by Nicole Baart
But the footsteps had stopped.
“Who’s there?” somebody whispered, and the sound seemed loud in the stillness.
I didn’t answer.
The figures didn’t move.
“You’re not a youth leader or you would have said something,” the voice came again. And they both started down the hallway toward me.
It wasn’t like I could hide or run away, so stepping away from the wall, I said, “It’s Julia DeSmit.”
“Julia DeSmit,” the voice repeated as a boy stepped close enough to scrutinize my face in the darkness.
“You’re Thomas Walker’s girlfriend, aren’t you?” the second boy asked.
I stopped myself from saying I was and tried to be grateful that at least I wasn’t the only one who had misunderstood Mr. Thomas Walker’s intentions. I decided I could count it a blessing that they first associated me with Thomas instead of the tragedy of my father’s death.
“Friend,” I finally corrected because I didn’t feel like explaining.
“Whatever,” the guy responded. He was almost exactly my height, but he carried himself as if he were much, much taller; I felt like I was looking up to him even though our eyes were level. I recognized him as the new transfer. His California tan and longish hair stood out against the pale skin and short cuts of the guys I knew. He was new and enigmatic, and all the girls had been rendered half crazy because of him. His name was Jackson or Donovan or something equally cool and un-Midwesternish. I was shocked he was wasting even a second on me, but his gaze was calculating, and it was obvious he was trying to make a snap decision as he studied me in the shadows.
“Let’s go, Jackson,” his friend muttered, grabbing his coat sleeve and giving it a little tug. I vaguely recognized him. “We’re going to get caught.”
“Don’t be stupid, Eric,” the tall boy said, shrugging off the offending hand and continuing to watch me. “Looks like you’re going somewhere,” he stated, nodding at my coat, my shoes.
I tipped my head evasively, leaving him to interpret it as assent or otherwise. What was I supposed to say?
Whether he took pity on me or wanted to use me as the butt of some private joke, I’ll never know. But his next words caught me so off guard I had no choice but to comply.
“We put a stone in the basement door so we could get out. Come on.” He took off in the direction they had come and flicked his fingers at me to follow. At the intersecting hallway, he stopped and realized I hadn’t moved. In the light from the glowing exit sign I watched him cock his head at me and make the motion again. Come.
I went.
The stone was so tiny that the door sealed almost completely, and I thought for a moment that their plan hadn’t worked and we wouldn’t be getting out after all. But the boy never paused, walking right through the doorway with utter confidence, then quickly ushering the two of us outside. Replacing the stone carefully, he shut the door slowly and took off at a light jog away from the sleeping lodge.
It was freezing. I balled my hands inside the sleeves of my coat and nuzzled my mouth and chin into the collar. But for all its biting iciness, the air was fresh and clean, and I drank in the feeling of it as it awakened every part of me. The bathroom mirror, the catty girls, and even Thomas seemed very far away as I followed these two strangers around the smaller, family-size cabins and through the thin woods surrounding Elim.
Our feet slipped on hard-packed, glazed snow as we wandered farther and farther away, and once when I almost fell, the boy snaked out a hand and grabbed my shoulder to steady me. I glanced up at him, but he had already looked away, and although I knew it was only instinct that made him stop my fall, I was grateful.
We didn’t say a word until we had walked for at least five minutes and the only light was the half-moon reflected on the surface of the lake. I followed the boys down a small embankment to a fallen log near the edge of the frozen water.
The other boy, Eric, the one who had wanted to leave me in the hallway, sat down on the log and patted the space beside him as he looked at me.
I shook my head and instead walked to the beginning of the ice and took a few steps onto it. I could feel the solidness of it and knew that in some places a foot of ice separated me from the glacial water below. Knowing it didn’t seem to make a difference though—my heart was beating wildly, as if the ice would crack at any moment. I took ten more steps.
I stood out there on the lake and listened to the sound of the ice shifting and fracturing—a dull, muted call, as if some fallen bird were trapped beneath the surface and crying plaintively to be released—and watched the Milky Way rip a shimmering gash in the black of a midwinter night sky. I stood out there just breathing in the cold and let the last pieces of who I thought I was slip from my shoulders and join the blend of ice and snow at my feet. I felt weightless there, alone in the night, and strangely new—like it was up to me to decide where I went from here.
But I wasn’t alone, and before I was done walking over the water of the lake, Jackson called to me from the edge. “Don’t fall in,” he warned flatly.
I whipped around to look at him. I couldn’t read his voice— whether he was mocking me or teasing me or concerned—but I felt like I owed him something for releasing me in the first place, so I walked carefully back over the ice to him.
“It’s solid,” I said as if I had to clarify that I wasn’t suicidal. I doubted that lakes froze over in California.
“It’s creepy,” he responded. He turned away from me and placed his back between me and his friend on the fallen log. It was almost as if he was trying to pique my interest—he had called me back yet was now excluding me from whatever brought the two of them out here in the first place.
