True Love Way

by Mary Elizabeth

  HERB KISSED MAHTILDA TODAY, I write.

  Pen’s eyes widen, and she smiles. She looks down to write in her notebook.

  THAT’S GROSS!

  Disgust isn’t what I felt when I saw my best friend kiss the redhead behind the gym after lunch today. I looked at the world in shades of green, and when I went back to class, only Penelope’s lips were in color.

  I was jealous.

  HAVE YOU EVER BEEN KISSED? she writes.

  My heartbeat picks up, and exhaustion moves aside by the rush of red-hot adrenaline that shoots through my body. I sit up straight, hoping she can’t see the blush that bleeds from my cheeks to my chest.

  NO WAY, I write back. HAVE YOU?

  She quickly shakes her head back and forth, forth and back.

  Tense muscles in my shoulders relax, and I exhale. My heartbeat slows down as the talk about kissing drops into silence. I watch Penelope chew on her nails, and she looks back. As tiredness I can’t fight off pulls me under, the last thought I have before I fall asleep is about how glad I am that Pen’s never been kissed.

  Herb, Kyle, Penelope, and I spend the day at the beach, boogie boarding and diving through salty waves. We eat sandy sandwiches and capture starfish between rocks at the base of cliffs shaped like castles. As instructed, when the sun starts to go down, I grab Pen and our towels and run home.

  “Don’t be late, boy,” Wayne warned me before we left. “My daughter better be here to celebrate this country’s glory.”

  Our bare feet pound on the heated concrete, and our shoulders sting from the sun’s burn. We both have more freckles across our noses than we had this morning.

  It’s the Fourth of July, and people from every house on the block are out front with their grills and lawn chairs, enjoying our nation’s freedom. Evening air smells like hamburger grease and the vinegar in the barbeque sauce on chicken and ribs. Firecrackers pop and smoke bombs make everything foggy.

  After I snatch a slice of watermelon from my mom’s contribution to the block party, we follow Risa out back to light Penelope’s sparklers.

  “Are you guys ready for high school?” my sister asks. An unlit joint hangs at the corner of her lips, and her toes are dusty. Risa’s long blonde hair is parted down the middle and ironed straight to look like Janis Joplin’s. Penelope painted a peace sign on her cheek this morning to match the ocean-faded one on her own face.

  “Yep,” I say, throwing the watermelon rind into the trees.

  My partner in crime shrugs her reddened shoulders, twirling her sparkler’s magenta papered end between her fingers.

  Leaning against a heavily barked pine tree, Risa cups her hand over the end of the joint and lights it with her other. The open flame flickers an orange glow against her face, and the twisted end of her habit scalds bright red. My sister blows dense white smoke over her shoulder before tossing the silver Zippo to Pen.

  “I mean, I’ll try to watch over you, but I have my own things going on, you know,” she says.

  When Risa gave our parents her report card, they tried to tell me that the teachers at Castle Rain High love the elder Finnel child so much they want her to stay longer. I’m not an idiot; Risa failed twelfth grade, so she has to repeat her senior year.

  She’ll be a super senior. I’ll be a regular freshman.

  Failure waves her burning joint between Penelope and me. “But you have each other.”

  I roll my eyes, waiting for some don’t be weird comment from Pen that doesn’t come. She’s preoccupied with her sparkler, flicking the lighter’s strike wheel, sparking the flint but unable to light a flame; yellow embers reflect on her blue-framed shades. Offering my help, I light it in one shot.

  “We’ll be fine,” I reply to my sister. Penelope dances between us with a pink-twinkling fire stick.

  “High school’s different, D. Even in this piece of shit town.” Dark ash falls from the joint. Risa’s eyelids droop, and a lazy smile forms on her lips. “I heard that school in Neah Bay closed. Rumor is they’re busing them into Castle Rain until something’s figured out.”

  I light a second sparkler for Pen.

  “So what?” I say.

