“Okay,” Alex said with concern in her voice. “Feel better, doll. I’ll let Mr. Rodriguez know that you’re running a few minutes behind for English.”
“Thanks, Alex,” I said, closing my eyes to another blanket of darkness and resting my cheek on the cold desk. “For everything. I mean it.” Alex rubbed my back, then departed, taking her floral-smelling skin with her, leaving me in a state of nothingness.
• • •
About an hour (I think—I couldn’t consult a clock) after the final bell rang, my sight came back. First the enameled wood of the desk shuddered into view, and then I slowly raised my head to the window and saw the sun penetrate the venetian blinds. The sun. I would never complain about it again.
Before I could start contemplating a life of solar worship, I was assailed by a rush of horrific thoughts. What if I’d been walking down the hallway when the blindness struck? What if I’d been driving? I would’ve plowed into a roadside saguaro stand or something. I could have killed someone. What if my parents found out things were this bad? Or Dr. Osborn? No, my current condition was totally unsustainable. I wouldn’t be able to hide these symptoms for much longer. Everything was going to change. Life as I knew it was going to be totally upended. I’d never felt so scared, so disoriented. I gathered my things and rushed down the empty hallway and out into the parking lot. I had to do something, and I had to do it immediately.
The way I saw it (now that I could actually see), I had one option, as crazy as it sounded. Well, maybe not so crazy for Santa Fe.
Jay’s ritual.
But to do that, I’d need four friends.
I couldn’t imagine taking Juanita to meet Jay. I loved her, but for one, she’d never take something like this seriously, and for two, what was her burden? That she’d recently gotten stuck behind a minivan full of kids in the drive-thru of Taco Sandy’s? That Luis persisted in buying her regular instead of diet at lunchtime? That her boobs were so big they caused her mild back pain? And Alex had nothing wrong with her except for what she termed her “spaghetti legs.” Everybody loved her. She was . . . happy. Like a character at the end of one of her mother’s romance novels. My friends weren’t shallow; they just weren’t searching for answers right now. They didn’t even have the questions.
No. If I was going to find real suffering, something more akin to mine, I would have to get creative. I would have to find the outsiders, those who didn’t drink from the agua of our lunchtime clique.
Like Jay said, I had to save my soul.
And to save my soul I needed to take a big risk. I needed to convince others to save theirs.
And suddenly I knew just the person who could help me do it.
• • •
I drove past my own house and parked three doors down, in Kit Calhoun’s driveway. Kit and I had grown up together and were in the same year in school, but he and I hadn’t talked much since our ill-fated “romance” three summers before. Today, however, he was my gateway to Thomas Kamara.
I was perhaps a little too well aware of the fact that Thomas had been hanging out in my neighborhood recently, always glued to a skateboard. Kit appeared to be teaching the Liberian orphan how to emulate Tony Hawk. Thomas was a fast learner. He also happened to look amazing with his shirt off. I’d seen them in the middle of my road, doing ollies and kickflips and skating in the empty pool in Kit’s backyard, which had been converted into a half-pipe. A lot of kids used to congregate there for long skating sessions, but Kit was more of a loner these days. Thomas, another notorious loner, seemed to be the only one allowed in.
How can I describe Thomas? In brief, he was a really hot student from Africa who looked half the time as if he wanted you dead and the other half as if he was about to hand you a bouquet of flowers and sweep you off your feet. There was just something so intense about him. Vibrant. Even when he seemed clouded or out of it at school, Thomas still had this piercing quality to him. And then there was the matter of that poem he wrote, the words he’d never meant for me to see. Right now it was those words more than anything that steered me toward him. But more on that later.
I let myself in through the Calhouns’ side gate, my childhood route, and walked around the house to the backyard. There was Kit, not skateboarding, exactly, but straddling the rusty diving board with his wooden deck on his lap, staring into the empty deep end of the pool. He was either lost in thought or ignoring me on purpose.
