The Anatomy of Curiosity

by Brenna Yovanoff

  “No,” I said, staring at her full, pale mouth. “I don’t.”

  I thought she might do it anyway. She leaned in, and for a second, her breath smelled so much like the wild plums that bloomed along the ditch in May, sweet and alcoholic and temporary. Then I stuck out my chin and squared my shoulders, and she flinched and there was nothing but the swampy reek of the water.

  “You can’t tell me you’ve never wondered about the dark corners,” she said, and she said it between her teeth. She was still holding Evan’s journal, offering it now, and in my chest, the wanting beat and beat.

  “You could have it,” she whispered. “You could have his mysteries and his secrets. I know what it’s like to be hungry.”

  The tenderness in her voice was awful. Her mouth was soft, and I believed her. People wanted so many things that didn’t belong to them, and I was no exception. I was just as hungry as anyone else.

  I left the spillway without it, without answering and without looking back.

  • • •

  Monday was hard and dull and ordinary. Things were starting to go back to normal. People were already starting to forget.

  Evan had his notebook again. The cover was warped and the pages looked wrinkled and fat, but he was writing in it anyway. His arm was curled around the book, and his eyes were tired, purple with shadows.

  At lunch, I sat in the cafeteria with my elbows on the table, knowing that even if I said something kind and understanding or asked him to talk about it, he would say what he always said. You don’t want to know. That maybe girlfriends got to ask the hard questions, but I wasn’t his girlfriend or his best friend or even someone to make out with behind the gym.

  All I could think was how this was not a conversation I was equipped for. That I would never know what to say.

  I sat with my chin cupped in my hands, watching as his pen scratched its way across the page. “You found your book.”

  He nodded without looking up. “Yeah, it was under some stuff in my room.”

  But even if I hadn’t been out to the spillway, hadn’t seen the notebook, bent and soggy, cradled in the green-haired girl’s hands, I would have known from his voice and the way he avoided my eyes that he was lying.

  “Do you want the rest of these?” I said, holding out my cardboard sleeve of chicken nuggets.

  He shook his head, still hunched over the notebook. I hadn’t seen him eat anything in days. His cheeks looked hollow and his jaw stood out. He’d been smoking a lot, which was weird because he didn’t usually. Caleb was the one who smoked. Who had smoked.

  I wanted to put my arms around him, but the time and the place were all wrong and we hadn’t touched each other since the night Caleb died. The almost-kiss. I wanted to wrap myself around his body and hold on, but it didn’t feel right. I didn’t know how to touch him when he wasn’t arrogant or sarcastic or brave.

  “Are you going to bio?” I said, trying to sound casual and not like I was checking up on him.

  He bent low over the notebook, keeping it turned so I couldn’t see what he was writing. He still wouldn’t look at me. “Maybe.”

  Suddenly, it seemed so awful—so pathetic—that I could wipe blood off his hand when he was almost a stranger, but I wasn’t strong enough to hold onto him when he was sitting there across from me, looking smaller than I’d ever seen him.

  He had always seemed so indestructible.

  I slid my hand along the table, reaching for him, but as I did the bell rang and he stood up in a jerky lurch, fidgeting like he needed to do ninety things at once. He was scraping his books together, sticking a cigarette behind his ear, tugging the metal ring in his lip. Running a palm over his shaved scalp. He yanked my jacket off the back of my chair and tossed it to me, even though I was right there and it would have been easier to get it myself. Before, he would have made the whole thing into an excuse to touch me, maybe tucked the jacket around my shoulders or pretended like he’d zip me up, but now he wasn’t even looking in my direction. He just yanked my jacket off the chair and tossed it to me.

  I put it on and watched him go. He looked tall and shaky and exhausted, like a person who had stopped caring.

  • • •

  It was the end of sixth hour and Ari was swearing like a trucker and ignoring our microscope, trying to unknot a long piece of green string that Justin had tied to her belt loop. Evan hadn’t come to class.

