Authors: Amy Huntley
Tags: #Social Issues, #Death, #Girls & Women, #Social Science, #Juvenile Fiction, #Dead, #General, #Family & Relationships, #Interpersonal relations, #Death; Grief; Bereavement, #Self-Help, #Schools, #Fiction, #Friendship, #School & Education, #Death & Dying, #Adolescence
And I can’t go back.
Neither can he.
We
both
found our keys.
A profound sense of loss is oddly accented by the presence of Gabe’s companionship.
But I don’t want his company now. Not like this. Not in death. Not as a ghost.
I want him to be alive.
I shouldn’t be surprised to discover that Gabe is dead, too. I’ve sensed all along that he belonged here with me in
Is.
But somehow I’ve always imagined he was back on Earth, still living the life I knew him in.
I can’t help grieving that I’ll never return to that moment in the car…that moment when he first kissed me…that moment where I slid so gently from insecurity at being with him to the greatest sense of togetherness I’d ever had.
But I’m
glad
I can’t, too. Those other moments that I’ve been re-returning to seem to fade a bit every time I go to
them. It’s kind of like reading the same book over and over. You keep trying to capture what you felt when you first read it, but the feelings just aren’t ever as…magical.
I can’t bear to have that happen to this experience with Gabe.
I guess I’m glad, too, that I can’t go back to that moment and keep myself from finding these keys. What if I ended up ruining the moment of our first kiss?
Not being able to re-experience our first kiss is, in a way, heartbreaking, but to have never experienced that kiss at all…that would be self-breaking. I wouldn’t even be me without that exact moment.
age 12
Even though it’s dark out, I feel completely exposed as I drop my underpants onto the ground. The water will be cold, but I don’t care. At least when I’m in that pool I’ll feel more covered up than I do standing here naked. Why was I stupid enough to play Truth or Dare in the first place? I was
sure
that if I chose “truth,” Tammy was going to—horror of horrors—ask me if I had a crush on Gabe…and
he
was sitting right across from me. He and Roger had been biking down the road in front of Tammy’s. They normally don’t spend any time with us, but tonight they stopped. And
pretty soon they were just hanging with us. Maybe they were bored, nothing else to do on a warm Saturday evening two weeks before the end of the school year.
But choosing “dare” was a mistake—definitely a mistake, I realize now, as I slip into the water as quickly and quietly as I can. It’s freezing,
totally
freezing.
“They better not be watching,” Sandra says.
Just exactly what I’m thinking.
“And you owe me for this,” she adds.
No doubt about that. Not many friends would be willing to put themselves through this agony just so their BF wouldn’t have to do it alone. I still can’t quite fathom that Tammy has done this to me. “I dare you to go skinny-dipping in the neighbor’s pool,” she said just ten minutes ago. Hard to believe my whole life has changed in that time: I have become a girl who trespasses—naked—into someone else’s pool.
Can I get arrested for this?
I think I’d rather not know.
We hear muffled laughter on the other side of the fence. Everyone is checking to make sure we’re actually in the pool.
Humiliating. Thank God the pool lights are off. Thank God no one seems to be home.
The fence rattles.
“Ohmygod,” Sandra breathes. “Someone’s coming over.”
First, Roger Myers appears over the top of the fence, then Gabe follows. More giggling on the other side. I’m about to scream in outrage, but Sandra smacks me on the head, “
Shh!
C’mon.” She pushes off farther into the deep end to hide beneath the shadow of the diving board. I don’t waste any time in following her.
Roger says, “We’re just checking to make sure you’re really skinny-dipping.”
“Ohmygodohmygodohmygodohmygod,” is the only thing coming out of my mouth.
“There’s
no way
we’re letting you check that out.” Sandra obviously has more presence of mind than I do.
Roger laughs. “No choice. We’ll just grab these”—he bends over and scoops up the pile of our clothing—“and check to make sure it’s all there.”
Carrying our clothes, he runs toward the fence. He throws them over (or tries to; Sandra’s bra gets stuck on the top of the fence), then scrambles up after them. He rescues Sandra’s bra and tosses it on the other side of the fence, then jumps down after it. Gabe shoots over the fence right after him.
“Oh. My. God.” At least I’ve managed to change the tempo of my speech even if I haven’t managed to find any new words.
“It’s all here,” Tammy announces, barely loud enough for us to hear. She doesn’t want to get caught, either.
Roger’s face reappears at the top of the fence. The
muffled giggling from below him is making me feel crazy. He tosses down our clothes. They rain into a scattered mess in the dirt; then Roger disappears again, and within seconds we can hear pounding feet receding into the distance as a giggling herd stampedes its way back to Tammy’s.
Quiet hangs heavy in the air again. The only sounds we hear are the whorls our limbs make in the water.
