Who We Are Instead, page 9
I don’t really remember their faces or what they said, but Mrs. Yun has looked like she’s sucking on a lemon ever since. Eden’s mortified. She never gets into trouble. Usually, I can charm my way out of any situation. Parents love me, nose ring and all. Luckily, Mrs. Yun likes me. She makes me kimchi stew whenever I come over. She knows me, gets my moods. Eden told her parents about my dad, so they’re cool with me here. They think they understand why I’m so upset. But they don’t. They don’t have a clue.
I’m off my A game. I’m spinning off into darkness. I can’t stop, can’t slow my fall. I can’t get my footing.
When I crash, I go down hard. When I’m like this, every day I don’t stab someone with a pen or have a stark raving meltdown right in the middle of Physics class is a victory. Then there are the days when even school seems like an insurmountable mountain, one I’m unable to even think about climbing. Like now.
I’ve spent the last four days in a pile of blankets on Eden’s floor, my phone clenched in my hands, staring at the text from my sister. Dad’s dying. Dad’s dying. Dad’s dying. I haven’t showered. Haven’t gone to school. Every morning, Eden shoulders her backpack and stands in the doorway, staring at me with a concerned, perplexed look on her face. Every afternoon, she comes home and does her homework and practices guitar and eats dinner with her perfect family and does all the things that Eden Yun does. She’s barely talked to me.
I cluck my tongue and call Phoenix’s name. “Here kitty, kitty, kitty.” The kitten is playing in the corner with one of Eden’s stray socks. When I move toward her, she leaps into the air and scrabbles across the wooden floor. She stumbles and slip-slides like an adorable dust bunny.
She’s a feral little creature. Wild-eyed and sharp-clawed. Terrified of everything. I haven’t been able to hold her since the night of the party, when I nursed her back to life.
“I saved you, little one.” I pick up the sock and flutter it in front of her face. She stares at it. Her enormous eyes follow every movement, her body a tightly wound spring. I move my hand toward her. She spits and hisses, hackles raised. “I’m gonna make you love me. You’re already doomed. You just don’t know it yet.”
I have to get up. I can’t stand the stench of my own body. My head throbs, my stomach a shriveled, aching pit. I force myself to take a shower, scrubbing off the filth and grime from the party. From that night with Reese in his car. I yank on a pair of Eden’s gray sweatpants and her blue Detroit Lions hoodie and scrape my hair back into a ponytail. I get my eyeliner, lipstick, and extra concealer out of my messenger bag. I shove my bangs out of the way and line my eyes with thick, black liner.
Eden’s mirror reflects my image back at me like an accusation. My face seems disjointed, fragmented. I only see parts of myself: watery, red-rimmed eyes, silver hoop nose ring, too-white, ghostly skin, the cluster of pimples on my chin. Dad always says I look like Mom. Her face in my memory is only a faded blur. I avert my eyes.
I walk around Eden’s room, restless and edgy. Waiting for her to come home sucks. On one wall, there’s a huge framed print of her at nine or ten. She’s riding a speckled pony, holding a third-place trophy. The tops of her bookcases are clustered with her glass-blown hummingbird collection. Some of the glossy little figurines hang from a jade jewelry tree on her dresser.
Above her desk, she’s decorated a bulletin board with all of her A+ English tests. I lean in to inspect a 100% essay, something about the South Korean immigrant experience in the 1960s and 1970s. I run my finger along the shelf full of sports and music awards and ribbons. Not even an iota of dust.
My stomach growls. Eden’s house always smells faintly of garlic and cabbage. Like home-cooked meals and love. Like what a house with a real family should smell like.
A thorn of jealousy pricks me. Everything comes so easy for her. I take a blue Cass County Regional Debate Team third place ribbon and slip it into my pocket. She won’t miss it. She’s not even on the team anymore.
