My Beating Teenage Heart

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  I marvel at the cleverness of my brain to create such an intricate plotline. Breckon. His parents and extended family, complete with a cigarette-smoking grandfather, grieving Pomeranian and deceased little sister.

  If my mind has the energy for that why can’t it bring me back?

  So many questions and no means to locate the answers.

  “Hey,” Breckon’s girlfriend says quietly as she works her hair free from its ponytail, brushes it with her fingers and then reknots it in place. “I didn’t want to wake you but I’m late for school.

  “I don’t have to go,” she adds, bending her leg to rest one of her knees on the bed.

  “No, you should go.” Breckon clears his throat, Ks h.

  I wonder if they might be, if they thought it would help him.

  His girlfriend pauses in place, her Mary Janes still on the floor next to the bed. “Well … what are you going to do today? You should do something.” She sits down on the bed and curls her arm around his waist. “I mean, maybe being busy will—”

  Breckon scrunches up his forehead, his eyebrows leaping together. “Being busy won’t do shit. Nothing changes the facts.”

  Breckon’s girlfriend winces at the bitterness in his face and tone and I know her suggestion wasn’t meant to be callous, just the opposite, but that she can’t think how to get that across without risking saying something else he’ll take the wrong way.

  “What?” Breckon challenges, squaring his jaw.

  “Nothing.” She moves her hand away from his waist to caress his face. “I just want to be here for you.”

  Breckon blinks heavily. “I know. But I’m not even here now. You know that, don’t you?”

  Breckon’s girlfriend nods and reaches for his hand. Their fingers automatically entwine. She bends towards their interlocked hands and presses her mouth to his skin, changing his demeanor entirely.

  “Thanks for bringing me the pills last night and everything,” he tells her. “But it’s okay. You can go to school, Jules.”

  Jules, so that’s her name. It’s possible Breckon mentioned it before when I wasn’t really listening. Now that I know she’s a Jules instead of an Emily or Megan, I can’t picture her being anything else.

  Jules studies Breckon, trying to determine whether it’s really okay to leave him.

  “I’ll talk to you later,” Breckon continues, hauling himself out of bed and into yesterday’s wrinkled pants and shirt.

  “You sure?” Jules asks.

  He nods and messes with his hair. “I might even go back to bed for a while.”

  Jules pulls back the straps on her Mary Janes and jams her feet into her shoes. One of her fingers brushes against her bottom lip. “I’m glad the pills worked.” A stiff smile stretches onto her face. “I’ll check messages at lunch. You call me if you need anything else, okay?”

  Breckon bobs his head in agreement and reaches for the doorknob. He and Jules stand in the open doorway, both their faces dropping in surprise. Out in the hall Breckon’s father stops and registers their twin presence. His mouth slumps too but only for the briefest of moments before he rectifies that by saying, “Julianna, hello.”

  “Hi Ky">ies t, Mr. Cody.” Jules pronounces his name cautiously, as though in anticipation of being forced to admit a mistake.

  The only names I’ve picked up so far are first names, and I perk up at the nugget of information and tuck it into my memory.

  “I’m just walking Jules out,” Breckon explains, avoiding his father’s eyes.

  “Ah,” Mr. Cody replies, as though this makes perfect sense. I congratulate myself for guessing Breckon’s parents would be more understanding than he gave them credit for and watch Mr. Cody turn and continue his way along the hall. Breckon and Jules hang in Breckon’s doorway until his father has disappeared back inside his own room. Then they proceed quietly along the hall and down to the side door where Breckon thanks her again.

  “Stop thanking me already,” Jules says, grabbing the end of his shirt.

  Breckon’s pupils are tiny. He looks every ounce as tired as before he went to bed last night, and he wraps his arms around her and holds her to him. “Do you want me to get you a cereal bar or something?” he asks as he pulls away. “You can eat it on the way to school—what do you have first period anyway?”

  “Bio.” Jules frowns at the thought. “And it’s okay, I’ll swing by Second Cup and get some coffee on the way.”

