The Last Tree Town

by Beth Turley

  “Let’s play Spin the Bottle,” Jenna announces, walking down the stairs with a soda bottle raised over her head like a trophy. She sits down near my feet, and a group forms around her. My spot on the couch makes me part of the circle. Daniella finally shows up again and sits next to me.

  “I don’t want to play,” I whisper.

  “You’ll be fine,” she says. “Don’t you want to fit in?”

  Her words stun me like a paper cut. Quick and painful. Daniella knows how much I want to fit in. She’s the person who used to make me feel like I could, even if I was a bad dancer, even if my hair was frizzy. But not anymore.

  “Okay. I’ll do it.”

  Jenna explains that you have to go into the closet with the person the bottle points to. Those are the rules.

  When it’s my turn, I lean down from the couch and spin the soda bottle. I get dizzier the longer it twirls. It stops on the boy with the Rudolph sweater. He stands and walks fast to the closet. I don’t move.

  “It’s just two minutes,” Daniella says into my ear. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”

  “Promise?” I ask.

  “Yes.” She nudges me out of the circle. I step into the closet, and the door closes behind me. It’s dark and small, like the inside of a cave. The wet smell of the basement follows me. I can’t see the boy.

  “Can you turn the light on?” I ask.

  “Sure,” he says.

  I hear a click, and his sweater lights up. Rudolph’s nose blinks like a stoplight, flashing across the boy’s face. I’m sure the whole party can hear my heart beating. The song “Last Christmas” slips in through the space under the door. Why did Daniella tell me to do this? Why aren’t we keeping up Buela’s tradition and pressing rainbow sprinkles into cookie dough?

  “You can come closer,” the boy says.

  “No, thank you.” I use the light from his sweater to look around. Lesson Fifteen of Math Olympics: If you’re stuck, look at a different part of the problem. There’s a stack of board games in the corner. I sit down on Monopoly.

  “We’re supposed to make out.” His breath smells like corn chips. I count the seconds. It’s only one hundred and twenty seconds.

  “No, thank you.” The air is so thick, I can’t breathe. I don’t want to be cool anymore.

  Someone pounds on the door.

  “Time’s up.”

  I stumble out of the closet, and the blond boy follows. The slap of a high five echoes behind me. I don’t get back in the circle. I walk across the damp basement, up the stairs, and out the front door.

  Daniella doesn’t even try to stop me.

  I forget my jacket in the pile on Jenna’s bed. My sweatshirt is too thin for the cold, but I don’t stop. Houses glow with Christmas lights. I want to feel the way I did when Daniella and I walked side by side to the party, like things could be better even if they were different. I can’t. Snow seeps into my boots like my anger, icy and irritating. So what if the wall in Daniella’s chest fell? Did she have to knock everyone else down with it?

  It takes three hundred and thirty-seven steps to get to my room. The Math Olympics book is still on my bed. I throw it onto the ground. The birds will never sing together. I bury myself under the blanket with the faceless princesses.

  The front door opens a while later. Daniella kicks the snow off her shoes before coming upstairs. She stops in the spot between my room and hers. My door cracks open.

  “I shouldn’t have brought you,” Daniella whispers into the dark. I hear my jacket fall to the floor.

  Luckily, the blanket is over my head, so she can’t see that I’m awake. I’m afraid to close my eyes. I’m afraid of the nightmares. Of whispers and corn chips and dark closets. Of red lights that blink and then burst.

  29 The Reflection

  I stand at the kitchen sink, soaking my oatmeal bowl and staring out the window. Mom must have cleaned it with Windex recently. It’s clear enough for me to see my reflection.

  My hair is longer than it was when Daniella and I looked in the mirror at Kindly Vines. It grows as fast as weeds. The curves in my hips and chest have filled out a little more, like Mom said they might. I stand and stare at the reflection until I don’t recognize who looks back.

  The Reflection’s eyes swim with tears. Her hair is too frizzy. Her freckles stay sprinkled across her cheeks. If someone asked her to dance like no one was watching, she couldn’t. A sob gets stuck in her throat, something deep and desperate that she doesn’t want her family to hear. She swallows it down.

