All Unquiet Things

by Anna Jarzab

  She nodded. “There’s a really great restaurant down there.”

  “The Calamity Diner,” I said.

  “Great burgers. We should go sometime.” From the way she said it I knew we would. That was the thing about Carly and me—we fit from the very beginning. We were friends in an instant, and despite everything that happened later, it was something I don’t regret, because it has never happened to me again.

  I looked down at the book she was holding. “What are you reading?”

  She glanced at it briefly, as if she’d forgotten she had it. “Oh. It’s just an old book of short stories.”

  “By who?”

  “Edgar Allan Poe.”

  “Ah.”

  She held up her hand to shield her eyes from the sun. “I think we lost them.”

  We had reached the student parking lot on the edge of campus. “Maybe we should go back,” I said, not meaning it.

  “If you want. Do you have somewhere to be?”

  “My parents called me out of school,” I told her.

  “That’s not really what I meant.” She reached back and gathered her hair into a ponytail, twisting it up into a knot, then letting it fall. “You should come over to my house. We can hang out. I mean, it’s boring, but it’s not school. My mom’ll take you home later.”

  “Don’t you have class or something?” I asked.

  “Finch’ll let me go home early,” Carly said. “I’ve been staying late this week doing extra algebra tutoring. That’s one of the perks of the program—flexible hours.”

  I thought about what my mother would say about this particular perk. “Okay,” I agreed, knowing my parents probably wouldn’t go for it.

  But they did. My father thought it was a great idea, and my mother, though no doubt secretly dismayed, put up a great front. This way, she could finish her shift this afternoon, she said, even though I knew that she had been investigating movie times in the newspaper that morning—I had found a few matinee showings circled, films I had mentioned wanting to see.

  It turned out that Carly lived down the street from my father’s McMansion in the hills. Not wanting to trespass on Mrs. Ribelli’s goodwill, he offered to pick me up from her house when I was ready to go home and then deliver me back into the arms of my mother. It was a ridiculous business, this attempt at politeness and civility; my father was a performer, and I was the ventriloquist’s dummy. I didn’t know it at the time, but Carly was about to change all that.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Senior Year

  Harvey Rosenberg was the only person at Brighton who talked to me now without needing a reason. He was on scholarship, and he lived in a house near my mom’s in the valley. Harvey had transferred in the middle of sophomore year when a Brighton Fund spot finally opened up, so while he knew who Carly was, he had no real connection to her and no personal interest in her death.

  I had quit the independent study program the previous September, one of the few decisions in my life so far that was both right and my own. Harvey and I ended up in all the same classes. I was comfortable around him, and we got along well. He was very smart and an all-around good guy—generous, laid-back, and friendly. He had a girlfriend, a blandly pretty brown-haired junior named Jules Grover. They were constantly groping each other at the lockers. She stayed away from me, though, and encouraged him to avoid me as much as possible, but Harvey wasn’t the sort of person who dabbled in rumor, or even heard what people were saying for the most part. He was a life raft in a sea of assholes.

  Harvey sought me out at the break, wondering where I’d been. Since I was late for class, I had found a shady place underneath the bleachers to read and wait out first period. “Hey, where were you this morning? Phyllis assigned lab partners.”

  “Oh yeah? Who’d you get?” I didn’t want to tell him about the article.

  “You, you moron. She almost didn’t let me because you were missing, but I turned on the charm and she was conquered. Although,” he continued, “she advised me to inform my partner that AP does not stand for ‘absences permitted.’ So, in other words, show your ass up from now on.”

  “Will do. Any homework?”

  Harvey scoffed. “Please, dude, this is Phyllis. We’re supposed to split the atom before Thursday.”

  “Copy the syllabus for me during your office hour?”

  “Fine. Are you coming to our next class, or you planning on spending the whole day wandering campus? Because if that’s your intention, I would suggest going home.”

  “Thinking about it,” I said, squinting into the sun.

