A Million Miles Away

by Lara Avery

  Facing each other, blowing bubbles in the backyard.

  At Christmas, holding up their presents.

  Wearing matching hideous dresses for their first middle school dance, back when they were really into dressing alike.

  And the one they took when they were fifteen, Michelle’s hair dyed purple and Kelsey’s bleached blonde: standing on the newly built porch in the summer, giving “rock on” signs with their hands, their tongues out.

  Prints of these photos were scattered on a white tablecloth, with a book and a pen for people to write messages.

  Michelle, one of the messages read in the loopy handwriting of the art teacher at Lawrence High, Your spirit and enormous talent will never be replaced.

  Michele, said another one, her name misspelled in chicken scratch, You were my favorite wandering soul.

  Kelsey recognized her grandma’s cursive. You’re with the angels now.

  “Bunch of bullshit, right?” Davis sat next to her in pleated pants, filling the air with the smell of mint. Kelsey covered Tabbie’s ears.

  “I guess,” she said.

  “You don’t have to be here if this is too much,” Davis said. He scooted close, putting an arm around her.

  “Yes, I do,” she replied.

  “You can do whatever you want.” Whatever she wanted, he said. Like it was her birthday or something. He leaned in close to her to kiss her lips, but Kelsey turned away.

  “Hey,” a voice said above her. The word went down at the end, as words said to Kelsey did a lot lately. Gillian and Ingrid stood in front of them, mascara streaked under Gillian’s almond-shaped eyes, Ingrid’s blonde hair looking unwashed.

  “I brought your homework,” Gillian said. “It’s just history and calc. Mr. Schulz said not to worry about Geography.”

  Ingrid sniffed, her jaw clenched. “Screw that. Screw school, Kels. You come back whenever you want to. We will be waiting for you.” Her voice started to shake. “We won’t do any new dances until you come back. We won’t choreograph anything, because you are our captain, and we’re not going to—”

  “Ingrid,” Kelsey said. “It’s okay.”

  Gillian put her hand on Ingrid’s back, and they smiled close-lipped smiles down to her. They told her to call them anytime.

  “Well,” Davis said jauntily. “What now? You want some inedible food?”

  “No, thanks.”

  For the first time in Kelsey’s dad’s life, she imagined, he hadn’t been up for cooking. Her mother didn’t care much, either. One of the aunts had gotten tasteless crackers and cold lunch meat from Dillons.

  Kelsey spotted two of Michelle’s ex-boyfriends talking to each other, the film student and the Brazilian. She felt like vomiting, but she didn’t have the energy for that.

  “I have an idea,” Davis said, brightening.

  A time machine was Kelsey’s first thought. A potion. An eraser. Nothing was making any sense.

  “Kansas City.” He gave her a knowing smile. “Let’s get you away from all this. Let’s go to St. Louis. Let’s go to Colorado.”

  Kelsey didn’t have the energy to get up from the couch, let alone take a road trip. She got a strange urge to ask Davis to smack her in the face. She wanted him to wake her up, to shake her, to tell her to crack so all of this would come pouring out of her, and then away.

  A memory came to her, peaceful, of the morning before everything changed. In it, she saw Peter. Kelsey hadn’t thought of Peter once, but she supposed she should have. Did Peter know about Michelle? She couldn’t imagine that anyone would have told him the news in Afghanistan. His family probably hadn’t even met Michelle yet.

  But they loved each other. He should know, and Kelsey would tell him.

  Kelsey hugged Tabbie tighter to her, bouncing her on her knee.

  “Can I go now?” Tabbie asked, trying to unhook Kelsey’s hands with her chubby little fingers.

  “No,” Kelsey found herself saying. “Please don’t go.”

  But Tabbie squirmed, slipping through her arms, and the warmth of her was suddenly gone, leaving Kelsey alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A few weeks later, Kelsey still had not cried. Or talked. Or eaten very much. There was a part of her that had wanted to cry, but it seemed like every time she moved, someone put their hands on her internal organs and squeezed. Why did it hurt to be alive? The Maxfields’ counselor had told Kelsey that in lieu of tears, her grief must be manifesting itself physically in other ways.

