Alive

by Chandler Baker

  Take it slowly, I remind myself, as I lace my fingers with his.

  We walk hand in hand down the hallway. Other students stream past us. Levi hands me an earbud and together we listen to Mudhoney, a band I’ve recently discovered through him. They’re part of my education, he says, a musical romp through Seattle’s rock history, which I soak in effortlessly.

  I like to sneak glances at Levi while he’s listening to music. Even when we’re walking, he’ll shut his eyes for several beats too long, and I have to steer him clear of any oncoming traffic. I like the way there are two lines that form a triangle between his eyebrows when he’s listening to a complicated guitar solo. I like how his teeth bite his lip and he rocks his head to the music. I think about what Levi told me about Kurt Cobain, about how one day he stopped feeling the excitement of listening to music, and I wonder if that will happen to Levi. I hope not, because this is what I like most about him. My favorite part.

  I must look up at Levi one too many times, because something catches my ankle and I fly forward into the back of a lowerclassman walking several feet in front of me.

  I push into her backpack. The earbud is yanked from my ear and I’m thrown from the happy bubble Levi and I have been occupying, and we both tumble to the ground.

  “Hey, watch it!” The petite blond girl glares at me. Scooting myself off of her and feeling like a giant in comparison, I reach down to help her up, but she pushes my hand away. “I’m fine.” She brushes off her khakis and collects her books from the hallway floor.

  Behind me there’s a loud cackle. I turn to see Tess slapping her thighs. Levi sees her the same moment I do. I push past him, hiking my book bag up on my shoulder. “What was that?” I demand when I’m close enough that I could spit in her face.

  “What?” She looks to Brandon and Connor with this can-you-believe-this-girl face I wish I could smack right off.

  “You tripped me.”

  “Hardly.” She drops her fake smile. “Honestly, I think everyone’s growing a bit tired of the victim card.”

  “Liar.” People are watching, whispering. “You tripped me.”

  “Then maybe”—she cocks her head—“you should look where you’re going.”

  I take a step forward. “What’s your problem with me, Tess?” People are all around now, pushing and shoving like wolves. Closing in on me. A ring.

  “Ooh. Tough girl. You know your little punk-rock-princess act isn’t fooling anyone, right? Under all that eyeliner you’re still the girl people are only nice to because they feel sorry for you.” Several sharp intakes of breath from the crowd. My pulse drums wildly out of control. Humming in my ears.

  “Shut up.” I don’t know what makes me do it, but without thinking, I shove Tess. At first I think I’ve shoved just hard enough to give her a jolt, but her head whips back and she loses her footing. She rocks back on her heels. Her hands reach for me but grab thin air before her head clangs into the rusted metal edge of an open locker. In that instant, when her body makes impact, my vision shifts.

  Her eyelashes flutter against her cheeks. She doesn’t say a word. Her back slams against the bottom row of lockers and her knees buckle. The whites of her eyes take over the pupils and it’s only in the fraction of time before she crumples that I know something’s wrong.

  Her torso makes an anticlimactic slump to the floor, her cheek pressed against dirtied linoleum, speckled with the shadows of footprints and the gray sweeps of a janitor’s mop.

  “Oh God,” I whisper.

  She lies on her side, and if this weren’t the middle of the hallway in the middle of a school day, she might be sleeping. A single drop of blood plops onto the white tile. The crown of her hair is already matted dark red.

  Her wrists, turned up to the ceiling, suddenly look to me to be unnaturally thin, with bones as fragile as a bird’s. There’s a ringing in my ears. I can’t remember why I pushed her. I shake my head slowly at first and then frantically.

  More drops stand out, bright as poppies. I’m mesmerized by the pool of blood. And something deeper, more visceral, rises out of the horror in my gut—satisfaction. I swallow it down, frightened of my own fascination. Her eyes go still first. Her mouth hangs open.

  “What the hell?” My vision shifts again. I gulp back a wad of spit and the ringing stops. Tess is there, screaming at me, flattening her pleated skirt. “She pushed me!” she shrieks to anyone who will listen. “She pushed me!”

  I gape at her, dumbstruck.

