100 Days

by Nicole McInnes

  “It’s not like we were great pals to begin with.”

  “You used to be.”

  “That was a long time ago, Agnes.”

  “So?” Sometimes she talks to me like she’s my mother.

  “So,” Moira repeats. “It’s…” Her voice grows quieter. “Just whatever.”

  If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s when the people I care about aren’t getting along. Thinking about whatever rift this is between Moira and Boone brings me right back to the last fight my parents had before Dad finally left for good. I was nine, and their raised voices through the wall separating their bedroom from mine woke me from sleep.

  “I can’t do this,” my father was saying.

  “You can’t do this? You can’t do this?” Mom’s voice was hoarse, which was a clue the fight had been going on for a while before I woke up.

  “I love her so much, but I didn’t know it was going to be this hard.”

  “This is life, Tom. It’s just … life.”

  I tried plugging my ears, but their voices got through anyway.

  “You’re tough, Deb,” he answered. “You know how to keep moving forward despite the odds, day in and day out. I don’t.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying I love her more than I can stand, but I can’t do this anymore.”

  There was a long silence before Mom said the next thing. The final thing. “Well, you can just go ahead and get the hell out, then.”

  Moira and I ride the rest of the way to school in silence. She parks El-C in the usual spot and opens the door.

  “Isn’t he supposed to come out to your house again this week?” I ask her.

  Moira pauses like she’s considering something, but only for a second. “He won’t show,” she says.

  43

  BOONE

  DAY 58: APRIL 28

  I show up at Moira’s house on Thursday after school because that’s what her dad and I agreed to the last time I was over there. And I’m not one to go back on my word. Sure, I could have called and told him I was sick or something. I could have lied.

  I don’t know why Moira hates my guts so much, but she clearly does. I’m not about to let it get to me, though, even if I have no idea what I did to deserve her wrath. It’s the same old story, really. What have I ever done to deserve anyone’s hatred? Okay, so there was the thing in sixth grade, and that wasn’t cool of me. But, I mean, get over it already.

  At least I got the truck working again, which means there will be no question of her offering me a ride. Not that she wants to drive me anywhere anyway. It was pretty obvious Agnes forced her to pick me up on the side of the road the other day after school. I wish they’d just driven right past.

  As soon as I arrive at her house, Moira’s parents invite me inside. “We’re working from home today,” Moira’s mom says.

  I hesitate for a second, but I don’t want to be rude. Moira passes through the living room as I stand there with my hands buried in the pockets of my coat. She takes one look at me and then goes straight to what I assume is her bedroom and slams the door. Her mom looks at me with an unspoken question on her face. I just shrug.

  With all the cold, wet weather we had all winter and well into the spring, everyone’s behind on tree maintenance. Moira’s parents are no exception. Just by glancing at the big elm in their front yard, I can tell it needs about half a dozen branches cut off. A few of them are hanging over the roof, which could cause some expensive damage if those brittle limbs give way. Plus, judging by the amount of wilted, yellowish leaves I can already see this early in the season, I suspect the tree is diseased. I tell them as much.

  “Do you think it’s serious?” Mrs. Watkins asks when I point the leaves out to her.

  “I’ve seen it quite a bit,” I tell her. “My dad knew how to save trees infected with Dutch elm disease. But you might want to talk to an expert. I’m pretty sure the whole tree might have to come down if it’s not trimmed back now. Even that might not save it, but we could at least give it a shot.”

  She looks like she might be about to cry. Moira’s dad comes up and puts his arm around her. “I guess there’s such a thing as being too much of a tree hugger,” he says. “But go ahead, Boone. We trust you. Do what you have to do. This elm’s like a part of our family. We want to save it if possible.”