  To throw it in her face, Kelsey imagined, her parents had gone and volunteered their house for a support group. Mourning parents and widows and widowers and lovers sat for hours on folding chairs in their living room, drinking their coffee, nodding at one another with bags under their eyes.

  “Are you going to come to grief group tonight?” her mother would ask.

  “Not tonight,” she would reply. Or ever.

  Kelsey could hear strings of their testimonies from downstairs whenever she emerged from her room.

  “… like there’s a hole next to me in the bed, dug into the mattress. And all I want to do is fall into that hole.”

  “I keep thinking I see him around town. I swear. I’m not supernatural or nothing like that.”

  “… and I said, God, I know there’s a reason.”

  Their frail voices made them sound as if they were the dead ones. And what was worse: her parents’ voices among them, talking about Michelle as if she were the Patron Saint of Daughters. Like they had forgotten all the fun, stupid things about Michelle that made her herself, like that time she’d spent all of her birthday money on a new, elaborate “elfin maiden” costume for the Kansas Renaissance Fair. But that’s not what support groups were about. Thanks to the slogan they all said before every meeting, Kelsey knew exactly what support groups were about.

  “LEARNING TO LIVE AND LOVE AGAIN,” they chanted before they sat down. Like a bunch of zombies.

  Kelsey had to get out of there. But she wasn’t going to go back to school. Not yet, at least. She found her shoes and the car keys.

  As she snuck past the foyer, she noticed a postcard among the unopened mail.

  At the airport in Maine, it said. On the plane out tomorrow. Ate a lobster sandwich. Can’t see the fall leaves through the darkness. Love, Peter.

  Kelsey drove the Subaru five miles under the speed limit. Because any amount of light hurt her sleepless eyes, she had taken to wearing sunglasses at all times. She yelled along with the lyrics on the radio, and when she didn’t know them, she just yelled. Then she parked and held her breath, waiting for whatever it was she felt to go away.

  The sign read KANSAS ARMY AND ARMY RESERVE RECRUITING STATION. It was a tiny storefront in a strip mall at the corner of Louisiana and 23rd, next to a Schlotzsky’s Deli, and it was the only trace of military Kelsey could find in Lawrence.

  Inside, one chair sat across from a neat, empty desk with a bell on it. An American flag stood in the corner. The walls were pasted with posters of burly men helping each other over walls, Army Strong emblazoned across their determined faces.

  Kelsey reached her hand to the bell and rang it.

  No one came. There was no noise from the other room.

  She rang the bell again.

  “What can I do for you, young lady?” A woman with a blonde bob and an official-looking sweater vest materialized behind the desk. Kelsey jumped.

  “Hi,” Kelsey said. It was strange to hear her own voice.

  “Would you mind taking off your sunglasses, please?” Even as the woman sat, she still seemed tall.

  Kelsey crossed her arms. “I’d rather not.”

  The woman’s eyebrows knit together. “All right, then.”

  The woman stared at her, waiting. “My sister died,” Kelsey said. Wow, there it was. It had just come out. Over the days since it had happened, Kelsey had never once said it aloud.

  The woman pointed at the chair. “Have a seat, honey.”

  Kelsey found herself sitting
immediately. She wanted to lay her head on the desk for a second. Just for a second. But she remained upright.

  “Was she deployed?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sister.”

  “Oh, no. No.”

  The woman folded her hands. “I’m confused.”

  Kelsey hadn’t really thought this through, and the lack of sleep was no help. With the woman’s eyes on her, unmoving, Kelsey found she missed the feeling of being able to talk. Of knowing what to say. She forced herself to continue.

  “Here’s the deal. My sister had a boyfriend in the army, Peter, and he doesn’t know that she… that she’s gone. He’s in Afghanistan somewhere, and I think someone should tell him.”

  The woman spoke slowly, emphasizing her words. “So you came to the Army Recruiting Office?”

  Kelsey could see the woman searching for her eyes behind her sunglasses.

  “How else am I supposed to reach him? I don’t know his parents or any of his friends. And I was thinking maybe you could look him up and send him a letter or something. His name is Peter.”

