Everyone Remain Calm

by Megan Stielstra

  Veronia felt a little kick in her chest. Then she went to the table, sitting down with her back to the guy, facing Oscar, who had a look on his face that she’d never seen before.

  It was a look that transmitted information.

  “Did you talk to Mom?” he said, loudly but not too loud. It was a small coffee shop; his voice would travel to the table behind them. Veronica saw that he wasn’t really looking at her—he was looking at the space just to the side of her. He was looking past her, and he was smiling. When did smiling become part of this? Had the transmission been accepted? What was happening? She longed to turn around, but knew that wasn’t part of the game. The game was staring straight ahead and saying, loud enough, “I did talk to her. She asked if you were coming for Christmas.”

  He smiled again, but this time—the first time—not for her.

  She had to realize it eventually, I mean, come on. She’s a smart girl. It was just a matter of time.

  16| All So Goddamn Great

  So I’m at the Metro for the EXO show and it . . . is . . . awesome! There are like five million people all suctioned together, banging our heads in unison like we’re part of some collective unconscious and me and Shelley are right up near the front so we can feel the speakers vibrate through our shoes. I’m wearing my EXO T-shirt ’cause EXO is totally the greatest band ever and if you say No, they’re not! I’ll be all You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about! ’cause I’m twenty-two-years old and totally smarter than everyone.

  It’s one of those nights, you know, when everything is just . . . so . . . great! The music is great, this vodka tonic is great, this other vodka tonic is great, and so’s this other one, and for the first time since Josh and I broke up last month, I know I’ll be okay. Strangers press into me on all four sides, I’m slamming both fists in the air, there’s guitar and bass and dududududududududu and I yell Hell yeah! and Shelley’s like This is awesome! and I’m like I gotta pee! and she’s like Fuck yeah you do!

  And then we hug.

  ’Cause it’s all so goddamn great!

  I do the drunky wobble-walk, pushing though the crowd and then upstairs towards the bathroom, hand-over-hand on the banister ’cause I’ve got heels on, and falling down the stairs is so not cool, so I focus like how I learned in yoga class: one foot, then the other, then the other, you’re doing great, and when I finally get to the top I throw my arms in the air and look around for applause, like I just totally made it up the stairs without falling over I’m awesome! and then I look up and there’s Josh.

  He looks good.

  He’s super tall and skinny—but not like skinny-skinny, like muscle-skinny—with the whole bad-boy thing going on. That’s what hooked me: night after night, sittin’ in some bar with his arm around me, and he’s all Yeah, she’s with me, and I’m all I’m with him I’m with him I’m with him! so yes, seeing him really sucks, but what sucks more is that now he’s got his arm around some other girl.

  Some other beautiful girl.

  Some other beautiful girl who’s twenty pounds thinner than me and obviously much cooler ’cause she’s wearing sunglasses in a darkened rock club and also she’s got perfect, silky, shiny hair like Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. My hair used to have a mind of its own, but then I started using Pantene—that hair. On this girl. Josh’s girl, she’s here with Josh, they’re leaning against the upstairs bar and haven’t seen me yet, which would be so totally too much for me to handle so I split–I leave–I turn–I run to the Ladies Room, the only place we’re ever really safe.

  The one at the Metro is this long narrow room with stalls against one wall and a sink at the very end. There’s a thin layer of What in the hell even is that? over everything, and bright fluorescent lights which are total buzzkill. Plus there’s never any toilet paper, and the stalls all have those graffiti conversations that go Lisa plus Johnny Forever, and underneath that somebody else wrote There is no forever, only heartbreak, and underneath that somebody else wrote Shut up, and underneath that somebody wrote the letter U, the letter R, the letter A—bitch, and this is what I stare at while I cry; that sloppy gaspy gulpy crying, the kind where you can’t control the corners of your mouth which is so totally stupid because I don’t even want to be with Josh.

  I don’t.

