Everything I Thought I Knew

by Shannon Takaoka

  Tonight’s moon, almost full but not quite, is enormous, and so bright it’s making the yard glow in the dark.

  Tomorrow, it will be a supermoon, in perigee, meaning the closest it can possibly be while orbiting the Earth, increasing its gravitational pull on the tides. Will this mean good surf?

  I pull my phone from my pocket and look up the number I have for Kai. I hesitate for a minute. We don’t really have a texting thing going. Or really anything going.

  Do we?

  I type, Check out the moon and hit send. And wait, staring expectantly at my lonely blue text bubble. There is no response.

  Probably because we do not have anything going.

  I imagine him out somewhere with his friends, wondering why I’m sending him dorky texts about the moon.

  But then the ellipsis indicating an incoming message appears

  I’m holding my breath. Those three little dots seem to hang there forever.

  Looking at it.

  Another appears and then, Supermoon.

  I know, I type, my heart picking up speed.

  My phone starts to vibrate in my hand and I nearly fall out of the hammock. He’s calling me? I wasn’t expecting that.

  “Kai?”

  I hear his voice but can’t make out what he’s saying. Our connection is filled with static.

  “What? I can’t hear you.”

  I sigh in exasperation as CALL FAILED appears on my screen.

  Another text comes in. Sorry. Shitty reception.

  And another.

  I kind of hate texting.

  You hate texting? I respond. Are you a time traveler from some old-timey era?

  But actually, I think it’s kind of nice. Texting is easy. Lazy. You can ignore a text if you want. Calling seems more . . . intimate.

  Another message arrives: I like to hear a person’s voice when I talk to them. Plus, it’s weird to converse in abbreviations.

  It is kind of weird, I respond. IMHO. LOL. J/K.

  You’re messing with me.

  Yes, I am.

  What are you doing? he asks.

  Listening to music, I type, and then add, wondering after I hit send if it sounds silly, Moonbathing.

  WTF is that?

  I thought you don’t like to communicate in abbreviations.

  I don’t. But also hate typing on tiny keyboard. Explain.

  Like sunbathing, but in moonlight.

  There’s nothing for a few seconds, then I’m trying to picture it. Tell me more.

  I feel my face heat up. He didn’t just, in a roundabout way, ask me what I was wearing, did he? I consider what I actually am wearing: sweatpants, a hoodie, and my fuzzy socks with Adidas slides. My brain cycles through possible responses that wouldn’t make me sound like an idiot. I’ve got nothing.

  Never mind. What were you listening to? he asks.

  So chatty tonight, for someone who hates to text.

  David Bowie. Life on Mars.

  Great song.

  I know, right? What are you doing?

  Same as you.

  Listening to music? All right, what song?

  Hello My Old Heart.

  I stare at his text. At the title of the song. It makes my breath catch. Logically, I know that this is just a coincidence. There are so many songs with the word heart in the title. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. And I haven’t even told Kai about my transplant, so it’s not like he could possibly have known. Still, it’s weird.

  You still there? he writes.

  I don’t know that one, I reply.

  Search for the Oh Hellos.

  With a shaking hand, I look it up on my phone’s music app.

  Got it.

  Try it.

  I’ll listen with you, I type. Let’s play it at the same time.

  OK.

  You ready?

  Yep. 3, 2, 1 . . .

  As soon as the music starts to stream from my earbuds, I melt. This song. It’s so beautiful and sad and otherworldly. It’s almost as if it’s speaking directly to me. That the entire universe is speaking to me through the song. Telling me to let go of my old heart. To set it free.

  I imagine Kai lying somewhere, one arm behind his head, looking at the same moon, listening, with me, to the same song. And I want to tell him everything. About my heart. About how glad I am to have met him. About how he’d picked the most perfect song for me to hear tonight — even though he didn’t really know it — one that somehow completely captures everything that I’ve been thinking and feeling.

  It makes me want to cry. But this is too complicated to say via text.

  I love it, I write when the song is done.

  Yeah?

  Yes.

