Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  “What did you wish for?” Jenna asked, later that night. We sat on the barstools in her kitchen, eating forkfuls of leftover buttercream cake while sharing a glass of milk.

  “I can’t tell you,” I said. “It won’t come true.”

  “Aren’t we a little old for that?”

  I shook my head as I downed the last of the milk.

  “So tell me what you didn’t wish for.” She smiled.

  I set the glass down. It clinked lightly against the marble countertop. “I didn’t wish to never spend a birthday without you. That’s for sure.”

  “Double negative.” Jenna laughed, but I could tell she was pleased. “Amelia, you’re going to have to be better at grammar if—”

  “I’m going to be a professor,” I finished. “I know.”

  I stared off into the distance over Jenna’s shoulder, trying to look pensive and serious.

  “What are you thinking about?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing.” I sighed deeply. “Just … you know … Do you think it’s too late to take back my birthday wish? Maybe I could trade you for someone less exasperating.”

  The memory makes me feel hollow, like my edges are blurred and I might not be entirely real anymore. So I try to flip through and read my favorite parts in this impossible 101st copy of one hundred, but my eyes refuse to string together meanings from the words. I turn to the internet, scrolling through forums and articles but never finding evidence of an extra printed copy. Is this edition even legit?

  It doesn’t matter that I can’t read it. I just need to find out why this edition exists and how Jenna sent it to me from a store in Michigan that has no record of either of us. And why.

  chapter five

  When Mark texts to let me know he’s outside, he punctuates it with a smiling emoji. I think about that stupid yellow happy face as I wrap the 101st copy in a clean hand towel I pulled from the dryer and carefully place it into the book tote I use as a purse.

  A happy face. Even with the Orman book tucked against my side, whispering promises of mystery and distraction, I can’t imagine using an emoji. There’s not a face that can capture the expression of My best friend is gone.

  I’m kind of mad about it—Mark and Trisha’s attempts to make everything seem normal and happy—until I pass Mom in her chair, staring at the TV. There’s just as many ways to handle grief as there are emojis, I guess.

  They all suck.

  Mark must have turned on the seat warmer for me when he left his office, because when I sit down, the cushiony leather beneath my butt and lower back feels warm through my shirt. I lean into the heat with a sigh.

  “You do know that it is nearly eighty degrees outside?” He half smiles at me as he backs the car out, its tires jumping over my crumbling driveway.

  I give one of my new false, dry chuckles, the humorless one that has replaced my too-exuberant laughs since the funeral.

  “Yes, but like all Texans, you run the air-conditioning below freezing,” I say. “Thanks for the seat heater.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  The windshield wiper blades squeak angrily against the rain as Mark drives us from my crappy neighborhood to downtown Dallas, to where huge homes sit in orderly rows behind wrought iron fences.

  The first time I came to their house, it was obviously different from mine in every way. Most notably, it homed two parents who loved each other almost as much as they loved their daughter.

  As it became my second home, I explored its nooks and crannies. It’s a Croatian style, so it has almost as much stone inside as it does on the exterior, and Mrs. Williams—Trisha. Call her Trisha—has covered the walls with this great art.

  My favorite is a piece by Vincent van Gogh. It’s actually a print—the original is in a museum an hour away, in Fort Worth—and it shows brightly colored houses along a street in a small Mediterranean fishing village. Van Gogh went pretty heavy with the paint; the viewer can see clumps and heavy streaks on the vibrant rooftops, even in the print. It’s like what he saw with his eyes was too much for his head to hold and he had to get it out in any way he could. It’s a strange piece, melancholy and hopeful in the way the colors fight for attention, and it manages to suggest so much in just one frame. Even though it is an oil painting, it makes me feel as if I’ll never be as good a photographer, never be able to capture anything in such a vibrant, genuine way.

  I’m looking at the painting now, avoiding Trisha’s and Mark’s eyes as we eat chicken fingers on porcelain plates at the dining table. Trisha uses a fork and knife to cut hers, but Mark and I both use our fingers.

