by Nina LaCour
“Who’s that?” I hear a guy say.
Then, Melanie, “That’s Caitlin.”
“Caitlin Madison?” asks a girl.
“Yeah.”
“Oh,” the guy says.
My face burns. I get my backpack loose and fight the urge to step back through the fence. Instead, I turn around and climb the bleachers.
“Close one,” I hear myself say. My voice sounds different, but that’s not entirely bad. Five skeptical faces turn to me. I keep talking. “Nails almost caught me ditching. I was walking straight toward him.”
They don’t say anything.
I set my backpack down next to a girl with a Metallica shirt that’s so worn it must be a decade old.
“I’m gonna stay here for a few minutes. I really don’t feel like having a chat with him right now.” I say it so confidently that for a second it makes me feel confident, too, like I’m the kind of person who has near brushes with danger every day.
Then I sit down, and no one says anything. The Metallica girl bites a nail. The guy who asked about me earlier braids a chunk of his oily hair. I glance at Melanie—she’s violently digging through her backpack. Two silent boys with glasses resume a card game.
“Shit,” Melanie says. “Caitlin, do you have a cigarette?”
I assume that she’s already asked everyone else there. I’m her last chance.
“Sorry,” I tell her.
And for some reason, that breaks the ice.
“So, you were, like, best friends with Ingrid Bauer, right?” Metallica Girl asks.
“Yeah.”
Oily-Hair Guy asks, “Did you know she was gonna do it? Like, did she tell you about it first?”
He says this like it’s a completely normal question, like it’s fine to ask people you don’t know to tell you the details of the worst things that ever happened to them. It catches me off guard. I don’t know how to react, so I just answer him.
“No.”
“Too bad for you,” says Metallica Girl.
The guy says, “I heard she slashed her wrists, right? That’s awesome. It’s not like just offing yourself with a gun or like carbon monoxide or something. Cutting yourself that fucking deep takes balls, you know?”
I open my mouth, but nothing comes out.
One of the cardplayers, still looking down at his cards, says, “My cousin’s boyfriend threw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge, which is pretty sick, but I agree: it’s easier than wrist slashing. You have to cut all the way through the tendon, you know. Most people get weak and pass out while they’re doing it.”
“What makes you such an expert?” Metallica Girl snaps.
“I was seriously considering doing it,” the boy says, pushing up his glasses. “In eighth grade. I did a little research.”
“You fucking loser,” says the other cardplayer. “You fucking shithead loser. No one does research.”
I have no idea who these people are. I look at Melanie. She’s digging through Oily-Hair Boy’s backpack now.
“Stop it,” he whines.
The baseball field stretches in front of us—perfectly mowed lawn, neat brown mounds of dirt at the bases. I imagine myself walking to the middle of it and collapsing there. I see a scene play out like in those movies where they speed up time; where you see a plant sprout through dirt, bloom, and die in less than a minute. Except this time it moves backward. I fall asleep on the field; the blue sky turns gray then purple then black. The stars come out. The moon goes down. The sun rises. A year undoes itself. I move a little. I’m wearing different clothes, last year’s clothes. The warning bell rings. I stand, reach for my backpack. It’s lighter. I walk to first period, sit down next to Ingrid.
Melanie jumps to her feet, shattering my fantasy. She yells, “I need a cigarette!” And I have no idea what passed between us that day at the mall, because I don’t feel anything now.
I don’t want to hear another word that any of them say, so I lift my heavy backpack to my shoulders and start down the bleachers.
“See you later,” I mumble, and manage to get through the fence without snagging anything. It isn’t much of a victory, but at this moment it feels close.
3
Dylan isn’t in class yet when I walk into English. I sit in my usual seat, get out the anthology, and force myself not to look up when people enter the room. They walk right past me, and I still keep my head down. Then I hear footsteps, and I know they’re hers. She pauses right by my desk, probably waiting for me to look up. When I don’t move, she sits behind me where she usually does.
“Hey,” she says. “Where were you?”
She doesn’t sound angry, and I realize that it isn’t too late to turn back—I could think of some convincing excuse. I could say I’m sorry.
But I stay concentrated on the page. I don’t even know what I’m looking at. Some poem. My eyes are so tired they won’t focus on the words.
“I ran into some people,” I say, and with that sentence, the damage is done.
“Who?” Dylan asks, now sounding pissed off.
“Just some people.”
She doesn’t say anything. I know that I should turn around and face her, but I don’t.
Finally, I hear her mutter, “Whatever.” The metal creaks as she leans back, hard, in her chair.
Soon Mr. Robertson comes in and starts lecturing. All through class Dylan swings her foot back and forth, kicking the leg of her desk with her boot, and even though I can hardly feel it, I want to flinch each time she makes contact.
The period passes agonizingly. As soon as the bell rings, Dylan grabs her stuff and storms out without looking back. I take my time getting to my locker, and by the time I make it to the science building, Dylan is gone.
