by Katie Henry
She knows I don’t like the feeling of cold food on my hands, but the last time I reminded her, she said, “Well, there’s not much you do like, is there?” And the Jensens just had a baby, which makes this an act of service. So I roll up my sleeves and start.
It’s quiet, but the wrong kind. Maybe she’s counting down the seconds, just like I’m counting down the seconds until my dad or little sister comes home and rescues me.
“So.” I hear Mom turn toward me. “How was it?”
“How was what?”
She tries to sound casual. “Therapy.”
Now I know why she gave me this job. My hands are covered in mayo and I can’t walk out. I mix the slaw with shredded carrots and shredded trust.
“It was fine,” I say, and can almost hear Martha: “Fine” is not a feeling. Mom doesn’t know that, though.
“Just fine?”
Or maybe she does.
“I talked. She talked. I didn’t cry,” I say. “So, yeah. Just fine.”
“It’s a lot of money for ‘just fine,’ Ellis.”
“It’s therapy, not Disneyland, Mom.”
Mom closes the oven door and checks the slaw over my shoulder. “It’s not mixed enough.”
“I’m not done, I—”
“What did you talk about?”
I close my eyes. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“No.”
“You don’t know what you talked about for an hour?”
“I mean, a lot of stuff,” I say. “I didn’t take notes.”
She waits a beat. “Did you talk about me?”
“Mom!”
She has the absolute audacity to look shocked. “You don’t have to yell.”
“Why do you always ask that?” I’ve stopped mixing.
“I have a right to know what’s being said about me.”
I shake my head and start mixing again.
“No, Ellis, not like that—here.” She digs her hands into the bowl, taking over.
“Do you have to criticize every little thing I do?” I snap, but step back.
“You’re being dramatic.”
“You’re kind of proving my point.”
Her nostrils flare, but at that moment, Dad steps into the kitchen, two reusable grocery bags over his shoulders. He was smiling, but that dies when he sees the way Mom and I are looking at each other.
“Hey,” he says, cautiously, hands out like a zookeeper faced with two snarling wolverines.
Mom flicks one last look at me before kissing him hello and rinsing her hands off at the sink. “I told my sister I’d call her back before dinner. Can you check the lasagna in five?”
“Sure,” he says. I unload the groceries. Once we hear the click of her heels on the second floor, Dad turns to me. “What happened?”
I don’t say anything for a moment.
“Come on, Elk,” he says, knowing I can’t resist my childhood nickname. Elk, for my initials—Ellis Leah Kimball.
“She wanted to know what I talked about in therapy.”
He sighs.
“She wanted to know if I talked about her.”
“She likes to be in the loop,” he says. “Just like you.”
I roll my eyes. Mom and I could not be more different. Like I’d ever host parties or stand up in front of a crowd to teach Sunday school. Like I’d ever have as many friends as she does, or know how to comfort someone who’s grieving, or argue with a salesperson over a gift card balance and win.
Mom is afraid of nothing and no one. And I’m—well, there’s a reason she asked Dad to check the oven, not me.
“I’ll talk to her,” Dad assures me, running a hand through hair that’s the same deep brown as mine, the same thickness and inability to curl. My sister inherited my mom’s dark yellow hair—she won’t let anyone call it “dirty blond”—her slight build and light coloring. Dad was adopted as a baby, so I’m the only one in our entire extended family that looks like him. Tall and broad-shouldered, capable of tanning when the rest of them just burn. Oddballs in a family of pocket-size blonds.
There’s a lot I don’t like about myself, but I do like the way I look. I can stand in the back row and still see, unlike my mom. I can go outside in summer without putting on sunscreen every ten seconds, unlike Em.
I didn’t always like it. Like when I was nine and at a family reunion, running around with my cousins, and one of my dad’s sisters said I was like a “moose in a deer herd.” I was old enough to know it wasn’t a compliment. When I told Dad, he said, “You like eating venison, right, Ellis?”
