A Map of the Known World

  Oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh. What did I just do?

  I did it. My blood feels like it has frozen in my veins. I signed my mother’s name. I forged her signature. Now my hands won’t stop shaking. I have never done something like this before. I’ve never even imagined doing something like this before.

  One part of me is horrified, the other part is exhilarated. I feel free, independent—grown up. She can’t tell me what to do, nor can she stop me from doing what I want to do. When it’s time to buy my ticket, I will walk to the bank and get a cashier’s check, drawn from the savings account flush with the money my grandparents have sent me over the past fourteen birthdays.

  Wow. I can get away with this. I am really going to London. I shiver with excitement. And nausea. This is a lie bigger, so much bigger, than any I’ve ever told before. I shake my head, as if to clear it of dust. I should feel glad that I did this. Empowered. But, I have to admit, it feels—I feel—kind of awful. My parents will be so sad when they discover I’ve left. Left without a word and without a warning.

  Now, I just need a stamp. How much is it to send an envelope to London? I wonder. Silently, I wend my way to the door and into the dark hallway. I need a stamp, and there’s only one place to find stamps in this house. My dad’s study. I start off down the hall, pausing to listen for any noises, but I don’t hear a thing. Maybe they’ve gone to bed. When I’m in front of my dad’s study, I halt and press my ear to the door. Not a sound escapes. Slowly, I turn the knob and nudge the door open.

  “Cora?” comes a weak voice.

  My heart sinks into my stomach. “Dad?” I whisper hesitantly. What do I do? Should I turn around and return to my room? Do I make up a story for why I need the stamps?

  “Come on in, Cor,” he says. His voice is so soft, so low, I can barely hear him.

  “What’s up?” I ask warily, thinking maybe I can make him forget that I am the one breaking into his study.

  “What are you up to?” he inquires gently.

  “I just…I was just looking for a stamp. I wanted to send a letter to—uh—to Auntie Janie,” I lie. She’s the only sibling of either of my parents who moved out of state.

  “Oh, well, stamps are in the top drawer,” he says, indicating the oak desk that fills up part of the room. “You know.”

  “Yeah, um, thanks,” I say as I start toward the huge, old, hulking desk.

  Quickly, surreptitiously, I peel off a stamp and stick it to the palm of my hand.

  “I heard about your little project.”

  Dad’s voice, scratchy, as if from disuse, catches me off guard, makes me catch my breath. Does he suspect that I’ve forged Mom’s signature on the permission form? Does he know what I’m doing? In more than ten months, he hasn’t shown an iota of interest or concern for what I’m doing. What is with the questions all of a sudden?

  I stare at him. I am sure my mouth is hanging open. “Huh?” I gurgle ungracefully.

  “You’re having an art show of some sort?”

  My heart stops racing, but now my head is spinning. A father who pays attention…foreign concept. And how did he find out?

  “It’s no big deal,” I tell him.

  “Your mother seemed to think it was,” he says. “She told me you had found some artwork by Nate and were going to show it.” From the dark recess of his chair in the corner, his eyes seem to gleam in the lamplight as the rest of his face is eaten by shadow.

  “Yeah, I guess,” I reply tersely. How did my mom learn about it? Did Mrs. Brown call her? Traitor.

  Maybe Dad is exasperated with my short answers, but a rumbling sigh comes from his direction, and he doesn’t say anything more. I watch as my father brings his hands together as if in prayer, and he rests his chin on the steeple of his fingers. “When?” he asks simply.

  “What do you care?” I shoot back at him, then spin around and stagger out the door.

  “Cora!” he calls. Loudly. In that I’m your father, don’t get fresh with me kind of tone that I haven’t heard in almost a year. “Come back here.”

  It isn’t a quavering question or a whisper. It’s a command, and it has taken me by surprise, so that my feet seem to turn of their own accord and march me back into the study. I stand in the doorway with my hands behind my back, fingers twisting and knotting and kneading themselves anxiously. I cock my head and brace myself, as if waiting for some kind of blow.

