“Why?”
“That kind of red is selfish,” Lizzie said. “It demands attention.”
I got upset. Chloe was my only friend, and if I lost her, I’d have no one to spend time with when Lizzie wasn’t around. After all, Lizzie likes attention, too. She’s the freaking sun—cadmium yellow demands devotion. She blazes and warms and heats the universe. But Lizzie said some people want attention because they need to see the truth. They shine a light. Others like attention so they can lie, manipulate, and bend the world to their liking.
I sit up on my elbows, look up at Chloe hovering over me, and say, “Chief threatened to send me to Utah if I didn’t leave the house.”
“I hear there’s good skiing in Utah.”
Chloe and her mom came over after Lizzie left.
I perched on the roof, knees hugged to my chest, while Chloe stood in the driveway.
“Chief wants me to tell you to come down,” she said.
I didn’t respond. There were no words worth saying.
Chloe spoke louder. “You’ve been up there for a day. You’re gonna hurt yourself. Come down right now, Wren.”
She has always been demanding. And most of the time I follow, but not anymore. It was impossible to hurt more than I did at that moment. Her logic wasn’t persuading me.
“What are you thinking? You’re acting crazy!”
I wasn’t thinking. In my head a picture replayed of a bird I saw once. It was pouring rain—the kind that comes down in wavy sheets in Spokane in the spring and fall. Rain that claims its territory. There is no place outside to hide in that kind of rain. Nothing can save you from getting drenched. I was huddled in a Dollar Tree when the clouds overflowed. Surrounded by the smell of cheap plastic and angry people hoping to find happiness in items that break easily.
I stood at the window and stared at a bird stuck in the storm.
The wind blew, and the rain poured, and this wide-winged bird looked frozen in the middle of it all. It was floating in midair, caught off guard by the sudden change nature decided to unleash. Held still by the fierce weather. The bird was perched on nothing. It was lost in the storm. Maybe it had a safe nest in a tree or a lookout under a bridge somewhere close, but that day, getting there was impossible. Life had changed too quickly, and all this bird could do was wait and make itself one with the storm.
“Fine!” Chloe yelled when I wouldn’t come down from my perch on the roof. “You’re gonna fall and hurt yourself. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”
Seeing Chloe now, I haven’t missed her.
“Still dating Jay?” I ask, even though I know she is from her Instagram posts. Yesterday she posted a picture of her bikini-clad body at the pool.
@chloethequeen Just getting a tan and drinking slushies at the pool. #tantime #myboyfriendisalifeguard #bestsummerever #brainfreeze
“I know you don’t like him, but you just don’t know him like I do. He’s a good guy.”
Said every woman who married Henry VIII.
“You just don’t understand what it’s like to have a boyfriend, because you’ve never had one.”
At that I get up and walk away. I wouldn’t even be here if Chief hadn’t threatened to move me to a place with too much sunshine and God.
I get a plate at the potluck table and start filling it with macaroni salad and chips, even though I have zero intention of eating. Chief’s tuna casserole sits untouched.
Chloe’s mom approaches me and grabs my face in her hands. “Wren, dear, it’s good to see you.” Mrs. Dillingham examines me further. “You look pale. Chloe’s been at the pool a lot lately. Why don’t you tag along with her? Get some sun.”
If sunshine was that easily caught, Lizzie would already be back.
“She burns too easily,” Chloe says.
“Well, why don’t you take Wren with you tonight.”
“What?” Chloe barks.
“You’re going out with Jay.” Then Mrs. Dillingham whispers to another cop mom excitedly, like we can’t all hear. “Chloe has a boyfriend. And he is so cute!”
“Mom.” Chloe demands her attention. “I’m sure Wren doesn’t want to go.”
At that moment, Chief runs up to the potluck table, sweating, baseball mitt still on his left hand. When he’s not in the field, he’s the designated umpire, a clipboard of the Spokane Recreational Softball rules never far from his reach.
