A Blue So Dark

by Holly Schindler

  "What is all this stuff?" I ask her, pointing.

  "Oh, pictures for the show," she sighs. "Trying to decide which ones to use."

  "The show?"

  "Yeah-you know," she says, waving her hand like it's nothing-like she's just rearranging some old knickknacks. "That First Friday Art Walk business."

  "You're going to be in it?"

  "Yeah," Nell says, sighing into her chair. "A change of pace from all the family portraits that pay the bills."

  "What's the theme?" I ask, trying to make sense of it all.

  "Theme," she snorts. "My-life."

  This practically lights my freaking hair on fire. My eyes start bouncing through the details in the photos, searching them the way some ransacker would rifle through the contents of somebody's drawers. "Your life?" I say, disbelief wracking my voice.

  "What?" she laughs. "You don't think an old lady like me ever smoked weed or got arrested at a war protest?" She grins as she twirls a shock of electric-white hair around her finger.

  "Who's this?" I ask, my heart knocking on my tonsils as I point at one of the framed photos. But I'm not talking about the younger Nell in the frozen image, wearing a one-piece swimsuit. I'm talking about the girl Nell's hugging-she's twelve, maybe thirteen, with long black hair. They're laughing in the picture, their bodies tangled like they've accidentally fallen onto the beach. Grains of sand dot their thighs. But they look like they're just so absurdly happy, they don't care that they've crumpled into a painful heap, elbows in stomachs, thigh bones crashing together like cymbals.

  "My daughter," she says. I know that's what she says. But the words that bounce in my head, up and down like rubber balls, are your mother. Because this is her-Grace Ambrose, born April 3, 1970-when she was younger even than I am now. This is my mother, before illness built a nest inside her brain. And this is Nell when she was Grace's mother, when times were still sweet, when no one knew yet that Mom would leave home in a furious rush, barely eighteen, and never speak to Nell again.

  "I didn't know you had a daughter," I lie, glancing over my shoulder at the white-haired Nell. The truth is, Nell's the one who doesn't know she has a granddaughter, let alone that her granddaughter is standing in her very own studio, as she has just about every Saturday for the past five months now, because she wanted to know if her grandmother really was the evil incarnate her mother always made her out to be.

  "Yeah, well, you know-" Nell says, her voice trailing off like a pop song that fades at the end instead of culminating in one loud, final guitar chord. "It's complicated."

  "Mothers are complicated, too," I mumble.

  "Yours must be," Nell laughs. "I swear, with a name like `Aura,' I always figured somebody drop-kicked you in the woods-only, instead of being raised by wolves, you were raised by the last hippie commune on the face of the earth."

  Thank God my town is just big enough to get lost in. If I lived in a real-life Mayberry, I'd never be able to pull this off-Nell would have known exactly who I was the minute I'd shown up. Or the town busybody would have grabbed Mom's sleeve in the coffee aisle of the grocery store, blabbing that I was at Nell's studio-and I'd be in the coldest, darkest dog house ever built. I never would have gotten a chance to know my grandmother.

  I turn back to the photo that looks exactly like the fairy tale I'd once believed in, back before I'd seen the reality of the ocean. White sands, blue water. Tropical paradise. In a place like this, I'd believe a girl could learn to swim. Here, I'd bet that Nell and Mom really did compete in a surfing competition.

  "You remind me of her," Nell says. "My daughter."

  I find myself backing away from these words, my sneakers squeaking on the historic floor, the way I'd try to back away from a rabid dog.

  "But I can't use that one, anyway," Nell mutters, pointing at the beach picture. "My husband took it, not me."

  That makes me work even harder to grab the details that swirl up at me from the photograph. Chipped toenail polish, soggy strands of hair trailing across a cheek, a dimple, a scab on a knee. My grandfather took this picture.

  Nell's nervous laughter shakes a little of the seriousness from the room. "All right, kid," she says. "You come to work, or not?"

  "Sure," I mumble. "But do I-do I really remind you of your daughter?"

  "Every time I see you," she says, the words like bullets ricocheting off the walls.

