The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  My ideas about how stories work almost always rest on a bed of maybes.

  The thing is, we use stories to make sense of the world, and now I think maybe the greatest failing of that first chilly, factual attempt is that … I wasn’t.

  When I started, I was writing about damp, existential horrors, so weighty and overwhelming—so brain-sucking—that I couldn’t even finish my thoughts. The original file is littered with cryptic margin notes and unfinished sentences, those ridiculous rows of commas like tiny waves.

  “I want to know,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  There was no answer, only the water. It was running down the walls, dripping in constant streams from the unfinished ceiling and the exposed beams. It soaked the insulation, turning the cotton-candy pink a deeper, bloodier hue.

  In the water, she saw him again, but now he lay faceup. He smiled, and his insolence was terrible. His mouth blue with cold and drowning.

  Viola stepped down from the ,,,,,,,,, and the water was cold, but only in the way that ,,,,,,,,,, Her pajama bottoms felt heavy, and the fabric clung to her knees. The water was deeper now. It had been rising.

  She moved closer to him, kneeling in the ,,,so that it,,,and washed over her thighs. She knelt over him, leaning to hear the whispered ,,,,,, His eyes were open, cloudy in the ,,,,,,,,,,

  The hand came up then, frighteningly,, His grip was chilly and inexorable at the back of her neck, pulling her ,,,,,,,,,,

  His mouth on hers was,,,,, The surge of water made her cough, but,,,and he pulled her down with him. In the,,,,she,,, and let him do it.

  After all, what,,,when words could not convey the,,,? He knew the dancing, gibbering secret of the world—what it was to die—and Viola ,,,,,,, pressed against his ,,,,,,,, mouth, waiting for him to share it.

  This is not what I wanted to write, but it was necessary—the clutter and the noise. I needed to tell the story in “By Drowning” in order to find what I was really trying to say. And so that next time I tried it, I could throw these parts away. Cora’s story is the wrong one. It isn’t what I meant at all, so let me tell you another.

  VI. THE DROWNING PLACE

  She wasn’t one of those girls.

  This opening is because of that thought I had—about how drowning is a person. I tried to figure out what it actually was that I was orbiting around when I thought about water. Water has a quiet insidiousness. It’s always more powerful than it seems. Over a long enough timeline, a stream can eat through a mountain. Sometimes it looks shallow and murky and still. We underestimate it. We feminize it. Who is drowning? Drowning is the girl people don’t even see.

  You know the ones. They show up to the party in sequined halter tops, flash through the crowd like shimmering fish. They toss their heads, bite their lips, suck suggestively on a never-ending supply of Tootsie Pops, and even though every movie and TV drama you have ever, ever seen has already told you to hate them … you can’t. Because secretly, you understand that certain magic that they have. You know that everyone is going to look, because everything about them is golden, and really, you just want to look too.

  She wasn’t like that.

  What I mean is, even when she came up over the top of the irrigation ditch and sat down next to our oily little bonfire, I didn’t really think about her.

  It was late on a Sunday, and the way the scrap wood was sending up smoke in fat, blooming clouds made it hard to see the stars.

  The field behind my housing development was where we went when we wanted to have fun without being bothered. It was on the other side of the jogging path, through a tangle of weeds, too far for Neighborhood Watch or Ari Loewe’s dad to see us from the street. We were all cozied up in the empty spillway above the ditch, huddled around a metal washtub, watching the trash burn. I was sitting on the edge of the concrete wall that the skaters used for rail slides, with Evan DeSoto behind me, his legs resting on either side of mine and his coat closed around me. Against my back, his body was warm through his shirt. The cement was cold through my tights. He smelled prickly and comfortable, like thrift-store army wool and American Spirits and all the things I liked best about nights out in the field. About just being near him.

  Evan wasn’t my boyfriend.

