Authors: Abbott,Megan
You Will Know Me (23 page)
“Drew, are you there? What's all the noise? Are you outside?”
“Yeah,” his voice came, “I can see you.”
“What?” Her foot on the brakes, her eyes searched the road frantically.
“I can see you by the tall trees.”
And there he was, tramping up the low hill in front of her, his hood pulled tight, phone against his pink-thick face.
He was breathing hard into the phone, pressed so close.
I'm hearing my own blood
, she thought, running out of the car.
It's roaring.
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“Don't be mad, Mom,” he kept saying. “It's only nine blocks, just like you said.”
“Drew, that doesn't matter,” she said, hands on his arms, her chest jerking. “You could've been run over. You couldâ”
“But I had to tell you.”
“Tell me what?”
“Dad called.”
“Why couldn't you call or wait until I got back?”
“You were gone a long time.”
“I wasn't gone a long time.”
“You were gone for eighty minutes.”
Eighty minutes
. “Drew, something happened andâ”
“And Dad called twice and said he was at Devon's school. He sounded really weird. I never heard him sound like that.”
She looked at him.
“Drew, what did Dad say to you exactly?”
“He said they wouldn't let him take Devon out of school and that it was your fault. And he wanted to know where you were.”
“Okay,” she said. “Okay.”
“I said you were in the shower. But then you were away so long I thought he might call back. Or something.” He looked at her, a worried, almost paternal furrow in his brow. “So I thought I'd better find you.”
She looked at him and thought her heart might burst.
“Mom,” he said as she pulled him close, pressed him against her chest, the smell of Chloraseptic and panic, “are you okay?”
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The corridors were empty, but all the classroom doors were open, the June heat filling the old high school and stray sounds wafting, the chant of French verb conjugations, the squeak of moving chairs, one student's lone protestation,
I'm so hot, Mr. Manear. Can we have class outside?
Drew kept wandering from her, staring up at the display cabinets, the team banners, the signsâ
Stay Strong, Jay Chong!
and
Seniors: Take the Pledge Today!
âall so mysterious to Katie, who hadn't been inside the school since parent-teacher conferences months ago.
“Devon,” Drew said, and she turned quickly.
But he was only pointing to a bulletin board:
Tenth-Grade Writing Contest: “Dreams, Wishes, Goals.”
Beneath it were the top three essays, and Devon's was number one. Always number one.
Katie walked closer. She'd never seen the essay and Devon hadn't said anything about the contest.
She started reading it, her eyes moving so fast the words seemed to smear.
I have never had any desire to be ordinary, or normal. But to be extraordinary, one must learn to conquer weakness.
I was three years old when I first set foot on the gymnastics beam.
“You were fearless,” my parents tell me. They believed in me from the start.
I was seven when I got my first rip, a flap of skin the size of a nickel torn from the center of my palm. I knew what it was. All gymnasts get them, from the friction of your hands on the bars all day long.
And I rubbed chalk on it and went straight back to the bars.
Same with the jammed fingers, the wrist sprains, the hamstring that cost me a year.
All those years, all that work, I can't believe I never got broken.
Now I am almost sixteen and I have known fear, and failure.
Two years ago, I had my crisis point. I faced a difficult vault. No, I did not fall. But I did fail. And it was because I was afraid and I was weak. I didn't want it enough. Or I was afraid to want something so completely, as completely as my coach did, my parents do. They want everything for me.
So, for many months, I became a slave to my weakness. I was afraid of falling. Of landing on my neck, my head. Of my bones breaking like wishbones. But most of all, of failing.
I lived with that fear, saw it in the faces of others as they watched how close I came. To falling. To losing. The greatest of all fears and the one that can destroy you.
My dad tried to fix it. He built me a landing pit, and he worked very hard to show me how important it was.
But the day the pit was finished, I was afraid again. More afraid than ever.
“What if I don't want it enough,” I asked my dad.
He looked at me. “Devon, I promise you do. It's the reason you're here. This,” he said, pointing to the vault, “is why you're here.”
