My Beating Teenage Heart (11 page)

On the fifth day of that first week I was making a humungous sand pizza on the beach at the foot of the cottage’s property. When my dad noticed me struggling to form a perfect circle he’d suggested using the top of a trash can as a mold, which I did, and I was in the process of adding bits of plastic foods (sliced mushrooms, tomatoes and olives) from one of Garrett’s play sets when Callum walked down to the sand to see what I was doing.

“I wish we could have real pizza,” he declared, looking down at my sand one. “At home we order pizza from Domino’s all the time.” The way he said that doesn’t look anything like you’d read it on a page—his sentences, like Ellie’s and my uncle Ian’ se Ihe said ts, were filled with hills and valleys. Their words danced.

That year my mom and aunt happened to be on a joint health-food kick and were determined that we all avoid junk food for the duration of the trip, so I knew how my cousin felt. Back then I believed most green vegetables were inedible and was tired of avoiding all the lettuce, bok choy and peas appearing on my plate at the end of the day. “I wish we could have chocolate,” I told him. “Or Cheetos.”

“What are Cheetos?” my three-quarters Scottish cousin Callum wanted to know, his green eyes focusing on mine.

“They’re sort of like chips, but cheesy,” I explained. “When you eat them all the orange stuff comes off on your hands but they’re really, really yummy.”

“I wish we could have those too then,” Callum said.

It’s funny, I remember how the sand smelled while we were hanging out at the beach at that moment—and how I had the taste of Cheetos in my mouth from thinking about them. And I remember wondering if Callum would walk away soon, like he usually did, and whether he would stay longer if I was boy, especially a boy older than seven.

“Do you want to play war?” Callum asked me. I temporarily forgot what war was. “I brought cards with me,” he added.

“Okay,” I told him. I could feel bits of sand between my teeth as I smiled. I always managed to get sand everywhere.

“I’ll get them!” he said, smiling back at me. He raced towards the cottage and brought the cards down to the beach with him. We sat on the sand beside my pizza and played war and then quadruple war for hours. The tide came in, the sun hung low on the horizon and Celeste was dispatched with the message that if we wanted to stay outside we’d need to come into the cottage for a minute so our mothers could douse us in mosquito repellent.

“Why don’t you bring us the spray?” I asked my sister in a pleading voice.

“Because Mom says you need to come in,” she repeated. “You know you
always
have to put on long sleeves and pants if you want to stay out when it’s getting dark.”

I stared at my father and Uncle Ian in the distance. They were hanging out on the deck, listening to a baseball game on my father’s hand-crank radio while they watched over us. I couldn’t hear the game from my spot on the beach but they often listened to games in the evenings, and as I gazed over at them and then back at my sister and Callum, I was conscious, with every fiber of my being, that I didn’t want the moment to end. I’d forgotten how strongly a seven-year-old could want something, but an echo of the intensity with which I’d clung to that moment charges through me as the details float back.

I really thought it might not ever be the same if I went inside—that I might never be as happy again as I was playing war out on the beach with Callum.

“Pretty soon it’ll be too dark for you to even see the cards anyway, scar>

“We’ll be fast,” Callum declared, already on his feet. “Come on, Ashlyn!”

We sprinted for the cottage, changed into long sleeves and pants and allowed ourselves to be coated in bug spray. Then we raced back to the beach together in the fading light and played cards until every bit of sun was gone. Celeste was wrong—if you tried hard enough you could make out the numbers even in the dark. Callum and I kept right on playing by moonlight and my throat got dry, but I didn’t dare go into the cottage for lemonade. Our parents let us stay out on the sand for longer than I would’ve guessed, but in the end my uncle strolled down to the beach and said we could pick up where we’d left off tomorrow.

The next afternoon, eager to cement my friendship with my cousin, I begged my father to drive us into town to pick up Cheetos and pizza. My dad smiled and said I must be suffering a fierce cheese craving if I needed both those things to satisfy it. I told him the Cheetos would be more for me and the pizza more for Callum and my dad nodded and said he was a big fan of both those things himself but that if he took us we should only tell my mom about the pizza and not the Cheetos.

