EPIGRAPH
I object to violence because when it appears to do good,
the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent.
—Mahatma Gandhi
The attempt and not the deed confounds us.
—William Shakespeare, Macbeth
DEDICATION
For Joan Ledbetter, who said, “You got the softball and writing from me,” and Heath High School
Ruth 1:16
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Epigraph
Dedication
0.
1. Measure twice, cut once.
2. In a perfect universe
3. Leave the FAFSA unmailed.
Caroline
4. The Upper Organ Pipe Chamber
5. Important things happen in threes.
6. Survivor of strange atrocities
7. Out of oranges
8. The exclusive and privileged club
9. The person in the back isn’t allowed to steer.
10. Then there’s the Chilean warlock.
Caroline
11. Sit down, Superman.
12. Have you ever heard film winding?
Caroline
13. You’d have made that same walk naked.
14. Beautiful but dark
15. More sides than a Rubik’s Cube
16. Ship it.
17. Some more than others.
Caroline
18. A picture of a picture of himself
19. Talk about ambiance.
20. Wildly vulnerable with a stranger
21. Beware of Alligators
22. All-wheel drives
Caroline
23. The next logical choice
24. Westwood is a fairly common surname.
25. Plenty of humor available
Caroline
26. Semi-typical night
27. The token bathroom at the bottom of the world
28. Capture it just right.
29. For your trouble
30. Starting was harder.
31. It’s time to talk about your vocabulary.
32. An unmarked grave in Bath
33. Who got up this hullaballoo anyway?
34. Ride, Sally, ride.
35. Society’s prodigious metaphor for love
36. What happened in Simon Westwood’s brain?
Caroline
37. Butter on a skillet
38. The opportunity to rip on Dolly, Roddy, and communes
39. Dickheads are like geysers.
40. Getting the story of your life from the front page of the National Enquirer
41. Gird your loins.
42. That’s what was in my bag.
43. You have this much baggage, you should stay put.
44. The wooden congregants
Caroline
45. A poor kid’s treasure hunt
46. Summer in an upside-down spoonful
47. It’s not like a Sherlockian leap.
Caroline
48. We have plans of our own.
49. Refrain from sucking.
50. Think of the human-interest story.
Caroline
51. The lady picks her prize.
52. Mach One’s a humdinger.
53. Things shrink when I wash them.
54. No longer a box
55. Those who save the things they should lose and those who lose the things they should save
56. Hazzard’s the better choice.
57. A heap of shadows
58. The gentle rocking of the boat
59. Nod if you understand.
60. It’s the decision before the decision.
Caroline
61. This doesn’t have a title yet.
62. Two hands on the wheel
63. You’ll be surprised by the things that survived.
64. I didn’t expect flowers.
Caroline
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Courtney Stevens
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
0.
BOOM.
It’s a bus.
BOOM.
It’s a New York City sidewalk. Brilliant fists of light punch and punch and keep punching. They grind me into the concrete like I am sirloin beneath a chef’s hammer. My jaw is throbbing, the bone displaced. My blood pools in the perfect shape of a kidney bean. I am seven hundred miles from home.
BOOM.
It’s a color that’s not color at all; a color there’s not a word for. Red? No, that’s not right. Orange-yellow-red-blue. A near-rainbow. The shade of burning metal. The toxic stench of accelerant.
BOOM.
It’s ash-black, hell-black wisps heading up, up, up into the sun. Aluminum confetti framed against the patina belfry of New Wesley Church. Raining metal. Raining body parts. A severed leg lands; a purple shoestring slaps my nose. The rest of that person (who is no longer a person; who is a torso wearing a once-red now-singed American Eagle tank top) lands on Chandler’s back. Chan gasps, the breath beaten out of him. He is alive. I watch his chest rise and fall, rise and fall, to be certain.
BOOM.
It’s the almost-car-crash smell. Friction. Heated rubber. Traffic grinding to a halt. There are screaming bystanders I can’t hear because the nerves in my ear are damaged. The thin membranes ripped and bleeding. Phones upload initial videos. #busexplosion. The first dulled wail of a siren. Blue. White. Blue. White. “Kid! Kid! Are you all right?”
BOOM.
It’s Rudy on the ground. The laughter on his pink lips replaced with blood. Trickling like crimson paint spilled on the wall of his cheek. Trickling. Down his chin. Onto his neck. Into the collar of his shirt. Twelve hours ago, he smelled of lemons and cheap IPA. His mouth is open, closed, open again. He’s screaming. My ears hear the void, the suction. They hear fear.
BOOM.
It’s four survivors. I think I am one of them.
1. MEASURE TWICE, CUT ONCE.
$0
The first secret Chan kept from me was our eleventh birthday party.
