The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World

by Amy Reed

  “I remember you saying how expensive tights are and how yours were getting ratty,” I say. “Did I get the right size?”

  “They’re perfect, Billy. Thank you.” She pulls out the second gift and looks at it for a long time.

  “It’s Filipino folk dance music,” I say.

  “I can read the CD cover,” she says, still staring at it.

  “Because you’re Filipina and a dancer and you can listen to it and get in touch with your roots or something.” Is she mad at me? Did I offend her?

  But then she looks up and smiles with that weird sad-happy look she gets in her eyes sometimes. “I love it,” she says. “It’s a really thoughtful gift.”

  But then why does she look like she’s going to start crying?

  “Okay, my turn,” Lydia says. She reaches behind the driver’s seat and pulls out something large and flat and wrapped in actual wrapping paper with a bow. I think I actually gasp. I almost don’t want to open it because it’s so pretty.

  “You wrapped that yourself?” I say.

  Lydia just shrugs. “I found the wrapping stuff in a closet. It’s, like, ten years old.”

  “It’s the nicest thing I’ve ever gotten.”

  “You haven’t even opened it yet.”

  She has no idea how low the bar is.

  “It’s not much,” she says. “I just saw it at a thrift store and thought you’d like it.”

  I try not to rip the wrapping paper as I open it, but I’m too excited. I hold the gift out in front of me—a framed painting of an abstract blue swirl with a glowing yellow ball at the center, like a galaxy or a tornado with a mysterious life inside, and I think, if there could be picture that perfectly illustrates what it feels like inside my brain these days, this is it. This painting could be my self-portrait.

  “I thought your room could use some decoration,” Lydia says. “What do you think?”

  “I think it’s perfect,” I say. I want to say so much more, but I have no idea what. I think giving someone art is just about the most intimate gift a person can give, except for maybe sex toys or something.

  “Okay, great,” Lydia says with an almost-sharpness in her voice. She buckles her seat belt and turns on the car. I guess that means the gift exchange is over.

  I don’t ask where we’re going as Lydia drives us across town, across the flat blocks of Criminal Fields, across the Rome bridge, and up into the hills where all the big, fancy houses are.

  “I bet Natalie lives up here somewhere,” Lydia says, and I startle awake. I doze off a lot these days since my house keeps finding new sounds to keep me up at night.

  We get out of the neighborhoods and enter what used to be an old-growth Douglas fir forest, but it’s all been clear-cut now. As far as the eye can see, it’s rolling foothills covered with moss and fern and flimsy saplings. And in the middle of it all is the famous Rome water tower that people around the world have heard of because Caleb supposedly slept there when he was homeless and then put it in a song. It doesn’t look like anything that deserves to be famous. The giant red ROME painted on it is barely decipherable after so many years of weather, the formerly white tank is discolored with some kind of greenish-black mold, and the hundred-foot-tall metal frame is rusted. A ladder hangs off of it, the bottom at least ten feet off the ground, like you already have to know how to fly just to start climbing.

  “Water tower home,” I start singing with my squeaky voice that’s nothing like Caleb’s. “Look at what I’ve sown. No cover from the rain. Liquefy my brain.”

  Then Lydia joins in: “A view of dirty memories from my hovel in the sky. Everywhere’s a cemetery. I’m dead but I can fly.”

  “I didn’t know you knew the words,” I say.

  “Everyone knows the words.”

  Lydia parks the van right where the ladder meets the sky.

  The wind whips around us as we climb. Our bags full of discount Advent calendars act like sails, catching the wind, trying to pull us off the ladder. Maybe other people would decide to abort this mission. But those people are not us.

  My lungs and every muscle in my body burn by the time we reach the top of the water tower. “There’s no way your uncle lived up here,” Lydia says as I pull myself onto the narrow walkway surrounded by a flimsy rail. “He totally would have fallen off.”

  “You should see where he lives now,” I say, panting. “He doesn’t take up much space.” I really need to get in better shape.

