Levi laughs. “Well you did say by far.”
“Does it crack your top five?” I ask.
He leans back. “By far the best. Of course the company may have given it a competitive edge.”
I look down at my lap, the corners of my mouth creeping up. Another moment passes. “I really should go inside.”
I let my head loll to the side. It’s then that I notice Levi’s eyes. I mean really notice them, because when I do, when I glance up to make eye contact, to say my best prim and polite first-date good-byes, they glue me to my seat. They’re like two swirling planets and I’m a speck of dust pulled into their orbit. I feel myself leaning, being sucked into the vortex.
We’re two magnets. I feel the instant pull at that moment we decide we’re going to kiss. And then Levi’s thumb is tracing the soft skin on my throat and sending a tickle down through the arches of my feet and I’m squirming against the upholstery. And there is no nose bumping or teeth colliding. It’s the kind of kiss that I’ve seen in the movies. The ones where music plays and credits scroll. He smells like salt water and tastes cold like the ocean spray.
Our lips still move together. The thumb at my throat slides down to my collarbone and rests over the thin skin that covers it. My heart pumps fistfuls of blood, which I can hear whooshing through my ears as it makes its way to my fingers and toes and the backs of my knees. My whole body tingles.
The fingers on my collarbone flatten into a hand on my chest and slip an inch. Then another. My pulse quickens.
The urgency in Levi’s kisses increases, but all I can feel is the hand. It’s as if my entire consciousness is focused on that one particular spot on my body. He must catch the pounding of my heart. How could he not?
Then, like his hand has a mind of its own, the fingertips steal into the V-neck of my sweater and I jerk back, alarmed. The connection snaps in half.
Levi’s eyes go wide. “Stella, I’m sorry, I just—” he stammers.
Oh my God. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod. What did I just do? He thinks I’m pissed about the—about the—about the thing. I’m such a spaz. Worse. He must think I’m acting like a twelve-year-old.
“No!” I blurt out. “I mean, no, it’s not that. It’s—” I take a deep breath. If I tell him, will he see me as a sick girl too? I don’t want him to like me because he feels sorry for me. But if I don’t tell him, what will he think then? “It’s my scar.”
Levi cocks his head and I tug down the neck of my sweater. It’s the first time I’ve shown anyone but my mom and dad. The thick scar tissue—tight, shiny, and ruler straight—runs from the middle of my belly up the length of my chest. It’s the sort of scar to cause a stranger in the supermarket to stare. And one of the first things I thought about when I first saw it: how could anyone ever be attracted to this?
Levi stares at the point on my chest while I try to force myself to sit still.
“I had a heart transplant,” I explain, my words spilling out too fast. “I was going to die, see, but I got off the waiting list. I got a heart and it saved my life, but…now…now I’m stuck with this.”
His brown eyes lift up to mine and I see them gleaming in the dark. There’s a slight wrinkle in his forehead. “Seems like a small price to pay then…for your life?”
A lump rises in my throat. “Sure, I guess.” The strength of my words is slighter than a sheet of paper.
Gently, he touches the angry welt. I try not to wonder too hard what he’s thinking, whether he thinks I’m a freak or disfigured or just plain unsexy. I’d never thought of myself as sexy before, but the scar, it has definitely made me think of myself as un.
“I know it’s not, um…the prettiest thing in the world.”
His thumb runs over the hump of scar tissue and my skin erupts with a shudder of electricity, every atom in me connecting and exploding in my chest.
“It’s…” he starts then trails off and I hold my breath. “It’s not ugly, Stella.” I experience a small dip of disappointment when he doesn’t call me by my last name.
Sometimes I see the scar when I’m getting out of the shower or pulling on my polo for school and I think I look like a murder victim, a corpse on a cold, metal table. I imagine myself, purple lips and pale white cheeks, black hair that’s as brittle as straw.
He retrieves his hand slowly and returns it to his lap.
I give a dismissive roll of my eyes. “It is and it’s fine. Like you said, it’s a small price to pay or whatever.”
