Authors: Jillian Cantor
“They’re all right,” Ben says, shrugging and sitting down on his bed. But I stare at the picture a minute longer, noticing two words underneath.
“What does this say?” I ask him.
“Island Girl,” he says, and he shrugs. I remember how I got mad at him that day when he called me that, how, at first, I thought he was laughing at me. But now I can see from the picture that he wasn’t. That by
nickname
, he really did mean something nice. Ben sees me, I think. He actually sees
me
. I don’t understand why it’s so much different for him than for my grandmother or Mrs. Fairfield, or even Dr. Banks. But it is, and he’s my favorite one in California, the only one I really find myself liking, wanting to talk to and spend time with. And maybe it’s because he draws me the way I am, rather than trying to change me. To make me
normal
. I have the sudden sense that I might miss him when River and I go back to Island, but then I quickly push the thought away because it makes me feel uncomfortable. I don’t need anyone else, I remind myself. River and me. Me and River. Shelter and Falls. The sky and the stars. Ocean and Fishing Cove. That is all I need. All I am.
Ben sits down on his bed and pats the space next to him, so I sit down, too. He lies back against a pillow, and I echo him and do the same. The white ceiling above us is covered with fake, too-large yellow stars. And suddenly I feel sad for him. It does not seem like any kind of life, sleeping this way, with fake stars shining up above your head.
Ben has a big bed and there’s space between us now, not like the way River and I always lay so close on the rabbit pelt mats. But suddenly I’m aware that Ben and I are sharing a space and that we could be closer if we each moved just a little bit. Though we don’t.
Maybe Ben notices, too, because he rolls over, away from
me, to pick up his iPod from the table, and he turns on music. This is part of making me
normal
, him teaching me about this stuff. I like music, the way it sounds, the way it can change from one moment to the next, the way you can just push a button and make the way you’re feeling surround you, without even having to say anything at all. I wonder if there would be a way for me to take an iPod with me back to Island, to listen to music there still, but then I realize that thought is ridiculous.
“You’ll like this song,” Ben says now. “It’s a blues song. Nina Simone.” He grins, and a thick low voice fills the room, singing about birds and sun and feeling good. I felt that once not so long ago, didn’t I? All of that. On Island, my birthday, the sun on my face as River held out his catch, spanning the width of his arms. I’ll feel that again soon. Once I find River at the fish market and we figure out our way back.
“All this nature stuff—you like this, right?” Ben asks.
I nod, but I like the sound of her voice more than what she’s saying to me. It is clear and deep and sweet, like my mother’s. “So this is what
normal
people our age listen to in California?” I ask Ben.
“Nope.” He laughs. “Total throwback song from probably Alice’s teenage years.” He shrugs. “I told you I suck at this normal stuff.”
“But how do you know so much about this not-normal music?” I ask.
He grins again. “My father is a jazz drummer in a band—a drummer, you know that, right?” I shake my head, and he taps with his fingers against the table. “The person in the band who
keeps the beat. At least, he was. I mean, I guess he still is.” He pauses. “Anyway, when I was younger, he used to play me records, teach me about all this stuff.”
“And now?” I ask, and I think it’s strange no one around me has mentioned Ben’s father up until this moment.
“Now … I don’t know. He left for a gig one night when I was seven, and I haven’t seen him since.”
“My father died before I was born,” I tell Ben, and he nods as if maybe he already knows this. “Where did your father go?”
Ben shrugs. “I dunno,” he says. “But he’s sure as hell not here.”
“Maybe he’s on an island,” I say.
“Are you making a joke?” he says. I shrug because I’m not sure what I’m doing. I don’t really think his father is on an island, though maybe. Mrs. Fairfield showed me many other islands on her maps, but they all had strange names I’d never heard of or would’ve never imagined existing before now. I never understood before that Island was not the only one, that we were not the only ones. And I’m still not sure I understand or believe it. Maps are just drawings on paper. Nothing more. I looked out over Ocean nearly my entire life, and the only thing I saw was blue water meets blue sky.
“Dude, I don’t know how it happened, but you are totally becoming normal,” Ben says now. “And so not funny, by the way.” Still, he laughs a little as he reaches across the bed and pokes me in the ribs.