  Everything within reaching distance is covered with graffiti—Rainy Day Knife Fight song lyrics, several I LOVE YOU, CALEBs, some weird poetry by anonymous fans, and one RIP CALEB SLOAT with the date of his disappearance. My stomach seizes at the sight of this, even though I just saw him last night.

  We find a spot out of the wind, with a view of all of Fog Harbor below us. It’s been cloudy all day, but that’s nothing compared to what’s coming. The real weather is hugging the ocean maybe a mile out—a wall of thick, white, inevitable fog advancing toward land.

  “What does he do up there all day?” Lydia says as she hands me one of the Advent calendars from her bag. We start popping open the days and fishing the little pieces of chocolate out from inside. I start at the biggest one and pick the rest randomly from there. Lydia starts at the beginning and systematically works up to the best piece of candy at the end.

  “He just smokes pot and watches shows on his computer,” I say. “He had me change all his passwords and security questions so he can’t read his e-mail, and he did something to block any news and social media sites from coming up. He’s, like, totally cut off from the outside world.”

  “He can’t do that forever, can he?” Lydia says, inspecting a piece of candy from her zombie Christmas calendar that looks like a severed elf head.

  “I don’t know.” I look at one of my candies. It’s either a drum kit or a machine gun.

  “You can’t do that forever.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Do you think they’re going to find him soon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “They just have to figure out the Social Security number that guy sold him, and then they can trace his bank account to here.”

  Why is she saying this? Is she trying to make me have a panic attack?

  The fog is advancing fast. It’s nearly to the shore.

  “Hey, Lydia,” I say.

  “Hey, Billy.”

  “Will you come with me to Gordon’s again?”

  Lydia sighs her biggest sigh of the day. “Ugh,” she says.

  “Pleeeease?” I plead.

  “It’s so wrong in so many ways.”

  “I don’t want to go by myself,” I say. “I always end up staying for, like, two hours because I’m too scared to leave.”

  “I wouldn’t want to go if I were you either. Why can’t you just say no to Caleb?”

  “He’s family.”

  “And it’s good to enable him?”

  “At least he’s not doing heroin.”

  “Jesus, Billy. You sound like an abused wife. ‘At least he doesn’t punch me in the face.’ ”

  “He doesn’t punch me in the face.”

  Lydia sighs again. She doesn’t get it. Saying no is so easy for her. Besides dancing, it’s probably her greatest talent.

  “So will you come with me?” I say.

  “Maybe,” she says. “If I have time.” But I know that’s pretty much a no. Lydia never has time anymore.

  We eat our candy in silence for a while, throwing the empty cardboard over the edge and watching it drift slowly to the ground, catching wind occasionally and changing course. The only sounds are the wind, the popping open of the little windows of the calendars, and a lone hawk somewhere in the distance crying about something.

  “Do you think I should eat this?” I say, showing Lydia a disfigured chocolate from my fourth, maybe fifth, calendar.

  “It’s green,” Lydia says. “The last time I checked, chocolate isn’t supposed to be green.”r />
  “It’s not green. It’s just a different shade of brown.”

  “It might be poisonous.”

  “I paid good money for this.”

  “Billy, that calendar cost twenty-five cents. That piece of chocolate cost a penny. I will give you a penny to not eat it if it means you won’t die of food poisoning.”

  “Look at you, throwing money around.” I thought that was pretty funny, but Lydia doesn’t laugh.

  I look at the greenish-brown blob in my hand. I throw it over the side and watch it fall until it’s so small I can’t see it anymore. There’s no satisfying sound to tell me when it hits the ground, and I feel cheated. I throw the whole calendar overboard and feel cheated again by how slowly it glides. I want to throw something heavy and hard, something that will really make an impact.

  We are silent as the fog swallows the shore, as it advances inland, gobbling up trees and roads and houses and every other solid thing in its path. It has become so normal, this disappearing.