“Wren doesn’t want to go where?” he asks.
“Chloe’s going out with her boyfriend,” Mrs. Dillingham says. “I think Wren should tag along.”
“She’ll be a third wheel,” Chloe says curtly, and then amends her statement to be sweeter. “I don’t want Wren to feel left out. That’s all. She’d be bored.”
There’s the candy-apple red I know so well.
“Well, I’m not going to tell you what to do,” Mrs. Dillingham trills, “but I think you should take Wren with you.”
Chief gives me a look that says UTAH. I have no argument. Chloe has no argument. And it’s settled. Chloe and I leave the softball game as if we’re still best friends, even though I’m pretty sure I was more of a convenient friend all these years. I have always been Chloe’s trusted old teddy bear that she can hug when she needs comfort and leave behind when she’s feeling grown.
The moment we get to her car, Chloe tells me she’s not taking me with her.
“Look, I like Jay. I can’t have you ruining this for me.”
I can practically see Chloe’s head dropping into a basket.
I tell her fine. I don’t want to go anyway. This was always inevitable. I’m not surprised by her leaving, only surprised by my own naïveté.
Chloe doesn’t offer to take me home, so I walk.
It’s dusk. The streetlights around our neighborhood illuminate the dimness of the evening, and I think I know why Monet stopped using ivory black. There’s enough darkness in the world. He knew better than to add to it.
5
A LIGHT IN THE ATTIC
A light comes on in the house next door. Outside it’s dark. Down the hallway a forest lies empty. In my room I lie staring at the ceiling. Covered in nighttime, I wait to hear the familiar sounds of Lizzie, but I catch only the echo of our old wooden floors heaving in the summer heat.
When the light comes, illuminating the bedroom window directly across from mine, I’m caught off guard. Chief had said he thought something was going on next door.
I watch from my window and eventually see a boy move around the room. This late at night, it feels like we’re the only two people awake in all of Spokane.
Maybe that’s why I decide to turn on my bedroom light, too.
Then he comes to stand framed by the window across from mine.
He has red hair, but not carrot red, darker than that. Garnet red, and gingerbread-brown eyes, a map of freckles across the bridge of his nose that could be constellations. Even from this distance, I can see all these details.
But then I notice his lack of an aura. He’s haloed in space. Just like me. Blank.
There’s a reason my room is white—white walls, white bed, white furniture. It’s so a person can’t see the spaces left from all the leaving. The reminders of what was. The holes torn in the space that is my life. When a person is nothing, she’s practically invisible.
Is he the same?
I can’t take my eyes off him.
He holds up a phone and mimics typing.
What’s your number? he mouths.
I write it on a sheet of paper and hold it up so he can read it.
Shortly after, a text rings through to my phone from an unknown number.
U look sad
I glance at my reflection in the mirror. Is this the face of a person who is sad? The word feels too small to suffice.
I glance back at him and shrug.
That’s when he presses his lips to the window and blows so hard it vibrates and makes a loud farting sound I can hear all the way at my house.
I laugh for the first time in over a month.<
br />
He smiles.
Another text rings through to my phone.
I’m Wilder
When I look back at his window, the light is off, and the boy with the universe sprinkled across his nose is gone.
6
THE PROBLEM WITH BEES
Our old Radio Flyer wagon is parked outside Rosario’s Market, the small grocery store just down the street from my house. Lizzie and I have been in charge of the grocery shopping since she started high school. It was Chief’s effort to give her “responsibility.” Rosario’s is one of those old-fashioned markets with overpriced food and premade meals and a mechanical pony out front to entertain complaining toddlers for a penny. Lizzie eyed the horse every week.
“Check it out, Songbird. Freedom costs only a penny.”
“It’s a fake horse,” I said. “It won’t take you anywhere.”
“You know as well as I do that ‘freedom’ is a noun, not a verb. People always think they’re stuck, but people carelessly lose freedom when it falls out of their pockets and gets lost in couch cushions. If only people knew how precious pennies really are.”
