X in Flight

by Karen Rivers

  Sorry. I guess I sound like a stalker or something. Psycho. I’m not. I swear it. It’s not like I’m wanting to get with you, I just feel like you and me – we’re different, like you and me maybe know stuff that other people don’t. I can fly, why can’t you have some kind of crazy-weird thing, too?

  Besides, I have a girlfriend. I did have a girlfriend. I have a sometimes-girlfriend. I have Cat.

  It’s not about that. It’s really not. I hope I’m not scaring you.

  Look, I feel like I’ve missed some important details. About me. About Deer. I guess I have “issues”. I hate that word, but what else is there?

  It goes all the way back to when I was born. It was just a straight up born-in-the-hospital-no-story-here kind of bullshit, which is only worth mentioning because if Deer had been as bad as she is now I would have been born in a wading pool in some hippies’ basement. The part building up to it was probably more interesting, like when Deer joined a cult (it wasn’t a cult, she says repeatedly, it was just a group of people working together to make the world a better place) and traveled around the world apparently oblivious to the fact that it’s easy to get pregnant when you’re not using any kind of protection and you’re sleeping with everyone you meet.

  That’s a terrific thing to know about your mother. Really healthy. No wonder I’m so messed up.

  I know about your mother, by the way. Everyone knows. About the fire. About how she threw you off the balcony and about how she died. That’s... I don’t know how to say it. I mean, obviously it sucks. But it’s more than that. It’s the worst thing. It sort of… well, it makes me think that maybe I’m right about you. Like maybe something happened to you that day to make you … special. Somehow. I don’t know. I just hope it did.

  At least ... anyway. Whatever. I’m sorry about your mother. I hope you have other people who fill you up.

  I don’t. I mean, other than Deer and Mutt, there’s no one. Deer was an only child. Her mother is dead, died before I can remember. And her dad… well, her dad. He was like her best friend, but when she had a black baby (that would be me) he walked out of the hospital and never came back. He is what we call a “bigot”. Deer never mentions him. Not much, anyway. There are pictures of him though. White guy. Funny thing that he could marry a Native and still be a bigot against African-Americans, but maybe bigots pick and choose.

  People let you down. That’s the lesson, right? Your whole life long, probably, people who you think will always be there are bailing out.

  It’s dark outside. So dark. Winter. Dark and still. I never thought I’d say it, but I miss the crickets and frogs that most of the year are so unfuckinbelievably noisy it’s like they’re living in my head. Sometimes I hate noise. In the spring and summer, I stuff Kleenex in my ears but it doesn’t help at all, it’s still all chirp chirp chirpy. But now, it’s completely silent. I wish I had an iPod so I could block out all that nothingness. The only thing I can hear is Mutt breathing his wet, kid breathing in the bunk under mine. Seventeen years old and sharing a bunk bed with my three year old brother. Nice, huh?

  Shut up, Mutty, I say out loud. Nicely, but still.

  Mmmf, he says in his sleep, stuffing his thumb in his mouth, slurping away on it like it’s a root-beer popsicle.

  I sketch a car I’ll never be able to afford in the edge of my notebook by the light of the clip-on-lamp. I’m not supposed to be writing letters (or whatever this is) that I’ll never send. I should be doing homework. Math. In the bad light, the numbers are even harder to make any sense of. This stupid lamp is old and wrecked and gets brighter and dimmer depending on the angle I prop it at with my shoulder. The light bulb burns my skin.

  I have to tell you something else that’s important.

  Sometimes I hate myself. I want to take this pen and drive it through the palm of my hand. Why?

  I don’t know.

  I’m no one special.

  I’m special because I can fly.

  Or maybe I can fly because I’m special.

  I never thought of it like that. I like it better that way around. Although it doesn’t make much sense because let’s face it, I’m really not special at all. Although maybe I’m supposed to be.

  I’m just X.

  This is who I am.

  Cat

  Chapter 2

  Cat flips through a mess of books that she’s grabbed randomly from her sister’s alphabetically arranged shelf. She doesn’t know what she’s looking for, and it doesn’t much matter. And because it doesn’t matter, she knows she’ll find it. It can be anything. She opens covers. She feels the pages. She looks at the author bios on the back. Drops them onto the floor, gets up to reach for more.

