Raj, however, is stuck in precisely the same place.
“So how tall are you exactly?” he asks.
“Five seven,” I say.
He sighs.
Lindsay, I realize, must have been shorter.
AFTER
January
My parents are the very last resort. If either of them finds out what I’ve been seeing, I’ll be in a psychiatric facility so fast I won’t know what hit me. I consider driving myself to the hospital, but after the night I spent there after the accident, I’ll try anything I can to avoid going back. To avoid the worried look on my mother’s face, the plastic food, the stench of disinfectant hiding the smell of worse things.
So after I leave the park, I race home and log on to my computer. I don’t know what to search for. Hallucinations? Psychosis? I go with the former, but I’m immediately knee-deep in articles about delusional disorders, and a tremor runs down my back.
I reach into my pocket for the piece of paper, the note to myself.
If I’m asking, then I can’t be.
I quickly close out of those pages and frown, struggling to think. I learned in school about a neuroscience facility close to Lyndale, and I’ve seen a few ads for it. I can’t think of the name, though, so I type “neuroscience facility Lyndale” into the search engine. Nothing.
How is that possible?
I know it exists.
After a few minutes of racking my brain, the name comes back.
Overton.
I put it into the engine, but there’s nothing.
Did you mean: Over town or Over a ton.
I’m pretty sure it’s Overton.
I pull out my phone and try again, but I get the same ridiculous results. Do I have the name wrong?
Neither my phone nor my computer is yielding anything useful. It’s not the first time I haven’t been able to find something on my computer, thanks to the insane parental controls my mom has had on there since I was in middle school and Channel Se7en ran some story on child predators and Internet safety. I’ve never figured out how to get around them.
When I crack open my bedroom door, I can hear my brother downstairs eating dinner, so I tiptoe down the hall.
I don’t just avoid Caleb’s room because we’re not particularly close; I avoid Caleb’s room because I value my life. Simply making it the approximately five feet from his door to his computer, I nearly lose my leg. There are clothes everywhere, three bowls with varying levels of moldy cereal, and books and papers covering every inch of his desk. His wall is plastered with pictures of different types of aircraft and a poster of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who successfully landed a plane in the Hudson River during an emergency.
After flinging Caleb’s jeans off the armrest and onto the floor, I sit in his swivel chair and pull up a browser. I type in “Overton,” and the website instantly comes up. I know he doesn’t have controls on his computer, but I can’t explain why mine couldn’t even find any results. On the page in front of me, words like “nanotechnology” and “cognitive neuroscience” jump out at me, but with Caleb shuffling around downstairs, I only have time to skim-read. Having Problems with Your Memory? a banner at the top of the page asks.
“Yes,” I whisper under my breath. From what I can gather, Overton helps people deal with memory problems and emotional issues. The page even mentions sleep somewhere; this is perfect. I grab a pen from his desk and scrawl the number on my palm. I can hear Caleb washing up downstairs, meaning he’s done eating, so I close the window and quickly go to his browser history—I don’t want him to know what I’ve been searching for. As I delete the pages I went on, curiosity forces me to look at Caleb’s last web hits.
I feel a small kick of delight when I see that, somewhere in between a dozen video-game sites, Caleb searched for “aviation academies” this morning. Is it possible that he is itching to get out of Lyndale, after all? Maybe he’s finally going to follow his heart.
I’m so busy marveling at this that I don’t notice Caleb coming up the stairs until it’s too late.
“Addison, what are you doing in my room?”
I jump out of his chair. “I was just, er, looking up New York stuff. School stuff. Some of the pages weren’t opening because of the parental controls on mine.”
His face is impassive. “You should have asked.”
“Fine. Sorry,” I say, starting to move toward the door, but then I stop. I know I shouldn’t mention what I saw, but I can’t help myself. “So, um, I saw you were looking at some aviation academies. Are you thinking of applying?”
“No, I’m not thinking of applying. Who the hell told you that you could use my computer?” Now he’s starting to get angry.
