by Jen Brooks
I spend the wait doing extra stretches and getting extra rained on with Rob Finkelstein. He’s waiting for his girlfriend to be done too. After running and sweating in the rain, though, we can’t get more soaked through than we are already. Eventually the girls start collecting their spikes and extra layers and go their separate ways. Rob says good-bye, leaving me standing at the fence alone, and for one horrible second I have the fear that Kylie isn’t going to come over. But she does, like always, and my body floods with relief. Kylie wanting to be with me still matters, no matter how much my attitude is off today.
She tosses her wet sweatshirt over her shoulder. “Have a nice run?” she asks.
“LSD,” I say. That’s “long, slow, distance” to us distance runner types.
“How far?”
“Seven. How many pacer chasers?”
“Ten.”
The coaches are still on the track timing latecomers only partway through their workouts. Maybe twenty people are still training around us, but no one hangs out casually by the fence like we are doing. The rain’s a little cold at this point.
“Are you still mad at me?” I ask.
“I told you I wasn’t mad.”
“Are you still feeling icky?”
She pauses, maybe to assess the state of her ickiness, then kicks my toe playfully. “Not so icky.”
“Then I’d like to go on a date today.” And make it up to her for yesterday at the mall.
“Oh yeah? With who?”
I wish she hadn’t said that. It makes me think she believes I’m yearning after pink-sweater girl, which there is no way I can tell her is my sister. “I was thinking of asking you. Wanna go out with me?”
“Where to?”
“It’s a surprise.”
“Only if it involves hot chocolate.”
“What quality date wouldn’t involve hot chocolate?”
We walk up to our cars together. She has a couple of towels in her trunk, and she lets me borrow one to keep my seat from getting soaked. I promise to pick her up in half an hour, and we drive to our separate showers to get clean and warm.
Miraculously, Uncle Joey’s home. He’s in his office by the looks of the light spilling from the doorway. I would peek in and say good morning, but I’ll have to work pretty quick to be at Kylie’s on time, so I run up the stairs, trying not to leave muddy drips on too much of the pristine carpet.
When I emerge dressed in sneakers, jeans, and a brown sweater, I’m making okay time. “Bye, Uncle. Be home later!” I holler as I dash out the door.
Kylie is waiting in her doorway and comes running when I pull up. The rain has turned into a fine mist that doesn’t splash around but still requires windshield wipers. We go to the drive-through at the closest coffee place and get our hot chocolates, then head into the city.
“Where are we going?”
“I told you, it’s a surprise.”
We talk a little about the track team and about the big meet next week, news at school and news in Kylie’s family. It’s all pleasant conversation, but there is the sense that we’re avoiding what we really need to talk about. For Kylie that would be the incident in the mall. For me, it’s Tess as well, but also this strange new unease about Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend not being real.
We rarely go into the city even though it’s only a thirty-minute ride. City traffic intimidates me, not because the people cut you off or forget they have turn signals, but because they all seem to know where they’re going, and I need a split second at each intersection to make a decision. City drivers are not forgiving of people who need to think while they drive.
We do make it to our destination, though, and I offer up a kidney to pay for a three-hour spot in the nearest garage. The only spaces left are on the roof. I take Kylie’s hand in mine, and we navigate the stairwells and streets until we’re approaching the Fine Arts Museum.
Kylie and I have never gone to an art museum together. Neither of us is particularly artsy, and I have no idea if coming here is a nice surprise or if she’s inwardly groaning. I just wanted to do something different, something grown-up, something that would expand our world.
“Cool” is all she says as we go up the steps and push open the huge glass doors. Inside we find a multistory rotunda filled with voices echoing into the frescoes of mythological figures on clouds and mountaintops. For a moment the sound is like prayers wafting up to the painted gods. I lead Kylie over to take our place in line for tickets.
“Is this okay?” I ask. “Do you want to stay?”
“Yeah. I’ve always wanted to come here. I’m surprised to find myself here today, though.”
“What if I told you I’m secretly an artist and the third floor is exhibiting my stuff right now?”
“If that’s true, there’d better be a painting of me up there.”
“If it were true, they’d all be of you.”
“Don’t be such a sap.”
The line moves pretty quickly, and soon we have our entry badges and maps and are standing at the foot of the massive granite staircase. Grand columns to either side sweep the eye up toward the balconies of the second and third floors.
“What do you want to see?” Kylie asks.
“I’ve never seen any of it, so I’m up for anything.”
She studies the map, flipping back and forth to see the collection and exhibition descriptions and their locations. I watch her, my awesome girlfriend Kylie, and I’m thinking about the day I created her. The darkness in my bedroom. The loneliness I felt. It was the start of sophomore year, before driver’s licenses and R-rated movies, and I spent that whole summer in Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club trying to keep myself from thinking of Kylie, from doing what I was about to do. Then I squeezed my eyes shut, and Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend formed around me. I was in her bedroom, her bed actually, and she let me put my arms around her, and we kissed and explored each other, and I remember so clearly how warm I felt afterward, Kylie falling back to sleep, me never to sleep again because of insane happiness, and the softness of her, and me secure in the knowledge that making her world had not been a mistake.
