Swansong (7 page)

I fix another smile on my face.  “I have to go back sooner or later.”  Skipping school isn’t going to rewind time.  Resting won’t fix my head.  “I left my paints on the thirteenth floor.”  My books, my brushes.

“I could pick them up for you.”

I hesitate.  I feel dizzy.

“Unless—”  Uncertainty crosses Azel’s face.  “You’re one of those types who doesn’t let anyone touch her tools?”

“No, no.”  I force a laugh.  Why does it sound so loud—?  “It’s just—postponing the inevitable.”

“Which is?”

“Well,” I say, gently, “I can’t keep running forever.”

Azel frowns.  “I suppose not.”

I want to ask what’s on his mind—because his eyes look faraway.  I don’t think I have the right to pry.  I don’t know him.  But he’s been kind to me.

“Do you want a towel?” I ask.

He lifts his head.  “Sorry?”

“For your hair?”  I shouldn’t make fun, but—it looks like a rat’s nest.  For the first time, I feel lucky mine’s so short.

Azel grimaces.  “That’s probably for the best.”

“Come on, then.”  I start up the stairs.

If someone had told me four months ago that I’d start the school year socializing with Jewish nihilists and Arabian gymnasts—well, I’m sure I would have told that person, as kindly as I knew how, that they were a few bulbs short of a Christmas tree.  But here I am: unlocking the door to a dingy apartment; turning on the studio lights and calling it home.  Azel steps out of his sneakers before he follows me inside.  Bewildered, I try not to stare.

“Do you want tea?” I ask.  It’s quiet in here.  Jude must be out job hunting again.

“No.”  Azel pauses.  “Thank you.”

Definitely not Kory, that’s for sure.  Every time Kory comes over, I have to safeguard the pantry.

I head into the bathroom.  I pull open the cabinet on the wall and drag free a scratchy towel.  A spider—or something like it—scurries past on the floor.  I’m glad Jude’s not home for a change.  Every time he spots a bug, he pulls out the pesticide.

I head back out.  Azel’s standing stock-still in the sitting room, his hair untied.  I hand him the towel.  With a quiet “Thank you,” he drags it fiercely through his hair.  His curls fluff up, shaggy and shapeless.  I’m laughing again.

“Would you stop that?” Azel says, flustered.

“You have sisters, and you’re not used to teasing?”

“You’re not exactly my sister, are you?”

My face feels hot again.  “No.”

Azel falters.

“Thanks again,” I say to the floor.

“Of course.”  He gives back the towel.

I roll it up.  “You’re sure you don’t want tea?”

“I—what time is it?”

I glance at the clock on the paint-stained wall.  “Eleven-thirty.”

“Then I’d definitely better get going,” Azel says.  “My little sister wants me to meet her for lunch.”

“That’s—” 
That’s cute
, I almost say.  I smile instead.

Azel tucks his hands in his pockets.  When did he change clothes?  The sick bay?  His jacket’s blue cotton.  His trousers, black, bag around his ankles.  His gaze is inquisitively soft.  I can believe he’s from another country.  Who has the bravery to look someone straight in the eye, and when caught, not turn away?

“Don’t be a stranger,” he decides.  “Okay?”

More pity.  But I can understand it.

We’re only human, after all.

* * * * *

Jude comes home a little after noon.  I’ve just finished drying the floor.

“Want a snack?” I ask him.

“No thanks.”  He runs a scarred hand through his thick gold hair.  He looks disoriented.

“Everything okay?” I ask carefully.

“Hm?  Yeah.”

I’m not entirely convinced.  I don’t want to push it.

“Hey,” I start again.  “Jude?”

On cue, he snickers.  The Beatles, right—it’s really not that funny—

“Jude.”  I lift my left hand; my dominant hand.  “Wasn’t I…  I mean, I was burned, wasn’t I?”

Jude looks at me, stark, curious.  “You had a couple burns.  Some smoke inhalation.”

“But this hand?  Weren’t there skin grafts?”  Wasn’t it red?

Jude shakes his head slowly, his mouth a little slack.

“Oh.”  I drop my hand.  My heart sinks.

“Kiddo.  What’s going on?”

“Nothing.  I mean—I imagined it, right?  It’s okay.  Nothing.”

