Love, Ish

by Karen Rivers

  “I have enough clothes!” I tell her. “This is plenty.” So far, Mom has bought me three pairs of jeans (that go in at the bottom so tight I can hardly jam my foot through them) and sixteen white T-­shirts (eight short-­sleeved, eight long-­sleeved). I only ever wear jeans and white T-­shirts except in the summer when I wear jean shorts and white tank tops. I also have an orange Gore-­Tex jacket that I wear over everything. It makes me look like I work for NASA, which I might one day, although the private missions are better for a bunch of reasons. But I’ll take what I can get! (It’s a great jacket. It has lots of pockets.)

  Mom holds up a bright green sweater in front of me, pressing it into my chest like I should want to reach out and hug it. It is the worst. A twirling pattern of sparkling buttons glitters down the front of it, like a Disney princess threw up. Mom has obviously mistaken me for an ice dancer or a regular girl who is going into seventh grade at Teddy Roosevelt Middle School.

  I’m not a regular girl.

  “Mom,” I say. “No.”

  “It’s fun to try something different,” she says. “It really is. And this green looks amazing with your hair.”

  “No way,” I say, firmly. I think there is some law that states that if you have red hair, it’s necessary for you to always wear green and look like a leprechaun. I refuse to bow to this pressure! I pick up a gray hoodie instead and rub the inside of it with my thumb. It’s soft, like an old blanket.

  “This?” Mom says. “Ugh. It’s so boyish, though. It’s plain! Don’t you want to feel pretty?”

  “It’s nice,” I say. “It’s great! Feel it.” I rub the fabric against her cheek.

  She looks dubious.

  “Please,” I say. “I really love it.”

  “OK,” Mom says. “Fine.” She looks sadly at the green sweater. “Are you sure?”

  “Mom,” I say.

  She sighs and takes the hoodie up to the register to pay. I’m standing there thinking about how long it will take Mars to evolve to become a giant intergalactic shopping mall when I hear them. Them.

  Nooooo.

  I duck behind a rack of colorful jean jackets and pretend to tie my shoe, but I’m wearing flip-­flops, so I just crouch there and fiddle with them a little. “Act natural,” I whisper to myself. The skin on the top of my toes is tanned and there is a white stripe where the flip-­flop strap goes. My feet aren’t very clean.

  The gaggle of girls swarms by, buzzing like bees on a mission. I do not know anyone who giggles as much as the twelve-­year-­old girls in my class. Sometimes I think I was programmed wrong at the factory. I mean, I just don’t find anything as funny as they find everything. The girls stop. I’m basically trapped. I can’t stay down here forever, so I stand up, reluctantly.

  The girls are smiling and drinking Orange Juliuses and touching their hair. They do that a lot. Their hands are always twiddling. Why? They hover outside the entrance to the store and because I am unlucky and also brightly colored (see: red hair), they spot me. (In nature, red means “stay away! danger!” I wish it also worked that way in malls.)

  The girls wave with the enthusiasm that you can only muster up when you are so used to faking everything that you don’t know when you are faking it or if you really mean it anymore. In case Mom is watching, I make myself greet them: “Oh, hi, Ashley, Ana Sofia, Camilla, Bea,” I rattle off their names like it’s roll call, plastering a smile on my face. “Zoe, Amber, Alex, Kaitlyn.”

  “OMG, hiiiiiiiiiii,” they answer, “Hi hi hi hi hi hiiiiiiiiiiii Miiiiiischa!” They seem a lot happier to see me than I am to see them. Then, like a single organism, they swivel back into a closed circle, heads tipped, hips cocked, whispering.

  I leave the store. Fast.

  “Ish,” Mom calls after me in a sing­songy-­and-­loud-­enough-­for-­them-­to-­hear Mom-­voice. “Do you want to stay and hang out with your friends? I can pick you up later!”

