Luz, Rebound

by Jeania Kimbrough

  ***

  By the time we made it downstairs, Kelli had been whisked into the locker room with most of the rest of the drill team. The girl’s basketball team had resumed playing, but many people still lingered in the hallway buzzing about what happened. Ryan stood outside the locker room door. “She broke her ankle,” I heard someone chatter. The sound of a siren blared in the distance. I exchanged glances with Nic. Her eyes were brimming with tears. We pushed through people to get closer to the locker room, but I lost my balance myself when someone bumped me from behind. A hand clamped around my bicep, at once steadying me and feeling familiar. I looked up into Ryan’s anxious eyes.

  “Is she okay?” I asked him.

  “I don’t know.” Ryan pulled me toward him out of the throng. It was the closest we had physically been to each other since I’d returned. For a moment the crowd muted around me. All I heard was my heartbeat pulsing in my ears. As if caught in slow motion, I zoomed in on his hand, moving my gaze to witness his shirt rise and fall almost imperceptibly over his chest, seemingly pounding from excitement just like my own.

  “Thanks,” I said, moving my eyes up from his torso to his face.

  Beside us Christie appeared, her eyes fastened on me with fury and ready for full-on confrontation. “Kelli’s gonna be fine, but get the hell away from my boyfriend, Kara!”

  Ryan’s hand dropped away from me, his expression mixed. I stared at him, smarting at her accusation, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t. While he would reach out to protect me in an anonymous crowd, he was not going to say or do anything in my defense in front of her.

  Weak, I thought bitterly, resisting the urge to hurl an insult back at Christie. She wanted a fight with me. As if that would help anything.

  “I’m only here to see…” A gust of cold, dusk air hit me in the face. The EMT guys busted through the double doors of the gym with a stretcher behind them. “…Kelli.” The crowd parted. I stayed on one side of the door while Christie and Ryan moved to the other. “Come on,” I heard her command him. Teachers were asking everyone to clear out of the way. I met up with Nic outside, where we waited for better access and news.

  But I wasn’t great at waiting for anyone.

  Chapter 8

  Catalyst

  “Do you think you’re out for the season?”

  I sat in a chair near Kelli’s bed a weekend later, watching her take small, slow bites of the piece of coffee cake I’d just brought her from the kitchen. Her ankle was still swollen but with crutches she’d gotten around okay the last few days at school, even though I knew it was taking a lot out of her.

  She took her time chewing before she spoke. “Maybe.” Dark circles under her eyes framed her blank gaze.

  I sighed, wanting to cheer her up. “That sucks. You are that team.” I reached out to touch her shoulder and caught sight of her ragged fingernails. I had helped her paint them last night before finals, but she already had bare spots again. “Did you not like the color?”

  Her beginning of a smile at my appraisal and touch morphed into a grimace at my questioning look. “Sorry, Kara. I did like it. I was just so nervous for the team I guess I did it without realizing. Bad habit.”

  They had placed third in the competitions last night, despite her injury last weekend. It had given us all a scare, but it turned out to be a painful sprain instead of a break. She seemed to be taking it well, even though she had a right to be depressed, and insisted Nic and I go with her to the competitions so that we could all cheer them on from the sidelines. Members of her team came up to talk to her during breaks. Most of them said hi to all of us, except Christie and her friends, who pointedly ignored me. Even Ryan came up to wish her well when I went to the bathroom. I watched him get up and leave when he saw me coming back. It was insulting and hurtful, but I didn’t say anything for Kelli’s sake. I even managed a smile and some encouragement when she went off with her teammates to celebrate for a while after the awards ceremony. Nic and I had ended up coming home alone. “But Christie did really well at the competition. We wouldn’t have placed as well as we did without her.”

  “I guess so.” I pushed past her gratitude for Christie, seeing the opportunity to get closer to what was bothering my friend. I wanted her to talk about what was truly on her mind, but she had told me nothing earlier when I had asked her directly. “Kelli, I just don’t understand how it happened in the first place. I’ve never seen you fall.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “But how?” I pressed. “Were you dizzy? Did you slip? You weren’t even doing a fancy move.” She hadn’t answered the last time I asked her these questions about the accident. She said she didn’t remember. She had to remember.

  “Kara, I’m just not the same as I used to be about drill team. I’m not as good. I probably shouldn’t even be captain.”

  “What? Don’t say that. Yes, you are! And yes, you should!” Christie’s face appeared in my head, telling me to get away from Ryan last weekend. “Did somebody tell you that?” I could see her being manipulative and twisting Kelli’s injury to her advantage.

  “No.” She sniffed, but her face hardened. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I looked out the window of her room. Being back at Trinity wasn’t supposed to be like this. My friends were holding back, my ex wasn’t speaking to me, my ex’s girlfriend was insulting me, and now it was possible this very same person was trying to slide into my best friend’s coveted position as captain of our school drill team. It was all so wrong.

  “I have something to tell you, Kara.”

  Blinking away some moisture I could feel starting to form in my eyes, I turned toward her. “What?”

