Everything Beautiful Is Not Ruined

by Danielle Younge-Ullman

  “All right,” Isaac said, starting to walk counterclockwise on the track. “You wanted to talk, talk.”

  “I just want to know what . . . I mean first, honestly I want to know how you are and what happened to you, because we went through something and it feels weird not to talk about it. Not to mention that you refuse to talk to me at all, or even acknowledge my existence.”

  I stopped, turned to face him, but he looked down at his feet, over my shoulder, anywhere but at my face.

  “See? You won’t even look at me. You seem to have this problem with me and it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “It’s you who has the problem.” His angry eyes suddenly, finally, locked on mine. “You’ve become one of them.”

  “One of . . . ? What? I have not.”

  “You have. You’re one of them—”

  “Oh, is that so?” I cut in. “You see me calling people names, then, and locking them in closets and humiliating them and beating them up? Really?”

  “No, but you’ve become a popular person,” he said, with a sneer that didn’t suit him.

  “I do have friends, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Yeah, and you can’t be hanging around with a guy like me.”

  “That makes no sense. That’s absurd.”

  “Okay, a guy like the old me. Who is still me, in fact.”

  “So . . . you think if you still were . . . what—looking like how you did when you were twelve, I would arbitrarily decide not to be your friend? That’s a ridiculous conclusion, Isaac, based on zero evidence.”

  “I have all the evidence I need!” He was almost shouting. “I saw the evidence, Ingrid, and you can say what you want and you can lie your ass off now, but I saw it in your eyes my very first day here. I saw you standing there with your giggling friend and I saw the look in your eyes when you realized who I was.”

  “Isaac, I was happy to see you.”

  “You weren’t!”

  “I was. But I—”

  “I saw it! In your eyes—like I was a ghost, or some unwelcome relative who showed up to take a dump in the middle of your new life.” He turned away, started walking so fast around the track, I had to jog to keep up with him. “After all the time I spent remembering you as this brave, ass-kicking girl, and meanwhile all you did was hide; all you did was assimilate.”

  I grabbed his arm, forcing him to stop again, and got in front of him.

  “Listen,” I said, right up in his face, “having friends is not a crime. Having a chance to be a normal teenager is not a crime. And the friends I have now are nothing like the people who did that to us, and you’ve been at Godark long enough by now to know it.”

  “But you haven’t told them—”

  “Told them what?”

  “That you were . . . that you were like me.”

  “You know nothing about what I’ve told them or not told them, Isaac. And you know nothing about what you saw in my eyes, either.”

  “So you have told them?”

  “It’s not like it’s a disease, Isaac. Or something to be ashamed of. They were assholes. Bullies. They’re the ones you should be mad at, not me.”

  He gaped at me, and I continued.

  “You expected me to be some kind of banner-waving advocate, is that it? I don’t see you telling everyone all of those sad details either. You don’t want to bring that along with you any more than I did. You want a chance for people to look at you as something other than a victim. You want to be able to look at yourself as something other too. You say I’m hiding? You’ve had a full body makeover, and don’t think I don’t know you’re enjoying every second of being the cute new boy at Godark. I don’t see you refusing to ‘assimilate’ as you call it, or refusing to make friends, so what the hell is your problem with me?”

  “I—”

  “You want to know what I was thinking, what I felt when I saw you? Yeah, you saw something there. Because just in case you’ve forgotten, we had an awful time, and seeing you brought it back all at once. So excuse me if it took me a millisecond to start jumping for joy, Isaac.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “No, not okay. You want me to tell everyone? I can tell them. I happen to believe they’re real friends and nobody would turn on me, or you. Personally, I don’t feel the need to dwell on or share every terrible thing that’s ever happened to me, but if you want me to, I will.”

  He kept his eyes trained on some point in the distance.

  “C’mon, just say the word.”

  Isaac’s eyes met mine then, and held for a long moment. “You mean it,” he said, finally.

  “Duh.”

  “It’s . . . okay. I mean, you don’t have to.”

  “You mean you don’t want me to.”

  “No, go ahead.”

  “All right, I will,” I said, and started to walk away.

  “Okay, I don’t want you to,” he said, and I stopped, turned back to look at him.

  “Well, maybe now I want to.”

  “I . . . whatever. Do what you want. Just . . . warn me first, if you don’t mind.”

  “Fine.”

  “Great. Fine,” he said.

  My fury started to fade, and suddenly I noticed the wind, felt the cold on my arms, and crossed them over my chest. He looked shell-shocked. He was more fragile than I’d realized, more damaged, maybe, from his experience than I had been from mine. He’d had it worse, and for longer, certainly. I should have been gentler, but I was angry about how he’d treated me, frustrated at how he’d jumped to the worst conclusions about me, and confused by the ache I felt as he held my gaze.

  “Next time, Isaac? Before you make assumptions about me based on something you think you see in my eyes?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why don’t you save us the drama and just ask me?”

  And with that, I turned and walked away.

