X in Flight

by Karen Rivers

  Cat likes people who are noticed. She’s noticed. X is noticed but that’s because he’s a tall black kid in a school of white short kids. Tic is noticed because he’s vivid. Maybe she’ll hook up with him. Maybe that’s what she needs. Besides, it would probably shock X into realizing how much he probably actually likes her, after all. Loves her even. Make something somehow change in how he feels, how she feels, how everything feels. Make it explode. Make it sharp and true and painful and real.

  Hey, she says. X.

  She can tell X is watching her, that his gaze is nervous. Well, good. She’s nervous, too, but she can’t stop herself.

  You’re an idiot, she says loudly enough for him to hear. She’s talking to herself, not to him, but he can’t know that.

  You’re on your own, he says.

  Not you, she says, but he’s already shifted back and is moving away. He’s inside a building, she can trace his progress through the tunnels. But it’s confusing. Loud, quiet. She’s disoriented. Is he coming closer or fading into the distance?

  X? she yells.

  X, c’mon, she shouts. She isn’t sure now. Where is he?

  He stands up and smashes what must be his head, swears loudly. He’s close. Relief seeps through her like oil.

  The sound of the plastic giving and bending under his weight, is audible enough to make her feel okay. She lets go with one hand and lazily swings back and forth to convince herself that she isn’t afraid. She’s waiting for him, but she’s not. What could he do anyway? She’ll have to get herself down somehow. No one could help her.

  She moves her hands one at a time so she’s a bit closer to the tower where the bridge starts. Her upper body is strong, muscles like pebbles under her skin, hurting and shaking. She can tell that she’s drunk because her arms and legs feel loose and detached, the trembling looks like it’s happening to someone else. She makes herself look, lets her head drop down and back so that she sees everything from upside down. If she fell right now, she thinks, she’d burst open like ripe fruit. And who would care? She frowns. Well, her mum and dad. Mira, probably. X? she guesses.

  Out of nowhere she is suddenly struck by a wave of remorse, of loss, of self-loathing. She wishes she had real, true girlfriends. A best friend. Not just boys who hang around her because they like her boobs and the fact that she looks like a slut. She can hear X’s breathing, he’s close enough to almost grab her. With all the strength she can tap into, she manages to pull herself all the way up, back over the rope safety net, inside the bridge’s net tube. For a second, her toes are stuck, but then she’s free. Just out of his grasp. Now she’s on the bridge itself, the thing swinging under her weight.

  This would be terrifying for a kid, she says out loud.

  X is so close she can see him blinking. I guess, he says. I’m not liking it much either. Don’t like heights. He laughs at this like he’s said something funny. She shrugs and stands, making her way slowly slowly slowly across the fifty or so feet of bridge to the castle. To the other side, away from him. The slats are wide, purple plastic. Shifty and slippery.

  Ladies and Gentleman, she says once she’s crossed, moved from inside the castle, up the trestle outside it, through some feat of magic pulls herself onto the outside of the highest point of the castle’s spire. May I present the magical stylings of … Cat! She claps for herself.

  Don’t kill yourself, calls X. She can’t see him very well from where she is. He’s lying down, it looks like: lower body on the bridge, upper body still on the floor of the tower it attaches to. Is he stuck? Is he really not going to come closer, not grab her, not stop her? Is he kidding? He’s not much of a drinker, she thinks. This pisses her off. He’s so weak and infuriating. There’s no sign of the other two. No sound. Where did they go?

  They’re probably raiding the vending machine in the lobby, that’s all. Probably up to something bad, but not too bad. Not like they’re blowing the place up or something.

  Undaunted by her apparent lack of audience, Cat steps onto a support beam that joins the castle to the bridge. It’s narrower and more sloping than she’d thought and it wobbles when she steps on it.

  She bites her lip and looks over at X. Is he looking back at her? She can’t tell.

  She wishes she had a cigarette. She takes a few hesitant steps out onto the beam and twirls. Gaining confidence shakily and slowly. Tentatively, she reaches down with her hands. It feels solid. Pretend it’s a foot off the ground, she instructs herself and then suddenly flips into a cartwheel.

