Gid spins around for a little while, then falls down again and signs OK.
“C’mere, you.” Noah hauls Gideon onto his back and smiles at Melinda. “We’ve got him.”
This finally hits me. “Yeah, and what are you going to do with Gideon while you’re with Melinda?”
“Cover his eyes.”
“Oh, ha ha,” I call to their backs.
Claudia and Shannon want to ride the log flume, so we walk across the park, crunching the gravel beneath our sandals. Every few steps Bella will look at me and smile. Whenever a girl from school is nice to me like this, I’m always tripping over myself figuring out how far I’m going to try to get with her and freezing up before I can do anything. But here, I have this feeling that I can’t screw this up, and there’s no point in planning anything, because what’s going to happen is going to happen. It’s as predictable as the carousel.
She doesn’t want to get splashed, so we stand under the pavilion while Shannon and Claude get in line. Bella’s wearing a pink skirt, and the breeze sometimes hitches it above her knees. Her legs are starting to tan, or maybe it’s that brown lotion girls use to pretend. Either way, I like it even more than I would have expected.
“Really nice night, isn’t it?” she says.
“Mmm-hmm.”
She revolves, looking at the lights from the Ferris wheel bouncing off the water for the paddleboats. “I love it here.”
“I love everywhere here.” I rub the back of my neck. “I seriously wish we could live here, even in the off-season. Like, even when it’s cold, this has got to be good.”
“We come down in the fall and winter sometimes. I almost like it better. No people around, everything so gray . . . It feels really old. Like you’re looking at this town a hundred years ago.”
“When our forefathers ran around barefoot.”
She smiles at me. “Exactly.”
There’s no one else under the pavilion, and with the amusement park bouncing off Bella’s eyes and the dusty pink of her skirt, I can almost pretend we are a hundred years old and we know everything. When, really, the only thing I know is that I’m going to kiss her, but I’m not going to try anything more. And she’s smiling because she knows it too.
It’s not really that we’re old so much as we’ve existed forever. We’re in a black-and-white photo. The only color comes from the Ferris wheel lights and her skirt.
We’re eternalized in the film. Forever kids. We are our forefathers today.
I kiss her, and her mouth tastes like wax and peppermint.
It’s not my first kiss, but it feels like it. Like I’m watching a movie of my first.
She pulls back, laughing. “Chase, you bit my lip.”
Or a blooper reel. “I did? Sorry.”
She giggles and turns, and I smell the powder on her cheek. I want to kiss her. I want to bake cookies with her. I want to watch her put on her makeup like I got to watch Claudia.
“Look.” She points to the top of the flume. “They’re going down.”
“Shannon looks terrified.”
“He’s just hoping Claudia will hold his hand.”
We watch Claudia and Shannon take the plunge, and I wrap my fingers around Bella’s palm.
“Chase.”
I look up from Camus. “Shh shh shh.” I jerk my head to Noah, crashed on top of his covers, shoes still on. “He’s asleep. And still, for once.” Noah’s always waking me up by thrashing around when he’s sleeping. It’s the worst.
Claudia tilts from one foot to the other, doing the same little dance that Gideon does. I close the paperback and say, “You’re supposed to be asleep, beautiful.”
“Mom and Dad are fighting.”
“Come on. Don’t let that worry you.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
I scoot over on my bed and she sits down, her nightgown pooling around her knees. She’s washed all the makeup off and she got sunburned today, so she looks like my little sister again. It’s something about winters and nighttimes that makes me remember how young Claudia is. It’s when she’s quiet. Her voice is old; she’s always confused for our mother on the phone.
“Is this Camus stuff really any good?” she asks.
“He definitely knew his summers.” I flip to one of my dog-eared pages. “‘Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.’”
She stares at me. “You can’t sleep with your eyes open.”
“You are so literal, Claude. Come on. Remember . . . you’ve got to remember. When Gid was still a baby, and Dad used to take me, you, and Noah and set us up on deck chairs on the balcony at night? Wrap us all up in sleeping bags and tell us stories? And we’d hear the waves come in and it would always be too bright to sleep—”
“Because of the stars?”
“Well, because Mom had all the lights on inside, walking Gideon up and down the hall so he’d shut up, but . . . yeah. The stars, too.”
Claudia sticks her head out my window. “I mean, I don’t know if they’re dripping exactly.”
“The sky’s dripping.”
She doesn’t speak for a minute, then says, “Oh.”
I tuck her under my arm and hold her for a while. She says, “I don’t really remember.”
“Well. You were young.”
“Don’t remember before Gideon.” She smiles. “Was I alive then?”
“I assure you that you were.”
“Your birthday’s in two days.”
“Oh, really? I didn’t know.”
She sticks out her tongue.
“Go back to bed,” I say. “Gideon will feel you walking around and get all upset.” Gid can tell the vibrations of our footsteps apart, and if he wakes up and realizes Claudia isn’t in bed where she’s supposed to be he is going to freak out. He hates when he wakes up and people aren’t where they’re supposed to be. Before he goes to bed every night, he takes an inventory of where we are, and if we drift, we have to be so quiet.
