by Mindy Raf
“Well, good. As long as you’re … good,” Marcus says.
“I am—I’m good. I mean, I’m just—well, I’m kind of …” I close my mouth and straighten myself up. But then Marcus slips his arm behind my back and kind of pats it gently, and when he brings his hand up to my shoulder and gives it a little squeeze, it’s like something inside me unhinges, like I’m one of those camping tents with the cheap poles that keep popping out of place, and I collapse.
Marcus pulls me into him, close.
“I’m scared for her,” I say into his chest. “I’m kind of … just … scared.”
He wraps his arms around me tight and lets me cry.
CHAPTER 23
I don’t want to talk about it.
I know it seems cowardly, but I’ve been hiding out in the bathroom stalls between classes, and coming out only after the bell rings. I just don’t feel like talking or seeing anybody. I slip into my classes late, just after they’ve started. I don’t get in trouble either, because Pam has already talked to all my teachers about Mom. So when I walk in, they all just nod and give me these encouraging smiles, as if they’re impressed I’m even upright.
“There you are!” Meredith manages to cut me off before I can make it inside the art room. She cocks her head to the side, her ponytail falling around her shoulder, and gives me the smallest of smiles.
“Izzy.” She says my name like it’s the title of a very sad, serious movie. “How are you? How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine, I’m feeling”—empty, defective, like something inside me is disconnected—“fine.”
“You up for doing some set painting?” she asks, because I guess technically I’m supposed to be at rehearsal right now.
I shake my head and tell her I’m just going to stick around the studio tonight and get some work done.
She nods and reaches her arms out, giving me a double shoulder squeeze, and then before walking away, says something about how she’s here for me, if I need to talk.
That’s what a lot of people have been saying to me, that they’re “here for you if you need to talk.” Which is nice, but some of these people I don’t even talk to under normal circumstances, so I’m thinking it would be strange to use them now, like as a therapist. And how would they react if I said, “You know what? Yes, I’d love to talk,” and then sat them down and told them how I looked at my hairbrush this morning and saw that it had an unnaturally large amount of my hair in it, and how for a split second I thought that it must be because of the progeria, that I’m losing my hair as I prematurely age. But then, right as I was about to look up “teenage hair loss” on Symptomaniac, this voice popped into my head, and she said, Come on, Izzy. You know that’s a normal amount of hairbrush hair, and I answered myself, in my head, I do? How can you be sure? and there was no answer, and it was hard, but I walked away from the computer and continued getting ready for school. You’d think I’d feel better, that voice telling me that I’m fine and not sick. But I don’t. I just feel lost.
I throw on my smock, grateful nobody else is here tonight, and grab one of my half-finished paintings from the rack.
“Hey.”
I look up to see Jenna peeking her head around the door, and then turn my eyes to my canvas. The familiar gesture—poking her head in like that—now just feels bizarre to me.
“How are you?” she asks, walking over. “How’s your mom?”
“The same,” I say.
“Oh. Okay. Well, I guess that’s … good?”
I shrug and start adding some white to my beige mixture, still not able to get Mom’s skin tone quite right.
Jenna sets her Post-it-note-plastered binder on the table, unsticking her sleeve from it, which is covered in bits of different colored gaffing tape.
“So … we’re in tech week and … it’s pretty crazy. I was hoping to see you at rehearsal, but—”
“Nope,” I say. So this is the reason she finally drops by, because she needs me at her play rehearsal.
“Listen, Izzy,” Jenna says, and she’s close enough now that I can hear her breathing. When I still don’t turn around, she hoists herself to sit on the table and dips a tiny paintbrush into some of my blue paint. “I’m really sorry about blowing up on you and being so … dramatic lately. I’ve been totally overreacting about everything.” She brushes blue paint onto her pinky fingernail. “And I don’t even know why I got so upset about you trying to fix me up with Nate. It’s not a big deal. I mean, I just … I’m not interested in him, but that’s no reason for me to go to crazyland, right?”
I nod and shrug, keeping focused on my canvas.
Jenna paints another nail blue, and then smiles at me again.
“You’re wasting paint,” I say.
“Oh. Sorry.”
“My mom’s in the hospital.” I fully stop what I’m doing and look at her.
“I … I know,” Jenna mumbles, slinking down from the table. “I’ve been thinking about you and—”
“People who hardly know me are coming up to me left and right, and you’re supposed to be my best friend and you don’t even—”
“I’ve been thinking about you this whole time!” Her eyes and mouth widen simultaneously.
“Great. Thanks for the thoughts.”
“I’ve been … I’ve been wanting to talk to you, to tell you that”—she pulls a long piece of yellow gaffing tape off her elbow, coiling it between her thumb and index finger—“well, you know that I think organized religion is structured societal brainwashing, but I’m still praying for your mom. I am. And I told my mom to tell you—”
“Why didn’t you just tell me yourself?”