  Few family members act on warning suns when they first present themselves in a schizophrenic patient. It is often quite hard to realize, in fact, that something is clinically wrong.

  f life were a John Hughes movie-Pretty in Pink, The Breakfast Club, etc., etc.-the Circle would be the badass place to hang out. The Circle (the weird little cul-desac that juts into the field that stands between Crestview High and the Tire & Lube of Kmart) would be where the weirdos, punks, airheads, and druggies all parked their junkyard saves and stood around smoking before school. If life were a John Hughes movie, the "richies" who went to spas before prom season would always get their daddies to buy them school parking permits for the lot closest to the front door, or better yet, permits at the spacious neighboring Gillenwaters tennis courts-after all, they couldn't let their brand new Mitsubishis get door dings.

  Sure, there are a few glistening goldens at Crestview- maybe four or five in each class. The ones who really do drive new cars and greet all the teachers by name in the hallways and seem to have the world under their professionally polished artificial thumbnails. But the rest of us are gypsies. And I don't mean that in a romantic, European history way. I mean it in a lowest of the low kind of way. A watch out for that gypsy scum kind of way. A you are just a nomad, you will not be in this school forever, and you have no respect for anything in it. You have no respect for yourselves kind of way.

  As I cut across the Kmart lot, I can see that the crowds have already started clustering at the Circle, and yeah, they're smoking, and, okay, some of them look a little rough, and all right, I'll admit, they're all out here because it's technically beyond school grounds and Mr. Groce (sounds like gross), the school security guard, can't patrol it. But it's not anarchy, you know? It's just freedom. One last moment to breathe deep before stepping through the door and becoming gypsy tramps.

  As soon as the toe of my sneaker touches the Circle, I see him. Jeremy. And goddamn it, my heart flops like a dying fish.

  He's standing in a cluster of black T-shirts-together, they look like the wilted petals on a single dead flower. And everyone he's with is smoking, but he's just standing there, hands in his pockets, staring right at me. The wind blows his long brown hair across his face, covering up his beauty mark for a minute.

  "You get my board done yet?" he calls out. His words form a speed bump that stretches all the way up to my knees.

  I stutter, I stumble, I glance to the opposite side of the Circle, where Janny's leaning against her two-toned p.o.s.- the red compact with blue fenders-smoking a cigarette. I try to telepathically get her to look my way, to see what's going on here, because I haven't talked to her all weekend, even though I left a bunch of messages. I haven't gotten a chance to brag about what happened with Jeremy outside the museum ... and it would really be so much better if Janny would just look this way and see him hitting on me. I swear, this stuff only happens to girls like Janny, who last fall had practically laughed her panties off when she'd found herself written up on the door of one of the Crestview High bathroom stalls: Janny Jamison is a SLUT.

  "Look," Janny'd said, proudly. "I'm what you'd get if you'd put Carmen Electra, Pam Anderson, and Kim Kar- dashian in a blender and pressed puree." She'd taken a pen from her own backpack and scrawled jealous! You had to lose your virginity to your own HAND!!!

  I want Janny to see me with Jeremy and flash a you naughty girl smile at me, her mischievous eyes bouncing with glitter. I want her to unfasten that old silver bracelet she's always worn and tie her hair back with it-seriously. It was always her favorite thing to do with her hair-to pin her unending piles of unf
athomably thick chestnut waves back with her bracelet and walk down the school hallways, with girls pointing and wondering out loud how that was even possible.

  But Janny doesn't look up from her cigarette that she flicks, sending ash onto her sneakers. And when the breeze hits her, the hair that lifts from her shoulders looks wispy and thin-like sheer curtains.

  "Did you?" Jeremy presses.

  "I-your-"

  "My board. Don't tell me you forgot already. I gave it to you to paint."

  My jaw flaps like a screen door with a broken hinge.

  "Aura," he tsk-tsks, putting his hands on his hips, playacting like he's a disappointed principal. "Don't tell me you're shirking your responsibilities." I look past his shoulder to find that a couple of his black-T-shirt-clad friends, who both have red baseball cap bills for faces, are fighting like hell to hold their laughter in. But Jeremy ignores them, rattling on like we're old BFFs. "It's not like you to ignore a very important assignment like that, Miss I-Skipped-AGrade Overachiever."

