Chapter Six
Eyes, an airplane full of them, every pair pinned on me. They burn like lasers, searing into my flesh.
they are staring at me, everyone is staring at me
People looking at me has never been pleasant, but this is excruciating, absolute torture, a thousand splinters under the skin.
My own eyes jump around the cabin, not landing anywhere. I fight the urge to run.
As we pass the exit row, a woman turns and whispers something to the man in the seat beside her, look at that girl, oh my god, what’s wrong with her face?
I drop my chin, stare at the thin strip of carpet, humiliation burning my cheeks. Dad lifts my bag from my shoulder and puts it in the overhead bin. “You okay?” he asks quietly.
“Yeah.” My voice is flat. This exchange happens over and over again, every five minutes it feels like. Our meaningless call and response.
He is watching me, but I pretend not to notice. I pretend to be focused on the Sky Mall magazine open on my lap. The Cocoon! Cocoon yourself in revolutionary comfort! The man in the ad is zipped up in a full body blanket, and I envy him.
I turn the pages mechanically, willing my dad to fall asleep. His attention is suffocating, like a jacket that’s two sizes too tight. It’s not just his eyes, it’s his focus, the constant scrutiny and concern. I can’t breathe when he’s watching me, which is most of the time. It’s never been like that with my mom. Even before the accident, her gaze seemed to float past me. Now it’s been pointedly off its mark, aimed at the wall behind me or a few inches below my chin. Lucky for both of us, she won’t have to look at me anymore. Not until summer at least, when I’m supposed to go back to L.A. for a few weeks to see a plastic surgeon about “revising” my scars.
My stomach has twisted just thinking about my face. Out-of-sight-out-of-mind hasn’t worked so well, not when my mom won’t look at me and my dad won’t stop looking at me and my doctors keep commenting on my progress and asking if I want to see it. if i wanted to see it i would look in a mirror!!! I want to scream. But I do not scream, I just shake my head.
It’s an avoidance behavior, I know that. I’m fine with that. Avoidance works.
“So,” my dad says when we’re in the air. He’s drinking coffee from a Styrofoam cup. So much for him falling asleep. “Are you even a little bit excited about the move?”
The knot in my stomach gets tighter.
“Sure,” I say.
Dad nudges me with his shoulder. “Wow, that’s super convincing, Bear.” He is angling for a smile. I wish I had one to give. I go back to my magazine. Eventually, he gives up.
Dad’s house in Denver is small and kid-free and quiet, the exact opposite of Mom and Carl’s house. It looks the same as it did two Christmases ago, though I didn’t remember all the mirrors. Two in the living room, one in the dining room, another in the hall. There used to be two more in the guest room, my room now, one above the dresser and another behind the door, but Dad took them out when I asked. I’ve gotten good at dodging the others. My eyes flick to the carpet when I enter the hallway and stay there until I get to the kitchen. The kitchen, thank god, is mirror-free.
So the kitchen is where I hang out, watching the tiny TV on the counter from a swivel bar stool and drinking superfood smoothies. Eat well, that’s number seven on the list I made before I left the hospital, after don’t avoid, make friends, no boyfriend, work out and deep breaths, all scrawled on a piece of pink notebook paper folded in my bag. Radical positive change. The list feels like a start. At the very least it’s a step in the opposite direction, away from my life in L.A., away from my life with Wren.
So far eat well is the only item on the list that I can check off, but I’m doing that one really well. I’ve consumed more kale, quinoa, and cacao nibs in the nine days I’ve been in Colorado than I have in my whole life. It helps that Dad is big on superfoods, both as a concept and as a word he attempts to insert in pretty much any sentence involving food. Not that eating better would take much effort, considering my diet before the accident basically consisted of Red Vines, cereal, and take-out pad thai, bon appetit. The twins ate early with the nanny, and Mom and Carl ate together late, so I ate whatever I wanted, which was usually not much.
“What time do you want to head out?” Dad asks from behind me. He’s at the kitchen table, reading the Home and Garden section of the newspaper and eating almond butter from the jar. There’s a giant bowl of steel-cut oatmeal on the counter in front of me, with almond butter and slices of banana mixed in. It took Dad twenty minutes to make it, but I’m too nervous to eat, so I’m basically just pushing the bananas around with my spoon.