Still, she’s been good to me, letting me stay here for almost three weeks. Even though she’s so furious she can barely speak to me. That’s something. I find my messenger bag in a heap next to Eden’s bed and pull out my folder of paper. I pick a smoky blue 6-inch square sheet and sit down at her desk. My hands move instinctively over the paper, forming the base creases, the valley folds from corner to corner, then petal-fold the paper into a diamond shape. I pull out the center layers to inside-reverse-fold a flared section for the tail feathers, then a few mountain-folds to create the head and pinch down the long, slender bill. I pleat the wings with alternating mountain and valley-folds, until it looks like the little bird is in midflight.
I tuck the hummingbird on her shelf, in between two second place soccer trophies.
Eden has volleyball practice after school on Tuesdays, so it’s 4:30 by the time I hear her key in the lock. She pauses in the bedroom doorway when she sees me, like she’s shocked I’m actually off the floor and dressed.
“We need to talk,” we both say at the same time.
She doesn’t laugh. She sits down on the bed, dropping her heavy backpack to the floor. She clutches a half-empty bottle of Faygo diet orange pop in both hands.
I pick at my plum nail polish. I know she’s angry. She probably hates me. I would hate me, too. I do hate me. But I can’t stand this wall of silence between us. I’ve tried to explain, over and over, but the excuses fall flat, even in my own ears.
Simone barely responds to my texts. She’s disgusted with me, too. Eden is the one we both protect. I’m not supposed to be the one who hurts her. I’ve messed everything up. Again. I always screw up. I’m losing my best friends. With everything else imploding right now, I just can’t deal. I’ve got to win her back. “I’m so sorry, Skittles,” I say. “I’m a terrible, horrible person. You must hate me.”
She tugs a strand of black hair out of her French braid and chews on it. Her eyes are hooded, wary. “I don’t hate you, Lux.”
“How can you not? I was basically all over the only guy who should’ve been off limits.”
“Yeah. I know. I was there.”
Phoenix tears in crazed circles around the room, jumps into the litter box and leaps out again, granules of kitty litter sprinkling across the floor. The day after I brought Phoenix here, Eden brought home cat food and made up a cardboard box filled with kitty litter. My heart hurts at how good she is. I don’t deserve her. “I don’t know what happened. I was crazy in my head, how I get sometimes. It’s like I didn’t know what I was doing.”
I wait for her to finally yell at me, but she doesn’t. She sucks in a breath. “I mean, it’s not like he’s my boyfriend. It’s not like he’s a Gray Wolf or Sandhill Crane. I know that.”
“Wait—what?”
“Animals that mate for life.” Her shoulders slump. She rips off the pop bottle label in strips and watches them drift to the floor. “Like seahorses. Seahorses are monogamous. They mate for life.”
“Yeah, you’ve told me. The male gets pregnant and gives birth. Which makes it Simone’s most favorite animal ever.”
Eden rubs the sleeve of her sweatshirt over her face. “Look, I know a guy like Dominic will never want a girl like me. I’m not stupid.”
Guilt spears me. She’s so sweet, so good. “That’s not true. And anyway, he’s kind of a tool. You’re the one who’s too good for him.”
She just shakes her head. Tears tremble in her lashes. “It just—it still hurts.”
“It wasn’t really me who did it, okay? It was like I was someone else, outside my own body. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to. I would never—” But of course, I did. I would never, but I did. I do. My own tears scratch the back of my throat. “I screw everything up, every good thing. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“I’m a terrible friend.”
She sighs. “No, you aren’t.”
We make eye contact. I want her face to be open and happy again, same old Eden. But it’s not. She’s stripped off the whole label, and now she just holds the bottle in her hands. Empty. “There’s something else. My parents said, last night they said that they’ve been happy to have you here these last few weeks, but—”
I don’t even hear the rest of her words. A great black void yawns open in front of me. A black hole. It only takes a second to tumble in. “You’re kicking me out.”
“No, no. I don’t want you to leave. But, Lux, you’ve been here a long time. It’s like, almost the end of January already. What are you hiding from? Why don’t you want to go home?”
Indignation sweeps over me, anger bubbling up inside me like water boiling over the sides of a pot. “What’s it to you? I thought friends were there when we needed each other.”
