by Karen Rivers
Kit was a nice person.
She was also a funny person.
But she could also be a sweet person. And a sad person. And a mad person.
The thing with kit was that she was a normal person. She didn’t have too much of any one quality.
If Clem had said kit was a unicorn, then kit would have listened when she talked about her dead grandfather, Beau, and maybe Clem could have shaken the weird, heavy, suffocating feeling she’d had since finding out.
She tapped kit’s number again and listened to the ringing and imagined kit skating faster and faster around the apartment, ricocheting off the furniture, the leaves of all those plants blowing in the whirlwind she created. She hung up when Jorge knocked.
“What?” she said.
“I was coming to see if you’re still mad,” he said, peering around the doorway like she might throw something at him, which made her want to throw something at him.
She picked up a pair of balled up socks and chucked them at the door.
He ducked. “You are mad, right?”
“Why do you think I’m mad?”
“I dunno. Because you ran home without me after dumping my hot chocolate on the table?” Jorge had his phone in his hand. He looked at it, then he held it up to her. He grinned. “Marina said yes.”
Clem fell back on her bed. “What did you ask her? If she thought you were stupid?”
“Ha ha, no, Mento. I asked if she wanted to hang out after school one day at the café.”
Clem rolled her eyes. “Don’t call me that. I was joking. I wouldn’t want to hang out with those M-girls anyway. They have terrible taste in boys.”
“You’re funny,” said Jorge.
“I know.”
“I was kidding, you’re not funny.”
“I know that, too.” What she had just said to kit was probably the meanest thing she’d ever said. She made room for Jorge on the bed. He lay down so close she could smell his deodorant. He loved this body spray called Axe. It smelled like a commercial for itself. “You stink,” she said, resting her head on his shoulder. “Don’t wear that on your date.”
“You have really good manners,” he said. “Maybe you could host a manners YouTube channel.”
“Ha ha,” she said. “A manners channel. Mento’s Manners.”
“I thought you said it was a joke.”
“It was. So was Mento’s Manners. Duh.”
“Can you help me pick out what to wear on Friday?”
“No way!” Clem moved over so her head was hanging upside down off the bed. This triggered one of her headaches, which she got pretty regularly since the fall, but she didn’t mind this time. She deserved it.
In the first few seconds of a headache, she always saw the TMTFIA stage in her mind’s eye, the way it rushed up and smashed into her, like she was frozen in place and it was the thing that was moving. Kit had been telling her about a window washer falling off a building. She told the story a lot, ever since Clem fell, like it explained something. And it did, sort of. It made Clem feel better. It made Clem feel understood.
The window washer had survived and so had she.
Kit was a good friend to her and she was a terrible friend to kit and her animal would be poisonous and awful and everyone would hate it.
“Please? I want to look like I’m trying, but not like I’m trying too hard. A hoodie? Jeans? My T-shirt that says I LIKE TURTLES?”
“What is with turtles? That’s a joke that needs to just . . . die.” She made a face.
“You gave it to me!”
“Oh yeah, right.” Out of the corner of her eye, Clem could see the upside down glass turtle on the floor. She rolled off the bed and onto the floor so she was eyeballing it directly.
“If you’re just going to lie on the floor and be unhelpful, I’m going back to my room,” said Jorge.
Clem didn’t say anything, so Jorge left. After he was gone, Clem held her breath until she could see stars. Then she did a handstand and stayed that way for five full minutes, just because it felt better to be upside down than the right way up. It was almost as if by being upside down, she was the opposite of herself, which, after all, was much better than being her mean, dark, lumpy, tree-rooty, twisted, jellyfish, right-way-up self.
kit
Kit found the letter hidden inside a flyer from Bed Bath & Beyond.
The flyer had gotten stuck in the mail slot.
Kit took it out because she loved flyers and because she was really upset about what Clem had said. She hoped the flyer would distract her, maybe.
“I wish,” she said out loud.
But nothing could distract her. She knew that. She would probably be hearing Clem’s voice saying, “You’d be a naked mole rat,” on a forever loop.
Kit looked across the road at Jackson’s apartment building. It was four stories and the balconies were all painted olive green. It was a truly ugly building, kit thought. She’d never been inside. Even though they were supposedly such good friends, Jackson had always come to her place. Her mom was sort of his babysitter, she realized. Maybe they were never even really friends at all.
She looked back at the paper on her lap.
The game she played with herself was to imagine what she would buy from the flyer if she had $100. A hundred imaginary dollars. Shopping with this imaginary money usually made her happy. But today she could already tell it wasn’t going to work.
It felt like a chore.
She examined everything on the front page and tried not to think the words “You’d be a naked mole rat.” The naked mole rat was the elephant in the room. Except it wasn’t an elephant. It was a naked mole rat. And she wasn’t in a room. She was on the front stoop.
Kit thought about the old photo, the one of herself as a baby all wrinkly and weird in her mom’s hands. The one that used to be stuck on the fridge. In that photo, she had looked like a naked mole rat.
