Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  “What’s funny?” Bonnie says. “Surely you have goals. Maybe even dreams . . . ?”

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “White picket fence, chocolate lab, a pretty little wife who likes it from both sides.”

  I flinch, and a choking sound comes from someone across the fire—Melissa, I think.

  Bonnie just waits.

  “All right, sorry,” he says finally. “I guess my goal is to stay out of trouble and spend some time looking at the sky. I’ve been thinking maybe I haven’t seen enough sky.”

  The wind shifts, I look upward, and a clean, clear breath of air goes into my lungs as I look at the shockingly bright stars and try to get “both sides” out of my head.

  “Your turn,” Tavik says, looking at me.

  I give myself a shake.

  “I . . . I’m sorry, but what is going on here?” I say.

  “We’re sharing,” Pat says.

  “I understand that part,” I say, trying to calm myself, trying to sound normal, and failing. “I mean, what kind of trip is this? Because I am certain I had a brochure that showed cabins. And smiling teenagers with ‘leadership potential.’”

  “What, you don’t think I have leadership potential?” Tavik says with a bark of laughter.

  “I didn’t mean . . . I just mean . . .” I break off as heat rushes to my face. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings. I just . . . expected something totally different from this.”

  Pat and Bonnie exchange a glance.

  “We do have a couple of physical camps, and some of the expeditions are run from them,” Pat says carefully. “And some, like this one, are not. For this group there is more of an emphasis on wilderness survival, group dynamics, and yes, leadership.”

  “Is . . . is there a chance I’m supposed to be at one of the other ones? The camp ones?”

  “This is the only Peak Wilderness program running at the moment,” Bonnie says, shaking her head.

  “Why don’t you tell us why you’re here, Ingrid?” suggests Pat in his gentle-with-steel-underneath way.

  I look around the circle, an aching, burning sensation pulsing inside me as I attempt to digest the fact that Mom has sent me for almost a month of actual camping, in the wilderness, with a bunch of junkies, criminals, and lunatics.

  I remember seeing that “camping” might be involved in some of the trips, and I can imagine Mom deciding to book me into one of the more intense programs, and not telling me because she was angry, or because she honestly thought it wouldn’t be so different from what we discussed, or to teach me a lesson, because she doesn’t think I’m self-reliant enough.

  But throwing me in with a group like this? I have a hard time believing she’d have done that on purpose.

  Regardless, I made a deal. A promise. I said I would do Peak Wilderness, and I didn’t specify which program. And if I complete this, I get to spend my senior year at school in London, England. I get to live the life I want.

  Bonnie, Pat, and the rest of the group are staring at me, waiting for an answer. I realize I’m rubbing my lower leg again, and stop, clasping my hands tightly together.

  I shouldn’t be here.

  I am a model citizen and paragon of stability compared to these people.

  Okay, there were a couple of months when I could barely eat. And there was the incident with the ax. But only one person knows about that, and he promised he wouldn’t tell anyone. And I’m fine now. Mostly healed, and much calmer, and really, it was an accident. The throbbing shin is totally psychosomatic—has to be. Anyway, none of that had even happened yet when Mom signed me up for this trip, and frankly, there’s no way she knows about it now, either. Point being? No way I’m talking about any of that stuff, or about my relationship with Mom. Not unless I suddenly want all these unbalanced people thinking they’ve been invited to dig into my psyche, which is never happening. It’s not relevant to why I’m here. Not relevant, period.

  Bonnie and Pat probably know something, but whatever they know or don’t know, they can’t force me to talk about it.

  And yet, I get the feeling that the music-school thing isn’t going to play well for this crowd, and I have to say something.

  “I had a bad year . . . at school,” I say finally. This is partially true—I had to complete eleventh grade via homeschooling. “I was having trouble.” (True-ish.) “I missed some school. . . .” (True.) “So . . . my mom decided . . . on my behalf . . . that over the summer, a . . . a change of scenery would be good for me.”

  Decided a change of scenery would be good for me. . . .

  That’s funny, right?

  ISAAC

  Dear Isaac,

  Uh, hi.

  I thought of you today. And I’m so far from everything and everyone that despite our being nothing but tense pretend-friends for the last long while . . . I thought I’d write.

  Did I ever tell you how my mom believes music saved her life? Not just her sanity, her actual life. I think you could call that ironic.

  Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to write about; I’m just filling space, bullshitting really, which is totally, hilariously, a waste of time in this context. Bullshitting in my own journal. Pathetic.

  How about I just dive in?

  It’s my fault, our being pretend-friends. Mostly mine, anyway. I have no business writing to you. And yet . . . here I am, so far away from where you are, and who knows what’s going to happen in our lives from this point forward. You probably noticed I didn’t come back to school after New Year’s, and we might not be in the same place in the fall, either. I got accepted into this incredible school in England, and I might do my final year there. I plan to, actually. Not that I expect you to even care anymore. You probably don’t. And I’ll never show you this, anyway.

