Amelia Unabridged

by Ashley Schumacher

  Nolan passes the bottle to me, and without thinking too much about it, I take a swig. Jenna’s disapproval at our three-way underage drinking radiates from wherever she is, and I try to appease her. Alex is almost as responsible as you, I tell her in my head.

  “Pregnant,” Alex announces. He’s lying outstretched on one of the cushioned benches. Wally sits at his feet, occasionally licking the bit of exposed ankle between pant leg and shoe in apology.

  He’s had a long day, I add.

  “Wally is regrettably bereft of the necessary organs to support a pregnancy, Alexander. Try again.” Nolan stands with a little wobble, his posture made looser by the proximity to the water or the wine or both, and then arranges himself on the bench to mirror Alex, his head in my lap.

  Alex throws the cork at Nolan, but he misses and it plunks into the water. Wally jolts up to bark but then thinks better of exhibiting any more bad behavior and sinks back down onto Alex’s ankles.

  “I was talking about things I hate in books,” Alex says, like it’s totally obvious. “I hate when anything other than a person carrying a fetus is described as ‘pregnant.’ How can a moment be pregnant with silence? Is it going to give birth to silence? Won’t that be loud?”

  Without being asked, I hand the bottle to Alex. He unsuccessfully attempts to take a sip while lying down and spills at least a quarter of the bottle onto his shirt.

  I wince. Okay, I tell Jenna. This is a really bad example, but I swear he’s usually very sensible.

  “Alexander’s brain is fried,” Nolan announces.

  “Is not,” Alex says. “It’s relieved the bazaar is over, and slightly intoxicated. There’s a difference.”

  “You’ve barely had two sips of wine,” I argue. “You can’t be feeling it yet.”

  “You know what I am feeling?” Alex straightens up and hands the bottle to Nolan. “That my head is fuzzy from too many nights of too little sleep, and probably hunger-induced delusion. Let’s all share a stupid story. Go.”

  Nolan and I look dumbly at each other and then at Alex.

  “Fine,” Alex says. “I’ll start for you. Nolan took fencing in college.”

  “You went to school?” I had assumed he hadn’t gone.

  He sighs. “One semester.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  I can tell he would rather not talk about it, but it’s the last night and I’ve had enough wine to warm my insides, so I ask, “What was your major?”

  “I didn’t really have one. I just took classes I thought might be interesting.”

  “They were all English classes, except for fencing,” Alex pipes up helpfully.

  I look down into Nolan’s face. “And you didn’t like the English stuff?”

  Nolan drops my gaze. “No. I didn’t like how author names were suddenly trading cards, a kind of academic currency. They didn’t have any real meaning. And everybody loved to argue over which one was the rarest, the most valuable, but nobody wanted to…” He falters and throws his arms up haphazardly, trying to make his frustration tangible.

  “Read?” I ask.

  He nods and then, eager to switch subjects, adds, “Besides, Alex will end up doing enough school for both of us combined. He’s going to live and die in academia.”

  Alex, who appears to be doing his best impression of being drunk on less than one glass of wine, will not let Nolan’s college experience go.

  “Oh! Speaking of fencing, tell her about the sword thing.”

  Nolan blushes so hard I’m worried the boat might catch fire.

  “Don’t you want to know why he carries around that ridiculous phone?” Alex asks.

  “If he wants to tell me.” I keep my voice neutral. If I sound too excited, Nolan will balk. He sighs and rolls off my lap and into a sitting position, his face grumpy.

  A pause. “It was because of a review.”

  “Like that explains everything,” Alex mutters, and I shush him.

  Nolan glares at Alex before turning to me. “Long story short, I read a bad early review on my phone. It pissed me off. I broke the phone. End of story.”

  Now Alex is sitting up, dislodging his legs from Wally’s girth.

  “Oh no it isn’t. You stabbed your brand-new phone with a literal bejeweled sword.”

  I can’t bite back my laughter at the ridiculous image in my head. Nolan poised above his cell phone, the hilt of a sword clutched between two hands as if he had just pulled it from a stone. It’s ridiculous enough to be one of my fantastical photos.

