by Ali Benjamin
No time soon, I thought. And then I felt a little wave of nausea.
The waitress set down our drinks. The ice in my Shirley Temple clinked against the glass.
“Sounds really cool,” he said. He nodded at the waitress as a kind of thank-you, then poured his beer. “We’d be able to walk where dinosaurs did. Apparently they were all over this whole valley.”
I thought about that, considered that dinosaurs, real dinosaurs, had walked near where I now sat in a Chinese restaurant drinking a Shirley Temple, tens of millions of years later.
We ate. I watched the fish in the tank. Those poor fish didn’t even know there was such a thing as a giant ocean tank in an aquarium, let alone an entire ocean. They probably thought this glass tank was the whole world.
When the server set down our fortune cookies at the end of the meal, mine was blank. The lucky numbers were on one side, just like they always are, and the LEARN CHINESE message told me that in Chinese, winter is dong tian.
But on the side where the fortune would go, there was just a line drawing of a rose—otherwise, it was totally blank.
I reached over to look at my dad’s fortune. It said, A SMOOTH LONG JOURNEY! GREAT EXPECTATIONS.
I frowned, because it really seemed like that one should have been mine.
On the way home, we listened to the news. There were wildfires out west, landslides on the other side of the world. Doctors had spent fourteen hours removing a tumor that weighed more than the small girl whose body it had been growing in. I tried to picture this, a child-sized lump on top of an actual child, but I could only imagine a giant balloon, carrying her away.
And then I heard the announcer say a name I recognized: Diana Nyad.
“. . . is making final preparations for her fifth attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida without a shark tank,” the announcer said. “Her previous attempts were foiled by jelly—”
Dad swerved around a car that had merged into his lane. “Sure, buddy,” he muttered to the other driver. “It’s all about you.”
“Shhhhh,” I hissed. I turned up the radio.
“Te sixty-four-year-old Nyad says she hopes this mission, her fifth, will finally allow her to claim victory over the jellies.”
And then the newscaster moved on to a different story, and my dad glanced at me, his hands still on the wheel.
“You following that story?” My dad sounded surprised.
I shrugged and looked out the window at the barren trees. Diana Nyad might be scary tough, but there was something about her that I really liked: the way she knew what she wanted and stopped at nothing to make it happen. She refused all limitations: distance, age, even jellyfish stings.
When we got to my mom’s house, my dad said, “Good night, kiddo,” like he always did.
I got out of the car just like I always did.
He waited in the driveway until I walked through the front door. Just before I stepped inside, I waved to him.
Goodbye, Dad.
He flicked his headlights, then backed out of the driveway.
Here’s the most important thing I’ve learned from not-talking: It is much, much easier to keep a secret when you don’t use any words at all.
And then it was Tuesday.
The day I would buy my ticket using my dad’s credit card.
Buying the ticket was simple enough. I plugged in my dates and locations. The ticket would take me to Chicago, then to Hong Kong, then to Brisbane.
It seemed impossible to imagine that my body would be in any of those places. From my tiny bedroom in South Grove, Massachusetts, none of those places seemed real at all.
My ticket would get me to Cairns, Australia, a day and a half after I departed. I’d go from winter to summer in just thirty-six hours.
I typed in each number of the credit card, my dad’s full name, the expiration date. Everything.
At the bottom of the travel site where I made my reservation was a big red button: PURCHASE TICKET.
I clicked it. Just like that.
And then it was real.
I sat and breathed for a while.
When I got up, I called the Green Hills Airport Shuttle. I said I needed to get to the airport for an international flight. I said it confidently, as if I booked travel plans like this all the time.
The voice on the other end of the line didn’t register any surprise. The voice didn’t ask me how old I was. The voice just asked me what time my flight was and then told me what time I should be picked up.
I had two choices. The shuttle could pick me up from the student center at the university where Aaron coached, or it could pick me up from a downtown hotel.
The university was riskier but closer. I could walk there.
I told them I’d take the campus shuttle. They told me I needed $54 in cash. It was arranged.
In school the next day, my last day there, I felt a strange sort of elation.
I am done with this.
I am leaving and I won’t be back until I have proved something important.
It was like I was floating through the hallway. Like I was there and not-there at the same time. Almost like I was already a ghost. Ghost heart.
At the end of the day, Justin came over to my locker. “Hey, Belle,” he said. “You coming to the dance Friday?”
And in that instant, I wanted so badly to tell him. Maybe if I’d needed someone to deliver a message after I left, I would have done it. But I wasn’t completely sure he would keep his mouth shut. So I shook my head. “I’ll be out of town.”
“Too bad,” he said. “I’ve got a great costume planned.”
“What are you, a villain or a hero?” I asked, referring to the theme my classmates had chosen.
“Sorry,” he said, and he smiled. “Gotta be at the dance to know for sure.”
The bell rang. We put on our coats and walked to the buses together.
Just before I got on my bus, I paused and grinned right at him.
“What are you smiling about?” he asked.
“Villain,” I said. “I’ll bet your costume is a villain.”