“I don’t know.” She shifts her gaze from her twisted tape to the studio’s paneled ceiling. “I guess I was just embarrassed about … I was so awful to you, and confused and … and I didn’t want it to stress you out even more, hearing from me. But I wanted to call you. I wanted to tell you that—” She flicks the tape to the floor, leaning her upper body back and turning her palms out like she’s under arrest. “God, Izzy I’m sorry. I’m not good at this stuff.”
“What stuff? Being a good friend, being a decent person?”
“You know”—her hands and eyelids drop—“you’re not good at this stuff either.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I try to talk to you, I’ve tried to talk to you so much.”
“What?” I get out through clenched teeth.
“All last summer and you just kept … blowing me off.”
“I did not. I— That’s not true.” I turn back to the painting, shaking my head.
“Yes you did.” She hops back onto the table, gesturing at me with my tiny blue brush. “I tried to see you, and I asked about your mom all the time, and tried to get you to talk about it, just even … a little bit, but you just totally isolated yourself, and you kept saying how busy you were with your portfolio, but—”
“Well, I was.”
“Yeah, but you could have at least just come out with me one night or—”
“Well, going to U of M and drinking at some frat house with a bunch of your writing group friends was kind of the last thing I wanted to do after a day of taking care of my mom!”
“Well … fine, but … we didn’t have to go up there, we could have—”
“No, it was always ‘so and so’s having a party, and this guy’s gonna be there, or that guy’s gonna be there.’ I don’t even know who you were hanging out with. I guess with Meredith and all them, and your cousin, who I didn’t even know about until last week! I didn’t even know you had a cousin Amy until last week!”
“Just forget it, I’m sorry I brought it up, I don’t … I don’t want to talk about the summer anymore.”
“Well, clearly you do, because you’re— Give me that.” I grab the brush from her hand, which is shaking so much, she’s splatter-painted her shoes.
“Listen”—she shifts her weight onto the table again, looking down a
t her now black-and-blue boots—“can we just—” Then she stops and looks over my shoulder. “What are you doing here, Marcus?”
“What?” he says, poking his head through door and taking off his headphones. “What?” he says again.
“You’re supposed to be going over light cues with Derrick?”
“Well, when Derrick is done humping Emily Belfry in the lighting booth, I’ll go ahead and do that,” he tells Jenna. And then to me: “Hey, how’s um, how’s it going? Any news?”
“Nothing new,” I say, giving him a smile.
“I looked for you in the choir room and thought maybe you’d be set painting.”
“No, I’m actually … um, not working on the play anymore,” I say.
“Oh. Why?” Marcus says, turning to Jenna.
“She’s busy with her portfolio and her mom and everything, duh,” Jenna answers, springing off the table.
“Oh. Right. Yeah, so I just wanted to see how you were doing, and drop this off for you.” He pulls a pint of strawberry ice cream out of the bag he’s carrying.
I smile. “All for me?”
“I figured you could use it.”
“I really could,” I say, taking the pint from him.
“Well”—Jenna claps her hands together loudly—“that was … nice of you, Marcus. Enjoy your ice cream, kids. I … have to go … remove Derrick’s tongue from Emily’s mouth, and you know, finish the run-through and … so …” She grabs her binder, flashes Marcus her special Cathy smile, totally avoids my gaze, and bangs out the door.
“Sorry … I’m not interrupting your art … flow or anything, am I?”
“No, it’s already been interrupted. Have a seat.” I open the pint of ice cream and fish a plastic spoon from the bag.
“So my mom talked to Pam, and she said your mom has some kind of digestive problem?”
“Yeah.” I shovel the strawberry into my mouth. “Blockage.”
“Hmm … you know, the stomach, it’s weird, it’s actually, it’s kind of like the heart.”
“Oh. Huh. What do you mean?”
“Well, it’s not totally like the heart, but it has electrical waves that make it contract. And I guess after we eat something, our stomachs contract like two or three times a minute, grinding up all our food and then sending away all the stuff that it … doesn’t need. So when someone has blockage or stomach problems, I think it means that for whatever reason, there’s something that’s messing with their electrical waves, so that their stomach doesn’t contract, and so then all the food inside can’t go … where it’s supposed to go.”
“Uh-huh,” I say, shoveling in more ice cream.
“But with your mom,” Marcus continues, “I think some of that mucus you were talking about is probably … mucking things up too.”
“Right. Probably,” I say, turning back to my canvas, not really wanting to think about my mom’s abdomen and her mucus right now. I just want to find out when she’s going into surgery and get back to the hospital to see her.
“It’s just that last week, after you told me more about what your mom has, I looked some stuff up.”
“You did, huh?”
“I was curious. Also, I figured you might want to talk about it more because … well, because what she has is rare, and so there’s probably not a lot of people to talk about it with … and I just figured if you wanted to talk about it … ever, you could, with me.”
“Thanks,” I say. I hear Marcus shift his weight behind me, but he doesn’t say anything more.
“So … I should probably get back to work.” I gesture to my canvas. “I have a week less to finish everything now, and I have to do some of Mom’s prep work for the dance too and—”
“If we even have a dance,” Marcus says, sounding relieved for something else to say.
“What?”
