The Museum of Us

by Tara Wilson Redd

  “No, let’s do it.” She put the book down. So much had changed over her freshman year. She had been terrified of high school, but it had all worked out: she had two best friends. Scratch that, she thought. A best friend and a boyfriend.

  “Awesome,” Henry said, jumping up. He pulled Sadie up by the arm and her book fell under the porch swing. “There’s this cool place I want to show you. Have you ever been to the Loop?”

  “Yeah, there’s a record store there that my parents like.”

  “Oh. Vintage Vinyl.” His face fell.

  “Yeah. But that’s the only spot I know. We never hang around.”

  “Really?” he asked, brightening. “Excellent. I’m going to show you something you’ve never seen before.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Vaughn and Sadie’s parents had not been particularly approving of their plan, but after much pleading they reached a compromise on the matter of riding bikes home in the dark, and they were off. “I’ll have my license soon,” Henry assured her, but Sadie didn’t mind. They pedaled hard up the hills, flying down them at breath-stealing speeds. It was farther than Sadie had ever ridden, extending the boundaries of what she considered possible. They took a scenic detour through Forest Park, riding past the art museum, and Sadie finally realized how close it was. It had never occurred to her that she could go there without her parents dropping her off and picking her up. But why not?

  She missed museums. She’d been spending so much time with Henry, and it just wasn’t his thing. But she missed her time alone in echoing halls of wonder. The world inside a museum was managed on a map. It was labeled and framed. There was something comforting about a frame and all that lies inside it. There was something comforting about a collection and the keeping of it. From fossils to paintings to skeletons, everything in a museum would live on forever, remembered. The past and present were only rooms apart, always accessible. Museums brought the world inside and organized it, kept it safe. That never changed.

  “We could do this every day,” said George beside her, leaning effortlessly over the handlebars of his vintage cruiser. There wasn’t a drop of sweat on him. “Imagine how quiet it is inside. No one to bother us in there. We could explore the whole Antarctic.”

  Sadie smiled at the idea. They’d come back sometime, but not today.

  “Come on!” Henry called, and Sadie rode past George.

  They weren’t far from where her family had been in the car crash. That day had become a hazy memory. The place was green and healed over. There weren’t any scars left from the crash.

  “What’s up?” Henry asked, looking at her inquisitively. He handed her a bottle of water. “You look dazed.”

  “Nothing.” Henry looked away. They’d already gone over this today. Sadie paused, though, taking a sip of water. Something was bubbling up inside her. “My family was in a car accident near here.”

  “I know. My mom remembers,” Henry said. He looked around. Sadie was sorry she’d brought it up.

  “I guess your parents were really hurt,” Henry said hesitantly. “Don’t they still have physical therapy? My mom said the other driver was, like, a teenager or something.”

  “Yeah,” Sadie said.

  “Do you ever think about what happened?”

  Sadie didn’t answer. She was receding into it, the final moments echoing in her head. It was better to say nothing than to tempt the memories. The distinction between past, present, and future was only an illusion, after all. That was what Einstein had said. That quote had colonized her like a cancer: she could never escape the past, nor exile it from the future. It was there, always, beneath the veneer of reality, a story waiting to be told, connections waiting to be made.

  “Do you know where it was?” Henry asked. The present around her began to wash away into the past—

  “I don’t want to think about it,” Sadie said softly, shaking her head and closing her eyes. “Let’s just…”

  “Yeah. Let’s just,” Henry said. He put his arm around her but she pulled away, still shaking off her thoughts.

  “Sorry,” she said, reaching out for his hand. He smiled, but with a question in his eyes that he knew he couldn’t ask.

  They pedaled on, escaping the difficult things.

  They rode in silence and finally emerged on a bustling street. “Ta-da! The Delmar Loop,” Henry said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s just a street. Good stores. Stuff that I like. Like Vintage Vinyl. They have an absolutely sick bargain bin that I need to hit up, but there’s so much more.”

  It was already dusky, in the way that summer nights grew hazy long before dark. It made everything look like a noir film. They locked their bikes and strolled up the sidewalks to a large, bright window full of books. The display was full of detective novels, with a giant magnifying glass made of cardboard and all sorts of prop weapons.

  “Okay, so, this is an awesome bookstore. Like, way better than the ones we’ve been going to in the mall. It’s got so much crazy stuff, and old books, and weird books. My mom comes here a lot and I always think of you.”

  Sadie looked in the window: shelves and shelves of books, just like any bookstore, but it was different somehow. The light was warmer. The people inside had tattoos and wore vintage jackets. They were laughing, talking with the lady behind the desk, whose hair was buzzed short and who wore white lace gloves that in no way matched her outfit. Sadie could practically see that lady getting dressed in the morning in her black skinny jeans, putting each hand finger by finger into those crocheted gloves before she walked out the door to her motorcycle. She probably even crocheted them herself.

