“Did what?”
“Honked. We’re at a cemetery, Heidi. Hell-o?”
“Okay, okay, stop yelling.”
I opened my purse and rummaged through it, looking for my keys. “Damn it,” I muttered.
“Relax, Is.” Heidi jiggled the keys in front of my face. “You gave them to me, remember?”
I swiped the keys out of her hands.
“Is everything all right?”
“No,” I said. “Everything’s not all right.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
I put the key in the ignition and was about to turn it when Heidi said, “Why is she staring at us?”
I looked at Heidi and followed her gaze, through the windshield and over to the sidewalk where a thin girl stood in a simple black dress, facing us. Her hair was dyed platinum white and cut short like a boy’s. She held her purse with both hands, then raised one tentatively.
“Do you know her?” Heidi asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you sure?”
I turned the key halfway so the car’s power came on. I lowered the window and poked my head out. “Do I know you?” I asked the girl.
She came over to the car and I realized how thin she was. She was all bones, a waif of a girl with twig arms and a scrawny neck and collarbones poking out from under her dress like a wire hanger.
“Are you Isabel?” she wanted to know.
“Yeah. Who are you?”
“I’m Sara. One of Vanessa’s friends from Wilson.”
“Oh,” I said. “She never mentioned her friends from Wilson.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.” She crouched and tilted her head sideways. “And you must be Heidi?”
“I am,” Heidi said.
“How did you know who we were?” I asked.
“Vanessa talked about you two all the time.” Sara smiled without showing her teeth. “I knew all her friends at Wilson, so when I saw you two walking together…well, it didn’t take a genius to figure out who you were.”
Heidi leaned toward the thin girl. “What did she say? About us, I mean.”
Sara slid the tip of her finger down the side of her mouth as if she was fixing her lipstick, which was a dark rose color. “Good things, mostly.”
“Mostly?” I was getting angry. Who the hell does this bony chick think she is? I thought.
“Listen,” Sara said, “Vanessa talked shit behind all her friends’ backs. Even mine.”
“Oh, is that right?” I said.
“You have no idea what kind of girl she was, do you?”
I remembered what Vanessa had told me on the phone one night, how she used to hang out with the wrong crowd. Drugs and stuff. It got out of hand, she’d told me. I began wondering if Sara was part of that crowd, if she was one of the reasons why Vanessa transferred to Millikan. I looked at Sara and said nothing.
“That’s what I thought. And, actually, that’s the way she wanted it.”
I started the car. “It was nice meeting you,” I said dryly.
I lowered the brake and checked my mirrors and began to pull out of the parking spot. Sara followed, walking casually by the driver’s-side door. She had one more thing to tell me, but I was done listening to her crap and peeled out of the parking lot, the tires squealing on the pavement.
“Hell-o?” Heidi said, mocking me. “We’re at the cemetery.”
CARLOS
After the funeral, I went home and changed clothes and checked my email. There was one from Mira with the subject heading “Call me after you read this.” I clicked it open and her letter filled the screen, a wall of text from one side of the monitor to the other. I didn’t have time to read it, nor did I want to. Hooking up with Mira the previous night had been a mistake, plain and simple, so I deleted her email without reading it. If there was a way I could’ve blocked out that evening and hit the BACKSPACE button, I would’ve done that too.
At the museum I walked past the east wing and saw that Nadine was suited up and filing her nails, dragging the emery board casually across her fingertips. I held up my hand toward her and she kept on filing as if I didn’t exist.
I knocked on Ms. Otto’s office door even though it was already open. While she typed furiously at her computer, her printer was spitting out sheets of address labels. Without so much as a glance in my direction, she said, “Just give me two seconds.” She was still wearing the black blouse and pants she wore to the funeral, but her large hat was nowhere to be seen.
“One…two,” I said, teasing.
Ms. Otto didn’t respond. She just kept typing away, mumbling the words to herself, the keyboard firecracking underneath her hands.
The stack of address labels was getting pretty thick, so I removed them from the output tray. All of a sudden the printer began chewing on a sheet. A wheel inside made a grinding noise and the ERROR light started blinking red.
“I didn’t touch anything,” I said, trying to look innocent, the warm stack of labels in my hands.
Ms. Otto swiveled away from her computer and rolled toward the printer. “It’s been doing that,” she said. “For some reason it doesn’t like these address labels.” She pressed a couple buttons and readjusted the blank sheets into the feeder.
“You want me to get started on something?” I asked her.
