The Heart is Not a Size

by Beth Kephart

  Beth Kephart

  The Heart Is Not a Size

  For Jeremy,

  who lived Juárez with me,

  and whose own heart knows no measure

  Contents

  Prologue

  What I remember now is the bunch of them running:…

  Part One

  One

  It was a sign thumbtacked high on the corkboard of…

  Two

  All I had to do to convince my mom to…

  Three

  They like to tell you that panic attacks begin in…

  Four

  My second panic attack had happened right out in broad…

  Five

  You can’t ride a bike to the mall from where…

  Six

  The next day I waited for Riley to call. She…

  Seven

  Two days later, Riley was, apparently, Riley. She had gotten…

  Eight

  My third panic attack happened during second period, April 3,…

  Nine

  The next day I woke to the quadruple clopping of…

  Part Two

  One

  We were out of our minds with the heat the…

  Two

  A little later we were all packed tight into our…

  Three

  Out in the heat, on the work site, it was…

  Four

  Back at the compound, after dinner, Mack told a story.

  Five

  It was on the second day that the children came.

  Six

  We didn’t get back until five, each of us kids…

  Seven

  We’d stirred up fifteen batches of concrete; Sam and Corey…

  Eight

  Two hours later, when the sandstorm stopped, it was as…

  Nine

  That night, after dinner, most of us went straight to…

  Ten

  The goose woke everybody else. It started honking soon after…

  Eleven

  We drove to Anapra with American music playing loud. Drake…

  Twelve

  I returned the way I’d come, up along the high…

  Thirteen

  Roberto’s cousin had brought two bamboo chairs into the room…

  Fourteen

  A cloud had floated in and opened; at last the…

  Fifteen

  At dusk we pulled the tables side by side and…

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Books by Beth Kephart

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  What I remember now is the bunch of them running: from the tins, which were their houses. Up the white streets, which were the color of bone. All the way to the top of Anapra, to where we were standing in our secondhand scrubs and where Riley said, “They might as well be flowers, blown right off their stalks,” and Sophie said, “This is so completely wild,” and the Third said nothing at all. The Third: He wasn’t talking yet. He was all size and silence.

  “I should tell Mack,” I said, but I didn’t budge, didn’t even turn and glance back toward where Mack and the others were digging in, hanging tarp, toting two-by-fours from one angle of sun fizzle to another. Because the kids of Anapra might have been chunks of blown-off petals, like Riley said, but they mostly looked like wings to me, flying and flying in their bright, defiant best; their yellow cotton shirts, red fringy skirts, blue trousers. They looked like something no one should lose to a single instant of forgetting.

  It was only our second day.

  We’d pinned everything on nothing.

  We’d flown south through the swill of a storm, ready for service. On the runway the rain against the plane had been the sound of slash, and then there was the high kick of altitude, and then the stitch of lightning through the chunking gray-green clouds. Finally we were through all that and into nothing but blue, the clouds a horrifying plunge below. I was window-seated beside a kid named Corey, who was friends with Sam and Jazzy but not with me; I was thinking about how, up so high, there was nothing to measure distance with. The sky was blue, just that one color—blue. You could fly forever and never get one inch closer to the sun.

  Riley was back in seat 15B, accessorized with her hot-pink iPod, her twenty-two beaded bracelets. She’d snatched the tortoiseshell claw from the back of her head before we’d boarded, letting her yellow-streaked-with-orange hair go messy around her shoulders, and she was swamped by this olive T-shirt with these fuchsia letters that would have won any prize, she boasted, for ugly. Riley had one of those freckle mists over the bridge of her nose and eyes the guys called sapphire. She had thirteen hoops that hung like minitambourine jingles from her left ear. She was smarter than she’d let most people believe; but she was private about that, just as she was with most things. Going to Anapra was the pact we’d made. If you go, I’ll go: That was our mantra.

  Of course, Riley’s parents thought that I’d be looking out for her, that I’d make sure that nothing lousy happened. That’s the problem with the way I am—big boned, brown haired, straight-backed, steady, and therefore (anyone can do the calculation) revoltingly responsible. When you’re seventeen years old and you’ve never kissed a boy and you’re in all the honors classes, when you can’t stand the thought of sticking fingers into your eyes so you still wear glasses and not contact lenses, when you’re the middle child of three, you have what comes down to no choice. All the neighbors choose you for their cat sitting. All the summer camps want you as their aide. All the parents suggest to their kids: You should be friends with Georgia. I was what passed for safe in a hapless world.

  Or, at least, to most people I was.

  PART One

  one

  It was a sign thumbtacked high on the corkboard of the local Acme. A flyer, really—quick-copy-shop mauve and nothing fancy. The headline read TWO WEEKS THAT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE—another famous preposterous promise, and so I stopped to read it. I find it humorous, what claims get made in the interest of stirring up business. I find it relaxing, reading the things they stick to the cork at the local grocery store.

