Everyone We've Been (3 page)

“Lord in heaven, girl!” Katy says in an over-the-top Southern accent (my fault for telling her about my nurse) when she sees me on Monday, holding her arms open all the way from her locker to mine, a length of about fifteen lockers. When she reaches me, she crushes my body against hers. “I nearly had a Cardiac Event. I should have gone with you!”

I laugh, choking a little on her lavender perfume. “Why? You'd just have gotten hurt and given
your
mother a Cardiac Event.”

“I would not,” she says indignantly, referring to the insinuation of getting hurt—not the part about her mother, because Katy's mother
would
have had a heart attack, and Katy
would
have enjoyed it.

I peel off my coat and stuff it into my locker. “Let me take a good look at you,” Katy says, clasping my cheeks in her palms. “You look like you got punched.”

“I got, like, four hours of sleep on Saturday night and then three last night,” I say, suddenly self-conscious about my puffy eyes. I'd been hoping they weren't obvious.

“Poor thing,” Katy hums. The pain in my head is completely gone, and my thick black hair is covering the bruise on my temple. “And the arm?” She gives my bandaged arm a thorough inspection, then says, “Shouldn't affect your playing. I give you a few more decades.”

“Thanks, Doctor.” I pick up all the books I'll need until third period.

Katy is carrying her own violin case, even though we'll have time to go back to our lockers before orchestra; she claims to need the time to socialize between periods. Even now, as we make our way to English class, she's waving at and small-talking with people all the way down the hall.

Sometimes the fact that Katy and I are best friends seems like a minor miracle. When I changed schools after the first year of middle school, I found a small group of girls to follow around for the next two years, never fully included and never getting beyond surface-level friendship. Katy moved here from D.C. in ninth grade with her mom, and from the second she laid eyes on me in the viola section, she hated me. I realized quickly that she was jealous of my playing, and I tried not to take it personally. Mrs. Dubois
is
a little partial with solos—I've had seven in our last nine concerts, even though the viola is not the most popular solo instrument—and it wasn't the first time a fellow musicophile hadn't liked me.

I learned fast, though, that Katy's hatred was on a different level from any I'd been used to. Acting was, after all, her first passion; music was her second, her backup. I'd walk into practice and the laughter would abruptly stop, with Katy shooting me a quick look of disdain or guilt, making it seem like her group been talking about me, even if they hadn't. Or if I whispered to ask which bar Mrs. Dubois was talking about, she'd turn icily, pretending she hadn't heard.

It was three months after she'd moved here—when she found out through the grapevine that I had no intention of ever applying to Juilliard, her holy grail—that she started speaking to me. That day, Mr. Quinn had been showing us a video in bio class, something about how new memory procedures had revolutionized neuroscience and the treatment of trauma, and we were supposed to be taking notes so we could debate the ethical pros and cons. I'd just scrawled
Informed Consent
on the top of my page when Katy, who was sitting behind me, tapped my shoulder with her pencil. I turned, and she tilted her head in the direction of Mr. Quinn, dozing with his mouth open at an empty desk near us, a tiny line of drool beginning to snake down his chin. I couldn't suppress my grin, and Katy coughed to cover a laugh.

Before we bonded over music, Katy and I bonded over people. Over Mrs. Dubois and the loud, clashing patterns she wore, though she herself was timid and sweet and so quiet we couldn't hear her speak unless we were silent.

Today, as she passes us in the hallway, Mrs. Dubois is wearing one of her signature outfits, a flowing turquoise skirt with bright yellow diagonal stripes, and a brown shirt with orange polka dots. One slight lift of Katy's left eyebrow, her patented expression, and we both giggle quietly.

We bonded over Paulie Wentz, a perpetually sunburned wannabe surfer, whose presence in senior high orchestra can only be explained by Mrs. Dubois's adamant belief that music is about not how well you play but how
joyfully
you play. Paulie is joyful all right, and actually a nice kid, but there is no better description for his playing of the French horn than glorified fart sounds. Katy and I physically have to turn our bodies away from each other when he plays, or we will be gone forever.

And we bonded over Gilbert and Sullivan. Katy is Gilbert, since my last name is Sullivan, but their personalities fit us, too. Sullivan composed some of the most incredible operetta music, and Gilbert wrote the stories that went along with the music. To Katy, it is the other way around—the music molds around the story, covering it, accompanying it, but for me, the music always comes first. It has to. We argue about it all the time.