“Ow!” I protest, but it doesn’t hurt, and I realize I’m smiling, actually smiling, the way I did when River would tease me sometimes, when he would chase me around Beach threatening
to pull me under into Ocean if I wouldn’t go wash my rabbit pelt in Falls, already. I think that’s what Ben is doing now, poking me in the ribs, and then I remember how close River is, just out on a boat and soon back at the fish market, and something a little uneasy twists in my stomach.
“I’m sorry,” I say, not smiling anymore. Because his father is lost, and so am I.
“You don’t need to be sorry for making a joke,” Ben says. “That’s what people do.”
“No,” I say. “I mean about your father.”
He nods, but he doesn’t say anything else, and we listen to Nina for a few more minutes, not saying anything.
Just as Nina seems to be making a big finish, Ben sits up and looks at me. “Can I ask you something?” he says. “What happened back there at the fish market? Why did you freak out?”
“Freak out?” I echo him. “I don’t know.” I feel strange talking to Ben about River. The spot where Ben poked me in the ribs doesn’t hurt, but it feels a little warm, as if my body, my senses, are more awake now.
“Yeah, you do,” he says softly. “You just don’t want to tell me.”
I realize he’s right. That I’ve lied to him. That in my short time in California, I’ve already become a liar. And maybe it’s only a matter of time before I’m cold and broken. A skeleton. “Lucas,” I say. “The man asked for Lucas.”
“And you thought of your Lucas?”
I nod, though I wonder if there is any way he is mine anymore. River was mine.
Lucas
, this strange person he might have become here in California—he doesn’t even feel like mine at all.
“What happened between the two of you, anyway?” Ben
asks. “You were together all that time on your island, right?” I nod. “And you were friends?”
I nod again, though I don’t know if
friends
is the right word. In California, there’s so much to learn and watch and understand. But on Island, it was simple, River and I ending every day in Shelter, back to back. River was everything to me, and I was everything to him. At least, I thought I was.
“So what happened?” Ben pushes.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He didn’t want to be friends with me here, I guess.” I don’t say it out loud, but I think if I could just talk to him again … see him again, I could change his mind. I would, I know it. Or maybe I would tell him he could bring his mother with us, that if she is as good and perfect as he remembered her, then she will love Island, as we do.
“That sucks,” Ben says. “He kind of sounds like a dick.”
“He’s not,” I say, though I don’t really know what that is. It just doesn’t sound nice, and there’s nothing about River that wasn’t nice. Lucas, maybe. River, no.
I feel tears in my eyes. I want to stop them from coming, but I can’t, and Ben sits up and puts his hand to my cheek, the way River once did, to wipe them away. “Well, I say you’re better off without him,” he says. “Alice hates him. And she’s a pretty good judge of character.”
The thought that my grandmother feels that much, that she has
hate
for River, makes me mad. “That’s ridiculous,” I say. “She’s never even met him. You can’t hate someone you’ve never met.”
“I don’t know,” he says, but he looks away from me as he says it, so I can’t see in his eyes what he might be thinking.
He picks up the iPod and turns on a new song. “R.E.M.,” he tells me. “‘It’s the End of the World as We Know It.’ ”
I listen to the words, and it’s like they’re talking to me, like Ben is talking to me through them. The world has ended, and the R.E.M.’s are still feeling fine. I don’t feel fine at all, and Ben’s words still echo uneasily in my head.
Alice hates him
, he said of River.
And she’s a pretty good judge of character
. But that doesn’t even make any sense. Is Ben lying? Is he a skeleton, just like all the rest of them?
I stand up quickly. The bed shakes, and Ben startles and turns the music off.
“I think I should go back now,” I say. Maybe I have been wrong to trust him, to come here with him, and I want to get back to Pink Bedroom, to come up with a plan to get back to the fish market, to River.
Ben opens his mouth as if he wants to say something, but then he seems to change his mind because he says nothing. He nods and stands up, and then we walk back to my grandmother’s house in silence.
“I have a question for you,” I tell Dr. Banks a few nights later. She has come after dinner tonight, and darkness floods past the window, the moon bloated again, nearly full. From the next room, I hear the noises of the television box, unfamiliar voices, shouting.
