Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  I’ve been practicing Bartók’s Viola Concerto for nearly an hour, trying to get the tempo exactly right. It goes from steady and lyrical, andante, to manic, notes tripping over each other in their hurry to burst out. Then back to calm again. Mrs. Dubois says that all good music tears down walls, shatters glass, shakes the foundations, then puts the house back together. Piece by piece. Brick by brick. Note by note. The strokes of my bow are like blows of a sledgehammer: heavy, violent. I imagine the house I’m flattening is mine—my father’s absence, my brother’s distance, the way we can’t reach each other no matter how close together we are. When I get to the second movement, I picture construction workers reassembling what’s been broken. I feel exhausted, like I’ve been working with them. After playing through all three movements once, I go back and start again. My heart moves at walking pace, then quicker and quicker, the kind of pace that takes you whirling around a corner too fast. It takes a second to slow down again, to lumber instead of run. I’m not happy with the first section, so I stop, preparing to start yet again, and that’s when I hear my phone ringing. I’m not sure how long it has been going, and when I reach for it on my table, I don’t recognize the number on the screen.

  I debate letting it go to voice mail, but then an image of the receipt I scribbled my number on for Zach yesterday pops into my mind. I hold my breath as I answer it.

  “Hello?”

  “Addie!” he says brightly, like he’s pleasantly surprised to hear me on the line. “I wasn’t sure whether this was your cell phone or not, or I would have texted.”

  “Hey! No. It’s my cell phone. So you could have texted. But it’s fine that you called, also.” Oh my God. Shut up, my brain screams at me. “How are you?”

  I put my viola down on my bed. What do I say? Why is he calling? Where does one buy stock in Wit and Decent Phone Skills?

  Luckily, he doesn’t seem completely horrified. “I’m good, especially since I have the day off.”

  “That’s awesome,” I say. “Any plans?”

  “Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I don’t know if this is weird or not”—he pauses, and I hear a bit of uncertainty in his voice—“but since your friend ditched you and I don’t have to work, I thought I’d see if you wanted to hang out.”

  Is he asking me out? It sounds like he’s asking me out.

  “Addie?”

  “Oh yeah, sure,” I say, trying to sound casual. My heart, on the other hand, beats in syncopated triplets.

  “We can do Completely Mundane Things with Unwarranted Enthusiasm,” he says. Laughs his joyful, uncontained laugh. I return it with one of my own; I didn’t really know I had one.

  “That sounds great.”

  “Yeah? You can say no if you want. As I said, I sense that you are cooler, and I understand if you’re not in the market for any more friends.”

  Friends.

  So maybe he’s not asking me out.

  “You can never have too many friends,” I say truthfully. Especially since I’ve capped off at one.

  He offers to pick me up so I don’t have to bike, and I give him directions to my house before we hang up. I quickly rifle through my closet for something to wear, settling on my favorite purple T-shirt, cuffed denim shorts, and flats. The real work is taming my hair, which has a hundred percent accuracy when it comes to informing me of when it’s humid outside. In the end, I toss half of it into a ponytail and let the rest fall around my shoulders. I’m running down the stairs to wait by the front door when my mother comes in from the kitchen. It’s Thursday, but I forgot she has this morning off.

  The whole downstairs smells like baked fish, which we usually eat with roasted breadfruit—my dad’s favorite. Breadfruit is green and about as big as my hand, and it tastes like a cousin to potatoes. Mom has to special-order it at the farmers’ market, but I guess she figures she learned how to bake, sauté, fry, and do a million other things with it in the fifteen years she was married to Dad, so she might as well use it. Cooking is, apparently, Mom’s choice of distraction from our familial brand of SAD today. I immediately feel a niggling, familiar guilt for not spending more time with her this summer or looking for ways to cheer her up—Caleb certainly isn’t going to—or being as sad as I should about the anniversary of their divorce.

  “Where are you going in such a hurry?” she asks.

  “My friend is picking me up.”

  Her eyebrows rise up. “I thought Katy was out of town.”