Now he’s the one who looks unconvinced.

I stifle a sigh.  “This brain damage stuff,” I explain.  “Sometimes I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“You’re not,” he tells me.  “There’s only one sane person standing in this room.  It’s not me.”

Can’t help but smile at a proclamation like that.  “Sometimes,” I tell him, “you’re just nice.”

“Your crazy axe murderer of a brother?”

“I’m done trying to see things in black and white.”

Judas ruffles my hair when he walks past me.  What little hair I have, that is.  “Always preferred purple myself.”

5

Black-Eyed Susan

I’m running down glass hallways, rain beating outside the walls.  Nothing-flavored shadows chase after me.  Something wet, something putrid, catches under my shoes.  I stumble to my knees.  I’m covered in paint, gray-and-gray paint.  It smells like rain.

I know I can get out of here.  If I can just find the car, I can get out of here.

Someone left her smile in the paint on the floor.  I sift through paint carefully, my fingers dripping wet.  I feel myself shuddering.  Teeth.  Sharp.  They belong to a shark.  I scramble backwards.  I scramble away.  The shark is going to eat me alive.

—An engine guns, roaring, blazing to life—

—Glass shatters, piercing the silence, drowning out
screams—

—The alarm clock jolts me awake.  I sit up in bed, gasping for air.  I smack the clock with a numb hand, my eyes blurry with the aftertaste of nightmares.

School
, says the calendar at my side. 
Take your pills
, says the post-it note on top of it.

I down my meds with half a bottle of water.  I tear the post-it note off the calendar, crumpling it in my hand.

The smoke detector outside bleats loudly, piercing through my thoughts.

In Neon City pajamas, I leap out of bed.  I dash out the door, skidding in my socks.

I find Judas in the kitchen, cluelessly brandishing black pieces of bread.  He looks baffled, too, like he never heard of toast burning before.

He looks my way.  “You watch Neon City?”

I pull a dish towel out of the drawer.  I stand on a chair and wave the towel at the smoke alarm.  “Morning,” I grumble.

“Morning.”  He drops the ruined toast in the sink.

Later—but only
later
, when I’m dressed and awake and positive Judas won’t go anywhere near the appliances—I manage to laugh.  I pour cereal for the both of us while Judas sits down.

“You’re definitely Mom’s son,” I tell him.

He raises his head.  Suddenly he looks as I’ve never seen him.  Mouth sagging, eyes frozen, the only word that comes to mind is: devastated.

And then something occurs to me, something I should have realized months ago—

Mom and Dad weren’t just my Mom and Dad.  They were Jude’s Mom and Dad.

I put the cereal down.  Reluctantly, I put my hand on his shoulder.  His shoulders—why are they so big?  His shoulder dwarfs my palm.

“Christ,” Judas mutters; and then his face goes dim.

My mouth’s gone dry.  I swallow.  “They loved you,” I tell him.  And I know that’s true.  The way they hushed each other whenever his name came up in conversation—they were anguished hushes.  Regret.  You can’t regret someone’s absence if you didn’t love them once.

“You gonna be okay?” Judas says.  “While I’m at work?”

Changing the subject.  “I—sure.”  Why wouldn’t I be?  I’m only going to school, right?  “What are you doing for work, anyway?”

He doesn’t touch his tomato juice, even though it’s his favorite.  “Computers.”

Okay, somehow that’s terrifying.  But at least computers don’t spit out pieces of toast.

“Jude?”

“M’listening.”

“If you ever want to…you know…talk…”

Judas stares at me.  I can tell my words aren’t reaching him.  Boys don’t talk about their feelings, right?  Maybe there’s some truth to that.

“Never mind,” I tell him.  I stretch my mouth in a smile.  “I’ll clean up later.  If I keep Kory waiting…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Judas says.  “I’ll clean up.”

I squeeze Judas’ shoulder.  “Just don’t break the sink.”

Kory’s waiting for me when I walk down to the lobby.  He flips his glasses at me—why?—and smiles a goofy smile.  I smile back, comforted by his familiarity.  All the same, the juxtaposition
is clearer than ever.  He’s not Jocelyn.  He’s not wearing the latest boy band on his t-shirt.  He’s not grabbing my arm, gabbing in my ear.  All of this feels surreal; like I’ve stepped into somebody else’s life; like I’ve become another person.

