All the Pretty Things

by Emily Arsenault

  “He’d say that every time?” I asked, my heart sinking at the sincerity of it, wondering if he saw a lot of turtles on that trip.

  “Yeah. I wondered at first if his mom had fed him that line or something. But you could tell by the way he took the hat off and looked at it that he meant it. And that’s, you know, something a lot of us have trouble with. Appreciating something even when it’s gone forever.”

  I considered asking Reggie if he really thought Ethan had accepted that he was never going back to Florida or whether he was trying to convince himself that he accepted it. But when I looked up and saw Reggie’s face, I decided against it. He looked like he might cry if he tried to say anything else.

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly. I hadn’t realized Ethan and Reggie were friends. Now it sounded like they were.

  Reggie stayed by the door, leaning on it, and eventually closing his eyes. I finished my beer. I was feeling kind of floaty, and I didn’t want the feeling to end. It would probably be easier to respond to Jason if I could keep feeling this way.

  “Can I have another beer?” I asked.

  Reggie opened his eyes but seemed to struggle to find a response.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, standing up and starting to walk away. “Never mind. Forget I asked you that. I’ll leave you alone now. I’m sorry to have bothered you. My brother, uh…says hi.”

  He waved and thankfully went back into the apartment. I was glad he didn’t stay outside and watch me drive away. I needed a few minutes to chug some water, to make sure the fuzzy feeling had dissolved before I started the car.

  When I finally took off, straining not to push the gas pedal too hard, it occurred to me that there was something similar about Reggie’s face just now and Morgan’s on the Ferris wheel. A kind of indecision, somewhere between devastation and disbelief.

  I wished I could forget it. But that wasn’t an option.

  NINETEEN

  My mother was asleep on the couch, collapsed under an afghan with CNN still on, when I got to her apartment. I turned down the air conditioner and the volume on the TV, then took off her glasses and set them on the tea table behind her. Without the glasses, she looked like her old self. Like the person who wore contacts and makeup and a whitening-strip smile.

  Not wanting to go to bed just yet, I sat at my mother’s feet, almost tripping over her laptop on the floor next to the couch. Sometimes she went on Facebook while she watched TV and posted inspirational quotes set against pictures of sunsets or kids blowing dandelions. I often wondered if she’d picked up the habit from her kindergarten-teacher buddies, who were presumably fairly positive people. Maybe more positive than she was, in her heart of hearts, these days.

  I opened the laptop, minimized the web browser with her Facebook feed, and navigated to the files with our old family photos. Scrolling through, I found one of my favorite pictures of my dad and me. In it, I was riding on his shoulders right before a parade was about to start. I was wearing an American flag T-shirt and a pink tutu, eating popcorn out of a striped paper box, making Dad’s hair all greasy with the artificial butter. I remembered that day really well. We had been visiting my mom’s parents. I was about five. Before the parade we were picnicking in a park, and my parents were trying to get me to eat a ham sandwich my grandma had made. I hated ham and didn’t want to eat it. So did Jason, but after Dad told him to man up he’d somehow managed to force his sandwich down. I, on the other hand, had no interest in manning up. I’d just finished filming a “sprinkle party” commercial a week or two earlier and was pretty enamored with my sparkly, princessy self. Dad had lectured me about eating what I’d been given. When he was a kid, he told me, he ate everything that was put in front of him and didn’t complain. He threatened to not let me watch the parade if I didn’t eat the sandwich. I stared at that sandwich for five minutes, then ten, while my dad eyed me, muttering under his breath. I took a small bite and his face softened. I put the sandwich down and stared at it some more. And then something magical happened. A German shepherd who for the past few minutes had been playing fetch with its owner careened over, casually snatched my sandwich up in its jaws, and ran away with it, chomping wildly.

  Dad had stood up and yelled at the dog’s owner for having her dog off its leash. But once she was out of earshot, my dad started laughing hysterically, telling me that I was the luckiest girl in the world.

  You’re like Cinderella and Snow White in the old cartoon movies, he said. The animals all want to come to your rescue. He bought me popcorn at the parade and lifted me onto his shoulders.

  Mom’s not in that picture, but there’s a different one of her that day, where we’re all standing together, posing by the car after the parade. She was wearing a lilac linen sundress that tied behind her neck. Her hair was all swept up to the back of her head in a bun, and she looked sophisticated and out of place framed by my cheap tutu, Jason’s chocolate ice cream–stained shirt, and Dad’s silly sunglasses slipping off his sweaty red face. She was squinting from the sun, but smiling wide all the same, showing off her perfect teeth and expertly applied coral lipstick. I looked over at Mom’s sleeping form, watching her breathe. She didn’t wear lipstick anymore.

  I scrolled down to a picture from about a year later.

  It was my seventh birthday, and we were all smiling. The cake was the biggest, sprinkliest thing you’d ever seen in your life—smooth fondant frosting, polka-dot ribbon, purple and pink sprinkles. Three tiers, as if I was getting married. Dad was grinning from beneath a fresh haircut and Mom was looking gorgeous in her indigo wrap dress—even though one arm was in a cast from when she slipped and fell on the ice that year. Jason was distracted by the size of the cake—staring at it instead of the camera. I studied his face for a moment, considering the question he and I had raised about being Dad’s daughter versus his son. Jason had spent a lot of time trying to be Dad’s right-hand man. But I didn’t remember him ever getting a big birthday cake like mine.