“Yeah.”
“And that’s deer.”
“Yeah.”
“Have you ever eaten a moose?”
“No.”
“That’s because it’s a lot harder to take down a moose.” He winked. “Or an elk.”
He talked to Aunt Karissa, and she never said anything like that again. So maybe he can get through to Mom. Eventually.
Mom’s phone call and the lasagna are both done before Em bursts through the door—late, as always. Ballet slippers falling out of her dance bag, bun half unraveled, talking about eighteen things at once, as always.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry I’m late.” She dumps her bag and kicks off her shoes in the middle of the kitchen doorway. I start counting the seconds until she trips over them. “Lizzy’s mom drove me home but first she—oh wait, I have a permission slip for—” She turns back for her bag. “Whoops.” There’s the trip, seven seconds in. She retrieves a crumpled blue form. “But so anyway, Lizzy’s mom wanted to ask about the date for the winter recital—are we going to Utah for Christmas this year? Because we can’t fly until it’s over—okay, but then so after Lizzy’s mom asked, I remembered I wanted to talk to Miss Orstrevsky about—ugh, these tights are killing me.”
She plops down in a kitchen chair and rolls her dance tights farther up her legs. “I was thinking it would be cool if we did a piece from Tchaikovsky’s The Snow Maiden because it’s not like I don’t like The Nutcracker but it’s kind of played out.”
“I hope you didn’t hold up Lizzy’s mom too long,” Mom says. “She’s very nice to drive you home.”
“Don’t worry,” Em says to Mom, as if they aren’t both biologically incapable of worrying about anything. “She loves me.”
Of course she does. Everyone loves Em.
“If we could start eating before midnight, please,” Mom says, and ushers us all into the dining room.
We fold our arms as Dad says the blessing over the food, then dig in. Conversation is, as usual, heavily dominated by Em. Today at school, she had to complete a ten-year plan. She thought this was exciting, which only shows how different we are. Not only do I not know what I’d do in a decade, I’m increasingly unsure the world will even last that long. But my sister’s got plans.
“First I’m going to graduate high school,” she reports. “Then I’ll go to college on the East Coast, then I’ll go on a mission, then I’ll get married in the temple and become a wildlife biologist.”
Mom raises her eyebrows. “I thought you wanted to be a nurse.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know, you have to be inside all day.”
“Didn’t you want to be a garbage truck driver?” Dad says, and Em groans.
“Ugh, Dad, when I was, like, six.”
“Why a wildlife biologist?” I ask her. “I mean, it’s cool, but why?”
“I watched this thing on YouTube about this lady wildlife biologist who lived out in the Canadian wilderness for years tracking this wolf pack,” Em says, “and she eventually made friends with them and became, like, a member of the pack and—it was so cool. She wasn’t studying them, she was part of them, you know?”
“I bet she didn’t have any children,” Mom says. Dad clears his throat.
“Maybe,” Em says. “She didn’t say. What’s it matter?”
“I think it would be very hard to do something like that and raise children, to
o.”
Emmy’s knife squeaks against her plate. “Maybe I won’t have kids.”
Dad looks at Mom. Mom looks at Em. “Don’t be silly, you love babies.”
“Well, you just said I can’t do both.”
“That’s not what I said. You weren’t listening closely.”
“Lisa,” Dad says.
“I said it would be very hard,” Mom says. “You’d have to think carefully about what was important to you. Or most important to you. And I don’t really think that’s following wolves around, but I could be wrong.”
Em’s mouth twists. “It was just an idea.”
“It’s a great idea,” I jump in. Mom’s always on me to hold people’s tiny, extremely breakable babies, but that’s because she knows I don’t want to. Em’s always wanted to cuddle newborns and wipe snot off toddlers’ faces. Why does Mom push like this when she doesn’t even have to?
“Emmy,” Dad says. “It’s okay. You’re thirteen. Don’t worry about this right now.”