  The newspaper article was in my back pocket. I don’t know why I didn’t just throw it in the trash. I had considered who might have been behind the little gift. At first I wondered about Audrey, but chucked that idea almost immediately; we weren’t on the friendliest terms, especially considering how cold I’d been to her that morning in the library, but she wasn’t the type to put energy into unnecessary malice. Finally I figured it must have been someone from Audrey and Carly’s old group of friends, specifically BMOC Adam Murray. He disliked me on principle, considering me one of the eggheads he was, by virtue of his popularity, bound by duty to hassle whenever it was convenient. But he had another big reason to give me a hard time: He was Carly’s boyfriend right before she died. He was the guy she dumped me for.

  Ever since Carly’s murder, rumors had run rampant about me. Even though someone else had been tried and found guilty, there were always whispers: How is it that he was the one who found her? What was he doing there? Didn’t they used to go out? What if he killed her? There was no doubt in my mind that Adam and the rest of Carly’s old friends—if you could call them that—were the ones who started people talking. I would’ve been more upset, but the unintended effect of the rumors was that they gave me what I wanted—my privacy—because very few people wanted to hang out with or talk to me after that. Except for Harvey. His willful ignorance of any and all school gossip was a fireproof blanket wrapped around my shoulders, one that I accepted with no hesitation whatsoever. It was worth coming to school to be reminded of that.

  “What’s up, man? You’re clearly not on today. Somebody forget to flip your switch this morning?” Harvey asked.

  I shook my head. “No sleep.”

  “Video games?” Harvey said, nodding his head in a show of sympathy.

  “Yep,” I lied.

  “Same here. But I got a latte before school, so I’m alert. You should look into large doses of caffeine, my man, if you’re going to maintain the virtual lifestyle. I do a run every morning if you ever want me to pick you up something.” He gave me a soft punch in the shoulder. “I’m going to catch up with Jules on the quad before nap time. Save me a seat in the back.”

  We had AP English next (nap time for Harvey, who favored the hard sciences), so I headed over to the humanities building, hoping that they’d fixed the Coke machine over the summer. They hadn’t. I was early for class; even Carmen, our teacher, wasn’t there yet. I took a seat near the door, as far from the blackboard as possible, and put my bag on the one next to it.

  Carmen came in first, her arms full of books, several of which toppled to the floor as she crossed the threshold. I picked them up for her and placed them on her desk, where she dumped her own armload. Wheezing from the effort, Carmen smiled her thanks at me and I headed back to my seat.

  “Wait, Neily!” she called. I turned.

  “Take one,” she said. I took a book off the desk and looked at the spine: Crime and Punishment.

  “This should be fun,” I said.

  “It will be hell. But you’ll thank me later.”

  “Might as well give me one for Harvey while you’re at it,” I said. Carmen handed me a second copy as other students began to file in. “Not that he’ll read it.”

  “Defamation of character,” Harvey protested from behind, which made Carmen laugh.

  The last person to stroll into class was Audrey. I was surprised to see her there. I’
d never had an advanced class with her, ever, as she wasn’t an AP sort of girl. Even Harvey, oblivious to almost everything, leaned over to me and asked, “Is she lost or something?”

  She walked with the air of a visiting dignitary and surveyed the room, scoping for a good seat. The first place she looked was straight to where Harvey and I were sitting, but the back row filled up the fastest in every class at Brighton and there were no empty seats. Finally, she was forced to take one up front.

  Halfway through class the second-period office aide came in quiet as a cat and handed Carmen a small blue slip of paper. Seeing the color, I knew it was for me.

  “Neily?” Carmen waved the piece of paper. I gathered my things from around my desk and went up to the front to retrieve it.

  “You’re excused,” Carmen told me unnecessarily. When you get a summons from the school psychiatrist, it’s never a question of whether or not you’re excused.