I started a penny collection after that, but I never told Lizzie. I’d been storing them in a big mason jar in my closet, waiting until it was overflowing with freedom before I gave it to her. Now freedom might remain hidden indefinitely under old clothes that no longer fit.
I pass the pony, its fake eyes taunting me, and walk into the market, Chief’s grocery list in hand. He makes one every week, with the same items. Even the pony seems to know I’m missing something. Like it needs to remind me.
This morning as we watched Wheel of Fortune, Chief handed me the list and said, “Time to get back out there.”
“Where?”
“Into the real world.”
“What do you call this?” I gestured to our real house and our real furniture.
“You know what I mean, Wren.” His expression reminded me that Utah is a real place, too. Tonight he goes back on the graveyard shift after a few days off, which means today he naps and Olga, the woman who sleeps at our house while Chief works, will stay on the couch. Chief always looks a little relieved when he knows he gets to live in darkness again.
“And you start Driver’s Ed tomorrow,” he said.
I was hoping he’d forget about that.
“You need to learn to drive, Wren.”
He’s probably right. Chief made me get my permit when I turned sixteen a few months ago, but I have yet to put it to use. Once school starts, I might be the last junior at South Hill High School without a license.
“You have a car waiting for you if you’d just learn to drive it.”
An old police cruiser sits in the driveway, without the labels and sirens and the cage that’s usually in the back for criminals. Chief bought it from the department ten years ago for $1,000 so Lizzie and I could have a car to drive when we turned sixteen.
When we were in junior high, Lizzie and I would sit in the front seats, me pretending to drive and Lizzie as passenger. Lizzie never wanted to drive. She hated it. Her eyes wanted to catch everything, to drink it all in and spin her imagination around reality until the world became more than just prescribed roads and stop signs.
“It makes me dizzy, Songbird. Everything moves so fast. It’s too . . . sad. I just want to slow down and walk. We can’t see anything clearly from a moving car.”
She would hang her arm out the window and grab the air, holding a piece of the invisible in her hand.
But most days, we’d sit in the cruiser just pretending it was moving, a portion of Lizzie’s body—whether it be her feet or her arm—always hanging half-out of the car’s open window, gently dangling in the wind. Behind the wheel, I felt rigid and responsible. At times I’d even find myself grasping the steering wheel and checking the rearview mirrors, just to be safe. We all have our roles.
Lizzie’s favorite thing to do was imagine the criminals who once sat in the back of the cruiser.
“Chief says most criminals are on drugs,” I said.
“That’s just their crime, Songbird.” Lizzie looked into the back seat like it was filled with the spirits of criminals past. “That’s not the real story.”
“What’s the story, then?”
“Love,” Lizzie said. “Little pieces of broken hearts are littered back there. Can’t you see them?”
I looked closer, but “real” to Lizzie never meant fact. Truth was a ghost, and Lizzie was a medium—she saw what no one else could.
“That’s the real story why people do drugs, Songbird. You can’t really live without complete, full love, and so you fill the space with medicine to hold your heart together.”
Lizzie made drug addicts sound beautiful, whereas Chief painted them as dangerous. I didn’t know what to think. Sometimes beautiful and dangerous go together.
“I’m made of rusted, unwanted pieces,” I said. “Do I belong back there?”
But Lizzie just put the seat back and said, “Open the sunroof, Songbird. I want to kiss the sky.”
She never did acquire a license, and I was thankful, thinking that might mean she’d stay. But in the end it didn’t matter. All she needed were her two legs to leave.
I’m different. Chief knows it. That’s why he signed me up for Driver’s Ed.
I didn’t tell him what I was thinking—that I don’t want to drive the cruiser alone. That every time I sit in the front seat, I’ll look to my right and see Lizzie sitting there, arm hanging out the window, long brown hair catching the wind. Radiant, before she dissolves into nothing and the world goes cold again.
