Fans of the Impossible Life (19 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Mira's dad was home for a rare family dinner the next night, and Mira was making a good show of helping her mom set the table, getting the food out of the oven, filling the water glasses. She needed them in a good mood if she was going to bring up the summer.

Talk over dinner predictably turned to the topic of Julie and some new professor that she had this semester who they felt wasn't giving her a fair grade.

“She'll be fine,” Mira said. “It'll probably be good for her to get a B. It'll help her build character.”

“Of course she should get a B if she's doing B-level work,” her dad said, “but I've read her papers for the class and those are A papers.”

Mira tried her best not to roll her eyes. She couldn't believe her sister still emailed their parents her papers, as if they were finger paintings from kindergarten and she was a little kid
announcing, “Look what I can do!”

“She should just speak to the professor,” her mom said. “

“It's an insult that she should have to,” her dad said. “She's obviously too advanced for that class and the professor feels threatened by her.”

Julie was a nice, safe topic for her parents. They both thought that she was amazing, so the only thing up for debate was how the rest of the world was or was not adequately agreeing with them.

Mira waited for an appropriate lull in the Julie lovefest to bring up the summer. “So. Jeremy invited me to go to his family's summer house with him,” she said. “I guess they have a nice place by a beach.”

Her mom looked at her dad.

“Well. That was very generous of him,” her mother said.

Her father cleared his throat. He always did this when he was getting ready to say something significant. Mira had never seen him in action in the courtroom but she imagined that there must be a lot of throat clearing.

“We've actually been meaning to talk to you about the summer,” he said. “We were thinking you might want to spend some time catching up with the rest of your class.”

“What do you mean, catching up?”

“Well, if you made up classes for the next two summers you might be able to graduate when you were supposed to,” her mom said.

“You mean go to summer school?”

Her mother looked a little nervous, as if they might be missing the opportunity to make this sound like a great idea.

“If you want to get into a top college you're going to have to show them that you worked hard to make up for all of that lost time last year,” her dad said.

Mira looked down at her dinner plate. Tonight's offering was flavorless fish with flavorless vegetables and plain rice. A dietary-restrictions special. Her stomach suddenly started churning.

“So you've already planned my next two summers?”

“I know college seems like a long time away, but you have to start thinking about these things now,” her mom said. “And you're doing so well. We just want to see you continue to move in the right direction.”

“But I don't care about all of that.”

“Well, I assume you want to go to at least a good liberal arts school,” her dad said, “and with your record, getting into anything other than a state school is going to be difficult. St. Francis can help with college guidance, but keep in mind that you're now in competition with everyone at St. Francis for those same schools. They can only take so many people from each prep school. Some people are of the mind that it's actually more difficult to get in to the top schools from a private school for that very reason.”

“So then why didn't I stay at MouVi? If college is the most important thing?”

“You tell us, Mira,” her father said, his lawyer voice now
fully engaged. His I-have something-to-prove voice.

“Okay, let's just take a minute here,” her mother said, sensing that conversation was not quite going as planned.

“And what if I don't want to go to a liberal arts school? Maybe I want to go to art school.”

“Art school?” her father said. “No. Absolutely not. If you want to study art you can do it in liberal arts. You're too young to be deciding those things anyway. You can't be limiting yourself at this point in your life.”

“I bet you didn't say that to Julie when she said she wanted to be a lawyer when she was, like, twelve.”

“Art school is not an option, Mira,” he said. “End of discussion. You will spend the summer catching up so that you will be in a strong position to apply to colleges.”

Mira stared at her plate. Why did he always do this? Act like she didn't have a say in her own life? She could feel the tears starting behind her eyes.

“I don't understand what you want from me,” Mira said. “I'm doing okay. So I'm going to be punished by having my summers taken away from me? I should be able to have a fun summer.”

“I think you probably had enough fun when you spent nine months not going to school,” her dad said.

“You think that was fun?” Mira said in disbelief. “You think depression was, like, a laugh riot?”

“I think getting to spend all of your time doing nothing with your friends is probably something that's very easy to get used to, and that's not going to be acceptable anymore.”

“Maybe there's some room for negotiation here,” her mom said. “I'm sure there's a weekend when you could visit Jeremy.”

Mira stood up. She had to get away from the table.

“This is so unfair,” she said.

“No. This is not unfair,” her father said. “We have been very patient with you, and now that you are better you are going to need to deal with the consequences of that missed time.”

Mira looked at her mom in disbelief.

“Consequences? Seriously? You realize you are basically punishing me for something that I have no control over.”

“Obviously you have some control over it,” her father said.

“Mira . . .” Her mom tried to stop her but she was already out of the room, up the stairs and in her bed.

“Mira!”

She could hear her mother calling her from downstairs. She put a pillow over her head so she wouldn't have to listen anymore.