  LYDIA

  THE FOG IS SILENT AND fast in its takeover. In just a few minutes, Rome and Carthage are gone. Everyone who ever thought anything about Billy and me are gone. Now it’s just the two of us left, at the top of the world, with no one to define us. The longer we are silent, the more time the bullshit has to fall away. The fog has reached the water tower now, has swallowed up the metal structures that hold it in the sky, but it stops just below the tank. We are floating above the sea of white—unmoored, untouched.

  Somehow this changes things. Suddenly, with the rest of the world gone, there are things I can say out loud.

  “Everything feels out of control,” I say. Billy doesn’t say anything for a while. I wonder if he even heard me over the sound of the wind. “I think it started when we met.”

  “I think it’s like chemistry,” he says after a long silence. “You’ve got two volatile elements that are used to doing their own thing, and then you put them together and bang!” He claps his hands together and I jump, the sharp sound so shocking and out of place up here in the clouds. “The explosion sets off a bunch of other explosions.”

  “That makes no sense, Billy,” I say. “That’s like some pseudoscience anti-vaxxer shit.”

  “Haven’t you been paying attention in chemistry class?”

  “No. And neither have you.”

  “There’s a fine line between madness and genius,” he says.

  “Did you get that from one of your talk shows?”

  “No. Caleb said it.”

  “Whatever,” I say, but my heart’s not in it. I don’t feel like being sarcastic or funny. I just feel confused and pissed off about everything.

  We sit there for a while saying nothing. I can’t see any of Carthage or Rome or my life below. What if it were this easy to break free from it? What if I could just be right here, right now, without what’s down there to define me?

  “I think my house is trying to kill me,” Billy finally says.

  I look at his face. He’s totally serious. “Is that why you haven’t been sleeping?”

  “It keeps me up all night. I’m afraid it’s going to kill me in my sleep. It’s breaking faster and faster, but only around me, like it’s reacting to stuff I do, like it has an opinion. I barely avoided a huge piece of plaster falling on my head the other day. It leaves nails all over the floor for me to step on. I feel like it’s watching me, like it can see whatever I’m doing, whatever room I’m in.” He seems genuinely scared.

  “Maybe it’s not trying to kill you,” I say. “Maybe it just wants you to leave.”

  Normally, I probably wouldn’t entertain Billy’s ludicrous ideas. But these are not normal times. I’m starting to accept that most of the logic of the universe is basically not applicable in Fog Harbor anymore. I’m being stalked by a ghost kid, so it is perfectly plausible that Billy’s house is trying to kill him.

  With the fog all around us, it feels like we are hiding inside a stack of down pillows, like we are insulated. Safe. I can see why Caleb liked it up here so much he wrote a song about it. It’s like up here, we don’t have to be who we are down there.

  “Why would it want me to leave?” Billy says. “It never did before.”

  “Maybe it didn’t think you were ready.”

  He’s quiet for a minute as he thinks about that.

  “I think I’m going crazy,” he finally says.

  “That makes two of us.”

  “But you’re the sanest person I know.”

  I don’t tell him about the nine-year-old girl in a pink tutu sitting next to me, her bare feet dangling over the edge as she silently works on her own Advent calendar, opening the doors one by one. I don’t even know how I’d begin to talk about her. And once you talk about something, it usually means you have to start dealing with it, and I certainly don’t know how to do that.

  Billy sighs. I sigh. The little girl sighs. Maybe way below us, down there on First Street, enveloped by fog that smells like something dying, Billy’s house sighs too.

  “I hate my mom,” I whisper. “I wish she could come back so I could tell her how much I hate her.” My heart is as soft as the fog. I feel it in my throat, expanding.

  Billy doesn’t say anything. He just reaches for my hand, and I let him. I don’t even cringe. I must have left my defenses down there somewhere, in the place now buried. And we sit here, holding hands, feet dangling a hundred feet in the air, looking at the erased context of our lives below, sitting in the fabled place where Caleb Sloat may have slept when he had no home, and I feel like shit, but I also feel safer than I’ve felt in a long time, also freer, and the combination of these feelings makes no sense. It’s like a tornado inside me with the sound on mute, and the only thing anchoring us in this cold place in the sky is the few inches where our skin touches, a tiny opening for trading each other’s warmth.

