This Is the Story of You

by Beth Kephart

  I heard the birds before I heard the O’Sixteens, some of their songs close and some of them falling in from the faraway coves. I followed the clattering bridge, passed the pond and the sleeping swans, and now the breeze was in the tops of the trees, and I was still on the path, edging the empty culs-de-sac of trees and nests, until there they were, in the shade, campfire style.

  Ms. Isabel’s lavender coat was dragging behind her. Mario was up on his backpack for the purpose of height. Chang held her azalea-pink blade like a dish, and Tiny Tina and Taneisha were holding hands, no secrets to those two, not since a year before, when Tiny Tina had stood up on the lunch-table bench and announced that she was in love and Taneisha was hers: “Taneisha Green, you are off the market. O-fish-o-lee.”

  I didn’t see Deni at first, then there she was, sitting against a cypress whose lower branches were long gone, the stubs of them like the start of deer horns. She had her arms crossed over the tied sleeves of her brother’s jacket. She had her tic-tac-toe T-shirt on and her khaki shorts and a pair of hiking boots, scuffed at the reinforced toes. Her eyes were disappointed, cautious. They looked from me and then to them and then back again.

  Where the hell have you been? her eyes said.

  I need some help here.

  Look.

  I looked to where she was looking. I saw: Eva and Shift sharing the stump of a tree. They were sitting back to back, propped against each other, sideways to the rest of us, like they had known each other all their lives, like they were O-fish-o-lee. There was moss hanging like Mardi Gras beads above their heads. There was a blackbird in their tree. Shift’s hood was up. The binoculars were back around Eva’s neck, but on Shift’s denim lap was a perfect conch shell, still sweating with the salts of the sea. Shells were an Eva specialty. She found them, whole and unbroken. She gave the best as gifts, her name written inside with a gold glitter pen, as if she were the shell’s creator.

  What do you want me to do about it? my eyes said back.

  Something?

  What something?

  She gave him a shell, Mira. A shell.

  “Mira Banul,” Ms. Isabel said. “Please take a seat.”

  There was a pine-needle clearing between Marco and Dascher, and I chose that. Slipped the backpack off. Set down the skates. I took out my notebook and I glanced back at Deni and she was staring into the middle distance, only half listening to Ms. Isabel telling the story Ms. Isabel wished she didn’t have to tell. About the rising sea levels and the habitat loss, about invasive species, vegetation shifts, birds getting all messed up in the head—confused on the subjects of migration and breeding, nesting and care. Birds showing up at the wrong time in the wrong places, Ms. Isabel was saying, her roller cart at her feet, her coat full of fluff, her buttons wound loose on their threads.

  “Look up,” Ms. Isabel said. “Listen. Love.”

  Eva lifted her eyes toward the tops of the trees.

  Deni took a long, painful look at me.

  We sat quiet.

  There was the whooo of an owl.

  “I don’t know how I could love much more,” Eva said, the kind of thing she was unafraid to say to an entire audience of O’Sixteens. The kind of thing they let her say, without bothering to tease.

  “That’s the tragedy of it, isn’t it,” Ms. Isabel said. And then she looked at Shift and dialed the dahlia in her dreads.

  I waited, I kept waiting, for Shift to look up, to look back.

  Tell me who you are, Shift.

  It was time to stand and find our way back, through the gates, to the white-crunch parking lot.

  The atmosphere zinged with blue.

  There were no clouds to speak of.

  There was a wind, and on the wind were the birds that had followed us out, and, with the wind, Ginger’s gold hair ruffled and the hem of Ms. Isabel’s lavender coat never touched the ground.

  Deni caught up with me. We walked, not talking, my skates hanging from their tied laces between us.

  “Whole world’s falling apart,” Deni finally said. Which is what Deni said both times she got her news, both times she lost big and forever. Whole world’s falling apart. It wasn’t one hundred percent true. It wasn’t one hundred percent false. I managed the skates out of the way. Put my arm around her.

