Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

  Anyway, like they say, you can pick your friends but not your family. Except in the case of our family, when Mom and Dad did pick us. But did they really? It’s not like they had a rack of babies to choose from. They just came up on a list and bam, they got babies. They got us, whether we were their choice or not. Sometimes I wonder if we were a package deal, and they picked Elliott because she was so cute, only to find out they had to take the red-­headed baby, too, so they got stuck with me. Maybe I’ve been a tiny bit mad at Elliott ever since then, for being cuter, for being the one that brought me along for the ride.

  Maybe.

  Dad comes into the room, jangling his car keys. “Well,” he says. “Ready for lift-­off?”

  “Past ready,” says Elliott. “Let’s just go! I don’t want to be late.”

  “OK, OK,” says Dad. “Move out, troops.”

  I grab my lunch out of the fridge.

  “Hurry up,” groans Elliott. “Seriously.”

  “I’m coming,” I say.

  “No fighting,” says Dad, automatically.

  “Yes, sir,” we say, together.

  Elliott catches my eye for a half second and winks, but then she’s gone, out the door, loping across the dead grass to the car. That half second is about as close as she comes these days to being a sister. I guess I’ll take it.

  “Hey,” Dad says, looking at me in the mirror as I throw my heavy backpack into the backseat and climb in after it. “What do you get when you cross a cow with an octopus?”

  “Not in the mood, Dad,” I say. The air in the car is as hot and impossible to breathe as Jell-­O. “Maybe you’d just be arrested?” (It’s illegal to crossbreed animal species. True fact.)

  “You’re so literal,” he says, but he’s grinning. “Nope, the answer is a cow that can milk itself.”

  “Ha-ha,” I say, flatly. “Oh em gee, hilarious.”

  “Tough crowd,” says Dad.

  Elliott has her headphones on and is banging on the dashboard like it’s a bongo drum. Each bang goes into my head and shivers down my neck. I swallow to keep from feeling sick. My mouth tastes like apple. I can’t remember if I brushed my teeth.

  “Excited about school?” Dad asks. “New school year, probably some new kids, so new friends, right?”

  “Dad,” I say. “Seriously? No.”

  “Oh,” he says. “OK. Want me to tell you more jokes to cheer you up?”

  I look out the window, at Tig’s old house as we go by. Then the Bishops’. And the Navarros’. Someone new has moved into the Munros’. For a second I imagine that Dad is right, that a new kid means that I could have a new friend, then I erase that thought immediately. I don’t need a new friend. I need my old friend back. There is a new shed in the front yard. It has a huge sign on the front of it, bright orange, that says TRESPASSERS ARE NOT ALOUD. I grin. That sign will get a visit from me and my red pen later.

  “Ish?” says Dad.

  “Um, no,” I say. “Thanks anyway.”

  I close my eyes and I can see Tig’s house imprinted there, yellow and cracked, a wasps’ nest hanging over the front door.

  Last Tuesday, I snuck inside that house. The back door was unlocked. I didn’t really mean to go in, but when the handle turned and the door swung open, I couldn’t help it. I don’t know why I did it, why I even tried. Going in felt wrong, but not wrong enough to stop me. It’s like I thought that if I kept looking, I might find Tig in there.

  The house looked weird and sad without any furniture in it, without any stuff on the walls, like how clothes look when they are on hangers, without anyone in them to fill them out. There were dents in the carpet where everything used to be: the dining room table and chairs; the sofa and coffee table; the ugly orange lamp that got so hot that I burned my hair on it when I stood up too fast one time after falling asleep watching Star Wars; and the aquarium table where the bright yellow and blue tangs swam around in circles, bumping against the glass like they thought they could swim right through and out into the room, out the front door, and down the road to the lake. They were saltwater fish. The lake would have killed them! But, of course, they didn’t know that. Fish aren’t very self-­aware, even ones with smart-­sounding names like “surgeonfish.” It’s not like they went to medical school. Or any type of school, except a school of fish. (Ba dum cha!)