“Never?” I suggest.
“How about seven-fifty?” he asks. “That’ll get you to school by eight-fifteen.”
School. The word is a grenade in my gut.
School is for smart girls, and talented ones, girls who thrive and excel and achieve. The kind of girl I was before my dad left, gifted, before my anxiety took over and I started freezing up on tests. When I switched schools in ninth grade my GPA was so bad they put me in all remedial classes and even then I couldn’t manage better than Cs. But that was okay, because school was where Wren was, and it didn’t matter that my grades sucked because I had him. As long as I was his girlfriend, I was enough. I didn’t have to be anything else.
“Bear?”
“Sure,” I say, and shrug like it doesn’t matter, a gesture that’s for me as much for him. “Whatever you think.”
“You know . . . I don’t have to take you,” Dad says casually. “I usually take the RTD to work anyway, so you’re welcome to use the Jeep to drive yourself if you feel—”
I cut him off. “I don’t want to drive.”
“Okay. You know I’m happy to drive you. To school or anywhere else you want to go. I just don’t want you to wait too long to get behind the wheel again.”
don’t avoid
“I’ll drive eventually,” I say. “It hasn’t even been a month yet.”
“It’s been five weeks, Bear. Today is February 9th.”
“I have to finish getting ready,” I say, sliding off my stool. deep breaths. I hear Dad sigh.
A dark brown ring on the wooden end table. I am fixated on it. The word knot is knocking around in my head, is that what this is? I am telling myself that the answer to this question matters so that I won’t think about anything else, like the fact that the plexiglass wall behind me is the only thing separating me and the hallway full of kids on the other side.
This end table I’m staring at, I literally see every grain. The handout Dr. Voss gave me when I left the hospital said that all of my senses could exhibit “heightened sensitivity” while my mind’s eye is out, but so far it’s only been my vision that’s amped up. My eyes feel like they’ve been coated in magnifying glass, like they’re constantly zooming in. The space between my eyebrows pretty much always throbs.
I follow the grain as it curves around the dark spot near the edge of the table, the knot. Hair knot, wood knot, it seems weird now that they are the same word. I absorb the details, every gradient of color, every curve of every line, then quickly press my lids closed before the image fades.
But it’s already gone. It was never there at all.
circle. table. brown.
I am a magician trying to pull a rabbit out of a dark, empty hat.
what does a rabbit look like?
a hat?
My jaw aches from clenching, my mind aches from straining.
table! circle! rabbit! hat!, these words are a soundless shout.
The turn of a knob behind me and my eyes pop open. Someone enters the front office from the hall. Footsteps, then a pair of brown leather work boots appear in the corner of my view. The boy wearing them stops beside me. I keep my eyes on the table as he fumbles through his bag. My mind randomly leaps to Wren’s shoes, the linen loafers he always wore, never with socks. The tops of his feet were always peeling a little from the sun. I remember this all so clearly but can’t picture any of it in my head. Not his sunburned feet or his perfect ankles or the way his face looked when he told me he loved me on Christmas Eve sophomore year. The void in my head dilutes the realness of him, as if my memories are coated in cotton, dulled to the point of irrelevance, like I’m thinking about a movie plot, or something that happened in a dream. But instead of making it better, the far-off feeling makes it worse, because my brain won’t stop reaching for them, these images I’ve lost.
“Jessa Gray?”
Surprised by the voice — a girl’s voice, lilting and almost lyrical and the exact opposite of the boots — I look up.
The girl’s face totally feminine, pretty even, in an I-don’t-give-a-crap-if-people-think-I’m pretty sort of way. Her auburn hair is cropped in a sort of asymmetrical bob, chin length on one side and buzzed almost to her scalp on the other, and she’s not wearing any make-up. Her outfit is like her haircut; stylish, but not especially flattering. Wool pants cuffed above boys’ work boots, a silky white t-shirt under a bulky brown cardigan. She reminds me of the models I saw hanging out backstage at my mom’s one and only runway show two years ago. Exotic cranes in boys’ clothing, twiggy and unassuming in hoodies and beanie caps and Ugg boots. But unlike those girls, this one has her guard up. She wears her caution like armor, stiff and opaque.
