Then Everything Happens at Once, page 23
“So you’re saying that if we somehow get the coronavirus, it will have been my fault.”
“Yes!”
“It’ll be my fault for seeing one person who stays in his house all the time, and his mom works from home, and his sister is always home, and they don’t even go to the store to shop—they do delivery. And—”
“Stop arguing with me.”
“No, Mom. It’s going to be my fault if we get sick because of Freddie. But all the nurses who come here—there are seven of them, I counted—and then there’s Juliana, and the worker, and almost Doris with her stupid allergies if I hadn’t stopped it, and everyone you see at work, and the people you walk by at the store, and—”
“Shut your mouth, Baylee.”
“How is that fair? I am always so careful. Freddie and I have been so careful,” I shout, and my voice breaks. “This isn’t fair!”
“It’s not fair? You’re going to talk about things not being fair as thousands of people are dying? As so many people never get to come home at all?” The look in Mom’s eyes right now. It’s like she doesn’t recognize me at all. “We don’t even know where this is headed. We have no idea if life will ever be normal again, and you just want to risk it all to go out there and mess around with a boy?”
“Okay! Okay,” I say. “I’m sorry. Can I just go now?”
This is torture. I want to scream, throw my phone at the tiled floor, slam the door, and never come back.
“Go to your room. Do not touch anything, and do not come out,” Mom says, moving to the side to let me through. “You’re officially on quarantine in your room. I don’t want to see you for fourteen days.”
Upstairs, I turn my phone off, then curl up in a ball under my duvet. The things I don’t understand, things that don’t make sense, things I need explained to me—it all feels too heavy. I cry, and the tears leave black-streaked wet stains on my pillow.
Thirty-Eight
I don’t wake up until past dinnertime, my phone blowing up with messages and texts once I turn it back on. Mom has informed me, through text, that I am not to come out of my room except to use the bathroom. My meals will be left outside the door, and I have zero say about what I get. She has left a couple of surgical masks outside my bedroom door, and I am to wear a mask when I leave my room to use the bathroom.
[Mom] Put your mask in the ziplock bag when you’re not using it to keep it clean. These are the only ones you get, because everywhere is sold out, so keep them safe.
I tiptoe to the bathroom as silently as I can, wearing my mask. Upon my return, I grab the two grocery bags resting on the floor near the stairs. Peanut butter, a loaf of bread, bags of chips, a box of Ritz crackers, granola bars, water bottles, sugar-free fruity water flavoring, a couple of protein bars, and plastic cutlery.
I wish, more than anything right now, that I’d suddenly woken up tonight and felt the error of my ways. There are so many versions of me, and sure, one of them is yelling at me to stop being so reckless and follow the rules, but the bossier, angry version of me is in disagreement. She says that what I did wasn’t the worst thing in the world. She says I’m totally not going to be able to handle going back to . . . nothing.
[Freddie] Are you home yet?
[Freddie] Are you OK?
[Freddie] ????
[Freddie] I just ran over there and everything looks normal at your house.
[Freddie] I just called your house phone and your mom unleashed on me. I get why you couldn’t text me back now.
[Freddie] Are you OK? Did she take your phone away?
I settle cross-legged on my bed, rereading the texts before I send my reply.
[Baylee] I just had my phone turned off.
He doesn’t wait for a response. My phone rings.
“What happened?” he asks.
“My mom caught me when I got home. I’m locked in my room for fourteen days.”
“Shit. For real? Quarantine?”
“Yes,” I say.
We’re both silent a little while, and I listen to his breathing.
“You went back to look for me?” I ask.
“Well, you just disappeared. I couldn’t sleep, so I just went to take a look. I don’t know what I thought I would find—bloodstains and tire marks from a getaway car? Anyways,” he says. “I called your house, and wow—that was not a good time.”
“What did my mom say?”
“Just . . . stuff,” he says. “Then she called my mom.”
