Twisted Fate Page 2

  They say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But this was not what I was thinking back before Rockland, when I tried to see if I could in fact break out of this world and into some dark, cool calm that would let me be happy all the time. I was not going for the “make you stronger” part. I was not going for the “what doesn’t kill you” part. I was going for peaceful silence. To be able to capture that moment between strength and destruction once and for all. I guess I miscalculated a little.

  But that doesn’t mean I’ll give up. I can try again. I’m making art, like Kim says. And maybe I can make an even better movie than the one me and Eric made back in Virginia. I’m going to stay dedicated to it no matter how many stupid doctors I have to talk to or new pills I have to try. I am going to get around all these people—the ones who always keep trying to convince you to be a part of their dull world, telling you how important you are and how much you mean to them and how you should get up and go for a walk or go to classes and meet new people, or—the stupidest one ever—“do something that will make you happy.”

  And the constant suggestion that I should “try to focus.” Like I can’t focus. I pay more attention than anyone I know—twice the amount of attention, especially if I have my camera with me. Then I’m thinking about how everything is going to look. And when I watch it later I don’t miss a thing. I think that’s the mistake people make—thinking that I’m missing something. I see this world clear as day. I see how everyone plays their part, says what they think other people want to hear. And I see how there are spaces where people are themselves. And that’s where I want to go. I want to see them there. Not in school, not trying to be good around their parents or trying to be an example for their kids or trying to look important at work. There is a time when people are entirely themselves, and that’s what I want to film. That’s the world I want to live in.

  What would make me happy is finding another friend like Eric. Eric and I were happy making movies and cruising in the Austin Healey. “Becoming immortal,” he called it sometimes when we were driving fast, shooting the passing countryside. Becoming stars. But like stars in the universe—remote and bright and cold and shining. Real stars.

  Nobody was going to make me pay for what I did, but instead of being happy about it, all I could think about was getting it right this time. You know what? Maybe I am stronger now. Maybe I should just say fuck it. Because if I’m honest I don’t know if I even feel like I need to pay for anything at all. Maybe I did for a minute, maybe I do sometimes when I talk to Dr. Adams—not pay I guess but “process,” like he says, and “understand.” But this is what I understand: life’s not fair. And if I’m doing the things that “make me happy” they might be different from what makes everyone else happy.

  I lied earlier about having no one to talk to. I met someone today. And she smiled at me in this way that made me feel like she knew me. Like she knew exactly who I was. I would love to be around someone who knew exactly who I was just for even a minute. It would be such a relief. We talked for about half an hour, standing in the driveway, and I could tell she really gets things.

  I was almost going to ask her if she wanted to come into the garage and see the Austin Healey.

  It’s so close to being fixed.

  I do have to give Dad credit for that. Making me fix it myself. And then showing me how. He even had it brought from Virginia so I could keep working on the engine now that I’ve got the body smoothed out and painted.

  I thought after the accident that he would freak, that he’d sell it for parts and never let me drive again. My first thought when I saw how much damage it took was that there was no way it’d ever run again, and that was a real disappointment. My first thought was that it was another miscalculation. Another thing Eric and I didn’t see coming. Sometimes I wish we could talk about it. It would really help if I could just ask him a few questions. My second thought was that maybe I was made of steel. Maybe I was unbreakable. I could watch the rest of the world slip away—I could record it—but I was here to stay.

  “It’s a lesson,” Dad said.

  And Kim, my stepmom, said, “It’s an opportunity.”

  Either way the Austin Healey is almost ready to get back on the road, and I’m almost ready to start school again. I’m not sure how I feel about going to this school. But maybe it will be different.

  The only thing I miss about Virginia is Eric. I wish I could hang out with him again. Though I can’t say I’m completely sorry about the way things turned out. Eric made me understand who I am. Eric made me know what the world is really like and what I am capable of. And if it weren’t for all the stupid bullshit from his parents, Eric would already be famous.

  Maybe I’ll talk to that Tate girl at school. Maybe I can see her alone. I felt when I went back into the new house like I wanted to see her again right away, like I needed to. I went up to my room and looked next door and wondered which window was hers. About an hour later I headed back to the garage and I thought I saw her standing in the big square cupola on top of their house, looking out over the harbor, over the tops of the giant pines.

  She was like Helen of Troy, standing up there in the glass room beneath the blue sky with the clouds rolling in from the ocean. I wanted to be able to look at her always. Wanted a film of her just standing there. I could film her doing anything and it would be interesting. Just talking. Just saying nothing.

  I could suddenly see how wars could be fought over beauty. And I wanted to film her for the rest of her life.

  My locker was nearly side by side with Allyson’s on the second floor by the stairs, which meant she could easily leave yellow sticky notes on it reminding me about chores we had at home or just offering her usual sisterly good cheer. Like: “Hi, Cutie!” or just a picture of a talking cat with a bow on its head—I guess that was supposed to be Hello Kitty. She dotted her i’s with hearts and every time I saw one of these sparkly, bubble-written monstrosities I nearly barfed. Imagine having to listen to the Barney theme song on permanent repeat. That’s what it was like getting these notes. There was nothing wrong with them—they all said nice things—but somehow everything about them was wrong.

