The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World

by Amy Reed

  Caleb opens his mouth, but I cut him off before he gets a chance to speak. “Larry never comes in here, but leave the door locked just in case. I’ll keep the key. You can still get out if you want to. Seriously, feel free.”

  Caleb opens his mouth again, but I keep talking. “No way in hell I’m cleaning up your piss and shit. You can use the bathroom like a civilized human being. But not between the hours of two a.m. and noon because Larry might be home. And don’t make any noise then either. Unless you want to meet my dad. I’m sure he’d be happy to meet you.”

  Caleb looks at Billy, but he’s still giving him the cold shoulder.

  “You can stay here until the end of next Saturday,” I continue. “You have less than two weeks. That’s it. You need to figure out what you’re going to do, because you’re out of here whether you figure it out or not. And let me make something clear. I’m not like Billy. I’m not going to baby you. You’re a grown-ass man. You should be able to take care of yourself. And if you can’t, then it’s your job to get professionals to help you, not put that responsibility on a fucking kid. I don’t care if you’re rich and famous. I think this whole situation is bullshit. I don’t like you. I don’t like your overrated band’s music. I think you’re an asshole. I think you took advantage of Billy, who is way too nice for his own good and loves you way more than you deserve.”

  “Okay,” Caleb says, his voice raw, his eyes shining. “You’re right.” I look at Caleb briefly and our eyes catch, and for a moment I see a glimpse of Billy, some spark in him of something good, something worth saving.

  A rush of sadness nearly knocks me over.

  But there are things that have to be done. I am all business. I set down the bags full of dolls on the floor inside the studio. I take the crate of books from Caleb and peer inside. “You brought a bunch of creepy-ass dolls and books about Buddhism? You’re a weird dude.”

  I shove a broom that was leaning next to the door at him. “Here. Clean up all that broken glass. Try not to cut yourself. And if you try to commit suicide in my fucking house, I will fucking kill you.”

  I close the door and lock it. Billy and I stand in my kitchen, not talking, not looking at each other. Something is wrong, but I don’t know what, and I don’t know whose fault it is. I don’t know whose job it is to say I’m sorry.

  Maybe we’re not built for this. Maybe we’re so damaged that we’re not capable of having healthy relationships.

  “Billy?” I say. He doesn’t look at me.

  No, we can do this. I believe in us.

  I open my mouth to say something, but Billy beats me to it: “I think we should take a break.”

  My heart stops. For a moment, I feel like I’m falling, like gravity has given up on me.

  Where is the little girl? Why isn’t she here?

  “What are you talking about?” I say. My voice is small, birdlike.

  “I just need some space to figure some things out.”

  “Wait, are you breaking up with me?” And then the vacuum inside me turns into a black hole. It is heavy and dense. It is violent and wants to suck me in and seize and destroy everything in its path.

  “I think I need to be alone,” Billy says.

  “Are you fucking serious?” I say. There’s the familiar feeling. There’s the fire to cover up the hurt. “You’re pushing me away?”

  “I’m not pushing you away.”

  “That’s exactly what you’re doing and you know it. Can we talk about this?”

  “I’m tired of talking.”

  “No, Billy. We need to talk about this.”

  “Please!” he says, finally looking at me. Something in his eyes tells me to stop arguing. I can’t make him want to talk to me. I can’t make him want to try.

  “Can you take me home now?” he says.

  “Fine,” I say.

  “Fine,” he says.

  I can’t talk him into loving me.

  Outside, caught in the middle of the ice storm, the little girl pounds on the window with her tiny fists, her mouth open in a silent scream.

  BILLY

  IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS SINCE the ice storm, three days since news broke about Caleb’s ATM transactions and he moved to Lydia’s and we decided to take a break. Or I guess I decided to take a break and she went along with it. I still don’t really understand what happened. I stood there in Lydia’s broken studio watching her lay down the law with Caleb and make all these rules, and all I could think about was that she’s the strongest person I’ve ever met and why can’t I be half as strong as her and how am I ever going to get my shit together if I just follow her around my whole life?

