No One Here Is Lonely

by Sarah Everett

  When I hear it again tonight, a familiar shiver travels down my spine.

  But something else too.

  Curiosity.

  A longing for something I can’t name.

  So I do it.

  I use the credit card my sisters and I share for emergencies, and I sign up to talk to Will.

  Whenever your heart desires, as he said.

  I answer a series of questions during the sign-up. My name, my age, my interests, likes and dislikes.

  And then finally, when it seems like this will go on forever, there is a click. The sound of an ending and the beginning of something.

  “I’m Will,” the voice on the other end of the line says.

  I know, I think.

  My heart is racing in my chest, my palms sweating.

  What am I doing?

  Lacey was right that we shouldn’t sign up. That this wasn’t for us. For me.

  “Hi, I’m…”

  “Eden,” he finishes for me.

  When I tell him he doesn’t sound like a ghost, he laughs.

  A full, hearty laugh that makes me picture him with his head thrown back, maybe clutching his side as well.

  This is Will, I suddenly realize.

  Will laughing.

  Will existing somewhere, never gone.

  “What exactly does a ghost sound like?” Will asks. “I’ll do my best impression.”

  He proceeds to make a bunch of windy whoo sounds, and I can’t help it. I burst out laughing.

  “With all due respect, can I ask why you thought I’d sound like a ghost?”

  “Because,” I start, but I can’t make the rest of the words come out.

  Because you’re dead.

  Almost as if the words passed from my lips, he answers, and his voice is a whisper. “I’m right here.”

  I NUDGE LACEY awake in between scrambling for my shoes and triple-checking the résumé in my manila folder.

  “Smsshrifma.” Lacey mutters something inaudible before yanking the sheets back over her head.

  “Lace, seriously,” I say. “You can’t be late. This is the last day of interviews.”

  “Mshpski,” she responds.

  I shake her awake again, determined to get a response out of her before I leave. “Promise me you won’t be late!”

  Finally she strings together sounds I can convince myself sound like “I promise.”

  I double-check my outfit in Lacey’s full-length mirror, then grab my bag and slip out of the room.

  “Eden! I thought I heard you come in with them last night,” Lacey’s mom says, emerging from the kitchen with a container of yogurt in her hand. She’s dressed for work, in slacks and a silk blouse, even though today is Saturday.

  “Hey, Mrs. M,” I say, heading over to give her a hug. I breathe in her vanilla scent. When she’s good—when she’s healthy—she is the warmest person I know. When she hugs you, she doesn’t let go until you do. “I hope we didn’t wake you.”

  I’m feeling her out, trying to figure out just how much of Lacey’s commotion she heard last night and whether we are in any kind of trouble, but she doesn’t seem upset with us.

  “You look ready to take on the world,” she says when she releases me. “What’s the occasion?”

  “We have our Camp Rowan interviews today,” I tell her. “Lacey’s is this afternoon.”

  “She didn’t tell me that was today!” she says.

  We chat for a couple more minutes, mostly her assuring me that I’ll do great, and then I hurry out of the house and get into my car, which has been parked in their driveway since I came over yesterday afternoon. Lacey and Oliver’s car is gone, so Oliver is probably already at work.

  I drive over to the Y, mentally rehearsing my answers to possible interview questions. I arrive five minutes early and am ushered into a cluttered office where a curly-haired middle-aged woman sits across from me.

  The interview itself is quick and painless. I answer questions about why I love working with kids, or rather, I present the impression that I love working with kids. I tell her about my years going to Camp Rowan as a camper, how they were some of the happiest summers of my life and how I can’t wait to go back as a counselor—things that are actually all true. Then the interview turns to logistics: my Social Security number, my bank account details. I pull everything out of the manila folder, and twenty minutes later, I have a job.

  I call Lacey immediately and get her voice mail.

  It’s eleven-thirty and her interview isn’t until two, so I decide not to get on her case for still being asleep. Given how drunk she was last night, she is probably battling a wicked hangover.

  “Hey, it’s me,” I say after the beep. “So you were right, it was totally straightforward and I had nothing to worry about. Kim was really nice and it’s pretty much a done deal. We’re going to camp!” I give a little squeal. “Anyway, good luck with your interview! Not that you’ll need it. Call me when you get this!”

  After I hang up, I feel like doing a little jig. I can’t remember the last time I felt this light, this excited. Definitely before Will’s death.

  Lacey and I went to Camp Rowan every summer, starting in third grade all the way till we were fourteen. It was my idea for us to go back this summer before we go off to college, before everything changes.

  I picture late nights around a campfire, decidedly unlike the one yesterday. Toasted marshmallows instead of booze, songs sung through laughter and not through tears. Adventures and new memories, a welcome escape from Erinville, where the weight of Will’s death hangs over everything like a dark cloud.

  I know it’s optimistic, imagining camp being the same as it was years ago, but I’m deciding to believe that, for once, reality can live up to my expectations.

