My Heart and Other Black Holes

  “Aysel,” she hisses. “Aysel, wake up.”

  “Georgia,” I groan, and roll over on my side. I press my face farther into the pillow in hopes of drowning her out. “I don’t really care whether you wear your purple sweater dress or your red pencil skirt. I’m sure everyone will think you look beautiful either way.”

  I hear the end of my bed creak. She starts poking me in the sides and I squirm away from her, my limbs tangled in the sheets. “What the hell?”

  “Wake up!” She bounces back up and paces around the room. “Look out the window.”

  I rub my temples. I was planning on sleeping for at least another fifteen minutes, twenty if I decided not to brush my hair. Sighing, I force myself out of bed. I stumble over to the small window that’s positioned in the very middle of the back wall of our room. That window has been our dividing line for the last three years—left side for me, right side for Georgia. Her side is covered with pages she’s ripped out of fashion magazines and pictures of her and friends and her collection of saltshakers. She has this strange obsession with unique saltshakers—shakers shaped like owls, trucks, wolves—she finds them at thrift stores. My wall is empty.

  “Look,” she presses, pointing at the window.

  Outside, I see that the grass is blanketed with snow. I blink because the sun is out and it makes our whole yard glisten. The snow is piled against the trunks of the oak trees, and from what I can see, it looks like we must have gotten at least four inches.

  “Isn’t it amazing?” Georgia says, clapping behind me. “School is canceled!”

  “It never snows in March,” I say.

  “It did once when we were little, remember?”

  I remember. It was a good day. I couldn’t have been older than nine, Georgia must have been seven then, and Mike was two. Dad drove me to spend the day over here because he still wanted to work at the store, hoping that he might get some extra foot traffic since all the kids would be out of school.

  That morning Mom made us chocolate-chip pancakes and then we spent the rest of the day building snowmen in the yard and sledding down the hill on Vine Street. We felt like a real family that day—I didn’t feel like an interloper who only came to visit on weekends.

  That was a long time ago.

  It’s silent for a few moments. Me staring out the window at the fresh snow and Georgia watching me stare. Neither one of us knows how to talk to the other anymore.

  “I think I’m going to go back to sleep,” I say. That’s what a snow day means now, not pancakes and snowmen, but extra hours in my bed. Alone.

  I hear her make the verbal equivalent of a frown—a whiny snort. “Are you like still tired from Saturday night?”

  “What?”

  “You were out late,” she says.

  I flop back into my bed and pull the comforter over my face. I’m not going to talk about Roman with Georgia. Not in a million years.

  She sits down at the end of my bed again. “Who were you with? Do you have a boyfriend now or something?”

  I can’t help but laugh. If I have a boyfriend, his name is Death. And I’m pretty sure Roman is in love with him, too. It’s like a love triangle gone wrong. Or maybe it’s a love triangle gone right: we both get the guy on April 7.

  She huffs and I feel the bed move as she gets up. “Fine. Just laugh at me. I was only trying to talk to my big sister. Excuse me for making an effort.”

  Oh, now you want to talk to me? I feel the urge to laugh all over again. The irony of the whole thing. She’s only interested in talking to me when a half foot of snow separates her from hanging out with her friends. “Half sister,” I correct her, and for a second I feel a little guilty. Then the black slug comes to the rescue.

  “You’re impossible,” she says, and sighs. If I didn’t know her better, I’d say she was sad. She leans against the wall, her hand on the door handle. “So you know, Mom made pancakes.”

  I hear the door slam as she leaves. A few seconds later, it opens again. “Oh, and so you know, Steve . . .” She says “Steve” in the exact same way I always do, stretching it out like it’s a loose rubber band. There’s an awkward pause and then she continues, “Yeah, Steve, he’s at work. Sparkle didn’t close the factory.”

  “You mean your dad,” I correct her again. “Your dad is at work.”

  “Yeah, my dad. The one you hate for no understandable reason. The one that gave you a home.”

  That’s it. I throw the comforter off of me and sit up straight. “How generous of him. And I don’t hate him, Georgia.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, you sure act like it. I’m tired of you spending every day feeling sorry for yourself just because of what your dad did. Newsflash: You aren’t your dad. And you should stop blaming everyone else for what he did. Yourself included.”