  “Bio,” Breckon repeats. “Right. Now I get why you’d want to hang around here instead. You don’t want to deal with Gallardo’s early-morning rantfest.”

  “Yeah, so you should really think about letting me stay.” Jules fingers Breckon’s shirt again. “Save me from a fate worse—” Her lips pause on the unspoken words, her face creasing in regret.

  “Worse than death,” Breckon finishes. His shoulders jerk up into a detached shrug. “Saying it doesn’t make things worse than they are.”

  Jules sighs soundlessly and steps towards the door. “Okay, I’m going. Call me later?”

  Breckon nods in confirmation, and once she’s gone he heads directly back upstairs, steps out of his clothes, digs another sleeping pill out from his bedside table and pulls the covers over himself, waiting for it to work.

  Even when it does, and there’s nothing for me to see or hear but a slight rustling of sheets or the noise of a van driving by outside the window, I’m completely stuck within the walls that surround Breckon.

  It’s eerily intimate, watching someone sleep, especially a guy my age. It’s just a dream and I shouldn’t care, but I can’t shake the feeling that I’m invading his privacy. No one but me knows about that morning sleeping pill or how he cried in the shower until he was shaking and sick yesterday. I feel an unfair responsibility for him tug at my consciousness and it makes me home in on his breathing again—or more accurately, the breathing beneath his being.

  Asleep, what previously sounded agonizingly similar to lungs filling up with shards of glass currently resembles a more muted noise, perhaps like that of shredding paper with your bare hands. Perhaps? The word doesn’t sound like me. This is what I mean about beginning to feel more and more like Ashlyn Baptiste—realizing she doesn’t use words like perhaps.

  Even in my amnesia state, I remember more words than I would probably use in conversation. Hence, doth, perchance, each of those feels exotic and ancient to me, though less so than they ever were in life, as though I could think in Shakespearean terms if I chose to. “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow that I shall say good night till it be morrow.” Why is it that I can recall the story of Romeo and Juliet but next to nothing about my own tale?

  I’m getting lost in my thoughts again, digging for more bits of Ashlyn while keeping my visual focus on Breckon, when I notice his mother ease his bedroom door open. She watches him for several ponderous seconds that set me to thinking … how long has he been asleep? It was only the one pill that he swallowed this morning, I’m sure of it.

  Granted, you’re probably not supposed to swallow them back to back the way he did last night and this morning, but it would take many more than that to overdose, wouldn’t it?

  My attention shifts to his alarm clock. Twelve minutes to one. No wonder Breckon’s mother is checking on him. “Honey?” she ventures. “Breckon?”

  He opens his glazed-over eyes and they remind me of frosted glass windows—it’s as though you can barely see through them to the actual person they belong to. Breckon stares hazily at his mother and listens to her say, “Your father and I are meeting Barbara and Sean for lunch. Lily was wondering if you’d like to join her, go out somewhere together?”

  I have no idea who Barbara and Sean are but Breckon runs one hand down his face. “I’m really wiped,” he mumbles after a five-second delay. “I’ll warm up something from the freezer later.”

  “You don’t want to get up?” his mom tries again. “Lily has to drop into the health-food store and run some other errands.”
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br />   “How does that have anything to do with me?” Breckon asks, sounding like your stereotypical moody teenager.

  Dawn Cody drops her hands into her cardigan pockets, her eyes weary but concerned. “I thought you might like to go with her. You shouldn’t stay in bed all afternoon today, Breckon.” I wonder if Mr. Cody told his wife about Jules’s sleepover last night and whether this is the point in the conversation where she’ll choose to bring it up.

  “If Lily really needs me to go, I’ll go,” Breckon says. “But not if you just want me to get up for no reason.”

  “For no reason?” his mother repeats. “How about because I’d feel better if you were doing something?”

  “Why shou K20119;ll go,ld I do something?” Breckon fires back. “Why should I do anything?”

  He glowers at her from the bed and I feel sorry for his mom, even sorrier when she points her chin down towards her chest and says, “Don’t fight me, Breckon. I don’t have the energy for it.”