They fumbled for a few moments, and I watched because it seemed like that was what they wanted me to do. When he finally turned to face the lake and I could see past to the boy on the log, I almost giggled. Eric was holding a smoldering cigarette between his thumb and first finger, and his face flashed between smug self-satisfaction at his own rebellion and an almost childish uncertainty that bordered on fear—it was obvious he had no idea what to do with it.
For his part, Jackson looked as if he had been smoking for years. He turned his gaze from the lake and puffed a series of perfect smoke rings in my direction, then glanced at his friend as if encouraging him to do the same.
Eric put the cigarette to his mouth and managed to cough harder than I had the first time Brandon introduced smoking to me.
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“Like you could do better,” the tall boy murmured with a touch of aggression in his voice.
His friend was still coughing too much to respond.
“Try me.” I couldn’t keep the smirk out of my own voice. I knew it was an immature thing for me to do, but a rather large part of me that was still vulnerable enough to want to impress this handsome boy was excited at the prospect of being more than he had imagined. It was a stupid act of pretension, yet I was eager to do it; I smiled at him even as he glared with barely concealed hostility at me.
He fished in his pocket again and tossed me the pack of cigarettes and a cheap convenience-store lighter.
I caught them both in my cupped hands and fingered out a cigarette from the Camel box. I put it to my lips, brushed the safety on the lighter, and flicked a tall, orange flame into being. Puffing slowly, I lit the cigarette and threw back the pack and lighter. I took a big drag and blew it all out into a cloud that rested warm and heavy in the air between us before slowly fading to a misty, translucent fog.
It was like riding a bike—as familiar and common as if I had done it every day since the last I shared with Brandon. Part of me wanted to say his name, to invoke the older boy and sound mature, experienced. But I didn’t say anything; I just took another puff and arched an eyebrow at the boys in front of me.
Eric glared at me, but the California boy was smiling. It was a bit of an unreadable smile—a one-corner half smile that was both a
pproving and wary—but it was a smile all the same. “Julia DeSmit,” he said again, as if cementing it in his mind.
It was like hearing my name for the very first time.
Mosaic
I BECAME A THING OF MYSTERY—inscrutable, vague, a well-kept secret. Of course, I was none of those things, but after Dad and Thomas—and, I suppose, the miasma that once was Janice—obscurity was a very beautiful thing.
Jackson and Eric played their parts well and created a confusion of tangled stories around me in the days and weeks that followed the doomed youth retreat. I never told them how I learned to smoke, and the half-truths and partially concealed revelations that I carefully doled out for the rest of the year only helped to fortify the allure of my elusive nature. I was the girl in the mask. Always more than imagined. Always deeper than could be probed. It didn’t necessarily gain me friends, but it gained me something akin to a reluctant admiration, and I was willing to live with that.
The spring of my senior year in high school I had to take a college-prep English course. My teacher was ripe with creative ideas designed to exercise our imaginations and push us to the limits of our artistic capability. We wrote eulogies for ourselves, odes to inanimate objects, and poetry based on scents that prodded subconscious memories and made them rise to the surface. I thought it was a waste of time. I’m sure she pored over my material looking for hints of the enduring pain in my shadowed spirit, but I resolutely gave her little to work with. Until the proverb.
Take, my friend, only what you need, lest the world see the extent of your greed.
It was undeniably pathetic and I took no pride in it—in the cheesy rhyme, imperfect meter, or archaic language—but it spoke truth to me like little before ever had. My proverb was a given, a big duh when everyone else was trying to be profound.
Only Jackson’s eyebrows rose when I stood in front of the class to read and expound on my maxim. Only he, who knew me better than anyone, would wonder at my choice of words when I was obviously the opposite of every conventional definition of greed.
I’m sure my decadent classmates and even the teacher were uncertain of the merit of my proverb because, in my generation at least, greed was presupposed—every person lumped into the same category: greedy, just on different ends of the spectrum. After I handed the teacher the three-by-five note card with my proverb printed in careful, bold letters across the lines, she scanned it, blinked, and read it again as if she had missed something. When she finally looked up at me, she forced a little smile, and I watched with increasing amusement while she did the mental gymnastics necessary to decide how best to handle the burdened, potentially unstable DeSmit girl.
In the end, pity won out and she said nothing, probably because she figured I was intentionally being shallow to protect myself from having to draw a lesson from my heartbreaking life. It was one time I was actually thankful for pity. It kept her from questioning me.
While a part of me wondered if she was right, wondered if I was inventing a theory that served only to soothe my own restless discomfort, I felt there was an entirely dissimilar level of greed that went regrettably unexplored even as we gorged ourselves on it. I didn’t fight her, though, nor did I defend my sad little proverb when we presented and elaborated on the wisdom in our sage declarations to the rest of the class. They expected greed to be a wanton lust for the things of this world: the usual vices of cars and money and fame. And I let them believe that their perceptions were right so they could resent me for reminding them of things they’d rather forget.
But I knew that greed could have a very different face.
Pride can come after the fall. Martyrdom is a badge that can be worn with as much vanity as the most extravagant success.
