by Avery Sawyer
“That’s not lava, Peanut. That’s margar-REE-ta.” He held up his glass to show me, but I didn’t understand. It was coming out of a volcano. I saw it. “We’ve got to go find your mom. We’re late.”
“I want to touch it!” My kiddie cocktail was long gone and so were my chicken fingers. “Please,” I said, like my life depended on it.
“Kev, can my kid touch the volcano before we go?” Dad said, resigned. He downed the last part of his drink and stood up, his eyes a little glassy.
“She can go swimming in it if she wants, man. I’m two seconds away from walking out of here. I’m not kidding.” Kevin the bartender took his nametag off and threw it over his shoulder, not even caring if he hit someone. It landed in a basket of someone’s chips and salsa.
“Please, Daddy!” I bounced in my seat then, sensing that the grown-ups were going to let me get my way. You could always tell.
Daddy laughed. “You want to swim in the giant blender?” His eyes were gleaming. There was nothing he loved more then a prank. Especially when it involved ticking off The Man. I never figured out who he meant when he said that. But he said it a lot.
“I do! I do!” I reached toward him and he picked me up. Kevin laughed and let us behind the bar. The next thing I knew, I was waist-deep in cold, green liquid. The restaurant looked so different from that high up. Everyone sitting at the bar and at the tables stopped talking and gawked at me, shocked. At first I felt shy and uncomfortable. It was so cold and my clothes were getting stained fluorescent green. But then I looked at Daddy laughing, and I smiled. I waved to all the people and blew them kisses. They waved back.
Then Mom came in. I could see right away that she was mad at Daddy. He pulled me out of the margarita blender, Kevin was fired, and Mommy bought a towel at the gift shop to dry me off. I was very sticky. No one was laughing, especially not Mom. Instead, the three of us made the long trip back to our car in total silence. We never went back to that place, not even once.
I blinked and looked at the screen in front of me again. I started typing.
I was once a margarita ingredient.
Who else could say that?
The doorbell rang. Reno. I shut my laptop, took a couple of deep breaths, and headed straight for the door. Getting out of there suddenly felt like the best idea ever. “I’m leaving for an hour or two, Mom. With Reno. See you later.”
“Wait!” She stood up from the kitchen table so fast three sheets of paper fluttered to the ground. “Are you sure it’s a good idea? I’m worried it’ll be too loud. Crowded. What if someone bumps you and you fall down?”
“Mom. I’ll be fine. Reno will take care of me. Please.” I held my breath. I didn’t want to stay here, stuck in the apartment all weekend. “And I’ve never seen Fun Towne before.”
She stared at me, her mouth open a little. Then she covered it with her hand and I knew I’d said something wrong.
“What? What’s the problem now?” I grabbed my pink baseball cap off the hook by the door and pulled my ponytail through it to fit it snugly over my head. I wondered if they’d let me wear a cap in school even though it was against the dress code. It would just make me stand out more, though. I’d better not try it.
“Sweetheart, you’ve been to Fun Towne a hundred times,” she whispered. “It’s where you…I thought…”
“Oh. Right. That’s what I meant. I, uh, never mind.” I backed up slowly, praying she wouldn’t change her mind about letting me go. Why did I say that? She looked all concerned now. I tried to picture Fun Towne in my mind, but I couldn’t. Was she sure I’d been there a hundred times?
She sighed. “Be careful and don’t be gone too long, okay? Here, take my phone. You can call the landline if you need anything.” She wrote the number on a Post-it, and I put it in my pocket. She sat back down and rubbed the back of her neck. Her shoulders hurt constantly from being all hunched over. I nodded and gave her as big a grin as I could manage. Thank God she was letting me go.
Now, where was I going again?
CHAPTER 17
LOST GIRL
“Hey,” Reno said as I shut the apartment door behind me. We both hopped in his dad’s Jeep. “How are you feeling?”
“Not bad. I have these.” I showed him my ridiculously ugly old lady sunglasses.