  I could have told her all that. I think she would have understood. But I’m so tired of talking. I’m so tired of everything. I’m tired of living in Lydia’s shadow, living in Caleb’s shadow. I’m tired of being a shadow.

  Lynn A. still hasn’t come back to the meeting. Why is her trip taking so long? Doesn’t she know I need her?

  Most of the ice has melted. Rome is swarming with tourists and private investigators and newspeople from all over the world. There was no bomb after all, but school was canceled for one day to give everyone time to thaw out. I started eating lunch with Mrs. Ambrose again, and she spent Wednesday’s lunch period telling me all about chakras and crystals and some kind of magic stone egg she bought from her spiritual life coach that she puts in her vagina, which I’m pretty sure is illegal for her to talk to me about. I wanted to tell Lydia about it so bad in Miscellaneous Science, but I didn’t. She said hi and I said hi, then I looked out the window for the rest of class, and that was the extent of our conversation.

  The crows were waiting for me outside of school yesterday. They followed me all the way home, and then about halfway there, one dive-bombed me. Then a few seconds later, another one did it. Then they all started squawking and wings started flapping and all of a sudden there were a million birds swarming around me, grabbing me with their talons and beaks, like they wanted to carry me away with them. I ran the rest of the way yelling and flapping my arms around trying to swat them off, and by the time I got home my hair was all over the place and I was covered with splatters of bird poop and feathers. And for a split second, I believed it really, truly couldn’t get any worse, but then of course it did.

  Because when I got home, there was a dump truck parked outside my house and a TV crew set up inside. A pink-clad woman with a clipboard was shouting orders at everyone, while a bunch of smelly large men in Hoarder Heaven T-shirts hauled Thrift Town bags out of the house and threw them into the truck. Grandma was just sitting on the porch under a blanket, rocking back and forth. I kept asking her what was going on, but she was catatonic. She didn’t even say anything about me being covered in bird poop, so I knew something was really wrong. I finally got the lady with the clipboard to stop yelling at everyone for a second so she could tell me that Grandma got bumped to the top of the Hoarder Heaven waiting list when they found out she was Caleb Sloat’s mom, and her episode will be put on the fast track to air.

  “But is she okay?” I asked the bossy pink woman.

  “I’m the professional organizer, not the counselor,” she said.

  “When’s the counselor going to get here?”

  She just rolled her eyes and started yelling at someone in the kitchen.

  I wanted to call Lydia and tell her about it, but instead I sat by Grandma for the next hour or so, watching the men haul her years’ worth of collections out of the house. The counselor finally showed up and was able to assure Grandma, with a TV camera in our faces the whole time and the help of a box of snack cakes, that all her things are going to a storage unit that she is free to visit anytime. That perked Grandma up, and for a split second, I had the strange feeling that everything was going to be okay. But of course that quickly passed.

  The weird thing is, the house seems to have relaxed a little. It’s still making the regular noises it always did, but it’s not nearly as aggressive as it has been la
tely. Ever since Caleb left, it’s like a spell was broken, like a huge weight was lifted. Lydia’s painting is back to being beautiful instead of scary, and I even managed to sleep last night, for the first time in I don’t know how long, and I’m feeling a little less like my brain’s going to explode any minute. These are good things. I should feel better. But all my weird feelings are still swirling around inside of me, and I still don’t know what to do with them, and now instead of feeling like I’m losing my mind, I just feel really, really sad.

  The TV people have left for the day. I hear the front door open, then slam closed. “I want to make your room more of a historical exhibit,” Grandma says as she scuttles into the living room, her arms heavy with new Thrift Town bags.

  “I thought you were supposed to be getting rid of stuff,” I say.

  “Dammit, Billy!” she says. “This is for business. Did you even hear what I said? This is what I need you to do. Go up to your room, remove anything that screams, ‘Billy,’ and replace it with what’s in these bags.”

  “What is all that stuff?”

  “Things that look more like what Caleb would have had in his room. You know, like real boy stuff.”

  My guts twist. If Caleb was a real boy, what does that make me?