“But why not?” I ask stubbornly. “It’s obviously what you want to do.”
“Leaving Lyndale won’t fix anything, Addie.”
I can no longer tell which one of us he’s talking about. Caleb hates that I want to go to New York. Maybe even more than Mom does. It’s like because he can’t bring himself to leave, he can’t conceive of the idea of anyone else wanting to.
And as happy as they are to clip our wings, it’s not as if either of my parents needs us here. Dad only spends a portion of his time in his sad, clammy apartment; the rest of the time he spends doing what he loves. For two years, Mom has been happily dating Channel Se7en’s five o’clock news anchor, best known as Bruce “Silver Fox” Landry. Or, to Caleb, as Bruce “Asshole” Landry. I don’t think I’ve ever heard Caleb call him Bruce at any point except when they are face to face. At which point, my brother is the picture of respect.
“So it’s better to stay here, forcing yourself to live a life you don’t even want?” I ask.
Caleb is quiet and then, in the coldest voice he is capable of, says, “Get out of my room, Addison.”
“Fine,” I spit. I’ve barely gotten into the hallway when the door slams shut behind me. I know what I said hit a nerve, and I want to feel guilty—I do—but I just feel irritated.
Caleb and I agree on some things. We both love plantains, fried like my father ate them growing up. We agree on Mom’s boyfriend—that he’s nice enough and we’re glad he makes her happy, but we sure as hell hope she doesn’t marry him, because it would break Dad’s heart. And also Bruce wears leather oxfords without socks and has his teeth artificially whitened every other weekend. My brother and I feel exactly the same way about this. Sometimes we randomly say Bruce’s hammy sign-off to each other: “Hate to leave you hanging, friends, but you’ll have to join us in twenty-three hours for tomorrow’s news.”
We’d been close growing up, but when he was thirteen, right when he became a teenager, Caleb started pushing us all away. Maybe he was angry at the divorce, or maybe it was puberty. Or both—that shivering helplessness at everything changing at once. But the more I tried to include him in my life, the more he retreated from me. Ever since I told him I wanted to go to college in New York, he’s seemed downright pissed at me. For leaving, I guess. Which makes no sense, given how little we interact now, living under the same roof.
When I was in elementary school, whenever my brother’s friends from the neighborhood came over to ask if he would play tennis with them in the driveway, Caleb would yell, “I call Addie!” Even if they hadn’t invited me to play.
Victor would make a face and say, “Caleb’s just showing off. He wants to prove he can beat us, even with a girl on his team.”
Both Victor and Job were Caleb’s age, and remarkably, Victor had managed to make it to the seventh grade, despite having a pea for a brain. Caleb would roll his eyes at him and tell him to shut up. Which he finally did, when we beat him soundly, even with a boy on my team.
We played pickup basketball in front of Victor’s house, and then, too, Caleb would say, “I call Addie.” I wondered whether it was because of Dad, flying in another part of the world, and the way he always looked at Caleb before he went and said, “Take care of things on the ground, okay?�
� I thought that was the reason Caleb looked out for me, keeping his promise to Dad by being nice to me. Or maybe he was saving me the pain of being paired off with either Victor or Job.
Except that when they didn’t come out to play and it was just the two of us in the driveway with our rackets, Caleb would ask, “Us against the wall?” And then we’d hit the ball at the garage door and take turns swinging it back.
As we played, Caleb would recite random facts to me.
Did you know that the pilot and copilot almost always eat separate meals, in case one of them gets food poisoning? Dad told me that.
Did you know that there are more than sixty thousand people in the air in the United States at any given time? That’s more people than live in Lyndale.
Did you know the longest flight in the world is from Fort Worth to Sydney, Australia? It’s almost exactly seventeen hours long.
“Did you know that the Concorde traveled at more than twice the speed of sound? And you could actually hear this massive boom when it broke the sound barrier. Although the first aircraft to break the sound barrier was a Douglas DC-8 in 1961.”
