by Karen Rivers
“All my memories are you,” you say.
“Look what you’ve done, though,” she says. “This is pretty amazing, Nerdball. All of this. Wyoming. You should have started that YouTube channel. You’d have a million subscribers! Your drawing is magic, obviously.”
“My drawing,” you repeat, dully. You look down at your hand. For your whole life, your middle finger has been stained with black ink from holding the pen, calloused from the way you grip too hard. But now it is clean and smooth. It doesn’t look like your hand at all.
“Who are you?” you ask yourself. “What have you done?”
You feel strange, like that time when you were in kindergarten and you got a fever so high that you passed out in the classroom, falling right down onto the hopscotch rug. You woke up looking at Mrs. Waterfield’s shoes but they weren’t shoes at all; in your fever dream they were fish, huge salmon, their mouths open, laughing at you.
You feel like that now.
You could open the door and anything could be there.
A salmon. Death. A unicorn. Who knows?
What would you draw, if you were going to draw it?
You open the door. Josh Harris looks at you and his eyes are wide, as though you, Elyse Schmidt, are the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. “Schmidt,” he says. “You look amazing.”
He holds out a corsage. The corsage is one perfect purple flower.
“Put it on me,” you say, and he pins it carefully to your dress. You almost want him to stab you with the pin, so you know you can feel something. You press your head against his shoulder. “Thanks,” you say, into his armpit. He’s wearing something ridiculous: a powder-blue tuxedo.
Of course he is.
You knew he would be.
In the paddock, Midi rears up in the moonlight. For some reason, wind is blowing and his mane shimmers. “Your horse looks like a unicorn,” Josh Harris says.
“Are you afraid?” you ask him.
He shakes his head. “I do not fear death,” he says.
“I meant of unicorns. Are you afraid of unicorns?” You shiver. You’re so cold, but also sweating.
Josh Harris throws back his head and laughs. “No way,” he says. “I’m not scared, Schmidt.” He offers his arm and you take it, walking carefully so you don’t trip over the bottom of the long dress, so you don’t stumble on the path in your heels. He’s holding on to your arm too hard. You don’t know how to tell him. You’re going to break my arm is on the tip of your tongue but you don’t say it.
Josh Harris can break your arm if he needs to, whatever he needs, you’re here for him, because you love him. You’ve always loved him, you’ll always love him.
“I carry your heart in my heart,” you say.
It’s all you can think of to say.
Everything else has already been said.
31.
You are at the dance.
There is a banner on the wall that says, The Great 1980s Dance-Off.
Nothing is a surprise anymore.
You knew the banner would be there because you drew it there. It’s only possible to ignore an obvious truth for so long before you have to acknowledge it.
You drew this.
You made it up.
All of it.
“Well, it’s about time. I was about to give up on you, except obviously I would never give up on you, because I love you, Nerdball. I love you forever. I’m happy for all of it, all of it, all of it. Except the end, obvs. It was all the best, right up until the end.”
“It’s the end?”
“It’s the end, but you’re still there. So be there for as long as you can.”
You can hear the click of your heels on the gym floor; you can feel the confetti that is falling in your teased hair—even the wig that Josh Harris is wearing is covered with it, like snow. The wig keeps slipping sideways on his smooth head, freshly shaved. You reach out and touch it. His head is so smooth. Everything about Josh Harris is everything you ever wanted it to be. You lean in and take a deep breath. The fabric of his tux is scratchy but underneath the smell of slightly-melted-from-the-iron polyester, he’s still the same, toast and soap and maybe a little sweat.
“Are you wiping your nose on my jacket?” he says, and he is as real as anything has ever been. You look into his eyes and you try to laugh because, after all, Josh Harris doesn’t make that many jokes, but what comes out is something different, closer to a cough. Ribbit, ribbit.
“I didn’t like the frogs’ legs,” you say, because it doesn’t matter that it’s out of context and it doesn’t make sense.
Josh Harris smiles at you and reaches out and tucks your hair behind your ear, except there is so much hair spray in there that his hand gets stuck.
“Ouch!” you say, and pull away, and you can’t figure it out, after all, why it hurts when he pulls your hair, why any of this feels so real.
“It is real,” says Josh Harris. “You’re a good person.”
You want to tell him that he’s wrong, because Benedict Cumberbatch, but you don’t because you’re not a bad person.
You’re not.
The music coming out of the speakers is tinny and scratchy, like it’s time traveled here, too, from the 1980s and the lights are too bright, shining in your eyes and flashing. In the middle of the gym, a huge disco ball turns slowly and the way the light bounces off it, it looks like snow falling, a flurry of light that is falling all around you. When you half-close your good eye, the room darkens and the freckles of lights are stars and the stars are sliding slowly across a night sky and you gasp because you are on the floor and you don’t know why.
Josh Harris reaches down and grabs your hand and pulls you to your feet.
“Not yet,” he says. “First, we have to dance, Elyse. Let’s make it count.”
“You know?” you say.
“I know,” he says. “How could I not know? The way you always looked at me. I liked the way I would always feel you looking, it was like you were always there for me, cheering for me, even when I didn’t deserve it.”