  “I’m not fighting you,” he protests. “I’m just really, really tired, Mom. Can’t you tell Lily to go without me?”

  His glazed-over eyes plead with her, her own expression revealing she’s about three seconds away from caving. “Please eat something,” she tells him. “Okay?”

  “I will.” Breckon yawns and dives under his pillow. Outside a delivery truck is backing up and I’ve just remembered something else about myself—I’m a light sleeper. I’d never be able to drift off to the annoying sound of that beep, beep.

  Well, unless maybe I’d taken a sleeping pill. For the second time today I watch Breckon Cody slip back into sleep.

  five

  ashlyn

  I think I’m beginning to understand what it would be like to live inside a straitjacket. Although time seems to speed up when Breckon’s asleep, it can’t move quickly enough for me. With every hour that goes by I find myself more and more surprised that the depth of my agitation doesn’t snap me immediately into full consciousness.

  I think …

  This is going to sound completely freakish but I think I might be able to remember the moment I was born, and if that’s true it’s something I want to forget fast. The experience smelled like sweat mingled with disinfectant. Overwhelmingly bright and loud and altogether wrong. I screamed at the outrageous wrongness of it, every cell of my tiny being protesting, but I couldn’t make it stop—the incomprehensible flurry of images and sounds, cool air brushing against my newly unprotected skin—no, no, I don’t want this!

  And this next thing is even crazier than my false birth memory—because there’s no way that can be real, right? Anyway, this is lock me up in a rubber room crazy (which doesn’t matter because for all intents and purposes, I’m already there), but the memories rushing to the surface now predate me. One moment I’m all but clueless about myself and the next I’m waking up in my dream within a dream and remembering my parents’ love story. I guess I must’ve heard it over the years so it’s not weird that I’d remember it, but now … well, now I can SEE and HEAR those past events in my mind. High-definition images and surround sound. If my parents had met in a foreign country maybe there’d even be subtitles.

  Somewhere in the outside world, they’re pumping drugs into N20119becausemy system, making me hallucinate fake memories. That has to be what’s happening here. Either that or my brain is beginning to shut down and this is what happens when you die, your prehistory flashes before your eyes right along with the rest of your life.

  Shut up, you’re not dying!

  I’m talking to myself in two different personas now. I’m reaching for a full-throttle meltdown and why not? Why stop halfway? Why not just go for it, jump on and ride the wave?

  I want to remember, when it comes down to it. Even if it’s fake. My own thoughts and memories and this Breckon dream reality are all I have in the world.

  I mean, they’re my parents. Of course I want to remember. My parents. I can’t believe I ever forgot them. The second their faces materialize in my brain they set like cement and make my soul sing. They were so young when they met, practically as young as I am now. They shared a first-year philosophy class at the University of Toronto, Cynthia and Curtis, sitting next to each other in the fifth row of a lecture hall, both of them not fans of the professor or the subject. My dad was a babe back then, which is one of those things you never truly want to realize about your father because that’s gross. Gross but obvious, like the way you can’t miss that it’s pouring rain if you happen to be standing around outside without an umbrella. My mom was pretty too, but in an understated way, an amused intelligence in her face that has always made people wonder what she was thinking. She’s paler and smaller than me—her ancestry half Chinese and half Scottish. Her keen eyes crinkled as she and my father quietly but mercilessly mocked their philosophy professor under their breath all semester, bonding over the act of eviscerating him.

  As I’m remembering that, another memory swims up to meet it, an old white man with piercing green eyes locking a grin on me and saying his head was hurting with trying to figure out where I was from. I don’t think he meant it in an unkind way but now that I remember the question I think it’s one I heard a lot when I was a kid. People think they can ask you questions they wouldn’t ask an older person, as long as they’re smiling.

