by Karen Rivers
“Down, girl,” Jackson said, like she was a dog.
She blinked. “What?”
“I’ve just received an update from Clementine Garcia’s parents,” said Mr. Hamish on the loudspeaker. “And there is good good good news.” He said it just like that. Three goods.
Clem was going to be fine, eventually, the principal said, probably, but first she had had some surgery to have her broken leg pinned together. Kit imagined the pins to be like safety pins with beads, like the ones that she and Clem and Jorge had made when they went to summer camp upstate for five days and nights in July. Jackson usually went, too, but this year he hadn’t. Kit still had her beaded pin pinned to her pillow.
Mr. Hamish was listing body parts: leg, arm, ribs, head, finger. “Counselors are on hand if anyone needs to talk.” That was how he closed it, which made it seem like Clem was not going to be okay at all.
It made it seem like Clem was going to die.
Kit opened her mouth to take a deep Samara-style calming breath, but instead she threw up on her desk.
“I told you we should have let the dog out,” Jackson muttered.
Kit went home from school right away. Her mom stroked her head and held cold, wet washcloths to her skin as though she had a fever and finally, after what felt like a lifetime, the phone rang and it was Mrs. Garcia finally calling back. She said that Clem said to tell kit she was A-OK, plus she was going to get to miss a lot of school, so neener neener neener. “Those were the exact words,” Mrs. G. told kit’s mom. Her voice was so loud that kit could hear her through the receiver, even from where she was sitting. She also said that Clem was on some medication for pain that was making her loopy. “She keeps taking photos of a fork,” Mrs. G. said. “She falls asleep clutching a fork. She calls it Forky.”
Kit waited for her mom to stop talking and then asked for the phone so that she could speak to Jorge. The first thing he said was that Clem didn’t remember. He said it urgently, in a whisper shout, like it was a secret. “She doesn’t remember.”
Kit thought she said all the right things about how she knew he didn’t mean to let go of Clem, that it was an accident, everyone could see that. He told her about the sandwiches in the green room and how the show was sponsored by Coca Cola, but his parents wouldn’t let him drink it because of the caffeine, which made him throw up.
“I threw up,” she told him. “Not to do with Coke. Because I was freaking out.” She had a Coke in front of her even while they were talking, bubbles fizzing on the surface, the ice cracking as it melted. Coke was what her mom always gave her when her stomach was upset.
“Lucky,” he said. “That you get to drink it, not about the barf. I have to go now. I’m going to draw on Clem’s casts.”
“Draw soft-and-loose dogs. Or a turtle. But a non-turtle-y turtle.” She laughed.
“I still don’t get that. It’s not funny,” he said, and then he hung up.
Clem
A lot of things happened after the show and the surgery and the physiotherapy and the constant, endless stretching Clem had to do to try to stop her tendons from shortening. They shortened anyway, leaving her pinky in a permanent claw. When she looked at that curled-up finger, she was extra aware of the weird glass-like lump of whatever inside of her that hadn’t gone away. She’d mostly stopped thinking of it as a turtle. The joke about turtles was from Before and that was a long time ago, when she was a different Clem.
A funnier, lighter Clem.
A Clem who could laugh until she cried. And did. A lot.
Now she was a darker, more serious Clem.
She didn’t laugh very much.
She didn’t cry either.
She just felt flat, like all the ups and downs of her old moods had been rolled over by one of those machines they use to flatten the blacktop when they patched potholes on the street.
She felt like maybe she was broken, that was the thing.
She had forgotten how to be herself. Instead, she was this flattened version of herself who was mad about everything.
She couldn’t remember how not to be mad.
And she definitely couldn’t explain that feeling to anyone, so instead of trying, she pretended to be normal, and the pretending was harder than the surgeries and the physiotherapy.
More than anything, she wanted kit or Jorge or really anyone to say, “Hey, are you sure you are okay?”
Because she wasn’t okay.
