You Go First

by Erin Entrada Kelly

  “Sounds rather gruesome,” he’d said. Not unkindly. Just curious. “You’ve certainly inherited your mother’s left brain.”

  She had wanted to tell him that the right-brain-versus-left-brain concept was a myth—in actuality, each side of the brain worked together, like a team. Math and science weren’t limited only to the left brain, just like creativity and communication weren’t only from the right brain. So there weren’t really “left-brain people” or “right-brain people.” There were just thinking people.

  But that would have only proved his point, so she continued talking about starfish and her father eventually got around to talking about seascapes—specifically those painted by Gauguin.

  When she was a little girl, he took her to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to show her a Gauguin. She couldn’t remember the name of it. Something about grapes. Grapes in France? Or something.

  “Just wait until you see it, Charlotte,” he’d told her, beaming.

  At the museum, he stood and stared at the painting like he wanted to become part of it. There were two women in the painting—or was it three? Charlotte stared, too. She thought: What’s the big deal? She scratched the back of her left leg with her right foot. She leaned on one hip and then the other. She asked if they could go home. When she was upstairs in her room, she wondered if she’d been born into the wrong family.

  She used to pretend that she and Bridget could switch places. Bridget loved art, just like Charlotte’s dad. She even wanted to be an artist. So Charlotte imagined that Bridget could become a Lockard, and Charlotte could be a MacCauley. She would play with the MacCauleys’ dog, Sergeant, and wouldn’t have to hear about Gauguin again.

  Sounds rather gruesome, he’d said.

  And now he was on the other side of the hospital wall.

  Recently dissected.

  Charlotte’s arms erupted in goose bumps.

  Mrs. Lockard told Dr. Ansari to wait a moment, then closed the space that Charlotte had created between them.

  “Do you want to wait out here?” she asked. “You don’t have to go in.”

  “But . . . ,” said Charlotte.

  “But what?”

  “But what if he asks where I am?”

  “He’s probably half-asleep,” she said. “And if he asks, I’ll tell him I asked you to wait outside.” She paused. “Okay?”

  Charlotte was silent for a moment, then nodded.

  When her mother and Dr. Ansari were out of sight, Charlotte still stood there, in the middle of the hall, staring at the door.

  Life According to Ben

  Part II

  The opposite of evolution was devolution. Complex species reverting to simpler forms. It was a contested and controversial concept, but it fit Ben’s parents perfectly. They had once been simple, single individuals. Then they got married and became a complex unit. Now they were regressing to their simpler form. No longer a family. Three single units.

  Ben stretched across his Ravenclaw comforter. His bedroom door was locked for the first time in—when? Forever, maybe. His phone rested on his chest.

  The first thing he’d wanted to do was call someone. That’s what you do when you get bad news, right? You call a friend and they make it better. They tell you that things will be okay. They say, “I’ve been there, too.” But when Ben scrolled through his contacts, he discovered that he only spoke to two people on a regular basis: his parents.

  In elementary school, he’d had Adam and Kyle. They weren’t his friends exactly, but the three of them sat together at lunch and sometimes talked before and after school. They’d never been to one another’s houses or anything, but Adam and Kyle liked to read and didn’t mind hearing Ben obsess about Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, even though they all disagreed on various plot points. The worst thing that had happened was the time Ben caught Sherry Bertrand copying off Kyle’s spelling paper, and he told Mrs. Havisham. Sherry flunked the test and her parents had to come and pick her up. Yes, Ben felt bad when she was carted off in tears and maybe he was the tattletale the kids—including Kyle—accused him of being, but it wasn’t right for Sherry to lift the answers so effortlessly when everyone else in the class worked hard for them. Well, except for Ben. All he needed was to hear a word and he usually knew how to spell it. But still.

  Anyway, that seemed like a million years ago. Lanester Elementary was one of several schools that fed into Lanester Middle, and Adam and Kyle had disappeared somewhere in the wide gulf. And they weren’t exactly the kind of friends he could call and talk to about his parents’ marital devolution.

