The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  “But it…hurts,” Sadie said.

  “So it does.”

  “How can you just sit there smiling? Don’t you care at all?”

  “Of course I do. The trick, Sadie, is not minding that it hurts. Things will be lost. People will leave you. You have to keep going. That’s life.”

  Her heart felt strangled. “Will I ever lose you?” she asked timidly.

  “No, darling. No. Of course not. Everything but me.”

  But she was still crushed.

  “Hey, I know. I’ll sing it to you.” George started singing softly. He knew The Tape just as well as she did. He passed his hand over the stereo, and it began playing along with him, every perfect note. Sadie lay down again in the backseat and listened, but it hurt to think about The Tape never coming back.

  Sadie wanted so much not to hurt anymore that she made herself forget about The Tape. She closed her eyes tight and erased it from every summer, capsizing its memory and sinking it to the bottom of the black forgotten ocean. George stumbled over the lyrics and began humming, the music fading away. She closed her eyes and thought only of the good things that had happened that day. If she could only make herself forget the sadness, all that would be left was joy.

  Ernest Shackleton was an Antarctic explorer. Someone once said, “For scientific leadership, give me Scott; for swift and efficient travel, Amundsen; but when you are in a hopeless situation, when there seems to be no way out, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton.” That’s how awesome he was. He’s not remembered for conquering Antarctica. He’s remembered for surviving it against all odds.

  When Shackleton’s men were stuck on the ice without hope of land, without hope of rescue, and every single moment could be called a treacherous brush with death, they found to their surprise that things settled down pretty quickly. Only a few days after their ship, the Endurance, went down, they settled into routine and their sense of constant danger gave way to a sense of…boredom.

  That’s basically what’s happened to me.

  I am so bored. Everything in a hospital is very routine. Pain checks, check-ins, bed checks. You’re expecting One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and it’s just checkmarks on a whiteboard.

  So I’ve been writing, and trying to edit what I’m writing here, because the TV doesn’t have TCM and the only thing on is Law & Order in every flavor. We have a big library I could use, and it has a bunch of movies, but the nurses will not get me any DVDs, because I am theoretically capable of wheeling myself there and getting them myself.

  My leg still hurts, but that’s not why I won’t go out there. It’s that I don’t want to see who’s here. I’m hiding. I’m going home in two days, and if I just play my cards right, I can get out clean, unscathed, virtually scarless.

  In here I’m safe.

  But the only thing to do is write.

  Maybe that’s Roberts’s evil plan. Bore me into writing down my secrets.

  I look at this morning’s entry, before I got off on that Shackleton tangent…How did that even happen?

  I ate breakfast.

  I cringe because it’s true and if Roberts wants me to write true things, that’s what she’s getting, but it’s just so dumb to write it down. Now I remember how I got distracted. I cross out “breakfast” and write in:

  really weird-looking eggs that are the consistency of blubber

  …because I thought that earlier and wondered what it would be like to eat blubber like they did on Antarctic missions. And then I got lost in all that stuff about Shackleton.

  If I hadn’t remembered to write it down, it would have been lost forever, that weird thought about blubber. And in a way, it’s more true than just saying breakfast, even though it’s probably wrong because I don’t know what blubber really feels like. But saying it that way feels more real.

  When I look up, Eleanor is standing right next to my bed.

  I didn’t even hear her come in.

  We just kind of stare at each other for a second. You have to understand, she’s not like normal people. You can’t just say boring stuff like “Hey, how’s it going?” to her. I mean, she’s wearing her fleece shark costume with teeth hanging down over her head. It’s beyond filthy, and all the teeth are stained and brown. It’s the kind of thing that would seem like an affectation if anyone did it in school, like one of those cool kids who think they’re so offbeat that society can’t stifle their creativity, and they all listen to the same hipster music and read Sartre and practice Buddhism and threaten to kill themselves and stuff, and everyone knows they’re the real A-list kids even though they say they’re outcasts. Everything they do seems like watching a TV show, like they’re asking you, “Am I interesting?” every time they get dressed.

  But you look into Eleanor’s eyes and see: this girl’s the real deal.

  So we just kind of sit there in silence for a long time, which is hard if you’ve ever done that. Silence is pretty much always uncomfortable for me, except with George, of course.

  “We’re going to be best friends,” Eleanor says finally, as though we’ve been having a long conversation and this is its conclusion.

  “Okay,” I mumble. My heart is racing.

  And then she erupts, chattering on about her various brushes with the law. Her mom is an artist and her dad is really rich, so she goes to boarding school in France. She hates boarding school because it’s all so pretentious, but she misses her boyfriend. She’s a criminal and an artist and schizophrenic and amazing. She hears voices and has spirits who follow her. They’re totally real to her, she tells me. But she hasn’t seen them since she got here because she’s doped out of her mind.

  “So what are you in for?” she asks.

  “I crashed my car. Broken leg.”

  “No, what are you in for. What’s your story?” She pokes me hard. Her arms are covered with thin white lines. They look so delicate I don’t know what they are at first.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yeah you do. You know. I can see right through you.”

