Inland (6 page)

THE BIOLOGY TEACHER IS LOOKING
at me suspiciously.

—

“Last name is Morgan?” he says.

I take a deep breath, getting ready for the inevitable new-student tango and grateful that at least we’re alone, the first bell not yet rung. It’s been thirty-seven days since my last attack. I know this because I dutifully marked each one of them, slashing a proud, self-satisfied red
X
on the calendar while my father watched warily over his latest round of figures from the latest samples of the ocean floor. Thirty-seven days ago, he took my inhaler—“So if you have an attack, I’ll know,” he warned—and made me a bargain: one month of easy breathing, and he’d enroll me at Ballard without argument.

I’m not sure who was more shocked when the thirtieth day rolled around.

—

“Yes,” I say. “Morgan, comma, Calypso.”

He raises his eyebrows at my full name; I roll my eyes in return, the wordless stand-in for an embarrassed,
I know.

“Creative parents, huh?” he says, and grins. “Well, I’d remember that one if you were on my list, but you’re not. My apologies, we’re not always the quickest with paperwork around here. And where are you coming to us from?”

It’s the new-student dance, the one I’ve done a million times, but I don’t know this version—the one where I’m not being studied like a lab rat, where a sudden coughing fit doesn’t earn a deer-in-headlights stare from a freaked-out adult. In this version, there’s no curious ogling or wincing as I speak; my biology teacher has no wariness in his eyes, just a disarming, wide-open smile sitting between his comb-over and his shirt collar.

“We lived in Wyoming,” I stammer. Is my throat closing up?
Please,
I think,
please don’t let me stop breathing just because someone was nice to me
. The teacher—Mr. Strong, it said on the door—looks down again at his papers, shuffling them again as though he expects my name might magically rise to the top, talking all the while.

“That’s quite a trek. Quite a trek! Wyoming, huh? Horse country, isn’t it? You ever ride horses up there? You look like the outdoorsy type.”

It’s not just the dance steps I can’t follow; now, I don’t even know the song they’re playing. I might as well have stumbled into another dimension. Dumbly, I shake my head.

“Well, welcome to the dirty South,” he says, and the smile keeps shining on, bigger, brighter. Behind me, the low rumble from the hallway becomes a roar as the metal
clang
of slamming lockers starts to come in staccato bursts.

“I’ll write you in here, and we’ll give the office a few more days to let your teachers know who you are, but you might have to give them a nudge, okay? Keep an eye on that, maybe stop in on Thursday to make sure you’re in the system. And here’s your syllabus.”

The classroom door opens as he pushes a thick sheaf of papers across the desk, and a tumble of kids bursts through with shouts of greeting. They’re all grinning and waving, and I suspect that Mr. Strong’s good humor and easygoing grin make him the kind of teacher that everyone likes. A favorite.

“Don’t worry, you haven’t missed much,” he assures me, with one eye on the entering, settling crowd, noisily filtering its way to seats at the high, Formica-topped lab tables. “And let’s see . . .” He scans the room, then shouts, “Hey! Ben!”

At the back, by the glass case filled with formaldehyde-preserved floating things and a handful of sun-bleached skulls, a boy with red hair and glasses snaps to attention. He even salutes.

“Mister S!” he shouts back.

“This is—” He pauses, looking at me for input. And though I’ve met no others yet, I make it official: Mr. Strong is my favorite teacher, too. Not just here, not just now, but of all time and forever.

“Callie,” I say. “Please. Thank you.”

“Right!” He turns back: “This is Callie. She’s an accomplished horsewoman from the wild Northwestern plains, and she needs some help settling in.”

I prepare for the miserable minutes to follow. I know what comes next. The boy will take me in—eyes down, eyes up—and sigh, and irritatedly make only the tiniest bit of room, and studiously ignore me for forty minutes except for the grunted information about which page we’re on. All while the rest of the class looks on with half pity, half relief that it wasn’t them.

Only he doesn’t.
He doesn’t.