“That’s a lot,” you say. “That’s weird, though, right?”
He shrugs. “What’s weird? What does it matter?”
“I’m weird, I guess. I thought you thought I was pretty. Remember?”
“I think you’re beautiful. I think you’re perfect. I think we’re perfect.”
“Perfectly weird maybe.”
“It’s so loud, I can’t really hear you.”
“What?” you say. “I can’t hear you! What?”
Because he’s right.
It is so loud.
Everything is so loud.
The music is so loud it doesn’t even sound like music, it’s too loud, it’s hurting your ears and you want to claw at them but Josh Harris pulls you closer and the two of you start doing a complicated dance that you never learned, but your body seems to know automatically, like something in a dream. The sound is so huge and vast and all around you, it feels like it’s inside you, like it’s taken over your cells and you’re trying to enjoy the movement and the dance and Josh Harris but the loudness of the song is demanding something of you.
“I don’t know what you want,” you say. You’re crying. Well, of course you’re crying. “I don’t know what to do.”
“I know, it’s so loud, right? It’s too loud. This is literally the loudest thing that’s ever happened to us. You didn’t draw the sound of it. You didn’t draw that.”
You look up and there, hanging from the ceiling, are umbrellas. Dozens of them. Hundreds. All different colors, strung up—open—over the gym ceiling. It looks so beautiful that you stop moving and then suddenly it’s quiet, there is no sound at all, only the soft smooth ink scritching softly across the slightly bumpy sketchpad.
“That sounds like a tongue twister. Smoo
th ink scritching softly across the slightly bumpy sketchpad. I like it.”
The vertigo pushes you sideways and upside down. It’s fine. You know you won’t fall. You let Josh Harris pick you up and twirl you and spin you. You can’t hear anything anymore. It’s like flying. It’s like how it must be for a bird soaring without flapping in the sky, carried on the back of the wind, so far above sound, so high up that there is nothing but the wind.
And now you are a bird looking down at the glorious gold red brown leaves of the fall trees and you are soaring and you are being carried and you are free and you are spinning and spinning and spinning.
No, you are rolling.
Down a hill, dizzy, as fast as you can.
You must do it. You have to get away.
Escape, escape, escape.
Nothing hurts.
Everything hurts.
The music swells again: Violin bows screech smoothly on strings. It’s not nails on a chalkboard, it’s something else.
Birds, you think. It’s birds. All the birds, all the songs, all the sounds that have ever been played, and it doesn’t hurt because it is everything.
All around you, people—the extras in the scene that you drew—are clapping, applauding, smiling for you and Josh Harris.
Of course they are: You are beautiful.
Who wouldn’t clap?
They would clap, even if they were real. You know they would.
People would have loved to see this.
Everyone loves love.
“I love you,” you say to Josh Harris.
Josh Harris pulls you close and then spins you away. Pulls you close and spins you away. And it must be happening because you can smell him, the breadiness of him, you can feel the smoothness of his skin, the firmness of his muscles. The way he grips your arm is the only thing that hurts.
The song is slowly winding down. You twirl toward him. “I know how you feel about Benedict Cumberbatch,” he whispers in your ear. “Everyone gets one pass. I’ll decide who mine is later and then I’ll tell you.”
“Maybe Emma Watson?” you say. “She seems like your type.”
“Hermione?”
“Yes. She’s smart. You like smart girls. Or you seem like you would. She’s smarter than me.”
“She’s not good enough for me. She’s not you. She’s a zero on the scale of one to Schmidt.”
“Elyse,” you say. “Please. Call me Elyse.”
“I can’t hear you,” he says. “It’s so loud.” He’s shouting now and you can’t hear him and then his face is in front of yours but his eyes are closed and you’re so close to him, you can see his pores. So close.
“Kiss him, you fool,” says Kath, and so you think about it, but you don’t do it. He’s sleeping.
Josh Harris is asleep.
Your hand is on his leg. What are you doing? You snatch it back. You can’t just touch him. People don’t like to just be touched.
You don’t. Although maybe you’d make an exception for Josh Harris, if he ever touched you of his own volition. His hand on your head in the elevator, resting there. You are desperate to talk to Kath about that, about the pat. The pat seemed to have more to it than just being a resting spot. The pat seemed to have meaning. A meaningful touch. You’re almost sure that it meant something to him, too.
It had to.
The plane sounds noisier than it did on the way over, but no one else seems concerned. The good news is that Kath is talking to you and when she is talking to you that means she is about to forgive you or ask you to forgive her. She holds up a napkin and on it she’s written, “Say this ten times fast: She softly slurred a slurry of sorries.”
“She softly slurred a slurry of sorries,” you say, dutifully. “It’s fun to say out loud,” you add, too softly for her to hear over the sound of the engines, and besides, she’s wearing headphones.
You’ve forgotten who is mad at who and who needs to apologize and that’s fine, because life is too short for this kind of silliness. “Sorry,” you say more loudly, but you know she can’t hear you. The napkin disappears. Maybe it’s not important that she hears it. Maybe it’s just important that you say it.