“Are you Jessa?” the girl asks again. Without meaning to, I look her in the eyes. They’re hard and bruised and wary.
is that how my eyes look?
“Yeah, that’s me,” I say, dropping my gaze as I reach for my bag. One of my mom’s designs. I never would’ve carried one of her bags back in L.A., but I had to get rid of the one I had with me the night of the accident. The smell of asphalt and burnt rubber was seared into the leather. The hardware on this new bag seems garish and clunky to me now, and sharp somehow, as if the edges of the gold-plated buckle might slice my skin.
why am i carrying this heinous bag?
“I’m Hannah,” the girl says.
“Hi,” I say, and stand. I force myself to look at her, pretend not to notice that she’s staring at my scars. “Sorry you have to do this. Show me around, I mean.”
“It’s no big deal,” Hannah says, and shrugs. Her whole body appears jostled by the movement, like the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz. She awkwardly shifts her weight. “Um. So. Do you have your schedule?”
I nod and dig it out of my bag. When I hand it to her, our eyes meet briefly again. The caution has faded a little, the hurt has mellowed out. She’s mostly curious now.
She glances down, scans my list of classes. “Performing or visual?”
“Huh?
She points at the letters CM at the top of my schedule. “The comparative media program. Which concentration are you in?”
I shrug. “No clue.”
Hannah has questions but doesn’t ask them. She hands the schedule back. “You wanna go now or wait?”
“Wait for what?”
“The bell. If you come in after everyone is sitting, you’ll get the whole new-girl routine when you walk in.” She shrugs. “If you want that.”
“No,” I say quickly, stomach clenching at the thought.
do i look like someone who would want that?
“Then we should hurry,” she says, pulling open the door. “We’ve only got two minutes ‘til the bell.”
The noise in the hallway nearly knocks me over. So many voices, so many decibels, so much sound. My hands fly to my ears.
don’t be a freak
I quickly drop my hands.
too late
Hannah is staring at me.
“I was in a car wreck,” I say, because I have to say something, and my hearing is on overdrive because I’m experiencing aphantaisa as a result of a traumatic brain injury is too many words.
She blinks, and now empathy is everywhere; in her eyes, on her forehead, around her pale, chapped lips. “I’m sorry,” she says softly.
My throat clamps up.
A group of boys passes us. They get quiet when they see me. One of them nudges another, nods at my scars.
“We can walk around the building,” Hannah says quietly, nodding at the metal door just a few feet away. “It’ll be quieter. And faster.” I nod, grateful, and zip up my puffy coat. I realize then that Hannah doesn’t have a jacket with her. It was sleeting when Dad dropped me off.
“But you’ll freeze,” I say.
“I’ll be fine,” she says, and heads toward the side door. I follow her. I don’t even know this girl, but I suddenly don’t want to be without her.
The metal latch grates against the door frame when she pushes the door open with her hip. The icy air rushes in, a storm of tiny needles on my cheeks.
Outside the sky is a pale, dimensionless void. It’s still sleeting. I keep my head down, watching the soggy wetness, heavy in the dead grass, darken my boots.
Hannah leads the way around the building, hands jammed in her pockets, cardigan pulled up around her neck. I tilt my head back as I follow her, eyes open, staring down the sleet. It’s as if I can see the snow melting into rain, as if I’m watching it transform in mid-air. Something beautiful and delicate shifting shape, becoming hard and heavy and mundane. And yet, from this vantage point, even the ordinary rain has its elegance. Tiny teardrops in flight.
“This is the G hall,” I hear Hannah say, metal door opening, a surge of voices and movement and sound, as a raindrop smacks me in the eye. I blink quickly, vision blurring, a chill settling in behind my left eyelid, seeping out to the rest of my face. “English and history are on G, and the student lounge. Technically it’s for the alternative school, but anyone can use it.”
“Alternative school?” I ask. “Like, for pregnant girls?”
“Pregnant, anorexic, bipolar. Kids like my brother who suck at regular school. We’ve got a wide array of dysfunction here.”
