A Million Miles Away

by Lara Avery

  “Hello?” Kelsey said. He hadn’t appeared yet, but she could hear him.

  “It’s late there,” Peter said. “What are you doing up?”

  Not a second went by. “French Impressionism,” she told him, and it was mostly true.

  The video loaded. Kelsey’s heart stirred in her chest. Peter’s grin passed through the screen and lit up the surrounding walls, and suddenly, she was wide-awake.

  1/15

  Michelle—I might get to talk to you before you receive this, but either way, I needed to write down this dream, so I remember it: You and I were walking in these tunnels made of brick and there were rugs on the floors and candles. It was you but not quite, louder and more loose and happy, leading me by the hand to something great that neither of us could miss. We kept getting lost in the tunnels, but for some reason it didn’t matter, even though we were in a hurry. Finally, the walls opened up into a canyon with these ancient faces carved into it and there was a burst of light and color. A sunrise, but it was everywhere, with no specific sun. I was overwhelmed by beauty, like, beauty beyond vision, beyond words, beyond sound. It was like my brain was giving me a gift after all the shit we have to sludge through. I didn’t want to wake up.

  Yours,

  Peter

  1/24

  Peter,

  How are you able to remember your dreams like that? I can never remember my dreams. Not the important ones, anyways. Once, I dreamed that I had a pet monkey. I was teaching it to talk. My sister said it meant I was having trouble controlling my impulses—that I’d been having too much fun. No such thing, I told her. I drove to the Flint Hills but I couldn’t find the sculpture. Bet a K-State hillbilly thought it was witchcraft and burned it. Just kidding. If I can find the time, I’ll try to look for it again. School has been keeping me busy. Art History is kicking my ass to high heaven. Can I write “ass” to a member of the U.S. military? It seems bad for some reason. Anyways we’re on Cubism and I got in trouble with Mrs. Wallace for asking her if I could write my essay on plastic surgery instead because they’re basically the same thing. Didn’t go over well…

  xo

  Michelle

  2/3

  Michelle—“Ass” is nothing. If I had a nickel every time a drill sergeant told me to do something with my ass—get off it, move it, watch it, cover someone else’s, cover mine, etc.—I’d have an assload of nickels. The filthy mouths on these men and women rival that of a Scorsese film. A French unit next to us lost three yesterday. We get hit at a lot in this valley. I’ve gotten used to it. Stopped having such terrible dreams and shaky hands. I’m so tired at night, I pass out until the alarm goes off. Last night, I won a pair of socks and two pieces of nicotine gum in a game of blackjack, so things are looking up. (Haha.) (I had to give back the socks.) A couple of units from New Zealand stationed with us got lost, but we found them. Believe it or not, it can be difficult to understand them when they speak over their radios. It’s a good thing I’m not in charge of communicating with them, because I could listen to their accents teeter-totter all day, like music, and forget to focus on what they’re trying to say. They’re so friendly that one of them offered to sell me a van if ever I were to travel in New Zealand. I was like, no, thank you, and he was like, you’ll need a van, trust me, and I said all right, though I don’t know why it has to be a van? So if you’d ever like to travel around New Zealand with me—in a van—we’ve got our man. I didn’t mean to rhyme there. (Haha.) I’d like to go somewhere with you.

  Yours,

  Peter

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Three minutes left in the second quarter and the Lawrence Lions girls’ basketball team was only up by two. Their undefeated record had them as a shoo-in for regionals, and the final regular season game against Free State High was supposed to be a cakewalk. But senior Marcy Mallman, the Lions’ high scorer, sprained her ankle early in the first quarter. As the clock wound down, the Lions and the Firebirds were going point for point.

  Kelsey paced by the line of dancers standing just outside the gymnasium doors. “Do you hear that?” she asked her team.

  The crowd screamed in protest of a foul called on Lawrence High. When the Firebird point guard missed her free throw, their voices lifted in delight. The bellow didn’t stop after the rebound, following the players up the court, goading them to score.

  “They’re out for blood,” Gillian muttered from the front of the line.

