Invincible

  “I think you and my dad have slightly different standards, unfortunately. You probably don’t have as much interest in my being ‘a respectable example of an educated black man in America.’” He says the last part in a very low and very serious voice.

  “I guess not,” I say.

  “I doubt everyone is really paying all that much attention to me, so I’m not that worried about it.” He takes a long pull from the joint. “Plus he makes me go to the whitest school in the entire Bay Area, so I’m pretty sure that makes him a hypocrite. The only other black kids in my class are these adopted twins who have two white Jewish moms, and another kid who’s, like, royalty from Kenya or something. We’re not exactly the epitome of African-American culture.” He hands me the joint. “But Judge Lyon has pretty much given up by now and leaves me mostly alone.”

  “I wonder how he’d feel about your incredibly white girlfriend.”

  “Well, he married my mom and she was white. Or haven’t you noticed my smooth, milky complexion?” He bats his eyes.

  “Was white?”

  “Was. Is. She’s not in my life anymore, so past tense seems appropriate.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He shrugs and picks up a eucalyptus seed pod and throws it in the lake. It lands with a less than satisfying plunk. He looks at me and smiles. “So that other thing you said. About you being my girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” Shit. “I said that?” Shit shit shit. “I, um—it just came out. I guess I’m stoned. Wow, I’m embarrassed.”

  “Don’t be,” he says, putting his arm around me and pulling me close. He says nothing more, doesn’t confirm or deny the label.

  We finish the joint, the view turns into a postcard, and I gradually forget my embarrassment. We could build a little fort out of sticks and branches and steal some fishing poles from the bait shop. We could stay forever on our hidden beach and no one would ever find us.

  I lay my head on Marcus’s lap and he runs his fingers through my short, patchy hair.

  “Your hair is so soft and fluffy,” he says. “It’s like a baby duck. I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  He doesn’t know this is a result of the chemo. Maybe I want him to know. Maybe I’m ready. But first, more pressing issues. “Do you think you could find me some Norco? Maybe some Oxycontin?”

  His hand freezes on my scalp. I can feel his body tensing under me.

  “No way,” he says. “I don’t fuck with that stuff. Do you?” I can hear the worry in his voice.

  I turn my head to look up at him. The sun frames his face like a halo. “What? No,” I say, trying to smile as reassuringly as possible. “I heard it was fun so I thought maybe you wanted to try it with me or something. But if you don’t want to, that’s cool.”

  “Don’t touch that shit, Evie.” Despite the warm sleepiness that wants me to stay lying down, I can tell this is serious enough for sitting up. “Promise me. Heroin, Norco, Oxy, they’re all the same. Meth and cocaine, too—these are all off-limits. Okay?”

  “Why?” I say.

  “Because they fuck you up big-time. You can’t do that shit recreationally. It owns you.”

  “I think you’re being a little dramatic.”

  “I’m being serious. Promise me. Please.”

  The concern in his face is real; his worry is sweet, not oppressive like everyone else’s. I say, “Okay, I promise,” because it seems like he needs it so much.

  “Thank you,” he says. “I feel like I can trust you. You’re the first person I’ve been able to say that about in a long time.”

  A knife turns in my chest. I don’t want to lie to him. I can’t abuse his trust.

  I know I should get off the pills. Maybe soon. Maybe I’ll start cutting down. Maybe next week. My promise to Marcus has to mean something. But I’m not ready. I can’t quit yet. I’m too scared.

  He looks out over the lake. A family in a paddleboat floats by. The parents don’t see us, but the little boy waves. Marcus waves back.

  “Someone hurt you,” I say. I am sick to my stomach thinking I could be that person, if he ever knew.

  “You could say that.”

  “Tell me.”

  He’s quiet for a while, lost in his own private world. I want in. I want him to let me in.

  “Do you want to go swimming?” he finally says.

  “Isn’t it illegal? Isn’t this a reservoir or something?”

