by Susan Oloier
I just want a straight answer for a change, but clearly I’m not going to get one. So I grab my bag and hug it to me for a moment. Dr. Wheeler waits. Instead of feeding his desire to know the most intimate details of my life, I make for the door.
“See you next week,” he says. “I’d like to discuss the written letters then.”
We’ll see.
Eli
I’m out in the hall, waiting for the start of English Lit. when Stella approaches. My heart lurches. I know she’s friends with Hailey. At least I’ve seen them together a lot lately. At lunch. At the club. I can ask her what happened on Friday, why they took off so quickly. But before I get the chance, Stella launches into a dissertation about Nate.
“Eli? What’s wrong with your friend, Nate?”
I glance from side to side. Maybe there’s another Eli she’s speaking to who can field this bold question better than I can.
As far as I know, Stella and Nate have never spoken. Of course, Stella’s stalked Nate quite a bit at school and at clubs. He even mentioned he saw her drive by his house once. But that may be Nate and his exaggeration—an overinflated sense of self. Then again, Stella is pretty outrageous at times.
“Well, he eats way too much fast food and watches cartoons. Aside from that, I can’t think of anything.”
“He doesn’t even know I exist.” Her shoulders sag and her expression borders on pathetic. Then she regroups after my unexpected response and forges ahead again. “When is he going to ask me out?”
Well, this isn’t awkward. At all. “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”
Nate sneaks up from behind. Stella grows quiet, and I don’t know what to say. Nate’s eyes shift back and forth between the two of us as if he’s happened upon a conspiracy. In some ways he has. “What’s…going on?”
I look to Stella who stands frozen and rendered speechless by the sight of Nate.
“Stella wants to know…” I start.
“…how the rest of your gig at the club was Friday night,” she interrupts. “Hailey and I had to leave early.”
Nate eyeballs me, then glances at Stella. “It went—great.” He raises an eyebrow to me, paying me a confused expression.
“About Friday?” I ask a little too urgently. “Where did you two go anyway?”
Stella’s too busy combing over Nate to listen. “What?”
“Friday night. You and Hailey left early,” I remind her.
Stella tears herself away from Nate. “Oh, right. Um, Hailey…” she stops and a shadow falls over her face. “We couldn’t stay,” is all she says. I know she’s holding back, but I don’t push.
I spot Hailey at the classroom door. Stella smiles big at her, but they don’t stop and chat.
“I’ll leave you two…” I gesture toward the room, but neither of them pays any attention to me. After all the stalking and avoiding of one another, they’re finally face to face. And it doesn’t seem so bad. Love definitely works in strange ways.
I move beside Hailey and find myself dealing with love on another level.
“So I did some research,” I say, pulling some papers out of my bag.
“This weekend?” Hailey asks, surprised as we make our way to the back of class.
I nod. “I have plenty of evidence to show Hamlet didn’t love Ophelia. In fact, I think he hated her.”
Hailey narrows her eyes. “You do?”
“Yeah.”
She looks kind of pissed.
“Something wrong?” I ask.
She slides into her desk chair and sets her stuff down. “I thought our project was going to show how Hamlet loves Ophelia.”
“Wait,” I put all my research down on the desktop. “You think Hamlet actually loves Ophelia?”
“Well…yeah.”
“Not possible,” I say.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s a total jerk to her.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Hailey argues. “He acts that way because he loves her.”
“Hailey,” I lower my voice and lean closer to her desk over the edge of my own, “that’s insane. If you love someone, you don’t treat them the way Hamlet treated Ophelia.”
“But there are extenuating circumstances. Hamlet’s confused. He has a lot going on. He can’t simply swoon over Ophelia and make her the center of his existence. It’s not the way life works.”
“How does it work then?” I ask because it seems like she’s speaking about personal experience rather than the play. “Have you ever been in love?” I ask sincerely, gently.
She stalls before answering. “Yeah.”