I suspected that Kit harbored some malice toward me. Which was understandable for two reasons: One, I might have been responsible for both his initiation into romance and his first broken heart. The summer between eighth grade and high school—the summer that decided many social fates—Kit and I hung out almost every day. In the not-too-distant past, Kit’s swimming pool had been filled with water and was a huge draw for me and the other kids in the neighborhood. Kit, on the other hand, had less appreciation for it. “I wish I could drain it and turn it into a skatepark,” he’d always say. Eventually, he got his wish.
But back during those lazy summer pool sessions, Kit and I got to know each other, floating head to head on inflated rafts in the blazing desert sunshine, drifting with the music that was always playing from his stereo. We talked about our parents, what we thought high school would be like, where we saw ourselves five years after graduation. We’d seen all the same high school comedies and romances and had read a lot of the same books. We felt qualified to declare to each other what mistakes we wouldn’t repeat.
“You’re going to get popular and forget about me,” Kit had teased. “You’re going to be one of those girls. I’ve got a bad feeling, Lo. You’ll start dating a generic senior quarterback on the first day of school. His name will be Rocco, and he’ll think Pink Floyd is a flavor of ice cream.”
I laughed and dismissed that prediction, throwing a beach ball at him. “Well, my crystal ball tells me you’re dead wrong,” I said. But secretly I thought that all sounded pretty great. Not the forgetting-about-Kit part, obviously, but . . . just . . . meeting new people, trying different things. And it turned out that Kit wasn’t too far off in his prediction. Except it was a junior lacrosse player named Simon, and it was the second week of school.
I’d never revealed this to Alex and Juanita, but Kit and I had kissed a little bit before that summer was over. I’d never kissed anyone before and . . . maybe I needed someone to practice on so I wouldn’t embarrass myself at the high school parties in my fantasy future. I admit that sounds awful, really mean-girl of me. But it’s the bitter truth. One day I just grabbed Kit in the pool and got to know his lips. They were soft, eager, and tasted a little like sunblock and chlorine. It was nice, but I didn’t feel that spark I’d read about in so many nineteenth-century novels, and I didn’t want to go into high school already attached to someone. Still, I thought we’d stay friends after I told him that even though I really cared about him, I wasn’t ready to be his girlfriend, that I wanted to start the new year with a clean slate.
But he wanted nothing to do with me afterward.
And though I made small efforts here and there, I all but avoided him because I felt so guilty for hurting his feelings.
And then there was the second reason Kit was cagey and despondent, around not just me but everyone. He was in mourning. The previous year he’d fallen completely Mohawk over Vans for Lucita, a beautiful Zuni girl and a recent transplant to our school from the Four Corners area. She had eyes that everybody wanted to wallow in, eyes like the deep end of an inground swimming pool.
But Lucita died.
She was driving home to the rez from Kit’s house one night and she ran off the road. She overcorrected and flipped her car. She wasn’t wearing a seat belt. I don’t think she was texting at the time or anything. It was just one of those stupid errors that inexperienced drivers make, like not yielding to school buses or taking twenty minutes to parallel park. Except this time the mistake was fatal. On
a weeknight after school when everyone else her age was joyriding, eating junk food, drinking, evading homework, figuring out what to do next to prolong the bliss of not doing anything much, Lucita bled out on the shoulder of an empty road.
Gone.
Ever since Lucita’s death, Kit had mostly isolated himself. I never heard music from his backyard anymore. He barely said a word at school, unless he was in American history class, during which he seemed universally outraged, especially about our government’s treatment of the Indian tribes.
So I wasn’t all that surprised when Kit started hanging out with Thomas last spring. But it wasn’t as if they were having long, intimate discussions over milk shakes. Actually, I’d never even heard them talk about personal things. They just seemed to be trying to leave all their feelings on the pavement. They were both so distant. I guess I was starting to relate to them.
I wondered how much Thomas knew about my history with Kit, or if Kit had ever said any resentful things about me. If Thomas thought I was a bad person who broke people’s hearts for no good reason. Well, I truly hoped not.