  I reached into my coat to get my keys so Ari could cut the string, and when I did, my fingers skated over something rectangular and lumpy, like waterlogged cardboard and duct tape. I froze. Minutes ago the book had felt like nothing at all, and now it weighed down my pocket like a stone.

  I sat through the rest of the class with my hand in my coat, fingers pressed against the cardboard, touching and touching it.

  After the bell, I walked straight past Bethany and Michelle and my locker and the hall to my computer class. I slipped into the bathrooms and shut myself in the last stall and stood with my back against the door, waiting for seventh period to start. Waiting for quiet and stillness and the faucets to stop running.

  When the late bell finally sounded, the last girls filed out and everything got so still there was only the ghost-white sound of the fluorescents buzzing. Even then, I just leaned against the door, holding Evan’s notebook and trying not to breathe so fast. The pages were a mess, stuck together in places, and I had to pry them apart with my fingernail.

  The first entry was nothing earth-shattering, just this list of homework problems for algebra and then a paragraph about how much he hated his stepdad and how he wanted to buy his cousin’s Honda but that it would probably be March before he saved up enough.

  The book was a disorganized record of every tiny, random thing that he’d collected—snappy quotes and lines from songs and snippets of conversation, the same way I collected pretty rocks and pop tabs and dropped pennies—putting them away in the notebook, no rhyme or reason, like a junk drawer for his thoughts.

  I had an idea that I was seeing a part of him that wasn’t quite familiar, but still wasn’t that much different from the part that pinched my arm or played with my hair. It was gross to read about him kissing Taylor Mackinaw, who drove an ancient orange Datsun and had the kind of slow, heavy eyes that made everyone fall a little in love with her, even just for an hour. I skimmed through it anyway, though, because it was part of the story. He didn’t belong to me. I wondered if maybe the book was a way to tell me that, or tell me that no matter what I was hoping for, it was never going to be about me and him.

  Then, after something that was either poetry or song lyrics, and a sprawling, messy description of a party I hadn’t been at, about a third of the way in, I found a single line, sitting all by itself in the middle of the page.

  Jane Dunn is the most badass girl I know of.

  The sentence was gouged into the paper in dark blue ink, printed in blocky capitals, traced and retraced and underlined, with fireworks and little lumpy stars scribbled all around it.

  There was no date, but then underneath that, there was a line about how Aaron Lloyd had pulled the fire alarm and everyone had to evacuate the building and it was raining. I remembered, because it was the kind of stupid fiasco you don’t forget—going outside in our PE clothes and freezing our tits off for almost half an hour. In front of everyone, I’d walked up to one of the angry-trench-coat seniors smoking out by the bus lot and told him, “Okay, I need your jacket because I’m about to die of exposure,” and even though it was practically freezing, he’d sort of laughed. He let me have it.

  That was at the end of October, three, maybe even four weeks before I walked out across the football field to Evan and wiped the blood off his hand and didn’t ask him what was wrong.

  Jane Dunn is the most badass girl I know of.

  I flipped frantically through the book until I found the story of how he’d punched the football upright and I’d crawled out from under the bleachers. Nothing about what or why. Just, Jane talked to
me today. It was like a scene out of a Wes Anderson movie or something just as good. It was kind of epic.

  Suddenly, for no reason, I felt like I might start crying. Not because it was so terrible or anything, but because it was true, and I was happy and sad and too many things that didn’t have names. The book was in my coat because he’d put it there. He wanted me to read it. I smiled, feeling like maybe things weren’t so terrible. Evan was sad, and he would keep being sad, but there was still enough of his old self left to want me there in the hard parts with him.

  It didn’t take long for things to get terrible.

  Not the things about me, how I was bright and interesting and hard to understand.

  Jane is colossally cooler than me. Like she knows how to be her actual self and everyone else is just pretending.

