The Whole Golden World (2 page)

3

T
he roar of the cappuccino machine drowned out what Connor had said. “What?” Dinah called.

First day of school. Her favorite day, her least favorite, her busiest.

“Britney!” she called for the girl to come get her coffee order. A slender strawberry blonde snaked her way among the round tables and scattered cushions, swaying her hips much more than necessary. Clumps of high school students filled the narrow, long space that had been the first floor of a bungalow once upon a time and had been rezoned to commercial use just before Dinah moved in, installed the restaurant equipment, and named it the Den, back when the twins had started first grade and everything still seemed shiny and possible.

Finally she turned to Connor again. “What was that, hon?”

He rolled his eyes and pulled an aggressive face, turned away from her roughly. It was the “hon,” probably. She was supposed to stop calling her fourteen-year-old boys “hon” and “kiddo” and “dear” by now.

She moved to the register to take an order, now that Janine was making a smoothie. Her college student employees had vanished back to campuses, and her main employee was Janine, an aimless, ageless woman between high school and real life. Dinah had also hired a few temps whom she might keep, if they kept their hands out of the till, out of the pastries, and into the sink for proper hand washing. She needed the help today, especially. The place was jammed on the first day of school, since the Den was on the road to the high school. She knew many parents dropped their teens off on their way to work, and then the teens who had vehicles would cart the lot of them to the school after a coffee or a smoothie and a bagel.

Connor and Jared were supposed to be playing chess over in the corner in front of the fireplace—the counselor said it was good for Connor to play chess, to improve his analytical thinking—but they were horsing around with the pieces, pretending they were action figures, and creating lewd tableaux with the queen and king.

Dinah looked at the clock and wanted it to speed up so she could quit worrying about the twins' behavior in her café. She also wished she could freeze it. Soon the boys would be officially high school students. Mainstreamed into the normal high school, something she'd long prayed for, worked for, but now that it was here she felt that she was throwing her babies to the wolves.

Times like this she flashed back to their earliest days in those awful plastic boxes, with the tubes and wires coming out of them everywhere, the sum of all that equipment outweighing the boys themselves easily.

Just as well Morgan was taking them to school; Dinah might change her mind and drive them home instead when she pulled up to that huge building.

“Hi, Miss D!” chirped one of the flute girls. Dinah could never remember them all; so many of the girls in band picked the flute or clarinet.

“Hi, hon,” Dinah replied. “Did you have a good summer?”

She ordered her latte, and Dinah got to work, listening to her chatter about a family vacation and a boy she met while camping and how they were texting all the time now. Dinah handed it over and the girl—oh, was it Olivia? Maybe Olivia—skipped over to her friends on the couch in front of the fireplace. She literally skipped. It made Dinah smile. The Den kept her young, she often thought, because who could be a sour old fart among this much enthusiasm?

Dinah glanced toward Morgan and Britney, in conference in the far corner from the twins. Something seemed to be up. Britney had her hand over Morgan's, in a gesture of what . . . comfort? Commiseration?

“Miss D? Did you hear me?” asked the young man in front of her.

“Oh, sorry. Tell me again what you'd like.”

She keyed in his order and shouted it to Janine, who began singing along with Lady Gaga over the speaker.

A break in the traffic occurred just then. The first school bell was coming closer. Kids walking in now wouldn't have time to drink their coffee or eat. Dinah walked around the counter, hoping to casually check on Morgan to see what might be wrong.

But in the back corner of the shop, near the stairs that led to her office on the second floor, raised voices caught her attention. No, not raised, exactly. Not loud. But urgent. Angry.

She looked in their direction and saw a young woman she remembered from the last school year. A pale little thing who favored large men's shirts and jeans. She was sitting with a boy who was glaring at her in a way that was causing her to shrink down, like she might turtle up inside that big shirt.

The angry voice was his, Dinah could see. She veered away from Morgan and headed for this couple. She'd ask if they needed anything. Her appearance alone might break whatever poisonous mood would cause this boy to look at the girl that way. Then the boy snatched the girl's wrist with the quickness of a cobra strike. She issued a small sound, just a little gasp, really, but there was pain in it, and something like fear.

Outrage crashed over Dinah like a fever. As Dinah quickened her step, she saw the boy grip her harder, and the girl turned her arm to get leverage away from him, and then he bent that wrist in a way that looked unnatural.

No,
she thought, may have said out loud, but her body was taking over now, heart over head, so by the time she reached the table she bellowed, “Get out of here! You will not treat girls that way in my place of business.”