Everything felt impossible, like she was swimming upstream but also carrying something ridiculously heavy, like maybe an elephant, on her back.
But no one asked, so she kept pretending, and a whole year went by.
kit
A lot of things had changed in a year.
Kit was the only one who felt like she was exactly the same, except for the chip in her front tooth from the popcorn kernel. Her mom wanted her to go to the dentist to have it fixed, but kit kept saying, “No, thank you. It’s fine.”
Kit was a tiny bit phobic about dentists.
It worried her, that she was scared.
It made her wonder if she was going to turn out like her mom, basically a prisoner in her own home.
Every time she touched the chip with her tongue, she worried more.
Clem and Jorge, on the other hand, had changed a lot. Twelve looked different on the twins than it did on kit. They had shot up in height and changed shape, so that even though they were still Clem and Jorge, it was as if the roles of “Clem” and “Jorge” were being played by different actors than before.
It made kit dizzy, literally.
Sometimes she’d be sitting in class and Clem would roll her eyes at something the teacher said and make a sarcastic comment about it, and kit would feel like Clem was speaking a different language. She would feel like she’d stepped into an elevator, only the elevator car wasn’t there, and she fell, far and fast.
“I can’t even,” Clem would say. “What an idiot.”
Clem thought all the teachers were idiots suddenly, even the ones that kit liked.
“Don’t be a turtle,” kit tried saying once. It was their old joke. But Clem had just looked annoyed, like she didn’t remember the turtle thing, and when she finally laughed, her laugh was not her real laugh. It was hard, like rocks banging together. Kit could tell she was just playing along to be nice, which made her feel worse than if Clem hadn’t laughed at all.
Now when they went to Brooklyn Flea, Clem just wanted to look at spiky bracelets that looked like dog collars. She wanted to buy vintage clothes that were “emo.” Kit wasn’t even sure she knew what “emo” meant, but she pretended to, because it seemed like she should know. Then Clem got her ears pierced in two places. She started wearing black all the time, but not comfortable black like kit’s hoodie, more like fierce black. She even painted her fingernails black.
“Clem is just going through a phase,” kit’s mom said. “Lots of girls go through that. I did.”
“I don’t think I’m going to go through that phase,” kit told her mom.
“You might. Just give it time.”
“I won’t.” It annoyed her that her mom was acting like it was sort of a joke. “I think I know myself.”
“Everyone says that,” said her mom. “Then everyone goes through a phase.”
Kit left the room and slammed the door, then put on headphones so she wouldn’t hear her mom if she said, “That’s part of the phase!”
One Monday, Clem showed up at school with a purplish sheen on her cheeks and blue lipstick. It made her look dead, but prettily dead, like a zombie in a TV show. When kit said, “Are you wearing makeup?” even though it was obvious Clem was, Clem laughed and touched her face, like she’d only accidentally contoured her cheeks.
“You look like you’re wearing a costume,” kit added.
“Does it look bad? Should I wash
it off?” Clem sounded like her old self. Sort of.
“No. You look . . . fine. Just different. You look like . . . ” Kit let the sentence fade without finishing it. Clem looked great, she just didn’t look like Clem, she looked like someone else entirely, someone way cooler than kit. Kit still looked like a little kid, she thought, while everyone else looked like the “after” version of a YouTube makeup tutorial. They weren’t even teenagers yet! “You look like Marina,” she finished. “But edgier and not like a mermaid. Better.”
“Want me to do yours after school?” Clem sounded so hopeful that kit agreed.
But then kit went home, dizzy, before lunch, so it didn’t happen.
Kit went home “sick” seven times before the end of September. She only left when the dizziness nearly knocked her right over and she got scared she might faint and the thing that happened—the weird dream, if that’s what it was—might happen again.
“It’s your fight-or-flight instinct,” Samara had explained. “It’s adrenaline and it can make you feel dizzy.”