“Then you know how consuming it can be. How the person becomes the center of your world, the one you think about in the middle of Chemistry or whatever, the one you dream about.”
“Not all love is like that,” she breathes quietly in my direction.
“Well, it should be.”
Hailey
The center of your world. The one you dream about during Chemistry. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
He isn’t even here, and he distracts me.
I answer patron questions, check in books, check out books, all the while fuming over his commentary. Since when does love have to be all consuming? He’s definitely mistaking infatuation for actual love. I’m sure Dr. Wheeler would agree with me.
During a lull, my eyes drift to the program board. Kids’ Music Program: 4:30. Today.
“Hey, Sharon?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, though her nose remains deeply pressed into the pages of the book she’s reading.
“Who’s doing the music program today?”
“Eli.”
“I thought he quit.” I suddenly find myself shuffling papers at the counter, stacking bookmarks, and being generally OCD when I’m typically not.
“He did.” She lifts her head to look at me since the conversation has surpassed her time expectations. “He came back.”
“Hmm.”
“Actually,” she looks at the clock, “he should be here in fifteen minutes or so. Will you make sure the conference room chairs are program-ready?”
“Conference room? Why not the children’s section?”
“Too big a venue. The kids are thrilled to have him back. I expect a large crowd.”
I’m sure Penny’s ecstatic, too.
In the conference room, I rearrange a few chairs and push some tables against the wall. I pick up the microphone for a sound check. I turn on the system, tap the microphone a few times to make sure it’s on. I glance around, then hesitantly move it to my mouth, wondering what it’s like to be in front of an audience.
“Testing. Testing.” I note the amplified sound and, for a moment, I’m a little shocked by it. But I continue, a little bolder now. “Welcome everybody.” I tamp down the embarrassment. After all, it’s only me. “Are you ready for some music?” My voice fills the space of the empty room. A smile inches to the corner of my mouth, as I suddenly feel empowered by the microphone.
“I am.” Eli leans against the doorframe, smiling.
My cheeks flush, and I avert my eyes. I didn’t expect anyone to actually be listening to me. Much less have the person be Eli. But I recover quickly.
“Well, if it isn’t the Hamlet hater.” I set the microphone down and feign more straightening, though everything is very much in place for Eli’s performance.
“I don’t hate Hamlet.” He continues to look at me, making no move to get ready or even set down his guitar case.
“But you think he’s cold and incapable of love.”
“When it comes to Ophelia.” He twists his mouth in consideration. “Maybe there was someone else. Someone he was truly passionate for.”
“Who? Gertrude? How Oedipus Rex of him,” I say sarcastically. Then I wish I could take it back because somehow Eli seems wounded by my caustic response to his playful banter. The tearing down of this fantasy life he’s created for Prince Hamlet bruises his naïveté.
He sets his
guitar case down and unzips it. “We should really get together to work on this. The end of the semester will be here before we know it.”
He’s right. We’re nowhere near to having any semblance of a project. Like it or not, we’ll have to work outside of the fifteen minutes of class time she gives us each day. Either that or accept an unacceptably low grade.
Eli strums some chords.
“Yeah, okay. Can we talk about it after the program?” I ask.
He holds my gaze for a moment, which is totally unnerving. “Sure.”
I return to work, manning the circulation desk and doing some reshelving. I take a break halfway through his time to peek in. He really does have a way with the kids: telling silly jokes in between songs, improvising goofy lyrics. All with that contagious smile plastered on his face. Even I’m entranced, and I’m well beyond my preschool years.
When the clock shows 5:27, I stop by the conference room as Eli finishes his final song. He has the kids smiling and clapping and fully entertained. He can really bring down the house—at least in the three to nine-year-old range. Soon, all the children and parents have filed out. But one lone girl sits wide-eyed and scared in the corner of the room.
“Where’s your mom?” I kneel down to her level to ask.
Nothing. I look over my shoulder at Eli and shrug at him, not sure what to do.