“Rawrrr,” he said.
“I know. Think I can start a new sophomore trend?” I put them on and made a pouty face like a model. Reno laughed, and I giggled too. It felt good.
When we arrived and got out of the Jeep, I put earplugs in my ears. There was loud music playing and bells were ringing and people were all over. Signs picturing a giant car bumper advertised something called the Saturday Nite Cruise. Families swarmed the kiddie rides and teenagers shoved cotton candy in their mouths.
The air was heavy with humidity and oldies blasted from speakers attached to the eaves of roofs: Today’s music ain’t got the same soul. I like that old time rock and roll. Every other person wore flip-flops on their feet and sunglasses almost as ugly as mine. There were motorcycles everywhere. A mechanical bull in the center of an intersection of kitschy tourist shops sat motionless, but it was easy to imagine a line of drunken people waiting to ride it. We walked away from the main drag, toward a quieter area near the pizza place.
“I hope this isn’t a bad idea, but I searched online for the newspaper article that appeared the morning after your accident.” Reno reached into a pocket and pulled out his phone. A page from The Orlando Sentinel filled the screen.
I snatched it. It was a very short blurb explaining that two girls, names withheld, both aged fifteen, were airlifted from Fun Towne to Florida Hospital at 12:44 a.m. on November 3. According to the article, authorities surmised we had fallen off the maintenance ladder of the Sling Shot from about thirty feet above the ground. We walked over to it and sat on some picnic tables. The Sling Shot ride was painted in rainbow colors and people were lined up to take a turn.
“Do you know where my dad is?” I asked Reno suddenly. I wanted to call him. Shouldn’t he know what had happened to me? I thought about this time he’d shown me how to throw a basketball so that it would go through the hoop—how you were supposed to aim for the backboard. It felt like it could have been three weeks ago.
“Uh, well, he split. He used to work here, you know. He did the sound board for all the bands.” Reno pointed at the bandstand.
“Yeah, yeah, I know.” I nodded, hoping Reno would say more about it. That’s right. I’ve been coming here ever since I was four. “So I didn’t know where he went?”
“No. Or if you did, you didn’t say anything to me about it.”
All around me, people were enjoying their weekend. They had no idea that everything could change. They felt safe. Secure. I wanted to crawl back into their world, into the world, but I couldn’t. Maybe I’d always be on the outside now, lists and notes and Post-its with phone numbers from my mom falling out of my pocket. Old lady glasses on my eyes and earplugs in my ears. I sighed and sat down on a picnic table. I drew patterns in the gravel with the toe of my sandal.
Guilt surged through my veins as I realized I was still a million times luckier than Emily, who slept in a cold, white room all alone. The pressure on my chest came back and my breathing got shallower. I remembered Emily’s screaming. I forced myself to slow my breathing, to see the blue sky and all the people. The ordinary day.
“Hey,” Reno broke into my thoughts. He tucked his hair behind his ear and reached out, almost touching my shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“I was hoping that being here would make the night of the accident make sense. But it doesn’t. It looks so different in the daytime, anyway.” I hugged my legs to my chest. I closed my eyes for a few moments, trying to picture how high up we’d been. It was a mistake coming here. Everything I'd ever done was a mistake.
Reno stayed quiet for a long time.
“Right before you picked me up I told my mom I’d never been here before. She almost lost it.”
“Really? Does it feel familiar now?”
“Yeah. Yeah, definitely.” Kind of. “Hey, when did we become friends? I can’t think of it and it’s been bugging me.”
“It’s a dumb story.” He adjusted his glasses.
“Tell me. Don’t make me beg.” I pretended to punch him in the shoulder a few times until he finally put his arms up in surrender.
He cleared his throat. “Okay, okay. It was at the Mall at Millennia. You’d gotten separated from your mom and I found you hiding in the middle of a rack of clothes. You’d just seen Peter Pan and said you planned to fly away to Neverland to be a Lost Girl as soon as Tinker Bell showed up to sprinkle you with Pixie Dust. I told you there were no Lost Girls, only Lost Boys, and you said you didn’t care about that, you’d be the first one.”