When Celeste and Ellie heard about the pizza, naturally they wanted to come too, and Uncle Ian said he could never resist pizza and to count him in. Only our moms and Garrett stayed behind. My dad let me get Fun Dip and Gobstoppers as well as a jumbo bag of Cheetos to share with my cousin. Callum said he loved the Cheetos and that the pizza was almost as good as Domino’s. As he was eating, a pepperoni slid off his slice and onto his T-shirt, leaving a red mark that he kept rubbing, smooshing the sauce into the fabric just like I would’ve done.

The six of us were sitting outside the pizza place, taking up their only two tables, when a woman in spindly heels walked past us in the direction of the 7-Eleven next door. The woman was holding a small black dog in her arms and Callum pointed to it and said, “Look at its wee paw.” I took a second look and noticed that one of the dog’s front legs was swathed in a light green sling.

“
Awww
, poor thing,” my sister declared, but her reaction didn’t sound a fraction as interesting as the way Callum had phrased his. I hero-worshipped him more with each passing day, and at night, as Celeste and I lay in our shared bedroom, I’d repeat stories about the games we’d played and exotic-sounding things Callum had said. “He’s Scottish,” Celeste said sensibly. “All Scottish people talk like that, Ashlyn.” Then, bored of listening to me rave about our cousin, she began to tease me. “I bet you wish you’d let Ellie and me share a room now. You could listen to Callum talk all night.”

I stopped jabbering, hearing the change in her tone, and hoped that she’d drop the subject.

“You know you can’t fall in love with your cousin,” she continued.

“I don’t
love
him,” I snapped. I hated that she was trying to turn my fondness for Callum into something weird, and I didn’t love him anyway, not in the way she meant. “Do you love Ellie?”

“Don’t be stupid,” Celeste said.

“
You
don’t be stupid,” I countered, on the verge of tears. “Just because he’s a boy doesn’t mean I love him.”

“Fine, fine,” Celeste said indifferently. “You don’t love him.”

The following day Callum and I went swimming together, as usual, and then tromping through the heavily treed area next to the house, unearthing bugs and pretending we were exploring the Amazon. Callum and I were as close, for the rest of that trip, as Ellie and Celeste had ever been. We played cards for hours and he taught me how to play snap and spit. We buried each other on the beach, constructed cities in the sand and kicked a soccer ball around. He tried to teach me his accent and I tried to teach him mine. We made a video of ourselves talking in the funny fake voices and when we watched it back, the ridiculous sounds coming out of each other’s mouths made us laugh until our stomachs hurt.

There are still so many gaps in my memory that I can’t say for certain that those three weeks at Farlain Lake were the best of my life, but I don’t need perfect recall to realize they were something special.

Shortly after we got back to Strathedine I remember talking to my mother, who I knew wouldn’t tease me the way Celeste had, about all the good times I’d had with Callum. “It’s nice that you’re friends,” she said, and I didn’t tell her that I thought Callum hadn’t spoken to me much the previous year because I was a girl and younger than him. I beamed at her and said, “I hope next year at Farlain Lake is exactly like this one.”

Nothing’s ever exactly the same way twice. I can’t remember the changes yet—my eighth year is still shrouded in mystery, but there’s a strange murkiness surrounding it that makes me wonder if I’m better off leaving the future forgotten and hanging on the near perfection that was that second trip to Farlain Lake. Hanging on for as long as I can, just like that night Callum and I played war on the beach in the moonlight.

ten
                            breckon

My folks say
they want me to see a therapist. They tell me they don’t think I’m sleeping well and that they know I’m having trouble settling back in to school.
Settling back in
. Like there’s any chance of that happening. Like a couple weeks after Skylar died I’m supposed to be able to go on with my life as though nothing happened.

“Are you telling me you’re not having any trouble
settling back in
?” I ask defensively. Going through the motions isn’t the same thing as settling back in. I hear muffled crying from behind closed doors every day. My parents both went back to work on Monday but their eyes are permanently tired, and when we talk, our words are just noise.

My mom nestles vcar>

“It’s a grief group,” my father adds. “And we think you might benefit from talking to someone too.”