  I mean, he flicked me behind the ear in biology or wrote little poems about submarines on my arms sometimes, and he was always grabbing me around the waist and pretending like he was going to throw me off the sidewalk. Sometimes, when he scooted forward in his desk to whisper something funny about protons, I stared straight ahead and thought about how good his mouth felt against my ear.

  But he wasn’t my boyfriend—not anyone’s boyfriend—so the way he looked at her didn’t bother me. And anyway, he didn’t stare longer than anyone else. Because all the boys glanced up when she came across the ditch. They watched her climb the bank to us, as if there was nothing so strange about some sad-faced girl appearing out of the dark. Then they went back to poking sticks at our scrubby little fire.

  Caleb Walsh was the only one who seemed to really see her. He looked across the spillway through the smoke, watching the way the flames reflected off her rings and bracelets like they were shining up from underwater.

  She had long, wavy hair that looked nearly silver, and it wasn’t until she got close and stepped into the light that I could tell it was actually green. She had on a leather motorcycle jacket covered in buckles and chains, and her smile was the small, expectant smile of someone who is used to being ignored. Her eyes were a washed-out blue, her lashes so blond they looked white. Even in the flickering light, you could tell she was almost colorless.

  When she sat down next to me and Evan, her hip pressed against the outside of his thigh, which made the inside press against mine.

  “Nice stars,” she said, nodding at the rainbow galaxy printed on my tights, and I laughed, and Evan and I scooted over to make room. Her voice was husky and low, with a musical edge that floated underneath, and I liked it. I liked the way her hair fell in front of her face, and how the chains on her jacket clanked and jingled when she sat down next to us, so easy like that. But even before everything else, I still sort of knew she wasn’t there for me.

  That sounds so obvious, or like maybe I was jealous, and that’s not what I mean. Just that it could have been someone else—Justin, because his dad was dead, or Michelle Fowler, who sometimes cut her legs and the insides of her arms with a paper clip and didn’t always hide the scabs. Later, I understood that it could have been a lot of people, but there in the orange flicker of the bonfire, everything still just seemed harmless.

  There was a foot of standing water in the ditch at the bottom of the spillway. It smelled like brackish swamps and old newspaper. She smelled sharp and clean, like ocean air or salt marshes. Like tears.

  I didn’t know that everything after that was going to be bad.

  • • •

  Evan walked me home at midnight, and we stood facing each other on my porch. My coat felt thin now, and sort of pointless without him pressed against me. My tights clung icy to my legs, and my ears were cold.

  I’d twisted my hair into two sloppy knots on top of my head, like bear ears, and he reached over and tweaked one. “Don’t you get bored, spending so much time messing with your hair?”

  The way he said it was mostly just making noise, like he was looking for any excuse not to leave. I didn’t mind. As long as he was here on my porch, playing with my hair, he was still standing close to me.

  I shook my head, letting my bangs go in my eyes. “I only get bored if it looks the same for too long.”

  He leaned in suddenly, like he was going to kiss me there under the burned-out porch light and there was nothing I could do about it. I stood still and waited. It would be so easy to tip my head back and let him. To close my eyes, open my mouth, let his arms slide around my waist. It sounded nice, but there was a gnawing feeling that made me freeze. The thing was, he was careless with girls—flirting with them, making out—and I di
dn’t want to get too close to that. I didn’t want it to stop being Evan and Jane and start being Jane and every other girl with a pulse.

  “I like it,” he said, right by my ear. “Mood-hair. Anyway—” I could feel his breath against my cheek, making little flutters of heat there. “You know I’m all about the details. It gives me something to write in my diary.”

  I laughed into my mitten, but he wasn’t joking. At least, not completely.

  Evan was never exactly what he seemed. Or he was, but he was also more. There were all these parts of him that I was always thinking I had a handle on, and then he’d say or do something, and I’d have to start over. I was always having to relearn the shape of him.