  “Another friend,” I say.

  She folds her arms across her chest. “Someone I don’t know?”

  The guilt for not spending more time with her starts to dissipate. Resisting the urge to roll my eyes, I say, “They wouldn’t let you hold my hand and go to school with me every day, remember? So yes, someone you don’t know.”

  “Don’t be cheeky, Addison,” Mom says. “This is a friend from school, then?”

  If she knew I just met this boy in the video store less than two weeks ago, she’d definitely want to meet him. And I can’t think of anything more embarrassing than Zach getting interrogated by my mother on our first maybe-date.

  Because one or two things in the universe are working in my favor, the phone rings right then and Mom goes to get it. She’s been waiting for a phone call from Bruce, this guy she started dating a few months ago. I know she expects me to wait there for her to finish speaking, but when she turns her back to me to write something down, I take that chance to make a run for the front door. It’s humid outside, but not quite as hot as it’s been the past few days. I’m just stepping onto the driveway when an aqua-blue car rattles up in front of the house. Zach waves as I get closer, then leans over to open the door for me.

  “Hey!” he says.

  “Hi!” I know lots of upbeat people—Katy, hypochondria aside, included—but what’s different about Zach is that I seem to match him exclamation mark for exclamation mark. Usually without thinking about it.

  The inside of his car smells a bit smoky. The leather seats are warm, as if the car’s been in the sun for hours, and it’s littered with paper bags, bottles, and empty cigarette packs. There’s a pile of DVDs on the floor of the passenger’s side.

  “Shit, I was going to move that. Sorry,” Zach says as the pile collapses around my feet when I get in.

  I laugh, picking up the DVDs and moving them to the backseat, which is full of film magazines. A stuffed koala dangles from his rearview mirror. “Is this what it looks like inside your brain?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” Zach says, smiling. He’s wearing a T-shirt and jeans, same as every time I’ve ever seen him in his dad’s store. His hair is especially remarkable today, the front part of it curling up a little bit, like the tails of little j’s. He turns to me, hands on the steering wheel, but doesn’t start the car. I have horrifying visions of my mom running out here, furious that I left while she was distracted, and dragging me back in. “So where should we go? What’s the most mundane thing you can think of?”

  “Hmmm. Laundry. Chores. Post office.”

  Zach makes a face. “Post office? I thought we were going for mundane, not painful.”

  I laugh. “Gardening? Grocery shopping?”

  “Shopping!” Zach says, pointing at me like I’ve hit on something ingenious. “That is perfect.”

  As soon as we drive off, I text my mom: Sorry. Ride got here while you were on phone! Love you!

  We’re near the mall, but we decide to drive a little bit farther to the discount store because it won’t be as crowded and, it turns out, we’re both cheap. The conversation is steady and normal for the whole drive (we talk about the DVDs he has in his car, which ones are good and worth seeing), but there’s this current running through my body the whole time we’re talking. It makes me hyper-aware of everything, of the number of times Zach glances over at me as he drives (five), the number of times he laughs at something I say (three), the number of times he touches his hair (seven). I fiddle with my seat belt and fold my hands in my l
ap, but then that feels matronly and weird, so I unfold them and leave them flat on my shorts, wondering what, in general, people tend to do with their hands.

  When we get into the store, Zach pulls out a cart and says, “Have you ever played Bigger and Better?”

  “No. How does it work?” It’s around noon now and a weekday, so there are only a couple other customers apart from us.

  “It’s easy. You start out with the smallest thing possible, like, say…” He glances around and we’re right by the stationery aisle, so he throws an eraser into the cart. “Then you pick something else out—something bigger and better—and we keep trading until we wind up with the biggest and best thing there is in here. Then we pay for it and feel awesome.”

  “Oh, but that sounds like too much fun to qualify as mundane,” I say sarcastically, and Zach laughs.

  “I think we can make it work. Your turn.”

  I inspect the items closest to us, take out Zach’s eraser, and replace it with a pack of yellow Post-its.