“I am! I have been! But you can’t—I mean, you know you can’t just like, live here, right?”
“Of course not!” I leap to my feet, suddenly frantic. “I can’t go home, okay? I thought you understood that. I thought you understood how it is there, how horrible it is for me.”
Eden just blinks at me. “I’m so sorry, Lux. But my parents—”
“This is because of the party, because of Dominic. You’re getting back at me.”
“No! I already said—”
“Just stop it!” My heart plummets. Howling despair sucks me down. Everyone leaves. Everyone abandons me. Even Eden. I’m never enough to make anyone stay. “Do you even care about me? Don’t pretend you care about me and then go and do something like this.”
“Of course I do!”
“Never mind,” I growl. “I don’t need you.”
She sniffles, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “Lux, please. That’s not true. You’re my best friend!”
I need to escape. I’ve got to get out. Now. I grab my clothes and shoes and the bag of cat food and hastily stuff them in my messenger bag. “Simone’s your best friend. You always did like her best.”
“No. You don’t understand. I’m not trying to—”
“I won’t bother you or interrupt your precious life anymore. You can be sure of that!”
Phoenix turns away from me, her little butt in the air as she stalks one of Eden’s hair ties. I grab her, her wiry body twisting and writhing to escape me. She hisses and yowls. Her claws scrape across my hand, but I don’t let go. I stuff her inside the front pouch of my hoodie. “Don’t worry. I’ll get your ratty clothes back to you. Have a nice life.”
“Lux, stop!”
“Dominic Harris doesn’t even know you’re alive, okay? You have no right to lay a claim on him!” I storm out of Eden’s house, hot tears blurring my eyes. Behind me, I can hear Eden crying. She always cries to get her way, to get people to forgive her when she’s just stabbed them in the back. She pretends everything’s okay, all the while plotting her revenge for whatever slight she thinks you’ve committed against her. I mean, give me a frickin’ break.
I jump into Dad’s old Accord and peel out of her driveway, leaving black skid marks on the perfect white concrete just because I can.
12
Lena
It’s dark by the time I make it to the basement. I’m running out of errands, running out of things to scrub and scour. I’m afraid of what thoughts will come unbidden if I allow myself to be listless in this house. Inaction is dangerous. Inaction lets the demons in.
The gray cement walls of the laundry room rise over my head, cold and pitiless. The air is heavy, thick with the dust of secrets, the scent of impending death. I’ve never seen death, but I’ve imagined it, dreamed it, a hundred thousand times. In this house, where one life has already been stolen and another is slowly fading, death is never far away.
The lone light bulb in the middle of the ceiling sheds a circle of yellow light. I’m just outside its glow, sitting cross-legged on the concrete floor in front of the cardboard boxes. The box I’m searching through overflows with bundles of photos of different thicknesses, each bundle banded together by a faded rubber band. At the bottom of the box lies dozens of white envelopes stuffed with negatives and marked with dates in black and red pen.
I flip through the snapshots in my hand, all of them monochrome. I’ve formed two small piles, filtering out pictures of my mother unless Dad specifically asks for them. I doubt he will. He seldom talked about her, afterward. And when he did, it was as if he lived a different life than we did, remembered an entirely different person. When he was forced to mention her death, he called it her ‘passing,’ like she was a ship sailing out the mouth of a harbor.
My father is so fragile, his heart sloshing within the shell of his skin like an egg. He must have suffered, finding her like that. He’d driven through the night to be home early, to surprise her with flowers, with daisies, her favorite. I remember seeing them later, wilted and crushed against the carpet in front of the bathroom door, white petals bruised beneath the shoes of the EMTs.
I picture Dad in my mind, much younger and slimmer, his face lit with boyish excitement. I imagine him noticing the light, the steam sifting beneath the bathroom door. What did he think? That she was taking a bubble bath? I see him opening the door handle with one hand, daisies twisted behind his back with the other. Then his face, frozen in horror, his eyes locked on the scene before him, hideous and unreal and red, so much red.
