Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  I just have to survive another . . . eighteen freaking days. No problem. Ha-ha.

  Breakfast is ready. I can’t imagine how I’ll eat, but I know I can’t hike all day with no food.

  I just have to survive. I’m good at that. Right?

  Bonnie comes to sit beside me as I spoon hot cereal into my mouth.

  “Ingrid . . . ?” she says. “How are you today?”

  “Fucking terrible,” I find myself saying. “And you?”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Bonnie says. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.”

  “Are you upset about Peace walking in on you changing last night?” Pat says, barging clumsily into the conversation. Harvey and Henry look up, interested. In fact, everybody except Peace is here, listening.

  “If I am, do you think I want to revisit the experience over breakfast, with everyone sitting here, listening?” I say, face flushed and barely managing not to throw my bowl at him.

  “I’m . . . sorry,” Pat says.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “Forget it.”

  “So what’s wrong?” Bonnie says, a hand reaching up to rub my back.

  “Nothing!” I say, trying to shift away from her. God, I hate these people poking into my business all the time. “Nothing, I’m just having a bad morning.”

  “Why?” she says.

  “Why do we need to talk about every little thing?” I say, getting up and moving to another log, away from her.

  “We’re here together,” she says. “And each person’s mood affects the entire group.”

  “Also,” Jin pipes up, “if you’re going to answer ‘how are you?’ with ‘fucking terrible,’ you have to know people are going to ask why. You’re practically begging people to ask why. So? What’s your problem?”

  “Look, I just don’t want to be here, that’s all.”

  “You changed your mind?” Bonnie asks.

  “No, I never wanted to be here.”

  “You thought you were going to a camp . . . .” Bonnie says, in a voice that sounds like her professional I’m-being-calm-because-I’m-talking-to-a-crazy-person mode.

  “No, I didn’t want to do it at all. Even when I thought it was camp. I made a deal that I would do it, but I never wanted to.”

  “Why did you, then?” Jin says.

  “Because my mother wanted me to.”

  “Seriously?” Jin sneers. “You do everything she says?”

  “No,” I say, glaring at her, wishing she would stay out of it.

  “Is she trying to control you?” Melissa asks quietly. “Because that’s very controlling behavior.”

  “No! No one is controlling me, or trying to control me.”

  “You’re obviously upset, though,” Bonnie observes again.

  “Look,” I say, standing up and backing away from the fire. “I’ll hike, and cook and clean up when it’s my turn, but all the rest, all this talking, all these questions . . . I’m not up for it. I’m not doing it. So stop asking me.”

  Dear Mom,

  I still haven’t told them about Ayerton, or my flip-out on the night of the spring dance: the ax, the garage. It’s not why you sent me. It’s none of their business. What would be the point in telling them I’m such a loser, I accidentally chopped myself in the leg? While not-accidentally hacking at the roof of our garage? And how the hell could I explain to them that this action—the roof, not the leg—made perfect sense to me at the time, and still does?

  And meanwhile, all I am trying to do is use everything you taught me. Shed the past. Move forward. Chin up, head high. And what you did earlier in your life—follow your own path and work your butt off going after what you want. But that’s practically impossible when you, via this damned trip, have stripped away everything that makes me feel comfortable or safe, every possibility of a coping mechanism. Why? Whatever the degree of trickery that was involved, you sent me here, and you knew it was going to be rough even if it had been a proper camp with cabins and some level of civilization. Is Melissa right: Is it to control me? Well, sure, but it’s more than that. Are you trying to break me? I promise you, I do not need breaking. And the gall of you thinking you know what I need at this point is . . . well, it’s extraordinary.

  Love (which often sucks),

  Ingrid

  Once again, I hike in the middle of the group, thinking, with each step, that I just have to get through the day. Ally starts out in front of me, the gauze her feet are wrapped in sticking out the tops of her boots.

  We begin in silence, and soon it’s the sound of her huffing and puffing that I’m hearing louder than anything else. I ask her if she’s okay, and she only nods and keeps going. Before long she’s limping and slowing down, and I can see her shoulders shaking.

  “Ally? Do you need a break?”

  Ally pauses, looks back at me, and I stop. Behind me, Jin stops.

  “I n-need a break every two minutes,” Ally says, tears streaking down her face, which she has, I notice, made up again today. I have to admire the optimism.

  “We can’t exactly stop every two minutes,” Jin says from over my shoulder.

  “I know,” Ally says, sniffling.

  I turn and glare at Jin, then say to Ally, “Why don’t you have some water?”

  She nods, pulls out her water bottle, takes a drink.

  “I’m never going to survive this,” she says, looking at me with wide, drippy eyes. “Everything hurts.”

  Seth, who has been walking ahead of Ally, has come back to see what’s wrong, and up ahead I can see that everyone has stopped.

  “Ally?” Seth says, getting an immediate sense of the situation. “What’s her name again? Angel?”

  Ally nods, sniffling.

  “Come on,” he says, reaching out to take her hand. “Every step, just . . . do what they suggested last night. Think about Angel. Every single step gets you closer to her.”

