Story of a Girl (16 page)

We drove past Liberty Park and I pictured Ethan’s car as a silver dot on the life map, zipping right along where it should. If you zoomed in you’d see that it was a cold and bright and fresh October day, the kind of day that, for most people, sang with a certain kind of hopefulness. I closed my eyes and willed myself into it, reminded myself that the girl in the car on the map in the hopeful day was me.

“Jenna? Hello?” Ethan poked my thigh. “Did you hear what I just said? About the play-reading committee?”

“You’re meeting today after school and you can’t give me a ride home. I know.”

“What’s the matter?” He gave me his patented Ethan look, one eyebrow cocked over mocha eyes that were always half hidden by light brown hair. It was a look that made freshman girls swoon and still made my own stomach twist pleasantly.

I flexed my endorphin-producing muscles into a smile. “Nothing.”

At school, he walked me to my locker, which Katy and Steph had decorated with peach-colored wrapping paper and gold ribbon. I projected a reasonable facsimile of surprised glee, even though Katy and Steph weren’t actually there and couldn’t see me. It would be good practice for later, when I knew everyone in homeroom would sing “Happy Birthday” and Mr. Moran would make me stand in front and get handshakes and hugs from a receiving line made up of the whole senior class — all sixteen of us. We were the first graduating class of Jones Hall, a small charter school for kids who were too smart or too creative — or too non-Mormon, even though no one ever said it — to cope in the regular Salt Lake City schools. The birthday parade was one of the little traditions Mr. Moran had started with us our freshman year.

I gathered up the cards from my locker and Ethan put his arm around my shoulders, bumping against me as he walked his bouncy walk in his signature red high-tops, hair flopping cutely over one side of his face. I experienced a moment of contentment then, the kind I’d have every so often when I felt completely like Jenna Vaughn and truly believed that she was me and I was her.

Ethan and I were on our third month of official couplehood, which had started with an end-of-summer accidental date at the main library. “Hey, Jenna, what are you doing here?” “Checking out books, oddly enough.” “Believe it or not, so am I!” It was hard to believe I had a boyfriend at all, let alone the kind of boyfriend other girls wanted. But he was mine; he’d picked me. Me, Jennifer Harris.

Actually, he’d picked Jenna Vaughn.

Ethan didn’t know anything about the fat girl, the Cootie Twin, the loner and reject. The only person who had ever picked Jennifer Harris was Cameron Quick, and sometimes when I was with Ethan I felt the smallest twinge of guilt, like being with him was a betrayal. The one thing that could never die or be buried was my loyalty to Cameron for everything he’d done for me and what we’d been through together, even if that loyalty was to a ghost.

By lunch, the work of being the birthday version of Jenna Vaughn started to wear on me. I’d been smiling all morning at the Happy Birthdays and the hugs and compliments while Jennifer Harris dogged me. I kept looking over my shoulder for I don’t know what, and hearing Cameron’s dad’s voice:
Where do you think you’re going?

“Jenna. J.V.? I asked what your parents got you.” Katy was jiggling her legs the way she always did. It shook the whole table and drove us crazy, but we generally didn’t say anything. All of us were at Jones for
some
kind of Issue, which made us pretty tolerant. For Katy, it was ADHD and some anger management stuff that we really tried not to tease her about. Steph had a learning disability that went undiagnosed until eighth grade, when she was already too far behind to catch up in a regular school; also she had a habit of “dating” every boy in school, which could cause problems. Ethan was some kind of creative genius and everything bored him. As for me, even after making some good progress in junior high, teachers complained I lived too much in my head instead of the real world and Mom thought the smaller class size at Jones would help me stay focused.

I answered Katy: “Nothing yet.”

“What do you think they’re going to get you?”

“I don’t know.” I knew this would not be an acceptable answer to Katy, especially since I’d in no way tried to make it witty.

She let her skinny, freckled arms fall on the table with an exasperated thwack. “Can’t you take a
guess?
”

“Katy,” Steph said, “she just said she doesn’t know. Maybe she wants to be surprised.”