  “You stabbed your phone?” I repeat. “And where did you get a sword?”

  Nolan opens his mouth to answer, but Alex beats him to it. “He bought it. Custom-made, too. It was like, literally the first thing he bought when his advance check came in. I know, because he sent me a picture of it. This was of course before he had a phone camera that was complete crap.”

  “Who doesn’t want a sword?” Nolan asks indignantly.

  Alex immediately raises his hand. He looks to me and waits expectantly. When I don’t move, he scoffs.

  “You must really have it bad for him if you’re willing to pretend you would spend actual real-life dollars on a sword.”

  “I think it would be neat,” I say. I don’t mention that, after years of traveling through wardrobes and sailing to foreign lands, I’ve already thought of what name I would give my weapon. (Pen. Because it’s mightier than the sword.) “A lot of people have swords.”

  “Yeah,” Alex says. “But most people don’t use them to stab their phones until they are so broken even the manufacturer’s help desk says it’s beyond repair.”

  Nolan looks at me, shamefaced. “It was a really bad review. And I was only fifteen.”

  “But that doesn’t explain the clunker phone from the eighteen hundreds,” I say.

  Alex bursts into loud hearty laughter so contagious that even Nolan joins in.

  “He did it twice,” Alex wheezes. “He got a new phone and read another review and stabbed it again.”

  “I was fifteen,” Nolan reminds us through his laughter. “No impulse control. It was easier to get a crappy phone to stab instead of banking on my ability to walk away.”

  “He keeps saying he’ll get a new phone, but he never does,” Alex tells the floor of the boat. He’s bent over to put his head between his knees, taking in deep gulps of air around more peals of laughter.

  “It hasn’t broken yet. No reason to get something new,” Nolan says. “And the best part is that I don’t have the review app on here, so I haven’t even wanted to stab it.”

  When our laughing fit passes, it grows quiet, and we lounge and look at the stars. It’s late enough that I feel the dark weaving the old kind of magic that has bound friends together through decades of sleepovers and accidental late-night talks on porches and doorsteps. There’s something about the absence of light mixed with near-exhaustion that loosens tongues and strengthens relationships.

  I don’t fight the memory of Jenna when it comes for me. It’s less a single remembrance and more a cobbled-together picture of admitting deep truths to each other, stretched out over dozens of nights.

  Some nights I would let my anger and confusion about my parents boil over. I would rail against how absent they felt, the unfairness that the two people who once argued playfully over the placement of glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling could fall so out of love with each other, and with me.

  But on the good nights, we would talk about things that secretly delighted us, our hopes and dreams for futures we didn’t quite believe were real.

  Remembering those—and that there won’t be more with Jenna—puts a lump in my throat. I swallow around it.

  “Resurrection,” I say, breaking the silence.

  “Huh?” Alex says.

  I can’t see Nolan’s face—we’re lying with our heads side by side and our bodies stretched out to opposite ends of the bench—but his cheek lifts against mine.

  “The
thing she hates in books,” he says.

  “Why?”

  “It’s…” I stop, collecting my thoughts before they scatter to the stars. “I used to not mind it, but now the idea of somebody dying and being brought back just makes me angry that I wasn’t born into a world that can do that. It’s so far outside of my experience with death, I can’t even entertain it anymore.”

  They’re quiet for so long, I wonder if I’ve broken the mood. Wally slinks over to curl up on my feet and rest his huge head on my kneecaps. He looks at me with large brown eyes that seem to understand the tangle of emotions in my chest. I rub behind his ears and wish on a star that if I am ever sent to a place where animals are magically bound to human companions, I’ll get a dog like Wally. Accident prone and all.

  In my head, I take a photo of me standing triumphantly on a hill, hands on hips, feet parted, my fearless horse-sized dog at my side, his head tilted up into the wind and tongue lolling. Disaster Duo, I call it. It’s up to the viewer to choose whether they are fixing disasters or causing them.

