by Karen Rivers
I sit, not because I want to talk to her, but because I need to get closer to the rock. I need some warmth. The stone feels like a hot relief under my skin. The thing with sandstone is that it looks smooth but it’s really not. The surface is a bit rough, sandpapery. I rub my fingers on it a bit, just because. I wonder if I’m erasing my fingerprints. I kind of hate people who say they are honest, out loud, because it usually is an excuse for saying really rude things. “Just being honest!” they tag, right after they’ve said something about you that hurts.
“Sooooooo,” she says. “Awkward, huh. Here we are, you and me, on this rock, on an island in the middle of nowhere and I have to do the talking because you don’t, which is … well, it’s a little weird, I gotta tell you. I’m Kelby, by the way. So hi. Helllooo in there. You are JC, otherwise known as Sharkboy, but that sounds kinda stupid, if you ask me, so I’m gonna go ahead and call you JC. Which, also, I don’t know. Jesus Christ? My mum is super religious, so she’s the one who noticed that actually, but I know, it’s John Christopher or whatever, but those don’t fit either. Hey, I could make up my own name for you! Like, I don’t know, Snort.” She laughs.
I like her laugh. It’s just there, a full laugh, happy and open. Daff’s laugh is a bit shrill, a bit trying-too-hard, a bit overly girly, but also perfect. So what do I know? Nothing. Jesus, not everything is about Daff. But man, she’d like calling me Snort. I kind of grin, kind of don’t, pretend I’m looking out into the bay, into the new shadows on the green sea, languorously reaching for us across the rising water.
“So, Snort,” she says. “What I’m going to do now is put my music back on again and go back to my book and if I think of something to say, I’ll say it. And you can sit there and be all pensive and cute and whatnot and think deep things about sharks and death. Oh, crap.” She pauses. “Okay, scratch that last part, Snort. I didn’t say anything about you being cute. The fact of your cuteness does not mean that we will be friends. Technically,” she adds, “you’re not my type. Too … soft.” She picks up her book and holds it up, like she’s inspecting it for bugs. She shakes it out.
“Sometimes wasps crawl in between the pages,” she continues. “Anyway, we can be friends. But only if you want. I like having boys as friends. I’m not so good with girls. Girls, in case you didn’t know, are way complicated. Boys are simple. I like that. And you, Snort, being so quiet and all, seem particularly simple. Your simplicity is appealing. As a friend. Not as anything else. So stop looking at my boobs, okay? You’re kinda weirding me out. Enough. Now I’m reading. I’m reading this book. It’s not very good. It’s about the end of the world, the apocalypse. Honestly, it’s freaking me out a bit. Now I’m just going to stop talking and I’m gonna kind of pretend that it is the end of the world, only we don’t know it, because we are here, and who knows what is going on in the world over there?” She waves her hand toward Vancouver, which is completely hidden by smog and haze. I nod. I understand that. Yeah, it could be the end of the world.
It has been the end of the world.
The end of my world.
I wonder if she’d get that, if I said it out loud. Which I won’t. I mean, I’m not opening up to a stranger for no good reason. But I can’t stop staring at her, not just because it’s taking me a while to filter through everything she said, but because she is insanely cute. Which is kind of true of all girls though, that’s the problem. If you look at them, separate from a crowd, alone, you can see all kinds of things about them that’ll make your heart stop. The way their lips are. Eyelashes. The shape of their face. A guy could fall for any of these people. They are all amazing. When you look at them, without distractions, I mean. Without comparing them to Daff.
I don’t know how anyone ever chooses. How anyone ever knows that this one girl is the only girl they want to be with forever. I get dizzy from all the pretty girls, if I’m being honest.
Settle down, Casanova, The King would say. You don’t need the drama. Girls are trouble, your basic nightmare. Sooner or later, they’re saying nasty crap about you on Facebook, then you won’t be so, ooooooh, look at those eyelashes.
I can practically hear him saying it, that’s how real it feels. I wave my hand through the air beside me, just in case.
