by Karen Rivers
“Slut,” I’d call him, and he’d say, “Listen, you’re clearly jealous. I should give you lessons.” And I’d say, “No thanks, I’m saving myself for—” and he’d say, “College?” And I’d say, “Nah, for someone who’d have me.” But I meant, For Daff.
Darcy clears her throat and says, “So hey, join us! We’re just talking and … you know, there’s a meteor shower for the next few nights, so we’re waiting. Want a burger?”
“I can throw one on the grill, son,” says Dad, in his too-jovial voice.
I shoot him a withering glance.
“We also have tofu!” she says, rubbing Zeus vigorously behind the ears. “Right, Sunny? Mmmmm, tofu. This one loves it,” she adds.
The dogs look at me as if to say, We love her! Why don’t you love her! Love her already! Love! Love! Love!
I glare at them. They are love vacuums, the three of them, sucking it all up like it matters more than food or water, more than anything. What do they know? I shake my head slowly. No.
Darcy says, “Hey, did you notice how Sunny has one brown eye and one blue eye? Legend has it that means he can see heaven and earth at the same time.”
I stare. Is it possible for anyone to go five minutes around here without mentioning heaven? Without making me choke on death?
Seriously.
Of course I noticed his eyes.
The kid runs over to where I’m standing, plants himself in front of me. His hair is dirty. Actually, his whole self is dirty, but in that way that makes him seem cleaner, somehow. Wholesome. Like he’s a part of this island and not part of the real world. The sinking sun makes his hair shine like pure gold.
My stomach growls.
“How come you don’t talk?” he says. “They told me not to ask you.”
I nod. That’s right, kid. Don’t ask.
“Are you sort of like … an idiot?” he whispers. “Like sort of slow?”
I nod again. Yes, I am sort of an idiot. A slow idiot. Slow to understand. Slow to catch up. Slow to figure anything out. The words clatter like rusty nails in my brain, too sharp. Dangerous.
“Fucking idiots,” The King’s dad shouted that day he picked us up from the police station where we’d been taken in for jumping on cars in a parking complex, for setting off alarms. “Why can’t you be fucking normal? Why can’t you play hockey like goddamn normal kids? Or goddamn basketball, you jerkwads.”
“I’m too short,” The King said, “though Mr. JC Sharkboy here, he can slay a team single-handedly, slam-dunk all those shots, plip plop, like it’s his full-time gig, yo.” I said, “I don’t play, actually.” His dad prickled with rage, tiny white sprays of light around him like something otherworldly. Alive. His jaw clenched, his muscles there as overdeveloped as an athlete’s pecs.
“Must get boring,” the boy singsongs. “Being, you know,” he whispers, “mute. Wanna go fishing?” He has an ice-cream bucket in his hand and he waves it at me. I raise an eyebrow. “For minnows,” he says. “In the tide pools, duh. Tide’s coming in, not much more time.”
I shake my head no, and walk by him, up the last two steps, past Dad and Darcy.
“Is he okay? I hope Charlie didn’t upset him. Poor kid,” I hear her say. “Did I step in it with that thing about heaven? I didn’t think—”
I slam the door on Dad’s awkward laugh. It’s okay to be rude here in the middle of nowhere, when you are so empty inside it’s like your stomach is grabbing for your ribs, desperate to devour something, anything to fill it up. I make a sandwich and then go upstairs to eat it. It’s hot. Every bit of the warmth of the day seems trapped in the stifling space. The air wants to curl away from my lungs. I open the window as wide as I can, letting in a clump of fir needles and a mosquito that aims for my ear immediately. I swat at it. The sea air drifts in, like it can hardly bother. I can see the kid crouched down on the shoreline, scooping his bucket through a tide pool. He looks up and waves. I raise my hand in what is quickly becoming my signature move. The goodbye salute.