  “Yep,” he says, unbuttoning his pants.

  “Whoa there, stud,” I say as he pulls them off. I notice a tattoo on his shin. The letters DL in messy black-blue, as if they were stabbed there with a pen. And a date, just a month from now, of last year.

  “What’s DL?” I say. “Who’s that?” I know it’s stupid to be jealous of someone he knew before me, but I can’t help it. I hate her, whoever she was. I hate that he loved her enough to make her permanent on his body.

  “Someone who hurt me,” he says, and pulls his shirt over his head. His smooth, muscled chest is all I see for a moment, and I am breathless. But that warm electricity is quickly extinguished when I notice the scars on his arms. The area between his elbow and shoulder, the part covered by a T-shirt, is scored with uncountable crisscrossing scars of various depths and widths. Nothing natural would make this pattern. Nothing but someone’s own hand could inflict this kind of torture.

  “Marcus,” I gasp. I look up at him from where I’m still sitting. “Tell me,” I say.

  “I will,” he says. “Soon.” Then he dives into the water and disappears.

  I strip down to my underwear and bra and leave my tank top on so he won’t see my portacath. I am not nervous as I follow him into the water. I am not embarrassed. For once, I am with someone who hurts, someone who’s damaged like me, someone who’s broken. Maybe I don’t have a place anymore with people like Kasey and Will, people who aspire to perfection, who are foolish enough to believe it exists, who want nothing more out of life than to avoid complications. For people like Marcus and me, complications are all we have. We have scars. He has shown me his, and I want to show him mine, too.

  We meet each other in a deep part of the lake next to the fallen log. Our feet cannot find the bottom. The lake could go to the center of the earth and we wouldn’t know the difference. We wrap ourselves around each other, held up by only a few fingers laid on the slippery wood. We float, entwined, our foreheads together, the tips of our noses almost touching, our lips half a breath away from each other. I close my eyes and feel his breath tickle my upper lip. We float like this for a long time, listening to the water lap against us, breathing each other in.

  “I can’t believe you exist,” I say.

  “I could stay here forever,” he says.

  “Tell me,” I whisper. “About your scars.” Maybe if we tell our secrets in the water, it will make them buoyant. They will float away like leaves, like flower petals. They will leave us and we will be unburdened, weightless.

  “I’ve never really talked about it with anyone. Not even the shrink my dad sent me to.”

  “You’re safe with me.”

  He takes a deep breath. “My mother left two years ago,” he says, and I hold him tighter. “Just left. One day, she was gone. Didn’t even leave a note. Didn’t call or write. Took some clothes and jewelry and withdrew a bunch of cash from the family checking account and we never heard from her again.”

  I run my hand across the scars on his shoulder, textured like the bark of the fallen tree that is keeping us afloat.

  I want to ask about DL. I want to give him my secrets. I want to give him everything. But the sound of a boat motor interrupts our solitude. The magic of the moment leaves us. Our secrets sink to the bottom of the lake.

  “You two,” says the garbled voice of a bullhorn. Birds chirp in protest of the interruption. It seems impossible that such a loud, unpleasant noise could be possible here, now. “No swimming allowed. Get out of the water right now and leave the park immediately or you will receive a citation.”
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  Several yards away is the khakied form of a park ranger in a small boat.

  “Yes, sir,” Marcus says. “We were just leaving.”

  We swim to shore and collect our things. Our tiny beach has been consumed by shade and is suddenly chilly with the arrival of the evening coastal breeze. The ranger motors away on his quest to ruin more perfect moments. I am wet and cold and covered in pine needles. I want to swim out to that ranger’s boat and pull him under.

  “Lame,” Marcus says.

  “I’m freezing.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  We walk to the car quickly, in silence, holding hands. The sunny glow of earlier has been replaced by muted shadows as the sun gets ready to set. My leg hurts from climbing the hill back up to the trail, but I say nothing. I don’t want him to worry. I don’t want his pity. I don’t want to ruin the moment any more than it already has been.

