by Julia Drake
Behind her, the fire popped, shooting bright cinders into the sky. The prow of a ship careened through my heart.
Here’s what I should have said: I saw your face and the world was different.
Here’s what I actually managed: “Hey, girl, cool forehead.”
There was a pause. I prayed for a freak wave to put me out of my misery.
“Oh,” Liv said, her voice small. “Thanks, I guess.”
“Where’s everyone else?” I asked.
“Everyone else?”
“I invited Orion, and he was going to bring Felix and Mariah….”
She had a little setup behind her, I saw now: a blanket spread with the metal detector, watermelon, and Oreos. Two flashlights.
“I thought it was going to be just us,” Liv said.
“Oh. I thought…I guess…”
“Whatever. This is great. I’m sure Mastergoon Theater will have plenty of comments about how silly you look with a metal detector.”
“Do you want…”
“Nope. No. This is perfect,” she said, sounding just like my mom when I left crumbs all over the table after cleaning up from dinner. “Let’s just hope they bring beer.”
They didn’t disappoint. Felix, Mariah, and Orion each arrived carrying a six-pack, whooping and hollering when they saw Liv.
“Hat-free, way to be!” said Felix.
“You look great!” Mariah said, and hugged her. Why couldn’t I have done that?
Orion stared at Liv like he’d seen her for the first time.
“Are you going to say hi?” Liv said to him finally.
“You just look so good,” he said. He was in love with her. Totally and completely in love with her. They were a saga. How could she not want him, when he talked to her like that? And sure enough, when they hugged, it was a long, swaying one, so much more than a hug between friends. Felix and Mariah made eyes at each other.
“Can I have a drink?” Liv said when they’d finally disentangled from each other.
“I thought you swore off drinking after you threw up behind that tree last winter,” Felix said.
“People change,” she said, hiss-popping open the top. People change. That was all the answer I needed. The hat was gone, and she wanted Orion.
Metal detecting was put off until dark, when there was less chance of getting caught. We sat around the fire pit, and somehow I wound up between Orion and Liv. I’d wanted to be in their vortex once, but now that I was here, I just felt awful. In the way, a hideous rock in their babbling brook. Mariah and Felix bickered, but the three of us hardly said a word. Orion’s knee bumped mine and I shifted closer to Liv, who angled herself toward Felix. Was she jealous? Orion only wanted her, obviously—
“Have you guys heard Liv’s latest theory about Their Love Was Our Beginning?” I asked. Maybe turning the subject toward truthing would cheer her up. “She thinks my great-great-great-grandmother fled the country because of a torrid love affair with a mystery man named S.”
“Sebastian,” guessed Orion.
“Stephen.”
“Sarah,” Liv said. My heart nearly stopped.
“Saucy!” said Felix.
“Not saucy. It’s possible S was a woman,” Liv said.
“What about your pregnancy theory?” I asked.
“The math didn’t hold up,” Liv said dismissively. “Plus, if Fidelia had been having an affair with a woman, there’s an even greater chance that she’d want to run away. And stay away once she landed. Not to mention that whole cross-dressing thing.”
“They had three kids, though,” I said.
“Sex means nothing,” Liv said.
“That’s definitely not true,” said Orion.
Felix fanned himself furtively and glanced at Mariah. Orion had kissed Liv. She’d kissed him. Grief second base, she’d said, but maybe it’d been more. Maybe she’d been lying to me this whole time.
“Hey,” Liv said suddenly to Orion, “why don’t you and Violet sing for everyone?”
“What?” I glanced nervously at Orion.
“That’s weirdly wholesome of you, Liv,” Mariah said.
“I’m down!” said Felix. “Sing to us, you beautiful creatures.”
“I don’t sing,” I said automatically.
“You sang for Orion,” Liv said. “That’s what he told me, at least.”
I shot daggers at him. Seriously? Even after what I’d said about Broadway?