  I nod along with Ally, and she murmurs, “Angel,” and starts walking.

  “You can do it,” I say, though I’m not really sure she can. I’m not even sure I can.

  “That’s right,” Seth says. “Let’s go.”

  Seth keeps hold of her hand even though it’s obviously awkward to do while walking single file, and we all start moving forward again.

  “About time,” Jin mutters from behind me.

  “You’re just chock-full of kindness and empathy, aren’t you?” I respond, shaking my head.

  “Endless supply,” she says, totally deadpan, and I almost laugh.

  For the next couple of hours, I find myself thinking, “Angel,” with almost every step, too, almost like a mantra. Sometimes it even helps.

  Five days in, Ally has shifted from weepy, limping, and slow to not crying at all and hiking, albeit grimly, at a steady pace. She starts doing stretching and push-ups with Seth before dinner. I’m a little worried she’s developing a crush on Seth, which can’t end well, but she’s much better, and at the end of the fifth day, even volunteers to lead the next day’s hike.

  That night, I’m on firewood duty. When I arrive at the fire pit with my last armful of wood, something is off between Melissa and Peace, who are in charge of dinner.

  “What is your problem?” Peace is saying. “I can’t have an opinion?”

  Melissa’s face is rigid, and she doesn’t respond.

  “I’m just being nice,” Peace says, as Melissa assembles ingredients on a flat rock. “I’m trying to help. Fine. Make dinner yourself. I’m out.”

  He stalks off into the woods, leaving Melissa there, breathing fast and looking like she’s going to pass out from . . . I’m not sure what the emotion is.

  “Are you okay?” I ask her.

  She doesn’t answer, just turns like some kind of automaton and continues with the dinner prep. Since Peace h
as left her on her own, I help, and attempt to engage her in conversation, but she seems to have shut down completely. She goes through the entire evening, including circle, without saying a word.

  Ally does a decent job leading us on Day Six, but we’re still taking hours longer than the map estimates to get to camp every night.

  She is having an easier time, but Melissa is not.

  Harvey and Henry get into a fistfight on the trail, so they’re obviously not either.

  And I am not.

  I have fantasies about hot showers.

  I have nightmares, waking in a cold sweat once or twice a night.

  And day and night, I feel like I’m trapped in purgatory, panic rising and falling, and the fury that’s been keeping me afloat coming and going. I try to distract myself by thinking about other people’s problems—there’s certainly enough of that around me—but more and more the fury gives way to other things: blankness, bleakness, a sense of shattering betrayal.

  PHANTOM LIMB

  (Ages Thirteen to Fourteen)

  “This, this, this . . .” Mom was tossing things into an ever-growing recycling pile. “Out it goes.”

  I’d been at Godark just over a year, and after much discussion, Andreas had agreed to sell his waterfront condo and move in with us. The three of us had looked at a few houses, thinking to move, but seeing other places only caused us to realize how unique and cozy the coach house was, and we decided it was more than large enough for the three of us. However, Andreas was going to need some closet space, and this had prompted a purging frenzy.

  “Mom, you can’t just—achoo!” I sneezed from the dust she’d stirred up, pulling all of her opera paraphernalia out from the back of her closet. There were programs, playbills, cast photos, review clippings, musical scores, tiny opera house–shaped chocolates from who knows when. “You can’t just throw all that out—not the Carmen program, not—come on, I remember most of these shows. Wait!”

  Mom paused to open a score and run her index finger along the notes, then she swore in some exotic language and threw it on the pile.

  “When they cut off your leg, do you keep it to take it out and look at?”

  “Eww. What?”

  “Precisely.”

  “A leg would smell, Mom.”

  “Well, this smells too, and I don’t want Andreas to find our house smelly. It goes.”

  “It’s not a leg, Mom. This is your life. Our life. Your legacy. It’s important.”

  At this she tilted her head toward the ceiling and growled.

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Fine.”

  “And we do not speak of it to him. Ever.”

  We’d been over this and were not in agreement, not that it mattered since 90 percent of the time in the case of a disagreement, I would lose. My being thirteen had not changed that fact.

  The craziest thing was that Mom, even after almost two years with him, had still not told Andreas about her life in opera. Yes, he knew she’d been a singer and that she “didn’t like to sing anymore.” She’d told enough of the truth—that she’d drifted around Europe in her early years, hoping to make a living as a singer, that she’d taken bizarre jobs all over the place and sung wherever she could, but I could tell he had the impression she meant she was singing in bars, or even on street corners, and that maybe she hadn’t been very good.

  “All this time I thought you were just waiting for the right moment to tell him,” I said.

  “There is nothing to tell. That person,” she said, pointing to a stunning photo of herself, “is not me. Not now. And it is me he is with. Me of right now. I don’t want to talk about it, I don’t want to relive it, I don’t want him feeling sorry for me, and I don’t want him wishing I were still that woman. He loves me now.”

  “So you’re never going to tell him.”

  “No. And neither are you.”

  “But . . .”