“Yes, actually.” From underneath a table in the corner of her office she slid out a cardboard box stuffed with sealed envelopes. The museum’s logo—the letters LBCM floating in a red square—was printed in the corner of each envelope. “You can start by putting labels on these,” she said.
“No problem.”
She wheeled back to her computer using her feet. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I placed the labels on top of the envelopes and moved the box to the glass coffee table. Her couch was sleek in design and made of leather the color of dark chocolate. I sat down and began to unpeel the address labels, sticking them to the envelopes as straight and dead-center as I could. Five minutes into it, Ms. Otto turned around and said, “How are we doing?”
I was aligning a label just right. “Good.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect, Carlos. It just has to get there, you know?”
“Sorry.”
“That’s okay. There’s just lots to do,” she said. “When you’re done with those, I’ve got some postcards for next month’s exhibit that also need labels.”
Ms. Otto went back to whatever she was working on and I picked up my pace with the labeling until I had a steady rhythm going, the envelopes moving from one hand to the next before I dropped them into the cardboard box. I was like a factory machine. Peel, stick, drop. Peel, stick, drop. I was certain there wasn’t a faster labeler in all of Long Beach.
My mind wandered and I thought about Mira, the email I deleted.
Peel, stick, drop.
I thought about Snake. The dream. Ms. Wagner kicking his head.
Peel, stick, drop.
Isabel and the way I left her at the cemetery parking lot.
Peel, stick, drop.
How guilty I felt for hooking up with Mira when I had no intention of getting back with her.
Peel, stick, drop.
How afraid I was that Isabel would see the guilt on my face.
For a half hour straight I labeled, barely even reading the names, but there was one I paused on: Richard Spurgeon. His address label stuck to my fingertip like an unpeeled Band-Aid. I decided to say his name out loud to test my theory that he and Ms. Otto had once been together.
“Rich-ard Spur-geon,” I said slowly. “Isn’t that the neon artist guy?”
Ms. Otto swiveled around in her chair. “Give me that.” She stuck her hand out. “He won’t be in town for the opening.” She plucked the label from my fingertip and crumpled it in her hand.
“I thought the postcards were for the opening?”
“Yes, well…” She paused and motioned toward the box of
envelopes. “Those are letters asking for donations. I generally don’t like to ask artists for money.”
“Oh,” I said. “I see.”
The printer began crunching on another sheet. Ms. Otto made a growling noise with her teeth clenched and rolled her chair over and pulled the ruined labels out.
“Are you friends with him?” I asked.
“Acquaintances,” she said, rolling back to her computer.
“He seems like a nice guy. I had to help him move the sign to his car. He acted like—”
“Carlos,” she interrupted. “I need to finish typing this letter.”
“Sorry.”
Peel, stick, drop.
We worked together for a good hour in silence except for Ms. Otto’s occasional mumbling. Once I finished labeling the envelopes, I moved on to the postcards that announced the new exhibit in three weeks. The postcards had a photograph of a red balloon lying on its side in the grass. Because the picture was taken from a low angle, you could see the blurry background in what appeared to be a park, the green splotches of trees under a blue sky, an unfocused man or woman walking down a fuzzy pathway. Tethered with a piece of string to the balloon’s navel was a card like the ones coroners slip on a dead person’s toe. On the card there were five lines—one for NAME, one for AGE, three for WISH—that someone had already filled out with a blue felt-tip pen, too messy to read.
Ms. Otto kept mumbling to herself while she typed. The printer continued to jam on the address labels until I clasped two fat binder clips on both sides of the feeder, forcing the sheets to go down straight. “How ingenious,” Ms. Otto said.
Again my thoughts wandered to Isabel, to Mira and Snake and then back to Isabel, what she said in the parking lot back at the cemetery. We were there, the four of us…. Where do you think they were going?…none of this would’ve happened if we’d all stuck together. Although I told her thinking that way was pointless and wouldn’t change anything, I had the same thoughts and often had an alternate version of the evening playing in my head. I don’t open my mouth and say, Let’s go inside and tear up the dance floor, I don’t open the car door, I don’t tell Isabel to come with me. Instead, the four of us sit together in the car, drinking and laughing, until Snake pulls the key out of the ignition and says, Come on, let’s show off our moves, and we all stumble out into the cool evening and cross the parking lot, take our raffle tickets outside the gymnasium entrance, and step into the blaring music and flashing lights and dance.