“Oh no. I’m sorry,” I say. “Did you get in trouble?”
“Yeah.”
“What happened?”
“No car and no garage.”
“Are you serious?” I say.
“That’s nothing,” he says. “She said if I don’t respect your mom’s wishes, then she’ll be forced to send me to my dad’s.”
“She wouldn’t do that, would she? You’ve never even been there.”
“Doubt it, but I guess she wants me to know she’s serious. I think your mom is pretty pissed.”
“I’m not going to see you for a very long time, am I?”
He sighs on the other end. “This sucks.”
There’s nothing else to say, so we hang up. It’s one thing if it’s just me getting in trouble, but I cannot be the reason Freddie’s life gets messed up.
On TikTok, Rianne has posted a video of her making this ridiculous vegetable-fruit-salad concoction with the help of her grandfather, and he actually agrees to taste it, and the whole time, her grandmother looks on in total revulsion. It already has three hundred likes and five hundred views. I watch it six times.
For a while, I sit on my bedroom floor, looking around at the purple walls, the window, the closed door of my walk-in closet, and I try to picture myself sitting in here for fourteen days straight. If this was before, I think it would’ve been doable. I think I might’ve even liked it, two weeks of lounging around, binge-watching shows, and writing pages and pages in my journal about all the things I was missing out on, all the things I couldn’t have. Writing the same things over and over, trying to find the reason for it, the meaning behind it. It would’ve been this super-angsty, almost painfully romantic experience, staring at my phone until a text from Freddie came to save me from my loneliness, giving me just enough to create a vivid and totally unrealistic scenario.
But this is now, and scenarios were reality. Did everything really just go poof?
Later that night is when I muster up the courage to take a hard look at the messy Alex stuff. My mother hasn’t texted me again. Below me, I can hear the rumbling of my sister’s compressor. She’s quiet tonight, almost like she gets that there’s been enough yelling for one day.
I thumb through my journal, skimming the things I’ve written about in the last weeks. Sometimes I’m convinced I’m totally figuring myself out, then I wonder if all I’m discovering is that I’m a fucking idiot.
I feel like I am two people who are going in different directions.
This will be the last time I lie to Alex. I’m taking it as a sign that the universe took Freddie away.
[Baylee] I got in a major fight with my mother last night. She took my phone away, and now I’m grounded for 2 weeks.
I just have to focus on staying home for now, until things settle.
[Baylee] I’m sorry. I have my phone back now.
[Alex] Do u want to video-chat?
[Baylee] Yes! But in like, an hour? I am not camera ready at all yet.
[Alex] OK. Message me when ur ready.
There’s something about the tone of her messages, like she’s not impressed or she’s guarded. But I’ll make it up to her. I’ll fix it.
Before I set out to get ready, I pull up my DMs with Garrett.
[Baylee] You haven’t told Pen about this morning, have you?
I’m already typing my next message because I didn’t expect him to be there, ready to talk back.
[Garrett] Lucky for you, I’m just getting up now. Sleeping the day away is a good time, am I right?
[Baylee] Can you please let me know me if you plan on telling?
[Garrett] I hadn’t thought about it, B. Let’s weigh the pros and cons, shall we?
[Baylee] The only pro for you is the ability to hurt me again.
[Garrett] Whoa, B. You’re being way too deep and shit. 🤮 🤮 🤮
[Baylee] You owe me, Garrett. If you’re no longer an evil monster, then you know that you owe me for everything you did.
[Garrett] Why don’t you just tell them both that you have a side piece? Honesty is the best policy, am I right?
[Baylee] It’s not a side piece kind of thing. It’s complicated. Can you just please keep it to yourself?
[Garrett] Relax, B. I got better shit to do than to fucking gossip about you being a little hussy.
[Baylee] A hussy?
[Garrett] I used the thesaurus on my phone to come up with a nicer-sounding word for slut.
[Baylee] Fuck you.