And now, click, it makes perfect sense, why Dad was so keen on my going here, how he was able to get me in.
“Oh,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.
Hannah glances over at me, then looks embarrassed suddenly, like she’s put her foot in her mouth.
“That wasn’t pejorative,” she says quickly. “Dysfunctional in the most interesting sense.”
dysfunctional is only interesting if it doesn’t apply to you
Just then, the bell rings. Loud and shrill, the sound knocks me off balance inside.
i don’t want to be here
Around us, bodies and backpacks in motion, a swirl of color and movement and noise. Lockers the shade of basketballs. Bright, screaming graffiti on the walls above. Somebody’s idea of art, no doubt, but the onslaught of pigment feels like an optical assault. It’s all too harsh, too saturated, too much. I keep my eyes on the back of Hannah’s muddy brown sweater, distracted now by my inability to picture actual mud in my head. For an eerie second, I wonder if mud even exists.
i am losing it. i am losing my mind
“This is you,” Hannah says when we reach my classroom’s door.
“Thanks.”
“I’ll meet you here after class,” she says, and smiles a little. “Good luck.” Then she’s off, the back of her brown sweater the dullest shade in the over-colored hallway, yet somehow the brightest, too.
I keep my legs moving, don’t let myself consider not going in. be normal just be normal. Heads turn as I make my way toward an empty desk in the back, curiosity so potent I feel it on my skin, but I ignore it, ignore them, focus on the speckled surface of the floor beneath my feet. There is a strand of dark hair wrapped around the silver leg of a desk, a smashed chunk of banana I recognize by its smell, hunks of mud somebody in sneakers tracked in. My stomach churns as my brain clocks these things but doesn’t store them. hair, desk leg, banana, mud. Words that do not stick, words that are just words.
There’s a worn copy of The Picture of Dorian Gray on my desk, a class syllabus tucked inside the cover. The desk looks new, but the chair attached to it is cracked down the center and someone has etched the word TRUTH onto the surface of the blue plastic seat. At the front of the room, a woman is writing on the white board. The teacher, I guess, though she’s not like any I had in L.A. Black leather pants and combat boots, spiky platinum hair and a tattoo of a rose on her neck. Its petals stand out in crisp detail, even at this distance. Its thorns seem to prick at my eyes.
“We’re on this teacher says, and I flip to the appropriate page and spend the rest of the class period pretending to listen as they talk about the book. Creepy looking man on the cover, tissue soft pages inside. I flip when they flip, force myself to blink, to nod like I am listening. But I’m not listening, I can’t listen. I’m too aware of the girl in the desk beside me who keeps looking at my scars. She’s trying to be subtle about it, but every few minutes she completely turns her head in my direction. I imagine myself whipping around to face her, calling her on it, I CAN SEE YOU. But I never would.
The bell rings eventually. I wait for the girl beside me to leave. I put the book in my bag.
“Hey,” Hannah calls from the door. “You ready?”
“Yep,” I say, and slide out of my desk. One foot in front of the other, deep breaths.
“So where were you before?” Hannah asks when we’re back in the hall. “Public school?”
“California. I moved here to live with my dad.”
“Were you in an arts program out there?”
I shake my head. “This school was my dad’s idea. I suck at art.”
Hannah gets quiet. “I feel like a jerk for what I said before,” she says finally. “About the dysfunction thing. I didn’t mean—”
“It’s fine,” I say quickly. “Really.”
“Seriously, though. I don’t want you to think I feel superior or some crap because I’m in the certificate program. It’s not like there’s some big divide. It’s the opposite actually — that’s the whole theory behind the school, that there shouldn’t be a distinction. Everyone takes the same classes, does the same things. We just have a performance element, and an extra set of grades. The asshole aspect is optional,” she adds. “Apparently, I opted in.”
I smile a little. “What kind of art do you do?”
“Music. I play the piano.”
“Is this a really good school for that?”
“It’s okay,” Hannah replies. “Mostly I’m here because my parents can’t afford to send me anywhere else and I haven’t been able to get a scholarship to somewhere better yet. And because Marshall’s here.”