She kisses my cheek. “Night, Chase.”
“Night.”
“‘No love without a little innocence,’” Noah says, completely still.
“I thought you were asleep. You’re so creepy.”
He shrugs. “So how was your lovely innocent night?”
“I kissed her.”
“What a man.” But he says it warmly. “How was it?”
My first thought is to relate it to soft-serve ice cream, but I can already hear Noah laughing at that. “It was nice.”
“God. God, really, it was nice?” He sounds so earnest that I think for a minute that he’s making fun of me. He props himself up on an elbow. “God, I fucking miss when kisses were nice. I’m so jealous of people young enough to still have nice kisses.”
“Wait, kissing isn’t nice anymore?”
“No. It’s foreplay. Trust me, you get old enough, and everything is foreplay. Kissing is foreplay. Talking is foreplay. Holding hands is foreplay. I swear to God, Chase, I think at this point, sex would be foreplay.”
This would probably be a good time to ask if he and Melinda have really slept together, but I can’t make myself say the words. So I just say, “That doesn’t even make sense.”
“Sex is a to-do list where nothing gets crossed out.”
I find the passage Melinda quoted in my Camus book. “‘No love without a little innocence. Where was the innocence? Empires were tumbling down; nations and men were tearing at one another’s throats; our hands were soiled. Originally innocent without knowing it, we were now guilty without meaning to be: the mystery was increasing our knowledge. This is why, O mockery, we were concerned with morality. Weak and disabled, I was dreaming of virtue!’”
Noah looks at me and coughs, his eyebrows up in his bangs.
“What?” I say.
With a straight face, he recites, “‘I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.’”
&nbs
p; “Come on. It’s foreplay? Seriously?”
“You’re too young.” He flops backward. “You wouldn’t understand. You are a fetus in a world of Camus and spermicidal lubricant.”
“And you’re an asshole.”
“I’m just cynical. And you have no idea how far that’s going to take me.”
“Neither do you.”
“Au contraire, little brother. I know exactly how this college game works. I will arrive, the dark horse in a band of mushy-hearted freshmen. College will pee itself in terror of my disenfranchised soul.”
I roll my eyes. “Beautiful.”
“Look. Listen to my words of wisdom. College’s only role these days, for an upper-middle-class kid going in for a fucking liberal arts degree, is very simple. Do you know what that is?”
“A diploma. A good job. Yay.”
“No. College exists only because it thrives on the hopes and dreams of the young and innocent. College is a hungry zombie here to eat your brains. It wants to remind you that your naivete is impermanent and someday, English major or no, you’ll wear a suit and hate the feeling of sand between your toes.”
It’s not going to happen to me.
Noah continues, in a low mutter, “Like that’s not already forced into our heads every single fucking minute of every winter.”
“So you’re, like, essentially already educated, just because you’re an asshole?”
“Because I’ve resigned myself to my fate, yeah. I’ve precolleged myself. I’m rocking the institution, entering it already all disillusioned and shit. I’m going to single-handedly change the world of higher education.”
I clear my throat. “‘I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.’”
“Go to sleep. Asshole.”
I never have a hard time falling asleep, but I do tonight. It takes a while of thinking of Bella’s lips before I drift off.
“Written with depth and heart and a quirky sweetness that I just adore. These are characters I will never forget.”
—AMY REED, author of BEAUTIFUL, CLEAN, and CRAZY
From
GONE, GONE, GONE
I WAKE UP TO A QUIET WORLD.
There’s this stillness so strong that I can feel it in the hairs on the backs of my arms, and I can right away tell that this quiet is the sound of a million things and fourteen bodies not here and one boy breathing alone.
I open my eyes.
I can’t believe I slept.
I sit up and swing my feet to the floor. I’m wearing my shoes, and I’m staring at them like I don’t recognize them, but they’re the shoes I wear all the time, these black canvas high-tops from Target. My mom bought them for me. I have that kind of mom.
I can feel how cold the tile is. I can feel it through my shoes.
I make kissing noises with my mouth. Nothing answers. My brain is telling me, my brain has been telling me for every single second since I woke up, exactly what is different, but I am not going to think it, I won’t think it, because they’re all just hiding or upstairs. They’re not gone. The only thing in the whole world I am looking at is my shoes, because everything else is exactly how it’s supposed to be, because they’re not gone.
But this, this is wrong. That I’m wearing shoes. That I slept in my shoes. I think it says something about you when you don’t even untie your shoes to try to go to bed. I think it’s a dead giveaway that you are a zombie. If there is a line between zombie and garden-variety insomniac, that line is a shoelace.
I got the word “zombie” from my brother Todd. He calls me “zombie,” sometimes, when he comes home from work at three in the morning—Todd is so old, old enough to work night shifts and drink coffee without sugar—and comes down to the basement to check on me. He walks slowly, one hand on the banister, a page of the newspaper crinkling in his hand. He won’t flick on the light, just in case I’m asleep, and there I am, I’m on the couch, a cat on each of my shoulders and a man with a small penis on the TV telling me how he became a man with a big penis, and I can too. “Zombie,” Todd will say softly, a hand on top of my head. “Go to sleep.”