  Her sister, Mira, isn’t home. She’s at one of her millions of “meetings”. Cat lumps them altogether as one category: Overachievers Anonymous. It doesn’t matter if it’s Save the Environment or Amnesty International or Students Against Drunk Driving. Whatever it is, it all adds up to the same thing. Too much.

  Mira’s bed is made perfectly. Sheets so tight they practically propel Cat back up again when she throws herself back down on to it. She bounces hard, on her feet, jumping like a kid. Jumping until she’s out of breath. Jumping until the bed has softened up. Messed into comfort. She stops bouncing and starts reading randomly from a stack of books she’s dropped in a heap on the floor. Poetry.

  Gross.

  She hates poetry. Especially pretty poetry. Robert Frost. Emily Dickinson. Yawn.

  What she hates more, though, is asinine questions like “Who Are You?” that have to be answered in essay form, double-spaced, in black type (Times New Roman or Arial only). She decided right away that she wouldn’t write a stupid essay. She’d do something even more abhorrently ridiculous. She’d answer the question with a poem.

  Originally, she planned to write her own, but she tried for about an hour and her verse was shit and she was too tired to try again. To tell the truth, she’d ended up toggling over to the internet and talking in a chat-room about body piercings for forty-five minutes. By the time she was done with that, the computer was starting giving her a headache. All those pixels bouncing off her brain. To make matters worse, she’d read about how some girl her age had a belly-button ring that got infected and somehow the infection got into her blood and she croaked. Probably an urban myth, but it still made her feel funny. Light-headed. Dizzy.

  Cat fingers her belly-button ring. It’s a small hoop with a scorpion hanging from it, a tiny diamond in its pincer grasp. The scorpion gets caught on the waistband of her jeans sometimes and makes her hair stand up, like the sound of nails on a chalkboard or biting tin-foil. That squeamish squirm that seems to form in your pores and make your skin shift. It doesn’t bother her though. The pinching feeling reminds her to breathe.

  None of Mira’s parts are pierced. Well, except her ears.

  Mira, Cat drawls, lying on Mira’s bed with her head on Mira’s pillow staring at Mira’s things. Mira, Mira, Mira. I admire ya, Mira, she says.

  She doesn’t understand how they could look so alike and still be so different on the inside. It’s like Mira is lit by an internal flame of goodness and she’s ignited by coal tar or worse. She imagines that Mira’s organs are even all clean and tagged and orderly, whereas her own are probably all blackened at the edges from smoking and sloppily stuffed into basically the right places well enough to function, but not properly. Not quite right.

  If Mira had to write an essay about herself, it would be twenty tidy pages long and full of foot-notes and quotes, in the correct font, clean and intelligent. She’d know how to do it right without asking anyone, without struggling for one second, without procrastinating for four hours first. Cat’s will likely be stained or torn by the time she gets it to the teacher, something always happens. Something dirties it all up.

  Mira, Mira, blah, blah, blah, thinks Cat, closing her eyes. She wants to scream or fall asleep or both. She’s tired. The red pattern of her eyelids against the light makes her
think of sea creatures or ocean plants. Insomnia keeps her awake every night. Last night, she lay there and unable to stop her brain from unfurling all her waking thoughts, she thought about X. She had to fight the urge to get out of bed, walk to his house barefoot, to yell at him. For what? She doesn’t know why she feels so pissed off when she thinks of him, so full of self-loathing, so inclined to punch her fist into the glass on Mira’s white little-girl dressing table. When she thinks about herself and X, thinks about them together, she bubbles over with something an awful lot like rage. Slumps into self-doubt. Feels incandescently furious. That’s the usual stuff that keeps her awake, eyes forced open by her racing heart, staring at the shadows and lights from the passing cars sliding down the wall behind her bed.

  X is her boyfriend. Boyfriend. Who says that word anymore? It sounds wrong. He’s her boy. That’s more often what she calls him. Her boy. Hers.