  “No!” she roared. “No, no, no! I would rather break up with him. Is that what you want?”

  “Fine.” I sighed and got back to the depressing task at hand. Margot-Sophia was in a mood, and even the old photographs, which we didn’t have digital copies of, went in the pile. There would be no dissuading her. And so I helped: holding the garbage bag open, sorting recyclables from nonrecyclables, making runs outside to the bins.

  My heart hurt with every bit that was tossed. It was my life too—the best part of it. Even things that had happened before I was born were part of who I was, and how we got to this place in time, with or without possibly odiferous metaphorical limbs.

  Not all of it made it outside—some of it, as much of it as I could manage, made its way to the very back of my closet, from which I could produce it later on, if and when she regretted tonight’s actions.

  WEEPING LEADER

  (Peak Wilderness, Days Seven to Ten)

  On Day Seven, after another night of restless sleep—due to Peace’s ongoing snoring, and my own too-awake mind—I begin to lose it.

  The tears start before I’m even out of my sleeping bag, then I am crying too hard to speak at breakfast, although of course Bonnie and Pat try to get me talking. I cry as we hike, and through every break, through lunch, and all the way to camp that night.

  It’s hideous. Embarrassing. Ally and Seth and Melissa all try to help, but I don’t want help, and I can’t talk. Won’t. I’m so angry to have lost control of myself like this, to have cracked open, broken down.

  “Ingrid, you need to tell us what’s wrong,” Bonnie says at circle that night.

  I’d tried to get myself excused and just go to bed, but of course she and Pat wouldn’t let me.

  “All I know is what I already told you—that I don’t want to be here,” I say finally. “It’s not fair.”

  “Why not?” Bonnie says.

  “I keep hearing the phrase ‘at risk’ from you and Pat,” I say, through a quavering breath. “I guess what’s not fair is . . . this is a boot camp. Right? For kids who are ‘at risk.’ Well, obviously I’m not the soul of stability at the moment, but . . . generally speaking, the only thing I’m at risk of is becoming something my mom doesn’t want me to be.”

  “Which is . . . ?” Tavik asks.

  My drippy gaze swings over to him. “None of your business.”

  “What’s the big deal?”

  “It’s not a big deal, I guess,” I say, deciding he’s right. “Except to me. I want to be a musician. Specifically, a singer. And my mom . . . doesn’t want me to.”

  Tavik snorts. The other campers look confused.

  “And this is supposed to talk you out of it?” Jin says, incredulous.

  “Well, you see, a few months back, I auditioned for the Ayerton School—this incredible music school. I didn’t think I had a chance. Your grades have to be good and you have to be hugely talented. They take three people from North America per year, from thousands of applicants. Anyway, shock of my life, I got in. I’m supposed to do my senior year there, and then, if I do well, join their conservatory program after that. But I need my mom’s permission because I’m underage, and obviously my saved allowance isn’t going to be enough to pay for it. It’s not the money, though. She doesn’t want me to have a career in music. She wants me to do something . . . stable and sensible.”

  “Why?” Bonnie asks.

  This is obviously her favorite question.

  “She just thinks anything in the arts is too hard. Plus it’s in England. ” I swallow. “Maybe she just wanted to make me prove how much I want it. I don’t know. But those were the conditions she set—I do this program, she gives permission and finances for me to go.”

  “So, you’re a super talent,” Ally says. “Meanwhile, the rest of us are . . .”

  “Badass messes and criminals,” Tavik says with a wicked grin.

  “I’m not mess-free myself. It’s
just . . . It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “But to send you to this without giving you the right details about it,” Harvey says to me, “I mean, dude, you must be pissed.”

  “Well, I’m not surprised,” Peace sneers from the other side of the circle, where he’s been observing with a nasty smile on his face. “You obviously expected a five-star resort.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “On your way to your five-star school with all the other ‘special’ five-star musical snowflake people.”

  “Peace, please,” Bonnie says. “We were having a very positive, productive—”

  Peace ignores her and gets up and advances on me instead. “You’re nothing but a spoiled, capitalist, elitist—”

  I haul myself to standing, and glare up at him. “If it’s elitist not to want to see your hairy ass in my face and then lie on the ground, listening to you snore all night, then sure, I’m an elitist.”

  “I have a breathing condition! I’m tired of being discriminated against by people like you.”

  “I’m not talking about your freaking breathing condition, Bob, whatever the hell that means. You weren’t even part of this conversation until just now, but since we’re into it, I’m pretty tired of your agro-granola bullshit.”

  Peace growls.

  Bonnie and Pat are on their feet, looking like they’re ready to jump in and intervene.

  “It’s fine,” I say, motioning to them to stay cool, and taking a step away. “Why don’t we just agree to stay away from each other?”

  “Fine by me.”

  The good news is that the argument has temporarily stopped the crying.

  But now I have to go sleep in the tent with Peace. I stop Tavik on the way there, with a touch on his arm.

  “I need your help,” I say.

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you . . .” I swallow hard. “I know it’s the worst spot, but could you sleep . . . in the middle? Tonight? I just . . .”