Bone Deep

by O'Brien, Kim;

  I look at Emily. “How about you? You ever been in love?”

  She drops her gaze, then pulls the silver chain out of her shirt and fingers the bead of turquoise. Her smile is sly. “I ’m focusing on my career now.”

  “I don’t believe you. Tell me who he is.”

  She laughs, drops the bead back down her shirt. “Nobody,” she insists, but her gaze slides away from mine. “I’m going to be an Ivy League girl and then graduate school. Your father promised to write me a good recommendation. And after I get my PhD, I’m going to travel. Meet people from all over the world and write a best-selling book.” She gives me an appraising look. “You could come with me. We always were a great team.”

  It’s my turn to laugh. “I could come with you as what? Your friend?”

  She looks at me hard. “As an archeologist. That’s what you always wanted. You saw things in a way I never could.”

  I shake my head. “The way I saw things almost got us killed, remember?” My hand flies to my mouth. Here I was hoping that Emily would never bring that summer up, and I’m the one who did it.

  “That was an accident,” Emily says firmly. “It shouldn’t stop you. You love it, Paige, and you were good at it. Come on—we’ll both get PhDs and really live our lives. Not just get some job that pays the bills.”

  The heat is so strong even my scalp is drenched in sweat, but it doesn’t matter as much as what Emily is saying, offering. For a moment I’m interested, and then reality sets in. “I’m not getting into a good college. I totally tanked last semester, remember?”

  Shaking her head, Emily flips her braid. “That was only one semester. You’re smart, Paige. You’re going to kill your SATs.”

  I almost laugh thinking about the PSAT I took last fall. I didn’t read a single question, just bubbled answers in the pattern of a butterfly. Of course I’d scored in the lowest five percent. To be honest, I’d been hoping for a total fail.

  “Even if I did, I don’t think an Ivy League school is going to take me.”

  “You’re the daughter of a man famous in his field. That counts for something.”

  “Like I would ever go to him for help.”

  Emily rolls her eyes. “You might not have to. Colleges look at more than your class rank. You have an interesting story—being homes-chooled, traveling around the Southwest with your dad as a kid. Every college essay,” Emily states with authority, “is basically about what diversity you bring to their school.”

  “Diversity?” I laugh. “I’m a white girl from New Jersey.”

  She shakes her head. “You weren’t born in New Jersey and you didn’t grow up there. Not many people have your background. And if you got involved with one of the research projects this summer, it’d give you material for a great essay.”

  “I’d have to go to my father and ask his permission. I’m not doing that.”

  “You don’t have to,” Emily’s lips curve slyly. “All I have to do is whisper in a certain intern’s ear that you’re interested in assisting him on a project and he could go to your father and ask him for your help.”

  I actually find myself turning the idea over in my mind. The idea of research, of working in the ruins, has more appeal than I’m willing to admit to Emily.

  “You could turn everything around,” she presses.

  “Who says I want to turn things around?”

  She holds my gaze. “I think you do.”

  I shift. “Community college could be fun.”

  “And you could keep living at home. Is that what you want?” She pins me with a look that makes me wince.

  I look away, seeing with painful clarity living at home and being my mom’s best friend and companion. I love her, but it just suddenly feels scary, wrong, and yet somehow inevitable.

  I know it’s my fault. I’ve let myself drift and fail and use my parents’ divorce as an excuse to stop trying. They may have turned our house into a war zone, but there was a part of me that was only too willing to let their problems consume my own.

  “Just think about it,” Emily says, “but whatever you decide, I support you.” She pauses. “I’m your friend and it’s your life.”

  She doesn’t say the last part sarcastically. More like she isn’t going to judge me or rub it in if she goes to Columbia or Princeton and I don’t.

  “It goes both ways,” I tell her. “I support whatever you want to do.”

  She looks at me, eyes cat-like and curious. “You do?”

  “Of course.”

  “What if it was something that you didn’t like?” She’s testing me, just like when we were little and she would ask me what scared me most.

  “I told you, I’m not playing the game anymore.” I climb to my feet.

  “I wasn’t talking about that,” she snaps.

  “Then what?”

  She’s silent for a long moment and then sighs. “Nothing.” Rising, she brushes the dirt from her legs. “Just promise me, we’ll always be friends.”

  “Of course.” But the moment still feels unfinished. “You know you can tell me anything, right?”

  Emily smiles and links her arm through mine. “I know that,” she says. “Thanks.”

  NINE

  Paige

  As much as I try to deny it, the seed Emily planted in my mind takes root. Over the next few days, I find myself wondering if I could start over. What if I nailed my SATs? Wrote a great essay and got into a really good college? What if I stopped obsessing over my parents’ divorce and started caring about my future?

  Wandering the cool cliff chambers, I stop thinking of them as gloomy and haunted, but as a metaphor for the restoration of my own life, the seed of an essay. The Paige Patterson who came here can die, and a new Paige can be reborn. She can be whoever I choose her to be.