  The hot water in the sink creates steam, thick and swirling like a ghost.

  Fantasma.

  “Stop it,” the Reflection whispers. The sound of her own voice scares her. She looks away from the window, from herself. The kitchen table is covered in birds that can’t fly. It’s where she eats silent breakfasts with her sister, where she filled out an application that told her who she could be. The Reflection’s heart knots up.

  She imagines a new kind of application. It asks: Do you want things to be the way they were?

  She checks “Yes.”

  30 Five, Four, Three, Two…

  For as long as I can remember, everyone comes to our house on New Year’s Eve. Jac and Uncle Eric, Ben and his parents, and Buela and Buelo. It’s tradition. But things are different this year. Buelo isn’t here. Leslie is. And Daniella doesn’t want to be. She sits in a chair by the tree, running her finger over a silver bell ornament, ignoring everyone.

  “Try not to be miserable,” Mom says. She sits on the love seat with Buela.

  Daniella tilts her head and widens her mouth into a fake smile.

  “Excellent.” Mom blinks hard. Buela puts a hand on her leg. I swear she whispers, “Todo estara bien,” like Mom does to Daniella and me.

  I sit on the carpet near the TV with Jac and Ben. We’re watching people freeze in Times Square. It’s sort of a reunion, since Ben spent the holiday two states away with his grandparents, and Jac was at her mom’s. We don’t have to say “missed you” to know it’s true. We just sit closer together.

  “Why is she acting especially angsty tonight?” Jac asks.

  It’s been like this since Jenna’s party, I should say. But then I’ll have to think about the tasteless cookies and musty basement and Daniella insisting that I’d be cool. I don’t want to think about those things, even if it means keeping a secret from my best friends.

  “I can hear you, you know,” Daniella says.

  Jac looks over her shoulder.

  “Yeah, I know.” She smiles, but it looks sad instead of scary.

  “Very mature, Jac.” Daniella grips the edge of her chair.

  “Can everyone just take it easy?” Dad snaps from his recliner.

  Dad never talks like that. It’s always Mom who does the disciplining. But nothing is the same anymore. I try to focus on the TV instead of the tension in the room. The camera cuts to a group in matching hats that say We traveled three thousand miles for this.

  Uncle Eric clears his throat. “Next year we go to the city with a big sign, HOLY BALONEY, HOME OF THE SRIRACHA GRILLED CHEESE,” he says. He sits in the other recliner next to Dad’s.

  “You go right ahead. I’ll be here,” Dad says, his voice slipping back to normal.

  “I prefer the Kim-Chay,” Leslie says, and smiles at the Chays from her spot on Uncle Eric’s recliner’s armrest.

  “Well, nothing beats that,” Mr. Chay says. His hand is linked with Mrs. Chay’s.

  A country singer starts to perform onstage in a puffy coat and cowboy boots. Ben stands.

  “I’m going to be there one day.” He starts his own choreography to the song. I realize that the song is “Elmtown.”

  “Yes, you sure will,” Mrs. Chay says. She picks her camera up off the coffee table, one of those big, boxy ones with the giant lenses, and snaps a picture. Mr. Chay rolls his shoulders like he’s trying to learn Ben’s dance moves.

  “First saw you when the leaves ch
anged, sitting in that wooden chair. Lost the nerve to say that I’d go with you anywhere.” Ben sings along with the performance. Mrs. Chay snaps a picture. Dad and Uncle Eric start pretending to play instruments—Dad with an imaginary guitar and Uncle Eric on an invisible keyboard. Mom and Buela sway back and forth on the love seat. Jac stands up and attempts ballet, leaping all over the living room in a flurry of faded blue hair.

  Daniella even rings the silver bell ornament. I feel the tension in the living room float away.

  Almost midnight + my family singing and dancing like nothing is wrong = The way things are supposed to be.

  Mom hands out noisemakers and hats and plastic glasses. We all gather in front of the TV while the ball drops. It glows like a color-changing moon on its way down.