I snickered.
“I thought it was cute. I thought you were cute.” Reno blushed. “Even though I was only six. You were five. Anyway, I sat there with you in the middle of that rack of clothes for like an hour and we told made-up stories to each other—it was probably only fifteen minutes, but everything feels like forever when you’re a little kid, you know?—until my parents found us and dragged you to the customer service desk so they could make an announcement on the loudspeaker.”
“But we got to play together again?”
“Not right away. Apparently I’d convinced myself in that fifteen minutes that you were my best friend in the whole wide world, so I got my mom to get your mom’s phone number when she arrived to claim you. She was hysterical. But you said to her, in a very adult voice, ‘Mom, we’re going to Neverland together. Stop crying.’”
“Wow,” I said, mystified. Reno’s blush was gone by then. I smiled at him. “So our moms made sure we got together?”
“No, they totally forgot about it. But when you started kindergarten that fall, it was at my school.”
“I remember that. Did we share our milk?”
“Yeah.”
I looked at Reno. I couldn’t believe he remembered something that had happened so long ago. But even with him beside me, I was most definitely still a Lost Girl.
I shivered in the ninety degree heat.
CHAPTER 18
I WENT TO FUN TOWNE AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS BRAIN INJURY
I had to see Dr. Kline on Monday. First he had me take a bunch of tests. I guess I did okay on them, because he looked happy. After that, we were supposed to chat about my “concerns.” I sat down in the cushy chair in his office and told him that all I could think about was the night of the accident. It was still driving me freaking crazy that I couldn’t remember it.
“Isn’t there anything else I can try? To remember?” I pressed on the sides of my head as if my whole face was a giant zit I could pop.
“Robin, why are you pressing on your temples? Are headaches still bothering you?”
“Sometimes. Not that bad. I’m just frustrated.” I took my fingers off my head and crossed my arms over my chest. I kind of zoned out. “I fell,” I whispered, reminding myself.
“You can’t really force a memory, even without a brain injury.” His voice was extremely calm. It was like he was working extra hard to make it that way. I wanted to tell him to chill out and be normal, but I also wanted him to like me, so I left it alone.
I slumped lower in the cushy chair. “I know I told you this before, but if I could just remember what happened, why we fell, I think I can help the doctors make Emily better.”
Dr. K. looked doubtful but sympathetic. “Alright. I have a few tricks up my sleeve, but you have to promise me you’ll go to bed earlier each night. You need more rest than you’re getting. If you can’t sleep earlier, we might need to rethink you being in school all day. There are options: tutors, online classes, catching up in the spring, et cetera.”
“I promise.” I sat up again and tried to look alert.
Dr. Kline handed me a book called Meditation for Beginners.
“Really? I have to sit on the floor like a yoga weirdo and chant? Tell me the truth, is this just for your own entertainment?” I flipped through the book. There was a picture of a girl sitting on a pillow with her eyes closed.
“Busted.” He winked at me. “Seriously, though, meditation is good for all kinds of health issues. As is exercise. You can take the book.”
I paged through it, but it was hard to imagine how sitting on a pillow in the middle of the room with my eyes closed could possibly help. It reminded me of one of those games parents play with their kids to get them to shut up: Let’s have a contest to see who can go the longest without making a sound.
“I’m confident things will be back to normal within a few months,” Dr. Kline added. He handed me a workbook with a bunch of crosswords and stuff like that. “Keep exercising your brain.”
I knew he was trying to make me feel better, but I glared at him. “That’s not fast enough. I need to know what happened now.”
“It doesn’t work that way. I’m sorry. The good news is that all of your tests are great. It’s an incredible recovery, Robin.” He smiled. His eyebrows hairs were even longer than before. Disturbing.
