The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  A lot of this is the same description— right down to some of the exact same words—that I used in the Cora/Viola version. Here, though, I’ve kind of pushed all the physical details into the background. The images of the body aren’t the main focus anymore, they’re just a backdrop for Jane’s thoughts and reactions. Because remember: this is a story about people wanting things, and not just an account of something that happened.

  When I opened the sliding door to the kitchen, the overhead light was so bright and yellow that for a second, it made me dizzy.

  My mom was at the stove, frying bologna. “I called someone to look at that Dutch elm out front, but they can’t come until Friday,” she said. “Do you want toast?”

  I didn’t answer.

  She glanced over her shoulder. “If they say we have to dig the whole thing out, I don’t know if we can afford—Jane, what’s wrong?”

  “Caleb Walsh is dead in the creek,” I said, and I said it so flat and so matter-of-fact that for a second, she just stood there, holding the spatula with her head tipped to one side. She smiled, like I might be joking, and I could see the lipstick on her teeth. It was poppy-orange, and I wanted to close my eyes. I wanted her to wipe it away.

  • • •

  Later, the police came. They sat in the living room and asked a lot of questions, but even when I took deep breaths and nodded and told them all the little stupid details of the night before—how Michelle had been drinking apple wine out of the bottle and when she tried to put her ultra-black Maxx eyeliner on Bethany Bledsoe, it came out all crooked; how Ari had tried to juggle burning branches like the boys were doing and accidentally lit the end of her ponytail on fire—none of it seemed connected to the way it really was.

  They wanted to know all kinds of things about Caleb, like did he drink (yes), and did he use drugs (I don’t know), and most importantly, had he seemed upset or sad or unusually quiet? (Um, what does unusual mean? That’s how he always is.)

  I tried to answer them like it was all just routine procedure, the way people did on TV, but no matter how straight I sat, how tight I held onto the points of my elbows through my sweater, my voice sounded strange and far away.

  “You’re doing a great job, Jane,” the tall one said. “I know this is hard, talking about your friend.”

  But the more I thought about it, the clearer it was how much I didn’t even know Caleb. He was Evan’s friend, not mine. He didn’t even like me. We hung out together, but being used to someone wasn’t the same as knowing them.

  Yes, he was the kind of boy who carried a pocket flask and liked thrasher music and probably had a thing for cheap weed or even something completely grim, like huffing paint or keyboard cleaner. Maybe he didn’t talk much, but he and Evan were close. At least, I thought they must be. They’d known each other since kindergarten. Yes, he was rude in class and broke rules and sometimes he seemed depressed. No, even with all these things taken together, I didn’t think that he would kill himself on purpose.

  “It’s like it’s not real,” my mother said again and again while the police sat in our living room, drinking coffee. “Something like this can’t even be real.”

  She was perched on the edge of the couch, clutching a soggy tissue, wringing it into oblivion, and I had to stop looking at her. It felt too gross.

  “It’s so terrible,” she said. “What am I going to do about Jane? What if she’s traumatized—or emotionally scarred?”

  “Mom, I’m okay.”

  One of the officers leaned forward, setting his cup on the table. His eyes were kind when he looked at my mom, who was sitting with her head bowed, picking at her Kleenex.

  “Oh, God.” She held the tissue tighter suddenly, pressing it to her mouth. “My God, it’s like this isn’t real.”

  When I’d touched Caleb’s hand, his skin had been icy, too cold to stand. In a lot of ways, the frozen body at my feet was the only real thing that had ever happened in my whole life.

  • • •

  At school the next day, everyone was talking about it. They stood around the halls in little clusters, but their voices sounded fake. Even the ones who hugged everyone they saw and cried into their friends’ hair were just going through the motions. Yeah, they were crying, but it wasn’t the same way they’d cried after Kylie Morgan’s car accident last March. Kylie had been on student council. Secretary, treasurer—one of those reliable, unfancy positions. She’d been popular, while Caleb had mostly just been like the rest of us.