  “Ten, nine, eight, seven, six…,” we shout together, hats on and horns ready.

  I watch Daniella lean her chin into Jac’s shoulder.

  “Five, four, three, two…” she counts into her ear.

  My heart swells with light like the ball’s million crystals. Ben and I lock eyes and tip our pointed hats at each other. I think about the last lesson Mr. G wrote on the board before we left for winter break.

  Lesson Seventeen of Math Olympics: Without numbers, there would be no New Year’s.

  “One.”

  31 Cute

  There’s an oddly warm day in January, the kind where fifty-five degrees feels like summer. The gym teachers bring us out to the adventure course in the woods. There’s a narrow rope bridge set up in the trees, and an obstacle where you have to maneuver from one tire swing to another, and this big wooden platform where we all have to work together to make it balance evenly. It’s fun in the fall when the leaves turn orange. But now the trees are bare and the ground is frozen.

  Ben has the same gym period as me, but a different teacher. Our classes join together for the adventure course.

  “We should get Aaron out here. He could tell us about a tree town while in an actual tree,” Ben says. He points to the rope bridge. It sways a little in the wind. A pulley system hangs down from where the bridge is attached to the tree trunk higher up. The ropes get hooked to harnesses when students are up there.

  “Yeah, good idea.”

  The truth is, I want to slow down on the tree town stories. After that conversation with Aaron and his dad at the mall, I’m starting to realize what happens when the stories run out.

  Ms. Kapinski, my gym teacher, claps a hand against her clipboard and tells us to huddle up. She wears lime-green athletic shorts. The skin on her legs is covered in goose bumps and tinted blue. I think she might have overestimated the warmth.

  “We’re going to do the two-person bridge walk today. One person will start on either side. You’ll both walk across at the same time. Your objective is to figure out how each of you is going to get to the other side. The bridge is too narrow for both to get by at once.” Ms. Kapinski speaks in hard sentences. No matter what she’s saying, it always sounds like she’s giving instructions. Even “Have a good day” comes out like a command.

  Ben swivels his hips, bumping me. His way of saying that we’re partners.

  “Please don’t dance up there,” I warn him.

  Ben’s moves + rickety bridge = A fall to our deaths.

  “Maybe it’s the exact strategy to get across,” he says.

  I guess the right solution isn’t always the one you think it is. Like how I thought going to that party with Daniella would bring us back together, but it didn’t. Instead it’s like there’s a canyon between our bedrooms. The results defied all my hypotheses.

  We form lines on both sides of the bridge, one partner from each set in one line and the other partner straight across. Ms. Kapinski and Ben’s gym teacher clip the first pair into the harnesses, then hold the other ends of the ropes while the students start up the ladders built into the trees. The climbing is the scariest part.

  Sage from Math Olympics is behind me. She taps my shoulder.

  “Are you going out with Aaron?” Her voice carries. Even some of the people in the other line turn and look.

  “What? No.” I’ve never gone out with anyone, ever. The idea makes my skin heat up like I’m wearing a hundred sweaters on top of each other.

  “You think he’s cute, though, right?”

  I haven’t really thought about Aaron as cute or not. But I guess I wouldn’t mind looking out into the woods and seeing him there. It’s kind of cute when he blushes at the big parts of his stories.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Good. I just wanted to make sure it was okay for me to go out with him.”

  My heart pauses. “He asked you?”

  “No. But he will.” She’s still talking loud enough for the other line to hear. I can feel Ben staring at me, but I don’t look over. The first pair up on the bridge is two guys from the soccer team. When they meet at the center, the shorter one squats down and lets the other climb over him. Like leapfrog without the leaping.

  “Good strategy,” Ms. Kapinski says. She gives the kid attached to her rope some slack so that he can climb down the tree.

  I need a strategy. Not to cross the bridge with Ben, since that leapfrog approach looked effective. I need to stop Aaron from riding off into the sunset with Sage the Great.

  But not because I think he’s cute. I add just my friend, just my friend, JUST MY FRIEND to my set of Aaron Facts.