[Garrett] What! That was me being considerate!
[Baylee] 🖕
[Garrett] Nah but for real, B. I won’t say nothing.
I swipe the conversation away and put my phone down.
When Alex appears on-screen, she looks better than I remember. Memories of the parking garage and of being at her house enter my mind, bringing with them the scent of her cologne. Male cologne might actually be the root of all this, because I seem to lose control every time that stuff wafts up my nose.
I was so awkward when we last hung out. It wasn’t that long ago, but enough has happened for me to feel like a different Baylee. For me to wonder who I’d be if I was on the green couch with her again.
“Hey, you,” Alex says, bringing her face up to the screen, pretending to try to get a closer look at me.
“I thought I’d dress up for you a little,” I say, which is ridiculous, because I’m actually wearing my robe, but I wanted to feel pretty. I wanted to feel other things.
“I approve.”
“Where are you?”
She pans the camera around. “My aunt’s garage. It’s the only place for privacy.”
“You must be so excited to go home soon.”
“Couple more days. I’m so tired of seeing my dad through the screen door,” she says. “Can you believe the world is so broken?”
“No, I can’t.”
“I was thinking about how, if this was before, I would invite you over, and I would make you dinner or something. I had it all planned out.”
“Really?”
She nods. “We were going to spend the evening lying down, staring at the ceiling, and I would’ve told you all kinds of stories about myself, and you would’ve told me stories about you. Then we would’ve listened to some sweet tunes on my velvet beast. And . . .”
She does this little shrug that makes it clear where her mind is headed.
“And then what?” I ask.
“Hey—you look a little sad?” she asks, and for a moment, I think she can see through me, that she’s figured something out. But then she says, “Are you going to tell me what the fight was about, with your mom?”
This doesn’t count as new lies. It’s just a continuation of the final lie. Just a little elaboration.
“Just . . . stuff that had been building, I guess.” She wants me to go on. I like that about Alex, the way she listens. She’s interested, and she wants me to run with the thought and lay out the real story. Except it’s made up. “I guess I’m not really ready to talk about it.”
Alex nods. “That’s okay.”
We don’t say anything for a while, then she says something about school, so we go on asking the same questions in different ways: When will this pandemic end? When are we going back to school? When are we going to be able to go outside again?
They are questions with no answers.
We talk a while, and never does she ask me to be her girlfriend. I guess I wouldn’t ask me either if I was her. The moment passed, and something is different.
Thirty-Nine
I’m in my room for days, alone. Days of sitting on my bed, working through the e-learning classes Castlehill High put together. They’ve decided we’re probably not going back to school for a long while, but that doesn’t mean we can’t continue learning. The learning is all just mindless clicking through screens of course material, assignments to be completed, instructions, prerecorded classes, due dates. Emails—so many emails keep coming while they figure out the details. I have three assignments in progress that I’m still waiting to learn more about, while trying to read about other things and taking notes. It’s chaos.
I’m uncomfortable after fifteen minutes or so, no matter where I sit, ready to just pass out and nap at any given moment. There is nothing to break up the time. No point in focusing and working hard for thirty minutes, knowing we’ll be piled in the halls soon, going for lunch, or huddled in the bathroom to talk shit about the guys or about all the girls who suddenly showed up to school with fake freckles.
So many people are dying of the virus now.
I don’t personally know anyone who’s got it, but what does that mean? Is it on its way? Is it going to show up all of a sudden and just wipe us all out? Sometimes I feel like we’re all going to die. Other times, I feel normal, like some teenager grounded in her room, and I want to go out. I want to tell my mother that she’s overreacting.
But my mother’s not even talking to me.
[Rianne] This is so BAD. The virus got into my grandparents’ building.
[Baylee] Oh no.
[Rianne] My grandma found out the lady down the hall that she goes to the grocery store with is sick. Like really sick.