4
Vista High School has tons of money, way more money than it could ever need. Because all the parents in Los Cerros are so rich, they’re always writing checks to the school to fund the musicals, or the dances, or the smart kids’ trips to Europe, where they tour museums by day and get drunk and go dancing at night. On one hand, it’s pretty nice that we can have basically everything we want, but on the other, it makes me kind of uncomfortable. Amanda, Davey’s fiancée, teaches history in the city and the books they use are so old that the covers have fallen off.
Sometimes, I feel a little guilty about all the stuff we have—our brand-new textbooks, the indoor swimming pool, the never-ending supply of photo paper and film. But at this moment I’m feeling pretty good about it all, because I’m hiding out in a shiny new bathroom that no one seems to know about yet. It seems completely unnecessary. It’s between the math hall and the science hall, both of which also have bathrooms. But I’m not complaining. I’m sitting in an impossibly clean stall with the door shut, just in case someone comes in. Lunch is half over, and I’m a few pages into my treehouse book. It says that I’m going to need bolts, because nails and screws aren’t strong enough.
On a piece of binder paper, I’ve sketched a plan. It’s a view from the top of the tree, looking down. The trunk is in the middle, and around it is the floor—a hexagon. I’m not sure yet how long each side will be, or how wide, but I want it to be pretty big, not the kind of treehouse you feel like you have to get down and crawl around in. I want to be able to walk from side to side, to have an armchair in one corner, and a table with two more chairs against a wall. I know I want it to have lots of openings so daylight and air can come in. I’ll have to think of a way to close the openings, though, in case it rains.
When the bell rings, and lunch is over, I decide to come back here tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. I tell myself it really isn’t that bad.
5
Taylor and I sit on the soccer field, looking through one of the huge mathematician books he checked out from the library.
“This guy looks kind of cool,” he says. “He was obsessed with clocks.”
I’m trying to pay attention to what he’s saying, but whenever I glance at the book I end up noticin
g how his eyelashes turn white at the tips. I keep forcing myself to resist touching them.
“Oh, crazy! This one guy went to prison for fraud!”
I reach over to grab one of the books and my knee presses against his. He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t even seem to notice. I feel my face getting hot. I open the book and try to focus. All I can do is wonder if Taylor knows that our knees are touching. I move mine away, just the tiniest bit.
Taylor and I already decided that we don’t really care about finding a mathematician who discovered some amazing concept, we just want to find one who had an interesting life. I look down at the millimeter of space between Taylor’s knee and mine, and start to read.
These books are full of boring information, like where certain mathematicians were born, and who they married, and what concepts they thought of and named after themselves. Then a word captures my attention: pirate.
“Hey, look at this,” I say, and Taylor pushes his knee back against mine, leans closer until we’re touching in so many places, puts his face so close to my face that I can feel him breathing, and starts to read where I point. I can tell that he’s concentrating, but there’s no way I can with him so close to me, so I glance up from the book for a second. Dylan is walking toward the parking lot with Marjorie Klein.
There are three kinds of outsiders at my school: the outsiders who everyone thinks are lame and nerdy, the outsiders who everyone looks at and thinks, That kid looks vaguely familiar, and the outsiders who are only outsiders because no one else is quite like them. Marjorie is the third kind, the best kind. Last year she tied with Ingrid for “most artistic.”
Dylan and I haven’t talked for over two weeks now. She’s started sitting across the room from me in English, and ignores me whenever we’re at our lockers together. Now she and Marjorie are gesturing like they’re having this really great conversation, and I feel my body sink into the ground. Dylan says something and Marjorie laughs, and I wonder what great joke she made, and suddenly everything that was good about sitting here with Taylor is ruined. All I can think of is Dylan’s boot kicking her desk, and the way she left class that day without looking at me.
“This guy looks awesome,” Taylor’s saying. “We should definitely choose this guy.”
I look back down at the page. Jacques DeSoir.
“How cool is this,” Taylor says. “A French renegade pirate mathematician.”
Dylan and Marjorie are getting farther and farther away.
“I have to go,” I say.
“Already?”
“My parents will want me home,” I tell him, but really, I just need to get this image of Dylan and Marjorie out of my head.
“Want a ride?” Taylor asks.
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
We head toward the parking lot, following far behind Dylan and Marjorie. Once we get there, I lose sight of them in the rows of cars.
“So we should have a map,” Taylor says, “and, like, plot the course of Jacques DeSoir.”
I nod and try to spot Marjorie’s van. I wonder where they’re going. I think of them at the noodle place, Marjorie ordering the most exotic thing on the menu, and I feel so replaceable.
Taylor and I stop. We’re standing in front of his ancient, yellow Datsun hatchback. I haven’t been paying attention to where we’ve been walking, and I realize that I’m standing by the driver’s door and he’s standing by the passenger’s.
“Here!” Taylor says, and tosses a set keys over the car.
I catch them.
“You don’t mind driving, do you?” he asks.
“Why?”
He grins and shrugs. “Unlock us?”
I do. I climb into the well-worn driver’s seat, lean over to the passenger side, and pull the lock up. Taylor gets in. The inside of the car is warm and it smells like chocolate. We sit, looking at each other for a minute.
