The View From Who I Was

by Heather Sappenfield

  No one said a word about it, though, and we never worked up the courage to ask them to play. Pathetic. And Corpse played it now? After Ash had shown up at the door, Gabe had said “Do you have any games?” and gotten it out to ease the tension. As if. Funny how things work.

  Corpse slouched on the velvety couch, Ash in the leather chair adjacent, a dancing kachina doll under glass on the end table at their elbows. Gabe sat on the floor, a Turkish carpet beneath him, the wide gas fireplace flaming over his shoulder. Above its carved wooden mantel hung the peace pipe, a carved-stone eagle’s head for its bowl and three feathers draping from its stem by rawhide laces. I floated around the room, inspecting Mom’s higher-placed artifacts up close.

  “I still can’t believe Gabe saw you first,” Ash said, joking but also not. “Honestly, Oona, we’ve been best friends forever.”

  Corpse’s eyes met Gabe’s. Over the last week, he’d visited every day.

  “Anyway, so now Paula and Kyle are an item and I’m single. After all that,” Ash said. “Paula’s such a jerk. I’ve always hated her.”

  Corpse felt the familiar sandpaper rub of Ash’s remarks. I supposed Ash had texted us about breaking up with Kyle, but Corpse hadn’t even turned on our phone since the dance. Ash obviously thought she was being ignored. I guess we were ignoring her, ignoring the world, by not even opening that beaded purse. How had we been so blind to how her every word ground us down?

  Gabe and Corpse said at the same time, “It’s your turn, Ash.”

  “Okay,” she said, like whatever. She leaned forward, her fuzzy, V-neck sweater flashing cleavage, and spun the plastic wheel in the board’s center. It whirred like a gear. Ash counted out her spaces and moved her tiny orange car forward. They were all halfway across the board; had careers and starter homes, were just building their fortunes.

  When had Ash started wearing low-cut shirts every single day?

  “Payday and a raise. Goodie! Give me ninety-thousand dollars,” she said.

  Gabe counted out the money as Corpse spun the wheel.

  “God, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow. Mondays suck,” Ash said.

  Corpse couldn’t even think about school. She still tired like she was a thousand years old, and her missing digits wailed. Faint purple crescents hung below her eyes, and though the bandages were off, her cheek resembled a tilled field. Mostly, though, we weren’t ready to face the stares that had nothing to do with her appearance. We’d accumulated enough credits to graduate after first semester, so it didn’t matter if she was there. Besides, it had dawned on us last spring, just before Gabe arrived in our life, that Yale would never deny us acceptance—Dad had established a monster scholarship fund for immigrant students there. All our hard-earned A’s had been for nothing. Actually, that’s not true; the A’s had come easy.

  “Olivia and Dylan broke up too, did I tell you?” Ash said. “I’ve always thought he’s such a hottie.”

  Corpse moved her car along the spaces, feeling Ash’s gossip turn the world gooey. You got the looks, but I got the cleavage, Ash had said the night of the winter formal, when we’d given Ash’s dress a double-take. She’d changed so much.

  Or had she? Maybe we’d changed. Ash had been our best friend since kindergarten, after all. I reached back and found memory after memory of her bossing us around. Each time, we settled into a glazed place, a translucent barrier that numbed us.

  Mom entered, carrying a silver tray with a pitcher of Sugeidi’s limonada, three glasses, and a bowl of barbecue chips. Gabe moved the pistachios, and Mom negotiated the tray onto the coffee table.

  “There. Enjoy,” she said.

  Gabe and Ash said, “Thanks.”

  Mom dropped her manicured hands to her sides, thumbs rubbing her fingers. A shaft of sun from the window veered off her face, making her seem miles away.

  “That was nice, Mom. Thanks,” Corpse said.

  Mom recognized the game, the only one in our house. We didn’t even have cards. “Didn’t you get that for Christmas?” she said.

  “Yes,” Corpse said, real careful.

  All of a sudden, Mom seemed to get it. Her eyes met Corpses’s:

  Mom: That game was for me.

  Corpse: Yep.

  “Well,” Mom said, and she left, trailing a sense of longing.