Her eyelashes really are unbelievable though. They make a shadow on her cheek. It’s the angle of the sun or a trick of the light.
I pick up my phone, which feels extra hot from sitting on the rock in the sun. It’s hard to see the screen. I write, You’re not my type either.
It’s not like I can send it. It’s not like I have her number. I hit Cancel. The pigeons do not swoop. Then, because my phone is in my hand, I type, Weather’s great, wish you were here, then take a photo of Kelby, and hit Send, the swoop curling around something in my chest and pulling.
Text failed, it says. Try again?
No.
My heart is pounding extra hard. Text failed. Try again?
No.
No.
No.
The dogs wander up from the sand, panting, shoving their faces into my legs. They look hot and thirsty and annoyed. I take my eyes off the girl and try to stand, pushing the dogs away.
“I don’t want you to feel weird,” she says, without looking up. “Even though the not-talking thing is totes weird, obvi. But we’re all weird. Everyone is. I mean, look at me. I look normal. I have a normal life and a normal boyfriend and everything. But I’m not normal either. I’m really not. Inside, I’m not. But maybe everyone feels like that, like everyone else is normal and inside, we’re all like, Yeah, but not me. Stuff happens. But it doesn’t change, say, your nose. Or the way your eyes are arranged on your face. But it changes you.” She stops and starts scratching her fingernail into the suntanned brown of her leg, leaving a white-flaked heart.
The water is rising now with serious intent. Tide. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced tide before, at least not like this. Not like watching a bay fill up and empty. I don’t want to interrupt but there’s no clear way to get in to shore now without wading. The dogs jump down and swim for it, their fur spreading out around them like feathers in the water.
“We all get changed,” she says. “That’s all.”
I cough, sounding like my mom. Ribbit ribbit.
“Okay,” she says. “Our whole lives, things are going to happen to us. Sometimes because of us. Sometimes nothing to do with us. But we can’t stop these happenings. And we can’t help being changed by them. I think of it like … seasons. Like the leaves on the trees. Hey, you want to know a great word? ‘Abscission.’ It’s my favorite word. You know how leaves fall off the trees in the autumn? Well, the trees actually kind of throw them off. Did you know that? They eject the leaves! I think that’s so awesome. But I guess what I mean is that the seasons happen, no matter what. Does that sound cheesy? Maybe it is. But yeah, change. We’re all changing. It’s like…” She pauses again. “Evolution, I guess. It’s like we’re evolving constantly. It’s unstoppable.” She lies back on the rock and I pretend to not look at how her breasts fall sideways a bit and I shouldn’t be looking, but I am. “It’s like because you aren’t talking, I have to talk too much.” She closes her eyes, like she’s exhausted from the effort it takes to talk to me. Her book slides down the rock and I should rescue it but I don’t. I want it to float away.
I feel dismissed by the way her eyes are shut, by the way she stopped talking. And I’m mad. I don’t know why I am, but I am. I hope for mud sharks. Bull sharks would be better, chewing at my legs. But they wouldn’t be up here. No way. Too cold. Tears sting my eyes. Abscission. Maybe The King’s dad’s building abscised him. Is that a word? Abscised? It’s not that good a word, not to me.
It’s hard to move fast in water, and buried partially in the soft sand sharp shells are poking through, slicing into my bare blistered feet. Once I get up onto the logs, I feel like I’m safer. Safe from her, safe from talking. My ankle rolls and crackles and throbs. The toilet was a long time ago, but s
till, it never healed right. It clicks back into place as I land heavily on a rock. I open my mouth and swear. Then, louder, I yell, “Bye.”
She sits up. Waves. Stares.
“Hey,” she shouts, her voice amplifying over the bay. “I thought you didn’t talk!”
“I don’t!” I yell over my shoulder, running now, jumping from log to log, my feet somehow knowing where to land, and I sprint hard up the sandstone slope into the woods, barely feeling the path under my bare feet, my shoes forgotten on the rocky shore, the dogs racing after me like it’s their full-time job to stay near me, it’s their duty to nip at my heels.