We were paired, even back then. Our birthdays fell days apart, and all three parents were pleased with one Happy Birthday, Golden and Chandler cake, one gathering, one table of gifts. I assumed we’d dodged the pizza-and-ice-cream-for-twenty bullet when the two dates arrived and passed with zero fanfare, but no. The following Saturday came, and with it, adults ducked frantically behind too-small recliners and overstuffed couches, and kids yelled “Surprise!” in the pale afternoon light of Gran’s living room. I soldiered through merrily enough, until Chan let slip our surprise party didn’t surprise him. His dad warned him the day before so Chan could plan an appropriate attitude. His father’s words were altogether fair; Chan was absolute shit at handling surprises. As I was not absolute shit at handling surprises, I was not told. Chan reasoned the secret was for my own good, to which I said (and rather indignantly), “Chan, it’s supposed to be us against the world.”
“Are you serious about that?”
“As a heart attack,” I said. (That phrase felt like a ten-pointer at the time.)
Chan tucked his fingers into his armpits and stretched the University of Kentucky basketball jersey to bursting. Back before his growth spurt, he was the boy who slammed home runs in PE, and none of the girls wanted to sit with him at lunch. He released his right hand from his armpit and spit in his palm. The lines and creases filled with blue cakey spittle. “Chandler and Golden versus the world?”
Our saliva mixed. “Chandler and Golden versus the world,” I repeated.
The promise was legit. Six years later, C
han and I were still running hard, side by side. He was significantly more fetching than he’d been at eleven and still allergic to sudden changes. I was me. That is to say, a relatively resilient soul who worked well with the Chans of the world. (I hadn’t grown much prettier though, so the exchange rate was fairly even.)
He was nursing another secret tonight, sipping it slow, making me watch.
He wasn’t exactly gloating—he wasn’t the type—but he was intensely pleased with whatever trap he planned to spring. I spotted this thing, whatever it was, the moment we got home from school. Chan didn’t usually commandeer our kitchen. Chan didn’t usually invite the Hive, the entire Hive, to dinner at my place. The expense alone was cringeworthy. And Chan didn’t usually plan celebrations when there was nothing to celebrate. For ten months we’d been devoid of events that required crystal goblets and place settings for twenty-seven, and then out of the blue, wham, “I’m throwing a party and you have to be there.”
I really should have changed out of my ripped jeans.
Then again, Chan wore festive pot holders he’d sewn himself, printed with bright yellow rubber ducks. There was flour on his cheek and a handsome amount of steam on his glasses from opening the oven door. The hat he always wore when he wasn’t at school, a rock-star cowboy job, was on the counter. “Chan, you look forty,” I said, even though he didn’t. He looked happy—and not the manufactured expression he donned to keep people from asking him what was wrong either. I prodded him with a spatula. “Don’tcha want to tell me what all this fuss is about?”
“What fuss?”
“All this.” I waved at the entirety of the kitchen.
“Can’t a guy do something nice for his girlfriend?”
“Uh, no,” I said, dutifully frowning.
“Too bad. You’ll just have to wait,” he said, and then tickled me until I curled like a Cheeto on the kitchen hardwood.
Maybe I shouldn’t have, but I side-eyed his playfulness, tried to examine what this happy streak might mean. Chan was not a tickler. He was a “measure twice, cut once” woodworker, the sort of person who said “Teamwork makes the dream work” with a straight face. He even used microfiche at the library for pleasure. Back before we went to New York, he memorized the entire subway system. “In case our phones die,” he had said. Because he is him, I thought, knowing subway maps would be posted on the walls. I’d even gotten on the plane without my cell phone cord, which wasn’t a problem, because he’d packed a spare.
“Golden,” Mom said, “be kind to this boy. Your father has trouble boiling water.”
I’d forgotten she was here, even though she was standing in the kitchen, stirring the gravy.
“Yeah, be kind to the boy making Hipponite delight,” Chan chided.
Mom groaned. “I wish you wouldn’t use that term.”
“Right?” I echoed Mom’s disgust. “He says Hipponite and I check the pantry for Kool-Aid and cyanide.”
“Hive Delight doesn’t have a pleasing rhythm,” he said.
Chan claimed Hipponite was a tidy expression for us on-Hive folks, as we were a bit of hippie idealism without the rock music and drugs, and a bob of Mennonite without the horses and religion. I’d explained repeatedly that his description didn’t make sense. If you casually said commune, you would be correct, even though Gran preferred the term social experiment. We were the pound, if the pound were for stray people instead of dogs. Except we didn’t put anyone down if no one came to claim them.
At any given time, we had twenty to forty regulars living on-property. Everyone worked. Everyone shared. And because of this, everyone had enough, when in other scenarios, they hadn’t. Folks around Braxton Springs, Kentucky, found our living arrangement intriguing or they thought we were nuts. Say what you will, the Hive was a helluva place to live. Among our current motley crew, we had two midwives, three homesteaders, and a family I’d swear on a stack of Bibles was in witness protection. The kitchen where we stood was once the fellowship hall of a Methodist chapel built in 1923. If you held normalcy in one hand and character in the other, I could promise you which one filled up faster.
Chan washed his hands at the island, reached across the counter to where I was messing with my camera, and tugged on a ringlet of my hair. The blond strands rebounded with the vigor of an overfilled basketball. “Did you know,” Chan said, “it takes three hundred and fifty ears of wheat to make a loaf of bread?”
“Did you know you’re a weirdo?”