“I’m not going to any group.” It was bad enough everyone staring at me at the funeral and then school, my first couple of days back. If I have to sit in a room with fifteen other people who feel like they’re being pulled under, I won’t make it out of there.

“It doesn’t have to be a group like ours,” my mother says. “Barbara and Sean know someone, a therapist who saw their daughter for a while when she was having trouble.”

Barbara and Sean’s daughter was anorexic. I remember Mom going to see her in the hospital two years ago. She got so skinny that she almost died. Imagine starving yourself until you’re just skin and bone and your body essentially begins to feed on itself in order to survive. I didn’t get it at the time. I don’t entirely understand it now but I think I have an idea of how Barbara and Sean’s daughter must’ve felt when she was starving herself. I bet it didn’t feel voluntary at all. I bet that it made more sense to her than doing anything else.

“I worry about you,” my mom says, her eyes beginning to mist. “I don’t want you to think this was your fault, Breckon.”

I can’t lie about that.
“It was my fault.”
She knows it too. We all know it. I’m the one who wasn’t there when it counted.

“It was one of those things,” my dad says in a brittle voice. “Just one of those things. Nobody can keep their eyes on anyone twenty-four hours a day.”

Logically I understand that to be true but I also know that emotionally he’s lying. There’s no way in hell that my father doesn’t blame me. Even if mostly he doesn’t let himself, there have to be times when he wishes I did things differently that day. One tiny choice, in a hundred other tiny choices you make a day, and everything would’ve been different.

We’ve had this conversation before, the morning before the funeral, and my dad told me then that if he blamed anyone he blamed himself for not being there when it happened. “You can’t always be everywhere we go,” I told him.

“No, I can’t,” my father replied, looking me in the eye. “And neither can you, Breckon. Don’t take that burden on yourself—if you do you’ll never get out from under it.”

He acted as if I had a choice on how to look at this, but I knew better. Nobody can keep their eyes on anyone twenty-four hours a day but if you’re the one who wasn’t looking when it mattered, it’s still your fault. The facts are what they are.

I didn’t reply to my father then, and I don’t reply now. I can see in my parents’ faces that they won’t let up. I’ve let the therapist idea gain traction by skipping classes and haunting Skylar’s room earlier { rooices you. My parents are in orange alert mode.

“Just give her a try,” Mom urges.

I don’t say yes or no. It doesn’t matter what I think. I hunch over, lock my hands around the back of my neck and stare down at the living room carpet. How can I feel so empty and still want to fight them? After all the pain I’ve caused my parents I should be willing to do this without making them worry and beg.

I can’t ditch any more classes either. From now on I need to convince my mother and father that I’m doing as well as can be expected, given the circumstances. I need to say, the next time we have this conversation, that I miss Skylar but that what happened to her wasn’t my fault.

I need to lie.

“I’ll go meet her,” I tell my mom and dad. “But I’m not promising I’ll go into therapy.”

My mother nods so readily that it makes my throat swell. “We only want you to have the opportunity to talk to someone about your feelings. We’re not saying it has to be permanent.”

With that settled, Mom confesses that she’s already spoken with the therapist, who has a cancellation tomorrow after school and can fit me in. Her name’s Eva Kannan and I’m supposed to speak to her for fifty minutes.

I’m sure what Eva Kannan and I have in mind for those fifty minutes are two vastly different things. She’ll want to unravel me—break me down into bruised pieces and shove them under a magnifying glass, but I can’t let that happen. The most important thing, during those fifty minutes, is that I don’t crumble. I’ll have to hold it together, no matter what, because every time I break makes it that much harder to keep going.

And this shouldn’t even be about me.

None of this should be happening.

I’m so sick of feeling my parents’ sad eyes on me, their cheeks carved into expressions of concern, that I stand up and mumble, “I think I’ll head over to Jules’s place, if that’s okay. We have an econ thing we need to work on.”

I haven’t been to econ in two days and Jules has no clue that I’m on my way over. She’s been trying to check in with me at every opportunity but I’ve been shitty at returning phone calls and text messages over the past few days.