by Julia Drake
Orion drove a minivan. Not just any minivan, he told me: Orion’s car was the “original minivan,” a 1980 Plymouth Voyager, complete with a wood-paneled exterior and beige leather seats. It was also extremely dirty. Half-drunk Arizona iced teas and energy drinks littered the floor of the passenger seat, and on the seat itself there were three empty M&M’s bags, four crushed Coke cans, and an Icee cup tacky with melted blue sugar.
“Just shove that stuff onto the floor,” Orion said, starting the engine.
I shoved and hopped aboard. “Sweet ride.”
“Nothing flashy, but she works.”
“Does she have a name?”
He looked sheepish.
“Wait!” I said. “Let me guess. Van Morrison. No! Van Helsing.”
“Her official name is the Apogee.”
“Good name.” I sounded like I meant it, which was good, because I did.
“Thanks,” he said, and I wanted to throw a parade to celebrate this moment of sincerity between us.
“So tell me about Liv,” I said.
“She’s one of my oldest friends,” Orion said. He kept his eyes on the road and seemed like a good, if cautious, driver, but then again, I didn’t have a license. “You know the town motto?”
“Is your love also your beginning?”
“Not quite.” He laughed. Subtext: not yet. “Liv’s got some cool ideas about the motto. About your ancestors’ story. She’s working at the Lighthouse Museum this summer, over on Bat Wing Point? You know it?”
“Yeah. Never been.”
He nodded. “It’s pretty cool actually. I’d never been, even, until this past year, besides, like, fourth-grade trips. Mariah’s mom—she’ll be there tonight, too, Mariah, not her mom, and probably Felix—has made a big difference. It’s a good spot for Liv. She’s super”—he opened and closed his hand, like he might find the right word in the air—“bright.”
“Huh.” Just because I was off the sauce didn’t mean that I wanted to hear him fawn. I changed the subject. “Orion’s an unusual name. What’s the story there? Are you named for the constellation?”
“My mom likes stars, I think. Liv says Orion’s the son of Poseidon, though, so that’s cool. She’s one of those people who just like retains everything. She knows so many facts. She’d kill on Jeopardy!, you know?”
Seeing as I didn’t have much choice, I tried to imagine the sort of girl Orion Lewis would fall in love with. Someone wood nymphy, I bet. I suspected Liv Stone had a curtain of flaxen hair, a wood-whistle clarinet, and an entourage of assorted woodland creatures. She was, without doubt, under six feet tall.
“Is that a tape deck?” I said. I punched the play button and a trumpet blared out at me, clear and fast and frantic.
“Shit.” Orion’s hand shot toward the console and knocked loose a full, uncapped bottle of Snapple from his cup holder. Dark pink drink sloshed into his lap, and he swerved. An oncoming car honked. Orion careened back toward the shoulder, throwing his arm across my chest and slamming on the brakes. Somewhere in there, I screamed.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
We were safely pulled over. The trumpet was still playing.
“Swell,” I said.
Orion’s arm had me pinned against the seat, still. He had quite a wingspan.
“I’m so sorry. Are you sure you’re okay?” His hand held tight to my right arm, his freckle-less forearm braced across my chest.
“You can let go of me,” I said.
“Sorry.” He uncurled his fingers. The pads of his fingers were squashed and square, nails bitten down to the quick. Blood rushed back to my arm.
Orion moved with mechanical precision. He turned off the music, then dabbed uselessly at his jeans with the hem of his shirt. He fished the offending Snapple bottle from the pedals, dumped its remains out the half-open window, and tossed the empty bottle toward the graveyard at my feet. Finally, he switched on his blinker and eased back onto the road.
“What the hell was that?” I said.
“Nothing. Just practice tapes.”
“That was you?”
“Nothing serious. Just ideas.”
“You wrote that?” My arm was still tingling from where he’d gripped me.
He bit his lip. “I dabble.”
“Orion Lewis, are you in a band?”
“It’s complicated.” His hands were tight on the steering wheel, and from this angle, his tattoo was more visible than ever. Something juicy had gone down, I could tell.