A corner of his mouth turns up. “Seriously. It’s unique,” he says. “Some people get tattoos to remind themselves of what they’ve been through. You”—he shrugs—“have this.”
I’d never thought of it that way. I try it on, this new point of view. It feels nice. Even if it is a lie.
“I thought I was going to die,” I tell him, surprising myself.
Strange as it seems, I’ve never talked about this before. I’m not sure why I suddenly want to, except for maybe the beers or the fact that someone else has seen my scar. The confession just spills out of me, as though Levi had pulled at the tip of a buried object and in doing so had managed unwittingly to unearth the whole thing.
Our faces are so close I can sense the coolness of his skin. “How does it feel?” he asks.
“How does what feel?” The trees rustle in the quiet driveway, mimicking the sound of our whispers.
“Thinking that you’re going to die.” His dark skin is dewy in the soft light. This, I realize, is how it feels to share secrets.
“It’s…terrifying. Like time is working against you. Like there’s a literal hourglass that contains the minutes of your life.” How funny that I’ve never said that out loud even though I’ve thought it a million times. That feeling, of the ticking countdown, still clings to me. I haven’t been able to shake it. Not yet, not completely, at least. I can’t comprehend the vast expanse of time that’s in front of me now. Years upon years upon years that stack up in short, time-capsuled columns stretching farther than I can see.
“Why, though? Why was it terrifying?”
“Because I hadn’t lived long enough. What if I missed something? What if I missed everything? What about my parents?”
“Sometimes,” he says, glancing down at the space between us and then up at me, “I think about dying.” Almost like a declaration of guilt.
My breath hitches. “Why?” Before my illness, I’d never once thought about dying. I drove around on highways, got on planes, ate questionably cooked chicken served by my mother, but never once did I think about what it might be like to die.
But things are different now. Death follows me around like a shadow.
“I think about what holds me here.” He sits back in his seat now, chin tilted up, staring at the car ceiling. “There was this philosopher, Eckhart, who said he saw hell and that the only thing that burns there is the part of you that won’t let go of life. You know, like your memories and attachments and stuff. Hell burns them all away, but it’s not punishing you. It’s, like, freeing your soul. So if you’re afraid of dying, Eckhart would say, you’re holding on, and you’ll see devils tearing your life away. But if you’ve made your peace,” Levi shrugs, “then the devils are really angels, freeing you from Earth.”
I sit in silence for a minute, remembering the feel of Levi’s lips on mine and contemplating his words, morbid but strangely beautiful. An invisible thread links us, knowledge of our own mortality, and I feel inextricably bonded.
“What holds you here?” I finally ask, almost too low to hear.
“Right now?” His head rolls to the side and he stares at me as if he can see all the way through me to the other side. He says simply: “I guess it’s you.”
As a teenager with a terminal illness, I got used to low expectations. So when my phone buzzes on Saturday at a quarter to three with the name Levi hovering over the message, I’m surprised and more than a little skeptical.
I’ve spent the entire day suffering. The space between my ribs f
eels like someone took a metal trowel and raked it between my bones. I’m getting to the point when I have to debate telling my parents and risk going back to Dr. Belkin.
Mom makes excuses to check on me by carrying the world’s smallest stacks of folded laundry so that she can come and go as she pleases. I think she’s weighing whether I’m sick or hungover. The answer is neither.
I don’t know much about booze, but I’m fairly confident a hangover doesn’t set up shop between your lungs. And I’m not sick, unless I’ve been that way since the day after surgery.
I’m in pain. There’s a difference, however minuscule. I rub at the sore spot over my heart. The tenderness makes my limbs heavy, but when I sit up and read the message, I smile despite all this.
I once read in a Teen Vogue magazine that there are three ways to know a boy likes you. I’m looking at number three. Cue the victory dance.
“Mom, I’m going out,” I say, next time she swoops the vacuum into my bedroom. I’ll wait another day to tell them. At least. Things are going well and I have to protect them. I have to protect my new life.
“Stella Cross, you’ve been moping in bed all day and now you’re well enough to go out?”