I got on my bus and sat in my seat alone. Justin waved at me through the window. Then he dug his hands deep into his coat pockets before walking off to board his own bus.
The engines started up, and I watched as Eugene Field Memorial Middle School got smaller and smaller, its bricks and cement gradually disappearing into the distance.
When I stepped off the school bus, I decided not to go straight home. Instead, I walked through the cold air to Aaron and Rocco’s apartment. I wanted to hear them call me Suzy Q one last time. I wanted to be distracted by their energy and conversation. But when I rang the doorbell, no one answered.
I stood there in their backyard, watching my breath. My fingers were numb, and I longed to go inside, to sit in their space if I couldn’t sit with them.
I knew they kept their key under a potted plant in the backyard. They probably wouldn’t mind if I let myself in. Just for a few minutes. Just long enough to warm up before going home.
Inside, I wandered from room to room: the kitchen with its clean, still-wet dishes resting neatly in the dish rack (Aaron and Rocco couldn’t have been gone long). The bathroom, which smelled of shaving cream. The living room with its stacks of magazines, Sports Illustrated and the New Yorker and the Atlantic and something called Adbusters. In the corner, a pair of Nike sneakers with inside-out athletic socks stuffed into them.
I hated that I was leaving them.
On the mantel I saw a framed photograph of Aaron from years ago, resting on top of some cash. A Post-it note was stuck to the frame.
I lifted the picture. In it, Aaron stood on a soccer field, the same field I saw every day through the window of my math class. He held a soccer ball and wore thick glasses and had braces—I’d forgotten that he’d ever worn braces. His arms looked so skinny—skinnier even than mine. He must have been my age when this photograph was taken.
I saw no trace of the confiden
t coach he was today.
On the note, Rocco had written, I loved you before I knew you. Even when you looked like this. XOXO.
I placed the picture back on the mantel, and I picked up the money. Two twenties, a five, and three ones. Forty-eight dollars.
I’d already taken so much from my mom. I had booked a flight on my dad’s credit card. I didn’t need to steal from these guys, too, did I?
And yet. I didn’t really know what I needed. What if I was short by exactly $48?
I thought about Bridget Brown standing in the Nashville airport, counting her money.
I stuffed the cash into the pocket of my jeans, started for the door, and then paused.
I ran back to the mantel, grabbed the framed photo of Aaron, and ran out of the apartment. It was only after I stepped outside that I realized I’d left the key inside, on the mantel. I turned back to get it, but their door had locked from the inside. I was locked out.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I ran practically the whole way home, gripping Aaron’s photo and nearly slipping several times on the icy sidewalk.
It was thursday, 7:18 a.m. My last morning at home. Mom would leave early this morning, thinking I’d catch the school bus on my own. But instead of going to school, I’d head to campus, so the shuttle could take me to the airport.
I was placing slices of bread in our broken old toaster, another one of Mom’s thrift-store “treasures,” when she walked into the kitchen, wearing her work clothes. She kissed me on top of my head, and I pulled away.
“You remember that I’ve got a showing this morning, right, Zu?”
Of course I did. I had arranged my plans around it.
“You have everything you need for the day?”
I nodded. I did, although it wasn’t exactly the day she thought I had planned.
Mom picked up her bag, started sorting through papers. “Ugh,” she said. “I just hate showing houses in the winter. Everything always looks so bleak.”
In my head I told her. I am going, Mom. I am going away.
As Mom shoved the papers back into her bag, I opened the utensil drawer and pulled out a butter knife.
“I don’t know,” she mused. “Maybe summer’s not that far away.”
I shut the drawer harder than I’d intended.
“Whoa, careful there,” she snapped.
I am sorry, Mom. You will not understand.
When my toast popped up, the edges were blackened.
Stupid burned toast from this stupid so-called treasure. Somehow, those black edges seemed like the saddest thing in the world.
And then I got angry at myself about being sad.
Sad was dangerous. Sad could ruin everything. Sad was the one thing that might still stop me.
I threw the toast into the sink, hard. Crumbs scattered all over the metal basin.
“Zu,” my mom said. She sounded surprised.
I ripped open the bag of bread and yanked out two more slices.
Just go, just go, just go. I can’t get started until you go away.
Mom shook her head. “Whoa,” she muttered. “Someone got up on the wrong side of the bed.”
I placed the bread in the toaster and turned the dial down to the lightest setting. From behind me, my mom put her hands on my shoulders. I ducked away from her touch.
Mom, just go. You’re the last one I have to say goodbye to, and I just want this part to be over. Please, just go.
I threw open the refrigerator door. The bottles and jars inside the door rattled.
“Okay, Zu,” Mom said. “What is up with you today?”
What is up with me is that I am about to do this very big thing. And every moment you spend with me makes me want to do it less.
I stared inside the fridge for a second.
“What are you looking for?” she asked. “Butter?”
And that is why I need you to disappear.
I slammed the refrigerator door shut. More glass rattled.
My mom took a deep breath—the kind where she breathes in and out through her nose, really, really slowly. I knew she was trying to avoid what she would call losing her cool.