  Ahead of us, out in front, Eva and Shift were leading the O’Sixteens back toward Main and the reconstituted bank, toward Mr. Friedley and the songs of the kindergartners, the unrelenting sorrows of John Steinbeck. They were a solid half block ahead—not touching, not talking, then talking and not talking again. Eva’s long blond hair was tangled with ringlets and wind—a thick, yellow fog. She had her pink Skechers on and her orange short-shorts and a white, gauzy shirt with long sleeves; her skin was still pearly brown from the summer sun. Shift was wearing cropped jeans and the same sweatshirt, the same thin-at-the-heels flip-flops. His hood had flown back and his hair was wild—lighter than you’d expect on a guy that dark. He had a good foot of height on Eva. He carried his hands inside his pockets. He squeezed his thin spiral-bound between his right arm and his chest. He took one step to every two of Eva’s. He had his shoulders hulked up, to his ears.

  I watched them, I studied them, I turned to watch Ms. Isabel, who was watching them, too, and I remembered Eva two weeks before, top of the world. We’d ridden our Modes half the skinny length of Haven, rolling and cruising down the centerline of Main—Woo-hoo, the invaders are gone. We’d stopped where the island had stopped, the northernmost tip, the lighthouse, those red and white stripes, like old barbershop stripes, like the colors I’d painted Jasper Lee’s canes.

  It was Deni, Eva, and me. It was one day before school was to start. We climbed the empty belly of the lighthouse and went out by the rails and caught our breath and stood there looking. The myriad sea was that way. The whole wet world of hidden things—octopi and killer whales, blue crustaceans, redfins, walleyes, purple snails, sunken treasure, mermaids. A couple of bright sailboats were skimming the ocean’s top. A couple of far-off freighters were chugging. You could see China if you squinted hard enough, even if China could never see us, but Eva—Eva could see everything: She could see the submerged city of Alexandria and its Pharos lighthouse. She could see Port Royal and the fallen thousands. She could see the big hotel on Last Island, underwater, and the billiard parlor of Edingsville Beach, South Carolina. She could see Diamond City and Thompson’s Beach and all the other places the sea had swallowed. She could see her history best from way up there. She pointed, and we listened. She named the lost places, and I remember thinking about how big her heart was, how much she could love, how she should be mayor someday.

  “Eva,” Deni called now. “Wait up a sec.”

  But her words got tied up with the wind.

  Dr. Edwards had a beard. He had a mustache, he had sideburns, he had hair that flopped across his brow and down into his eyes. He was gray all over except for a thatch near his right ear. He favored that thatch. Touched it when he talked, and when we listened.

  We’d made it past Algebra to History.

  Down the hall, under Ms. Isabel’s orchestration, the O’Seventeens were reciting the periodic table—beryllium, magnesium, calcium, strontium, barium, radium, then back up to scandium. In Dr. Edwards’s room, we were still in Pompeii with the first century and the Romans, what he called a resorter’s paradise. Homes for the wealthy in Pompeii, he was saying. Brothels for the bored. Paved streets, tourist traffic, slaves for hire, open squares—Dr. Edwards was drawing us the picture, throwing images up on the screen, quizzing us on what we had promised to read the night before. That hot lump of rock called Mount Vesuvius. The spout of pumice and gas. The shower of ash. The air thickened like soup and the buildings falling down and the people trapped by the pyroclastic surge. One hundred miles per hour of poison rushing down—poison gas and murderous rock and ash. The pyroclastic surge of Pompeii swallowed eve
rything at once. It suffocated the stay- behinds. Knocked them flat where they had stood.

  Two thousand dead, Dr. Edwards said.

  “I believed that I was perishing with the world, and the world with me,” Shift, of all people, said. Shift of the Quotes, I was beginning to see. Shift of the timely memory. I could see Deni thinking one word: Pah-leeeze. I could see Eva thinking, Shift of my dreams. I could see some trouble coming, but the thing is, I didn’t foresee the trouble that came.

  “Pliny the Younger,” Dr. Edwards attributed, with a nod.

  “Yeah.”

  “And your name again, sir?”

  “Shift.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Shift. You are precisely right. Pliny believed the world was perishing. He lived to say it wasn’t.”

  Shift covered more of his head with the hood. Eva looked at Deni, who looked at me. They were chanting nickel, palladium, platinum, darmstadtium down the hall, Ms. Isabel singing the lead. They were going all out on “Frère Jacques” two floors down. Mr. Friedley was seconds away from sounding the bell.