“Want to hang out at the arcade after school?”  Kory follows me out the door.

“Maybe,” I hedge, smiling without confidence.  Video games aren’t really my…never mind.

We step out onto the street.  A wave of heat strikes me across the face, hidden though the sun is behind dirty gray clouds.  Just yesterday it was chilly, and raining.

Kory says the same thing.  “The planet’s going to shit,” he reports calmly.

“Really?” I ask, a little skittish.

“Our own horizon’s about to eclipse us.”  Kory ticks off his fingers while we walk.  “We’re pulling so much oil out of the earth’s crust, plate tectonics have no lubricant when it’s time for them to shift—so we get earthquakes and tsunamis instead.  Aquifers are drilling up groundwater at ten times the planet’s sustainability rate and our country’s still building 12,000 new wells every year.  We need 110 billion cubic meters of rain to replenish all the water we’ve sucked up, but we’re just not getting it.  Why?  The ozone layer.  There’s a hole in the ozone layer, and it’s ripping faster than it can repair itself.  Blame carbon emission.  Consequently there’s nothing protecting us from the sun.  Skin cancer skyrocketed 86% in the past decade alone.  If we shot chlorofluorocarbons into the thermosphere to eat up the pollutants, maybe sent somebody up there with a gigantic Tesla Coil, we could repair the depleted ozone, no problem.  But where are we going to get enough chlorofluorocarbons for
that
?  We could take the bromine from the ocean—but the Pacific Ocean’s already shrinking two inches every year.  We’re slowly being cooked to death.  Even so, the sun’s reached the halfway point in its lifespan.  The minute the sun dies, the planet freezes over.  Heat death—ice death—which one comes first?”

When he lays it all out like that, it sounds horrifying.  “This whole planet…”

“Not just the planet,” he says swiftly.  “The universe, too.  The Higgs boson’s mass is only 126 billion electron volts.  Oh, sure, that
sounds
big, but consider that this particle needs to give mass to more than five hundred billion galaxies…that we know of.  Our galaxy alone has an estimated seventeen billion planets and four hundred billion stars.  A single mother on minimum wage can’t feed a family of ten.”

“You don’t have much hope,” I say.  “Do you?”

“What’s the point?  In all likelihood there’ve been universes before this one.  Should a new Higgs boson come along, as physics indicates could very well happen, then there’ll be universes after this one.  We’re not even a blip on the radar of the collective spacetime manifold.”  Kory stops walking.  “Can you imagine how many billions of people might have lived before us?  And we can’t possibly cull any quantitative data on them?”

“I…”

I’ve never been very smart.  I’ve said it before:  Painting is my only talent.  So maybe it’s Kory’s grand scope of matters that’s left me flummoxed.  I don’t know what it is.  Whatever it is—there’s a ferocious headache building in the back of my skull.

Kory’s face slackens.  “Wendy?”

I grip the base of my skull in both hands.  I mutter an apology.

Kory digs around in his camouflage jacket.  “I’ve got fioricet.”

“No,” I tell him.  I can feel the perspiration on my hairline.  “I can’t take aspirin.”  Something about blood thinners.  Something about statins.

I feel sorry for Kory.  He looks so shocked, so guilty, like he’s killed me with his words.  Maybe that’s why he reaches around me and helps massage the back of my head.  I try not to stiffen when his fingers pass over my scars.

“We could talk about something else,” Kory suggests nervously.  “Uh…”  Poor guy.  “We could talk about Wooper Looper?”

If he starts to talk about Wooper Looper, I think he really
will
kill me.

* * * * *

The morning passes without event.  On occasion I keep a lookout for Azel; but even between classes, I don’t see him.  In a school as big as Cavalieri, I guess that’s to be expected.

Kory and I get
separated two periods before lunch.  Around lunchtime I take the elevator to the ground floor and follow the tunnel to the canteen.  We made plans to eat together.  Kory should be coming out of AP Physics right now, on the third floor.  In all likelihood, he’ll make it to the canteen before I do.

I step into the canteen.  I blink rapidly against the bauble lights glimmering on the creamy beige walls.  The service counter is so clean, it practically shines.  Warmth from the unseen kitchens suffuses the air.  It’s much more like stepping into a four-star restaurant than visiting a high school cafeteria.