  My sister laughs. “So what? Those reservation boys are huge, and they’re troublemakers. I can’t imagine they’re going to like it when they’re uprooted from their hometown and transported an hour just to go to school. But that’s what the man does. When people get comfortable, the government breaks apart families and ruins lives. That’s why I say fuck the authority. I’ll go to high school for five years if I want to. I won’t conform!”

  Penelope takes a break from sketching stars with sparkles to cross her eyes under cobalt-tinted lenses and twirl her finger beside her temple, like Risa is coo-coo coo-coo.

  The scent of skunk and wet grass hangs heavily in the air, smoking out the smell of burning coal and sunscreen. I have another sparkler in my back pocket for Pen, but the more my sister hits the herb, the more outrageous she becomes.

  “The wars,” Risa says, lowering her voice. “They’re all a conspiracy.”

  I side-eye Pen, who covers her mouth with her palm to keep from laughing.

  “Which war?” I ask.

  “All of them,” paranoia replies. “President Clinton ordered the hit on World War II.”

  Embers fall from her joint, and she waits for my reaction, puffing smoke circles from her mouth. I’m about to carry Pen out of here over my shoulder when the ultimate conspiracy theory calls out for his daughter.

  “You better not be out there with that freak boy!” Mr. Finnel booms from his backyard, practically rumbling the ground beneath my feet. “Boy, you better not be out there getting fresh with my girl!”

  “President Clinton sent him here to ruin your life, too,” my sister laughs, squinting as she smokes another toke.

  Penelope drops her firework and snuffs it out with the toe of her sandal-covered foot. Pushing sea-salt caked hair out of her face, the girl with sunburned shoulders runs up and presses her lips to my cheek before she disappears between the trees without a word.

  I slap my hand over my face where she left a kiss as heat flashes through my body, from the tips of my toes to the ends of every strand of hair on my head.

  “Handle that one with care,” Risa says. She winks, but it’s with both eyes.

  So, she just blinks.

  Mom and Dad smell incense on Risa right away and call a family meeting on the front porch away from the block party.

  “Have you no respect for the law?” My mom stomps her foot. Her blonde hair bounces. “Have you no respect for your lungs? Have you no respect at all?”

  My father has his Hawaiian printed shirt buttoned all the way to the top like a cholo on vacation. His glasses slip to the end of his nose as he leans toward me and sniffs. I take a step back with my hands held up.

  “I did not inhale,” I say with a smile.

  My sister flips me the bird, and I run down the steps to sit beside Penelope on the damp lawn. Tables, chairs, barbeques, and smokers have all been cleared from the street. The sun is down, but the air is still summertime thick. Pen’s barefoot, and her dirty hair is pulled back away from her tanned face and skinny neck.

  Freckled cheeks go red, but she doesn’t look at me.

  “Hi,” I say.

  “Shhh,” she responds. Penelope drops her hand, palm up on the grass between us.

  With the prickle of his only child’s lips still on my face, Wayne rushes into the street with a firework and a lighter. Pen’s smile bends high when the fountain erupts like a volcano, gushing silver and gold magma into the air. It whistles and pops, bursting with colors that brighten the dark street. Illuminating the faces of my family and hers with white light, it dims as fast as it catches the world on fire.

  Mr. Finnel is there to replace it with one that shatters the night like a strobe light. Between blinding surges of intensity, I lower my hand beside Pen’s and immediately feel the warmth of how close she is.

  My pu
lse drops in sync with pulsating brilliance and keeps the beat when it burns out.

  Taking advantage of the few seconds of darkness between flares, fountains, and wheels, I scoot closer to the girl next door.

  Our pinkies touch.

  There’s no air.

  My ears ring.

  My vision’s spotty.

  Red, white, and blue lights screech as they lift for the stars, and there’s no stopping me now. I grab her hand—warm and sticky with nails she bites until they bleed—and tie our fingers so closely together not even the hand holding Nazi’s glare can make me let go.

  “How long have you been sad, Penelope?” the female doctor in a long white coat asks.