  “I know I left you alone. I know that I haven’t been there, since…” His voice trails off. Then he leans forward and clears his throat with a sharp cough that seems to cut through the charged air. “Since Nate died,” he continues, “and I’m sorry for that.” It is as if he has used up the last of his strength saying this to me, and he falls back into the cushions of his armchair and is enveloped by the evening gloom once more.

  I’m reeling, stunned. I had never expected this. An admission. An apology. I don’t know what to say to him. One “I’m sorry” is not enough. Will never be enough to make up for all those months of silence. My mouth opens and closes once like a fish, then I leave, closing the door with a quiet click.

  Between my mother not speaking to me and my father’s renewed interest, I feel like I’m trapped in an insane asylum. Or a fun house, where everything known is suddenly the unknown or the unusual. I wonder what they talk about, Mom and Dad, when they’re by themselves. Clearly they do talk. More important, they know about the art show. Will Mom try to stop me? Ha, well, she can try.

  I never managed to get those clamshells for my map, and there is still a gaping hole in the center. Now this house, this real house, feels even more fractured and foreign. Then I realize, smacking my forehead with a great “Aha!”, how to build this.

  In Nate’s bedroom, there is a tiny mirror with a seashell frame around it that my grandparents had brought back from a trip to Florida many years ago. That’s it. I move back up the hall to Nate’s room. I open the door; there is no need for hesitation anymore. I know what lies inside, now.

  Yet, when I enter the room, a rush of cold air seems to wrap itself around my very bones and marrow; a chill envelopes me.

  “Nate?” I whisper. “Are you here?”

  I wait.

  Nothing.

  Wait some more.

  Still nothing.

  I move over to his bed and perch myself at the edge of the mattress. Another freezing draft slinks into the room like a cat, wrapping itself around my arms and shoulders. I swing my head wildly about, and then I spot, just behind the bed where I’m sitting, a small crack in the window. I reach out my hand and graze the triangular shard with my fingertips. It wiggles. Gently, I prod the loose piece out of the pane. Now there is a hole in the glass, roughly the shape of Michigan. Cold air whistles into the room. I heave a sigh—no ghosts here. The splinter of glass rests heavily on my palm. Carefully, so as not to cut myself, I bring the glass up to my eye and look through it. A cloud of frosty crystals prevents me from seeing clearly, but as I peer through the sparkling haziness of the glass, it’s like looking into a dream.

  I wonder what my dad is thinking about right now, if he’s feeling sorry for himself or sorry for the way he messed up everything. Sorry for me. I wonder if he knows about London, if my mother told him she’d forbidden me to go. Probably not.

  A year ago, he’d have looked at this broken window and roared about how the heat he was paying for was escaping from the house, and how did this window break, blah blah blah. Now, I bet he’d just shrug his shoulders and shuffle back to his chair.

  I can use this piece of glass. I pocket it and then, rustling through the drawer of Nate’s bedside table, I find the mirror with the seashell frame, and slip out of the room.

  When I’m back in the safety of my own bedroom, I take a long piece of cardboard out from under my bed—my dad gave it to me once to use as a hard surface when I used to draw on loose sheets of construction paper. Gently, I place the shard of glass and the mirror on the cardboard. Then I set about fiddling with the mirror
, trying to pry it loose from its frame. It seems to have been glued together. I grab a palette knife from my desk and wedge it between the mirror and the frame and begin to pull it apart. In the wiggling process, seashells start dropping off the frame, because the glue is old and dried out, I guess, onto the cardboard. Maybe, I think, I can just pull off all the shells instead. They come off easily, and soon I have a pile of tiny shells. Then, I bring my tennis racket out of my closet and rest the butt of the handle on the mirror and press. The mirror pops and shatters into a dozen jagged pieces. I shift the racket over to the piece of glass from the window and do the same.

  Using tweezers to pick them up, I begin to glue the pieces of glass and slivers of mirror and seashells to each other, until I have cobbled together what looks like a miniscule house. There is a peaked roof and even a little chimney. The base of the house is glued to the cardboard, and so I cut away the excess cardboard, leaving a small square beneath the house as a base. I can mount this onto my map. The final, missing piece.