  PEACE

  (Peak Wilderness, Day Eleven, Continued)

  The moon is out (again) when we stagger into the campsite. It isn’t quite dark, but it certainly will be by the time dinner is being made.

  I don’t wait for anyone to give me a job to do. I don’t even worry about getting the tent up. I set my backpack on a rock near the shore, take my boots and socks off, dig out my bar of soap, and walk into the water fully clothed.

  Most of the group follows suit, with the exception of Peace, who strips down first, and runs back and forth in the sand, giving the rest of us a prolonged (should we desire) view of his genitals bouncing in the glowing pink last light of day.

  At least he’s going to bathe.

  It’s a long beach, and we each find our own spaces in the water to shimmy out of our clothing and try to rub the mud off. Once my pants, shirt, and socks are done, I dash out of the water in my underwear and bra (another thing my mom would freak over, but how can I even care?). I wring the clean-ish clothes out and put them on the rock next to my pack, then go back into the water.

  It’s cold—really cold—but I want desperately to be alone, and the cold feels so good on my sore feet, on the hundreds of bug bites, on my sore muscles. I kick back and forth in a futile effort to warm up, then pull my bra and panties off, looping them over one arm so I don’t lose them before I can get them washed.

  Before long it’s just me, my dwindling bar of soap, the reflection of the rising moon left in the water, and my miserable, angry heart beating against the cold.

  I am too tired to cry.

  I am so tired of everything, about everything, that I can imagine allowing the cold to take over, letting myself sink under the surface, and staying there, releasing my hold on the world and everything in it. I’m so tired, I’m not even shocked by the thought.

  Then I hear splashing and turn to see Peace coming back into the lake.

  I sink farther d
own into the water, hoping he somehow doesn’t know I’m here, and/or will get the hint that I don’t want company.

  But no.

  He comes right over to me.

  And there I am, horribly aware, suddenly, that I am naked under the water, and not too tired to care about that.

  “Hey, fearless leader,” he says, giving me a splash.

  “Hey, Bob,” I say, with a deliberate lack of enthusiasm.

  “Peace.”

  “Right. Um, no, thanks.”

  “No thanks for what?”

  Another splash.

  “For the splashing game invitation.”

  “What’s the matter, afraid to drop your soap?” he says, with a yucky waggle of his eyebrows.

  “I’m just trying to enjoy the peace, Peace.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “Alone, if you don’t mind.” I drift sideways.

  He follows. “Free country.”

  “What, are you five?”

  “Hey, hey, it’s all love, baby. All love.”

  “Riiiight.”

  “You don’t like me,” he says.

  “I don’t know you,” I reply. I’ve hunched as far down in the water as I can, and now I have to step backward into deeper water to keep him out of my space.

  “But you don’t like me. Admit it.”

  “Why do you care if I like you?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then why are you asking?”

  “I just want you to admit it.”

  “Look, sometimes people don’t hit it off. It’s normal.” I inch backward again.

  He follows again, towering over me now—his height and the fact that he doesn’t care that he’s naked and I do care that I am are both to his advantage. Because clearly he knows, and knows I know he knows, and he’s enjoying my extreme discomfort.

  Since backing away isn’t working, I plant my feet on the lake bottom and cross my arms over my chest.

  “I think, Peace, we should just agree to disagree.”

  “Yeah? About what?”

  “Everything.”

  “I dunno . . . Maybe we should talk about it.” His hands come down on my shoulders, and he starts massaging. “Maybe I can help. You seem very tense around me.”

  “I don’t need your help. And I don’t want a massage. Take your hands off me.”

  “Come on,” he says, hands gripping me harder, and bending down into the water so we’re face-to-face. “I think I know what this is about. It’s tension.”

  “Let go of me,” I say in a more assertive voice.

  He pulls me closer.

  “Sexual tension.”

  “Eww.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Let. Go. Of. Me. Now.”

  I struggle backward, but suddenly there’s no sand under my feet.

  He still has me, and he’s stronger than I am, stronger than I expected. And he’s managed to get me in a position where he can still touch the bottom and I can’t.

  “I know how to take care of that kind of tension,” he continues, putrid breath in my face. “We’re far enough out we could take care of it right here, right now.”

  I start kicking hard—not at him, but to get away.

  But he just laughs and yanks me right up against him so I can experience his disgusting hairiness and be revolted by his erection.

  “I don’t think so,” I snarl, but I’m scared. And worse, I can see by the satisfaction flaring in the depths of his eyes that he likes it.

  Now I kick him, but it’s hard to kick underwater and have any effect, and it lands with a whimper.

  He grins like a maniac and dunks me, holding me underwater for a few long, terrifying moments, as I try not to panic, not to waste energy struggling, and it becomes very clear to me that this is not how I want to die.

  Peace yanks me back up and, while I’m sputtering and gasping, makes a grab for my butt.

  “I could fuck you and drown you at the same time,” he says. “That would solve all my problems.”

