Be Good Be Real Be Crazy

by Chelsey Philpot

  Homer watched her put Goober in a car seat in the white SUV parked on a driveway of broken shells and white stones. When Trisha waved as she backed into the street, Homer waved back automatically. His mouth puffed frozen ghost words into the air. “Thank you.”

  Only then did he turn his head to find Mia already standing on the sidewalk. Only then did he realize how the orange in the funny ball on the top of her winter hat looked really cute with her red hair. Only then did he see that the afternoon had clouded over while they were inside—or maybe it had been overcast before, but he’d been too wrapped up in thinking of all the things he wasn’t brave enough to say to notice.

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that the sky had gone gray. Mia looked more lost than Homer knew a person could be. And it was cold and December and beginning to snow.

  THE PARABLE OF THE GIRL WHO COULD BREAK

  THE GIRL WHO COULD BREAK liked to discover animals in the clouds and words in the sand. She looked for famous faces in burned toast and patterns in cracked concrete. She had started the game right after the first time her world fell apart and she’d kept playing it through every time since.

  The Girl Who Could Break found it comforting to spot recognizable things when she was thrown into otherwise unrecognizable new lives, to uncover something known in the unknown, to have control amid chaos and order where there seemed to be none. She recited aphorisms and clichés like she believed them—because she did.

  ALL CLOUDS HAVE A SILVER LINING.

  IT’S BETTER TO HAVE LOVED AND LOST THAN NEVER TO HAVE LOVED AT ALL.

  KEEP YOUR CHIN UP, BECAUSE THERE’S NO USE CRYING OVER SPILLED MILK.

  AND THAT WHICH DOES NOT KILL YOU MAKES YOU STRONGER.

  SO LET YOUR HAIR DOWN AND WEAR YOUR HEART ON YOUR SLEEVE.

  PUT YOUR BEST FOOT FORWARD WHILE STANDING AND DELIVERING.

  But like any system here on this imperfect third planet from the sun, the one that the Girl Who Could Break created could (and did) falter.

  It turns out to be a beautiful illusion, she discovered, that forces beyond her reach were actually within it.

  It turns out that the tea leaves aren’t symbols. They’re just the scraps some person chose to leave behind.

  It turns out that she was an idiot to believe that good things happen to good people and bad things to bad.

  She was a fool to have told herself for so long that the next sunrise would be brighter and tomorrow would, indeed, be another, better, day.

  There are only so many disappointments a person can take before her faith begins to show the cracks in the facade. There is only so much a person can endure before she realizes that the proverbial lemonade she is supposed to make with her life’s metaphorical lemons is just sour juice with too much sugar.

  THE BEACH OF SAND AND SNOW

  WHEN TRISHA’S CAR DISAPPEARED around the corner, Mia started walking, and Homer followed her all the way to the beach and then right up to the water’s edge.

  Homer had never seen a beach in the cold. It looked like a place from another planet. The water was a navy blue so dark it was almost black. The white froth of the waves looked sculpted. Frost made the stalks of sea grass on the dunes shimmer, and when snowflakes landed on the dense sand, they only lingered for a heartbeat before getting sucked beneath the surface. It didn’t smell like a beach. Maybe the salt was trapped beneath the frozen rocks. Maybe, come spring, the stench of rotting seaweed would take over, just as soon as the sun remembered what it was meant to do.

  The air was uneven, some breezes warmer than others. Because of the Gulf Stream, Homer thought as he watched the blue-black waves pick away the sand from around the smooth gray rock at his feet. Or is it because of the way the cold in the sky interacts with the cold in the water? Einstein will know. I’ll ask him when we start driving again. Homer reached down and worked the rock free from the sand. It was much larger than he’d thought it would be, and though he threw as hard as he could, it plunked into the water only a few yards from the shore. Do we keep with the plan? Go to New Hampshire? What happens after you get to where you were supposed to be and it ends up not being the supposed-to-be place at all?

  “Homer.”

  Homer heard Mia but didn’t. It was like she was calling him from the shore and he was trying to make sense of the world on the beach from a world underwater. The only thing that was clear to him at that moment was that miles and months after the Anywhere Girl walked into La Isla Souvenirs, she was still a mystery.

  “Homer.”

