That was the first time I saw his dimples, and the golden undertones that lit up his skin when he was thoughtful.
But none of my friends had ever mentioned Thomas’s beauty; their fear of his war-torn past pushed him right into the category of weird and undateable.
Which I guess is why I’d hesitated to tell my friends that I thought Thomas was hot. Like, smoldering hot. I worried that they might judge me strangely for it. That was my weakness. And I hadn’t told them about his poem that I’d found, about how much it had affected me. Ever since I read the poem, whenever Thomas walked into a room, I felt his energy more than ever. Like an electric charge. His eyes were usually downcast, and his body language made him all but unapproachable, but it seemed as if he hid universes beneath his skin. Galaxies. He didn’t radiate blandness like my ex-boyfriend, Jason Sibley, or Juanita’s boyfriend, Luis, or the other varsity guys at school. Thomas was different.
But I won’t lie. He scared me a little bit. But not for the reasons he scared everyone else. I was scared because his presence made me seek the same vital qualities I saw in him—even the painful ones—in myself. And perhaps I wasn’t ready to face them.
Or, now that I was on the verge of diagnosis, to lose them.
Over the last year, Thomas had started to make casual friends, and once in a while our social circles overlapped. He’d been to a couple of Weekends on Wednesdays, though he didn’t really chat with anyone and he usually left early, long before I’d get up the courage to talk to him. So why did I think I could summon the guts to speak to him one-on-one now? Mano a mano. Tête-à-tête. No, French didn’t put nearly the same positive spin on things as Spanish.
But it was way too late to backtrack now. Before I had a chance to bail, I was standing close enough to kiss him, staring at the cloud of dust my feet had thrown up.
“Hi, Thomas,” I said. He squinted, as though willing me to shrink into a bug or turn around and walk away, a thousand miles away. As he crouched over the burner with a faint shimmer of sweat on his forehead, I thought he’d never looked more handsome, or been more disconcerting.
“I, um, thought I’d find you here,” I said.
“Oh?” Thomas said, revealing no emotion, good or bad. He waited, still affectless, for me to continue. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the sun that seemed to penetrate my neurons themselves, causing a migraine. My vision blurred slightly, and my knees weakened like a wave had hit them. But there was no place to go but forward.
“Which of course begs the question,” I said, trying to fill the embarrassing silence, “of, um, why have I been looking for you?”
“You tell me,” Thomas said, keeping his eyes steady on me. “You never have before.”
He had me there. But in all fairness, Thomas didn’t exactly make himself easy to befriend. He always seemed light-years away. Which is precisely why I knew we could help each other.
“Well, did you ever think that maybe you’re sort of hard to talk to?” I said, smiling. “Like maybe you’re willfully intimidating?” Was I bordering on flirtation?
“Am I?” Thomas said, lighting the burner with such vigor that I could feel the heat on my bare legs.
“You’re just . . . you know. . . .” Suddenly this was coming out all wrong. I didn’t know how to finish. I didn’t have the words. How pathetic I must appear to him right now. I might as well be blind again, considering how much I was stumbling.
My eyes wandered to the people climbing into the generous scoop of balloon. For a second I wanted to trade places with any one of them, even if it meant changing schools, changing faces, changing histories. I just wanted to feel strong again, like I would remain whole until graduation.
“I see,” he said, solemnly fiddling with the balloon apparatus. Though his English was impeccable, his accent was slightly foreign—possibly French—and it made me melt a little.
Focus, Lo. You can do this.
“Listen, Thomas,” I said, regrouping. “The truth is . . . I have a proposal for you. And, well, I don’t know what you’re going to say. It’s kind of heavy.”
“Let me be the judge of that.”
“Well, it’s about this condition I have.”
“Condition?”
“Yeah.” I wanted to stall for time, but Thomas’s eyes were expectant, burning into me. There’d be no equivocating. “I just found out that I might be . . . sick. Like incurably, neurologically sick.” There. I’d said it. MS. My Strain. My Substance. Mucho Sorry.
