Kate
It’s a normal Thursday morning in my kitchen. The coffeepot hisses and puffs as it always does; we sit at the round breakfast table as we always do. Mom, as always, reads the business section while Dad, as always, reads about the foreign news first and then cheers himself up with Arts and Entertainment.
We eat toast and fruit and yogurt.
We reach over one another for the box of half-and-half or the jar of honey.
Periodically, we check the bright red clock until one of us says, “Seven thirty,” at which point we’ll collect and rinse the dishes, put the perishables back in the refrigerator, and walk to our three cars, parked side by side in our wide suburban driveway. I can’t even explain the comfort I take in this routine. The comfort could fill the sky—it’s that immense.
But I haven’t been able to enjoy it for months, because of this thing I’ve been carrying. This anxiety. This crushing, terrible dread. This weight I decided to shed yesterday in the shadow room, holding hands with Mark and Violet. We were like a paper chain of children. We were substance and shadow. We were heat and clutched hands, and wonder, and love. And that clarity I got—it was breathtaking, it took me by surprise, and then it let me go.
So maybe a normal Thursday morning at the breakfast table is not the right time to do this, but I’m doing it anyway.
“Mom?” I say. “Dad? Can I talk to you guys for a second?”
They lower their sections of the paper.
“Of course,” Dad says.
“You can have more than a second,” Mom adds, smiling even though I can see her nervousness.
“I’ve been having a hard time lately.”
“Something’s happened with Lehna, hasn’t it?” Dad says. “The house hasn’t been this quiet since you two met.”
“Shh,” Mom says. “Let her tell us, sweetheart.”
“Right. Go on, Katie.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Lehna and I are going through some stuff. That’s part of it, maybe, I don’t know. But what I’m really struggling with is college.”
Mom cocks her head. Dad takes his glasses off—very, very slowly—and presses on the spot between his eyebrows.
“I don’t want to go,” I say. “Not yet.”
“Hmmmm,” Mom says.
Dad keeps pressing between his brows. Harder and harder.
“Can you … elaborate?” Mom asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. I just want to defer for a year. Every time I think about leaving I panic. I know it’s normal to be nervous, that it’s huge—to leave home, fend for myself—so it’s expected to feel kind of shaky about it. But I should be a little bit excited, too, right? And I’m not. I’m not at all. I can’t even think about it because I hate the idea so much.”
“You hate the idea,” Mom says.
“I do. I hate it. Dad, you’re stressing me out. You’re going to bruise your face.”
“I don’t even,” Dad says. “I don’t even know…”
“I think what your father is saying is that we need a little time to sit with this.”
I have no idea what’s going on inside her head. Her voice is calm; she’s even smiling. But she works in the Human Resources department at an investment firm. She’s used to telling people what they’ve done wrong in a way that makes them feel good about themselves. She’s used to firing people and making it sound like an opportunity.
“Fair,” I say. “It’s seven thirty anyway.”
We all rise. Dad puts his glasses back on.
“We love you, Katie,” Dad says.
“Kate,” Mom corrects.
“Right,” he says. “Kate. We’ll pick this up later on, okay? When we have more time.”
I nod. We clear the dishes and we rinse them. We grab our bags and hoist them over our shoulders. We walk single file out the door and to our three cars.
“Just a year,” I say, before we all slide in.
My mother nods. My father sighs.
And then they pull away, and I hear my phone ringing from the back. I haven’t left yet, so I jump out and get my bag, and I look at the caller.
Ryan. His name on my screen takes me by surprise. We haven’t texted since last year when we were working on the lit mag cover. I had forgotten that I even had his number.
“You answered,” he says. “Are you with him?”
“Mark?” I say. “No. I’m on my way to pick him up.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Um … getting ready for school I’d imagine?”
“Not right this second. That’s not what I meant. Or maybe I did. Right now he’s probably finishing his homework for first period. Or brushing his teeth? He brushes his teeth a lot. Like a lot a lot. Or maybe that’s just because he thought we might be making out and he was trying to be prepared. I never thought about that, but it’s probably what it was.”
“Hey,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“No. I don’t know. I’m tired. I didn’t sleep.”
“At all?”
“He saw the poem, right? I mean the rest of it, right? I know he did. I can just feel it. And his phone was off. Off at midnight, off at two, off at five, off at seven. It’s just been totally … off.”
“Yeah,” I say. “He read the rest of it.”
“He did?”
“Yeah.”
“I knew it. We left. I was … upset. At least that’s what Taylor kept saying, ‘You’re upset. You’re upset,’ and he said we should probably leave, so we left. And then we got back to his place and I remembered that I dropped my poem. That it was just lying there on the stage somewhere, all alone, for anyone to find and make fun of, and I panicked. I left him and I ran all the way back, and everything was over and almost everyone was gone, but they let me back in anyway and I looked all over the stage, but it wasn’t there. But then I found it, and it was face up, right there on the table, and I knew it. I knew he’d read it. How did he react?”
