All We Left Behind (20 page)

It's all negative space.

*  *  *

The purple sky is salted with stars. There aren't any streetlamps on the road, and without them everything is indigo shadow and pavement. Kurt sits in my passenger seat and I can't believe my father let me drive him back to school for his car. But that's the thing . . .

My father trusts me.

The smell of sweat rolls in from the backseat, and I hear the crash of water in my ears. Rolling waves, yearning, and all the things that are new to me. How softness can ache out the past I regret. How skin has a language made of quietness and breath. How Kurt's body is an ocean and it capsizes me.

I don't know if there's a surface or if I'm supposed to learn how to breathe underwater. I only know that there's an underness. A space below, where there's nothing but uncertainty, and I'm not sure who I am anymore.

I turn my wheels into the parking lot and I don't know what sleeping with Kurt makes me. For Lilith, sex is alchemy, gold power and hot. But as I pull the car to a stop and Kurt looks in my direction, I feel that hollow space and what has been lost. That single word that no longer defines me.

Virgin.

And I'm naked without it.

The entire parking lot is
empty when Marion pulls into the school, and for a second I think I might sleep in my car tonight. I don't want to see Josie or Dad and have them ruin this. This day was like something outside of my life.

Something better.

I lean over and kiss Marion's ear. Her hair smells of salt water and I want to cut the headlights and take her into the backseat again. I slide my hand around her waist, but her body stiffens.

“Look . . .” She pulls back to face me. “I'll, uh . . . I'll see you at school.” She gives me a quick peck on the lips, like a grandma, and nods to my car. I shift in her father's pants, hating that I put them on.

“Do you . . . ,” I start, but there's sand on the dash.

Our sand.

I turn back and kiss her. Really kiss her. Her mouth opens for me and my hand slides up her neck. She tastes better than running. Better than air.

“Kurt.” She breaks away and threads her fingers through mine. But only long enough to put my hand back in my lap.

“We could—”

“My dad,” she interrupts. “I have to . . .”

She lets go of me and presses herself into the shadow by the door. Sand and cold fabric touch my ankle. I look down and it's my jeans wadded up on the floor. Stiff and half-wet.

“Right,” I say, bending down and grabbing my pants.

I get out and she does a U-turn and speeds through the lot. I watch her brake lights through the trees.

Red driving away from me.

It unsettles me like I'm seeing Mom driving into the dark. Like there's something on the other side of this. Something she can't come back from.

*  *  *

My mom's eyes were angry that night, glaring at Josie shattering empty eagles into the trash.

The porch light was covered in moths and there was a gash on Mom's face. It was a thin slice below the eye, where her guitar string snapped and lashed hard.

“Kurt, move,” Mom hissed, her breath wet with eagle fire as she stumbled on the bottom step and pushed past me.

“The store's not open,” I said, running after her.

“At eight o'clock?” She turned to me with a fierce calm in her eyes, black as lake water. Her voice was smooth too, steady enough to mask her unsober. “You owe me.” She jabbed a finger into my chest and nodded to the eagles
I'd dumped down the sink. “You're going to pay for every bottle.”

“You can't drive!” I said as she marched for the truck.

“Every bottle,” she hissed, waving me away.

I barreled my thirteen-year-old shoulder into her leg, taking her by surprise, and her keys clanged against the truck and dropped to the ground.

We both flung to the dirt like animals and I could hear Josie snickering from the porch. I wanted to scream at her, but I had to get the keys first.

My fingers hit metal and I squeezed, my fist tightening around gravel and sharp teeth. I stalked away from the truck, watching Mom still on her hands pawing at the ground, and Josie whistled, like I'd scored a point.

“You going to call Dad?” I yelled at Josie, but she didn't budge.

“Like he'd leave work.”

Light flooded over us and I turned into the beam of her headlights in my eyes. How could—? “Silver Wings” filled my ears, coming from her radio, but then Merle Haggard was drowned out by a screech of tires as her truck sped out of the driveway.

Red taillights streaking through the trees.

I opened my hand to see dirt and rocks and a metal chain. It was a bracelet, full of charms that had felt like keys. But they weren't. It was nothing but a fistful of all the things I couldn't do to get her to stay. Just like Marion,
speeding away though the dark. Like all I deserve is this. Like there's nothing left for me but red driving away.

*  *  *

Josie's on the couch when I get home. The TV's on, casting blue light over her body. She sits motionless. Like something inhuman. Like something dead.

I take a seat on the couch and I'm sure she can feel my weight beside her, but she doesn't look up. There's an empty bowl in her lap and a spoon in her hand—scraping the sides. Round and round.

There are black lesions on her neck and I don't want to imagine what she thought was inside her to pick those bloody. I follow her eye line and she's not looking at the TV. She stares at an empty patch of the wall, at nothing.

The smell of salt water makes me want to tell her about my day and Marion, but her eyes are sunk so deep in the black hole of her features that the television light can't find them.

“What happened to you?” I say, but it comes out raspy and small.

Her spoon stops moving.

I want to say more but it feels like I've caught her crying, like that night in the hall after Mom died, barking at me and making it clear how much no one needs me. Like I walked in on something I'm supposed to ignore. Something that needs no witness. Especially mine.

It shouldn't be as easy as it is to walk away from Josie and
leave her in that empty room. Habit maybe. If you train yourself to look away enough times it becomes a reflex. Only I don't know why Marion is different. Why seeing her cry in my car was something I was allowed to look at. That vulnerability. Fighting to be seen in the middle of all the shit.