The boy had raised his arms in a manner of surrender as soon as he heard Dinah's stomping footfalls. His face was all,
Who, me?

The girl rubbed her wrist and stared between Dinah and the boy with round, wide eyes.

The boy now fixed Dinah with a sneer. She studied him, memorizing the moment. His hair was curly and shaggy, and on anyone else it might have looked endearing. Blemishes peppered his face. He had hazel eyes that were narrowed at her. He finally said, “Seriously? Really, lady?”

“Out.”

“Whatever.” As he stood up, he slammed his chair to the floor. He walked past Dinah just close enough for her to notice he was taller. He mumbled something as he passed. “Crazy bitch,” or similar.

“Quite the big man you are, muttering things as you walk away, hurting young girls who weigh half what you do.”

The music blared inanely on, but all other sounds had stopped. The boy pivoted on his heel and turned to her, slowly. “Get your eyes checked, lady. We were just talking.” He started to walk away with a gliding stride, like nothing was wrong in the whole wide world.

“And don't ever come back!”

He stopped at the door, with a look like she was the dumbest rock in the garden. “Like I'd want to. Jesus.”

The bells on the door jingled as it swung closed.

Dinah wanted the air-conditioning on, felt she was probably flushed in the face. She turned to the girl whose wrist the boy had grabbed.

Dinah stepped toward her, but the girl put up a hand. “Leave me alone. For serious.” She turned away in her chair, then jammed in some earbuds and curled up, facing away from everyone and everything.

Chatter slowly resumed, then shortly there was a bustle as they all noticed what time it was.

She walked up to the boys, heart still rattling around in her rib cage. “Connor, Jared, get your stuff.”

Jared: “I know, Mom. I can tell time.”

Connor: “Mom, we're not babies.”

She tried not to let Jared realize she was watching him, but she was, of course, studying his gait as he picked up his backpack and moved with his shuffling, slightly tremulous step toward the door, pushing up his thick glasses and hiking his backpack into place. The glasses, the mild palsy: lasting imprints of his early thrust into the cold world. Connor was already at the door, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. He, too, had lasting effects from his prematurity, but his were not so obvious. He struggled in reading and writing, had to battle his way through math, and he had no patience. What little kid would? What little kid wouldn't be frustrated and defeated by looking at all the school papers posted in the hall on Parent Night, with his own letters misshapen, his spelling garbled?

Morgan appeared behind her and popped her gum.

“Come on, Mork and Dork.”

“Shut up, Morticia.”

“Have a good day, guys!” Dinah called cheerily, trying to erase and write over the drama of the morning. “Love you all!”

The girl with the big shirt had slipped out without Dinah noticing, as she cleaned up behind the counter, while the rest of the kids risking tardies charged out to their cars. Dinah had to grip the cleaning rag hard to keep her hands from shaking, as her blood rush spiraled back down to normal.

When Dinah was satisfied the place was empty of customers, she turned to Janine, who was rinsing out the blender parts. “When did it become a bad thing to object to physical abuse of a girl? Have I gone through the looking glass here?”

“Well,” Janine said. “Subtle is not your strong suit.”

“Subtle? He was gonna break her wrist! I won't put up with bullshit like that. Not now, not ever.”

Janine flipped her hair out of her face. “Okay, but Di, what's that guy gonna do at school when he sees her? You think he's gonna say, ‘Oooh, I better be nice to you or Miss D is gonna get me'?”

“Hey, easy on the sarcasm. I've got teenagers at home. It's the Sarcasm Marathon on all channels already.”

“Sometimes you get more flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“Who says I want flies?”

The front doorbell chimed and a young mother came in with her baby. Dinah cooed at the baby, wiped counters, and prepared sandwiches for the lunch crowd. But the whole time, she kept imagining the boys having a great first day in high school, as if she could conjure such a thing into existence by force of will, the same way she felt that her fierce and terrified love kept her fragile preemie twins alive, day after day in the NICU.

4

I
n Morgan's nightmares, her scar opened up like a fault line and swallowed her face, then her scalp and hair, and she was left waving her hands in the blankness over her stunted neck.

Morgan knew better than to tell anyone about this, lest her parents pack her off to some shrink like they did Connor after too many playground scraps. Then she'd have to fend off their mother's hovering, and she'd be lucky if her parents let her go to college ten miles away, much less a thousand miles.