I believed my own proverb, and I began to live my days carefully, with Spartan indulgences and self-denial, fearing that the world had already seen me take more than my share—stuffing myself with tears and sorrow that weighed me down and bulged from every pocket, gap, and crevice. Sorrow so big and consuming it begged to be noticed, begged for time and attention, sympathy and pity. I didn’t want it anymore. I emptied myself of it. Left it behind when the mirror broke, when I had to reinvent myself one piece at a time. When I finally realized that it was me—not Dad or Thomas or even some impossible, far-flung God—who had to create a stronger, better Julia.
And in the newness of it, in the miracle of learning to create, I made sure to be a careful collector, picking up tiny pieces of life like hard pebbles and tucking them one at a time into the palm of my hand, where no one but me knew that I held them.
My life became a cautious mosaic, slowly taking the form of a shabby mixed media—shattered glass among cool, round stones and tentative, interrupted strokes of inoffensive color. I couldn’t see myself as much as I could feel myself in the angles and corners and lines. I was well hidden. Unrecognizable.
I was unfamiliar even to Jackson, Eric, Grandma. It wasn’t that I was afraid of getting hurt, of losing more than I had already lost. I wasn’t trying to hold them at arm’s length or be evasive. The truth was, I didn’t know who I was, and I was afraid of being defined by who I wasn’t. By what I didn’t have. By all the tears that I had cried and the catalog of dates that told me who I could never be. By remembering with predictable, cyclic accuracy all I had lost.
I decided I could do better than that. I could handcraft the life, the person I wanted for myself. I could be my own artist, and I surrendered myself to the creation of a Julia who was too smart to attach, too independent to want to, and so secure as to be untouchable. I wasn’t interested in allowing myself to wait a single second longer for something I was convinced I could walk up and take.
Departure
I WOKE IN THE MORNING to the sun filtering softly through the windows and casting a mellow light across the shadows behind my eyes. I rolled over and pressed my cheek into the coolness of an untouched stretch of pillow and allowed myself a contented, sleep-drenched yawn. The room was warm and still, quiet except for the gentle sound of a muted snore coming from somewhere across the room.
It didn’t register at first. The snore. But somewhere in the back of my mind it didn’t make sense, and although I wanted to crawl back into that sweet, dream-filled, early morning sleep, something wasn’t right.
And then she snorted loudly and shifted in her bed.
The shock was so overwhelming I ripped off the sheets and stumbled halfway to the door before I remembered where I was.
“Do you start every morning like this?” the girl mumbled, rolling over and pulling the blankets over her head.
“No—no, of course not,” I stammered hesitantly. As I glanced around the box-filled room, the fog began to clear. I repeated her name in my mind to assure myself that I hadn’t forgotten it. Becca. Not Becky. Not Rebecca. Becca. That’s what she’d asked to be called, even though the letter I got halfway through the summer was signed Rebecca. Even though the placard on our door said Becky. “Becca,” I said aloud, and I wasn’t even aware that I had said it.
“Yeah?” came the muffled and slightly prickly reply.
“Nothing,” I quickly said. “Go back to sleep. It’s only six-thirty.” Flustered, I crawled hurriedly back into my own bed and pulled the comforter up to my chin. I could tell by the even hum of her breathing that she had already fallen back asleep. Hardly daring to move lest I disturb her again, I lay in the tiny dorm-issue bed and let my gaze roam around the cluttered room.
Our two beds were pressed against opposite walls with our structurally uninspired desks crammed in between. The massive tables looked like a high school shop project gone wrong, and the wood used in constructing them had obviously been salvage since even the tops and sides of each individual table didn’t match. But they were sturdy and currently home to towering stacks of boxes and books. Though the desk touching my bed was technically mine, the waxy fruit boxes proclaiming Washington apples were Becca’s. I told her I didn’t mind if she used my desk as storage for a day or two
, since all my stuff was already carefully tucked away.
According to everything Becca had lugged along, I hadn’t brought anywhere near enough junk. My small wardrobe and handful of personal effects didn’t fill the closet at the foot of my bed nor take up much space on the shelf beneath the chest-high mirror bolted unattractively to the concrete block wall. I had tried to bring as little as possible—partly because I didn’t have much I cared to show off and partly because I wanted to make the right impression and I didn’t yet know what things or lack thereof would do that. I had hoped my frugal packing would, if nothing else, gain me an appreciative roommate. Instead, when Becca arrived a few hours after I had settled in to find my stuff already put away and me lounging on my neatly made bed with a novel, she looked at me as if I were from outer space.
“You’re done?” she asked incredulously after we had introduced ourselves. I had tried to shake her hand, but her arms were full with a duffel bag and two hot pink pillows—one in the shape of lips and the other an overstuffed heart—and she didn’t move to put them down.
“Yup,” I said, attempting a light and cheerful manner.
She had a cute face and spiky, russet-colored hair that was too gorgeous to be anything but natural. She was easy to smile at, even though she was still surveying me a bit warily.
“The dorms have only been open for two hours!” Becca accused.
I just shrugged.
She didn’t even see it; she had already turned to appraise the bare walls and the bland, khaki-colored duvet that covered my bed. There were no decorative pillows. “No posters?” she asked.