Em stabs at her lasagna with a fork. Mom touches her shoulder.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” Mom says, and Em smiles. But she smiles like she thinks she’s supposed to. Not because what Mom said didn’t hurt.
“You know what we should really be worrying about,” I say. “Emergency food storage.”
Em frowns. Mom closes her eyes.
“You don’t need to worry about that, either,” Dad assures Em, who’s closely watching Mom’s reaction.
“No one’s going to get to live with wolves or have babies if we can’t get through an earthquake,” I say.
“Okay,” Dad says. “Let’s not do this tonight.”
“We only have three months’ worth of food.”
“That’s enough,” Mom says, and I don’t know whether she means that’s enough out of me, or that we have enough food.
“Bad things can happen,” I say. “They do. And when people aren’t prepared, they suffer. I don’t want to us to suffer, what’s so terrible about that?”
Em looks to Dad. He sighs. “No one is saying it’s bad to be prepared, but we are, and the more you obsess over this, the worse it gets for you—”
“The worse it gets for all of us,” Mom cuts in. “It’s not only about her.”
You’d think I was holding them at gunpoint or forcing them to eat dirt. All I want is to make sure we survive. All of us, together.
“What do you think’s going to happen?” Em says with a tilt of her head.
Biological weapons released into the air. Superviruses that can’t be cured. Terror attacks at the university, at my school, on the Golden Gate Bridge. I open my mouth to answer.
She’s a kid. She’s your little sister. You want her to have nightmares? You want her to start checking for fire exits whenever she walks in a room? You want her to be like you?
I shrug. “Earthquakes.”
Mom and Dad share a look. They know it’s more than that, but I doubt they want Em to know about it, either.
“We’re perfectly prepared for an earthquake,” Mom says. “A power outage, a fire—this is California. We don’t have hurricanes, we don’t have tornadoes or snowstorms. We. Are. Prepared.”
“Three months of food storage is the bare minimum,” I argue. “Aunt Karissa has three years.”
“She also doesn’t vaccinate her kids,” Dad mumbles. “She should not be your role model.”
“Your aunt lives in the middle of nowhere,” Mom points out. “If something happened—and nothing is going to happen—it might be a while before help could get to her.”
“We have Safeway right down the street,” Em says, taking a bite of lasagna.
“We have five grocery stores in walking distance. And food banks. And—” Mom holds up her hands. “No, you know what? I’m not doing this.” She turns to Em. “Emmy, why don’t you go pick out a board game for after dinner? Anything you want.” She quickly adds, “Anything but Trivial Pursuit.”
“Why not Trivial Pursuit?” I ask.
“Uh, you know why not,” Em says, getting up from the table.
“Sometimes the answers on the cards really are wrong, Em,” I call after her as she pads into the living room.
The second Em’s out of sight, Mom grabs my wrist, not lightly. I try to pull away.
“Mom—”
“No,” she says. “No more of this. I know you worry about these things. But it’s irrational.”
“Lisa,” Dad says. “She can’t control what she worries about.”
“She can control what she says,” Mom counters. “I know it’s hard. And I’m glad you’re working on it with Martha.” She tightens her grip. “But you are not allowed to hold this whole family hostage because you’re anxious, Ellis.”
There’s the word. The word that always tightens my chest, but only slices my skin when she says it. She drops my wrist.
I don’t always like my family, but I love them. And I’m going to keep all of us safe, whether they like it or not.
Three
HERE ARE THREE things my school doesn’t have:
A dress code
Detention
Any real rules besides “no murder, no arson, no water guns”
Here are three things my school does have:
A campus the length and width of several city blocks
Nearly four thousand students
A halfway decent library
So though we also have an open campus during lunch, there’s only one place I’ll eat, and that’s the library.