Still. Those dreams made for some unsettled mornings, and she found herself touching the side of her face, as if to check that her head hadn't actually disappeared.

This morning's variation, Morgan remembered as she sprawled on her bed, half reading the “The Summoner's Tale” for AP English, had been with Ethan. They'd been kissing—right then she knew it was a dream; she even thought, outside of her dream world yet still in it,
Oh, I'm dreaming—
and then the scar began to swallow her. She tried to back away from Ethan, but this passionate dream-Ethan wouldn't stop kissing her, wouldn't let go, in fact was almost suffocating her, and the scar swallowed them both.

She would like to be able to tell Ethan about this, but of course she could never do that. Good way to make her closest friend run off, screaming, and she had a feeling she'd need him more than ever this year, the year of senior pictures, prom, college applications, graduation. Britney always laughed when Morgan called Ethan her friend. “He's totally hot for you,” she'd say, rolling her eyes. “You guys should just hook up and get it over with.”

Morgan would deflect her—please, they'd been friends since sixth-grade orchestra, though Ethan long ago gave up the viola—but lately she'd been wondering if she didn't have a point about Ethan being more than a friend. Morgan looked forward to seeing him every day, thinking about him the minute she woke up. She could take or leave pretty much everyone else.

Morgan slammed shut her AP English book. Chaucer in Middle English. Dull as shite.

From between her mattress and box spring she withdrew a spiral-bound notebook and a fine-tipped pen. She propped the notebook on her folded knees and sighed, letting all the stupidities of her day—her idiot, spoiled brothers, her dad at the assembly today with his assistant-principal gut straining his best suit, the kids mocking him—spill out onto the blue-lined paper. These days it seemed like she saw her dad at school in his suit more than he was at home, in his blue jeans, just being Dad. When he did get home finally, he always seemed too worn out to do more than say “Hey, Mo-Mo” and ruffle her hair like she was five years old.

And her mother . . . ugh. That scene at the Den where she flipped out on Justin—who, granted, was a jerkface and obnoxious—and Missy had to run around half the school day insisting she was not a battered woman or anything, they were just arguing. Morgan had tried to talk to her mom about it after school, trying to get her to cool off, that just because it's Crisis-o-Rama with the twins doesn't mean that there are epic dramas unfolding all around her. But naturally, all her mom could do was panic about all the kids abandoning the Den, before grilling her about how the boys did on the first day of school. Morgan being unofficial Deputy Mom and all.

It didn't occur to Dinah to ask how her flip-out had affected Morgan. All day long kids were going, “So I heard your mom saw Justin beat up Missy and called the cops,” and she had to straighten it out about seventeen times.

She was writing semiconsciously, occasionally crossing off a word here or there, feeling the stress pour out through the tip of her pen. Morgan would never show anyone this poetry. She'd made that mistake before, in middle school, having written this weirdly dark poem about death, and though her teacher had been impressed with her “stark imagery,” her mom had freaked out that she had some secret dark side and grilled her about her fears of mortality.

So it was simpler for everyone if she just hid her notebook and pretended to be as normal and straightforward as the rest of the school, cheering at football games and sneaking booze on the weekends. But turning eighteen years old in July, and finally going off to college next fall . . .

Her parents were assuming she'd go to Michigan State or U of M, or maybe Central in Mt. Pleasant. Those were the campuses they visited last summer, anyway, with Dinah more excited than Morgan about this or that dorm, about how pretty the Red Cedar River was, or how funky-cool Ann Arbor would be. She and her parents agreed (meaning: Dinah told and Morgan didn't object) to apply to those three schools and Grand Valley, too, though one in-state school or another seemed about the same to Morgan. She'd be away from home, anyway, for all of them. That counted for something.

But one bored-stiff night last summer, she'd dragged out an old map of the United States, trying to pick a better place to be. She'd run her finger down, up, and down the east coast from Maine to Florida, as cities slipped in and out of her line of sight, and stopped on Boston. She wasn't exactly Harvard material, but when she started researching, she found that Boston was in fact overrun with universities. Boston University seemed within striking distance of her academic record. Boston also had beautiful buildings, a deep and important history, and proximity to all kinds of other thrilling places. New York! Washington!

Maybe at BU she could confide in her roommate. This roommate—a worldly girl from New York, or maybe literally worldly, from France or Korea—would say
yes! I have crazy dreams, too!
Or maybe she wouldn't, but she'd nod with the sage maturity that must come from growing up somewhere way cooler than Arbor Valley, Michigan.