“What’s your name?” I ask, hoping to break the ice. I receive nothing but silence.
Eli saunters over. “Do you want me to play you a song while you wait?” he asks.
Not a word.
This time he shrugs at me, almost asking my permission to start a tune. I nod. He strums and sings, “I like to eat, eat, eat, apples and bananas.”
At first I only watch. The girl remains camped out in her corner, completely rigid with fear. There’s no hint of a smile. The music doesn’t seem to be working on her. Where could her parents be? Who leaves a four-year-old child alone in the library conference room?
“I like to ate, ate, ate, aples and baneigh, neighs,” Eli continues. His voice is more charming than it was in the club. It’s easier to hear with only the acoustic accompaniment of the guitar.
But the girl clearly is not as moved by his serenade as I am. So when it still doesn’t work, I join in, trying to show her how much fun it all is. “I like to ite, ite, ite, iples and bani nis…”
Eli beams at me as we sing together. We pretend to ignore her, pretend to have fun. And, in reality, I actually am having fun.
On the next verse, the little girl moves away from her corner and inches closer and closer to us, eventually reaching the edge of the makeshift stage. By the final verse of ooting ooples and banoo noos, she has found her way into my lap while intensely watching Eli. He has us both under his spell. And when he finishes, she’s not the only one smiling and clapping; I am, too.
“Well thank you to my adoring fans,” he grins at me and my insides melt like butter in a saucepan. A blush rises to my cheeks, so I tip my face into my hands to hide it. But he’s looking at me; he’s already seen it. A smile ignites in his eyes, then he looks away.
“How ‘bout another?” he asks. But we’re interrupted.
“There you are?” A red-cheeked man who has clearly just entered from the outside calls out to the little girl. She leaps off my lap and runs to him. “I stepped out to get a drink of water and then—” She wraps her tiny arms around his legs, giving him reason not to complete his sentence. “So thanks,” he says. She gives us a coy smile from behind her dad, and they take off.
“I guess I should pack it in,” Eli says, removing the strap from around him. But I touch his wrist to make him stop, my fingers brushing the mesmerizing tattoo. I’m dying to know why he has an infinity sign etched into his skin.
We both look down at my hand, shocked by the gesture. I don’t know what possessed me. I draw my hand away. “Sorry,” I say.
“Don’t be.”
There’s a moment where we hold each other’s eyes. His are blue-gray, hypnotizing. And again, I glimpse the few freckles peppering the side of his nose. Staring at them is like taking an opiate. I could so become addicted to looking at him. He’s nothing short of dreamy.
I pull myself from his gaze. And he instantly looks away, tinkering with his guitar. Did I seriously just think that? I can’t believe it. I did not just call Eli dreamy in my head.
It dawns on me: “Oh my god, I’m Penny,” I say out loud.
“What?” he glances up.
“Nothing.” I jump up. I have to get away from all of this. “I have to get back to…” I stumble over my words and, on my way to the door, physically trip over the leg of a chair and practically fall to the floor. But I recover before I make a spectacle of myself.
“Hailey,” he calls.
I stop at the door and turn. I feel flushed and flustered. “Yeah?”
“I thought we were going to talk about Hamlet.”
My heart races. I feel totally unnerved being in such close proximity to Eli now. It was so much easier before all this intensity came on, when he was just some guy. Now…now, he’s a cute guy. A very sweet and gentle cute guy. “Um…okay.”
“Scuse me,” a voice from behind says. A middle-schooler with some type of disability makes his way into the conference room. “Eli.”
Eli stand up, walks over. “Hey buddy!” He rumples the kid’s hair and kisses him on the top of the head. “Hailey, this is my brother. Conner.”
I smile and wave. “Hi.”
He grins back a hi. “Mom’s in car,” he says to Eli.
“I need to pack up first. Wanna help?”
“Sure,” Conner says.