We disagree on Juilliard, too. My first choice is NYU, major undeclared, but Katy swears she came out of the womb intending to go to Juilliard for theater.

“The plan was for the doctors to cut the umbilical cord, clean me up a little, and then send me straight there. But my mother missed the memo and kept me for
seventeen years.
” She says this with such solemnness that I always laugh, no matter how many times I've heard it.

I discovered the viola in fifth grade, the first year we had orchestra in elementary school, and everyone went scrambling for the flute, recorder, or clarinet. Miss Root played us short recordings of all the different instruments in an orchestra to introduce us to their “voices” so we could find which of them best matched ours. For the viola, she played Lionel Tertis's performance of Brahms's Viola Sonata in F Minor, and I fell in love with its full, heavy sound. Miss Root said it was one of the few instruments that used the alto clef, and I thought maybe that explained why it sounded a little bit lonely. Even when the melody it played was joyful, I liked that its sound was tinged with a trace of sadness and that the pockets of space between the notes were so deep, it sounded like you could hide entire worlds in there.

Katy can't understand how I could possibly be interested in another school—though the irony is that she would not have befriended me if I had wanted to go to Julliard. It's so odd, now that I think about it, how she seemed to figure that being friends with me somehow affected the probability of her getting in, or
not
getting in, as the case might be. But we'd spent hours filling out application forms together and editing the essay she sent off to Juilliard in December. My NYU application was a month later, in January, and we'd worked on it together, too.

Juilliard—being totally immersed in music—has just never been something I wanted. Music, unless you write it, is always vicarious. It's written by a composer in a particular manner with a particular style. It's somebody else's story, and even if you can relate to it or find yourself in it or
hide
yourself in it, it doesn't belong to you. When I explain this to Katy, she always says something like, “Well, write your own story, Sullivan.” But you actually need a story in order to write one. You need peaks and valleys, crescendos and decrescendos, and things that wreck you and put you back together. It's not like I'm some tortured emo kid; I have a pretty happy life. But there's something in me that's always wanted a little more than I know.

I love my viola. Many times a week, I play so hard I sweat, play till all the world melts away in the heat, and hours feel like seconds, or seconds like hours. And sometimes when I stop playing, the world seems so empty and quiet that I just want to curl up at the foot of my bed and cry.

I love losing myself in the sensation of playing, in the distraction and competitiveness of orchestra, and feeling more awake than ever when I do. But I want to love something else just as much. Something that's a part of
my
story. A new place, a little street-side café, a class in college I signed up for just because, a person I haven't met yet.

The truth is, I could probably find those things at Juilliard—or anywhere else, for that matter. My mom is hoping it'll be at the community college Caleb goes to, at least for a year. But I want to go someplace where I can't hide behind anything—not the town I've lived in all my life or my overzealous parents. Not even music.

“So do you think Bus Boy is from Lyndale?” Katy asks, rummaging in the compartment between us for something. The mall parking lot is crowded for a weekday afternoon, but there isn't much else to do in a town this aggressively on the smaller side of medium, and I fully expect to run into half the people we've just been cooped up for hours with at school. “Check the glove box for me?”

I comply, rifling through a mess of insurance cards and hair ties and tiny bottles of lotion, despite the fact that I have no idea what we're looking for.

I told Katy that I met a cute boy on the bus, even though a minute-long conversation qualifies more as a non-story than anything else. Still, the thing about best friends is that they make you feel like your non-stories matter.

“I have no clue,” I say as we both climb out of Katy's car. She stands with her hands on her hips, frowning. I can't tell whether she's trying to think of where to look next or just unimpressed with the lack of information I have on Bus Boy.

“Well, how do we send out a search party if you can't give me a less generic description than
tall and cute
? What did he look like? How tall is tall? What color hair did he have?”

“It was dark and he was wearing a hat!” I say defensively. “Anyway, he's probably not even from around here.”

“That's too bad. Now, if only you'd be open to letting me find you a hot guy. Or at least letting us go to places where you could meet one.” To Katy's disappointment, the fake IDs she got us almost two years ago have gone untouched—mine, Kathleen Kelly, after the character from
You've Got Mail,
one of my favorite movies, and Katy's, Beatrice Lane, Beatrice for the character in the play
Much Ado About Nothing.
“I mean, you're seventeen and you act like the freaking black widow.”

“The spider or the superhero?”