  “You won’t like it.” Her eyes widened, looking directly into mine. This is how she looked when she was about to tell me a secret. “Ryan gave Christie a ring last night.”

  I stared at her, registering something different than I expected.

  “I wanted to tell you before you found out another way. It’s just a promise ring.”

  The news unwound through my head like a ball of string. My back spasmed at the absurd sound of the word “just” as I mentally repeated it.

  Now it was time for me to hold back. “A promise for what?” I finally asked.

  “I guess marriage, eventually.”

  I straightened the throw pillow behind my back, resisting an urge to fling it across the room. Instead, I shut my eyes for a moment, internalizing the emotion before I opened them up again and shook my head. Ryan was such a shit. This couldn’t be real. If he was so into Christie, he would be able to talk to me and Christie wouldn’t be so nasty toward me. He wouldn’t treat another person like he was treating me if I didn’t matter. But now he had gone and proposed to her? Why was he doing this?

  “Aren’t we only seventeen?” My arms opened wide in an incredulous gesture. “Who’s planning on marriage now? He’s told me before he wants to go to college.” I forced my hands back down, gripped the arms of the chair, and sat back into the pillow with a huff of irritation, trying not to show this news was also painful.

  “Well, eventually,” she said. “You know…a promise for the future.”

  “Is she pregnant?” I asked, a new thought firing through me. “That must be the only reason if they’re serious. She went and got pregnant, and she’s trying to trap him.”

  Kelli turned white, like I had just said the ugliest thing in the world. “No.” She looked away from me. “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, did anyone ask her?” I softened my tone a little, but inside I wanted to scream. I didn’t want this for Ryan, even though he was being ridiculous. He was making a mistake.

  “I think they are just really happy together, Kara.”

  Her words punched my gut. Was I the only one who felt their relationship was a showy mess, doomed to fail? Da
mn it, why did I even care!

  “Huh.” I swallowed hard. “Well, good for them.” I wanted away from her and everyone I thought I knew all of a sudden. “Good for them.”

  “Kara!” The voice in the hall calling my name was like a godsend. I could exit without having to say anymore. It hurt that Kelli didn’t see things the same way. “Kara, phone!”

  ***

  “G’day. Ben Carsten here.” Ben’s familiar voice crackled back at me over the line in response to my hello, immediately taking me out of the previous conversation. I became a tiny blip on a phone line, reverberating over eight thousand miles, lost in a tunnel through space and time.

  “Where are you?”

  “In the outback now—some little place you’ve probably never heard of.” His voice sounded the same but unfamiliar in the phone booth in our dorm hallway. I heard an intercom paging medical staff in the background. “I’m actually calling from work.”

  “In a hospital?” To know that he was at work made me edgy. It made me think of people waiting on him, waiting for our conversation to end already.

  “Yeah. How are you?”

  “Fine,” I said automatically, and heard him chuckle. We had always teased each other into saying more than that word after we had gotten past it. “I mean, I’m back at school. Just studying and stuff. How are you?”

  “Working. Nonstop. I just wanted to ring you and see how you are, how things have been since you’ve returned.”

  Eight thousand miles. If I wasn’t okay, what could he really do? “I’m…” I felt tears starting to swell in my eyes. “Where are you again?”

  “It’s a place called Broome—in Western Australia, near the coast. It is a small hospital but we service outlying areas, a lot of aborigines.”

  “When did you move?”

  “I got the job a few weeks ago. I’ll send you a postcard.”

  Not only was Ben out of my life, he was in a place I couldn’t picture anymore, somewhere I’d never been. He was moving on, past studying now and starting his career. The thought brought me back to my own setting, and I squirmed against the wooden seat in the dark, coffin-like atmosphere of the dormitory phone booth. I was so limited by comparison. I hated the feeling of not being on even footing with him, but it had always been like this.

  “I’m happy for you,” I said. He had everything going for him again. “I hope you like it there.” Should I tell him I missed him?

  “Dr. Carsten—”

  I heard the sound of his name in the background for an instant until he must have cupped his hand over the receiver. I waited for what seemed like a minute or two until his voice asked if I was still there.

  “I’ve got to go. There is a patient I need to check on.” His voice had changed. It sounded more serious, remote.

  “Okay. I don’t know if I ever said congratulations on your new title.” It made him sound like someone I didn’t know.

  “Thanks. I’ll ring you again, sometime,” he said.

  “It’s hard to get through in the dorm. There’s usually a line at night to use the phone. Then sometimes no one hears it or picks up.”

  “I’ll try anyway.”

  “Okay, well . . . bye.” I felt the first tear slip down my cheek.

  “Kara?”

  “Yes?” Another.

  “I want you to be happy.”

  Don’t call me then. And another. “Thanks; you too.”

  “I’ve got to go now.” They were hot, dazed tears that sprung up like perspiration from all the emotional stress of the day. I didn’t think he could hear them. My breathing stayed steady. “Love you. Cheers,” he said, as if he would put the phone down that instant, and I pictured telephone lines under deep water, carrying our voices miles away from where we were now. There was always a lonely delay of sound as it traveled through transpacific conversations that made me feel the distance. He was even a day ahead of me in real time—almost a full revolution around the sun. So out of reach. We might as well have been on different planets.