  When I arrive at home, my entire house smells like finger foods, like mini-pies and crab cakes and deviled eggs—and then there’s the stuff we are actually allowed to eat. A bunch of vegan, gluten-free, low-fat options. When my mother started on our new health kick, she made it clear that it wasn’t just Dad’s new life—it was ours.

  Now my mother is scrambling around like a crazy person. She gives me a look of disapproval the minute she sees me.

  “Please tell me you’re not wearing that,” she says, appraising the pants and blouse I thought passed for professional.

  “I’m not wearing that,” I say, but she is in no mood for my jokes. Yesterday’s version of my mother—sentimental and soft—is gone, and in her stead is the to-the-point, no-nonsense Mom I know.

  “Eden, I’m serious. Go upstairs and change.” She herself is in a knee-length black-and-white dress, with a tasteful string of pearls. “I thought you’d be here hours ago.”

  “I had my interview, remember?”

  “Interview…” Mom gives me a blank look, then scans the living room for anything that is out of place.

  “For camp? I told you about it yesterday morning before graduation?”

  This does not appear to jog her memory. Instead of beating a dead horse, I turn the conversation to the only topic her attention is capable of handling right now.

  “How is everything coming along?”

  Mom sighs and is about to launch into a long spiel about everything that is going wrong with the preparations for the party she’s throwing when my older sister appears at the top of the stairs.

  “Mia?” I choke. Really it’s a cry of excitement, but it comes out as a question.

  We meet at the bottom of the stairs and exchange a quick hug.

  “Holy…wow,” I say. Unlike me, she is already in a dark green cocktail dress, the clean-cut image a sharp contrast to the rows of dreads on her head. I would have paid money to see Mom’s reaction when Mia got off that plane. She looks beautiful, but my mother believes dreadlocks are what you get
when you’ve given up. She believes in buns and ponytails, in clean, neat braids if you want something different. She has this belief that as one of the few black families in Erinville, it’s our job to exude something that impresses people, something that feels a lot like perfection.

  I haven’t seen Mia since Christmas, and it’s like she’s become an entirely different person since then. Her face is rounder, her eyes twinkle in a way that makes me wonder what she’s seen.

  “Sorry I couldn’t make it home for yesterday,” she says, and I shake my head, still mesmerized by how different she looks, how much older.

  Will college transform me the same way too?

  I can’t decide whether I want it to or not.

  “It’s okay,” I say.

  “You’re not wearing that, are you?” Mia asks, and from the way she echoes Mom, I realize she might not have changed that much after all.

  I sigh. “No, I’m going upstairs now.”

  I trudge up the stairs and into my room. I grab a shower, then get dressed for the party. Between Will’s memorial and graduation and now this, I am basically out of semiformal dresses.

  I decide on a maroon dress I haven’t worn since last summer.

  In the space of time I spend getting ready, my mind drifts back to last night, to hearing Will’s voice and the way he had sounded the same as always. All boy and no robot.

  All boy and no ghost.

  I feel a sudden need to tell Lacey about it. I know she’ll have something to say about the fact that I signed up, but it’s already done. All she can do is call with me, experience the same sense of being transported elsewhere that I did when I heard his voice.

  By the time I’m ready, the party has already started.

  As I descend the stairs, I hear laughter, the clinking of glasses being set down on glistening silver trays, my mother seamlessly slipping in tidbits about her new teaching series while my father, her biggest fan, tries to hand-sell copies of her new book, Happy Starts With You, or even some of her backlist. People are eating it up too, because my parents are the kind of people you don’t want to disappoint. People pack school gymnasiums and seminar rooms to hear my mother speak about getting what you want in life, and there’s a three-month waiting list to get into my dad’s dental practice.

  Everyone has hopes and dreams, but my parents live theirs. Save the one hiccup with my dad’s health, it’s like life itself is afraid to disappoint them.

  “It’s all about putting out there what you want.” This is Mom’s standard response whenever she is asked how exactly she ended up with the perfect life. The husband, the career, the house, the girls. The girls.

  “The Paulsen girls! Look at them! Just darling.” Almost as soon as I get downstairs, I find myself sandwiched between my sisters while Mrs. Flynne, one of Dad’s patients, coos over the three of us.

  My sisters and I are somehow positioned in our birth order. Mia first, me next, then Samara. I think sometimes that we’re like birds flying south for winter, innately forming a V shape wherever we go even though it’s been months since we’ve all been together. Hundreds of dinner parties and awards nights and dance competitions will do that to people. It’s easiest to understand our places relative to each other.

  Mrs. Flynne pats all our hands affectionately and then I am gently extricated from the middle while she prods Mia for details about college and the youth UN summit she’s attending in DC over the summer, then grills Sam on the short dance scores in her last competition. On the spectrum between normal and enchanted, my sisters’ lives fall on the same end as Mom’s and Dad’s. It’s just the way things are.

  Later, I’m standing with my parents, talking with Dad’s colleague Dr. Jensen and trying not to stare too hard at his miraculously restored hairline.

  “So, Eden,” he says. “I hear you’re all done with school. Now what?”

  “I’m working this summer, then going to State in the fall.”

  “What do you plan to study?”