  I clean up, taking care to pick up any extraneous shards of glass, then wipe my hands on my jeans and grab the now-stamped envelope with the permission form off my desk, and head out to the mailbox. As I pass through the garage and slowly weave my way between my parents’ cars, I remember Damian telling me, all those weeks ago, when the acceptance letter first arrived, not to do this, not to do something stupid that I would regret. To talk to him about it first. But I know that if I don’t mail this letter right now, I’ll lose my courage. I’ll wimp out. Besides, it’s Friday night, and I can’t even see my boyfriend (if that’s what he is), which just goes to show that I’m a prisoner, and this is the only course of action open to me.

  So, I suck in a deep breath and jog down the length of the driveway to the mailbox. It’s Friday night, so Joe, the mailman, should pick this up early tomorrow afternoon. I open the mailbox, pop the envelope inside, and lift the red flag. That’s it. Done is done.

  When morning comes, I feel like I am going to bounce off the walls of my bedroom. I jump out of bed and look out my window to the mailbox. The flag is still up. I check my clock. It’s only 8:30; Joe won’t get here for at least another four or five hours. I sigh and flop back down on my bed. Then a terrible thought occurs to me. What if my parents have to mail something—a letter or a bill?

  I dig out my slippers from underneath the disheveled piles of drawings and books and discarded clothing, and run downstairs. There are no envelopes in the BILLS AND LETTERS AND THINGS pouch in the kitchen. I think I’m safe.

  “Are you looking for something, Cora?” My mother’s deadened voice startles me.

  “Oh, Mom, hi.” I fumble for something to say. “Um, no, just wanted a glass of juice,” I tell her.

  “Okay,” she replies, “help yourself.”

  I pull a glass down from the cupboard and pour myself some orange juice. Before, we used to have fresh-squeezed juice on the weekends. My dad would pick up oranges from the grocery store on his way home from work Friday evenings, then my mom would squeeze the juice when she got up. It was the first thing she’d do, after switching on the coffee machine. But that tradition went out with The Accident, too.

  I bring my glass over to the table and study my mom, sitting there in her ratty pink terry-cloth bathrobe. She looks exhausted. There are dark circles under her eyes, and her hair hangs in strings around her face. She is clutching her coffee mug as though it were a lifeline.

  “Are you—are you okay, Mom?” I ask.

  “No, Cor,” she says, looking at me earnestly, “I don’t think I am.” She picks up her mug and pushes out her chair, then gets up and wanders into her sewing room.

  I feel a tug in my chest, a tiny burning pull. I am doing something bad by lying to her. I just don’t see any other way.

  Chapter Sixteen

  February 8. One year has passed since The Accident. I don’t know how a whole year got by me. On one hand, it feels like just yesterday that Nate was calling me a dork as he breezed out of the house. On the other, it’s as though we three remaining Bradleys got tangled up in a pool of quicksand, were left hanging in some kind of suspended animation, just trying to keep breathing—and time got stuck in there with us.

  What’s changed? Well, there is the obvious stuff, like Nate is dead, and I miss him. My parents act like zombie prison-masters. I started high school and have been kissed—a few times—by Nate’s best friend. And Rachel and I aren’t speaking to each other, but I have a new friend.

  Then, there are the more subtle changes. Like when I think about Nate, I no longer concentrate on the fact that he either ignored me or tormented me. I remember how he used to help me catch minnows in the creek and hold my hand when we crossed the street to go to the pool. I remember his laugh and the way his nose scrunched up when he smiled. I remember how intent he looked when he stood out in the baseball field, and how he would daydream with his eyes open, sucking on his lower lip. I remember how looking into his eyes felt, somehow, like looking into my own. I suppose another difference is that I know about Nate’s art now, and I am so proud of him. And I’m making my own art, and I feel good about it.