  "How do you know that?" I say, my forehead wrinkling so much I figure I probably look like a shar-pei.

  Jeremy smiles. "I remember every little tidbit your mom dropped about you in class. I was a ... an Aura collector. Still got everything. All the facts. All saved up. My sister puts dried-up flower petals in books, you know. To remember good days. That's what I've got, see? All these little Aura facts, like petals in a book."

  Okay-what the hell do I say to something like that? I just stand there like some ventriloquist's doll on a shelf, my mouth hanging half-open, waiting for somebody to put their hand inside me and make some words come out.

  Jeremy's friends are leaving, calling to him, and he starts to back up, even though I don't want him to. "My board," he says. "I need my board, all right?" before he turns and jogs right out of the Circle.

  My legs are about as strong as toothpicks, but somehow, I make them turn toward Janny. Surely, I think, she heard some of that-surely she'll toss her head back and laugh that great, throaty chortle.

  But Janny's still staring at her ash-coated sneakers when I walk up to her. As she has for months now, she looks covered in the dust of her now-gone happier days-just like the mermaids hanging in my kitchen at home. She's a paler, sadder version of her once glorious self. Her bloodshot eyes are as red as the pimples that dot her cheeks. And she never got rid of the forty or so extra pounds that pull at the ass of her sweatpants. Baby weight, you know. The kind of thing that makes losing your virginity to your hand seem like not such a bad thing after all.

  "There's something wrong with Ethan," she says, as soon as I get within earshot, before I can blurt a syllable about Jeremy. Her voice sounds like the crack of brittle autumn twigs beneath her feet.

  "How do you know?" I ask with a shrug.

  "How do I know?" she snaps. "You know, all right, when you look at someone you're that close to. You just know, if you pay attention. There's something wrong with Ethan, and I should take him to a doctor, but I can't because I don't have any money right now, not even for that crappy walk-in clinic, and Mom won't listen-"

  She sighs a gray cloud and tosses her cigarette into the street. She quit when she was pregnant, but afterward, in the craze of diapers and pacifiers and weird rubbery nipple things that fit on disposable bottles and Dr. Spock and baby, baby, baby, she started up again.

  "I'm not dumb, you know," she informs me. "Not about this. Doesn't matter that I failed first grade. This isn't an essay exam. It's my kid."

  "What about Ace?"

  "Well, there's something wrong with Ace, too," she says.

  "Like a virus?" I shrug.

  "Sure, if assholedness catches."

  The acid in her voice makes me think about the public pool, summer before last. God, I can practically smell the chlorine, almost have to blink against the sunlight that's turning the water into a giant mirror. I remember Ace Lawler in the lifeguard's seat Ace, blond and distant. Ace, who was like a TV that could never click to life, no matter how many buttons you pushed on the remote, because he'd never been plugged into the socket in the first place.

  I remember stretching out uncomfortably on my beach towel, one knee jutting up toward the sky because I couldn't stand to lie flat, my hips all spread out on the hot concrete (sometimes, voluptuous feels like enormous). I remember Janny dipping in the pool and pulling herself out, all arched back, hair dripping, like someone needed to take her picture right then, send it in for the next Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Her display made the lights come on behind Ace's eyes, like he was never a TV at all, but a toy monkey that just needed new batteries.

  But the public pool has already been drained for the year, twice, since that fateful meeting of the soon-to-be starcrossed lovers. And now Janny looks like one of those women who's given up. One of those housewives who doesn't see the point in ever combing her hair or putting on lipstick again.

  I bum a cigarette from her, just to have something to do with my stupid hands. As we stand there, it hits me how quickly everything changes-how life is like peering into a kaleidoscope, and just as you're looking at a gorgeous pattern you think you'd maybe even like to keep around forever, the colors morph into something completely different, and there's no getting back to that first pattern. No matter how much you'd like to see it again.

