Awake in the World

by Jason Gurley

  I cleared my throat. “Do I get to play this game?”

  “Nessa!” Aaron’s face split into a wide grin. “I didn’t even hear you come in.”

  “What game?” Mom asked.

  “Bad Day Bingo.”

  She laughed. “Goodness, Vanessa. I always tell Aaron, you have a flair for the dramatic.”

  “The two of you are positively melodramatic,” I said. “Oh, my problems. Alas! Oh, however shall I go on?”

  “Did you have a bad day? If not, then—” Mom drew an invisible zipper across her lips. “In the meantime, set the table.”

  My iPhone hummed. I slipped it out of my pocket.

  sorry for ditching you today.

  I tapped back a reply.

  don’t sweat it, yo.

  An ellipsis appeared in a bubble as Cece typed back.

  but i feel baaad. pizza and a movie?

  “Vanessa?” Mom said, looking pointedly at my phone. “The table?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay.” I quickly replied:

  mom made enchiladas.:/

  I slid the phone back into my pocket.

  “So, Vanessa,” I said, taking plates out of the cabinet. “How was your day?”

  “That’s right—college fair!” Aaron remembered. “Well?”

  I dealt the plates, then returned to the kitchen for silverware. “Well,” I began, “let me see…”

  “Was your school there?” Mom asked. Your school. She’d made her case against Cornell a hundred times if she’d made it once. I’d practically memorized her talking points.

  1.  It’s a million miles away. That one is decidedly not true. The circumference of the earth itself is just under twenty-five thousand miles. Ithaca is a little less than three thousand miles from Orilly. There just aren’t enough zeros to substantiate her claim. Point: Vanessa.

  2.  You haven’t even considered anything else. This one is a dummy argument, a placeholder for what she’s not saying, which is: Astronomy was my father’s mistress, the obsession he shared with me but not with my mother. That I persist in my pursuit of the stars, despite his decision to abandon us, confuses her. But it’s my life, not hers. Point: Vanessa.

  3.  It’s not even the best school you could get into. “Children always want to run so far away from their parents,” she chided. But it had nothing to do with best. It was the astronomy thing. We both knew that if I’d chosen Oxford, or the University of Dublin, or college on the moon, she’d be completely on board—so long as my major was archaeology or literature or anything that had nothing to do with the stars. Point and match: Vanessa.

  “Was it everything you hoped it would be?” Aaron asked.

  I didn’t tell them the Cornell booth had been empty.

  “What other schools did you visit?” Mom asked, checking the oven again.

  I tried to steer the conversation away, but my attempt backfired. “You should have seen Cece. Her backpack probably weighed as much as she does.”

  “Your friend’s got it right,” Aaron said. “I keep telling you, these days, you don’t limit yourself to just one school. Backup plan, that’s the ticket.”

  It wasn’t worth the argument, and it would definitely be an argument, so I dropped it. I finished setting out the silverware. My phone vibrated again.

  oh noooooooo i am so sorry

  I stifled a laugh, but before I could reply, a new message appeared:

  Then another:

  DO NOT EAT THE CHILADIES

  “Vanessa. No phones at the table,” Mom scolded.

  I took two steps backward, slowly, holding my phone an inch from my face. “What?” I asked loudly. I crossed my eyes, mimed furious text-messaging skills. “Sorry, what? Did you say something? I wasn’t listening.”

  Mom was unamused.

  I put my phone away with a sigh and took my seat at the table. Without asking, Mom lifted my plate and spooned an enchilada onto it. Spooned. I don’t know how to make enchiladas myself, but spooning one onto a plate seems like, I don’t know, maybe a sign that you’re making them wrong. Little orange carrot cubes and cylindrical green beans spilled out of the enchilada-thing.

  Aaron tried once more on the college front. “You know, Stanford has astronomy courses. I spent some great years there when I was studying law.”

  “Courses,” I said. “The operative word. They don’t offer a degree.”

  “Oh,” he said. But he smiled. “You’ve looked into it.”

  Shit. “Just to compare against Cornell,” I said.

