Magonia (2 page)

None of the above topics, the death and dying topics, are things I actually feel inclined to talk about. I’m not depressed. I’m just fucked up. I have been since I can remember. There’s not a version of my life that
isn’t
fucked up.

Yes. I’m allowed to say that word if I feel like it, and I do. I feel like swearing about this. It’s me in this body, thank you, snarled and screwed up and not going to make it; let’s not go on about things we can’t revise. I’m an edited version of a real live girl, or at least, that’s what I say when I want to tell you something and I would rather not talk about it but have to get it out of the way so we can move on to better topics.

Yeah, I totally know I don’t look well. No, you don’t need to look concerned. I know you wish you could help. You can’t. I know you’re probably a nice person, but seriously? All I really want to talk to strangers about is anything other than this thing.

The facts of it, though? Basic, daily of Elmer /Clive/the Jackass/Azaray Syndrome? I have to live in rooms kept free of dust. This has been true almost since forever. When I was born, I was healthy and theoretically perfect. Almost exactly a year later, out of nowhere, my lungs stopped being unable to understand air.

My mom came into the room one morning and found me having a seizure. Because my mom is my mom, she had the presence of mind to give me mouth-to-mouth and breathe for me. She kept me alive until they could get me to the hospital. Where they also—barely—kept me going, by making a machine do the breathing. They gave me drugs and did things to make the oxygen density of the air less, rather than more. It got a little better.

I mean, a lot better, given that here I still am. Just not better enough. Early on, I slept for what felt like centuries inside a shell of clear plastic and tubing. My history is made of opening my eyes in rooms where I didn’t fall asleep, the petting of paramedics, the red and white spinning shriek of
sirens. That’s a thing that just
is
, if you’re the lucky girl who lives with Clive.

I look weird and my inner workings are weird, and everyone’s always like, huh, never seen
that
shit before. Mutations all over my body, inside, outside, everywhere but my brain, which, as far as anyone can tell, is normal.

All the brain chemical-imbalance misery that some people have? I don’t. I don’t wake up riddled with apocalypse panic, and I don’t feel compelled to do anything in the category of biting my own fingers off, or drinking myself into a coma. In the scheme of things, having a brain that mostly obeys your instructions is not nothing.

Otherwise, I’m Aza-the-Exhibition. I’m the World’s Fair. (All I want, ALL I WANT, is for there to be the
World’s Unfair Exposition
, preferably in a city near where I live. Booths full of disappointments, huge exhibits of structures built to fail. No Oh-My-God-the-Future-Will-Be-Amazing Exhibits, but the reverse. No flying cars. Cars that squinch along like inchworms.)

I try not to get involved with my disease, but it’s persuasive. When it gets ahold of me, the gasping can put me on the floor, flopping and whistling, something hauled up from a lake bottom. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that bottom and start over somewhere else. As some
thing
else.

Secretly, as in only semi-secretly, as in this is a thing I say loudly sometimes—I think I wasn’t meant to be human. I don’t work right.

And now I’m almost sixteen. One week to go.

School Nurse: “You’re a miracle! You’re
our
miracle!”

Aza Ray Boyle: (retching noises)

Because I’m still alive I’m thinking about having a party. There’s that thing about sixteen. That big-deal factor. Everything changes and suddenly you’re right in the world, wearing a pink dress and kissing a cute boy or doing a dancey-prancy musical number.

I clarify, that’s what happens in movies. In this life? I don’t know what happens from here. Nothing I majorly want to think about.

Who would I invite? EVERYONE. Except the people I don’t like. I
know
enough people to categorize the group of people I know as everyone, but I like maybe five or six of them, total. I
could
invite doctors, in which case the group would radically grow. I said this to my parents a couple of days ago, and now they hover, considering my questionable attitude. Which they’ve been considering since forever.

But I ask you, wouldn’t it be worse if I were perfect? My imperfections make me less mournable.

Nobody enjoys birthdays. Everyone in the house is nervous. Even the plants look nervous. We have one that curls up. It isn’t allowed to share a room with me, but sometimes I visit it and touch its leaves and it cringes. It’s curled up now into a tight little ball of Leaves Me the Hell Alone.

Get it?

Leaves? (Oh, haha. Oh very haha.)

