Chapter Four
3 Years, 44 Weeks, 6 Days
Sometimes when life kicks you in the ass, you have to kick it back.
In the nuts.
With steel-toed boots.
Essentially, if someone, anyone, kicks you, it is very mature to take the high road and not kick them back. But it’s not fun. And I’m all about fun. One hundred percent fun. One fundred percent.
I smirk at my own pun. One pundred percent. My father groaning across the breakfast table is the only indication that I’ve been thinking out loud for the past five minutes.
“Isis, eat your food,” he pleads.
“No, Dad, I gotta go.” I stand up quickly from my chair. The twins pelt each other with oatmeal.
“You’ll sit down and eat your breakfast with the rest of us, Isis, or so help me—”
“Where are you going?” Kelly interrupts him and smiles sweetly at me.
“Home.”
Kelly’s eyes light up at the prospect. Dad’s darken.
“Isis, your ticket doesn’t have you going back until the thirtieth—”
“Dad,” I whine. “My friend died and I gotta go kick life in the nuts.”
“We’re all going to die. The Lion King said so,” one of the twins pauses in her oatmeal-throwing to say, her bright blond braids contrasting with her blue eyes as she blinks.
“Exactly!” I motion at her. “See, Dad? She gets it!”
Dad’s face turns red in his about-to-explode manner when Kelly grabs his arm and coos.
“Oh, darling, she must be so eager to get back to Ohio and start college. Remember when we were that age? I was so excited to leave the house and get on with my life! She’s just feeling that good old independence bug. Delta loves me—I’m a gold flier. They’ll let me change the date for nothing.”
Dad lets out a frustrated sigh, his red face going with it. “Aren’t you—aren’t you happy here? This was supposed to be your summer vacation, with me. I haven’t seen you in two years, Isis. Two years.”
“I’m having loads of fun here,” I lie vigorously. “And I’m gonna miss you.” Another lie. I don’t even know you. “I’m just, you know. Like Kelly said. I’m ready to go!”
Dad eyes me over his glasses, and after what feels like eternity, sighs. Kelly smiles. I’ve won. As I pack my bags, I realize there’s really nothing for me here except borrowed BMWs and a family that was never really mine. And it took me nine years to figure that out.
You really are slow, aren’t you?
The voice echoes so clear I’d swear Jack was standing nearby. But there’s no one there. A lopsided picture of Kelly and Dad and their new family stares at me through the open doorway. There are no pictures of me anywhere in the house, not even as a kid. I guess Dad just didn’t have any. Or maybe Kelly didn’t want them up.
I’m surrounded by people here, but I’m completely alone.
I snap my suitcase shut and sit on it.
I cry a little at the airport two days later. Dad doesn’t cry at all. This tells me everything I need to know about everything I never wanted to know. The airplane takes off and I helpfully throw peanuts at the bald guy in front of me who won’t stop farting. The stewardess thanks me with her eyes, but then he gets up and goes to the bathroom and leaves the door open afterward and we perish. For two slow hours.
Mom is waiting for me at baggage claim. I smell like man-farts, but she hugs me anyway, and that’s how I know I’m really home.
Packing for college is like packing for war. You’re not coming back. You don’t know what’s out there. There’s a chance you may die (exams) and/or suffer life-changing injuries (hangovers, STDs). And if you do come back, you’re lucky. But the enemy territory is just begging to be explored, and I’ve gotten all the training I need from basic (high school). I’ll be okay.
I can’t fit Ms. Muffin into my suitcase.
I’m absolutely not going to be okay.
Mom hears my wails of distress and comes like a tired hound to the slaughter.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“Everything is over forever!” I throw myself onto my pillows. Mom waits patiently for a translation. I thrust my finger toward Ms. Muffin half hanging out of the bursting suitcase.
“Isis, she’s a doll.” Mom sighs. “You’re going to college. Maybe it’s time to get rid of her.”
I bolt upright, my eyes as big as saucers and my mouth as big as a flying saucer.
Mom corrects herself. “Okay, okay. Ms. Muffin stays. But keep in mind, first impressions are everything, and the only people Ms. Muffin will impress are six-year-olds.”
“Precisely, Madre. I don’t want to be friends with people who aren’t six. At heart. Only at heart. Because it’s also fun to legally drive.”
Mom shakes her head, laughing a little, and goes back downstairs to her pancakes.
I sneak into her bathroom with all the grace of an anime ninja and check her pill stock. She’s full up—antidepressants, mostly. It worries me because they make some people kill themselves. But it also doesn’t worry me, because they stop some people from killing themselves. It’s the shittiest fifty-fifty gamble in the world, but it’s all we have. It’s all that’ll keep Mom safe while I’m gone.