I was going to need his help.
“Kit?” I said now, unsure of my right to be in his backyard. He finally looked up, but he did it with such sluggishness he seemed barely alive.
“Lo? What are you doing here?”
“I’m actually looking for Thomas,” I said, “but I take it he’s not here.”
“Kamara? You guys know each other?”
“No . . . not exactly,” I said, remembering lines from Thomas’s poem: He thinks you must be deaf / Not to hear the shots, / See the blood. For a second I thought Kit was going to give me the third degree, but then he visibly lost the required energy.
“Nope. I’m alone.” He sighed. “But have a seat. Stay a while.”
Okay, so maybe he didn’t hate me.
I sat down on the edge beside the diving board. To populate the silence, I started tossing twigs into the pool, and from there I kind of understood why Kit was wearing that look of fierce concentration when I arrived. That gaping void of a view was rather entrancing. Such a deep, seductive sanctum. All sun-bleached concrete cut through with black tire marks. A person could easily disappear in it.
“I still don’t know how you convinced your mom to drain the pool,” I said, making conversation. “We used to have so much fun swimming.”
“Yeah, well, she was sort of desperate to do something to make me feel better since. . . .”
I nodded. So we were going to go there.
“I understand. And I’m so sorry, Kit. How long has it been now?”
“Eight months, three days, and two hours since the car accident. Eight months, three days, and forty-five minutes since she died.”
I looked up at him. I was crushed about my aunt Karine’s death too, but I wasn’t keeping such a morbid and precise timeline.
“I see,” I said. Lucita had been really special—like movie-star special—and Kit had adored her. I hadn’t known any other high school couples who seemed so in love. Seeing them hold hands down the hallway, or make themselves a table for two at lunch, or dart around Kit’s front yard playing with squirt guns, it had almost made me feel . . . well, not exactly jealous. But as if I had missed out on something wonderful. And then all that happiness was obliterated in a random instant by the side of the road. I tried to visit Kit after it happened, but he refused to leave his room. In many ways, he still hadn’t emerged.
“I was going to teach her how to skate,” Kit said softly now from his diving board perch. “I’d finally convinced her to try it. The week she died.”
“Kit, I’d . . . I’m so sorry. I want to talk more about her, and I want you to know that I’m here for you always. I feel like a colossal jerk, but the thing is, I’m in a bit of a rush, in a deadline situation, you know? I need to find Thomas as soon as possible. Do you know where he is?”
“Oh yeah. Your mysterious quest for the mysterious Thomas. Well, um, it’s Friday so he’s probably helping with the sunset tour at the balloon field.”
Oh, right. Thomas’s adoptive parents ran a Christian-themed hot-air balloon business just south of downtown. It sounds crazy, but this isn’t so remarkable in Santa Fe. Everyone’s parents seem to have some wacky job or another. Luis LeBlanc’s mom sells meteorites in the plaza. Mrs. Laramie’s husband paints old RVs and fills them with scrap metal as installation art pieces. Then there are the bodice-rippers by Alex’s mom, which you can buy in airports all over the country. By comparison my parents’ careers are snore-inducingly normal, even though they flirt with death and fire every day.
“Okay, thanks,” I said. “I’ll try there.” I got up to leave. Kit just nodded and resumed staring, idly spinning the wheels on his skateboard. I felt bad leaving him like that, but I also knew that sometimes, when you were really missing someone, you just wanted to be alone with her absence.
“Listen, Kit,” I said, “if you ever want to talk. . . .”
“Talking doesn’t really help,” he said. For a split second I heard Jay’s voice in my head. Four friends who are similarly suffering. Maybe now wasn’t the time, maybe it would never be a good time, but I wondered about taking Kit to see Jay with me.
“Well, you know where I live,” I said. Kit showed a hint of a smile. He didn’t just know where I lived; he knew which first-floor bedroom I slept in. He used to wake me up some mornings before middle school by tapping on the window.