  OK. Your turn. What have you got for me? he asks.

  How do I top the perfect song? I can’t, but it reminds me of another one I’ve been listening to a lot lately.

  Perfect Day. Lou Reed.

  We like the same music.

  We do?

  We do.

  “We.” This makes my heart go BOOM.

  BOOM BOOM.

  For the next hour, we go back and forth with other musicians and songs. His favorites. My favorites. Songs that make us sad. Songs that make us happy. Songs that make us want to crank up the volume in the car and roll all the windows down. Songs for rainy days. Songs for surfing. Until I get an alert on my phone warning that it’s almost out of power.

  My phone is about to die, I type. Somehow, I feel like it wouldn’t be the same to continue all this texting inside. Without the moon.

  Chloe.

  Yes?

  Come surfing tomorrow, Kai writes.

  Tomorrow is Friday, not Wednesday.

  Does that mean this is different? Not a lesson?

  And right then, my mom opens the sliding glass door.

  “Chloe. It’s past midnight. Give the phone a rest. It’s going to scramble your brain.”

  “I’m coming in in five minutes,” I tell her.

  She looks up at the sky.

  “Wow, look at the moon,” she says. “I wonder if your dad is already in bed. He should come check it out. Maybe you guys should get out the telescope!”

  Oh my god, no. We should not get out the telescope right now. I glance down at my phone, where Kai’s last text awaits.

  She ducks back inside and I hear her calling my dad, “Davis, are you still up?”

  OK. I will, I text quickly back to Kai.

  The usual spot. Same time?

  The usual spot. Same time. See you tomorrow.

  The phone feels warm in my hand.

  Tomorrow.

  The old man who swims without a wetsuit is back again today, doing his preparatory stretching in the sand. His hair is thin and white, but his body is wiry and strong. He must swim every day. I wonder about his age. Is he seventy? Seventy-five? Eighty? It’s hard to tell because he looks both young and old at the same time. He turns my way and breaks into a brilliant smile.

  “Hello, mermaid! How are you today?”

  “Great!” I call back. “How about you?”

  “Wonderful!” he says. “It’s a beautiful day!”

  “It is.” I hope when — if — I ever make it to his age that I’m still able to greet a beautiful day with as much enthusiasm as he does.

  Then he asks, “Did you know that mermaids hold the secret to eternal youth?”

  “Uh . . . no?” I answer back.

  “They do! Mermaids stay young forever.”

  “That’s good to know,” I say. He’s kind of strange, but sweet.

  But if that’s the case, then I’m more of an anti-mermaid.

  Ten years. Ten years is the average life span of a transplanted heart. Considering that I’m now seventeen, this means that it’s quite possible that I may only make it to the ripe old age of twenty-seven. Not what most people would consider a full life. My parents may have only temporarily escaped having to bury their only child.

  I remind myself that for younger re
cipients, recipients like me, donor hearts last even longer than the average. Fifteen years. Twenty. Thirty years is the current record. A woman from Pittsburgh who received a heart when she was a toddler is still doing fine at thirty-two. I imagine thousands of transplant patients quietly keeping tabs on her progress and doing the math for their own hearts. 17 + 30 = 47. That’s just a few years older than my mom is now. Which still seems pretty young.

  The old man finishes his stretching and attaches his swimming goggles.

  “Enjoy your swim,” I say with a wave as he heads toward the water.

  “You too!” he replies. “You and your boyfriend should have the good waves today.”

  Hearing him call Kai my boyfriend makes my skin flame up again, even if it isn’t true. He doesn’t know, after all, that I’m paying Kai to teach me to surf. But what about last night? And today? When Kai asked me to meet him, it seemed as if he was not talking about a lesson. It seemed as if he just wanted to surf, with me, for fun. To hang out. At the very least as friends.

  Friends is good, I say to myself.

  No, it’s not.

  An image of Kai’s tattooed skin flashes through my head. His eyes, which sometimes look green, sometimes gold, and sometimes brown, depending on the light. I think of the current sparked when his hand brushed against my hip last week when he’d reached out to steady my board. The connection I felt when we listened to music together last night. I don’t want to be just his friend.

