Anything But Ordinary

by Lara Avery

  Greg joined the mass of his friends, leaping in time to the music, taking shot after shot until he could barely stand.

  In every interaction, she was half there. Half listening to Tom tell her about the time he almost broke some guy’s neck when he played football for Stanford. Half holding Zen’s hair back as she upset the contents of her stomach in the toilet. Half dancing with Gabby when she dragged Bryce onto the floor.

  The other part of her was still outside with her heart stopped. She had done the right thing, but no good feeling came. Nothing came. Emptiness was all.

  Her two halves came together with a snap when she heard Gabby’s voice. “I’m ready to go,” she said, taking off her heels, her eyes half closed. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

  The parties exited in a herd of arms wrapped around shoulders, bare feet, shoes dangling from hands, and even some sloppy kisses.

  Inside their suite, Bryce took a long time washing up. She would run the faucet, stop and stare at nothing, forget what she was doing. By the time she entered the bedroom, three lithe, still-dressed bodies were sprawled on the king-sized bed, fast asleep. Zen was asleep on the couch. Bryce tiptoed to each one, removed their shoes, and stretched out on the down comforter of the second bed.

  But Gabby was still up. Bryce could hear her filling a glass of water, through a crack in the bathroom door. When Gabby emerged, she gave a heavy sigh and drifted out to the main room. Bryce looked at the ceiling, took a deep breath, and followed her to the far windows.

  “Contemplating?” Bryce asked.

  Gabby turned around, her eyes bright, still drunk. “Oh, good, it’s you,” she said, her voice thin and tired. She grabbed Bryce’s arm. “Come with me!”

  “Where?”

  Gabby slid up the pane and stepped through the open window into the night air. “Come on!” she repeated, and with a dangerous sway to the left, she disappeared.

  Bryce stepped through to climb the rickety fire escape behind Gabby’s barefooted form. Of all places she thought she’d end up tonight, following a drunk Gabby up a fire escape was not one of them. But something about it was right in the rest of a terribly wrong evening. The stupidity of it, mostly. They could fall, but so what? Bryce was sick of doing the right thing all the time.

  “Look, Bryce!” Gabby called down ecstatically. She was propelling herself over a wall at the top of the ladder. Bryce followed suit.

  The roof of the Opryland Hotel was an expanse of bare cement except for the center, where thick steel girders held up an enormous neon sign. Bathed in the red light of the giant cursive, Bryce and Gabby caught their breath.

  “I’m still totally plastered,” Gabby breathed, laughing.

  Bryce laughed with her. “I’m glad you’re scaling the side of buildings, then.”

  They stood in silence for a moment, taking in the blur of lights below them.

  “Are you having fun?” Gabby turned to Bryce.

  “Yeah!” Bryce tried to sound as enthusiastic as possible. “Definitely.”

  “You’re faking,” Gabby said, with a scolding look. “I can tell.”

  “No, I’m not,” Bryce said quietly.

  “I’m having the most fun ever,” Gabby said, and then, suddenly, her lip began to tremble. Tears rolled down her cheeks in black, mascara-filled streaks.

  “Gab!” Bryce put her arm around Gabby’s bony shoulders. “What’s wrong?” Bryce glanced around the empty roof. She had no idea what to do. She had rarely seen Gabby lose control.

  “I’m—I’m—sorry,” Gabby sputtered. “It’s just, it’s really good to be home.”

  “It’s really good to have you home.”

  “I felt like I could let loose,” Gabby sniffed. “It was good.”

  At good, she collapsed in Bryce’s arms, her chest heaving with sobs. Bryce tore her gaze from the cracked concrete. “What’s wrong, Gab?”

  “I just feel so much pressure,” Gabby said between sobs. “With all these people in our hometown…” She swallowed another wave of tears. “They’re all so perfect, they know what they want to do with their lives, and I’m just putting on a big show.…”

  “Are you kidding me?” Bryce almost laughed, but she held it in. “You’re going to one of the best law schools in the country!”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know if I can keep up,” Gabby confessed, shaking her head.