  “Love you too,” I squeaked out before his side of the phone clicked. I put my handset back in its receiver. We’d said “love” like nothing, like automatic sign-offs to family members, or just really good friends. Was this what we had become? It didn’t feel as comfortable as we both tried to make it sound. I sat there for a moment until I knew I could bring myself to walk back to my room.

  Chapter 9

  Light and Dark

  “Busca la luz: Look for the light.” Chaplain Robinson raised his hands in a dramatic Y gesture and began this morning’s sermon. My eyes followed the direction of his arms, framing opposite ends of the circular seal of our school emblazoned at the top of the stage behind him, and read the bold type running around the edges a second time. In the middle of the seal was a cross with stylized light beams shooting out from it like an aura. “What does it mean: Busca la luz? You’ve all seen it behind me on our Trinity College Preparatory motto day after day.” He gestured again without turning back to look at it. “But what does it mean?”

  The students in the wooden chapel seats stirred in reply, as if the people within them had suddenly become more alert. His rhetorical question seemed to spark extra interest today, I supposed because the school logo defined us as a group, just like our gold and black sports colors and lion mascot. Or maybe they were listening for an accent with our Spanish language motto, because so many of my classmates, including Nic and Kelli, were from some of the oldest families in New Mexico, who could trace their heritage back to the time of the conquistadores. Considering the phrase myself made me think it must have come from the Catholics, even though Trinity considered itself non-denominational these days.

  “If we need to look for light, doesn’t that imply we are in the dark? And what does it mean to be in the dark or void of light?”

  My attention was all his now. Darkness and void could symbolize so many things, and we had recently gone over this same theme in English class, but my first response was a prickly recognition of the tenor of my own thoughts lately. I was starting to feel uncomfortable, disconnected, especially if I was alone. I wasn’t sleeping right. I had nightmares or thought too much about things—about the last year, about Ryan, about Ben and other friends. Since the ring conversation with Kelli and Ben’s phone call, everything had gotten worse, and fast. I didn’t know when I would hear from Ben again, and I didn’t want to think about it.

  But my problem wasn’t just Ben. It was other stuff. They told us at our departure camp we could get reverse culture shock. The highs of returning home could sink to deep depression when you started to feel like you might not fit in anymore or that people might not relate to you the same way. They said home might not be as happy of a place as you remembered. Another name for an exchange student returnee was “rebounder” and I had never known quite why until now. I felt dejected, like something I had been a part of was out of reach. I understood the psychological explanations for what I was feeling; I just wished I’d hurry up and get past it. And there was no one I could really talk to about it, because even my closest friends played a part in these feelings.

  “In the beginning, when God said, ‘Let there be light’—Fiat lux in Latin or genēthētō phōs in Greek—a more exact translation of the gospel is to dispel ignorance,” the chaplain was saying.

  Dispel ignorance. I wanted to write that down. I bent to pick up my notebook, which had a pen folded into it, from the floor beside me. I had to contort to prevent it from scraping Lauren’s knee, but instead it bumped into my own, causing the pen to pop out onto her lap and ricochet back onto the floor on her other side. Agh! My favorite pen, too. I had received it for Christmas a couple of years ago and loved the enameled floral design on its shell. It was expensive, and you had to buy special cartridges to refill it. Mom and Dad had given it to me because Mrs. Sandvig had told
them I liked to write.“To drive away the dark by growing one’s awareness of light,” Chaplain Robinson continued, but I had lost my concentration. I looked over past Lauren’s lap, fighting the urge to forage further for the pen and cause a disturbance, when I caught sight of Ryan bending down out of the corner of my eye. Startled, I instantly knew he was picking it up, and then glanced his way again, following his movements.

  Since Kelli’s accident we’d gone back to ignoring each other, and yet now he was going out of his way to help me again, like when he kept me from falling before. I’d wondered if he regretted that, given Christie’s reaction. My heart started pounding, drowning out the chaplain’s voice as I watched the cloth of Ryan’s checked shirt stretch across his back. His arm searched the floor, moving about unaided by his eyes. Just once he turned them toward me before his body straightened up, pen in hand. He looked down at the object, running his thumb across the raised enamel, and then switched it to his left hand and looked directly at me, extending his arm across the seats between us.

  “Thanks,” I whispered, reaching out toward the pen but not quite far enough. I strained a little more as he did too, and our fingers touched when he passed it to me.

  I turned back toward the front of the room, my pen tight in my hand for a moment, and opened my notebook.

  “This shining light behind us is a symbol—a sign, if you will—to remind us of what we must do, where we must look, what inside we must bring forth,” Chaplain Robinson said. I jotted down these last words for something to do, underlining the word “sign.” “A will of the spirit inside us to shine on a higher plane than what we can fully comprehend now. To look for the light,” he paused for effect, “of revelation…of love.”

  ***

  It is one of most bizarre violations of privacy to be caught sitting in a bathroom stall with your pants down, aware that someone who doesn’t like you is on the other side with a literal cheer section, measuring every mortal sound.