21
I just want to stop remembering, but none of it will go away, like my brain is on a ride that it can’t get off, which makes me think of rides, which makes me think of that time we climbed up the roller coaster track after the park was closed. Daff was so tiny down there on the ground yelling, “Come down! Come on. You’re gonna kill yourselves!” But her laughter bubbled up and urged us on. Truth: we’d both do anything to make her laugh her crazy laugh like that. The King stood tall, bowed elaborately. Daff got it on her phone for our parkour YouTube channel, the one that’s all over Gawker now, the ones of us showing off. She was doubled over laughing, eventually, at whatever we were shouting, her laughter driving us higher and higher into the darkness. We were spider monkeys, that’s what it felt like, arms and legs swinging and searching and then finding holds. Scampering. We were so fast, you’d get dizzy from watching, the track lit up by bulbs that you could see the filaments in, yellow and flickering like tiny torches lighting up a runway and we were the planes, soaring to touch down, I can’t explain how it was flying, how it was freedom, even though we could have fallen, almost fell, but didn’t fall.
And at the top of the highest loop, I looked down and was hit by a wave of vertigo so intense that my stomach threatened to heave itself out of me, my eyes lost anything to hold on to, and I couldn’t tell which way was up. Sometimes when you’re diving, you lose the surface, your inner ear messes up and then bam, up is down, down is up, everything is tilted. Well, I lost the surface for a second, the stars and the bulbs got mixed up and I felt like I was going to fall up and out into space and be gone forever, I had to drop to my knees and hold on.
I would have fallen if The King hadn’t been there, right behind me.
Or maybe I would have jumped, I don’t know. Because that possibility is always there, like a frame around a picture. What if I jumped.
Not because I wanted to die but because sometimes you get that feeling, that one split second when you almost let go because you believe you could actually fly, for real, like you could almost force your arms to become wings, like there are feathers there that no one can see. Feathers waiting to help you fly. You can practically feel your arms and legs scrabbling in the air, failing (or flying, soaring) and the ground so far away but at the same time so close and the confusion inside you when that happens and that’s vertigo, that’s what it feels like. I teetered. I know I did. I thought about feathers. You don’t ever want to think about feathers.
I wonder if The King thought about feathers.
I didn’t fall. The King grabbed the back of my shirt, the collar cut into my neck and my breath had nowhere to go. Strangling, my hands flew up to my throat and he shoved me down hard onto the track, my hands slipping between the ties, skin peeling back like I was a ripe piece of fruit, blood seeping from the soft pastel place inside my wrists. “Oh man,” I said. “That’s gonna leave a mark.” He laughed, his hand resting on my head, like he was giving me benediction.
Son, you are saved.
Amen, amen to that.
I came down slow, so slow, too slow. I wobbled down on shaking legs, hands dripping blood, pretending to be laughing, trying not to puke. He came down the same way he went up: full tilt, running, jumping, a handstand on the crest of the upside-down curve, flipping where he shouldn’t have flipped but making it anyway. I took a shortcut down the struts, hand over hand, foot over foot, climbing down them like a ladder with too much space between each step.
“Thanks,” I said, when I was finally steady, pavement underfoot. “Don’t know what happened.”
“I wouldn’t let you fall, man,” he said. “I love you.” He reached out his hand and cupped my chin and …
Or no.
I don’t know what I’m
There was a minute when I thought he was going to
I would never
Adrenaline was surging through both of us. An owl swooped down behind him from the darkness, so silently we both screamed. It dropped a dead mouse, which landed near The King’s feet. He flinched backward, kicking at it. Stepped back and fell over on the hard concrete ground.
“Well,” he drawled. “That was stupid. Your turn to save me, I guess. Makes us even.”
I think it was raining, which must be wrong because I also remember stars. The memory is blurry and I can’t quite get hold of all of it. I think I reached out my hand and pulled him up. I think I laughed. I think he laughed. I think we were laughing right there in the shadow of that coaster that didn’t kill us with all those stars up there flickering like an audience. But maybe not. Memory is a word that slithers away suddenly, darting faster than it should be able to move at all.