  “An historian among us,” Dr. Edwards said.

  Shift. The first new student at Alabaster in ten years had been crowned “historian,” a word none of the rest of us had earned.

  Eva’s smile said it all.

  The wind had started to turn.

  There was no Mini Cooper on the pebble pad when I got home. Nothing. Traffic on the bridge, I thought.

  Eva, Deni, and I had each gone our separate Mode way—Deni rumbling the Gem, and me riding my wheels, and Eva pedaling her board, Shift beside her. He had that thin notebook of his still clenched under his arm. His legs were long; he didn’t have to run. We went north and south and east, two of us alone.

  On the couch by the bay window I threw my backpack down beside Mickey’s apron, Mickey’s secondhand purses, Mickey’s collection of sun hats. I grabbed a jar of Mickey’s granola mix, ran up the steps and rolled open the door to the deck. The sea was getting its gnarly face on, looking a little dented and chipped. There was a bank of gray clouds in the distance and Old Carmen on the rocks, her radio volumed up. News. Eye of the storm headed out to sea. Worst of the storm hurtling east, hurtling past.

  The Ultimates were rambling in—cutting over the dunes, kicking off their shoes, running the quickest line toward the sea froth. Chang dumped her backpack on the high sand, snatched her blade, flicked it, and it flew—a straight up-and-back boomerang whip. Taneisha raised her arm and snatched it, easy, nothing to it. She flicked it right back out, aiming for a trick, but the blade slammed against a breeze and fell into the sea.

  I could hear Taneisha’s bracelets ringing. I could see her cupping her hands around her mouth and calling to Mario, who was running, plunging into the cool temps of the sea, laughing inside the soak of it, his long hair hanging down like the ears of a sheepdog. He snapped up the Frisbee and high-kicked his way back to shore, his jeans hanging low below his waist.

  It was just some breeze. It was just that gray patch of clouds—way out there near China—and now the team had its game going again, its after-school practice of flicks and cuts, corkscrews and bombs, bookend maneuvers. Chang had a whistle around her neck, team-captain style. Mario was reckless with his art. Taneisha was off with her toss. Every time she missed, Tiny Tina called out, “Love you!”

  It took a while before they saw me, before Ginger, her plum-colored sundress filling up like a balloon, then deflating, according to the theatrics of the breeze, pointed at me, up on the deck, said, “Hey. Yo. Mira. You’re in.”

  The blade went short from Chang to Mario to Taneisha and then it took off and the breeze had it, the breeze rinsing it free, swiping it high and hinged, the sound of Taneisha’s gold bracelets still ringing. I stood by the rail of that deck. I raised my hand to the sky. I stopped the bullet speed. The Ultimates hollered high fives at me.

  Mira Banul. Blade in hand. Medium nothing, right then.

  The breeze blowing the wrong way, I bent at the knees, angled my wrist, and webbed my fingers across the disk and let go. It swished. Over the rail, into the sky, across the dune, where it caught a whirlpool of air and spun and Chang began to run, her long legs chipping across the wet sand, her black hair tossing forward, like a hat fallen down on her head. The blade was a kite on a string. It wobbled, then fell. Bounced on the sand, then rolled the wrong way, and now all of the Ultimates were running, dragging their game farther on, away, throwing a goodbye wave over their shoulders. Chang and Mario out in front, their long black hair snapping. Ginger in the middle. Taneisha and Tiny Tina in the back, holding hands as they ran, Tiny Tina an entire head and some shoulders over the girl she loved. The bright blade shone like a beacon. Atlantic City stood in the distance, its neon lights muted by the afternoon sun.

  I wished Mickey and Jasper Lee would come home, wondered vaguely what they were up to, when Deni would call, what Eva knew about Shift and when she would tell us. The tide was going to turn. Old Carmen was watching the sea. She stood up, hitched her waders to her waist with her hands in her pockets, then walked down to the tide and went in up to her knees, didn’t flinch. She stood there, staring, for the longest time, then reached in and rinsed both hands in the salt of the sea. There was a dolphin way out there, or maybe two. There were gulls collecting like clouds and swooping low, screaming some nonsense. The waves were full of extra froth and vigor.