High school. First bell. Walking down the middle hall. Past a billion lockers. Late for class. No excuse, except for the one I always have.

I raise my fist to bump with Jason Kerwin, also late, who doesn’t acknowledge me with his face, just as I don’t acknowledge him with mine. Only fists. We’ve known each other since we were five. He’s my best friend.

Jason is an exception to all rules of parental worry re: Hanging With Humans Other Than Parents, because he knows every possible drill of emergency protocol.

He’s allowed to accompany me places my parents don’t want to go. Or
do
want to go, but do not want to spend hours at. Aquariums, natural history museum bug collections and taxidermy dioramas, rare bookstores where we have to wear masks and gloves if we want to touch, back rooms full of strange butterflies, bone and life-size surgical model collections discovered on the internet.

Et cetera.

Jason never talks about death, unless it’s in the context of morbid cool things we might want to hunt the internet for. Aza Ray and the Great Failure of Her Physical Everything? Jason leaves that nasty alone.

Second bell, still in the hall, and I raise one casual relevant finger at Jenny Green. Pink streak in her hair, elbows sharper than daggers, tight jeans costing roughly the equivalent of a not un-nice used car. Jenny has pissed me off lately by being. I mean, not by basic being. Mean being. We have a silent war. She doesn’t deserve words at this point, though she called me some a couple of days ago, in a frenzy of not-allowed. Calling the sick girl names? Please. We all know it’s not okay.

I kind of, semi, have to respect her for the transgression. It’s a little bit badass, to do the thing no one else has ever dared do. Lately, there’s been this contagious idea that I resemble a hungry, murdery girl ghost from a Japanese horror movie, so Jenny came to school in blue lipstick and white powder. To mock me.

Jenny smiles and blows me a kiss full of poison. I catch it and blow it back through my today very indigo lips, thoroughly creeping her. I give her a little shudder gasp. If ghost girl is going to be my deal, I might as well use it to my advantage. She stares at me as though I’ve somehow played unfair, and takes off at a repulsed run for her class.

Insert meaningless pause at locker. Slow walk. Peer into classroom windows, through the wire mesh they put in there to discourage people like me from spying on people like them.

My little sister, Eli, senses me staring, and looks up from her already deep-in-lecture algebra. I rock out briefly in the hallway, free, fists up, at liberty like no one else is this time of morning. Sick-girl privilege. Eli rolls her eyes at me, and I walk on, coughing only a little bit, manageable.

Seven minutes late to English and it’s Mr. Grimm, eyebrow up.
The Perpetually Tardy Mizz Aza Ray
, his name for me, and yeah, his name is Grimm, really. Blind bat eyes, thick-frame glasses, skinny tie like a hipster, but that look’s not working for him.

Mr. Grimm’s muscle-bound, though he never rolls up his sleeves. He has the kind of arms that strain against fabric, which fact tells me he has no actual life, and just veers between being a teacher and drinking protein shakes.

He’d seem as though he belongs in the PE end of the building, except that when he opens his
mouth he’s nerdtastic. I also think he has tattoos, which he’s tried to cover up in various ways. Pancake makeup. Long sleeves. Not too smart to get a skull/ship/naked girl (?) permanently marked on you. You have to button your cuffs all the time.

Mr. Grimm’s new this year. Youngish, if you can call thirty young. But the tattoo is interesting. I can’t tell exactly what it is because I’ve never seen the full extent of it.

It makes me want tattoos. I want one that’s worse than whatever his is.

He’s got a constant complaint going that I could work up to my potential if I’d only pay attention instead of burying my face in a book while he lectures. He can’t lament too successfully, considering that I am one of, oh, what, four people in this school who read.

And I know that’s trite. Yes, I’m a reader. Kill me. I could tell you I was raised in the library and the books were my only friends, but I didn’t do that, did I? Because I have mercy. I’m neither a genius nor a kid destined to become a wizard. I’m just me. I read stuff. Books are not my only friends, but we’re friendly. So there.

I don’t need to pay attention to Mr. Grimm’s lecture. I read it already, whatever it is, in this case, Ye Olde Man vs. Ye Olde Sea.

Obsessed guy. Big fish. Variety of epic fails. I have to wonder how many generations of sophomores have been oppressed by stories about this same damn thing.

