by Julia Drake
Liv points to the van, as if to say, Want to come? Violet shakes her head again, and then Liv does something inexplicable: she lays her hand flat across her own chest and presses.
Violet’s breath catches. She’s never really thought of her heart before. The heart’s a muscle that works to keep her alive. Works to keep this other girl alive, too. Two muscles squeezing over and over to keep them upright, all for the purpose of this moment, right now.
They’re standing far away, but Violet can feel Liv’s hand on her own heart.
GO-BETWEEN
I might have written that whole night off as a dream. I might have, were it not for my loving, slightly unorthodox uncle, who burst into my room that morning before sunrise and cried, “I had quite an interesting call from Frieda at the Lyric Pub!”
I squinted awake. The clock read 4:02 a.m. I had a splitting headache, a series of singing cuts on my ankle—glass shrapnel, I figured—and a horrible memory of Rus’s hand on my wrist. And something else…at the end of the night…
Liv’s hand on my heart. For a split second, even through my hangover, I went fizzy and alert with the memory.
“Up and at ’em, tiger. Day’s about to start at the bakery. Thought I’d give you a ride to work since I’m already up. Let you mull things over in the bright light of day.”
“It’s the middle of the night,” I said, pulling a pillow over my head. The room pitched like a boat. I needed to be horizontal for at least another eight hours.
“The teenage girl who’s been out drinking and subsequently terrified her uncle gets the worm. That’s how that saying goes, right?” He yanked off my comforter. “Violet. Seriously. Out of bed, now. We need to talk. I’ll meet you in the car.”
Somehow, I managed to obey. I dressed and blundered outside, and we drove through inky darkness in silence. In the blue light, Toby’s face wore a look of supreme disappointment. I leaned my head against the window and the night came back to me, stronger this time. Toby may have been disappointed, but I couldn’t believe how badly I’d slipped up. I was supposed to be different, but last night had been a disaster. Exactly the same as New York. Worse, even.
Except the ending. The glass, the heart. That’d been different. Jarringly so.
“How do you feel?” Toby asked. His voice was quieter, calmer than it’d been in my room.
“Like shit,” I said into the window.
“Frieda said you threw a glass.”
“I’ll pay for it.”
“That’s not my point. Were you—is everything all right? What happened?”
I considered this. Nothing happened. Everything happened. The answer lay somewhere in the middle, murky and difficult to articulate, especially with a hangover. I was so tired. I went with old reliable.
“I’m fine,” I said. “I just overdid it. I won’t again, I promise. Are you going to tell my mom?”
“Haven’t decided. You sure you’re okay? Why the glass?”
I wondered how much Frieda had said. “Am I in trouble?”
“Not in the traditional sense,” Toby said. “You can’t do this, Violet. I was terrified. Am terrified.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and it sounded weak, but I meant it. Disappointing Toby felt particularly awful. He’d trusted me completely, for absolutely no reason at all, and left me baked goods and notes from ghosts. He didn’t deserve what I’d put him through.
The car ride was short. We were already pulling into the aquarium’s parking lot. Everything looked different in the dark, empty, a little sad. I wanted to be a better niece, a better sister, a better version of myself.
“I don’t know if you’re in trouble,” Toby said slowly. “You’re more in Serious Worry. I’m thinking mandatory puzzle hour every day after work. Structure and habit can be wildly transformational when one is spinning out. They’ve helped me a lot. We have more in common than you think, you know. That’s a large part of why your mom sent you here.”
“Not because she hates me?”
“Vi. Is that what you think?”
I fell silent, staring into the dark parking lot. I hated myself a lot of the time. I wouldn’t blame my mom if she did, too.
“Violet,” Toby said, in a soft way that made me feel like I was in danger of cracking in half, “your mom loves you so much. She thinks she failed you.”
That was laughable. If my pub escapade had made anything clear, it was that I was the failure in the family. I didn’t say that, though. Instead, sounding far more hurt than I intended, I asked, “If she loves me so much, why’d she ship me off here?”