  We studiously ignore Jenna’s empty seat next to mine. Nobody comments on the empty place setting that Trisha must have put out by accident, but I can’t stop myself from zeroing in on it and remembering, even if it makes my insides feel like an empty well and my skin itch.

  Memory takes over. My plate morphs into a finer one with a tented cloth napkin placed perfectly at its center. The gleaming silverware twinkles against the polished wooden table. Mr. and Mrs. Williams will be meeting us any minute, but until then, Jenna and I are on our own in this very fancy restaurant.

  I inhale, and the air has the clotted, close smell of spiced vegetables and butter and wine. There is a large elk’s head mounted on the wall above the kitchen. He seems out of place, presiding over this fancy Latin fusion restaurant with his wide stare, but taxidermy is rarely considered unsuitable in Texas, no matter the theme.

  I only break eye contact with him when Jenna puts down her phone and looks up at me, shaking her head.

  “They’re stuck in traffic on the other side of town. They said to go ahead and eat without them.”

  “What? But it was your mom’s idea to try this place to begin with,” I say. “Let’s go, and come back when they’re with us.”

  “We’re already here, Amelia,” she says. “Why not?”

  This turns out to be a terrible idea.

  The cheapest thing on the menu is something neither of us can pronounce, and it costs fifty dollars. Even Jenna, who wields her parents’ credit card with a fair amount of confidence, balks at the prices.

  “Maybe we should split something?” I suggest.

  Jenna agrees, and neither of us thinks much of it when the waiter gives us a funny look, until he eventually returns with the world’s smallest plate of thin, unidentified cooked meat and another, only slightly larger plate of … French fries.

  “Thank God there are fries,” I say, popping one in my mouth before it can burn my fingers. “Tastes kind of funny, but they’re good!”

  “Amelia,” Jenna hisses, her eyes darting to a very well-to-do couple who are looking at us like we’re a pair of mice that just scurried across their plates. “Those are plantains. Use a knife and fork.”

  I roll my eyes. “Jenna,” I say, mimicking her tone, “these are called fries. You eat them with your hands.”

  I lean forward to grab another and demonstrate, but Jenna pokes at my knuckles with her fork. Her eyes get a fraction larger, the face she makes when she is trying very hard not to laugh at me.

  “Look, Bambi,” I say. “Why don’t you take care of … well”—I reach with my fork to nudge at the thin meat—“whatever that is, and I’ll take care of the fries?”

  It took less than five minutes to eat the pathetic amount of food. When we finished, Jenna and I looked at each other for a long moment before Jenna’s stomach audibly grumbled.

  “Maybe this is just the appetizer?” I asked hopefully, but the waiter, eager to be rid of the plantain hand-eater and her friend, darted forward with the check.

  “Answers that,” I muttered.

  We called Mrs. Williams from outside the restaurant, beside the valet booth, Jenna and I fighting over the phone in our eagerness to tell the story.

  “We can never eat there again, Mom. Seriously.” Jenna giggled into the phone. “Dad would have to order at least five main courses.”

  “Pick us up at the bookstore,�
�� I half yelled. Jenna tried to shove me away, but she was laughing too hard. “And bring cheeseburgers!” I added.

  Her parents had a good long laugh at our expense as we reenacted the short meal over Whataburger that evening.

  But here it’s only me and Mark and Trisha, and as I exhale, the room goes back to smelling like chicken fingers and the plate goes back to being just an empty plate before an empty chair.

  The show must go on, though, this charade that we’re all okay. We chat about the rain, discuss what I’m reading—I lie and make something up—and when Mark brings up Missoula, I try my best not to wince.

  “Soon you’ll be at freshman orientation,” he says proudly. And, with less enthusiasm, “I know it won’t be exactly how you wanted, but I hope you’re going to stay the course, hon. You … you have to live for you both … you and Jenna.”