  My parents used to trust me, they used to pay attention to me. Now, I am treated like a broken thing to be guarded. But they’re broken. When I think about what I’ve done, forging my mother’s signature, I guess they’ll never trust me again. The thought makes me feel sick to my stomach.

  One thing that’s stayed the same: I don’t want to be a screwup.

  If Nate were alive, I wonder if he would still be acting so crazy. I wonder if I would have found out about his art, or if he’d have continued to guard that secret. Well, today is the day his secret is released into the world. My heart flutters excitedly. This is it.

  I get ready for school, carefully packing a change of clothes and some makeup into my backpack. Damian said he’d leave early this morning to pick up all of the artwork in the Wright barn and bring it over to school in his El Camino. Helena and Cam were supposed to meet him there, too, to help bring out all the pieces and load them into the back of the truck. I’m aching to know what happened, that everything went okay.

  As I step into the school today, I can’t help but remember my first day, how I felt like a fish swimming upstream, against the flow of all the other kids, of how cold, how alienating this building felt. But this school has come to be as much mine as anyone else’s, and it feels comfortable. I make my way to the art room, where I find Helena, Cam, and Damian huddled in a corner of the room, popping the bubbles in giant sheets of bubble wrap, laughing. Nate’s sculptures are strewn across every flat surface in the classroom, Damian’s paintings are resting on easels. And there’s my map, balanced on its stone-and-metal base.

  “Cora!” Helena drops her bubble-wrap sheet and prances over to me and throws her arm around my neck. “Look, we did it!” she proclaims happily.

  “Wow! Thank you, guys, for doing all this. I’m sorry I couldn’t come help. But you know, the jailer wouldn’t let me out of her sight.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Cam chimes in. “It was no problem. And, hey, I like your map. It’s really cool,” he adds, brushing his floppy brown hair out of his eyes. A dimple winks in his cheek as he tosses me a shy smile.

  “Thanks,” I reply, feeling a warm glow heat my cheeks. I like this feeling of us being a foursome. “So, did anyone else drop off any pieces to be in the show?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” Damian says. He comes over and puts a hand on my shoulder. “Hey, how are you doing today?”

  I smile, grateful for his thoughtfulness. “I’m fine. How about you?”

  “I’m okay, too. Hey, look, I think we have our first participant.” Damian thrusts his chin in the direction of the door. “Hey, Dana,” he greets her.

  I turn, and recognize a girl from the junior class.

  “Cora, this is Dana. She’s in my English class,” Damian introduces her. “Dana, this is Cora, my girlfriend, and Helena, and Cam.”

&
nbsp; Wait. What? His girlfriend? Oh my gosh.

  I realize that Damian is staring at me, and for a second time this morning I am blushing. He smiles at me, his gray eyes silvery in the bright sunlight pouring through the windows. And I smile back at him.

  “Hi, Dana,” I manage to reply. “We’re still trying to figure out how to set up everything—” I stop talking as a stream of people start to file into the art room. There must be at least two dozen kids here from various classes, all carrying paintings, sketches, prints, collages, sculptures, mobiles, and other assorted works.

  Helena comes over to Damian and me with her hand over her mouth. “Can you believe this? Most of these kids don’t even take art! It’s all our posters,” she whisper-screams. “Pretty soon there won’t be room for all of this stuff. It’s amazing!”

  “It is amazing,” I agree.

  I never would have guessed that all of these people were artists. I survey the crowd of kids dropping off their works. It seems every clique is represented; there are kids from the basketball and soccer teams, there are goths and emos, and skaters and calculator nerds, cheerleaders and hip-hop wannabes. It’s like a high school rainbow.

  Some more kids trickle in, leave their pieces and walk out again. The first bell will ring any minute. One last silhouette appears in the doorway, hesitates there. Suddenly, Damian is by my side. He squeezes my hand and nudges me toward the door. As I move toward it, the figure steps forward into the room.

  “Rachel?” I ask, wincing at the note of shock in my voice.

  “Hi,” she says uncertainly.

  “Hey, what are you doing here?” I ask. “Do you have something to submit?”