  I wish I had a way to check the time, but my phone is in my car. It feels like Kai is late. Or maybe I’m just impatient for him to appear.

  I wonder if time will always feel different for someone like me. Will my life constantly feel like a party that I know I’ll have to leave earlier than everybody else? Or will I be satisfied that I had more hours and days than I was ever supposed to have? Even if more, in my case, is less than most.

  Best not to think so far ahead. Today the heart in my chest is beating normally, so normally, in fact, that it feels like my own. The waves are perfect, their peaks sweeping toward the beach in long, graceful formations. The old man is already diving into the surf, ready for his swim. Pelicans glide over the water, dropping down when they spot a fish. Kai is walking toward me, breaking into a smile when our eyes meet. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? But today, I’ll live.

  “You ready?” Kai says, dropping his stuff next to me on the sand. “Looks killer out there.”

  “I’ve been ready,” I tell him. “Just waiting on you. I almost ditched you to go swimming with our friend instead. He thinks I’m a mermaid.” I motion toward the old man out in the water, now just a small shape half hidden by the breaking waves.

  “Are you sure you still want to surf?” Kai asks, squinting in the man’s direction. “You can practice your backstroke instead.”

  “I’m sure.” I laugh. “But try to keep up.”

  I give him a playful shove and make my way ahead of him to the water. We paddle out together and join the lineup. Wait, side by side, for our turn.

  “You got this,” he says, after the surfers in front of us have taken off and the next set comes our way.

  I paddle ahead of the approaching wave, pop up, and balance myself on the board, feeling that I have indeed got it this time, just right. This one is longer than any I’ve ridden yet, but not as wild as the one that dumped me weeks ago when I bashed my head into my board. Sea air whips across my face, and I inhale its sweet and salty perfume as I lean into the wave, synchronizing my body’s movement with that of the ocean beneath my feet. Finally, I am skimming over the surface of the water effortlessly. Like a dolphin. Like a bird. Like Kai.

  Every muscle fiber, every neuron, every cell of my body is 100 percent focused on the ride. And it’s this feeling that makes me love surfing so much. When I surf, time stops. I don’t think. I just am. Past and future fall away. There is only water and air and movement and sound. There is only now.

  I stay upright all the way to the shore, and as I’m coming back to earth, Kai rides in right behind me.

  “Nice!” he says, high-fiving me after he picks up his board. “You have graduated to full shredder.”

  There is a lightness to him today, pure joy apparent on his face. This is where he is meant to be. Where I am meant to be. I can’t imagine a life now without the ocean, without the rush that I am feeling in this moment. Minutes later, we paddle out again. And again. We are like kids at an amusement park, giddy that the line for the fastest roller coaster is so short, and that we are able to get on, off, and back on again as much as we want.

  It is almost dark when we stagger out of the water, drunk on adrenaline.

  The beach is nearly empty. We drop our boards and collapse on the sand.

  I’m glad I thought ahead and told my parents that I was catching a movie tonight with Jane.

  I look over at Kai. His eyes are closed. His chest rises and falls. I hold my breath and listen, trying to hear his heart beating.

  “Chloe.” He opens his eyes but doesn’t look directly at me.

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you please not pay me anymore?”

  He doesn’t need to explain why. We do have a thing going, it seems.

  In answer, I reach over and slip my fingers through his, and we lie like that for a while looking up at the indigo sky, and at stars that first sent light streaming across the universe billions of years ago. A universe so enormous that it takes lifetimes upon lifetimes for their energy to reach the two of us on this night, on this tiny stretch of planet Earth.

  “So tell me about your heart,” he says, running his thumb over the tattoo on my wrist.