  He gives me a skeptical look. “It’s definitely bigger, but is it better?”

  “Of course,” I say. “Everybody loves Post-its.”

  “I don’t love Post-its,” Zach says. “This No Boys Aloud notebook does not love Post-its.” He takes out the pack of Post-its and picks up this bright orange book with the four faces of the latest pop girl group to hit the music scene. He shakes his head as he leafs through it. “I’m sorry. The Spice Girls were better.”

  I snort. “Oh yeah? And who was your favorite, Zach?”

  He frowns as if trying hard to recall something. “Thyme?” he asks innocently. His gray eyes twinkle as he tries not to laugh, and something flutters in my chest. “Oregano?”

  “Oh my God,” I say. “I hope for your sake that you’re actually kidding.”

  Before middle school, one of my many loves was musical groups. I loved the harmonies and the different, complicated histories you could create for each member. Whether they were random bubblegum groups with a five-second life expectancy or Queen, who my dad and I would sing along with in the car. You could never convince us that we didn’t have enough voices for the opening multipart harmony of “I Want It All.” I haven’t thought about that in forever, and it hurts trying to remember the last time I had that much fun with my dad. Thoughts of the terrible family dinner swirl in my mind, and I suddenly want to go home and blast Queen songs, use them to lure my parents, my brother, myself out of ourselves. I’d wake us all up with Freddie Mercury.

  Instead, I pick up a book of crossword puzzles and hold my hand out for the notebook, but Zach refuses to hand it over.

  “You can’t. A puzzle book? This notebook is clearly superior.”

  I make a grab for it when Zach isn’t expecting it, and our fingers brush, and that electric zap surges through my body again. Blood rushes to my ears as I take the notebook from him and drop the crossword book in. I can’t tell if he felt it, too, or what exactly that was, so I pretend to be thoroughly inspecting the aisles and don’t meet his eyes.

  We move into the home décor aisle, and Zach takes this couch cushion with French words stenciled in loopy black cursive: L’amour fait les plus grandes douceurs et les plus sensible infortunes de la vie.

  My attempt at translating goes like this: “Love fate—feet?—big…two?”

  I glance at Zach and he’s repressing laughter, a fist placed over his mouth. “Go on. It sounds like you’re on the right track.”

  “Sensible unfortunate life,” I finish.

  “So obviously”—Zach pauses, seeking out the right words—“love is for everyone, even Bigfoot.”

  “Two big feet or two Bigfoots might not be a sensible pairing,” I offer.

  “Right, because they’d be way more conspicuous that way,” he says.

  “But a lone Bigfoot is in for an unfortunate life.”

  “Yes,” Zach says emphatically. “We’ve mastered the French language in, what, five minutes?” He holds up his hand for a high five and I raise mine to meet it, my palm all nerve endings where it touches his.

  “And this is why French people hate Americans,” I laugh.

  It’s actually fairly hard to find something bigger and better than that, but eventually I go with this oval-shaped plastic storage container. Zach is not having any of it.

  “I see your random and flimsy bin and I raise you this broom,” he says.

  “Um, no way.”

  “Why not?” he protests.

  “It’s not bigger or better. It’s just longer.”

  “I think that counts, Addie.”

  “We can’t leave here with a broom!”

  Finally he relents and then we traipse around the store for several minutes until we find something to Zach’s liking. “Yes! My mom has one of these,” he exclaims as he approaches the far end of an aisle. “I think I win with this one. It looks like one thing from afar, but when you get close, when you really look closely, it looks like something else.”

  He says this with such drama that I have to laugh.

  “It looks like an umbrella, Zach.”

  “Wrong,” he says. I’m pretty sure he’s not allowed to do this, but he pushes the tag out of the way and opens the umbrella up. It flares out with a swoosh, nearly knocking down some stacks of hangers by us. “It’s a giant-ass umbrella. Functional, therefore better. And”—he points at the container in the cart—“bigger, therefore bigger.”