  I realized, just now, that I liked knowing you were close by, after we broke up, if you could call it a breakup when maybe we weren’t officially together. Even when I was mad as hell, and hurt, it was nice knowing you were down the hall in another classroom, or right next to me but pretending I didn’t exist, or a couple of subway stops away on weekends. I thought I wasn’t thinking about you anymore, but I was. Am. I could see you, hear you, smell you if you got close enough. Now I can’t.

  It’s funny how many things we never talked about. That’s (at least partly) my fault too. I had so much going on at home, and I didn’t tell you any of it. The thing is, I got used to dealing with things on my own, and even if I’d wanted to talk to you, I didn’t know how. So you didn’t know how fragile I was, how screwed up. You didn’t know how much I needed to feel I could trust you, even though I wasn’t, in fact, trusting you. Ha. You didn’t know how complicated and full of contradiction I was, either, and hey, at least I saved you from that.

  So, my mom, when she was little, she says she was “moody,” which . . . there’s probably a diagnosis for it now, but the point is, she had trouble staying afloat. She didn’t feel normal—not at home, not at school, not anywhere.

  You and I both have felt that, I know.

  Anyway, she had trouble. She couldn’t be happy. And her parents—my grandparents, whom I never met—didn’t know how to help. My impression is they were of that stoic, Victorian, chin-up generation where they didn’t talk about things.

  She used to climb out her window at night and lie there on this short bit of roof with a steep incline, and wish that the stars would come to life, and fly away with her. One time she started to fall asleep out there, and almost fell off. For a whole three days after, she felt incredible—amazingly energized and happy—that’s what she told me. Near-death experience = happy.

  Weird reaction, right?

  Then when she was eleven, she started piano lessons. She was late starting, compared to a lot of kids, but she said that in music she finally found something to grab on to. The rest of the time she’d just been drifting.
r />   I have that sometimes—a drifting feeling.

  Her parents didn’t get it, really, but music was at least a proper activity for a young girl to be engaged in. Like I said, she says it saved her life.

  Because, what—otherwise a star would have come to take her away?

  You know, Isaac, I spent half my life on guard against that star. For the longest time she was all I had, the center of my universe, and I just had to be vigilant. Later, it felt like I was always trying to get her back—the real her. But it wasn’t just her, it was my childhood, the shining-ness of it. That time in my life was like a state of being I could somehow get back to, an anchor, like music was her anchor.

  She says it saved her, so it probably did.

  What is going to save me?

  Ingrid

  PEACE OUT

  (Peak Wilderness, Day One, Continued)

  Finally it’s bedtime—time to go sleep with the agro-hippie and the ex-con. The good news is there should be no mosquitoes in the tent. The bad news is I don’t know how I’ll even get to sleep in such a foreign, freaky situation.

  I take a deep breath, unzip the door, and scramble in.

  Tavik is already there and he’s taken the uphill side. I slide over to the other side, which leaves a mere two feet between us for Peace-Bob.

  Tavik’s got a tiny LED light on, and my jaw drops when I see what else he’s holding—a book, wrapped in what looks like a zippable waterproof cover.

  “How’d you manage to keep that?”

  “Unlike you, I didn’t just stand there and let the guy unpack and repack all my shit for me,” he says.

  “I noticed you lost a few things.”

  “My stash, you mean?”

  I nod. He’d had a sizable bag of weed that Duncan confiscated.

  “I meant to lose that.”

  “What, so you could smuggle in a book?”

  “You jealous?” He gazes at me, unblinking.

  “Depends on the book.”

  “It ain’t your hardcover Dostoyevsky.”

  “Tolstoy.”

  “Same thing.”

  “Actually, Dostoyevsky’s writing was much more symbolic, more infused with ideological discussion, whereas Tolstoy puts you right in the center of—”

  “Sure, nerdo. But dead Russian dudes are fucking pretentious reading for a wilderness retreat.”

  “Not if you like dead Russian dudes.”

  He grunts, and goes back to reading.

  “Anyway,” I say, unable to stop myself, “does this seem like a retreat to you? I’m thinking ‘retreat’ is a word that could only be used ironically for this trip so far. Is this what you were expecting?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Huh. You never said what you’re reading.”

  “Porn.”

  I suck in a breath. He smirks.

  “If you’re nice, I might let you borrow it when I’m done.”

  I doubt I’m ready for his version of “nice,” so I ignore this comment, unroll my sleeping bag, bundle up the sage hoodie to serve as a pillow, and try to figure out how I’m supposed to change into my pajamas.

  The most logical thing would be to ask Tavik to leave. But can I manage to open my mouth to ask that? No. Not after the porn comment. Not with the perma-smirk he’s wearing even while supposedly reading, as if he knows I’m mortified and uncomfortable and have never spent a night sleeping with a boy, much less two.

  Changing outside isn’t an option—less private, creepy, and I’ll be eaten alive by mosquitoes. So I’m left with being too embarrassed to change with Tavik here, and too embarrassed to ask him to go.

  Finally I lie down on top of my sleeping bag, fully clothed, and stare at the canvas above me. I’ll just sleep in my clothes. And tomorrow I’ll figure out a better system—one that includes getting to the tent first so I can have some damn privacy.