Katy rolls her eyes, pulling open the trunk of her car. “Neither. You act like you're completely over love.”

“Um,” I say. “I think I'd have to have been under or
in
it, ever, to be over love. Pretty sure making out with Acrobat-Tongue Grant in seventh grade doesn't count as love.”

“My point exactly,” Katy says before her head disappears into the trunk of her car.

“What are you looking for?” I ask when she comes up for air a few seconds later.

“My silver bracelet—the one I always wear? I've told you that, like, three times,” she says, irritated.

“Oh, right,” I say, though I have no memory of this.

“Just the way I
told
you we were hanging out after school and then I had to chase down the bus for two blocks to stop you from leaving with it. Exercise-induced asthma is no joke. And what senior even voluntarily takes the bus? God.”

She's joking, but I can hear the annoyance in Katy's voice. I have been a little out of it all day. Apparently, two nights tossing and turning will do that to a person.

“It was
not
two blocks,” I argue. “Anyway, I forgot. Sorry. And taking the bus is not voluntary—I told you my mom wouldn't let me have the car this morning. She wouldn't even let me out of her sight all day yesterday.”

“Attachment disorder. I don't think I've seen a more severe case of it,” Katy says in a know-it-all voice, shaking her head as she shuts the trunk. “When one individual is unreasonably and detrimentally attached to another.” Katy's mother is a clinical psychologist, which is where Katy picks up phrases that sound like they've come from some yellowing medical textbook. It really should have turned my best friend into the best-adjusted seventeen-year-old in all of Lyndale, but it has only served as fuel for her lifelong hypochondria. Katy doesn't get headaches; she gets migraines. Anaphylaxis instead of allergies. Influenza instead of a cold. Everything is a Psychological Episode.

I've always suspected this had something to do with Katy's father leaving, remarrying by the time she was five, and sending gifts in lieu of visiting. Her mother works long, hard hours, but she does respond to crises. If Katy wants attention, she—or someone she knows—had better be On the Brink.

We maneuver our way through the parking lot, sticking close together so we don't lose each other. There is one other high school in town—Meridian—and it seems their entire student population had the same idea of crashing the mall, too.

I don't really know anyone from Meridian High, while Katy can't go anywhere without seeing people she knows.

Within seconds of getting into the movie theater lobby, Katy is kicking a girl in the kneebow, and they are squealing and hugging and talking about community theater stuff. I never feel more out of place than when I'm among Katy's other friends. They, like Katy, are a certain breed of people: bright, confident, funny. They talk louder than they have to; they grab one another's shoulders and hands and cheeks. They exclaim and lunge and weep and
enunciate.
I feel lonely in such a specific way around them—like only half of me has shown up.

Some of Katy's friends are nice enough—once or twice, someone came up and started talking to me as if we knew each other, though Katy wasn't even there. I didn't want to be rude, but I could only stare at them listlessly before mumbling something and escaping. When I told Katy about it, she said it sounded like so-and-so from Meridian, and not to worry about it.

Still, these ones—a girl with white-blond hair and her boyfriend—are acting as if I'm invisible, so I tell Katy I'm going to get our tickets and then head for the concession area. I'm looking around for the shortest line to join when I see him.

A hundred-watt smile.

Tall. Skinny.

The boy from the bus.

And he's looking right at me.

Before I think better of it, I am making my way over to him. He's standing behind the concession counter but not manning a register.

“Hey!” I exclaim as I reach him. “It's you!”

“Hi!” he says brightly, looking just as pleased to see me. That warm feeling twirls in my stomach again. Where does a person learn to smile like that? On anybody else, it would look goofy, but he's pulling it off.

He adjusts his black cap, the Cineplex's logo—
CINEXPERIENCE
—stamped across it and on the rest of his uniform.

“Are you okay? You just disappeared after the accident, and you weren't at the hospital. I was…looking for you.”

His eyes twinkle a little bit when I say that. And they're gray, the closest to silver a human's eyes are allowed to be. I didn't notice that two nights ago. “You were?”

My face gets warm, ears hot.

“Well, kind of. I mean,
I
wasn't. The nurse…my…”
Shut up, Addie.
I need a diversion. “So you work here?”

He looks down at his black
CINEXPERIENCE
T-shirt, then back up at me. “How awkward would it be if I didn't and I was wearing this?”