She walked to the refrigerator and opened the door. Then, without saying a word, she placed a stick of butter, the wrapper half-open, on the counter in front of me.
I didn’t dare look at her. Instead, I brought the butter to my nose, as if I were sniffing it. I tossed it back onto the counter like it smelled bad.
“For heaven’s sake, Zu. You’re being rude.”
Please. Please, just go.
My toast popped up, less burned this time. I grabbed it, slammed it onto a plate, and started smearing butter on it so hard that I ripped the bread.
“Zu,” Mom said, “if there’s something I can do to help turn your morning around, this would be the time to tell me.”
And then I said it.
“Just go,” I muttered.
“Zu . . .”
I whipped around, the hiss already coming out of me. “Just go, Mom. I don’t. Want. You. Here.”
I wanted to be past this part. I wanted to have already crawled through my escape hatch into whatever world lay beyond. I wanted all the goodbyes to be over with.
Mom glanced at the clock. “I don’t want to be late, but, honey—”
“What is wrong with you?” I cut her off. “Why can’t you just go away?”
There was such a gulf between my insides and outsides, between what was in my heart and what I was putting into the world. That gulf was so big it was about to crack me into three billion pieces, right there in the middle of the kitchen.
Mom took a deep breath. “I don’t know what to do,” she said softly.
“You should go,” I said. “That’s what you should do.”
Mom picked up her bag. “I’ll see you after school, okay?” she said. “We can talk then.”
I won’t be here, Mom. I’m sorry, but I won’t be here. There is something I have to do.
“I hope your day gets better from here, Zu.” She paused, then added, “I love you.”
She closed the door quietly behind her.
As I listened to her footsteps on the walk, I wanted two things at once: I wanted to make my escape. But at the same time, I wanted to chase my mom so she could stop me from leaving. I wanted her to tell me that there were people who needed me here, at home, more than anyone else needed me to do this thing.
I wanted her to put me to bed, and to wake me only when everything was back to normal.
But I didn’t know anymore what normal even looked like.
Mom’s car drove away.
It was only when she was gone that I understood I still had one more goodbye.
I picked up the phone.
I still knew the number by heart, remembered it from years of can’t-wait conversations, like the time we both finished reading James and the Giant Peach on the same day and I couldn’t wait to talk to her about the peach mansion in New York City. Or the hundreds of times we called each other to check the homework assignment, even though we both already knew it. Or the day Dylan Parker showed up at school with his high-top sneakers and Patriots jersey and his hair spiked into a faux-hawk and Franny called to say, “That new kid is really weird, right?” I hadn’t noticed he was particularly weird—I hadn’t given him much thought at all—but I said yes, and then didn’t figure out for a long time why she’d wanted to talk about him in the first place.
The phone rang three times. I was just about to hang up when I heard someone pick up.
“Hello?”
Franny’s mom.
I took a deep breath. She couldn’t have known that I’d spent the last few months not-talking, that I’d not spoken into a phone since before Franny died. She couldn’t have known how hard it was to say anything at all.
“How is Fluffernutter?”
There was a long pause before Franny’s mom answered.
“She’s good, Suzy,” she said. “You can come over and play
with her sometime if you want.”
I thought about that. I imagined going over there and sitting with Franny’s mom, instead of her alone, and me alone, the two of us connected only by some cords strung up on wooden posts along the side of the roads. I wasn’t sure I would ever want that, but I said, “Okay.”
We didn’t say anything for a while. Then I said, “Maybe it’s too early in the day to call. I didn’t think about that.”
“No, it’s fine. I’ve been up for a while.” I pictured her sitting in the kitchen, the wallpaper border near the ceiling with its strips of stamped ivy, the floral porcelain handles on the cabinets. Franny and I always smeared brownie batter on those handles when we baked, no matter how hard we tried to keep everything neat.
“There’s a school dance tomorrow night.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. The theme is heroes and villains.”
It was hard to know what was okay to say and what wasn’t. I mean, maybe I shouldn’t even have told her about the dance, since Franny never got a chance to go to any dances. It was weird. I was growing, and other kids were growing. In a few months, I would officially be a teenager. In another year, I would be nearly fourteen years old, which sounded so old it seemed nearly impossible. But Franny would always be twelve.
“Which are you?” Franny’s mom asked.
“What?”
“Are you going as a hero or a villain?”
“Oh,” I said. “I won’t be there. I’ll be out of town.”
I took a deep breath, because this was it: This was my chance to explain everything I was about to do and why. To tell her that everyone else might have given up at sometimes things just happen. But I hadn’t.
Before I had a chance to begin, Franny’s mom said, “You know she always admired you so much, Suzy.”
And then I didn’t know what to say.
“She said you never cared what anyone else thought. I could tell how much she liked that about you. I think she wished she had a little more of that in her.”
Franny’s mom’s words were such a surprise that I wondered if she might be lying.
It had never occurred to me that Franny might wish she could be like me. And of course what Franny’s mom had just said wasn’t true: I had cared what someone thought. I’d cared what Franny thought.