She notices my expression but mistakes it for criticism. “You don’t like the light. I know, I know, it’s dorky. But I love it.” She switches the light back to purple.
I shake my head. “That’s not it … I just, well, I miss you,” I tell her, trying not to sound like a sappy idiot.
She perks up. “Come home! What are you even doing there?”
I try to keep defensiveness from leaking into my voice. “I think this is really going to help me, being here. I just need some time to get my head on straight.”
Josie narrows her eyes. “Do they have special head-straightening gear in Antarctica? Why can’t you get your head on straight in a warmer climate?”
For Josie, anything under sixty degrees is Antarctica.
I glance around my new room. No changing bedside-table lights here. No bedside table, actually. Outside, snow flutters past the window, dusting the green fence of trees behind the cottage. When I told Josie that I wanted to come to Squaw Valley, you would have thought I’d told her I wanted to try living in a snow cave in Alaska without electricity or light. So in my defense, I reminded her that for someone who wants to be an oceanographer, she should remember that many oceans in the world are freezing.
Still, she knows this isn’t about geography.
Josie sips her Diet Coke loudly through a straw. “So how are things with the biological father?”
“Okay. He’s not very talkative. But he taught me how to build a fire.”
She looks skeptical. “Congratulations. He’s a caveman.” I pretend to shut the laptop cover. “Kidding!” she pleads. When I reopen it, she says, “I’m glad you’re getting to know him better.” I drop my eyes, and she hurries to ask about school. “Are you bored? What do you do all day?”
I hold up a pile of books and binders. “Impossible to be bored with the bucket-load of assignments Ranfield gave me for this whole Home Hospital thing.” Apparently, Ranfield’s version of a hospital involves producing large volumes of I promise I’m actually learning something. Maybe even more than when I was in real school. “Oh, and Mom’s making me see a shrink.”
Josie’s eyes widen. “She is?” Tons of kids at Ranfield see shrinks, so I know Josie’s reaction is about Mom and not the actual shrink part. “That’s not like her.”
“I know, right? The queen of solving your own problems. I couldn’t believe it. I guess she wants to figure out why I decided to become a human paper-shredder.”
Josie makes a sympathetic face. “Well … why did you?”
Shrugging, I push aside images from that terrible day — the numbers shifting on the page in front of me, the sound of paper ripping, my classmates’ horrified faces. “I had a panic attack.” Before she can reply, I hurry to change the subject again. “Want to help me figure out how to redecorate this place? Because, well, see …” I move my laptop around so Josie can view the bed, the woodstove, the bookcase now stacked with my clothes in neat, even rows. “It’s a work in progress.”
“What’s with all the ski posters?” she asks, her voice sounding far away. One of the things I’ve always loved about Josie is she doesn’t press me when she knows I’m done talking about something.
I set the laptop back on the bed in front of me. “These are the legends of Squaw Valley,” I say in my best movie trailer voice-over.
“Don’t you people have a Target?”
“Mom’s sending me bedding.”
“Well, I’m sending some better wall décor,” Josie insists. “Text me the address.”
Before I can respond, she says, “Oh, wait —” and she’s suddenly off camera. Seconds later, she’s back, holding up a pair of pants. “Our new warm-ups.”
Another tug in my chest. “Oh, no way — he let us get the green ones?” Coach Jeffers told us we had to stick to our usual dove gray for warm-ups. Figures right after I leave he caves on the pretty pale green ones we’ve all been begging him for since August.
She hesitates. “I had him order you some. For when you … you know, come home.”
“Thanks, Jo.” My eyes sting. “How’s school for you?” Josie and I both came to Ranfield on scholarship in sixth grade, and she’s always been the only one there I can actually talk to.
She rolls her eyes. “School is school. We have a thousand poems to read in American lit, and Mr. Roberts is trying to raise, like, a million dollars for the Eco Club trip to Costa Rica. Same old same old. Oh, and Chris Locke is having a party tomorrow night.”