I lie down on the rumpled sheets and crack a beer that I’ve swiped from Dad’s stash. It’s warm and tastes like parties and things I’ve regretted doing, but I drink it anyway. I fire up the laptop. I can’t access the Internet—the connection seems to come and go here—but I don’t care. It’s not like I wanted to stare at Daff’s pictures and love her and hate her and feel more than I can feel right now. It’s not like I was going to answer the fifteen e-mails that she’s sent since the funeral. It’s not like I was going to go to The King’s memorial page and hate everyone who wrote anything there. We’ll miss you, bro! Catch ya on the flip side! It’s not like I was going to Google the story again and read about it again and relive it again and be mad again and be sad again and everything keeps happening again and again and again. Maybe that’s what life is: lather, rinse, repeat. Emphasis on the repeat.
I stare at the “connection unavailable” screen for a while, then I start watching Sharkwater, which I’ve mostly memorized. I fall asleep dreaming of the blood in the water, which congeals into the jellyfish I saw in the bay, red-bellied and ominous, which is lifted onto the flat palm of the girl with the white hair, Kelby, who spins around and morphs into Daff, laughing and twirling away on feathery wings up into the darkening blue of the summer sky.
If only my dreams were obvious or something, right?
For the first time since April, I don’t dream of The King. I don’t see his face as he flips backward into the volcano that swallows him as effortlessly as plankton disappearing into the baleen of a passing whale. I don’t dream of him at all.
23
When I wake up, my mouth is thick and dry and sticky. It’s fully dark but the voices are still chattering on the deck. The air is dense with the smell of burned burgers and fire-pit smoke. The boy is curled up on the couch, asleep with the dogs, breathing in god-knows-what-kind-of terrible old couch mold. Dad and Darcy are sitting on a bench a short way down the point, heads bent together. From here, they could be anyone. They could be teenagers. They could be me and Daff but the hair is wrong, as is the way they are sitting. Everything is wrong. I shudder. There is a huge moon hanging over the strait that looks like a prop from a stupid Broadway musical. I half expect them to burst into a song-and-dance number, tap dancing along the sandstone bluff.
The girl with the white hair is playing solitaire on the driftwood table. Kelby.
“Hey,” she says. “Again. Hey again. You. Look, I’m sorry. This is going to be weird if you hate me. Please don’t hate me.”
I shrug. I do hate her, but there’s no use in her knowing that, and besides, I hate everyone. When it’s spread so thin like that, the hate, is it really anything at all? We’re kind of stuck with each other.
“You going to talk or are you back to being mute?” she says. “It’s super hard work doing the talking for two. Usually I don’t have to. My brother and my mum fill up the silences, you know? I’m the quiet one! But I guess that won’t work out with you.” She pauses, runs her finger around the edge of a card, then flips it over. “Okay, well. Um. Let’s talk about sports. You like the Yankees? Is that a New York thing? The Yankees? Come on, give me a break, okay? I won’t tell if you talk. Maybe you could whisper.” She whispers the last part, which makes me shiver. I’ve read on the Internet about people dialing up YouTube videos, listening to people whispering, and right up till this second, I thought that was totally crazy. Now I’m not so sure. I raise my eyebrow at her, and she whispers, “You do know how to whisper, right?” Goose bumps. I rub my arms. Screw this. I raise my hand in the Official Sharkboy Goodbye and head down the steps to the beach, tripping a couple of times because this is a whole new kind of darkness to me. Nothing is even. Everything is off balance.
Kelby, Kelby, Kelby, I think out loud in my head, so maybe she can hear me. Maybe she’ll follow me. Maybe I want her to.
Maybe I don’t.
The tide is high, so I find a rock and sit on it, take off my shoes, and let my feet rest in
the water, which is as cold as ice.
She really is stupidly beautiful, which is pretty unfair. I mean, any guy would be interested. She doesn’t look anything like Daff, but she reminds me of Daff, because everything and everyone reminds me of Daff, from the barnacles that are poking my calves to the lump of seaweed floating slightly too far away to reach.
My phone buzzes, startling me. It’s easy to forget about your phone when you are here, on a rock, on an island, mosquitoes feasting on your arms. I wrestle it out of my pocket, almost dropping it into the water by my feet, catching it just in time.
Wnt to hear a rddle? LMK. Daff.
I type back, Non. Rien est drôle.