Eli kneels down with Conner and puts his sheet music and guitar away. I feel like a voyeur watching the two of them together. Eli lifts his eyes to meet mine. “Maybe another time with Hamlet?” he asks, as if he needs my permission for a rain check.
I nod. And my heart becomes a puddle.
Jeremy
“So, have either of you been…?” I gesture to the boundary where the forest kisses the cemetery’s edge. I’ve decided it’s better to make friends in this desolate place than to be alone.
Rae and the boy glance up, as though I’ve interrupted their dandelion-seed blowing. “Well, hello to you, too,” Rae says sarcastically.
I’ve gone out of my way to avoid—even ignore—them both.
“Changed your mind?” Rae asks. There’s still a tone. “We’re suddenly good enough to talk to?”
“I’m sorry,” I say, hovering over them. “It’s just…”
“Confusing?” Rae finishes my sentence.
“Yeah.” I glance over at the far end again. “About that?” I ask, gesturing nondescriptly with my head as though what lies beyond is alive and can hear me.
“He wants to go,” Rae answers, motioning to the child who now plays with the pinwheel. “But he’s waiting.”
“For what?”
“His parents.”
I realize I’ve never seen them here.
There’s a tangible energy coming from the veil. When I get close to it, I can feel it. It’s warm, buzzing, and emanating something close to full moonlight. But I dare not cross into it. I need more time. Maybe forever.
“And you?” I ask. “Do you want to go?”
“I like it better out there,” Rae says, looking in the opposite direction toward the cemetery entrance and the road. The place where old lives carry on without us.
I’ve been outside the cemetery gates, back in the deserted hallways lined with lockers at Wheaton; in my own bedroom where I crawled into the covers of my own bed. I’m not certain how much time has passed since my—I audibly gulp at the idea of it—death. The passage of time almost seems irrelevant on this side of things. But if I let go of the minutes, the months, the seasons, then I may become irrelevant, too, and simply slip away.
Anyway, the times I’ve been on the outside were practice runs.
Tonight it’s time to try out the
coveted place I have longed to go: Hailey’s room. I want to make sure there is no way to screw it up, no way to wind up in another dimension or sucked down a wormhole. My insides spill over with roller-coaster-like anticipation—climbing the hill, teetering at the edge before plummeting down the rise.
I’ve planned it all out. How I’ll crawl into her bed and hold her. How I’ll once again smell the lilacs in her hair, feel the softness of her skin, and bury myself in the life of her.
“Yeah. Me, too,” I say.
But change is happening all around us. The cemetery trees are shedding their summer threads. Crows caw incessantly in their highest boughs. Though it is well into the heart of autumn, the summer tanager remains a faithful companion, living in the anorexic branches of my oak tree. I reach an arm out to it, and it perches there. I stroke its feathers, and it doesn’t seem to mind.
Rae and the boy watch as if my actions reveal my thoughts and my resistance.
The tanager helps stave off the loneliness in the times between visits from family and friends and from Hailey. It makes a quiet pi-tuck and sheds a bright red feather—an offering. I take it, study it, then stick it in my pocket for later.
Hailey
I return to that night over and over again in my head, and it never gets easier. I reach my threshold of pain each time I relive it. It’s like a snapshot of the big picture: leaving the party, darkness, rain falling, a drowsy feeling, then lights streaking over my face while someone hovers over me. And finally, blackness. There are so many blanks to be filled in. Gaps I hope to close with each new visit. The one thing I’m stellar at remembering, though, is the party and the drinking. That never eludes me. I wear it like a stigma, and no matter how well I try to hide it or how good I am at pretending it doesn’t exist, it’s always there. Always.
I live in the land of what ifs and if onlys. What if I had refused to take the car keys? Jeremy would have been livid with me for having no way home, but he’d still be alive. If only I drank soda instead of beer, I never would have fallen asleep and veered off the road.
“Yoohoo, Hailey.” Stella stands over me.