Or maybe what’s important is that she’s dancing and Josh Harris is asleep, next to you on a plane and the plane is beginning to vibrate and you—only you—know how this is going to go. You want to stand up and scream out a warning but who would believe you? You reach up and touch your eye, which is an eye, and something in your heart tears open, that’s how much it hurts. Your eye is an eye.
Nothing happened, yet everything happened.
No wonder Mom was so sad, you think.
You close your eyes. “I carry your heart in my heart, too,” you whisper.
You should have gone to the barn to find your dad, to tell him goodbye.
The complicating factor is that the barn doesn’t exist.
There is no Schmidt’s Creek.
No red truck. No Midnight. No feedstore. No lake.
There is only this: a plane, suddenly veering off course, the engine screaming in protest.
No one else has noticed yet.
How do they not notice?
“It is what it is,” you say. But the thing is, it is also what it isn’t.
You open the sketchpad and draw a barn quickly. So quickly, like your hand is possessed. You’re shaking. “We’re all going to die!” you want to shout, but maybe not. Maybe it’s a mistake. A bad dream. A panic attack. You want there to be room to be wrong.
You wallow around in the tiny shred of doubt that you are allowing yourself.
You draw the sign that your dad made: Schmidt’s Creek. You hang it at the bottom of the driveway of the house that doesn’t exist.
You’ll miss it.
You’ll miss Midnight.
You’ll miss Rumpelstiltskin.
You’ll miss the red truck that you never drove.
You’ll miss Benedict Cumberbatch.
You’ll miss the silky feel of your pen against paper.
This is not a panic attack.
This is how it’s going to end.
32.
You are on a plane.
The plane is an Airbus. It is nothing like what you would have imagined an Airbus to look like, which would have been more like an actual school bus with wings. On the seatback in front of you, a dot blinks your location over France. California is just too far away.
You change the screen. Benedict Cumberbatch smiles and turns away. “I’ll be seeing you,” he says. A white horse gallops by and he whistles, the horse stops in his tracks, the wind lifting his mane away from his beautiful neck. Behind the horse, the blue-green of a lake sparkles in the afternoon sun. “I’m seven percent in love with you,” the actor says.
Your heart is a bird in your throat, flapping loudly in the leaves, showering you with the colors of fall in Wyoming: gold and orange and brown and green.
This is happening.
This is real.
Pay attention, you think.
Kath pokes her head over the back of the seat and the girl in the seat in front of her stands up and whirls around. “For God’s sake, stop kicking my seat. Are you a toddler?”
“Poppy?” you say. You’re standing up. You’re shouting. “What are you doing here? Is this what you survived?”
“I’m afraid you’ve got me mixed up with someone else, and/or you’re mad. Which is probable, considering the people on this plane. But your friend here has been ruining any possibility of me getting any rest on this interminable flight. I’ve told her ten times to stop.”
“I can’t control her,” you point out. “I’m not her mother.”
“Well, PITH YOU, Elyse Schmidt,” Kath says.
“It’s all happening,” you say. “It’s all happening. How do I stop i
t?” You sit down. “I don’t know what to do.” You turn to Josh Harris. “WAKE UP,” you shout, but he doesn’t.
You lean back in your seat, touching the hole in the window with your finger. Pressing on it so hard that your finger turns white.
Kath kneels up on her chair. Her face peers over the seatback at you. Her hair is swaying, as though she’s dancing, which she isn’t.
“Don’t say it,” you say, frantically. “Please don’t say it.”
“You know, I was thinking—”
And then SUDDENLY she disappears.
“Kath,” you say, helplessly. “There was nothing I could do.” You squeeze your eyes shut and then open them again. Why didn’t you tell her to put on her seat belt?
Poppy-who-is-not-called-Poppy flies upward and her skull splits against the roof of the plane, blood is everywhere. She is dead. The first of all of you to go.
So why was she in Survivors’ Group? You don’t know what it means, you can’t, because it hasn’t happened and now it won’t.
You dry heave into your yellow mask, which is on your face, having dropped down from the ceiling. You take it off. You don’t know what to do. Josh Harris is looking at you. You put the mask back on.
He pulls his mask off. “I do not fear death,” he says.
“Yes, you do. We all do, Josh,” you say. “Please just say my name.”
“I do not fear death,” he says again. People are screaming. The swell of noise is out-of-tune violins threatening to deafen you, the desperate whine of the engines, the screams of those who are about to die. They know it. They shouldn’t know but they know. You don’t want to look, you can’t look, but you look. The mom is holding her baby, her head bowed, her nose pressed to the baby’s skull. She is rocking slightly, her eyes closed. You feel worse about the baby than anyone else.
The beverage cart is racing down the aisle, untended by the beautiful stewardess whose shirt was unbuttoned one row too many—the Survivors’ Group leader—who has disappeared out a cavernous hole in the side of the plane where the wing used to be. People are gone. The air whips through the cabin, pulling and pushing at clothes and hair and tearing whole seats away. The screams, God, the screams.
