Watch Me Disappear

by Janelle Brown

  Her mom is still there, looking amused. She smiles, revealing deep grooves in her sun-etched face, and she outstretches her hand as if to take Olive’s own. “Olive,” she says with a note of disappointment in her voice. “You aren’t trying hard enough.”

  There’s a burning sensation in Olive’s chest that’s making it hard to breathe. “I’m trying as hard as I can, Mom,” Olive whispers, tears welling up in her eyes, but the weird thing is that she doesn’t feel sad, not at all. She feels almost…transcendent, as if she’s thisclose to getting the answer to some vital question that will make everything clear.

  And then it comes to her, the answer she’s waiting for. It floods her with a giddy rush: Mom isn’t dead.

  Olive lurches forward with the force of this epiphany. Where did it come from? She takes a step toward her mother, and then another as her mother’s figure starts to fade and recede before her; and then she starts to run, although it feels like she is running through wet cement. She feels the backpack slip off her shoulder and slam to the floor behind her. She understands that she needs to grab her mother’s outstretched hand, and that if she can somehow seize it, she will be able to drag her mother through that translucent overlay and back to her, back into Olive’s world, back to…

  Wham. She runs straight into the wall.

  Olive is momentarily blinded with pain—a goose egg will later rise on the spot where forehead connected with plaster—and when she can finally see again, her mother is gone.

  The world comes collapsing back in around her: the rank locker smell of dirty gym clothes and spoiling bananas, the squeak of rubber soles on waxed oak, and the thrilled faces of the three gaping freshmen who have gathered around her, so close that she can feel the heat of their gummy breath.

  “OhmyGodareyouOK,” says one freshman, an unfortunately pimpled blonde whom Olive has never spoken with before (Holly? Haley?). She leans in as if to touch the lump on Olive’s forehead, and Olive flinches.

  “I’m fine, thanks for the concern, really, but it’s no big deal,” Olive says, smiling apologetically as she backs away. She clocks her backpack on the ground a few feet away and sidles toward it. Ming and Tracy, still on ladders at the end of the hall, have stopped what they are doing and are watching with overt fascination the tableau playing out before them. She waves at them. Tracy waves back with a silly little finger-wiggle, but Ming just stares at Olive, her brow puckering behind the severe curtain of her black bangs.

  Meanwhile the three freshmen are following closely behind Olive, not ready to give up rubbernecking quite yet. “You just ran straight into the wall,” Haley/Holly says accusatorily. “It was kind of crazytown.”

  Olive reaches down and grabs her backpack. Its weight in her hand grounds her, and she swings it over her shoulder, then tugs her skirt straight. The presence of the girls makes it hard to hang on to the answer that she just had in her grasp, and she desperately wants to escape so she can think all this over, figure it out. “Honestly, it’s nothing,” she says. The girls continue to peck around her, unsatisfied. Oh, please let me be alone, she thinks. “Just,” and her voice drops as if letting them in on a secret, “I’m a little hungover. You know?”

  “Ohhhhh,” the girls say in low knowing voices that fail to conceal their utter unknowingness. Not that Olive knows much, either—she’s been hungover exactly once in her life, after a sleepover at Natalie’s house during which she polished off half of a leftover bottle of Christmas crème de menthe. But one thing she’s learned during her five-year career at Claremont Prep is that underclass girls believe there are secrets to a better life that will someday be unlocked, like the upper levels of a videogame, once they are able to drive a car or procure alcohol or get their braces off. She wishes she could tell these girls that things get easier, but in her experience they don’t. Not really. (With the possible exception of being able to drive yourself: That is pretty great.) You just discover that there are even bigger, more complicated problems that you have to solve.

  In any case, with this small untruth, Olive is at last able to untangle herself. She continues to walk in the direction of the Redwood Wing, aware that the girls are whispering behind her. (She hears just a snippet: You know, the girl with the dead mom…) And then, as the warning bell rings, she turns abruptly and exits to the courtyard.

