by Emma Mills
I stand there for a moment, paralyzed, before crossing the hallway back to my room.
When Zoe slips back in an hour or so later, I am still awake.
She pauses when she sees me, her hand on the doorknob as she’s shutting the door.
“You’re up,” she says, voice scratchy.
“You too.”
“I couldn’t sleep. I was just…”
“What? You were just what?”
She knows I know. I know she knows I know. But neither of us speaks for a long moment, and it’s hard not to feel stupidly melodramatic, like somehow something hangs in the balance.
“What do you want me to say?” she says finally.
Just tell me. “Say what you were doing.”
She crosses her arms, leans back against the door, directs her gaze at the ground. “Claude…”
I shake my head. “You should’ve told me.”
“I didn’t … know how you’d react. And at first I wasn’t sure if it was—like if we were just messing around, or if…” She shrugs. “Or if it was, you know. For real.”
“How long?”
“What?” she says, even though the question was perfectly clear.
“How long?”
“Since the summer. Since we got out of school for the summer.”
“Holy shit, Zoe.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she says again, which is not the thing I want her to say, which is sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so so sorry.
“That must’ve been really funny.” I can’t help how bitter it sounds. “‘Oh gee, Claudia has no idea, what an idiot, she’s so oblivious—’”
“Claude—”
“I see you almost every day,” I say. “We text each other what we fucking had for lunch, but you left out the part where you and Alex are … doing whatever?”
“Because I thought you might freak out.”
“So were you going to tell me after you guys broke up, or at your engagement party?”
“God, this isn’t—you’re overreacting.”
“I am UNDERREACTING, ZOE.”
She tries to shush me, holding her hands up and looking at me with wide eyes. “Look, I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry that you feel … hurt by this.”
“That is a crap apology.”
“I shouldn’t have to apologize for liking him.”
I shake my head, and flash on us doing homework after dinner. You should have a lot of friends. Ones you make on your own. Without me. “Is that why you were happy me and Iris are friends? So, like, I’m out of your hair more often? So you could fool around behind my back?”
“What? No!”
“‘Make other friends, Claudia. Go out with other people, Claudia. Get out of the house so me and Alex can make out and do all the stuff—’”
“You’re being ridiculous—”
“I think you should go home.” I can barely control my voice. “I think Alex should drive you home. Or, you know, you can go sleep in his room and have fun explaining that to my parents in the morning.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“And you’re being a shitty friend.”
She looks at me for a long moment.
“Fine,” she says finally, and grabs up her stuff. She doesn’t slam the door on the way out—neither of us want to wake up my parents. I hear her pad across the hall, knock lightly on Alex’s door. It swings open and shut. Shortly, I hear them both leave.
I squeeze my eyes shut and fall back across the bed.
forty
Only one set of footsteps returns to the hallway a little while later, pausing outside my door. There’s a light knock. It’s still dead early, not even four a.m.
“Claude?” Alex says quietly.
I don’t reply.
“I’m coming in.”
The door opens and closes. I refuse to open my eyes.
“I know you’re awake.”
“Fuck you.”
“Claudia. Geez.” He fumbles with the light switch, and when I finally look over he’s standing there by my dresser, jacket still on over his rumpled pajamas.
“How could you?”
“We were gonna tell you.”
“What are you even doing? Why are you even with her?”
“I love her, Claude,” he says, and there is an earnestness to it that only serves to freak me out even more.
“No you don’t,” I say, sitting up. “You love Smash Bros., and chili-cheese fries, and … yourself. You don’t love Zoe.”
“I’ve always loved Zoe,” he says with that same intensity, a pleading look in his eyes. “But it just … changed. Recently. It became … stronger, and different, and better. I’m better because of her.”
“You are eighteen fucking years old and you sound like an idiot.”
“I’m trying to—God, why do you have to make things so difficult? Why can’t you just be cool about this? For once in your life, be cool and just … let me explain.”
“Explain what? That you were bored because everyone you know went off to school so you started dating my friend and lying to me about it?”
“I didn’t lie, we never lied—”
“It’s not my fault you couldn’t go to college because you’re lazy.”
He looks at me, and for a split second I flash on a moment in the play I caught at rehearsal last week—the scene where Hermia and Helena are about to fight. Sudha is so good at that part, her eyes narrowing, her back straightening—Ay, that way goes the game.
“You can’t bear the idea of her having something outside of you, can you?” he says, eyes blazing. “You can’t stand the idea that she might move on from you. That you might not be the sun that her life fucking orbits around anymore.”
“That’s bullshit, because, if anything, I’ve moved on from her.”
This is not even remotely true, and we both know it. He shakes his head. “Come on. Like I wasn’t in school with her for the last three years. Like I don’t know how many friends she has there. A whole life without you, Claude. You want to talk about lazy? You’re the laziest person I’ve ever met! You made one friend in preschool and then stopped trying!”
“Fuck you,” I say again.
I think he’s going to say more, but he just stands there for a moment, and then walks out.
forty-one
To defeat those who serve the Lord of Wizard, you must follow three basic rules, young warrior.
