by Amanda Stern
Athena, I quickly decide, is boring, but Stacia Moore is not. Stacia’s duffel is filled with cool toys, like glow-in-the-dark light sticks. One night I wonder aloud what it feels like to glow, and Stacia says we should find out. Out on the porch, we crack the light sticks, cut them in half, and rub the sludge all over our bodies. We can hear Sally in her room practicing a Lou Reed song on guitar. Tracey turns out the porch lights, and I see gold winking sparkles on Stacia’s chin, cheeks, and shoulders.
“We’re glowing!” I shout.
“We’re glowing!” Stacia is yelling too. The other girls come racing out of the cabin and everyone wants a turn.
“There are only four sticks left,” Stacia says, which means not enough for everyone.
The porch lights flick on and Sally stands in the doorframe. “Whatcha up to, little chicks?”
“We’re glowing!” I shout.
Sally cocks her head sideways. “What do you mean?”
“Tracey, the lights,” I order. Tracey shuts off the lights and Sally gasps, then laughs, then gasps again.
“How did you do that?” she asks, awe-eyed and wondrous. Stacia holds up the empty wax sticks. “What are those?”
“Light sticks. My dad got them for me. He owns a paint store.”
“Oh, hellish moment. We have to get you to Norma, immediately.” Stacia and I exchange confused glances. Sally grabs Stacia’s hand and Stacia grabs mine and we rush across camp to the infirmary. I feel like Madeline with a burst appendix, but I’m not sure why we need Norma the nurse when the only thing that burst was glow sticks.
Norma strips us down and rushes us into the showers to scour our skin with scrub brushes until it hurts. When we’re done, she turns the lights off and Sally plays the ref, shouting: “They still glow!” It takes five showers before we’re just regular human kids again. Wrapped in towels, we follow Sally back to the cabin, numbed, barefoot, and dull-skinned. On the tops of my feet I spy two luminous dots, and I smile at the part of me they couldn’t wash away.
Stacia and I become very popular after that, which helps me be less homesick. Even Kara and Eddie hear about it. Plus, I get my first boyfriend. Gideon Kaplan and I are twins: little, sporty, and scrappy; but unlike me, he’s not afraid of anything. Melissa and I have been writing to each other, but after I brag about Gideon she doesn’t write back, and I worry I bragged too hard. I am trying not to think about that. When I do, I feel like I’m flipping and flying through outer space. Once I get home I will prove to her that I am not conceited about having a boyfriend. Imogen sent me a care package, so I know she’s not mad.
My mom and Jimmy write me all the time, which just shows how boring their life is without me. Still, I check the return addresses just in case—as long as they match our home, I am safe. I write them back so they know that I’ve learned how to kayak, swim across the lake, play tetherball and tennis, make a leather bracelet, ride a horse, and shoot a bow and arrow as well as a rifle. I’ve also learned all the words to “Walk on the Wild Side.” I don’t know what I was so afraid of. Soon the kitchen and country smells that turned me sad at first become familiar. I feel stronger. I see Kara and Eddie all the time, and I know all the camp songs and everyone’s names. No one teases me and when I am homesick, people make me feel better. Camp is a new world whose language I have come to understand. There’s so much to do all the time and so many people to do things with that I feel the same sense of belonging I feel in New York. Camp Killooleet becomes another home where I am safe.
Then, one night late in July, someone taps me on the shoulder during movie night—Lawrence of Arabia, what a bore—and says there’s a phone call for me at the main house. My heart belly flops. Phone calls are not good. Especially at night.
I peer toward the main house, which is a molar in the distance. There is a field of darkness to walk through alone before I find out that my mother is dead. I pray and beg and plead with the world and the phone company to reverse it. The walk is humid and damp. I want the thoughts to stop, but they refuse. These are the steps I am taking before the good part of my life ends. This is my fault and I know it. Had I been alert to my worries instead of letting my guard down, my mom would not be dead. Why did I let myself glow? How could I have been so selfish?