  And so, even though it feels like I’m betraying my promise not to let my father think I find any part of being in Arizona interesting, I seek out Emily and tell her my decision. I find her in the locker room, changing from a pair of sweat-soaked Nike shorts and a tank top into a short denim skirt and a floaty, cream-colored top cinched at the waist with a belt. When she hears my news, she grabs both my arms and grins in excitement. “You’re not going to regret this,” she promises. “I’m so glad you’re doing this.”

  “I’ll give it a week,” I tell her, trying to make it seem like it isn’t a big deal even though inside I’m pretty excited. “And if it doesn’t work out…” I shrug my shoulders.

  “It’ll work,” Emily states. “Just wait and see.”

  Two days later, in the fourth-level chamber, the place I have come to call the airplane hangar, my father calls me over. My heart starts to beat a little faster because I’m pretty sure I know exactly what this is all about.

  It’s mid-morning and engineers have already removed about a fourth of the black railing. I walk past the tall, dark form of Jalen Yazzi, who, as usual, doesn’t even glance in my direction. Although he doesn’t know it, he has factored into my choice process as I have decided being attracted to Jalen falls into the category of self-destructive behavior. Something I will no longer allow myself to do.

  “One of my interns just asked if you might be available for a few hours every day to help research,” My father says.

  I dig my sneaker into the yellowed stone floor and shrug. “Whatever.” I hope he doesn’t see the flush of blood that’s rushed to my face. The interest that powers my heartbeat.

  “It would be a great opportunity for you,” he says. “Mostly it would involve taking samples and recording data. Some photography, as well. Are you interested?”

  I count to five before answering. “I guess.”

  My father shifts. “You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. In fact, if it doesn’t interest you, I’d rather you not get involved. Indifference breeds mistakes. It isn’t the attitude of someone I want working in the ruins.”

  It feels like he’s slapped me in the face with the truth of our relationship—that t
hese precious ruins mean more to him than I do. But I also recognize that letting myself get mad at him will only keep me trapped—that if I want to get out from under his control, if I want to move forward with my life, I have to swallow my anger.

  I lift my gaze. “I’ll do a good job.”

  He nods and then gestures to someone standing somewhere behind my left shoulder. “Jeremy, can you come over here for a moment?”

  He says Jeremy’s name so loudly that several heads turn around, including Jalen’s. Jeremy detaches himself from the group and walks over to us. Although he’s only a little taller than me, Jeremy’s cute in a preppy, intellectual sort of way. His gaze lingers on me, and I feel increasingly confident about my decision as he comes closer.

  After my father grants his approval, Jeremy turns to me. “We could get started right now.” He pushes a long, dark bang behind his ear, only to have it fall forward again.

  “Of course, of course,” my father says, already looking past us at the iron railing that has begun to bow and yet still seems to desperately cling to its grip on the wall.

  Jeremy smiles warmly. His teeth are small, but very white and even. I glance over at Jalen to see if he’s noticed, but already his back is to me. “Just let me get my pack,” Jeremy says. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever had any experience with GIS systems?”

  I shake my head, deciding now probably isn’t a great time to tell him about my recent scholastic achievements, or rather, lack thereof.

  “No matter,” Jeremy says as I follow him to the side of the wall where he retrieves a battered canvas backpack from the ground and slips one of the straps haphazardly over his shoulder. His voice lowers a notch. “I’ll teach you.”

  As we head down the ladder connecting us to the floor below, I glance back at Jalen one last time. For once I catch him watching me, and his scowl fills me with more satisfaction than it probably should. I give him a smug smile. He might not want to spend time with me. He might not like me. But I think Jeremy does.

  For the next few days I spend a lot of time with Jeremy inventorying the walls. Basically, this means taking photos and then mapping the construction of the interior walls in the ruins. It’s slow, tedious work, but I don’t mind. It reminds me of when I used to watch my father all those summers in New Mexico. How slowly he would study a semi-collapsed pit house, remove the unsalvageable pieces, and then even more slowly put the rest of the structure back together.

  I always liked that about archeology—that nothing happens in a hurry. You study things before you touch them. You look at something from every different angle before you decide what it is. You think about how the broken pieces fit and why someone might have built it to begin with. You have to daydream about it, let your mind play out different answers.

  By Thursday, I begin to think that maybe that’s how I saw Jeremy. When I met him, I made assumptions, but they weren’t necessarily the right ones.

  When he stands a little too close to me, I don’t back away. When his hand accidentally brushes mine, I don’t say anything.

  We reveal ourselves to each other in pieces, discovering that both of us are only children, homeschooled, and raised by fathers who have unapologetically put their careers before their families (his is a neurosurgeon).

  On Friday, we’ve just finished mapping an interior wall on the third level when Jeremy wipes the sweat off his forehead and closes his sketch pad. “We need a break. Want to go somewhere cooler for a little while?”

  “Like the North Pole?”

  He laughs. And this is something else I like about him. Even if I’m not that funny, he always acts like I am. “I’ve got somewhere closer in mind.”

  I get to my feet, stretching out my back, which feels tight and cramped after sitting on the ground for a couple of hours. Jeremy sips water from his canteen, watching, an amused smile on his lips. “Want some help?”

  “With what?”

  He laughs again. “Nothing.”