  I just nod. How did these two have a daughter like Moira? They’re so … well, gentle and … nice. Moira’s dad hands me a smallish chainsaw he got from the garage, and I climb up into the highest crook of the elm I can get to. Before long, I’m looking down on the roof, focused on the work, which is a good thing. The last thing I need to do is cut my own arm off because I’m distracted by the bitchy attitude of some girl who clearly has issues that are beyond the scope of my ability to—

  The chain hits a knot in the wood and snarls, bounces back toward my face. I manage to push back right before it slices through my nose, but that was close. Focus, idiot, I tell myself. I hope Moira didn’t see that; not that she cares enough to be watching me or anything.

  The rest of the work goes pretty smoothly. I manage to limb the worst of the high branches without dropping them on the roof or on my head. When I’m done, the tree looks a lot better. It might even survive. I don’t know why this makes me feel so proud, but it does. I’m pretty sure Moira’s parents will think it looks better, too. They went somewhere in the car when I was about halfway done. Before they left, Moira’s dad waved up at me. “We put your cash in an envelope on the seat of your truck,” he called out.

  Now I lower myself carefully out of the elm and half stumble to the back of the house, where I sit on the concrete step with a thud. My saw arm has pretty much gone numb, and I’m about as dog-tired as I’ve ever been.

  “My mom said I had to bring you this.” It’s Moira’s voice, surly as ever, coming from the doorway behind me.

  Twisting my body, I look up to see what she’s talking about. Then I laugh my not-exactly-friendly laugh. I hope it makes her as uncomfortable as her comment made me. Like she was forced to do something nice for the hired help, and it pretty much wrecked her day. “Don’t do me any favors,” I mutter, reaching up to take the glass of lemonade from her hand. Either she forgot the sugar or she left it out on purpose; when I chug it down, I realize (too late) that it’s just really strong lemon water she’s given me. I gag a little but keep drinking. For one thing, I’m so parched I almost don’t care. For another, I refuse to let her see that she got to me even a little bit.

  Her need to always be on the offense drives me crazy. It’s like she goes around constantly itching for a fight. I don’t understand it. Opposition finds me so easily, and life always gets worse when it does. Why would anyone go looking for it on purpose? Not that I care why Moira does any of the things she does. I’m over it. In fact, I’m done thinking about her at all. This time, I mean it. As usual, though, my mouth is lagging behind my brain. “What the hell happened to you, anyway?” I blurt out.

  Moira was already headed back into the house, but she freezes at my words. Moron, I scold myself.

  She turns around to face me, her eyes blazing with hatred. “Meaning?”

  “Meaning … I don’t know.” I’m looking away now, but for some inexplicable reason, I still don’t stop talking. I’ve reached the tipping point where I can no longer keep my rush of thoughts about her from spilling out. “All the…” With one grungy hand I motion to my own face, then gesture toward my body with both hands. “All the black … everything. Black hair, black makeup, black clothes. You look like walking death. I mean, you could mix it up a little, you know?”

  A long, bleak moment of silence hangs suspended in the air between us. God, I’m an idiot. Why does this fact always occur to me too late?

  “Mix it up,” Moira repeats, her voice suddenly too calm, too quiet. “Right, because it’s my job to make sure I always look pleasing for a guy. Is that it?”

  “Give me a break.”

&
nbsp; “No,” she tells me. “You give me a break. Do you even know what the statistical probability of a woman overcoming her culturally instilled desire to please men long enough to succeed in the world on her own terms is?”

  At which point I just stare at her, dumbfounded. Did she have to practice that line in front of a mirror? Holy hell, I’ve never been this tired. “No,” I say, my own voice calm and quiet now. I feel twenty years older than I am. “I don’t know that. How would I know that? How would anyone know that? I don’t … I don’t even know what you’re talking about right now.” I stand up and hand her the glass. “Tell your mom thanks for the lemonade,” I say. “Tell your dad the chainsaw is by the back door. Tell both of them good-bye for me. If it’s not too much trouble, that is.”

  44

  AGNES

  DAY 57: APRIL 29

  Mom and I are in the pool at the Y Friday after school. I tread water in the shallow end and watch as she finishes up her freestyle laps. Her arms sailing through the air and cutting through the water’s surface are the picture of strength. Everything about her is long and elegant, from her neck to her arms to her legs.

