In a World Just Right Page 7

  She finishes some magic move to tie her hair back, steps forward, and shoves me in the chest real, real hard. . . .

  I’m lying on the floor of a public restroom. A pair of legs stands at a urinal, and a zipper zips. Shoes jump back. “What the—” A deep breath. “I didn’t see you, kid. Are you okay?”

  I don’t know if I am, but I nod and stand up. I don’t want this man calling security, not after the chase down the mall.

  “You sure?”

  “It happens sometimes. Doctor says I’m okay.”

  He shakes his head and leaves, and I’m alone. I stick my hands under the automatic faucet and wash off whatever I might have picked up on the bathroom floor. I rest against the counter and reassure my reflection in the mirror. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re okay.

  CHAPTER 8

  LAUGH, AND THE WORLD LAUGHS with you. laugh alone, and the world thinks you’re an idiot.

  Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

  My karma ran over your dogma.

  What happens if you get scared half to death twice?

  If you ate pasta and antipasto, would you still be hungry?

  So I’m feeling philosophical. Kylie’s sitting beside me in the passenger seat as I drive her home. We’ve said four words to each other since I rejoined her at the food court. I started with “I’m sorry,” and she ended with “Let’s go.”

  If she knew my thoughts were skirting the borders where philosophy meets humor, I think she’d be mad. I don’t know exactly what she’s feeling, but I don’t think it’s mad. I mean “mad” as in angry, not crazy. Let’s reserve the word “crazy” for me right now.

  I’ve come a tad bit unglued. It’s quite an emotional ride to go, in a matter of hours, from talking to your dream girl in real life, to bringing your made-up dream girl out for tacos, to chasing some world-hopping girl through the mall into a dream world.

  I wish I could reassure Kylie I wasn’t hounding some hot chick through the mall for fun, but I’m not sure what she thinks I was doing when I ran off. She sits in stubborn silence, or contemplative silence, energy focused, while my energy bounces throughout the car. This is the closest we’ve come to a fight in the three years since I made this world.

  Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.

  Enough, brain. We pull into Kylie’s driveway, the car stops, and I shift into park. Kylie makes no move to get out, so we sit for a moment while the car idles and I reconnect my tongue to the few neurons I can trust not to say the wrong thing.

  “Kylie,” I manage to say.

  She looks over the dashboard out into the world lit by headlights. “Something weird’s happening with you,” she says. “I feel weird around you today.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t like feeling icky like this.”

  I put my hands on the steering wheel, like pretending to drive somewhere gives me control. “How can I fix it?”

  “You can start by telling me why you went after that girl.”

  “It’s not what you think.”

  “What do I think?”

  “I recognized her, or thought I did, but it turned out she was somebody else.”

  She sighs. “In all the time I’ve known you, I’ve never heard you give a lame excuse instead of the truth.”

  “It’s not a lame . . .” But it is, and denying it only makes it lamer. Plus, I can’t help but reflect that I’ve given her plenty of lame excuses over the years for my odd behavior, and she’s only just now noticing this one?

  The colon separating minutes from hours on the digital clock blinks by the seconds as I sit there, helpless, completely unable to tell her anything that will make things right. Kylie is patient for a very long time.

  “Never mind,” she finally says. “Don’t worry. I just . . . I’m going in.” She opens the door and steps out, lingers a moment before closing it.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” I say.

  “Okay.”

  She shuts the door and waves as she crosses in front of the headlights. When her front door closes behind her and the entry light winks out, I feel as alone as I’ve ever felt. I wish that I could confide in her, but I don’t see how. Some girls, maybe all girls, would throw a fit if their boyfriend ran after a hot girl in the mall and then lied about why. She didn’t even ask why I returned from the bathroom when I set off in the other direction. Kylie might be a little subdued, but she took it all so well. I’m grateful that no matter what I do, she seems to take it well. A teeny tiny part of me, though, wishes she would kick and scream a little. It would be more normal.

  Laugh, and the world laughs with you.

  Cry, and the world couldn’t care less.