  That makes him look. It sounds klutzy. Her bare feet scrabbling for a grip on the plastic beam. Searching, searching, finding. Relief feels like strength flooding her.

  Stop it, X calls.

  She laughs. Her adrenaline is going nuts. Surging. It feels good. It makes her feel lucid and clear-headed.

  Hey, she says. Six points from the German judge.

  Get down, X says.

  He’s paying attention now, she thinks. Good. She stands there, arms above her head, thinking about what to do next. She can’t tell from his tone if he’s imploring her or if he’s bored by the whole thing. Is he annoyed or afraid? She’d prefer afraid, given a choice. She wants to make him feel something.

  Maybe I should run away and join the circus, she says. Only it comes out “shircus”. She’s drunk. She wobbles precariously.

  You’re being stupid, says X.

  He looks pissed off.

  Okay, I’ll get down, she says. But first…

  And she bends backwards. She’s thinking of doing a backwards walkover. She used to be able to do them in her sleep. When she was nine. She’s not nine any more. Her center of gravity is different. Alcohol rushes around in her blood.

  Cat, she hears him scream, and then she’s falling, backwards, falling for a long time. Hands stretched out and somehow – how? – X is holding her, on the castle drawbridge, the fake moat under them painted with alligators. She clings on to his neck and says, Thanks.

  It’s only as they are driving home that she thinks, how the hell did that happen? It isn’t possible. It was too far to fall and land without breaking bones, without damage. How the fuck did he do that? She’s dizzy. She doesn’t understand.

  X won’t meet her eye. Slams out of the car. Says, good night assholes. Disappears into his sad sack little trailer. He has to duck to fit in the door.

  I’m breaking up with him anyway, she tells Tic who is staring at her from the backseat. His eyes wide and dilated.

  Whatever, he says patting her head limply. Nice haircut.

  Yeah, she says, turning up the radio. Whatever.

  Ruby

  Chapter 9

  Something is happening to you. You are stuck in a place between ennui and some sort of pain that is too scary to explore. Does something hurt?

  No. Not literally.

  But it’s something. Something is changing. A constellation of acne has bloomed on your chin. You touch it now with your hand, gently. It stings. You’ve never had acne before and it makes you want to scream and cry and hide your head under an old sack until it goes away. One thing you counted on about your appearance was your skin, your pale even skin. Now it, too, is letting you down. Red and angry.

  Maybe you are red and angry.

  I’m taking Cassidy on a holiday to that place where we went, says her dad. She needs a break. She’s been working too hard. It’s not good for anyone to never go on holiday. Would you believe she’s never been away?

  He’s eating ice cream out of the carton, offering it to you like you’d want to share his slobbery spoon. You used to do things like that. Before.

  I don’t want any ice cream, you snap impatiently, spinning on your bar stool. Slowly. What place?

  You know, the place, he says. Storm watching. That lodge with the hot tub on the deck. He winks.

  Is he demented? He winked at you? You’re supposed to imagine Cassidy and your dad getting it on in the hot tub on the deck? You’re supposed to… what? Nudge him and make a
face? Congratulate him? It’s too disgusting to even contemplate. Is he so out of touch with you that he thinks that this is the sort of banter he should have with you? You’re his kid.

  And the place. Well, it’s your place. Your heart drops all the way to your feet and somehow you swallow even though your mouth is dry and it relodges in your chest. Hammering.

  The place at the beach? you say.

  Yeah, he says. She’ll like that, won’t she?

  Of course, you say, but it comes out more like “gorse”. You nod vigorously.

  Who wouldn’t like it? You and your dad have been going there every winter forever, just for a weekend, to watch the huge waves crash along the west coast in an array of wild spray and power. You’ve gone every year. Forever.

  Forever, you say out loud.

  What? he says. Are you sure you don’t want some of this? It’s so good. Your favourite.

  You look at him blankly. It’s not my favourite anymore, you say.