After we moved five years ago, there were no more tennis games in the driveway. There were only memories of a time when we used to know each other.
It catches me off guard sometimes how much I miss the relationship we used to have. It happens when Caleb and I are mocking Bruce’s sign-off together. Sometimes, when Mom ropes us into watching the holiday movies we’ve seen every year since we were in diapers, we’ll accidentally recite the same lines at exactly the same time, and I feel it then, too. It feels like finding something important you’d misplaced but hadn’t really noticed was gone. In those moments, we’re shaking dust off something lost and it’s like, Oh, there you are.
There we are.
Only to lose it again.
BEFORE
Mid-July
Caleb is bleary-eyed when he comes down for breakfast on Monday morning. With the exception of Mom’s short-lived family movie nights, our paths haven’t crossed much this summer. Instead of celebrating the end of high school, making plans for the rest of his life, he’s been holed up in his room. Today he’s wearing sweatpants and a crusty-looking shirt, but the most offensive thing about his appearance is the dusting of dark facial hair on his chin.
“New look?” I ask, unable to hide my disapproval.
Without looking up at me, my brother pats his chin. “Just something I’m trying.”
“I don’t think it’s working,” I say. He doesn’t answer, just chews his Lucky Charms silently, obnoxiously. Most of Caleb’s friends hightailed it out of Lyndale the second they were done, the way I plan to. I look at him and wonder if he feels lonely, if he secretly hates that he’s staying. I want to ask him why he is.
I doubt he’ll tell me, though.
We never confide in each other.
I remember being fourteen and wanting so much to be included in everything my brother was doing. One afternoon after Caleb had just gotten his license and inherited Mom’s old car, I saw him getting ready to go out and I asked to go with him, but he refused. He was so set on whatever he was doing—his jaw stiff, his eyes determined. He was gone for hours, and when he came back, he went straight upstairs. I tiptoed after him, curious.
I found him in the bathroom, his shirt raised, looking in the mirror and flinching like he’d been stung. I moved closer, quietly, so he wouldn’t see me through the glass, and I saw him touching his rib gingerly. He looked like he was about to cry.
I stepped into the bathroom before he had time to pull down his shirt.
R. That was all his tattoo said.
“Oh my God!” I exclaimed. “You got a tattoo?”
His face contorted. I was sure he was going to tell me to get lost, threaten me to breathe a word and it would be my last, but to my surprise, he only seemed terrified.
“Please don’t tell Mom,” he begged me. “Or Dad. Please.”
“Okay,” I said. I was shocked at what he’d done and, most of all, at his response. I liked the idea of a secret between us, but I wanted to feel fully included.
“Who is she, anyway?” I asked. “R?”
Caleb didn’t answer.
“Rachel? Rebekah? Rrrrrrandy,” I said. Admittedly, I was jealous. I wished I could’ve thought of something or someone I cared about enough to mark my skin, my body, with their name.
“Addie, please,” was all Caleb said. The lack of disdain in his voice surprised me again. I promised not to say anything.
When I broke a couple of weeks later and told Mom, it was payback for something stupid like Caleb taking too long in the shower. As soon as I saw his face and Mom’s, though, I wished I hadn’t done it. She was furious with him and, inexplicably, with me.
“I’m sorry,” I told Caleb after he and Mom had finished a yelling match behind the closed door of her room. “Is it because you’re underage? It’s not a big deal. Lots of people have tattoos. I’m sorry.”
He stalked into his room and banged the door shut.
“I’m sorry,” I called from the other side, but he didn’t answer. I knew somehow I’d crossed a line, done something I couldn’t take back, no matter how desperately I wanted to.
I caught him on his way into the bathroom the next morning. “Caleb, I’m sorry. It’s just a tattoo. Mom will get over it. Should I talk to her or something?”
“Just leave it, Addie,” he said with such finality and coldness that it scared me. “Leave it.”