  “Oh my God,” Melody Vickers said to me in gym class, opening her eyes wide. “Did you really find his body?”

  I nodded. We were in line for volleyball drills, and the knobby little freshman in front of us was taking her sweet time serving over the net.

  Melody leaned into me with her hand on my arm, like she was steadying herself. “Jesus, what was it like?”

  I gave her the bare-bones version, how I went out for Evan’s notebook and found Caleb at the bottom of the spillway. I told her how he’d looked, lying there in the water, but left out the ice in his hair, the way I’d touched his hand.

  Melody moved closer. Her breath smelled pink, like bubble gum. “Was it totally awful? Did you just want to scream?”

  I looked straight into her wholesome face and tried to figure out if the question was rhetorical.

  • • •

  “We shouldn’t have left him there,” Evan said at lunch.

  We were sitting under the big cottonwood tree behind the school with Ari and Michelle. Up until then we’d kind of been avoiding it, talking about nothing much, and even though my hands were cold, like they’d turned to ice from touching Caleb’s skin, I was feeling better, feeling like maybe it was enough to just be sitting here with each other—that we were all still okay. But as soon as Evan said that, the other girls got up and disappeared so fast, like I was the only one in the whole stupid world who’d know how to fix it. Like because Evan and I pinched each other and made paper airplanes or whispered about how creepy Mr. Hobart was, I would somehow have the magic words to make him not care that his friend was dead.

  “Someone should have stayed,” he said again, hugging his knees and staring out at the football field.

  And it was true. Someone should have stayed, made sure that no one was the last to leave, but that seemed too obvious, and there were so many ways to measure the responsibility, assign the blame. If Evan hadn’t walked me home. If Michelle was sober or Bethany was assertive or Ari and Justin weren’t so relentlessly attached at the face. There were too many ifs, and I just didn’t see the point in entertaining them.

  I pictured Caleb, facedown in the water, and tried different sentences in my head. There were all these tidy, reasonable things I could have said, but I picked the worst one—something awful and stupid about drunken-bonfire safety, and Evan looked away. He sat with his back against the tree, smoking a cigarette and ignoring his greasy triangle of pizza.

  I wondered, if he were someone’s boyfriend, whether he would talk to them—tell that special imaginary person what he was thinking. I knew he probably wouldn’t. Evan never said anything serious without it being half a joke, but still, I couldn’t help thinking that if we were anything real, I’d somehow know the right words.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, tugging on my necklace, which was a clunky secondhand atrocity full of pop tabs and spare hardware. “That was … it was bad. It wasn’t what I meant.”

  Usually the sound of all the screws and bolts and lock washers jangling together made him smile, but now his eyes were fixed on some far-off point and I had a horrible idea that he would never smile again.

  He just shrugged, chewing on his cigarette. “It’s true, though.”

  He didn’t say anything else, but he didn’t have to say it out loud for me to know what he was thinking—that Caleb was dead because of us, because we’d left him there.

  When the two-minute bell rang, Evan ground out the cigarette and stood up. I picked up our trash and walked him
to history. He was quiet the whole way there.

  All day, I kept thinking I smelled the ditch, even at the most random times—in the halls, dissecting earthworms in lab. At home in the shower spray. The smell was everywhere, dank and swampy. It was all over my hands.

  • • •

  They buried Caleb on Thursday, out at Oakridge where they’d buried Kylie after her car accident.

  Evan wasn’t in school. If he’d been there, I would have driven out with him and stood at the gravesite, held his hand if he wanted, the way I did on the day we first met.

  But he wasn’t there, and without him, skipping class for Caleb’s funeral seemed indecent. Like I had no right. All during algebra, I sat alone at my table, staring down at the chapter on factors and imagining the others, sobbing graveside in a little cluster.

  Michelle and Bethany were back in time for English, whispering during free-reading and holding hands between their desks. Their eye makeup was heavy, smeared with tears, but when they talked about Caleb they sounded almost like they were talking about a stranger. Some dead celebrity who everyone had magazines and posters of, but no one had ever actually met.