Viola Constantinople stands in the heart of a cavern, deep within the Mountains of Gelbreth. The crystal in her hand casts a pool of light, but the cavern walls are too wide, the ceiling too high, to illuminate more than a small patch around her.
Havil the Wise stands before her.
Tell me what I must do, Viola says.
It’s always odd to see your character speak. You spend so much of a game like Battle Quest running around accomplishing tasks for people—take these scrolls, find these elves, deliver these coins—and for all the nonplayer characters that talk to you in the game, you rarely ever talk back. But when the preprogrammed cut scenes take over, suddenly you’re not in control of your character anymore. Suddenly Viola is her own person.
First, the kill, Havil says. It must be clean, it must be swift, it must be complete.
Havil tells me what to do. And when the scene ends and I appear back outside the entrance to the cavern, my chat window dings.
>Selensa Stormtreader: what ru doing up this early?
I blink. I could ask Julia the same.
>Viola Constantinople: Couldn’t sleep. You?
>Selensa Stormtreader: same. ru ok?
>Viola Constantinople: no. you?
>Selensa Stormtreader: no
* * *
I go to Indianapolis in the morning to visit Julia.
I know my mom would flip out if I drove all the way there alone. So I plan to take the bus. But. I need a ride to the station.
As soon as it’s barely considered morning—I never did fall back
asleep—I call Gideon.
Iris doesn’t drive, after all, or else I would’ve called her. Funny how that happened.
Gideon actually picks up the phone. I was ready to leave a voice mail, unsure if he’d be awake, unsure how not to sound sketch as hell in a text.
His voice is rough with sleep. “Claudia? You okay?”
“Yeah.” No. “Yeah, sorry. I just…” Tears prick my eyes. I don’t know why. I’m still upset about Zoe and Alex, obviously, but somehow his voice makes me feel … like I’ve come undone, I don’t know, and I still feel terrible about last night at the restaurant.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
I swallow. “I need a favor.”
“Anything.”
* * *
Gideon comes to pick me up. I walk down to the corner of our street and stand outside the house there.
A tree used to sit square in the front yard. It’s long since been taken down. It was old and twisted, a large hollow in the front, branches splaying out like arms.
I was, in fact, terrified of this tree as a kid. I don’t remember my first encounter with “Spooky Tree,” but apparently at one of my earliest Halloween outings with Alex and my parents, I burst into tears at the mere sight of it.
“It was the most precious thing.” My mom has told the story time and time again: “Your brother—just a little guy himself, mind you—runs up to the tree and kicks it and goes, ‘Stop scaring my sister!’”
That’s Alex. He kicked Spooky Tree for me. He was fearless.
I wanted to be like Alex when I was little. You’d think it would be Julia. I did want to be like her a little, I guess—I liked playing with her makeup, I liked putting on her clothes and clomping around in her big boots. But Julia’s eleven years older. When I was starting second grade, she was starting college.
Alex is just one year older, and he’s always been cooler than me, smarter and funnier; he always knows what to say. Where he went, I followed.
Gideon pulls up to the curb in a shiny SUV.
“Morning,” he says with a small smile when I open the door and pile in. His hair is messy, and he’s wearing a hoodie and pajama pants.
“Sorry to wake you up,” I say, and busy myself clipping in my seat belt. “Sorry, I just…”
“Don’t be sorry,” he says quietly. He doesn’t go to take the car out of park. “I don’t know if I feel super awesome about leaving you at a bus station, though.”
“I’m just going to visit my sister.”
“I’ve seen the TV movies. You could disappear, and it’ll haunt me, and then you’ll show up like fifteen years later totally changed, and like…”
“Pretend I don’t know you but secretly I’m obsessed with you and your family?”
“Something like that.” A pause. “I would totally watch that movie, by the way.” Then he frowns. “But I don’t want to live it.”
“Literally, I’m just going to take a bus to Indianapolis.”
“I’ll drive you there.”
“Gideon.”
“It’s only three hours. We can, like … listen to an audiobook or something. My mom just got The Brunelleschi Scrolls. She said it’s supposed to be like The Da Vinci Code but more convoluted. Apparently, there’s this monk who wants to—”
“I just want to take the bus,” I say, against my better judgment. “Just … by myself.”
He nods. And looks forward. Nods again.
“Yeah. Okay. But I’ll wait with you until it comes?”
“If you want to.”
He does. And when the bus comes, we stand up, and he sways toward me a little. I get the feeling he wants to give me a hug. Like we’re parting for some significant period of time. Like we’re … people who hug each other good-bye.
But he keeps his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, a half smile on his lips.
“Be safe, okay?”
I nod. And then I hug him.
Just briefly, so quick that he barely has time to take his hands out of his hoodie and hug back.
“Thanks for the ride,” I say, and then board the bus.
* * *
I listen to TION on the ride. Mostly their first album, which is arguably the most upbeat, the most pop-sounding. Boppy songs about partying all night, interspersed with ballads about love as deep as oceans. I sink into it all, try to pick out which band member is singing what part—something that I’ve improved at doing, and Iris is near genius at.