  “Death sucks,” Alex whispers.

  “Everything sucks,” Nolan answers. I laugh low in my throat at our inside joke, and Nolan trails his fingertips across my lips like he might catch it.

  We spend the evening outstretched like this, unmoored from the shore and sensible conversation. We talk about death and how it sucks and where do we go when it happens. (Nolan: Heaven. Alex: Not sure. Me: Somewhere else, but not nowhere.) Alex shares his favorite memories of summers with the Endsley kids, most of which involved filched ice cream and forts made out of books. (They once got in trouble for the forts because they damaged an entire shipment of brand-new hardbacks that, after, had to be sold at a discount.) Nolan tells me about how he and Alex spent the first month after Nolan bought his family’s summer home painting over the green walls with light gray paint, managing to mess it up so badly that Nolan had to hire professionals to redo everything.

  I tell them about Jenna. How her lipstick saved me, about Moot and family dinners where I never felt like an extra puzzle piece that didn’t fit. We laugh as I recount the time I pushed her into the Williamses’ pool fully clothed and she hauled me in after her and I ended up with a black eye when my face met her knee. We laugh harder when I tell them it was the day before a dance and Jenna was furious because she had labored over finding makeup to match the dress she made me wear. She had not accounted for greenish-yellow skin as a base for eye shadow.

  Our laughter dies off, lulled by the soft waves grazing the boat, the distant sounds of Lochbrook going to sleep for the night.

  “If Nolan’s right and we all end up in a heaven somewhere,” Alex says, “I want Jenna to train Wally. I think she’s the only one who can do it. I really do.”

  * * *

  Nolan walks me to the door of Val’s, and I almost ask him to stay with me in the Orman room. But he looks too tired to endure another night of sleeping against bookcases, so I say, “See you tomorrow, right?”

  “Tomorrow,” he promises. I think he’s going to kiss me good night, but he doesn’t.

  Behind his eyes, I watch the forest start to darken, as if the sky around us is sucking out his light. “You never asked my least favorite thing about books,” he says.

  I don’t ask. I don’t want to. I want to go on pretending that this night is the first of many bazaars I will photograph, the first of many nights I’ll go to bed hungry because Wally ruined a planned dinner.

  But Nolan tells me anyway.

  “I hate endings,” he says. “Hate them. If the story is good, it’s never going to be long enough.”

  The words are out of my mouth before I can hold the sentence in my head. “But we keep reading.”

  Nolan’s smile is lazy and slow and my toes curl in my shoes. He leans down and his breath brushes my forehead, my cheeks, and he pulls away.

  “Good night, Amelia.”

  The trains of thought zip through without stopping as I climb the stairs to my weird little guest room with the sink in the corner, but I don’t try to find out where they are going. I am on every single train and they are all taking me back to Texas and away from Nolan.

  My last conscious thought before sleep is a flash of a photo that doesn’t exist. I’m on a train platform and Nolan is on one train and Jenna is on another. They are going in opposite directions. They stick their hands out the windows, beckoning me to come with them.

  I fall asleep before I can see the photo that shows me which train I choose.

  chapter sixteen

  The next morning, Nolan is waiting for me when I get off the elevator, and relief courses through my veins. I half worried he wouldn’t be here, that he would want an Irish good-bye. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

  “There’s one last thing I want to show you,” he says. “Before you go.”

  He sounds unsure, and I wonder what could be so big as to cause him to hesitate when he has already shown me his sisters’ graves.

  “What is it?” I ask with forced brightness. “Do you collect weird taxidermy in glass jars?”

  He snorts. “No.”

  “Do you have an embarrassing stack of failed internet memes that you tried to make before you launched your illustrious writing career?”

  I make up all sorts of nonsensical things over breakfast at the café, each more ridiculous than the last.

  “Christmas movie scripts,” I decide. “N. E. Endsley has authored some of the world’s most heartwarming kisses on berry farms.”

