No Such Thing as the Real World

by M. T. Anderson

  I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I should not move.

  But, of course, I did.

  I shuffled toward the bleachers until I could see them there, leaning against the metal framework of the stands. Several other couples dotted the shady landscape. Sarah was pressing against him, her hips lined up with his, her long hair loose down her back.

  I watched as they parted and she took out her favorite cherry-flavored lip gloss and applied it seductively. It was a move I’d seen her use on a hundred boys before, and for a split second I knew that she saw me, that as she smudged her lips together, she was looking straight at me. Daring me to grow up.

  Then she and Kenneth disengaged and Mr. Falhauser caught my elbow and ushered me toward my place in line.

  “Let’s go, Rachel,” he said. “We need you up front. You’ve got an important speech to give. Can’t be late.”

  My speech.

  As I followed his lead, my mind was utterly blank. Everything I’d ever known had vanished, replaced instead with nothing.

  I looked at the papers that I was unwittingly crumpling in my balled-up grip, the first line of my speech staring up at me: After four long years we have finally made it. I closed my eyes, then wadded up the pages and threw them at the nearest garbage can. For once, a perfect shot.

  “What are you doing?” Tara Miller, class secretary, asked. “Wasn’t that your speech?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, do you have it memorized?”

  I laughed, a short, bitter laugh. “Far from it.”

  But though I no longer knew the words, I knew what I was going to say. A single word flashed across my brain and would not leave.

  Survival.

  Now I understood. This wasn’t what we learned from high school; it was what we learned from life. It was what we would always have to learn again and again. No invisible line would be crossed, no diploma handed out, no age limit surpassed that would ever change this fact.

  I took a deep breath.

  From somewhere behind us, Mr. Falhauser’s voice rang out.

  “Seniors, proceed.”

  Our procession was ushered onto the football field, one by one, each of us crossing over. The crowd rose, their applause constant, deafening. Each holler and whistle, every metallic stomp magnified. At first my feet stumbled, heavy and awkward, my palms sweaty, my breath short, but then I looked at the stage, empty and vast, waiting for me.

  I took one step forward, then another, moving on.

  About K. L. Going

  K. L. Going is an award-winning author of books for children and teens. Her first novel, Fat Kid Rules the World, was named a Michael Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association as well as one of the Best Books for Young Adults from the past decade. She has also written The Liberation of Gabriel King, Saint Iggy, and Garden of Eve. Her books have been BookSense picks, Scholastic Book Club choices, Junior Library Guild selections, and winners of state book awards, and have been featured by Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and the Children’s Book Council as best books. K. L. began her career working at one of the oldest literary agencies in New York City. She currently lives in Glen Spey, New York, where she both writes and runs a business critiquing manuscripts. You can visit her online at www.klgoing.com.

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  The Longest Distance

  Beth Kephart

  Even when you don’t ask, you have asked by the way you look at me—by how you try to hold my eye, try to suggest (a touching gesture) that it is concern you feel, not curiosity. But if I had answers, don’t you think that I’d confess them? That I’d have said by now, put out a proclamation, that Joelle died for this, or for that. That she died because. All I can tell you is what you know, which is: Joelle is gone. She’s the slash of black you see just after lightning breaks the sky. She’s the place where a cliff stops being stone and becomes the air that you could fall through.

  I was her best friend, only and always. Now she exists in my mind. I carry thoughts of her everywhere I go. I scrunch up my eyes so that I don’t lose sight of all that she might have been.

  Mom says, “Honey?” with a question mark, and that’s her How are you doing? That’s her thinking that she’s not crowding me all around with questions, that she’s giving me equal parts love and room. She got into the habit right after it happened, and in our house habits are glue. Once we start doing one thing, we don’t trade it for another. Habits make living easy, Dad says. Habits make it possible. This is what he says when he’s headed out the door.

  I set the alarm for six each day.

  I hit the five-minute snooze.

  I brush my teeth before I eat to get out the taste of last night. I eat and brush again. I pull on my clothes and I run for the bus and nobody ever sits beside me. The seat beside me is the seat that Joelle filled. First grade through March third a year and two months ago.