Around three o’clock I was all done with the labeling. I stood up from the couch and twisted at the waist, cracking my back. Ms. Otto thanked me for coming in on my day off and said I could go home. “See you tomorrow,” she said.
“Tuesday,” I corrected her.
“That’s right.” She jerked her head like a bug had flown into her hair. “I can’t get my days straight. There’s too much going on right now.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel the same way.”
“At least you know what day it is.”
I smiled and walked out of her office. I waved good-bye to Bridget at the front desk, who was laughing on the phone, obviously talking to someone she knew.
Just outside the museum I found Nadine sitting on a concrete bench, smoking. She leaned forward and looked down like someone sitting at the end of a pier, watching the blue water below.
“Bye,” I said weakly.
Nadine wouldn’t look at me.
I followed the pathway through the grass, feeling really small, and imagined myself the size of an action figure, scaling up the abstract sculpture in front of the museum like a man climbing a high-rise from the future. Nadine called my name and I turned around and watched her tap out her cigarette on the side of the bench. “Get over here,” she said.
I walked back, my hands in my pockets, head lowered, so she knew how sorry I felt for kissing her before I apologized again. “I’m really sorry about yesterday,” I told her.
“Forget about it,” she said. “Water under the bridge.”
“I don’t know what came over me.”
“Stupidity.” Nadine smirked.
“Okay, I guess I deserved that.” I sat down beside her on the bench, but not too close.
“I didn’t call you over to badger you. I wanted to ask a favor.”
“Shoot.”
“Could you cover my shift tomorrow?”
I made a face that said, Oh no, don’t ask me to do that.
“You know…” she began. “What you did yesterday was really inappropriate.”
I smiled. “Okay, okay, I get it.”
“So is that a yes?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Thanks, Carlos. I’ll let Ms. Otto know.”
I stood up from the bench. “Okay, now it’s my turn to ask you for a favor.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? What is it?”
“No more using what I did yesterday to guilt me into covering your shifts.”
Nadine stuck out her hand. “Deal.”
ISABEL
Go back. All I wanted to do was go back and undo everything that had happened over the past year. Just rewind and erase, rewind and erase, until my heart was repaired and I could trust the world again….
The mourners walk backward, their legs jerking up the slope of the lawn toward Vanessa’s gravesite. At the bottom of the hill, Vanessa’s brother raises his foot off the ground and a cigarette leaps up, wedging itself between his fingers. Then he too walks backward up the lawn, his parents trailing behind him—all three of them pulled closer and closer to where the dirt is flying out of the open grave and into the mourners’ hands. “Dust to dust,” the preacher says. “Ashes to ashes, earth to earth.”
Heidi takes the flame away from the candle’s wick and back onto the tip of a match head. I hold my hand over the glass and the candle slides up to my fingers. Across the street, a black sports car rolls in reverse into a gas station. A plastic bag on the pavement inflates as the tire rolls over it, then the bag spirals away. Wind breathes a flame into a burnt-out match I’m holding in my hand. I look at the ruined wall and Snake’s car pulls away from it, the bricks rising back in place.
A heart cut from construction paper hops off the gymnasium floor and slips between the double doors just as Carlos closes them. We walk into the crowd, hand in hand. A red balloon floats to his head and swerves quickly into my slap. We dance, then move away from the flailing crowd, the warm air leaving our bodies as we step outside. We return our raffle tickets to Ms. Lauden, Mr. Bissell erases two marks on a sheet with the tip of a pencil. We zigzag through the parking lot all the way to Snake’s car. Carlos sucks air out of his cupped hands and then rubs them together. I climb into the backseat and see Vanessa’s blue profile in the console’s glow. Her hand is over my hand. My hand is on her shoulder, unsqueezing it gently.
Bite by bite I piece the licorice together and hand it to Carlos. He pushes the licorice into its bag, slips it into his jacket pocket, asks me if I want a Red Vine. Around the middle of the room I linger, wishing Carlos would talk to me. Heidi steps away from the pile of green sand and points at the pink neon sign on the wall. I take strands of hair from behind my ear, pull them forward so they rest alongside my cheek. I read the overlapping names on the black painting. When I step away from it, the names sink into the canvas.
The tail of a lizard dangles from Roland’s raised fist as he tiptoes into the flower beds, turns, and lifts his empty hands from behind the quivering daisies. The smell of burning trees blows away from me as I close the sliding glass door. I sit on the couch where Vanessa and Heidi pull wedges out of their mouths and fit them into their oranges. I motion toward the tree in our yard. Vanessa mends the peeled skin over her fruit. Above Heidi’s hands, a cloud of mist forms like a ghost and disappears into her orange. It’s the one-year anniversary of Gabriel’s passing.