  “School tomorrow,” Marcus says when we get into the car.

  “Ugh.”

  “I still have homework to do.”

  “Yeah,” I say, even though I stopped trying to do my homework a long time ago.

  “Can I drive you home? Or do you still want me to drop you off on Telegraph?”

  “Drive me home, I guess,” I say, doing nothing to hide my disappointment.

  “Hey,” he says, reaching out his hand and turning my face gently toward him. “We’ll do this again soon.”

  I nod.

  The music he plays on our drive down the hill is beautiful and sad. Just a guy and a guitar and his sweet, mournful voice.

  “I like this,” I say.

  “Yeah, my brother turned me on to this guy,” Marcus tells me. “One of the best songwriters ever, until he stabbed himself in the chest.”

  “That’s morbid.”

  “And such a cliché. Troubled genius and all that. He was a drug addict and an alcoholic, too, of course.”

  “He must have been in a lot of pain.”

  “We’re all in pain. But that doesn’t give us a fucking right to waste life like that.” There is a storm across his face. He is talking about something else, someone else. His mother, maybe. Or DL.

  There is so much more to say, but we will talk about it later. We are driving back into the real world now. The moment for secrets has passed. Why do I feel like time is running out?

  I tell Marcus how to get to my house and he drops me off in front and kisses me good-bye. A part of me thinks I should keep him hidden, as if some magic will be lost if my two worlds collide. But I am tired from the sun and wine and weed and walking. I am too tired for sneaking around.

  I walk in the house and straight into my room, not even bothering to say hi to Jenica, who is studying in the living room. I lie in bed and look at the ceiling, making up stories to fill in the holes of Marcus’s secrets, until my thoughts become thinner, until they become air, until I fall into a dreamless sleep and they become nothing at all.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  if.

  Stella,

  I’m screwed. I’m seriously fucking screwed. Not only am I out of pills, but my parents and Dr. Jacobs and the whole fucking world knows I was stealing them and now everyone thinks I’m a drug addict and a criminal. I don’t know if Mom forgot about Dr. Jacob’s speech about tapering off the pills, but she tried to refill my prescription even though the bottle said no more refills. Some red bells probably went off on the pharmacist’s computer that said “Warning! Warning! Drug addict alert!” Then Dr. Jacobs called and the shit hit the fan.

  You would never have let things get this far. You would know how to keep things cool and under control. But everything I do seems to run away from me and get bigger and bigger, way bigger than me. I’m no match for it. All I ever wanted was to be free and brave like you, but it’s like I traded in one prison for another.

  The worst part is, Mom isn’t even mad. She just sat on the couch crying like I broke her heart. “You were stealing them, Evie? You were sneaking into our room and stealing?” she kept saying, as if it did not compute, as if wires got crossed and she was getting an error message. She was practically comatose when she told me Dr. Jacobs wants me to come in and see him. She got real small and practically whispered, “He thinks maybe he should refer you to an addiction specialist,” as if saying it quietly enough would make it less true.

  I wish she would scream. I wish she would get angry and cruel so I could be mad at her. This is so much worse. “I don’t know how to help you,” she whimpered. “What did I do wrong?” And then I started comforting her. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mom,” I kept saying. “It’s all my fault. I screwed up.”

  Then that’s when Dad chimed in, “Damn right you screwed up,” which made Mom cry harder as he yelled, “What the hell is wrong with you?” at me. And I kept saying I don’t know, I don’t know, which is the only true answer I can think of. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I have to keep taking these pills. I don’t know why I had to steal. I don’t know why I turned into this twisted version of the girl I used to be. I don’t know why I have to keep smoking pot and not telling them where I’m going and not doing my homework and not studying for tests. I don’t know why I do anything anymore. Stella, if you were here, I don’t know if you’d even like me anymore.

