You Are the Everything

by Karen Rivers

  24.

  It’s the first day of school and you’re standing in front of a locker that you know the combination to, because it’s your old combination from your school in California: 0-45-28.

  You had to act unsurprised when the secretary handed you the piece of paper. You couldn’t possibly explain it, so instead of saying anything, you laughed inappropriately. As you walked away, you could see her checking her teeth in the mirror, as though you were maybe ugly-laughing at some unforgivable hunk of spinach stuck in her teeth, as if you were that kind of person, who would laugh in someone’s face.

  Anyway, it’s just a coincidence, the number being the same, like picking the right six numbers on a lottery ticket and suddenly finding yourself with millions of dollars. It happens. But there’s no money involved, here, just a bright orange locker, empty. You half expected you’d open it and see all your old stuff: the shelf where you kept your hairbrush and a mascara and a lip gloss, the mirror glued to the door, the special jars that stuck with magnets, holding your favorite pens and hair bands. It’s all so familiar at the same time as being new, the clanging of doors opening, the banging as they shut. You hang your backpack on one hook, your jacket on another. It looks so desolate, empty. Next to you Josh Harris is putting his backpack into his own locker. You get a whiff of him, toasty and soapy and perfect.

  He looks over at you and winks. “We’ve got this, Schmidt. How hard can it be?” His head is freshly shaved and it makes him look younger, somehow, less Josh Harris–level sure of himself. He also looks beautiful.

  And perfect.

  And you are so lucky, that’s what all the other girls here are thinking.

  You know it.

  You reach out and rub your fingers along his shaved skull, above his ear, glittering with the diamond he always wears. You—Elyse Schmidt—get to do that, because Josh Harris is your boyfriend.

  He smiles at you. Your blood rushes to all the places that he’s ever touched, all at once—the field the field the field—and you want to drag him by the hand out of the school, find a place where you can spread a blanket, press your naked self against him. It’s been so long that maybe it didn’t happen at all, or maybe it happens every day and it’s just lost in the broken pathway in your insulted mind.

  “I know,” you say, instead. “It’s going to be good. I mean, look at it. It looks like a high school in a book or something. It’s so clean. Creepily clean, actually.”

  “I don’t think cleanliness is creepy,” he says, looking around. “It’s very shiny. It just looks new.”

  “I like it, too. So far, anyway.”

  You don’t mention the thing about the locker combination. If his is also the same as his old one that would no longer be coincidence. It would be something else. It would be something you have to figure out, forcing your brain to process it and disseminate it and decipher it until it makes sense. It’s terrifying to consider, so you kiss him instead. Hard. Velvety lips. You kiss him even harder, until your teeth clatter together painfully.

  His mouth always tastes exactly the same.

  A passing teacher clears his throat, “Hey,” he says. “No PDA in the halls, you know the rules.”

  “Sorry, sir,” says Josh Harris, pulling away from you, rubbing his lip with his finger and looking at it as if he’s expecting blood or some other kind of stain. “We’re new.”

  The teacher is young, bearded, white, in a polo shirt with the collar turned up like the trying-to-be-trendy teacher in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. “Ah,” he says. “The plane crash kids.” He cocks his head to one side. “I’m Coach Sims.”

  “Please don’t ever call us that,” you say, shocked that he did.

  That he would.

  That it happened so fast.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, but you can tell that he isn’t. “Call me Coach,” he adds. “Everyone does. I have that People magazine in my office, you two on the front. Maybe you can come by and sign it.”

  “There is literally no possibility of that,” you say, at the same time as Josh Harris is saying, “I don’t think that would be very appropriate.”

  “Heh,” says Coach Sims. “What a world.” He sticks out his hand, as though he expects you to shake it.

  “I don’t touch people,” you say, your smile stuck in place. “It’s in my file. No touching.”