  Tell that to everyone else, I think. I flash her a snarly frown, hoping she’ll leave me in peace, but she stays. She stares at me for a while, her hands on her slender hips. I stare back at her, trying to figure out how we are even half sisters. With her fair skin, honey-colored hair, and tiny nose, she looks like the prototypical Kentucky beauty pageant contestant. She’s like the sun and I’m like the bumpy, brooding moon. The only thing we have in common is our eyes. We both have Mom’s dark, almond-shaped eyes.

  Right now, her hair is in a braid and she’s wearing boy boxers and an oversized Kentucky Wildcats T-shirt. I wonder if she’s given up on her Monday rule. I’m about to comment on it, but before I do, she says, “I just wish you weren’t so sad all the time, Aysel.”

  Me too, Georgia. Me too.

  I take a deep breath and get out of bed. “I’ll meet you downstairs for pancakes. Just let me brush my teeth.”

  She smiles like I just told her she aced her algebra exam and skips out of our room. I don’t think I’ve skipped since the last March snow day.

  I walk down the hall to the bathroom and squeeze some toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I take the toothbrush back to our room and scrub my teeth as I look out the window. I overhear Mom and Georgia and Mike talking in the kitchen.

  “She’s coming down soon,” Georgia says.

  “Oh, good!” Mom says. “I’m so glad you convinced her to get out of bed.”

  The smell of maple syrup fills the entire house. I can hear Mike banging his fists on the kitchen table. “Make sure you add extra chocolate chips,” he says. “Aysel loves chocolate chips.”

  My heart swells and I wait for the black slug to take the feeling away from me, but it doesn’t. It lets me keep it. The swelling turns into a small, sharp ache—it’s going to be harder to leave them than I realized.

  As I put on my slippers and pad down the stairs, I find myself wishing that every day were like this one. If every day were like this one, I don’t think I’d be so eager to be gone.

  The problem is, March snow days are miracles. You can’t live for miracles.

  WEDNESDAY, MARCH 20

  18 days left

  Tyler Bowen is waiting for me at a table in our school’s library. I’d figured he would blow the whole thing off, but it looks like sometimes I can be wrong about people.

  Our school library is less like a library and more like a media center. It sits in the middle of our high school, a hollowed-out space that they filled with computers, tables, and flimsy plastic bookshelves. Recently, they’ve hung Brian Jackson banners on the back wall. They’re the same ones that hang in TMC. I can’t escape them.

  “Hey, Georgia’s sister,” he says as I take a seat at the table.

  “You do know I have a name of my own, right?” I unzip my backpack and pull out my physics notebook.

  Tyler’s pale face flushes, making his freckles more prominent.

  “What?” I uncap my pen and tap it against the table.

  “I don’t know how to pronounce your name.”

  I laugh and his face turns a deeper shade of red.

  “It’s not funny,” he says, looking down at his shoes. “You have a . . . strange name. Did your
dad choose it?”

  I blink, a bit stunned that he would actually willingly bring up my dad. “I think my mom picked it. But I’m not sure.”

  “So how do you say it?”

  “Aysel,” I say. “Rhymes with gazelle.”

  He squints with confusion and so I add, “Uh-zell.”

  “Got it, Aysel,” he says, overpronouncing it, but it’s a start.

  “You seriously didn’t know how to say my name?”

  “I had an idea, but I wasn’t sure. You know, it’s hard to pronounce.”

  “Fair enough.” I shrug as I realize I see myself in the same way Tyler Bowen does: as an unknown variable. “So should we get started?”

  “Yeah, probably.” He runs his hand through his auburn hair. I wonder if he thinks that makes him look suave.

  “Any ideas for the project?” I nibble on the end of my pen, ensuring that I look decidedly not suave.

  Tyler doesn’t answer me. He leans back in his chair and waves to one of his basketball buddies who just walked into the library. His friend shouts something at him but gets shushed by Ms. Silver, the school librarian.

  “Hey, give me a minute?” Tyler asks.

