The One Thing

by Marci Lyn Curtis

  Hell, I hardly believed it myself.

  I huffed out a sigh, thinking about the lyrics I’d seen in Mason’s room. I suppose I couldn’t really blame Mason for being distrustful of me. Not really. He was still reeling from the loss of his father, and it had clearly left him bruised, suspicious, jaded. And I knew that more than anything, he was just trying to protect Ben, who had been mistreated and hurt in the past. Still, it didn’t give him the right to treat me so poorly. To sound so condescending. To make me feel so small. I collapsed into a kitchen chair beside Ben’s mom and massaged the epicenter of the headache that was growing between my eyebrows.

  “Mom,” Ben whined to Mrs. Milton, who was hunched over a recent stack of photos and a mug of leafy-smelling tea, “this is my house, too—isn’t it? I have just as much right to be here as Mason.”

  Mrs. Milton didn’t answer right away. This was one of the things I liked about her. She wasn’t the sort of parent who blurted out canned responses. Leaning back in her chair and looking speculatively at Ben for the space of several breaths, she said, “I understand how you might be feeling unimportant.” She considered the situation for a few more moments, taking a sip of tea and crinkling her nose at the steam. “But it isn’t as though you have to leave the house, is it?”

  “Well, no. It’s the principle, Mom,” Ben said helplessly. “Why do I have to cancel my plans just because Mason wants to practice his crap music here?”

  Well. Never thought I’d see the day. Saint Ben was jealous.

  Mrs. Milton nodded as though she completely understood Ben’s plight. “Yes. Of course. The principle.” Running one finger around the rim of her mug, she said, “Don’t you want your brother to succeed?”

  Ben let his head fall backward, all dramatically, and he stared at the ceiling. “Maybe,” he grumbled.

  “Hasn’t Mason supported you in your pursuits?” she said, watching Ben closely. “Chauffeured you back and forth to swim practices? Sacrificed many an afternoon to go to your meets?”

  Ben straightened up, looking as though he were biting back several inappropriate words. Finally, balancing his weight on his crutches and letting his feet swing back and forth, he muttered, “Maybe.”

  She took another sip of tea and smiled gently. “So I’m sure you understand then.”

  Ben’s lips twisted, but he said nothing.

  She smiled. “It’s settled: I’ll drop Maggie off at home and you two can watch your movie tomorrow.”

  Since I couldn’t sleep that night, I padded down to the basement and listened to one of Mom’s old soccer DVDs. Most of my insomnia was because of Mason—I suspected that he’d already told everyone within shouting distance that I was a fraud—but some of it was because I’d become hyperaware of my upstairs bedroom. Whether it was my confrontation with Mason or the emotions I’d been wrestling with, I wasn’t sure, but when I’d crawled into bed that night, I’d felt my old bedroom looming above me, dark and ominous.

  Anyway, since the house had been picked through and organized and blind-proofed ad nauseam, I knew exactly where to find the DVDs—in the cabinet right underneath the TV. In the past, I’d always watched them on mute, overly concerned that I might wake my mother. I hadn’t wanted to remind her of the past she’d buried. But now, mute wasn’t even an option for me.

  Not that it mattered. I’d felt so disconnected from my mother the past several months, so excluded from her list of priorities, so defiant, that I cranked the volume up louder than necessary, willing her to discover me here.

  For the first several minutes, I had no clue which DVD I’d chosen. All I heard were the sounds that accompanied professional soccer games—the crowd noise, the buzzers, the vuvuzela horns. But then: Dad’s voice.

  Dad used to morph into a totally different person at soccer games. Between his armchair reffing and his constant hollering, he was obnoxious enough to tick off roughly a fifty-seat radius. It was a side of him I used to love to see, a side of him I missed desperately since I’d stopped playing soccer, and listening to it now made me feel lousy and ecstatic, all at the same time.

  The game was old, international. In Spain, most likely, given the announcer’s language. I could hear a tiny voice, my voice—God, I must’ve been a toddler—say, “Mommy is fast, isn’t she, Daddy?”

  “She’s amazing,” Dad said in a reverent tone.