  There was no one except Lottie.

  “How pathetic,” he said, out loud to the ceiling.

  What kind of eleven-year-old didn’t have anyone to call with big announcements?

  What if he won the lottery? Then what? Who would he call? There wouldn’t even be anyone to tell him congratulations. His grandparents lived in the Midwest; he only saw them at Christmas. (And what would Christmas look like now?)

  What if he won the Nobel Prize one day or something and wanted to tell someone? Then what?

  Devolution. Maybe that was his life: gradually devolving from a boy with two parents and two sort-of friends to a boy with no parents and no friends at all. Maybe he could become a brilliant hermit living off the grid with no modern conveniences except his mind. He’d solve complex mathematical problems in his one-room cabin in the wilds of Ann Arbor (assuming Ann Arbor had wilds). He could get a dog and name it Snape. Or, if it’s a girl, Professor McGonagall. And he and Professor McGonagall would have to walk two miles into town just to use the phone and call his parents. You wouldn’t move back to Michigan, so I did it myself, he would say. Only he’d have to make two long-distance calls now instead of one, and where would he even get the money?

  Life was so complicated.

  Ben picked up his phone to text Lottie.

  Do you think our generation relies too much on digital communication?

  Never thought about it.

  Why?

  I was just thinking and it occurred to me that our language has devolved in recent years because we rely too much on digital devices to communicate, like social media and phones and whatnot. I realize neither of us is on social media, having decided it had the potential to eat away at our respective schedules and compromise our academic performance, but we do spend a lot of time on our phones, particularly texting and playing Scrabble and so forth. So I was just thinking maybe we should try to evolve our rivalry, despite the fact that you live in Pennsylvania and I live in Nowheresville. Despite the one-thousand-plus miles between us, we can still communicate verbally rather than relying on our handheld modes of communication. You know?

  . . .

  Huh?

  Um . . .

  Do you want to talk on the phone?

  ok

  Ben sat up in bed, took a deep breath, and dialed Lottie’s number before he could think too much about it. If he did, he would have thought: This is the first time I’ve ever called a girl. Or: I’m talking to a seventh grader that I’ve never met.

  She answered right away.

  “Hello?”

  “Oh,” said Ben. “Hey. It’s Ben.”

  “I figured.”

  “So . . .” Ben picked at a thread on his comforter. He wondered what his parents were doing. Were they still in the kitchen?

  “So.”

  He wanted to tell her everything. About the announcement. His theories of his parental devolution. Even about becoming a brilliant hermit, and maybe the part about him not having anyone to call when he won the Nobel Prize or the lottery. But now that they were actually on the phone, he discovered that none of those words would come out of his mouth. It seemed like a lot to unload on someone on your very first phone conversation.

  “What are you doing?” asked Ben. It sounded like she was in a wide-open space, like a library or something.

  “Um . . . nothing. Just sitting, I guess.”

  “Were you busy?
”

  “No.”

  “Me neither.”

  “So what made you want to talk on the phone?”

  “Oh. Well. I kinda had something I wanted to say.”

  “Really? What?”

  He and his parents had gone to the Grand Canyon once, when he was in third or fourth grade. They’d stood side by side and stared into the big, open void, none of them saying anything. It felt like the sky was a million miles wide and they were standing at a cliff in front of it. They’d driven there in his parents’ SUV and sang most of the way, until they ran out of songs and settled into their seats to watch the world go by. On the way back, they listened to an audiobook of Bridge to Terabithia.

  Ben thought of that trip now. It hit him suddenly, like a slap in the face. His eyes watered.

  Speak freely, his father had said.

  Lottie was silent on the other line. Ben heard something, like an announcement over a PA system. Maybe she was at a train station or something. He wished he was at a train station, because it would mean he was going somewhere. Anywhere.

  “I,” Ben said, back to one-word sentences.

  After a long pause, Lottie said, “Are you still there?”

  “Yes.” And then it spilled out of his mouth. From where? He didn’t know. “I’m running for student council.”

