The Radius of Us

by Marie Marquardt

  That’s the difference between me and my stupid-ass little brother. I can let things go. Ari, though, he’s got a temper. I’m telling you, he’s always been that way. Even when I was, like, twelve and he was a six-year-old little pissant, he used to come at me, arms flailing, every time I did the smallest thing to make him mad. I mean, I would accidentally pull the covers off him when we were sleeping at night, and the next thing I knew, he’d be wailing on me. I used to think it was funny, little Ari’s temper. But that was before it got him in real trouble and sent us both running for the border.

  I step back and look around, trying to decide which of these little girls I need to help next. It’s kind of amazing, watching all these people at work—even if they don’t know what the hell they’re doing. When I first saw this piece of land, it was covered in weeds. Hard to believe the people around here let it go like that, since the yards in this neighborhood are so perfect, they look like they’re made from plastic. Yesterday I tilled the soil for the first time. The color is so strange. In Ilopango, dirt looks like dirt. It feels like it too. Black-brown and soft, easy to dig around in. Stuff grows really fast over there. They say it’s because the town is located on the edge of a volcanic lake. The thing is, even though it’s easy to make things grow, no one really does it much anymore. My grandmother did. She had a little courtyard with some fruit trees, and we used to plant beans and corn. But most people, they get jobs at factories, unless they’re too busy dodging bullets. Or shooting them.

  Anyway, the dirt here is this weird orange-red, and it sticks together in big clumps. It smells different too—like maybe it has some metal in it. To build a garden, we had to go out and buy big bags of soil—like the kind back in El Salvador. Christ, for all I know, the dirt we’re about to pour into these raised beds came from El Salvador. Home Depot probably sent people down there to dig it up for free, and now they’re selling it to me in Atlanta for eight dollars a bag.

  That’s messed up.

  I’m thinking about all of this as I help the girl with the goofy grin. She’s finally getting used to using the hammer, and I can tell she feels proud. After a while, and exactly as I predicted, Mr. Tough Guy loses interest in arranging the two-by-fours and moves on. I tell the girl how great she’s doing and then head back to undo his damage.

  The girl follows me over to the raised beds, which is fine. I set the two-by-fours where they belong, and we both start hammering away at them. And then a small miracle happens. The sun burns through that dense layer of gray clouds and I feel a ray on my face. It’s still cold, and the wind is still blowing a little, but there’s a sun up there, and it’s warm on my skin. I stop to pull off my sweat shirt. I can feel that little girl watching me.

  “Oh my God,” she says, and giggles. “You have a tattoo! That’s sooo cool.”

  Mierda.

  Heat starts to spread across my chest and neck. I can feel it rising.

  “Nah,” I tell her. “It’s just like—uh—a scar.”

  I’m tucking my T-shirt into my jeans, cursing myself.

  Jesus, Phoenix. What the hell were you thinking? You need to be more careful.

  Here’s the thing about this stupid goddamned tattoo. When people see it, they think they know all about me. They think this tattoo means something, but it doesn’t. I got stupid drunk and let somebody ink me. That’s all it means. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

  The girl smiles big and winks at me—she actually winks.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “I can keep a secret. I promise.”

  I smile back and shrug. And then I make a little prayer to the Virgencita, begging the sweet Virgin Mary to make that kid keep her promise. Because if she doesn’t, all hell could break loose.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  GRETCHEN

  “SO, WHEN ARE YOU going back to school, mon chou?”

  Adam calls me mon chou. It literally means “my cabbage” in French, but it’s also a term of endearment. At least, that’s what our French teacher told us. I used to love it when Adam called out mon chou from down the hall at school, or when he leaned over to whisper, “I’ve missed you, mon chou,” after I climbed into his car at the end of my shift at the restaurant. Now it doesn’t seem quite right; maybe because it never was. I don’t even like cabbage.

  Luke and Anna are finally asleep, and I’m sitting in front of Aunt Lauren’s home computer, which has a screen so enormous that Adam’s face is larger than in real life. So when he asks me that question about school, it feels larger than life too.