  Jane is so up-front about everything. She always does exactly what she wants. If I had any kind of chance with her, she wouldn’t keep me guessing. Anyone else might turn it into some kind of game, but Jane isn’t like that. She doesn’t screw around. She’d just tell me.

  I think sometimes I’ll find some other girl and forget. Then I try it. Next morning, I wake up thinking I’d trade anything else just to stand close to her.

  She’s always drawing pictures of Ari and them, like she sees all their best parts. I wish I had some of those same best parts. She never draws pictures of me.

  I held the book so tight, thinking of all the pictures I’d drawn and how I’d always been so careful to never let him see because it was embarrassing for him to know I looked at him. Like I had no right.

  The book was a whole tiny gallery of Evan’s life, and not everything was about us. It was almost overwhelming, seeing every random scrap of noise that crossed his mind, and sometimes the only way I could take it all in was if I leaned my head back and closed my eyes.

  I had to close my eyes at the part about his stepdad—how he told Evan all the things he’d always been most scared of, that he was a loser and a slacker. That he was never going to be anything but trash, just like his brothers and his dad. I bit my lip at It’s my fault Caleb’s dead. At I never told him he was my best friend and It’s so bad without him and I feel cold all the time and it kills me that I knew he was so messed up but I didn’t ever do anything about it.

  That part that was the worst—all the pages and pages—words shaky, handwriting drunk, maybe. Evan, trying to figure out how to live with it, to have known the truth or suspected it, and not have done anything about it. I held the book tighter, thinking how impossible it was to help someone.

  I kept waiting for him to talk about the actual night Caleb died—the details and the facts—but all he said was, There was this girl who came by the spillway, like we were waiting for her or she already knew us. When I saw her again, she was weird and sad. Or maybe I was. It was hard to tell where it was coming from. She was a good listener. At least I got my book back.

  School was almost over by the time I got to the end, the last scribbled lines, written in the cafeteria while I sat across the table from him and didn’t reach for him or touch his hand, didn’t ask about it or about anything.

  Jane, this is really hard. I wanted to do it right or better or something. I’m not sorry how I feel about you, but I’m sorry I could never say it.

  • • •

  I called him. I called him a million times, and every time it went right to voicemail.

  As soon as I was out the double doors, clattering down the steps to the parking lot, I was already hitting his name in my favorites, looking around at everyone filing out of school and knowing he wouldn’t be there. I walked home in a panic, my hands going cold and numb from every time I took off my mittens to tap his name again, while every other part of me felt like I was hooked up to a car battery.

  Finally I gave up and called his house. His mom answered, agitated and out of breath. In the background, I could hear his brothers shouting. For a second she just sounded confused, like she couldn’t figure out why I would call the landline when we had a portable technology for that.

  She told me Evan wasn’t home, but I could leave a message if I wanted. I could hear her sighing into the receiver, scratching around in the junk drawer for a pen. Then she said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, he left his phone on the counter.”

  “No message,” I said. “Just tell him I called.”

  After that, I waited.

  I waited through dinner, through Spanish homework and algebra sets and reruns on TV and long, excruciating conversations with my mom about the dying tree in the yard. I waited upstairs in my flannel pajamas and the bad feeling just got worse and worse.

  It was after ten and I sat in my room, clutching Evan’s waterlogged notebook. The pages were wavy and it smelled strange, like dead, wet air and minerals. I crouched on the edge of my bed, turning it over and over. There was a smudge of something dark and chalky on the back, like the fine-textured mud that collected at the bottom of the ditch. It looked like a dirty fingerprint.

  Jane is the most badass girl I know of.

  Then I put on my boots and found myself a flashlight.

  • • •

  On the cement slab above the spillway, the smell of the ditch was thick and murky. The flashlight seemed much too tiny to depend on suddenly, throwing a shaky circle of light.

  For a long time I stood in the weeds, feeling stupid and disoriented, but under that, there was another feeling. It was the feeling of being in the exact wrong place, and that’s how I knew, without any question in my mind, that it was the right one. The ground by the ditch was bumpy and frozen. There was no place else the air hurt so much.