Instead, there’s a smile. A beckoning hand. Mr. Strong’s send-off pat on the shoulder, and only a handful of curious stares as I cross the room.

“Hey, Callie,” says Ben. He pulls out the high-legged chair and waits, patiently, as I heave myself up. And when I do, he holds out a hand for me to shake—small but strong, and pleasantly warm—and then gestures at my ponytail, pulled back against the humidity and hanging in crazed, curly coils down my back. “Nice hair.”

“Yours, too,” I manage to whisper.

As promised, I call home at lunch. She picks up on the first ring.

“Callie!” she yells, and even as I cringe away from her ear-piercing squeal, I can’t help smiling. It has been weeks—weeks!—and for all my father’s glowering and pointed remarks, he can’t make Nessa leave. He’d have to put his foot down, evict her, kick her out with a flourish and threats of arrest if she ever came back. But he won’t. He can’t. The confrontation, with its inevitable madness and sobbing good-byes, a perfect repeat of the last one, is a door he won’t open again. And for once, his dry and undramatic disapproval has met its match.

“Aren’t they missing you at your job?” he’d said, irritation creeping into his voice, when he came home late from work two weeks ago to find my aunt and me substituting a box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch for dinner.

“Oh, and aren’t you sweet to be concerned!” Nessa sang, all innocence and wide eyes, then smiled at him—the way that a cat might smile at a dog as it scampered up a tree and sat, smugly, just out of reach. “But surfers, you know, they’re such a laid-back crowd, it didn’t matter a bit for me to take a leave of absence. In fact, I can stay as long as I like.”

The last sentence was less a statement of fact than a challenge, aimed right between my father’s eyes.
I can stay as long as I like
. But he didn’t meet it. Didn’t flinch. Didn’t say,
No, you can’t
. Instead, he sighed, and shrugged, and wandered away, closing the door to his study, and eventually planting a dry, distracted peck on my cheek when I knocked to say good night. I’m starting to think that he can’t bring himself to take her away from me. Not again. Not this time. And not when, and even he has to admit it, Nessa has made herself useful. For all her flightiness and swearing and refusal to wear shoes, for all the nights she vanishes into the darkness by the water and then comes back with the telltale, slightly sweet scent of marijuana clinging to her hair, she’s someone who can be there—to keep me company, to take me places, to be at the door when I get home in the afternoons. Filling the space left by the woman who came before her, looked like her, had the same musical voice. She is only a little bit older now than my mother was. Though the resemblance makes me ache—and though I know it hurts him, too, maybe even worse than me—I’m glad of it. It feels like a second chance, a substitute taste of the life we might have had.

—

“How’s it going?” she asks. “Tell me everything!”

“There’s not much to tell,” I say, but I know she can hear the smile in my voice. She snorts, impatient.

“Well, what’s it like?”

I think for a minute, the phone pressed to my ear, while students swarm around me. Some of them look, registering the presence of an unfamiliar face, but nobody peers at me like something inside a glass case. Nobody points and whispers. In this moment, in the flip-flops and jeans and fluttery, flimsy top that Nessa insisted on buying me at the mall in Tallahassee, with my backpack slung on one shoulder, I’m one of them.

You are here.

“It’s not like it was,” I say.

And she says, “Of course it’s not.”

—

And it’s not. I can even say it out loud, now, confidently and clearly. It’s not the same at all. It’s in the way I move through the hallways, buoyant with air that keeps me from heaving, or coughing, or crashing against the moving surge of students alongside me. It’s in Ben’s face, open and familiar, as he tugs my ponytail and then pushes my bulky backpack into safe port under the table with one deft swipe of his foot. It’s in the way I’ve started hoping his hand will accidentally brush against mine, and can’t stop myself from smiling and blushing when it happens. It even comes home with me, straightening my spine as I walk through the door, putting a Mona Lisa smile on my lips when Nessa asks me about my day.

—

Three weeks after my first day, we open our biology textbooks to the chapter on marine ecology, the flora and fauna that live beneath the sea. It’s full of diagrams, small text attached to narrow lines that point to the inner workings of frogs, fish, whales, and I feel the barest touch of déjà vu.

