by Kate Gray
“How are you?”
“As if you care,” she says. Her fingers through her hair make her curls fall in her eyes.
“I do,” I say. Mr. Crap-on-My-Career not thinking about Carla, my only concern has been the force to resist the forward momentum we had. Mr. Empathy. Mr. Mature.
“Sure.” Her arms crossed, she falls back against the chair.
“What happened in the cornfield?”
“Did you follow us?”
“Something happened out there.”
“Now you’re spying on me? Why’d you go there?” She looks at me through her curls. All of her is far away. “Oh, I get it,” she says. “You want to know about Kyle.”
“Of course. Kyle is, Kyle was one of my concerns.” Using the past tense is hard.
“Right,” she says. She draws out the one syllable into a long sound, pulls the word with her chin from left to right. “I saw you two together. You liked him.” The slump in her body keeps her farther away from me, but her face gets brighter. The optical illusion is the idea of a smile on her face. It builds into a smile. She likes this idea.
“Liked,” I say. “Yes, Mr. Harney was unique.”
“Is that what you’d call it?” The smile is breaking out on her face. Its force is motion with no equal or opposite reaction except inside me. The Taiko mallet rises inside me. “Suuu,” the drummer exhales. The drum beats on my sternum, beats on my ribs.
“He was brilliant, if different.”
“And you like different,” she says. She straightens up in the chair. “Did you like him the way you liked me?” In unison the team of Taiko drummers sound the drum so loud the building shakes around me.
“Stop it.”
“Stop what? You’re the one who likes students.” The mallet cracks my sternum; the cracked sternum presses my lungs.
“You know better than that.”
“Whatever.”
“Stop it, Carla. You like messing with minds too much.” My hand rises up like I might bat away a ball she tosses. If only my hand could bat away my transgressions.
“Turn it on me, why don’t you?” she says. “Awesome. Good work.” Satisfaction on a face is an equilibrium of forces. The strike of the mallet on my ribs has less force. “Blame everything on me. Go ahead.”
“Forget I asked,” I say. “Forget it.” I’m the one now to lean back in my chair.
“I try,” she says. “A lot.”
Standing up, Carla is a girl, not fully grown, her motion in pieces. Her back leans forward, legs rise, legs straighten, back opens up. The distance between her standing and my sitting is a meter, and she is still a moon away.
She cocks her elbow, twists her wrist, raises her middle finger, bends her arm, flips me the bird, and walks out.
The mallets do not rise to strike the drum in me. Carla’s wrong. I care a lot about her. Two masses exert force on each other. The one with greater mass exerts the greater attraction. What I can’t explain to Carla is the force that Kyle exerted on her, or on me. Without the mass of him, we are not balanced. What I can’t explain is the science of loss, the weight, the density, the draw. There is turbulence in loss, a wild spinning of particles. There is a vacuum that is not an absence. It is full.
How to fold a crane is all I can explain.
Taylor / Sand
“Nice shirt.” The way Carla closed the door behind her was angles: head forward, chin up, one foot ahead of the other, left arm raised to the front, wrist in line, right arm lowered to the back, the heel of the hand pushing the door, the fingers bent forward.
My shirt had Alex Jeffers’ tears in the shape of Rhode Island, the simplified map. I guess, he and I are even. At the beginning of the year I left a spot on his shirt when I cried in his arms.
“Yeah, thanks for pointing it out,” I said.
If she were a different student, if we had something different, if today were yesterday, I might have excused myself to change my shirt.
“Any time.” She walked past me and swung her arms high and stiff.
In the living room, the pull-out couch was back to a couch. Carla turned on her heels and said, “No Terence?”
“Breakfast.”
“Right.” Her flop on the couch was a big bounce, and her legs crossed. “You know what I figured out at breakfast?” Her sweats were the same ones she wore all night, and her shirt was untucked under her hoodie. With one hand she pulled back her curls, and they fell down anyway.
“No clue,” I said. The armchair, not the couch, was the best place to sit. No longer did I feel the walls go wavy, but there was still a want in my arms. Something was missing. Something was always missing.
She raised her curls out of her face. “I figured out how I’d do it.”
“Do what?” I had to stall, hear her words again, make sure I was doing the right thing.