This is as far as my mind travels in my waking hours. It’s at night, racked in the clutches of my nightmares, that the red water comes, the blood-soaked tub, the thin arms slashed to pale bone, the dead white eyes. It was weeks after the funeral before I realized this scene was meant for me. I was the one who came home right after school on Thursdays. Lux had flute practice. Dad was supposed to be gone for another day.
Maybe I could’ve protected him somehow, lifted some of the weight of his guilt, if he’d been spared from finding her, from that ruthless judgment that he’d failed at the only thing that mattered to him—keeping his wife alive. I will those thoughts from my mind. I’ve already played this ‘what if’ game a thousand times. It always ends the same way, with more questions than I’ll ever have answers.
I concentrate on the photographs. So many memories, so many years encapsulated into each 4 by 6 print: Dad brushing his teeth before work, foam dribbling down his chin; Lux sleeping curled up on our parents’ bed when she was seven; Lux at five, spinning in circles in the backyard, her white dress swirling; my parents in a fight, Mom crying, screaming; and Lux, out of focus as I chase her down the hallway.
I finish the first batch and take out another. Most of the pictures are of my mother: Mom sleeping with her hands beneath her head like a prayer, her red hair in ratty tangles around her head, Mom cross-legged on the floor with a stapler in one hand and a canvas frame in the other, Mom sitting at the table, bent over her daily horoscopes, Mom dancing with Lux in the living room, her head thrown back in laughter.
I was obsessed with capturing her then, of trying to understand her by freezing her image on paper. Mom always seemed like this unpredictable stranger, a wild creature of the forest, of the moon or maybe the stars, of places I couldn’t go or understand. For most of my life, she was volatile, her moods erratic and shifting like oil in water, so much rage and joy and sorrow shut up in one woman’s body that she was never the same person on any given day.
I toss another picture into the pile, one of Mom slumped on the couch watching TV, face blank and glassy. The next photo stops my breath.
I hold it up, examining it in the halo of light. I’ve forgotten this picture almost entirely. Now everything comes flooding back. Maybe . . . but no, the face is too small, the features too indistinct to make anything out. The negative. I drop the picture and grope through the jumbled box for the envelopes, searching for the right date. I find it and withdraw the sleeve of negatives.
Do I still have photo paper? Enough developer? I leap to my feet. The air hums against my skin, raises goose bumps on my arms. Am I ready for this? It doesn’t matter. I have to do it. Maybe I’ll find something . . . an answer, a reason . . . something. At this point, I’ll take anything.
My fingers tremble as I hold the negative. This, the last photograph of my mother ever taken, the last image of her, warm and breathing and alive. I don’t know why she decided to leave us, why we could never manage to make her happy. I did everything I could think of to earn her love. I tried to be perfect. I never whined or complained or threw temper tantrums. I did all my chores without being asked. I earned good grades. I watched after Lux.
But it was never enough. We were never enough. I was never enough.
After all these years, I still don’t know why.
13
Lux
I’m alone. Always alone. Trapped inside my own skin, with nothing to do. Nowhere to go. Last night, I used the last of the cash I stole from Dad’s top drawer on the Village Inn Motel a few miles outside of Brokewater. I spent a sleepless night tossing and turning on a thin, lumpy mattress. Today I’ve been driving around town for what seems like an eternity. The gas needle drifts lower and lower. Dread builds up inside me like a brick wall.
There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere to go but home.
I don’t want to go home. Lena is there, with her perfect little life. Always taking care of everything and doing everything right. Always reminding me of all the ways I fail. All the ways I’ll never measure up. She’ll just judge me and make me feel like crap, like she always does. She’ll take one look at me and she’ll know. She’ll see the guilt scrawled all over my face. She’ll know what I did to Dad.
Dad. Dad is dying. Bile fills my throat. I can hardly breathe as I choke it down. Dad is dying for real this time. It’s my fault. I caused it and then I ran, just like a frickin’ coward.