  Just this morning, I logged into the progeria community website for the first time in a while. The memorial page was updated with two new death announcements, one for a thirteen-year-old girl named Marisol in Mexico City and the other for a fourteen-year-old boy in Cleveland. I knew the boy, Daryn. We met on the website’s chat forum two years ago. I told him we should try to hang out at a progeria gathering someday, and he said that would be great. When I saw his memorial this morning, I didn’t really know what to think. I still don’t. I never told Mom about it, either.

  I look around at the other swimmers and continue to tread. Mom’s almost done with her laps. Thank goodness for the flippers on my feet. Without them, I would have already tired out by now. Some little kids swimming nearby glance in my direction, look at each other with wide eyes, and then paddle away toward the other side of the pool.

  45

  MOIRA

  DAY 56: APRIL 30

  What was I thinking, letting him waltz back into our lives like nothing ever happened, like the three of us had no bad history? Agnes and I were perfectly happy (for the most part, anyway), and now she’s all caught up in thoughts of Boone hanging out with us again, of Boone being our new best buddy. But what’s to stop him from waltzing right back out of our lives, just like he did in sixth grade? I wouldn’t care, of course, but it would break Agnes’s heart. No. Better to push him away now. In the long run, that’s what will be best. For Agnes.

  I thought I’d forgiven him for what happened all those years ago. I thought I’d forgotten that feeling of standing there with a knot in my stomach, pressured to do something I didn’t want to do. Something physical, athletic. Dodgeball, horseback riding. Doesn’t matter what it is. Those things are all about the body. They’re about reflexes and control, fitness and grace. I was always the big, ungainly girl picked last for any kind of sports team. It’s such a cliché, and I despise clichés. But this particular one happens to be my life—or at least it was. PE is finally an elective now that I’m a sophomore, but back then, back in grade school, it wasn’t an option. Everyone had to participate, even Agnes. And it was like Lord of the Flies on that blacktop. The ringleaders and the victims. The killers and the killed.

  Take that day when any possibility of friendship with Boone officially imploded. Dodgeball team captains were picked, and the rest of us were sent out to the blacktop to be chosen … or, in my case, aggressively not chosen, until one team was forced to take me just to keep the numbers even. Even Agnes got picked before me, but at least we were teammates. Boone was on our team, too, but he was acting like we weren’t there. Worse, he was laughing about something with Jared Vandercamp, who’d already cornered me in the hallway that year to spit insults in my face. He and Boone were apparently best buddies now that they’d been teammates for all of five minutes.

  Jared said something to Boone in a low voice as I headed toward where Agnes was standing, and I caught a glimpse of him sneering. Boone didn’t look at me at all, but as I walked past him, he stuck his foot out right in my path and tripped me. I knew it was his foot. Nobody else in the class wore dollar store tennis shoes. This certainty settled into my brain as I spotted the foot (too late) in my peripheral vision and then tried in vain to stop the momentum of my body as it pitched forward toward Agnes. Out of the way! I tried to scream at her, but there was barely time to open my mouth before I basically tackled my best friend. I threw my weight hard to the right in an attempt to land on the concrete instead, but it was no use. At least half of her tiny, delicate body was trapped beneath me when I landed. I rolled to the side, and she whimpered a little.

  For a long moment, nobody said anything. I expected Agnes to start screaming or at least crying, but she didn’t. Instead, in a voice so quiet I almost didn’t hear it, she said, “I think something’s broken, Em.”

