Wake

by Abria Mattina

  “Morning.”

  She looks at me like she can’t believe I have the nerve to talk to her, and then at my hand where it rests on the edge of her car door.

  “Uh, I guess you want to be left alone?”

  “What do you want?” She’s doing that thing again—the thing that makes me feel very small and insignificant and helplessly in the wrong.

  “Just to see how you are.”

  “I have to finish this.” She gestures to her homework and closes the car door firmly. I just stand there like the idiot I am, watching her work while she doesn’t even spare me a glance.

  How can she just blow me off like that? I have the sudden urge to pound on her window and ask her what the hell is up her ass, but that would only worsen her mood. I shove my hands in my pockets and head inside.

  She’s not just being cold and ignoring anymore—she’s being downright mean.

  *

  Elise makes me a milkshake without having to ask for the second time this week. And so my night turns around: in sweats by five, sitting down to a milkshake and bowl of homemade soup for a snack.

  “Why don’t you invite Willa over for dinner?” Mom says. “I haven’t seen her all week.”

  “I’ll call her.” And just like that, my day is shit again. I call Willa’s cell and house lines, but she won’t answer either one. I tell Mom that she’s busy tonight. By her worried expression, I get the sense that she doesn’t entirely believe me. Willa’s absence has been noted.

  Thursday

  My alarm clock goes off unreasonably early. Before I even open my eyes or roll over to switch it off, three thoughts surface from beneath the haze of sleep: It’s Thursday. It’s a school day. I can’t do this.

  I roll over and shut off my alarm. My day hasn’t even started and I feel completely, utterly defeated. Why should I bother to get up and go to school? No one there cares that I even exist. I don’t feel like eating. I don’t feel like doing anything. I spend five whole minutes debating whether it’s worth the trouble to get up to pee.

  Mom pokes her head in and tells me to get a move on.

  “I’m not going in today.”

  “Why not?” She steps into my room and puts a hand on my forehead. I’m not sick. Not in that way, at least.

  “I’m not up to it.” She studies me for a moment, and it looks like she’s about to say something when she turns and leaves without a word. She comes back a minute later with a glass of water and a reminder to take my meds.

  “I’ll call the school and tell them you won’t be in.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  When she leaves I burrow deeper into my blankets and go back to sleep. It’s about as numb as I can get without a morphine drip.

  *

  Tom Petty wakes me up. The hell? I lift my head—the clock says it’s ten-thirty—and look over my shoulder at my speaker setup. The thing doesn’t just turn on by itself.

  There’s a blue-haired freak standing by my speakers, dancing unabashedly. She hasn’t changed a bit. The blue of her hair matches the bullring in her nose and the stud in her eyebrow, because she likes to coordinate like that.

  Ava catches my eye and smiles. “Hey slut.”

  She takes a run at the bed and leaps toward me. She lands above me on all fours with a wicked grin on her face. “Check it out.” She sticks her tongue out to show me a new piercing. I’m not surprised. Ava’s primary motivation for most things is ‘because it would piss my dad off.’

  “I’m thinking of getting my lip done too.” She kisses my forehead—shit, I’m not wearing a hat—and then sits back on her heels, balancing above my waist. I’m so thin that there’s actually room between her butt and my stomach.

  “Good idea. Your dad’ll have a stroke.” I sit up on my elbows. “What are you doing here?”

  “Nice to see you too, bitch.” She teasingly brushes her hand across my face in an approximation of a slap. “Your mom called me this morning. She wanted me to call you and cheer you up or some shit. But this is better, even if it is a long-ass drive.”

  “It’s a school day.”

  “A what?” She blinks at me. “Screw that. You’re my excuse to get out of Gym class.” Ava pulls back my blanket and waves me up. “Come on, get up. Emily said you were getting your energy back. We’re doing shit today.”

  “She said stuff about me?” I swing my legs out of bed, but stop there. I’m dreading her answer. If it’s bad I’ll just crawl back into bed and bury my head in the sand.