“C’mon, man, you can tell me. My dad raised us on Bowie and Patti Smith and the Talking Heads and Joy Division. Music is liiiiife, man. Rock and rooooollllll.”
He looked at me sidelong. “You’re ridiculous, you know that?” he said, but he’d cracked a smile. Mission accomplished. “Liv’s brother and I used to play together. Jazz.”
“Jazzz, baby! Did you guys break up? Oooh, was it because you fell in love with his sister? A Yoko situation? West Side Story meets ‘Under the Sea’? Was there a rumble in the aquarium? Was there—”
“He died. Three years ago. Bike accident.”
He lifted his chin slightly. I think I said I was sorry. I hope I said I was sorry.
“Don’t worry,” Orion said. “You didn’t know.”
What I remember next is struggling to breathe. The car had stopped on the side of the road, and we were by the woods. A local spot, he said, don’t tell your New York friends. I was sitting down but I was dizzy. His friend was dead. We’d almost hit a car. My friend’s friend had jumped out the window once. My brain was on the fritz. Was I going crazy? Lost marbles, like Tootles in Peter Pan. Was that—? We were almost in a car accident. I couldn’t breathe.
Sam had tried to die.
Orion said something. Sam had tried to die. Orion’s door was open. Orion and I had almost died. “Violet?” My thoughts were mashed potatoes, and Sam was in Vermont, learning to eat, like a baby. It was freezing. A noise: a hand shaking dice. “Violet, you okay?” I’m not blacking out, not high, def not an orgasm. The dice clackclackclacked. “Violet, it’s okay.” A skeleton, playing her own rib cage like a xylophone. “Am I dying?” That was my voice, cut with dice clacks. I spoke and my mouth moved against my thighs. That was weird. I’d folded in half, I guess. My eye sockets were in my knees. My arms cradled my head. I couldn’t breathe. Purple and gold galaxies danced on my eyelids.
“I can’t—”
Orion’s hand was between my shoulder blades, the way you might calm a quaking dog.
“You’re not dying,” he said. “Deep breaths.”
My teeth were chattering. That was the dice noise. The rib noise. My own teeth. Why were my teeth chattering?
“It’s okay,” Orion said. His hand spread wide and flat. “Deep breaths.”
A breath shuddered through my body. Time passed. Each of Orion’s fingertips touched my back. My teeth slowed. I thought of Mom, Dad, even Sam telling me it was okay that time I lost my apartment keys and cried. Time passed. Orion’s fingers were like a tree frog’s. I’d gone through a tree frog phase as a kid and in my head I recited different species until finally, finally, my teeth stopped.
I sat up and the world pitched.
“Slow,” Orion said.
I went slow. I leaned against the seat and gazed up at the gray fabric ceiling of the minivan. My teeth clacked once and I steadied my jaw with my hands. My face was wet. I’d been crying. What the fuck had just happened? God, poor Orion.
“Sorry. My body—that was weird. God. Sorry. Your friend—”
“Do you get those a lot?” Orion said.
“What do you mean, those?”
“Panic attacks. My mom gets one, like, every tax season.”
“No,” I said, because panic attacks weren’t part of my repertoire, I’d never had one. Why did cars have fabric ceilings? Why—oh—fuck. I understood what he was trying to say.
“I don’t want to have a panic attack,” I told him. My voice sounded exposed, young, and Orion�
��s face was full of sympathy.
“Well, it already happened, so all you can do now is go slow. You okay?”
“I think so.” I peeled my head from the headrest and looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry about your friend.”
“I’m sorry—whatever happened there. Whatever I did to, um. For my driving back there. I’m sorry.”
“Were my teeth chattering?”
“Like crazy. You want me to call someone? Or I can take you home—”
“Can we just sit here for a second?”
“For sure.”
He got back in the car. We sat there. A breeze blew in from Orion’s open door. My tears were drying on my face, and when I surprised myself with a yawn, the salt tracks cracked like riverbeds. I felt like I’d run six marathons and hydrated with iced coffee. I said as much to Orion and he laughed.
“I’d offer you some really old Grapeade, but I’m all out,” he said, gesturing at the Snapple bottle.