  I do what Grandma says. I march up the stairs while she stays at the bottom, administering decorations. “Put that one on the wall next to the bed!” she yells up at me. I unroll a NASCAR poster.

  Really? That’s what Grandma thinks Caleb would have had in his room? I guess it doesn’t really matter. None of Grandma’s tour customers are going to care one way or another. No one wants to know who Caleb actually is.

  I look around my room and realize there isn’t much for me to remove to make space for the fake Caleb exhibit. I took most of my furniture to the attic, and in the almost ten years this has been my bedroom, I’ve never done much decorating. I heard on a show once that a person’s home is a reflection of their soul. So what does my room say about me? That my soul is empty?

  I hang up the NASCAR poster, a Seattle Mariners poster, and a poster of a Black Bart Simpson on a skateboard. I blow up an inflatable pink guitar and put a broken lava lamp on the floor next to the bed, scatter some books about guitars and a few pairs of sweatpants around the room, drop a mostly deflated soccer ball in the corner, though I’m almost positive Caleb has never kicked a soccer ball in his life.

  “Are you done?” Grandma yells from the bottom of the stairs.

  I inspect my work. This looks like the room of a total asshat.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Okay, I’m picking up a tour, then we’re heading over here in twenty minutes. You better scram.”

  I know that’s the closest I’m going to get to a thank-you.

  After she leaves, I turn on the AA channel, but Lynn A. still isn’t there. Right above her empty seat, there’s a new poster of a picture of a river and text in Comic Sans font over it: DENIAL IS NOT A RIVER IN EGYPT. I’ve been hearing that saying in meetings for years, but I still don’t know what it means. What does denial have to do with Egypt? I’m guessing they’re saying denial is bad, but they also always say, “Fake It Till You Make It,” and isn’t that kind of like saying denial is good? I am so confused. How I am supposed to practice these principles and do what they tell me if I can’t even figure out what they’re telling me to do?

  Then, sitting on the coffee table under some wadded-up napkins, I see Grandma’s laptop that she brought home from work. She finally got Internet at home, but she still won’t let me touch her computer, but she’s not going to be here for at least ten minutes, and I’m sure I can do one simple Internet search before she comes around to smack my chin. Luckily, she’s even worse at computers than I am and hasn’t figured out how to lock it with a password.

  I open up the Internet browser. I type: “Where is Lynn A.?”

  The first thing that comes up is her obituary.

  I slam the computer on the coffee table. I don’t want to read what someone else says about her. I don’t want to know the names of her family or where she was born or what jobs she’s had. I don’t want to read that version of her life. I want the one she talks about in meetings. I want the story of pain and redemption. I want the hopeless life with the happy ending. I want the miracle. I want her in her chair, in that room, on my screen, in my house, where she was supposed to stay forever and never ever leave me.

  She was never on a trip. She was never on an airplane to visit her new grandchild. She was just dead. Gone. Forever. I will never see her again. She is in the same place as my mother—nowhere.

  I go to my room. I look at Lydia’s painting now, still and lifeless. I look at the hole in the wall with nothing coming out of it. I look around at my sad little room, full of other people’s garbage, with nothing in it that’s mine, and my heart feels like all those hundreds of crows are tearing it apart, and then I scream the loudest I’ve ever screamed in my life, so loud it makes my throat feel like it’s bleeding, and then, just like that, it’s over, and I feel almost exactly the same, and the silence settles, and nothing’s changed, and the house says nothing in return, doesn’t even shake in acknowledgment, and the crows have devoured everything inside me so all that’s left is a deep black void and a few stray feathers. And now I’m numb. Now all I want to do is sleep.

  I pack up my few belongings—mostly clothes from Thrift Town—in the now-empty Thrift Town bags. I place the shoebox full of money on top and haul everything upstairs to the attic.

  Everything is still here from when Caleb left, in the same state of disarray. For some reason, the Hoarder Heaven people haven’t come up here, like they have no idea it even exists, like the house is hiding it from them.