  Peace-Bob, though, has no such scruples.

  Oh no.

  He charges in, unpacks in record time, and then, before I have the foresight to look away, hunches down in the middle of the tent, peels off his pants and underwear, hanging his hairy ass—I am not exaggerating—right over my head.

  (I believe I mentioned he is odiferous?)

  My throat closes on itself, and I roll away from the horror, almost choking, and making a disgusted sound in the process.

  “What?” he says.

  Tavik (the jerk) is laughing.

  “I don’t need to see your . . . bare butt, thank you,” I say, staring at the side of the tent but seeing his butt over and over again in my mind’s eye.

  “The body is a natural thing,” he says. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of. Personally I love to be naked.”

  “Oh my God.”

  With that I pull my hood down over my eyes and get to work on trying to un-see what I just saw.

  DIVA’S BED

  (Age Eleven)

  Three months after our life in London was over, we had moved into Mom’s childhood home, a charming coach house on a tree-lined street of Toronto. Mom’s parents had died a few years back and we’d been renting the house out, but now the renters were gone. We’d had our things shipped and unpacked, and gotten me registered in my first “normal” school. And I would be going with my real last name: Burke. Lalonde had only been Mom’s stage name—her way of separating herself from parents who never understood, or approved of, her career choice.

  I liked Lalonde better. I was used to it and wanted to keep it, and no matter what, my mom would always be Margot-Sophia Lalonde to me, because that was what she had chosen for herself. But now she was choosing something else, and since Burke was our legal name, arguing was pointless.

  So, fine. New name. New start. I would be in sixth grade in the fall, and I was excited, figuring I’d finally have a chance at having friends—the kind you don’t have to say good-bye to after a few weeks.

  Meanwhile, Mom had gone from positive to stoic, had soldiered on.

  But once she got us settled in Toronto, she went to bed.

  I watched and waited and hoped she would get back up after a few days, like the times this had happened when I was younger, but days turned into weeks.

  At school I discovered that I knew too much of many things and not enough of others to be trying to make friends just yet, and quickly decided to aim for invisibility instead. Every day I would come home, let myself in, and listen from the foyer, hoping to hear Mom up and about. Hearing nothing, I would then slip off my shoes, coat, and backpack, and tiptoe upstairs and stand outside her bedroom door and listen again, every bit of my being focused on her, on willing her heart to be beating and her lungs to be taking in air, at least.

  Sometimes I would still hear nothing, and it was such a loud nothing, like the sound of that curtain falling—soft to nonexistent, and yet so final.

  And so I would slip forward carefully, one foot and then the other, the door swishing against the ivory carpet as I gently pushed it open, just enough to step into the room.

  In the darkened, stale-aired space was the giant bedstead from the silent auction in London—one of the few pieces that Mom refused to sell, and insisted on shipping to Canada, despite the impracticality and expense. It had a gold-leaf headboard and a canopy hung with diaphanous sky-blue, white, and gold silk, with long tassels. The top part of the canopy was so tall, we’d had to have it affixed to the ceiling.

  Once I was close enough and standing very still, I would detect the subtle rise and fall of the sheet, and all the rigid, frightened pieces of me would come back together in relief. I would creep closer and then just stand, breathing with her, each breath dissolving small portions of the dread I carried with me all day long at school, and then on the way home, and worse and worse down the block, and then up the stairs and inside.

  I wanted to tou
ch her. Climb up onto the bed and curl into her, around her. But then I might wake her, and I couldn’t bear the things she said when she was awake.

  “I want to go to sleep and never wake up.”

  You would have to be an idiot to miss the meaning of that.

  Curtain.

  Stay with me, I would beg in my mind, sending my will through space to the defeated form on the bed. Stay.

  I was not an idiot.

  As the months of sixth grade passed and my mother failed to die, I also wanted her to get up and live.

  I didn’t want to be mad. I knew what she’d been through. But after the initial worry and subsequent terrifying realization that she wasn’t going to just snap out of it, I was like an orphan—alone in a new house in a new city, nothing familiar, no friends or family, and motherless.

  I knew why. Of course I knew. But I started to boil inside. I started to stare down at her in the bed, the words GET UP screaming in my mind.

  Get up. Get up.

  I need you.

  How she could drop me into this new life and then just abandon me to fend for myself, I could not fathom.

  Get. Up.

  She was a crumpled, diminished, washed-out, fireless shell. But the mom I knew, the dedicated, optimistic, magical mom—she was in there somewhere and I wanted her back. I felt terrible and guilty for being so angry, so full of hate sometimes. It was the wrong feeling, I knew.

  But I had lost the same things she lost. Plus her. Not the same, exactly, but still. At eleven years old I wasn’t supposed to be buying groceries with my mother’s credit card, depositing dividend checks from the modest investment portfolio my grandparents had left us, making all my own meals plus someone else’s, not that she ate.

  I didn’t have to be a math genius to see the dividend checks weren’t going to be enough for us to live on.

  Please get up.

  There were days she tried, days I’d come home to find her in the kitchen, having cooked half a meal, or sitting in the living room with a stack of self-help books, trying to read.