Places No One Knows (7 page)

My feet hurt.

They throb with a deep, constant ache that hits as soon as I swing myself out of bed. I get in the shower, and after standing there for fifteen minutes, the pain is better. My head feels numb, like it's stuffed with cotton.

All morning, my phone keeps buzzing in the side pocket of my bag.

Five texts. Count them: five. All of which are from CJ, who I've known for two years but do not
know,
not really. Not in any relevant sense. All of the texts are spectacularly content-free.

“What are you so homicidal for?” Maribeth says, prancing up to my locker after third period and leaning her chin on my shoulder.

I force myself to stop scowling and hold out the phone, offering:
skipped western civ do you hate tha romans as much as I do?
“CJ texted me this morning. A lot.”

“So? That's ideal! I mean, doesn't it make you feel special?”

I think of the various ways to interpret that. The answer is no. No, it does not. What's special about five text messages? He knows my number. He knows how to work his phone. Everything else is incidental.

“Don't you like knowing that he's thinking about you?” Maribeth says, and it's in this moment that I realize I'll never be able to answer her in any way that she would understand.

When I look at my phone and see a message from CJ that says
What up girl,
followed by three question marks and an exclamation point, I can tell we're not compatible. It's not that I'm a huge punctuation snob, or even very fascist about grammar. It's just that we are clearly not relating to each other in even the most fundamental way.

By the time last period rolls around, the day feels dreamy and bottomless. I think my heart is slowing down.

The counseling office is empty—its natural Tuesday state—and for the first fifteen minutes, I'm content to wipe down the copier with Lysol and rearrange the add/drop forms. Compulsive cleaning can only tide you over for so long, though. I put up the
Back in Five
sign, write myself a hall pass, and go for a walk.

I want to talk to someone and really mean what I'm saying. I want to put into words any of the frantic, tumbling things in my head and know that someone else in the world understands.

Instead, I wander in ever-shrinking circles until I wind up in the west hall bathroom, standing in front of the spill wall, looking at the secrets. There are so many of them—so much realer than any of the things people say to each other's faces. A thousand truths about drugs and sex and friendship. Beauty, envy, bodies. Love. Even if I managed to read every single one, in an hour, they'll have already proliferated.

Down in the corner, next to the heating register, someone has written:

I study the handwriting, trying to figure out if it's someone I know—someone from cross-country, maybe?

But maybe it doesn't matter.

Maybe all that matters is that it's something true.

With a tight feeling in my chest, I unzip my bag. This is so stupid. It's absolutely not my business. My pencil case is stocked, though, filled with weapons of frank communication.

I take out a green felt pen I never use and uncap it like I'm watching from outside myself. Underneath the secret, I write, in neat block letters:

I leave the bathroom wondering if giving unqualified medical advice constitutes some kind of malpractice.

But the sentiment is right.

I decide that at most, it must amount to practicing common decency without a license.

Home—where the spring that's coiled inside me unwinds a little, where the gears stop grinding. Where no one is waiting or watching, or expecting me to be anything but bright and sharp and self-contained.

In the kitchen, there's a stack of takeout menus on the counter and everything smells warm, like ginger and lemongrass. My parents are standing in perfect symmetry with the island between them. They're eating Thai food out of paper containers and talking about determinist psychology.

No one else's parents like each other as much as mine do. They are charged like nucleons, paired like magnets. They communicate using a cool, coded language of theories and statistics, but their eyes are always locked in flirtatious combat.

“So tell me,” she says, “about that Cambridge study on automatic eating.” Her hair is shot with gray, and under the kitchen light, it looks silver. “I can't remember if it suggested industry-manufactured addiction, or just offered conclusive proof that people can be manipulated into consuming whatever you tell them to.”

He smiles, gesturing with his chopsticks. “Does this mean you're going to try and convince me that volition is a flawed concept because of
peer
pressure?”

She takes another bite of pad see ew before launching into a mini seminar on social conditioning.

I climb onto one of the tall stools at the counter, watching as my parents conduct their courtship rituals. I eat green curry out of the plastic tub, thinking that I have never seen two people so in love, and so completely untouchable.

It's not that they fake the fake parts better than I do, because they don't. My mother is easily the strangest person I know. It's more like they know a language I've never encountered. A dialect you can only speak with someone who actually understands you.