  “Not ‘said’ exactly.” Ava goes to my drawers and starts rifling through them. She throws articles of clothing at me as she finds them—socks, underwear, shirt, sweatpants. Then she opens the drawer I keep my toques in and throws her hands up. “Dude, it looks like a yarn factory threw up in here.”

  “Just tell me what she said.”

  Ava huffs “Caitlin wanted to know how her weekend was and before Emily even said anything she started bawling like a fucking baby.” Ava slams the drawer and makes a disgusted sound in the back of her throat. “She can be such a whiny little priss sometimes.”

  “I’m telling her you said that.”

  “Speaking of—” Ava whirls on me. “How come you invited her for Easter and not me?”

  “It was Mom’s idea.” Mom likes Ava, but only in small doses. She couldn’t do an entire weekend with her as a guest. Ava has a mouth like a teamster, no sense of appropriate timing, and no verbal filter on her thoughts. She can be absolutely hilarious or embarrassing as all hell.

  “So what is there to do in this town?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, there has to be something.”

  “Nope. It’s Smiths Falls.”

  “Don’t kids usually go cow-tipping or something in small towns?”

  That makes me laugh. “Did you pass many cow pastures along the road?”

  Ava heaves a long-suffering sigh. She’s a city girl to the core. “I brought Shelby with me in case you weren’t up to going out. But since there’s nothing to go out and do…” Shelby is Ava’s violin. She plays nearly as seriously as I do cello. We weren’t even really friends until we were in the same music classes. My hands are too sore join her on strings, but there’s always the piano.

  “Bring her in.”

  *

  It’s been awhile since Ava played classical. She isn’t signed up for Music at school this semester, and if the school or music camps aren’t forcing her to play classical, she attaches an amp to her violin and creates her own sound. These past few years she’s been flirting with death metal. If I’d seen her band play before I knew her, I’d have totally stalked her.

  “You’re such a goody-two-shoes,” Ava complains as she rifles through my sheet music, looking for something worth playing. My collection is entirely classical. I did aspire to play professionally, a lifetime or more ago.

  “Just pick one.”

  Ava pulls a blue folio out of the stack and smirks. “Okay, you’re taste isn’t totally pathetic.” She pulls out the sheet music and slaps Das Wohltemperierte Klavier, Prelude in G Major down on the music stand. Kill me now.

  “I’m sick of Bach.”

  “Well you’re short on Apocalyptica, so this’ll have to do,” Ava says. She tests the tune of her instrument before launching into the opening bars without me.

  “Ava.”

  She stops and looks at me archly. “It’s this or cow-tipping.” God damn it, why couldn’t she have just called like Mom asked her to? I turn to the keyboard and shift reluctantly through the notes. It’s like walking, just one key after the other. Keep moving, because it hurts too much to stay put. It’s the illusion that I’m going somewhere, or going away from something. I’m moving, so I must be alive. I can’t die, because music isn’t really alive. It’s an equation; a sensation; a fleeting thought that runs through my head too fast to be heard; an idea that lingers and drives me insane until I have to play it. To move is to blur the line between self and song.

&nb
sp; Willa likes this song. She hates me, but she likes this. Willa falls asleep to this song. I wonder if she ever thinks of the time we played it together. Does she ever think of me at all without disgust? I bet her other friends keep her too busy to spare me much thought. It’s not like I have anything to offer that she would miss.

  The faster I play the faster it will end and I can get her out of my head.

  Yeah right.

  Ava lowers her bow and flicks my ear. “Stop messing up the tempo.”

  “Sorry.”

  We start again from the beginning. So much for getting this over faster. But this is supposed to be a light, mellow song. To adjust its speed is to corrupt its tone. I block out the thoughts of Willa and the aches in my joints and the niggling hunger in my stomach, and just listen to it. I haven’t played like this in ages. It’s effortless, weightless. It breathes. Time becomes irrelevant and the room could go up in flames without my noticing. When I run out of notes to play I’m not quite sure what to do. My hand lingers on the final key, drawing out the note unnecessarily. Ava gets fed up with the pointless noise and grabs me by the wrist to lift my hand away.