  I started down the slope, picking my way through the dead grass. Halfway there I stopped, holding the light in front of me so it sent shadows splashing over the ditch. My breath was puffing out my mouth in wispy clouds.

  For one awful second I thought I saw Caleb, lying facedown in his gray jacket, hands floating lifeless in the water. Then the wind blew through the weeds, making the cattails bend and the ditch ripple, I looked away and shivered hard and he was gone.

  “Where are you?” I said out loud. My voice shook a little, and I felt stupid for speaking into the dark when no one else was there.

  The temptation to leave was strong. It would be so much more sensible to go back to the house, to take off my boots and get in bed and wait for Evan to call, but another part of me whispered that if I did that, I was never going to hear his voice again.

  Then, above me, someone moved—the scuffing sound of boots on the concrete, zippers and buckles clanking. She was there, standing at the top of the spillway by the burned-out fire pit, a pale-haired shape in the moonlight.

  For a second, neither of us spoke. The sight of her made my heart squeeze like a fist. The air was so cold it hurt.

  “What do you want?” she said, and her voice was low and harsh, like the voice of someone used to speaking underwater.

  The wind gusted, and I shivered, holding the flashlight tighter. “I need to tell you something.”

  She stood looking down at me, her hair floating on the air like streamers. “What is there to talk about now? I offered you what I have, and you said no. We have no business with each other anymore.”

  “You were wrong about the notebook,” I said. “You told me it was ugly—that it was full of all this bad, shameful stuff, but you’re a liar.”

  That made her smile into the beam of the flashlight, and her teeth looked sharp and jagged. “Are you saying you don’t know how pathetic it is that you let him follow you around like a puppy? How ashamed he was? He told me all about you when he came looking for his book.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “Nothing. I just gave it back to him. And maybe I gave him something else. I might have given him a kiss before he left.”

  The word had a whole mountain range of edges to it, aching in my chest like something icy. “He let you kiss him?”

  Her face was a pale oval, glowing like a
pearl in the dark. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t because he loved me. When I kiss a person, it’s never about love. They just feel whatever was already there.”

  “So, sad and guilty?”

  She laughed, and it sounded shrill, like a panicked swimmer screaming a long way out. “And worthless. And hopeless. He was never so sure that his friend’s death was his fault as he was when I kissed him. Never so sure that he would end up an abject failure. He had never been so convinced he meant nothing to you. To anyone.”

  Under the moon, her hair looked white. The buckles on her jacket flashed, and I wondered if, when she drowned Caleb in twelve inches of water, that meant she was really strong, or that he was just really sad. If he went gratefully, willingly, comforted by her tragic face. If misery had a kind of charm.

  “Do you get off on hurting people, then?” I said. “On using them? Or is that just the only way anyone will let you near? I bet it is—I bet no one lets you into their heads because they want it, no one volunteers. The only reason you picked Caleb is because it was easy.”

  In the ditch below me, I saw him again, but now he lay faceup. He was smiling, but not like someone smiling because they wanted to. His mouth was blue with cold and drowning.

  The girl laughed, like she knew what I was seeing. Then the wind blew harder and the moon came out, reflecting off the sleek, velvety curve of his scalp. Off the steel ring shining at the corner of his mouth, and it wasn’t Caleb. It was Evan.

  He lay on his back, his face pale in the water. For one electric second I thought that he was dead. Then his chest rose in a huge, shuddering breath, and he gasped, blinking up at the dark sky.

  “Evan!” I shouted it, nearly choking on my own voice. I sounded close to tears.

  “You can’t help him,” the green-haired girl said, looking down at me like I was a castaway, miles out to sea. Already so far away. “This is where he belongs now.”

  For one slow, dismal moment, I knew that she was right. She had to be. No way that anything so terrible, so total, could be changed. There was no fixing the things that were wrong, no taking them back. The world was exactly what it was. It was hopeless.