Sort of.
But didn’t all new, too-early, wrinkly babies look kind of like naked mole rats?
“My little naked mole rat,” kit murmured and put her hand on her heart, like her mom always had when she looked at the photo.
Her mom had meant it as a good thing, but kit had hated it. The only one who knew she hated it was Clem.
Clem hadn’t meant it as a good thing.
Kit didn’t like being mad at Clem but she felt as though she didn’t have a choice. She knew she’d forgive her, probably, when Clem asked.
If she asked.
When kit turned the page of the flyer, the first thing that jumped out at her was a rack that heated up your towel while you were in the shower (on sale for $99.99!). Then a pancake pan that imprinted Star Wars characters on your food. Jackson loved Star Wars. “Not that,” she said out loud. “Never that.” She felt extra mad at him for liking Star Wars and ruining it for her because now she couldn’t even consider liking it anymore.
On the next spread, there was a sequinned mermaid pillow, which was interesting, but she dismissed it because mermaids were one hundred percent totally only Marina’s thing. Her next choice would be the toaster oven that also broiled steaks and baked pies. It seemed useful and also kind of futuristic.
“Maybe,” she said out loud. “Maybe not.”
The truth was that if she did have $100, she would go to One Buck Chuck and buy one hundred balloons. She’d let Jorge fill them up, because Clem hated blowing up balloons with the helium machine. Then they could run around Kensington handing them out to people who looked like they were having a bad day.
At least, she would do that if she were still friends with Clem.
What if Clem didn’t say sorry?
She wasn’t sure that her friendship with Jorge would stand up without Clem being the bridge. The triangle constellation maybe didn’t even exist anymore. Maybe they were
just three dots who weren’t connected by lines at all, imaginary or otherwise.
Kit turned the second-to-last page, and there, nestled in between a page of plush Egyptian cotton towels in a rainbow of bright colors and a page of vacuum cleaners designed specifically for pet hair removal, was an envelope.
The envelope was light blue and old-fashioned looking. It said “Miss kit Hardison” on the outside. Then it had her building number and the street where she lived. Who would send her a letter? The paper was whisper-thin. For a second, she imagined it was an apology letter from Clem, but it wasn’t Clem’s handwriting.
She tore open the envelope and unfolded the paper carefully. It felt as though she was doing something she shouldn’t do. She hunched over so that if anyone were to look at her, they wouldn’t be able to read the letter over her shoulder.
“It wasn’t a lie!” the letter said, in square, purple handwriting. That was all.
Kit sniffed her wrist, which still smelled faintly like Truth. Then she sniffed the letter. It just smelled old.
Kit knew who it was from.
It was from Jackson.
There was no one else who could have written it.
There was no one else who would have written it.
“What do you want?” she asked the piece of paper. “I don’t forgive you.” But she wasn’t sure if he was even asking for forgiveness or if he even cared that they weren’t friends anymore. Probably he didn’t. He didn’t need her. He had the two Ethans.
Her mom had a sign on the wall of the salon that used to be her grandma’s. It said, “Sometimes it is better to be happy than to be right.” Kit wanted to take a photo of it and send it to Jackson. She wanted to bonk him right on the face with it. What it basically meant was that even if you were right, you didn’t have to foist your rightness on other people. You could let it go instead of fighting. You could let the other person believe what they wanted to believe.
“I know he’s right, okay?” she said out loud. “I know who my father is.”
Kit felt the sky start to whirl around her, like a tornado in her mom’s favorite old movie, The Wizard of Oz, except when she looked up, all the trash was still on the ground where it had been before and she wasn’t moving at all. Kit blinked hard, a full-on squished-eye blink. The sky held still again.
Was it happening?
Again?
Now?
“Never again,” she said, firmly, as though it was her decision.
There was a time when she could have told Jackson what was happening to her, when she would have told him. This must be what loneliness feels like, she thought. It was terrible.
“It wasn’t a lie!” she read again.
“So what?” she said. She knew that Jackson had all kinds of “proof.” He had photos of her mom with a man. Photos that were taken at a whole bunch of events, exactly eight months before she was born.
He had an article from People magazine about her mom and this man.
He had evidence.
But it didn’t make it the truth.
The truth could be bigger and better and more magical than that. It wasn’t her fault that Jackson didn’t get that.
She tilted her head up to the sky, even though it wasn’t night, and she said, “Right, Dad?”
Nothing happened.
“Just so you know, I’m okay,” she added, which wasn’t one hundred percent accurate. It wasn’t even one percent accurate. She definitely wasn’t okay. Her heart was doing a strange zig-zaggy beat and she knew she was breathing funny, in short, sharp gasps.
Kit wanted to get up so she could show the note to Samara but there was no way to do that without her mom seeing and asking questions and freaking out and besides, she might say that yes, actually, Jackson was right (and obviously he was) and then she would also have to talk about why she made up the whole thing about the Night Sky and then kit would have to forgive her for that or be understanding and she didn’t want to have to do that.