Toby placed a warm hand on the back of my head, like I was a baby. The simple kindness of the gesture almost undid me. Toby and I’d always gotten along, but we’d never really talked. I hadn’t known he’d be so gentle.
“A change of scene. Space. A chance to gather your thoughts.” Toby paused. “You should talk to her about how you feel.”
“And tell her what a transformation I’m making? She’d be so proud.”
“You’d be surprised,” Toby said. “She’s a really great listener if you give her a chance.”
“What if she…”
“What if she…” Toby echoed gently.
What if she doesn’t like me anymore? I was going to say. But it sounded so babyish. I couldn’t talk about my mom anymore. It hurt too much.
“This is a punishment, right?” I said, pointing to the aquarium. “Being dropped off at work six hours early with a hangover?”
“Work? This isn’t work. This is Lyric’s hip after-hours spot, Club Tentacle.”
“Ha-ha.”
Toby shook his head. “It’s not a punishment per se. A chance to clear your head, more like. Unless you’d rather come to the bakery. But the ovens are really hot, and I thought at least the aquarium would be cool.”
“It is freezing in there,” I said.
He reached into the backseat of his car and handed me a blue-and-pink windbreaker.
“Weird parenting move, Toby.”
“Kid,” he said, ignoring the dig, “next time you find yourself in a situation like that, you call me. No matter where you are or what time it is. Okay?”
“There won’t be a next time.”
“But on the off chance there is,” Toby insisted. “You promise?”
“I promise,” I said, but promising felt superfluous. I already knew that last night had been a turning point: a real one. I wouldn’t go bananas like that again. I didn’t want to. The Lyric Pub had been Year of Wild Violet’s last horrifying hurrah.
“You have keys?” Toby said, nodding toward the aquarium.
“Uh-huh.”
“Good,” he said. “We’re gonna keep talking, you and I. Open lines of communication, so to speak. Promise I won’t make it too painful. In the meantime, enjoy Club Tentacle. I hear the rays can cut a serious rug.”
In the dark, the aquarium was different. I waited for my eyes to adjust, then walked through the blue shadows toward the touch tanks. The world around me was still, but in darkness, underwater had come alive. The creatures in the tanks were brighter, their colors more vibrant, their movements agile and pronounced. Grapefruit-pink anemones waved their tentacles hello. Tangerine-spiked sea cucumbers breathed across the mossy tank floor. A chunky scarlet sea star shuffled across a rock. I touched a purple urchin and the urchin actually responded, catching my index finger in its spiny grip.
A feeling of wonder stirred in my chest. Maybe this wasn’t what Toby had meant by clearing my head, but in the urchin’s grip, I felt smooth and cool as sea glass. I understood, suddenly, why Orion loved the aquarium. Maybe I could love it, too. It had been so long since I cared about something.
And at the very least, the Lyric Aquarium was more scenic than the Lyric Pub.
Hours stretched in front of me. A deep de-scumming, I decided, would be good penance for last night, a fresh start. I tidied the gift shop, refolded the sweatshirts, scraped the grime from between Scrooge McDuck’s butto
ns. I stocked the bathrooms and mopped the floors. I emptied out the industrial fridge upstairs and scrubbed fish juice from the insides, vacuumed Boris’s hair from the break room couch. All of that, and I still had an hour to kill, so I lay down on the fresh couch to catch a quick nap.
I’d barely closed my eyes, when I heard a noise coming from beneath me. Not a noise: a harmonica. A song. I crept downstairs to investigate, keeping my footsteps light as I followed the tune to its source.
The sound, I understood when I rounded the corner, was Orion. He was standing in front of the far tank, playing harmonica to Louise the Lobster.
Correction: he was standing in front of the far tank, serenading Louise the Lobster.
He was playing a zipper-breathed, bluesy version of “Moon River,” and while the aquarium may have been lackluster in some ways, its acoustics, it turned out, were fantastic.