Mira hadn't been on the roof in years. She could climb out her bedroom window and get out onto the lip over the garage. Her mom used to let her do this and then at some point she decided it was too dangerous. Maybe as Mira got bigger. She lost that dexterity of childhood. An ability to adapt to different surfaces. Why, now, would it be harder to catch herself? Broken bones fuse back together quickly on children. Evolution wants them to survive.

Now it was two a.m. and she was perched on the sloped shingles, arms around her knees. Her parents' bedroom was on the other side of the house. They wouldn't see her out here. It was cold, but she wrapped herself in the oversized sweater coat that had been her favorite in sixth grade. She used to put the hood up in class and hide inside it. She brought it out here now to ask it some questions. It was the past, and the clear night sky and bracing cold felt an awful lot like the future. She wondered if she could get them to come to some kind of a consensus on things.

She knew her dad didn't believe that there was anything wrong with her. He thought depression was for people without real problems who didn't understand the value of hard work. He was the first one in his family to go to college, his parents taking multiple jobs to make sure he had enough money to make it through. Mira had all of the opportunities that they had worked so hard for, and she was squandering them.

But wasn't the story more complicated than that? Her father had a younger brother who killed himself after high school. No one ever talked about that. What if that was a legacy too? A kind of cellular depression passed down through the ages. Maybe her father was so scared that she was the same way that he wouldn't even consider it. Or else he thought his brother was weak too.

Mira couldn't stop feeling like she was the thing rotting away at the center of this family.

She had only been home from the hospital for a week when she and Sebby ran away. Her dad had been so careful with her
during that week. Her mother was fussing over everything, but he seemed to have decided that he was going to be the calm one. The level-headed one. He was at dinner every night. After they ate, they would watch old movies together in the family room. Mira would fall asleep on the couch, and he would carry her up to her bed like she was a little kid again. And then she ran away with Sebby, and when she got back everything was different.

It was her mother who met the state troopers halfway and drove Mira and Sebby back in silence, her dad's car pulled by a tow truck behind them. It was days before Mira even saw her father after that. He seemed to be needed at work until almost midnight every night that week. And when she did see him he was distant, no longer casual, kind dad. He seemed to be angry with her for not rewarding his patience. For not recognizing that “casual, kind dad” did not come easily to him. Her running away had been a betrayal of their attempt to try to put their family back together. She had abandoned them in a moment when they needed to be reassured that she was okay, that she would not try to hurt herself again.

After that, her parents had fallen into these new roles, which seemed to have now solidified into their new life. Mom as fussing caretaker, Dad as distant disapprover. They did not make her go back to Mountain View. She was allowed to spend her time with Sebby. But even that felt like a result of them giving up on her, or at least needing a break from trying to force her to be who they needed her to be. Going to St. F in the fall had been a kind of test, to see if she really was a lost cause after all
or if this was all just a phase. And unfortunately, passing the test meant to them that she should be doing more. That it was safe for them to start pushing her again.

She knew as soon as Jeremy invited them that it wasn't going to happen. She hadn't even bothered mentioning where this house was located. A return trip to Ptown, unsupervised by her parents, would not be in the cards.

So did this mean the boys would go without her? Would they really leave her like that? She gathered the sweater tighter around her. Could she survive a summer alone, knowing that they were together?

Everything was feeling up in the air again, and this was not a place where her brain did well. She had always been afraid of the dark, her mind racing to try to stay one step ahead of the inevitable, invisible thing lurking out there. As if a person was walking behind her too closely, breath she could feel on the back of her neck.

This late at night was when she got her best ideas. Thinking about her project, she wanted to write down all of her secret fears and tuck them into the sewn pockets so that they dragged on the ground behind her, picking up dirt and earth as she went. She could sit in her sewing corner in her room and work on it, give up on sleeping for the night and give in to the idea that this restless energy wanted her to use it. But then she remembered that she could work all night and the dawn would bring with it the reality that none of it mattered. She was foolish to think that it did.

This was the essence of the depression. If nothing meant anything, there were no choices. When she fell into the depths of tiredness she was deep inside a lack of possibility. She felt like a heap of meat tied to this planet for no reason. A foggy dream of a future where she could spend all of her time doing something that she loved, rather than fulfilling duties out of obligation, was nothing more than a fantasy.

She pulled the hood of the sweater around her face and asked for a sign. She remembered in the hospital the girl who thought that she was being sent messages through her soup, her cereal. Anything that came with a spoon had to be examined for spiritual content before she would eat it. She was insane, of course. But what if she was just tuned to the wrong frequency? Buddhist monks adjust their brains like radios to the waves of the universe. What if the insane are too raw to know which stations are real and which are just confused static?

She and Sebby were supposed to keep each other tuned to the right frequency, like twin receptors, each receiving noise that only made sense when combined. But when the rest of the world imposed, it got harder to hear any of it. She could feel him pulling away. Keeping secrets. That wasn't how this was supposed to go.