“The grossest flavor,” I said, and he laughed, I laughed, and it felt really good. Then my laugh went wacky, dangerously so. My teeth did a quick Irish jig. Christ almighty. Not even Sam had panic attacks. I would’ve heard about them. I rubbed my face with my shirt.
“Do I look terrible?” I asked.
“You look fine.”
I flipped my mirror down. “I’m completely blotchy, Orion.”
“You look good. Who cares if you were crying, anyway?”
He was right. Who cared? I slammed the mirror shut. “Let’s go meet your girlfriend,” I said.
“Take it easy,” he said.
“Sorry. Not your girlfriend.”
“No, you take it easy. Your body’s done work just now. Just, like, be nice to yourself, okay?”
The thought had never even occurred to me.
“Oh—um—and—don’t say anything to Liv about her brother. She doesn’t like when that’s the first thing people know about her.”
“I’d never.”
“I figured,” he said, putting his hands in his pockets.
I don’t know what it was, exactly, but that figured made me feel a little better. Like we were on our way to something. If not friends, then friendly.
We walked through the woods and found ourselves on the edge of a rock slab, big as a baseball diamond, long and flat and sandy gray, a little yellow in the fading sun. We could see all of Lyric below us, the coastline, one street, no stoplights. Three people were grouped around an unlit inflatable lantern, two girls and a boy, and past them, the rock ended and the sky began.
“Wait’ll the stars come out. Normally the fog rolls in, but I think it’s going to stay clear tonight,” Orion said. He walked across the slab, clipping his carabiner around his belt loop as he went.
“Leeewis!” called the boy as we walked closer. He had shoulder-length hair and was seated on his heels like a yogi. One of the girls was wearing a baseball cap and smoking a cigarette. The non-smoking girl had a choppy black bob, a nose ring, and a perfectly lipsticked red mouth. That must’ve been Liv. She wasn’t a pixie princess, but she was certainly a babe.
“Felix is hoping you brought weed,” the babe said.
“Better. This is Violet. She works at the aquarium.”
“You’re his underling? Pro tip: he’s actually a softie.”
“Thanks for that, Mariah,” Orion said. The other girl took a drag on her cigarette and Orion turned to her. “She’s Fidelia’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Liv.”
Something whacked Orion in his chest; Felix had pelted him with a flip-flop. Orion pelted him back.
“Boooooo!” Mariah screamed. “I take it back! He’s not a softie, he’s the worst!”
“Ignore them,” Liv said, standing up and reaching out her hand. “They’re just upset they don’t have a project.”
Liv Stone was not the bohemian fairy I’d envisioned. She wore all black—not in a Goth way, and not in a chic New Yorker way either, but in a plain, black is my uniform way. Her black dress was a sack that hung to her knees, and she wore black sneakers, even the laces and the soles, and a black Portland Sea Dogs cap. Her hair had been gathered into two thin braids, locks of hair escaping the plaits and sticking out like straw. The only thing flashy about her was a ring that sparkled on her index finger: a huge purple rock in a gold setting, so craggy and rough-hewn it seemed as though it had been ripped directly from the earth. I wondered if that rock had left behind a crater somewhere.
She crushed my hand in a strong handshake, and something thrashed in my stomach, finned and flickering.
Mariah said, “You want a beer? Liv’s driving.”
“Liv’s always driving,” Felix said. His right eye moved slower than his left. “That’s why we love her.”
“A reason we love her,” said Orion.
Yes beer. No beer. Take it easy. I shook my head and sat between Liv and Felix.
“So what’s the project?” I asked.
“Liv’s a Lyric truther,” Mariah said.
Felix waggled his fingers. His right eye was glass, I saw now. “Small-town conspiracy. Big cover-up. WooOOOooo.”
“Full disclosure, Felix is extremely woo-woo,” Mariah said.
“Mariah, you gotta let the woo-woo reveal that on their own schedule.”
“Violet should know what she’s getting into with you clowns,” Mariah said.
Felix cackled. Orion grinned. Liv’s expression was difficult to read beneath the brim of her hat. She brought her cigarette to her lips, inhaled, and the tip bloomed red with heat. Her eyes were wintry.