  “When I grow up, I’ll be amazing, too,” I vowed.

  My chest twisted. I’d always believed that I could be amazing. That Mom’s magic would rub off on me. That I was invincible. And I was, at least for a little while. Sighing, I pulled an afghan over me, yanking it clear to my chin, and, feeling small and broken and frail, I remembered my very last soccer game.

  It was November, junior year. We were playing our rivals, McDonnell Prep, some swank private school just outside of town. My teammates and I had been playing with one another since rec ball, so we practically moved together without thinking, as part of the same machine. And that night we were amazing. We won in the sort of grandiose fashion that is boring as hell for the spectators—a 20–2 score at the final buzzer. Afterward, Sophie, Lauren, and I rolled out of the stadium on a massive high, loafing around in the parking lot far longer than necessary as we clung to the last few seconds of the soccer season.

  Sophie had just gotten her driver’s license, and her parents had gifted her with a monstrous black Chrysler that the three of us called Bertha. Bertha’s most redeeming quality was her gigantic hood. And that night, we sprawled across it indelicately, in an unladylike fashion that is perfectly acceptable when you’re sweaty and dirty and you’ve just spanked the crap out of a bunch of hoity-toitys from McDonnell Prep. The late-November air had a bite to it that promised winter, but the sun had just set, so the hood was still warm.

  Lauren sat up, dangled her legs off the side of the car, and looked at me. “So what gives, Sanders? When the hell did you learn that bicycle kick? I’ve never seen anything like it.” She slapped the heel of her palm on her forehead, her eyes bugged out. Thin and attractive, Lauren always made these crazy faces, which drove me a little nuts, and she had long blond bangs that hung in her eyes, which drove me a little nuts, and she had great boobs, which drove me a little nuts. Regardless, I liked her. She was passionate and full of life.

  I shrugged, gazing up at the night’s first stars, completely embarrassed and yet completely elated by her reaction. But this was the way it had always been with Lauren. She was forever fangirling something—Nick Jonas’s abs or Maroon 5’s newest song, or, more currently, me. Lately I’d burst into a whole new level of soccer. It had shocked me almost as much as everyone else. I didn’t know how I’d done it, only that I’d stopped thinking about what I was doing on the field and started reacting instead. Taking a long swig from my Gatorade bottle, I said, “I don’t know. I guess it just happened?” I’d crossed in front of the goal and seen the ball coming toward me—in slow motion, like it was hanging in the air waiting for me. I’d jumped and kicked in two beats, an upbeat and a downbeat. It had been a rhythm, was all, the last two notes in a chord of music. To my body, it had made perfect sense. It had been intuitive.

  Sophie, who always knew how to cut through the bullshit in a conversation, bumped me with her shoulder and said, “You should have seen your mom. She went insane.”

  My eyes jerked to hers. “Yeah?”

  She smiled and nodded, and something huge and warm and perfect swelled in my chest. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to get home, couldn’t wait to sit with Mom at the kitchen counter and dissect the game over a shared spoon and a gallon of ice cream. Soccer was the biggest and best part of both of us. It wound us together into a singular person, a stronger person. A Maggie-and-Mom.

  I hummed along to a Dead Eddies song trailing out of Sophie’s open window while Lauren rummaged around in her backpack, extracting an expensive-looking French lip balm. She slid the balm generously across her lips, smacking them together when she was finished. Lauren’s mom worked at t
he makeup counter at Nordstrom and had no problem whatsoever hijacking cosmetics from the store. And Lauren had no problem whatsoever hijacking them from her mother’s bathroom.

  Sophie stared pointedly at Lauren’s lips and huffed out a tremendous sigh. And then she spun her car keys around her index finger. Spin, clunk. Spin, clunk. She was our self-appointed mother figure. With Sophie, I’d always let anything slide. She deserved a little leniency. She was the best of the best, my rock, a straight-A report card made flesh. She was allowed a personality flaw or two.