“What are you doing, Isis?”
I immediately slam the mirror shut. “Checking for rats! And mold. Both of which kill people. Did you know rats can leap more than ten feet horizontally? And they always aim for the jugular.”
Mom tenses, her lips pursing like she’s going to chastise me, but then she moves in, enveloping me in her arms. Arms that are a little thicker than they used to be.
“I’ll be all right, sweetie,” she murmurs into my fading purple-streaked hair. “It’s okay. It’s okay to stop worrying now.”
“I can’t,” I say. “If I stop, something bad will happen. If I stop, I won’t see it coming, I won’t pay attention, and something will happen to you—”
Mom’s grip tightens. “You’ve been so strong for me, for so long. Thank you.”
I feel a familiar prickle in my eye and promptly deny it exit. Mom holds me at arm’s length, looking me up and down as she strokes my cheek.
“And now, it’s time for you to be strong for yourself. Not me. Not anyone. No one else but you.”
I laugh, but it’s watery. “I’m not—I’m not so good at that.”
She smiles, eyes like gray mirrors full of love. “Then it’s time to learn.”
In the very back of my closet, I find a pink chiffon shirt Kelly sent me as a gift. But it’s more than that now. It’s the pink shirt Jack said I was— I was— I can’t even bring myself to say it, and how lame is that, that I can’t even say a word? Mouths are meant for saying words, and I have one, and I know words, but this one is hard. This one means something, so it’s hard.
In this pink blouse, someone called me beautiful for the first time. Someone I respected. Respect. Someone I loved.
Love.
Love?
I shake my head and jam the shirt into the farthest reaches of my suitcase. You never know when you’ll need a new curtain. Or a toilet rag.
Mom helps me load stuff into the car. I’ve got my trusty blue suitcase and my beat-up backpack from high school. High school. Hi, school. Bye, school. I shiver a little as I realize I’m not in it anymore. I’m officially out. Half of me wants to drink nineteen Red Bulls and dance the motherfucking hokey pokey nonstop for twenty-four hours, and the other part of me wants to crawl back into school, wrap it around me like a security blanket, and never come back out. I settle for rolling on the lawn and moaning with dread like a grubby caterpillar refusing to get out of its cocoon.
Kayla pulls into our driveway just as Mom loads the last bag. I jump up from groaning on the lawn and rush over. She’s right on time for our dinner date. Our last and final farewell dinner date. She gets out of the car in a blindingly beautiful white dress and sandals, her dark hair combed out to chocolate sheetlike perfection. She greets my mom with the graciousness of seven French queens and drags me into her car with the strength of seven Viking warriors. When we’re on the road, she huffs.
“Is the stuff in the trunk really all you’re taking? The Romanies travel with more stuff than you!”
“Ah”—I raise a sage finger—“but Romanies don’t have an entire suitcase pocket devoted to Haribo gummy bears.”
Kayla rolls her eyes. “You’re so nuts.”
“I prefer gummies to nuts.”
“Oh do you?” Kayla arches her brow in that terribly cheesy double-entendre way, and I suppress the urge to pluck it off her face. Her face is a work of art, cheesy eyebrow or no. I don’t ruin art. Except when I do. And then I get yelled at.
“Anyway,” I say. “This is the last time we’ll see each other until Christmas break, so we'd better crash a party or something equally entertaining yet memorable.”
Kayla grins and merges onto the highway. “I know just the place.”
I recognize the street before I do the restaurant. The Red Fern looms before us. The same place I arranged Jack and Kayla’s first date. The one I stalked them at. But Kayla doesn’t know that, of course. She picks a booth by the window and we settle in; she orders iced tea, and I order a root beer.
“If we were in Europe, we’d be able to order wine.” Kayla sighs dreamily. “God, they have it so good there.”
I frown, remembering the ticket Jack left me. It leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
“Oh yeah. Everybody loves the plague.”
“That was centuries ago, Isis. No one has the plague anymore.”
“The death metal fans of the world beg to differ.”
Kayla rolls her eyes, and when the waitress returns with our drinks, she orders spring rolls for us to split. I look around nervously at the decor. The same colorful birds of paradise linger in the vases, and the crystal light fixtures look like seaweed suspended in ice.
“I’ve never been here,” I say. “It’s nice.”
“Oh, don’t lie.”
A cold jolt runs down my spine and into my butt. It is mildly unpleasant. “What?”
Kayla sips her tea. “Jack told me you stalked us on our date.”