  He’d passed the posters every day at his new middle school—MAKE A RUN FOR STUDENT COUNCIL! REGISTER TODAY! MAKE A DIFFERENCE!—and each time he thought hey, maybe I will, but then he’d forget about it just as quickly. It must have nestled in the edge of his brain somewhere all this time.

  “That’s great,” said Lottie. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Ben replied. “Well. I guess that’s it for now. Unless you have any announcements, too? Any big news going on?”

  “Um . . .” Lottie was quiet. “I’m dissecting a starfish soon.”

  “That sounds exciting.”

  “Yeah. I guess.”

  “Okay. Well. Talk to you later?”

  “Yeah. Talk to you later.”

  After they hung up, Ben looked at his list of recent calls, and there it was.

  Lottie Lock.

  “Now I have someone to call when I win the lottery,” he said.

  Plain and Simple

  Rabbit Hole: Research shows that our brains react differently when we hear the sound of our own name versus other words. There are about 5,163 different first names in common use in the United States. One of them is “Charlotte.” About 275,000 people in America are named Charlotte.

  Some people were born to have nicknames. Niko. Mimi. Shonda.

  And then there were Elizabeths and Madisons who were never Lizzies or Maddies. That’s how the world worked, even if Charlotte didn’t understand it.

  In elementary school, there was a girl in her class named Nicole Rodriguez. People started calling her “Nikki,” just because. Do you have a pencil I can borrow, Nikki? Hey, Nikki, can I copy your paper? It happened organically. That’s how nicknames were supposed to work. They crept into the conversation and next thing you know—boom—you had a second name, and only certain people knew what it was.

  Nicknames were personal. If you had friends who knew your nickname, it meant you had friends who really knew you. But one day Nikki stood up in the middle of the classroom and yelled, “My name is Nicole! Nicole!” Everyone stared at her with their mouths hanging open. Charlotte couldn’t believe it. Who gave up a perfectly good nickname?

  Charlotte would have loved to have one. Something only her friends called her.

  Not that she had a lot of friends.

  She just had Bridget.

  “Hearing your own name is one of the most powerful sounds in the world,” Charlotte’s father had once told her. “So you want to make sure people say it the way you prefer.”

  But Charlotte didn’t prefer Charlotte. She preferred something more familiar, like Charlie or Lottie. She wanted someone to lean over and say, Do you have a pencil I can borrow, Lottie? Or Hey, Charlie, can I copy your paper? But it never happened.

  She was Charlotte, plain and simple.

  Except when she played Scrabble. Then she was Lottie Lock.

  Some people called her best friend “Bridge,” but Bridget didn’t care either way because she hated her name altogether. She said that “Bridget MacCauley” wasn’t sophisticated. They’d tried switching names in the third grade, but in less than twenty-four hours they’d both realized that you can run away from your name as much as you want, but it always catches up to you.

  Even Bridget’s father had a nickname. People called him “Mac,” including Bridget. She said it was more grown-up to call your parents by their first names. She never did it in front of them, though.

  “Mac and my mom are driving me bananas,” she said now.

  Charlotte’s mother had taken her home and driven back to the hospital, so Bridget had come over. They walked into the Lockards’ backyard on Hampshire Street. Charlotte was glad to have been dropped off, away from the white walls and medicinal smells of Crozer. She was glad, too, that her mother hadn’t made her feel like the worst daughter in the world for not going into the room.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” her mother had said.

  Bridget yawned as they made their way across the yard, toward the short stone wall near the pear tree. The wall served as a fence that separated the Lockards’ property from their neighbors, the Riveras. Their backyards were side-by-side. It only took a quick hop to perch yourself on top of the wall, which is exactly what Charlotte and Bridget did. They faced each other, like always, with one leg dangled down. They were two opposites together. Compare and contrast. Bridget had thick, auburn hair and perfectly placed freckles that made her look older instead of younger. Charlotte was so spindly that she seemed tall, even though she wasn’t. Bridget had curves; Charlotte was all straight lines. Charlotte was wearing last year’s sneakers. Bridget bought a new wardrobe at the start of the school year. Charlotte had been surprised at all of Bridget’s new clothes, and Bridget had been surprised at Charlotte’s old ones.