  Your loss, he shrugs. He pats you on the head like a dog. Why can’t he see that you’re incandescent with rage? Is he stupid?

  You and I will still go there, too, sweetness, he adds. It’s still our place.

  Uh, you say.

  If there was ever a time when you could light a fire with your eyes, it’s now. You stare hard a piece of paper and will it to explode into flames, but of course it doesn’t. Dumb. People can’t light things on fire because they’re in a bad mood, not psychically anyway.

  You sure you’ll be okay on your own for that long? he asks, looking back at you over his shoulder. He’s rinsing off the spoon to leave on the counter. They always leave an ice cream spoon on the counter, in case of sudden hunger. That’s what he used to say, “In case of sudden hunger.” It was like a joke, your private joke. He dries the spoon and puts it away in the drawer.

  Of course, you say witheringly. I’m seventeen, not seven. Go. Have fun.

  Thanks, he says, as though he believes that you mean it.

  You shrug and stomp as heavily as you can into your room, which is impossible because this apartment is so thickly, richly well- constructed that even stomping sounds like tiptoeing. Slam the door, which also doesn’t slam, some kind of hinge that causes it to settle into its frame like a sigh.

  Well, fuck that, you think. Fuck you, Dad. FUCK YOU. Only you don’t say it out loud. Instead, you flop face first into your pillow, your zits hurting against the rough cotton.

  You want to scream.

  Instead, you close your eyes. You breathe. You listen to the hushed sounds of your dad talking on the phone. To Cassidy, of course. Explaining the romantic surprise. Closet doors open and shut: packing already. He’s not leaving until Thursday, but he has to start now. He’s overly organized, anal retentive, annoying in his planning carefulness.

  You can hardly stand it. You can’t explain it. You don’t understand why you feel so totally destroyed. Betrayed. Cassidy in the hot tub on the front deck of the hotel, laughing in the moonlight. Of course she should be. It’s a romantic place. She’s your father’s girlfriend. You’re his daughter. You shouldn’t be in romantic places with him. There is something wrong with you that you’re jealous.

  You are sick.

  For the next two days, you pretend to be normal. Your skin pustulates. You make jokes about your zits and your father laughs and tells you that his zits were so bad he had to have surgery when he was grown up to reduce the pocking. This doesn’t make you feel better.

  It makes you even madder.

  You don’t say anything.

  Finally, he leaves. He goes while you’re at school and when you get home, you know he’s gone because his packed bag is missing from its perch by the front door and there is a note on the counter that says, Remember to eat nothing but ice cream. Vegetables are for sissies! That’s the kind of thing your father thinks is funny.

  You crumple it up, throw it in the garbage, and crawl into bed, even though you aren’t sick. You’re just empty. Empty empty empty.

  You get up and make toast and eat it, your sheets filling with crumbs that scratch your skin. You eat a lot of toast. You think about things you don’t want to think about. For example, you think about your mother. You pull your favourite photo of her out of your school binder, where you always tuck it. In the picture, her mouth is half-open and you can see her bottom teeth are very crooked. She’s in the middle of saying something and she isn’t smiling. In this picture, you think she probably looks most like how she would normally look. In a lot of the pictures you have of her, she’s smiling hard and you can tell that she never really looked that way. Most people don’t.

  You look at her picture. She looks like you, a bit, but mostly like herself. Her hair was messy, being lifted maybe by the wind or else she slept on it wrong and didn’t bother to comb it. Was your mother the kind of person who didn’t comb her hair? Are you?

  You stop combing your hair. In fact, you stop washing your hair and it gets progressively grosser until it looks dark with oil when really it’s so blonde it’s nearly white. This makes you look more like your mother.

  That will show your dad how upset you are. Except it won’t, because he won’t see it.

  You can’t understand why you’re so mad.