For a millisecond Thomas seemed like he might be genuinely troubled. But then he knelt back down to the ground and began puttering with the burner once again. Moving on to the next task. This hurt my feelings.
“Hello?” I said. “Sick girl here.” Wait, I hadn’t meant to sound angry.
Thomas’s eyes had gone cold again. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“It was stupid of me to come,” I said, whirling around. So much for risks reaping rewards. I felt exhausted, hopeless. What had I been thinking? This wasn’t gorgeous, untouchable Thomas’s problem. This was mine alone. I couldn’t expect him, of all people, to care. The migraine began spreading down my spine, if that were even possible.
“I’m sorry,” Thomas said, making me slow down and stop. His voice was loud, clear, almost yearning. I turned around to face him again. He was still squatting in the dirt, not making eye contact, but he’d put down his tools.
Not me, of course.
I am not at war
Anymore. . . .
“About what, exactly?” I said.
“That I was callous. . . . That you’re sick. It’s just that . . . I’ve . . . seen too many people die. I can’t . . . get close. My instinct is to turn away when someone I like. . . .”
He trailed off, and I got confused. Someone he . . . likes ? Was he referring to me? He didn’t even know me. How could he like me? We’d barely had a conversation. His life experience was so vastly different from mine. He was an ex–child soldier from Africa. I was an economically comfortable white chick with parents who still made me a basket full of jelly beans every Easter. I owned four Joni Mitchell records, for god’s sake. I could keep eight hula-hoops going at once. Thomas and I were the dictionary definition of “worlds apart.”
“I have a favor to ask you,” I said, gaining nerve and brushing aside Thomas’s confusing comment for now, though I feared I was still blushing from it. “But I don’t have much time to spare, so please be honest with me. And promise that you won’t do anything that you’re not one hundred percent comfortable with.”
Now it was Thomas’s turn to be confused. “I promise,” he said.
I took a deep breath. “I know you’ve been through a lot. The war, coming to the States, the adoption.”
Was I saying too much? Thomas’s face became forbidding, maybe even angry. It wasn’t really fair to know all these personal details about him secondhand. But I’d already warmed to my speech, so I kept going.
“You’ve got some things that probably weigh on you,” I continued. “Heavy things. And so do I, though probably . . . to a much lesser degree. So I’m just going to say it. Tomorrow there’s a ceremony in the desert that could maybe take . . . that weight . . . away. I’d be healed of my disease. Potentially. And you’d be, you know. . . .”
Truth was, I didn’t really know what Thomas would be released from after the ritual, because I didn’t know what exactly he was afflicted with now. I was confronting him out of the blue about his sorrows before he’d even shared them with me. Maybe now he never would. I lowered my head.
“Come here,” Thomas said. “I have something to show you.” He grabbed my hand and practically yanked me across the airfield toward an isolated red balloon. I looked around for Mr. Dent, but he was already high above our heads with the tourists. I’d been so absorbed in our conversation—in Thomas—that I hadn’t even noticed
their ascent. Now Thomas and I were alone together in the field with this menacing red contraption.
“Get in,” he said.
Though earlier I’d been longing to go up in the air, these weren’t exactly ideal circumstances. I’d made Thomas angry, had triggered something in him. I didn’t truly know him, not beyond my own haphazard guesswork, and I couldn’t predict what he would do.
I sleep in a bed.
My new mom makes me a sandwich.
There are no machine guns at my disposal.
But that is me. Not him. . . .
“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe we could get coffee or something instead? Frozen yogurt?”
“Get in,” Thomas repeated, and this time the command had an almost military ring to it. I obeyed, climbing into the basket. He followed me inside, latching the short wicker door behind us. Then he lowered his black hood and turned on the burner. A long, jagged scar I’d never noticed before stood out prominently on the back of his neck.