“My instinct is just flight, I guess,” kit had told her. “I want to fly away from feeling dizzy.” Samara had hugged her.
“You’ll grow out of it,” she’d said, but kit wasn’t so sure. Her mom had grown into it, after all.
The only good thing was that the dizziness passed as soon as she left school. “Flight” worked.
And the thing that happened hadn’t happened again.
Yet.
She had actually Googled “turned into a rodent after hyperventilating” and nothing specifically came up, although she did find one site that said that in situations of extreme stress, sometimes people hallucinated. That was probably the real explanation. It had to be. It wasn’t magic. It was science. Logical, sensible science.
She was pretty sure that explained it, but she couldn’t be totally sure. That’s why she had to leave school so often. That’s why she had to go home as soon as the dizziness began.
On days that she left school early, her mom would see her coming in the door of the salon and she’d stop doing what she was doing and walk kit upstairs and unlock the door and press her lips against kit’s forehead or scalp and pour her a cold glass of Coke and flash her wrist.
“K.i.t., remember? Do your homework,” she’d say. “Or practice for the talent show. And don’t forget to lock the door.”
Kit’s mom was obsessed with the talent show.
The talent show at her own middle school was when her mom figured out that she wanted to be a singer. It was the first time she’d sung on stage and realized that she was good at it. She talked about it all the time.
She asked kit every day what she was going to do for her own talent show and every day kit said, “It’s going to be a surprise.” She knew her mom badly wanted her to sing, and to be really good, and to get a standing ovation and suddenly know her life dream, just like it had happened for her. But kit hoped that by waiting long enough to sign up, she wouldn’t have to do anything at all.
She didn’t practice.
She couldn’t.
She couldn’t even imagine anything more painfully awkward or impossible than standing alone in a room and singing. But she said that she would, and then instead, she did absolutely nothing. She sat on the couch and worried, mostly, after carefully locking and dead-bolting the door against any potential Batman-mask-wearing men. Having scoured the local message boards for news about him, she knew that in the last year, there had been six more incidents involving the mask-wearing man (it had to be the same man, she knew) stealing a guitar, a slow cooker, a microwave, an Xbox, a PlayStation, and a barbecue—so far. Kit could imagine his apartment, all set up with the things he’d brazenly taken from other people’s homes. What she couldn’t imagine was why the police hadn’t found him yet.
Once, instead of doing nothing, she pushed her sleeves up and picked up the marker that her mom kept beside the phone on the counter. Then she drew wings on her upper arms. She walked over to the mirror and looked at herself. She imagined they were real wings and that she could transform into a bird and fly away from everything here that was scary (dentists, the Batman-mask-wearing thief) or hard to understand (her mom, Clem, Jackson).
She tried to make the magic work, whatever it was that had made her hallucinate being a rodent. Why couldn’t she hallucinate being a bird instead?
But it didn’t work, even though she stood there for a long time, flapping.
Then, suddenly, she felt embarrassed. What would Clem say if she saw kit now? She went to the bathroom and rubbed soap all over her arms and rinsed them with hot water, as hot as she could stand, until they turned bright red and only a ghost of the wings remained.
“You are so weird,” she told herself in the mirror. “Seriously, try to be less weird.”
Her own weirdness made her feel extra-panicky.
“You’re twelve years old. Do you want to be weird forever?”
She stepped into the bathtub and chose a vial of oil. She wanted to do a spell, but she didn’t know which one would work, so she just wrote “weird” on a piece of paper, sprinkled it with peppermint oil, which was one of her favorites and smelled like a brisk cold wind. Then she tore it up into tiny pieces and blew it out the window into the alley, which was hot and felt airless that day, like it couldn’t even remember what wind was, much less coldness. She sprinkled out a few extra drops for good measure.