  When Sadie looked around, she could see stories on all of the faces through the glass. She saw a few Truman State hoodies under a sign that read EXISTENTIALISM, and even spotted a girl from cross-country—a varsity girl from the front of the pack who played a few other sports—inside with her mom looking at giant art books. Sadie knew the pleasure of those books, how they were delightfully heavy in her lap at the library. She spiraled away into thoughts of what that girl was really like, if she too loved the weight of what she held. Sadie didn’t know her. The girl caught her eye and waved, nearly dropping the enormous book in her arms. Sadie was knocked out of her thoughts. Had she been caught staring? She waved back but too late. The girl had escaped back into the pages. Henry sighed happily.

  “Isn’t it cool?”

  “So cool,” Sadie said. “This whole street. It’s so different from where we live.”

  “Yeah, but you must have seen all kinds of interesting places traveling around with your parents for car shows.”

  “Not really,” Sadie admitted. “Mostly just small towns in, like, rural Idaho and Ohio. Mostly gas stations and cornfields. But we always went to any museums or cultural things there were. My dad called them field trips.”

  “Like art museums?”

  “Yeah, and science museums in Chicago and Detroit and stuff. And all the weird little town historical societies. Those are cool too, because you get to see the life of a whole town. It’s like looking in other people’s windows and thinking about their lives.”

  “Do you miss it?”

  “Miss what?”

  “Exciting places.”

  “It was just Ohio.”

  “That’s where I want to go to school! Ohio is sick.”

  Sadie laughed a little nervously. Henry was going to be a junior. He was already planning for college, taking prep courses. “Oberlin is sick. Ohio is a lot of corn.”

  “You’ll be able to drive then, you know. You can come visit me.”

  “Yeah,” Sadie said. Thinking about it made her sad.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just…”

  “Yeah?”

  “I don’t understand…why you even like me.”

>   “What?”

  “Like, you could meet someone awesome at Oberlin. You don’t have to…to settle….”

  “I never settle,” Henry said, laughing.

  “But why me?”

  He fidgeted with his hands, playing chords in the air. He wasn’t good at saying things out loud. He said everything in notes and chords and harmonies.

  “Maybe it’s that…you’ve got things you love, like I love them. Like, if I have an album I’m obsessed with, you’ve got a book that goes with it. It’s kind of like we fit together.”

  Sadie blushed. The people on the other side of the glass continued their shopping, oblivious to this time-stopping moment outside their window.

  “Why do you even like me?” he asked her back.

  Sadie laughed. She slid her hand into his, fingers twining.

  “It’s so obvious,” she told him.

  “But you can still…say it.”

  “Because you’re…perfect. Who wouldn’t like you?”

  “But why do you?”

  Sadie opened her mouth, but Henry held up a hand.

  “That’s your quoting face,” he said with a grin. “You always say everything perfectly, but you never say it as you. I just mean…why do you like me? Like, in everyday words.”

  Sadie searched her mind. Everything she could come up with was stolen from a movie or a book or a Beatles song. And that wasn’t why. That was just a filter on why. But the filter was better than she could ever be, and she lost herself in a slide show of disguises for how she really felt: “You were my first friend. And then when you fell in love with me, I was so proud,” she imagined saying. And then “Whatever our souls are made of, yours and mine are the same.” On and on she went until she was lost in a rainstorm of words—

  “It’s okay,” Henry said with a laugh, breaking her spiral of thoughts. “I know you do. Like me, I mean.”

  “Sorry,” Sadie said. “I do like you. I like your…everything.”

  “Same.”

  “Double same.”

  He sighed, and instead of tripling or even taking her “same” to infinity in his usual silly way, he continued:

  “It’s just…I don’t know why, but I always feel like you’re far away. My mom once said you were homesick for the road.”

  “What does that even mean?”

  “I don’t know. I just thought…maybe you liked somewhere else better.”

  “I didn’t really like anyplace in particular. Except…” She remembered, despite herself, how much she’d loved always moving, always being on an adventure. She remembered the promise of a different life broken against a tree in Forest Park. The sound of screaming tires—

  “But this is cool, right? You like it?”

  “Yeah,” Sadie said quickly. He looked so desperate. Anyway, Ohio was nothing compared to Japan, where Henry’s dad lived. What was she lamenting?

  Sadie inspected the cracks in the sidewalk.

  “So…do you want to go in?” Henry asked.

  Sadie peered inside at the shelves and shelves of adventures. She could imagine George stocking the books, working undercover. She belonged in there, alone with the stories and George. She saw him, his back turned, putting books on shelves.

  Then she turned to Henry.

  “Maybe another time. This was perfect, though.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Let’s eat. I’m figuratively starving.”

  * * *

  “Chuck Berry used to play at Blueberry Hill every once in a while,” Henry said. “But mostly I like it for the cheeseburgers.” Even so, it was “pretty freaking sweet,” he thought, to eat in the places where his heroes had stood. He had told her the long history of Chuck Berry and rock and roll and its relationship to a variety of other genres between mouthfuls of Sadie’s abandoned fries. They hadn’t needed two appetizers after all, and the blueberry pie—“We have to! It’s got blueberries!” insisted Henry—was definitely ill-advised, but they took it home. Laden with Styrofoam boxes and high on laughing and sugar, Sadie couldn’t imagine how the night could have been more perfect.