“I’m just saying,” Liv repeated, swallowing her words along with her smoke. “The way this town rallies around this supposed love story”—here, she exhaled, and her voice dripped with disdain—“is bewildering. I mean, really. Their Love Was Our Beginning?” She scoffed, then looked at me. “No offense. I know they were your people.”
“None taken.”
“It’s just so ridiculous”—“Here we go,” said Felix—“so ridiculous, Felix, that everyone thinks Fidelia and Ransome’s story was a fairy tale! Violet. Would you like to hear the big questions?”
“Here’s a question,” said Felix. “If two trains leave Chicago at six-oh-five p.m….”
“They’d leave two different stations,” said Mariah.
“If one train leaves Chicago, and one leaves another dimension…”
“But now you need the theory of relativity.”
“Maybe Violet brought that,” said Felix.
“Orion wants to kill us,” Mariah said.
“Orion, don’t be mad.”
“Orion, we love you.”
“Orion, ole buddy, ole pal…”
“For Pete’s sake! I’m not mad! I just want to listen to Liv for fifteen seconds without you two putting on the Goon Show!”
“We all agreed to call us Mastergoon Theater, Orion,” said Mariah.
“You’re right,” said Orion, rolling his eyes. “My bad.”
“I, for one, love Mastergoon Theater,” said Liv.
I really hated the smell of cigarettes.
Mariah hooked her thumb toward Orion. “See what I mean? The angriest he gets is ‘for Pete’s sake.’”
Orion put his head in his hands.
“So…the big questions?” I said to Liv.
“Thank you,” she said. “To start: Why didn’t Fidelia just write her family after she washed up on shore? Why did she disguise herself as a boy? Was she hiding from something, and if so, from whom? Why did Ransome just give this strange, beaten-up boy a job in his home? Think about how fucked up she must have looked. She’d just pulled herself out of the sea! And why doesn’t anyone think it’s weird that Ransome married the woman he thought was a boy? And why, then, would she choose to reveal that she’d survived the wreck, months later? Yet here we are. Over a century past, and still celebrating their love.”
“Maybe they were, uh, gender-blind,” I offered.
“In Maine in 1885? Yeah, right. Even if
they were, trust me, that’s not how people in this town are interpreting the story.” Liv licked two fingers, clamped them around the end of her cigarette, then tucked the butt into the front pocket of her dress. “The things I do for you, Orion, you see this?”
“You’re doing it for the planet, Liv, not for me.”
“Are we done yet?” said Felix.
“The ship, Liv,” Orion said.
Liv’s arm shot out and she gripped Orion by his shoulder. My heart fluttered—because of them, or for them, I didn’t know.
“The ship!” Liv cried. “How could I forget!”
“Liv, do you subject my mother to this every single day?” Mariah asked.
“Say more, Professor Stone! I sense I’m about to become a convert!”
“I will say more, Felix, thank you. Final question: Why hasn’t the ship been found?”
“What, you think the wreck was a hoax?” I asked. That seemed extreme.
She shook her head. “Of course not. I just think the fact that no one wants to look for the ship is indicative of a larger problem. No one wants to address the fact that thousands of other people died. Everyone just wants to celebrate the love story. Literally: no one wants to look for the wreckage. Consider it a metaphor: no hunting for the ship, no hunting for the underbelly of Ransome and Fidelia’s story.”
I made a mental note to start encouraging people to consider things a metaphor. Also to use the words underbelly and indicative.
“My mom calls her the wrexpert,” Mariah said.
“As in wreck expert,” Orion said.
“Yeah, Orion, I think she gets it,” said Mariah.
Felix clapped wildly. “This girl’s gonna change the world!”
“I’m not trying to change the world,” Liv countered. “I just don’t understand why no one in this town will turn the rock over.” She fluttered her hand along her acned cheekbones, and I went to gather my hair and touched only bare neck with dirty, rock-dusty fingers. The sensation was startling, like missing the last step on a flight of stairs.
“Anyway,” Liv said. “It’s cool to meet you. You must know a ton about your family.”
“Hardly. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. You’re perfect,” Mariah said. She shot me an enormous thumbs-up.