Don't Ever Change (28 page)

“I want to go home.”

“I know it’s a cliché,” I tell her, “but they do say it’s good to get back on the horse.”

“I want to go home.”

It’s all she can say. She keeps saying it. But I can’t give her that.

“Let’s just sit here,” I say. “Let’s stop thinking about home. Let’s stop thinking about going anywhere for a while.”

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HarperCollins Publishers

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AFTER CAMP I
want my mom, I want my dad, I want my sister, but they’re all gone. Courtney’s on a random date, and my parents are at the Hollywood Bowl. It’s the first time in my life I’ve longed for a dog, just some lapping, licking, living thing to show me love. A friend to miss and be missed by; it sounds nice.

At eight Elliot calls from Melrose, seeming pretty drunk. The band got into L.A. early, and he’s either ecstatic or miserable about it, it’s hard to tell.

The fact that Elliot’s back in town, that he’s
here
in the same city as me, should feel so giddy and exciting, but honestly I have no idea how to feel.

Today was too much drama, so I tell him I can’t come to the record store and watch what might be his band’s last show. For some reason he’s not upset.

“Does the whole band need somewhere to stay?” I ask, afraid of the answer.

“Just me,” he says, which is potentially an even worse answer. Me and Elliot, utterly, totally alone.

He says he can score a ride to my place but not for four hours, which means I have the whole evening free. I dig through our movies and pull out an old VHS of
Good Will Hunting
that my dad recorded off HBO. I take it into his office, where the VHS player is, and curl up on his leather couch with a blanket. The machine is boxy and clunky, a lame leftover from the Emo Century, nothing really to miss.

But the degraded picture quality and warbly sound transport me to this blurry, muffled, dream version of Boston, and it makes me wish the city was actually like this: color-bleached, hazy, homemade. Even though I want my memories and experiences there to be fresh and vivid, I know they’ll just be taped over other stuff, whatever was there before. And each time you do, the quality gets worse.

I finish the movie, but the house is still empty. Performances at the Bowl rarely run this late, so I focus and really try to remember where my parents said they’d be tonight. Something about Santa Barbara, maybe? For an anniversary? Exercising my memory wears me out for some reason (
Eat a cheeseburger!
), so I fall asleep on the couch, still in my camp clothes.

I wake up later to the doorbell ringing, the TV a solid blue screen. I rub my eyes, unsure how long I was out. Elliot’s at the door, bag slung over one shoulder, guitar case in hand. He does this move where he leans against the door frame, but not in a sexy Foster way, more in just a stupid drunk way, and I can tell by the way his eyes swim that he’s seeing two or three of me, instead of just the one pissy me.

He stumbles inside, dropping his stuff at the foot of the stairs, and follows me up to my bedroom. Even though he’s out of it, I’m happy to see him—we’re friends after all, we
are
friends—I just don’t know what to do with him. What not to do with him, too.

I mention that my parents are gone. I try not to make it sound like an invitation, but how could it not?

“They’re in Santa Barbara,” I say. “Or possibly Ojai. For the night.”

“Oh hi,” Elliot whispers into my ear, “for the night.”

Once we get to my room, he walks straight to my bed and flops down on it.

I say his name a few times, but that’s it, he’s out. For the night.

To myself I say, “Oh, Elliot,” and I mean it in a frustrated way, like “
Oh God
,” but it comes out sounding tender, forgiving. Finally I flop down too, next to the bed on the carpet.

I guess I did want him to come back. I guess I needed to see him, to see what I felt when I saw him.

Hours later, in the early morning, I wake to a weight on my back. It’s Elliot, snuggled against me, nuzzling into my hair, rooting around sleepily for a kiss. My face feels like it’s sewn into the carpet, or made of carpet, so I don’t even try to lift my head to return the gesture—not even when he traces one finger lightly along the elastic of my bra strap.

Everything in front of me is a wash of blurry, color-bleached textures, real but not really, my room but seen through a degraded, muffled haze.

And when I say, “Oh, Elliot” this time, I can’t tell which
Oh, Elliot
it is.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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WHEN I WAKE
up, Elliot’s gone, but there’s a scribbled note on my dresser. All it says is:
Texted you
.

Something about his lazy scrawl on the back of an envelope makes it clear to me in a uniquely official-feeling way: Elliot’s wasting my time, and I’m wasting his.

This is what Mr. Roush would call an Anticlimax. Curiosity, anticipation,
promise
, all building toward a Significant Moment—Elliot’s Return!—but then it happens too quickly, fizzling out without even feeling like much. Mr. Roush has always pushed me to work harder on my plots and engage a deeper, more descriptive language, but it’s not easy.