  “How can we help you?” Mom said, which really made Dad lose it. “Help her?” he screamed. “Are you insane? Are you a fucking idiot? First, you don’t even notice her stealing from you, now you’re treating her like she’s still sick? She’s manipulating you, Pam. Are you really that stupid?” Jenica ran in from where she was hiding in the kitchen and started yelling at Dad to stop yelling at Mom, and Mom was hyperventilating, and Jenica started screaming how I’m destroying the family, how Mom and Dad never fought until now, and then Dad started crying, and he started apologizing to Jenica, and to Mom, and then they were all crying, a big, wet heap of sadness on the couch, and me by myself facing them, everyone crying except for me.

  I felt nothing but shame, and shame doesn’t make me cry; it just makes me want to roll into a ball and eat myself alive until I’m gone, destroyed, nothing. But I was still there, still in the living room, watching the people I love unravel because of me. All I could say was “I’m sorry.” I said it over and over until they were quiet, until my voice was the only sound in the room. I couldn’t face them, couldn’t look any of them in the eye. But I could say those words and mean them. I managed a few others—I’m having a hard time; I feel like no one understands me; I’m going through a lot; I never meant to hurt anyone. I said I’d try harder. I said I promise. I said I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  My family’s breaths returned to normal; their eyes dried up. I don’t know exactly what I promised them, but I know it means quitting the pills. Maybe this was meant to happen. Maybe this is a sign. It’s my chance to make good on my promise to Marcus, to quit the drug I promised him I’d never even try, to really be the person he can trust. If it weren’t for him, I don’t know if I would have enough reason to quit. Even without my prescription, there are always other ways to get things.

  I will try to be good. I will try to be nicer to Jenica and join my family’s conversations at dinner. I will try to start doing my homework again, will take my teachers up on all their offers for after-school help. Maybe I will find my way back to become someone resembling the perfect daughter I once was.

  But I am not hopeful. That girl is gone. Maybe I can pretend just enough to keep them happy. Maybe I can work harder at my secrets. Maybe I can show them who they want to see, someone they love, and they can keep that mask, they can hold her and love her and she can take my place at the dinner table and fill up my space in the family, and no one will notice that I’m really gone, that I’ve become someone they cannot recognize at all.

  I don’t know what’s going
to happen now that the pills are gone for good. I’ve always managed to get enough just in time, before the want turns into need turns into pain. I’m scared, Stella. I’m scared this is going to hurt. I’m scared of needing something I’ll never get. I’m scared of opening the hole where pain lives. I’m scared that once it is open, it can never close again, and it will always be empty, I will always be empty, and the absence will just grow and grow until it takes over everything and I am really, truly gone.

  I am going to quit. I am going to get off the pills. This is not who I am. I am not someone who steals from her mother. I am not a drug addict. I will not let these pills own me like Marcus warned. I am done. I am done. I am done. If I say it enough it has to be true.

  God, I wish you were here. You would know exactly what to say to me right now. You would know how to zip me back up and stuff myself full of confidence. You could convince me I deserve to exist.

  Come back, Stella. I need you. I need you really bad.

  Love,

  Evie

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  twenty-four.

  THE WORLD IS AS SMALL AS MY MOTHER’S LAP. ALL I FEEL are her fingers in my hair, their mindless back and forth. All I hear is the faint echo of her heartbeat, the mysterious gurgles of her stomach. I am a child, home with the flu. I am taking a sick day. She will make me soup and I will try to eat it and I will let her think she’s making me feel better; she’s loving me back to wellness like she used to, when sickness was something far more simple, when it was a little virus you caught like everybody else.

  Never mind the throwing up, the sweating, the cramping, the diarrhea. Never mind that a virus has nothing to do with this. Never mind that I brought this on myself, that this is purgatory, that I deserve none of my mother’s kindness.

  Is it normal to forget how to breathe? To have anxiety tie me up from the inside until I’m gasping for air?