No one’s actually supposed to eat in the library, which I understand, but it does present practical difficulties. Late in the spring semester of my freshman year, I went looking in the library stacks for a book on extreme weather patterns. It took me all of lunch to find it—the shelf it was on was in the back corner, with a wide, perpendicular set of bookshelves blocking outside sightlines. My first thought was, This would be a perfect place for a mass shooter to hide. My second thought was, This would be a perfect place for me to eat lunch.
It’s a perfect place within another perfect place. And maybe a public school library wouldn’t be everyone’s perfect place, but it’s mine. Everything about the library is routine. Every time I walk inside, the steps I take are as replicable as a lab experiment, and much safer.
I walk in the A-building and up the stairs to the second floor. I push open the glass door. I smile and say hi to Rhonda the Lunch Librarian, who does not smile back. Ours is a clandestine friendship. I head straight to the reference section and scoop up the heavy maroon book on the top shelf, five books from the left: Barnhart Concise Dictionary of Etymology. I make a beeline for the corner by the Meteorology/Climatology section. I sit with my back against the corner stack, the most tactically advantageous position. I spread the etymology dictionary out on the mauve synthetic carpet. I take out Kenny #14. I breathe in the solitude, the books on every side of me like a cocoon, the smell of old paper and ink and a little mildew.
And for the first time all day, I can breathe out.
I unwrap my PB&J sandwich as I flip through the etymology dictionary. Sometimes I’ll go in order, word by word, page by page, but today, I skip around. Parabola. Galore. Kestrel.
I feel someone standing close by. Ugh. Rhonda the Lunch Librarian, here to demand I throw away my sandwich even though I never leave crumbs.
“Okay, okay, I’ll put it away,” I mumble without looking up, though it doesn’t seem fair. Food is a human need. Books are a human need. It’s cruel to make a person choose.
“Put what away?” asks someone who is not Rhonda.
My head snaps up. Standing a foot away from me is the girl from Martha’s waiting room, the girl in blue. She’s still in blue, actually—same shoes, same Cal Berkeley hoodie. It might even be the same outfit, which is weird, but not as weird as the fact that she’s standing here, in my corner where nobody else goes.
Half her body is still behind one of the other bookshelves. She’s lea
ning in like she knows she’s invading something private. But she doesn’t look nearly as surprised as I feel—she doesn’t look surprised at all.
I think she knew I’d be here.
“Can I sit?” she asks, indicating a vague portion of the carpet next to me.
I peek my head around the stacks. There are many available chairs in the center of the library.
“Um. Sure.” She plops down but keeps her backpack on. She says nothing as her eyes move up from the tips of my sneakers to the tips of my hair. I untuck the strands behind my ear.
“Yeah,” she says softly, on a breath out. “It’s you.”
I still have no clue how we know each other. But we must; she wouldn’t say it like that otherwise. But where? Church girls’ camp? Freshman-year PE? The two weeks I played soccer before discovering that I lack both hand-eye and foot-eye coordination?
“I’m really sorry,” I say. “I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s Hannah,” she says. “Hannah Marks. And you don’t have be sorry. We only met on Monday. And I didn’t tell you my name then.”
What? “We met on Monday?” I bleat.
“Yeah,” she says, then looks concerned. “In Martha’s office? I mean, in her waiting room. You came out of your appointment and—”
“No, I remember,” I say. “I thought maybe we were on the same sports team, or in the same grade.”
“We are. You’re a junior, right?” I nod. “Me too.”
I wait for her to elaborate, as if all I could possibly want to know is that she’s Hannah, a junior. After a long silence, it’s clear I’ll have to speak first.
I clear my throat. “I’m Ellis.”
“I know.”
“Okay,” I say. “That’s kind of creepy.”
I didn’t really mean to say that last part aloud, but she brushes it off with a wave of her hand.
“I only know because I snuck a look at Martha’s appointment book.”
“That’s . . . actually creepier.”
She shrugs apologetically. “Martha wouldn’t tell me, so.”
“You asked her about me?”
“Only what your name was.”
“Why?”
She blinks. “Because I didn’t know.”