“Is Marshall your boyfriend?” I feel a twinge in my chest where my heart would be if Wren hadn’t torn it out.
“Ew. Gross, no. Marshall’s my twin brother. I don’t have a boyfriend.”
I feel it coming, do you?
“My mom has twins,” I hear myself say. Not, I have twin brothers, what a normal person would say, but my mom has twins, as though they have nothing to do with me. Which is how it’s always felt, but still. I don’t know why I’m even bringing them up. “With my stepfather,” I say, to clarify. “They’re my half brothers.”
I can almost see them. Dylan’s dark eyes, Wyatt’s freckles, their matching devilish grins. Almost, but not quite. Almost, but not at all.
“Identical or fraternal?” Hannah is asking.
“Fraternal. My mom had in vitro. There were actually three of them but one of them died.”
Hannah’s face registers discomfort, sadness, shock.
“It wasn’t a big deal or anything,” I say quickly. “It happened really early on. Before they were born.”
why am i telling her this?
“That must’ve been hard on your family,” Hannah says, her voice like a greeting card now, stilted, too formal, I’m sorry for your loss.
My family. Is that what they are, Mom and Carl and the twins? It always felt like a family and then, separately, me.
My mind disengages from our conversation, like the latch on the heavy door we just walked through. We are back outside again, in the quiet, in the cold.
Hannah comes to get me after chemistry, taught by a man with shaggy white hair and a matching beard, like Santa. Or maybe not like Santa at all. I kept trying to picture him, rosy cheeks, white beard, red hat, beads of sweat on my forehead when his face wouldn’t come. When the bell rang I barely heard it. I sat, gripping the edge of the lab table, cheeks! beard! hat!, as the room cleared out, convinced that Hannah wouldn’t come for me, that I wouldn’t recognize her if she did.
But then I heard my name and there she was, standing in the doorway, like a lantern in the dark. I could let go of the table and stand up.
“The cafeteria’s across from the office,” Hannah is saying now. “But I need to practice during lunch.”
“Got it,” I say, taking the hint. “I’ll catch up with you later, then.” My voice is casual, nonchalant even, but inside I am desperate, please don’t go. My eyes jump to the GIRLS sign behind her. I can feel the toilet seat against my calves, the crinkle of the paper cover under my butt. My eighth grade daily ritual, pre-Wren, perching cross-legged on a toilet during lunch time, eating a sandwich out of a sack. Holding my breath each time the bathroom door opened. Dropping broken pieces of hair into the water, watching them float on the surface, flushing them when I left. My chest aches with the memory of it.
i don’t want to be alone
“You can come if you want,” Hannah says casually. She shifts her weight, fiddles with the hem of her sleeve, suddenly insecure, as if she’s worried I might turn her down. It’s so absurd I almost laugh. “I mean. No pressure, obviously. Just if—”
make friends
“Yeah,” I say quickly. “That’d be great.”
Hannah smiles. “Rad.”
The practice rooms are on the music hall, a length of windowless doors, a space that reverberates with contained sound. Hannah goes to the room at the end, holds open the door.
From inside, voices. Girls talking. I wasn’t expecting others. My eyes dart to where the door’s hinges should be, to the place where a space should have appeared but hasn’t. I can’t picture it, but I know this should happen, the creation of a space to peek through, a crack between door and frame. Crack, another word, like knot, that doesn’t fit. Windshields crack, and cheekbones and cuticles and confidence. Sometimes all the way through.
“Jessa?” Hannah pops her head back out. “Are you coming in?”
“Yeah, sorry.” I force a smile and follow her inside.
The room is nicer than the hallway. Berber carpet, wooden walls, a grand piano, music stands in a cluster at one side. When the door shuts behind me, the noise from the hallway abruptly goes out. The door is soundproof, I realize, designed without hinges because hinges make cracks, and cracks leak.
The other voices belong to two girls with violins. They are packing up their instruments now, gathering their things. They stop when I walk in.
“Hi,” the taller one says, staring me down. I swallow thickly. Her forehead is puckered with scars. “I’m Janet. This is Chloe.”
