In a World Just Right Page 5

  A ripple of excitement runs through the room. We’ve had two contest days so far, and the prizes were gift cards to a local bookstore/coffee shop. Only ten dollars, but hey, that’s a date over two fancy hot drinks, unless you want to buy half a book.

  “You have eight minutes to write a descriptive paragraph of no more than one hundred words,” Eckhart says. “The catch is that you may not use visual imagery. You must rely solely on the other senses. When time’s up, you will share your piece with your group for critique, then print out an anonymous, improved version for posting around the room. The class will then read one another’s paragraphs and vote for the piece that evokes the strongest sensory images. Questions?”

  No one raises a hand. A few are already writing. I’m totally blank on things to describe without using the sense of sight, so I’m certain I’m not taking a date for coffee tonight. My group mates and I all exchange looks and then get to work.

  Let’s see. I could write about love. You can’t see that and you can feel it, but I can’t think of any sensory images that don’t include seeing or clichés. I’m pretty sure cliché won’t work, unless I go over-the-top cliché for effect, but that’s been done before. By Claude Arsenault, actually, about a rap star trying to talk to a wall.

  I rest my forehead on my hand and try to imagine what I might hear or smell if I were somewhere else. In Jonathan-is-a-hero it’s all laser blast burns, alien squeals, and human shouts. I haven’t been there in so long, it might be fun to write about it. In Jonathan’s-smokin’-hot-dance-club the music is so loud, it hurts, and there’s a whole bunch of touching I don’t think Eckhart would approve of writing about in class.

  Maybe a track meet.

  Maybe this classroom.

  I bet I could win if I did the crashing airplane.

  The screaming, the heat of the fire, the plunge into the icy harbor. Salt in my throat.

  Maybe the hospital bed after?

  No. No. No. It’s not that I’ll fall apart if I think about it. Enough time has passed that I don’t break down blubbering with every remembrance. It’s just . . . no one at school cared about the details back when it happened. I’m not going to gratify any curiosity now.

  Swinging on monkey bars might do. Cold metal on the hands and nothing but air beneath the feet. Kids screaming all around. It’s as good an idea as any, and since I’m the last one to start writing, it’ll have to do.

  Several silent minutes tick by while the only sound in the room is rustling paper and scratching pens. Although I was the last to start, I’m the first done in my group, mostly because I care the least about getting every last word sparkly perfect. Zach finishes second. Claude, smirking to himself over what is undoubtedly a paragraph worth smirking at, finishes third. Amber is still tweaking things when Mr. Eckhart calls the class to attention.

  “You have twenty minutes to exchange, critique, print, and post. Starting now.” Amber dashes off some final correction.

  “Should we just read our own?” asks Claude.

  We all nod. One by one we read our paragraphs out loud. Claude’s is hilarious. It’s about the tastes and smells in a Pokémon game. Amber’s is about lying in grass. Zach’s is about driving a car. My monkey bars win moderate praise. We give one another feedback and then head for the computers at the back of the room to type and print. The class trickles up to Eckhart’s desk for scotch tape to post our masterpieces on the wall.

  Eckhart goes around with a red pen writing a number on each anonymous paper. “Remember, no choosing someone in your own group. Write the number of your favorite on one of these.” He holds up little squares of blue paper. “And drop it in here.” He holds up an empty tissue box we’ve used for voting before. “Begin.”

  We all head for different starting places. Kylie chooses a spot by Eckhart’s desk, and I land three or four papers down from her. I know where Claude’s masterpiece is posted, because of the laughter already erupting on the next wall. As I go around the room, I can guess, with decent accuracy, the author of each paragraph. We’ve been reading and listening to one another’s work for months now, and we have this sort of familiarity with one another’s words. It’s the closest thing I have to friends in the real world, and I’m surprised at how strongly I like these people all of a sudden.