I laugh. “Well, it seems like a fun place to work. Cheap Movie Mondays excluded,” I say just as—as if on cue—someone's shoulder rams into mine, pushing me forward.

“Shit, sorry!” the person says. I turn around and see that the voice belongs to an Indian guy with short black hair and dark rectangular glasses. He is carrying about five bags of popcorn, three supersized drinks, and a bag of cotton candy. No wonder he didn't see where he was going.

“That's okay,” I say, about to turn away when the boy's expression suddenly changes. His eyes widen in something like surprise or recognition or confusion.

“Hey…there,” he says. He's looking at me now in a way that can only be described as gaping, and it's making me uncomfortable. I want to go back to talking to Bus Boy, who is also witnessing this.

“Am I in your way?” I ask at last, because I can't think of why else he'd still be standing here. That seems to shake him out of his stupor.

“No, um, you're fine,” the boy says, readjusting his grip on the bags of popcorn in his arms. Another second's hesitation. “Well, bye,” he says, and takes a step backward.

“Dude, we're going in without you!” a male voice calls from somewhere across the lobby, presumably to him, and then breaks into a fit of snickers.

The Indian boy rolls his eyes, sighs, and finally turns around to head back to his friends. There are so many people clustered throughout the lobby that I lose him before I see which group he joins.

I turn back to Bus Boy, who is looking at me with an amused expression.

“Sorry, that was weird,” I say to Bus Boy as a woman wearing the same black
CINEXPERIENCE
shirt he is reaches across him on the counter for a pile of napkins. She glances up at me. “What'd you say?” she asks, giving me a look that is both puzzled and impatient.

“Um, nothing,” I say, waiting for her to realize that I was not talking to her.

She pauses a second, then narrows her eyes at me and goes back to work. Is she annoyed at me for distracting Bus Boy from his work?

“Maybe I should let you—” I start to say, but before I can finish speaking, someone is grabbing my arm and yanking me across the lobby.

“Katy! Why are you
yanking
me?”

“And why are
you
spacing out in some corner of the lobby when you were supposed to be getting us tickets? Look how much longer the line is now!” We stop at the end of a line on the opposite side of the lobby from where I just saw Bus Boy. “I know you haven't been sleeping well and are possibly concussed and yada yada yada, but I swear it's like you're having a Psychological Episode.”

“I found him!” I say, completely ignoring her previous statements. “Bus Boy! I just saw him.”

Katy finally releases her iron grip on my jacket sleeve. “You saw him
here
? Why would he be here? Did you talk to him?”

I nod, unable to stop the grin from spreading across my face. “Not for long, but yeah.”

“So what's his name? Did you get his number?”

“I was getting to it when
someone
dragged me away,” I say.

“I didn't even see him,” Katy says, a frown creasing her face. “Where is he?”

I look back across the lobby, but there are too many people in the way. “He's all the way on the other side.”

“I did really want to see this movie, but we can blow it off to chat him up, if you want,” Katy says, wriggling her eyebrows at me.

I give a long-suffering sigh. “No, let's see the movie.” The lady at the counter didn't look amused by me hanging around to talk, and I don't want Bus Boy to get in trouble, but I act like I'm making the ultimate sacrifice for Katy's benefit. “The things I do for you.”

She bumps my shoulder with hers. “The things
I
do for you. You don't even know.”

As we wait, she starts telling me about how she'd been hanging out with Mitch Enns yesterday and had just driven him home—“Hanging out sounds a lot like making out,” I interrupt to point out—when she realized her bracelet was gone. I feel guilty for not remembering when she first told me it was missing, because she sounds more upset about it than I've seen her about anything in months. But she lights up quickly when she recognizes someone in the line next to ours. “Addie, this is Lena from Act! Out!”

Me and the girl wearing a winter jacket over a spandex volleyball uniform exchange polite “Nice to meet yous,” but she and Katy do most of the talking while our respective lines inch forward. I'm still mildly annoyed that I didn't get to say a proper goodbye to Bus Boy. Not to mention find out his name.

We are apparently doomed to minute-long conversations. Still, I'm relieved he's okay. And the fact that he lives in Lyndale means I have a good chance of seeing him again.

I replay today's conversation in my mind.

My mind hitches a little on his smile. The way it starts so slowly and then stretches, magnifying quickly across his face. Maybe I
am
having a Psychological Episode because it makes me think of physics: How quickly does the twitch of lip corners accelerate into the kind of smile that makes a stomach somersault?