  I walked around every room and ran my hand over the walls, feeling all the bumps and dents and bubbles under the stripy wallpaper. There were clean marks where the Santa pictures used to hang, a row of rectangles of brighter yellow than the rest. I climbed up the thickly carpeted stairs to Tig’s old room and lay on the spot where the bed used to be. I looked up at Tig’s old ceiling, like he must have done a million times. There were marks where he’d pinned the satellite maps of Mars that we printed off the internet at the public library. The room smelled a bit like socks. I wonder if he stuck those maps up in his new room in Portland. I bet he didn’t. I bet that he just threw them away, like everything else that used to matter to him. I tried to list all the major craters on Mars: Hellas Planitia, Utopia Planitia, the Borealis Basin.

  Then I noticed that there were little brown pellets all over the carpet. Gross. Rats.

  I got up pretty quick, so quick that I got dizzy. (Rats are another thing I definitely won’t miss on Mars. I hope that none stow away with the supplies, somehow arriving there first and taking over the planet. I bet rats would adapt. Animals do that. You can drop a nuclear bomb and the animals will just evolve to survive in the post-­Apocalyptic wasteland. Look at Chernobyl! There are all kinds of weird animals living there now, with two stomachs or weird body temperatures. Humans don’t adapt. We just get cancer and die and that’s the end of it, for us. Depressing if you think about it, so I don’t recommend it.)

  “OK,” Dad says, suddenly, startling me out of my daydream. “Fine. Be that way. I had a great riddle about a pirate and a cow, though . . .”

  “I’m not being any way,” I say. “I was just thinking.”

  “Thinking is good,” he says. “Fair enough.”

  “YEAH!” shouts Elliott. Her eyes are closed and she’s still hammering on the dashboard.

  I wonder what it’s like to be her. She does so much to hide what she looks like so people won’t look at her because she’s pretty, but then she does all this other stuff that kind of demands an audience. I bet she doesn’t even know why she does that. I don’t know why I do the stuff that I do. But it’s easy to see in other people. I sometimes think there are two layers of all of us: who we are and what we look like. They are completely different parts and one doesn’t necessarily know what the other is doing.

  We drive the rest of the way without talking. When we arrive, I lean over the seat and give Dad a quick kiss. Poor Dad. He tries so hard. He’s just always slightly out of step. He smells so Dad-­like, like toothpaste and soap and bleach, that I feel like I might cry.

  “Want me to come in with you?” he asks me.

  “No way,” I tell him.

  I brace myself and pull my pack onto my shoulders. It turns out that all those glue sticks are quite heavy. It’s a good thing I’ve been working out. “I’m a machine,” I whisper, and in I go, swallowed into the belly of Theodore Roosevelt Middle School, which looks exactly like you’d imagine: like every school, ever. Ancient linoleum floors, worn down to gray in the middle of the halls. Rows of light blue and yellow lockers. Safety posters, and windows that are too high to escape through. Fire alarm pulls with big signs above them saying PULL IN CASE OF FIRE ONLY. Red EXIT signs. “I wish I could,” I tell the signs. “Exiting is my favorite.”

  It’s the smell that I hate the most: the floor wax and all the other people and boy-­sweat and papery mold and who knows what. My headache is so bad, it feels like someone is cupping my brain with their hand and then squeezing really hard, like one of those stress balls that Dad keeps on his desk. I tug at my long ponytail, which relieves the pressure just a tiny bit. Then I find my name on the posted list. L
OVE, MISCHA. 114. I make my way down the hallway, following the signs to the classroom: Mr. Wall’s Grade 7A. All along the way, those high windows show the sky outside and the sun filters in and lights up the dust. I kind of think we’re all like that dust, actually. Sometimes, when the sun shines on us, just for a second, we’re beautiful.

  Then someone pushes me from behind.

  “Move it, nerd,” a voice says.

  I brace myself against a locker and wait for them to go by.

  “Happy first day of school, Ish,” I say to myself, I say to no one, I say to the shining dust in the air.

  “Loser,” someone says.

  And that’s how seventh grade begins.

  Chapter 8

  Mr. Wall is a tall, skinny man with a moustache that has grown around his mouth and down onto the two sides of his chin, like a horseshoe with all the luck running out. If he would tip his head up, we could see if it met in the middle. That would make it less of a moustache and more of the letter O, which totally fits him, because he also has arched, high-­up eyebrows that make him look perpetually surprised. He’s awfully old, at least fifty, and the shoulders of his black golf shirt are sprinkled with white flakes.