  Driving home is like driving through a void. I park the car in Uncle Joey’s driveway and squeeze my eyes shut to return to the real world. I emerge in the kitchen. All the lights are out except for the one by the front door that comes on with a timer. Uncle Joey isn’t home, and although I often prefer having the house to myself, I really wish he were here right now. I need parental guidance, or at least the feeling that someone’s looking after me.

  The house stands, big and silent. I’d give anything for the sounds of that girl breaking and entering upstairs. I wouldn’t even go up and scare her off. I’d just sit down here and listen to the footsteps and the creaks.

  I’m drawn to the only light in the house, the one by the front door. To reach it I have to go through the living room. I pick my way through the semidarkness in slow motion. Sitting on the mantel is a small photo tucked behind a vase—me with my mom, dad, and Tess. My sister is in my mom’s lap, set before a cake with one candle on it. I’m three years old sitting beside them, ready to blow the candle out. My dad stands behind us, the top of his head cut off by whoever took the picture. There was a time when the place I lived in was a house where I was never alone. At Uncle Joey’s the cold sofa, love seat, recliner, coffee table, rug, lamps, and tasteful accessories all are arranged as if for a photo shoot. No one actually lives among them. There is no life here.

  I’ve gotten myself into a mood, and usually the thing I do at times like these is visit a world. I could even make a new world.

  I won’t, though. All I want right now is what’s real. And what’s real is a Kylie who barely knows me, an uncle who’s still not home, and a family who’s still dead. I need to wallow in self-pity for a while, and I know the best way to do it.

  In the dark I go upstairs and down the hallway, straight past my room to the one at the end. I open the door and fumble inside for the light switch. I almost never come in here and don’t think I’ve ever turned on the light, but the switch is where switches usually are, and a stark overhead globe brightens as I flip the lever.

  I step farther inside an almost empty room with neutral cream wall paint and neutral beige carpeting. Nothing has ever been hung on the walls. It is the same as the day the builders declared the house finished. Except for the bins.

  A dozen green plastic bins sit double-stacked against the wall, each labeled in permanent marker: Jonathan’s room, Tess’s room, Mark and Christine’s room, silver and crystal, china, trophies, Mark’s work (two bins), Christine’s work (two bins), photos, Mom and Dad (my grandparents, who were Uncle Joey and my mom’s parents; both died when I was a baby).

  I have done this before, come in here and rummaged through the bins, but it’s been at least four years. I was in middle school the last time, lost in my loneliness after an incident with kids at school, wishing for the protective love of my family. I start with the bin for Mark and Christine’s room, my mom and dad’s stuff. I reach for a purple velvet pouch, open it, and spill my dad’s coin collection onto the rug. He had a couple hundred coins, mostly from other countries he had visited, coins worth no more than the value stamped on them, but there are a few more valuable, ol
der coins sealed in plastic that tumble out too. I run my hand through them, spread them out and remember how proud my dad was of this little collection, how he’d started it when he was a boy, with a single Canadian penny he’d gotten at the store as change for a candy bar. I find the penny, picturing him holding it in his palm and telling me how he went straight home and washed it with soap to try to make it shiny. Some of the older coins came from his own father’s collection when he died. Dying early is the rule in our family. I never met my dad’s dad.

  I put the coins back into the velvet pouch and reach into the bin. I pull out a two-pocket school folder, frayed and browned at the top. It’s a small collection of things my mother kept from her school days. On top is a computer printout, three sheets I have to unfold because they’re attached by perforations. The sheets have a column of holes punched out on either side, where they were fed into a printer. On these sheets is the first computer program my mom ever wrote. It’s in BASIC, and it’s the directions to make a Christmas scene with flashing tree lights and snow falling outside a window. She reproduced the scene years later for me and Tess, to show us that graphics had come a long way.

  I riffle through my mom’s papers. She once took creative writing, like me, and I read a few of her poems. She was better than me, but not nearly as good as Kylie. She also saved a few tests with perfect scores, some papers she wrote for history and English class, a copy of her school newspaper that includes an article she wrote about the gymnastics team. My mom did gymnastics from age three until she graduated college.