  He is starting to sniffle, and Trisha puts down her fork and dabs at her mouth with a white napkin. When she takes it away, there is a bright smudge of reddish-purple lipstick imprinted on the cloth.

  When Trisha speaks, my eyes stay focused on the smudge.

  “Don’t forget about that college preparatory course in a couple of weeks. It can’t hurt to be as prepared as possible for these upcoming changes, Amelia.”

  I can feel a manacle forming around my ankle, any hope I ever had of doing something other than what Jenna wanted fading away. I cannot disappoint her parents by not doing what Jenna had planned for us. I have to honor her memory, and the only way I can do that is by sticking to the plan … college prep course, Missoula, becoming a college professor … even if I was—am—totally unsure what I would do if nobody were watching.

  I have no choice.

  I pinky promised.

  Smiling at Mark and Trisha, I rearrange the weight on my shoulders and make myself enthuse about Missoula and what lies ahead. I won’t break their hearts or dishonor my friendship with Jenna. I will do the sensible thing and adhere to the route Jenna mapped out for us, for me.

  My smile falters, my brain staging one last rebellion.

  It’s a stupid plan. I might not even be able to pull it off. But when Mark’s homemade banana pudding is brought out, to be eaten straight from the serving dish, I clear my throat.

  “So,” I begin hesitantly, the plan seeming more ridiculous now that I’m voicing it aloud. “I’m thinking about driving to Michigan. I’ll probably miss our dinners next week.”

  I say it to my spoon, but I don’t miss the shared glance of worry. I eat a mouthful of pudding and try to summon strength from Jenna’s empty chair.

  “It’s not a big deal or anything,” I rush after swallowing. “I mean, I know it’s a long drive to Michigan, but I got this book and—”

  “Michigan?” Trisha interrupts. “What could possibly be in Michigan that warrants such a trip?”

  “I got a book in the mail that I didn’t order,” I say, again wishing I had planned out a script. Suddenly telling the parents of my dead friend, “Hey, I think your daughter is trying to communicate with me from the beyond using our favorite book, and/or she might be in a pirate’s possession,” sounds not only crazy but also insensitive. “I Googled the store it came from and it’s in this really cool, tiny town in northern Michigan. There are sailboats and chocolate shops and—”

  “And you just want to leave,” Mark says. “You want to get away.”

  When he puts it like that, I feel guilty, because there’s truth to his words. Part of me wants to run as far as I can go, to a place that has never borne the mark of Jenna and doesn’t taste or smell or feel like her.

  But I also want to see if she had anything to do with this mysterious 101st copy, if that knowledge will give me answers to questions I’m not even sure how to ask.

  Is it possible to want to run both from and to someone’s memory?

  “How will you get there?” Mark asks.

  “I was thinking about renting a car. It’s the cheapest way.”

  Nobody is paying any attention to the pudding, and I can practically hear the bananas browning in the thick silence.

  “You should go.”

  It’s hard to tell who is more surprised at Trisha’s sudden verdict—me or Mark.

  “Trish, you can’t expect her to go up there alone.”

  “She’s eighteen. She’ll be going to college in the fall and will have to navigate things on her own sooner or later, Mark. She is a very capable young woman. She will be more than fine. We have to let her go.”

  Trisha is giving him a look I don’t quite understand, but Mark must understand it, because he sighs through his nose like Jenna used to and turns to me.

  “Well, you can’t drive that far alone. I won’t allow it. I’ll book you a flight. And for the love of God, Amelia, don’t forget to text us.”

  My head is spinning, my half-formed revolt is turning into a full-fledged battle, and Jenna isn’t here to be the general.

  “You really don’t have to,” I say. “I can rent a car.”

  I don’t tell them it would take every last penny of my birthday and babysitting money to afford the car rental and gas.

  “No.” Mark’s voice is the most forceful it has ever been with me. “No long-distance drives. No cars. Ever.”

  “Mark,” Trisha whispers, a hand coming up to rub his arm. “It’s okay.”