“That was only because he was, objectively, a nasty-faced pus-butt bug-eater, and I had to—”
“I know you paid him to take me out,” she interrupts. I gape like a particularly mute fish. “It’s fine. I’m over it. That seems like so long ago.”
“You—” I swallow. “You aren’t super pissed?”
“Why would I be? It was one of the best nights of my life.”
“When did he—”
“The night we broke up. The morning after Avery’s party, when she—”
When she locked Wren and a drugged Kayla in a room. I don’t say that, though, and it really doesn’t need to be said. Kayla shakes her hair out.
“It was when you and Wren went to kick Avery’s ass. Jack and I talked about a lot of things. That was one of them. He came clean.”
“I never did. Shit, I never told you,” I say instantly. “And I’m really sorry—”
“Don’t be, idiot.” She kicks me under the table. “It’s over and it was a long time ago, and anyway I’d forgive you for anything. Short of killing my baby brother. And maybe I’d even forgive you for that, depending on how much he’d spit up on me that week.”
Our spring rolls arrive, and I drown my gratitude in sprouts and poser meat made out of innocent bean curds. Kayla talks about Massachusetts, and all the places she’s going to visit with Wren. The East Coast will suit her—she’s gorgeous and tan and tall, and a big city is all but required so the maximum amount of peons will be able to bask in her splendor as she blooms into the most beautiful woman in the world, and eventually, the queen of Westeros.
“I don’t even like Game of Thrones,” she offers, and I realize I was speaking my thoughts again. “Everyone is too white.”
The books have fewer white people, and she would know this if she read more often.
“I’ve been reading War and Peace.”
Correction: she’d know this if she read better, not-dumb books more often.
“Oh my God, you’re a snob. I’m best friends with a book snob.”
I flip my hair and order stir-fried rice. Kayla orders coconut curry. Somewhere outside, a man yells “FUCK” and another man yells “STOP” but we never see them and keep eating our appetizers gleefully. Life goes on outside the restaurant without us. It is all very dramatic. Kayla picks at her nails, a somber look replacing her faint exasperated joy.
“I’m going to miss you, snob.”
I reach across the table and put my hand over hers.
“I’ll always be with you,” I say. She smiles, and I continue. “As a pair of disembodied eyes. Watching your buttocks with great admiration-slash-envy-slash-protective maternal instinct.”
“Ew.”
“Wren won’t know what hit him when I materialize out of thin air on your first get-it-on night and punch him in the mouth.”
Kayla glares.
“Softly. Sock him in the mouth softly,” I correct. “With my pinkie.”
Our dinner arrives and we eat like starved hyenas, which is an improvement, because on the ladder of voracious eaters teenage girls are just below great white sharks and above starved hyenas, which means we are actually behaving ourselves. The waitress doesn’t seem to think so, and she wrinkles her nose when she takes away our dishes, the rings of food left behind like halos of glory. And indigestion. I duck into the bathroom for a second to wash my face free of peanut sauce. And it’s then the memories come flooding back with a particularly heinous vengeance. Jack leaned against that counter. Jack touched that sink. Jack touched my face for the first time while he stood where the counter and the wall met. Jack’s in every tile of this bathroom, and I can’t escape it.
I don’t want to.
He might be missing, gone from my life like a ghost, but here? He’s still here. I can envision his tall frame here. I can close my eyes and be in the past again.
It’s just a dumb bathroom in a Thai restaurant. But to me, it’s so much more.
I wash my face and stare in the mirror.
This is the last dinner Kayla and I will have together for a long time. Four months, at least. I leave tomorrow. She leaves a week after. This is where it all stops, and begins again. Nobody knows what will happen, but I’m determined to keep her in my life. I won’t lose her.
Not like I lost Jack.
“Everything okay?” Kayla asks when I come back to the table. “Diarrhea?”
“Oh, constantly. It’s my superpower. Semiautomatic shitting.”
Kayla’s quiet, which either meant she didn’t get my joke or she wasn’t listening.
“You miss him, huh?” she asks quietly.
I know who she’s talking about. It’s hard not to guess when he’s a giant pink elephant all but sitting on our faces. Spiritually. Spiritually sitting on our faces. But I play dumb because that’s easier.
“Wren? Hell yeah, I miss him. I messaged that nerd on Facebook last night and he never—”
“I meant Jack, dummy.”
I’m quiet. Kayla sighs and crosses her arms over her chest as she waits for the check.
“It’s not fair. He just took off and left you.”
I laugh, the sound bitter. “It’s fine. There was nothing between us, anyway.”