  “I haven’t really thought about it. I mean, I’m fine at home with Dad.”

  “Really? It’s your senior year.”

  Yes, really. School’s not really going to work out, Adam, since I barely have the courage to leave my house.

  That’s what I want to say. Maybe that’s what I should say. But I don’t.

  “Yeah, I know,” I tell him instead. “I’m working on it, Adam.”

  We used to constantly make up new pet names for each other: my squash, my artichoke, my Brussels sprout. Mon chou was just the one that stuck. It made us both laugh like crazy, coming up with those names. But we don’t laugh much anymore. Or maybe we don’t ever laugh. I’m not really sure.

  “Come on, mon chou, it’s just—”

  Loud music overtakes Adam’s voice. He lifts a finger, gesturing that I should wait, and then stands up to walk away from the screen. I hear him slam the door to his dorm room, which has the basic effect of making the music just as loud but sort of muffled.

  Adam appears on screen again. “Sorry.” He shrugs.

  Last fall, only a couple of weeks after I fell apart, Adam left for college. He offered not to go, but I kept telling him that he wouldn’t be very far away. He’s in Athens, at the University of Georgia. Even though Athens is only an hour-and-a-half drive from where we live in Atlanta, whenever we talk, it feels like he’s in a different galaxy. We never see each other, and his life is so—full.

  “Listen, mon chou, I gotta go soon. But New Catalan is playing at the 30 Volt next weekend. Remember how amazing they were live? You should come up.”

  Yeah. Right.

  We went to see them last spring. Adam picked me up from work at ten, his car already packed with people. Back then I was a hostess at a funky restaurant in the Old Fourth Ward. All night I had been so excited to see the show, I kept forgetting to give people their menus when I took them to their seats. It was a great place to work—the kind of place that served breakfast all day long. It had the most amazing apple butter. God, I used to love that job—I loved the independence of it, and all the weird people that worked there.

  But I haven’t gone back. That entire life feels like a distant dream.

  “I can come get you after my last class, if you want. Maybe you could stay over?”

  Adam is so completely out of touch with my reality that I feel like crying.

  “And they keep saying there’s gonna be a surprise guest, you know? A legend. Michael Stipe’s supposed to be in town these days. So maybe—”

  I hear a rowdy group burst into his room. Two girls appear on the screen, shoving Adam aside. I don’t recognize them. I watch one of them take Adam’s arm and yank him out of his seat while the other calls out, “We’re gonna miss the opener!”

  They’re wearing ripped jeans and dark-red lipstick. One of them has pale streaks in her hair. The other’s hair is dyed bright pink. They both look so beautiful, and so—alive. I wonder what Adam thinks when he sees them, what he feels. Does he wish I still looked more like them? Does he wish I weren’t part of his life anymore, so that he could be with one of them?

  For a moment I see myself, six months ago. I suddenly remember so clearly what it felt like to stand in the restaurant’s cramped bathroom and apply my lipstick before leaving work. I remember the crack in the mirror, and the feel of the tube in my hands, the way I’d duck a little to avoid the broken glass and then lean in. I remember the chalky smell of my favorite
lipstick, how I always started at the center of my mouth and then worked my way out. I remember how much I loved to push those new red lips against Adam’s smooth cheek.

  But then I start to feel it. It’s like my body is lifting out of itself, like I’m moving away from reality, pulling away or up to someplace distant, looking down onto that moment. My heart is starting to beat fast and I am remembering another red mark, the one smeared across the brown skin of that boy’s forearm.

  Instigator.

  I squeeze my eyes shut—so tight that my eyeballs tingle inside their sockets. And I make myself forget.

  “Gretchen?” Adam says from somewhere offscreen, his voice anxious. “Are you okay?”

  I open my eyes and look directly at him. “Mmmhmm.”

  I lick my bare lips. Always bare. I can’t exactly remember the last time I put on lipstick, but I know it must have been that night, just before leaving work. Since then, I haven’t worn earrings, either, or eyeliner, and my hair is always yanked into a ponytail.