  It was a Saturday morning when I found out. It was my mom who came to tell me. I had heard the ringing of the phone through a dream. I heard a sudden something, a rustling, sounds that were getting in my way. “Hannah?” my mother said, and she was sitting right there on my Mexican quilt, pulling the colors tight across me, making it hard for me to breathe, and there was something she had to say but couldn’t, and I knew right then that a huge big bad unfixable had happened. There was the dirty rub of yesterday’s mascara beneath my mother’s eyes, wetness on her cheeks. There was a catch in her voice, the way that she started and stopped and tried to start again.

  “Baby,” she said, and it was the last time she called me that, it was the last time that anyone would ever, ever think of me as just a girl, as a child-daughter, as Robbie’s little sister. My mother lifted my head with the cradle of her hands. She kissed me on the forehead. “It’s Joelle,” she said, and I said, “No, it isn’t.” Because I knew that whatever had gone wrong had to be shouted back first, had to be shoved straight out of understanding, if I was going to survive.

  “Hannah,” she said. “I am so sorry.” And now there were rivers flowing from my mother’s eyes and down her shape-of-Pennsylvania cheeks and disappearing past her U-turn chin, and I was crying, too, for all that I didn’t yet know but soon would have to. For all that I couldn’t change about whatever it was that had started the phone ringing in the first place.

  How can a best friend—anybody’s best friend—go as far away as Joelle? How had I not seen her disappearance coming? I was her best friend. Best friend. I was the one who was supposed to know her every single thought. She was the queen of the motes she said—not like castle moat, but like dust-speck motes, those bits that hang suspenseful and still in cones of window light. In autumn, especially, with the sun slanting in just right, I would find her sitting yoga style on the rug of her bedroom floor inside a beam of sun. She’d be holding her hands as if she were catching flakes of snow, naming the colors, the shapes, the qualities of what was floating by. “They’re purple, Hannah, can you see them?” she’d ask, and I’d sit beside her and stare like she was staring until I could see the tiny bits, too, which never really rose nor fell. “Afterlife-quality peace,” Joelle would say, sad but not mad, the way she said things, and I’d say, “What would you know about the afterlife?” She’d point to the side of her head and say, “Stricken at birth by a cruel imagination.”

  Which she had been, no doubting that; it was her heritage. It was the primary thing that had put the long stitch down the center of her forehead to just above her nose—her too-young-to-be-so-old line, is what she sometimes called it. Imagination was in her genes, her genius for it going back, on her father’s side, to the great-great-great generation. A poet, an inventor, an architect all the way down to Joelle’s father, who specialized in risk. There were stories about him in the financial magazines and the Wall Street Journal, and even if he was, as Joelle liked to say (emphasizing the underemphasis), a smidgeon on the eccentric side, he was
trusted for his opinion. He would hole himself up in his office for weeks and then emerge with some solution to some given problem, his eyes big, Joelle said, as cartoon-character eyes, his face white as a baby’s tooth. “One half step away from the looney bin,” she’d say about him, but she was fine with it, I thought, fine with being his spitting image, fine with all that imagination genius streaming through her blood. She was fine with sad, I thought—a truly serious person, a big thinker, following along in the footsteps of fate. She wasn’t full of giggles, didn’t have a silly side. She wasn’t girly. She had all sides of most equations in her head at the same time, but still she made me believe, made it seem that if only you waited a while longer, you’d emerge on the right side of change. Odds, she always said, had to be with you. Joelle was a brand-new version of ancient wisdom, but she said she felt right-aged with me.

  “Tell me your secrets,” she would say to me, and I’d think hard until I remembered one I hadn’t already shared before—something about a turtle I’d found when I was a girl, something about a bracelet I once stole from a neighbor’s jewelry box; I had it still.

  Once I said, “I bought you some motes for your birthday,” and just like that the seam down Joelle’s forehead vanished and her cheeks flushed pink and the sadness lifted long enough for her whole self to break open with laughter. It was the sweetest, rarest, most lovely sound, and when it happened, when laughter triumphed for that one fantastic moment over sad, we fell back, both of us, through the cones of sun.