  “Sure.” I watch him dash across the library to meet his friends. I can see them whispering to one another, motioning in my direction. Tyler shuffles his feet and shrugs. I imagine he’s explaining that he was forced to work with me.

  “See you later, man,” I hear one of his friends say.

  “Yeah, good luck,” the other one adds.

  Tyler eventually walks toward me, but his pace is slow, like he’s doing his best to show that this is a punishment. Not a choice.

  “Sorry about that.”

  I shrug. “No need to be sorry. Let’s just get back to work.”

  “Sure thing, Aysel.”

  “You don’t have to say my name every time.” I reach into my backpack and pull out my physics textbook. I let it fall on the table with a slam. “So do you have any good ideas for the theme of our project?”

  “Theme?”

  Tyler Bowen evidently doesn’t pay much attention during class. “Yeah, a theme. Mr. Scott said our project has to center around one.”

  “Oh, that theme.” He stretches his long legs out. “Why not basketball?”

  I give him a blank stare. “Seriously?”

  “Yes, seriously!” Tyler leans over the table toward me. “Mr. Scott used it as one of the examples, so he clearly loves it as a theme.”

  “Or it’s been done a hundred times before. We should be creative.” Then again, I don’t know why I care about this project. Meeting with Tyler is a waste of my time. It’s not like my grade on this matters. I’ll be gone before we even turn it in.

  But I want to do a good job for Mr. Scott. Even if I’m not around to see his reaction to it, I want him to know I took his class seriously. I flip to a blank page in my notebook. I tap my pen against the paper, hoping to come up with an idea.

  “What do you mean, creative?” Tyler says the word like it’s as foreign to him as my name.

  “Yeah, creative. Why don’t we go to the zoo or something?” I jot down my idea.

  He makes a face. “The zoo? That’s like a place for little kids.”

  “Oh, c’mon. I bet you used to love it.”

  “When I was like eleven I did.” He touches his hair again. To his credit, his hair is shiny and soft looking. And this fact obviously isn’t lost on him.

  “The zoo is perfect,” I continue. “There are so many photo opportunities. Like the bats hanging upside down have potential energy. And maybe we could even photograph a lion eating raw meat and label it as an energy transfer.”

  “But the zoo is a million hours away in Louisville. Can’t we choose something easier?”

  It’s not like I can spell out the truth for Tyler: that I want to go to the zoo one last time before I die. That I’d love to see the lions bathing in the sun or the polar bears splashing around in their deepwater pool. FrozenRobot would probably tell me I’m a flake to be thinking like this, but I can’t help it.

  “Yeah. It’s a long trip, but once we get there it will be easy. There are so many different things we could take photos of,” I argue, mentally crossing my fingers.

  “Fair enough, Aysel like gazelle. Put us down for the zoo theme.” He takes my pen and grabs my notebook. He waves it in the air. I reach to snatch it back from him, but it’s too late.

  His eyes grow large as he stares at the page the notebook has fallen open to. “Whoa.”

  I reach for my notebook and glance down at the page. I take a shallow breath of relief. It’s not as bad as it could’ve been. It’s only a stick figure with a noose around its neck. I think I drew it a couple of weeks ago in class when Mr. Scott was rambling on and on about angles and velocity and I couldn’t stop wondering about the destruction of energy.

  “What’s the deal with that . . . hangman thing?”

  “I drew it when I was bored in class. Don’t you get bored? Mr. Scott never stops talking about angles.” My heart is racing, but I do my best to make my voice sound normal.

  He frowns and scrunches all of his facial features together. “You sure I shouldn’t be worried about you?”

  “For playing hangman?”

  “It doesn’t look like any game of hangman I’ve ever played,” he says softly.

  I shrug again and force myself to smile. “I guess I just play a weird version of it.”

  “Okay . . .” He swallows and I can see him fumbling over his words. I’ve made Tyler Bowen speechless. I guess I can scratch that off my bucket list.

  He returns my halfhearted attempt at a smile. “I once heard fish are the best animals to look at if you’re depressed or whatever.” He punches my shoulder lightly, like we’re old friends. “And the zoo has a great aquarium.”