  I didn’t find Mickey’s message until later.

  Call me, sweetie. Soon.

  One blue Slurpee. Two blue Slurpees. Three blue Slurpees. Four. Counting the way I’d learned to count in First Aid and Rescue—Rosie’s sister being the paramedic instructor and always influenced by flavors.

  The phone rang through.

  I punched end, tried again, nothing.

  Third time I dialed, it rang five and a half rings, and then I got the echo noise of Memorial, the beep of some machine, the slipping squeak of rubber soles, until finally, after that, the alto version of my mother’s voice—not a good sign, not what I wanted to hear. Low alto was Mickey controlling her breaths and monitoring her tone. It was Mickey trying to protect me from something.

  “Mickey?” I said, leaving the deck for my attic, too little pacing room.

  My back to the breeze. My phone to one ear, my free hand cupping the other ear. I had to hear everything she said. The first time. No repeating.

  “Tell me,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “Please?”

  There were all kinds of Memorial noises now. Wheel vroom on linoleum. Background shuffle. The flip flop of Mickey’s shoes, because she was on the move, looking for a quieter wedge of hospital hall; I’d seen that hall, I’d hopscotched that hall, I knew the shine of its every painted- like-everything’s-fine green inch. Seven blue Slurpees. Eight Blue slurpees. Nine.

  “Mickey?”

  “It’s Jasper Lee.”

  If I talked, she couldn’t, so I said nothing. If I pressed, she’d just have to pause again, breathe in steady and breathe out steady, keep her voice slow, low. Ten blue Slurpees. Eleven.

  “He’s had a reaction, Mira. To the Elaprase.”

  I stopped walking my tight circle. Turned to face the breeze that was blowing in through the open sliding door. On the beach, the Ultimates had returned, were running north after each other, toward the longest arm of rocks. There was a grayer patch of sky. Old Carmen stood with one hand over her eyes, salute style. That tide rising, higher.

  “Anaphylaxis. Angioedema. Tachypnea. Dysphonia,” Mickey was saying, and a gull, maybe a couple of gulls screamed, and I couldn’t hear the in-between words, couldn’t hear the next part, stepped out of my room, into the hall. The bathroom door was rattling on its hinges. A bottle of shampoo had blown off the ledge into the claw-foot tub.

  “It was like—we were done,” Mickey was saying. “It was like any other infusion day—the needl
e out, the gauze on, packing to go. You know? We were by the elevator. We were pressing down—he was, Jasper Lee—and the next thing I knew his face was bright red, and he was wheezing, saying, ‘I can’t see,’ and then he said, ‘Everything tastes like metal, tastes like I swallowed the Mini Cooper keys, did I swallow the keys?’ and thank God, Mira, thank God I was standing right there, because he slumped, but he didn’t hit the floor, he’d have hit his head if he’d hit the floor, because I had him, at least I had him, right? And he was in my arms and I ran him back to the machines, to the bed, to Vidushi—you remember Vidushi? The nurse? She saw me coming.”

  I could picture her there, in the fake happy of bright hospital lights. I could put her into place in my freaked imagination—the chipped blue polish of her toenails like bruises on the beat-up pads of her flip-flops, that long slash-tear in the hem of her jeans. I could see Mickey, but I couldn’t see Jasper Lee. Not where he was, not who he was with, not what was happening to the bravest guy I knew.

  “Is he—?”

  “Intubated,” Mickey said. “And . . .” She swallowed, stopped, didn’t start again, as if she couldn’t remember, had forgotten where I was, that I was me, alone, in the hand-me-down house behind the dunes beside the shore, Old Carmen acting weird out there, the Ultimates gone again. “Isotonic crystalloid,” Mickey said. “Isotonic crystalloid, because they said he needed fluids. Fluids and air. That’s what they said. Oh. Sweetie,” she gasped. She must have put her hand over her mouth, covering up whatever her voice was doing then, but I could hear her trying to right herself, trying to turn the voice channel back to low alto, the delivery channel, so that she could be Mickey, a mom with two kids. Mickey, a mom who had to get this right.

  “I think he’ll be all right,” she started again. “I think—”