“Time to get out,” Sandra announces. We stumble over to our clothes. No towels, of course. Not one of the amenities offered to trespassers. The clothes stick to us as we put them back on.
“I can’t find my underwear,” I tell Sandra.
“Forget ’em,” she says. “Let’s just get
out
of here.” Her long curly hair has already soaked the top half of her shirt. I can’t help being satisfied with the messy look of it. Sandra’s always dressed a bit too neatly. All her clothes—picked out by Mrs. Simpson, of course—are too well coordinated. Her socks, her hair clips, her shoes, everything all goes together. She sometimes looks like a present that’s been professionally wrapped by someone who doesn’t care at all about the gift inside the box. But as she stands here now, in a wrinkled and wet shirt, she seems more like the person I really know she is. “Hurry up,” she prods me.
“I can’t just leave behind my underwear,” I protest.
“Sure you can,” she insists. She grabs my arm and pulls me to the fence.
age 16
The note comes back to me folded a few extra times.
Thank God. That must mean Sandra had an aspirin. My head is pounding.
Throbbing. In time to Ms. Winters’s voice. Chemistry class. Just where a girl with a headache and major problems doesn’t want to be.
I unfold the note carefully, and a yellow and red Tylenol Geltab rests on top of Sandra’s writing. Right underneath my plea for an aspirin, she’s written:
At least Winters is off on one of her tangents. You
won’t have to know any of this stuff for a test. That must help with your headache.
I write back:
It would if she hadn’t decided to get distracted by something so scientific and complicated. Every once in a while I actually try to get all this stuff to make sense. I liked it better the time we all managed to get her talking about her crazy brother for the entire hour. Whose idea was it to get her going on this quantum mechanics thing?
I pass the note back one seat to Sandra. We don’t dare talk. We don’t want to interrupt her in any way, or she’ll remember that she’s supposed to be teaching us about covalent bonds…that she’s somehow gotten away from what she wrote in her lesson plans for today. Quantum mechanics isn’t nearly as thrilling as some of the personal stories she tells us when her mind starts wandering, but it still means that in twenty minutes she’ll realize we don’t have any of the information we need to do our homework and—awesome—she won’t give us any.
While I’m waiting for the note to come back, I contemplate trying to dry-swallow this Tylenol. I was hoping for an aspirin. They’re smaller. This rubbery thing is likely to get stuck in my throat.
My day totally sucks.
The note comes back:
Uh…that would be
your
boyfriend who started asking her how the rules of particle physics influenced the bonding of molecules. He was trying to get her off track, wasn’t he?
I take my time writing a response. Ms. Winters looks like she’ll be going on and on for quite a while.
Probably. Are you following this whole thing she’s trying to tell us about how subatomic particles can be both waves and particles at the same time? Those splatter pictures she’s drawing make my head pound in pain. I want to throw a whole bottle of Tylenol through one of those slits and see if we get a particle or wave pattern, you know? And okay, so maybe it’s amazing that something can be two things at once, and that observing them influences which of the two they are, but I’d rather set up a study to see how observation of that Web page influences Dana.
I pass the note back to Sandra. Ms. Winters has moved on to talking about how everything in the universe is connected in ways that can’t always be seen or understood. This has something to do with photons behaving like both particles and waves. She calls this the particle-wave duality and wants to impress on us its importance: that at the subatomic level no time has to pass for one particle to know about and be affected by what’s happening to another. At the smallest levels of the universe, rules of cause and effect become blurred because particles can communicate with
one another simultaneously.
This is enough to make my brain explode, so instead of trying to make sense of it, I begin wondering what kind of interaction two subatomic particles would want to have, anyway. Might make an interesting short story for English class. Maybe I can give it a bit of an Edgar Allan Poe flair. One particle nukes another and then tries to hide its energy under a floorboard—or maybe in a wormhole. Thus, the second particle can never be observed again and have imposed upon it human expectations about whether it is a wave or particle…and therefore it can be
neither
particle nor wave…or maybe it would still then be both…but the universe’s communication about the nuking event is simultaneous, so does that mean that the universe (and the humans trying to watch this event) have already taken into account—at the very moment it’s happening—the event itself? Now, that would seem to take all the suspense out of the story. I mean, that’s sort of like everything is predetermined, right?
Ohmygod. I can’t escape subatomic thoughts. I’m definitely losing it. If I don’t stop, my head isn’t just going to explode, it’s going to create nuclear fallout.
Thankfully, the note comes back.
You don’t need to set up a study to find that out. She had a screaming and crying fit in the bathroom and everyone’s talking about it.
Yeah. Everyone.
Except—apparently—me, since I’ve missed out on all the good gossip. That’s what I get for hanging with Gabriel between classes.