  “Oh my God,” Becky said, pulling the latest one down, sticking it to the front of my sweater, and reading it. “Do you really have to meet your mom downtown at the historical society after school? I was hoping we could take the back way home and get in a little four-twenty action on the way.”

  Becky was wearing her headphones, a red-and-gray flannel shirt, and black skinny jeans. She fiddled distractedly with her new nose ring, a small silver hoop that looked like it might already be irritating an infection. She had a wide mouth and full lips and small square teeth. And she polished her nails so that every other finger had black or red nail polish on it. Today she was wearing a gauzy scarf with little skulls all over it. Lockers were slamming shut all around us and voices were raised and slightly rowdy at the end of the day, just kids happy to be getting out, happy to have a couple hours of freedom before it started all over again.

  Of course I wasn’t going to meet my mom downtown. Becky didn’t even need to ask. Mom wanted to get Ally and me some new shoes. She could get them for Ally. I’d just broken in my slip-on Vans and I had no intention of seeing what her idea of a fashionable pair of shoes looked like. I had a closet full of things my mom thought were so “me.” This is “so you!” she would say, holding up a pair of low pink wedges. Or: “This would look great on you!” holding a powder-blue silk blouse up just below my chin and taking a step back to nod approvingly. “Stunning.”

  Ally loved this kind of thing, and she generally did look stunning in whatever Mom picked out for her. But these shopping outings weren’t my thing. I always felt like I was being dressed like a poodle. It was an outfit or shoes for my mother, not for me. It was an outfit or shoes that would make my mother look good because she had a daughter who had fancy clothes or looked pretty. Sometimes when I was out with her I felt like a bracelet she owned a
nd not her daughter. And I always heard it when Ally was standing beside her: “She’s so pretty!” they’d say—right in front of Ally as if she didn’t exist at all. As if she was something my mother had bought for herself.

  I pulled the yellow sticky note off my shirt and crumpled it into a ball, dropping it into the bottom of the locker where it landed on a pile of maybe two hundred other crumpled yellow notes.

  “Yeah, four twenty sounds good to me,” I said.

  “Hell yeah,” Becky said, and laughed.

  I put my history and science books away and jammed that evening’s homework into my backpack, turning around just in time to see Declan Wells striding up the stairs two at a time, his bag over one shoulder, his board under his arm, and his wavy black hair falling around his shoulders.

  “Speak of the devil,” I whispered to Becky. Though it was hardly by chance that he appeared. Declan met us upstairs at our lockers every day after school.

  He stopped in front of us and bent his head to the side. “Aw, yeah. Does someone need a little mental vacation from the strain and stress of pretending all goddamn day that we are not really living in some tedious made-for-TV movie about the failure of the education system, the folly of youth, and the burgeoning surveillance culture? A little lift perhaps? A little journey to a softer world?”

  Becky and I looked at each other, shook our heads, and grinned. Declan could never just say “Hey, homies.” Or “What’s up?” He loved to hear himself speak too much—but then again we loved to hear him too. That boy always made me smile.

  I pulled my skateboard out of my locker and set it on the smooth gray tiled floor, then stood on it to make myself as tall as Declan, folding my arms across my chest. I looked right into his wide-set dark-brown eyes and then he laughed, almost to himself. “Yes? Ms. Tate? You have something to share with us?”

  “I’m up!” I said, then pushed off and maneuvered down the hall on my board against the steady stream of kids headed out for the day. I turned and glanced back to make sure he was looking, then did a perfect, tight kick flip right in front of the upstairs office.

  “She’s crazy,” I heard him say in that admiring tone—the one he had where he sounded excited, like he might almost laugh. I looked back just in time to see Becky nod in agreement and then watched as they both stopped short. Mr. Fitzgerald leaned out of his office and called my name.

  “Tate! How many times have I told you not to skate in the hall?”

  “Probably thirty,” I called back to him. “Maybe forty. But who’s counting?”

  Declan and Becky stifled their laughter.

  “Carry that board out of the building or I will confiscate it this time.”

  I flipped the skateboard up into my hands and kept walking, ignoring him. Becky and Declan followed behind me.

  “’Sup, Mr. Fitz?” Declan said as they passed. “Happy to go home after a long day as guardian of America’s future rocket scientists and Walmart greeters?”

  Fitz said, “Watch yourself, Wells. Have a good afternoon, Becky. Oh, just a minute . . . Wells, we have a new student starting next week. He’ll need to shadow someone for a day and get shown the ropes, and guess who’s going to be doing the showing?”

  “Aw, serious? Me? I’m not like Virgil or something, you know, guiding some newbie through hell. That’s really not the archetype I prefer, Mr. Fitz.”

  Mr. Fitzgerald smiled and shook his head. “Nice Dante reference, Wells. You have such a good brain in there. Maybe your attitude could catch up to it, huh? And guess what? You are gonna be Virgil for a day or some of those missed detentions are going to magically multiply. The student’s name is Graham Copeland. Nice kid. Getting a little bit of a late start and I think he needs someone like you to show him around.”