  She’s happy.

  He’s gorgeous, freakishly beautifully made. Perfect. Like a male model, he’s lanky and angular. Dark skin, fierce blue eyes, shaved smooth head. Cheekbones like blades. She wants to take photos of him, capture him in the lens, blur his outline, highlight his eyes. She wants to catch him in her camera and keep him, but for some reason when she tries, she gets shy. She misses the shot. She fucks it up.

  She should just concentrate on taking her weird pictures of inanimate junk instead. That’s her calling. Her “art”. Pictures of zippers. Piercings. Drops of water sliding of wire fences. Garbage spilling out of cans. Stuff like that. Ugly pretty. Pretty ugly.

  What it comes down to is that she can’t believe that X. chose her in the first place, that they’ve been together for two years. Who would choose her? She has nothing to offer. She isn’t smart or hot or pretty or funny or even really very much fun. Her own father says she’s ugly. Okay, he says her piercings are ugly, but her piercings are as much her as anything else. She keeps thinking that X will realize his mistake, will dump her suddenly and hurtfully and she’ll be caught off guard, off balance. She’ll fall. She’d hate that. So instead, her brain takes over and forces her to imagine a film reel of what’s going to probably happen. To guess what he must be thinking. She practices in her head for the ending. It makes her ache. It makes her hate him enough to make herself feel okay.

  In the other room, she can hear the rise and fall of a too-boisterous-to-be-meaningful conversation. Her mum on the phone yammering away, her voice like some kind of bells or cymbals. Bam bam bam-ditty-bam. Clang clang. Cat can hear threads of the conversation, although it is just far enough away that she has to strain to listen, to weave it back together. She hears the words “very proud” and deflates. Her mum is bragging to someone on the phone again about Mira. Must be. They are so proud of Mira that their eyes shine like mirrors when she comes into the room, always with some big announcement. Some great thing she’s done. Some kid she’s saved from a burning building or some charity she’s given a fortune to in pennies collected in a jar. Something she’s won or achieved or been recognized for. Cat’s bile rises in her throat. It’s as though she, Cat, doesn’t even exist.

  I need to use the phone, Ma, she screams.

  Though she doesn’t. And even if she did, she has her own cell phone, makes all her calls on that for privacy.

  For good measure, she picks up the extension in Mira’s room, sighs noisily into the receiver, then slams it down. This won’t make her mother hang up, she knows it won’t. But it will bug her, and that’s enough. Her mother talks on the phone about ten hours of the day, unless she’s out selling make-up to old people. Cat’s mother’s Avon route involves five local “retirement homes”, which Cat calls “Death’s Waiting Rooms”. She went with her mother once and nearly killed herself, it was so depressing. Old people sitting around with vacant expressions on their face and their teeth in jars beside them spending the money they probably saved their whole lives on Rabid Raspberry Lip Smackers and Sparkling Wine nail polish. And the smell!

  The smell.

  Cat gets dizzy thinking about it. Can’t breathe. Feels like she’s gagging on mothballs. The stench was unforgettable, saturating: cleaners and body waste and something worse. Like the smell of death itself. It was the most hideous smelling experience of her life.

  Mira, of course, loved it. She still, even now, goes once a week to play Scrabble with the old bats. She reads them poetry and calls it a “workshop” when really it’s more like story-time at a kindergarten. What a suckhole. Cat can’t believe that she’s related to such a simp. She kicks at Mira’s comforter until she’s made even more of a nest, ignoring the fact that some old caked mud from her boots clumps off onto Mira’s white pillow. She forces herself to read another poem from another book. It sucks. It rhymes and it’s cheerful, like some kind of hideous birthday card featuring a dew-spattered rosebud. Terrible. It reads like song lyrics for some kind of feel-good up-with-people choir.

  Cat can’t sing, but wishes she could. Not in a choir, not that kind of singing, but fronting a band of edgy strung-out rockers. Something noisy and pissed off. With screaming. With rage. She looks like that kind of singer. People see her barbell and her belly-button ring and her hair-cut and her clothes and think she is one. Of course, she muses, people don’t know shit about anything. People suck. And just because you look a certain way, means jack all. Look at X. He’s a golfer. He looks too cut and cool and edged out to be a golfer. Way too alternative. But inside, he’s just a preppy white guy in an argyle cardigan and knickers, perfecting his putt.

