I sleep through the morning of my second Visitation. After Mo got up, I turned off my alarm and pulled the curtains closed. I pretend this day is like any other. Savannah won’t be here. And I told my mom not to come.
She cried, of course. Over the phone in Richard Fisher’s office, she sobbed into the receiver and begged me to reconsider.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know, honey,” she’d pleaded. “Anything at all. No more lies. I promise.”
I’d handed the phone to Richard Fisher. Thirty seconds of honesty is a drop of water in an ocean of deceit.
“He’ll talk when he’s ready,” Richard assured her. “We can’t force him to deal with these feelings if he doesn’t want to.”
“Thanks, Fish,” I’d said on my way out of his office. “I owe you one.”
Turns out it’s hard to sleep when you’re hungry, and the thought of red velvet cake sounds way better than spending the whole day alone in the dark. I fumble under the bed for my sneakers and head downstairs to the dining hall.
It’s packed with families, and the red velvet cake is already gone. I grab a plain bagel (the only kind left) and go looking for the only other person I know who won’t be spending the day with visitors.
Libby’s on the same leather chair in the lobby where I found her last weekend. She’s perched with her legs tucked under her like a bird, and even though her notebook is open on her lap, she’s not drawing. She’s staring through the glass doors into the parking lot.
“Any sign of them?”
Libby startles, nearly jumping out of the chair. I wait for her to laugh or hit me or something, but her face is drawn tight, and she looks back toward the parking lot.
“No,” she says. “I don’t think she’s coming.” Her voice is laced with disappointment, and I realize, not for the first time, that I can’t figure this girl out.
I drop into the chair opposite her. “I told mine not to come.”
This gets Libby’s attention. She turns away from the window, her fingers toying absently with the corner of her notebook. “Good for you.”
Libby has no idea what happened between me and my mom. But maybe that’s the best kind of support there is—the kind that doesn’t need to hear both sides. The kind that’s on your side no matter what—the kind that backs you up, even if you’re wrong.
“So, what’s going on?” I ask over a bite of dry bagel. “I thought you didn’t want visitors.”
“Things change.” Libby looks up at the clock above the receptionist’s desk. It’s already noon—only two hours left of Visitation. Some people are already filtering back out into the parking lot, off to attend soccer games or dance recitals for their non-disappointing children. Libby turns to me suddenly. “Do you want to do something?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.” She closes her notebook, threads her sketching pencil through the wire binding, and stands up. “A walk or something, maybe? I’m tired of waiting around. You snooze, you lose, right?”
“Sure, I guess.” I toss the rest of my bagel in the trash by the receptionist’s desk. “I hear the landscape here is beautiful,” I tease, mimicking my mom’s lame attempt at normalizing LakeShore. “Should we take a tour?”
Libby grins and slips her arm in mine. “Lead the way.”
Arm in arm, we weave through families and loved ones too focused on one another to care if two scarred junkies decide to go for a stroll. Unnoticed and unclaimed, we slip beneath an EXIT sign and out into the wooded landscape beyond.
We find a path as close to the edge of campus as possible, far enough to feel like we’ve escaped, but not so far as to actually send the Front Desk Fascist into a conniption. It’s a gorgeous spring day, with afternoon sunshine that’s melted the morning chill. The trees are so beautiful you can almost forget the security cameras harbored in their branches. The air smells like open woods: damp, earthy, and alive.
“My mom was supposed to come today.” Libby clutches her purple notebook to her chest, and for a second she looks like a normal high school girl, walking through a hall of lockers with her books in her arms. Normal, but for the scars.
“I thought you didn’t want her here,” I say, realizing too late that I’ve probably crossed a line. Why couldn’t I do for Libby what she did for me? No questions, no talking. Just presence.
“She broke up with her boyfriend. Or at least, she said she did. She said she kicked him out. It’s about time.” Libby’s lips screw up into a perfect rose petal pout. “Anyway, she was supposed to come today so we could talk about what it’s going to be like when I go home next week.”