  “But when you first told me, at the restaurant, you didn’t look like you weren’t sure. You looked, like, ready to go.”

  “I was trying to impress you.”

  Bryce scoffed. “Impress me? The girl who couldn’t walk?”

  “I don’t know,” Gabby said wistfully. “I wanted you to think that I’d done so much while you were asleep. God knows you would have done more. Probably a gold medal by now, right? Maybe two?”

  Gabby smiled through her tears, and Bryce laughed, softening. “You don’t need to impress me.”

  “I hope I don’t mess it up,” Gabby said, burying her head into Bryce’s arm, her dark hair fluttering in the breeze. “Law school is going to be so hard.”

  “Oh, stop.” Bryce shook her head. “You’re smart. You’re strong. You can do anything. And…” She gulped. “And you’ll have Greg.”

  Gabby heaved a sad sigh. “I honestly don’t know if he’ll like D.C. We’ve been fighting about it, about Greg getting a job. But…I need him with me.” Gabby leaned next to Bryce, putting her head affectionately on her shoulder. “I’ve lost so many people I love. I don’t want to go it alone.”

  Bryce thought with a pang of the pictures she’d seen of Gabby’s father—of his handsome, bearded face, his kind dark eyes. In a way, Gabby lost her mother that year, too. She was never the same after her husband died. And then there had been Bryce herself.

  “Not all of them come back like you do,” she added playfully.

  Bryce wriggled out from Gabby’s arms.

  Not all of them come back. She couldn’t argue with that. Her thoughts were too twisted, her mind too tired, her eyes too full of city lights, her disappointment too great.

  So Bryce sighed, shaking her head at the world that didn’t look nearly as cruel and confusing as it felt, and followed her best friend back down the ladder.

  ryce stood in the doorway of her house. The van honked as it pulled away. The party was over.

  She tossed her house keys on the table by the door, and saw a note in her mother’s loopy handwriting:

  Bry—off to Aunt Martha’s until Sunday. Call us or Carter if you need anything—said he’d be around. Love, Mom.

  Bryce sat at the kitchen table, her bag at her feet.

  Her hands were clenched in fists as she stared at the table. She had brought all this on herself. Kissing Greg, wallowing in the past, letting herself hope for a different future…it had all been her fault. She felt helpless, but worse. Like she was sinking to the bottom of a pool with weights around her ankles, and she had strapped the weights on herself.

  She looked at the clock. An hour had passed just sitting.

  Every part of her was tense. She needed to not feel so much, to make everything less sharp and real. She needed to be numb.

  Bryce entered Sydney’s room. As usual, it smelled like her vanilla lotion, cigarette smoke, and a sweet, herbal smell Bryce didn’t recognize. She dug through drawers, tossing clothes onto more clothes, shoving aside art pencils, scissors, hair bleach, scratched CDs. And then she found it. Alcohol. The scent wafting from the blue, half-empty bottle was unmistakable. TRIPLE DISTILLED VODKA, the label read. It wasn’t tequila, but it would have to do.

  Bryce grabbed a jug of orange juice from the refrigerator and made her way down the stairs, out the basement entrance. Her entrance.

  “This is perfectly legal,” she said to no one, stomping through the field full of dry grass.

  Once in the barn, which looked even more ragged and dusty in the daylight, Bryce twisted the lid of the blue bottle and took a swig. Her throat was on fire, shooting flames down
her chest to her stomach. When the bitterness on her tongue got so bad she began to gag, she remembered the orange juice.

  She perched on a stray beam. She used to sit in this very spot, keeping her dad company while he worked on his plane. She took another swig. “To flying,” she said, and laughed to herself. When she felt this wound up at seventeen, she just took dive after dive until she was so tired she couldn’t think. But she couldn’t do that anymore. She took another swig, “To Sydney,” and something like hot molasses was traveling through her veins. Sydney was probably out drinking right now. Bryce doubted her sister would ever toast her, though.

  She drank to the last night she spent here with Greg, to the shivering feeling that came when she was with him, like she would explode from happiness and fear.