Why? Which of us is or will one day be engaged in a death struggle with a big fish? What is the rationale?

I’ve read
Moby-Dick
, another version of Obsessed Dude, Big Fish, and taxonomies of sorrow and lost dreams.

I know, whale = not fish. Mammalian cetacean. Still, whales have always been the prototype for Big Fish Stories, which makes all kinds of sense given how wrong humanity always is about everything.

I even read the
Moby-Dick
chapters that no one reads. I could tell you anything you need to know about flensing. Trust me on this, though, you don’t want that information.

Ask me about
Moby-Dick
, Mr. Grimm. Go on. Do it.

He did do that once, about a month ago, thinking I was lying about reading it. I gave a filibuster-quality speech about suck and allegories and oceans and uncatchable dreams that I then merged into a discussion of pirate-themed movies, plank-walking, and female astronauts. Mr. Grimm was both impressed and aggravated. I got extra credit, which I don’t need, and then detention for interrupting, for which punishment, in truth, I respect him.

I glance over at Jason Kerwin, who is ensconced in his own book. I eye the title.
Kepler’s Dream: With the Full Text and Notes of Somnium, Sive Astronomia Lunaris.
It looks old and semi-nasty, recycled hardcover library copy. Big picture of the surface of the moon on the front.

No clue: me.

I slink my hand over to his desk and snatch it to read the flaps. The first science-fiction novel, it says, written in the 1620s. An astronomer tells a story of a journey to the moon, but also he attempts
to encode in the novel a defense of Copernican theory, because he’s looking for a way to talk about it without getting executed for heresy. Only later did people realize all the fantasy bits are pretty much Kepler’s code for astronomy and equations.

I thumb. There’s a flying alien witch.

Awesome. Kind of my kind of book. Except that I’d prefer it if I could write one of my own. This is always the problem with things containing imaginary languages and mysteries. I want to be the cryptographer. I’m not even close to being a cryptographer, though. I’m just what used to be called “an enthusiast.” Or maybe a hobbyist. I learn as much as I can learn in like fifteen minutes of internet search, and then I fake, fast and furious.

People therefore think I’m smarter than they are. It gives me room to do whatever I want, without people surrounding me and asking questions about things. It keeps people from inquiring about the whole dying situation. I invoke factoid privilege.

“Give,” Jason whispers. Mr. Grimm shoots us a
shut-up
look.

I consider how to pacify my parents about the birthday party. I think they have visions of roller-skating and clown and cake and balloons—like the party they had for me when I was five.

That time, no one showed up beyond two girls forced by their mothers, and Jason, who crashed the party. Not only did he walk a mile uninvited to my birthday party, he did it in formal dress: a full alligator costume leftover from Halloween. Jason didn’t bother to tell his moms where he was going, and so they called the police, convinced he’d been kidnapped.

When the squad cars showed up outside the roller rink, and the cops came in, it became immediately clear that Jason and I were destined to be friends. He was roller-skating in the alligator suit, spinning elegantly, long green tail dragging behind when they demanded that he show himself.

That party was not all bad.

For birthday sixteen, though, I’m drawing a better vision in my notebook: a dead clown, a gigantic layer cake from which I burst, a hot air balloon that arrives in the sky above me. From the hot air balloon’s basket dangles a rope. I climb. I fly away. Forever.

How much pain would this solve? So much. Except for the pain of the dead clown, who died not according to his own plan, but mine.

Apparently, Mr. Grimm hears me snort.

“Care to enlighten us, Miss Ray?”

Why do they always use this phrase? Rest of the class is taking a quiz. They look up, relieved to be legitimately distracted. Jason smirks. There’s nothing like trouble to make a day pass faster.

“Do you really want enlightening?” I ask, because I’m working it today. “I was thinking about dying.”

He gives me an exasperated look. I’ve used this line before in Mr. Grimm’s classroom. It’s a beautiful dealbreaker. Teachers melt like wet witches when I bring it up. I kind of enjoy Mr. Grimm, though, because he sees through me. Which means he’s actually looking. Which is, in itself, weird. No one looks at me too closely. They’re afraid my unsustainability is going to mess them up. That
plastic bubble I lived in when I was little? It’s still there, but invisible now. And made out of something harder than plastic.