  That’s when we both notice that my hands are shaking. I curl my fingers into fists to make it stop, but the tremor only gets worse. It’s hard to get a good breath.

  “Jesus, boy,” Ava says, and grabs my hands. She turns me away from the keyboard and forces me to put my head between my knees. “You okay?

  “Yeah. Sorry. Just…got a little lost.” She knows what I mean, the way music can transport you to such an other place. Down the rabbit hole, with no clear way of how to get back when the song ends.

  “You, my friend,” she says, “are more messed up than I first fucking suspected.”

  I hang my head. That is such an Ava thing to say. What’s weird is that I know exactly what she means by it, and it isn’t cruel.

  Ava crouches down in front of me to be on eye-level. “Who is she?”

  “Who?”

  “It’s always a girl.”

  “What’s always a girl?” I pull my hands away and sit up.

  “There are times,” Ava says seriously, pointing a finger at me, “that you get this look on your face. It’s like your making love to the goddamned piano, and I know it’s the doing of some chick you’re all lovesick and blue-balled about.” She smirks and shakes her head. “You’re really quite a musical pervert.”

  “This coming from the girl who lines her violin case with Georgia O’Keefe prints?”

  “You were fingering the bejesus out of that piano.”

  “I was not.”

  Ava presses the nearest key she can reach, keening in time with it. Her voice pitches up with each key press and she sets an almost frantic tempo. She makes my piano sound like a girl about to come.

  “Damn it.” I grab her hand off the keyboard and she laughs at me.

  “It’s really cruel to tease her like that,” Ava informs me seriously. “It didn’t even look like she came when you were giving her Bach.”

  “I can’t do this.” I pack up the sheet music and close the key cover. That’s quite enough of music and my playing habits for one day.

  Ava quickly resumes her original plan. “Let’s go out.”

  *

  Ava’s car is a lemon yellow Gremlin that she won off her brother. Well, it’s mostly yellow, in between the rust spots. He bet this piece of shit on a football game and she took him up on it. And Ava loves this car, even though it’s fuck-ugly, falling apart, and can barely pass emissions testing.

  We have no idea where we’re going when we pull out of the driveway. There’s nothing to do, so we’ll just drive around ‘until we find trouble,’ as Ava so touchingly puts it.

  She turns on the radio and searches for a station with good reception. She settles on an obscure AM station without too much static. They’re broadcasting “Cecelia” by Simon and Garfunkel. Ava turns it up and sings along.

  I change the station.

  “My car, my music.” She changes it back.

  “I hate this song.”

  “Nobody hates this song.”

  “I do.”

  “I can see broken-hearted depressives hating it, but come on. It’s a great song. And adultery is natural, don’t you think?”

  I don’t say anything. We travel for a few more minutes without conversation, listening to this annoying song. When it ends Ava switches the radio off entirely and asks, “Who?”

  “What?”

  “Who broke your heart?”

  “No one.”

  “Give me a name so I have an excuse to crack her skull.”

  “Ava,” I complain. I don’t need to involve her in this.

  She smiles with surprise. “It’s not a she?” Typical Ava. She lives in fear of being stereotyped as ‘the gay friend,’ even though she plays both sides.

  “I’m not gay.” Though it’s the second time in two weeks that I’ve been asked. “And I’m not seeing anyone, and haven’t been since I moved here. No broken heart, so lose that theory, okay?”

  Ava mulls that over for a few seconds. “Yeah, bullshit.”

  “It’s not bullshit.”

  “Emily didn’t mention anything about a girlfriend, but she’s always been such a spazz around you that it’s no wonder she’d leave out that little detail. So come on, who is she?”