“End it,” she said. She was talking peppy, like she might say, “Go team,” even though Carla was no cheerleader.
“How?”
“Car.”
“You drive?”
“Duh, I’m eighteen, and besides, my dad bought me a car the day he got killed. We fought about it right before. Fucking-A, that was weird.”
She never softened or slowed when she talked about her father.
“He never bought Doug anything. Doug loved cars better than girls, way better. Lots of times Dad bought me necklaces, microscopes, fancy shoes, fancy art. I mean, the car was amazing, but I just wanted a real dad, a brother and dad. In the middle of our fight that day, I told him to fuck off, and I ran to my friend’s house. That night, bam, he was gone. Never leave things unsaid.
“Oh my God.” She moved up and down on the couch. “Bonus. Just thought of that. I had the-missing-the-curve part. But the-crash-in-Dad’s-car part? Awesome.”
She was into a movie she was making in her head. “Harm to self and/or others,” like White’s voice on the phone, was the audio tape in a loop in my head.
“Look, Carla,” I said, “it’s time to stop.”
“Stop what? Really, Taylor, you got to get this.”
We’re back on a first name basis, I guess.
“Really. Think about it.” Her hands were cupped over her mouth, like a little girl trying to stuff her giggles down. A little girl in a full-grown body. A bile rose in my throat.
“This weekend I get permission to go to my mom’s. I pick up my car. Late at night, when my mom is boinking her latest boyfriend, I take all the origami Kyle and Jack Song folded in the car with me, and drive to the shore where the road curves around, and on the way, bam, I miss a turn. Looks like I fell asleep at the wheel. And everything will go up in a fiery blaze. Death and cremation, two for one. Perfect.” She bounced against the back of the couch and clapped.
Everything around me was sand, white, crystalline, fine. My hands weren’t big enough. My fingers were twigs.
“Did I tell you Kyle had a crush on me?” Sand was falling everywhere. I couldn’t keep it from spilling.
“Yeah, so, I’d been getting these notes all folded up, and each one was signed ‘Donny Zurkus,’ like he could fold. But the last one said to meet him in the cornfield before dinner. So, I’m like, ‘whatever,’ and I think, ‘shit, the biggest bully in the school, but he’s tall and cute if you like that sort of thing,’ so I go. And I walk out to the middle of the field, and Kyle goes, ‘Boo!’
“‘Fucking-A, Kyle,’ I say. Kyle was smiling like crazy. Such a little-little.” Carla smiles now, and her eyes are seeing the cornfield and Kyle.
“‘Scared you, huh?’ he says. In his gray sweats, you know, and his pea coat, he was, like, a possum, little eyes, big teeth.” Kyle was definitely like a possum.
“So, I say, ‘What’re you doing here?’ Donny Zurkus hadn’t shown up, and if he did, I didn’t want Kyle around. For Kyle’s sake. And anyway, three’s a crowd. But I don’t say that.
“‘What’re you doing here?’ he says. You know that really annoying repeating thing he does. Ma
ybe not.” I know exactly what she means. Kyle repeating the words I said, Kyle and I in the cornfield.
“He stiffens up, and says, ‘I mean, what brings you out here?’ He got over the repeating thing.
“‘Looking for bugs.’ It was the only thing I could think of.
“‘Yeah, right,’ he says.
“So I say, ‘Following a lead.’ And that sounded lame, even to me.
“But he went with it. ‘Like a tip? Like a private eye? A tip from who?’ Kyle folds his arms behind his back, leans forward and takes three steps one way all stiff-legged, turns on his heels, takes three steps back. He is fucking Sherlock Holmes. Oh, sorry.” Kyle pretending to hold a magnifying glass, pacing back and forth. The little guy pretending.
“I try to be all cool. ‘None of your business, punk,’ I say.
“He says, ‘Oh, come on, Carla, you can trust me. Honest. I’ll be your private eye. I’ve even got a magnifying glass. See?’ And from an inside pocket of his pea coat, he pulls a real fucking Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass. Sorry.
“‘Kyle,’ I say, ‘you’re one strange-ass kid, you know that?’”
There was no one as strange at St. Tim’s as this boy. This little boy with greasy hair.