“Uh-huh.” I slip on a fleece jacket and a pair of fluffy boots. “Pretty much.”
She unplugs the vacuum. “And what about your Stanford application? Your dad said he was going to take a look at your essay but that you hadn’t sent it to him yet.”
“I will,” I say, grabbing my keys. And maybe I will, but right now Stanford University is the farthest thing from my mind.
“Stella—” It’s the last thing I hear before I slam the door. I can’t believe I just did that. I smile stupidly, pulse pounding in my eardrums.
Once in the car, I punch the address into my phone’s GPS. It’s a spot on Ballard Street, one I’m not familiar with, and on the drive over, I have to force my foot off the gas pedal. My nerves, frayed from the hours of monotonous throbbing, are eager for a distraction. For the span of a breath I worry that my quick acceptance of his invitation reads “too available.” Another sliver of wisdom gleaned from the glossy pages of back-of-the toilet literature. But then again, he asked me first, I reason. I take a deep breath. Those magazines really ought to be more specific.
After a short drive, the female robot voice tells me I’ve arrived at my final destination, and when I determine I’ll have to squeeze my compact car into a tiny parallel-parking space, it’s all I can do not to leave it in the middle of the road with its hazards blinking.
For me, Levi Zin appears to have his own gravitational pull.
I pay the meter and stroll along a tree-lined stretch of sidewalk, searching for an address. It doesn’t take long before I locate the right numbers on a shabby storefront. The sign marking the entrance depicts a cartoonish red fox wearing a blue suit and carrying a saxophone. The letters spell out BOP STREET RECORDS.
A cowbell chimes when I walk through the door. A kid with curly hair that covers his ears welcomes me without looking up from a comic book. His style walks a thin line between punk rock and homeless.
Vinyl records fill shelves upon shelves from one end of the small, musty shop to the other. The bell clangs again and in walks Levi. A worn hoodie hangs open over a gray tee. He spots me and grins. Almost at once, my chest quiets. It’s like burning your finger on a curling iron. First the sting grows and you want to shake it in the air to force it to stop, but then you remember to stick the burned skin under cold water, and it’s magic. The finger doesn’t burn anymore. And that’s how it is with Levi—he’s the cold water.
As he walks over I’m suddenly self-conscious of how, I don’t know, dorky I look in comparison. With my cable-knit sweater, skinny jeans, and flats, I could be swapped with a suburban housewife, while Levi could pass as an off-duty rock star.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“I heard you were in the market for a Thing,” he says. I hear him capitalize the T with his voice. I think at this point I should explain to him that I’m not completely milquetoast, that I had a Thing, but that thing was taken away from me. The bite of ice-cold water in the morning when it’s still dark outside, the red sting of chlorine, the strain of lungs filling to the point of near combustion, these were details that required a deep and pure love, the way a mother loves her child even though everyone else can see he’s mean and nasty and always has dirt underneath his fingernails. I miss swimming like I’d miss a person. This, though, is too much to explain and, besides, what does it matter, really?
“I am, but—” I protest while he takes my hand and pulls me into the heart of the stacks.
“Then I thought maybe you could borrow mine.” He turns to walk backward through aisle. “At least for now,” he adds.
“I’ve never even heard of this place.” All around me I’m surrounded by large, square sleeves filled with vinyl records. I don’t have a clue where to start.
“Blasphemy.” He stares greedily at the overcrowded rows as if he’s a dog eyeing a juicy piece of steak. “This,” he mutters, “was worth coming back for.” I’m about to ask when he was last here when he pulls out a record, decorated in collage and newspaper scrap art. He holds it out for me and I take it gently because, at least to him, the flimsy sleeve with torn-up corners seems valuable.
“‘Mother Love Bone,’” I read aloud. “What kind of name is that?”
“They started from…hold on.” He holds up a finger and then skips further down the row, rifling through a pile of records until he finds what he’s looking for. “These guys. Green River.”