  “Oh, I wasn’t touching, I was just . . .” He shakes his hand out like it’s wet or as though he knows about the touchers, like he’s found the website and seen what people have said about you and Josh Harris and the power they want you to have. You wonder what’s wrong with him that he wants to fix, while pretending to not want it. You study his face. He has that look that some men have of wanting to be better looking than they are. Maybe he has an STD. You giggle. “Welcome to Stamford,” he continues. “You’re our first celebrities. It’s a small school, only two hundred. You’ll find your people. Make friends. All that. Hope you’ll consider playing basketball,” he adds to Josh Harris. “You played at your old school, right? We have a solid team.”

  “I’ll think about it,” says Josh Harris. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  “I don’t do sports,” you say, to save him the awkwardness of asking you, even though he is already turning away.

  As soon as he’s gone, Josh Harris kisses you again, the kind of kiss you can feel all the way down to your feet, which are up on tiptoes so you can reach him and he can reach you. A gentle kiss, no chance of drawing blood.

  The bell rings and only then does he pull away. People are staring, but you don’t care.

  Maybe you even like it.

  You won’t be invisible at this school, not like your last school, where it didn’t matter what you wore or what color you tipped your hair, you were always in Kath’s shadow.

  Here, you are just you.

  Here, you are Josh Harris’s girlfriend.

  A girl with teal and pink hair smiles at you, then walks away into a beam of sunlight shining in through the high windows. You’re temporarily blinded, and when you blink, she has disappeared into the crowd.

  “Hi!” you say.

  “Who are you talking to?” asks Josh Harris.

  You shrug. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m relieved,” he says. “I thought maybe you’d seen that girl, Poppy. The one with the secret survival story. She’s the only other person you know here, right?”

  “What was her story?” You’re dizzy again, just like that. “I’ve forgotten.”

  “You stormed out. You were mad, remember? She said she couldn’t tell anyone what happened to her because of her circumstances. Maybe she’s on the run from the mob. In the Witness Protection Program.”

  “Yeah, she wishes,” you mumble. “Too bad they didn’t catch up.”

  “That doesn’t sound like something you would say.”

  “Well, I said it, so I guess it is. I’ve told you before. I’m not a good person.” You slam your locker harder than necessary and the sound feels like it rattles your bones, your spine, your whole body.

  That day in the lake keeps surfacing in your memory: You, floating on the air mattress with Kath while her brothers swam around underneath, pretending to be sharks. You knew they weren’t sharks—obviously they weren’t sharks—but the possibility of them rising to the surface under the raft, upending it, dumping you into the cold water, gave you the creeps. Your mattress kept wobbling on the waves and you kept screaming and Kath kept laughing.

  Why are you thinking about that now? It doesn’t make sense.

  “We hold on to two types of memories the hardest,” says Dr. McDreamy. “The good ones and the bad ones. It’s the ones that aren’t extreme that we lose the most easily.”

  The trouble is that so much of your life has not been extreme.

  You clear your throat. It’s not a frog, not exactly, more lik
e something dry is stuck in there, scratching. In your comic about weird ways people have died, you drew a man who died the day after a cockroach-eating competition, apparently asphyxiating on cockroach legs that were lodged in his throat. “It’s a metaphor,” you wrote underneath it, but now you don’t remember what you meant. Sometimes it feels like all your thoughts are slowly disconnecting from your other thoughts, pulling apart, leaving behind a void that’s a blur of white noise and light, and you are falling into it and your throat is so scratchy and you need a drink of something, anything, and you cough and cough.

  You gasp when Josh Harris puts his hand on your arm. He squeezes, maybe a little too hard. “Do you need the Heimlich maneuver?” He slaps you on the back hard, too hard, and it hurts, but the cough stops, at least.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes, stop hitting me,” you say, trying to sound normal. Something is wrong, but you can’t tell what it is, like when you are dreaming and the dream tips over into a nightmare and you’re stuck on the border between the two, trying to awaken.