  Wandering away from the restaurant in the falling dark, Henry called his mom to come pick them up. Sadie glanced in store windows at their reflection. They looked almost like college students, almost like a real couple. Henry wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

  “Twenty minutes,” he told her. “We should get the bikes.”

  Sadie nodded, but she wasn’t listening. She was looking at the building where they had stopped.

  It was a movie theater, but not like the big theaters in the mall. She looked up and a neon sign sprang to life: TIVOLI. She’d heard her dad mention it once or twice, but they’d never gotten around to actually going.

  The light from the box office lit up their faces. She backed up into the shadows to read the showtimes, leaving Henry standing under the neon lights.

  “They’re playing Casablanca,” she said.

  “They’re always playing Casablanca or some other old movie. It’s that kind of theater.”

  “That kind of theater” rang in her ears. She bit her lip.

  “Have you ever seen it? Casablanca?” he asked.

  “It’s a classic,” Sadie said, trying to seem indifferent.

  “I’ve never seen it. Did you like it?”

  What if he thought she was weird? What if he stopped liking her? What if? What if?

  “Yeah,” she admitted. “Yeah. A lot.”

  “Oh, cool,” he said, oblivious to her nervous shaking. “It looks like it’s playing all week if you don’t mind seeing it a second time.”

  She didn’t correct him on the “second time.” Try twentieth, she thought.

  “It’s in black-and-white,” she warned him.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said, poking her.

  He put his arm around her, and they looked at the movie posters on the side of the building. They were mostly for movies Sadie had seen in hotel rooms on TCM. In all of the posters, colorized black-and-white heroes sprang to adventure or gazed into the eyes of their romantic leads. Henry’s arm was uncomfortably warm, but she liked it even in the summer heat.

  Henry kissed her cheek. She jumped, staring at him. They never kissed in public. He was changing the unspoken rules. His grin fell, mistaking her surprise for horror.

  Sadie glanced around, then kissed him back in kind. He kissed her awkwardly on the lips: a closed-mouth movie kiss. They smiled and stopped, looked around. No catastrophe had struck. It surprised them both, and they laughed, knowing they were thinking the exact same thing. They stood in front of the theater, a world of possibilities before them.

  As they wandered away, the heroes’ faces on the posters changed. In each, a pair of jilted blue eyes watched them. Though she didn’t know why, Sadie felt a chill run through her entire body, right through her love-stricken heart.

  I’ve begun to get curious about Eleanor.

  Here is what I know about Eleanor. She is a shark. She is amazing. But who is she? How did she get here?

  Maybe I’m curious a little too late. I want to know everything about her.

  When she arrives in my room, I don’t let her distract me with questions. I start right in with my own interrogation.

  “Why are you here? I mean, I get that you have visions, but why are you here now?”

  Her eyes darken. “Oh you know. It’s not interesting,” she says, flashing her wrists at me to say: it’s obvious.

  “When you hallucinate, what is it like?” I ask shyly.

  “Beautiful.” A nostalgic smile crosses her face. “And scary. And magic.”

  “Do you have hallucinations all the time?”

  “No. But I get lonely without them.”

  “I’m lonely without George,” I offer, more honestly t
han I intended. “I feel really alone.”

  “You are, and so am I. That’s why we’ve got to stick together. They’ll take everything you have, and you won’t even realize it. And then you’ll be alone forever.”

  Alone forever. The words threaten to wake up the unexploded bombs in the back of my mind. I quiet the memories and return to the present.

  “How long have you known George?” she asks.

  I blush. Before he was George, he was a million fragments of stories: the princes from books, the best friends, the heroes. He was there to save me when I was scared and alone. Every vanquisher of nightmares was George. But he wasn’t George yet, he was only an idea.

  But there was a point in which all those universes collided. Suddenly he had a name, and that is what made him real to me.

  I love remembering when I met George. Sometimes I go back in my mind and watch it, like an iconic movie clip that makes you feel the whole movie run through you like a drug.

  It was my first week back in regular school, back in seventh grade. I was staring into the pages of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I knew it so well I didn’t even have to really read it to know where I was. I was just hiding in the pages, hiding at Hogwarts.

  A teacher came to my desk.

  “What are you doing?” she asked. I remember her being terrifying, but I bet she was nice. I couldn’t even answer, I was so scared.

  “Can we put the book away during class, please?” she said. “You need to look at the board.” She took my book away and put it on her desk. Then I remembered that I was supposed to be looking intently at a bunch of fractions.

  The whole class laughed and I put my hands in my lap and counted, because I liked counting a lot then. I would count up and down until I lost all track of time, and whatever was bothering me was gone. But even counting wasn’t enough to help this time.

  Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone who understands, I thought. I wanted it more than anything. But I knew that kind of thing didn’t happen. Not in real life, anyway. In real life, every single person was alone.