  So it wasn’t the headline that suckered me in; it was the smaller-type info. The stuff about traveling south of the border, to the great Mexican nation. The promises about building community. Participants will come together for a shared purpose, the flyer said. They’ll live and work with the people of Juárez on behalf of those with nothing. Twelve people my age were being solicited for the summer trip, plus two adult chaperones. If you wanted to know more, you could ring up GoodWorks or visit the web. I read the thing through twice, and after that all the other nearby flyers and tabs and desperate pleas for house sitters and dog sitters and nannies. Then I called Riley.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “What’s up?” It was Christmas break of our junior year, four days past the presents. She was downloading songs to her iPod.

  “I’m at the Acme,” I told her.

  Riley groaned. “Reading the corkboard again?”

  “Precisely,” I said. “Reading the corkboard.”

  “Don’t you have a Lit thing due?”

  “I do. But this is better.”

  “And?”

  “And I’ve made a discovery.”

  “Can’t wait.” She big-yawned. “What’s that?”

  “You ever heard of Juárez?”

  “That’s a battleship, right? Or, like, the name of a painter?”

  “Wrong again.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “Your best every time, Riley. Always.”

  “Okay, so what’s Juárez?” she said, after she remembered I was still waiting.<
br />
  “A place,” I said. “In Mexico. Do you mind if I come over?”

  From the Acme to Riley’s took thirty minutes walking. By bike I could get there in ten. There was a small stretch of ugliness before you got to the perfect prettiness of Riley’s neighborhood, where every mini-mansion sat on a hill and was connected to the street by a cobbled drive. They’d chewed up a farm to make room for the homes, and then they’d gone and rooted in new trees—little spindles that gave off no shade and hardly dirtied the emerald-colored lawns with fallen leaves. In the winter those trees looked like shiver, all lit with Christmas doodads.

  At Riley’s, which was the biggest house on the tallest hill, there must have been two dozen of those minuscule birches—twelve on one side of the cobbled drive, twelve on the other—all of them done up with blinking reds, greens, whites. I had to walk my bike to the top of that hill. I parked it around back and out of sight—rule number 37,854 of Riley’s more-perfect-than-most-perfect mother. I called Riley after I parked. She let me in through the back door and I went up the set of back stairs. It was easier than going the front-door route and drinking ginger tea with Riley’s mom.

  Riley was sprawled out as usual when I found her, looking tinier than ever in her pink-frilled, queen-sized bed. She had a bunch of pillows at her head and the buds of her iPod plugged in. She was doing a squiggle dance on her back like a flipped-over turtle, but when she saw me she yanked at her ear buds, slapped the edge of the mattress, and invited me to sit down.

  “Do you have an encyclopedia in this room?” I asked, looking past her now to the wall of shelves where she kept every scrap of collected thing. Used water bottles, lacrosse medals, People magazines, the little dolls that her parents used to bring her from their around-the-world trips—excursions, they called them. There were sketches she’d never developed for art and sculptures that had gone screwy and buckled watercolor portraits; there was a bunch of books lying sideways, like props—little stages on which sat the fuzzy elephants and neon monkeys from the Devon Horse Show, where we’d gone every year since we were kids and where Riley inevitably won at the water pistol booth.

  “Maybe,” Riley said. “Somewhere. Why?”

  “Juárez?” I said. “Remember?”

  I tilted my head sideways to read the names of the books, pushed my glasses up on the bridge of my nose. Finally I found something that said World Atlas. Probably some gift from some aunt somewhere. Clearly not a book Riley’d ever opened. “You mind?” I asked, starting to shift things around—moving a stuffed turkey to the ledge of another book, shifting a squeaky mouse to a shelf below. When Riley didn’t answer, I turned around. She had her ear buds back in. She was dancing.

  Flipping through the pages of the atlas, I got to Mexico in no time, then found Juárez, which is directly across the Rio Grande from the Texas town of El Paso. Fourth largest city in Mexico, the atlas said. Home of the final battle of the Mexican Revolution. Sited along the famous El Camino Real. Juárez is a border town, a real place, in an atlas. Google makes a lot of promises, I’ve found. An atlas goes sturdy with the facts.

  “Riley,” I said. “Please.” I pantomimed about the ear buds until she plucked them out.

  “What’s up?”

  “We’re going to Juárez,” I said.

  She laughed her lovely Riley laugh. I sat beside her, let her laugh.

  two

  All I had to do to convince my mom to give me two weeks off was to promise her a rest-of-summer’s worth of babysitting. My younger brother, Kev, was nine going on 150 miles per hour. He was all Fantastic Four wrapped into one; and his most death-defying mission was messing with Geoff, my older, bound-for-college brother. My mother volunteered mornings at the local library. Every summer, she begged me to make sure Kev stayed alive. “Just don’t let him hurt himself” was her favorite line, and then she’d close the door and go to her morning of superlatively well-behaved library books, to rooms that were so quiet you could hear a pencil snap. I offered my mother a—she loved the word—reprieve. I was the someone Kev mostly obeyed. Geoff had no patience, never had, not for his little brother. I said that if she let me go off to Juárez, I’d be home afterward, available every library morning from mid-July through the day that school began.