“Every marine species on the planet has evolved, physically, to survive in its native environment,” says Mr. Strong. “Can anyone give an example?”

I don’t even know that I know it, until he points at me. I don’t even feel my hand reach for the sky. It must be somebody else, someone with a voice that’s throaty, smoky, but as clear as a bell, who says, “Seals can collapse their lungs completely in order to dive in deep water.” It’s somebody else who receives the raised eyebrows from the kids nearby, who notices the smile from the boy sitting next to her, who raises her own eyebrows and shrugs and grins back.

“Excellent, Callie,” says Mr. Strong. “Really excellent, that’s exactly right.”

—

Later, I’ll be pleased for other reasons. I’ll realize where the sudden knowledge came from, and smile to realize that something in my mother’s ancient books, paged through so many times and with so little understanding, ended up speaking to me after all.

But as I gather my things and walk the familiar route to my next class, this is what I know:

He looked at me, and he knew my name.

IF YOU WAIT AT THE SHORELINE
while the tide comes in, the surf will begin to bury you where you stand. Water rushing up and all around you, the sand shifting away like a sly living thing beneath your feet, burying you deeper and deeper still, even as the undertow slides with a come-hither tug around your ankles. If you only hold still for a moment, you become the anchor that the world swirls around.

You are here.

—

In the weeks since school began, I’ve held firm while life crashes over me and springs up on all sides. I know this place, these people. I know the halls by heart. Names, faces: they’re all familiar. This place full of fluorescent lights and laughing kids is my every day. I know the exact soaring curves of the live oak that hovers beside the white concrete entranceway, how many steps between Nessa’s car and the wide front door of the school. I know how many picnic tables sit in the courtyard at the center of the building, and which ones have been permanently claimed by territorial packs of high-school archetypes. I know that the girl with the appraising stare, the golden highlights, the designer sunglasses, and the angry-looking mouth is Meredith Hartman; I know that every day, her friend Kimberly Dunn leaves lunch early to purge in the upstairs bathroom near the teachers’ lounge. I even know which stall she likes best: third from the left, nearest the window, where the room is overwhelmed by the wafting sweet scent of the grass they cut every week.

I know that in the five minutes before the first lunch bell, I can go to that same bathroom and take my pills without ever seeing another human soul.

For the first time, I remember my locker combination without having to carry a cheat sheet.

—

Some days, I think that it’s this place that made the difference. That the heat and the sunshine and the waving palms have softened the people who live here, melting away their sharp edges and slowing everyone’s pace. It would explain the loss of my paperwork, all the carefully faxed records that my father has always made sure followed me no matter where I went. My name and vital statistics arrived three days after I started; my transcript, two weeks later. But the fat medical file—the one full of warnings, allergic triggers, medication logs, and lists of all the things that sickly girls aren’t supposed to do—never made it. I picture it getting caught on its way, slowing, and then stopping just beyond the Florida state line, thumping heavily somewhere by the side of the road and simply deciding not to show up.

Nobody knows where I was before this.

Nobody knows about the scars, the pills, the hospital stays.

Nobody knows the girl who stood in the dark on her first night here, trying and failing to breathe.

And best of all, nobody knows they don’t know. Even my father, busy and distracted, keeping longer and longer hours with his team of researchers and hovering investors, never thought to make sure that my old life had caught up with me.

—

Sometimes, even I forget that girl. She is growing smaller in my mind and in my memory, like someone who I knew by sight but not by name, a familiar face in a hospital hallway. With two months and two thousand miles between her life and mine, I no longer feel her nearby. And though there are some days when I wake up short of breath and begin to panic, frantic, convinced that she’s come back to ruin everything, there are others when I don’t think of her at all.

Instead, I hold still and let the rising tide bury me by another inch.