  * * *

  Mr. G has us silently read an article at the beginning of Math Olympics. I stare at the back of Aaron’s head like it’s the first time I’ve ever seen it. I wish this article was about how to slow my pulse down, and not the discovery of a new formula.

  “Get into groups to discuss what you learned from the reading,” Mr. G says. His tie has paw prints on it.

  I see Sage grab on to Allie’s sweater and pull her toward Aaron and me. Aaron pushes his desk next to mine, like normal. But nothing feels normal.

  “Your sweatshirt is nice,” I say.

  Aaron looks down at his black hoodie, and then at me. “I wear this all the time.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you.” Heat rushes to my cheeks and chest and everywhere else.

  “Thanks.” He bends the corners of the article, looking as confused as I feel. Sage and Allie stop in front of us.

  “Wanna be a group?” Sage asks.

  “Sure,” Aaron answers.

  “Great.” Sage sits down, tossing her blond hair back. Her face isn’t red and blotchy. Sweat stains aren’t forming under her armpits. And I’m sure her head is full of better words than “Your sweatshirt is nice.”

  “I thought the article was fascinating,” Allie says. I look at her paper. Lime-green highlighter streaks cover the whole thing. “Can you believe that math has been around for a billion years and there’s still new discoveries all the time?”

  Yes, this is good. We’ll discuss the article, and no one will have time to ask anyone else out.

  “Agreed. And I liked that the guy named the new formula after his mom, and not himself like everyone else does,” I say.

  “We don’t have to talk about this.” Sage pushes her article to the side with a purple-painted pinky. Then she leans forward onto her elbows, facing Aaron. “Are you going to the Ice Plex thing?”

  Posters for the Parents and Teachers Association ice-skating fund-raiser showed up in the halls after winter break. Jac stole one to add to the poster collection in her bedroom, but she crossed out most of the words so that it just read Parents and Teachers Are Ice.

  “I was thinking about it.” Aaron turns to me. “Are you?”

  I want to be as cool and calm as Sage.

  “Probs,” I say. I flip my hair back, but a chunk gets stuck in my ChapStick. I want to hide under my desk.

  Probs? I’ve never used that word in my life.

  “See you both there, then,” Sage says, but she’s not looking at me at all. I wish Daniella were here to explain why my heart feels like it’
s snapping in half. Last year when she and her boyfriend Mason broke up, she cried for days even though they only went out for two months. I remember thinking it was grown-up to feel that sad over a boy.

  But this doesn’t feel grown-up at all. It feels uncomfortable. And Aaron isn’t even my boyfriend. I just don’t want him to be Sage’s. Then he’ll start telling her his stories instead of telling me.

  Allie pounds on her desk, demanding our attention. “A billion years, people! And there are still new discoveries out there!”

  32 Together

  Mom is at the kitchen table with Buela when I get home from school. They both have puzzles in front of them—Mom with sudoku, Buela with a word scramble. Buela’s big copper rice pot is on the stove. Steam escapes from the sides of the lid.

  I kiss Buela on the cheek and breathe in her powdery smell.

  “Help me, Fantasma.” She points at the word scramble. Her place mat is shaped like an owl.

  “I don’t want to be a ghost.” The words fall like bricks.

  Buela’s face wrinkles. Her brown eyes darken. Mom looks up from her puzzle.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t know that upset you. I will stop,” Buela says.

  I want to take it back. I want to take everything back. I want to rewind and stop Buelo from collecting electricity, stop the wall in Daniella’s chest from falling, stop that piñata in the cafeteria from breaking into pieces. But I can’t.

  “It’s okay, Buela,” I say. I look at her word scramble. She’s trying to rearrange the word “SCGHNAE.” “I’ll help you. But you know I’m better with numbers.”

  Buela wraps her arm around my waist.

  “Dinner is in an hour,” Mom says.

  I find words inside the scramble. “Hangs.” “Cane.” “Sea.”

  “Do you want me to tell Daniella?” I ask. Mom shakes her head.

  “She knows.”

  I watch the clouds of steam around the pot and think about my failed attempt to help Daniella. There has to be another way.