Kayla gives me another, sharper death stare. She’d learned from Avery well. “Don’t bullshit me, okay? There’s an entire school that can attest to your mutual attraction. Plus, I’m your best friend. And I dated him for a while. I know exactly how much you meant to each other.”
“Obviously not a lot.” I laugh again. “Since he left so quickly. Without saying good-bye.”
Kayla’s silent, waiting for more. I smile.
“Living is really weird,” I say. “You never get used to it. But it happens anyway. And sometimes you find things that make it a little more comfortable, and you try to hold on to those things, and the tighter you hold, the faster they slip away.”
I look out the window to the dusk-painted main street, gold streetlamps just starting to bloom. I’ll miss this small town. It won’t miss me.
“I think Sophia knew that the best out of all of us. Maybe she was the only one in the world who knew that. Maybe that’s why she just…let go. Because the things she loved were leaving faster the tighter she held on.”
“Isis—”
I turn back to Kayla. “I’m okay, I promise. I’ve just been thinking about her a lot. About what I could’ve done. Gran told me I couldn’t have done anything. But I could’ve. I could’ve just…let go. I could have let Jack go, and maybe Sophia would still be here.”
“That’s not true!” Kayla protests.
“Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. But the only thing I really know is in that alternate world where I let Jack go, Sophia is more likely to still be alive.”
Kayla flinches. The waitress leaves the bill, but Kayla doesn’t even notice. I motion at it.
“You gonna get that? We can splitzies.”
We split the bill evenly. On the drive home, with the sky as dark and starless as cold ocean water, Kayla finally speaks.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Isis.”
“No,” I agree. “You’re right. I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t do anything at all.”
Kayla tries to break the dark ice that’s layered over our conversation, and I try, too. The shadow of Sophia’s death haunts us. Me. It haunts me, and it’s ruining this good-bye, and I can’t even stop it.
“Look, Kayla, I’m sorry. I’m just…just really sorry. I don’t know when I got like this, and I promised myself I wouldn’t—”
“But it’s easier said than done,” she interrupts. “I know. Wren’s been like this, too. Don’t worry. It’s okay. I’ve had practice handling mopey.”
Her smile is a little drained.
When we pull into my driveway, we sit in the dark car, watching the moths attack the porch light. They throw themselves at it, over and over again, like they want to catch fire and burn.
“I’m lucky I met you.” I smile at Kayla. “And I’m triple lucky you have a thing for insane weirdos. Pretty much won the friend lottery.”
“So did I.” Kayla pouts. “Without you, I never would’ve realized Avery was using me.”
“Jack helped.”
She nods, grinning wryly. “I guess. A little.”
“Do you remember the first time we met at Avery’s party? And he made you cry?”
“Oh God, I was such a crybaby. I can’t even believe how dumb I was. And that was just, like, ten months ago. I could’ve had a baby in that time.”
“A crybaby,” I insert.
“All babies are crybabies,” she counters. I take on a wise old man squint and voice as I postulate.
“But are all crybabies…babies?”
Kayla courteously punches my arm, then sighs and leans back in her seat.
“Jack was the first one to bring it up. He made me start questioning everything—why I was hanging with Avery, did I really enjoy her company, how much of my feelings were hidden behind the shopping and the gossip. Without him, it would’ve taken me a lot longer.”
“Wouldn’t have killed him to put some damn sugar on it,” I grunt. “Willy Wonka does it all the time, and he’s fine! Possibly homicidal, but fine.”
Kayla laughs and shakes her head. “You know Jack. He doesn’t work like that.”
I smile, the thing a little twisted but still whole. Kayla puts her hand on my shoulder.
“You two are…the same. I didn’t notice it before, but Wren pointed it out to me. He’s right. You two really are the same. So I think— I think even if he’s gone now, he’ll be back. People like you—you don’t find very often. He’ll be back.”
“And when he comes back, I will behead him,” I announce.
“You’ll greet him,” Kayla says sternly. “With a hug.”
“I will greet him with a hug. To his torso. Which will be missing a head.”
Kayla slaps her palm to her face, and I hug her, laughing. Laughing warm. Laughing true. Laughing for the first time in what feels like forever.
I’m not really losing my best friend.
We’re just going our own ways. We’re scattering ourselves to different winds, but we’ll come together again. We are exploring a globe in different directions. Like Columbus and Magellan, boldly going where no stinky sixteenth-century European explorer and his crew of scurvy men have ever gone before! Except one of them died of fever, and, like, mutiny, I think, and the other was pretty much a racist bastard who enabled hundreds of years of genocide, so in a fit of good judgment I decide to nix that metaphor entirely.
“Thank God,” Kayla breathes. “Can you get out now?”