—

Ben is waiting for me by my locker, unseen but for a dab of orange frizz just visible over the shoulders of two tall and broad-shouldered boys. I’ve learned to look for him there, and he never disappoints. This, I have learned, is part of Mr. Strong’s magic: putting people together with the same effortless intuition that lets him hold a room of teenagers at attention for a full fifty minutes. He knew, somehow, that Ben’s gregariousness would match my unconfident quiet. That his won’t-take-no-for-an-answer insistence that I meet this person, hear this band, see this movie, would make quick work of the mistrustful walls I’d built during so many years of loneliness. And that my peculiar sick-person fluency in Internet memes, Wikipedia peculiarities, and all the best bad television—all the side effects of an isolated life—would find an eager listener in this boy who was interested in everything.

“Cal,” he says.

“I really hate when you call me that,” I say, even though I don’t, not even a little.

The others are already in line, a strange pack of unlikely friends with Ben its unofficial leader. His friends, and so they’re my friends, too. Mine. Suddenly, and just like that. Five hundred percent more friends than I’ve ever had, anywhere.

There’s Mikah and Shanika, born ten and a half months apart but seated together in every class. Mikah, who takes pictures of everything, is braiding her sister’s hair. Shanika, who already has the jutting collarbone and long, limber legs of the model she hopes to be, is complaining about the stress on her knees.

“Hurry up,” she demands. “Or get a chair. I’m not standing here with my knees bent and my neck all crooked for another minute.”

“You will if you want those headshots with your hair back,” says Mikah, then adds, almost as an afterthought, “bitch.”

Corey, who is allergic to everything, scans the printout hung on the wall and says, “There’s nothing here I can eat.” Nobody pays attention; he says it every day, and every day he comes out the other end of the line with three hamburgers, no cheese, no condiments, just the meat and the bun.

At the same time, Jana—a big girl, with a big voice, who’s better at being exactly who she is than anyone I’ve ever met—looks back over her shoulder and says, “Forget what’s on the menu, ladies. I’d like to take a nice, big bite out of Eric Keller.”

She says it loud.

Mikah lets go of Shanika’s hair. Corey turns beet red and presses himself against the wall. Across the cafeteria, Eric Keller looks up at the sound of his name, tilting his angular jaw in a way that makes half the girls in the room go weak at the knees, brushing a hand over his close-cropped blond hair, and raises his eyebrows as Jana grins and waves. Nearby, clusters of girls are starting to giggle. At the front of the line, Meredith Hartman turns back and fixes Jana’s oblivious back with a blood-freezing glare.

“Congratulations, Eric!” Jana calls across the room.

Eric’s eyebrows climb higher and a small smile appears on his lips—all remaining female knees in the room turn to mush—and he calls back, “What for?”

Jana pops a hip, bats her eyelashes, and yells, “For getting into those pants today! YOW!”

The whole room bursts into laughter, then applause. Eric rolls his eyes even as a big embarrassed grin breaks over his face. Meredith Hartman rolls
her
eyes and places her order in a huff. Corey squirms against the wall, as though trying to burrow into it, and says, “Christ on a cracker, Jana, do you have to be so loud?” Ben, clapping along with everyone else, winks and exclaims, “Of course she does!”

And I laugh quietly, taking it all in, as the sound crests and then subsides, as Ben gives my ponytail a flirtatious yank, as Mikah leans in close to my ear and gestures at the embarrassed Eric and says, “But seriously, that
ass
,” and then collapses in another fit of giggling.

You are here.

—

And for the first time in a long time, I dare to dream of keeping my friends close. That I’ll bask in the sunny afternoons, all through the seasonless year as October turns to November to April to July, one seamless golden life in which I finally belong. Daydreams. Hope dreams.

Tonight, after dinner, I leave Nessa midway through a nine-o’clock movie. Two well-muscled actors are running through a blaze of gunfire as I yawn loudly and tell her I’m heading to bed. We’re alone tonight. My father phoned at seven, sighing and apologizing but with an undercurrent of excitement in his voice, to say that he’d be working late and starting early again the next morning. On nights like these, he doesn’t bother driving home, choosing instead to sleep on a cot in his office. The last time it happened, there had even been a grudging thank-you for Nessa at the end, or as close to it as he’d ever been able to muster.