[Baylee] ☹
[Rianne] My grandpa is SO smart. He just basically wrote my English essay for me. Well, I wrote it but he helped. He knows what a thesis statement is. It made so much sense when he explained it to me.
[Baylee] I’m so jealous.
[Rianne] I bet he can help you TOO!!! We should video-chat later. I’ll make him teach class!!!
I talk to Rianne in sprinkles throughout the day. Sometimes Lara is in the group chat, but we just talk around each other.
My problems are small, but they feel heavy. I’m not a better person just because I’m locked at home, unable to do anything but homework.
I flip through my phone, going through all my photos. Shots of Rianne’s parties, us in the halls at school, our trips to the mall, makeup selfies with Lara, photos taken solely based on Freddie’s presence in them, just so I could stare at him when I got home.
I am next-level bored. I can’t concentrate on anything.
I have never been this disinterested in learning in my life.
Nothing is happening anymore.
I’m alone in my room with my homework, and my hatred for math persists. Actually, it’s grown, because now I don’t even see the point in learning about it.
Forty
Everything is late—my bedtime, my waking-up time, my email response time. All my music is trash, my favorite songs have been played so often that I can’t even recall why I liked them so much in the first place. I stream TV shows for a change from streaming movies. I have a list on my phone of all the shows and movies I’ve watched, to keep track.
I watch Dirty Dancing, and it makes me think of that night in Freddie’s room.
This bedroom quarantine is the worst punishment I’ve ever received. Every single day feels as long as four.
[Mom] Do you need anything today?
[Baylee] Stuff to drink. Maybe more chips.
[Mom] Is chips all you’re eating?
[Baylee] No.
Eating sour cream and onion chips is the highlight of my day, so maybe I’m overdoing it a little.
I lie on my bed, staring at the ceiling, remembering being with Freddie. This is all there is left. The scenarios I make up in my head are so real that I can manufacture stomach flips and chills just by remembering Freddie’s touch. It’s not cutting it.
I feel lonelier now than I did when I had no one.
Is everyone else going crazy like this? What’s wrong with me?
[Alex] What’s going on? R u OK?
[Baylee] I’m swell.
[Alex] You’ve been quiet lately. Is it me? Am I boring?
[Baylee] It’s so not you. I feel like I’m tired all the time. Maybe I’m just watching too much TV.
[Alex] It’s frying your brain. 😋
[Baylee] What did you do today?
[Alex] Did some homework. Went for a walk and I happened to “walk by” Pen and Blake real quick.
That’s not allowed. The premier of the province said so. My mother said so. Even Alex said so, when I asked her about seeing each other, two meters apart.
Seeing me wasn’t worth the risk.
I tell her it’s great, that she’s so lucky to be able to go outside to break the rules. She gives me a sad face in response. Then I let the conversation die.
I sit cross-legged on the floor, my bookshelf in front of me. I pull out my old diaries, the little pink books I used to write in when I was in Grade Eight. It’s words about Freddie everywhere. I think about my younger self, and I want to tell her, Don’t worry, you’ll end up getting him. Not for long, though, because of a viral apocalypse, but you’ll get what you want.
It doesn’t make me feel better.
Alex comes back, having changed the subject.
[Alex] My dad and I stained the basement furniture. So much work, but so worth it. It looks totally restored.
[Baylee] 👍
[Alex] I can’t wait for u to see it for real, but would u like to see photos?
[Baylee] Sure.
[Alex] R u OK?
[Baylee] Totally! Send me photos!!!
Exclamation marks make me sound all better.
Later, I leave my bedroom door open and sit in the doorway, wearing a mask. I listen to my family downstairs, to the news coming from the television, and to my sister whining or giggling. I discover that the banister is a little crooked, and the baseboards up here don’t exactly match. Sometimes I leave my room to run around the upstairs hallway, hoping my mother will catch me and yell at me. Because then I’d at least be talking to somebody. Maybe she thinks I’m having a great time up here.