I see Kara and Eddie. They’re crying. Even though Eddie is eleven and Kara is thirteen, they suddenly look much younger to me. Kara is holding the phone. My stomach puckers. For a brief moment, I realize a very small part of me is ready to be told my mom is dead so that the constant worrying about her death will end, but of course, that’s not what I want. I squeeze the thought away as fast as I can.
“Is it Mom?” my mouth asks.
When Kara nods, I get dizzy. She hands me the phone. When I hear my dad’s voice, I’ll know it’s true.
“Hi, pumpkin.” Mom is alive! I nearly laugh with relief and gratitude. But why are Kara and Eddie crying?
“Baba died,” she says. I feel my insides evaporate. Oh. Oh no. My wishes are even more powerful than I thought. That secret I’d forgotten, the secret nonwish that Baba would die: I’ve gone and done it. The more I worry about death and disappearance, the more it seems to happen. If this is a superpower, I want to trade it in for a weaker one.
I don’t remember returning to the movie screening. My thoughts ran like their own movie, in an endless loop. I need to go home. I should never have left. Baba died because I had that bad thought. I am a jinx. This is the night Baba died. This is the night I learned I am a jinx. The fear I had before I left, the fear they said would not happen, happened. And then I came here and had fun. I never should have had fun. I will never leave again. I will go home tomorrow, and I will live there with my mother forever, because when I leave, people die, and now the poison is in my own family and crawling toward my mom.
My mom won’t let me, though. We have no choice. So instead of going home for the funeral we stay in Vermont, and all the kids are extra nice to me, Kara, and Eddie, and before I even know it, a few days pass, and my old happiness creeps back in.
For the first time, a trip away ends too fast. Soon it’s commando raids and the camp banquet, then the buses come and I am crying because I don’t want to leave. But this is a totally different sadness: I am crying like all the other kids. I am normal. I am cured. We go back the way we came, seven hours by bus to Grant’s Tomb, singing all the camp songs, and every last word of “Walk on the Wild Side.” My happiness is leaking, oozing as nonstop chatter to Stacia. My sadness has reversed; I want to go back to camp and away from home. This is the feeling I’ve always chased. When I imagine next summer, nothing in me buzzes or pulses, and I know my countdowns are gone. Out the window, trees turn into buildings, and the city appears. I check with my body to see if being back turned me into my old self, but no, I’m still cured.
The bus gets asthma and jolts, lowering. When the driver pulls the doors open, I rush to Mom before Kara and Eddie and throw my arms around her waist. “Did you have the best time?” she asks.
“Back to camp, back to camp!” I sing, and then run off to say good-bye to my friends. I don’t look back to make sure my mom didn’t disappear. Normal is the best feeling I’ve ever known. I survived camp. I even survived accidentally killing Baba. I am normal. Now I can do all the things I never wanted to do before.
Our house is exactly where we left it, and I’m so glad to see it I wish I could give it a hug. We whiz past the “Welcome Home” sign, to our bedrooms, to hug Jimmy, and then head to the garden to show everyone we’re home. Even new things—the umbrella stand, the lace covering the front hall table, Marcel’s haircut—none of these things push me out of my new world. I wanted to carry my camp lightness all the way back home, and I did. It’s still with me; I am at ease. When the sun sets, nothing sinks in me; and when I go to bed, I miss the sound of mattress plastic and the smell of mothballs, and I sleep there all night, in my own room.
The next day we walk to SoHo to see friends. I unlink my hand from my mom’s and h
urry ahead, something I couldn’t do before camp. Our narrow cobblestone streets, our clustered buildings, our borders and stoops, our bread shops and bums, our hippies, musicians, sculptors, and outcasts: Not once did I remember to miss them, and look—they’re all still here. Jimmy Alcatraz, Vito, the Guardian Angels, Ciggy, Sasquatch, and even the lady on the corner. Everyone is safe, I think. Right where we left them. Not even the abandoned-seeming streets that used to give me chills haunt me.