  She drank to Gabby, who had better have the best married life of all married people, ever.

  The booze was working.

  She climbed into the barn’s loft and was pleased to see the rope she had tied to the rafters was still there. She loosened it, upsetting a roost of swallows. She poised her foot on the knot she tied when she was nine, tightening her legs and arms, ready to hold on. And then she was swinging, flying with the birds through the clouds of five years’ dirt, silence except for the flutter of wings, the fibers from the rope pulling against the beams.

  She made up a game where she balanced the blue bottle on a shelflike piece of wood protruding from the hayloft walls. She swung wildly on the rope, steering herself so that she could swipe the bottle off the shelf for a drink, and then set it back on her return trip.

  But she got bored when she became too good at that game. She was too good at games.

  She returned to the house, the bottle almost empty. She stopped at the pool. The ripples seemed to attract the sky’s colors more than usual.

  And then, without a thought, she crossed her hands in front of her, and dove in.

  The water was cool and familiar. Her clothes weighed her down. She could have been swimming through pudding. But she managed a few laps. No freak-outs. No weird flashbacks. The water didn’t morph or meld into anything other than what it was. Everything was free and easy.

  Free and easy, Bryce thought. She turned over to float on her back. Dead man’s float. She wondered if she was drifting, or if the clouds were drifting, or both.

  Time had passed. She was being dragged out of the water. Her back scraped the edge of the pool. She struggled to her hands and knees on the patio.

  A voice above her asked tensely, “What the hell are you doing, Bryce?”

  Sydney. With difficulty, Bryce stood up to face her sister. Then she abruptly turned to go through the open doors, dripping water on the basement tile, and vomited into her hands.

  Alarmed, Sydney followed her quickly, watching her retch. She ducked outside to the pool, and came back with the blue bottle. “Oh my god, Bryce. Are you drunk?”

  Bryce froze, disgusted, holding back the next round of vomit. She was sobering quickly.

  “Go take a shower,” Sydney said, either trying to hold back laughter or vomit of her own. Bryce couldn’t tell. “I’ll take care of this.”

  “No, don’t,” Bryce said, wiping her hands on her shorts, trying to stop the ground from spinning.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Sydney repeated.

  Bryce had little choice. Her clothes felt almost too heavy to move. There was vomit in her hair.

  She stood in the shower until her hair was rinsed clean. Then she sat down, her bare backside and thighs on the white porcelain tub, her legs crisscrossed, letting the hot jets hit the back of her head, her neck, sending a feeling of intense calm through her spine and all the rest of her. All the mistakes washed away, at least for the moment.

  When she came out of her room, dressed in a new T-shirt and basketball shorts, it was evening. Sydney was gone. At least she seemed to be. She was usually gone by now.

  Bryce was overcome by her sister’s absence. By the emptiness of the house. What would she do, all alone here? What she normally did, she guessed. But what was that? For some reason, she couldn’t remember.

  “Bryce?” she heard Sydney’s voice above her. “I’m upstairs!”

  Bryce’s anxiety melted away. She found Sydney lounging on the couch in front of the TV, wearing men’s boxers and a tank top.

  “You’re not going out?” Bryce asked.

  “Not tonight,” Sydney responded, her eyes on the screen.

  Bryce’s first instinct was to ask if she could sit down. On her own couch. Next to her own sister.

  “Nothing’s on,” Sydney said.

  Bryce sat down. “That’s okay.”

  “So,” Sydney said, absently landing on a channel. A school of jellyfish appeared on the screen, part of some nature video. “What was that all about?”

  Bryce sighed. The problems she had washed away were crawling back. “I messed up.”

  “You mean you got messed up?” Sydney turned to her with a wise smile. “Because that’s what it looked like.”

  “Both.” Bryce turned her gaze to the jellyfish. They glowed unnaturally on the screen, their white translucent skin dominating her vision.

  “Tell me why,” Sydney said.

  Bryce didn’t want to answer that. “I’m sorry I drank your vodka,” she said instead.

  “It’s fine; just tell me why you drank it.”