  The school is so small, it feels like a soundstage more than a real place. It is so much smaller than your school in California. It is also picture-perfect. It is brick on the outside, with wide stairs leading up to the front door. The building itself has a series of angles that, from the outside, make it appear like the architect was maybe crazy, but on the inside, the angles translate to skylights and so much light everywhere, spilling from the windows, filling the halls, covering the walls with light so bright it’s almost blinding. It’s a movie-set school; it can’t be real life. Everyone is too well dressed and looks too happy. No one is skulking alone by the lockers, trying not to be seen, like the Other Max back home, always waiting for some idiot to try to beat him up, or to stuff his head into his tuba.

  You look back, over your shoulder, half expecting to see Charlie Martin, looking depressed about Kath still, his saxophone case strapped to his back. You need desperately to see Kath, bopping along down the hallway, listening to something, talking to someone, and gesturing with her hands all at once. If she saw you, she’d stop in her tracks. “You know, I was thinking­—” she’d say, only this time she’d finish the sentence and you’d finally know what she was thinking, after all this time.

  You search for her, suddenly believing that she might be here, after all. It’s surreal, so why not?

  But there is no Kath.

  There is no Charlie.

  There is no Max.

  Instead, there’s a sea of familiar-looking strangers who all look like people from TV shows you watched a long time ago. And Josh Harris had nothing to worry about, there are plenty of black kids.

  Someone taps you on the shoulder and you jump, startled, too much adrenalin. You turn around, “Well, hello there, Pixie,” says Benedict Cumberbatch, English as ever. “I was hoping I’d run into you.” He glances at Josh Harris. “And your rather intimidatingly good-looking boyfriend. I’ve heard all about him from Poppy. Speaking of, there she is! Poppy, it’s the plane crash kids!”

  “Dwayne,” you say, twisting his name around in your mouth like metal. “Please don’t ever—”

  But next thing you know, Josh Harris—Josh Harris who has never been violent in his life—has Dwayne up against the locker, by the neck, feet dangling comically. He doesn’t look like Benedict Cumberbatch up there: smooth, debonair, witty. He looks like a scared, scrawny kid with bad skin and an awkward accent. You almost feel sorry for him.

  Almost.

  “Part of the deal with Survivors’ Group,” you hear Josh Harris say in a voice you’ve never heard from him before, “which your sister would know if she’d bothered to listen, is that nothing leaves that room. Get it? Got it?”

  “Yes. I get. I got. Could you please put me down? I’m afraid of heights. Nothing higher than a horse, that’s my rule.” His voice gives away his fear, or maybe he’s just not that good an actor, after all.

  “I really don’t get what so many people see in that guy. He’s so wormy. Like he looks like a person who has actual worms. That degree of whiteness is just unhealthy and who is attracted to bad health? How is he so famously sexy? It’s offensive to my eyeballs, actually.”

  Josh Harris lets go and Dwayne crumples to the floor. You’re torn for a second. Do you help him up? Do you walk away? Your eye meets his and you shrug.

  He looks away.

  Your knees feel shaky and strange. You remember going to Survivors’ Group with Josh Harris. You remember running out partway through. You remember him leading you back into the room, twirling you in the hallway outside first—once, twice—like you were about to step through time into a ballroom dance, your floral dress spinning around your legs. You remember Poppy appearing in the doorway and saying something sarcastic—what was it? Something like, “You people just never stop dancing, do you?”

  You went back into the room and listened to Bo, the man with no legs, talking about how the tank he was in hit an explosive and was torn apart, his buddies dead in front of him, his own legs no longer where they should have been. “I thought I’d come back a hero,” he said. “But instead, people react to me like I’m contagious, like if they actually got close to me, maybe they’d become freaks, too.” That made you cry, you remember that. You remember hugging Bo, the way he smelled like cigarettes and hay. You ate three donuts, each one more stale than the last, but you couldn’t seem to stop.