“Mrs. Preston still wants to cancel, but my mom and her whole PTO crew are torn, I guess because of all the work they’ve put in, and it being a fund-raiser. They’re meeting with Preston tomorrow, or no, day after tomorrow, I think, to try and work something out, I guess.”
“Why would they cancel? What are you talking about?”
“Because of …” He clears his throat and says at a barely audible level, “Boobgirl.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry, that’s what everybody is calling her, it’s terrible. But yeah, if nobody comes forward, then—”
“They’re going to cancel a dance just because of one … stupid picture?”
“Well, it’s basically gone viral. It’s been e-mailed to me at least thirty times already.”
I clench my teeth. “Really? Wow. Really.”
“Yeah. It’s gone around the whole district. So I guess the pressure is on to … punish somebody …”
“Huh,” I say.
“Anyway, if the dance does happen and you and Blake want to go with us, Meredith said that—”
This makes me wheel around, and suddenly my face is on fire, so I turn quickly to face my canvas again. “Oh. I didn’t know you were going with—”
“Oh, yeah, yes I am. Meredith asked me, actually.” He laughs, but it sounds more like he’s got something caught in his throat.
“Wow.”
“Yeah, I think after helping her out with her photos, she was just grateful that—”
“That’s great,” I say, putting the ice cream down on the table and starting to mix the already mixed paint on my palette. “I’m … I’m not sure what our plans are, but … sounds like fun.”
“So is that something new?” Marcus asks, moving so he’s next to me and gesturing toward my canvas.
“Yup.”
“It’s really good,” he says, studying the painting. “Must be hard for her.”
“Who? Meredith?” I ask.
“What? No, um, for your mom,” he says, walking closer to the canvas, “losing control of her body like that because … you know … she’s always so … put together.”
“Oh. Yeah. I guess so,” I say, angling the canvas a little more in my direction. “It’s not done, I’m still in the middle of … I’m really just … just painting.”
“Oh, and you’re using some of the medical journals I got you,” he says, pointing to the small stack at the end of the table and smiling.
“Yeah, yeah, some of the pictures are pretty cool.”
“This one”—he picks up the magazine at the top of the pile—“has this really interesting article in it, this study about love and feelings and how—”
“A study about love and feelings?” I glance at him.
“Well, yeah. It’s about how it’s basically the result of some feel-good biological union between some peptides and some cells. Just a chemical reaction; a … generic addiction.”
“What is?”
“Love.”
“Oh,” I say, mixing some colors, deciding to change Mom’s skin tone slightly. “Wait, so then why do we love certain people and not others?”
“What?”
“If it’s so generic, why do we love some people and not—”
“No, I think it just depends,” he explains, “on how chemically attached you are to them.”
“But aren’t we all chemically attached to everyone?”
“Um … I guess kind of.” His eyes go unfocused as he thinks about this.
“And if love is something so … generic,” I say, “then shouldn’t all people be at the same generic level of love to each other and therefore replaceable? I mean, different people have different relationships with other people that produce their own unique chemical reactions, right? What’s so generic about that?”
“No you see … okay, yes, you can have different relationships with different people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you have more love for them. Is that what you’re saying?”
“No … I’m just trying to say that … Wait, so you think all people are replaceable?”
“No,” he says. “But, well, maybe in a biologi
cal sense, I mean, we’re all just a bundle of—”
“You think … that my mom is replaceable? Like if something happened to her and she was gone, I wouldn’t miss her, specifically?” I ask.
“What? No. No, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying,” he says, blinking, “but technically … I mean chemically speaking—”
“Wow, well, thanks for this heartwarming chat, Marcus, but I have to get some work done.”
“Wait, what’s wrong?”
“You,” I say, “you’re wrong. I didn’t even want to talk about any of this—my mom, her stomach, the stupid dance, and that stupid photo, and chemicals, and the biological definition of love. And then you just start talking about how my mom—how you think my mom is replaceable!” I drop my paintbrush, barely even knowing what I’m saying.
But apparently Marcus knows exactly what I’m saying, and to him it all translates to “Get out of my studio and leave me alone.”
Which, he does.
CHAPTER 24
I was picked.
“I’m beginning to think you should juuuust … set up a cot and sleep here, Izzy.” Miss S. walks toward me slowly from her office, setting down a towel, a really large wooden vintage picture frame on top of it, and a hammer on the table next to me.
I’m at the studio for the second night in a row.
“This thing is such a space sucker.” She runs her long fingers against the ridges of the frame and then hands me a pair of safety goggles. She puts on a pair herself over her glasses and then picks up the hammer and takes four powerful whacks at the frame, splitting it at the corners.
“Sorry,” she says as I wince at the noise and remove my goggles.
“So, how’s your mom?” she asks simply, propping her goggles on her head and picking off bits of wood from the towel.
“I just got off the phone with Pam,” I tell her, adding some more red to Mom’s lips. “She’s still pretty knocked out, but Pam says she’s getting stronger. She’s going to call when they put her on the surgery schedule.” We both turn and look at my cell phone sitting on the table like it’s a bomb that could go off at any second.