  “Totally.” Kelsey paused to straighten Hannah T.’s strap.

  Despite complaints from the younger dancers, Kelsey and the team had been working on this routine for seven days straight. It was darker than usual. It was powerful. It was perfect, in Kelsey’s opinion. “Y’all really think they want to hear a pop song at this game?”

  “No,” they muttered.

  “Can’t hear you.”

  “No!”

  “Pop is for pep rallies. Pop is for parents.” Kelsey pointed at the gym. “We’re doing this for them. If we expect the basketball team to kick ass, then we have to kick ass, too. Got it?”

  Kelsey’s stone face broke into a smile. “Chins up. Knees high. Here we go!”

  The buzzer sounded. The players left the court. Kelsey’s heart pounded. “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the announcer’s voice boomed. “For your halftime entertainment, please welcome the Lions Dance Team and their rendition of ‘Dance Yrself Clean.’”

  They entered smiling, in step with one another, uniforms red and glistening. Kelsey stood in the center, her head held high.

  She scanned the crowd for Davis, who she knew would be late. But not this late. Well, no time for that now.

  The beat began, barely audible. As the volume grew louder, the dancers shifted out of their line in robotic steps, their limbs stiff, like moving dolls. The drums began to fall on top of one another, more complex, and the crowd was quiet in their seats. The dancers ended up in a staggered group in the center of the floor, joints bent and jagged, posing awkwardly, a far cry from their usual careful pirouettes and three-point turns.

  Then the beat dropped, deep and electronic, slaying the dancers row by row, slack bodies falling to the floor. Seconds of silence between beats. Whispers from the crowd.

  On cue, they rose together with the song, triumphant, stomping the floor like tap dancers with a vengeance, kicking, their arms slicing the air.

  Kelsey was in it. She was gone. She didn’t think about what the rest of her troupe was doing, because these minutes were an extension of her mind, the crowd now clapping along—they were all in a daydream she had, and was now having, in complete control.

  Pace. Slide. Pace. Slide. Leap. Land. Up. Hips.

  The song ended with the dancers’ backs to the home team, pointing painted fingernails straight at the opposing crowd’s bleachers, ponytails and buns in wrecked nests, mouths pursed and eyes flashing. Everyone, no matter what team they supported, was on their feet, cheering in approval.

  The announcer had to shout to be heard over the clamor. “Wow! What a display!”

  Kelsey pulled a whistle out of her uniform. Three blasts, and her team snapped straight and walked off the court.

  “The Lions Dance Team, ladies and gentlemen!”

  The crowd whooped again as they exited.

  “What?! What?!” Ingrid shouted, a happy purple mess.

  Outside the doors, next to the locker room, the two basketball teams waited to take the court again.

  “That’s how we do it,” Kelsey said, slapping the hand of every girl on her team, hard.

  Over their shoulders, she glanced at the basketball team. Two of the girls nodded, giving her a small bow.

  “Badass,” one of them said.

  Kelsey smiled. I know, she resisted saying.

  She retrieved her phone. A text from Davis was waiting: Woulda loved to see you dance tonight baby but my sex appeal would have been too much for the high school basketball moms to handle.

  Kelsey texted back: Busy with beer pong? />
  You know me too well. :)

  The Lions basketball team took the court, and then they took the game. The second half was a blowout.

  Afterward, both the girls’ and the boys’ basketball teams met the Lions Dance Team in the gymnasium lobby, letter jackets on over their jeans.

  “Victory party at the Wheel?” Gillian yelled above the happy din.

  A few calls of “Yeah!” and “We should call ahead, tell them to make all the pizza they have,” and “Nick’s house after?”

  Kelsey didn’t take the time to change out of her uniform. She gave a few more pats on the back and ducked out a side door to the parking lot.

  Through the dark, Kelsey heard, “Where are you going, Maxfield?” Under a streetlight, she could see one of the forwards from the boys’ team.

  “So tired,” she called back. “Tell Gil and Ingrid I’m heading home, will you?”

