Notes from Ghost Town

T
hink about a moment, a little centimeter of time you’d happily exist in forever, if time could be laid out along the spine of a ruler. Maybe it haunts you in that blue inch of half consciousness just before you’re fully awake.

Here is mine: Miami, me and Stern. One week before I was supposed to go back to art school.

If I could stay there, in that moment before everything changed, I would stay there forever.

I’d see him standing before me, spun out, golden, suspended in light that looks like honey. The thick black curls of his hair, how wide his eyes get, blazing electric in the sun. The slender gap between his front teeth he always tries to hide with his hands when he smiles.

We’d be in the old shed behind Oh Susannah, the bright purple house my parents built before I was born. Stern named the house when he was four years old—the year he began taking piano lessons with my mom. It’s the first song Mom taught him to play when he was a Tiny. He came to associate the house with the song.

Oh Susannah, don’t you cry for me
. He sings it as soon as the house comes into view. I hear him singing it, and I see him approach.

And right there, I’d press the
freeze
button.

His smile would be spread across his whole damn god-awful glorious face. Silence. Nothing would have begun yet, nothing would have begun to end.
Freeze
.

I could stand here at the door to the splintery shed with that vibration of anticipation between us, staring at his god-awful glorious face forever. And we would never have to do anything but this.

And we would never have to change.

And he would never have to go away.

U
nfreeze
.

But only because there is no other way to tell this story.

“It’s too hot for manual labor, Liv,” Stern complains, as we lift a giant painting I made over the summer—a seascape, the sky bleeding aqua into the deep green waves—from a fat stack of other paintings inside the little storage shed behind Oh Susannah. My best friend’s voice is husky and smooth, not like it was when we were kids.

He heaves the canvas above his head, while I stoop to the dusty ground and lift a different painting—blackbirds, nestled between the thick leaves of palm trees. Stern and I both pause in the dark of the shed, still not willing to move back out under the sun. The cotton of my tank top sticks to every inch of my skin.

I notice the way Stern’s muscles twitch as he shifts his grip on the canvas, and I realize I’m twitching, too, just looking at him. And this scares me a little bit, but also thrills me.

“We’d better move now,” Stern says, tapping his big, neon Nike sandal-clad foot against the concrete floor of the shed. A cloud of dust rises. My eyes water. “Or we’re going to die like this.”

Stern moves toward Jasper, my rusted-up, old, frog green Capri, so-named because it reminded Stern of the color of the swamp frogs he’s always called by the same name.

Mom and Dad will drive me (and Jasper) back to school tomorrow, all the way from sea to shining lake. They will suffer the presence of each other in cramped-car-quarters one last time, for my sake. Then they will leave us—Jasper and me—to the mercy of Michigan and I will cross my fingers for an Indian summer before all the snow comes while they jet back home, where it is eternally hot. Mom will call to tell me they’ve arrived safely. What she’ll probably spare me is all of the details of what’s to follow once I leave: Dad’s departure (they decided he wouldn’t actually move out until I was out of the house), deciding who gets what, packing boxes piled up in the living room, and those Styrofoam popcorn things I used to love to pinch between my fingers, scattered across the hardwood floor.

They’ve been separated for three months already, divorced for one week. Mom knows the divorce is still too fresh for it to seem like anything but a momentary sickness to me. An open wound capable of being stitched back together.

“Come on, Liver!” Stern calls back, when he notices I’ve fallen behind.

“Slave driver!” I grunt, beginning to move backward out of the shed and to the trunk of the rusted-up old Capri at the top of the driveway.

Through a window, I see Dad inside, preparing dinner. Biscuit flour sifts through the clear of the window like softly falling snow. I didn’t even know what snow looked like until last winter. We don’t get much of the stuff in Miami. Stern made me Skype with him the first time it snowed, and position the computer outside the window so he could watch it with me.

We finally make it outside of the shed. We settle both paintings gently inside my trunk, our fingers slick with sweat.

“Nice,” I say with a sigh. “Okay. Can we stop now?” I smile huge, tucking my top lip under so my gums show.