But now that seemed like an eternity ago. Now we were separated by much more than panes of glass.
5
AT PSALMS OVER SANTA FE, the Dent family does a booming business at sunrise and sunset, when the local scenery is at its most picturesque. I was used to seeing the giant canvas balloons overhead when I fed the chickens in the morning or came home in the early evening from lady dates with Alex and Juanita. The structures made me think of massive sea creatures floating through the brine, like whales or giant squids. Oddly enough, I’d never actually seen the balloons land, only rise and sink.
I parked at the far end of the vast Psalms lot and sat in my car for a few minutes, trying to build up some nerve. TranquiLo. Remember: no risk without reward. No, that didn’t sound right. The opposite of that. Lo contrario.
Finally, I got out of my station wagon, bypassed the main office, and went straight for the balloon launch site. You didn’t have to worry about airfield security at Psalms, though it would be sort of funny to have to remove your shoes and go through a checkpoint before boarding the balloon basket. And then be asked to turn off all electronics upon takeoff and landing.
Settle down, space cadet. Sketch comedy is not your forte.
Thomas was at the periphery of the bald, bone-dry airfield, hunched over some kind of metal burner. In the center of the field Mr. Dent helped a group of middle-aged passengers weighed down with cameras board the basket of a half-inflated balloon designed to look like an ice cream cone dipped in rainbow sprinkles.
I have to admit, I was kind of jealous of these tourists. Even though I don’t lust for the Southwestern landscape, as so many flocks of visitors seem to, early September is by all accounts an ideal time to have a bird’s-eye view of the region. Monsoon season had just ended, and though we were still suffering from an unusually arid climate, the colors were beginning to change in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.
I looked away from the Baskin-Robbins balloon to find that Thomas had stopped what he was doing and now had his gaze set squarely on me. He wore his customary uniform of Converse high-tops, a white V-neck T-shirt, and cutoff jean shorts. And of course the usual dark hoodie that hid his face at school.
When you say the war is over,
He wants to argue the point. . . .
I knew Thomas’s story partly from my mom, who went to the same church as his parents. The Dents used to travel worldwide as missionaries, but their han
ds were currently pretty full with one biological son and six other young children they’d adopted or were fostering. Not to mention the responsibilities of running the airborne ops at Psalms Over Santa Fe.
But Thomas seemed to be the exception to their happy family. He was the newest, and chronologically the oldest, addition to the Dent melting pot on de Gama Street, and as far as I could tell he hadn’t yet assimilated into the Smiling Grateful Children Club. Just two summers ago he’d been relocated to whitewashed Santa Fe from Liberia, where rumor was he’d been a child soldier in the Second Liberian Civil War. At school, people said that he’d killed people. Lots of people, maybe even his own parents.
I’d never heard Thomas talk about growing up in Africa. Actually, I thought, as I prepared to ask him the biggest favor of my life, I’d never even had a proper conversation with him. I only knew of his experience secondhand, through the rumor mill and my mother’s friends at St. Francis. At school Thomas kept quiet, aloof. He was jumpy in class, easily rattled by loud noises, as if his finger were still on the trigger. His body still seemed poised to dodge bullets or dive into ditches. Everyone (except maybe Kit Calhoun) was too terrified to ask him questions or even to stand too close to him in the cafeteria lunch line. Because he kept so silent, I guess everyone assumed the worst. That Thomas could snap at any moment, as if he had some machete muscle memory and might stab them with a cafeteria fork.
But what I first noticed about Thomas was how good-looking he was, especially on the one or two occasions I’d seen him smile. Like the first time I met him, sort of, when I found him standing alone by Agua de Water at the end of lunch period.
“Why do people throw away their money in the fountain?” he’d said as I walked by him very slowly.
“I guess because the hope of having their wishes fulfilled is worth more than their money,” I’d said. Then I’d pulled some change from my pocket and handed him the sole quarter in a constellation of pennies. “You try.”
The Way We Bared Our Souls Page 4