  “Have it your way!” he said, and went back inside.

  It wasn’t that Kelsey didn’t want to celebrate. She did, very much.

  But it was morning in Afghanistan.

  After she had texted Davis, her phone had buzzed again, with a Skype message from Peter. She told him she would be online in an hour.

  As the car started up, she hooked up her phone to the Subaru’s speakers, and selected the first track of one of Michelle’s playlists, where she had found the track her team had danced to tonight. The playlist was mostly filled with bands named “The” and plural nouns. The Breeders, The Strokes, The Turtles. She didn’t know if she liked the actual music, or just liked the idea of Michelle listening to it, her hair escaping the windows as she hummed along. Probably both.

  At home, she opened Michelle’s laptop to three missed calls from Peter, and now a fourth rang out. Kelsey let down her hair and threw a sweater over her dance team uniform before she answered, watching his face fill the screen.

  “Good morning,” she said.

  “Good evening,” he replied.

  “You look chipper.”

  He lifted a tin mug. “Thanks to this watery Nescafé we call coffee here.”

  Kelsey gave him a sympathetic look. “You miss La Prima Tazza, don’t you?”

  “Ha! Not that chocolaty stuff you drink.” That’s right. Michelle and her hot chocolate. He continued, “Give me a Styrofoam cup of 7-Eleven drip and I’d be golden.”

  “Well, if we had one of those machines from Willy Wonka, I’d send you a cup.”

  Peter looked puzzled, his lips turning up into a confused smile. “What machines?”

  “You know, the machine that takes the candy bar into the TV, then dissolves it into molecules and transfers it into the other TV?”

  Peter put his hands in a prayer position. “I have a confession to make.”

  “What?”

  “I have never seen Willy Wonka.”

  “What?!”

  Peter laughed at her disbelief. Kelsey realized her mouth was wide open and she snapped it shut, blushing. “I know you don’t watch much TV, but Willy Wonka is, like, a classic film.”

  “It always freaked me out. The little orange men? Come on.”

  They used to freak Michelle out, too. Kelsey couldn’t help but feel a little smug. “They’re supposed to freak you out. They scare the characters into doing the right thing.”

  Peter, who had been sipping his coffee, spit it out all over his lap. Between laughs, he said, “I was going to say that’s the wrong way to go about it, but then again, I’m in the army, so that might be hypocritical.”

  As Kelsey laughed, watching him clean up, she heard a click behind her. “Kels?”

  She turned around.

  Gillian stood in the doorway, letter jacket over her arm. “You can’t say no to pizza.…”

  Kelsey snapped the laptop shut. But she wasn’t fast enough.

  “Was that—?” Gillian walked into the room, pointing at the computer. “Who was that?”

  “No one,” Kelsey said, which was the wrong answer. Any answer felt like the wrong answer.

  “That was Michelle’s boyfriend,” Gillian said, her eyebrows furrowing. “The soldier.”

  Gillian had seen Peter the night of their party through Michelle’s door. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was how guilty she looked by hiding him. Oh no.

  “Yeah, but—” Kelsey began. She could feel tears coming on. She blinked them away.

  “Kelsey. Calm down.” Gillian’s head tilted, puzzled. “Why did you end the Skype call?”

  “You startled me.”

  Gillian’s lips pursed. She didn’t buy it. She was a smart girl.

  “So what’s up? What were you guys talking about?”

  “Just Michelle stuff,” Kelsey said. She gave the long sigh she gave her parents when she didn’t want to talk, but with Gillian, her breath came out uneven and forced.

  “That must be tough,” Gillian said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You want to talk about it?” Gillian asked.

  “Not right now.”

  Gillian made a dismissive hmm. Kelsey usually told Gillian everything. But where could she start when the beginning was the end of Michelle?

  “He’s—he’s not taking it well,” Kelsey continued.

  “Well, at least you all were laughing when I came in,” Gillian said slowly, not meaning a word. “When did you tell him?”

  Kelsey could feel the air get more still, muffling her. “I—soon, I mean, recently…”

  “He didn’t find out from the news?”