The melody ached through the space so richly that I felt the song behind my eyes, my nose, and my mouth, that feeling of almost crying, of your nose brightening, pinging, prickling. A warm hum spread through my chest. The song was almost the same feeling as Liv’s hand on my heart, all the way across the street. The notes buzzed through me, leaving me a little weepy, aching for someone I could call my huckleberry friend.
When the song ended, I erupted. “That was beautiful.”
Orion spun, startled, and hid the harmonica behind his back. “Shoot. You’re here early.”
“Are private concerts a regular thing? Because if they are, I’m going to make early arrival a habit.”
He looked embarrassed. “I play to her sometimes.”
“Is this like a sing-to-your-plants sort of thing?”
“Sort of. It’s dumb.”
“I bet it’s not.”
Orion considered for a moment, and then launched into a half-mumbled explanation: “Lobsters don’t have ears. But they emit vibrations. Probably for self-defense. Maybe for communication. You know how humming to periwinkles brings them out of their shells? I thought with maybe the vibrations of the harmonica…”
“You could talk to her?”
“It’s not exactly scientific,” Orion admitted bashfully.
He was like Doctor Dolittle. It was the sweetest thing I’d ever heard.
“Who cares about scientific? I love it. You sound really good, also. From a purely melodic standpoint. I mean, independent of communicating with animals.”
He put the harmonica in his back pocket. “Thanks. I haven’t played in a while, so…that actually means a lot. Hey, I’m glad you’re here early. I think you’re ready to move out of the gift shop and onto the floor. You want to learn about some sea creatures?”
I nodded. I wanted all the facts.
“Have you always wanted to study marine biology?” I asked him later that afternoon. It was so nice out, Joan had sent us both home early, but we’d decided to eat lunch on the picnic tables behind the aquarium. We’d sat on the same side to better look at the now-defunct Exploration Zone, a rocky shore ideal for tide pooling. In those tide pools, Sam and I had seen miniature worlds. From the small sea snail, to the great blue whale, everyone has feelings….
Maybe I could show Sam the aquarium at night, one day.
“I was pretty shy as a kid,” Orion said. “Animals were easier. We had so many pets growing up, like dogs, guinea pigs, bunnies, you name it. We had this wounded raccoon once for a few weeks before the shelter had space. My mom still feeds feral cats.”
“I wish we had a dog. A really, really big one, you know? My dad feels too guilty in the city.”
“Yeah, our last dog, Faye, was huge—a Lab-and-hound mix. She died in April, though. It’s the worst part about having pets,” Orion said simply. “Marine biology, though. Living here…I mean, the ocean’s on your mind all the time when it’s your backyard, and plus half the people in Lyric make their money fishing. But it’d be cool working here, regardless. The ocean’s got so much to discover. I mean, starting with just the basics, do you know we’ve explored less than five percent of the world’s oceans? Seventy percent of the planet is salt water, and we know, like, zilch.”
“Sort of like the human brain.”
“How so?”
I studied the carvings on the picnic table, jagged graffiti done with penknives. ALL U NEED IS LOVE someone had written, and beneath that, in Sharpie, someone else had added YEAH RIGHT.
“Well, like antidepressants, for example. Psychiatrists don’t even know the science behind how they work. They just know that they do. Or don’t, depending on the patient.” Sam had been on so many different med cocktails that I’d stopped keeping track. “What about Liv? Is the truthing a new thing?”
Orion inspected his sandwich in thought. “She always liked history. As a kid, she was really into Rasputin. She went through a pretty hilarious Goth phase. Like, cat collars and black braces. Will and I gave her so much shit for that.” He half laughed. “The truthing started round the time he died. Gave her a thing to think about.”
I understood distracting yourself. Unfortunately, I distracted myself in significantly less intellectual and thought-provoking ways. Such as smashing glasses on the floor of the local pub.
“What was Will like?” I asked.
“Smart, like Liv. But less book smart. He liked taking things apart and putting them back together again. He liked music, not as much as me, but he played the sax, and we had this idea….” Orion rubbed his hand along his thigh, steadying himself.