  I bite my lip.

  “I broke my leg. It’s just…standard procedure,” I say, parroting back what I’ve been told. She gets off the bed and goes to the door.

  “You know, we might be allies. But I need allies I can trust, Miss”—she consults the chart on my door—“Miss Sadie Black. And in the grand scheme of things, embracing the truth of your plight is likely to do more good than harm. You can’t fight an enemy you don’t understand.”

  She steps out of the room.

  “Wait!” I call after her. She grins and returns to me.

  “It’s the silence that makes you crazy, you know? Who am I going to tell, anyway? No one would believe me. I’m psychotic. I’m a liar.”

  “Right. But I’m telling the truth.” I think I am, at least. Sometimes I don’t even know.

  “Oh come on. You want to tell someone. Tell me. What is it? Raped by a football player? Alcoholic? Bulimic? Suicidal cry for help—”

  “It’s nothing! There’s just been a misunderstanding about the car crash.”

  “Because of your friend.”

  “What?” My heart stops.

  “The one you don’t want to talk about.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  She smiles. “I have my ways. I am invisible to those in power.”

  She raises her eyebrows expectantly.

  I hold my breath. I grit my teeth, weighing the options. I know better. But then, there is something about being in the glow of someone interesting and watching her listen. Having her full attention is such a rush. My little life seems so magnified in her eyes.

  I’ve never told this to anyone. Not even Lucie. Definitely not Henry. But my mouth is already moving, even though part of me is trying to choke back the words. Before I can stop myself, I reply
faintly:

  “His name is George. And he’s…not real.”

  She cackles maniacally. “His name is George? Just George?”

  “Well…yeah.” George doesn’t have a last name, I realize. I never considered it important.

  “Is he a person or a monster or what?”

  “A person. But he’s just kind of an imaginary friend. Not like a hallucination or anything.”

  “Sure, sure. And what do you and George do?”

  “We hang out,” I say lamely.

  “Do tell.”

  “Mostly we go places that I read about.”

  “How?”

  “We just do. Haven’t you ever daydreamed or…like…imagined something?”

  “Sure,” Eleanor says, exasperated. “But I want details! Details! Technical tips and tricks!”

  I sigh. It’s hard to explain.

  “Well, I just…think about it,” I say. “And then the thinking becomes daydreaming and the whole world fades away and I’m with George.”

  Right then, we hear footsteps. Our heads snap to the door like two meerkats.

  “Cover for me,” Eleanor whispers. I nod. She slips into the bathroom, where I can barely see her hair and shark fin in the mirror.

  It’s a nurse.

  “Hello,” I say.

  “Was someone in here with you?”

  “No.”

  She raises an eyebrow at me. “Are you sure? Dr. Roberts is going to be here in five minutes.”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” I say, too formally for it to sound true. “I was, however, reading aloud.”

  “All right. By the way, a boy called—”

  “I know,” I say, clutching my T-shirt on instinct, like wringing his neck. “I’ll call him later.”

  “He must be nice, such a sweet young Romeo, calling you all the time.”

  “That story doesn’t end well,” I tell her.

  “Yes, but it begins so beautifully.”

  She sighs dramatically and leaves. I grin. She’s not so bad.

  “That was close,” Eleanor says, apparating herself to my bedside. “The doctors here are morons, but the nurses have laser vision.”

  “Will you get in trouble for being in here?”

  “More for poisoning the minds of America’s youth. Don’t worry, though. Roberts is a lamb compared to some.”

  “She’s trickier than you think,” I tell her. My notebook is under the covers and I run my fingers over its bony spiral binding. “She wants me to write down stuff about George. She thinks it’ll make it easier for us to talk about…things. But I know she’s going to use it against me.”

  “Why are you doing it, then?”

  I think about it, and I don’t have a good reason except…a person in a white coat told me to. Milgram experiment in action, I guess. Stanley Milgram did this famous experiment where a person dressed up like an authority figure told random people to give electric shocks to a stranger, and a lot of people did it even though they could hear the person screaming. Sometimes they kept going until the person stopped screaming altogether. I feel a little ashamed.

  “Well…I refuse to write anything about George. It’s too dangerous. But I can’t really do what she wants, so it doesn’t matter anyway,” I tell her.

  “Can’t do what?”

  “Write a story. A true story or whatever she said. I tried, but it sounds stupid.”

  Eleanor gets up and stands on the bed, towering over me. The movement from her standing shoots waves of pain up my leg, but I’m so stunned I barely notice.

  “I’ll bet it’s a great story!” she shouts down at me. “But don’t write it for them. Write it for me. I have an appreciation for the fine art of hallucination.”

  “He’s really not a hallucination.”

  “Daydream, then, my little dreamer.” She drops down. “So tell me about him.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What does he look like?”

  “I don’t know. Like…a guy,” I tell her. “He’s got black hair and blue eyes.”

  “Is he hot?”