I am happy right up until I see a “Still Missing” poster with a reward stamped across it: $10,000. Suddenly I bump into old me, and I feel a flood of shame for forgetting. I turn to my mom. “They didn’t find Etan Patz?”
“No, sweetheart.”
None of us say anything for a few blocks. Cafe Borgia took down their poster of Etan, and the row of missing posters that covered the scaffolding on Greene Street has been plastered over with concert posters and graffiti. I am furious. How will anyone recognize him and save him if people take his photo down? A block or so later we walk into a cold front, a stretch of emptiness and nobody. Broken windows, sharp panes hanging from the ledges. The buildings are black inside. Garbage bags and wood patch over the top floor windows, and graffiti colors the outsides. A pants-down bum is asleep on the sidewalk and we cross to the other side. Shadows of buildings cool the stone streets and spread thin the gloom, and the air smells musty, like spring, when Etan Patz disappeared. What if he’s inside one of these buildings, and we’re walking right past him? How would it feel to be so close to your mom knowing your mom didn’t know? My arm rises, my hand slips and locks into its old position in my mom’s palm. My dirty Pumas land soft, and with no one around I can hear all our steps, like we’re in a movie and the sound is the signal to the audience to be scared.
But when we hit the other side of Houston Street I feel safe again, and my fear slips away as I run after Eddie. At camp I was scared until I wasn’t. I went away and didn’t come back at the first sign of trouble, which means I am brave. My body made a callus around my feelings, and now I know that being scared doesn’t mean staying scared. I’m tough enough to withstand anything. I’m not going back to how I was. I am brave now. I am cured. I am normal.
* * *
It isn’t until a couple of days later, when my mom and I are back-to-school shopping, that I ask when I can see Melissa. My mom goes silent. At first I think she didn’t hear me, but then she stops walking. I don’t like the look on her face.
She didn’t feel any pain, my mom says. It happened in her sleep. What? What do you mean? Now I am sitting on the curb, my feet in the gutter, staring at my knees. I can’t stop crying. What about our piggy bank? Who will break it open and count all the change? Melissa would never die before the change reached the top. She would never die without telling me first. And if she did die, she would call to tell me she died, even though I know that’s not how death works, but Melissa would have done that for me, just like I would have done that for her.
When my knees become my knees again, the world feels different. My body has been replaced with an exact replica of my old body, and only I know this new body isn’t actually me. When other people look at it, they’ll think they’re seeing me, but they’ll be wrong. I don’t feel close to myself, and worse, I don’t even feel close to my mother. Nothing is the same. This is the opposite of cured.
As the new me slips off, I know that I’m not the old me either. I’m a new old me. A worse me, a bad-luck me with power I don’t want. I am a killer of people. I left home when I didn’t want to, and once I stopped being scared two people died, and that is my payback for not worrying. Worrying keeps people alive.
“When did she die?” I ask.
“A week before Baba,” she says.
“Why didn’t you call and tell me?”
“I thought it was best to wait and tell you in person,” she says.
But she didn’t tell me. I had to ask. She knew when she called me at camp. For an entire month she knew that Melissa was dead, and I didn’t. For an entire month I thought Melissa was mad at me for having a boyfriend when really she was dead. For an entire month, I was happy, carefree, when I should have been devastated and in mourning. I am a bad person.
Every draft of air tells the new story of me. The beep and grind of morning garbage trucks, plastic bags caught and panicked in the wire bones of fences, the smell of blood from a freshly scraped knee, the hard striped candy in bowls at my grandmother’s, the flapped-open lip of a broken sneaker sole. Every signal, every layer, gesture, flavor, texture—I feel separated from it all. I am cardboard in the shape of a person. I feel nothing. How could my mom let me laugh, play, have a boyfriend, sing, jump, kayak, swim, make friendship bracelets, and drink bug juice while Melissa was dead? If I had known she was dead, I would have come right home. I wouldn’t have made myself glow, or learned any of the camp songs, or gotten a boyfriend, or laughed.