Ethan laughed. “No. She definitely doesn’t want to be surprised. She hates surprises.”

“Oh, yeah? I’ve got a surprise right here.” Gil Guerrero leaped onto the cafeteria bench and began to belt out “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” from
The Sound of Music.
Everyone turned and stared with slightly horrified and annoyed expressions — Jones Hall might have been special, but it wasn’t exactly the set of
Fame.
We were still in Utah, after all. I buried my head in my hands and laughed because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you are being affectionately humiliated by friends — or so I’d observed in movies and TV.

“Gil,” Steph said, “is that really necessary?” I peeked through my fingers. Steph was licking frosting off a cupcake in her shamelessly sexy way, gazing up at Gil, who had stopped singing and was now staring at her. “And are you looking down my shirt?” she asked him.

He jumped down off the bench. “No.”

Steph changed the subject to the play-reading committee. With the attention safely off me, I tuned them out to eat my lunch: half a sandwich, a low-fat yogurt, and a small peanut butter cookie. I slid the cookie over to Ethan, guilty about the cheese in my omelet that morning. I’d spent too many hours hiking the hills of the Avenues, running up City Creek Canyon, and doing late-night crunches to let one pound of Fattifer back into my life. I smashed up the last quarter of my sandwich and stuffed it in my lunch bag. Even though the day was nearly half over and nothing bad had happened, it couldn’t hurt to hurry it along. “Let’s go to trig early,” I told Katy. “Maybe we’ll actually learn something.”

The Lucy Variations

Try harder, Lucy.

Lucy stared down at Madame Temnikova’s face.

Which seemed incredibly gray.

Try.

Harder.

Lucy.

She put her hands over Temnikova’s sternum again, and again hesitated.

Stage fright: an opportunity to prove herself or a chance to fail. Which was nothing new for her. It just hadn’t been a life-or-death issue until now.

This isn’t a performance.
Do
something.

But an actual dying person in the living room wasn’t the same as a Red Cross dummy in the school gym. Lucy tried not to think about Temnikova’s skin under her hands. Or the way, from the looks of things, that skin now encased only a body, no longer a soul.

Except the moment wasn’t definite. More like Temnikova was not there and then there and then not there. Mostly not.

Gus, Lucy’s ten-year-old brother, started to ask the question she didn’t want to answer. “Is she…”

Dead?

“Call nine-one-one, Gus,” she told him for the second time. He’d been motionless, mesmerized. Lucy kept her voice unwavering, though she felt like screaming. She didn’t want to freak him out. Channeling her mother’s dispassion and authority, she said, “Go do it right now.”

Gus hurried across the room to the phone, and Lucy looked at the ceiling, trying to remember the steps in the Cardiac Chain of Survival—what went where and for how long. Where were her mother and grandfather, anyway? They were usually and annoyingly
there
, running the house and everything, every
one
, in it like a Fortune 500 company.

The metronome on top of the piano ticked steadily; Lucy fought off the urge to throw a pillow at it. Instead she used it to time the chest compressions.

Still…

That sound.

Tick tick tick tick.

A slow adagio. A death march.

She didn’t know how Gus could stand it. Spending day after day after day after lonely day in this room, with this old woman.

Everything good
(tick)
is passing you by
(tick)
as you sit here
(tick)
and practice your life away
(tick).

Except she did know, because she’d done it herself for more than eleven years. Not with Temnikova, but in this room. This house. These parents. This family history.

“My sister is doing that,” Gus said into the phone. Then to Lucy, “They want you to try mouth-to-mouth.”

When Lucy and Reyna signed up for the CPR workshop at school last spring, they’d assumed their future patients would be sexy, male, and under forty, an idea which now seemed obviously idiotic. Lucy swept her hair back over one shoulder and braced herself.

Their lips met. Lucy’s breath filled Temnikova’s lungs. They inflated and deflated, inflated and deflated. Nothing. She went back to the chest compressions.