Now as I watch her study the map, mulling over her decision, I’m highly aware that I made her what she is. I’m less her boyfriend than her keeper. Her creator. And this change in how I see her sickens me, frightens me, because all this time I thought I loved her.
Oh God. I do love her. That’s not what I meant.
Is it?
She looks up from the map, blanches a little at something she sees in my face, and recovers quickly. We’re still pretending something weird isn’t going on between us. “If I had to pick one thing to see before I leave, it’s the medieval art collection.”
“Medieval art it is.”
Turns out medieval art is about as far from where we’re standing as you can get, so we chart a course and get moving. On the way I’m surprised to find out how many worlds one can travel to in an art museum. The modern collection appeals to me with its room after room of sculptures made of the strangest things—such as bottle caps or a giant cheese grater. There’s this one painting that’s just a purple square, an orange square, and a yellow square with a tiny red circle inside it. I’m fairly certain I could reproduce this particular painting, but I would never think to give it the meaning described in the plaque beside it. Kylie pauses over a few life-size figures made of copper pipes but is generally unimpressed with modern art. When we enter the watercolors collection, she examines a number of pictures with pinks, greens, blues, and yellows. Pond scenes. Park scenes. Seascapes. I recognize the names of a few artists.
I think we’re having a good time. I’m trying not to dwell on the question of Tess and the fact that my girlfriend isn’t real, and Kylie’s doing a pretty decent job being cheery, even if she is keeping at least three feet of distance between us at all times.
/> “I never realized ‘art’ covered so many things,” Kylie says as we pass the peace quilt made by local schoolchildren. We see totem poles and Egyptian bracelets, ancient lutes and ceramic pitchers, ceremonial masks and children’s dolls. Things start to blend together after a while, because the more we look at stuff, the more we realize everything humans make can be considered art.
The entrance to the medieval section is a towering stone archway reassembled from a cathedral in Europe. Set into wooden timbers on either side are huge stained-glass windows backlit to reveal crucifixion scenes. I sense Kylie’s excitement level rise as she draws a breath and passes under the arch. Inside, a round room contains seven stained-glass windows. I don’t need the plaques to tell me what they depict: night and day; sky and sea; land and plants; stars, sun, and moon; fish and birds; animals and man; an eye at rest. The seven days of Creation.
“I love castles,” Kylie says, which is a weird thing to say, since these windows are clearly from churches, not castles. She bops from one day of Creation to the next, oblivious to the fact that I, her anonymous creator, have gone still as I imagine what a stained-glass window depicting her creation would look like among these others. Smaller, I think, less colorful, less majestic. Just my dark bedroom and Kylie springing from my forehead.
Of course I’m no god, but for the first time ever, I feel a little like one, an awkward god. Here stands Kylie, raising her eyes to each of seven windows for a thoughtless second, unaware that the truth of her origin is not debatable in creationist- versus-evolutionist circles. I could tell her with certainty how she was made. What’s unknowable is the origin of my power to make her. This is obviously not the first time I’ve asked myself why I can do what I do. I falter in this room because I feel like the answer might be behind the stained glass, if only I had the courage to shatter it.
Kylie’s experience of this same moment is less profound. With her gawking done, she patters from the room as though it were any other. I watch her go, feeling all the while like a giant spotlight beams down on me, fixing me in place. A room away she glances at icons of Jesus, Mary, angels, saints, all stylized with gold halos or pointy beards or symbolic staffs and whatnot. Those things are less threatening, more like the display of the first rough clay figurines ever fashioned by human hands, or the modern female statue made out of single-serving coffee thingies. Kylie, moving among the art, becomes indistinguishable, something molded from clay and breathed on.
She apparently forgets me when she sneaks a peek into yet another room beyond. As she disappears through the doorway, I finally find my feet and chase her down. The room is draped in tapestries, this time from the castles she loves. The largest depicts a medieval hunting scene, with a bloody deer. Kylie studies the tapestry with more interest than she spared the religious stuff, and she practically swoons over the ceremonial armor standing beneath it, plated in gold and stamped with medieval designs.
“This is so cool,” she says, and her hand slides into mine. It’s warm and squeezes my hand with gratitude. I hate that as I feel a distance swelling between us, she has felt the gap shrink. This medieval expedition has definitely turned out differently for each of us.
To find the exit we cross through a gallery of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and are confronted with a temporary exhibition of Arthurian pictures. Kylie makes a little happy noise and squeezes my hand harder.
“Why didn’t you just say this is where you wanted to go?” I ask.
“Do you think I knew what ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ meant?”