He was right. Because my vault was perfect, I was fixed, and everyone loved me again.
I learned that day that I must trample fear and I must own my desire. To be extraordinary.
It has been hard. I had to learn how to go inside myself. Places no one could touch, or see.
But I can say today that I am no longer afraid. I have learned to make fear my slave. Whenever I confront my own weaknesses, I look in the mirror and say, “You have taken things from me. You will take nothing more.”
Now it is only desire that rules me. Desire to win, yes, but also to be the best. To be extraordinary.
It was like a picture of your life from an angle you'd never seen before. And Katie didn't know what to do with it, one hand pressing the paper, her other hand on her mouth.
Then she saw it. Across the bottom of the page, scrawled in giant diagonal letters and paper-tearing tugs, was a word:
Freak!!!!
Underneath, someone had drawn a cartoon, lurid and X-rated, a girl whose head dwarfed her little naked body, doing a split, her hairless crotch exposed.
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“She's in her history class right now,” said the principal, an earnest-jawed man named Mr. Waltham whom Katie had never met. “Room one twelve, if you'd like to check.”
“I'm sorry about all this,” Katie said. “My husband is having some medical issues.”
“He seemed very upset,” said the principal, who seemed upset himself. “He seemed to believe we were being deliberately obstructive.”
His gaze falling, nervously, to Drew's pink, gummy face, the way he kept scratching at his scaly skin.
“It's the medication talking. I'm very grateful,” Katie said, grabbing Drew's hand. “I won't bother you again.”
“We don't see too much of you two here,” Mr. Waltham said, hoisting a smile. “We'd been hoping to recruit Mr. Knox for the PTA, get himâboth of youâinvolved more in school activities. I understand he's a very successful fund-raiserâ”
“Absolutely, Mr. Waltham. I promise.”
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She moved with purpose through the musty halls, Drew's hand, his delicate peeling fingers, in hers past all the classrooms until she found the right one.
Seated in the far corner by the window was Devon. Pencil in hand, her warm-up jacket's sleeves creeping over her gnarled gymnast hands, as if she wanted to hide them. Hair pulled into a bun hard as a walnut.
It had been a while, more than a while, since she'd seen Devon among so many other girls her age. Non-gym girls. But, whether thick-bodied or willowy, round-shouldered or all elbows and knees, whether with cat's-eye glasses and braces, or thickly eyelinered and greasy-foreheaded, or donning Day-Glo nail polish and a do-rag, they all looked so much more like one another than like Devon.
None of them looked anything like Devon.
When had they all developed these bodies, whether hard little tennis balls or absurdly luxuriant breasts stretched beneath straining T-shirts? And hips, hips that seemed to sway and undulate even when they shifted in their seats, stretching across revealing ample, fleshy waists and downy hair.
They were women, or close enough.
And a few feet apart from them, in her quiet corner, her pencil moving, her eyes on the teacher, on the whiteboard, on something, sat her tiny, herculean daughter, stallion thighs stretched against the denim of her jeans, her face elfin and small. Her feet, misshapen and scarred, hidden in her softest pair of sneakers. Nearly sixteen. Fearless. Extraordinary. Like no one else. Only like herself. Whoever that was.
Isn't it a strange day
, Helen Beck had said,
when you realize you have no idea what's going on in your kid's head? One morning, you wake up and there's this alien in your house. They look like your kid, sound a little like them, but they are
not
your kid. They're something else that you don't know.
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The bell rang, the door pushed open, and Katie retreated quickly into the crowd.
Book bag swung over her shoulder, all the boys, most of the girls towering over her, Devon hurried out to her next class.
“Hey, Baby Gap,” one jug-jawed boy called out, “can you carry my bag too?”
“But look at those thighs,” another added, grinning, his teeth monstrous. “Wrap those thighs around my cock, Baby Gap.”
“Watch out for her toes. They look like nutcrackers to me.”