  Kylie slides one entry closer to me, and suddenly I’m holding up the line. I read the words in front of me quickly and move on. Apple picking. A circus. Dinnertime. The beach. Kylie glances my way with more and more frequency as I round the corner and begin my third wall. Then I come to this:

  What I hear is rhythm. Step, step, huff, step, step, huff. Stones crunch, twigs snap, fallen leaves crackle. The air is rubbed pine needles and early frost; the ground is soft on soles of air, or gel. We match strides perfectly, the beat of seasons and earth running through us. The autumn sun, at its low angle, is as useless as a flame in a picture. But a new warmth flushes more strongly than miles of covered trail—step, step, huff, swing, swing—he holds my hand.

  Wow. Just . . . wow.

  I don’t like it quite as much as the poem folded in my notebook, but there is no doubt in my mind that Kylie wrote this. There is no doubt it’s about me. I inhale some courage and turn toward her, acknowledging openly that she has been monitoring my progress.

  She studies again the paragraph posted before her, but then she takes her own breath of courage and looks back at me. There are a couple of students busy reading between us, so we’re partly protected by a shield of their bodies, but we are unquestionably, unequivocally looking at each other. The skin on my neck prickles. I can’t imagine what she’s thinking or feeling, but for me the wash of emotion is strong enough to stop my heart, like a near-death experience, or meeting God. Something life-changing happened when she made the decision to meet my eyes. We’re going to have to talk about this. I am not only on Kylie Simms’s radar. I am holding her hand in the control room.

  The rest of the class is unaware that the earth just moved beneath them. The students between us are ready to read Kylie’s paragraph, and I’m in the way. I step back to let them pass. Kylie’s expression is uncertain, maybe even scared. I imagine she’s a little messed up over this.

  I find my voice first. “Can I talk to you after practice today?”

  She closes her mouth. I think her lips came unsealed with a gasp when we looked at each other. She chews on her upper lip and nods. “Five o’clock in the senior lot.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I ARRIVE EARLY TO WATCH the end of practice, but there are only a few pole vaulters and a hurdler still on the track. I assume Kylie’s in either the weight room or the locker room, so I sit on the curb where I can see the gym door and the senior lot at the same time. I don’t see Kylie’s car, and it occurs to me she may have changed her mind.

  I really hope that’s not the case.

  I’m usually in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend this time of day, finishing up my own workout. Today I made a lame excuse to girlfriend Kylie, which she accepted without question. Then I hurried through a locker room shower so I could be here for real Kylie. Practice didn’t go so well because I was agonizing over what, exactly, would happen at this meeting.

  I only know what I want to happen—to learn how real Kylie is getting her poetry inspiration from my girlfriend—but it’s not the kind of thing I can just ask her. What I don’t want to happen is to scare her away with crazy-strange questions. It’ll be better to talk with her a little before I decide what to say, and that’s what has my adrenaline level at flood stage. How can I talk to this girl I’ve admired from afar for so long? Especially since she already knows something weird is going on? Maybe she’s only a little curious. Maybe she’s completely freaked out. Maybe she wants to ask specific questions. I can’t make a plan of attack before I know where she’s coming from.

  “Hey, Jonathan.”

  I jump. It’s Luis Alves from creative w
riting. He’s hauling a gigantic duffel bag, and I vaguely remember he’s on the baseball team.

  “Hey.”

  I want him to keep walking, but he stops right in front of me. This is awkward because I can’t recall a single time someone from school engaged me in a conversation outside the classroom. Does this mean we’re kind of friends? Is he just being polite?

  “I’ve never seen you around after school,” he says.

  “Yeah.”

  “Somethin’ up?”

  “No.”

  He looks at me like he can’t understand my monosyllabic English. I’m being rude, but I want him to go away. Kylie’s car just pulled into the parking lot, and I don’t want him to know I’m meeting her. Plus my adrenaline’s starting to give me the shakes.

  “Okay, man.” Because I just glanced behind him, he looks over his shoulder toward Kylie, then back at me. “See you tomorrow.”