“I’m sorry, Violet, but it’s true! You do have a nice voice,” said Orion. “It’s, like, moody and unique.…I have my harmonica.…We could do ‘You Belong to Me’…that’s your favorite, right?”
“Yes, yes, yes!” said Felix. “It’ll be a real live campfire experience, like sleepaway camp!”
“Summer camp was miserable,” said Mariah.
“Then this’ll be better,” said Felix.
“I really don’t want to sing,” I said. I had the feeling that when Orion and I played music together, we’d look really, really good. If Liv was upset with me—if she thought I was moving in on Orion, or if she thought—
She’d wanted it to be just us, I thought.
“It’s a short song,” Orion said. “Please?”
“Please!” said Felix.
“Please,” said Mariah.
Liv lit a cigarette, already bored. I wanted her to look at me so badly I thought I’d burst.
“All right,” I said, “let’s sing.”
What else could I do?
Romeo and Juliet once had a conversation that became a sonnet. Alone, they were good; together, they were art. I always wondered what that would be like—to be so in sync with someone, you create.
I confirmed right then and there what I been suspecting: that Orion Lewis was my musical soul mate. Music at the aquarium was lo-fi, but here, now, on this beach, this was serious.
I took a deep breath and sang:
“See the pyramids along the Nile
Watch the sunrise on a tropic isle…”
Orion punctuated the words with his twangy, bluesy notes, and I looked skyward at first, because that was easier than looking at their faces. I tried hard not to impress anyone, just to remember how much I loved this song, throaty and sad with lyrics that sparkled, each one its own moment of discovery.
“Send me photographs and souvenirs…”
My tune double-helixed with Orion’s and I chanced a look at Mariah, who was dreamy-eyed. Felix was swaying. I wanted to look at Liv so badly, so badly, to see her look at me, to watch me the same way I’d watched her in the museum….
“Fly the ocean in a silver plane
See the jungle when it’s wet with rain…”
I looked at her, finally. She was looking at him.
“Just remember till you’re home again…”
In the final lines of the song, I willed her gray eyes my way, and when her gaze didn’t budge, I looked skyward again. My voice was overly thick with feeling, Orion’s notes panging blue, and I sang the last line looking up at the stars. You belong to me.
It didn’t matter where I was looking, though. From the start, I’d been singing only for her.
Orion played his final notes, and I recognized the silence that followed as that of an audience transported. It hadn’t been a sonnet, but it felt close. I wasn’t even sure Liv cared.
Felix was the first one to speak. “You two would make the most handsome musical babies.”
Mariah whacked him on the shoulder. “You guys are obviously amazing, but that song is jacked. How ’bout you belong to no one and are free to make your own choices?”
“Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it,” said Orion.
I looked to Liv, stared at the new fact of her face. For the first time, her eyes met mine, and looking into their somber gray depths, I wanted to hear everything she thought, to hear her use a word I’d never heard, to give me some weird fact about Old Algiers, to compare my voice to some obscure singer that I’d listen to and fall in love with
.
“Not bad,” she said.
Then she snatched Felix’s beer and took a long, long drink.
By the time the tide was low enough for metal detecting, Liv was drunk.
Is she okay? I mouthed to Mariah as Liv fumbled with her lighter.
Take her with you, Mariah mouthed, miming metal detection.
“All right, Violet,” Felix said, picking up the metal detector from the sand. “Crash course in how to use this sucker. It’s the cheapo kind, but still.”
The contraption was basic, a thin rod with a sensor at the bottom. Wires maypoled up the handle to a control box, which was supposed to beep-beep loudly if the sensor picked up any metallic traces. When I took the wand, the detector immediately went haywire, sending shrieking beeps into the night. Liv dropped her latest beer on the sand.
“We got it secondhand,” Felix said apologetically. He punched a few buttons on the control panel. “Truth be told it’s always been finicky.”