  I struggled to my feet and told her not to move, that I’d go get Mrs. Johnson, the PE teacher. “Somebody stay with her!” I yelled. I registered the fact that nobody was doing anything of the sort, that our classmates were instead just standing there with their hands over their mouths, staring down at her crumpled form on the blacktop rather than comforting her like any human being with a beating heart would do. And then I heard it: the sound of Jared Vandercamp’s laughter followed by the other boys on our team cackling like hyenas, like they’d just witnessed the most hilarious thing ever. A few of the guys on the other team started laughing, too. The only one not laughing was Boone. Not that it mattered. I knew what he’d done to try to show everyone how cool he was, to show how much he belonged. He was no better than the rest of them. It made me sick to think about how Agnes and I let him be our friend. How we’d trusted him enough to let him into our little outcast club.

  It turned out something was broken: Agnes’s arm. She had to have it reset, which basically meant the ER doctor had to rebreak it, since the first break wasn’t clean. “It hurt more than anything,” she told me when I saw her at school the next day. She had to wear a cast and a sling for what seemed like an eternity, and her doctor wasn’t sure if the bone would ever be quite the same, since it was so delicate to begin with. I could tell how badly it hurt at any given time by looking at her face, even though she tried to hide it.

  Boone was suspended from school for only three days. The principal was willing to believe that the whole thing “might have been an accident,” which was the most infuriating thing I’d ever heard. I never talked to him again after that, not until our altercation in the cafeteria four years later.

  Some people might think it’s senseless to hold on to my anger all these years, especially since Agnes’s arm eventually ended up healing better than anybody thought it would. And I really did think I was over it. Mostly, anyway. But whether I want it to or not, what Boone did that day on the blacktop still reaches a place buried so far down beneath the layers of who I am that it’s almost like I’m not holding on to the memory at all. It’s like the memory is holding on to me, and I have no idea how to make it let go. Even if he had apologized afterward, which he didn’t, I’m still not sure I would have been able to forgive him.

  I used to go with my mom to sit zazen at a Buddhist retreat on the outskirts of town. We’d meditate with a bunch of other people inside a big white tent and then silently feast on vegan food afterward. It was kind of boring, but kind of neat, too. Maybe we should go do that again. Maybe it would help the stuff from my past loosen its grip. A form of meditation is what I try to do most of the time during school hours, anyway. I sit there, crammed into a too-small desk, trying to convince myself that the suffering is only temporary. That it’s a sentence I’m serving, a way of getting through. I do it for Agnes, because Agnes just wants to be a “normal” teen doing normal teen stuff like going to high school. The problem is, normal teens at our school don’t want anything to do with Agnes. Sure, they’re nice enough
to her when they have to be, but it’s not because they’re genuinely interested in being friends. Who has time for that kind of commitment to a girl they obviously view as a freak? Not that any of them would admit this. We’ve all had enough training in what you can or can’t say out loud to know better.

  Sometimes, like now, it occurs to me that maybe my parents are right. Maybe I should get away for a while. Everything’s pressing in too much lately, suffocating and confusing me. And it’s not like I don’t have options. There’s always …

  Berkeley.

  But no. I’m not ready for that kind of adventure.

  Am I?

  A strange noise from the spare room—Grant’s old room—interrupts the daydream. I haul myself up from the bed and go in there to investigate.

  Bingo is lying on his side in a striped patch of sunlight shining in through the blinds. It’s the dog’s favorite napping spot in the house, and he gets agitated any time the door to Grant’s room is closed. This time, though, his entire body is twitching. No, not twitching. More like convulsing.

  “Mom?” I call out. I turn my head toward the doorway so my voice will carry into the kitchen.

  “Coming,” she calls back.

  As I stand there watching, Bingo’s legs stick straight out in front of him, and his entire body goes rigid. Sometimes, when he’s in a deep sleep, his legs will twitch and he’ll make little squeaky barking sounds, like he’s chasing rabbits in his sleep, but this isn’t a dream. Breathless, I step closer and see that his eyes have rolled back in his head.

  “Mom!” I scream this time. “Something’s wrong with Bingo!”

  46

  BOONE

  DAY 55: MAY 1

  May day, I think as I bend down to pick a wild iris growing by the side of a boulder. SOS.

  Mom used to love getting flowers. Maybe the bunch I’m picking in the forest now will help her remember that.