  I shift back on the examination table, crinkling the bleached tissue paper underneath my legs. Mom wipes away tears she tries to hide from her eyes, sitting in a blue plastic chair in the corner of the small examination room. The scent of rubbing alcohol stings my nose, and images of ocean life painted on the walls in bright colors don’t make me feel majestic or safe like they’re supposed to.

  “You can be honest with her, sweetie,” my mom says, forcing a smile. She clutches her large leather purse to her chest.

  My eyes swing back and forth across the room, unable to find a spot to focus on. Schools of fish, a winking octopus, and the grinning blue whale look back at me, mocking my unease with their perma-happiness.

  “Do you want to play with my stethoscope?” Dr. White Coat asks in a high-pitched, generic tone. She and the whale have the same smile.

  “I’m almost fourteen.” The palms of my hands tingle, and my chest feels like it’s full of fluid.

  Red-lacquered lips fall into a straight line. “You’re right, I’m sorry.”

  I’ve spent time trapped in offices like this one since I was five. Every doctor I’ve ever seen asks the same questions as the one before them. They wear the same stiff coats, speak in identical patronizing tones, and each promises to make the spinning agony inside me disappear.

  They all shine lights into my eyes.

  “Just look straight ahead,” Dr. Stethoscope says, aiming her penlight through the lenses of my shades. Her breath smells like rubbing alcohol, too. “This would be easier if you’d take your sunglasses off.”

  My heart’s been spied on by countless pediatricians.

  “Are you nervous?” She lifts my wrist and counts the beats manually, just in case she heard wrong.

  I always become a pincushion.

  “We’re going to run some blood tests, Penelope. This is normal, and it will only pinch a little.”

  Mom holds my arm down while I scream. It doesn’t hurt, but stretching my lungs feels good.

  Every Rorschach test is different, but I always give the same answer.

  “What do you see in this one?” Dr. White Coat asks. She exhales heavily through her small nose, and her ear-length haircut gets uglier the longer I’m made to look at it.

  The black ink blob on the white card looks a lot like my dad’s shaggy chest when wet or two people holding hands.

  “Murder,” I answer dishonestly.

  Mom smacks her forehead.

  Dr. Mushroom Hairdo lowers the test card and says angrily, “What?”

  Shrugging my shoulders, I kick my dangling legs out and crinkle more tissue paper beneath me.

  “Murder.”

  “You see … murder?”

  “Penelope, please, don’t do this again. Dr. Laura is here to help you, baby.” Mom’s round eyes plead with me from her seat in the corner between the door and the blood pressure machine.

  It’s the exact expression her face twists into each time I’m dragged into fake oceans to be studied, poked, and questioned. They throw words around like anxiety, helplessness, and depression. My eating, sleeping, and social habits are questioned, dissected, and analyzed.

  “How many hours a night do you sleep?”

  “Do you eat at least three times a day?”

  “Are there people your age you feel close to?”

  For the first time there is, but I don’t want to talk about Dillon Decker. Words about brilliant birthday marbles I keep in my pockets—five in each side—won’t pass my lips. I can’t hide the blush that spreads across my cheeks when I think about the way his sweaty hand felt holding mine, but they’ll never know. Mom tells Dr. Nosy about the boy next door, but when she looks at me for confirmation, I don’t confess happiness on handlebars.

  “Have you ever experimented with drugs and alcohol?”

  “Do you want to hurt yourself?”

  “Are you sexually active?”

  I cross my arms over my chest and look up at the white ceiling through my orange lenses, refusing to answer anything.

  “Do you hear voices?”

  Only yours, I think to myself.

  “Do voices in your head ever tell you to do anything you’re not comfortable with?”

  My eyes drop down to my mother’s. She sits on the edge of her chair, expressionless with a sea turtle behind her head full of dark hair. As I wait for her to tell this quack I’m unhappy not mental, I notice the stiff posture in her shoulders and lack of breathing and realize the woman who gave me life might actually believe there’s crazy behind this sadness.

  When she finally speaks up, it’s nothing I haven’t heard before.