The rainbows on my laces have faded; they’re almost gone. Everything disappears. I know that every day is someone’s birthday, and now I wonder if every day someone dies. Someone could be dying right now, and we’re doing nothing to save them.
“But you said she wouldn’t die,” I say.
“I didn’t think she would,” my mom tells me.
“You said what she had wouldn’t kill her.”
“I had hoped it wouldn’t,” she says.
“But it was possible? She had something that people die from?” I ask.
“Yes,” she said. “She did.”
Nothing is safe anymore. I am angry, in a way my mom can’t make better. I want her to apologize. I want her to admit she made a mistake, that she should have told me the truth from the start and let me stay home. There was a funeral I didn’t know about. I was getting ready for school when Etan disappeared, and I was watching a boring movie when Baba died, but what was I doing at the exact minute Melissa died? Was I sleeping, too? I didn’t even know she needed saving. My mom said Etan would be found. She said Melissa wouldn’t die. My mom knew, and she lied.
“Why didn’t you tell me she could die?” I ask.
“I didn’t want to upset you,” she says.
Now how can I trust what my mom tells me? Does everything I worry about come true and she’s been telling me I’m wrong about the world just to keep me from getting upset? If I don’t know what does and doesn’t happen, how will I know whether to say yes or no, run or stay? I am nine years old and I still don’t know the rules for anything. I don’t want to be protected from the truth. I want to know what can happen, and what to do when that thing happens, but she won’t tell me. Although my heart and brain feel betrayed, and I feel more alone than I’ve ever felt, my body still needs my mother, and this is confusing.
Before I left people were blurry and I worried everyone would get blown away like skywriting, but then I got cured and everything seemed fine. Now the cure is gone, and so is Melissa. My mom doesn’t understand what I need, and I fear she never will. Maybe she never did. Instead of telling me how to handle a bad thing, she always said there’d be no bad thing, and now Etan, Baba, and Melissa have all disappeared from life—that’s three bad things in a row—and I don’t know what to believe anymore, or whom. Things don’t mean what they did just ten minutes ago. I can’t be the new me. I will never get another boyfriend, and I will make sure never to be happy again. I will always be this old bad me, hatched and abnormal, like no one else.
The wind presses hard against me, a private warning telling me not to move forward into the future, pushing me back to the beginning before I was born, before I had days. Somewhere, there’s an original world where I haven’t killed anyone. One day I’ll be dead, too, but I don’t know when that will be. I could die at any time. I could die now. Maybe I am walking toward it; maybe it’s walking behind me, trying to catch me and tag me out, dead.
My mom says, “I don’t know.” I don’t know what she looked like. I don’t know what she thought or felt or smelled or tasted while she was dying.
I don’t know if she knew she was dying. I don’t know if dreams turn into death, or your breath forgets to come. I don’t know if her mother found her in the morning, or whether she was awake when it happened. I don’t know if she was on her side or her back, wearing her bandanna or not. I don’t know if she was scared or smiling.
I was right all along, but no one listens to me, and no one tells me the truth. I feel grief for every moment that passes. I feel time as it leaves me. I don’t need to read clocks to understand. I feel time as I walk through it. Soon, time will grow its gravity-hours and push down the light, burying today, like Melissa. I am always walking toward my next separation. I am always walking toward someone’s death.
I don’t want to go to sleep again. I don’t want to go back to school. I don’t want a new classroom, or new friends. Why does the world invent kids if it’s just going to throw us away?
Intelligence Test: Detecting Absurdities
“An unlucky bicycle rider fell on his head and was instantly killed; they took him to the hospital and fear he cannot get well. What is foolish about that?”
“He was already dead so he couldn’t get well,” I say.
“I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest, and myself. What is foolish about that?”
“You can’t be your own sibling.”
“The body of a young girl cut into eighteen pieces was found yesterday. People think she killed herself. What is foolish about that?”
I don’t like these questions.
“You can’t cut your own self up like that,” I say.
“There was a railroad accident yesterday, but not a serious one; only forty-eight people were killed. What is foolish about that?”