  “Maybe you should think about law,” Mom suggested. “Just think about it.”

  “I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

  “Just think about it, I said.”

  “Okay.” I paused and closed my eyes and counted silently to three. “There.”

  “Don’t be smart.”

  “I thought the point was to be smart.”

  We’d had this conversation so many times, whipping the topic back and forth like a deflated tennis ball. How hard was it for a parent to let something go? I wanted to ask her, but I knew what she would say. I don’t know, Vanessa. Why don’t you ask your father? And I didn’t want to do that to her. Things had been good for her here in Orilly. I wanted to have left all traces of my father behind in Santa Barbara. For her sake as well as my own.

  But it was hard when she looked at me and saw his face. Or heard his dreams coming out of my mouth.

  Well, I knew how she felt.

  “Here’s the thing, though,” Aaron said, returning deftly to his earlier topic. “We can’t lose today’s deposition. Today we found out that the whole thing might not have been Bernaco’s fault. The whole thing might have been a faulty pipe sleeve.” He sighed heavily. “I don’t know if I can get that witness to say that again.”

  A moment later, though, we were back on Cornell. “You know,” Mom observed, “Berkeley has an astronomy program.” She saw my face change. “What? If you have to study that … stuff, at least Berkeley is close. I don’t have to lose my baby entirely.”

  One chiladie later, I excused myself, washed and stowed my plate, and went upstairs. In my bedroom, I slumped against the door. Carl Sagan smiled at me from a photo pasted to my bulletin board.

  “Help me, Dr. Sagan,” I groaned. “You’re my only hope.”

  The next several hours passed in a blur. I logged into the Common Application, uploaded my transcripts, my writing samples, completed my profile. When I heard Mom and Aaron go to bed, I glanced up at my phone. Eleven fifteen already. By the time I checked the Early Decision box and clicked Submit Application, it was almost three A.M. I fought a yawn as I sprawled across my bed. My backpack bounced from the jolt, and the art-school application slid out. I’d forgotten to give it to Zach.

  My phone buzzed.

  did you die of chiladies

  Somehow Cece always knew when I was still awake. We texted for a few minutes, our messages as hazy as I felt. I’d almost drifted off when the phone vibrated again.

  i cant stop thinking of her

  she does roller derby

  nobody knows it

  how cool is that

  she has secrets

  she is wonderrrful

  I glanced at OSPERT and wondered: If I had enough energy to get out of bed, and I tipped his lens toward the impound lot, would I see Zach’s familiar silhouette scaling the fence? What other secret things was he up to when he thought nobody was watching?

  I typed back:

  i know what u mean

  And slid into sleep before Cece replied.

  13

  Zach

  I reclined on the couch with my sketchbook. The house was quiet; the girls and Mama had been asleep for hours. Leah had said Mama had a really good day; they’d even talked. “Well, for a minute or two,” she’d said, “and then she was gone again.”

  With faint lines, I sketched out the shape of a building similar to one I’d seen at the art-college booth earlier that day. The building wasn’t th
e focus of my drawing; the lawn was. Bright green, students splayed out in the shade. Some making art, one reading a book about Basquiat.

  I was still awake when Derek’s key sounded in the lock. He spotted me on the couch.

  “Sorry. I tried to be quiet.”

  I flipped the sketchbook shut and pushed off the couch. “Hungry?”

  He glanced toward the clock on the oven. It was nearly midnight. “I shouldn’t,” he said. But he had that look.

  “Did you eat?” He didn’t always look out for himself, and I added, “I’ll scramble some eggs.”

  There were two left in the carton. I made a note to pick some up from work tomorrow night. We had enough on the CalFresh card. The times we didn’t, sometimes Maddie sent me home with food. She never said a word about it, but I knew she’d seen the card. Now and then I’d find a sack of things—canned food, some produce, maybe day-old bread—under the register where I kept my bag.

  “How’d it go?” I asked.

  “Certification exam? Got delayed.” He took a seat at our little kitchen table. “Madsen was out sick.”

  “You’ve been sweating it.”