  A little boy turning in to the aisle where we are points and whispers something to his dad. Zach turns the open umbrella so that it curves away from us, blocking us from the view of the customers, and he grins at me. “Think they can see us?”

  We’re standing with our backs to a shelf of items, and when he speaks, I realize how close we are to each other. I almost shiver from how silly and light I feel.

  “I think we’re in their way,” I whisper back, and Zach laughs and closes the umbrella so they can pass. One of the store workers is giving us the eye, and I don’t think I can top Zach’s item anyway, so we go to the checkout and pay for it.

  On the way out, Zach hands it to me. “Yours,” he says.

  I shake my head. “You won fair and square. I don’t need your pity.”

  But he pokes my arm with the knob at the end of it and says, “I’m not pitying you. I’m having too much fun for it to be mundane. So I’m disqualified.”

  I don’t know if his words land exactly the way he meant them to, because the atmosphere shifts the slightest bit then and I feel myself grinning and he glances away, like he didn’t mean to say that. I take the umbrella from him.

  “Thanks.”

  While we were inside the store, someone stuck a yellow flyer under the wiper: OVERTON INC.—CUTTING-EDGE NEUROSCIENTIFIC PROCEDURES THAT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. I hand it to Zach, who crumples the piece of paper and tosses it into the nearest garbage can.

  As we climb into the car, Zach says, “So we have the first part of Doing Completely Mundane Things Exuberantly down, but we’re missing a crucial part.”

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “The bragging,” he says.

  We stay in the parking lot—windows down—while I craft the perfect text to Katy, using the memory of some of her updates as a template.

  Just spent an hour shopping and bought nothing but a big-ass umbrella from Two Dollars or Less. Blessed!

  Zach is thoroughly impressed when I show him my work, and Katy’s response—uncharacteristically fast, considering it’s been taking her hours to text back—is great.

  ??

  Huh?

  We shake with laughter for a few moments and then I say, “So what’s our next mundane thing? Or is one enough for the day?”

  “Well, my car is in desperate need of a wash.”

  We drive over to the car wash and I help Zach throw out his garbage, then lift up the magazines and DVDs so he can vacuum.

  I can’t help it. I send Katy another text.

  Suds. Water. Everything
smells like wax. Best car wash of my life. Life is good.

  It is not so far from the truth.

  THE FUQ?!!! she texts back.

  Zach and I erupt in laughter and keep working. He refuses to throw out his broken and therefore unwatchable Mask of Life DVD in case anything can be done to fix it. My body hums from feeling for the last three hours like it’s been struck by lightning, and I’m afraid to breathe too deeply, to make any sudden movements. I think that maybe this is what it’s like to feel wide awake.

  When I get home, I send Katy another text, and I know before I send it that I’m going to get a response in all caps, though I don’t know when, and all I say is, So…there’s this boy.

  AFTER

  January

  He’s staring at me, forehead creased with a frown.

  The boy from the bus.

  Bentley Lake is windy today, the grass in the park around it covered with days-old snow. After a big storm like the one we had over the weekend, the snow stays for ages on the ground, except on roads and highways that have been salted and walkways that have been shoveled. Still, it’s one of the warmer days we’ve had in weeks, and people are strolling along the cleared paths around the park. And there he is, sitting on a bench, long legs outstretched, hands tucked into his jeans pockets. No coat or sweater or anything. He’s wearing the same black beanie he had on a few hours ago when he showed up outside the music-room window.

  And then disappeared.

  I tug on my own wool hat, self-conscious and cold, as I triple-check that I’m really seeing him.

  I came here to figure out what to do with the fact that I’m going crazy. To decide who to go to since I can’t go to my parents. And then to clear my head and simply breathe fresh air for a few minutes.

  But, of course, he couldn’t let me have that.

  He followed me.

  Or showed up here.

  Or something.

  I fix my eyes on him now as I march toward the bench, determined not to let him slip between my fingers again without some serious answers. I’m trying so hard not to blink—in case he vanishes—that my eyes sting a little by the time I reach him.