  Eighth Grade—Fall Semester

  My anxiety returned as Carly and I made our way up the drive of her very large, very elegant home. It looked nothing like my father’s house, which was ostentatious and cold, the embodiment of new money. People sometimes say that all California money is new money, but there is a difference between the people who know how to hide it and the people who don’t even know it’s something to be ashamed of. Still, I cringed the way I always did when I went to visit my father, and felt the icy blast of separateness travel up my spine. You don’t belong here, everything—every object, every room, every piece of art or furniture—seemed to be saying. This is not your place.

  Miranda, Carly’s mother, tried her best to set me at ease. She welcomed me warmly, brought me into the kitchen to point out where they kept the snacks and the sodas, then took off for parts unknown, pausing to rumple Carly’s hair and say, “Have fun, kids,” before disappearing.

  The afternoon consisted largely of Carly and me watching television, but mostly I just watched her. When she became absorbed, her face, usually so animated, would go absolutely still, and she would purse her lips. I would always catch her doing this when we were reading. Once, I pointed it out to her, and she tried very hard not to do it again. That was the funny thing about her—she never seemed to give much of a damn about what anybody thought. But she did—she really, really did.

  After an hour or so, it occurred to me that I might want to see the rest of the house. It didn’t look like Carly was going to offer to give me a tour, so I asked her where the bathroom was—“Down the hall, to the right, past the fountain”—and then marveled inwardly a little at the idea of a fountain in the Ribelli’s front hall.

  In actuality, the fountain was less like the Trevi of my imaginings and more like a piece of tin mounted on the wall, with water running over its surface in whispering rivulets. Miranda Ribelli was sitting in the living room, which was on the opposite side of the hall, reading a Michael Crichton novel and sipping a glass of white wine. I went into the bathroom and ran the faucet, staring at myself in the mirror.

  My hair needed a cut—it always did. I looked myself over from head to toe, wondering what Carly saw when she looked at me. What I saw was unpromising—a gangly boy, tall and lanky, with arms that were strong but lacked tone and a countenance that lacked conviction. I had no idea who I was, despite all the people in my life telling me, and you could see it in my face. That was the part of me that I wanted to hide from Carly, who seemed so sure of herself.

  When I came out of the bathroom, Miranda (who from that day forward insisted that I call her by her first name) was gone and the coast was clear.

  The floors were hardwood, so I removed my shoes, set them by the front door, and padded up the stairs in my socks. I had no idea what I was looking for. In the hall, on a long credenza, there were photos of Carly as a baby—chubby-cheeked, blue-eyed, and, amazingly, blond. By the time she was walking, her hair had darkened; in the photo I picked up, she looked to be about two years old. She was toddling forward, arms outstretched for something uncaptured. As I walked down the hallway, I watched Carly grow from an affectionate child who pressed kisses against her mother’s cheek to a contemplative six-year-old who was most often shown reading a book to a proud nine-year-old holding up a trophy won in a horseback riding competition. Obviously, someone in the house fancied himself or herself a photographer. The most recent spatter of portraits could be most appropriately titled Carly in Nature—Carly picking apples, Carly petting a sheep, Carly reading in a tree, Carly swimming in a lake. They all seemed to have been taken in the last year or so.

  I heard water running in the walls, and took this to mean somebody had flushed a toilet or run a faucet nearby. Not wanting to be caught snooping, I opened the first door I saw. I thought it was a guest room because it was so neat, but in moments I realized that it was, in fact, Carly’s own bedroom.

  Instead of the requisite pink, Carly’s room was done up in hues of light blue and green. Everything was perfect, as if it was a professional job, which, I reasoned, it probably was. Later, Carly would tell me that before marrying her father, Miranda had been an interior decorator at a well-respected design house in San Francisco. She seemed as proud of that fact as Miranda seemed of her daughter’s fourth-grade dressage trophy—that is, hugely.