“I guess it’s good that Callie has some company, so . . . well. Good night, then,” he grunted, then hung up.

Nessa had stared at me, and I’d stared back at her, and then we’d laughed so hard that she spilled her cereal all over her lap.

“You’ve been turning in early a lot,” she says. “Is everything okay? You’re not getting sick, are you?”

“No,” I say. Too quickly, too loudly. I sound defensive and her eyebrows go up; I can almost see the question mark in the air.

“Sorry,” I add, and force a smile. “I guess I’m a little sensitive.”

I kiss her on the cheek as she reaches for the remote, and make for the darkened hallway. To the bathroom to take my pills, and then to the sweet solace of my waiting dreams.

“You don’t need to be, you know,” she says, just before I cross out of the room. She’s still looking at the TV, trying to be casual, but her voice is warm with pride. “You’re looking better every day.”

“Oh, go on,” I joke, but I’m not looking at her, either. My eyes are on the window, where my reflection looks caught by surprise, where an open mouth and wide stare mirror my own. Sometime in the past two months, somehow, I seem to have grown taller.

—

It doesn’t take long to drift away, to find my mother in the dark. Snuggled deep beneath the covers, buried in soft, opaque layers of sleep, I try to tell her: about Ben, about Bee, about the waving palms and the way the air feels moist. About football games. homecoming rallies, Halloween parties. I want to paint her a picture of the broad, bright hallways of my school, Nessa sitting on the couch with her feet tucked underneath her and the television on, the sweet scent of the trees that floats out of the dusky yard to remind us of the closeness of the water. I tell her what I saw there in the window, the girl who was me, but not-me, with a stronger gaze and straighter back than the shuffling girl in gray who used to look back at me from the mirror in Laramie.

For weeks now, I’ve spent my nights telling her how things have changed, while her fingers brush my shoulders in the liquid, drifting dark. I thought she would be pleased. I thought she’d listen, like she’s always listened. Captive, quiet, smiling from behind her tangled hair while I tell her every secret that I’ve kept. Every other night, the dark has drawn close around us, heavy and warm and safe.

But tonight, something is different. In my dream, she flits in and out of the blackness, all pale hands and swirling hair, advancing and receding and then close, closer than she’s ever been, gazing into my eyes more deeply than before. I can see the beauty mark on her forehead, a small scar on her cheek. I can see her eyes, pupils dilated, as lightless as the darkest heart of the deepest water.

Come away
, she says, her voice echoing back, bouncing noiselessly against the curves inside my head, careening sharply within the confines of my skull.
Come home, come home with me.

Mama,
I say,
I can’t.

Come.

I can’t.

You belong with me.

You left me.

And suddenly, the darkness changes. It begins to move, to swirl, to froth. This is no arid blackness, I realize. And of course, of course it’s not. We are in the water.

She is always in the water.

Her face is inches from mine. Her eyes are huge and dark, so close that I can look into them and see that her pupils are not just large but without boundary, that she has no irises at all. Her skin is white, her lips are bloodless. She is so pale, and I shudder, and I think, O
f course she is
. The ocean drained the color from her cheeks at the same moment as it took the air from her lungs, the life from her body. Had I really forgotten that my mother wasn’t truly here? She’s dead. Gone. Drowned. And this time, when the light shifts and she speaks again, it isn’t in my head but in my ears. A voice that groans like creaking wood, like a rusted lock, like machinery shuttered and left to rot.

I would never leave you
, she says, and her mouth opens wide, and her hands fly like striking snakes to grip my shoulders. Hard. Hard, and close. In the glistening murk, her lips peel back. And though it’s still my mother’s face, her hands, her long black hair, her voice rasps out between two rows of teeth like sharpened knives.

I DIDN’T HAVE A CHOICE.

And in my dream, I scream. I scream loud enough to wake, to kick, to surge up through sleep, and to claw for purchase on the wall. I scream as I reach for it.

My fingertips touch nothing.

No wall, no sheets, no bedside lamp.

I open my eyes.

I keep screaming.