  “Students, students.” I hear the voice of old Mrs. Truitt. I see her gnarled hands trying to part the crowd.

  I back away. Slowly. Slowly. No, I think. Not happening. No. I try to disappear in the mess of people. Where’s Levi? I lost him. I can’t wait for him.

  “She pushed me? Did anyone see that?” I turn. And I go.

  When someone catches my arm I think immediately that it’s him. I spin into his chest, grateful that he’s found me. The breath I’ve been holding is already on its way out.

  “Stella. What happened back there? Why is Tess saying that you pushed her?”

  It was Henry. I glance over his shoulder at the dissipating crowd and tug at the sleeves of my school-issued sweater to pull them down over my knuckles.

  “Don’t worry, your little designer doll is fine,” I mutter. “It was stupid.”

  “I don’t care about her. I care about you.” He ducks to look me straight in the eyes. “What’s going on?”

  I’m shaking. Tremors shoot through my hands. Henry grabs them and holds them together in a strong grip. I find this oddly comforting. “Talk to me,” he says. “What’s wrong?”

  I swallow down the ache in my chest. “I don’t know.” We’ve resumed a certain degree of normalcy since my midnight visit, not comfortable, but something. “I thought I saw—”

  “Thought you saw what?” Henry’s eyes search mine. He holds my hands close to his body. His chest is warm. “What did she do to you?”

  I look down. His hands clasped around mine. “Nothing,” I mumble. “I don’t know.” Tess. Dead. My fault. The thoughts are disjointed. More so when I keep having to come to the same revelation that none of it is true. “I was with Levi and—”

  “Where is he?” There’s a growl to Henry’s question and I can tell he’s latched on to Levi as some crucial part of the story.

  “I don’t know.” I clench my teeth to keep tears from forming. If I could only get the trembling to stop. It had seemed so real.

  “This isn’t you, Stella.” He glances over both shoulders. “I know you. You’re not yourself when he’s around.”

  “I—” My eyes snap up to his. My mouth falls open. “I thought you were…I don’t know…being supportive, not looking for an excuse to bring up your one-sided grudge match with Levi.”

  “I am being supportive, but…” He sighs. “Stel, there’s something creepy about that guy. And since you met him you’ve been acting—” He squeezes my hands and I snatch them away.

  “Creepy, huh? You think my boyfriend’s creepy? God, Henry, I should have known this whole be-a-good-friend bit was just that. A bit.”

  “Okay. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He drags out the words. Henry tugs his hat down over his eyes. I swear, I can tell the ten degrees of Henry’s discomfort just based on how he maneuvers that damn baseball cap. “I mean, he follows you, Stella. Like, I don’t know, like a stalker. That’s kind of creepy. I’ve seen him just, you know, trailing behind you, watching you. There were times you didn’t know he was there.”

  I drop my chin and glare at him. I feel my lower jaw go stiff. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe Levi and I go to the same school? There are only so many places to go.”

  “Yes.” Henry glances in both directions again and lowers his voice. “Of course it did. At first I thought it was just a coincidence or something, too. But then…Look, this is going to sound weird, but I was at the mall the other day.” I narrow my eyes. “My mom asked me to pick up her alte
rations. Anyway. I was walking by the costume store and saw Levi hovering outside and only realized later it was the exact same time you were in the store with Brynn.”

  Anger opens up in me like a pit. “It sounds like you’re the one who’s stalking me, Henry. Now who’s creepy?”

  “For Christ’s sake, I’m not stalking you

  “So let me get this straight. You saw Levi quote-unquote following me. So in order to check that he was quote-unquote up to no good, you checked up with Brynn about me. And Levi’s the stalker?”

  “Okay, it’s not just the stalking thing. What about Halloween? Did you not think it was weird how he jumped on you just for talking to me? I know you noticed it too. We’ve been friends for years and—”

  “Maybe Levi thinks you want more than just friendship. Shocking, I know, since you have quite obviously headed up the welcoming committee.”

  I start to leave, but Henry catches my wrist to stop me. “Stella, I’m worried about you. And about him. I’m telling you, there’s something wrong with that guy.”