I’m smiling though. What is wrong with me? The King is dead. There shouldn’t be smiling or summer air or the smell of the ocean or the show-off stars up there and all this crazy beauty because it’s all wrong.
I turn the phone off. I turn it back on. I text him. Want to hear a riddle? Let me know. Send. The fact that it doesn’t bounce back is such a relief that I exhale something that was stuck without realizing I’d been holding my breath.
“Girlfriend?” She startles me, Kelby, suddenly standing in front of me, teetering on a loose log. It wobbles and she hops off. “I always text so much when I first get here but then after I’ve been here for a while, it kind of seems less important, you know? Like I actually don’t care what anyone over there”—she waves her hand in the direction of Vancouver—“is doing, you know? I probably should, but I don’t. It feels like a different life or like, I don’t know, a movie. This party or that party or so-and-so did this or here is a picture of some idiot puking in a bucket or she said what? To who? I mean, I really don’t care.”
I have a perfect view of the smooth brown skin on her knees. I look away, embarrassed.
“You should probably know that I have a boyfriend,” she says. “I see you falling in love with my knees right now. I’m not blind. And he’s a big guy. He could take you out.” She laughs. “Enh, screw that. Does anyone actually fight about girls anymore? I do have a boyfriend, but he’s small. Well, not small. He’s normal. He’s a normal guy with normal friends who is doing who-cares-what in Vancouver right now and I just … don’t care. I should care! But I don’t care.” She pauses and stares up at the sky. “Holy crap, those stars. Right? Maybe it’s just that … none of this matters. Not really. What he’s doing. Why I’m not texting him. Why I’m telling you this while you sit there like a big dope and stare at my knees.” She shrugs. “Tide’s coming in, let’s go up.”
I follow her up the stairs and she lies down on the hammock and I hesitate, but she pats the spot next to her, like sure, yes, it’s obvious that I’m invited to lie with her. Getting in is awkward and I nearly tip us out. Finally, I’m in and I can feel the whole length of her body next to me and I try to pretend to myself that I’m not noticing it but come on, of course I’m noticing it.
She starts talking again like she never stopped, like the whole interlude of getting up the steps and into the hammock didn’t happen. “He’s actually probably going to dump me at the end of the summer, if he hasn’t already. But that’s okay. He’s normal. He’s a normal guy who likes, I don’t know, soccer and video games and drinking and doing stupid stunts with his friends and whatever normal people do. Normal is so boring. You know? No. I don’t know either. Normal can be good, I guess. I think if you were normal, you’d have different expectations. If you were normal, you’d be disappointed less often. I basically wasn’t in love with him, but I kinda had a crush on normal. Do you know what I mean? I don’t think I know about love, not really. It seems stupid, but then I see my mum and your dad and…” She pauses. “I guess that’s weird for you, if he didn’t mention it. Men are such idiots, actually.”
I want to ask her why she thinks she isn’t normal, because from where I’m lying, she’s the only normal person around. But my voice isn’t willing to play along, the inside of my mouth is sand and seaweed and the ocean and the tide, but it isn’t making words. Not yet. Not right now.
“Talking around you is exhausting, it turns out,” she says, stretching. “I’m going to quit. If you don’t answer, I don’t talk. I’ve already said way too much. Shooting star!”
I’ve missed it, but I look up anyway. We lie in silence for a while, our breathing synching, which is nice. The night is freckling up with stars, more stars than I’ve ever seen. I get caught up in looking at those stars but I don’t forget she’s there, warm and present beside me. She smells like sunscreen and something sweet: honey or vanilla or cake. Do all girls smell like cupcakes? What is it with that? Do they do it on purpose? As it gets darker, more and more stars appear, so that it looks like there is star dust behind the star fragments behind the stars themselves. It’s flat-out amazing.
“At least half those stars are probably ghosts, if you think about it,” she says suddenly. “That’s maybe partly why I’m so into them. The stars. And ghosts. Listen. Think about this: a lot of them have already burned out, they aren’t even there right now. But we can see them like they are there. We see them, so they exist, right? But they don’t! They are long gone! Mind-blowing, right? There is nothing actually there, only dark space. So if you think about it”—her voice speeds up—“why is it so weird that some people can see people that are gone? Like ghosts? Why is it so strange to imagine that they leave a mark? Like it’s taking longer than normal for the fact of their death to travel to our eyes? Do you believe in that kind of stuff? I guess you aren’t going to answer. But you could nod. Or something. God, this is sort of annoying, Snort. I wish you’d say something.”