“Yes, Megan,” Dr. Banks says. “What’s that?” She smiles her silly this-is-your-safe-space smile, and a part of me wants to reach across her face and hit her now just to make the smile go away. I wouldn’t have hit anyone on Island, ever. My mother, Helmut, they wouldn’t have allowed it. And besides that, I never wanted to. But Dr. Banks’s lips are a terrible shade of pink—lipstick—I know, because my grandmother showed me how to put it on and asked me if I wanted to try some of hers. But honestly, I just don’t see the point.
“Well,” I say now, looking away from her so I don’t have to see that awful pink smile. I hear the sound of tiny footsteps in the other room—my grandmother’s—and I guess
she’s listening to us while trying to pretend that she’s watching the television box. “We all had different names on Island,” I say. “I am Sky. Lucas was River. My mother, Angela”—the name still feels funny on my tongue—“was Petal. But Helmut was Helmut.” I remember what Ben told me that first night, that he’d learned about Helmut from the Google, that Helmut had done some bad things. But all the newspapers Mrs. Fairfield has shown me have made little, if any, mention of Helmut, and I don’t know if that’s because the stuff Ben told me was wrong or if it was that Mrs. Fairfield has been leaving pieces out.
“That’s an interesting question, Megan.” Dr. Banks draws her pink lips together in a line. “But first let’s address something else. You said, ‘I am Sky.’ Not ‘I was Sky.’ ”
“So?” I say, suddenly wishing I hadn’t asked anything at all.
“So you have trouble being called Megan, don’t you?”
I sigh. “Maybe.”
“And why is that?”
“I don’t know,” I say because I am not going to tell her the truth, that soon I will be back on Island, with River, and I will be Sky again, always. That I
am
Sky. No matter what.
Dr. Banks does that annoying thing where she just stares at me. She stares and stares and stares until I say something else. “My mother called me Sky,” I say. “That’s what she told me my name was.”
“She called you Megan once, too.”
“I don’t remember that,” I say, though I think about the last moment my mother spoke to me, when she might have said Megan.
She nods. “But why do you think you get so angry when people who do remember that call you Megan?”
“I don’t,” I say, but even as I say it I realize that, actually, I do.
“All right.” She holds up her hands. “But you don’t like it, do you?”
“Not really,” I admit. “Everything is different here. I don’t know anything anymore.” I have not meant to be honest with her, but the words have escaped me before I can stop them. And it feels good to say them out loud.
I know nothing here. I am nothing here
.
“Not even your name,” she says softly. I nod. “So what if I call you Sky? Would you like me more?”
“I don’t think so,” I say.
She laughs. “Your brutal honesty is refreshing.” She smiles more openly now, and maybe if I think about it, I would like her a little better if she called me Sky. I’m not sure why, though, but I can’t tell her that. “So back to your question,” she says. “Why Helmut never changed his name.” She leans over and rubs her forehead. “It’s a very good question, Megan—Sky,” she quickly corrects herself. I can’t help it—I smile a little. “I don’t know that I can give you the answer. From what we know of Helmut, he was a narcissist, which means he was very much in love with himself, his image. He held himself above others. People like him usually do.”
“People like him?” I say softly.
“It’s complicated,” she says, and that’s when I understand that Mrs. Fairfield has been hiding things from me, not reading me all of the newspaper, leaving the most important pieces out. I think about how my grandmother asked if he’d killed my
mother, and I wonder why she would think that, what it is that everyone in this world thinks they know about that I don’t.
“It’s complicated,” I echo after her. “You mean, you don’t want to tell me?” Outside, I watch the bloated moon move behind a pale gray cloud. I listen hard, wishing I could hear the ocean from here. But I can’t. There’s so much noise in this house. Machinery. The television box. The dishwasher. The fan whirring above my head. The refrigerator buzzing in the next room. My head hurts.
“It’s not that I don’t want to … it’s just that … I want to wait until you’re strong enough here. Until you have the tools to process it all.”
That’s ridiculous. I am strong already. Stronger than her, than anyone I have met in this California world. “You think Helmut was a bad man,” I say. “Everyone thinks he was. But he wasn’t. He loved us. He loved me.” I hear my voice rising in my throat, my face turning red in frustration.