Nick and June Were Here

by Shalanda Stanley

Do you remember how to fight?

  Is Justin still there? Is he still a dick?

  Did they put the doors back on the bathroom stalls?

  “It’s the same,” I said, answering all of them. “I need you to do something for me.”

  “Whatever you need.”

  It was exactly the answer I wanted.

  “I need you to pick up some things for me and take them to that place I told you about.”

  There was silence for a moment. “All right,” he said. “What do you need?”

  “Go to my aunt Linda’s house, but it has to be when she’s not there. She’ll be out tomorrow night after six.”

  She played cards every Wednesday night with Mrs. Walton, the lady who lived down the street. It was her only night off.

  “There’s a hide-a-key under the flowerpot by the front door.”

  “Okay…,” he said.

  “Go to my room and get my backpack. I think I left it on my desk.”

  I kept a couple of changes of clothes in it at all times. I never knew when I’d need them.

  “And then I need you to look on the kitchen counter by the refrigerator. That’s where she keeps the mail. There should be a Priority Mail box. Put it in my backpack and bring it with you.”

  “Whatever you’re thinking is probably a bad idea,” Tommy said.

  I didn’t answer.

  “All right, man. I’ll do it,” he said.

  “Thanks, Tommy. I’ll make it up to you.”

  I didn’t know how. I hung up.

  I’d leave the next day. The food truck came on Wednesdays. I’d slip out of the rec hall and hide in the back of the truck. I’d have to figure out how to get around the guards. I knew two of them were in the kitchen at all times. They might be easy enough to slip by, but I didn’t know if there were any more guards once I was outside—other than the one by the fence, at the exit gate, but I’d be hiding in the back of the truck by the time I got to him. Maybe I could do it. It was how this kid Colton had broken out the last time I was here. Hopefully security hadn’t been tightened up since then. I could do this. Boys broke out all the time. They were always caught, though, including Colton, because the only place they had to run to was home.

  But I wasn’t running home. The choice wasn’t five years or fifteen. Not anymore. I’d get my bag from Tommy and then I’d make things right with Uncle Hank. If I couldn’t take back how I’d left things with him, what I’d said, I could at least take his ashes back to his cabin. Hopefully John would be there and he’d explain to me what the hell he was doing home and we’d bury Hank on that spot on the hill.

  Then I was going to do what I’d wanted to do for a long time, what I’d been hoping to do with Hank’s blessing. I was going up the mountain. I’d disappear like Hank had and go off-grid. Hank had told me all about the people who had helped him. But first I had to see June. I had to make her believe that this was the only choice for me. She had to understand. Then I had to convince her to come with me.

  A couple of years ago, we went on a church trip. My parents had the same trouble picking a religion that they had deciding what type of dog would work best for our family, so we’d tried a few different ones. That summer, we were Methodists. I hadn’t been excited to go, but then my parents agreed to let Bethany and Nick come, too. It was after Nick’s first arrest and he’d just gotten out of Durrant. My dad thought it’d be good for him. We stayed at this place in the mountains called Church Campground, which we found out was a recently renovated chicken farm. The dorms were the old chicken coops. Even though it’d been a while since chickens had been kept there, you’d still see a floating feather from time to time. There was a girls’ side and a boys’ side, even for adults, so it was me and Bethany with my mom and Nick with my dad. It was the first time Nick and my dad spent a lot of time together just the two of them.

  So much went wrong on that trip. Our first day, they’d scheduled a bonding exercise and we went canoeing on this lake a couple of miles away. It was fine at first, but we all missed the pickup point and had to walk back, pulling canoes upstream. We’d all left our shoes on the bank, and when we returned to the bank, they were gone. Someone had stolen fifty-two pairs of shoes from church campers. When we got back to the campground, the owners announced there would be an ice-cream and pool party, to cheer everyone up from the canoe disaster. The pool was only five feet deep, so you couldn’t use the diving board, and all they served was ice-cream sandwiches. The whole thing felt like a challenge. The Methodists said it was a test of our faith. Theresa Reynolds snapped a picture of us about two seconds after my dad had gone into a hysterical fit of laughter after he noticed his foot was bleeding from some rock in the lake. My mom said it was one of those laugh-or-cry days. Then we all started laughing until our stomachs hurt.

  There’s a framed photo of the five of us on the mantel in my living room. We were standing next to the edge of the tiny pool, barefoot and holding ice-cream sandwiches and our stomachs, a feather floating in the background. It was the first time that I thought of all of us as a family.

  * * *

  My parents hadn’t wanted me to know. They thought they could still keep things from me. But I knew Nick better than anyone. I knew he’d be waiting at my house the first night I was home from the hospital.

  “Where is he?” I’d asked.

  “We haven’t heard from him,” my dad had said.

  But his look had said something else. He had forgotten that I knew what his face looked like when Nick was in trouble.

  “What happened?”

  They’d traded looks and then my mom had pulled out a kitchen chair.

  “Sit down, baby,” she’d said.