  “Depression runs on my husband’s side of the family,” she says, taking a breath. “Both his mother and sister suffer from it, but they didn’t develop symptoms until adulthood. Penelope started showing warning signs as a small child.”

  Dr. Jerk Face nods.

  “Psychotic behavior,” Mom continues slowly, “has never been an issue, but Pen does have obsessive tendencies. My daughter doesn’t sleep at night and rarely eats entire meals. Because these depressive episodes occur more often as she gets older, she has missed a lot of school, and her grades have suffered.”

  I almost start screaming again to make her stop talking.

  “The new school year starts in three weeks, and I’m worried about the way she’s going to deal with the pressure of high school. I mean, she has her sunglasses…”

  I pound my fist into the examination table, and the fluid feeling in my chest hardens and prickling panic trickles down my arms into the tips of my fingers. My lips tingle, and my teeth snap together and grind.

  “Penelope never did well around strangers. As a toddler, the tantrums she had in public were frightening. She would cry herself into unconsciousness. Other times she threw up on herself or pounded on her chest until she bruised because she said it hurt on the inside. People would look at us like we were monsters.”

  Mom allows grief to fall freely down her cheeks.

  “Watching her little face turn blue from how afraid she was … I still hear her screams.” She stops to ponder for a moment. “After a while, my husband and I took turns running errands so that one of us could stay home with her. When she started kindergarten, it was apparent how unaccustomed to human interaction she was. Tantrums started again, and most days I would have to sit in class with her so she wouldn’t cry. Although, she still didn’t participate, and after the first month they wanted to drop her.”

  Dr. Laura passes my mother a box of tissues, which she takes but doesn’t use.

  “The day before they were going to kick her out of school, my husband bought her a pair of pink sunglasses from a gas station. He told her they made her invisible, and she believed him.”

  I pound my tight fist into the padding once more and start to shake my head, knowing exactly where this conversation goes next.

  “Penelope,” the pediatrician starts, “have you considered trading the sunglasses for something that will actually help?”

  “Nope,” I answer quickly.

  “You have to understand that you’re only putting a Band-Aid over the real issue. Depression has a history of becoming worse with age, and you’re self-medicating with what you believe makes you invisible. But I can prescribe something that will tre
at your true symptoms.”

  “No.”

  “This isn’t your fault, and I can help. One tiny pill before you go to bed and you won’t have a problem going to sleep anymore. School will be easier because you’ll be able to concentrate, and medication will dull the ache inside your chest. There won’t be a need to be invisible anymore, Penelope.”

  Squeezing my eyes shut, I swerve my thoughts to the only person who’s never made me feel unseen and focus on the kindness and care Dillon offers me until my grip on the edge of the table loosens. My lungs fill with air as I take a breath, and my jaw aches as it relaxes.

  I look up as Dr. Laura passes my mom a prescription.

  “She’s been up there for a week, Sonya. What’s wrong with her?”

  Dad just walked through the front door, and he and Mom are already fighting. His muffled voice travels through the floor and walls from downstairs into my room. Kitchen cabinets slam closed, jolting my panicky heart. From the middle of my bed, peeking out from underneath a pile of heavy blankets, I listen to them argue like I have for the last seven nights in a row.

  “Football season’s about to start, and the team needs me. I can’t be home all day. You’re here, so act like the adult and make our girl get up,” Dad barks, slamming the utensil drawer shut. Sterling silver forks, knives, and spoons clank together. The sound digs into my bones.

  Normally soft-spoken and non-confrontational, Mom cries out, and a moment later glass smashes. I push myself up against million pound gravity and drop my numb legs over the side of the bed. My head feels too large for my shoulders, and my skeleton too soft to support the weight of my body.

  “This isn’t about a little girl who thinks she’s invisible, Wayne. She needs more than sunglasses!” Mom shouts. Another glass breaks.

  Stepping toward my bedroom door with wobbly knees and gritted teeth, each step is harder to take than the one before it. I wait for the floor to fall out from underneath me or for the walls to cave in, but I safely reach out for the gold doorknob and turn it.