  “Enough, Henry. Drop the act. I made it perfectly clear that I wasn’t available.”

  “Made it perfectly clear in my bedroom, in the middle of the night. I’d call that murky at best,” he says, but I can tell he wishes he didn’t as soon as it’s out.

  I inhale deeply. “My boyfriend’s not evil, Henry, and this isn’t Lunatic Outpost. If you’ve begun to think that everything and everyone is conspiring against you, then clearly you’ve been taking that stuff way more seriously than I have.” Suddenly all the hours we spent laughing over our crazy theories about Roswell and the Kennedy assassination don’t seem so funny. I twist my arm out of his grip.

  “But—”

  “But nothing. This is my life. And I’m done with having other people decide what’s safe for me and what’s not. Find another job.” He opens his mouth, but I cut him off before he can speak. “And I’d have thought we were good enough friends that you’d have gotten over the whole jealousy thing by now.” I lift my eyebrows. It’s mean. I know it’s mean. Too mean. Henry’s face crumples. I might as well have kicked him in the groin. But for some reason I can’t stop. “I’m sorry I didn’t go to the stupid concert with you, Henry. But he didn’t ruin things between us. If I’d wanted to be with you, I would have. Quite frankly, you remind me of a past life I’d rather forget, okay?” Kick, kick, kick. “Why’d you agree to sell him the tickets if you were going to act this way?”

  “I didn’t sell him the tickets.”

  “Oh, really? Yeah, that makes perfect sense.”

  Henry’s brow line lowers until it’s cloaking the top half of his eyes. He looks away and then back at me. “I gave them to him.” He pauses for that to sink in. “I wanted you to be happy. Stupid me.”

  The revelation plunges into me like a javelin and I snap, a caged animal. “Good news. It worked.” This doesn’t change anything. “I’m with Levi now, whether you like it or not. So you can stop trying to convince me I’m dating a psychopath.” Henry’s Adam’s apple bobs. “Seriously, Henry. It’s pathetic.”

  I pivot on my heel and storm off in the direction of the math building, tears cropping up in my eyes that I pray nobody will notice.

  I spend the first half of Calc cursing Henry in my head, telling him he’s stupid and ugly and a world-class asshole. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. That much is true, at least. He doesn’t know Levi. He hasn’t tried to know Levi.

  For Christ’s sake, I put up with him when he dated Tess Collars. And, what, he can’t handle the fact that now I have someone? That I’m not the fallback prom date he thought I was? He asked me out a few days before he thought I might die. And that qualifies as some grand romantic gesture? Please. What’s more, who asked Henry to martyr himself? Certainly not me. Surprise, I’m not as desperate as he thought I’d be. I didn’t fall headlong in to the arms of the first person who stood by me.

  I pinch my leg hard to keep from tearing up in class. By the second half, I’m still pissed, but regret is seeping in, too, and I wish I hadn’t said what I’d said quite the way I’d said it. Henry was still wrong, though. I’m not backing down from that.

  The bell for class rings and I realize I haven’t listened to a single word. Were we talking about functions of derivatives or derivatives of functions or limits of properties or continuity of a function? It’s always something of something, and I know nothing of nothing.

  I have a flash of the Stanford application stuffed in a drawer in my room. The essay I told my parents I’d write, but haven’t started.

  I squeeze through the door with the crush of other students trying to steal a spare minute or two of a social life between classes. My mood is foul, rancid, and putrid to the point I think students passing by must smell it decaying around me as I storm across campus, head down, hands shoved in my pockets.

  As I walk, though, I feel a shudder slink up the back of my neck. The odd, uncomfortable feeling that somebody’s eyes are on me unfurls over my shoulders and, without wanting to, I quicken my pace. What am I thinking? Nobody’s watching me. Henry put this in my head. Out of principle, I refuse to look back. I mean, I know I could look back and it would be fine. But I won’t, because that’d be giving his stupid theory power over me. So I won’t.

  This is so Henry’s fault.

