Picture Us In The Light(64)
We both stop, and he motions for me to go ahead. But it’s too late; my face has gone hot, my courage dissolved. “Nothing. What were you going to say?”
“I mean, they’ve definitely backed off some compared to last year, but I don’t think they’re actually like any more cool with me going to like Irvine or something. They’re just worried about me going over the edge.”
“You’re definitely not going to end up at Irvine.”
He grins. “Who knows, though, right? I could drop out and become a pro surfer.”
“You hate the ocean.”
“That’s true.” He swivels his chair toward me and kicks lightly at my ankle. “You know dolphins don’t need to sleep for days? And they play with their prey before they kill—”
“Yes, I know, you’ve told me that like six times.” He has a thing about dolphins. “But you’re definitely not—”
The door pushes open, and we both go quiet. It’s Regina, backlit by the morning sun. She blinks at us. “What are you guys doing in here?”
“We got to school early.” Harry stands and kisses her forehead. Maybe I’m just imagining it that he deflated a little when she came in. Just projecting, probably, because of those times I feel it myself, that urge in me that resists other people wedging apart a moment I didn’t even realize I was so invested in. “What are you doing?”
“Working on my piece for the center spread.”
I knew I’d see her, obviously, but I didn’t think it would be yet, and it feels like staring into an eclipse. I say, quietly, “Hey.” What I don’t say is Please don’t think I’m a terrible person. Please don’t think what happened to Sandra was even a little bit my fault. Please don’t tell Harry. When I meet her eyes, I can tell—I know her—she knows exactly what I’m thinking. That’s the hardest thing to walk away from in somebody: those spaces where you’re known and mirrored back.
“Hi, Danny,” she says. Her real voice, the one she uses in private, is pitched lower than her public one—plain and unadorned, missing all the embellishments she has when addressing a roomful of people, or a group. And I trust it, less because of that and more because, in all the time I’ve known her, it’s how she sounds when she’s at her most vulnerable. “Harry told me about your plan.”
I bring my chair-swiveling to a halt. “Ah—yeah.”
“You’re going through with it? You’re just staying here?”
“Assuming I can pull it off.”
I have been through a whole lifetime with Regina; I could never untangle her from my history even if I wanted to. You always think people will give you a sign, that when you know them as well as I know her you’ll be attuned to it, that even within those secrets hanging between you you can parse meaning in a look, a careful word.
Regina gives me more than that, though. She sits across from me and touches my wrist, and when I meet her eyes she offers a tiny smile, one that means—I know her—we’re okay. “I’m really glad you’re back.”
It’s funny how almost losing something makes you see it all differently—makes it rise up in your vision all shining and bright.
I miss my house and my old life, my real life, constantly. Whenever I go by our old street the anger that’s always burning in me flares up, the flames licking at my lungs. But at least here I have friends, a place I belong, a world I’ve made myself a part of that I can find myself in. We’re knitted together, all of us, in our history and hopes and grief and guilt and all those things we saw each other through and in twenty years any one of the people I know from here could call me up and ask me a favor, and I’d do anything for them. I would. In Regina I have someone who knows probably the worst parts of me and still thinks there’s enough left over worth keeping, who decided to keep our friendship even knowing what she knows, which I will never take for granted. And in Harry I have—still not sure how I’d put it, exactly, but what I do have I managed to keep. For now.
So there’s a part of me that, when I’m at school, is always something close to euphoric, the way it feels when you slam on the brakes right in time and can see over the ledge. When you’re with the right people you can feel like you’re hidden wherever you are. But every morning, as soon as I wake up, that dull gray patch that retreated in the night flies back to me and spreads itself expertly and efficiently over my whole body. It dims the light around me and pulls a dark film over my eyes. Mr. X watches, grimly indifferent, reminding me, always reminding me, that I deserve nothing more than this, demanding some objective proof of what I think I’m worth, why I should’ve been the one who lived.
I’m scared all the time—all the time—of losing this. It could be anything. Maybe some kind of important mail will get sent home and I’ll miss it, or I’ll accidentally say the wrong thing in front of a teacher or one of our old neighbors saw the moving trucks and will call and report me to the school. (The real Mr. X still lives there, probably, if he hasn’t white flighted himself somewhere free of Ranch 99s and Tapiocas Express.) And I’m terrified I’ll slip up and my parents will find out.
My parents have, by all appearances, accepted the course of our new lives as inevitable. We don’t talk about my mom living with the family she’s paid to be a part of; when she spends the night here on weekends and my dad’s gone we say nothing as she checks the deadbolt dozens of times and peers motionlessly out the peephole when we hear footsteps coming down the hallway. And when they ask me about the new school it’s only questions you’re supposed to answer like you’re happy: Your new school has less homework, that’s nice, huh?