  The October air is sharp and wet against her face. She stands under the eaves, the rain splattering the rubber shells of her Converses, and tries to focus. Mom isn’t dead. She allows herself this thought again, gingerly, as if she’s metering out a particularly tasty piece of chocolate cake. The storm rushes through the oak trees, sending a shiver across them, and Olive realizes that she’s trembling.

  She finds herself thinking about her mother’s books. Years earlier, when Olive was in seventh grade, Billie had given her a dog-eared collection of Lois Duncan novels that she’d found at a yard sale. “These were my favorite books when I was your age,” Billie told Olive, dropping them on her desk. “My parents didn’t allow me this kind of stuff—my dad was a preacher, he called them devil books, he wanted me reading the Bible instead—but I’d hide them under my bed anyway and read at night with a flashlight.” She spread the books out, examining them with a faint smile.

  “I’m supposed to be reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Olive had said, secretly skeptical of the mass-market covers and broken-down spines.

  Billie wrinkled her nose. “That racist old saw? I’ll tell you what happens: Tom finds the gold, and the widow adopts Huck,” she said. “Now. Read these. They’ll never give you these kinds of books in school, even though this is the stuff that’s really fun. God, junior high is so dull and confining. Don’t let them box you in with those dreary assigned-reading lists.”

  Olive was thrilled by this—her mother, openly defying authority—and so, that night, she began flipping through the first pages of Down a Dark Hall. It turned out to be a story about a boarding school called Blackwood where telepathic kids are forced into servitude by an evil headmistress, Madame Duret, who uses them to channel the spirits of famous dead artists. Immediately, despite herself, Olive was hooked:

  She did not sleep well at Blackwood. She dreamed. She knew that she dreamed, for when she woke in the mornings the feeling of the dreams still clung to the edges of her mind, and yet in most cases she could not remember what they had been.

  I know that feeling, Olive had thought. She often woke up in a state of vague panic, sensing that something had happened in the dark over which she had no jurisdiction. She would lie there with her heart pounding, terrified and awed by this sense that there was something bigger than she was, something that was just out of her grasp, something she needed to understand to make everything settle properly into place.

  She finished Down a Dark Hall before she went to sleep that night, then demolished the rest of the pile by the end of the month: the book about the girl who can astral project, the book about the girl who can read minds, the book about the girl who has visions about people halfway across the world. There was something freeing about all the possibility contained in these books, of transformation just over the horizon. Secret worlds unfurled before her, inviting her in. What if? she would ask herself with a delicious shudder. What if it’s all true?

  What if? She stands there in the Claremont Prep courtyard now with her eyes closed, the rain soaking through her shoes as she thinks of phantoms, and visions, and possibility. Her mind keeps settling back in the same place: What if Mom is still alive, somewhere, and she has reached out to let me know?

  Rationally speaking, it isn’t completely beyond reason, given the circumstances of Billie’s death.

  For the last year, ever since the accident, Olive has felt like she’s been in a constant state of waiting: waiting for Billie to walk through the door, waiting for her cellphone display to light up with the word MOM, waiting for her mother’s voice to waft up the stairs calling her down for dinner. It’s as if her mom is always just offstage, abou
t to enter, but keeps missing her cue. Maybe Olive has felt that way for a reason: Maybe, deep in some part of her brain that no one really understands, she has secretly known that her mom isn’t actually gone.

  She thinks of her mother’s outstretched hand. Why aren’t you looking? And it’s obvious, suddenly, what she meant: Why aren’t you looking for me?

  “Olive.” A voice yanks her back to the present. Her eyes fly open to see Mrs. Santiago, the school counselor, standing in front of her, her stout body swathed in voluminous layers of earth-tone knitwear. “Don’t you have English with Mr. Heron right now?”

  “I needed a little fresh air,” Olive says. “I was just about to go in.”