“I'd let her work my beam any day, but what do you hold on to except biceps?”
Devon walking, and walking, never turning her head.
*Â Â *Â Â *
Back in the car, Drew didn't ask what was going on with his dad, what had happened at the Belfours', why the police had come to the house.
It was as if he knew she wouldn't be able to answer, the noise in her head so loud.
They were driving on Sparrows Way when she noticed the turnoff, spotted the flutter of yellow tape through the trees.
Ash Road
.
“That's the spot,” Drew said, as if reading her mind.
“Yes.” She decided in an instant, turning the wheel hard, the gears gnashing. “It is.”
But the minute her tires landed on Ash Road's soft asphalt she regretted it.
“Except the picture's from the other side,” Drew said.
“What picture?” she asked, but something began sliding into place in her head.
“Ryan's picture.”
Pulling the car onto the road shoulder, she stopped the engine, hand shaking on keys.
“The one on his refrigerator,” she said, realizing it. The snapshot taped to Ryan's fridge door. A blur of greenery, the swampy colors of a cheap printer. “This is the place.”
“Yeah,” Drew said, almost a sigh.
Looking at him, a revelation felt close, just beyond her grasp.
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The yellow tape twisted, held pockets of dew, rain.
“Drew, go back in the car, okay?”
Arrayed on the dirt road, spilling onto the shoulder, were a series of small fluorescent flags, mud-splattered, bending in the wind.
Each flag had a number, marking something. Maybe a gouge in the dirt, glass fragments, a heel print. They looked so festive, like miniature versions of the scoring flags judges flashed at meets, or the parade of flags at the Olympics.
A few cars sped by, jolting her as she walked along the shoulder, the dirt beneath her, dusting up the sides of her shoes.
Hairpin turn.
That's what everyone always said, but it was just a sharp one, and not blind at all.
Her sneakers, half untied like a sloppy teenager's, slid on the shoulder, the dirt sandy, almost like silk. The edge was so steep you could imagine at night, with streetlamps several spans away, getting turned around, getting lost inside yourself.
Off the shoulder, there was a drop, and a shallow ditch heavy with old rain, filmy pools of motor oil floating on top. One lone flag lay flat in the water, spinning like a propeller, like those whirlybird seeds that fell from the maples.
This was where Ryan fell. His body knocked, hurled, jettisoned.
There were no skid marks on the road
, the reporter said.
Whoever the driver was, he never even set his foot on the brake.
The silver car never stopped.
The shallow ravine looked scraped clean, long rake grooves thatched across, combed for evidence, for glass, for paint. As the slope cantered down, it was like the earth folded up upon itself, a green swoop, a pelt of foliage at its center.
Even though it was daylight, just shy of noon, it was the darkest place she'd ever seen, a cut in the earth.
I saw one of his shoes.
That was what Eric had said, nearly asleep and holding her arm, stroking it, the night after they heard the news, after he'd been to Ash Road.
She thought about Ryan's shoe tumbling down, one lace spinning like a whirligig.
I saw it,
Eric had told her. His voice mournful, lost.
Now the words sounded different. Meant something different.
I saw it
. Because he was there when it happened.
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“Why did Ryan have a picture of the place he died right on his refrigerator?” Drew said, standing next to the car.
Katie didn't say anything for a moment.
“Maybe it was his favorite place to walk,” she tried, finally.
Drew looked around doubtfully.
“Maybe if you didn't want anyone to see you,” Katie said, thinking.
“Maybe.”
“Or something else.”
A meeting place, a lovers' rendezvous point.
One that sentimental Ryan kept a photo of on his refrigerator door.
Now Katie could see it.
There's a hundred ways sex can ruin you.
That was Eric's doomful warning to Devon.
Amid the balloons and banners of Lacey Weaver's party, had Devon gotten a call, a text, not from Hailey but from Ryan? Ryan saying,
Let's meet at our spot. I don't have my car. But I'll be waiting.
Meet me at the turn in Ash Road. You know the spot.