  “No one.” I need to change the subject before Ava really gets pushy. “Are you still with that guy? The dipshit with the ponytail and the GreenPeace shirt?”

  “Phil? Eh.” Ava shrugs. “He’s a little political. Keeps blowing me off to do important shit like protest for PETA. Fuck’m.”

  “Good.” I never particularly liked him. He was always pushing some agenda. I wonder if he’s ever had an original thought, because all I’ve ever heard from him are the platitudes and PR bullshit that he gets from environmental groups.

  “So who’s the girl?”

  “God damn it, Ava, I said there is no girl.”

  “I’ll ask Elise. She’ll blab.” She’s right. Elise will talk about anything with minimal prompting.

  “She’s just a friend.”

  Ava laughs, gleeful that I’ve given in. “A fuck-friend? Or a friend you want to fuck?”

  “Neither.”

  “I watched you do her in your head while playing Bach.”

  “Ava,” I complain. Worse than being caught at it is the way she describes it.

  “Does she like you back?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? You’re adorable.” Ava reaches over and taps my nose. Great. Because every guy aspires to be ‘adorable.’ Nobody wants to date guys like that. They’re the poor schmucks that continually get sorted under ‘friend.’

  “I pissed her off.”

  “That is a habit of yours.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Remember—”

  “No.”

  “Or—”

  “No.”

  “And the time that—”

  “Will you be quiet?”

  Ava blows a raspberry at me. “When are you going to learn to stop pissing off the girls you want? This is so fourth grade.”

  “It’s more complicated than that.”

  “You’re a guy. How complicated can it be?”

  I end up telling her the whole story in all its pathetic detail. How I hated her guts at first, but was too lonely to pass up trading insults with her. How she made me soup and slowly brought me around to thinking that she was a nice person, she just had a short temper and a lot of anger. How she was nice to me and invited me places and my family liked her. I even tell Ava about the music late at night and how I can’t sleep if I don’t talk to her first.

  “Fucking hell, you’ve got it bad,” Ava says with an appreciative chuckle.

  “She hates my guts right now.”

  “Of course she does. You’re a chronic fuck-up.”

  “I told you this was different.”

  “How?”

&n
bsp; “We usually do stuff on Saturdays. She made plans last weekend and didn’t tell me, and I snapped on her for blowing me off.”

  “That doesn’t mean she hates you. She’s just sore about it. Girls hold grudges like that.”

  “I apologized for snapping on her. She won’t even look at me.”

  “Did she apologize for blowing you off?”

  “We didn’t exactly have firm plans…”

  “So which is it? She blew you off or she didn’t?”

  “It’s complicated.”

  Ava rolls her eyes. “Your life is fucked, my friend.”

  We stop near one of the rocky beaches on Lower Rideau Lake and sit on the hood of the car, watching the waves and clouds roll in. I tell Ava about the get-together after the school dance, the first time since moving here that I’ve felt normal. She thinks it’s hilarious that a school dance is the highlight of the social calendar here.

  I’m not mad at Willa because she didn’t include me in last weekend’s plans. I can’t change the past, so it’s useless to dwell on a weekend with her that I’ll never get back. She probably did have a full car, considering how many friends she has. That is why I resent her: she has people she can be with. I only have two, and one is my little sister.

  “This bullshit has changed you,” Ava says, and rubs my head. I think she means my cancer. “You’ve gotten used to being taken care of. You used to be so full of initiative.”

  “I am not used to being taken care of.”

  “Yeah you are. It’s to be expected, I guess, after all that time in the hospital, and your mom looking after you, and Elise.”

  “It’s not like that. You have no idea. We haven’t seen each other since last June.”

  “That’s a lot to put on a girl. I assume you’ve been chasing her, since you’ve already fucked up, and probably not by accident.”

  “I’m not chasing her. I know it’s not fair to her.” It wouldn’t be fair to put any girl to the choice of being with me, and I couldn’t stand the humiliation of having her say no.

  “Maybe when you recover a little more.”