  “No,” I say, over my shoulder. “No, thank you.” I pick up my pace, practically running to the doors, heavy bags of back-­to-­school clothes and paper and pens and glue sticks and pencils banging against my legs. Once I get outside, I break into a sprint. I beat Mom to our car by almost three and a half whole minutes, the sun glaring down on my sweaty nose, turning it redder and more freckly than ever. It sucks to be a redhead in summer, trust me. (And it’s no cakewalk the rest of the year, either, unless you like random strangers patting you on the head and going, “Oooooooh, I love your hair.” Which I do not. I’m thinking about shaving my head. It would be very practical! There won’t be shampoo on Mars.)

  “You know,” pants Mom, finally catching up, “you should give them a chance. If you got to know them, you might like them.”

  “I’ve given them lots of chances,” I say, scowling. “I know them fine!”

  “Maybe you should try to just . . .”

  “Just what, Mom? Be like them? Pretend to like them?”

  “Never mind,” she says, starting the engine. “I was going to say, ‘Maybe you should just lighten up,’ but you know what? You have to figure this stuff out for yourself.”

  “Whatever,” I say. “There’s no law that says you’re totally required to have friends in middle school. I like being alone. I’m a loner. It’s better for my psychological profile to show that I don’t need a bunch of people around me all the time.”

  “You’ve always had Tig,” she says. “I know you miss him. But you can’t just go it alone forevermore now.”

  “DTM,” I remind her. “Dead To Me. Don’t say that name. Not ever. Not even once more.” Then I add, “And no one says ‘forevermore,’ Mom. This is not 1898.”

  “Ish,” she says. She takes a big huge breath, like a massive speech is about to follow, but then she just says, “I’m sorry.”

  I shrug and turn the radio on. A sappy song from the eighties leaks out all over the car, filling up our silence with gooey lies about love. Love is a bill of goods that’s been sold to us by savvy marketers. Think about all the stuff that love sells! Heart-­shaped jewelry, for one thing. Red roses. You know, all that junk.

  Mom sings along. She knows every word to every song ever, but she sometimes loses the car in the parking lot. Her brain-­workings are a mystery. For example, when she was my age, she had to memorize the poem “Jabberwocky,” including all the punctuation. She still remembers it. Every comma, every everything. When I was little and I couldn’t sleep, she’d sit on the edge of my bed and recite the whole thing. “apostrophe Twas brillig comma and the slithy toves carriage return Did gyre and gimble in the wabe colon carriage return All mimsy were the borogoves comma carriage return And the mome raths outgrabe period,” she’d recite. It sounds weird, but I found it pretty soothing. (If you don’t know, “carriage return” has to do with when you are typing on an actual typewriter. My mom is quite old. Obviously if we had to do that now, we’d say “enter,” but it sounds prettier her way.)

  I roll my window down as we pass through the mostly closed-­up downtown, which is only four blocks long. The air is holding on to the wet, greenish smell of the lake all mixed in with the hot pavement of the road and the dryness of everything. All the good shops moved to the behemoth air-­conditioned mall when it opened, leaving hot, shadowy spaces behind, like words censored from a sentence. Some of the empty stores have broken windows. They are almost all covered in graffiti. I wish the graffiti artists spent more time making nice paintings instead of just spraying swears, or at least, if they’re going to do swears, spell them right. How hard is it to spell a four-­letter word?

  What’s left unscathed are the stores that are still open: the post office, the bail bondsman, the pawn shop, the store that sells beer and cigarettes, and a used-­book store that no one ever goes into, ever. Dad says it is probably a cover operation for a drug cartel. (If that were the case, you’d think they’d invest in a proper sign, not just a handwritten cardboard one that says BOOKS 50 CENTS. But on the plus side, they spelled it right!)

  Da
d is a screenwriter, so he has a crazy imagination. He writes animated movies. Well, he’s one person of a billion who write those scripts as a team. His super-­specific job is to punch the script up with jokes. That’s the actual word: punch. His job title is “punch doctor.” It says that right on his business card, above a pencil sketch of a hand curled into a fist. He’s trying to work the used-­book store/drug cartel into the film he’s working on right now, which is about cute pale-­pink Martians who land on Earth by mistake. I am deeply offended by the inaccurate portrayal of Martians, who—if they exist (which continues to be very unlikely)—are just bacteria, at best. But Dad tells me to lighten up, buttercup. If you ask me, Dad is too light. I’m surprised he doesn’t float right off into space sometimes, that’s how light he is.