  “A little.”

  Not a little. He’d been studying all hours. Staying late to get more time in the dive pool. Certification would mean more money. He’d qualify for deeper dives, more work. Better pay. He was definitely sweating it.

  I cracked the eggs into a bowl and whipped them with a fork. Added a splash of milk to the bowl, and a pat of butter to the skillet. I slid open the small kitchen window; the stove had a ventilation hood, but the fan rattled and would wake the girls.

  “School called me today,” Derek said. “Z, you’ve got to make sure the girls are on time.”

  They’d missed the bus because Robin couldn’t find her shoe. Leah had driven them. They’d only been five minutes late, but I let it go. “I will.”

  “And make sure Mama eats. You do that. Leah can’t do it all.”

  He was wound particularly tight tonight.

  “I will.”

  “How was she today?” He yawned. There were plum-colored sacks beneath his eyes. He rubbed his face, exhaled slowly. “I should peek in.”

  “Let her sleep. Leah said she talked for a couple minutes. She said good night to the girls.”

  “You talk to her?”

  The last doctor had put it most clearly: “I could help her,” she’d said to us, “but it’s as if your mother’s standing on the other side of the door. Right? Except she’s holding the knob so I can’t turn it. She has to want to be helped.” It had been this way since the accident. There was a Dad-shaped hole in the middle of everything. The rest of us edged around it, tried to step over it; Mama, though, had just fallen right in. She’d always been somewhat … quiet, but losing Dad turned that melancholy into something with teeth. Derek said once it was like she got swallowed up by her sadness, but I’ve never thought so. Sometimes I’ll sit with her, watch her eyes as she tracks something moving across the room, something I can’t see. In those moments, it’s as if time had unraveled and permitted her to still see him: putting his clothes away in the bureau, carefully shaving at the bathroom mirror. A smile flickered over her lips now and again, as if she still heard his wiseass remarks.

  “No,” I answered. “I didn’t.”

  He asked about school. I didn’t mention the college fair, the art-school booth. I said it was fine, then served up his eggs and a glass of milk. He’d hung his work shirt over the chair. His name was stenciled on the left breast: D. MAYS III. On the sleeve, a patch bearing the DepthKor logo, a silhouette of a diver holding an underwater torch. It was his only work shirt. I’d wait until he went to bed, then walk down the street to the twenty-four-hour Laundromat.

  “Next few exams are harder,” he said, returning to the previous topic. “They’re deepwater exams. For the easy ones, I’ll be gone a week. For the deeper ones—”

  “A month. I remember.” Dad had been through the certification program, too.

  “Decompression alone is nearly forty-eight hours.”

  “Plenty of time to reflect on your strong performance,” I said. My persistence got to him, at last, and it warmed my insides to see him smile. But it didn’t last.

  “I hate to put all this on you,” he said. I’d heard this before. “You’re a senior, you should—”

  “Done?” I scooped up his empty plate and glass and went to the sink to wash them. When I was finished, he said, “I just wish I could do better, Z.”

  “You do fine,” I said. “Go to bed.”

  He did. I stuffed his shirt into a plastic bag with some of the girls’ school clothes and went to the Laundromat. I sketched while I waited, the clothes tumbling, the dryer warm and loud.

  In the morning, Derek was gone when I woke. I rattled cereal into a couple of bowls, then rapped on the girls’ door. While they ate, I took Mama her oatmeal. I told her about the day ahead and how well her girls were doing in school, and listened for Leah. I put the girls on the bus, then started the long walk to school; as I walked, it began to rain. I waited under the awning of the Shell station on Nipomo Street until it backed off. The girls would be on time, but I wouldn’t be. That was okay, though: Today Derek would pass his certification, and we would celebrate. That’s what we do. Celebrate anything we can, no matter how small.

  We have to.

  * * *

  The bell rang as I scanned the library shelves. There were a half dozen books by Carl Sagan there. Cosmos. Comet. Pale Blue Dot. I picked up one titled The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God and read the flaps. It was a few years old, but it appeared as if it had never been read. Surely, Vanessa had checked it out. No, that wouldn’t be true—anyone with a bicycle like that could afford to buy her own books.