In the mirror, her eyes looked huge against her pale face. Maybe Clem was right. Maybe she did need makeup. She looked too round: round bald head, round eyes, round glasses, round collar on her T-shirt. If she let Clem contour her face, would she look less round? “You would just look stupid,” she told herself. “Stupid and round and weird.” She inspected her chipped tooth—food sometimes got stuck in it—and then she went and sat on the couch.
Even sitting on the couch didn’t feel right since Clem’s accident.
When she had asked Samara what kind of magic could make the accident unhappen, Samara had not laughed at her, not exactly, but she’d smiled in a way that made kit feel silly. “I can’t do that kind of magic,” Samara said. “I’m not a real witch.”
“Aren’t you?” kit had said.
Samara sighed. “No. But I know that belief is the strongest kind of magic. If you believe something, it can be real.”
“What about all your spells?” kit had asked.
“I Google,” Samara admitted. “Most of them probably don’t work, but what if they do?”
“What if they do?” kit had echoed.
The next time she had a chance, she’d Googled “spells to make things unhappen,” but everything she got seemed like a joke, or it had ingredients that didn’t exist, like “a hair from a unicorn’s tail” or “the feather of a dodo.” Then she tried “spells to change people back after they’ve changed.” She couldn’t think of the right way to word it to find the magic she needed. Or maybe that kind of magic just didn’t exist.
When people changed, kit now understood, they did it both gradually and suddenly. One day you realized they were a different person than they used to be, but looking back, you couldn’t remember when they were last themselves, you couldn’t see the exact moment when they became someone new.
It could happen to any of us, kit thought. Even me.
It had happened to Jackson first.
Now it was happening to Clem.
“This is the last time I’m going to watch it,” kit told the Boston fern that her mom had hung from the ceiling in a hanger her mom made by knotting string. The plants had been coming by delivery once or twice a week for the last couple of months. It added up to a lot of plants. Kit had decided that the plants were good company. They were like very quiet, low-maintenance pets.
The Boston fern didn’t answer, obviously. It didn’t care, which was the other great thing about plants. They w
eren’t judgmental, like people. They definitely didn’t care if you watched the same episode of The Most Talented Family in America a million kajillion times.
Maybe that’s why her mom liked plants so much, too.
Her mom had largely stopped going outside at all. She said she didn’t need to go outside if the outside was inside. The kitchen—the only room with an uncovered window—was beginning to look like a jungle and smell like a greenhouse. Sometimes kit expected a monkey to swing down from one of the bigger trees or a snake to slither out from a vine.
She didn’t mind it though. She liked the plants. But that didn’t mean she didn’t wish her mom would go outside, just once in a while.
Kit walked over and turned on the air conditioner so it would blow right at her—it was still so hot—and then she sat down on the couch.
Behind the TV, a thick, now-always-closed blind kept the light out, as though her mom was also trying to stop the outside world from trying to sneak in. The “outside world” included her fans and the press, who hadn’t cared about her for years, but who suddenly cared again. Fame was stalking her, that’s how she was acting, kit thought, as though it was ready to pounce. Kit mostly thought that was a crazy idea, but sometimes she wondered if maybe her mom was right. Just yesterday, in the bodega, kit had heard “Girls With Wings” playing on the radio, just like a normal song that wasn’t sung by her mom. The man behind the cash register was humming along and smiling. Kit almost told him the truth, but then she didn’t because her mom’s privacy mattered more than making the bodega man happy to know that Cyng lived next door. If he knew, would he try to climb in the window?
As far as kit could tell, her mom being afraid had started when she had gotten famous, and this new wave of fame was making it all worse and worse.
“It was just stage fright,” kit’s mom had said, about why she quit. But kit knew it wasn’t only that, because her mom had stopped singing altogether, and even when the public forgot about her, she didn’t stop being afraid.
So even though the stage fright had been her mom’s first big fear, somehow—and kit didn’t know how this worked exactly—it had spawned all her other fears, too. And then those other fears had become their own thing and the fact she was never on stage anymore didn’t stop them from growing and growing