  I sneak a glance at the Brian Jackson banner. Words sit on the edge of my tongue and I’m half tempted to tell Tyler the truth, that the drawing isn’t a joke or a game. I wait for the feeling to pass, but it doesn’t. I’m like a grenade made of ceramic—solid and dense and cold—but still fragile. I could burst at any moment. I don’t want to burst in front of Tyler.

  In the steadiest voice I can manage, I say, “So when do you want to go to the zoo? We should probably go soon, get a jump start on this. I know you’re going to think I’m a nerd, but I really want to do a good job.”

  “We could go on Saturday,” he offers.

  “During the day?” I think I’m technically scheduled to work on Saturday, but I can probably trade shifts with someone. Or I could just skip—my job seems more pointless now than it ever has.

  He curls his lips up over his teeth, his blue eyes glossy with surprise. “Why? Do you have big plans on Saturday night or something?”

  “No,” I say, bracing myself for his teasing jab.

  But it doesn’t come. “How about I pick you up around ten?”

  “Works for me.” I don’t have to tell him where I live; he’s picked up my sister a few times. I bet she’s going to have a heart attack when she sees Tyler Bowen in our driveway, waiting for me. The thought almost makes me smile.

  “What?” he asks.

  “Nothing,” I say, and fold my hands in front of me on the table. “I’m just excited to go to the zoo.”

  THURSDAY, MARCH 21

  17 days left

  Today is Mike’s tenth birthday. We’re all gathered in the back party room of Pirate Jack’s Laserplex. Pirate Jack’s Laserplex is exactly what it sounds like—a run-down pirate-themed laser tag facility. It’s housed in a cement-block building that has small dusty windows and stained tiled floors.

  Steve always has Thursdays off, and Mom used a vacation day. Georgia and I came straight from school to help Mom decorate the room with black and red streamers, eye patches, and fake gold coins. If you close your eyes, cover your ears, and spin around a few times, you could almost believe you were on a pirate ship, not stranded in Langston, Kentucky. Almo
st.

  I’m currently seated in the back of the room, at a table by myself, balancing Mike’s present on my lap and holding a plastic cup of orange soda in my left hand, trying to pretend like I don’t feel ridiculous wearing a paper pirate hat. Steve sits in the front with his buddies, downing cans of cheap beer and applauding every time Mike opens a basketball or a baseball glove. Georgia, Mom, and some of Mom’s friends sit at the table next to Steve’s, gossiping about the cheer squad and lamenting how Christine Beth Thomas beat Sandra Dewitt in last month’s beauty pageant.

  Every once in a while, Mom glances back at me. Like I’ve said before, she, Georgia, and I all have the same eyes, but Mom has different eyelids. Hers are dusky and weathered looking. They have a sadness to them. She catches me staring at her and I look away.

  Mike’s ripped through his stack of presents like a tornado. Guess it’s my turn. I reach out and carefully place my soda on the table. A sliver of sugary orange syrup sloshes over the edge of the cup and dribbles down my hand. I wipe my hand on my shirt and grip Mike’s present. It’s light in my hands when I want it to feel heavy, significant. I walk toward him.

  Mike grabs the present from me. “Hey, Aysel,” he says, his gray-green eyes lighting up. Mike looks eerily similar to Steve, a miniature version. They both have wavy blond hair, small and beady gray-green eyes, and sharp, pointed chins.

  “Hey, Mikey,” I say. “Happy birthday.”

  The rest of the room has gone silent. Watching us. I wrapped my gift in E=MC2 paper. He doesn’t seem to notice. He tears the paper away fast, and as he stares down at my gift, his small eyes stretch as wide as baseballs.

  Mike squeals and waves the gift, a comic book, in the air. It’s an edition of The Amazing Spider-Man, signed by Stan Lee. He clutches it to his chest and beams at me. “Spider-Man? This is awesome!” He stares at the cover and traces his finger over the signature like he’s hypnotized by it. Then he carefully places the comic on the table next to him and stretches his arms out wide, pulling me into a tight hug.

  My mouth feels dry and my stomach is heavy like a bowling ball. I weakly return his hug and run my fingers through his wavy hair. “You’re welcome, buddy. I hope you enjoy reading it for years to come.”