  “Since when does your mom do that?” Ash whispered. “She wasn’t wearing makeup, either. Just mascara. Wow! You really got to her.”

  “Ash!” Gabe had been reclining back on one arm, and he lunged forward.

  “Gabe, it’s okay. Really,” Corpse said. She noticed how Ash’s face had taken on an oily sheen that she’d masked with powder. “Mom’s trying. All right?”

  “Where’s my crown, anyway?”

  “I’m sorry, Ash.” Corpse paled as I pictured the doctors and nurses standing around her on the operating table, guffawing at that crown.

  “Ash.” Gabe’s body looked like a weapon.

  Ash studied him for a moment. She fluffed her hair. “My mom said your mom hasn’t been to ski group or Foundation meetings or yoga since … you know. Hanging close, I guess. Where’s your dad?” Ash said this last with a toss of her head. She knew just how to hurt us.

  “Working. Downstairs,” Corpse said.

  “Well, at least one thing hasn’t changed,” she said. “Your turn, Gabe.”

  He glared at her, then spun the wheel, that sound spraying out between them. He didn’t move his car, though. Instead he lurched up and stalked to the window, a view of our front yard, the wall, the mountainside where we’d tried to kill ourself.

  Ash watched him with one eyebrow raised. “Touchy.”

  He turned on her. “It’s nothing to joke about!”

  “What are we going to do? Spend the rest of our life tiptoeing around Oona’s problems? Besides, we all know she just did it for attention.”

  Gabe was at Ash in three strides. He loomed over her, and she recoiled in the chair.

  “She died, Ash! Do you get it? She was dead! See if that will stay in your empty head!”

  We’d never seen him like this. He stepped back, chest rising and falling in that same light Mom had stood in, except Gabe looked velvet, illuminated motes dancing around him.

  Was this the rumor Ash was spreading? From where I’d drifted, in the ceiling’s farthest corner, it was obvious Ash viewed Corpse with a sense of entitlement. As if she were a low-cut sweater, or a car. Mom had been the same way. I remembered Mom standing there moments ago, looking so new, so unsure how to behave. Corpse felt herself settling into that glazed place. She sat up straight, forcing it back.

  Ash rose. “Okay. I’m done.” I had to admire her nonchalance. “I’ll leave you two lovebirds alone. It’s not like I was invited anyway.” She strolled to the door, lifted her fitted pink parka from its hook on the wall. Pulled it on. Zipped it to her cleavage.

  “Ash,” Corpse said and limped to her. Ash gripped the knob.

  “I’m sorry,” Corpse said. “I can’t explain anything right now. Not even to myself.”

  “Look,” Ash said, “I know you think I’m an idiot.”

  “I don’t think you’re—”

  “Admit it.”

  “Ash—”

  “You’re my best friend, Oona. You’ve always been my best friend. Couldn’t you have even texted me?” Ash’s eyes turned glassy.

  “I just … I can’t … something about the way life used to be made me do this. I’m afraid to go back. Does that make sense?”

  “You think I—”

  “No! Ash, I just … after something like this, who’s dating whom … It just doesn’t matter.”

  Ash looked down and wiped her nose. “Whom? Wouldn’t Ms. Summers be proud. You always were a brainiac.” She looked up, and her cheeks matched her coat. She shut the door. From the window beside it, Corpse
watched her climb into her little Audi and zip away.

  Corpse averted her eyes from the mountain where we’d frozen, but she felt the cold on her limbs, the hardness of that rock under her butt. She sensed me then, watching her.

  “She doesn’t get it,” Gabe said from his window.

  Corpse turned at the sound of him putting away the game. She knelt beside him and helped clean up, glancing over her shoulder. Toward me.

  “I have that Physics test tomorrow. I really have to go. Are you okay?” He reached out, stroked Corpse’s neck. That touch sent a jolt through her, a heat she’d never felt. In all the time we’d been dating, depression had blocked us from offering Gabe anything more than vacant kisses. She sensed me again—reasoning, doubting, judging. She rolled her shoulders.

  “I’m fine. But Ash is right,” Corpse said.