  “Mom?” I whispered. I wanted to show her the picture, to see what she remembered about that day. And to see what she might say about that year in general.

  “Ivy?” My mom opened her eyes and pushed her feet against me, stretching. “What time is it?”

  “About ten,” I said. “You going to bed?”

  “I think I’ll stay here for a while.” She closed her eyes again. “I’m going to try to stay up for the monologue.”

  “Mom, you’re asleep,” I reminded her.

  “Yeah,” she murmured, curling herself up tighter.

  I glanced at the picture, then closed the laptop.

  “Okay. Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  I got up from the couch and went to my room, looking at my phone once I shut my door.

  An hour ago, Jason had texted, Ivy? You there?

  I decided to text back an answer to his earlier question—about our dad treating me like he had our mom:

  He doesn’t yell at me the way he used to at her.

  You’re special to him right now, Jason replied. That’s why you don’t get that shit.

  Mom used to be special to him, I wrote.

  Until she wasn’t, Jason wrote back.

  I felt a hollow, almost sore feeling in my stomach as I considered how to reply.

  Do you remember that night we slept in the cushion fort? I asked.

  It took a few minutes for him to write back the word Yes.

  Should we talk? I texted.

  I prefer to type, he wrote back.

  Probably a smart choice. We didn’t ever talk about that stuff. It would maybe be too weird to start saying anything out loud. We’d just end up shutting down and hanging up.

  Why didn’t we come out of the fort all night?

  Jason: We built forts like that more than one time, so I’m not sure which night you’re rememberi
ng.

  Me: The night when you put that folk music on Mom’s iPod and had me listen to it on repeat.

  Jason: I did that on more than one night. Because I was worried about you hearing too many bad words. But there was only one night when we stayed in there until morning.

  Me: Why did we do that?

  Jason: We were afraid to come out because Mom left the house and didn’t come back all night. That’s why we slept there.

  I felt uneasy reading those words. Funny, you could live with a memory your whole life and not think much of it. But then once you forced yourself to step out of the age you were when you experienced it, you started to see it differently. To my seven-year-old brain it wasn’t weird to spend a night in a cushion fort. It was kind of cool. But if a seven-year-old kid told me now—told seventeen-year-old me—that she’d done the same thing, I would think, Wait, that doesn’t sound right.

  Me: We couldn’t go to bed because Mom wasn’t home?

  Jason: I guess that was how I looked at it. They were yelling at each other, and she took off like she was scared of something. And if it was scary enough for her to leave and not come back, shouldn’t we just stay put? That’s how I looked at it at the time.

  Me: But they let us bring a picnic into the fort, and decorate it with glitter and sprinkles.

  Jason: No.

  Me: Why do you say no?

  Jason: You’re funny.

  Me: How am I funny?

  As soon as I typed it, I half knew the answer. I was “funny” because I was still kind of remembering it like I was seven.

  Jason: That wasn’t decorations. They were throwing shit at each other. There was a big bag of party supplies in the living room. And a shipment of sprinkles. Somehow they ended up opening them and flinging them at each other.

  Me: That’s not how I remember it.

  It really wasn’t. Of course I remembered our parents fighting other times. I just didn’t remember that night being one of them. And yet I didn’t find Jason’s version terribly surprising. Numbing, maybe. But not surprising.

  Jason: Maybe because you were barely seven and had earbuds in. I was ten and didn’t.

  Me: What was that music that you would always play for me?

  Jason: Mom’s Shawn Colvin. The song called “Polaroids” that you always wanted me to repeat. Why are you asking about all this now?

  Good question. When I’d looked at the couch cushions on Dad’s floor the night after the Ferris wheel incident, I’d felt an overwhelming desire to crawl beneath them and hide. I typed back, I’ve just been thinking about it lately.

  Which was why I’d almost asked my mom about it. But it hadn’t seemed possible when it came down to getting the actual words out. I gripped my phone hard as Jason’s reply came in.

  I try not to think about that stuff. I’m the biggest fucking snowflake cliché there is. Because you could say I find sprinkles triggering.

  Do you ever write about that? I typed back quickly.

  Jason: Are you kidding?

  Me: No.

  Jason: No, I don’t write about that. I write about memory sometimes, but only in a fictional way, usually. I try not to write autobiographical stuff. I think people would find me unsympathetic.

  Me: And weren’t you going to say more about the Yo-Yo?

  Jason: Are you at home right now?

  Me: Mom’s.

  Jason: Tomorrow. Go look at it in the daylight.

  Me: I was just looking at it the other day and didn’t notice anything.

  Jason: Before I said anything about it?

  Me: Yeah.

  Jason: You weren’t really looking, then. Look again.

  I sighed. It seemed like lately everyone had an assignment for me.

  I put on my pajamas and turned out the light before typing back Good night.