Not yet.
She wanted it to be her own thing to work out.
It was one thing for her dad to not actually be the Night Sky. It was another thing for him to be dead.
Why did Jackson think kit had needed or wanted to know anyway?
What was wrong with him?
He even gave her an obituary for the man—his name was John Alexander Findley—that he’d printed off the internet.
He was a thoughtless jerk.
He must have thought kit would say, “Oooh, you’re so smart, thank you for being so smart.”
He must have thought that she would think he was the best friend ever.
“Wrong!” she said out loud.
Jackson’s dad was a policeman. Everyone in his family was a cop: his aunts and his cousins and his grandfather and his uncles. He seemed to think he was a detective, too, like you could inherit it.
“You don’t know anything,” is what kit had actually said, when he’d presented her with what he found. “You are so stupid. I hate you.”
His face had crumpled up and then he’d stood up straighter and said, “You’re the one who is stupid, if you really think your dad is the Night Sky. Grow up.”
She hated him so much then and still, now.
She pressed her face against the note. It stank. He probably found the paper in his grandpa’s old desk, which he had in his bedroom. It was a real desk from a police station. His dad had had to saw the legs off and then glue them back on again to fit the desk through Jackson’s door. Jackson loved that story, he’d told her a million times. He also told her that the desk took up more room than his bed. That did not sound great to kit but Jackson loved that desk so she’d said, “Awesome.”
“It wasn’t a lie!”
“That is not the point,” she said out loud. But it was impossible to explain the difference between facts and magic to a person who believed only in science. And Jackson was that kind of person.
“It wasn’t a lie!”
An old man was opening the door of the bodega that shared the stoop with the salon. He gave her a funny look.
Kit folded the note back up and unfolded it again. She felt terrible.
Can kids have heart attacks? she wondered.
She wanted to go upstairs and call Clem, but she was mad at Clem and not being able to call Clem made her feel even madder at Clem, but she didn’t want to get too mad in case the thing that happened happened again.
She creased the note into smaller and smaller squares until it fit into the palm of her hand. She hadn’t talked to Jackson for a whole year. She never had to talk to him again. But it bugged her how this dumb note was making it seem like she had to do something, like it demanded a response.
She looked through the glass of the door and Samara gave her a thumbs-up, like they’d shared a riddle and she thought it was funny, too. Kit wasn’t laughing. She was crying.
Jackson wasn’t wrong!
Her real father was dead!
But that didn’t mean her dad wasn’t the Night Sky. It couldn’t. She might have lost Jackson and she might be losing Clem and her mom might be losing her mind, but kit wasn’t going to lose her dad. No way. Not now.
The wind lifted the pages of the Bed Bath & Beyond flyer. It looked like it was waving at her, a pair of colorful wings, but she couldn’t pick it up.
A bunch of pigeons flickered—not quite running, but not flying either—on the sidewalk, pecking around the garbage can, which was overflowing. On the other side of the short cement wall, was the entrance to the bodega. A lot of people had gone in and out since kit sat down. The sun had moved to a different place in the sky. The buses had come and gone and come and gone and come and gone. One lady who passed her was holding a baby who was screaming so loudly kit thought he was going to throw up.
No one seemed to notice kit and her impossi
bly heavy but folded-up-tiny note.
She pulled her hoodie up over her nose and it smelled good, like fresh laundry and the sun. It was still too big but definitely not as big as it had been when she got it. Even she was changing, she supposed, just more slowly than other people.
Her legs felt quivery, like when you get too close to the edge of the roof of a building and you look down at the street.
My father, who I don’t care about or know, is dead, kit thought.
“My father is dead,” kit said. It was true and it was okay. She took a deep breath.
A man wearing a turban was walking by with four tiny poodles all on one leash, three black and one white. They were moving their legs very fast to keep up with him. The man paused, looked over at kit and shrugged. “Sorry, kid,” he said. “Mine is, too.” He had a cigarette between his lips but it wasn’t lit. It looked like a mistake, bouncing there while he spoke.
The poodles yipped. Maybe their father was also dead.
“MY FATHER IS DEAD!” kit yelled.
She hoped Jackson’s window was open. She hoped he heard her yelling. She hoped that if he heard her, he would leave her alone again. She was accepting it. She got it. Was that what he wanted?
The man turned away and started walking again. He had really long legs. The poodles’ legs were twinkling, that’s how fast they had to move to keep up.
“GOODBYE!” kit shouted, as though suddenly she couldn’t be big enough or loud enough to fill the space she needed to fill.
The man waved, but she wasn’t talking to him, she was talking to the Night Sky.
As the last dog disappeared around the corner, the tiniest little bit of lightning forked down from a single cloud that had floated into view. People see what they need to see and kit knew that she needed to see a tiny fork of lightning.
She knew it wasn’t real, but maybe it was, and she really didn’t understand why the difference mattered.