  Nolan isn’t listening to me as we rise from the table. But instead of going to the stairs, he heads to the Orman room and stops halfway there. He looks down the long hallway and pokes his head into the last two rooms at the end, a paranoid meerkat scouting for predators.

  “We have to be quick,” he says with great urgency, and my mind goes blank as he falls to the floor and moves a square piece of the carpet, exposing a slatted door with a leather strap. He pulls on the strap, the door puckering open like a folding window shutter, revealing a short ladder that extends into the darkness of this … hole in the bookstore.

  “Wait, what?” I hear myself ask. Is this the part where I’m finally murdered by the crazy, reclusive author? Maybe it’s research for a murder mystery he wants to write and he needs to know whether anyone can hear me scream in his creepy bookstore dungeon.

  “Come on,” Nolan moans, slipping down the ladder. And because he can read my mind he says, “Amelia, get that look off your face. Nobody’s going to kill you. Get in before someone sees.”

  I am unceremoniously pulled after him by my calves, our bodies much too large to both occupy the ladder at the same time.

  As soon as my head is clear of the opening, Nolan scoots the carpet back into place and raises the door back up with a soft click, effectively leaving us in total darkness.

  I’m thinking about testing my scream theory when he clicks on the light.

  As if this world weren’t charming enough, N. E. Endsley has carved out a second office space within the walls of A Measure of Prose’s first floor. I thought my brain had its fill of awe and wonder, but I was wrong. I’m having a hard time keeping my mouth closed and my hands at my sides.

  It is maybe a square foot or so smaller than the fort, but you wouldn’t be able to tell, if it weren’t for the low ceiling. There is another desk pressed into the corner—this one made of metal, not wood—that takes up most of the space, aside from the lines of modern plastic shelves filled to the brim with journals: leather bound, Moleskines, and spirals. Slim wooden boxes with intricate carvings are stacked atop one another, with tiny typed labels that display dates from four or five years ago to the present. There are piles of elegant pen cases worth almost as much as the fountain pens they protect, and bottles of ink that look like they belong in Flourish and Blotts, not in a cellar-like wing of Val’s bookstore.

  But they do belong. This space feels like a reflection of him—both Old World and New, modern and inexplicably tradition
al in its melancholy and its contradictory contents.

  Nolan is watchful, unspeaking. His gaze says he is showing me something vitally important to him, as important as the cemetery where his sisters are buried, and he desperately wants to know what I think.

  His eyes want to know if it’s enough to make me stop pretending, to make me stay.

  But I can’t think clearly. I feel like Belle examining the Beast’s massive library or Cinderella when the slipper fits. Every heroine from every story I’ve ever read is bursting from her bindings to come flutter in my chest and assure me that this is okay, this feeling of bigness and rightness and wrongness all mixed together. It’s more than okay that I am experiencing something other than grief. It’s okay that I’m not entirely sure if the feeling is a good one or a bad one.

  “I’ve never shown this to anyone,” Nolan says, breaking the silence. “Except Alex, but he doesn’t count. He just wants to use the Wi-Fi, since we’re right above the router. We think the space was built to hold electronics, like speaker system equipment and stuff. Or at least that’s our best guess, since it’s ventilated. See?” He points at a vent beside one of the shelves, its little plastic slats fluttering open on a silent wind.

  Nolan chuckles uncertainly. He is waiting for me to say something, but the space in my chest is only getting bigger and shows no signs of stopping. I have the strangest thought that, if I wanted to, I could bring this whole bookstore crumbling to the ground by touching my index finger to the boarded wall of this room and releasing all the energy stored in my body.

  I turn to Nolan and say the truest thing I can articulate. “It’s you.”

  What I should have said is that I feel like I am standing inside of his heart.

  If this were a different kind of story, if we were shelved in the romance room, or even the adventure room, my statement would mean Nolan closing the space between us and kissing me fervently on the lips, and the music would swirl and the birds would come down with showers of glitter and ribbons to make me a dress, and together we would ride off into the sunset, with Wally trotting happily behind—but it’s not that kind of story.