  One jellyfish had broken off from the pack. Its tentacles jutted out to suffocate a sea star. Bryce became immersed in finding the sea star’s flashing orange legs among the pink-white neon of the jellyfish. She had to fight the urge to follow it through the midnight water, reminding herself that it was just on screen.

  She turned back to Sydney. Bryce could tell her sister, she decided. She had to get it all out somehow. “You promise you won’t tell?”

  Sydney made a noise for “Are you kidding me?”

  “Okay,” Bryce said. She took a deep breath. “I’ve been…seeing Greg. Behind Gabby’s back.” Bryce closed her eyes. She didn’t want to see Sydney’s reaction.

  “Wow,” she heard Sydney say. “Huh. I didn’t think you had it in you.”

  Bryce opened her eyes. Sydney wasn’t shocked or disgusted. Sydney was facing her, her head resting on her hand, looking steadily at her sister. She wasn’t wearing eyeliner. She looked younger. Softer. More like the old Sydney.

  She sat up. “Yeah…” Bryce said. “Me neither.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?” her sister asked.

  Bryce clenched her teeth, images from last night running through her head. She flashed to the anguished look on Greg’s face as she walked away from him. “I already broke it off.”

  Sydney shrugged. “So, great. What are you torn up about? Do you still love him?”

  She pressed her palms into her eyes. “I do. And he loves me. He wanted to go away together, but I said no.”

  Sydney stayed quiet.

  “Part of me thinks since I already screwed up, I should just go all the way. Just take him back from Gabby and get my way, and everyone else be damned.”

  “You really think you could do that?” Sydney said with a half smile.

  “I don’t know.” Bryce shrugged, even though she knew the answer was no. “How do you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  “Do what you want, and not care about what anybody else wants, or thinks?”

  “Thanks a lot, Bryce.” Sydney’s voice was suddenly cold.

  “Fine.” Bryce scooted to fully face her sister. “What is your deal, anyway? What is the deal with you?”

  For the first time she’d seen since Bryce woke up, Sydney looked hurt. “What do you mean, my deal?”

  Bryce softened. “I don’t know.” She took a breath. “Syd, what happened between then and now?”

  Sydney’s mouth tightened. “First of all, I’m not as bad as you think. You judge me, you get pissy every time you see me just because I look different than you, or because I go out, or whatever. But you
didn’t even give me a chance. You need to loosen up.”

  Bryce shook her head. “You need to remember you have a family.”

  “You need to understand that you were literally dead to the world, and everyone thought you were going to be dead forever.”

  Bryce opened her mouth to respond, but something in Sydney’s voice made her stop. The bite was gone behind it.

  Sydney continued. “I was so young, and I just…didn’t know how to deal. You were gone, and Mom and Dad…”

  As Bryce began to understand, she felt a sharp pain in her chest, like a knife stuck in her. She thought of the vision she had seen, twelve-year-old Sydney crying quietly in the corner, with no one to hold her or wipe her tears. “They didn’t know how to deal, either.” Bryce’s eyes clouded with tears. She wanted to comfort Sydney now, like she used to, to tell her everything would be okay. But she knew Sydney didn’t need that anymore. She had grown up on her own.

  Sydney just nodded. “It’s like, when something that bad can happen, anything can happen, you know?” Her voice began to shake. “And if you’re never sure if things are going to be okay, what’s the point of anything being okay? What is ‘okay,’ anyway? Because I sure as hell don’t know.”

  Bryce let out, “But you’re more okay than I thought. And that’s good.” She looked at Sydney and touched her folded knee briefly. “You’re really smart.”

  “Shut up,” Sydney said, dismissing her.

  “You are,” Bryce shot back. “Smarter than me.”

  “No!” Sydney said, raising her voice. Then she smiled back serenely. “I know.”

  Bryce laughed, wiping her eyes on her sleeves.

  “It’s nice to see you…” Like this, Bryce wanted to say. “It’s good to see you home.”

  “Yeah.” Sydney rolled her eyes. “Got kind of burned out.”