  Even looking at the picture makes you mad. Once you showed it to Tic. To Joey. But you think of him as Tic when you remember the Picture Incident because he was such an asshole, he was like someone you didn’t know. You know Joey. You don’t know Tic. Anyway, you’d been talking about the fire, which Joey was always fascinated with. He can’t believe you remember it and for some reason he loves to hear you tell the story. He makes you feel like you are telling the truth, that you do remember, that somehow this makes you special. After you told him the story, you pulled out the picture to show him. He was just looking at it, you can see it there in his hand, sitting on the falling down rock wall in the old park. It was sunny, the bright blue sky reflecting off his eyes like a ricochet. He was so beautiful, you could feel a pang in your heart. He was looking at the picture when out of nowhere X and Robbo appeared. The picture in Joey’s hand, Joey looking down at it and saying “Not much of a looker, was she?” and it dropping in slow motion to the patchy grass below. There were cigarette butts there and a handful of the tabs from the top of cans. A crumpled bag of empty chips and a box from McDonald’s fries.

  You felt like you’d been punched.

  You remember now that X picked up the picture. Passed it to you. Glanced at it and said, “Pretty.” But he was just being nice. She wasn’t actually very pretty. There’s something wrong with that, as though if you have a dead mother, she ought to have been very beautiful. Ethereal. Forever young and forever gorgeous. You snatched the picture back, didn’t look him in the eye, although you could feel his eyes on you, feeling sorry for you. This made you mad. You turned and walked away without another word to any of them, not to Joey, that’s for sure. You were mad for weeks, but he didn’t much notice.

  The thing is that you think maybe that’s what you like about him. Maybe you’re used to being casually dismissed.

  Your dad calls and you tell him that you’re sick and once you’ve said it, it becomes true. It starts out with a hollow feeling in your throat, like it has been scooped out like ice cream. Turns into a lowgrade fever. He says he’ll send people to check on you, which makes you laugh out loud. Who? Why?

  After days of lying on the sofa, watching TV, watching whatever is on, watching and not watching, feeling too down to even change the channel, the sickness forgets itself. It wasn’t the sore throat that really got to you, it was something else. Something more global, bigger. Like you were being crushed under the weight of everything: oceans and forests and cities pressing down on your chest so heavily you could barely bother to breathe.

  Eventually, the checkers check in: At your dad’s request! they say brightly as they hover there, filling up the doorway. You think they are probably scrutinizing your ragged appearance, but you don�
�t care. They all bring you food, like they would if someone had died. It’s so awkward it’s actually funny, the door buzzing and someone you don’t even recognize thrusting towards you a casserole dish. How did your dad get the word out so quickly? Did he send a mass e-mail? My kid has the flu, take noodles, I’m too busy humping my girlfriend in the hot tub.”

  It’s like a contest to see who can best feed the girl from the famous book. The really funny part is that you have about twelve casseroles stacked up in the fridge. You’ve had to take out all the condiments to make room. Which just goes to emphasize to you that your dad has more friends than you do, which makes you feel much worse. How could one person – especially one sick person – eat so much in a handful of days?

  Your skin is itchy and toast crumbs are beginning to leave a pattern of indents on your leg. You give in and have a bath. Change your clothes. Wash your sheets. Turn off the TV.

  Lying in your bed at night, you are struck by the overwhelming impossibility of it all. How are you going to ever grow up? How will you ever go to college? How can you ever have a life and explain to anyone how you can’t sleep until you heard the jangle of your father’s keys, his deep-even breathing filling the apartment until it felt like home?

  Finally, you force yourself to get on with it. Up at the normal time for school, have a shower – which in itself seemed almost impossible, you had to remind yourself about soap, shampoo, rinse, conditioner, rinse, all the complex steps that go into it. You get dressed, go outside, walk the mile to school. Now you’re here and it’s as dull as day-time TV. And as pointless.

  You sigh and try to plaster an interested-in-what-you’re-saying expression on your face. Mr. Beardsley is telling an anecdote in the same tone of voice that you would expect someone to use when talking to a coma patient. Hushed. Monotone. His voice is lulling you awfully close to the sleep that’s been eluding you. To keep yourself awake, you gouge your pen into your palm over and over again and when you look down, your hand is covered with blue dots. You hide it quickly on your lap. Stare hard at Mr. Beardsley and nod like you understand.