  The last time I saw him was a month ago, this horrible, fuzzy night at Inner Town Pub. One second it was just like always: we were drinking, laughing, feeding quarters to the juke box—then the next second some guy asked if he could buy me a beer and before I had time to say No thanks, I’m with him—it was the next second and bam—Josh slammed the guy into the bar, yelling You asshole! and I was like Josh, he didn’t know—but the guy shoved back, so then Josh was on the floor, and then he was up again, and then he had his stool over his head and before anyone could stop him he threw it over the bar and into the mirrored wall behind it.

  I remember watching the multiple reflections of shocked faces as slowly, slowly, the glass cracked into a spiderweb, like how water seeps through the walls of a sunken ship. It took approximately ten seconds for the bouncer to tackle him, but during those ten seconds, Josh went after me.

  Ten seconds is a really long time.

  I remember him reaching for me, I remember the veins in his arms, purple rivers on a map, his biceps like baseballs and people were on their feet now, backing away from us, and I backed away from him coming at me, and he was yelling and I was confused ’cause apparently this was my fault? I’d said/worn/done/thought/felt the wrong thing but I didn’t have time to piece it altogether because there were his hands, reaching for my face but just before they connected, the bouncer caught him from behind, his meatball arms locking around Josh’s neck and—

  I was lucky.

  The next morning, he called. I didn’t pick up. “I’ve got a bitch of a hangover,” he told my voicemail. “Must’ve been a crazy night!”

  “What’s up?” he said the next day. “How come you’re not calling back?”

  “Dude, what the hell,” he said on the third day, and, “What’s the matter with you?” on the fourth, and by the end of the week it was, “Baby, are you okay?” and “Did something happen?”

  Yeah. Something did. I was different: no more light and naive and free. Now I had baggage, a big heavy suitcase to carry from relationship to relationship, and the worst of it was—the part that really makes me hate myself—I wanted to pick up that phone. I wanted to believe in him, to say He was tired drunk, he was drunk, he was stressed out because sometimes? When you’re twenty-two? Being with somebody bad for you is better than being alone—and believe me, you’re never more alone than sitting in a bathroom stall, crying your eyes out ’cause your boyfriend found someone else.

  I stay in that stall for a really long time, listening to EXO through the walls but it’s not near loud enough to make everything okay. I’m sweaty and wasted and sloppy, there’s snot everywhere, mascara all over my face, this isn’t fun drunk anymore, it’s stupid drunk, and once I’m cried out I head to the sink to try and clean up but when I round the corner of the stalls, the thing I see next makes me so totally sober I could’ve walked straight down a tightrope.

  It’s her, standing in front of the mirror with her back to me: twenty pounds thinner. Long Pantene hair—we’re so close that if I had a pair of scissors in my pocket I could reach out and cut it off and, yes, I know, what you’re supposed to do in these moments is turn around and walk away—but I don’t, ’cause you never do, you always, always, always stare. Her sunglasses are on the sink in front of her, she’s looking down into an open makeup bag and in the mirror over her shoulder I see that both her eyes are black.

  The bruises are caked with cover-up, but those horrible fluorescent lights forgive nothing: her eyes are two goose eggs, purple-black and nearly swollen shut. The slits of her eyes are bloodshot, but if it’s from crying or drinking I can’t say. The bruises run up
to her brows and down past her cheekbones, they are painful and brutal and fascinating, a car crash, a science experiment, I can’t look away—not even when she looks up and sees me in the mirror, my reflection just behind hers.

  For years afterwards, well into my thirties, I will imagine our faces switched: me with the black eyes and her staring from behind. I will imagine what might’ve happened if that bouncer hadn’t caught Josh in a headlock, if his outstretched hands had reached my face, and how much heavier my baggage would be. I will imagine, when I shut my eyes, a bullet flying straight for the center of my forehead—and how, at the last possible second, I stepped to the side and dodged its impact and I will imagine, again and again, what I should have said to that girl in the bathroom ’cause in the moment? Standing next to her at the sink? I had absolutely no idea.