  Carly’s bedroom was practically the size of the living room in my mother’s house. She had a large four-poster bed, which was covered with a blue, green, and white patchwork quilt and piled high with pillows. There was a light green love seat pressed up against the wall in one corner, and a matching armchair with an ottoman. Carly had a large white rolltop desk with what looked like a brand-new laptop and state-of-the-art speakers sitting on it, and a smaller white vanity with a large mirror that was littered with female mysteries. The walls were painted sky blue; I’d find out later that it was the only room in the entire house with carpeting.

  “My sanctuary.” Carly was standing in the doorway, shoulder mashed against the doorjamb, arms crossed and eyebrow lifted. “Are you lost?”

  “N-no,” I stammered, trying to think up a good excuse for being in her bedroom uninvited. There really wasn’t one. “Yes. I’m lost.”

  She shook her head and smiled. “I don’t believe you. It’s nice, huh?”

  “Uh, sure.”

  “I hate it,” she confided. “It’s like a Laura Ashley catalog threw up in here. But my mother insisted. She thought it was so me.”

  “It isn’t?” The room was bright and confident and perfectly collected, which was how Carly seemed.

  “Oh, God no. This is Easter on morphine. Pastel paradise.” She shuddered.

  “Why don’t you say something?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “My mother really loved the idea. She designed the whole room. It’d break her heart if I told her I hated it.”

  It struck me how kind and mature that sentiment was, abnormally so for someone our age. I fought with my mother over everything, from school to the intramural sports she was constantly trying to sign me up for to what brand of hot dogs we bought at the supermarket. It never occurred to me to shut up and deal with some things in order to protect her feelings or make her life more bearable.

  “You’re nice,” I said, lamely. But it was how I felt.

  “Thanks.” She grinned. “Now get out of here. I can’t believe I caught you snooping.”

  When my father picked me up that night, I could tell he had had a martini or two and was feeling affable. As I climbed into the car—he hadn’t bothered to come to the door, preferring to honk instead—and buckled my seat belt, he asked, “How was it? Did you have fun?”

  “Yeah,” I said, when what I really meant was, I never want to go home again.

  Senior Year

  The school psychiatrist’s office was a fascinating spectacle of ego in bloom. The good doctor, who insisted we call her Harriet (“Like all the other teachers”), kept her office impeccably neat. Her books, all academic texts and journals, were arranged alphabetically by title on frequently dusted shel
ves; her walls were covered with every diploma, certificate, award, and letter of recognition—framed—that she had ever received in her short career; every object in the room was turned ever so slightly toward the one chair that sat on the opposite side of the desk. It was as though Harriet wanted the student, her patient, to feel like he or she was the center of everything. It might have reassured some, but I found it vaguely unsettling, so when Harriet’s back was turned I liked to subtly shift a few of the items to take off some of the pressure.

  Harriet had no photos of friends or family to indicate that she had a private life, but whether it was a matter of personal taste, or an effort to make herself seem a little more human for our comfort, or just a sad attempt at cultivating an eccentricity, every spare inch of Harriet’s desk was covered with seashells. I would guess that, on average, Brighton students spent eighty percent of their time staring at the seashells and wondering if their presence was some kind of test.

  “Are you still having nightmares, Neily?” Harriet tilted her head slightly and gave me a tight smile.

  I’d been seeing Harriet more or less regularly since Carly died. Everybody, from my parents to the principal, insisted on it. They said I needed therapy to help me cope with the tragedy, with everything I saw. By the time she died, I hadn’t spoken to Carly in almost a year, but by discovering her body on the bridge that night, I had accidentally stumbled into the middle of something devastating, and people were worried.

  “They’re not nightmares,” I told her. “They’re just dreams.”

  “The dreams, then—are you still having them?”

  I shrugged. “Sometimes.” Every night.

  “And the sleeping pills I prescribed for you aren’t helping?”

  “No.” They did me no good sitting in the back of my medicine cabinet, hidden behind a box of Band-Aids.

  “Are you even taking them?”

  I hesitated. “No.”