Todd has this way of being affectionate that I see but usually don’t feel.
I say, “Someday I might need this.”
“The penis product?”
“Yes.” Maybe not. I think my glory days are behind me. I am fifteen years old, and all I have is the vague hope that, someday, someone somewhere will once again care about my penis and whether it is big or small.
The cats don’t care. Neither do my four dogs, my three rabbits, my guinea pig, or even the bird I call Flamingo because he stands on one leg when he drinks, even though that isn’t his real name, which is Fernando.
They don’t care. And even if they did, they’re not here. I can’t avoid that fact any longer.
I am the vaguest of vague hopes of a deflated heart.
I look around the basement, where I sleep now. My alarm goes off, even though I’m already up. The animals should be scuffling around now that they hear I’m awake, mewing, rubbing against my legs, and whining for food. This morning, the alarm is set for five thirty for school, and my bedroom is a silent, frozen meat locker because the animals are gone.
Here’s what happened, my parents explain, weary over cups of coffee, cops come and gone, all while I was asleep.
What happened is that I slept.
I slept through a break-in and a break-out, but I couldn’t sleep through the quiet afterward. This has to be a metaphor for something, but I can’t think, it’s too quiet.
Broken window, jimmied locks. They took the upstairs TV and parts of the stereo. They left all the doors open. The house is as cold as October. The animals are gone.
It was a freak accident. Freak things happen. I should be used to that by now. Freaks freaks freaks.
Todd was the one to come home and discover the damage. My parents slept through it too. This house is too big.
I say, “But the break-in must have been hours ago.”
My mother nods a bit.
I say, “Why didn’t I wake up as soon as the animals escaped?”
My mom doesn’t understand what I’m talking about, but this isn’t making sense to me. None of it is. Break-ins aren’t supposed to happen to us. We live in a nice neighborhood in a nice suburb. They’re supposed to happen to other people. I am supposed to be so tied to the happiness and the comfort of those animals that I can’t sleep until every single one is fed, cleaned, hugged. Maybe if I find enough flaws in this, I can make it so it never happened.
This couldn’t have happened.
At night, Sandwich and Carolina and Zebra sleep down at my feet. Flamingo goes quiet as soon as I put a sheet over his cage. Peggy snuggles in between my arm and my body. Caramel won’t settle down until he’s tried and failed, at least four or five times, to fall asleep right on my face. Shamrock always sleeps on the couch downstairs, no matter how many times I try to settle him on the bed with me, and Marigold has a spot under the window that she really likes, but sometimes she sleeps in her kennel instead, and I can never find Michelangelo in the morning and it always scares me, but he always turns up in my laundry basket or in the box with my tapes or under the bed, or sometimes he sneaks upstairs and sleeps with Todd, and the five others sleep all on top of each other in the corner on top of the extra comforter, but I checked all of those places this morning—every single one—and they’re all gone, gone, gone.
Mom always tried to open windows because of the smell, but I’d stop her because I was afraid they would escape. Every day I breathe in feathers and dander and urine so they will not escape.
My mother sometimes curls her hand into a loose fist and presses her knuckles against my cheek. When she does, I smell her lotion, always lemongrass. Todd will do something similar, but it feels different, more urgent, when he does.
The animals. They were with me when I fell asleep last night. I didn’t notice I was sleeping in
my shoes, and I didn’t notice when they left.
This is why I need more sleep. This is how things slip through my fingers.
My head is spinning with fourteen names I didn’t protect.
“We’ll find them, Craig,” Mom says, with a hand on the back of my head. “They were probably just scared from the noise. They’ll come back.”
“They should have stayed in the basement,” I whisper. “Why did they run away?”
Why were a few open doors enough incentive for them to leave?
I shouldn’t have fallen asleep. I suck.
“We’ll put up posters, Craig, okay?” Mom says. Like she doesn’t have enough to worry about and people to call—insurance companies, someone to fix the window, and her mother to assure her that being this close to D.C. really doesn’t mean we’re going to die. It’s been thirteen months, almost, since the terrorist attacks, and we’re still convinced that any mishap means someone will steer a plane into one of our buildings.
We don’t say that out loud.
Usually this time in the morning, I take all the different kinds of food and I fill all the bowls. They come running, tripping over themselves, rubbing against me, nipping my face and my hands like I am the food, like I just poured myself into a bowl and offered myself to them. Then I clean the litter boxes and the cages and take the dogs out for a walk. I can do this all really, really quickly, after a year of practice.
Mom helps, usually, and sometimes I hear her counting under her breath, or staring at one of the animals, trying to figure out if one is new—sometimes yes, sometimes no.
The deal Mom and I have is no new animals. The deal is I don’t have to give them away, I don’t have to see a therapist, but I can’t have any more animals. I don’t want a therapist because therapists are stupid, and I am not crazy.
And the truth is it’s not my fault. The animals find me. A kitten behind a Dumpster, a rabbit the girl at school can’t keep. A dog too old for anyone to want. I just hope they find me again now that they’re gone.
Part of the deal was also that Mom got to name a few of the newer ones, which is how I ended up with a few with really girly names.