Haywire and cheap as the metal detector was, when I swung it over the sand, I felt powerful, like I was holding a magic wand. I’d find pieces of the ship that would help reveal the location of the wreck. I’d write my brother and tell him we found the Lyric. I couldn’t wait.
“You look intrepid,” Orion said. Liv rolled her eyes. Take her, Mariah urged again.
“Liv, are you going to come with me?”
“You know you’re not going to find anything,” she said. “Especially not with that piece of junk.”
“All this booze is making you uncharacteristically negative,” Mariah said.
“I’m not saying anything she doesn’t already know,” Liv said. “There are over three million wrecks in the ocean. You really think you’re just going to roll up to the beach with a metal detector and stumble upon the Lyric?”
“The power of positive thinking, Liv,” Felix said.
“Yeah, that’s gotten me so far in life,” she said.
That shut us up. In the quiet, she slurped her beer. I’d lost track of how many she’d had.
“I thought we were in this together,” I said. My voice sounded small.
“So did I.”
“Then come with me.”
“Make Orion go,” she muttered.
“I’ll go with you if you want,” Orion offered.
“What a knight,” Liv said. Felix and Mariah exchanged uncomfortable glances.
“That’s really okay,” I said. “I’m good on my own.”
I set off across the dark beach, swinging the metal detector in front me like an absolute idiot. And what did I care if Liv came? She was just drunk. Besides, she was right: in the first half hour, the only treasure I’d dug up were soda-can pull tabs and oxidized pennies. Not exactly the clues I needed.
I’d made it to the end of the beach, when I heard Liv’s voice behind me.
“Find anything good?”
She’d brought a flashlight and shone it on me. I uncurled my fistful of treasures: corroded scraps of metal, some nuts and bolts, the green pennies.
“Kind of a disappointment,” I admitted. I waited for her to disagree. To tell me that the nuts and bolts looked promising, to offer me a theory entirely based around the way these rivets had corroded. She said nothing.
The detector beeped. I looked at the sand.
“Go ahead,” Liv said.
I dug, fast. An old-fashioned house key.
“Kind of pretty. You want it?”
“Do I want your trash?” she said.
“I didn’t…That wasn’t…”
“Orion told me you kissed.”
Oh, shit.
“It was more like a half kiss,” I said, backpedaling furiously. “He told me not to tell you.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me you liked him? Instead of—whatever speech you gave me? Whatever—objective observer? Instead of prying for all sorts of personal stuff and letting me ramble on about anagrams and my family? Was that, like, recon? Get a read on how fucked up she is, report back?”
I was so stunned I could only choke out a “No, never,” before the metal detector exploded.
“Go ahead. Dig away. I know you want to,” she said.
She shone her light at my feet. About a foot and a half down, the shovel scraped against something hard. In the beam of Liv’s flashlight, I pulled loose a pair of binoculars—opera specs, really—corroded with salt, covered with barnacles, but there, nevertheless, in my hand. They looked ancient. They looked amazing. They looked straight off the deck of the—
“You have got to be kidding me. Forty-five minutes with a broken metal detector and you’ve got artifacts? I’ve been looking for years and I’ve got nothing. You get the zoo picture. Your emerald! Do you have any idea how much that must be worth? How much the rest of us would kill to find something like that?”
“Have it!” I said, waving the binoculars at her. “Take the emerald! And, Liv, seriously—Orion—that’s not even a thing!”
“It’s all so easy for you, isn’t it? God. I’m so pathetic. For a second I thought it could be easy for me, too. Like I’d take off my hat and poof. Some dramatic makeover, I thought! I’m still the same. I’m still me. Same problems. Same everything. I won’t ever get what I want. And you always will.”
I reached my hand to her, because she was drunk, and hurting—
“What is that?” she said. “Am I supposed to hold your hand now?”
“No. I don’t know. I just…”
“Don’t hold my hand. I’m not tragic. I’m not cool. Death isn’t cool. Fidelia’s this party trick for you, and my dead person is literally across the hallway. We’re not the same, you and me.”