  “You know what genius is?” she asked afterward, lying faceup on her floor.

  “What?”

  “Genius is finding the funny.”

  “No way,” I said. “Genius is you.”

  “Genius is the motes,” she said. “How they hold themselves up in the spaces in between.” She touched her finger to the side of her head and blew a kiss through the room. She sighed long and hard, and I lay there, too, until it got dark and time for home and my own family.

  Nobody sits on the bus beside me anymore. For a year and two months I’ve come and gone in the hollow nothing of Joelle not laughing.

  For my senior thesis I’m doing a report on time. My working title is “Time: The Great Houdini Healer,” even though it absolutely is not, and I’m writing toward twenty-five pages instead of fifteen, working with eighteen references instead of ten, and when my parents say to come down to dinner, I say I can’t, I have this project due, I am in the middle of research, I am in the middle of a sentence, I am in the middle. They’re used to this now, but it took them a while. My Dad calls “Dinner!”—brusque, the way he does—and I call “Busy!” harshly back, and a few minutes later my mom will be at my door, a dish in her hand. My mom is a nurse, and she’s good with all the food groups. It’s ham with green beans and whole-grain rice, or trout with purple potatoes and broccoli, or salad with soup and a heel of bread. They always save me the heel of bread, because I like the challenge, the way the tough crust finally gives in. Even when Robbie still lived here, before he left for the big-time Ivy League, I got both ends of the loaf.

  I don’t rush my dinner. I chew and chew and chew, and after I’m done, I lie faceup on my bed and contemplate my next sentence, my next category, the things Mr. LaMotte, my thesis advisor, calls segues. I’ve already got chunks on the solar system—the sun, the moon, the stars. I’ve got an okay couple of pages on the Sumerians and their thirty-day months, the Egyptians and their moon cycles, the Aztecs and their stones. I learned about obelisks and I put that in. I’ve got stuff on medieval clocks, on the swinging of Galileo’s pendulum, on the ways that atomic clocks are better than quartz ones—even though, to be honest, I don’t really know what a lot of that means, can’t get my head around terms like piezoelectric property, or cesium, or resonance. I look them up, but it doesn’t help. I try to bring them into my mind, “activate” them, like Mr. LaMotte says. I even look at the diagrams, but I’ve never been stellar with labeled pictures; they’re like a language I can’t read. So I lie on my bed and I think about next. Next sentence, next topic, next minute, next hour. Next day without Joelle. Next steps. I graduate in twenty-two days. Come next September, someone else will take my place in the old school bus, which means that someone else will take Joelle’s, and when that happens, what happens? Will Joelle be gone for good?

  Where do ghosts go? What do you do with all the impossible possibilities? How do you find your way through, to the other side of change?

  My mother says that I’m working too hard, but you have to work hard if you want to stop time. I want to dial time backward. I want time to heal me. I want to hold myself steady in the spaces in between. If I were to tell my father this, he’d shake his head. My father lives in the realm of the rational.

  The two girls who sit in front of me on the bus are Annie and Marne. Joelle always called them the fairytale girls, because of their names but also because of their looks—long, blond hair, both of them, Annie with hazel eyes, Marne with brown. Annie is the prettier one. Marne tries hard to keep up. They switch off sweaters, from what I can tell. Belts. They wear the same kind of lip gloss. There are the very best of best friends.

  Joelle and I were never like that. We always made our own decisions. We didn’t borrow each other’s ideas. We talked about everything—I swear we did—but we drew our own conclusions. “You girls are old before your time,” Joelle’s mom would say, and I would laugh, but Joelle would shrug, and whenever people told me that Joelle was always sad, I would say, But she’s smarter than a pile of encyclopedias, smarter than the whole debate team put together, as smart as my own freak brother, Robbie. There is a kind of sad that is genius sad, and that’s the way I saw it.