  I am twenty-two years old. I am terrified. So I say nothing.

  I look away, like I didn’t see anything, and she looks away, like there was nothing there to see.

  And then I leave.

  Out in the hall, it’s a different world: dark, and safe, the music’s full volume and it pounds into my chest. I’m part of the crowd again, no more me all by myself, now there are bodies, five hundred faces to hide behind. I follow some random girl towards the stairs, staring at the back of her head, the back of her head, the back of her head, ’cause if I look up, even for a second, there’s a chance I might see Josh—and I’ve had enough of him for one night.

  Once I’m on the main floor, I push through the bodies towards where I left Shelley, up by the speakers when not ten minutes before everything had seemed so easy: music and dancing and people and vodka, it’s all so goddamn great! Shelly’s jumping up and down, punching the air with both fists, and when she sees me she yells There you are!

  Yeah, I say, but she’s not listening. I’m going to get another drink do you want another drink? she yells, and even though my head’s starting to hurt, even though strangers are slamming into me, even though my life just entirely changed—I still say Yeah, sure I’ll have another, because I don’t know what else to do with this stupid, stupid night or my stupid, stupid heart—so I shut my eyes. I feel the music vibrate through my shoes, and—I dance.

  17| Indestructible

  When I was a kid, my dad took me to New York City. For “culture.” We did the usual—museums, Times Square, Forty-second Street—and the day before we left was Coney Island. It was August, hot as hell. I was in pigtails and an OshKosh jumper, and my dad had white legs under his shorts and a sunburnt bald spot. He bought Big Gulp–sized Coca-Colas from a vendor, and I scooped out the ice and rubbed it on my arms to cool off. There weren’t a lot of people out that day, and we went up and down the boardwalk looking at the water, the old decaying roller coasters and the freak show booths with their colorful circus posters promising sword swallowers and contortionists. My dad paid the buck fifty so we could go into a couple: inside they were small and claustrophobic like the dressing rooms at JC Penney, except when you pulled back the curtain there was some funky-looking person standing there.

  Like, ta-da! The Fat Lady!

  Ta-da! The Albino Midget!

  Ta-da! Siamese Twins!

  But none of this was particularly impressive to my seven-year-old sensibility ’cause I’d seen way fatter women at the airport, and Ms. Astors, the librarian at my school, was a “little person,” and I could tell that the twins weren’t really joined ’cause I saw that the one on the left had his extra arm turned up behind his back.

  But then—ta-da! Hold onto your hats, boys and girls, for what you are about to see scoffs in the face of science, defies every rule of anatomy and busts open Darwinian theory by its sheer impossibility: The Indestructible Lady!

  The curtain was thrown aside, and I had to tilt my head back, back, back, ’til I was almost looking at the ceiling. BIG. She. Was. BIG. That’s all I would’ve been able to tell you then, but looking back on her now I can do the description justice. She was way over six feet with that male professional bodybuilder body you see in the Mr. Universe pageants: hulking muscles that pushed at her thighs and six-packed her stomach. She was wearing a little red string bikini but she didn’t need the top—the cut of her pecs buried any breasts she might once have had. Her neck was as wide as her waist, and her arms popped with softball bulges at the shoulders, triceps, and right above the inside of her elbows. She curled her arms at L shaped angles and the muscles jumped. She tensed her legs and, I swear, you could trickle water through the definition of her quads.

  What got me, though, were the knives. This lady had knives stuck through her skin; big long knives like Dad used to skin deer in the garage back home in Michigan. They had fancy hilts with fake jewels, and spliced through one side of the Indestructible Lady’s arm or leg and came out the other. I tried to count them . . . one, two, twelve, twenty, twenty-two. Twenty-two knives cutting into this woman right in front of me—no blood, no pain, just clenched teeth, curled upper lip, and every now and then she growled.

  “Daddy,” I said, as we left the booth. “That’s what I want to be when I grow up.”

  “What?” he asked.

  “Indestructible,” I said.