“I don’t have my license.”
“But you know how to drive, right?”
“Yeah.”
“And you live nearby?”
“Right off of Oak.”
“So that’s not far.”
“True,” I say. “Not far at all.”
“So I don’t mind.”
“Well, if you don’t mind . . .” I say. I put the key in the ignition and the car spits and shakes to life. Taylor leans forward and rests his cheek against the dashboard. “Good, Datsun,” he says. “Good little car.”
I laugh at him and release the emergency brake. I wonder what the fuck I’m doing. If we got pulled over I could get arrested, I could lose the right to ever drive, I could get grounded for the rest of my high school life. But I can’t stop myself. This is just happening. I’m just doing what I want to do and it feels good. I adjust the rearview mirror and see Marjorie’s Volkswagen van pulling away from the sea of shiny, adult cars that kids around here get for their sixteenth birthdays: brand-new Accords and Passats and Maximas. I put Taylor’s car in reverse.
“Careful when you switch to drive,” Taylor says. “It gets kinda stuck sometimes.”
I drive carefully out of the parking lot and down the street to the main road. It’s a red light; I look for oncoming cars and then turn right. I expect Taylor to be all nervous that I’m behind the wheel, but he’s leaning back in his seat, just smiling at me.
“You look good driving my car,” he says.
We pass the hills and the strip mall and so many other cars. I glance at Taylor and find his eyes still on me. I’ve been so used to sitting still in the backseat that I’ve forgotten how much I liked the feeling of making a car move, take me somewhere. I’d forgotten how I called Ingrid one night after practicing for the test with my dad and told her, This summer I’ll drive us anywhere. Where do you want to go? Name a place and I’ll drive us.
At a stoplight, a car blaring hip-hop pulls up next to us.
A girl shouts, “Taylor!”
Alicia McIntosh is leaning out of her convertible Mustang.
He turns to me and rolls his eyes. The light turns green and he whispers, “Go!” I accelerate hard and Alicia’s car gets smaller and smaller in the rearview mirror.
6
My parents say that I have an hour before dinner will be ready. I’m feeling too much to be in the house right now, so I go out to my car, but the space in there is too small to contain me. All through my chest and my stomach is this regret over what I’m doing with Dylan, in my hands and my feet is this electricity at the thought of Taylor leaning close to me, and all over my whole body, way, deep inside it, is this hurting over Ingrid. I could scream at the top of my lungs and the sound I would make wouldn’t be half as loud as I’d need it to be.
An hour isn’t a lot of time, but it’s enough to do something, so I run across the backyard and down the hill and out to the oak tree and my pile of wood and box of tools and the bolts I bought. The treehouse book says that oak trees are perfect for treehouses, something about how their branches are shaped and angled. I’ve chosen to build the floor about ten feet up, in a spot where the branches aren’t very dense.
First, I have to build myself a ladder.
I hoist up a long plank of wood and lean it against the tree. I pick out a handful of one-inch bolts and hammer them through the plank and into the tree trunk, spacing the bolts a foot apart from one another. The hammer feels heavy and solid in my hand. I can still feel recklessness in my stomach. As I work, I lose myself in memories of Ingrid.
The summer after ninth grade, Ingrid and I met two guys who went to a high school a few towns over. It was hot. We were bored. So we wandered the streets with them, ended up at a park they knew. We climbed through bushes and over rocks and ended up at a creek.
We sat with our feet in the water and listened to the friends talk about nothing, and laughed when we knew that something was supposed to be funny. Then, almost midconversation, the taller one leaned over to kiss Ingrid; and the other guy, as if on cue, pushed his mouth against mine. I jerked away—this wasn’t wh
at we had planned—and I was sure that Ingrid was going to also. But she didn’t. The shorter one put his hand on my leg, but even that was too much, and soon I stood up and stepped deeper into the creek. He muttered something to his friend, and left. I looked into the water, up to the trees, over to where a stranger’s hand inched up my best friend’s shirt.
Later that night, she said, God, Caitlin. We were only kissing. It was true, but I kept thinking about how she felt about Jayson, and how this had been so different, so much less.
When I’ve hammered nails up one plank as high as I can reach, I line up another one about a foot away from the first and nail it to the tree. After that’s done, I saw a piece off a third plank and bolt it in to make the first step. I look up through the branches and imagine what it will be like when the house is built and I’ll sit in this tree and watch the sky turn black.
My dad calls me from the house. I’ve never felt an hour pass so quickly. I put my hammer back in the toolbox and close the metal lid. My arms are sore from lifting and pounding, but for some reason this makes me feel satisfied, like I really accomplished something. I walk back up the hill to my house, and wonder what Dylan is doing.
7
Ms. Delani is wearing a dress today. It’s all black, sleeveless and billowy. She has a red scarf tied around her neck, and as she walks past me passing back work, her scarf trails behind her in the air. I watch the end of it swishing around. I want to reach out and yank it.
Then she stops in front of me, and drops a hideous, overexposed picture of dirt on my desk. My landscape. I flip it over. In thick red pen she’s written D. Below it, See me.