  We follow the passage past the dark mouths of chambers no bigger than closets where families once lived. Ahead of me, Jeremy moves through the gloom with the ease of someone who’s done this hundreds of times before. I follow him through the third-floor passageway to the small ground-level chamber.

  However, instead of leading us outside, he points to the ladder descending into the deepest chamber in the ruins.

  “Have you ever been down there?” He shrugs his pack off his shoulders.

  “Of course.” Emily took me there when she gave me the grand tour. It’s small and dark, almost well-like, and we didn’t linger. I think it reminded us too much of things we would rather forget.

  “Then you know how much cooler it is down there.” He wipes the sweat off his thin face as if to emphasize how hot it is, but there’s a different kind of energy coming off him than I’ve ever felt before. “I’ll go first and turn on the light for you.”

  Turning around, he eases his body down the wooden ladder. The rungs creak as he disappears from sight. A moment later Jeremy’s voice calls up, “You can come down now. Careful, though, it’s steep.”

  A line of sweat forms on my upper lip. I hesitate, knowing he’s right but not wanting to feel the claustrophobic press of the walls. But then I hear Emily’s voice in my head, advising me to replace unhappy memories with good ones. I find the first rung of the ladder.

  The tunnel between the levels is so narrow I can easily touch all sides. It almost feels like I’m climbing through a chimney—kind of like Santa Claus. The thought cheers me up and I make a note to joke about this to Jeremy, who appreciates my sense of humor. Not like Jalen, whose face would probably crack into a million pieces if he let himself smile.

  I take another step and then another and another. The light gets stronger. I’m near the bottom when Jeremy reaches up to steady me. His hands span my ribcage, and he lifts me effortlessly, swinging me down the last few rungs and setting me gently on my feet. I’m aware how strong he is, how great it feels to be held, how his thinness is exciting. And most of all, the void of my own loneliness, screaming with the need to be touched.

  In the beam from the flashlight, Jeremy’s face is harsher, more angular, his eyes black and glossy. That shock of hair that won’t be tamed has fallen forward, and he pushes it behind his ear. “Better?”

  “Better.”

  The room is cooler, although a long way from feeling air-conditioned. The tribe’s shaman lived here, and it is considered one of the most holy spots in the ruins. I know my father wouldn’t like us being here. I feel a twinge of guilt and then tell myself we aren’t harming or disturbing anything.

  “Make a wish,” Jeremy moving the beam of light across the ground until it comes to rest on a gaping black hole.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “I’m not saying we should throw a penny down there, but if you were going to wish for something, what would it be?”

  “Three more wishes,” I say and move closer to the opening of the si’papu.

  In the velvet darkness, I can almost hear my father’s voice telling me about how, a long time ago, the earth was lost in a great flood and then a new world came into being. Mankind didn’t exist until a goddess named Spider Woman sang them into existence and led them through the four caverns of the underworld until they finally came to an opening—a si’papu—near the Colorado River.

  There’s more to the story, but what my mother and I loved most was the idea of God as a woman—a mother to mankind and also grandmother to the sun. My father, to his credit, had no problem accepting that women held the power. He and Dr. Linton spent hours discussing how Spider Woman “sang” people to life, and the idea of creation by thought. I didn’t understand this completely, but I believed it because my father and Dr. Linton were the smartest people I knew.

  I’ve seen dozens of si’papus, but none as deep as this one. I put my arm inside the hole and stir the black air with my hand. It feels lush—like liquid velvet. As my fingers continue to move through th
e darkness, I find myself reaching deeper and deeper into what feels like a bottomless pit.

  “I know what I wish for,” Jeremy says, kneeling beside me. He gently pulls my arm out of the si’papu and then laces our fingers together. I feel his thumb stroke the back of my hand back and forth, back and forth.

  “World peace?” I say, but know that isn’t what he’s wishing for at all.

  He laughs. “No.”

  My heart beats faster as a heavy silence falls between us.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asks.

  We both know the question is a formality. This has been building for days. Every casual touch, every lingering look has been adding up to this moment. I think, Why not?

  Leaning forward, I brush back that shock of hair that won’t stay out of his eyes. It’s heavy, silken, jet-black against his skin. “Yes.”

  He clicks off the flashlight. The room implodes into pitch blackness. It’s like one minute I have vision, the next I’m totally blind, like someone has cut out my eyes. “Where are you?” I punctuate the sentence with a nervous giggle.

  “Right here.”

  I smell him—the faint odor of pine, like the woods at home. It doesn’t matter, suddenly, if he’s the right guy for me or even if I really like him. He’s here. And then his lips—cold as river rock—land on mine.

  The chill of his mouth is unexpected, and I pull back. “Jeremy…”

  He swallows the word with a kiss, and although his lips are still cold, they’re not as bad as before. I tell myself to give it a moment, to relax. He kisses me in a pulsing motion that’s easy to follow. I close my eyes and lean into him, trying to get into the kiss.

  He puts his arms around me and then pulls me forward, tipping me sideways onto the stone floor. His tongue traces the line of my lips, probing gently. I open my mouth just enough, and he slips inside me. He tastes of some unfamiliar, slightly pungent, dark spice.