  A snowflake landed on the end of his nose. Homer crossed his eyes and watched it melt. His nose and fingers felt cold, but his cheeks were warm. Maybe he’d gotten sunburned and hadn’t noticed. Or maybe the northern wind was roughing up his delicate Florida skin. Maybe he wasn’t cut out for the cold or living anywhere other than La Isla de Plátanos.

  The wish that he had never left, that he was home or at school or even at the store doing inventory hit him like a rubber band snapping. Homer had to think about breathing in and out, and then Mia was standing next to him, strands of her fruit-punch hair sticking to her face, obscuring her eyes. Is she crying or is snow melting on her face, too?

  “I think I missed something. Or maybe I was too oblivious to understand.” Homer cleared his throat. “Where’s Dotts? Didn’t she know you were coming?”

  Mia shook her head. “I didn’t want—” She was speaking so softly that the wind picked apart her words. “I needed to hope.”

  Homer wiped his face on his sleeve. “Sorry?”

  “I needed to hope that Dotts would be here. That’s how it works,” Mia said slowly. “When it’s just me, it doesn’t matter how it turns out. I pick a new postcard . . . and . . . I really, really wanted her to be here. She said she loved it. That’s what the postcard says on the back. She loved it and would never leave and I should come and live with her, and it’d be just like before.”

  Homer pulled his hat down, once, twice on each side. He didn’t know where to look. The water was too black and too endless and it made him feel too small and unimportant. The sand, frozen and hard, confused him. Sand wasn’t supposed to be that way. And Mia—looking at Mia was impossible, not if he wanted to stay upright, not if he couldn’t handle more of him falling apart.

  Homer nudged a shell out of the sand with the tip of his right sneaker, then turned his foot and kicked it. The shell barely moved, but sand went flying into the wind.

  “Oh.”

  “Oh God. I’m sorry.” Before he realized what he was doing, Homer brushed a blob of sand off Mia’s coat, “Your eyes are red. Did it hit your face?”

  “No.” Mia sniffed. Strands of her hair stuck to her cheeks.

  Homer raised his hand, then lowered it. Shoved both hands in his coat pockets.

  Mia’s hands were pink with cold, but she kept them hanging by her sides. “This is the first time that it’s not just me. I’m sorry. I was greedy. I wanted too much. I wanted you to come with me . . . to . . . to not go alone just this one time.”

  “Doesn’t it get exhausting? Always running away? Or maybe you’re running to places. I don’t know.” Homer was surprised at how aloof he sounded. He wasn’t certain he meant to. “Pinning all your hopes on geography. Each time, you get to pretend that the shitty stuff won’t follow you and that it’s better for the people you’re leaving. Is that how it works?”

  “You make it sound like I don’t care about hurting you.” Mia’s words rattled and clicked. “I told you I’m not a good person. I’m not sweet. I’m not pretty. You just feel bad for me because I’m so stupid and ’cause I’m knocked up. And I’m going to mess up just like everyone messed up before me, because that’s who I am.”

  “Who?” Homer ran his tongue over his lips. They were chapped. Bits of skin came off. Disgusting. “Who is ‘everyone’?” Homer’s voice cracked. He didn’t care. As long as the stinging in his eyes was from the cold and not the start of tears. “I just want to understand what the hell you’r
e saying. I need to comprehend how big a moron I am.”

  “You’re not a moron, Homer,” Mia said, shaking her head. “I am.” She sniffled. Wiped her nose. Continued. “I actually thought that if I wasn’t like the other kids, if I was sweet and polite and smiled a lot, they wouldn’t care that I was dumb or that my own mom didn’t want me. And maybe one of them would adopt me.” Mia’s gaze went from the ground to the black water and back to the ground again. “I didn’t ask for you to fall in love with me. I didn’t want you to.”

  “What do you mean? You can’t require a permission slip. People fall in love. It’s not something you control.”

  “I don’t know what I mean anymore.” Mia shook her head side to side. The wind whipped her hair in all directions, but if it stung her face, she didn’t let on. “It doesn’t matter anyway.” Each exhale looked like she was losing something, each inhale like the air was frozen glass.