  Mrs. Santiago scrutinizes Olive’s face. “Do you need to visit the school nurse?” She twists her lips, and her brown eyes grow soft as—Olive can see it coming a mile away, she has seen it a thousand times in the last year, this well-intentioned but exhausting concern that, honestly, often feels more about them than her—she reaches out and grips Olive’s upper arm. “Or do you need to talk, hmm? I know it’s almost the anniversary of your mother’s…Well. It’s very normal to be having emotional feelings right about now.”

  Feelings. Yes, she has one. Olive smiles, a grin so wide that Mrs. Santiago’s hand slides off and hangs with quizzical surprise in midair. “I’m fine,” she says. “Thanks for your concern, Mrs. Santiago. But honestly, I feel great.”

  And she does. She feels great as she heaves the backpack up and cradles its bulk in her arms, thrusting the courtyard door open with her shoulder. She glances at the hall clock—five minutes past ten—and begins to run, and that feels amazing, too, light and free. Behind her, Mrs. Santiago is watching her with bafflement and in most likelihood making a mental note to get Olive back in for a psychiatric evaluation, but Olive doesn’t care.

  My mom isn’t dead after all. This conviction grows, pulsing through Olive as she runs through the Redwood Wing, past the glass case prominently displaying her science fair model of a vertical-axis wind turbine; past her own locker, smelling faintly of the dried lavender sachets she keeps there because they remind her of her mother’s shampoo; past the administration offices where she once spent endless hours dutifully filling in “grief worksheets” with Mrs. Santiago, which didn’t make her feel better at all. But now—now she feels great.

  Why aren’t you looking for me? You aren’t trying hard enough. She realizes now that she has been summoned. By her mother. Who supposedly died a year ago. Summoned—where? To do what? It makes no sense at all, and yet somehow it seems so very clear. She thinks of that line in the book that she read all those years ago—the feeling of the dreams still clinging to the edges of her mind—and for the first time, she thinks she knows what it is she’s been dreaming of.

  By the time she swings herself down into her seat—Waiting for Godot flung open on the desk before her, Mr. Heron winking at her from the front of the classroom as he taps the face of his Apple watch with a finger—Olive is certain. Her mother is still alive out there, somewhere, and Olive needs to try harder, much harder, to find her.

  I read, not long ago, about a psychologist who claimed that he’d made two strangers fall in love in his research lab: All it took was thirty-six probing questions and four minutes of staring into each other’s eyes. This could work for just about any potential couple, the doctor wrote. “Love,” as he’d manifested it, was not an unfathomable mystery—not some cryptic brew of chemical attraction and compatible personalities and a shared passion for cowboy poetry or Russian opera; not kismet, luck, or fate—but a simple matter of openness to intimacy. Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.

  There’s part of me—the pragmatic left-brain part, honed by journalism school and nearly two decades at a news publication—that appreciates the logic in this. With seven billion people on the planet, it would make sense that instead of one true love you would have a multitude of potential connections in search of reciprocity. But the other part of me—the part that loved one woman and one woman only my entire adult life—finds this “love quiz” notion depressingly clinical. It sounds like rats in a cage, learning to press the proper combination of buttons to receive their food pellets, and that can’t be right.

  Because there was something magical about my immediate connection with Billie. From the very first moment, that soggy evening when she burst through the closing doors of the rush-hour J Church streetcar, rain flying off her, and plopped herself into the last available seat, which had just opened up next to me. Like a kite, sailing through a storm right to me.

  She turned to me, water trickling down her face, and she said something that I couldn’t quite hear over the Smashing Pumpkins song blasting from my Discman. Later, Billie would tell me that she’d simply commented about the weather, but as I fumbled with my headphones I could have sworn that she’d said There you are. As if she’d known all along that we would find each other there, on that crowded Muni car. The floating, wistful chords in my ears, the steam coming off her skin: Who was I to argue with this luminous girl with the fairy-like pixie haircut, laughing as she wrung the rain from her dripping clothes? She had somehow sucked all the light from the bus and drawn it into herself.

  So I echoed her words, thrilling to them—Here I am—and she smiled back at me, her entire face brightening with delight. That was it for me. There was no need to ask her about her “most treasured memory” (question 17) or to make “three true ‘we’ statements” (question 25): I knew that our life together had begun.