  “Name?” he barks at me.

  “Ish,” I say. “I mean, Mischa.”

  “Mischa,” he says. “And you prefer to be called Ish?” In his mouth, the name Ish sounds terrible: all spitty and wet.

  I can feel the blush blooming on my chest and crawling up my neck, where it settles on my face like a hot, clammy washcloth. “Mischa is good,” I tell him.

  “Ish,” someone whispers in the back row and then, “Ish, Ish, Ish, Ish, Ish” spreads across the whole room like running footsteps on thick carpet. IshIshIsh. I’ve known most of these people forever. They’ve called me Ish since I was five! Why does it sound so dumb now? I want to stick my tongue out at all of them, but I bite it instead.

  In Tibet, sticking your tongue out at someone is like saying hello. But this isn’t Tibet. And, anyway, I don’t want to say hello. What I want to say is a swear with four letters, but I won’t. It wouldn’t improve the start of this year to be in the principal’s office, already trying to explain myself. Anyway, I don’t think I could do that if I tried.

  “Fish,” someone says, louder than the rest, and they all burst out laughing. Everyone. Tig wouldn’t have laughed. They wouldn’t have laughed either, if he was here. Not really. I mean, I wouldn’t have cared if they had. The difference is that I didn’t need them then. Now, I guess I do.

  Sweat prickles on my neck. The boy who shouted “Fish!” won’t make eye contact with me, even though I try to stare him down. He’s new. He has curly hair and too much of it. It’s brown and so thick and tall that it looks like a wig or a joke. He gazes at the floor, a little grin on his face. I don’t care who he is or where he came from, I already hate him. I hate everyone. Even Mr. Wall. And the cement blocks that make up the walls of the classroom. And especially the way the window shades block the light. The dust is probably still here, I just can’t see it without the sun.

  “I’m a machine,” I remind myself. “Just a machine.” But I can’t make myself believe it.

  I sit down behind Kaitlyn Brenner because it’s the only empty seat except the one beside Fish-­boy. Kaitlyn laughs like a donkey, hee-­haw, hee-­haw, but somehow still manages to be one of the most popular people in our grade. Her hair is done in rows and rows and rows of tiny braids, each one with a different-­colored elastic at the end, like the ones in those rubber band bracelet kits, which I know she has because she’s wearing about twenty bracelets on each arm. It must have taken a billion hours to braid all that hair and make all those bracelets.

  “I like your hair,” I lie.

  “Oh,” Kaitlyn says. “Thaaaaa-­aa-­anks.” I don’t know how she can even manage to make that into so many syllables.

  “Yeah,” I say, trying to mimic her tone. “You’re wel­coooooome.” If I blend in more, they’ll leave me alone. The trouble is that when I stretch words, I sound like a humpback whale, singing.

  She squints, like she’s not sure whether I’m insulting her or not. “Your hair is, um, brushed nice, too,” she says, charitably. Kaitlyn is OK. I don’t know why I feel mad at her. I guess because she’s not Tig.

  I laugh to fill the silence, even though nothing is funny, and she laughs, too. Hee-­haw, hee-­haw. I feel exhausted. Exhilarated, even! Contact made! Well done, Love. I would high-­five myself if I could. I give myself permission to stop trying for the rest of the day or perhaps forever. (TIWNM: trying to figure out the right things to say all the time; awkward giggling fits; classrooms.)

  Mr. Wall starts telling a story about how he was riding his motorcycle through the Grand Canyon in the summer and he hit a coyote that was crossing the road, wiping out his bike. He rolls up his pants and shows us the road rash. I try to force myself to look. One more thing Tig and I have in common is fainting when we see blood. “You can all come and take a closer look,” Mr. Wall tells us. No one moves. “OK, then,” he says cheerfully. This is the happiest he’s been since I walked through the door. He’s practically grinning. “Now, did everyone bring all their supplies? Let’s put them all away, starting with green notebooks. Green notebooks, everyone.”

  No one asks about the coyote. Did it die? Does anyone care? I do. But it’s not like I’m going to put up my hand. No way.