  All the other details swirl into a too-bright fog through which you can’t see clearly. Nothing remains, just a sour taste in your mouth when Poppy looks at you, a bad feeling that you can’t quite shake.

  The rest of the day goes perfectly smoothly, blurrily, quickly. You join the cheerleading squad and the student council. Everyone is kind. No one mentions the plane crash, or looks at you funny, or makes a comment about how you are white and Josh Harris is black. Your classes seem interesting. Your teachers kind. But even as you walk out of the building, thinking about what to tell your parents about your day when they ask, you already have started forgetting: It’s like trying to hang on to a spider’s web; the gossamer threads keep blowing farther away in a wind so slight that you can barely feel it on your skin.

  But I’m happy, you think. I’m happy.

  This is happiness.

  I am happy so everyone is happy.

  I deserve to be happy.

  Don’t I?

  Your knuckles ache.

  “We would have been happy if we’d lived,” say the stars.

  I’m not going crazy, you tell yourself. I will not go crazy. Not now. Not after everything that happened to get me to here. No one goes crazy in Wyoming. Right?

  Wyoming is your safe place.

  25.

  “Wyoming is my safe place,” you’d said, and then you both laughed.

  “Still?” Kath said.

  “Oh, always,” you said. “Once Wyoming, always Wyoming.”

  “You should get that on a T-shirt,” she’d said.

  Then: laughter.

  “Think of it like data storage. You can rewind or fast forward. It’s all there. You just have to find it,” says Dr. McDreamy in his soothing voice. You try to focus on his face, but it’s like looking through a lens that’s been smeared with Vaseline.

  Rewind further:

  You are lying on your back on a dock. The wood is old and smoothed out by time. In between each board, there is a gap of an inch or more, through which you can see the dark water of the lake. Kath’s grandmother’s summer place.

  It’s been a hot day and you are sunburned. Kath is not. “I feel sorry for you,” she’s saying. “It must be terrible to be a white person who turns so very, very pink.”

  “Ha ha,” you’re saying. “I hate you because you’re beautiful.” That’s from an old ad from the 1980s. Kath is a collector of 1980s clothes, books, movies, ads. There is one pinned to her wall
, a woman with long brown hair. “Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful,” it says in ’80s font across her face, which makes it impossible not to hate her even though she’s probably old now, not quite so loathsomely gorgeous.

  Kath snort-laughs.

  There is a storm coming. You can feel it prickling in the air: a heightened sense of something that is about to happen.

  Something terrible.

  Yet you don’t move, neither of you do. You don’t do the logical thing, which would be to get up, make your way up the long flight of stairs to the cabin, where the fireplace probably has been lit and one of her brothers is playing the piano or singing and someone is looking for a board game for everyone to play. Instead, you remain, bellies pressed to the wood, picking a splinter away from a board, watching a water beetle skittering across the lake through the gaps.

  The evening sky, which was indigo blue and clean a few minutes ago, is becoming congealed with a thick black layer of clouds.

  Kath is talking and talking. She is having a crisis. “Being in love is like having appendicitis,” she is saying. “It hurts so much and then when it stops, you think you’re better, but it turns out that you aren’t better, your appendix has ruptured and you only have one good, pain-free day before it gets toxic in your blood and then sometimes you even die.”

  “Don’t oversell love,” you say, sarcastically. “I might want to fall into it one day.”

  “That’s it!” she sits up straight, abruptly. You can see imprints of the boards on her skin. “That’s why they say you fall into love! Because it’s, like, terrifying. Think of something you can fall off or into that isn’t scary. You can’t! Right? So it’s basically falling into the worst thing: love, quicksand. And you can’t get out of it. The more you try, the more it drags you in. Then you’re stuck and the sand goes over your face and you’re trying to breathe in muck and you know you’re going to die and then you do. That would be a terrible way to die, right? The worst thing I can think of.”