“You should probably ask him that yourself,” I say.
“I told you already! His phone. Is fucking. Off.”
“Then ask him at school.”
“I don’t think I can go to school today. I’m not really feeling well.”
I want to tell him he doesn’t need to state the obvious. I didn’t know Ryan was capable of this kind of emotion. I thought he was all literary allusion and little feeling, all critic and no poet. But then I think of him onstage last night, all tremor and fear, and I feel myself softening for him, even though he’s crushed my friend’s heart and might not deserve my sympathy.
“Are you okay, Ryan?” I ask him. “That’s a sincere question and I want a sincere answer.”
Silence.
“Ryan?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Okay,” I say. “Just breathe. We’ll be there soon.”
Mark’s waiting for me when I pull up to his house. He looks a little worn-out himself, and I can’t help it—I reach out and mess up his floppy, all-American boy hair.
“Is that really necessary?” he asks, but I can tell that he didn’t really mind.
“Where does Ryan live?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s where we’re headed.”
“You know,” Mark says, “there’s this thing called ‘first period’? And then this other thing called ‘first period on the second to last school day of the year’?”
“Address,” I say.
“Howard Street. Behind the Seven-Eleven.”
“Thank you.”
“What’s this about?” he asks as I drive.
“You’d know if you turned on your phone.”
“Maybe I kept my phone off precisely so that I wouldn’t have to know.”
“Then you should be happy that he called me so that I could tell you this: Your friend needs you. It might not be fair. It might really suck, because you’ve needed him and he’s been off slip-dip-dripping with a college boy—”
“Don’t forget mortar-pestling.”
“Oh, I haven’t. Nor have I forgotten rearranging the universe—”
“—with their bodies—”
“—which last time I checked is a pretty big accomplishment. I mean, not just anyone can do that.”
“Apparently not me,” he says. “Or else Ryan wouldn’t have had to trade me in for his erotic poet.”
“Nope,” I say. “No time for self-pity this morning. You have some rescuing to do. Which house?”
“The blue one.”
I pull over. I turn off the Jeep and turn to Mark.
“He sounds like shit,” I say. “It sounds serious. I’m gonna be right here. Let me know if you need me.”
Mark takes a breath. Shakes his head. I can tell he really doesn’t want to do this, but he gets out of the Jeep anyway. I expect him to knock, but he turns the knob and lets himself into the house, and yeah, that makes sense. Because up until a few days ago, nothing was wrong between them—not on the surface, anyway. A few days ago, Mark was a quiet kid in my math class, a blur of motion in the outfield at the one baseball game I ever attended. So much can change in a few days, even in a few hours. I’ve brought him here to face the change head-on and I know I’m going to have to face it, too.
I’m not running away from anything anymore.
It’s a promise I’m making to myself.
You can keep doing what you’re supposed to, what you’re expected to, and tell yourself it’s what you want. Sit with the same people at lunch, pretending you still have things in common. Read the shiny college brochures, go on the tours, buy into the myth that one of them is meant for you. Believe, at eighteen, that you know what your life will hold and how to prepare for it.
But if you don’t really believe it, if all that time you’re harboring a doubt so deep it creeps into even your best moments, and you break the rules and step away, then there’s going to be a reckoning. You are going to have to explain yourself.
As I sit in the driveway and wait, last night rushes back, takes me over. I’m sitting in that uncomfortable chair, already wrecked by Quinn’s poem, by Ryan’s exit, by Mark’s defeat. And now here’s Lehna.
“I don’t usually write poetry,” she says. “But I had this in my journal from the other night and I figured, I don’t know, why not.”
She blinks against the lights into the audience. “Go, Lehna!” Violet shouts. June and Uma wave with great enthusiasm. But I just watch her, bracing myself for what might come.
“Okay,” she says. “Here it goes.”
We were swimming downstream, always.
We were all scales and fins,
all gleaming in the sun,
all carefree and careless.
We never had to try hard
or even try at all.
You and me,
me and you,
and the water,
and the sun.
Or, no.
What we really were,
were twins.
The kind that feel it
when the other is cold.
The kind that always hears
two heartbeats
instead of one.
Pinch me
and you’d say
ouch.
Or maybe
I imagined all of it:
the water,
the sun,
even our scales and fins.
Maybe it was just circumstance
and nothing profound
or anomalous
or even
unusual,
the way you’d eat a strawberry
and I’d say
yum.
Because all it took
was for you to step away
for me to hear
a single heartbeat.
It was always
just me.
It was always
just you.
We thought we were special,
but we were always
the subjects
of two separate
sentences.
“Okay,” she said. “That’s it.”
And I know things happened after that. The rise of applause, everyone’s teary eyes. Mark leaning over to me, saying, “Wow. So she is human.” Violet’s questioning look and whatever it is I must have told her. But everything that happened after, it was a blur, because all I remember is Lehna, blinking into the bright light, and the way it sank into me, burrowing, festering: Whatever this is that’s happening between us, it’s another part of the tower that I have to burn down.