  “See you in class,” I say, proud to have mostly completed a sentence. Luis greets Kylie on his way across the lot, and she must have asked him if he’d seen me, because he turns and points a finger. Okay, so he knows. Whatever.

  Luis heads out of the picture as Kylie—the real, honest-to-God Kylie—walks up to me. She’s obviously been home to shower and change, and although the reason might be other plans after this, it’s nice to think that she cleaned up just for me. Her hair flows softly over her shoulders. Rarely do I get to see her hair when it’s not tied up, even in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend.

  I stand and offer my traditional witty greeting. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  I can’t read her emotion. A little nervousness maybe, but I get the sense she’s annoyed. Does Jonathan Aubrey annoy Kylie Simms? If so, we’re off to a bad start. Vaguely I wonder if the other Kylie in my made-up world is annoyed with me because I’m not around. They share a poetry brain, why not an annoyed-with-Jonathan brain? My gut says that whatever Kylie’s feeling right now has nothing to do with her otherworld twin and everything to do with something the matter with me.

  “So?” she says. “What did you want to talk about?”

  I hoped we’d do this somewhere other than the student parking lot. I don’t know this Kylie well enough to invite myself into her car, and I didn’t bring my own car—not that this Kylie would be comfortable inside it. We could go sit in the stands by the track, but the pole vaulters are still there.

  “I just . . . I wanted . . .” She folds her arms and settles her weight on one foot. This is killing me. “I thought we should talk about what you wrote today.” Not the subtlest start, but her impatience is urging me to get to the point faster than I’d hoped.

  “What about it?”

  It was about me. “I thought it should have won.” Duh. Did I just say that?

  She says nothing. Kylie really isn’t one to put up with nonsense.

  “Okay.” I take a deep breath and spit out some truth. “I thought you were watching me as we went around the room. Something weird happened when I read your piece. Maybe I was imagining it, but if something weird didn’t happen, we wouldn’t be standing here, right?”

  Her shoulders drop about a quarter inch. She sucks some of the gloss off her lip and watches her foot play with some sand on the asphalt. “So?”

  “I just thought you might want to talk about it. Maybe that and your tree poem from before.”

  Her head snaps up. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The bang of shed doors announces that the pole vault equipment has been put away. Finally. “I don’t want to stand here by the road,” I say. “Can we sit in the bleachers for a few minutes?”

  She nods and turns. An awkward silence settles between us. Usually silence with girlfriend Kylie is comfortable, companionable, but this silence trembles. I’m conscious of the need to keep appropriate distance between our bodies. We climb the tiers of benches and sit at the top in the middle. We aren’t alone on the track. Some middle-aged guy is walk-jogging laps, but for now he’s opposite us on the far turn. Kylie and I sit side by side—I can’t believe I’m sitting here next to her after all these years—and watch him.

  She perches her feet on the bench below and leans back into the rail. “Have you ever gone running, Jonathan?”

  A hundred times with you. She must be thinking about the piece she wrote today. Maybe her inspiration for writing it. “Not really.”

  “Does that mean never?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So I wouldn’t have seen you running in town or anything?”

  “Not likely.”

  The walk-jogger reaches the top of the straightaway. In another minute or so he’ll pass in front of us. His face is obscured by shadows. The track doesn’t surround a football field, as it does in so many other schools, so it doesn’t have stadium lights. Simply one orange sulfur thing that buzzes when lit. The sun’s late afternoon glow comes to us through a tangle of bud-branched trees opposite.

  “Kylie,” I start. I think I’m about to say stuff I might want to take back, but she’s on the edge of what she really wants to ask. If this conversation bombs, I can always go hide in my made-up world until final exams are over. I’m not graduating anyway. “I almost bumped into you the other day in the hall. Do you remember that?”

  She nods.

  “Since then—please don’t take this the wrong way—you kinda keep popping into my head.”

  Her intake of breath is slow but audible. “What kinds of things pop into your head?”

  I’m lying at this point, so I have to guess what’s been happening in her headspace. It could be anything from subconscious poetry topics to, well—is it conceited to hope she might dream about me? “I think that lighthouse poem I wrote might have been about you.” It wasn’t, but it seems an easy-ish place to start.