  My remaining classes blurred together. My shoulders ached from lugging all my books around. There hadn’t been time to visit my locker until now. I skirted the crowd that jammed up the intersection of A and B wings, then halted when my locker came into view.

  Something protruded from the door slats.

  On the second day of senior year, someone had pushed chewed-up tobacco through those same slats. And over the summer, a pipe had burst in the ceiling, and water had seeped into what would become my locker. It smelled like a moldy baseball dugout inside.

  But the thing in my locker wasn’t tobacco. Or gum, or a used Band-Aid, or any number of things I’ve found in my lockers over the years. This was the corner of an envelope. I spun the combination dial and opened the door. A packet fell past my fingers. I squatted to retrieve it. The outside of the envelope was blank, except for a lime-green Post-it note.

  Your future alma mater?

  There was no signature.

  I looked around, half expecting to see Ms. Grace or another teacher waiting with a thumbs-up and an encouraging smile. But there were only kids milling about, none the slightest bit interested in the contents of my envelope.

  Which happened to be an application for the Fleck Institute of Art and Design.

  14

  Vanessa

  Zach wheeled the television cart into Mrs. Harriman’s class. I hadn’t seen a working VCR since I was a toddler, practically; in Santa Barbara, my old school had Blu-ray players and high-def projectors in all the classrooms. This antique, unsurprisingly, didn’t work.

  “Well, take it back to the AV room,” Mrs. Harriman said with a sigh. “See if he has another.” As Zach wound up the cord, someone behind me murmured, “Maybe send someone without shit for luck.”

  Mrs. Harriman missed it, but Zach hadn’t. He didn’t look up, but I caught the twitch in his posture, the most subtle flinch. I turned around and studied faces but couldn’t tell who’d said it. When I turned back around, Zach had slipped out the door with the television cart, and Ephraim was at my desk with my exam. He placed mine facedown on my desk, then kept moving. I turned it over. In neat red pen, Mrs. Harriman had written 102, not bad. I’d
done the bonus essay question for five extra points … which meant I’d gotten at least one normal question wrong.

  I paged through the exam, searching. Yep. Page 2: Name three physiological signs of stress. I’d missed it entirely. The answer blank was just that: blank.

  Cece flashed her exam at me with a bright smile. 105! Exceptional. She spotted my grade and mimed a sad face. “What’d you miss?”

  I showed her the answer blank.

  “Ooh,” she said, cringing. Then she ticked off the answers: “Headaches. Muscle tension. Also, I would have accepted ‘the crushing disappointment of utter defeat.’”

  “And Cece takes the lead,” I said.

  “Hush. You don’t even care.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Well, I don’t, either.”

  “Liar.”

  She shrugged. “Fine. I care a little.” She leaned close. “Did I tell you about my cousin Eduard? Second smartest in his class for years, behind this girl Clarissa. He couldn’t ever beat her. Girl was just stupid smart. But in the eighth grade, she moved away.”

  “And little Eduard inherited the throne,” I finished. “So are you moving away, or am I? I just got here—”

  “Hold up,” she said. “So Eddie’s tops in eighth grade, then ninth, then tenth. All the way to senior year.”

  “And then she came back, didn’t she.”

  “She totally came back,” Cece squeaked. “Can you believe that? Sailed in like she’d never been gone, and boom, Eduard’s salutatorian. He said he fired rubber bands at her during her speech.”

  “Little shit.”

  “Little bit, yeah.”

  “Wait,” I said. “So am I Clarissa, or am I Eduard? Who are you in this story?”

  Cece’s eyes popped, and she straightened up in her seat. I turned to see Mrs. Harriman, arms folded, staring at us. I hadn’t even noticed how quiet the room had gotten.

  “Ladies,” Mrs. Harriman said. She glanced at the clock. “Well, since Mr. Mays appears to have been delayed, I might as well introduce our video. We’re watching the 1993 film Philadelphia, which at its time…”