  “He hasn’t read it.”

  The details dawned on Gillian, now visible in her face, tightening it.

  She had figured it out.

  “He doesn’t know?”

  Kelsey tried to breathe through her nose. “Know what?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You were talking to Michelle’s boyfriend.”

  “It’s not a big deal.” But Kelsey’s jaw, which had started shaking, said otherwise.

  Gillian took a step toward her. “Does this soldier guy not know that Michelle is gone?”

  Kelsey stared at the carpet. The more she lied, the worse she looked. So she didn’t lie. “No. He doesn’t know.”

  “Does he know he’s talking to you?”

  A pause. “No.”

  Kelsey finally looked her best friend in the eyes. They were still narrowed, but just as much in question as in anger. “Why the hell would you do something like that?”

  When Kelsey opened her mouth to speak, she found her throat was caught again. The tears were back. “I didn’t know how to tell him,” she got out. “I’m sorry. I know it’s bad. But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to make things harder on him than they already were. He’s putting his life on the line, you know? And—”

  Gillian shook her head, as if she couldn’t bear to hear anymore.

  Kelsey wanted to go further, to explain, but she knew the words would make it sound even worse. She had never stated the facts this way, not even to herself: With Peter, I can pretend it never happened. And I like talking to him. He makes me laugh. We were having fun.

  Gillian’s voice brought her back. “I know you miss Michelle, but this is crazy. You have to stop.”

  Kelsey sat back down at her desk, and looked up. “Of course. Yes. I will.”

  “Kels. You’re playing with fire.”

  “I’m not doing it to hurt anyone,” Kelsey offered.

  Gillian scoffed. “Oh, yeah? How does Davis feel about that?”

  Kelsey said nothing. A hardness formed inside her. It was the initial shock that ruined it. She had no time to plan for something like this, an interruption like this. “Davis has nothing to do with it. You don’t understand.”

  “No, I really don’t,” she snapped.

  “I’ll stop.” Then, at her back, Kelsey pleaded, “Please don’t tell anyone.”

  Gillian turned, her eyes roaming around the room, trying to process. “Yeah.” She nodded, but she couldn’t look at Kelsey.
She didn’t want to look at Kelsey. “See you Monday.”

  With that, Gillian slid on her jacket, and opened the door.

  “See you then,” Kelsey replied, but by that time, the door was closed between them.

  2/10, 1:32 am

  From: Maxfield, Kelsey

  To: Farrow, Peter W SPC

  Subject: (no subject)

  Peter,

  You are such a good person, and you deserve the truth. I’m just not sure that you would ever want to hear this truth, which is why I haven’t told you yet.… You’re probably wondering why I’m emailing you. I’m Kelsey—Michelle’s sister, we met in my kitchen. And I need to tell you that

  SAVE AS DRAFT?

  SAVED

  2/10, 1:44 am

  From: Maxfield, Michelle

  To: Farrow, Peter W SPC

  Subject: got cut off

  Oompa-Loompa, do-ba-dee-doo / A friend came over to borrow my shoes

  Then I remembered we were supposed to eat pizza / Nothing rhymes with pizza

  Talk to you next week?

  SENDING…

  SENT

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  When there was nothing on TV, Kelsey and Davis used to sit on her porch in the summer, drinking AriZona iced tea, going back and forth with “It’s so hot…” jokes. Most of them were so old-timey they barely made sense. It’s hotter than a two-dollar pistol on the Fourth of July was a good one. It’s hotter than a pig tart in pig church was one Davis had said that made her laugh so much that she started laughing at the fact that she was still laughing.

  Tonight, Valentine’s Day, they met at a table for two at one of the fancier places downtown, Kelsey in her little black dress and heels, Davis in a T-shirt that read THE DUDE ABIDES under his blazer. The waitress at the Eldridge had come around for the third time, but Kelsey still couldn’t decide what she wanted. Davis sat across from her, fingers drumming next to his salad fork, or his dessert fork, or whichever fork it was.