  “How so?”

  What was it she said in class? I need the lighthouse’s protection. Well, if I tell her she’s my lighthouse, I would expect us both to heave our lunches over the corniness of it. She liked the “fisherpeople having fun” line, but I don’t remember why. Probably she wouldn’t think it a compliment to be told she’s the happy fisher. “Maybe ‘about you’ isn’t right. I think it’s more I pictured you while I wrote it, how you would react if you ever read it. I wanted to impress you. But I don’t remember needing to impress you so much before that incident in the hall.”

  “Hmph,” is all she answers. I’m grateful walk-jogger is down there, because he’s something to look at while our conversation stalls for half a lap.

  Since I offered the tidbit, however untrue, about me writing a poem for her, she should tell me about her poem, but she doesn’t. Instead she asks, “Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Uh . . .” I have to clear my throat in surprise. “Not really.”

  “Like you don’t ‘really’ go running?”

  “This world hasn’t been too good for either my running or my bachelor status.”

  She goes ultra-still, the way people do when they realize they’ve said something to dredge up memories of a dead family and a coma. I meant that to be funny, mostly a joke to myself because I run and date Kylie in another world, but I realize too late that she takes it to mean because of the airplane crash.

  We sit for a long time, unable to pierce the cocoon of self-consciousness that forms around us, separating the experience of our conversation from the almost empty track and the dropping temperature as the sunlight filters through the trees. I fold my arms over my torso in defense against the April chill. Kylie remains motionless.

  Walk-jogger stops at a gate not far below and reaches for his toes. He circles his arms a few times and leans side to side, then glances up at us as he swings through the gate and disappears into the parking lot. Kylie and I are alone with the orange sulfur lamp and swelling shadows.

 
“When we were in third grade . . . ,” Kylie says slowly. Her gaze remains fixed on the infield below. “I wanted to be your friend. Hunter LeRoy shoved me once, and you told Zach not to pick him for dodgeball at recess. Since you and Zach were always captains, Hunter didn’t get to play until he said sorry to me. Do you remember that?”

  I have a vague recollection of Kylie in a dodgeball circle. I don’t remember defending her against Hunter LeRoy. Hunter LeRoy was always my bully. “I wish I could say I did.”

  “Then a few weeks later, you didn’t come to school. Mrs. Costa said you were in the hospital and might not be back for a long time. I made you a card but didn’t know how to send it.”

  This is all news to me. I don’t talk much with my girlfriend Kylie about the past because her past is just a bunch of memories she woke up with when I made her. I’ve assumed she carried a copy of the real Kylie’s childhood with her, but maybe that’s not true.

  “When you finally did come back,” Kylie continues, “you were different. You walked funny and couldn’t play dodgeball. You didn’t talk to anyone, not even Zach. People made fun of you because of your face, and I hated that I didn’t have a dodgeball game to take away from them. When you started staying inside for recess, I asked Mrs. Costa if I could stay in one day, but when I did, you ignored me. I didn’t understand. It was third grade. You just became like a statue after a while. No one even made fun of you anymore because you just sat there in your own world and didn’t respond to anything.”

  Although I’m not lying when I say I’m basically okay on the subject of the crash, this is not one of those okay times. My hands are trembling. Kylie is throwing little-kid memories at me that I haven’t examined in many, many years. Usually I have jumbled flashbacks of the plane going down, or being smothered by water, or yearnings for my family to be alive. The idea that there was a kid in my third-grade class who wanted to reach out to me is painful to hear, especially because that kid was Kylie. And I don’t remember her doing it.

  “The truth is,” she continues, “when you almost bumped into me in the hallway, I had dreamed about you the night before. In the dream I walked to your house and went up to your room to watch you sleeping. It was so weird when our paths crossed later at school. Like fate or something. Maybe God’s giving me a chance to apologize for not trying hard enough in third grade.”