to be—my mother, withdrawing from the people who love her, retreating even from herself. Helpless to stop any of it.

  Also, I never would have gotten to know Nate without them, because Nate is one of the five, too. Rory Gold is another one, and sometimes I wonder how much of what I know about her comes from the movies, and how much comes from real life. There’s Felix, who doesn’t think he’s on my radar, but I read his blog. I even comment sometimes, although he’d never guess that “Sunshine & Roses” is me.

  The fifth is a girl named Justine Connolly. What I see of her, I see from afar. But it is close enough to know that what you see is what you get. I’m so baffled by how she accomplishes this, lives it, that I can’t get too near. I think it would hurt too much.

  Garrett has taken out his phone and is writing some notes on it. “5 at 16, doc series,” it says at the top.

  I will be so busted.

  At a point in the near future, maybe even tomorrow, Garrett will do some research about the Five At movies. He’ll see a picture of me, and maybe even read about what happened. Then perhaps he’ll write a feature story about the girl with all the lies, and forget about those moments when the energy between us seemed nearly flammable. You can’t fake energy like that. I know it was real. But Garrett won’t care about it once he knows, and it was stupid of me to even let myself feel it in the midst of all my pretending. I’ll get what I deserve.

  Until then, I can enjoy being Rayanne, who’s enjoying sitting with Garrett.

  “Wanna play a game?” he suddenly asks. I turn to see him waving a small advanced Sudoku book. “We can take turns.”

  I can’t help but smile. I do Sudoku at night when I have insomnia. “Sure,” I say.

  “Ladies first,” says Garrett, handing me the book and a pencil. I look the puzzle over. It’s a tough one. I don’t go for the obvious blanks. I put a seven where I’m pretty sure there should be a seven, and hand the book back to him.

  I watch Garrett as his eyes sweep over the puzzle, biting his lip, rolling the pencil up and down between his thumb and forefinger. I bet he’s a great boyfriend. I bet he brings Mary-Kate tiny gifts—Robert Browning poems copied onto vellum paper, or a bouquet of bare twigs arranged in an empty jelly jar.

  My father never did this for my mother, although I know he did other things. He liked the grand gesture of a surprise weekend at a fancy hotel, or bringing in a caterer on Thanksgiving so she wouldn’t have to cook. As a little girl, I was dazzled by this stuff. Then, as I got older, I noticed that these gifts were never just between the two of them. He made sure everyone knew and responded accordingly.

  I understood that my dad had an image to project, and learned how to project my own.

  Garrett hands me back the puzzle and I see he’s made an easy choice. I don’t hold it against him. The easy ones are building blocks that must be locked in before you go any further. He’s doing me a favor, and I’m thinking this is probably on purpose.

  “Where do you like to hang out?” he asks.

  I could take this as a come-on, if he didn’t claim to have a girlfriend and if I were actually me. But I’m Rayanne, remember? Where does Rayanne like to eat?

  “I go to Muddy Joe’s a lot, to work or read. The library’s too quiet.” Rayanne and I really would n
ot hit it off at all. The library is my home away from home, in the second comfy chair in the periodicals section—the one with the mysterious yellow stain on the arm. “Open mic at Esoterica is fun. And my friends and I like to eat at the diner.”

  Open mic at Esoterica has always sounded fun, even if it’s not something I would ever do. What does Rayanne order at the diner? She does not get an egg-white omelette with spinach and feta like I do at the Bistro every Sunday with my dad. She gets pancakes and bacon. She gets hot chocolate instead of cranberry juice. She stays for hours, chatting with her friends, even when the place is crowded and it’s not fair to tie up the table. They take the corner one when they can, the one with all the windows and the glorious view of the ridge. Because, why not? Someone has to sit there.

  “What about you?” I ask finally. “Where’s somewhere great to go that I haven’t heard of?”

  Garrett sighs and says, “I don’t go out as much as I used to.” Then he adds quickly, “Except for when Mary-Kate comes up to visit. We’ll check out the galleries in town, then go to the Tea House.”

  Something about him saying this rings off. Forced. It suddenly occurs to me that there may be no Mary-Kate.

  Which would be bad. I really want there to be a Mary-Kate, so I can ignore that flash I felt earlier. So I can just enjoy it for what it was on an intellectual level. I keep her real by picturing Garrett and Mary-Kate at the Tea House in town, hunched over a pot for two of Darjeeling and an apricot scone.

  My mother used to take me every Thursday to the Tea House, an old, yellow Victorian in the middle of town with modern buildings all around it. Somebody from way back must have refused to sell, and refused and refused, and then maybe died and fortunately, somebody thought it was a cool space. Mom would order me a pot of chocolate tea and she’d get some hard-to-pronounce green tea, and we’d talk. Like friends, getting a good look at our days, holding them up to the light so we could both see them better. Later, as I got older, I did most of the talking, and she would half listen while flipping through an academic journal or grading papers. Then she would just sit and watch people, a dazed look on her face, while I sipped in silence and actually wished for the half-listening days.