  "Sorry," Janny finally whispers. "I'm probably miserable to be around, right now. I just-"

  In the distance, the warning bell sounds. Janny grabs her backpack from the backseat of her car, tosses it over her shoulder. As we start across the field, toward Crestview, I get such a need to touch her that I grab her hand.

  But Janny wrenches away, fury flashing across her eyes. "Don't be ridiculous, Aura," she says. "We're not little kids anymore, you know."

  God, do I.

  .An illusion is not a hallucination. In a hallucination, a schizophrenic patient sees or hears things that are real only to them.. 4n illusion is more like seeing the -world, but not being able to comprehend it. Misinterpreting everything your eyes take in, as if you were from Alars, and were trying to understand the Earth Jr othe very first time.

  m the first one in Wickman's Bio II class, so I flop into my chair and heave out a monster sigh. Good to be left alone for a minute, before the day officially kicks into gear. I've just barely started to relax when Angela Frieson comes clomping though Mr. Wickman's door in her blue cowboy boots with the stars all over them.

  "Hey, y'all," Frieson the Freak tells me and Wickman in her Texas Hold'em accent. Instantly, I feel like a hundred jack-in-the-boxes have sprung open inside of me. I grimace as she settles into the chair next to mine, her static-laden hair standing out from her face like flower petals. I swear, she looks just like some kind of demented daisy.

  I read someplace once that ugly flowers are the ones that reproduce. Everybody picks the prettiest blooms, so the uglies are the only ones that stick around in the ground long enough to spread their seed. Whole world gets uglier and uglier, all because of flower pickers. Someday, I'll look out into a meadow and see nothing but tiny little Angela Friesons. Makes me wish I could grab Frieson by her crazy blue boots and yank her right out of the ground.

  But I can't because I'm stuck with her. All year-me and Frieson, lab partners extraordinaire.

  This is how it happened: there are three girls in Mr. Wickman's first period Bio II. Three. Me, the Freak, and Ruby Fox. I swear that's her real name, Ruby Fox, and by God if the girl doesn't live up to it. In the ninth-grade unofficial Best of Class, she was voted Girl Most Likely to Pose for Juggs. And when Mr. Wickman told us to partner up back in August, the guys didn't see me or the Freak-they just saw Ruby.

  So there we were, me and Frieson, in the back corner, while everybody else was pawing at Fox. Angela sighed and craned her neck, looking out at the rest of the room like surely, surely, there had to be somebody around who was better than that creepy Aura Ambrose.

  Failing to find anyone better, she just moaned an "All riiiiight. I guess,"
in her crazy southern twang, and scooted her desk toward mine as we launched into our first project together-some juvenile worksheet that helped us get to know each other. As if Angela Frieson had time to learn anything other than what we'd be tested on-after all, the girl couldn't disrupt her 4.7 GPA.

  Yeah, lucky me, I get Angela Frieson who, because of what I can only imagine was the world's most tragic scheduling conflict in the history of all time, got stuck in regular Bio II. Angela Frieson, who's auditing band so that two nonhonors courses in the same semester (imagine the horror!) won't bring down her precious GPA. Angela Frieson, who resents that she has to have a lab partner at all, especially one that she fears she'll have to carry on her back, somebody who will get the credit for all her right answers. Angela Frieson, who is positive she is smarter than the entirety of the Crestview student body combined, who never once even considered the possibility that I'm no slouch in the scholastic department myself. It's just that I'm not skywriting it, or weeping about a B+ on an exam, you know?

  The tardy bell lets loose its funky blurp, blurp, Bio II begins in full, and I'm about to scratch another notch on the top of my desk (just like the good little inmate that I am) when the Freak leans toward me and whispers (even her whisper has an accent), "Hey, Aura, I wanted to talk to you about the cat."

  I guess our school gets them from the Humane Society or something. Nothing like the crawdad and the worm and the frog we dissected back in Bio I. A real cat, that somebody loved, that got in the wrong place at the wrong time. Thinking about having to dissect it-like they do in Bio II every year, no secret there-makes my skin feel prickly, like it's not just an arm or a leg that fell asleep, but my whole body.

  "What about it?" I mumble.