“Jessa,” I say, sweat cooling the backs of my knees. they’re not real, i’m imagining it, i’m making them up. The refrain kicks in automatically even though I haven’t needed it in over a week, not since the barista at Starbucks with the bruises and the burns. Then again, I haven’t left the house.
“What instrument are you?” Chloe asks coolly. She looks normal, almost. There’s a brownish bruise on her right cheek, edged in yellow, the shade a bruise turns as it fades. I stare at it, weirdly thrilled by its color. The color of progress, of healing, a wound on its way out. If my brain is making up old bruises now instead of new ones then maybe it means my mind is finally working its crap out.
“She’s not in the music program,” Hannah says when I don’t answer. She’s on the piano bench with her back to us, playing scales. Her fingers move up and down the keys the way mine twirl hair; fast and fluid, no effort at all.
The girls’ faces relax. “Oh,” Janet says, and now she’s not hostile, just confused. “What are you doing in here, then?”
“Do you guys mind?” Hannah calls over her shoulder. She doesn’t stop playing. “I only have forty minutes.”
As soon as the girls leave, she pulls her hands off the keys.
“Sorry about that,” she says. “They also opted-in.”
I smile a little. “I thought the shorter one was going to stab me in the eye with her bow.”
“Only because she can’t reach Janet. Chloe’s second chair and it drives her insane.” Hannah rifles through her bag and pulls out a piece of sheet music, sets it on the stand.
“Is everyone here that intense?”
“Not everyone,” she says, laying her hands on the keys. “Only the ones who are good.”
At first I think she’s joking but then she doesn’t laugh.
“So how many hours a day do you practice?” I ask.
“Normally, two or three. Right now, six.”
“A day?”
“I’m applying to Interlochen,” she says. “It’s a boarding school for the arts in Michigan. Literally the best music program in the country. It’s basically Juilliard for high school kids. Going there would change my life. But their admissions rate for rising seniors is less than five percent, and I can only go if I get an Emerson scholarship, which only forty kids in the world get. I tried for one last year and didn’t get it. This is my last shot.”
“When’s your audition?”
“Twenty-six days.”
Her dark eyes are the only thing moving as she studies her music. The rest of her is still, steady, muscles taut like she might pounce on the keys. Abruptly she turns her head to look at me. “Can you sit or something? You’re sort of throwing me off.”
“Sorry,” I say, and drop to the floor. “Is here okay? Where do people usually sit?”
“They don’t,” Hannah replies, eyes back on the music, fingers drawn up on the keys, every ounce of her focus hovering in that space between her hands and her face, shoulders rising and falling with long, steady breaths. “I’ve never had anyone in here with me before.”
“This is Liszt’s La Campanella,” she says then, and starts to play. Slowly at first, left hand then right, back and forth, taking turns on the keys. Then her right hand plays faster, a delicate pitter-patter on the high notes. The left hand stays lower, more measured, precise. Faster, and then faster, the tempo picks up. Her hands leap from one end of the piano to the other, her fingers like hailstones on the keys.
“Wow,” I breathe when she’s finished. “That was—”
“Sloppy,” she mutters sharply under her breath. She looks over at me. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m off my game.”
“Are you joking? That was incredible. I’ve never heard someone play like that.”
“I’m having trouble with the two-handed trills,” she says, ignoring my compliment, flexing her wrist. “The parts where it alternates between adjacent notes.” She demonstrates with her pinky and ring finger on her right hand, fingers fluttering like a hummingbird’s wings. “Ugh!” she says suddenly, clenching her hand into a fist and banging it down on the keys. Self-loathing darkens her features, pulls on her brows.
i know what that’s like
Then, as fast as it appeared, the darkness is gone, painted over with confidence, and I think to myself i wish i had that. “From the top,” she says, straightening up.
She starts again, but this time only gets a few bars in before she stops, abruptly, and curses under her breath.
i should offer to leave. i’m throwing her off
“Hey listen,” I say, reaching for my bag.
“Don’t go,” she says suddenly. “I mean. . . Unless you want to. If you’re bored or whatever. But don’t feel like you have to.” She smiles a little. “I’m glad that you’re here.”
She starts playing again before I can say anything, which is good, because my throat is too tight to speak.
me too