“That should be fun.” She knows I don’t really think it will be fun. I’m not much of a party girl; it’s embarrassing how boring I am. Josie always ends up hanging by someone’s pool with me, but listening to her chatter about it, I wonder if she’ll be able to have more fun without me there.
“You know, Mar,” Josie says. “He was really pissed at whoever posted that video.”
“Who?”
“Chris Locke.”
I don’t respond, my mind flashing to an image of Chris Locke in his baseball uniform. I don’t know him very well. He’s quiet and hangs out with other sporty guys.
Josie mistakes my silence for disagreement. “He is! Most people thought it was a horrible thing to do.”
My skin tingles. “I know.” But I don’t really know. I don’t really want to think about any of it, actually. The test. My classmates’ wide O mouths. The YouTube video. I shake my head. “Most people aren’t the problem.”
Josie breathes out, clearly trying to choose her words. “Chris says it’s the jerks who ruin it for everyone else.”
Why are we still talking about Chris Locke? “Right, key word ruin.”
“We can’t let them. I mean, they’re only, like, ten percent of the population.”
“Do you have actual data to support that? Because it seems like the jerks are winning.” But Mom and Will said the same thing. Let haters be haters and all that. Don’t give them the energy. Don’t let them win by running away, which is what I’m sure everyone thinks I’m doing by coming here.
A voice floats into the background of Josie’s world. “Dinner, mija!” My mouth waters at the thought of one of Mrs. Martinez’s amazing meals.
“Coming!” Josie shouts back. “Gotta go, Mar. Get in a little trouble, will ya? You’re in Tahoe.”
Looking around the empty room, I pull my Now binder across the bed to me and add:
12. Get in a little trouble
Not that I have any idea how to do that.
Trick waits for me outside in his truck while I have my appointment with Dr. Elliot the next morning. “How’d it go?” he asks after I get back into the truck. He heads out of Truckee toward Squaw Valley.
“Okay. He’s nice or whatever. I made more lists.”
He pulls into the McDonald’s drive-thru. After ordering, he asks, “What do you mean, ‘lists’?” He hands me a bag of food and my Diet Coke.
I tuck my drink between my thighs and open my box of chicken nuggets. “You know — what I’m grateful for, what I can and cannot control, beautiful things in my life — that sort of thing. Can I open this sauce in here?”
He motions at the ratty interior, much of it patched with duct tape. “You worried about messing up the fine upholstery?”
I pop open a barbecue sauce, licking a bit from my finger. Trick digs around in the bag on his lap for some fries as he pulls the truck back onto Highway 89. “So these lists — they help you feel better?”
“I guess.” Of course, having me create lists to help me is like asking a dolphin, Have you thought about living in water?
I’ve made these assignment lists before.
Last year my sophomore history teacher, Ms. Diaz, made us keep gratitude lists as part of our current events folder. Maybe she saw it on Facebook or something. She called it the Current State of Me project. I made endless lists for her — the sun on the water, the smell of brunch on Sunday, the way my brothers laugh at funny movies. I got an A+ on it and she’d written, Such a strong sense of what’s good in you
r life! in her scrawling purple pen.
What Ms. Diaz and her exclamation point didn’t know was that I used to sit and stare at the posters on the walls of her classroom and get these horrible stomachaches. Ms. Diaz’s posters had sayings like LIFE IS SHORT; HISTORY IS LONG with pictures of a Roman building, once great, now in ruin. One poster read IN THE GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS, THAT PROBLEM’S PRETTY SMALL! written over a dot showing where our generation lands on the Time Line of Humans. I hated that poster. I wanted to write underneath it: Shut up, poster! History, she told us (over and over), teaches us that we are but small parts of a much bigger struggle and so we must make the best of where we land. So I made her list after list after list to show her I could make the best of where I’d landed.
I got an A+ in the class. And dozens of secret stomachaches.