  “Do you know anything about Juárez?” she asked me. “Anything at all?” She was cleaning out the refrigerator, ditching what she called her science experiments. A startling blue-green mold had started to web across a tomato. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, and tossed it. She crouched again and fished out a bag of half-used mozzarella and a block of white-pocked cheddar. “I’m not buying cheese for another year,” she said, and walked the two steps to the garbage can. “Why is it so hard to eat the food we buy? Why do I feel like congratulating people when we actually do?”

  “Juárez is a border town,” I told her, shrugging at her questions because, really, are there answers? “Across the Rio Grande. Mixed up with the southern Rocky Mountains. It was the Mexican capital a long time ago, back during the Mexican Revolution.”

  Mom had an old slice of blueberry pie in her hand—a crusty plate of solidified slime somehow forgotten by Kev. She carried it to the sink and set it down. She turned to look at me. She looked as if she might never eat again.

  “I atlas’ed Juárez,” I said. “At Riley’s.” I knew she’d like that—me starting with a book as opposed to The Machine, which is what she called the internet. I figured that that small fact would help my cause.

  “Well, that’s all terrific, Georgia. But I still don’t get why you’d want to go to Juárez. There’s a whole wide, explorable world out there. If you’re going anywhere, that is.”

  “I got the idea from a flyer,” I said.

  “You’re being sketchy here, Georgia. Frustratingly vague.” She smiled, but it was a tired smile. She had a bag of wilted lettuce in her hands. Above our heads, a rumble had started. We heard Geoff first: “Cut it out.”

  “GoodWorks,” I said, rushing to explain before the next inevitable explosion. “It’s this—I don’t know—organization, I guess. It collects teens from here and takes them down there for community improvement projects.”

  “I see.” She frowned, and the two dark valleys between her eyebrows deepened. Upstairs, Kev was yelling Geoff’s name. Now he was running down the hall so fast that the light fixture above us shook. “Frankly, it sounds a little impulsive, Georgia. Make sure, before you go any further, that this is what you want.” Mom might have said more, but the phone began ringing, and she cut across the room to get it.

  I felt myself growing anxious—that hurt in my chest, that knot at my throat. I filled my lungs with air, closed my eyes, let the air go. Sometimes I could stop anxieties from getting nasty that way—sideline the attacks from their own game, breathe them right out of my mind. Mom on the phone was saying, “Oh, no. I’m so sorry.” She was walking out of the kitchen to take the news alone. Another Kev crisis, I figured. Kev, who was upstairs yelling from behind a closed door and who always managed to mess with the day.

  A few minutes later I was back up in my room—door shut, computer on, in the middle of a Google. I was humming to block out the noise of my older brother and then my cell phone rang. It was Riley, talking before I even said hello. That was one of Riley’s things—so much effervescing talk, when she wanted to talk, that Ms. Jean from school had dubbed her Bubbles. I called her that sometimes, when I was trying to get her attention.

  “So, like, I swear this happened: She screwed up the self-tanner.” Riley chirped, she couldn’t help herself. She was a fast-talking, pitch-perfect soprano.

  “Who? Your mom?”

  “Of course my mom. Who else could screw up a self-tanner?”

  Anyone, I thought. But no one else Riley’d notice.

  “So I hear this noise, and I think the water pipes are broken; but it was her, the way she was crying. I’ve never heard my mother cry like that, and you know how she’s had some crying doozies—you’ve seen her
.”

  “Crying over a tan gone wrong?”

  “She had little anklets of orange above her feet, you know? Like a henna tattoo or something.”

  “She told you that?” The truth is, I rarely saw Riley’s mother sit down and tell her only child anything. They could be together without being together, the negatives in each other’s equations. Riley’s mom was the most disappointed person I ever knew. Always someone somewhere had it better: A bigger house. A buffer husband. A bound-for-fortunes daughter.

  “No. I saw it,” Riley was saying. “I’d gone into her room to find out what was wrong—I thought maybe she was hurt or something, maybe she needed some actual help, maybe I could be useful—right, yeah, what a concept—and the door to her dressing room was open. I found her in there trying on shoes with just her underwear on, all bawling over her self-tanner mistake.”

  “Why not just put on a pair of socks and forget about it?” I asked.

  “She and Dad are going out. You know. To a function.”

  “Oh.” I got a picture of Riley’s mother in my head—her skimpy little skirts and low-cut sleeveless sweaters. The ultragigantic diamond ring that she wore on the ring finger of her right hand that looked more like a weapon than like jewelry.

  “I told her she should go with a pair of lace-up sandals, and I wasn’t even being sarcastic, I swear. I thought lace-up sandals could help, thought it was a genius solution. But you know what she did right then, when I was talking? She slammed her dressing-room door in my face and told me to mind my own business.” Riley laughed, but I could tell she wasn’t feeling funny; she always laughed hardest when things were bad.

  “She’s so hysterical, my mother,” Riley said. “She just is.” She kept laughing again, and I held on, listening. I didn’t press, because I never did. To be Riley’s best friend back then was to give Riley room. It meant being best-in-class at standing back. “Slammed the door in my face,” Riley repeated. “You gotta love my mom.”