I climb onto my bed and think of the beach. How being with Marion makes me feel . . . I don't know, better. Not numb.

I pull out my guitar and play quietly. Not because I need an anchor, or something to hold on to, like Mom. But because I'm tired of the quiet. Because I want the sound, loud and full and possible.

I can't sleep.

I lie in bed in the morning with this cavern inside me. A piece missing. The piece that knew how to be the virgin, but doesn't know how to not be one. I don't regret sleeping with Kurt, but somehow I thought I'd feel different—
be
different. That's all Lilith ever talked about. It's all anyone ever talks about. How sex is some kind of transformation into adulthood. How it makes you no longer a child.

But I don't feel grown up. I don't feel Lilith's fire.

All I feel is uncertainty and dark. I'm not even sure what I'm supposed to do when I see Kurt. What does yesterday make us? We aren't nothing, but I don't know that we're something, either. He doesn't know me. No one knows me. Not the invisible parts. And yesterday feels like one more phantom piece of skin.

I get dressed and drive to school early. There's a mist clinging to the leaves, hiding everything. I stand near the east entrance of school, watching the mountain as the fog
yawns. It stretches thin with the wind, revealing a blush of maple orange beneath it. Only a moment later the clouds cover that whisper of gold like it never existed.

For a moment it feels like yesterday didn't happen. Or at least, it feels like I could pretend it didn't, and I could sweep it under the fog and go back to who I was before. I texted Lilith and told her to drive to school without me this morning, because I haven't figured out how to tell her.
If
I'm going to tell her.

I'd rather walk into those mountains, where the lips of the fog can eat me.

In the library I sit by the window and pull out my English homework. I can't see the soccer field from my angle, and I wonder if I should go and wait for Kurt. Am I supposed to wait for him before school now? I attempt to read, but my mind keeps drifting to Kurt and yesterday's ocean, of floods, and music, and this empty place inside of me.

“That book must be really good.”

I startle and see Abe standing at the edge of my table.

“Oh, it's, uh . . .” I wave the book around, searching for words.

“Riveting, I can tell.” His white shirt is pressed and curls hang in his eyes. “You haven't turned a page for about thirty minutes,” he says, sliding onto my seat with me and taking my book. He smells like fabric softener and closes the novel without marking the page. “What's up, M? You're never at school this early.”

I shake my head and look at the fog.

“What's wrong?” he asks, and I suddenly wonder if I
am
different. If I can't hide this. My eyes feel wet and I grit my teeth to keep it inside.

“I'm fine,” I manage, and he doesn't push it. He leans his shoulder against mine and sits there like we're in the grass counting dandelion seeds caught in the sun. The pressure of his shoulder makes me want to unsnap each of his buttons and resnap them back up again. Run my finger over his collarbone. I don't know if it's Abe's collarbone I'm thinking of or Kurt's, just that I want the contact.

I shiver and he looks up.

Is this what Lilith meant? That need for contact. Touch. Like it could hold us together again? I shake myself, not wanting to accept anything Lilith's said, and unsure what to do with this burn in my skin. I can't tell if this heat is really for Abe or if I'm mixed up because of Kurt or if it's stupid hormones.

“Hey,” Abe says quietly, keeping his weight on my shoulder but looking out the window. “Did I ever tell you about the first time I shot a gun?”

I pinch my eyebrows at him. “What? What does that have to do with anything?”

“Have you ever shot a gun?”

“No.”

“It's freaky,” he says, and I laugh a little, but he's serious about this. “I was eleven, and my dad took me to the practice
range behind the police station. He wanted to teach me about guns so I'd be comfortable around them, since he's always got one on his belt when he's on duty. Plus there are three more in our house.

“But the second he pulls out that .22, I don't want to touch it. I hate it even more when he forces me to take it and I see how small my hand is holding it.” Abe stretches out his fingers and starts massaging his palm. Like maybe he remembers holding the gun.

“I ask my father if it's loaded and
stupidly
I flip the gun over to look down the barrel. He rips it away from me so fast I think I'm a criminal he's disarming. ‘Of course it's loaded!' he yells at me, and starts lecturing about how guns aren't toys, which I know, because he tells me every day of my life.” Abe crunches his hand into a fist. “So he proceeds to show me the bullets, and where the safety is, and how I'm supposed to hold it with two hands and not one. And then he puts it back in my hand, points me at the target, and asks: ‘Are you afraid of it?'

“ ‘Are you afraid of it?' ” he says again, tapping the bottom of his fist on the tabletop, each tap punctuating a word. “I'm holding this gun, and even with two hands it's
heavy.
It's nothing like the plastic water toys my friends and I used to run around the woods with. And I want to tell him I'm fine. I
want
to be comfortable with this the way he is. But it's loaded. It has real bullets in it. And as much as I don't want to disappoint him, I tell him the truth. ‘Yes,' I say. ‘It scares the shit out of me.' I swore and everything.”
He smiles for a second, but it drops quickly. “And I'll never forget this: He looked at me with this stone-cold face and said, ‘Good. If you're afraid of it then you'll respect it.' ”

Abe looks at me, and my pinkie hooks itself in his. It's the slightest touch, but somehow it feels like the right thing to do in this moment.

“Did you shoot the gun?” I ask quietly, and he nods.

“Yeah. It felt like it was going to take my arm off.” His pinkie rubs lightly against mine. “I was so rattled I wouldn't even pick up a water gun after that.”

“Have you ever shot a gun again?”

He shakes his head no.

“Would you?”

“Not unless my life depended on it.”