“No—we’re anagrams, I thought—”
“DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT AN ANAGRAM IS? They’re completely different words! ICEMAN is not CINEMA. ORCHESTRA is not CARTHORSE. Your family’s missing a WRECK and my family’s missing a PERSON. You smoke like an idiot at your fancy private school and get suspended and think that’s the end of the world, and he’ll kill me for telling you this, but Felix lost an eye in sixth grade and that wasn’t the end for him, he almost left school last year because the bullying was so bad! And your brother! God! You don’t even call him! Do you know how many times a day I wish I could call my brother? It’s so fucking easy. Your whole life! So fucking easy!”
I stepped back. She was so angry. And she was so right.
“You are ungrateful,” she said. “Deeply and truly ungrateful.”
I didn’t think it was possible to be blindsided by a truth you’ve always suspected, but there you have it. As it turns out, it’s devastating.
I couldn’t hear any more. I set the metal detector down at her feet and then ran down the beach, past the fire, past the chorus of shouts. They were Liv’s friends, not mine. She needed them.
When I got home, there was a letter waiting for me on my bed. I recognized the handwriting.
Dear Violet,
I’ve got a picture of the family on my dresser here. Unfortunately it’s the one you hate, from cousin Margot’s wedding, the one where the photographer put you on the end to “account for height” (please don’t say you look like a behemoth. I know you’re thinking it). Whenever people see that picture, there’s always a moment after I point you out where they say That’s your sister? I think they’re going to talk about how pretty you are. People usually do. But today, someone said: You guys look identical.
I don’t know if you remember that wedding. It was last summer, right before things got bad for me, or worse than usual, and bad for you, too, I guess. The band was so loud I couldn’t even be in the room with all the dancing. The cousins were so scary—so big and so adult. Half of them had kids! Dad told me to relax, that they were family, which was true, but that didn’t help. Then he disappeared to talk to cousin Adam about baseball, and his need for a sports-oriented son was so blatant that I wanted to hide in the back with the caterers. I tried to be brave, but I just wanted to leave.
You kne
w.
“Let’s take a break,” you said.
There was that pond out front, with green plants and leaves and swans. You and I spent the whole time making boats out of leaves. It was really, really nice of you.
We’re not identical, not in the slightest. You’re like this Amazon. You’re brave. Only you would think it would be possible to find a shipwreck. Only you would try! I’ve wanted to be like you my whole life. Instead I’m me: terrified of my own cousins and made of jelly. Afraid of everything. I should have been a snail. I’d always have a hiding spot.
I know I can be a lot. I know I’m not the easiest brother to have. I’m not the easiest person to be. You’re a good sister. I just wanted to say that. I love you, and I want to see you soon. I hope Maine is okay, and if it’s not okay, that’s okay, too. Vermont is fine. I feel a little better, but I wish I were there with you. I wish I could help you find the wreck.
Love,
Sammy
PS: Not a single person who’s seen that picture says you look like a behemoth.
PPS: Mom said you shaved your head?
I did not feel like an Amazon. I felt like trash. Ungrateful, Great-Pacific-Garbage-Patch-size trash. I owed Sam a letter. A proper one. I couldn’t put it off any longer.
I took a deep breath. I sat down at my desk and finally, finally wrote what I should have written long ago.
Dear Sammy,
Thank you so much for your letter. I’m so glad to hear from you. I’m sorry it took me so long to write something other than a wreck update. I didn’t know what to say.
I’ve been thinking a lot about how we wound up here—you in Vermont, me in Maine. Genetics? Family curse? Bad luck? Broadway, maybe. The epicenter of all badness.
I have to admit now that part of what happened was my fault. Maybe I helped you build leaf boats that one time. But come on. That was one time out of a million. I’m sorry about all the times I walked by you in the halls at school. All the times I chose a romantic circus over hanging out with you. I’m sorry about Spain. I’m sorry I was nothing but mean.