  And I do. I tell him about the day at cross-country practice, the day that changed everything, when I fell to the ground, gasping, like a freshly caught fish. About learning that my heart couldn’t be fixed. I tell him about the list — my place on it dependent upon a succession of tragedies and a cold calculation. Was I less or more sick than the patient that applied last week? Or the one that would apply tomorrow? How many head injuries, traffic accidents, and gunshot wounds would it take to move me to the top? I tell him about the night we got the call to show up at the hospital, and the ride with my parents across the Golden Gate Bridge. About wondering what they were going to do with my old heart. Toss it out with the trash? Save it in a jar for science? Bury it? Wondering about the person whose death offered me a new life. Wondering what my parents would do if the transplant didn’t work. I tell him about how weird it was to open my eyes after the surgery and feel so immediately different. How I would never take breathing for granted again. I tell him about the strange purgatory of recovery. Hours ticking away in my hospital room. Hours of school missed. Graduation missed. My former self missed. I tell him what I couldn’t tell Dr. Ahmadi that day in his office: about how there have been times that I’ve wished I could rip it out, pulsing and dripping. And then there are other times when I feel it burning inside of me, stronger and more powerful than the one I had before.

  “Well, I think you should keep it,” he says softly. “It’s a pretty awesome gift.”

  I turn to face him, the two of us nearly touching foreheads in the sand.

  “What about you?” I ask, pointing to the spot on his arm, now covered in neoprene, where I had seen his own tattooed heart, weeks ago, when we had compared them on the beach.

  “I got it after my mom died,” he says. “I wasn’t sure what else to do.”

  His mom. No wonder he sometimes seems so sad.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say.

  “Yeah, well, she’d probably laugh if she knew. Or tell me I should have tattooed a more useful reminder, like ‘Don’t forget to floss.’ My mom was big on flossing.”

  “Mine is too,” I say. And then I want to take it back. My mom is. His was.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say again, not sure if I should ask him more about her. His loss seems recent, and still raw. “Do you live with your dad now?”

  “Yeah, whi
ch is kind of . . . an adjustment. He wasn’t very involved in my life until now.”

  He looks like he’s just remembered something. “Shit. He’s out tonight. I have to go home and let out my dog.”

  “Sure,” I say, unable to hide the disappointment in my voice as I sit up. “I should probably go too.”

  He catches my hand. “Don’t go. Come with me,” he says. “You can give me a lift. It’s too dark to take my bike.”

  “You have a motorcycle?” I ask.

  “No,” he says. “Bicycle. I can come get it in my dad’s pickup tomorrow.”

  I grab my backpack from the car and hurry into the restroom in the parking lot to change. This is what I usually do after surfing: I peel off my clammy wetsuit, rinse off as fast as possible in the lukewarm shower, and throw on some sweatpants and a hoodie. However, since I was in a not-usual mood when I packed today, I have a light summer dress, which is not really warm enough now that it’s getting dark and the breeze is picking up. The weather hadn’t been my top consideration when I pulled it from my closet. As I put on lip gloss, I check my reflection in the scratched-up mirror. My cheeks are rosy from the ocean wind; my hair falls in barely tamed waves. The scar peeks out above the neckline of my dress, but I don’t care anymore about hiding it. Tonight, I do not want to reach down and rip out my heart.

  When I push open the rusted restroom door, Kai is waiting outside in jeans and a faded black T-shirt. It’s the first time I’ve seen him in regular clothes and it sends a current through my entire body, head to toe. He doesn’t say anything for a few long seconds, then: “You’ve got goose bumps.”

  “I’m kind of cold.” I laugh.

  He moves closer, hands me the jacket he’d been holding. “How come you don’t have your Smurf hoodie? I really like that.”

  “You do, huh? It’s in my car.”

  Now that we are no longer zipped into our wetsuits, it feels as if an energy that’s been bottled up for weeks has been released, sending sparks into the air all around us.

  I wrap myself in Kai’s jacket and the two of us carry our boards to my Honda. The walk seems endless, like I’ve parked a mile away.

  When we get to the car, he helps me secure the boards to the roof rack. I get into the driver’s seat and pop the lock open for him on the passenger side. And once Kai finally pulls the door closed behind him, all I can think about is how little space there is between us. We look at each other.