  We killed a few more hours on the boardwalk and were getting ready to go back to the hotel when all the Coca-Cola caught up with me. I was a little girl, and Big Gulps are a lot of soda, and when I ran over to the door that said Ladies, it was locked. I clenched hard and waited—waited and waited and waited—for whoever was in there to finish. I stuck both hands between my legs and squeezed—I made the squeeze face, eyes all squinted, mouth pulled up, nose tight ’til my eyeballs hurt and finally, I couldn’t hold it anymore so I knocked, and—get this: the door opened and there were the thighs. The red bikini bottoms, sparse as dental floss. The stomach. The chest. The hulky, hammy neck. The knives still splitting her flesh, in and out like a pin through your pant leg, and when my head was bent back as far as it could go I was looking right into the Indestructible Lady’s face.

  She was crying.

  Her skin was swollen and puffy and her mouth was twitching at the sides, like when you’re trying to control it but can’t. The whites of her eyes were red and veiny and full of water, and it was horrible, and fascinating, and I couldn’t look away.

  “What are you staring at?” she asked finally.

  I was so starstruck I couldn’t even speak.

  “Well?”

  I tried to be brave. “Is it the knives?” I asked, not more than a whisper.

  “Is it the knives what?” she said.

  “That make you cry,” I said.

  She stared at me from her impossible height. Then, slowly, she knelt down until we were eye level, so close our noses were almost touching. “The knives?” she said, and tapped the hilt stuck deep in the meat of her shoulder. “Sweetheart, the knives ain’t nothing.”

  18| Everyone Remain Calm

  You know the drill. There’s this long, droning horn and that means tornado. The teacher tells everybody to Remain calm, this is just a drill, and your second grade class stands up in unison and lines up alphabetically at the door. What happens next is you walk out to the hall in an orderly fashion and stand with your back up against the lockers. Then you slide down to the floor, tuck your head into your knees, and put your hands over your neck. This is to prevent paralysis in case anything falls on you, you are told. When you ask what will be falling, you are told flying debris. When you ask what debris means, you are told to Shhhh, be quiet, you must pretend this is a real tornado. This is real danger. During real danger, no one must talk. But everybody knows the tornado drill is just practice danger, so everybody goofs off. They poke the kids next to them. Make jokes. Laugh.

  Nobody did that the day there was a real tornado, though.

  The wind was loud outside and everyone was scared, lined up in the halls, squeezed into balls with their hands over the backs of
their necks and their eyes shut tight. The wind screeched—rattled the building—and I could feel the lockers quivering at my back, shaking against the base of my spine and with every bamblast there were gasps and screams and cries from little kids all terrified. Ms. Atkins was yelling that everyone must Remain calm, this is just a drill, and then there was an awful noise and I peeked up between my elbows. The windows had busted through, glass was everywhere, wind was whipping all around and suddenly I learned what debris was—papers, book bags, rain hats, rolling garbage cans, all the red and yellow construction paper fish the third graders had made for a bulletin board about the ocean, crayons, and open tubes of glitter and banners with the cursive alphabet, all of it flying, whirling around in the air past my nose. It’s magic, I thought—but then Ms. Atkins was screaming for Everyone to remain calm and she sure-as-shooting didn’t look calm. Her hair was all flyaway around her head like she had one hand on a balloon and she was holding tight to a door, the wind pushing lifting her up off the ground, yelling This is just a drill, it’s pretend, and I thought I would blow away, too. Then Jimmy Azrial, who sat alphabetically next to me, grabbed hold of my arm with his left hand, keeping his right on the back of his neck. I grabbed hold of Elisabeth Benning the same way, and she grabbed hold of Kyle Burns and so on down the line ’til we were one long chain of little bodies up against the lockers, our collective weight holding us down. I pressed my eyes into my knees and whispered over and over, It’s just pretend, pretend, pretend, and later when I went home and it wasn’t there anymore, just a big ol’ pile of boards and splinters and tossed-around furniture, I looked up at my father and said, “I thought it was pretend.”