I thought of the way I’d found him in the bathroom, running his hand over the curve of the R like it was either precious or painful. Maybe both.
Who’s R? I wanted to ask him when he was finally speaking to me again, weeks later, but I couldn’t. Everything between us felt fragile, tentative.
In a way, it still does.
I force myself to try now, though.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
He takes so long to answer that at first I don’t think he will, but finally he says, “Nothing’s wrong.” But I’m not sure I believe it. “Summer, you know,” he adds halfheartedly.
“People still bathe and have normal human contact over the summer,” I say, even if we can lounge around the house and sluggishly pass the time.
I’m tempted to ask whether he wants to do something, hang out like we used to when we were younger, but we don’t really do that. So instead, I retreat and start getting ready for my viola lesson. Soon Caleb is back in his room, the door shut between us.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Zach asks, his mouth open in surprise, moments after I enter his house. It’s our first official day of shooting, and he is staring at my viola.
“It never came up,” I answer with a shrug. I’ve just come from my lesson, which I biked to, so my viola is still in my basket.
After a little back-and-forth, Zach has been able to come up with a production schedule that suits all of us. He is working evenings at the movie store this week. Kevin, who landed a job as a dishwasher at Pizza Hut, starts work at four every afternoon. And since my lessons go till ten-thirty every weekday morning, I can only start after eleven, which works well with Raj’s request that he not be required to wake up, under any circumstances, before ten.
The great thing is that, with my mom at work, she can’t hover or demand to meet Zach’s entire family or something embarrassing like that.
“We were going to use Raj’s iPod for the sound track,” Zach says now.
“Rajesh likes honky-tonk,” Kevin adds with disgust. “And not the kind I like.”
“Kev,” Zach says tiredly. He turns to face me again, still wearing the look of shock he had earlier. “Will you play something?”
“Um, sure,” I say, even though I am thinking, Oh God, no. Maybe it is preshooting jitters, but I can’t help feeling nervous whenever Zach’s full attention is on me. Our test run the other day went well, but I noticed something. Zach is different when he’s behind the camera. He is very calm and f
ocused, and he is almost always frowning with intensity, concentrating. I’m terrified now that somehow I’ll disappoint him. Or maybe it’s just those gray eyes—twinkling, I can handle, but smoldering, traveling slowly over my face, even with the lens between us, I just cannot get used to.
I sit down on one of the couches, careful not to crush any of Zach’s camera equipment, which is scattered everywhere at this point. Then I open my case, pull out my instrument, and begin to play.
I play for a minute, tops, an upbeat melody I hope they’ll recognize.
When I am finished, Kevin bursts into applause. “Bravo! Bravo!”
Both Zach and Raj are quiet for a minute, and I watch them, flushed from playing, trying not to be disappointed at their mild reaction.
Then, together, they go quietly, “Oh my God.” The very first time I met Raj, apart from the fact that he dressed casual and seemed moderately invested in, if a little detached from, their film, it was hard for me to see why he and Zach were friends. But little by little, I’m seeing similarities. Both of them can talk Ciano movies for hours—Zach pro, Raj also pro, but not at Zach’s level. Raj, despite appearances, has a dry sense of humor. And for all the heaviness, the sighing, Raj brings into a room, Zach’s lightness balances it out.
“What’s wrong?” I ask now, biting on my lower lip.
“That’s fucking Super Mario,” Raj says, a little inflection—God help us—coming into his voice. “She plays Super Mario!”
Kevin laughs. He likes to slap things when he laughs—his thigh, the arm of the couch. Now he slaps Zach’s back.
I laugh, too, relieved. “Oh, my brother was obsessed growing up, so I learned to play it.”
Raj continues to appraise me, as if I am a deity. “That needs to be our sound track.”
I realize Zach still hasn’t spoken, but he’s moved to start putting together his camera equipment.
I am packing away my viola, carefully, because I’m OCD about scratches, when I notice he’s stopped what he’s doing and is watching me.
Everyone We've Been Page 9