Late at night she sometimes felt that she could hear the messages on her own, something telling her that, if she just listened hard enough, she could do anything. That it could be important. Her little life. The things that she had to offer. She could hear the night sky telling her that she was not small, she was as big as
the whole universe. Maybe the universe itself was a sign. It was trying to tell her that she was it too.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Two days after I told them about Ptown, Mira texted me and Sebby.
Meet me at St. F bench in an hour. Wear butch shoes.

It was a Saturday, and the school was quiet except for the sounds of preseason baseball practice coming from one of the fields in the back. Sebby was sitting on the bench when I got there. I hadn't seen him in a few days. We could see Mira making her way down the block.

“Hi,” I said to Sebby.

“Hi,” he said.

“What's going on?” he asked.

“I don't know,” he said. “I got the same text as you.”

I sat down on the bench next to him, looked at my hands. I felt awkward suddenly. How was that possible? Wasn't this the same boy who slept next to me? My tiny twin bed somehow now felt too big when he wasn't there.

“Are you okay?” I asked Sebby.

But Mira was there before he could answer. Close up we saw that she was wearing some unstylish hiking boots that were caked with mud.

“Those are definitely butch,” Sebby said. He and I were both wearing sneakers.

“They're my sister's. From some rainforest trek or something. Come on.” She started walking away from the school and we followed her.

At the end of the street that St. F was on, past Peter's house and before it crossed over into the next town, there was the entrance to the nature reserve, a winding path that led up a hill into a small preserved county park.

It took us almost an hour to follow the path up to the top, Sebby complaining most of the way that we should have just made Rose drive us.

“We have to earn it,” Mira said.

At the top we were rewarded with the view. It was the highest point between there and the city, and on a clear day you could see the entire skyline. In the spring, warring bridal parties jockeyed for the best spots for pictures along the low stone wall. But on this day it was sparsely populated. Only the most committed dog walkers and joggers were braving the late-winter chill.

Mira put a quarter in one of the viewers and looked through. The wind whipped her blue coat around her. Sebby leaned out on the wall, looking below us.

“What do you see?” I asked Mira.

“People,” she said. “People who have escaped.”

“You can't really see people,” Sebby said.

“I can,” she said. “And I can see the future. Oh look. I see us. There we are. We look great.”

She stepped back from the viewer, away from the edge.

“Come on,” she said.

She led us away from the trail, away from the parked cars and dog walkers and panoramic view, into the woods. The dead branches and leaves crunched under our feet, trekking through this place that was left to what little nature still existed out here.

“How far are we going?” Sebby asked.

“Just a little farther,” Mira said.

We watched her make her way through the brush ahead of us. Then she stopped.

“Here,” she said when we reached her.

It was a round patch of dirt and leaves surrounded by sections of fallen trees. We stood on either side of her and looked at the ground.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

She thought for a minute, then said, “Help me clear it off.”

We watched her get down on her hands and knees, instantly dirtying the skirt she was wearing, and start pushing aside dead leaves and sticks with her gloved hands.

“Are you serious?” Sebby said.

“Yes,” Mira said, looking up at him.

We watched her for another minute, then Sebby and I got down on the ground and helped her. We worked until we had a
smooth patch of dirt in front of us.

“Now what?” Sebby said.

Mira looked at me. “You have to cast a spell for us, Jeremy,” she said.

“Me?”

“Draw us. The three of us together. This summer.”

I looked at Sebby. He nodded at me.

I went back into the woods behind us and found a sharp stick, came back and kneeled down next to the two of them in the dirt. I drew three figures sitting on the dock, the water, and the beach, and another figure lying on a towel.

“Who's that?” Sebby asked.

“The man in the pink Speedo,” I said.

I drew curly hair on one of the figures on the dock. Short hair on the other two.

I turned to Mira. “How's that?” I said.

She examined the drawing. It looked like something a caveman might have etched into stone.

“It's good,” she said.

“Now what?” Sebby said.

“Now we make it come true,” she said. She lay down in the dirt next to the drawing. The sun was getting lower and rays angled down into our tiny clearing. Sebby lay with his head on her stomach and motioned for me to complete the circle. I got down and rested my head on his chest, making sure to keep the drawing in the triangle of dirt between the three of us. Sebby's hand found the top of my head and he left it there. I closed my
eyes, feeling him breathing under me.

The three of us stayed like that for hours, until the sun had dipped so low that I was worried about finding our way back.

“Maybe we'll just stay at your house forever,” Mira was saying. “We'll live there and eat saltwater taffy and ride our bikes down the street in the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping.”

“It gets too cold in the winter,” I said.

“Not in my fantasy,” she said. “Always summer.”

“Eternal summer,” Sebby said.

The sun's departure felt like the promise of spring fading away. But lying there with them in the cold, I thought I could feel the ground softening under us, waking up to the call of our spell.

We were three bodies that didn't know the end of each other, breathing together. We knew that we would have to go back. Kick off the leaves and become three separate people that would go off into the world, forced to breathe on our own. But not yet. Not quite yet.