  My dad has no similar folder. He wasn’t quite as into school as my mom was, which is weird, since he ended up a teacher. Instead there is a shoebox with a few memories from the middle school where he worked. I open it and touch the newspaper articles and kid-drawn pictures and thank-you notes. One note, my favorite, is written on a folded piece of yellow composition paper:

  Dear Mr. Aubrey,

  Thanks for helping me get out of the locker yesterday. I wish you were my dad. I hope I wrote this letter in the write form for a letter.

  Sincerely,

  Justin Mably

  I wonder how many of his students wished my dad were their dad. He taught sixth grade, so his kids were three years older than I was when he died. I wish I had had three extra years to get to know him. A lot of my memories of him are really just things I’ve found in these bins.

  I put my mom’s and dad’s things away and take out Tess’s bin. This one opens on a collection of Lil Miss dolls. I don’t bother to take them out, just paw through to the layer of stuffed animals underneath and find Meow Meow, a cat drawn on an hourglass-shaped pillow. It’s wearing its third skin, hand-sewn by my mom because Tess loved it so much that she wore through the original stuffing cover and mom’s first replacement attempt. Around its middle Tess tied on a shawl my mom knitted that last Christmas. I don’t remember much about Tess’s toys, but Meow Meow stands out because Tess had a big fight with mom over bringing it on the plane. Mom wanted it to stay home, I guess, because she thought it would be lost or ruined. Turns out she was right.

  I put the cover back on Tess’s bin and prepare to torture myself with photos, but first I lift the lid of my own bin. I don’t want to touch anything inside it, just want to check on my things. Most of them didn’t get packed for a few years because I was still playing with them. My Game Boy is on top of my Thunderbirds Island play set and Where’s Waldo books. I distinctly remember how it felt to spread out this stuff on my bedroom floor in my old house. Tess made daily attempts to play with it, but I stopped letting her in my room after she broke a palm tree off my Thunderbirds Island ramp.

  I put the lid back on and settle in with the photos.

  Most of them are in albums. A few from my family’s last months are in envelopes from the developer because Mom didn’t have the chance to sort them. A separate bin within the bin contains the professional photos that were on the wall and mantel in our old house. I open that bin and pull out my school picture from third grade. I was a cute kid, I have to admit. I pull the backing off the frame and find my pictures from second grade, first grade, and kindergarten. The one thing all four little boys have in common is a smiling, unscarred face.

  I reassemble my picture frame and pull out Tess’s. Hers is a first-grade picture, and she’s missing a front tooth. She’s wearing a purple velvet dress I actually remember. Under Tess’s picture is a family portrait taken at the mall. We’re dressed in Christmas colors with a white-lit tree in the background. My dad and mom pose like catalogue models in their red crew-neck shirts and black pants. Tess wears a green-and-black dress, and I wear a green sweater with black pants. We’re a color-coordinated, Christmas-perfect family.

  Looking at us, though, I feel a little disturbed. Not because I’m longing for those good old days—well, I am, but that’s not what’s disturbing me—but because the picture reminds me of something I can’t remember, if that makes sense. I study the four faces, search the nooks and crannies of the Christmas tree, but the thing I need to see eludes me. I decide to leave the picture out and go through a few of the albums.

  The albums come in all shapes, sizes, and textures. My mom kept a distinct album for each major vacation, and then a chronological, numbered set containing photos of our daily lives. (Her life had reached album number thirty-one.) I open album thirty-one, the one whose events I most remember, and flip through the last year of our lives. I had a birthday party at an indoor playground. Tess had a birthday party in the backyard. Dad got his Teacher of the Year award. Mom painted the kitchen. Tess and I played at the beach. Mom and Dad played golf with Auntie Carrie and Uncle Joey. Dad helped Tess ride her bike. Mom hugged me. It’s when I’m near the end of the album that I see it.