  “It’s like it happened just to show us how messed up he really was,” said Michelle, scraping at the skin under her eyes. Her fingernails were painted a chipped plummy purple. “Like there was no way he was ever going to be okay.”

  Bethany leaned across the aisle to touch Michelle’s shoulder. “Don’t. Don’t say that.” Bethany was always the tender one.

  “Why not?” Michelle whispered down at her desk.

  By now, the coroner’s report was public knowledge. It was the kind of thing health teachers had been warning us about since seventh grade. Beer and vodka mixed with over-the-counter pills—no one knew what or how many. They were talking about an overdose, but if he’d gotten that messed up, he must have started after Evan and I left.

  I listened to Michelle and Bethany whisper dully back and forth, but I was thinking about the girl—the green-haired one. I wondered if she’d stayed. Given him some kind of tab or drink we didn’t know about. If anyone else had seen the way he’d looked at her.

  Michelle was hunched over her desk, worrying at her lip until the skin was picked ragged. I was sure that in a minute she was going to draw blood.

  On other nights when we’d all gone out to the spillway and sat around the fire, Caleb hadn’t seemed too hormonal about any of us. It was hard to picture him all wild and handsy like Ari and Justin, stuck to each other every chance they got. But then, everyone assumed that Evan and I were doing it. Maybe it was just as misguided to assume that Caleb wasn’t. For the first time, I wondered if maybe that girl was the kind of thing he wanted, when before he had never seemed to want anyone. So had she stayed? Did she talk to him? Was she as strange and hungry-faced as I remembered her?

  “Who was the last one there with him?” I said, and I said it too loud for homework time. Everyone looked around.

  Michelle twisted in her seat, still picking at her lip. “Ari was there after us, I think.”

  “No,” said Bethany. “No, that’s not right. She went home when Justin did.”

  “What about the girl?” My voice sounded weird and cool and not like mine. “The green-haired girl?”

  The question seemed vital suddenly, more urgent as soon as I’d said it out loud.

  “Maybe,” said Bethany. “I don’t know.”

  Michelle didn’t say anything. The way she’d liked Caleb was that wispy, lonely way. The kind that gives you a radar for any time the boy you like looks at someone else. She didn’t say anything, but her eyes were red and shiny, and I had an idea that she did know.

  • • •

  I saw the girl the next afternoon, on my way home from school. She was standing in the weeds near the place where I’d found Caleb’s body, with her collar turned up and her hands in her pockets. Her hair looked much greener in the daylight.

  When she glanced around and saw me there on the edge of the footpath, she smiled. It was a tight, toothy smile, but it kind of made me want to go to her anyway.

  I stepped into the dead grass and went crunching out toward her. Behind her, the spillway sat gray and deserted. Our makeshift fire pit above the ditch seemed almost shabby in the daytime. It seemed so much smaller.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “Nothing. Just hanging out.” The way she said it sounded strange—foreign almost, like she was speaking a second language and really meant something else. For a second I thought she might turn and start for the ditch, but she just stood there in the knee-high weeds, waiting for me.

  “Were you with Caleb the other night?” I asked when I reached her. “Do you know what happened?”

  “He drowned,” she said, looking sweet and sorry. “Didn’t he?”

  Up close, her eyes were a pale, slippery color that wasn’t quite blue, but wasn’t some other color either. She was taller than me, with a pointed chin and a high, smooth forehead like a fancy doll.

  I stood looking up at her with my hands stuffed in my pockets, trying not to shiver. There was an icy flatness in my chest every time I thought about his body. “Yeah, he drowned.”

  “Oh,” she said. “That’s sad.”

  “There’s one word for it.” My voice sounded hard, colder than I was used to, and she turned away.

  Her hair hung down like a veil, and the green looked nearly see-through in the setting sun. “It’s an easy word for things no one wants to think about. It’s what people fall back on—more poetic to call something a tragedy than say what it really is. Ugly. Pitiful. Wretched.”