  Six weeks later, we were engaged. Looking back at those weeks, I remember them the way a drug addict probably recalls a bender: as a giddy blur, time that seemed to disappear into a single throb of annihilating emotion, chased by a dim awareness that I was dancing on a precipice.

  Billie was beautiful, with the kind of unforgettable face you see in old movies—a study in dark and light, pale skin and black eyes, an elfin chin and freckled cheekbones—and she was also an aspiring artist, which of course thrilled me. Four years older than me, she possessed a worldliness that I aspired to. But what I loved most about Billie was her capacity for joy, her fearless abandon. Sure, I liked indie rock and often drank too much—who in San Francisco didn’t back then?—but Billie introduced me to Ecstasy, and skinny-dipping in Lake Merced, and driving around on rented motor scooters at night, taking photographs. I never knew what to expect with her. She destabilized me.

  By the time I met Billie on that bus, I had managed to make myself a minor name in the fish tank of San Francisco’s incipient tech journalism scene. As a junior writer at Decode magazine, I would stand around at parties on South of Market rooftops, my hoodie pulled up against the fog, and make proclamations like “There’s no real freedom until all information is free” and “The true democracy of the digital revolution spells the end of traditional power structures.” And when I sat down in front of my computer and wrote these things down, they got published and read by hundreds of thousands of people, and that somehow made them true. I was twenty-six years old in the new millennium and the whole world was changing and I was at the very forefront of it.

  And yet, with all the thrilling things happening around me, Billie was the only part of it that really took my breath away. I’d spent my career that far writing about what the world was like, but she’d actually been out there living in it: She’d lived through an abusive childhood with tyrannical, religious parents; lived through running away her senior year of high school; lived through an itinerant radical phase in the Pacific Northwest with a drug-dealer boyfriend, a period she referred to as her Lost Years. Her diminutive Tenderloin apartment was hung with artifacts from her years of world travel: Indian saris, Balinese carvings, Turkish pottery. She even had the scars, emotional and physical, to prove just how much she’d lived: the faint holes in her eyebrows and nose from old piercings, the blurred flesh on her calves where her regrettable tattoos had bee
n lasered off, the way her gaze went someplace far away when she talked about her childhood.

  Six weeks after we met, Billie took me for a midnight picnic on a secret rocky peak above the Castro where the view was, she promised, “tremendous.” There we sat, collars turned up against the freezing wind, drinking cheap Chianti straight from the bottle and looking out at the endless stream of taillights passing through the city below us.

  “Look at all those people,” I remember her saying. “Like locusts. Eating and drinking and shopping and going about their business without a bigger thought in their heads. Just plowing down anything that gets in their way without realizing what they are doing to the planet.” She cocked a finger at a yellow Hummer barreling down Market Street and pulled an invisible trigger.

  I loved this: the righteous activist, passionately opinionated. “Sure. But think of the flip side of that,” I said. “Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”

  She laughed. “You really believe your own propaganda.” But she turned to study my face. “Seriously, you’re so upbeat. I love that about you. I can’t decide if you’re the smartest person in the room or the most naïve. I hope we all get to live in your world.” She reached out and slipped her hand into the pocket of my hoodie, sliding a cold palm into mine. Her voice grew thick. “I guess I’ve seen things that you haven’t. It’s made me pessimistic. Growing up with my parents telling me I was going to go to hell, and then all those years with Sidney, who took me into some bad places…it changes you, you know? You never trust people after that.”

  I gripped her palm, warming it with my own. I’d had a painful childhood, too—my sister, Jenny, died in front of me, a swimming pool accident, when I was eight—but it was full of love. Billie couldn’t claim the same. When we were together I felt this imbalance acutely, as if I needed to make some transfer of the abundance that life had gifted me. When she lay quiet in my arms I could feel her racing heart, sense something broken underneath her tough shell. It pained me to know that she’d been damaged by people who hadn’t loved her enough. How could I possibly fix that?