“He puts the round magnifying glass to his eye, bends over, and pretends to look at cornstalks. He bends way over.”
“‘Cut it out,’ I say. ‘I’m meeting someone. Do you mind?’
“‘Oh, some guy,’ he says. He straightens up, but keeps the magnifying glass on one eye. His blue eye is killer big. “‘You’ve got a date. Ooh.’ He is grinning that toothy grin. He crosses his arms behind his back again, leans forward, and says, ‘Let me guess.’ He goes Sherlock Holmes again. ‘You’re meeting Harrison Ford to look for the Lost Ark.’ He turns and takes three steps back. ‘No, that’s not it.’ He gives a little smile, pulls one hand from behind him, puts his fingers to his chin to think, changes the direction he’s walking, and says, ‘You’re meeting Grover?’ Then he tries to say some things in a grouchy, Oscar voice.
“I am rolling. Who knew this weird kid could be so funny.
“‘Okay, okay,’ he says. ‘You’re meeting Donny Zurkus.’ And he stops, like dead-in-his-tracks, and he looks right at me. No shuffle. No toothy smile. No Sherlock Holmes.
“‘How did you know?’ My insides spin around, got all jammed up.
“‘Clairvoyant,’ he says. I barely know what that means.
“‘Who told you?’
“He says, ‘Nobody.’
“‘Fuck you, Kyle. Don’t make fun of me.’ I can’t figure out how he knows. There’s nobody I told. Besides, nobody talks to him. Talked to him.
“Then, Kyle gets totally little. ‘I’m not making fun of you,’ he says. ‘I’m not. I know, that’s all.’
“‘Tell me how,’ I say.
“‘Because I have abducted your brain,’ he says in his mechanical, Martian voice. ‘Hee, hee, hee.’” Carla pulled back her lips and says the words with a combination of mechanical and hissing sounds. For a moment, Kyle is in this room.
“‘Hey, I’m out of here,’ I say. This kid is jerking me around. Usually, he’s there for me and listens. I like talking to him. He likes the music I like. He likes bugs, but he goes too far.
“‘Wait, wait,’ he says in a high voice, no metal machine. ‘I’ll tell you. It’s me you’re waiting for. Me.’
“‘Stop kidding around,’ I say. My insides are jammed up with trying to put the pieces together, the notes inside the origami, the things left in trees.
“‘I’m not kidding, not kidding, honest. I folded the bat and everything. You wouldn’t come out here just for me, just because I wanted. I meant what I said: You’re the best bat in my cave.’ He was talking so fast I had to watch his lips.
“‘Donny Zurkus has it all. He’s tall and handsome. And I’m a little Second Former. I can’t compete, but I thought if I got you out here, if you came to the cornfield, I could tell you.’
“‘Tell me what?’ I asked like a total doofus.
“He is pacing back and forth, not because he’s pretending any more, but because he’s scared or something.
“‘You’re the best,’ he says. He looks at his feet, those sneakers. ‘That’s all.’
“‘You pretended to be Donny Zurkus to say you liked me?’ Poor little-little, weird little geeky guy. I didn’t tell him how good that made me feel. I didn’t tell him he was smart and cute in his own geeky way. I didn’t tell him anything.
“Then, he goes Charlie Brown on me. He tips his head back like he’s looking at the sky, and he says really loud, ‘Good grief,’ and he tosses something up in the air and runs away. His baggy sweats slow him down, and his pea coat’s too big, so he looks more like someone pretending to run than really running. He runs away from me where I am in the cornfield, down the mud path, his hands in the air, his elbows out.
“That’s the last time I see him. The little-little with a crush on me, leaving with more things unsaid.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. For a second she looked down, and her body went concave, melted into the couch. She might cry, and we could talk for the rest of the time left for breakfast, and I could call off the alert and she’d go to class, and I’d go to class, and the day would keep going.
“He didn’t think about people finding him,” she said.
“He was in pain, trying to get out of pain,” I said. “What did he throw before he ran away?”
“A tape.”
“Have you listened to it?”
“Can’t.”
“Yeah.”
“No way. You don’t get it,” she said. “I killed him.”