“Next week?” The words push the air from my lungs. I don’t know what this is between us, but I know I’m not ready for it to end.
Libby gives me a sideways glance, and I can’t tell if she’s thinking the same thing as me. “Yep,” she says. “Only a few more days.” She steps closer to me, on purpose maybe, and her arm gently bumps mine. “What about you?”
“Me?” I run my hand through my hair and let out a deep exhale. “Where do I start?”
Libby smiles. “You don’t want to talk about it. I get it. We don’t have to talk about it.”
“No, it’s not that.” I don’t want to talk about it, but I don’t want to not talk about it either. “My mom’s been the bearer of bad news lately. And I knew if she came, we were going to have to ‘talk.’” I bookmark the word in finger quotes, teasing a laugh from Libby. “I just didn’t want to, you know? But I also didn’t want to bullshit for four hours.”
“Totally get it,” Libby says. “You can only mention how good the cake is so many times before you start to sound like an idiot.”
“Or answer the how-are-you question.”
“Oh my god, the how-are-you’s!” Libby stops in her tracks and flings out her arms like she’s sunning in disgust. “They’re the worst!”
I pause mid-stride, turn around to face her. “It’s like, what do you want me to say? I’m fine, thanks, except for that whole heroin thing.”
“Right?”
Libby and I laugh together for a minute, and I can’t help but think, screw high school. Screw Mom and Steven, with their trumped-up expectations. This is real, this shared laughter and shared pain. Underneath the fake bullshit, where people’s secrets hide. That’s where Libby belongs.
She touches my arm, and we keep walking. “Heroin, huh?” Libby muses. “I would’ve guessed pills. Oxy, percs, the good stuff.”
“Yeah, well, turns out a taste for H kinda runs in the family.” I squint into the distance, remembering the afternoon Mom got the call that Dad had died. The divorce papers were on the table, and Dad was late. Mom had been so pissed; she’d paced the kitchen, mumbling under her breath that it was just like Dad to bail on a promise. I tried to drown out her words with crunchy cheese puffs as I worked on my homework at the kitchen table. When the phone rang, she snatched it off the hook. “Where are you?” she demanded. And then she slid down the wall, crumpling into a heap on the floor, the receiver still clutched in one hand.
Mom didn’t cry. Not then, and not later, at the funeral.
I used to hate her for that. I thought she wasn’t sad enough about his death, maybe even secretly happy about it. But now I can’t help wondering how many sleepless nights she’d spent waiting for that call.
I turn my face away from Libby, blinking away tears. We’re halfway around campus, and I can see the rear parking lot up ahead. I’m not ready for this walk to be over; I’m not ready to stop talking. I push my hands deep in my pockets and slow my pace.
“I used to draw on my arms,” Libby blurts suddenly.
I peer at her sideways, curious.
“You know, doodles, cool quotes and stuff.” She trails her fingers down one creamy arm, her bracelets jingling like delicate wind chimes, sunlight glinting off of silver. “One time I popped too many Xannies before school, three out of Mom’s purse while she sweated out her hangover on the Pilates machine in the basement, and two more I’d saved in my locker.” She giggles. “I kept nodding off in History, woke up when some asshole pegged me in the head with a balled-up gym sock, my cheek stuck to my hand, drool all over my desk. Everybody laughed, but it wasn’t until later, in the bathroom, that I knew why. Everything I’d drawn on my arm was tattooed right across my face. I might as well have written LOSER on my forehead in Sharpie.”
She laughs again, a sharp, hiccupy sound, like a bubble of stomach acid, sour and burning. I glance at the notebook she’s carrying, thinking of the sketches scrawled there and the scars drawn across her skin.
“Hey, I have an idea,” Libby says. “I should draw you.”
I give her a doubtful look.