  At this point, I notice Eleanor’s pretty brown eyes, and the bloodshot whites. They reminded me of Henry’s eyes when he gets offstage after a concert: the way he’s completely disoriented and can’t even hear me. He always looks like he’s struggling to break through from some other world. I wonder where Eleanor is coming from.

  I can see her toenails through her threadbare socks: bright red. I notice the pink bandages on her arm, and how they are covered in words I can’t read, like they’ve been tightened and the words have been misaligned. And then I realize that she is staring at me, and I am staring at her and saying nothing, and so I have to answer her.

  “I like his eyes,” I say, still contemplating Eleanor more than George. Of course he is hot, in a way. But not in a way that is easy to explain. He’s hot to me. It’s like when you see a picture of someone you know well and they appear to be so much less than who they are to you. Describing him ruins it all.

  “Tell me about them! Specifics!”

  It’s strange. It’s hard to pull his face to my mind even though I knew it so well. I am filled with Eleanor.

  “Well, they’re blue.”

  “Blue how?”

  “Blue…like the ocean.”

  “Like the ocean? That’s called a cliché. You can’t describe someone’s eyes like they’re the ocean, unless you go full Princess Bride and they’re like the sea after a storm.”

  “Well, what if it’s true?”

  She taps her temple, thinking.

  “I suppose if the truth is a cliché, then…you must accept it no matter how boring. Or trite,” she concludes.

  I don’t like that. Nothing about George is a cliché.

  “Well, it is true,” I start, thinking of his eyes. Blue could be so many things, if you really paid attention. “But they’re a totally original kind of blue, just like the ocean is new every day. Sometimes they’re ice-blue like the polar seas. Sometimes they’re blue as water over white sand. Sometimes they’re blue like the deep ocean where the fish that light up live. Dark blue. Dangerous blue. They’re blue like they could capture a ship for Davy Jones’s locker, and all the pirates would never care that they were dead because they would have gotten to see that perfect shade of nocturnal ocean blue.”

  She grins.

  “Blue like that ocean is certainly not a cliché.”

  “I’ve never seen the ocean.” It’s true: in all our family trips, we never made it to the coast.

  “Could have fooled me.”

  “Me too,” says a voice from the door.

  Dr. Roberts is standing there, looking in on us.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to steal Sadie for a while,” says Dr. Roberts.

  Eleanor leans in close.

  “Promise me you won’t tell her a thing. Save your stories for me,” Eleanor hisses. She spits a little in my ear, but I don’t mind.

  I nod.

  “Eleanor, you’re not supposed to be in here,” Roberts says, her hand sweeping toward the door. “You girls are welcome to socialize in the common room.”

  “I knew you were special,” Eleanor whispers in my ear. And off she swims, a shark on land.

  * * *

  “Did you write your story?” Roberts asks, settling herself in.

  “It’s not done,” I tell her.

  “Oh? But that means you are working on it, right?”

  I don’t want to tell her about my brilliant “true” observations:

  Nothing is on TV.

  My socks are blue.

  I want pizza.

  I just give her my most masterful sullen-teenager stare. She clears her throat. I win.

  “So what would you like to
talk about today?”

  “Nothing.”

  “How about some coloring. It’s very trendy right now. You’re going home in a few days. Could be a new hobby?”

  She pulls some blank paper and an impossible quantity of crayons and pencils out of her briefcase of secrets. It must be bottomless to fit all that. She sets some on the little table I have across my bed.

  “Are we going to do that stupid thing where you ask me to draw a house and a tree and it reveals my darkest secrets?”

  She laughs.

  “We can draw a house if you want to. Here: draw me your house, and I’ll draw something for you too. Then you can know all my darkest secrets as well.”

  “Fine.”

  “Shall we listen to some music? I have these speakers….I noticed you have an iPod.”

  “It’s a mix from my boyfriend. He sent it to me.”

  “Oh? I heard there’s someone who keeps calling you, but you won’t take the call. Is that Henry?”

  “Yes,” I groan. “It’s Henry. My boyfriend, Henry.”

  “Not George?” I can practically hear her salivating.

  “No. It’s Henry calling. And the music’s not private. It’s just his music and some bands we like. You can listen to it if you want to,” I say. She pulls out the speakers and I plug the iPod in to shut her up. In an instant the air is full of pure electrified punk rock. She cringes. One point to me. Some of Henry’s favorite music is hard to like.

  We settle in and start drawing, but I can see her watching me, so I don’t know how many of her deepest darkest secrets are going on that paper. I try to focus, but my thoughts start to wander as I draw. I can’t get lost now, especially with her sitting right across from me. I have to be careful. There’s no way I can get away with daydreaming right in front of her. I focus as hard as I can on my house.

  I start with the basement, where I draw two big squares: one for my room, and one for the laundry/storage place where all our old stuff is in boxes. It’s kind of like the part of a museum that’s off display, like our archives or something. After the crash, all of my parents’ travel and radio stuff got put in the basement: the records and suitcases and cassette tapes.