  The winter water beat at the crystal sand. The wind screeched. And somewhere far away, maybe in another world entirely, a crowd of happy people roared and music played. Homer’s feet moved him toward a large piece of driftwood. His legs sat him down and his hands reached for a sand-polished stone so they’d have something to hold, so they wouldn’t reach for Mia’s. “I don’t get it. Why couldn’t you stay in Florida? D.B. and Christian care about you. They want to help. We all want to. Why, this one time, couldn’t you stay?” Homer looked at the rock as he rolled it between his fingers. It had small flecks of silver sprinkled throughout the gray. “I told D.B. and Christian to hire you. Told my little brother . . . We drove over fifteen hundred miles and you weren’t sure what would be at the end? Why not just stay?”

  Mia winced. “Because I couldn’t.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t know.” Mia threw her hands up in the air. “Because . . . because for a lot of reasons. Because sometimes seeing how your . . . seeing your family together hurts so much it feels like my heart could stop. Because D.B. and Christian wanted you and Einstein so, so badly and they kept you . . . and didn’t give up. And my mom did. She gave me up because . . . And then no one. Else. Wanted. Me.” Mia wiped her sleeve across her eyes, took a shaking breath, and continued. “I couldn’t stay because the pain was too much and moving on is what I’ve always done. You can’t hate me for not trusting things that seem too good to be true.”

  “I don’t hate you, Mia. I couldn’t.” Homer had to fight the instinct to stand up and wrap his arms around her.

  “I want you to know I wanted to be the person you thought I was. I wanted to be who you saw.” Mia was gasping like she couldn’t get enough air. Her fingers fumbled with the zipper of her coat. But fabric kept getting caught in the metal. Her fingers kept slipping.

  Homer felt his own eyes prick. His heart flooded with wet concrete. “Here.” He stood up, tugged a fold of fabric on her coat until the zipper was free. Mia’s grateful look was a wave crashing on his concrete heart. In a beat or two, it was his heart again. The one that loved the Anywhere Girl with the fruit-punch hair and the strange sayings and the animal shapes in the clouds. “I’m sorry. Look, can we go somewhere warm? There was that diner by the parking lot. We drove by it, remember? We’ll wait for Einstein and Sid. Call the dads. They’ll want you to come home.”

  Mia sniffled. Smiled, catching tears in the corners of her mouth. Wiped her face. “Sure. Okay.” She turned, hesitated, found the opening to the path they had taken between the scraggly bushes, and started plodding through the sand. Homer let her get a few feet ahead of him before he followed. Neither one of them said a thing until the water was hidden by the dunes.

  Mia stopped so suddenly Homer almost ran into her. “I need to go.”

  “Okay. We can get a hotel tonight—”

  Mia shook her head. “Can I use the Banana? I need to do something—alone.”

  “Sure. Yeah. The keys.” Homer bent his face close enough to his shoulder to wipe his eyes against his shirt collar as he reached into his pants pocket. “How long will you be gone?” Homer glanced at his cell phone. It was hours later than he’d thought. At some point the gray sky had gone mostly black and the crooked streetlights had switched on.

  “Just a bit. Not long.” Mia looked out straight, but if she saw anything, her eyes gave no hint. She was a sand person, unsteady and as heavy as a broken heart.

  “Okay. I’ll tell Einstein and Sid to meet us at the diner.” There was paper in Homer’s throat and the center of him pounded and whirled like he had swallowed the ocean. All of it. Every last drop.

  Mia nodded, once at the view, then at Homer. “Thank you.” Her feet were too heavy to lift, so she dragged them, leaving two messy lines behind her, a trail to prove she had been there, that it wasn’t just Homer’s imagination.

  Homer sat in the Glory-Be Twenty-Four-Hour Diner for a long time. He texted Einstein, drank coffee, and watched the shapes that the neon signs on the other side of the parking lot made across the large windows.

  When he was too jittery to sit still, Homer walked, not realizing until he was standing in front of Trisha’s small house that that was where he had intended to go. It was way too late for a stranger to show up, but Trisha answered the door. Insisted Homer come in. I’m up all night, she explained. This one, she said, gesturing at Goober, is a pain-in-the-ass night owl. You look a lot like a cousin of mine. That makes you almost-family. Trisha made coffee, which Homer only sipped to be polite.