Her arms were not crossed in front of her. They were slack at her sides. Her voice was not animated like a cheerleader any more. The words were soft and simple. She stated them as if they were fact.
“No, you didn’t, Carla. Absolutely not.” She looked up as if she were rising out of a pool in summer waiting for me to wrap a towel around her, as if she had no curls, nothing to hide her, her face only eyes and hurt. But when she saw me see her eyes without the curls, her look changed to dry and ready to play another game.
“Whatever.”
“Do you hear me?”
“Yes, sir, Sarge.” She picked up her hand and with two fingers, saluted me. “Besides, I’ve got it all figured out. No problem.”
“Really. You have to stop.”
“I’d do two things at once. Awesome,” she said. “You know, miss a turn, go bye-bye.”
“Forget it!” I said. “It’s time. Got to go.” Standing up made the room change. The couch was so big it made Carla small.
“What?”
“You,” I said. “You’ve got to go. Now. Get out.” Everything was adrenalin. “I’m tired of you jerking me around. I can’t take it.”
One hand pulled her curls out of her face, and her eyebrows, dark and long, moved up her forehead. It was her eyes so flat in their light, so beaten; they showed how little she expected, how much I fit what she knew of other adults.
She dropped her curls in her face. “Not you,” she said. She shook her head back and forth. “Fuck off.”
To get up, Carla used a hand on the armrest, pushed her hips first. She brushed by me without touching. Before she turned the corner to the hall, she stopped. Out of the pocket of her hoodie, she pulled something that filled the palm of one hand and left it on the desk. The screen door slammed behind her.
She took twenty steps out my door, and I picked up the phone, dialed the nurse, and said it was time. The nurse had the car waiting.
In another forty steps down the flat black driveway under maples with no leaves, Carla walked, and a car pulled up beside her. The car that slowed to a stop. She bent at the waist to talk to the driver of the car. Since it was a maroon St. Tim’s car, the driver was surely the nurse. That’s when the back door opened, and before she got in, she turned toward my dorm. Her right hand went high in the air, the wrist rot
ated, a finger extended from the hand. A hand flipping the bird.
On my desk a perfect crane topped my pile of papers. Crimson, with gold-leaf shapes. Sharp points to the beak, to the tail. The wings were symmetric, the neck the right thickness, the body of the bird in proportion.
Song / Earth on Us
Scottish people must have Korean in them. The bagpipe, air forced through small opening, is like gok, the wailing we do. Westerners have no stomach for it. We do it for days, and best part? Guilt and regret forced out of our systems. Tim-Tim’s is most Scottish at memorials.
This chapel in the basement is more cave than cathedral. The place is packed. No surprise in the front row: Mr. Oral-Fixation White with Mrs. Busybody, next to small Japanese woman and frail white guy, next to Rev. Moose. Classes canceled. Everybody’s here. The next row is, listing to his left, Mr. Herbert of the Library, Rower-Man Jeffers, and Rower-Dyke Alta, next to Terence, and the rest of the remaining Second Formers. Some parents came for them. Some didn’t.
Behind the rows of teachers, more students, like Rambo, Donny Bad-Boy Zurkus, and Buttons Daly. Behind the students, no parents. American parents are different from Korean. The character in Korean for hyo is son and earth. Hyo, filial piety, is the earth on the son. The parents are the son’s world and carried on his back. What is the Korean character for parental responsibility? I never learned that one. Should be: earth on parents.
What is Tim-Tim’s responsibility? Earth on us.
Rev. Moose takes the podium, the bagpipe stops wailing, and we’re off.
The Rev reminds me of the teacher in the Charlie Brown comics. Can’t help it. Too many holidays on Kim’s hospital bed, the specials on the tiny screen. “Wah, wah, wah, wah,” the voice goes while Peppermint Patty and Charlie Brown sit at their desks.
The one thing I hear: He invites Kyle’s parents to speak.
Bent-over white guy, Mr. Devoted, turns to Asian wife, shuffles up in his baggy corduroys, black blazer. Rev. Moose touches the guy’s elbow as he takes the steps. Kyle’s father, Mr. Harney, is a little man. The hand he uses to tilt the mic is disproportionate, huge, the fingers bent different ways.