“Well, I’m glad they’re helping,” Trick says now, turning the truck down Squaw Valley Road. “Sounds like you’re a girl who knows what works for her.”
“Yeah,” I mumble, munching fries and staring out at the strange white world, not adding, Or at least convincing people I do.
I officially suck at meditation.
For the past hour, I’ve been sitting here by this flickering fire, wearing yoga pants, with the snow falling outside, trying to follow an article titled “5 Handy Tips for Meditation.”
I’m stuck on step 1: Quiet the mind.
But my mind won’t shut up.
Be quiet, mind!
Thing is, I don’t have a quiet mind. I’ve never had a quiet mind. My mind is shouty and bossy and makes a weird sort of buzzing sound like a malfunctioning space heater. If I don’t distract my mind by reading or studying or exercising or doing something, it gets even louder.
Psssssst, growls my mind, my eyes squeezed shut, you suck at this.
When Trick walks in with a pizza at a little after six on Thursday evening, I have stopped quieting and started crying. “Oh — hey?” He dumps the pizza on the card table. “What’s wrong?” He takes in the pile of books, notes, binders, pencils, and paper I left spread all over the coffee table an hour ago. He also notices the binder I might have thrown across the room earlier, which now rests facedown in the dregs of the ripped-up sunset picture.
“I … I’m meditating.” I look up from my cross-legged position, my face flushed from sitting too close to the fire. And from the binder throwing.
He shakes some snow from his shoulders and starts peeling off layers until he’s just wearing his jeans, wool socks, and a long-sleeve shirt that says SQUAW VALLEY across the chest. “Meditating. Okay, well, nice job on the fire.” He hunkers down in front of it, warming his hands. He smells cold like outside.
I swallow and wipe some tears from my cheeks. “I suck at meditation.”
He looks sideways at me. “I thought maybe you were into some style that encourages crying. You know, lets out all the inner tension. Through your eyes. Or whatever.”
Is that a thing? Can I count this? “Nope. Just sitting here in fail mode.”
He gives me a funny look. “I’m not sure that’s how it works.”
“I read three different articles telling me that I need to just accept where I am in my mind and go with it. But I don’t know how to do that yet.” I crawl to my binder and pull it onto my lap. I flip through the articles I’d printed out about meditation. I’d highlighted the line “Settle into your mind” and written ??? after it. “It says to quiet your mind, but it doesn’t really tell me how to do that. It’s missing a step.” I hold it up. “These are faulty instructions.”
Shaking his head, Trick stands and slips into a seat at the card table, flipping open the lid of the pizza box and grabbing a slice. The smell of pepperoni makes my stomach growl. He chews his slice halfway through before saying, “Maybe the point is to just sit and be still and not fight it so much.” At my blank look, he says, “Don’t try to be good at it.”
I shut the binder. “What’s the point of doing something if you’re not trying to get good at it?”
He gives me a funny look. “To just experience it.” He nods at the box. “Want a slice?”
I join him at the table. “Should I get a plate?”
“Nah. Then we just have to do dishes.” Outside, the sky darkens. Trick doesn’t say anything else and we eat our pizza in silence, watching the fire, its warm glow reminding me of at least one thing I managed to get right today.
I spend much of Friday at Elevation finishing my schoolwork for the week. A little after two, I rub my eyes, feeling slightly sick. Note to self: Three lattes and two cheese bagels do not fall under the “healthy choice” category for daily dining. Ready for a change of scenery, I pack up and head next door to Neverland to see if Trick might be able to run me back to the cottage. I should probably start studying for the chemistry test I have on Monday. The bells tinkle on the door as I push through it, and Logan Never comes out of the back dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that says THE FROST BOYS across the front. “Oh, hey — thought you might be Isabel.”
“Nope, just me.” To fill the awkward silence, I say, “That’s a nice sweatshirt. I’ve seen other guys wearing them around. Are they for your ski team?”