  We are all thinking about the photos of a smashed-up rental car. Jenna died instantly in the front passenger seat; the other three passengers were taken to the local hospital, where they made a full recovery.

  I bet Mark is thinking the same will happen to me, that another freak episode will take me away and there will be nobody left for him to dote on or to call on long lunch breaks or to turn the seat warmer on for. I have no idea what Trisha is thinking.

  “I’ll fly,” I say. “If that makes you feel better. I’ll have to rent a car to get around town, I think, but I’ll fly there if you want me to. I … I just have to see what’s there. I have to go.”

  I have to go away.

  Mark starts crying in earnest. “Jenna would want you to,” he says. “She would want you to enjoy your summer the best … the best that you can.”

  Trisha rubs his back in soothing circles and says to me, “I see no problem with a trip, so long as you are back in time for the college prep course.”

  I don’t tell her that I would rather have someone explain to me how I’m going to live the rest of my life without my best friend. That, I would take notes on.

  Before Mark drives me home, I go to Jenna’s room to tell her that I’m going to Michigan. It’s strange, seeing her bookcases empty, half her clothes taken from their hangers and packed into boxes labeled “Donation” in her mom’s handwriting. The other half—her formal dresses for school banquets and weddings and funerals—hang forlornly. I wonder if Trisha means to keep them or just couldn’t bear to put any more bits of Jenna into boxes.

  It feels too soon.

  But there’s the window where she cried over Moot, and there is the bed beside which I first stepped into Orman. There’s the rug that covers a large Coke stain, from when we were too immersed in our books to hear the glass fall and the liquid soaked into the floor.

  Maybe part of her lingers still. Maybe I am not entirely alone.

  “I’m taking a trip,” I whisper. My voice comes out reverent and hushed. “I’m going to Michigan. Mostly because of that book you sent. You probably think it’s stupid, but … you’re not here to tell me what a stupid idea this is, so I’m going to do it, okay? I swear on Orman, I’ll come back and do everything you wanted. The prep course, Missoula … everything.”

  A light wind rattles against her bedroom window, the leaves on a tree branch casting fluttering shadows on the floor. I hope it’s a magical, clever wind come to aid me in Jenna’s absence.

  I hope it stays.

  * * *

  When I stand between my mother and the television later that night to tell her I am going to Michigan for a week,
that Mark took care of the flight, she tilts her head to look at me, cigarette held between her fingers.

  “You know where the suitcase is?” she asks.

  My father took the luggage when he left us, but I nod anyway.

  “Great. Just leave me y’all’s travel details. Now, can you move, Ames? This is the best part.”

  I don’t correct her when she assumes Jenna’s parents are going with me. Later, I hear her laughing in the living room as I pack my duffle bag with sweaters, T-shirts, and the 101st copy of The Forest Between the Sea and the Sky.

  After hesitating, I pick up my camera case from where it rests on my dresser, a dust ring left in its wake. I haven’t touched it since the festival, haven’t wanted to, even if my head can’t seem to stop trying to take mental photos.

  I don’t even think I’m that good at photography. My way of framing photos in my brain is too fantastical to be professional or skillful. I haven’t won any contests. But I enjoy it. Since I started taking pictures last year, I made a rule that I could only take one photo of a subject at a time. A lot of YouTube videos I watched discourage this, telling new photographers to take as many shots as they can and to sift through and find the good ones later.

  But I don’t want every photo to be good; I want them to be real. I want to capture the exact moment where I stood and observed something about the world and thought it worth documenting in all of its crooked, imperfect glory. I want to catch myself by surprise, and the only way I know how to do that is to point the lens and snap what I see before me.

  Once.

  This trip is going to be a photograph. One snap, one chance, to figure out why and how Jenna sent that book, to put the loss of her far enough behind me that I can move on and do everything she wanted us to do, everything her parents expect me to do.

  It’s what Jenna would want.

  chapter six