  “She’s still mulling over her options,” Mom cuts in, before I can embarrass them by saying I have no idea what I want to do with my life. In her mind, she’s only helping me field the question, but there’s a reason Mia gets to answer that question on her own and I don’t. I’d be lying if I didn’t say at least thirty percent of the appeal of going to camp is being surrounded by kids who don’t give a crap what my plans are or what I want to study in college, whose foreheads don’t immediately furrow at my lack of direction.

  There’s this moment around junior year when you stop being a person and you become the sum of everything you hope to achieve, your value determined by your future earning potential, whether you’re going into the arts or doing something sensible and levelheaded, something sustainable.

  My parents have never cared one way or the other what we do, as long as we excel at it. Mom has a chapter in one of her books called “What’s the Point of Doing Something If You Don’t Plan to Be the Best At It?” I know this because I’ve received many abbreviated lectures on the subject. It’s not just a black thing (being twice as good, etc.); it’s a Paulsen thing.

  The conversation switches to something about overheads and Dad’s practice, so I swivel away from them and head to the snack table. I covertly pull out and check my phone, but there’s nothing from Lacey about her interview. She’s probably getting ready for her performance tonight.

  I shoot her a couple of texts.

  How did it go????

  Ready for your set yet? Wish you were here!

  I’ve just put my phone back when it vibrates in my dress pocket. But it’s a text from Sam, not Lacey.

  OMG Dad just pinched Mom’s butt. Can Mom do Closing Remarks yet???

  Mia responds before I do. Crap’s sake. Eden, tell Mom it’s Closing Remarks time!

  You tell her, I text back.

  It’s past four and I’m hopeful that things are wrapping up, that I’ll soon get to duck out and go and meet Lacey. Lacey, the one person who is consistently on the same wavelength as me.

  Across the room, though, my parents are still laughing in a group with a bunch of their friends and Sergiy, Sam’s ice dance coach. Sam is standing with them, while Mia is still chatting Mrs. Flynne’s ear off about all the fantastic things she’s achieved and done this year, things even I don’t know about yet.

  With the rest of my family engaged in conversations that I am not part of, I spend the rest of the afternoon drifting from group to group, practiced grin in place.

  At one point, it’s like I come outside myself. I’m floating above, listening to myself give lifeless answers about graduation and what I’m doing for college and working at Camp Rowan for the summer. I don’t know what it is about Mom’s functions, about nights like these, but they turn me into a cardboard cutout of myself. It’s like the room is so full of Paulsen excellence, I have no choice but to preemptively bore people with how completely ordinary I am.

  When we were younger, people used to have trouble telling Mia and me apart, with our rich brown skin and black hair. Sam has the same full lips, our big, expressive eyes. These days, it’s easier to tell the three of us apart, and not just because Sam is so much younger or because Mia suddenly has dreads. It’s as if time has differentiated us, like particles sifting out of solution or atoms splitting apart; suddenly all the ways we’re different are so obvious, the ways I am not enough of Mia or enough of Sam.

  I wish sometimes we were still indistinguishable from each other. There are not particularly many people here tonight—thirty or forty, at most—but the room feels so crowded that only the smallest version of myself will fit.

  “THIS SONG IS about feeling homesick for a place you haven’t been yet.”

  I walk into Kiely’s Coffeehouse a few minutes after six, just as Lacey is introducing the second song in her set. I’m overdressed, still in the dress
and heels from my mom’s party, but I’m just relieved to be out of the house.

  Lacey’s eyes are closed as she strums on her guitar, so she doesn’t see me come in. The lyrics to “Someday Maybe” are soulful, melancholy, like the rest of her music.

  I order an iced coffee and start toward my favorite corner in the café, but it’s Saturday night and busy, so it’s already occupied. I find the only empty table, then pull out my phone and record the next couple of songs. No matter how well her performance goes, Lacey likes to watch footage after and critique herself.

  For the next thirty minutes, Lacey performs a mix of songs she’s written and acoustic versions of popular mid-tempo songs.

  “That’s it for me tonight. Thank y’all for listening,” she says. When people start to applaud, she curtsies, then packs up her guitar and water bottle. As Lacey makes her way from the front of the café, I’m preparing to ask about her newfound Southern accent. Except instead of walking in my direction, she turns and walks to her right, across the room from me.

  I’m confused until I see whose table she’s headed to.

  Hail, Libby and Vance are here.

  Vance half stands from his seat to give her a high five, Libby follows suit and Hail stands up to give her a hug. Lacey gives a little squeal as her feet leave the floor. Then the four of them are laughing and talking over one another.

  I hesitate before walking toward them. Of all the things I hoped I’d be doing tonight, making small talk with Hail and Co. was not high on the list. Still, I can’t just leave. I told Lacey I’d be here.

  I’m halfway across the café when Lace suddenly turns around and waves at me. Vance must have seen me and told her I was walking over.

  Before I reach their table, Lacey meets me, cradling a mug.

  “Hi!” she says, giddy the way she always is when she’s just gotten off the stage. “I didn’t know you were coming.”