I follow Kylie around the room as she studies the details of knights being knighted, dead ladies floating around in boats, and Holy Grails touched by the most worthy champions of faith. I don’t think she even knows much about the legend besides what she has seen in a couple of old movies like First Knight or King Arthur, which I suspect don’t tell the whole of it, by the looks of this art all around us. Still, the exhibit is a nice way to end our museum experience.
We take the elevator down, and emerge by the gift shop. While Kylie’s off browsing, I search through the posters for a reproduction of one of those Arthurian pictures. I don’t find one, but I do pass a T-shirt display with a colorful print of an Arthur and Guinevere painting and a caption on the back about Pre-Raphaelites. I buy a medium for Kylie and a large for myself and tuck them into my jacket before she can see. Then we head out of the museum to find somewhere to eat, and end up in a little burger place a block away.
I order a fancy chicken sandwich, and Kylie chooses a turkey burger. We split a fries and onion ring platter, which comes on a bed of lettuce, as if putting a piece of salad at the bottom is going to change the fact that we’re eating grease. Because we’re runners, we’re usually a little careful about what we eat, but this is a special occasion. It’s a date.
As if reading my mind, Kylie says, “Chicken and turkey count as a healthy decision.”
“We do have to get protein,” I agree. “Just don’t give me that crap about fried potatoes and fried onions counting as vegetables.” I munch happily on a giant, crispy onion ring.
“They do, though.”
“We should have gotten a salad,” I say.
“Isn’t the boy supposed to be the defender of junk food and the girl the health food junkie?”
“It’s more like sprinters defend junk food and distance runners eat right.”
“Is that so?” She takes a bite out of her turkey burger. When she does, a tomato wedge slides partway out the back. We both eat, concentrating on our chewing and the comings and goings at the tables around us. Someone ordered a brownie sundae that I’m tempted to go over and sample.
Kylie puts down her turkey burger to take a sip of strawberry lemonade. She casts her glance down at the table as she drinks. I can tell she wants to get down to talking about something, but the changes in her expression tell me she’s not sure how to proceed. She goes for something safe. “So, what was your favorite thing you saw today?”
I’m midchew, so I get a few seconds to think about it before swallowing. We can talk about art if that’s what she wants. “I guess the rocket ship made out of rocks with those caveman paintings on them.”
“I didn’t see that.”
“It was in the modern room. You weren’t too into it, remember?”
“Yeah, I don’t get modern art.”
“So, what was your favorite thing you saw today?”
She smiles. She can’t help but let her happiness over having a favorite trump everything else for the moment. “The whole King Arthur room. I think I’m a girlie girl in love with romantic stories.”
“I seriously did not know that.”
“My mom used to read to me from Le Morte d’Arthur when I was younger. The Round Table. The Lady of the Lake. Excalibur. A lot of love stories that didn’t end so well. A lot of knights in disguise accidentally killing their friends because no one could recognize anyone. A lot of weirdness surrounding the quest for the Holy Grail.”
“Sounds a lot like Monty Python,” I say.
“Only, real tales of King Arthur aren’t meant to be funny.”
“Who said Monty Python was funny?”
“You did. About a thousand times after we watched it in eighth grade.”
Eighth grade is two years before this Kylie began her existence, but she has memories going back further than that, and of course I have to pretend it all happened. She’s told me about Monty Python before. In this world Kylie and I have been friends since birth and in love since we were old enough to be in love.
The onion ring pile dwindles faster than the french fry pile, so I start eating fries to even it out. Kylie puts down her burger and sits kind of still, watching me dip the fries in ketchup and stick them into my mouth. Eventually I get that she’s waiting for me to stop eating, so I wash down my food with some cola and give her my full attention.
“What’s going o
n, Jonathan?”
I clamp down on a What do you mean? because playing dumb isn’t going to help anything. I was hoping we could finish out this date pretending nothing was wrong.
“I mean,” she says, “besides that girl last night. You looked at me weird when we were starting out in the museum. I know sometimes you get distant, but I always know the reason is something else. I get the feeling this time your distance is because of me.”
“It’s not.”
“Well, what, then?”
How do I tell her the problem is that she isn’t real and that’s not as okay as it used to be?
“When we were in third grade,” I say, “and the crash happened. Do you remember if we were friends?”
“Of course we were friends. We’ve never not been friends.”
“What was I like after the crash? You know, when I went back to school.”
She senses we’re entering dangerous ground, that she has to be careful not to say the wrong thing. “Uh . . . you were . . .” Her eyes scan the plates and silverware on the table. “I don’t know. You had the scar, and you were obviously sad because your family had died.”
“But was I different in other ways? Did I change enough to make people act differently toward me?”
“Well, yeah. Everyone felt bad for you. Don’t you remember the party the class threw on the one-week anniversary of you coming back to school? Those first few weeks, you had so many people inviting you over to their houses that I didn’t see you much.”
I don’t remember any of this, of course, because it never happened, and I sit in silence for a moment, mulling over her version of the truth.
“Were you jealous?” I ask.