  TWENTY

  My alarm didn’t go off because I had forgotten to set it. And my mother hadn’t woken me before she left for work. When I rolled over and grabbed my phone, I saw that it was 9:20. And then I saw that Jason had texted me more than an hour ago.

  WTF?

  DID YOU GO TO REGGIE’S LAST NIGHT AND TALK TO HIM?

  I leapt out of bed, my heart pounding. Clearly, something bad had happened for Jason to be screaming at me like this.

  Yes, why? I typed back, and forced myself to send with a shaking finger.

  The phone began to buzz.

  “Jason?” I said, picking up.

  “Reggie overdosed last night.” Jason was nearly yelling. “He’s in the hospital.”

  “What? Is he okay? I mean, I just saw him.”

  “He’s going to be okay. But his roommate thinks he did it on purpose.”

  It took me a moment to remember to breathe.

  “What kind of drugs?” I asked.

  I wasn’t sure why it mattered. I just needed to ask something.

  “That’s the thing. It wasn’t all, like, recreational drugs. He had old prescription painkillers lying around from when he had a broken bone a while back, and some Tylenol and booze. Reggie’s an intelligent guy. He would’ve known that wasn’t a smart combination.”

  “When?”

  There wasn’t a hell of a lot of when between when I’d visited him and this morning. I sat on the bed to steady myself.

  “Last night. I don’t know what time. Katy texted me that his roommate was posting updates, and I looked on Facebook and Twitter and there are threads about him. People sending their thoughts and prayers and whatever until it looked like he was going to be okay. Some people were starting to theorize about what the cause of it all was, but luckily somebody shut that down pretty quick.”

  “Oh,” I said slowly, trying to swallow the rush of dread that I felt coming up my throat. “People were saying it was kind of about Ethan? I’m guessing?”

  “Some. Yeah. But the thing is, Ivy…the story his roommate is telling is that some girl in a weird flowered dress came over, they talked for a little while outside, and then Reggie got really drunk after she left, and then he did this, up in his room. Good thing his roommate checked on him.”

  Weird flowered dress. I didn’t really hear the words that followed those three.

  “Is he still in the hospital?” I asked, my voice quavering as I thought of the locked doors of the ward Morgan had been in. Likely Reggie was behind them now. How many people was Fabuland going to send to that ward before we were done?

  “Yeah. I’m not sure when he’ll get out. I think the roommate was telling this around because he thought it was some kind of breakup that Reggie wasn’t handling well.”

  We were both silent for a minute. I glanced around my room. The summer sunlight was slanting in, making a cheerful rhombus on my light-purple carpet.

  “I assume he’s got it slightly wrong…unless you haven’t been honest with me about Reggie,” Jason said.

  “Uh-huh,” I squeaked. I hated the girlish innocence of my room. Mom had set it up this way when she and Dad first got divorced, but she couldn’t afford to change it now.

  “I assume you made it to Reggie’s place after I gave you his address?” Jason asked, his voice low.

  “Uh-huh,” I repeated, creeping to the kitchen. “He’s wrong.”

  “Jesus,” Jason muttered. “What did you guys talk about?”

  “Ethan…” I opened the fridge and stared into it even though it felt like I might never eat again. “The night he died.”

  “What the fuck, Ivy?”

  I sat on the cold kitchen floor and started to cry. Then I sniffled into the phone for a few minutes. Whenever I tried to recover my voice, I found I had nothing to say.

  “I’m sorry,” Jason said, sighing. “I shouldn’t have said it like that.”

  “Please come home,” I managed to say. “Wit
hout Morgan, I don’t really have—”

  “I can’t. Not for the next couple of days, anyway.”

  “But what about for the big doughnut unveiling? Dad said he emailed you the date.”

  “He did, but—”

  “Please come home for that, at least.”

  Jason hesitated. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Yeah,” I breathed. “Please.”

  “In the meantime…try to stay out of trouble, okay?”

  “Okay,” I whimpered. Even though I had no idea how to honor that advice. I’d never been someone who got into “trouble” before. I wasn’t quite sure how it had happened so suddenly and so disastrously.

  After we hung up, I dragged myself up and yanked on some old shorts and a T-shirt. Maybe if I dressed more like everyone else today, the weird flowered dress girl might be less identifiable to everyone who had read that social media rumor.

  While I brushed my teeth, my reflection caught my eye for a moment.

  You look in the mirror and you see that pretty little pink mouth of yours. But when you’re at Fabuland, everything you say is amplified, whether you want it to be or not. People listen. People listen hard. Because you’re my daughter.

  I spat out the toothpaste and didn’t bother to rinse. And I didn’t bother with a shower either—just grabbed my phone and purse and headed to Fabuland.

  When I got there, I parked at the far side of the employee lot near the two rides my father had retired last summer. I got out of my car and walked around the Yo-Yo a couple of times, looking upward at its plum-purple beams, its white riding cars with red and yellow seats. There was nothing particularly noticeable about the ride except that it looked sort of sad and lonely here, away from the park, its lights off, pushed up against the trees. Did Jason maybe see the ride as a metaphor for himself, off on his own away from the frenzy of Fabuland, out of our father’s favor? I snorted at the thought. Maybe that was how an English major looked at things.