  Annie and Marne may be laughing behind their hands, but their laughs are little kaput laughs, over before they get started. They’re practically flirty with each other, silly, the oh-my-god! kind of girls, and they were always like that—on the bus, in the cafeteria, at football games—always making a show of themselves, like they were posing for reality TV. Except they weren’t like that the day I climbed back on the bus, a week after Joelle disappeared. They just stared at me then, with their hazel and brown eyes. “Hannah,” they said, both of them turned around, both of them staring open-mouthed at me. “Why did she do it?”

  “Because she did,” is what I said. And closed my arms across my chest and stared out the window. All the regular things in the neighborhood went by. They looked blurry to me, underwater. I’ve worn sunglasses to school every day ever since. No one needs to know how I am feeling.

  Here are some of the things that have been said about time: “Time brings all things to pass” (Aeschylus). “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind” (Nathaniel Hawthorne). “Time is the longest distance between two places” (Tennessee Williams). “Time, which changes people, does not alter the image we have retained of them” (Marcel Proust).

  I collect these things for my senior thesis—go through quote books, copy them down, try to make some sense of them. If Joelle were here, she would give me her opinion, she would study the words with that line down her brow, she would say, “Well, you know…” Then she would peel the polish from her fingernail, bite away at it until the shiny shell came free in a single piece. She would not say another word until she was sure of what she thought. She’d sit in her dark blue room, the motes invisible around her, her long legs up on her desk while I lay on the little braided rug on the floor below her—her grandmother’s rug, her heirloom rug. Eventually she’d offer something smart that no one else would ever think to say—tell me the story, again, about the longest she ever went without having a thought, tell me the sound that wings make when they’re flying back home, tell me about how no one yet had invented a cure for the excessive-imagination gene. Then she’d reach for the bottle of black nail polish and polish up the naked nail.

  “You’re such an original,” I’d tell her.

  “Yeah,” she’d say, “but what good does that do me? Where does original
get you?” She would look out toward the window, the winter sky. She’d get this complicated look inside her dark eyes, and I would lie there, waiting.

  But now Joelle was not here, and I didn’t know her thoughts; I didn’t have any way of asking, and even when I scrunched up my eyes, I couldn’t hear what maybe she would say. It was a cocktail of cleaners that killed her, if you have to know, because always the question after Why? is How? Always it’s there, the Annie-and-Marne question—and don’t think I wasn’t mad, don’t think that there wasn’t anger spewing out along with my oceans and oceans of tears when my mother, sitting on my bed beside me, tried her best to explain. My mother said, “Hannah, I’m so sorry. Hannah. She was alone when it happened; her parents weren’t home.”

  “Alone?” I said. “She was never alone. She had me. She had me. She had me.” I threw back the colors of the Mexican quilt, and I pushed my mother aside and I went running down the stairs in my red-and-white nightgown, and running down the street, running all five blocks, my mother calling out behind me, my hand at last pounding at the door of Joelle’s house. “Joelle!” I shouted, “Joelle, let me in!” and they let me in, they let me in and hugged me hard, but they would not let me see her.

  “Remember her as she was,” they said.

  “As she was?” I said, I screamed.

  My brother, Robbie, is my family’s superstar. He was born special and he stayed special, and it was like he didn’t have to try: Success walked right up to him, stuck around, was his never-going-to-leave-him friend. Robbie never even looked goofy, like smart guys are supposed to, and to top it off he was Mr. Sporting Life—tennis, fencing, crew, the sports that rich people are supposed to play, except that we were never rich people. My dad’s the accountant for the local newspaper, and my mom only works part-time. We always said Robbie was the family accident, a freak among normals, and he was so smart and so very super special that I didn’t mind, I honestly didn’t mind, because proximity made me famous. Between having Robbie for a brother and Joelle for a best friend, I kind of slid through school, got a truckload of benefits of the doubt. When I was stuck on something, people assumed that it was temporary, that I was smart enough to figure it out and was having a weird mental block. When I didn’t know an answer, teachers slid it my way. When the time came to decide who was A.P. material and who was just plain honors, every teacher of every class promoted me up to A.P., where Joelle was, where Robbie had been. I worked my butt off to maintain my ranking, and it was never, ever easy. You’re around smart, you’re supposed to be smart. Those are the rules of the game.