  It’s only 9:42 a.m. and already the day feels like it’s taken forever. On Mars, days are 37 minutes and 22 seconds longer than on Earth. If we ever get to the point in the settlement where we have schools, I’m going to propose that those 37 minutes and 22 seconds are not spent in the classroom. This is not a good use of time! I want to scream. This is not the point of anything! It seems impossible to believe that road-­rashed Mr. Wall will have anything useful to teach me that will help me survive on Mars. There should be special schools for kids who are earmarked for Mars missions. I should be learning about how to tell where I am by the stars. Or how to terraform a planet. Or how to create an atmosphere where none currently exists.

  I start doodling a biome on my new agenda. I shade in all the hexagons on the glass dome faintly with pencil. I draw leaves of plants, growing up toward the sun. I sketch a Martian settler in a protective spacesuit, stepping out of the biome, onto the dusty wasteland. When I see Fish-­boy staring openly at my paper, his dumb mouth hanging open, I curve my body around so he can’t see it. I try not to cry even though I suddenly really really feel like crying. Crying is stupid. There won’t be any crying on Mars. (I hope.)

  “I am a machine,” I write in perfect cursive in the blank that says Date, at the top of the page. Beside Name, I write “Tig,” then I cross it out, then I scribble over it, and pretty soon there is just a block of black where my name should be.

  By lunchtime, my headache is as big as Deimos (which is Mars’s other moon, not the doomed one), and just as lumpy. I walk carefully, trying not to jostle it. We have to go outside to eat today. Mr. Wall announces this like it’s a treat. The cafeteria is being painted! You get to eat outside! Does he not know there’s a heat wave? Everyone groans.

  The air outside is prickly and tight, like it is before a thunderstorm, but the sky is still blue and hazy, like always. The wind is barely stirring up the dust. It’s just stupidly hot. There’s no way to describe it beyond that. Stupid. Hot. The kind of hot where you can’t think about anything else except how hot it is. The heat takes over your brain. It takes over everything. Basically it’s what I imagine Hell to be like, if it exists, which isn’t likely. Maybe I’m dead. Maybe this is Hell. Do dead people know that they are dead? If you think about it, and if you think that death is just a stopping of everything, your own infinity is the period of time of your life. Because you can’t know that it’s stopped, it never stops, but your own infinity is held inside your life span, like a snail in a shell. You become your own “forever,” stuck in the loop of youness. Think about it.

  I pinch myself to
make sure I’m not dead. I’m definitely alive, because it hurts. I sigh.

  I wonder if Tig is at school or if he is being home­schooled. His mom was always talking about homeschooling, but Tig would never do it. He wouldn’t have been away from me. Is he in a regular school now, like this one (but less hot)? Or is he at one of those shirt-­and-­tie schools? Or at home, at his regular kitchen table, his mom’s long hair swooping down over the place where he’s writing an essay about ancient Egypt or building a volcano out of cardboard and baking soda?

  Maybe she’ll make him write me a letter. Maybe she’ll ask him about me and he won’t be able to answer because he hasn’t emailed me even once so I haven’t emailed him either. Maybe he’ll have to do it, when she asks, to see how I am. Maybe then he’ll tell me why he didn’t say good-­bye. Why everything stopped.

  Maybe.

  I sniff. I can’t start crying out here! That would be social suicide. I look around frantically for a place to be alone, so I can hide my pink, about-­to-­tear-­up eyes.

  The kids cluster around the edges of the brick buildings, pressing themselves into the shade. I go over to the one, single tree on the far side of the playground, crossing the tarmac, which burns my feet through my shoes. It’s worth it just to put some distance between me and everyone else. I lean against the tree and try to look busy in my own thoughts. The tree is sticky with sap. I try to look like I don’t care that I have no one to eat with. I try to look happy. Luckily, I’m not terrible at acting. I’m actually pretty good at it. Last spring, Tig’s parents and my parents got together and decided that instead of just hanging out all the time, Tig and I had to choose some kind of extracurricular activity. Apart from sports, there was not a lot to choose from, so we chose acting. It was pretty silly. We made fake commercials. We laughed a lot. Most of it was laughing, to be honest. It was always hard not to laugh, even when a camera was filming all of it. But it was fun.