Gus was speaking, but his voice seemed far away. The order of Lucy’s actions felt wrong; the backs of her thighs cramped. She looked up at Gus, finally, and tried to read his face. Maybe her inadequacy was engraving permanent trauma onto his psyche. Twenty years from now, in therapy, he’d confide to some bearded middle-aged man that his problems all began when his sister let his piano teacher die right in front of him. Maybe she should have sent him out of the room.

Too late now.

“Tell them I think… I’m pretty sure she’s dead.”

Gus held the phone out to Lucy. “You tell them.” She stood and took it, wincing at the needles that shot through her sleeping left foot while Gus walked to the piano, stopped the metronome, and slid its metal pendulum into place.

The house seemed to exhale. Lucy gave the bad news to “them.” After going over the details they needed, she hung up, and Gus asked, “Do we just leave her body here?”

Temnikova had dropped to the Persian rug, behind the piano bench, where she’d been standing and listening to Gus. Right in the middle of a Chopin nocturne.

“Yeah. They’ll be here soon. Let’s go… somewhere else.”

“I don’t want her to be alone,” he said, and sat in Grandpa Beck’s armchair, a few feet away from Temnikova’s head. She’d been coloring her short hair an unnatural dark red as long as Lucy’s family had known her.

Lucy went to Gus and rested her hip against the chair. She should try her mom’s cell, or her grandfather’s, and her dad’s office. Only she didn’t want to. And the situation was no longer urgent, clearly.

“Sorry, Gus.”

Fail
.

One of the EMTs said it looked like a stroke, not a heart attack, and there was “probably” nothing Lucy could have done. He typed into his phone or radio or whatever it was while he talked.

Probably.
It wasn’t exactly a word of comfort.

While the other EMTs loaded Temnikova’s body onto a gurney they’d parked in the foyer, the “probably” guy clipped his radio back onto his belt and checked off things on a form. Lucy gave her name and parents’ names and the house phone number. He paused halfway down the page and rested his finger over one of the check boxes. “You’re over eighteen, right?”

“Sixteen.”

“Really.” He—small and wiry, maybe two inches shorter than Lucy—gave her a once-over. Their eyes didn’t quite meet. “You look older.”

She never knew what to say to that. Was it supposed to be a compliment? Maybe she didn’t want to look older. Maybe she didn’t even want to be sixteen. Twelve. Twelve had been a good age: going to the symphony with Grandma Beck in excessively fancy dresses, unembarrassed to hold her hand. Being light enough that her dad could carry her from the car to the front door on late nights. Shopping with her mother and not winding up in a fight every time.

“So I’ve been told,” she said. He smiled. There should be some kind of rule against smiling in his job. She said, “Just another day for you, I guess.”

“I wouldn’t put it that way.” He handed her a card. “I’ll need to have one of your parents call this number as soon as they can. You said she’s not a relative?”

His look turned into a stare that lingered somewhere between Lucy’s neck and waist. She stood straighter, and he returned his attention to the clipboard. “She’s my brother’s piano teacher.”

Lucy gestured to Gus, who’d been sitting on the stairs, his chin in his hands. He didn’t appear traumatized. Bored, possibly. Or, knowing him, simply thinking. Maybe thinking about how if he’d been allowed to go to his school sleepover at the Academy of Sciences, like he wanted, this wouldn’t even be happening. But, as usual, their parents and Temnikova had said no, reluctant to take any time away from his scheduled practice.

The EMT blew a breath through his thin lips. “That’s rough. It happening right here, during a lesson.”

Where else would it happen? Temnikova practically lived there, in the piano room. Gus wasn’t your average ten-year-old, fumbling through “Clair de lune” and “London Bridge” while everyone who was forced to listen held back the eye rolls. He had a career. A following. Like Lucy used to have. And Zoya Temnikova had been working with him since he turned four, when Lucy’s grandfather flew her to the States from Volgograd, set her up in an apartment down the street, and helped her become a legalized citizen.