  “C’mon!” I yelled from the end of the hallway. I didn’t hear everything Fitz had said but I’m sure it wasn’t worth spending another two seconds of our lives at school. “Half pipe’s awaiting! And so’s the other pipe.”

  They caught up to me and we ran downstairs and out into the parking lot. Becky was already taking the little bowl out of the top pocket of her flannel and she started packing it as we walked. She could barely get through the day anymore without medicinal help. She’d just started getting high a couple months ago but she was already making up for lost time. Usually she would smoke right after school, then go straight to her room and listen to LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver over and over again while she wrote computer code and did other hacker things that were so geeky even me and Declan could barely understand her. She also made jewelry out of sea glass and superglue and wire that she gave to people as gifts. It was like some kind of stoned Santa’s workshop in her room with electronic music instead of Christmas carols.

  And she was running out of people to give them to. Their cleaning lady already had two necklaces, a bracelet, and three sets of earrings. And the cleaning lady’s kid had a sea glass necklace she had made him that he’d drawn a big W on with a Sharpie marker. “For Wolverine,” he told her. I had a whole cigar box full of necklaces. Some of which I’d just hang in the windows of my room to catch the light. Declan took her sea glass stuff and actually put it back in the sea. “It’ll get better with time,” he told her when she caught him doing it. Before Becky started getting high, she used to do schoolwork with the same intense concentration. But now it was just coding and sea glass and she seemed much happier now.

  “What did Fitz want?” Becky asked, brushing her long red hair out of her face as we ducked beneath the low branches that hung before the footpath down to the creek. The fall leaves crunched beneath our feet and the air smelled good, like autumn: wood smoke and mud and pine and the faint brackish salty smell of the ocean that hung in the air all around.

  Declan said, “He wanted me to show some new kid around. I swear, he thinks just ’cause of my PSAT scores, I always gotta represent the school or some bullshit.”

  “It’s your own fault,” I said. “You could stop winning chess games and science fairs and maybe drop out of the Model UN and debate team. The reason he got that idea is because you actually do represent the school. Duh.”

  Becky nodded in agreement. “Shoulda done the wake-and-bake method of studying for the P-sat,” she said, inhaling deeply and passing the bowl to him. She coughed and smiled. “I think that helped knock me down to average from slightly above. Except in math.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I don’t think anything could depose you from being the scary computer math nerd queen,” I said. “Anyway, who’s the kid?”

  “Graham somebody.”

  I couldn’t believe my ears. “Graham Copeland?!” I shouted. “Gross. That’s the creepy fucking dweeb I was telling you about.”

  I took the bowl from Declan. Becky was laughing at the way I’d said “creepy dweeb,” or maybe the way a squirrel had run across our path, or she was just laughing because, as usual, she was high or thinking about something else when other people were talking—I couldn’t tell which.

  Declan shrugged. “The car kid?”

  “Creepy dweeb,” Becky said to herself, snickering.

  “Oh my God, you’ll be with him all day and telling him about school? This is too good. You have to tell me all about him.” I handed Becky the bowl and grinned back at Declan. “I just know there’s something weird going on there. There’s a story in there that we don’t know.”

  Declan shrugged. “Your motivations seem suspect, Tate. Him being a dweeb or a nerd or socially outside the norm is hardly a reason for me to spy on him, but perhaps you’d like to simply admit to us how you feel about this creeb. This dewy breec, this weepy bed wrec.”

  “Oh God! Stop with the anagrams!” Becky yelled. “He’s worse with the anagrams when he’s stoned,” she told me, but of course I already knew this.

  “It’s true,” I said, looking at Declan. I don’t think those even count as anagrams. Weepy Bed Wreck? He’s just making up words.

  “I’m simply saying that if you wan
t me to spy on him because you feel hormonally compelled to spend time with him, you might as well just say so.”

  Becky looked at me, rolled her eyes, then started laughing again. Declan grabbed me around the waist and spun me in a circle. “Tate’s got a crush!” he said, and then kissed me.

  “You know who I’ve got a crush on,” I told him, looking right into his eyes.

  He smiled at me, returned the look. “Life’s long, Tate. There’s lots of crushes to have.”

  The woods were becoming prettier by the second and I was happy to be there with my two best friends. We walked along the trail out to where it met back up with the road that led to our neighborhood. Then I put the skateboard back down on the pavement.

  “Of course I’ll check him out for you,” Declan said.

  “Can we please go buy some Doritos now?” Becky asked. “Or cake. Oh! You know what would be good? Cupcakes. My mom made some yesterday. Let’s go to my place.”

  “I’m gonna skate,” I told them. The fact was I loved skating when I was a little high. There was a good winding downhill to my house and almost never any cars and it felt amazing to cruise down it right to the door of my house. “See you tomorrow.”

  “Bye!” they yelled in unison, grinning and looking like the coolest people you could ever spend an afternoon with. I watched them turn around and walk beneath the trees that flanked the sides of the road, leaves just beginning to turn yellow and hope and mystery filling our whole small world. Then I got on my board and leaned into the curve, coasting home.

  To: harlanadams@mind2mindpsychotherapy.com