He looks down at it. “Yeah, the shop partly sponsors our team, so, you know — Lost Boys, Frost Boys. Are you impressed with our cleverness?”
“Oh, sure.” I think of Isabel and Joy. “But what do the girls wear?”
“Their sweatshirts have Tinker Bell and say ‘Eat my fairy dust.’” His phone beeps and he checks it, his face falling. “Aw, man.”
“What?”
He doesn’t look up. “Our friend Bodie can’t make it today. He forgot he has a dentist appointment. Isabel’s going to kill him.” Logan texts back, chewing his lip.
“Where are you going?”
“Goggles.” He tucks his phone back into his pocket. “It’s this program that meets on Friday afternoons at one of the middle schools up here. For at-risk kids. We play games with them and talk about how to stay on the right track.”
“Cool.” They have stuff like that at Ranfield, too, since we’re required to have one hundred hours of community service every year, but I always end up tutoring math or something in our learning center because it fits better into my schedule, instead of having to go off campus.
Isabel comes through the door in a down jacket and jeans. “Where’s Bodie? We’re going to be late,” she announces, as if Logan hasn’t been hanging out waiting for her. “Hey,” she says, noticing me.
Before I can respond, Logan tells her, “He’s not coming.”
Her brown eyes widen. “What?! Our entire talk today is about not skipping out on your commitments. And Bodie flakes? Great example.”
Logan grabs his jacket from a hook on the wall. “He has a dentist appointment.”
“We’re building a ‘triangle of accountability’ with our bodies,” Isabel fumes, flipping her braid over her shoulder, her eyes flashing. “Can’t have much of a triangle with just two of us. Kind of defeats the triangle part of it!” She squeezes her hands into fists. “I’m going to crush him into a million tiny pieces until he’s just a pile of broken Bodie on the ground.”
Whoa. Kind of scared of Isabel right now. “I can go,” I say. “I can be an arm of a triangle.”
Logan looks relieved. “Great — my dad’s waiting for us at the car.”
I follow them out, thinking, Bodie, whoever you are, you owe me your life.
Turns out, being the third arm of a “triangle of accountability” means having Logan step on your face.
“Does it hurt?” he asks, handing me the ice pack he went in search of minutes earlier, wincing as he looks at me. I sit in a metal folding chair near the stage in the multipurpose room of the middle school. After the face stomping, Isabel organized all the students into a big circle of chairs, spinning what had just happened to me as one of those lemonade-lemons lesson, like When life steps on your face, get a refreshing ice pack. I watch them out of my one good eye
.
“Well, you stepped on my face,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. “So, yeah. It might hurt a little.”
“Have I mentioned how sorry I am about that?” Smiling apologetically, he pulls up a chair next to me to watch Isabel in the circle of kids. She’s gesticulating wildly and they’re eating it up, laughing as a group at something she says.
I motion to her. “She’s great with them.”
He pulls on the strings of his hoodie, watching her fondly. “Yeah, she is.”
I hold the ice away from my face for a second, not sure what’s worse, the throbbing or the cold. “Does she ski, too?”
He raises his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah. She skis.” The way he says it, the way he watches her while he says it, tells me there’s more to Isabel and Logan than just the Goggles after-school program. I’ve never wanted someone to look at me like that. Suddenly, I do. He leans forward, resting his forearms on his thighs. “Our girl over there will probably be heading to the Olympics someday.”
“Really?” I can’t keep the awe out of my voice. I rack my brain for Olympic terms but can’t remember any for skiing. “Does she have an event?”
“Downhill. Mostly super-G.”
I hold the ice pack back against my swollen cheek. “Sorry, ski newbie over here — I don’t know what that is.”
“Super giant slalom,” Logan explains, making a squiggly motion with his hand. “Really fast. Lots of turns.”
“I know nothing about skiing.” Skiing. Meditation. Building fires. Clearly, in Tahoe, I’m an idiot.
The Possibility of Now Page 5