I try to speak. I want to say something, but my voice is gone again, a crackling dead leaf where a sound should be. I cough instead. Crackle crackle. I nod, shrug, shake my head. Do I believe in ghosts? Would I want to?
No. Yes. I don’t know.
“Sorry,” she says. “I get a little … Mum says I’m overly imaginative. Which is good, because I’m a writer. I’m going to be a writer. I’m writing a book. About the stars and stuff. When I say it like that, it doesn’t sound good. But it is. I like it, anyway. Probably no one else will ever read it. Maybe you’ll want to.”
I smile, as much as I can. Because I do want to, actually. I want to read Kelby’s book.
“If you laugh at me, I’m going to—”
I laugh a little bit, and she raises her hand and punches me in the arm, which hurts more than I would have thought, so I move quick and the hammock flips, spilling us out on the deck in a tangle of arms and legs and bodies. Which is nice, honestly. Except for the bruising.
“Shit!” she yells from under me.
Charlie sits bolt upright on the couch. “You swore!” he says. “I’m going to tell Mum. You’re going to get it.”
Kelby crawls away, gets up, dusting off her knees. (She’s right about her knees, I am in love with them. Maybe. A little bit, anyway.)
“Charlie,” she says. “If you tell, then I am not taking you out tomorrow. Or ever. Never. Got it? Just don’t. I will put a spider in your bed, kid, I swear.”
“Okay, okay,” he says amiably. “Hey, can I swear?”
“No,” she says. “You’re too young.”
“Then I’ll tell,” he says, sort of sadly. “I’m not really scared of spiders anyway.”
“Okay, fine,” she says. “But just once.”
“Fuck,” he says, looking really pleased with himself. “Wooo-hoo! Stupid! Shit!”
“Stop,” she says. “Time’s up.”
He grins. One of his teeth is broken off at the bottom, making him look like a hapless kid from an old 1950s sitcom. He runs down the stairs and scrambles up an arbutus tree that curves out from the bank, hanging low over the beach below.
“His favorite tree,” she tells me. “Mum gets weird when we swear. She’s kind of religious,” she adds. “I’m not. In case you’re wondering.”
I nod again. The nodding is getting boring and I really want to talk and I ha
te that nothing comes out, that my voice is blocked off by the lump that’s always in my throat, and here I am in the middle of nowhere in this surreal place with a girl—a pretty girl—and I’m mute. Dumb. Useless.
And she’s right about the stars. Most of them are long gone, yet there they are, shining through the tiny pinprick holes in the whole big stupid universe.
“Sorry,” I whisper.
But I don’t think she hears me. The word is too small, a feather on my tongue and the wind blows it away before it makes a sound.
24
The next morning, the sky is a white-gray haze of heat and the air is still. Even the trees seem to have rolled up their shadows, leaving the ground painfully exposed. Instead of being warm, the sandstone burns my bare feet. Sunlight glares through the glass, the reflections stab my eyes like blades.
Dad is worried about fire. “This whole island could go up like a giant bonfire,” he says. “Let’s go up to the site.”
I walk with him up the steep trail to where the hotel’s foundation looks like it was dropped from outer space. It doesn’t fit here. The salal is growing over it like it is trying to reclaim its space. Moss creeps up the support beams. Lichen. Stuff I can’t name. I’d ask Dad, but I’m not sure I want to get him started. Blackberry brambles are hugging some low walls like they are stretching to see over the top. Predictably, the unfinished building reminds me of all the other unfinished buildings, which takes me right back to the forty-second floor. Whoopee. I brace myself for the ride. My stomach clenches.
Then, nothing.
Or at least, a wave of nausea, but nothing more. I clear my throat. I think of The King, lying in his coffin, neatly, like he did on the ground beside the roller coaster, but of course, he’s not lying like that in his coffin. He’s in pieces.