  * * *

  It’d only been a couple weeks, but my mom was like a different person. She’d always been so driven and goal-oriented. Now her favorite thing to say when I couldn’t make up my mind about something was “Don’t worry. No need to stress,” or “It’s fine. We’ll just take it day by day.” Who was this person who no longer planned things out five years in advance?

  She hid my mail from me. Earlier today, I had found three letters from different universities hidden behind the bread box.

  I’d wanted to go back to school right away, but my parents had told me it would be good for me to take a break, said we’d see how I was feeling in a couple of weeks. I hated it. I’d never missed a day before. On the first day of Pre-K 4, the school secretary had asked me which Pre-K I was there for, 3 or 4, because I was small for my age. I remembered being upset, because I hadn’t known there was a Pre-K 3. I’d felt wronged.

  Now school would be over soon and I really wanted everything to go back to normal first. Dr. Keels had said that that was a dangerous train of thought, though, that there was no going back to normal. She’d said the challenge was finding a new normal. She’d also said I needed to avoid stress triggers, and my parents were worried that school was a land mine. Most of my classes were AP classes, so I didn’t need them to graduate. It still felt like I was missing out, though. I didn’t want people to think that I couldn’t do the things I used to do, and I was eager to prove to my parents that I could handle school and my symptoms at the same time. I didn’t know if it was true or not but I was ready to find out.

  My mom opened my bedroom door to check on me. She checked on me a lot. She saw the university letters sitting on my bed. I hadn’t opened them.

  “June, I just don’t think it’s a good idea to worry about college right now,” she explained. “You have enough on your plate.”

  “I’m not worried about it. I just think it’s weird that you’d hide them.”

  “I don’t want you to s—”

  “Stress, I know. I don’t want to either, believe me, but I still have to pick one.”

  Her face changed. “Who says?”

  “What do you mean?”r />
  “Who says that you have to go to college right after high school? You can take some time off and focus on yourself.”

  I didn’t know who I was talking to. This was the person who had dressed me in Brown University onesies as an infant. I was at least eight before I’d realized college was a choice. I’d thought it just came after twelfth grade, like twelfth came after eleventh.

  “But I don’t want to focus on me. I want to go to school and focus on something else.”

  I wanted to try on all the different Junes she’d been telling me about.

  “I just don’t see the rush,” my mom said. She sat down next to me. “We have so much to figure out, to feel out, and it might be best to not put any extra demands on yourself.”

  She meant every word she said. I could tell. She truly thought that this was best for me. Maybe she was right. Maybe up was down and left was right and college didn’t come after high school. Not for me. Not anymore.

  “But what if the idea of not going to college stresses me out more than going?”

  College had always been my path to something new. This felt like an avalanche. I was buried.

  “I’m not saying never, June. I just think it’s responsible to allow yourself a new timeline. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  Maybe a new timeline would be part of the new normal.

  “Nothing has to be decided right now,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a compromise and we’ll find it. I promise.”

  I wanted to believe her.

  She left the room and I pulled out the information Dr. Keels had given me, the studies of people with schizophrenia who went to college and had jobs and spouses and kids. I opened my notebook to my list of occupations. Before, I couldn’t decide on a major, and now the problem was compounded. It was one thing to think about managing my symptoms while going to college. It was another to think about the odds of getting a job after college. Would someone hire a teacher who heard voices?

  I read all of the names in the studies and looked at the data tables with charts of hundreds of people, and they were each able to find a way. They each picked a path, chose a school, got a job. I reread each occupation on my list.

  Dr. Keels would tell me to focus on one problem at a time, pick one obstacle and then tackle it. I was pretty sure my first obstacle would be convincing my parents that while we would have to find a new normal, with a new me, I still wanted the same things the old me did.

  There was tapping on my window. Three soft taps letting me know it was Bethany. I lifted the window for her and she climbed in.

  “You can use the front door now,” I said.

  “I like being sneaky. It makes everything more exciting.”

  She’d been at my house all evening, ever since I’d gotten home. I’d been officially released from the hospital. My mom had run her off eventually, when I started yawning, but Bethany had given me a look that had let me know she’d be back soon.

  She plopped her bag down and opened it.

  “I bought these,” she said, pulling out headphones and handing them to me. “I meant to give them to you earlier but I forgot them at my house. They’re noise-canceling. I read that they help drown out background noise, but you can use them to listen to music, too.”

  Background noise was code for voices. Dr. Keels had said headphones could be helpful in that department, just until the meds hit peak effect. I still had a week or so before that happened. And if my symptoms turned out to be persistent, the headphones might be a good long-term coping strategy.

  “What did your dad say about Nick?” I asked.

  Earlier, I’d sent Bethany home with a task: find out anything she could about what had happened to Nick. All my parents knew was that he’d been arrested for trying to steal a car and that he was being held at Durrant. My dad had called everyone he knew who might know something, but so far nothing.

  “The only thing he knows is what was in the paper,” she said.