  The girl with streaked hair looks at me from the screen, like she’s trying to work something out in her head. Her eyes are pool-blue and rimmed with tons of black eyeliner.

  “Oh, hi!” she says brightly. “You’re Gretchen?”

  Adam’s dorm room goes quiet.

  I nod, silent, acutely aware of how dull and lifeless I must look. “Come to Athens!” she says. “We all want to meet you.”

  The pink-haired girl nods. Her face has gone all somber.

  I shrug. “Can’t,” I say quietly. “I promised Bree I’d go to a basketball game with her.”

  “A basketball game?” Adam says. “Why?”

  “I don’t know, Adam. Bree just wants me there.”

  “Blow off the game and come with us,” the pink-haired girl croons. “I bet it would do you a lot of good, you know? To get out of Atlanta.”

  I need to get out of this conversation.

  The other girl keeps nodding, a sympathetic smile across her glowing, flushed face.

  Maybe I should feel angry—that these strangers presume to know what I need. Or maybe I should be pissed at Adam for telling them what a mess I am. Maybe I should feel jealous, or maybe relieved, that even though she didn’t mention the unmentionable, she at least acknowledged it. I don’t feel any of those things, though.

  I just feel alone.

  “Y’all go on,” Adam tells the beautiful, alive girls. “I’ll catch up to you.”

  The girls lean in, waving at me, and then they’re gone.

  Adam looks back at me and smiles. I know every one of his smiles, which I guess happens after a couple of years together. This is the forced one, the one that shows he’s trying a little too much to make everything all right.

  “I’ll come see you,” he says. “On Saturday night. My mom has been begging me to come down for my sister’s piano recital Sunday—I’ll come early.”

  “Yeah, okay.” I nod.

  “We’ll go out, or…”

  “Maybe, yeah. Maybe we can go out.”

  “Or we can just stay at the house, order Thai.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell him. “I want to come to Athens. It’s just—”

  “No worries, mon chou,” he tells me, glancing toward the door.

  In his mind, he’s already outside. I can see it. But he stays with me for a few moments longer, because he’s Adam—My sunchoke. My kohlrabi. My broccoli. My asparagus.

  I want to say something, to give him a name. But none of them work anymore.

  * * *

  For the rest of the week, I make myself do it. I look for the guy with the dog. It seems important. I feel like if I find him and talk to him, I might prove something to myself.

  I drag Luke and Anna away from their screens and I force them to ride their scooters around the Place Without a Soul, in and out of every cul-de-sac. (And why do they even call them that? Cul-de-sacs. They’re dead ends, for God’s sake!) Luke keeps getting tired and making me carry him, so I end up hauling him around on my hip, dragging the Batman scooter behind us. Anna asks why we can’t ride scooters on their cul-de-sac. Every time I hear her say cul-de-sac it makes me feel sad, wandering these streets that are going nowhere, in the Place Without a Soul.

  Anyway, no boy. No fluffy white dog. Just a bunch of empty streets, emerald lawns, and dead ends. By day three, I’m feeling almost certain that Bree was wrong—that I am, in fact, losing my mind completely.

  But then we turn onto a dead-end street near the neighborhood playground, late in the afternoon on our third day of cul-de-sac wandering. I see him, sitting on a pile of wood, in the middle of a big torn-up field. Part of me is thinking how strange it is that this empty lot is still here, since it stands out against all of the perfect homes and neat lawns. But most of me is thinking this: Oh, thank God and all the angels in heaven. He is real. That boy is real.

  And he is not the boy. He is just a boy, which means I am not crazy. At least not completely off-my-rocker crazy. He’s about the same build as the boy, strong and lean, and his hair is dark brown and cut close to his head. But his skin has more copper in it, I think, and his face looks a little stubbly, not smooth. All of his features are so defined, almost sharp. He has high, broad cheekbones and a long, straight nose. His eyebrows are thick and full. His ears, they stick out a little, in a way that’s kind of sweet. They make him look young, probably younger than he is.

  I know I’m staring, but I can’t stop.