  BILLY

  IT’S THE FIRST DAY BACK at school after break, and all anyone can talk about is a New Year’s Eve party in Rome that ended in a bloody riot after Carthage students crashed it. Rome police had to call in county deputies so they’d have enough handcuffs and cars to transport kids to the station. More than a few students are absent today due to injuries, and several more have some form of black eye or split lip. Braydon Hansen has his right arm in a cast.

  But everything changes in fifth period, when the principal announces over the loudspeakers that school’s getting out early because the mayor just declared today a new holiday, tentatively titled “Liberty Day,” after news reports that the King pronounced the Olympic National Park no longer protected and now open to logging. Students and teachers start cheering in class, Carthageans and Romans holding each other and crying tears of joy, forgetting their hate because the good news and promise of abundance suddenly makes their rivalry unnecessary. It’s an emotional roller coaster, to say the least.

  Lydia and I haven’t talked about what we talked about on the water tower. Somehow up there, anything seemed possible, but down here it’s the same old crap. I couldn’t find her after school got out, so I’m on my own again. It’s just like when she showed me her dancing; anytime she lets her guard down, she goes into hiding immediately afterward.

  I get why everyone’s excited about the forest thing, but I don’t think I’ll benefit too much since Grandma definitely isn’t getting a job cutting down trees, and if I tried I’d probably die the first day on the job, and to be honest I kind of think the forest should stay a forest, but I will never in a million years admit that to anyone around here because they’d probably murder me and tie my dead body to a tree and write on it with my blood, ARE YOU HAPPY NOW, TREE HUGGER? as a warning to anyone else who might think trees should have more rights than red-blooded Americans.

  Everyone’s celebrating as I leave school grounds. In the streets, people are setting off fireworks and firing guns into the sky, the colorful flames and sparks glowing eerie in the misty fog all around. It’s a little scary to be walking around in the middle of a bun
ch of explosions when visibility is only a block or two and people can’t really see where they’re shooting, but it’s kind of pretty and I guess I’m glad everyone’s happy, and for once they’re too busy to harass me about Caleb.

  I hug my coat tight to my body, but it does nothing. I haven’t been able to get warm all day. Those crows I saw the other day are waiting for me in a tree down the block. I try not to make eye contact as I walk by, but then I hear a bunch of wings flapping, and they all land on another tree ahead of me. As I walk by a second time, they all start cackling, and it’s so loud and shrill it makes my ears hurt, and it feels just like when the popular girls at school huddle together and don’t even bother whispering as they make fun of me. And now I feel embarrassed in front of a bunch of birds.

  It takes Gordon a long time to answer the door. I have to ring the doorbell three times. Finally the door opens, revealing a shirtless and crusty-eyed Gordon in boxer shorts. “Oh hey, little man,” he says. “I just woke up. Come on in.” The stump of his missing arm moves back and forth as he leads me into the house, which is in the same general state it usually is. “Do you want to play video games or something?” Gordon says as he pulls on some wrinkled pants from the floor.

  “No thank you,” I say. “I’m just here for, you know.”

  “Sit down,” Gordon says. “Stay awhile. Let me get you something to drink.”

  “Um, no. I have to go,” I say, but Gordon’s already in the kitchen. I wonder when the last time he went on a date was.

  He brings back a beer for himself and one for me, which I set on the table without opening. Gordon sits on the couch next to me, turns on the TV, puts it on mute, and we watch live news footage of people dancing around the Rome/Carthage tornado pit. “Pretty wild, huh?” Gordon says.

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “You got some serious bags under your eyes. You want an eye mask or something? I got a nice gel one in the fridge that’s great for inflammation.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Let me know if you change your mind.” Gordon takes a big swig of his beer. “It’s lavender-scented.”