  No, Mia never came back.

  Does she know anyone around here?

  I’m sure she just got lost or ran out of gas or something like that.

  Maybe it was the way Trisha’s sea-glass eyes could hold so much sympathy. Or the steadiness of her gaze, the way she unflinchingly listened like nothing Homer could tell her would shock her. Whatever the reason, Homer found himself rambling about the trip and Mia until the cozy, neat, tiny house began to feel too warm and he needed to walk again. So despite Trisha’s invitation to stay, Homer wrote down his phone number and walked back into the night.

  He didn’t know where else to go, so he went back to the diner. He ordered food he didn’t eat because he didn’t want to be rude and because the woman behind the counter, Melissa, called him “sweetheart” in a way that seemed like she meant it. He got so many messages from Einstein—Apollo’s playing another encore. This is the best night of my life!!!! See how close we got to the stage?!!!—that he turned off the sound on his phone.

  He was still at the same table—a piece of barely touched something-something pie that Melissa had insisted he try in front of him—when Einstein and Sid burst through the diner door.

  “Homes. Uh, where’s the car?” Sid said. His nose and cheeks were red from the cold and his smile was so wide it looked frozen in place. “We cut through the parking lot and the Banana wasn’t in the spot.”

  “Mia took it,” Homer said flatly.

  “Like, borrowed it?”

  “No, took it took it. As in ‘took off.’ I don’t think she’s coming back.” Homer sounded as hollow as he felt. It’s not so bad—feeling empty. He stood up. Frowned. Einstein was standing behind Sid like he was trying to hide. “Steiner, what happened?”

  Einstein peeked around Sid just enough for Homer to see that he was holding his left arm to his chest like it was made of crystal instead of muscle and bone.

  “He was feeling the music and—” Sid started to say.

  “Is it broken?” Homer interrupted.

  “Yeah.” Einstein crept forward the same way he tiptoed around the neighbor’s German shepherd.

  “Wrist or arm?”

  “Just my wrist. I think.”

  “How?”

  “Well, the human wrist is made up of eight different bones with the scaphoid being the most commonly—”

  “I’m not asking for an anatomy lecture, Einstein. I’m asking how you broke it.”

  “Right. Uh. I was helping someone.”

  “A blond-haired female someone,” Sid
said.

  Einstein kicked a piece of crust on the floor next to the counter in Sid’s direction. “And I helped her rescue something she dropped at the concert.”

  “A teddy-bear-that-she-was-trying-to-throw-on-the-stage-from-the-dance-pit something.” This time Sid knew to stand out of range of possible pastry missiles.

  “Can you guys cool it for one second?”

  Einstein and Sid were so quiet Homer wasn’t sure they were breathing. “I’m sorry. I’m tired. And the idea of calling the dads to explain how I let my little brother break his wrist at an Apollo Aces concert is not how I wanted to end this shitty, shitty night. What happened exactly?”

  “Uh.” Einstein coughed. “By the third encore, Sid and I had managed to work our way up to the front. A lovely woman with blond hair got bumped by a group of people jumping up and down, and I fell the wrong way when I tried to catch her stuffed animal before it fell on the ground.” Einstein paused, then added, “That thing was so gross and sticky.”

  “So you broke a bone rescuing a teddy bear at a pop concert.”

  “Yeah.” Einstein shuffled his feet. “What are we going to tell the dads?”

  “You better start coming up with a backup story, because I don’t think they’re going to believe the truth.” Homer leaned forward, pressing his clenched fists against his forehead. He shut his eyes and thought out loud. “Okay. We’ll ask Melissa to call us a cab. There’s got to be a hospital nearby.” He opened his eyes and dropped his hands. Both Einstein and Sid were staring at him. “What?”

  “Homes, are you okay?” said Sid.

  “I’m fine. It’s not the end of the world, right? Not until Saturday.”

  Einstein didn’t laugh. In fact, he looked even more worried.

  Homer wished he could tell his little brother that it was all going to be okay, that someday this day, the whole trip, would be a funny story, a great remember-the-time-when. But a gear in his chest was stuck. Something inside him had become jammed, and it hurt too much to think, never mind try to lie. “We’ll get you some ice. For the ride, okay?”