  I’d read the article online. I didn’t know if I could trust what it said, though, because it’d called Nick a man. A man was arrested for possession of a firearm and attempted grand theft auto in El Dorado.

  “He said nobody in town is talking about it,” Bethany said. “Nobody at school is either.” We sat down on my rug. “The timing couldn’t be worse for this, but it’s not good for you to worry about him,” she added. “You need to focus on you.”

  “You sound like my parents,” I said.

  “They’re smart people,” she answered. “So Mr. Glover freaked out during physics when he realized that Scott Roberts didn’t even know Newton’s laws,” she said. “And I mean freaked out, the whole ‘What am I doing with my life, you people don’t listen to anything I say’ freak-out, and then he wished us all good luck with our futures and walked out. Oh, and Brian Watkins got suspended for vandalizing the boys’ bathroom, and Carla and Miguel broke up again.”

  Carla and Miguel had been breaking up since we were in the fourth grade. Each time got more dramatic.

  “She threw chocolate milk in his face, right in the middle of the cafeteria,” Bethany said.

  She told me everything, every second that I’d missed, because she knew I’d want to know all of it.

  All our lives, the two of us had been a we. We had plans. We were going to college together. I didn’t know how to tell her that I might not be going, at least not right away. Everything was different now and I didn’t know what was in store for me.

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Bethany said, reading my mind.

  “Except that it changes everything,” I countered.

  “Don’t do that. Don’t start making lists of all the ways your life is screwed. We still get to have what we’ve always wanted.”

  “You do,” I said. “You can still do all the things you’ve always wanted to do.”

  “So can you,” she said. “It’ll just be harder to do it. You’ve always worked hard, though. You can do this. You can handle whatever happens. Your future will look different, but it’s still a future and you’re still in it.”

  I loved her.

  “I love you, too,” she said, reading my mind again. “You look sleepy, June. It’s a good look on you. Come on,” she said, standing.

  She pulled me up and led me to my bed. We slid under the covers, Bethany smoothing them over us. We stared at the ceiling.

  “This is hard,” I said. “Figuring out a new me, a new path. I didn’t plan for this. I don’t know what comes next.”

  “None of us do,” she said. “Life is weird, June. There’s only surprises.”

  She rolled toward me and scooted closer.

  “Remember the time we went for a drive and saw that toilet on the side of the road and we stopped?” she asked.

  “That’s not something easily forgotten,” I said.

  “Yes. And it was brand-new! I still can’t believe someone had thrown away a perfectly good toilet. And Nick picked it up and put it in the back of my truck because you can’t just walk away from something like that.”

  It was last year and it was the middle of the night. We’d snuck out so Bethany could practice driving. The only time Bethany had felt comfortable driving was at night, when everyone was asleep and the roads were empty. It was Nick who had taught her how, because her parents weren’t known for their patience and Bethany wasn’t known for good driving.

  “Nick said we should drop it off at school, but you wanted to keep it, because you’d seen something on Pinterest where people had flowers growing out of them,” she said, and laughed.

  “My dad did not appreciate it.”

  “But your mom did. She said it was so tacky that it was perfect and she grew, like, a thousand petunias out of it.”

  We still had it. The flowers looked more like a bush now, so it was hard to tell that t
he planter was a toilet.

  “Why are we talking about this?” I asked.

  “Because you forgot that something beautiful can grow from someplace unexpected.”

  “Wait—I’m the flowers in this analogy, right?”

  “No, June,” she said, exasperated. “You’re the toilet.”

  We laughed so hard we shook the bed. My bedroom door opened.

  “Bethany, get out of that bed and go home,” my mom said.

  She wasn’t kidding. She was mad. She pointed to the window. Apparently Bethany wasn’t allowed to use the front door anymore.

  “No, please,” I said. “I missed her and I feel more like myself when she’s around. Please? Just for a little while longer.” She had to see that Bethany was the best medicine.

  She looked like she wasn’t going to change her mind, but then she relented. “Okay, June. But only for an hour. No longer. Dr. Keels said we really have to enforce bedtime.”

  She looked embarrassed then, because she’d said bedtime like I was a little kid.

  “It’s okay, Mom. I know it’s important. Bethany won’t stay too long.”

  Bethany crossed her heart in a promise and my mom exhaled one long, loud breath.

  As soon as my mom shut the door, Bethany looked at me sternly and said, “Repeat after me: I am June Daniels and I can do anything.”

  “I am June Daniels and I can do anything.”

  She looked at me sideways, like she wasn’t sure she believed me. “We’ll keep working on it,” she said. She flipped to her back. “Would you rather eat an uncooked grasshopper or a cooked cricket?”

  “Cooked cricket. Would you rather go skinny-dipping or streaking?”

  “Skinny-dipping,” she said. “Swimming is always better than running.”

  We laughed, quieter now, not wanting to risk Bethany’s eviction. The laughter rolled out of us until we were still and it was quiet.

  “Do you think he’s okay?” I asked.

  “I hope so,” she said. “He has to be.”