“Thomas, what are you doing?” I was really starting to feel anxious now. It seemed as if my enigmatic classmate intended to launch us into the heavens. Thomas untied various ropes around the basket. When he got stuck on a particularly stubborn knot, he pulled a large hunting knife from his belt and sliced the rope clean through. Then he cranked the burner under the balloon, and I felt my body begin to lift off the ground. My stomach leapt the way it did in fast elevators. I wanted to grab for the ropes that Thomas was dropping one by one to the earth, but my hands had gone numb. I leaned into the corner of the basket to try to secure myself by my elbows in the shaky vessel as we jerked skyward.
“Consuelo Katherine McDonough,” Thomas said, “you don’t know what you’re asking me. You’re out of your depth here. You have no clue.”
I looked over the basket edge and saw the ground floating away. I closed my eyes. Could Mr. Dent see us? Would he and his passengers descend to save us?
Wait, Thomas knew my full name?
“You’re right,” I said through gritted teeth. “This was a mistake. Please put me down.” What if the breeze blew us into an electrical line or something, caught us on fire, caught everything on fire?
“What do you know about my life?” Thomas said. “That I came from a war zone, that I’m an orphan, that I should be ever so grateful to be safe in the US of A? To be taken care of by Big Daddy America?”
I nodded my head, barely listening, still unable to open my eyes or hold on.
“Can I tell you what you don’t know?” Thomas said. “When I was a boy, rebel soldiers killed my parents in front of me. They shot them and then burned them in our house outside Monrovia while they were still alive, screaming. My little brother, Henri, and I escaped through the jungle, but we heard their agonizing cries as we ran. And then they stopped.”
In one of my nightmares, my father burned alive in the forest, unable to halt the flames of wildfire. Here in the real world of Thomas and the sunset and a rising balloon, I opened my eyes. Thomas gripped the cord that fed gas into the burner. The flatness in his gaze was gone, replaced by something feverish and urgent.
“After weeks alone, starving, Henri and I were picked up by an opposing army. They said we could avenge our parents’ murders. That the men who had killed them were less than dogs and we needed to get retribution before they slaughtered more members of our families. The army soldiers marched us into a military camp and gave us guns. I’d never seen a gun up close. It was heavy. Savage. A few days later my best friend from school arrived at the camp. When I saw him I embraced him. I thought he’d died in the fire that had consumed our village. My commander saw our embrace. He didn’t like that we were still . . . human. He handed me a machine gun and told me that if I didn’t shoot my friend on the spot, he would kill me. . . . Shall I continue?”
I nodded. The earth was farther away every second.
I am a broken T.V.
Not like the nice ones in America.
Like the ones I watched in Monrovia.
My static is loud, violent.
Black and white.
Good and evil.
“Henri was standing right there. I knew that he needed me.” Thomas’s eyes were lit up as if he were reliving the scene in real time. “I was his big brother, his only family left. And so I shot my friend. I shot him in the leg, and he fell to the ground, screaming in pain. My commander cracked my head open with the butt of his machine gun. ‘In the heart,’ he said, pointing at my friend’s chest. I told him that I couldn’t do it. My friend was writhing on the ground, begging me to spare him. Blood was shooting from his leg. I must have hit the femoral artery by mistake. I didn’t know anything about the body’s most vulnerable points . . . at the time. The commander grabbed my hair and jerked me to the ground, began kicking me in the ribs again and again. My little brother cried for him to stop. The commander shook the gun in my hands. ‘Kill your friend,’ he said. ‘Or I’ll kill your brother.’ I aimed the gun and shot my friend through the chest.”
I trembled in the corner of the basket, wanting Mom and Dad, wanting to be grounded again, feeling my body convulsing beneath me like a storm cloud.
“That was the first person I killed,” he said.
“Why are you telling me all this?” I whispered. I was one hundred feet above the ground, a killer’s captive.