  “About what?”

  “About Dad.”

  “That he still works all the time?”

  “That he keeps us miles away. Even now, when he’s right here. In the hospital he was different. He said he was ‘a new man,’ that things would be different.”

  Gabe’s face turned grim. “Oona, he … ”

  “What?”

  Gabe sighed and looked around the room, seeming to relive what had just happened with Ash. “Nothing.”

  Our backyard sloped down to Crystal Creek and the golf course fairway on its far bank. The basement opened through floor-to-ceiling glass doors that folded away onto stone patios with comfy furniture. In summer the whole area became indoor-outdoor. Flowers spilled from copper boxes and pots. Even when the river froze over, the snow drifted high, and people Nordic skied along the golf course on groomed tracks. We liked those glass walls. There were two rooms along that glass: the library and Dad’s office.

  Corpse didn’t loiter in Dad’s office doorway. Just limped straight in with LIFE under her arm, me trailing like a speech bubble in a comic strip. LIFE’s pieces bounced inside, sounding like a tiny marching army.

  “Hey, Dad.”

  He was typing something into a chart and looked up. “Oona. What a surprise!” He said this like she’d travelled from New York instead of from upstairs. I wished we were up there, that she’d just leave things be.

  Corpse settled into the tufted leather chair that faced his desk. She’d never sat in that comfortable-looking chair before, and its hardness surprised her. Dad sat very straight, watching. She watched him.

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “Updating a client’s portfolio.” Boundaries surrounded his words.

  Discomfort swelled the air. He clicked off the murmuring TV with the remote.

  “Do you like being a financial manager?” Corpse said. I retreated toward the window wall.

  Dad looked as surprised as I was. His chair squeaked as he settled back and considered her question. “It’s lucrative.”

  “What would you do if money didn’t matter?” Corpse said.

  Dad smiled slyly and his eyes glinted. “Money matters.”

  “Why?”

  “It keeps us safe. Free.”

  “Safe? Free?”

  “We have a roof over our heads, insurance, clothes, food.”

  Corpse studied the game’s upside-down lid in her lap. Warning laced the air, and she tilted her head against it. Her left hand rested on the I, with the E, the F, the L surrounding it. “I was wondering”—she felt her nervous words hovering at the edges of themselves—“if you wanted to hang out, play LIFE or something.”

  Dad looked at the game, and she thought how to him it would appear right-side-up.

  “Isn’t Gabe here?”

  “He left.” In a green square on the box’s bottom corner, Corpse read Family, Ages 9+.

  Sweat beads rose on Dad’s brow, and though the house was hot, I knew that wasn’t why. “Oona, I—” Not a hint of those chocolate eyes.

  “That’s okay.” She bolted up, moving toward the door, that little army marching under her arm. “No worries.”

  In the hall, Corpse leaned against the wall and shut her eyes. What was she afraid of? A memory rose up like connect the dots: us, a first grader, wanting to hold Mom’s hand, but scared and looking up at her as she leaned against this very wall, eyes closed just like this.

  Eight

  From Oona’s journal:

  In its liquid form, water’s hydrogen bonds are fragile, lasting only a few trillionths of a second before bonding with a new partner. This constant, rapid change creates a phenomenon called cohesion. It is structure not found in most other liquids.

  —Biology: Life’s Course

  “So you’ll call me if you want a ride home. Or if you need to come home early.” Mom drove her Range Rover slower than the spitting snow warranted, and the wipers screeked across the windshield.

  “Gabe and I will walk.”

  “Okay, but if you’re tired—”

  “I won’t be,” Corpse said.

  “You might get cold.”

  “I won’t.”

  Mom’s look said Sure you won’t.

  She turned into the Crystal High parking lot and steered to the drop-off lane at the front entrance. Gabe waited there, his breaths warm puffs rising on the cold. Corpse watched several puffs disappear. I thought of The Daily Crystal article after our suicide, of the angry rumors Ash had probably spread in the month since the winter formal. Today’s headline: DEAD GIRL RETURNS.