  A smile twitched on the woman’s mouth. “You said that.”

  Kelsey sighed. “Can you look him up?”

  The woman turned to her computer. “If he enlisted around here, I might have a record of his address, but I can’t give that to you.”

  “What about—” Kelsey began.

  “Nor can I give you his location in Afghanistan. But I might be able to talk to someone who can reach his parents. What’s his last name?”

  Kelsey’s mouth, which had opened to tell her, closed. She didn’t know Peter’s last name. The person who knew his last name was now nothing more than disintegrating dust and molecules, sitting in a tin can.

  All she could do was shake her head.

  “You don’t know it,” the woman said. She wasn’t being mean. It was just the truth.

  “Nope,” Kelsey said shortly.

  The woman took her hands away from the keyboard, and they hovered for a second, not knowing what to do.

  Kelsey pictured herself from the woman’s view: a morose teenage girl in Victoria’s Secret sweatpants, refusing to take off her sunglasses, asking her to search the entire army database for a boy named Peter.

  A laugh escaped the woman, but she wasn’t mocking Kelsey. She could tell by the way her eyes wrinkled when she laughed. It was just funny, that’s all.

  “Pretty ridiculous, right?” Kelsey stood up. “The whole thing is just goddamn ridiculous.”

  The woman stood with her. “I’d help you if I could.”

  Kelsey turned. “I’m gonna go now.”

  “Just a minute,” the woman said. Kelsey paused in the door. “Eat something, all right? You look like you need to eat something.”

  Kelsey nodded. Something was rising in her throat that she had to push down. She sped home with the radio turned all the way up, not really hearing the music. The brown tint of her sunglasses made everything look like an old-fashioned movie.

  When she came in the front door, her father was standing in the middle of the circle of sad adults. They were all holding hands like a bunch of preschoolers. Tears were running down her dad’s face, through his beard. Though the room was completely silent, no one had noticed she’d come in. Or that she’d left, for that matter.

  Kelsey’s eyeballs felt on fire.

  She ran up the stairs as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t un-hear her father’s voice. “This is part of a poem I’ve memorized. It helps me. If you’d like, you can repeat it after me. Okay. ‘As there is muscle in darkness’…”

  A chorus of voices. “As there is muscle in darkness.”

  Michelle’s room stayed dark, even during the day.

  “‘There is cowardice to holding on.’”

  “There is cowardice to holding on.”

  He continued, “‘A cottonwood flare’…”

  They echoed, these strangers. “‘A cottonwood flare’…”

  Kelsey kicked open the door to her room. She could still hear their voices. There were cottonwoods lining her street, lining the highway where her sister veered off the road, lining every street in Kansas.

  “‘A hand to straighten her collar’…”

  She slid open the screen to her porch. Her and Michelle’s porch. She kicked over the potted trees that were meant to be a barrier, cursing them.

  “‘A bravery in good-bye’…”

  She collapsed on Michelle’s side, putting her cheek to the wooden slats still splattered with the outlines of paintings, her palms pressing where the two of them stood not long ago.

  By this time, Kelsey was crying. Her sobs shook every muscle in her body. Every new breath could not come fast enough, and with each exhale, she said her sister’s name.

  Not out loud, but speaking it with every ounce of her being. She was putting it into the air, and realizing, then, that each time she said the name was another time Michelle would never hear it. Each time Kelsey said it, a little more of Michelle was gone, and she would never come back.

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was basketball season. Kelsey had to make changes in the Lions Dance Team halftime routines in order to accommodate the wooden court. Their newest dance was to a mash-up of a popular indie song and its hip-hop counterpart: a lot of shifts in speed and general tone. Sexy but innovative. Tight formations with subtle movements, all in sync. With ten minutes left in practice, they still hadn’t gotten the timing of the final cancan line. Kelsey and Gillian paced in front of their team, chests heaving, their red practice shorts soaked in sweat. Ingrid, who could never seem to get in shape, was practically purple in the face.

  “I’m not mad at you guys,” Kelsey announced. “Just totally focused. I promise you, if we do it again, it will be perfect for Friday.”