“Because you don’t know what you’re messing with. You’re in over your head. When I fall asleep at night, I see my finger pulling a trigger again and again. I see the blood of my friends pouring from their bodies like sap from trees. I see myself grinding an old man’s face into the ground until he chokes on mud. And sometimes I think I’m capable of doing it all again. For no reason whatsoever. Just because.”
He still gripped the knife that he’d used to cut one of the tethers. He stepped closer to me.
“My new siblings are afraid of me,” he whispered. “They hear my screams at night. In those seconds before I wake up, I’m fighting for my life. Every time. If they got near me in those seconds, when I’m still un-conscious, operating on instinct, I fear I might break their necks.”
His eyes welled up with tears.
“You say you might be dying,” he said. “But I’m already dead. I have nothing to lose.”
Just then I felt a violent jerk on the basket. I stumbled headlong into Thomas’s chest, my stomach barely missing his knife. We had stopped ascending. One rope held us tentatively to the ground.
“If I’m going to do this ritual with you,” he said, “and try to lift the . . . weight, as you call it, then I need to know that you’re not afraid of me.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” I said. And I wasn’t. I could feel the chill of the knife through my T-shirt, but his chest was warm, inviting, safe.
“I’m a monster,” Thomas said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Maybe I’m a monster too.” We slowly began sinking.
6
WHEN I CAME HOME FROM the airfield with an assurance from Thomas that he would join me in the morning, and would approach Kit about coming too, I found Mom sitting at the kitchen table in her church clothes, an empty bag of barbecue potato chips in front of her. She looked up as if she’d been waiting idly for hours for me to walk in the door.
“If this is an intervention,” I said, kissing the top of her head and wiping the crumbs from her cheek, “you are way off the mark. I’m not pregnant, nor am I an alcoholic. But give me a few more months. Isn’t patience one of the cardinal Catholic virtues?”
Mom smiled. “Very funny, sweetheart. It’s not an intervention. But, believe it or not, Miss Independent, your dad and I are worried about you.”
“Isn’t that how every intervention begins?” I said. “In fact, I think there’s a show on MTV about this. Where is Dad anyway?” I began filling a glass from the faucet.
“He’s on the mountain with his crew.”
I bristled, and the water overflowed my glass. “On the mountain? Why?”
“There’s a small fire up there today. They’re just rerouting and containing it. But he’ll be fine, dear. You know how cautious your dad is. Safety first.”
This was true. One Christmas he’d given me and Mom life jackets, and we’d never even been on a boat before. He made sure the trunk of my car was stocked with bright orange safety vests at all times, in case I got a flat tire or something and needed to await help on the side of the road. The giant signal flares he’d given me for my fifteenth birthday were supplements to this little kit. He probably would’ve been quite disturbed if he’d known that I’d just been up in the air with a teenage balloon pilot. But right now the memory was too charged and too confounding to share with anyone.
“Consuelo, your dad and I know that you don’t want to talk to us about your symptoms. But we think it’s important for you to talk to someone. A friend or. . . .” She let the sentence fade into the kitchen linoleum. I had a feeling she was about to say “relative,” but we both knew that Aunt Karine was the only family member I had a history of opening up to. And we both knew she was dead.
“I’m trying to respect your wishes,” Mom continued, “but I don’t think it’s healthy to keep this possible threat to your health a secret. You go back to the hospital for testing in just over a week. I think you should be prepared for the eventuality that your life is going to change. Maybe radically. And if that happens, you’re going to need support. Why not ask for it?”
Little did she know, support was what I was trying to get, except I was going through coyote rather than human channels.
“When . . . your aunt was dying,” Mom said, still unable to say her sister’s name, “she surrounded herself with friends. You know how much people liked her. She was just a . . . a warm soul.” Mom paused for a moment, digging around in the potato chip bag before remembering that it was empty. “And I know that having a support system comforted her. As she made her . . . transition.”
The Way We Bared Our Souls Page 5