I don’t have much data left, but I watch a couple of videos, too—behind-the-scenes vlogs released before the start of the current tour. One of them features all five of the boys, squeezed onto a couch that’s really too small to accommodate them, talking to the camera about the theme of the tour.
“The management and, like, the people in charge,” Kenji says. “They said we shouldn’t call a tour ‘heartbreakers,’ that it wasn’t good branding or whatever, if the fans think, like, we’d break their heart. They don’t want you to think that. But we always said we were gonna stay true to us, and that’s us. We’re not perfect guys; we’re, like, real, and that’s real, you know—getting your heart broken. Nothing’s realer than that.”
“Yeah, and who said it’s even us? Who said we were the heartbreakers?” Josh says with a cheeky grin. “Maybe it’s them, you know? Maybe we named it after the people who broke our hearts. Or the people who will.”
* * *
I call Julia when I arrive, and she greets me at the bus station, her belly rounder than it was the last time I saw her. An egg with legs, my mom had said. That’s how I looked when I was pregnant, that’s how Juju is going to look. Like she’s trying to smuggle a basketball under her shirt.
We go to Julia and Mark’s apartment, a little place just north of downtown. Mark’s working all day, so it’s just the two of us. I sit on the couch, and Julia makes us lunch. Really, I should be the one cooking—isn’t that a thing, aren’t you supposed to give pregnant people a rest?—but I’m in too much of a stupor to be properly considerate. So I let Julia heat us up some chili on the stove, and I shut my eyes against the sting of the onions she’s chopping up.
She brings two bowls out for us when she’s done, and is extending one toward me when her leg catches the side of the table; she jolts, and both bowls go flying, sending chili spilling across the floor. She lets out an aborted “AH!” and then we both stare at the chili-strewn carpet for a moment, until she promptly bursts into tears.
I haven’t seen Julia cry in years. Not even at her wedding. Her voice got a little wobbly as she said her vows, but that’s all.
But now Julia starts crying and crying and I forget my onion tears and my Alex-and-Zoe turmoil and I remember that Julia was also playing Battle Quest at four o’clock this morning, she was also not okay but she didn’t say why, just that the baby was fine and everything was fine, it was “all okay but you could come over if you want, you could come visit for the weekend. If you want.”
Julia sinks awkwardly down onto the floor and starts scooping the chili up with her hands, still crying, and I can’t help but sputter a laugh.
“Literally, what are you doing? We’ll get some paper towels.”
“We won’t get our deposit back,” she sobs.
“That’s why you’re crying. Because you won’t get your deposit back.”
“What are we going to eat for lunch?” she says, looking at me totally serious, eyes big and wet, lip quivering.
“Julia, Jesus, it’s okay.” I get on the floor, too, and pick up one of the spoons, trying to scoop up some chili, though this doesn’t seem like the most efficient method. “We’ll call one of those rug doctor guys like on TV. We’ll get McDonald’s.”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know what I’m doing, Claude.”
“You’re making it worse is what you’re doing. At least use the spoon.”
She sits back, and it can’t be comfortable, can it? Carting a human around in front of you like that. She rubs her nose with the back o
f her arm.
“I don’t think I can do this.”
“Maybe we could use the vacuum?” I start to get up, to grab some paper towels, but the look on her face stops me.
“I mean any of it.”
“Any of what?”
“This. The wife thing, the mom thing.” Her mouth twists unhappily. “Mostly the mom thing.”
“Because you spilled lunch?”
“Because I’m not … wired right.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m supposed to be an adult,” she says haltingly. “And like adult things. I’m supposed to … care about stuff that’s bigger than myself, and I’m supposed to want to, you know, fucking … be the best person I can be for my kid, but what if I—what if I’m defective? What if they made me wrong? And I can’t do any of that stuff? What if I can’t … feel … any of that stuff? What do I do then? I can’t even be an adult properly.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“Not helpful.”
“Okay,” I say, sliding a bit closer. “Maybe it’s … maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re not built for every single one of the adult things. But it doesn’t have to be one way, does it? It’s not like there’s a mold or something. It’s not like it’s prescribed.”
“But it is! Society prescribed it! I’m supposed to eat whole grain pasta and bust a nut saving money on car insurance!”
“Look. Jujube—”
“Do not fucking come at me with Jujube right now—”
“No, listen, I think…” I pause. “You’re going to be a mom.”
“That’s great, Claude. Did you forget you were supposed to qualify that with something?”
“No, because whether or not you’re a good one isn’t decided by some … committee, or something. Or society. Or anything. You decide that. You choose what kind of mom you want to be. You choose … what kind of adult you want to be. Right? So maybe you’re an adult who plays Battle Quest. And spills chili sometimes. Maybe you get things wrong occasionally. Maybe that’s okay.”
She shakes her head. “It just feels like…” Her voice is small. “Sometimes it just feels like I’m faking.”