  While Sophie was ridiculously serious and Lauren was ridiculously social, I straddled the line between the two, my grades just good enough to be considered mediocre and my mouth just loud enough to be entertaining. Which, as far as I was concerned, was a great place to be. Sure, I didn’t have a long wake of ex-boyfriends—if you counted Dillon Young, from the fifth grade, my ex-boyfriend count would be an almost-respectable five—but I was a soccer god, and that was what was important.

  “Can you believe,” Lauren said, changing the subject, “that we only have one more soccer season until—”

  “Don’t say it!” I hollered. “You’ll spoil the moment. Remember? We just handed McDonnell Prep their asses.”

  “I know, but the thing is—”

  I held up a palm to stop her again. Even though it was a year and a half away, Lauren was already getting sentimental about the prospect of graduation. About breaking up our team. Going our separate ways. She’d always been emotional—teetering between the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows—but she’d been treating our impending graduation with the same sort of dread generally reserved for root canals. Personally, I couldn’t wait to graduate. Move on to college ball. National ball.

  I felt unstoppable. Like a miracle.

  And now, as I huddled under an afghan in my dusty basement, knees pulled up clear to my chin, I remembered how I had put both hands on Lauren’s shoulders that night and looked her confidently in the eyes. I remembered that she had smelled like watermelon bubble gum and Serum de Rouge Lip Treatment. And mostly, I remembered telling her, “It’s all going to work out, you know.”

  As it turned out, that had been the biggest lie I’d ever told her.

  For a woman who struggled to pronounce “twelve o’clock,” Hilda sure knew how to materialize on my doorstep at exactly twelve o’clock. On the dot. Since the Mason debacle had eclipsed nearly every aspect of my life, I’d forgotten to cancel my session with her, so I ended up spending a delightful afternoon learning How to Locate the Right Street and How to Cross Intersections. Both of which felt about as easy and as natural as navigating on and off a ski lift with a newborn baby in one arm and a carton of eggs in the other.

  So after an hour or so, my brain went on recess, and I began to wonder whether my U12 soccer coach still had a muffin top, and whether Hilda’s teeth had ever visited the dentist, and whether Nutter Butters were better than Fig Newtons. And then Hilda, who had evidently taken notice of my daydreaming, said in a surly voice, “Tell me, Maggie, where are we?”

  All I knew was that, one, we had been walking long enough for my hand to start sweating all over Hilda’s elbow, and that, two, Hilda had been rambling on about “stepping onto the curb” or “stepping over the curb” or “side-stepping curbs.” It had definitely been something about both stepping and curbs. So I said, “Err...I believe we are beside a curb?”

  She blew a big gust of Romanian breath in my face and said, “Tell me about your surroundings.”

  Now, I’d spent a lot of time with Hilda over the past several months, and I’d learned that the easiest way to get her to shut up was to tell her what she wanted to hear. So I soberly said, “There are traffic sounds in front of us, so we must be facing a busy street.”

  She muttered a long string of foreign words under her breath. “More.”

  I bounced my foot to the faint beat of a flag fluttering somewhere to my right, mixing the rhythm with the music that was always in my head. When I first lost my sight, I thought my other senses would instantly sharpen. But that never happened. It was Hilda who showed me how to pay attention to the world around me, Hilda who taught me to extract clues from my environment.

  “We’re between a couple buildings?” I said finally, after taking note of the funneled breeze against my skin. I gestured with both arms, like a traffic director. “There’s a flag flapping over there, and—um—it smells like French fries? So we are downtown, between, like, the courthouse and a McDonald’s?”

  “Oof” was all she said in response, which could mean one of two things: I was either very right or very wrong.

  Ben’s first words to me when I picked up the phone that evening were not “What’s up?” or “Hey, how’s it going?” or anything remotely close to normal. They were “The manatee.” It was strange how he could make me smile with just a couple words.

  “Ben. What are you talking about?” I said, spinning a slow circle in my desk chair while silently mouthing the words to “Eternal Implosion,” the new Loose Cannons song on the radio.

  A massive sigh, then, “Thera. The thing is? There is something seriously wrong with the master plan of the universe, and it’s called the manatee.”