  I don’t know if I answered him but the short answer is Ontario, Canada, which is the same place we were when he asked me. And the answer he wanted to hear is really the answer to an entirely different question, which is that my mother is from Canada too and her father was born in Jamaica to Chinese Jamaican parents, and her mother emigrated from Scotland. I see my grandparents’ faces in my mind, my memories doubling and quadrupling. My grandmother on my dad’s side is African American from Chicago, where she was both a teacher and an amateur singer. She moved to Ontario when she married my French Canadian grandfather, and when anyone meets my grandmother one of the very first things they usually find out about her is that she’s quite possibly the world’s biggest Tina Turner fan, which is apparently the reason that even when I have amnesia I can still remember the Queen of Rock and Roll and the song “River Deep, Mountain High.”

  I sing the song in my head a little and I can hear the way my grandmother sings it, almost as good as Tina herself. I love that I can remember that. Bit by bit I’m reclaiming my identity.

  Sgn=ouldnI see the three of us—my grandmother, me and my big sister Celeste—shimmying and singing along to Tina in my grandmother’s kitchen as cinnamon rolls baked in the oven. A big sister too, yes. One who was long and lean like my father. The prettier, smarter one who always knew the right way to speak and do things, even when we were both small.

  My voice would pierce the air in uncontrolled bursts, my elbows and feet accidentally knocking delicate treasures off shelves. Fragile birthday gifts would be broken in no time, clothes torn and holes appearing in almost-new shoes. Even my printing was messy and flopped way over to the left side like it’d been subjected to a strong wind. And, ohhh, at night I would lie in bed with the gigantic teddy bear my dad had won at a company raffle, telling Winston (because that’s what the tag attached to the back of one of his paws said his name was) about my day and then lending him my voice so Winston could reply.

  Countless nights we’d stay up late talking to each other, and the following day I’d act like a brat from exhaustion, even clumsier and louder than usual, until my parents threatened that Winston would have to sleep in another room if I wouldn’t go to sleep. Of course I didn’t listen. And then I was distraught when my father came in to take the bear away from me, and I cried so long and hard that my mother had to bring him back.

  This was such a long, long time ago, yet the images and feelings are as crystal clear in my head as if they had just happened, the sympathy in Mom’s eyes as she handed Winston back to me and stroked my hair. “You save the talking to him for morning, okay, love?” she said.

  Love. Like her own mother would say.

/>   And my sister … before my life collapsed into this surreal dream-world existence I think I used to be a bit jealous of her, but when I remember Celeste now all I feel is grateful for having an older sister—an older sister and a twelve-year-old brother named Garrett, both of them smarter and quieter than I was. I bubble with happiness as I picture the two of them. Garrett as a baby laughing gleefully as he squirts my diaper-changing father in the cheek. Celeste, years ago, reading me an adventure book about an underground city, sounding, to my young ears, almost as grown-up as my mother although she only has three years on me.

  My brain swirls with memories, the sights and sounds catapulting me back to the very beginning. I’d be dizzy if I was conscious. Dizzy and overjoyed at the same time.

  So what if this is a hallucination? I get to watch my parents fall in love. I see them in philosophy class and want to laugh at how immature they seem. Not like people who are anyone’s parents. Solely themselves, Curtis and Cynthia.

  Though they clearly have a lot of fun talking to each other, their in-class chats don’t develop beyond casual friendship. That doesn’t surprise me because now I remember how their version of the story goes, and it doesn’t really get started until years later, at a city hospital. St. Mike’s in Toronto, Curtis visiting my grandmother after her hysterectomy and Cynthia visiting a friend who had just given birth to her first child.

  Toronto is full of hospitals—what are the odds my parents would visit the exact same on Sexahile on the exact same day at the exact same time? And even so, with a huge, majorly busy hospital, the likelihood that you’d run into someone must be slim. But there they were in the St. Mike’s gift shop, Curtis in a light leather coat and dress pants that look like they were tailored to fit him and Cynthia in a turtleneck and shapely brown boots. They spotted each other while each of them was examining the bright assortment of floral arrangements in the gift shop flower cooler, and my father did a miniature double take. My mom grinned widely, recognizing him right away too, and exclaimed, “Hey—it’s been a long time!”