  Cat hates golf.

  But she loves X. She really does love him. Love. The word makes her puke, but it doesn’t make her feelings less real. And because she loves X, sometimes she carries his bag when he plays in tournaments. She even takes the piercings out of her face because for some reason, golf courses get to dictate whether or not you have a one-inch piece of metal above your eye. Up-tight bastards. She hates golf courses, golf clubs, and golf pros. And X’s golf bag, which weighs about two hundred pounds, but which she carries without complaining. Cat is nothing if not tough. Nothing if not strong. While Mira is trouncing around the town doing good deeds and learning things that her mum can brag about later, Cat is usually at the gym or at the pool. Lifting weights, swimming, running. She has tons of energy. Sometimes, she has so much excess energy she wouldn’t be surprised if she just left the ground altogether one day. It’s like she’s buzzing. Constantly. That’s part of the reason for the pot she smokes daily, she rationalizes. It’s the only thing that makes the buzzing stop.

  Speaking of pot, she’s been staring at the same page for twenty minutes at least, the last hit was too much. Mira’s room smells so much like Mira that it’s making her head ache and her throat clench. It’s a soapy clean papery smell. Soft. Cat hangs over the edge of Mira’s bed and looks underneath, hoping to find something that would incriminate her sister, make her seem less perfect. A diary or porn or an empty bottle of JD or even a candy wrapper. Nothing. She sighs, still upside down, the blood pulsing behind her eyes. There aren’t even any dust-balls. Clean, sunny, bright Mira. Well, fuck, she thinks, sitting up so fast her head feels light and fluffy, like a dandelion gone to seed. Closes her eyes.

  Good thing my parents had Mira or they’d be really sad to have just been stuck with me, she thinks.

  Back up on the bed, which is now in complete shambles, Cat flexes herself up into a back bend and upside down observes the Greenpeace poster that Mira has over her headboard. She wonders if Mira ever wants to rip that thing down and to become someone else. Replace it with something ugly, something dark. Experimentally, she flexes, and then pushes off with her feet, idly wondering if she’s still strong enough to get up onto her hands from this position.

  She isn’t.

  Her feet hit the poster – does it tear? – and she crashes onto the floor, half-laughing, half-hurt.

  What are you DOING up there? her father yells.

  NOTHING, she screams back.

  Pretty noisy for NOTHIN
G, he shouts.

  I’m doing my HOMEWORK, she says.

  Try to do it more quietly, he says from the doorway.

  Okay, she says.

  He stares at her for a second. His lip curls as if he’s about to say something, then he shakes his head. Hard. Like there is water in his ear he’s trying to dislodge.

  And try to do it in your own room, he says.

  Yeah, she says.

  Her own room is a pit. There are clothes everywhere and CD’s and papers and … junk. Mira’s room is nicer. Well, mostly because it’s clean.

  And clean up your sister’s room before you leave it, he says.

  She can hear his heavy footsteps on the stairs. Clomp, clomp, clomp.

  Hey dad, she wants to yell. Are you HAPPY? Is this the life you wanted?

  But she doesn’t. She gets up and tugs Mira’s comforter back into some semblance of “flat”. Grabs yet another book from the now half-empty shelf and flips it open, tears out a page. There, she thinks. This page of this book will be my answer to “who are you”.

  Why not?

  Cat slams back into her own room, which stinks like stale cigarettes and laundry and something rotting, and types the poem into her computer, changing a few words just to make it less like cheating and more true. For a second, she thinks that maybe she should trash this idea and instead type out the lyrics for that old Police song that her Mum loves so much. She thinks it’s called “Don’t Stand so Close to Me” or some crap like that. Then the teacher would know that she knows that he’s hot for her. Staring at her boobs all class. Trying to meet her eye. Blushing when she stares him down. Creep. She’s ON to him. She knows.