  On the outside, he didn’t seem like a journal guy. He seemed like a knock-down, drag-out, punch-each-other-in-the-pit guy. He made a big thing out of his army jacket and his shaved head, but that wasn’t all of him. The bare scalp was just a haircut, and a pierced lip isn’t a whole person.

  There were all these other, stranger parts, and one was the way he wrote down everything. He collected the most minor things and put them in a little spiral notebook with bent corners and a piece of duct tape holding the cover together. The rest of the time he was a clown and a show-off, joking around like nothing mattered. I figured maybe he needed the book because he had to put his extra thoughts somewhere.

  After a second he stepped back, and then I was just standing in the dark, still half waiting for him to kiss me and knowing that if he did, it would mean I was nothing special.

  The wind blew down through the cul-de-sac, making the placuna shell chimes clatter and jangle. The neighborhood was dark and shabby and mostly foreclosed. I had an eerie feeling, suddenly, that we were the only two people in the world. Then he put up his hood and walked away, crunching out to the road between my mom’s half-dead chrysanthemums.

  I went inside with my chin down and my heart beating hard, telling myself how stupid it was to sit around wondering about kissing him, when the smart thing would be to just ask him if he wanted to. But even if he did, so what? He wanted to kiss all the girls.

  • • •

  Evan was the kind of guy who fell straight into the category of ordinary and made your face feel too hot anyway.

  He wasn’t beautiful, but he had a nice profile and a good jaw. A long time ago, before we knew each other—before he ever pulled me into his lap or played with my hair—I used to draw pictures of him in my English binder and hope he would look up. It wasn’t one of those pining crushes, but I was a more-than-casual fan of his chin and a downright authority on the shadow under his bottom lip. All I mean is that I noticed him.

  How I met him was so random it almost felt like it wasn’t random at all.

  It was this gray, awful day in November, near the end of fourth period. I was out behind the school by the football field, sitting alone under the bleachers where the security guard couldn’t see you cutting class from the parking lot. I was waiting for Ari and Justin to show up, hopefully with coffees from the gas station, and drawing pictures of the Canada geese honking and flapping around on the fifty-yard line.

  Evan came out across the grass, and the geese all shuffled out of his way. He crossed to the metal upright at one end of the field and glanced back toward the school, like he was checking to make sure that no one was around. Then he took a deep breath and slammed his fist into the goalpost. He did it ferociously, like he was punching down the pop-ups on Whac-a-Mole.

  Even though I liked how close to each other the characters were in the original scene, that blocking didn’t seem to work as well with my new thematic overhaul.

  I moved Evan to the end zone because I wanted to put a substantial distance between them. He’s not invading Jane’s territory the way Adam was with Cora, and in order to reach him, Jane has to see the distance and then still make a very conscious effort to bridge it. (Also, this conscious effort is sort of/kind of … FORESHADOWING!)

  The actual moment happened when he finally turned in the direction of the sideline and there I was, sitting cross-legged under the bleachers with my sketchbook in my lap. My coat was pink-and-black checkered, and I was very hard to miss.

  For a second he just stared at me. There was blood on his knuckles, so red it made everything else look gray. I didn’t say anything, but I could tell I was raising my eyebrows, like, Whoa, guy, what is your deal?

  He shook his head like I’d asked the question out loud. “You don’t want to know.” His expression was cool—half a smile, and under that, a look so tired it seemed almost bottomless.

  This is the basic thesis of every version of the story (even my own). The gnawing curiosity of wanting to know about someone, even when it’s inappropriate or impossible—to understand the strange intimacies of someone else’s interior life.

  It was impossible to get out from under the bleachers in any kind of dignified way, so I didn’t even try. I just flipped my sketchbook closed and crawled out on my hands and knees.

  The whole time it took me to cross the field, he stayed right there next to the goalpost. When I got to him, he gave me a quick little nod, then leaned back against the post like he’d been waiting for me.

