The Rest of Us Just Live Here (2 page)

Over the course of my life, I’ve told Henna about my mad, desperate feelings for her exactly zero times.

We’ve got a lot in common: a thing with anxiety we don’t really like to talk about, best friends who we kind of love more than any girlfriend or boyfriend could really compete with, parents who … aren’t the best. We’ve got Mel in common, of course, so that’s good, and we’re also both not indie kids, even though she’s totally got an indie kid name (but it’s because her dad is foreign, so it doesn’t count; and I guess in Finland, “Henna” isn’t very indie kid anyway. Plus her last name is impossible).

We’ve been friends since we were eight, over half my life now, though mostly with my sister as an intermediary. I’ve been madly, desperately in love with Henna from when we were about twelve. She started dating Tony Kim slightly before then, which was, of course, the thing that made me realize the madly, desperately thing. She broke up with Tony this past New Year and has been single since then. It’s now May.

So what have I been doing for the last five months? I refer you to “zero times” above.

“Coast is clear,” Mel says, as the four of us come down our driveway, dogs barking eternally in distant yards, and see my mom’s car gone. We live in a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a suburb of a city that takes about an hour to get to. There’s nothing out here but woods and the huge great Mountain on the very near horizon that’ll blow up one day and flatten everyone and everything in this part of the state. That could happen tomorrow. It could happen five thousand years from now. Life, eh?

The road to our house only got properly paved last year, and our neighbours are a mixture of professionals like my parents who wanted a bit of land to build a house on and other people who think Fox News is too liberal and build bunkers for their guns. Out here, people either grow organic turnips or vast fields of marijuana. My parents do daffodils.

Don’t walk on them. I mean, seriously, don’t walk on them.

Henna’s parents live down the road, but that’s coincidence because we actually know them from the church both our families have gone to for a hundred years. Henna’s mom is the music minister there. She and Henna are the only black people in the whole church. That’s our tiny bit of the world for you. Henna’s dad is a white Finnish foot doctor (so, like,
really
white) who does mission trips to Africa with Henna’s mom. That’s where Henna is going to spend this summer, the last summer she could spend with her high school friends before leaving for (a very Christian) college. She’s going to be in the Central African Republic, speaking high school French to Central African Republicans who are going to get foot doctoring and music ministry whether they want to or not.

What this means is that five months of a last chance since her break-up with Tony has narrowed down to four and a half weeks of a last chance until graduation. Given my success rate to date, I don’t think my odds are very good.

Mel lets us in the house, and we aren’t two steps inside before Mary Magdalene, our tubby little orange cat, is running a purring streak around Jared’s legs. He touches her nose lightly with his finger. “I see you,” he whispers, and Mary Mags does an ecstatic lopsided spin to the floor, like a falling propeller.

“Anyone want anything?” Mel says, heading to the kitchen.

Jared asks for an energy drink. Henna asks for an energy drink. I ask for an energy drink. “Little help?” Mel calls from the kitchen. I go over. I look at the glass of water she’s poured herself. “I’m fine,” she says quietly. “We’re out of Diet Coke and I hate the taste of those things.” She’s got a point about the energy drinks, which are all called Monstropop or Rev or Lotusexxy and which are, yeah, kinda disgusting, but so filled with caffeine I’m unlikely to sleep until college.

We’re next to the fridge. I open the door. There’s a bottle of Diet Coke in the back. It only has a little bit in it, but still.

“Mikey,” she whispers.

I look into her eyes.

“Sometimes it’s just hard,” she says. “It doesn’t mean anything. And you saw me at lunch.”

I did see her at lunch. And she’s right, it was fine. Home is always harder for her.

I tap the rims of each of the four glasses in turn with my fingers. I tap them again. “Dammit,” I whisper, and tap them again. Mel just waits. Three times seems to be enough, so I shut the fridge door and help her take the drinks out to the couches.

“What do you think that was in the Field?” asks Henna, looking worried. “With the indie kid?”

“I hope nothing,” Mel says. “And even if it is something, they’d better hold off until after graduation.”

“I just mean I hope he’s okay,” Henna says, and we all can tell she’s thinking of her brother.

The indie kids, huh? You’ve got them at your school, too. That group with the cool-geek haircuts and the charity shop clothes and names from the fifties. Nice enough, never mean, but always the ones who end up being the Chosen One when the vampires come calling or when the alien queen needs the Source of All Light or something. They’re too cool to ever, ever do anything like go to prom or listen to music other than jazz while reading poetry. They’ve always got some story going on that they’re heroes of. The rest of us just have to live here, hovering around the edges, left out of it all, for the most part.

Having said that, the indie kids do die a lot. Which must suck.

“Where’s Merde Breath?” Jared asks, changing the subject. Our little sister, Meredith (and yes, I know, Michael and Melinda and Meredith and even Mary Magdalene the cat. We once even had a Labrador called Martha, but she bit a porcupine one day and that was the end of that. Apparently you
can
put a price on love. It’s slightly less than $1,200 for doggy face surgery).