I do remember that he lay back flat, stretched out, hands crossed over his chest. He closed his eyes. Smiled like someone in a coffin, pinched and fake. I remember that he hugged me hard, arms around my back. He tipped his head back and screamed up at the sky, animal-loud and raw.
He was so powerful, more powerful than anyone I’d ever met or known. He had this
I don’t know
He was
Then Daff was saying, “I gotta pee, I gotta pee,” and The King grabbed her and kissed her hard on her cheek, bit her really, and she doubled over, peed her pants, and we were laughing and couldn’t stop, not ever, and the laughter was the same as falling through space, leaving a huge distance between where we were on the ground and where we’d been, up there at the top, nothing above us but those stars and the crescent thumbnail of the lightly veiled moon.
I stop running, out of breath. I might be crying, I can’t tell, but I know for sure that I feel like puking, the stitch in my side is pulling me up so tight that stretching makes me feel like I’ll snap myself in two. I bend over, hand on a rotten stump, focus on the yellow grass, green moss, gray rock. I lift my eyes and stare across the strait, rising now with white caps, the wind blowing at me seems to have come from out of the blue, the angry sea is whipping its fury into my face. I pull my phone out of my pocket to take a photo—the buildings on the Vancouver skyline are illuminated by the sinking sun behind me and look like they are on fire, a scene that was basically made for Instagram—but then I stop. It’s too beautiful and it’s not what I mean to say. If a picture is worth a thousand words then each one of these is the wrong word. I angle the phone up toward the ancient trees and take a picture and send it to my mom. She’ll know what I mean, even if I’m not exactly clear myself.
22
I can hear their voices as I get closer to the cabin. Dad. A woman. A kid. Someone laughs. A glass clatters to the deck. A boy yells, “I DIDN’T DO IT!” Someone shushes him, laughing. Music plays tinnily on a crappy stereo. I don’t want to get closer to this private party but I’m starving, so unless I want to eat something I’ve picked out of the woods, I have to go past them to get to the kitchen.
They go quiet when they see me. Then Dad breaks the silence. “Hey!” he says. “Did you swim? Did you meet Kelby? She went down to say hi. This is my…” His voice fades. “Anyway, this is Charlie, and he’s great. Oh, and his mom, Darcy.” On the Darcy, his voice cracks, giving him away.
She’s pretty like a woman in a shampoo commercial for some kind of organic brand.
Too pretty for my dad.
Darcy looks nervous, her smile is crookedly questioning. She’s freckly and overly tanned like her daughter but her hair is long an
d blown back by the wind. She smiles like an aging supermodel. I force myself to smile back. Raise my fingers in a sort of salute, sort of wave.
“Hiiiiiii,” she says, drawing it out long enough for me to know she’s uncomfortable. “Good to meet you.” Her hand goes up to her throat where it finds a cross on a chain that she twists while she smiles. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you. Hi,” she repeats.
Dad’s hand is resting on Charlie’s arm in a way that it never casually rested on mine, but the kid swats his arm away. Hard. Dad flinches.
“Oh, hello to you, too, scruffy beasts,” Darcy says, holding out her hand. Then, “My favorite pups.” The dogs break away from me and rub their faces on her like she’s made out of steak. Burger, I think. Burger.
The King used to rank girls as Burgers or Fries. The Burgers were the ones with something to them, like Daff. The Fries were fun but meaningless, empty calories. He usually hooked up with Fries. Well, always. The girls from school who would relentlessly text him after he hooked up with them. The girls from other places who would appear, suddenly, in front of him on the sidewalk, smiling awkwardly, pretending not to be upset, playfully punching him on the arm, and saying, “Hey, you said you’d call.” Sometimes he got their names wrong on purpose, or he’d squint at them, hesitating before getting it right, like he really had to think. He said it made them like him more and who knows, maybe they did. He didn’t like them, though. I could never figure that out, why he kept it up, kept flirting, kept smiling, kept holding on to them after the party ended.