  I took off my mittens and reached for his hand. It wasn’t like a proclamation or anything. I wasn’t claiming him. I just took his hand and wiped the blood off with my thumb.

  “I’m Jane,” I said. He wasn’t wearing gloves, but his skin was warm.

  He looked down at me, and his expression didn’t change. “I know.” His eyes were a clear, deep hazel-gray, like frozen ground or muddy water.

  After that, he was always around.

  It was hard to be sure what changed exactly, but when I’d reached for him, the lines of our territories shifted. Not like something earth-shattering, but he’d circled closer to me, the way a person can be around without it really meaning anything.

  We teased each other over stupid things—my complicated hair, his secret notebook, the bruises he got at the shows he went to.

  And maybe he never kissed me, but in a room, I always looked at him first, and the smell of his deodorant was enough to make my face hot. I could feel him come up behind me without even looking, and then my heart would start going a million miles a second, and sometimes the way you feel standing next to someone is all that really matters.

  • • •

  Caleb Walsh was not my biggest fan, but most of the time he kept it to himself.

  That wasn’t some impressive feat or anything. He kept pretty much everything to himself. Generally he ignored me, but sometimes when I tried to tell a story or a joke, or got excited about something he thought was stupid or girly or overly pink—or especially when I had opinions—he’d give me these bored, disgusted looks, like I was a new toy that Evan had found lying around on the playground and would forget about as soon as something better came along.

  The night of the bonfire, before the green-hair girl came up over the spillway and he fell headfirst into her strange, pale sadness, he’d looked at my star tights and said, “That’s the thing about Jane. If you ever need an emergency rodeo clown, she’s got your back.”

  Then Ari tore the pop tab off her beer can and flicked it at him and we all laughed, and he just sat there, giving me the worst look, while I tried hard not to care.

  I forgave him for that look, and for his sarcasm and his sulky bullshit, and for anything else he’d ever done when I found his body the next morning, lying facedown in the irrigation ditch at the bottom of the spillway.

  Later, the newspaper made it sound like I was some kind of psychic. Like it was a miracle, me walking out through the weeds, straight to the place where he lay. The evening news said that joggers and dog walkers might have passed his body all morning and never noticed, if I hadn’t gone out behind my house and across the footpath, picking my way down to the stream.

  I wasn’t psychic, though. I was looking for Evan’s notebook. He’d texted me ten minutes earlier because it wasn’t in his
coat, and he asked if I could go back to the ditch and look for it. The sun was barely up. It was freezing out and I hadn’t finished drying my hair, but the notebook was Evan’s most important thing, so I pulled on my boots over bare feet and went to find it.

  The ditch was shallow, running with a foot of dirty slush, not nearly deep enough to submerge a person, but Caleb was wearing a gray mechanic’s jacket, and his hair was full of ice. In the reeds, he was almost invisible.

  I saw his hand first. It was still and pale, lying half-closed against the bank. Even when I got close, it took me a minute to understand what I was seeing, to follow the pathway from his blue fingertips back to the rest of him.

  He looked like he was waiting for someone. That’s what I didn’t say to the police.

  He looked sad and patient, like he was only resting, waiting for some well-meaning stranger to wander by and offer him a hand. He just needed someone to help him to his feet.

  I stood over him in my unlaced boots. The collar of his jacket was turned down, and the back of his neck looked bloodless in the morning light.

  I had this crazy idea that maybe he was sleeping. I’d touch him and he would jerk awake and sit up, ask if I knew where Evan was and if I had a cigarette he could bum and why did my hair look like a wet wildebeest. But even before I reached for him, I knew he was never getting up.

  When I finally crouched down, I did it slowly, touching his shoulder first and then his curled fingers, feeling the rough canvas of his jacket, the icy smoothness of his skin. The jacket was the same one he wore every day, and his face was turned away, sunk ear-deep in the stream. Ice had formed a fragile rim at his cuffs, like broken glass, and I went back to the house with the cold aching in my fingertips.