  I felt myself get hot inside, like I was growing bigger. “Look, he might not have been my favorite person, but I’m not about to start calling Caleb ugly or pathetic, because he wasn’t those things. He was mean and angry, maybe. He was obnoxious. He was a real dick. But he was sad.”

  “What do you know about sad?” she said. Her tone was vicious, like it was so utterly impossible that I could even comprehend it. “You don’t know the first thing. You have no idea what your boyfriend writes in that notebook, do you?”

  I shook my head, keeping my chin high. “He’s not my boyfriend.” As soon as I said it, the look she gave me made me feel like I was lying when no one else’s knowing smiles or teasing ever had. “And what he writes or thinks or says in private, when it’s not to me, is none of my business.”

  “If his thoughts are so private, he should be more careful about where he leaves them.” She leaned closer, holding up a little spiral notebook. The battered cover was familiar, held together by duct tape and good intentions. “I found it in the grass behind the wall the other night.”

  “Great, then.” I held out my hand. “I’ll take it.”

  She was working her teeth into her lip, studying me. Everything about her made a cold tide rise in my chest. She closed her hand around the book and shook her head. “I’d rather give it to him myself.” Then her voice lilted up, and she didn’t smile exactly, but her eyes got wide and bright. “Unless you want to read it first?”

  I wanted to grab her by the hair and make her expression change. “That’s his personal property. It’s private.”

  Her mouth twisted, making her look predatory. “Private?” The way she bit down on the word made me step back. “Nothing’s private, Jane.” She said my name like a swear. “No matter how fiercely they deny it, no matter how tricky they try to be, people wear their hopes and fears right out in the open.”

  “And so you just know so much about it then? You’re like some kind of expert on whether total strangers have emotional problems? That’s not even how things work!”

  She shrugged, and it made an army of tiny shivers under my skin, like something was trickling down my spine. “Your boy Caleb was in a bad place. You knew. Your friend Evan knew. I knew it the minute I saw him, but mostly, I knew it by how he saw me right back.”

  Her mouth curved gently, almost a smile. Her bottom lip was f
ull and glossy, so pale it looked bloodless. Her face was peaceful, like a carved saint, and I could see a hard, ugly hunger in her eyes that made my skin crawl. I could see her craving things. Bad things—desperation, frustration, desire. Whatever it was that made boys like Caleb drink and swallow pills and drown facedown in a foot of icy water, where candy wrappers and cigarette butts made circles in the eddies.

  I could see a need so big it was nearly wicked, and I had a creeping conviction that she might devour me next, just for the crime of missing my dad sometimes, or because in Current Events, Ms. Halverson made us read the news every day after homeroom, and it was always full of diseases and complicated wars, and polar bears that drowned from global warming, or because the elm tree in the yard was dying, or because I was there.

  “What did you do to him?” I said, stepping closer, weeds crunching under my feet.

  The girl looked down so that her eyelashes made fringy shadows on her cheeks, like the secret flutter of feathers. The air coming off the ditch was cold, and the sun was getting lower.

  “I kissed him,” she said. “That’s all. It was what he wanted. Since when is it a crime to kiss someone?”

  She smiled then, showing small, straight teeth, like she was remembering something good to eat. Suddenly, I could see her looking around the circle of firelight, studying the faces and then settling on Caleb. Wanting him, but not the way Michelle wanted him and not the way Ari and Justin were always wanting each other.

  She’d wanted all the things I sometimes wanted from Evan even though I didn’t deserve them—his secrets and his hopes and fears, anything that made him Evan-for-real and not the boy who dove into the pit or swore at our teachers or kissed anyone who would stand still for it. She wanted all the sad, uncertain parts inside, and I closed my eyes for a second. My heart was beating so hard I thought I’d choke on it.

  “Do you want to know what it was like?” she whispered, and I opened my eyes again. She was inches from me now, getting closer all the time. “I can show you if you want.”