  (That was a joke, in case you didn’t notice. I’m not very good at jokes, but I’m trying. Everyone gets better at everything if they practice it.)

  Every other shop on this street has a big FOR SALE OR LEASE sign in the window, even the old ice cream shop. I miss that one the most. We used to go there every Sunday for family outings before Iris moved away. We rode our bikes. The last cone I had there had a dead fly stuck into the pointy part at the bottom and I only noticed it at the last second before I popped the whole thing into my mouth. I haven’t eaten a cone since. That last one gave me the ongoing gift of cone phobia.

  “Thanks for nothing,” I tell the shuttered shop as we pass. “I miss you.” The hot wind snatches my words and throws them onto the deserted sidewalk, where they turn into tumbleweeds and tumble away, like in an old Western story.

  “What?” Mom says.

  “Nothing,” I tell her. “Don’t let me interrupt your lovely song.”

  The song ends on a long drawn-­out youuuuuuuuu­uuuuuuuuuu and then Mom barely even takes a breath before she launches right into her favorite topic of conversation, which is How To Have More Friends And Why It Matters. This includes such gems as “give it time” and “they just don’t know you very well” and “one-­on-­one they might be less overwhelming” and “do you want me to get you a playdate with _____” and “the friends you make now are your friends for life.”

  “Mom,” I interrupt. “We’re almost thirteen years old. No one does ‘playdates’ anymore.”

  “I was just checking to see if you were listening,” she says.

  “I’m listening,” I half lie.

  We slow down as we go past the playground where Tig and I built a tree house two summers ago. It wasn’t very good. It fell down earlier this month. I think it was hit by lightning. It tipped right over and dumped itself, our two chairs, and my copy of the classic novel The Martian into the shrubbery. Parts of the structure are still sticking up out of the blackberry bramble. One day, I’ll risk being scratched to bits to rescue the book, at least. Or maybe I’ll go to the drug cartel’s bookshop and buy another one for fifty cents. That old one is probably pretty moldy and gross by now. Or maybe it’s been eaten by a squirrel. Squirrels will eat anything. Once they ate through all the wiring in our attic and started a fire that burned a perfect circle in our roof. You can still see it because the roofing stuff is newer in just that one spot.

  While we wait for the light to change, I wave my pinkie finger at the place where the tree house used to be. Tig and I invented the finger wave so we could communicate at school without actually talking to each other. It was pretty important to us that no one knew we were friends outside of school because he is a boy and I am a girl and people would think something that wasn’t true if they knew we loved each other. We decided on the first day of kindergarten. I don’t remember why we kept doing it all the way through the end of fifth grade, because by then everyone knew we were BFFs. I know they knew because in the third stall in the downstairs bathroom someone wrote “Ish loves Tig” and someone else wrote “They are just friends, you jerk” underneath. I’m not saying who wrote the second part, but it was written in red Sharpie and I always have one of those in my pocket, just in case someone has misspelled something on a wall and it needs correcting. You’d be surprised how often people use apostrophes where they shouldn’t, like in “nacho’s” or “pizza’s.” There is almost never a time when a nacho or a pizza owns something! I mean, come on.

  Mom is at the part of her speech where she is reiterating how important it is to give the girls a chance—as though they are all desperate to have me as a friend, ha—and that it will take time and that people change or that, wait, actually, Maybe I won’t find my people until I grow up, and that’s OK, too, as long as I stay open to the Universe and the possibility that my future BFF is someone I already know but haven’t noticed yet. Then she says that it’s possible that in a small town like Lake Ochoa, I’m just misunderstood.

  I wait for a beat so that the silence filling the car can contain everything I’m thinking, which is, You don’t understand anything. Then I say, “Like monsters and bad guys always are in Dad’s movies? Scary-­looking! But hearts of gold, am I right?”

  “Ha-­ha,” she says. “Very funny. But yes. Sort of. You know, I didn’t find my people until I went to college. Then as soon as I met them, I knew. Oh, there you are, I felt like saying. Where have you been?”

  “Martians are my people,” I tell her. “Will be my people, I mean. When I go.”