“No, come on, it’ll be fun.” She’s already pulling her pencil out of her notebook. “Here, with the woods behind you.” She leads me to a sunny spot between the trees and pushes down on my shoulder. “We both know this is the closest thing to a decent self-portrait you’re going to get in this joint.”
I hesitate, but Libby’s persistent. “No broken limbs or zippers, I promise.”
I laugh and sink down into the grass. Libby scoots a few feet away and then sits down facing me, opening her notebook to a fresh page.
I shake my hair down into my eyes, over my scar, and smile like in my driver’s license picture.
Libby giggles. “Relax,” she says. “This isn’t a mug shot.”
So I try to cover my awkwardness with humor, go all Blue Steel, and strike a couple poses.
“Be serious, Eli.”
And then I don’t know what to do, so I lie on my back in the grass and stare up at the bulbous, shifting clouds. It’s a sky for daydreaming—the kind of clouds that can be anything, depending on what you’re looking for.
Libby drops her notebook, lies on her belly beside me. Propped on her elbows, she plucks the heads of clover, making a little white pile in the grass. “Tell me something else,” she says. “Something true.”
“What do you want to know?”
My hair has fallen back off my forehead, and Libby’s fingers find my scar. She touches it, feather soft. “What happened here?”
“It was a long time ago.”
Libby’s expectant gaze tugs at the memory of that afternoon. Glistening green grass and the kind of sun that blinds you. Superman ice cream dripping down my arm. Dad’s warm hand wrapped around mine.
I swallow. I know I don’t have to tell her. But I want to. “It happened in the park, a long time ago. My dad and I were spending the day together, and all I wanted to do was swing. Dad tried to get me to do something else, anything else. The sandbox, the slide. I guess he was tired of pushing me.” I laugh. “But I kept going right back to the swings. It was something about that feeling, I guess. Feet in the air, wind in your face. Like flying.”
The grass prickles the back of my neck. I shift my hands behind my head. “I kept begging Dad to go higher. He was worried I couldn’t hang on, but I begged and begged, and so he made me promise. ‘Whatever you do, don’t let go.’”
Reliving the scene in the park makes me think of Benny, how he drew me at Disney, even though I wasn’t there. He drew me where he wanted me, where I should’ve been.
“What did I know, anyway? I was just a dumb little kid.”
A dumb kid like Benny—too young to understand that my hero was a junkie.
My eyes burn. I swipe at the corners with knuckles that come back wet.
Libby’s fingers stroke my brow, my cheek, my jaw. I want to take her hand; I want to press it to my mouth. I want to know what her skin tastes like. “That was the night my dad left us,” I whisper. “But the crazy part is, up until the hospital and Mom freaking out afterwards, it’s one of my favorite memories.”
“The best and the worst,” Libby whispers, and I think of Savannah, of her blue dress at Winter Formal, and later, the sour stink of her puke on my suit. The best and the worst all in one.
Libby lowers her elbow, settles down into the crook of my arm, and lays her head gently on my chest. Her hair smells like lavender and sleep, and I close my eyes and breathe her in. It’s natural the two of us like this, together on the outskirts, in this quiet place under the trees. I wrap my arm around her, draw her closer, and softly trail my fingers down the length of her forearm, thinking of the things she drew there, of the words I’d write on her skin. “Your turn.”
“I don’t want to go home.”
My chest tightens, and I crane my neck to see her face. “Libby . . .” I begin, but she shakes her head, nuzzling her face into the soft fabric of my shirt. “We all have scars, Eli,” she whispers. “They make us who we are.”
And I wonder if that’s true. If it’s our scars that form us, or the other way around—if we choose our own particular brand of pain. If we go looking for it somehow, because it reminds us that we’re alive, that we exist, that we’re still capable of feeling something. Or if it’s because without pain, we forget how good we’ve got it.
My heart beats in Libby’s ear, and I hope she can’t tell it’s racing. She threads her fingers through mine, and we stay that way until one or both of us falls asleep, and visiting hours are over, and the Front Desk Fascist sends an orderly to wake us.