  I walk toward him, preparing to make normal conversation. He looks right at me, his eyes big and dark and penetrating. His hand is resting against his lower lip, like he’s thinking about something. And maybe I’m imagining it—maybe it’s all in my crazy head—but the way he looks at me, it’s like I’m scary. Like I’m the dangerous one.

  CHAPTER SIX

  PHOENIX

  THAT CRAZY GIRL from the playground is heading right at me, like she’s coming over to have a chat, and the two little kids are trailing behind her, dragging their scooters.

  What the hell?

  She’s wearing jeans and big black boots. They look like work boots, but they aren’t scuffed. She has on a bulky sweater that hangs almost to her knees, and it swings around her when she walks. She smiles—a big, broad smile. I feel myself smiling back, but I don’t want to do that, so I lift my hand to cover my lips.

  I cannot be smiling at this girl.

  This girl cannot be pretty.

  This girl is way off-limits.

  She’s white. And she’s nuts. And she’s still waving. At me.

  I take my hand from my lips and wave, casually. I’m hoping she sees I’m harmless, hoping she isn’t going to bolt again. I almost stand up, but she was so skittish the other day that I figure it’s best if I don’t make any sudden movements. So I sit as still as I can and watch her approach.

  “Hey,” she says. “I’m Gretchen.”

  Gretchen. I know a lot of American names from the missionary groups, but this one I’ve never heard.

  I figure it would be rude to stay seated, so I go ahead and risk standing up, very slowly. She holds out her hand and I take it.

  “I’m Phoenix. Like the city.” I pronounce it the American way. “I’m sorry I scared you the other day at the playground. I was just, uh, looking for a dog.”

  The girl sighs, all deep and heavy, and then she looks right at me. “I’m the one who should apologize. I was sort of, I don’t know, sort of out of it, I guess.”

  “No worries,” I say. “How are you now?”

  What am I doing? I’m asking this crazy beautiful girl how she is. I’m not supposed to care about these things. And then I realize I’m still holding on to her hand. It feels soft and powdery. Truth be told, I don’t want to let go, but I do anyway.

  “Oh, I’m fine,” she says. “I mean, whatever.”

  She doesn’t look fine, not anymore. Her eyebrows are crunching up and she’s squeezing her eyes shut.

  “Really?” I say.

  Sh
e gives me a strange look, like she’s trying to solve a mystery or something. Then she smiles, really big. And, derecho que sí, this is a problem. Because seeing that smile makes me feel dizzy. I try to focus on her eyes instead. They’re green or blue. It’s hard to say. It’s like they couldn’t decide. And then to add to the confusion, one of them has a little brown spot, just to the left of the pupil. It’s like a freckle, right in the middle of all that blue-green.

  Those strange eyes are not easy to look away from. Maybe they aren’t confused. They’re just sort of everything, all at once.

  She reaches back and tugs on her ponytail. The way she does it makes me think it’s something she does a lot. Maybe when she’s thinking. But she keeps looking right at me. “I’m not fine,” she says, shaking her head slowly. “And—the other day—I was kind of a mess.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, gesturing toward my clothes. “I’m kind of a mess too.” And I am. I am filthy. I’ve been dumping bags of dirt into raised beds all day, and I’m 100 percent positive that I stink. “Wanna sit?” I ask.

  What am I doing?

  She doesn’t answer, just plops down on the edge of the vegetable bed. I try to keep some distance between us so she won’t have to smell me. That would not be good.

  We don’t say anything. We’re both looking at the kids instead. They have abandoned their scooters and are walking along the edges of the new flower beds, their hands outstretched like they’re on a balance beam. The boy’s acting all crazy, calling out, “Whoa, whoooa,” like he’s gonna fall. But the little girl is serious and focused, carefully placing one foot in front of the other, watching the plank of wood like she’s studying it.

  And then it comes to me: I need to be nice to this Gretchen girl. Right? I mean, wouldn’t that be better than being standoffish and having her get all weirded out, again? Like I said, the last thing I need is for people in this neighborhood to think I’m some sort of criminal or something. I’ve got enough problems as it is.

  It’s decided. I’ll just be friendly, make her feel comfortable. I can do that.