  “You’re not a Martian, honey,” she says. “You’re just too intense for these kids right now, but they’ll catch up eventually. You’ll see.”

  “But Mom,” I say. “Once I move there, I will be a Martian, just like people from Canada are Canadians. Right?”

  “But if you moved to Canada, you wouldn’t be Canadian,” she said. “You’d be an expat who happened to live in Canada. Unless you renounced your US citizenship. Which, I suppose, you could—”

  “Fine,” I say. “My people will be expats who happen to live on Mars.”

  “Right,” she says. “OK. You win. Just promise me that before you go, you’ll at least try college for a while, just to see if you might find someone or something a little closer to home.”

  “Mom,” I say. “I’m going to Mars and you can’t stop me. It’s not going to be for a decade. Stop freaking out. I’ll go to college! I’ll do everything. I’m sure I’ll have new friends this year. Whatever. I don’t care! It’s fine! I’m fine! Everything is fine!” A headache starts pushing down on my brain. I push it back. It pushes harder. I close my eyes and wait for it to pass.

  Mom doesn’t think I’ll be picked for any of the manned Mars stuff, I know she doesn’t. It doesn’t feel very good to have a mom who doesn’t believe in your dreams, let me tell you that. This is America! Anyone can do anything! Hasn’t she paid attention to the message hidden inside every movie and every book ever? NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE! Cue theme music! And optimism!

  The trouble is that at this rate, she’s right. Mars Now seems pretty busy promoting their reality TV show and taking photos of the already chosen participants in bathing suits with their muscles rippling, their hair shimmering in the sun. It’s pretty dumb because on Mars, looks are the last things that will matter. Being smart and strong will be the things that count! I’ve been lifting weights in the garage with Dad and going for long runs around the lake so that I can be as fit as anyone by the time my turn comes. My biceps pop up like oranges under my skin when I flex my arms; when I run, my legs ripple like the legs of a horse pounding down the track.

  “I’m a machine,” I whisper to myself. “My body is a machine.” It makes me feel better to think that way. Machines don’t have feelings. Machines don’t have hearts or hopes or dreams. Machines don’t feel stupidly lonely when their best friend leaves town. They don’t have seventh grade, looming on the horizon, replete with a new middle school and giggling girls who they don’t know how to understand. They definitely don’t get headaches.

  Mom starts singing along to another song, loud and off-­key.

  “I miss you, Tig,” I whisper out the window, and this time, my words aren’t even strong
enough to get blown out of the car, they just plop on the floor with the old straw-­wrappers and shoe-­dirt. They lie there beside my dirty summer feet, like there isn’t anywhere for them to go, even if they could.

  Chapter 4

  Mom pulls into the driveway in a cloud of brownish-­gray dust. Everything is dry, dry, dry. It’s the driest dry in the world, in the history of time. Drier than the desert, even. Drier than Mars. It hasn’t rained for weeks or maybe actually months, I forget when the drought started, exactly. Now the lake—which wasn’t very big to begin with—is sinking away from its beaches, leaving dry, cracked mud around the edge that looks a lot like Mars, actually. I like to sit on it and trace the cracks with my fingers, all those crevices reaching as deep as they can, thirsty for water to fill them up. It’s my Mars, but I know it really isn’t. If Tig were still here, we could pretend, though. We would pretend. Tig didn’t think pretending was dumb. Tig wouldn’t have rolled his eyes or laughed. But Tig is DTM!

  Anyway, this is nothing like Mars. Mars is freezing cold. Too cold, really. (Things I will miss/TIWM: the hot smell of Earth summer. Things I will not miss/TIWNM: mosquitoes, heat waves, missing Tig.) But if I’m going to Mars, I have to get used to droughts. Even though NASA found flowing water, it’s not a lot. It’s not lakes. It’s more like marks on the ground, the mostly empty veins of something that used to flow.

  Dad’s bike is leaning up against the fence, so he’s home. He rides twenty miles a day, just because.

  “Because he’s procrastinating,” Mom always says.

  “Am not,” Dad always replies. “It helps me think! I have my best ideas on the bike!”