“If you get your license, you won’t have to drag the wagon to the grocery store anymore,” Chief said. “It’ll make life so much easier.”
That’s what he thinks. Chief has always lacked imagination.
When Wheel of Fortune ended, Chief said, “How about I get the art supplies out of the basement for you? It’ll feel good to paint something.”
But I’m not ready for that.
“It’s Sunday, Chief,” I said. “I’ll stick to the grocery list.”
Now at the grocery store, I’m reaching for a bag of Cheetos from the shelf, when someone says, “Don’t get that.”
Next to me a girl is stocking potato chips. Her hair is black, pulled into two buns that sprout from the top of her head.
“What?”
She looks at me and says, in a hushed tone, like she’s sharing a secret, “Don’t get that.”
“Why not?”
“Three words.” The girl leans in closer. “Yellow Number Six.” I give her a confused look, and she continues. “Artificial coloring. That shit contains carcinogens.”
I look at the bag. “It does?”
She examines the other items in my basket. Her face falls in disappointment.
“Artificial colors. Genetically modified. Synthetic rice fillers. Soy. Are you looking to get cancer?” she asks.
“Not particularly.”
“Don’t get this garbage.”
“I don’t have a choice. It’s on the list.” I show her Chief’s well-written column of items.
“That list is killing you. Throw it away.”
“I wish it was that simple,” I say. “It’s not my list. It’s my dad’s.”
The girl gives me a knowing look. “I get it. My dad’s a pharmacist. He thinks there’s a pill to cure everything. I’m Leia Gonzalez, by the way. Like the princess.”
“Wren Plumley,” I say. “Like the bird.”
Leia’s body might be small, but her turquoise-blue aura radiates all around her, making her golden-brown skin practically shimmer. She’s vibrant life captured in a tiny package.
“Did you just start working here?” I ask.
“No,” Leia says. “I’ve been here about a year.”
I don’t ever remember seeing her, which seems impossible, considering how vivid she is. But in the past, I spent most of my time trying to keep Lizzie focused and on task. There
was no time to look around. I never noticed much but her, the pony, and Chief’s list.
“You go to South Hill High, right?” Leia asks.
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen you around.”
“You have?”
Leia nods. “I’ll be a senior next year.”
“Junior,” I say, awestruck.
I can’t stop staring, slightly suspicious. No one notices me.
Leia’s wearing a red apron with one pin on it—SAVE THE BEES.
I point to it. “What’s that about?”
She turns serious. “China is cutting honey with synthetic rice fillers and pumping bees with lethal antibiotics. It’s a mess.”
“Wow.”
“If we can’t trust our honey, what can we trust?”
“I guess I’ll bee careful.”
Leia laughs. Then she takes a bottle out of her pocket and dabs oil on her wrists.
“Patchouli oil,” she says. “It’s a natural antidepressant. My parents wanted to put me on meds, but I was like, No way in hell. I won’t let society manipulate me. Doctors just want to give people a Prozac bandage, but guess what?”
“What?”
“That bandage leads to more bandages, and suddenly you’re not only taking a pill for depression; you’re taking a pill because your depression pill causes constipation. And now you’re not just emotionally clogged, but literally clogged. But you know what the side effects of patchouli are?”
“Smelling like dirt?”
Leia laughs again. “I’d rather smell like dirt than be clogged with shit.”
“Amen,” I say. “So . . . where do I get some of that oil?”
Leia takes me by the arm, leading me toward another aisle. “Let me give you a little education on genetically modified food . . .”
But as we’re turning the corner, a streak of bright, blinding light almost knocks me over.
For a moment I stumble, unable to see anything, but hands grab me quickly and place me back on my feet. I hear Leia say, “You’re not supposed to ride your board in the store, Luca. You’re gonna get fired.”
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” he says. It was his hands that stopped me from falling.
Postcards for a Songbird Page 3