Suddenly, I want to know what they'd think about the spill wall. Maybe one of them would understand the psychosocial appeal of confession. Maybe they could make the wall make sense. As soon as I imagine the conversation, though, it's an unmitigated disaster. Me, trying to explain that I wrote something there today—their hyper-rational, law-abiding daughter has defaced school property. Them, just as baffled by the entire concept as Maribeth is.

Answering someone's cry for attention is not in my character. I've never been one to involve myself in someone else's problems. But what I wrote today seems more like fulfilling a moral obligation. I think maybe if a person is asking—
begging
—for attention, it's because they need it.

When I leave the kitchen, I can almost feel my mother's eyes flick to the doorway after me. She knows I'm not there anymore—it's not that the information hasn't registered. It just doesn't mean anything.

In my room, I dust a pair of crickets with mineral powder and feed Franny and Zooey, watching them stalk delicately around their terrariums.

After the carnage, I sit with my knees drawn up and my physics notes scattered around me. I consider lighting the candle again—whether I should, whether it's safe. Whether I imagined what happened on Friday. If it's even possible to just
imagine
something as inarguable as a pile of dirt in your bed.

Maribeth would say that anything is possible if you set your mind to it. Except she's talking about acing the SAT, not late-night interlocational travel. I try to picture what she'd say if she knew I dreamed a dream so real I woke up with mud on my feet.

Maribeth has always been a believer in the power of persistence in the face of ambiguity. Don't understand a social situation or a sample set in pre-calc? No problem. Learn by doing. Want to be one of the most powerful girls in school, but don't know how to get there? Enlist a friend's help, devise a system and a plan, never look back. Pedal to the metal, full speed ahead, you'll figure it out. One thing follows another.

But I know something else, and it is this:

The world is under no obligation to be sane or orderly.

There was a regional meet in Baker once, freshman year, and the whole cross-country team stayed up way past curfew, crammed into a block of group-rate hotel rooms, eating Skittles and talking about who'd done it and who hadn't, the
it
in this context being sex. (It always is.)

I'd been rattling all day and was just getting worse. No one was remotely close to sleep, and I was beginning to feel jagged, like if I didn't get away, I was going to fly into shards like a dropped cup.

I took a dollar bill and a keycard. I went out to get a Coke and then kept going. My ears were ringing, my hands were tingling, and I walked faster. Out in the porte-cochere, the bellhops were wrestling with people's luggage, hurrying to get it off the curb because it looked like rain. Over the street, the clouds were dark and towering.

My pajamas were a rayon shorty set with tiny ducks all over them. I should have been shivering, but the sidewalk was warm. The wind gusted as I stepped off the curb. The street felt gritty under my bare feet and I started to run.

I'd gone six blocks when the lightning started, cutting the sky into a blinding network of cracks like a broken windshield, and I understood I was doing something reckless—dangerous, even. But it's so hard to tell when something's actually dangerous, or if it just feels that way.

I came around the turn at the end of a wide, residential street, and the sky seemed to open in one colossal thunderclap, so close the pavement shuddered. For a second, the world lit up white, and in an instant, the street was full of moths. They came plunging down out of the trees and surging up from the wheel wells of parked cars, like the night had exploded around me in tiny silver pieces. Then the wind tore down through the street, scattering leaves and branches. Scattering the moths. Thunder clapped like hands, and they were gone.

Afterward, I never knew if they were there at all, or something I'd told myself to make the night seem magical, or just my eyes. I raced myself back to the Hyatt. No one had noticed I was gone. I wiped the grit off my feet and climbed into the bed I was sharing with Kendry, not sure if the memory was real or imaginary. If I'd even gone out into the storm at all.

I push my homework out of the way and get out the candle. This is the world, and nothing in the world is ever truly inexplicable. But my heart beats harder just thinking about moths and dead leaves. I'm breathing too fast now for no good reason. When I work up the courage to strike a match, I hold it so long it gutters out, leaving me with a blackened strip of cardboard and a burned finger, trying to think whether or not it hurts.

I light another one and it flickers gently, reflecting off the votive jar.

Okay, so. Let's be logical. Consider the possibilities. Maybe sleep is miraculous—a strange doorway to something unknown. Maybe the other night, I accidentally dreamed myself into someone else's backyard.

Or maybe sleep is just a normal biological function, and I'm letting myself be intimidated by a candle.

I take a breath and touch the flame to the wick.

Under the covers, I count down like I'm preparing for liftoff. With my arms tucked close at my sides, I fall through darkness and cold murky air.