  “And it has to be perfect,” Gillian added, tightening her sleek black ponytail.

  “This could be the one we use for competition, ladies. Okay, Ruben?” Kelsey lifted a hand to the scraggly junior who was in charge of sound. “One more time. Cue it to 2:57.”

  Kelsey stopped in front of Hannah T. “Hannah, try your part a beat faster. Cool?”

  “But won’t that throw everyone off?”

  “Try it.”

  Kelsey took her place in the center with a bowed head, hands extended. This portion of the routine required total concentration. She would begin by completing a backflip into a split, and move directly from there to the standing line.

  The music started and Kelsey was lost in her body, exactly how she liked it.

  It had been six weeks since she returned to school. People had finally stopped randomly touching her on the arm, looking for signs of watery eyes or suicidal tendencies.

  The backflip was smooth, though it could have used a little more bounce.

  It had taken her several weekends home drinking sugar-free Red Bull to catch up on her missed schoolwork, but Davis had helped her fill out useless biology worksheets and copy and paste Spanish essays into Google Translate.

  The splits were seamless.

  The University of Kansas Rock Chalk Dancers weren’t holding tryouts until May, but Kelsey had memorized their requirements: quadruple pirouettes, fouetté turns, leaps (right, left, center), turning discs, kicks, fight song. She would learn the jazz combo online, which would be posted two weeks prior. She would also be taught a short hip-hop combo at tryouts.

  Kelsey pulled her legs together into a stand, and when the wave of legs came her way, she kicked straight, high, head up with a smile, like she had always been taught.

  Hannah T., toward the end of the line, hit her mark. A full bow by all of them at once, then the finish: arms up and crossed with one another at a perfect diagonal. They had nailed it.

  The Lions Dance Team burst into triumphant shrieks and high fives. Friday was the first home game, versus Blue Valley North. They were so ready.

  Kelsey gave her girls a thumbs-up, told them what time they should show up at the lock
er room, and went straight to the bleachers to find her stuff. She didn’t like to linger. Lingering meant memories, and she didn’t like those. She had to keep moving.

  Gillian and Ingrid caught up with her.

  “Whatcha doing now, Kels?” Ingrid asked, awkwardly poking her in the bare stomach.

  “Oh, my God,” Gillian said, staring at her phone. “Check out this guy who friended me on Facebook. He is so cute. Let’s go stalk him.”

  Ingrid grabbed her duffel bag. “Let’s go get frozen yogurt and stalk Gillian’s boyfriend.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” Gillian replied.

  “FroYo, Kels?”

  “I can’t,” Kelsey said automatically.

  “Why not?” Gillian said, furrowing her brow.

  “I have to—” But Kelsey didn’t really have anything to do. She had hurried through all her homework in free period, and probably wasn’t going to study for her finals that much, anyway. “I have shit to do.”

  Ingrid grabbed Kelsey’s wrist. “Can you let us be friends with you? For once? It’s been a long time.”

  Gillian caught Ingrid’s eye and shook her head, as if to say, Let her be. “Text us if you feel like it, okay?”

  Kelsey softened, pushing out a genuine smile. “I definitely will.” She zipped up her puffy jacket and waved good-bye to her teammates. Soon. Just not now, she thought.

  When she arrived home, all the lights in the house were out, except for one lamp in her mother’s office.

  She kicked off her boots.

  “Kelsey?” Her mother’s voice had become so thin, like it would snap at any minute.

  “Yep, it’s me.”

  “Why are you home so late?”

  “Dance practice went long.”

  “Come here.”

  She found her mom already in pajamas, her glasses on the tip of her nose, poring over final papers next to a glass of red wine.

  “Have you eaten?”

  “I’ll find something.”

  Her mother tipped her head back, examining her over the top of her lenses. “You look so unnaturally tan for winter.”

  Kelsey said nothing. She had been using her allowance to go to the tanning salon since she was sixteen. It was part of who she was, who she liked to be. And all the Rock Chalk Dancers got tans. Or most of them, at least. Her mother knew that.