  “Oona,” Mom said. She reached over and grasped Corpse’s hand, and they seemed to look inside one another. The words for something big hung on Mom’s lips. Instead she said, “Good luck,” and let go.

  Corpse nodded and climbed out. Gabe took that hand. They walked up to the entrance. As we crossed through the first set of doors, Mom still watched, and Corpse waved back in the space between her and Gabe’s heads. Through me.

  My first touch. An electric shock brimming with confusion and longing.

  I’d always hated being touched when I was in Corpse, but that was skin. This was way worse. Like touching a person’s soul.

  Corpse rubbed her two fingers and thumb together like they itched, then rubbed them against her jeans. We passed through the second set of doors and into the building.

  We’d forgotten school’s smell. The cafeteria’s fake butter mixed with the janitor’s barfy cleaner. Dr. Bell, the principal, stocky and shorter than half the guys in the school, stood outside his office speaking with two freshmen, but his face lit up when he saw Corpse.

  At her shoulder, I reeled. All those years inside, I’d never allowed her feelings to seep into me. I mean, I knew them intimately. Manipulated them daily. Felt them? Never.

  In the school’s entrance lobby, across from the main office, stretched a sitting area made of two knee-high carpeted steps. Here, the kids of workers from Mexico or South America hung out. Some mornings they’d all be bawling because a raid at work the day before had rounded up their parents and sent them back home.

  “Serves them right,” Ash would say, but we understood that sense of no family, of scrambling for footing in air. Even so, I hate to admit we’d felt superior to them. Now they saw Corpse walk in and swarmed together, whispering Spanish.

  We climbed the stairs to the first hall of lockers, the slamming and buzz of voices yanking us back to just before we’d died. Corpse lifted her chin to hide that she was gulping air. Gabe squeezed her hand, but she didn’t look at him, just squeezed it back.

  We moved in a buffer of silence, and Corpse imagined smoke rising off her from the burning gazes. A couple people said, “Hey, Tunes,” but everyone else was mute. Tanesha’s friends, who ever since we’d started dating Gabe had sent bitch barking at our heels, studied Corpse with calculating eyes. As we turned the corner toward the Student Union, I understood that every look, no matter its skin’s hue, held fear. This brand of fe
ar could care less about prejudice.

  We passed the Student Union’s tables and chairs, where Mr. Handler stood, mug of coffee in hand.

  “Oona,” he announced. “Welcome back!” His kind face just about killed us. Eyes at tables looked up.

  “Thanks,” Corpse said, not like thank you but like thanks a lot.

  He knew what he’d done, and he chuckled. Like I said, he was smart as a fox.

  Ash had the locker beside ours, and she was there, banging books from her backpack into it.

  “Hey, Ash,” Corpse said and spun her lock’s dial. I drifted to the breath-crowded ceiling. Risk getting touched again? No way.

  Ash assessed Corpse. “Coming to the Student Union?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t do that anymore,” Corpse said.

  Their eyes had a conversation:

  Ash: “You’re serious?”

  Corpse: “I’ve always hated it. I just did it for you.”

  Ash: “Duh.”

  Corpse: “I’m not trying to be mean.”

  Ash: “Well, you are.”

  Corpse: “Still not going.”

  Ash: “Go to hell!”

  Ash slammed her locker and stalked off. Gabe put his hand on Corpse’s back.

  Taped inside our locker door was our schedule and posters of two soccer players: Lionel Messi and Alex Morgan. Corpse studied them like she was seeing them for the first time. Everything seemed foreign.

  “You okay?” Gabe said.

  “Chingado! ” Manny yelled from across the hall. Gabe waved to him.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s get you to Bio.”

  Tanesha shot us a vicious look from her locker down the hall. Her mouth resembled a wound as she spoke, and the girls around her turned and looked at Corpse and laughed.

  Corpse pulled out her textbook and folder and she and Gabe started back toward AP Bio. Our English class with Ms. Summers was AP too. Last year, we’d taken AP Physics and AP History.

  “Gabe.” Corpse halted. “I can do this. Your class is right here.”

  “That’s okay,” he said.

  Corpse didn’t budge. “No. I need to do this alone.”