I sob in the shower, the water leaping from my body and shooting into the showerhead. I get dressed and go to my roo
m where the “Risk of Death” chart, crumpled in a ball, springs out of the wastebasket and into my hand. I stretch out my fingers and the clipping flattens out. In the kitchen, my dad walks in from the garage and places a banana in the fruit bowl, twisting it at the stem until it joins the bunch. Mom tells him to take a banana. He says good-bye to us and hurries to the bedroom. I look at the clipping and notice there are many ways to die that aren’t included on the chart. The microwave beeps, then glows a dull yellow behind the glass where Roland’s frozen pancakes turn counterclockwise, getting colder and colder.
The weeks reel back, the months—September, August, July, June. My mind is nowhere and elsewhere at once. The ache grows inside my chest as May turns to April, March to February. Tears crawl into my eyes more and more—at home, during class, under bedcovers, in the shower. The grief sharpens, then the shock of the phone call: Gabriel is dead. The telephone rings.
His car emerges out of the glittering blue canal, water materializing out of the air and into a giant splash folding into itself. The car rolls up the embankment and the chain-link fence rises as he crashes out of it. The car hops down the curb, skids out of a turn, accelerates. Backward he drives toward my house and I watch him coming down my street. I taste the spearmint of his gum, I lean into his lips, he leans into mine, and we unkiss.
CARLOS
The days moved slow and fast at once, like a dream of standing in place while the world reeled in front of my eyes. At the museum it slowed when the pieces were unplugged, taken down, dismantled, carted off, and slowed again when two men slipped the rag doll Jesus into a giant plastic bag, carried him to the parking lot where the artist waited in his truck. In Spanish another two men spoke while they shoveled the large pile of green sand into a wheelbarrow, then swept, then vacuumed. The chest of the sleeping museum guard stopped moving up and down, his cord yanked from the wall socket. And then Richard Spurgeon arrived with a paint-spattered black T that looked like he was wearing a galaxy, with the same yellow blanket folded under his arm, and together we transported his neon sign once more to his car minus the ash floating into my eye. He started the engine and I motioned for him to roll down the car window and when he did, half the sky disappeared in the glass, and I asked him flat-out if he used to date Ms. Otto, and he gave me this big shit-eating grin and said, Not sure if I would use the word “date.” The minutes hovered, fell, rose, and through the museum entrance arrived the artist who made the self-portrait entirely out of wads of bubble gum, and I asked if she’d heard about the boy in Detroit who pressed his gum onto a painting worth $1.5 million, and she laughed and said, I’m glad no one did that to mine, and I said, How would you know? I was there when the two televisions facing each other were unplugged, and Nadine was there too, and when the artist was out of earshot (a shy man in corduroys and a plaid shirt), she said, Thank God I don’t have to hear that again, so I kept repeating the video’s looped message—My starling…Come back…The key is under the doormat…My starling…Come back—until Nadine threatened to strangle me with the Red Vine I was chewing on. I laughed, it might’ve looked like I was doing okay, but in the back of my mind I was always thinking about Snake—his face, his voice, his face, his laugh, his face—and finally one day after work I drove to the hospital, went up the elevator to the Trauma Center, and told the woman in a yellow shirt behind the counter that Jeffrey McKenzie was my friend, one of my best, that I wanted to see him. The world paused. Then a woman in a white jacket came and down the hallways I followed her as her white tennis shoes moaned softly with each footstep. It killed me when I first saw him, his closed eyes, his head still swollen and faintly bruised from the accident, a watercolor of pale green and yellow clouds on his cheek and forehead, the valleys of his sockets. His lips were chapped and his mouth was partially open as if he was about to speak, but I did all the talking and scooted a chair by his bed and said, Hey, and said, I know you’re going to come out of this thing, and said, Pretty soon it’ll be the three of us again on the bleachers. You, me, and Will. For a good ten minutes I talked to him and said nothing with him for another ten and left weeping and ruined, left wishing he’d just wake up and get back on his feet so we could hang out again, so we could laugh and talk about stupid shit like whether or not it’s better to use dolphins or carrier pigeons instead of puppies to smuggle in heroin from Mexico. The world stalled, lurched forward, its mosaic of colors, its elaborate sound track. Behind my desk I sat, half listening to Mr. Hunnicutt’s lecture on the Great Depression, and then the room changed, the