  As I stood I got a whiff of dried sweat from my clothes. Blech. “Um. Why?” I asked Ben, shuffling to my closet. The labels on my clothes were marked with fabric-painted dots that described the color (one dot for black, two for blue, three for red, and so on and so forth), something Hilda had engineered in an effort to prod me into efficiency in the morning. It hadn’t worked.

  I found a blue T-shirt and yanked it over my head. When I returned the phone to my ear, Ben was saying, “Just think about it, Thera. The manatee: piglike snout, flip-flops, blubber, tail, and a goatee. I don’t think he was meant to be invented. I think he was invented accidentally.”

  “Maybe he was invented at the last minute?” I said, smiling into the phone. “Like, after all the decent animal parts were already used up?”

  I heard him snap his fingers. “Thera. I think you are on to something. God was like, ‘I’m supposed to meet the guys for poker in five minutes, and I have all this extra animal-making crap left over. I’ll just slap it together and call it MANATEE.’” I could practically feel him grinning like a lunatic. “I feel so much better now.” Then I heard a muffled sound on his end of the line, and Ben grumbled, “Why so early?” He sounded as though he were talking through a tunnel, so I figured his hand was over the receiver. “Okay. Fine. Fine.” Then his voice came booming back to me. “Mason is insisting that we leave for swim practice in ten minutes,” he informed me. Then he raised his voice. “WHICH WILL PUT US THERE TWENTY MINUTES EARLY. WHICH IS STUPID.” My stomach twisted involuntarily as I remembered the scene in Mason’s room. A full twenty-four hours had passed, and I still had no clue what I’d say to Mason the next time I saw him. “So,” Ben went on. “What’s happening in Theraville today?”

  I cleared my throat, thankful for the distraction. “Well. I ate half a bag of Doritos—which, incidentally, are really great but they are not my Thing—and then I checked out a couple online encyclopedias, and then I had a session with Hilda.”

  “No shit? Encyclopedias?” he practically yelled, paying no mind to all the other stuff.

  “Ben. Don’t cuss,” I said, which, okay, was sort of hypocritical coming out of my mouth, but whatever. He was only ten and I was practically a legal adult. “Yes, encyclopedias,” I told him. “I looked up the Phantom Keys after one of their early songs came on the radio. That one about the ocean? ‘Stealing the Wave’ or something like that? Because really: that song. It’s insane. After that I went to the Qs to read up on Peter Quigley, their keyboardist. Did you know he plays with only his left hand because his right hand was injured in a car accident back in the nineties? Only his left hand, for crap’s sake. And he’s so good.”

  I figured Ben would give me grief about skipping around the alphabet, stalking musicians and whatever. I wa
s wrong. “EXCELLENT!” he hollered excitedly. He prattled on about the Ps for a while, about how the term “penal servitude” has nothing to do with male body parts, and about how the famous Pedros take up page after page after stinking page, and about how the color pink is technically not a real color, since scientists say there is no such thing as pink light.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I’m sort of partial to the Qs. That entry on Peter Quigley? The best.”

  Silence spread over the line.

  “Ben?”

  “Yeah?” he said quietly.

  “What’s wrong?”

  There was another odd hiccup of silence, and then Ben cleared his throat. His voice about fifteen octaves too high, he said dismissively, “Nothing. It’s just that I don’t have the Q encyclopedia.”

  “Oh. That’s right. What happened to it, anyway?”

  Silence again.

  “Ben?” I said finally, feeling strangely as though I’d hurt his feelings, though I wasn’t sure how. “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” he said. He cleared his throat. “It’s just...Some assnozzle at school thought it would be funny to steal the Qs from my backpack and rip the pages into a hundred trillion pieces.”

  A swell of sadness crashed into my chest and dragged it out to sea. “Ben, I’m so sorry,” I whispered.

  “It’s fine,” he said, sort of loudly. “Totally fine. I mean, some people are just...” He exhaled. Tried again. “Some people are just assnozzles, you know?”

  “Yeah. I know,” I murmured.

  My heart had been flooded with water. It was drowning.

  We didn’t speak for a beat or two, and then Ben exhaled, coughed, and abruptly changed the subject. “Thera, when you were completely blind—like, before you hit your head and could see me and stuff—what did you miss seeing the most?”