“We don’t have to get into it.”
“No, I was just thinking it’s good to talk about him. It’s not like I don’t think about him. People don’t normally ask, because they don’t want to upset me. But…”
“It’s not like you forget.”
“Exactly. You’re not going to remind me of anything I’m not thinking of twelve thousand times a day, anyway,” he said. “But yeah. We had a harebrained scheme that we were going to build a boat and sail around the Caribbean. We actually started building it in my garage. Liv was in on it, too, kind of, would sit there while we worked. She thought we were idiots, actually. That we’d all drown if we ever finished the thing. But she kept coming.”
“Do you love her?” I asked. I tried to keep my voice casual, which was tricky. Love was so far from my experience that I could barely say the word. Orion, though, didn’t even bat an eye.
“I know it’s a cliché. Best friend’s sister. Girl next door.”
“She’d probably have a field day taking that one down.”
“Believe me,” Orion said, “she already has.”
“She’s supposed to come over tomorrow. To research, or whatever.”
“She told me.”
I traced the heart on the picnic table, thinking of how they looked like one person that night on the rock. Orion’s music, Liv’s hand on her heart. A saga, Felix had said. I’d vowed to turn off the romance channel this summer, but what about helping other people tune in to the romance channel? That was…noble. Good. They both deserved a good thing.
“I could talk to Liv for you, if you want,” I said.
Orion scowled. “You mean, like, woo her?”
“Sure.”
“Terrible idea. Better to just be direct. Besides, she knows how I feel.”
“Maybe not. Have you told her? Expressly? Been like, Liv, I like you, let’s date?”
“Okay, no, but—”
“Real direct, Orion.”
“It’s hard!”
“Exactly! Which is where I come in. Subtly, obviously.”
“Aren’t we past this stage in our lives?”
“Dude, no. My parents met on a blind date in their thirties! This won’t be some middle-school clusterfuck. I’m good at this. I set my best friend up with her boyfriend!”
Really, I’d poured them both shots and they’d taken care of the rest, but Orion didn’t need to know that. I just wanted to convince him I could Yente the hell out of this situation. Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match
….
“Look, I’ll show you photographic proof.”
I pulled out my phone and swiped through pictures of my former life to find one of my (not-exactly-best) friend and her boyfriend.
“Wait,” Orion said, leaning over my shoulder. Our faces were close, and our shoulders were touching. Neither of us moved away. “Is that you?”
Oh God. It was.
Orion snatched my phone and brought the screen inches from his face. Last night had been a good reminder of my former life, but I’d gotten so used to my seal hair that Orion had recognized me even before I had, dressed to the nines for a Year of Wild Party: a regrettable velvet mini-miniskirt (it was December and freezing), a Solo cup in one hand, spiked heel boots. I’d had blood blisters on the tips of my toes for weeks.
“Shoot,” he said.
I grabbed the phone back.
“I mean that in the nicest way possible,” he said.
“I’m sure.”
“You look…I mean, yikes.”
“How can you say you’re not good with words, Orion?” I sneaked another look at myself. Actually, my lipstick that night had been kind of cool.
“Violet. Are you a secret party animal? Were you all up in the New York Club?”
“It wasn’t a big deal. Just normal high school.”
Just normal high school. That’s really how it had been. Tall, loud, drunk, down = normal. I wasn’t weird, at least not in anyone else’s estimation. Sam was weird. Sam, smart, skinny Sam, who sometimes ate Splenda packets for lunch, paper and all (so fucking weird, my “friends” agreed, and I laughed, because if you laughed with them, you hurt less); Sam, who avoided the third-floor bathroom because the fluorescents were too bright and the mirror was warped; who once, in the second-floor bathroom (softer lighting, less foot traffic), was spotted slapping himself across his own face, hard. I thought of telling my parents about that one. The hitting, I mean. I didn’t. Sometimes rumors are just rumors, like the one about me hooking up with the substitute math teacher.
Turned out I had it wrong: if you laughed, you hurt even worse.