He sticks his tongue out at me, wipes his hands off on his shorts, and starts walking back into the shed. I follow him. “We can stop when we’re finished,” he says. Then he stops, sighing. “I can’t believe you’re leaving already.” He fishes for something in the pocket of his shorts. “Oh, by the way—I made you something to remember me by on those lonely, lonely Michigan nights. A going-away gift.” He hands me a CD marked
L. STERN, PIANO GOD
(subtitled in very tiny red letters,
Lucas Stern vs. Juilliard: Practice sessions of our nation’s foremost musical savant
).

I grip the CD in one hand, bringing it dramatically to my
heart. “Wow. What an honor, L. Stern, piano god. Because I was just thinking that listening to you practice the same audition piece with my mom hundreds and hundreds of times just wasn’t enough.”

He grins. “I know, right? Don’t you wish you could be there at the recital to see the piano god himself, in real time? Especially in case he screws it all up and needs someone to make him feel less shitty about it afterward.”

A fresh bead of sweat trickles down my back. “There’s no chance of the piano god screwing it up,” I say. “And you know I’d be there if my stupid trimester didn’t start so early.”

“Now, his next great challenge: eating two separate dinners with your parents, alone, every night while you’re gone.”

“Well,” I start, laying the CD safely atop a box marked
LIV: MICHIGAN
in dad’s chicken scratch as my jaw tightens, “you’ve still got a couple of single-dinner days before Dad moves in with Heather.” I take a deep breath and shoot Stern a pitiful glance. “Wish there was a CD to remedy that….”

He swivels the tip of one sandaled foot into the concrete ground. “I’m sorry, Liver,” he says softly, “I didn’t mean to bring it up again.” His basketball shorts begin to dip down his hips a bit and he tugs them up a little higher before bending to lift the next painting. I see the line of dark hair that snakes down from his belly button, the flat of his belly where once there was little-boy chub.
The length, the height of him. The flush of his skin. The red swell of his lips.

“Well, they’re practically your parents, too,” I say, quickly, hoping words will shut out the unexpected buzzing feeling he’s sending through my body. “I mean, you’ve definitely hung out with my mom way more than I have this summer.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call drilling the same piece for a Juilliard audition until my fingers go numb ‘hanging out,’” he says, hugging one of my half-assed paintings into his chest. “Though your mom is way cooler than mine ever will be.”

“Aside from the whole schizophrenia thing, you mean?” I say it as a joke, but the word—
schizophrenia
—brings a weird taste to my mouth.

Some days, she’s still fine. Better than fine: brilliant. Stern still takes lessons from her, when she’s actually taking her meds, (when she’s not so preoccupied with how they
dull her creative spirit
), when she’s safe—when her fingers glide across the keys and what results is the kind of music that makes you stop just where you are and notice every beautiful thing around you.

His
fingers can do this, too. I listen to his music as I paint sometimes, up in my hardwood triangle of a room.

Now, as I watch his long, beautiful fingers curled around the edge of my canvas, I feel a weird, sudden thrill, like being buckled into the swaying plastic seat of a roller coaster, just before it rockets downward. This feeling has
been building in me for a long, long time—a thing I still don’t quite know how to define.

Until this past year, I never even looked at him like a boy. I know everything about him: that his first
real
kiss was with Marisol Fuentes, in eighth grade, in Marisol’s mom’s hot tub. I know that, as a little kid, he used to like to play dress-up in his mother’s clothes, complete with headbands and clip-on earrings. I know that his biggest fear is getting in an accident and losing his hands.

But none of this ever helped me to realize that one day something would change without either of us quite understanding How or What. Stern—my funny, chubby, nerdy little Stern—suddenly became this other
being
with stubble and a little chin cleft that gets even deeper when he smiles.

I can’t deny it, no matter how hard I try. And I do try. But Stern is undeniably and unquestionably hot. How did I not notice before?

I meet his eye for a second and there’s a glint there—like he knows, too, that something has … shifted. We squat down and wrap our fingers around the next frame, an oversized piece, and—eyes on each other—haul ass back into the double-balls-hot outdoors. I watch some lopped-off power lines wriggle in the breeze. The heat’s dizzying, the palm trees quiet and still, heavy leaves drooping. Devil sun.

We’re near the end of the stack of paintings, and I’m leaning against the hot metal side of the car, probably
singeing holes into my tank top. Stern’s got a funny smile—one that makes his face look sort of monkeyish—as he walks toward me, carrying one of the final paintings. “I found my favorite one,” he tells me, raising his eyebrows.