  A picture of Mom and Tess sitting on the front doorstep. There are carved pumpkins to their right and to their left and a scattering of fall leaves under their feet. They’re wearing light jackets, and the wind is blowing their similarly long, dark hair. Mom has her arm around Tess, who smiles for the camera like she wants the world to see how many teeth she’s lost. And my mom. Her face.

  Looks very much like the pink-sweater girl’s.

  Though Mom’s face is older, I’m struck by how surely I know I saw it only hours ago. I grab the Christmas picture and study it again, this time concentrating on Mom, whose pose is less casual than in the pumpkin picture. The formality makes her appear less familiar, the angle a little off, but the same formality that makes Mom’s face more distant makes Tess’s face look older. Like in a few years she could look very much like our mother.

  It’s been ten years since these pictures were taken. Ten years to become a young woman.

  I’m reeling with the idea of it.

  A ghost? Resurrected? Never dead at all?

  I know with a certainty I’ve felt very few times in my life that that girl I chased in the mall is my sister.

  Tess.

  CHAPTER 9

  AFTER AN HOUR RUMMAGING THROUGH more pictures and all of Tess’s bin, I put everything away and start wandering around Uncle Joey’s dark house, hoping for Tess to reappear. She disappoints me. I watch TV downstairs for a while, though “watching” is a generous way to describe it. I’m remembering Tess in all her sisteryness, both fond and irritating memories of growing up together for her short six years. I hoped Uncle Joey would come home, but when he doesn’t appear by the eleven o’clock news, I go to bed.

  I guess I sleep okay, because the next thing I know my alarm is going off. It’s Saturday morning, seven thirty, and I have eight o’clock track practice in Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend. I pull on my running stuff, eat a piece of toast and drink a small glass of OJ, switch worlds, and head to the track.

  Kylie-Simms-is-my-girlfriend feels different this morning. The track, the trees, the sky, the rock I kick off lane six, the sound of hurdles being dragged into position, the spring-thaw smell of the damp infield�
��all are tainted by the idea that Tess might be alive. My whole concern has shifted from enjoying made-up world stuff to figuring out real-world stuff.

  Kylie stands with her coach by the triple jump pit. I’m struck with the thought that, judging from their serious postures, they’re probably discussing next week’s championship meet with Dunford High, and whereas yesterday it would have mattered a great deal to me that Pennington win, today I have trouble seeing how it matters. I’ve never had a thought like this before, and I know it’s because I expect Tess to intrude on this world at any moment. Tess has become very real, even if I don’t know what she is or how she is alive.

  I head for the opposite end of the long straightaway, to the starting line for the hundred and hundred hurdles, where the boys’ team stretches. The gray day threatens rain, and there is a sense that we’ll have to get practice in quickly before the sky opens. The girls’ and boys’ teams remain pretty separate during most practices, except for hurdlers and jumpers, who work with the same coach, so I don’t get to do much more than wave at Kylie during the warm-up before I’m off on the roads with my distance pack for a seven-mile run. By the time I get back, a light rain is falling, but Kylie’s sprinter group isn’t finished with their workout. They’re doing this thing called pacer chasers, where they pair up and run two hundreds, alternating who runs first and who has to wait a few seconds before chasing the partner down. It’s a workout that takes a while because they walk the opposite two hundred to get back to the starting line.

  Kylie is chasing down Mandy Breuger, the second leg on the four-by-one-hundred relay that Kylie anchors. The pair of them are well known at the state level, and to watch them battle down the straightaway—Kylie gaining after Mandy’s huge head start, Mandy fighting her off because she’s supposed to keep from getting caught—is a little like watching superheroes do battle.

  Again, I’m awash with this impression that nothing matters, like they could run world records tomorrow and it wouldn’t mean a thing because they aren’t real. They cross the line together and fold over with hands on knees, each catching her breath. It must have been their last one, because they stay there at the finish, collecting more and more pairs of sprinters as they come in. Then everyone does a two-lap jog and some quick stretching at the fence because the rain is falling a little more steadily.