  The toilet bucket has had some time to fester. After I throw it into the forest of dead weeds in the backyard, I begin my work. I build a little bed out of a stack of blankets. I set the bedside table right side up and put the box of money in the crooked drawer. I steal a light bulb from the downstairs hallway and replace the smashed one in the lamp. A couple of Caleb’s dolls were abandoned during the hasty escape, so I set them on one of the lawn chairs and face it toward mine. And then I start the long and grueling, but strangely relaxing, task of refolding and stacking the dozens—maybe hundreds—of blankets scattered around the attic, and the two orphaned dolls watch silently as I build my own new walls.

  LYDIA

  I’M NOT SURE WHAT EXACTLY is happening right now. Natalie and I just finished Saturday morning classes, but instead of each of us going our separate ways, Natalie invited me “to do something,” and I said yes even though I had no idea what that even meant, because what are two dancers supposed to do together if they’re not dancing?

  So now I’m sitting in the passenger seat of Natalie’s car. I didn’t mention I drove to practice too. Larry’s van is parked out of sight, two blocks away.

  “Are you hungry?” Natalie says.

  “Always,” I say. How many calories did we burn in the last three hours? At least a thousand. And what did I have for breakfast? String cheese, a mostly brown banana, and a cup of black coffee.

  “Want to get drive-through and park at the beach?”

  My stomach lurches in joy. “Oh my God, yes. But wait, aren’t you supposed to be on Mary’s high protein and organic vegetable diet?”

  “At home, I am. But when my mom’s not looking, I eat whatever I want. There’s only so much grilled chicken and quinoa a person can eat before they crack.”

  Natalie pulls up to the drive-through screen and places our order. Double cheeseburgers, fries, and chocolate milkshakes for both of us. A real dancer’s diet.

  Billy would love this meal. He would close his eyes when he drank the milkshake. He’d somehow get ice cream all around his mouth even though he was drinking with a straw.

  I shake my head to dislodge the thought of him. We haven’t hung out or really talked for five days, and I feel like a part of me is missing. The little girl’s been mo
ping around too. We both miss him.

  But right now, I’m with Natalie. Right now, I want to try to be happy.

  “What if you brought this home and ate it right in front of your mom’s face?” I ask Natalie as we wait at the window for our order to be ready.

  Natalie thinks about this like it’s a very serious question. “She’d probably cry. Then she’d ask me what she did wrong. Then she’d send me to the youth pastor at our church to talk about it so she wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.”

  “Wow. That’s a pretty serious reaction to a cheeseburger.”

  “Cheeseburgers are pretty serious.”

  Natalie pulls a card out of her wallet to pay when the order is ready. “Wait, how much is mine?” I say, rummaging through my backpack for my wallet.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Natalie says. “It’s on me.”

  “You don’t have to pay for me.”

  “It’s fine,” Natalie says with a smile, and hands her card to the cashier in exchange for two greasy bags of food.

  “No, I can pay for myself,” I say as Natalie hands me a milkshake. She doesn’t get it. Billy would get it.

  “I know. I just wanted to—”

  I shove my money at Natalie. “Take it,” I snap, immediately cringing at the sharpness in my voice.

  “Fine,” Natalie snaps back. The car behind us honks. Natalie puts her hands on the steering wheel and drives.

  I am sliced down the middle. On one side is the angry girl who’s used to fighting everyone; on the other is a girl looking at Natalie, feeling like shit for hurting her, a girl who knows Natalie was just trying to be nice, that she would offer to buy me lunch even if I was the richest person in the world. One girl desperately wants to say, “I’m sorry,” but the other girl is holding my lips shut.

  We drive the short distance to the closest public beach in silence. On the way, we pass two fire trucks battling an apartment building engulfed in flames; the homeless encampment near city hall, now eerily vacant and surrounded by police tape; the intercounty bus depot, its benches full of junkies; and the tornado pit, full of garbage and broken dreams. All of this decay behind the shiny new signs announcing the upcoming Unicorns vs. Dragons festival. This is not the part of Fog Harbor the tourists come here to see.