Most students leave the campus at lunchtime, I guess because they can afford it; but even so, the checkered brown tables are filled to capacity.  I skim the hall twice for a sign of tawny hair.  The sea of heads dizzies me.  Question-filled glances flicker my way.  My stomach vaults.  I’m still the girl from the car wreck whose whole family, whose best friend died.  I don’t know how I let myself forget that.  I don’t know how, the little gilded swan dangling from my very not-scarred wrist.

Thud
, goes my head, disciplinary in its discourse. 
Thud.

I bolt through the canteen’s back door.  The door bangs shut behind me.  I emerge in the school’s courtyard, pavement under my feet, lawn benches scattered across the fresh grass.  I breathe in cool, sweet air and pretend it isn’t coming from vents in the towering glass walls.

It’s bright out here.  In here.  I don’t know what you’re supposed to call it when the outside is technically inside.  I crane my head back and drink in the sunlight refracted through the bulbous clerestory ceiling, panes of glazed glass overlapping like the sloped, ambivalent faces of a tired diamond.  It’s a gray sunlight, isn’t it?  Out here in The Spit, a blue sky’s as rare as a blue moon.  You want the blue sky, you go to Tillamook Bay.

I lived on Tillamook Bay.  I’ll never go back again.

I sit down on a plastic white bench.  A rusted little water fountain bubbles amid a tepid bed of Black-Eyed Susans.  A girl kneels among the flowers, watering them.

A pair of shadows falls over me.

Sarah Ayello and Monica Tandy are as thick as thieves.  I guess they have to be:  No one else really talks to them.  I’ve tried, before, but Monica’s only interest is cacti; and Sarah doesn’t know how to answer a question without a non sequitur.

I look at them,
Sarah with her widow’s peak and her flyaway hair, Monica with her sparkly barrettes and her vacant gaze.  They’re nothing like us; but still, I think of Joss and me, how we went everywhere together, how we spent all our nights on the phone with each other until one of our moms invariably yelled at us to hang up.

“We’re sorry for your loss,” Sarah says.  She sounds like a newborn fawn.

“Joss was really nice,” Monica chimes in, scratching nervously at her neck.

Joss wasn’t really nice.  Joss was flighty—and flakey—practically the official synonym for high maintenance.  If you took her someplace she’d never been before, she lost her head.  If you invited her to a party, she called a miniature press conference beforehand just to make sure no one else was wearing her outfit.

She was Joss.  Now she’s gone.

I smile through a surge of pain.  “Thanks.”

Sarah and Monica traipse away.  Monica takes Sarah’s arm.  Just watching them—it hurts.

I should probably go look for Kory.

I stand up.  I run my hand over my hair.  It’s so short, it doesn’t feel like it’s mine.

The charm bracelet doesn’t jingle next to my ear.  My wrist is uncomfortably light.

Horrified, I drop my hand, the hand that should be burned, the hand that should be wearing a swan.  The burn is gone.  The charm bracelet is gone.  I crouch on the pavement and search under the bench.  I pat the grass with my palms.  Panicking, I stand.

Okay.  Okay, that’s—I was still wearing it when I entered the canteen.  It has to be here somewhere.  It can only be in the courtyard or the canteen.

I flit back across the pavement, running.  I run through the swinging brown door.

My classmates are still at their tables, snacking on fruit cups and sipping their smoothies.  Only a few heads turn my way this time.  I scan the floor.  I don’t dare to blink.  Gleaming caramel tiles stare back at me, yieldless, disdainful.  My bracelet isn’t here.

It’s childish of me.  It’s just a bracelet.  I know that.  I’m lucky to have my life.  I don’t feel lucky, but I am.

It’s not just a bracelet.  It’s the last present my best friend will ever give to me.  It’s the sole relic left from my past life.  It’s the only way I can hold onto those better days.

I turn around.  I race back out into the courtyard.  Maybe it’s lying on the ground somewhere, maybe I missed it—

It’s not.  I didn’t.  I know it.

I sit down on the plastic white bench.  Shoulders shaking, I bury my face in my hands.  I can feel the tears warming my fingers, the breath catching in the back of my throat.  I’m such an idiot.