“But I’m your weirdo, right?”
I pulled my toes under my knees and straightened my spine, exhaled for show. It should have been easy to tell him yes. Or . . . for him to avoid asking the question. But he’d been seeking my constant reassurance since June, and I was tempted to tell him he was eight gallons of crazy in a five-gallon bucket for not trusting me. Steering a conversation was like steering a horse. Words, the bit. Our inflection, the reins. The mood turned whenever we gave the leathers a hard yank to the left.
I gave the conversation a significant tug. “You know the answer to that, Chan.”
Chan stuck his head in the oven and peeled back the aluminum foil from the roast, basting the kitchen in smells of onions and salted meat. “Fifteen more minutes,” he said, his voice husky and frustrated. He slammed the oven door a little too hard, plopped on the stool, and crossed his long legs at the ankles. Everything on him looked crossed. He’d developed a habit of lacing his arms like a pretzel when he was stressed, and he was doing that now.
I walked over, kissed his knuckles firmly, and said, “Thank you for fixing me dinner.”
Chan untangled his arms and returned to his rolling pin and dough.
This meal would be perfect. Chan had seen to that with his meticulous grocery lists and charts of what must come out of the oven at 6:05 and reenter by 6:07 with a brushing of butter. But I longed to retreat to my room and let the party go on without me. Accelerant Orange, an online video series about the bombing of Bus #21, was dropping a new episode at eight. The show host had hinted at a big announcement for tonight, but . . . I couldn’t exactly excuse myself from a party at my house with my family and friends that my boyfriend was throwing. So we followed Chan’s extensive charts. Mom dimmed the lights to a romantic setting. Dad filled plastic goblets with sparkling grape. I lit tea candles in the old church windowsills, bathing the room in shadows that made missing the episode slightly more palatable. As the Hive arrived, everyone chatted loosely like they’d had wine. We ate off chargers and real china. Freshly polished silver. Holiday treatment on a Monday evening in April. It was quite lovely, this thing Chan had planned.
Eight o’clock came and went.
When only cake crumbs dressed the plates, Chandler scooted his chair away from the table. The claw feet screeched against the hardwood and the Hive turned in our direction. People giggled nervously when Chan crashed into the low-hanging lamp with his forehead and displaced his glasses. Mom gave him a discreet thumbs-up—which he couldn’t see at the time with his 20/600 vision, but I did. He righted the frames and clinked his fork against my water glass. The room responded with silence.
“Everyone.” I inched my fingers closer to Chan’s on the table, knowing that would steady him. “Go and I were lucky last June.”
My eyes rocketed to Chan’s, startled. My inside thoughts making their way outside. He gave me a half wink. A very casual It’s okay, I promise.
One of the smaller kids whispered loudly, “What happened in June?” and another slightly older child said, “You know,” and mimicked an explosion.
Chan pumped my arm. “It has been ten months—”
“Right,” I said, sending him strength.
“And . . . I really don’t want to talk about it or think about it ever again. I want to focus all my energy on a new plan. Start the process of moving on.” He clasped his sweat-drenched hands around mine. “That means making you a promise, Go.”
Chan and I had made plenty of promises to each other over the years. Not to
cheat. Not to lie. Not to watch episodes of Supergirl without each other. None of those required four-course meals.
“Around here”—Chan’s eyes swept to Gran and then drifted to a stained glass window where an old Methodist cross was still mounted—“when a promise is especially important we make it official. Gran?”
I bit through the nail on my index finger so loudly my teeth clicked together. I usually liked Hive rituals. Promises made here were harder to break, and there was something special invoked by formality and history. But creeds were markedly better when they didn’t involve Chan or me.
Gran hunched when she stood, her paisley button-up shirt exposing fine wrinkles around her collarbone. She was still so regal, so glorious, with her watery blue eyes and silky white hair pulled into a loose bun. One hand raised to the ceiling, she spoke with complete authority. “A community like ours would never last without public accountability and trust. Early on, we established ceremonial rhetoric for big life events: moving on or off Hive, weddings, funerals, business decisions, etcetera. We did this to honor and respect each person who abides here. By invoking Hive language, Chandler, you’re making a promise before your family and friends. Are you certain you are ready to give your word?”
Chan straightened his back. “I am.”
There were more required words for Chan to repeat. For the community too. As the formality finished, Chan removed a blue felt box from his pocket and lifted the lid. The ring inside was an antique or a copy of an antique. Two yellow-gold interlinking hearts studded with a speck diamond. Probably a quarter of a quarter of a carat.
“What do you say, Go?” he asked shyly. “Someday, would you want to make a good thing a sure thing?”
My cousin had asked his girlfriend to marry him in a very similar fashion two years ago, but they were in their twenties and had real jobs. This wasn’t an engagement—there was a different creed for that—but it was certainly a preengagement-shaped thing, and Chan, asking right now—before we graduated or voted—felt way off in left field. Totally flattering in a my boyfriend really loves me way, but also quite strange.
“I . . .”
There was our age. There was the shift in our chemistry since last June. And there was the fact that three days ago, I’d been worried he was ending things between us.
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