“I went back to Fun Towne with a friend of mine to see if I’d remember the accident. But it didn’t work.”
“You should know that you might not ever get back the few minutes before the fall. Scientists think perhaps new memories go into a kind of holding tank, and then our minds classify them later…as in, put them in either short-term or long-term memory storage. The experts think that accident victims often don’t remember their accidents because all the stuff in that holding tank never has the chance to get properly filed. I’m really sorry.” At least he didn’t say let it go. I hated that phrase. “Emily’s getting the best care you can imagine, Robin. Her doctors are some of the most renowned in the country. Try to focus on your own health for now and trust them. Do you want to talk to the social workers again? Sometimes talk therapy is a good idea after this kind of injury.”
“Christ, no. Do I have to?”
“Not unless I say you do. How’s school going?”
“Meh.” I looked away, out the window. There was a little airplane flying around, trailing a banner. I wondered what it said.
“Meh? What is ‘meh?’”
“School’s fine. I sometimes forget which books to bring to which class and they all whisper about me, but I can handle it.” I looked the doctor in the eye. The truth was a little more complicated than that, but since when did any adult understand what really went on in school? Even the teachers didn’t. “I’m writing myself notes like you said.”
“You sure?” He sat back in his chair like he had all the time in the world. I appreciated that. Sort of.
“I’m sure. Mostly, I just miss Em.”
He nodded. “It’s hard, isn’t it? Not knowing what’s going to happen?”
“Yeah.” I looked down at my hands.
“Alright. I won’t insist you talk to a social worker. But let’s schedule another appointment here next week. Oh, and I have something for you.” He handed me a penny. I looked at it: 1932. “Your mom said you collect old pennies.”
Mom was the one who liked them so much. Since waitresses always carry around lots of change, she made a game of it and brought home the oldest one she got each night. When I was younger I thought it was cool, but now I think it’s kind of sad. There’s a huge jar in our living room full of them, with a label on the front that says RETIREMENT.
“Thanks,” I managed.
“Take good care, Robin.”
CHAPTER 19
BABY GIRLS
Back at home I rested on my bed and looked up. There were pale green glow-in-the-dark stars up there, arranged in constellations. I tried to think about when I might have put them there, but instead I thought about a stormy night sky and heard Emily’s voice in my head.
“I like it up here.”
I sat up straight and grasped my bed like it might throw me off, mechanical bull-style. The memory wa
s so vivid. Recent. We were outside. It was windy when she’d said it. Emily’s parents were getting a divorce. Yes. And she’d just found out. I closed my eyes, hoping for more.
Nothing.
“Damn it,” I sputtered in frustration. I kicked my bed with my heels.
My door clicked open. “Sweetie? Are you okay?” Mom poked her head into my room.
“I’m fine. I’m trying to think about the accident—about before we fell—and I just remembered something Emily said to me but it was just one sentence and that was it.”
She sat down on the bed next to me and put her arm around my shoulder. I leaned in to her, allowing myself to be comforted. I was glad she wasn’t telling me to calm down or stop trying.
“What did she say?”
“Um.” I debated sharing what I thought I knew. Before, I tried to tell my mother as little as possible. Now it seemed kind of pointless to play that game. “I think Emily might have told me her parents were, like, over.” I whispered. Mom looked a little bit sad, like you would if you heard that a celebrity couple you’d kind of admired had decided to split up.
“That’s too bad. I’m sure she was upset,” she said. “Was it upsetting to you, too? To hear that?” Mom always wanted me to talk about my feelings about Dad leaving, but I didn’t have any. And now that I needed a cheat sheet just to figure out how to take a shower, they had faded even further away. It’s true what they say: life goes on. When you think you’re dealing with something super shitty, just wait. Another super shitty thing will come along to distract you from the first thing.
“Me? No. I can’t remember the whole conversation. Did you see Mrs. Sampson in the hospital?”
“I did. Once. She came to visit your room the day after the accident. We hugged and promised each other you darling, baby girls would be okay.”