  They were surprising each other a lot lately.

  Bridget stretched one of her long delicate arms toward an overhanging branch and snapped a pear from the tree.

  “You’re going to get me in trouble,” said Charlotte. Her mother didn’t like when they picked the pears before it was time.

  “It’s just a pear.” Bridget rolled her eyes. “Your mom is so old-fashioned.”

  That was Bridget’s way of saying that Charlotte’s mother was old. And she was right—Charlotte’s parents were almost the same age as Bridget’s grandparents. But that didn’t negate the fact that Charlotte would be scolded for Bridget’s stolen fruit.

  It didn’t seem to faze Bridget, though. She tossed the pear in the air and caught it.

  “I can’t believe your dad had a heart attack,” she said. “How come they wouldn’t let you see him?”

  Charlotte looked down at the stone wall beneath them and cleared her throat. I was too afraid to go in. I didn’t know what to say. Does that make me a terrible person?

  “You have to be thirteen, apparently,” said Charlotte. “I can’t see him until he’s out of ICU.”

  “When will that be?”

  “The doctor said he might be moved tomorrow or four days from now. There’s no way to know.”

  A yellow leaf fell into Charlotte’s lap.

  See how the stem comes to this triangular point? Beautiful, isn’t it? And the color: just like a painting.

  But the color wasn’t from a painting. It was from a breakdown in chlorophyll. Charlotte knew. Rabbit hole.

  “I can’t believe your dad had a heart attack,” Bridget said again.

  “Can we talk about something else?”

  “Sure.” Bridget tossed the pear. Up, down, up, down. “Tell me about the field trip. How big were Van Gogh’s sunflowers?”

  “They aren’t that big, really.”

  “I bet the TAG kids didn�
��t even care about them.”

  On Friday of last week—before the heart attack, when life was somewhat normal—Charlotte had gone on a field trip to the Philadelphia Museum of Art with the Talented and Gifted program—a.k.a. “TAG.” Bridget had been furious.

  “It’s not fair that the TAG students get to do everything and the rest of us dummies have to stay behind,” Bridget had said. “Besides, art is my thing. Not your thing.”

  That was true. Charlotte would have preferred to go to the Mütter, the medical museum that had bodies and heads and stuff.

  “I’ll get my dad to take us,” Charlotte had offered.

  But Bridget had sighed and stomped off. She’d apologized later, but her frustration lingered between them.

  “Did you know Van Gogh called the sunflowers a ‘symphony of yellow and blue’?” said Bridget now.

  “No, I didn’t know that.”

  Bridget turned the pear around and around in her hand.

  “Do you wanna play Scrabble?” Charlotte asked.

  “No. You’ll win. What’s the point?” Bridget smiled toward the Riveras’ yard and brightened. “Go get your dad’s binoculars. Let’s spy on Mateo.”

  Mateo Rivera: the most gorgeous high school sophomore who ever lived. Mateo’s younger sister, Magda, was in seventh grade with Bridget and Charlotte at West Middle School but had inherited none of Mateo’s mystery. Well, she had mystery, just not the same kind. Locks of dark hair fell over Mateo’s eyes, and he always looked like he had a brooding secret that he was dying to tell, if only he could find the right person to confide in. Magda’s hair was a perpetual mess. She was one of the top students at West Middle, but she counted to ten with her fingers before every test and tapped on the teacher’s desk when she turned in assignments. The kids called her “Mad Magda.”

  “I don’t know where he put them,” said Charlotte. This was a small lie. She knew the binoculars were in the drawer under the coffeepot, but it felt wrong to use them while her dad was in the hospital.

  “Too bad,” said Bridget. She gazed at the Riveras’ back door. “Maybe Mateo will come out and you can ask him to play Scrabble.”