  I haven’t been to a lot of parties. At least not lately, but here’s what I remember:

  The best part of any party happens before you even get there. It’s the getting ready. The listening to loud dance music with your friends while curling your eyelashes and mixing lip glosses into the perfect shade. Attempting that smoky eye tutorial you saw online. The taking an hour to choose an outfit. It’s the driving to so-and-so’s house singing at the top of your lungs in your best friend’s car with the windows rolled down, but here’s what it’s not:

  It’s not the actual party.

  I’ve been lucky so far. And I use that term extremely loosely. My partygoing has been, up to this point, pretty much devoid of the typical pitfalls that bring the average party experience down (or so I’ve heard). For instance, I’ve never had to lie to my parents about where I’m going. I’ve never gotten in trouble for going to a party. My parents have never once checked my breath for booze. These are sick-kid perks. The benefits of the fact that (a) when you’re measuring your life in months, things can’t really get worse and (b) the sick kid in question (me) apparently deserves some semblance of normalcy, and parties, apparently, qualify. (Thankfully, my parents are still operating under the tenets of [b].) That said, it was still never the party—the loud, booming speakers, the hot-potato game of trying not to get stuck standing alone, the sloshing liquids on new clothes—that was fun. That stuff was all pretend, straining-to-look-like-I’m-having-fun fun.

  This time’s different, though. This time I have Levi.

  I’m still curling my lashes. I’ve chosen a bright, berry lip gloss and a tight T-shirt with skinny jeans and riding boots, but now it all has a point, an audience. Levi.

  “He’s here!” my mom calls upstairs. I peek through the curtain and see the Tahoe’s headlights sweeping into the driveway. The ache in my chest opens up again, making me hurry faster.

  “One second!” I yell back, swiping the flatiron over my hair one last time. Grabbing my pink cell phone case and debit card from the nightstand, I stuff them both in my back pocket and gallop down the stairs.

  “So can I finally meet this young man?” My dad appears in the foyer. His shirt’s unbuttoned, tie strung over his neck and hanging at loose ends. There’s another pinch of guilt. He’s been working late again. For me.

  I pause at the bottom of the flight of stairs. “Dad,” I whine. My head tilts and my arms hang limply at my sides. “Please? We’re running late and—”

  He waves one of his pawlike hands. “Fine. Fine. I get it. Too cool for your old man. Can I trust you?” At this he drops his chin and gives me the dad look. The one he’s been giving me si
nce I was two. “Because I know I can’t trust him.”

  “Yes, you can trust me…and him,” I add.

  Mom pops out from the hallway bathroom. The ends of her hair are soaked and she’s holding a naked, slick-skinned Elsie. “Back by two,” she says.

  “Definitely,” I call over my shoulder as I bolt out the front door. I’m down the path cutting across our front lawn before they can consider changing their minds.

  And it’s worth it. Levi’s leaned up against the Tahoe waiting for me, legs crossed one in front of the other. I catch a moment of abstracted fatigue on his face as if the day has worn him out, but he straightens as soon as he sees me, right before I run headlong into him and throw my arms around his neck. Relief washes over me as the throbbing in my chest dulls. I wish I could stay pressed up against him like this forever, but I can’t. Instead, I let Levi take my hand and help me into the car.

  “You look pretty,” he says, grinning and staring. Sometimes I like the way he seems to feel me up without even touching me. Like I’m his prize.

  “You saw me only a couple hours ago.” I smile back at him. “You don’t clean up bad yourself.”

  Levi rubs his eyes and traps a yawn behind his hand. “Sorry.” He squints and tilts his head. My face goes momentarily slack. “Didn’t sleep well. I’m ready, though.” He grins. “Swear.”

  “Okay,” I say. “But you’re going to have to shape up, Zin. I’m watching you.” On second glance, I see that the creases around his mouth are deeper and his expression more drawn. Not that this does anything to detract from his appeal.

  Levi’s in a soft gray T-shirt that hugs his biceps and chest. His hair’s still soaked and he smells like a river on a hot summer day. There are even a few beads of water streaming down his neck. I breathe him in, wishing I could bury my face in the fabric of his T-shirt and kiss away every last drop. Maybe later. If everything goes well, there could be plenty for later.

  Already, I can tell I’m right. Tonight’s going to be different. A million times better than any night before it.