She hadn't exactly mentioned Boston to her parents. But once she started the online applications and had her mother's credit card at her disposal, it wouldn't be so hard just to add another to the list.

The poem began to take shape beneath her fingers; it was no more cheerful than her middle-school death verse had been.

She used to try and force herself to write something sweet and pretty, so she could show people, and teachers would hang it in their hallways and her parents would beam with pride. But those attempts resulted in her hand freezing over the paper. Morgan gave up fighting and tried to accept her unchangeable nature.

She propped up the notebook in front of her on the bed, and stretched out on her stomach, her chin in her hands, and reread some of her handiwork.

 

Beauty scarred

Is beauty still

But not if

The scar

Swallows up what

Is lovely pure precious

Leaving tough dead skin behind

 

Pounding on the door startled her. “Dammit,” she muttered, and stuffed her notebook back under her mattress. She straightened the comforter and shouted, “Just a minute!”

She yanked open the door to see Connor there, frowning hard.

“What!” she demanded.

“I'm . . . Um. Mom said to ask . . .”

“Connor, spit it out.”

“She said to ask you for help with my math.”

Morgan let a sigh slip out.

Connor started to storm away. “Fine, be that way. I'll just go fail like I always do because it's too much trouble.”

“No, stop.” Morgan fought to scrub her voice of irritation. “It's fine. I'm not annoyed with you. It's not your fault . . .”

Connor stopped and slumped in the doorway. “Not my fault that I'm stupid?”

“I was going to say not your fault that ninth-grade math is hard.”
Not your fault that Mom makes me take care of you.
“Come on in. Where's Jared?”

“He says he already finished his work at school.”

Morgan knew the school had decided to split up the boys in different classes, so they would learn to be separate entities. The truth being, of course, that the two of them often brought out the worst in each other.

She leaned over Connor's shoulder after he perched cross-legged on the bed. As she helped explain the concepts of basic algebra—
didn't his teacher go over this?
she wondered—another part of her unbusy brain calculated the exact number of days left until graduation, then added eighty-five days for a reasonable summer vacation.

Connor smiled up at her so gratefully that she tasted a spike of bitter guilt at her secret hunger to escape.

“It would be understandable to resent your brothers,” her mother had told her more than once in private moments, ticking off the reasons (as if Morgan didn't know them), like the fact their doctor appointments and tutoring and general caretaking sucked up so much of Dinah's time and energy. Morgan had learned to do her homework in her lap in waiting rooms, while the boys were being ministered to by this or that doctor or therapist or tutor.

Morgan always knew better than to cop to even a hint of resentment, though. They'd gone down that long, tortured road after the boys' wrestling match knocked Morgan into the dining room table, which shattered a vase of peonies in such dramatic fashion that a shard leaped up and sliced Morgan's face.

That day, the vase-smashing day, she'd been crying while the doctor stitched her face; it had felt like a line of fire, despite the supposed numbing medicine. Dinah had to keep reaching over and dabbing her cheek dry with a cloth so the doctor could sew. When the doctor was finished, Dinah said, “The boys just feel terrible,” and Morgan shot back, “I wish they'd never been born.”

Dinah's face contorted with such anguish that momentarily Morgan wished she'd been the one never born.

That was fifth grade. Just before middle school, when everyone started caring the most about physical appearance. Just when people were starting to comment how pretty she was becoming.

Dinah then launched a not-subtle-at-all campaign to convince Morgan how wonderful her brothers were by taking all of them to the park and the roller rink and the beach, forcing the boys to make handicrafts that said “We love Morgan” with painted handprints.

Everyone was more miserable than ever. Finally, Morgan made a big show of forgiving her brothers and Dinah gave it up.

“Okay,” the ninth-grade Connor said, in Morgan's room. “I think I get it now.”

Morgan tried not to show how relieved she was that he would finally get out of her space. “Good,” she said, nodding.

He gathered his things but paused just before leaving. “Hey, Morticia?”

“Yeah, Dork?”

“Will you still help me next year? You know, on the computer? Mom said she'd get a webcam for us so we could all stay in touch.”

“It's a lost cause, you know.” She smirked at this. “But, sure. I'll help.”

She closed the door behind him and rested her forehead against the faux woodgrain, listening to his heavy footsteps move off to the room he shared with Jared. She remained there with her head on the door, feeling smaller and smaller, as if she really were being swallowed up, like Alice in Wonderland, or Jonah, or nightmare-Morgan who ended up flailing, looking for her own head.