configuration of desks, and I was in Ms. Vann’s class, doodling geometric shapes on my notebook as she talked about The Red Badge of Courage, the epiphany Henry Fleming had with the squirrel in the woods, and I thought, Screw the squirrel—my friend’s in a coma. So it was mostly me and Will on the bleachers, a herd of clouds stampeding silently across the sky, and sometimes this scrawny kid named Eric Fontaine joined us, a freshman who talked incessantly about all the girls he nailed at DeMille Junior High and all the girls he was going to nail at Millikan. We egged him on, Will and me, and laughed at the absurdity of his accounts, our sides aching, tears sliding down our cheeks, I had her feet on my shoulders like this, Eric said, demonstrating with his hands curled beside his neck. But usually it was just me and Will in the bleachers, and a few seagulls milling around the basketball courts, and on those days we talked about Snake (still in a coma after two and a half weeks) and Suji (whom I saw at Millikan every now and then, cheerless, slow-footed, her head bowed like a wounded animal) and the shittiness of life in general. I avoided both Mira and Isabel on campus, I scanned the quad before crossing it, I turned corners anxiously. Still, Mira called and sent me emails, some I deleted and some I read, a handful of sentences or long-winded letters filled with words like love and us and hiding, until finally she sent an email with only one word: coward. Will tried desperately to get in touch with Suji (on campus, by phone, by email) to say how sorry he was, to explain himself, but Suji would have none of it and sent him a text message that said Leave me alone, which he did, which drove him nuts—his clothes became more wrinkled, his hair more oily. Like a dream, the world rolled in front of me, shadowy and dazzling. Back at the museum, workers spackled over the holes and repainted the walls white, their paint-speckled boots echoing throughout the empty museum, and so for two weeks while the exhibits changed over I was off from work, two weeks without Ms. Otto, Nadine, Leonard, or Bridget, my uniform hanging inside my closet like a giant bat, and with my extra time I caught up with homework, I cleaned my room and watched television mindlessly, and read articles about comas on the internet, the persistent vegetative state that sometimes follows, about falling into a deep state of unconsciousness simply by drinking too much, that silent abyss, and I remembered all the times that Snake and Will and me pounded beers at some party, how wasted we got, how unbalanced, and the night a girl came up to us with vomit in her hair, weaving, slurring, asking us if we could take her home, and we steered her instead toward the chaise lounge by the swimming pool and left her there by the lapping water, alone, like a patient in a hospital bed. I dreamed Mira gave me a blow job at a graveyard. I dreamed Snake was a museum guard sleeping in his chair until someone came and took him apart, wires dangling from his hollow torso like black spaghetti. I dreamed of Isabel’s face—smooth, egg-shaped, radiant, her eyes green and caring—and at school the next day I scanned the quad again, looking for that face, that wavy dark hair, and when I couldn’t find her I went to the cafeteria, to the administration building, to the concrete steps outside the theater building, wind blowing through the nearby trees, its leaves silently clapping. Down the halls I strolled, looking, looking, until I spotted Isabel coming out of the girls’ bathroom with her friend Heidi, both of them chattering away until Isabel saw me, then a silence filled the hallway and hardened like glue, so the three of us were frozen there, our words caught in our throats, and then I said, Can I talk to you for a second? and Isabel said, Yes, and Heidi said, I’ll meet you by the plante
rs. And once we were alone, I apologized for avoiding her, for the way I’d acted at Vanessa’s funeral, how unsympathetic I’d been, my hands fidgeting, You’d just said good-bye to your friend, I told her, and then you had me afterward, acting like an asshole. She smiled, her eyes shimmering like green tinsel, and she asked if my life was still too complicated right now, throwing my words back at my face. I winced, fidgeted, and said, Did I really say that? and she nodded and I said, No, it’s not too complicated for you. I dug into my backpack then and took out the glossy postcard for the opening at the museum on Saturday and handed it to Isabel and told her she should go, free drinks and food, that the exhibit was interactive, how fun it would be. She slipped the postcard into her purse and said, If my life’s not too complicated on Saturday, I’ll go. And then the world moved leisurely again, the seconds dripped like honey, and as Isabel walked away down the hall—that tunnel of lockers and corkboard and Xeroxed flyers—her hair sailed like a dream over her shoulder blades, so slow and vivid I could’ve counted each delicate strand.
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