Someone anonymously published on the Web a list of spiteful awards for Overton High School girls. Things like Most Emo, Aberzombie of the Year, and Biggest Babbler. Dana won in the Best-Looking Bitch category. I can’t help feeling satisfaction that someone else has finally discovered the perfect description of Dana—even though I know that makes me a terrible person. Whoever published those awards really shouldn’t have done it. That was way out of line. The author is entitled to his or her opinions (especially when they’re so close to the truth), but putting that out there on the internet? Way unethical. Still…
Missed all that. Details please.
A few minutes later, the note returns.
She was all crying in the bathroom because who would do something that terrible to her? She’s never meant to hurt anyone, etc. Guess she was some bizarre combination of totally hurt and so angry she wanted to kill someone. Lacey was in the bathroom at the time, and it was enough to even make her feel sorry for Dana. Maybe this will be a turning point for her, and she’ll start being nicer. Did you hear that Mr. Patterson already got the website taken down?
Is Gabe really worth this? First he earns me Dana’s eternal enmity…then he keeps me from hearing all the good gossip when she’s finally managing to get what she deserves.
I pass the note back:
How’d he manage to do that? I thought he didn’t even know who did it.
It returns:
He called the people who host the Web page, and they agreed to take it off. Oh, and he’s found out who did it. Lucky it
wasn’t
you.
What the…?
What do you mean?
Dana was telling everyone that you were the one who must have made the page.
Me?!
Oh, crap. The bells rings. I’ve got to take that Tylenol.
Where is it?!
age 8
“Rrrghghgh!”
Cozy’s claw slices across my wrist.
“Ouch!” I yell.
Perhaps the hat
isn’t
such a good idea. Even as I think it, I continue trying to tie the ribbon beneath Cozy’s chin.
“If you’d just hold still,” I say through gritted teeth, “I’d have you all dressed.”
Felicity, my American Girl doll, lies on the bed next to me, naked except for her tights. It seems impossible to get the tights on Cozy, so I haven’t even tried, but Felicity’s blue and white summer outfit looks very cute on the cat. An
American Girl pet: perfect. Just what I’ve always wanted—well, at least ever since the idea occurred to me ten minutes ago. But the cat won’t cooperate with me. She struggles against me and uses her paw to try to push the beautiful straw hat off her head. The shoe I’ve worked so hard to put on her back paw goes flying through the air as she keeps struggling.
“Stop it,” I tell her.
She caterwauls in response—loud enough for Kristen to hear. Now she’s pounding on my door. “Maddy,
what
are you doing to that cat?” she demands. “Let me in.”
Mom should know better than to leave Kristen as my babysitter. We fight
all
the time when she’s babysitting for me. She won’t let me have
any
fun.
Cozy’s still yowling, and Kristen’s still demanding to be let into the room. I try to hold the cat still as I crack the door open. Kristen pushes her way through, and I slam the door before Cozy can jump from my arms.
“What’s going on?” Kristen asks. She stares in amazement at Cozy. I think the cat looks great dressed in 1780s clothing, but I can tell from Kristen’s expression that she doesn’t. “You’re going to
ruin
your doll clothes,” Kristen informs me.
“Will not,” I say, even though I can see perfectly well that Kristen’s right. The pretty blue hat ribbon I’ve tried to tie below Cozy’s chin is in her mouth, and the sides of
it are getting all icky.
Kristen tries to grab the cat away from me, and now we’re playing tug-of-war with her. She yowls and scratches Kristen on the cheek. Kristen screams and lets go of Cozy. The cat slips from my hands, too. She somersaults end over end and lands squarely on all four feet. Kristen opens the door to let her out, and Cozy stumbles and trips over the Felicity dress as she races through the door.
“You did that just to be mean!” I yell. Kristen’s
always
ruining anything I think is fun. Already today she’s denied me an ice-cream cone, refused to let me swim at the neighbor’s house, told me I couldn’t watch TV because
she
wanted to watch it, and now this?!
Kristen snorts. “Oh, stop being such a baby.”
“I’m not a baby.”
“You are, too. If you don’t get exactly your own way, you whine and cry. ‘It’s no fair,’” she mocks. “That’s all you know how to say.”
“Well you stink as a babysitter,” I tell her. “I hate you. I’m going to tell Mom on you when she gets home.”
Kristen laughs. “Go right ahead. Tell her how I spoiled all your fun torturing the cat. She’ll give you a big lecture about why the cat hates you and runs away whenever she sees you coming.”
“She doesn’t hate me!” I yell louder, enraged. Kristen spins around and leaves my room. “But
I
hate
you!
I hate
you, hate you,
hate
you!” I scream after her. When she still ignores me, I charge from the room, yelling, “Everyone hates you. You’ll make a terrible mother! Your own kids will hate you. You’re—”