I do want to be relatable, to be
related with
, and to craft a story that’s memorable, that reflects something thoughtful and crucial—the difference between some random romance and an epic one, between a Naive Eva and a potentially Wiser one.

It’s just that last night with Elliot lacked the right adjectives. It can’t really be described as anything particularly resonant, or specific, and the main word that comes to mind is
ambiguous
, which is basically the
opposite
of specific, and rarely means anything good when it’s written in red ink at the top of one of your pages. Even now that he’s come and gone, Elliot’s still What I Don’t Know. I guess he’s sort of a Rough Draft person, no matter how many times I try to revise him.

I didn’t change out of my camp clothes last night, so I just leave for work, doubtful my parents will even notice I came home.

After my girls swim and sunbathe, we move on to pottery, where the previous group’s already fired up the kiln. I help the girls roll clay snakes and shape little clumsy cavewoman bowls, listening to them chatter about who’s cute on TV and who isn’t, and the repetition soothes me. Even Alexis seems relaxed, therapized by the soothing rhythm of her thumbs pressing into stiff, cold mud. She’s happy as a fat little clam.

“Let’s finish up soon,” I say to the group, “so we can get our projects in the oven.”

Everyone cheers.

“Where’s the clipboard?” I ask Alyssa. Today there’ll be no wasting time, and no one’s time will be wasted.

“I dunno,” she says, shrugging.

“Anyone?” I ask. “Clipboard?”

“Oops,” Alexis says.

“Where’d you leave it?”

“Changing room.”

I ask the girls if they can be good and watch themselves while I’m gone, and they nod and mumble, “Yes, Eva,” without looking up from their gray blobs. I make my way back to the pool, where now the twelve-year-olds have taken over, splashing around in the deep end and diving off the diving board.

Inside the changing room it’s dank and drippy like a cavern, and smells of old towels, the concrete floor slick with water. I do a quick walk-through, looking for the clipboard, and that’s when I see Katie—or is it Christy?—one of the older girls. She’s over in the corner near the showers, facing the wall, crying it looks like, staring down at her hands.

“Katie,” I call out. She doesn’t move.

I try “Christy,” and she turns.

Even in the dim light I can make out the blood on her hands. But the color of the blood isn’t the normal bright red I’ve seen running from my campers’ noses or down their scraped knees; this blood is brown, and clotted, and tacky on Christy’s palms.

“You got your period,” I say. My voice echoes off the concrete.

I walk closer and notice the crotch of her bathing suit is brown and damp. She’s also left a few faint, bloody fingerprints on the skinny wooden bench next to her.

“It’s okay,” I say. “Let’s wash your hands.” I lead her over to the sink and turn on warm water. She’s shaken, but not actually crying. I help wash her hands and dry them.

Next I tell her to take off her bathing suit so I can wash it. She doesn’t react.

“Christy?” I say, and then she reaches back into her bathing suit, and when she pulls her hand out, it’s streaked with brown blood again. I’m too stunned to say anything, especially because what she does next is touch her fingers to her tongue.

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THE REST OF
the day I map out an idea for a new play:

There’s a husband and wife. She’s pregnant in the first act, with a giant round belly. She shuffles around the stage in pain, grasping at her back, and the only thing that takes her mind off the pain is tending to a garden she’s started in the backyard. So even though her husband’s concerned for her health, he lets her spend day after day—each day leading closer to the due date—on her knees in the vegetable garden, planting and cultivating and sweating in the sun. He lets her root out weeds until her hands are blistered and raw, because it makes her happy and because it gives her a different kind of pain to focus on.

At the beginning of act two she loses the baby; or she doesn’t lose it, it’s a stillbirth. Then the husband and wife begin to drift apart, slowly losing interest in one another. The husband spends most of his time at work, the wife in her garden. Each day he comes home she’s prepared dinner and feeds him vegetables that look like nothing he’s ever seen before. They almost aren’t recognizable, these vegetables. A squash, but not. A zucchini, but not really. That sort of thing.

She begins acting strangely—as all my characters tend to do when they’re hiding a secret. And her secret is that she’s planted the placenta, the nutritious afterbirth, the blood and all its bloody mess, into the soil of the garden. It’s what’s fertilizing the vegetables.

“What have you done?” he says. “What have you given me?”

Then one of the vegetables falls off the table and rolls down into the audience. Then the curtain closes and the stage goes black.

It’s a compromise, I think. Something for Mr. Roush, and something for me.

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