“Look.” He turns to the back of the Mother Love Bone album, where there’s a black-and-white photograph of five long-haired boys. “Three of these guys started out in Green River, which was sort of this grunge rock band. They didn’t get much airtime, but they’re, like, the great-grandfathers of the real scene. This one in the middle—he’s Andrew Wood. He was from a different band. Malfunkshun. Completely insane. Would have been an icon, too, but he overdosed when he was only twenty-four.” Levi grows solemn, as though this might have been a close personal friend.
He rebounds quickly, though, and we’re off on a whirlwind tour of Seattle’s music history. Every so often, he passes me a record with an explanation, like “These guys were influenced by Hendrix” or “This band shared the same label as Kurt Cobain.” I teeter under an armful of vinyl that feels like a musical graveyard of singers that, according to Levi, died too young.
When my record load threatens to topple over, Levi leads me to one of the sound booths. I’ve begun to think of this record store as Levi’s version of a temple and the music as his religion. The way his eyes dance as we put on Nirvana’s first album I can see that he practically worships them.
I slide a clunky pair of headphones over my ears. A snare hit ricochets through percussion. Kurt Cobain—I know only because Levi tells me—starts singing quietly and then carefully, gradually, the music builds to the chorus until it’s loud and angry. Before I know it, my foot is tapping along to the furious beat. The music is unlike anything I’ve heard on the radio. I’ve always enjoyed music and I love Action Hero Disco, but this is different. It reminds me of unfair things like the random injustice of my illness and the fact that I’ll never swim again and about the moments I’ve missed that I’ll never ever get back. The song makes me mad, but what’s weird is that I like it. It’s as if someone finally gets me. The heated voice inside, the little bit of rage that feels like a rush.
Like standing on top of the pier looking down.
I don’t know how long it’s been when I realize that my eyes are closed. I peel them open to peek at Levi. His teeth dig into his lower lip. His nose scrunches. He uses his fist to drum on his thigh. At the instant I open my eyes, our stares meet, and we’re caught in a split-second flash. I imagine the expressions on our faces as mirror images and I know that somewhere, at some time, he’s experienced the same anger and that it’s reflected here between the n
otes and words blaring through the headphones.
At the end of the track, he lifts the pin and places it on another rib of the record. I don’t know how he selects the songs, exactly, since there are no titles or search functions the way there are on a smartphone or computer, but the fact that he can seems sophisticated: it’s something no other boy at Duwamish High would know how to do.
As the static breaks to mark the beginning of the next song, my phone buzzes. I slide it out of my back pocket.
We on tonight?
Henry.
I’d forgotten all about the new episode of Lunatic Outpost tonight. Earlier this week, they’d aired a repeat of the twice-weekly show. In fact, I’d forgotten it so completely that even after reading the text, it takes me a few blinking seconds to recall what he means. That’s how narrow my focus is when sharing a room with Levi.
I glance at Levi. In the tight booth, our knees touch. Occasionally he leans over and drums on my thigh, a gesture that sends my heart into the same frenzy as a June bug in a jar. I’m not ready to leave yet.
And so I pocket the phone unanswered. It’s easier to ditch Henry the second time, I realize. If I’m not careful, it’s bound to become a habit.
“What do you think?” he asks, lifting the headphone from his right ear. “This was the first song I learned on guitar.” He bites his lip and mimics riffing on an electric guitar. His fingers fly in midair, so precise that I get the sense that if a real instrument were in his hands, he’d hit the notes exactly.
“I didn’t know you played guitar.” I shrink when I realize that I’ve been yelling to compensate for the music, which is only playing in my headphones.
“Used to. Hendrix was my idol until I got introduced to Stone Gossard.” He finishes the air guitar, but even when he rests his hands back on his lap, his fingers continue twitching like he’s dying to play. “All of the good ones die early, you know. Blaze out like comets. When I was younger I’d get all sad about Cobain. I’d, like, mourn the loss of all the music he could have made if he hadn’t killed himself. But now I get it.” Levi leans over and switches the track again. “If you live that hard you run out of wick fast. Cobain said in his suicide note that he hadn’t felt the excitement of listening to music in years. Can you believe that?”
Alive Page 10