  LOCAL ORGANIC AUTUMN

  (Age Fifteen)

  My conversation with Isaac cleared the air between us, somewhat. He stopped avoiding me, I stopped obsessing about his avoiding me, and I made a (possibly exaggerated) point of saying hello to him, particularly when I was with my friends, to show him I really wasn’t “one of them” as he put it. Everything was friendly.

  Friendly-ish.

  There was still something awkward between us, though. He would catch me looking at him in class, usually when he’d said something particularly smart, which was often, and I would turn away, my face feeling hot. Or I would notice him hovering at lunchtime or recess, acting like he wanted to talk to me, but then he’d wander off once he noticed me noticing.

  I was curious and disturbed by him, and filled with a kind of . . . expectancy.

  And then he fell into the clutches of Autumn Robarts.

  Became friends with her, I mean.

  Autumn was perfectly nice . . . in a perky, overly positive, possibly secretly evil sort of way. It was just that she always had to be the person to point out that your jeans were probably made by a child laborer, or that the cheese in your lunch wasn’t real cheese. Whatever you had, or thought, or did, she had/thought/did it better/cleaner/more ethically/ecologically. She gave up coffee and sugar and wheat and dairy and nightshades (what?) and television and her phone and found it transformative.

  “I’m so much more present,” she said.

  Was I the only person who considered this a bad thing?

  But we were a tolerant school, and if someone wanted to spend their spare time in conspicuous meditation and/or proselytizing, fine. Some people even joined her.

  It galled me to see Isaac hanging out with her. They were in music together (a subject I did not take, due to the not-subtle discouragement of Mom, even though it would have been an easy A for me), and I noticed him helping with her campaign to get rid of the school vending machines—a campaign Juno was campaigning against. In fact, suddenly Isaac seemed involved in everything—band, rugby, basketball, fund-raising, track-and-field, good cause X.

  “You’ve become quite the joiner,” I said in early November when I saw him putting up posters outside the theater. This came out a little more acidic than I’d meant it to, and his eyes narrowed.

  “Why not?” he said. “College applications aren’t far off. And it’s a good way to make friends.”

  “Plus you’ll be saving the world,” I said, unable to help myself. “You know, with your friend Autumn.”

  “You don’t like her.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Then why are you being such a bitch all of a sudden?”

  “Why are you still not talking to me?” To my surprise, this came out almost a wail, which was embarrassing.

  “I’m talking to you right now.”

  “I know, but it’s still . . . it’s not . . .”

  “Look, Ingrid . . .” He stood in front of me, flustered now and gripping the stack of posters tightly in both hands. “It’s . . . I don’t know. I recognize it’s still weird. But . . . it’s not like we have to be friends. Maybe that’s the problem—we’re both working on the illogical hypothesis that we should be. But we weren’t friends before.”

  “We didn’t have a chance to be friends.”

  “We wouldn’t have been, though. If you’d stayed. You’d eventually have risen to a higher social circle, and we wouldn’t have been friends.”

  “Okay, you have to forget about that. Neither of us has any idea what would have happened. It’s done. But . . . just come with me.” I gestured to the posters. “Put those down and come with me.”

  “What? You want to drag me over to the track and argue again? It’s cold out.”

&nb
sp; “No, I just . . . want to talk to you. Don’t you feel like . . .” I looked up and down the hall to make sure we were alone, and then felt awkward because he’d seen me doing it.

  “Like what?” he said, and took a half step closer, then took the same step back again.

  “I just have this . . . I keep having this sense that you and I, that we know each other.” I paused, waiting for him to say that we did or that we didn’t, but he was just watching me, waiting, so I barreled ahead. “I realize we don’t, actually, but I feel like one of these days we’re going to start talking and . . . it’ll be crazy because we won’t be able to stop. We have things to say, both of us, and I think we can say them to each other.”

  “Don’t you have Juno for that?”

  “Yes, but . . . no. Juno’s awesome. Very fun, very loyal, and she’s hilarious, but . . .”

  “Nothing bad has ever happened to her?” Isaac said. “That’s how she seems to me. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.”

  “That you just said that is exactly what I’m talking about. You get it. We’re meant to be friends, Isaac. Like, we already are friends, but just haven’t . . .”

  “Activated our friendship program?” he finished for me, a funny smile tugging at the corners of his mouth.

  “Yes!”

  “You’re a weirdo, you know that?”

  “Why?”

  “You go from shy to persistent to bitchy back to shy, and now you’re this tornado of intensity.”

  “So . . . what are you saying? You don’t feel it?”

  “I’m saying you confuse me. Yes, I have a similar feeling of knowing and yet not knowing you and being . . . curious about you. But we might find each other boring and stupid and nothing alike. What happens then?”

  I shrug. “Well, I know you’re not stupid at least. And neither am I, so we’ve got that part secure.”

  “You’re very all-or-nothing, Ingrid.”

  “I just want to be your friend, Isaac. No big deal.” It was a big deal, though. “I’m sorry if I’m being a freak.”

  “Well, why don’t we start by doing something normal?” he said, and held out the posters. Autumn had made them, to advertise auditions for The Wizard of Oz. “You can help me put these up.”