Anyway.

Meredith is ten, a loon, maybe a genius (our mom is certainly counting on it), and is hopelessly, painfully ensnared by Bolts of Fire, the country and western boy band specifically created to hopelessly and painfully ensnare ten-year-old girls, even the geniuses. She’s played their biggest song, “Bold Sapphire” (by Bolts of Fire, get it?), exactly 1,157 times. I know, because I checked, after begging my parents for mercy from having to hear it a 1,158th. We’re all a little obsessive, us Mitchell kids.

Jared is a firm second in her affections after Bolts of Fire, though. He’s big, he’s friendly, and there’s the whole cat deal. If there’s one thing we all, every one of us, agree on, it’s that Jared is going to be a great dad.

Not that any of us have first-hand experience of one, really, except Jared, which figures.

“German lessons,” I tell him. “My mom didn’t think she was being challenged enough at school.”

Jared blinks. “She’s ten.”

“They’re still hoping they’ve got one left who isn’t screwed-up,” Mel says, flicking on a downloaded TV programme we’ve all already seen as background noise.

Henna looks at me. “You’re not screwed-up.”

“No one in this family is screwed-up,” says our mother, coming through the front door. “That’s the official campaign line and we’re sticking to it.”

She drops her purse on the table by the door, already frowning at the four teenagers draped across her couches. She’s two hours early. “Hello, everyone,” she practically booms, seeming friendly enough, though Mel and I can already tell we’re going to pay for this later. “Look at all the feet up on the furniture.”

Jared and Henna slowly put their feet on the floor.

“Hello, State Senator,” Jared says, politely.

“Just ‘Senator’ is the protocol, Jared,” my mom says with a tight smile, “even for a lowly state government official. As I’m sure you must know by now. Hello, Henna.”

“Mrs Mitchell,” Henna greets, her voice three sizes smaller than a minute ago.

“You’re early,” Mel says.

“Yes,” my mom says. “I can see how you might think that.”

“Where’s Dad?” I ask.

“Still with your grandma.”

“How is she?”

Mom’s smile gets even tighter. “You two staying for dinner?” she asks Jared and Henna, somehow communicating clearly that they’re not actually invited.

“No, thank you,” Jared says, getting up, downing his energy drink in one. “We were just heading out.”

“You don’t have to leave on my account,” my mom says, meaning that yes, yes, they do.

“Homework,” Henna says, gathering her things quickly. She leaves her energy drink on the coffee table. It’s already sweating beads of water down the side, and I can feel my heart start to race at the need to either put a coaster underneath it or wipe the water away or something.

One glass of energy drink. One.

Mel sees me staring at the glass, picks it up off the table, and drinks it down, even though she particularly hates Lotusexxy.

I give her a pleading look of thanks.

While I’ve been trapped, Jared and Henna are at the door already, waving their goodbyes. The door shuts behind them. It’s just us family now. Embrace the warmth.

“It’s bad enough you’re friends with that boy–” my mom starts.

I get up so fast, she stops mid-sentence. I don’t put on my jacket. I don’t take anything with me except the car keys I’ve already got in my pocket. I’m out the door before she can do anything more than give me a shocked look.

I catch Jared and Henna out on the walk. “Ride home?” I say.

It takes about three seconds to drop Henna off down the street, though I do get a full eye-contact thank you from her as she gets out. My mad, desperate head thinks of mad, desperate things to say to her, but of course I don’t. Then Jared and I are driving, even though his own car is still parked at my house. I turn the opposite direction from where he lives.

He says nothing.

We drive until the sun sets. There are more back roads into and out of these woods than anyone can count, than are probably on any map. You can drive and drive and drive and just see forest and fields, the occasional cow, the occasional elk, the even more occasional moose (the animal Patron Saint of Perpetual Embarrassment; I can relate, though not to being Catholic, which I’ve apparently decided mooses are). The Mountain glows in and out of view, turning pink, then blue, then shadow, as it watches us wander.

I finally stop in a turn-off by a glacial lake. Huge, crystal clear, cold as death.

“Is it Henna?” Jared finally asks.

“It’s not Henna,” I say, into the dark. “Well, it is. But not just that. And not my parents either.”

“Good, because I’m fine about that. The bad feeling between me and your mom is entirely mutual.”

I stare out into the really amazingly dark night. There are more stars over my part of the world than anywhere else I’ve ever seen. “Four and a half weeks to go.”

“Four and a half weeks,” Jared agrees. “Graduation.”

He waits. I wait, too. After a long minute, I turn on the cabin light and hold up my hands to him. “What am I looking at?” he asks.

I point to my fingertips. They’re wrinkled and cracked. “Eczema.”

“And?”

I turn off the cabin light. “I washed my hands seventeen times this morning after taking a piss before History.”

Jared exhales a long, long time. “Dude.”

I just swallow. It’s loud in the silence. “I think it’s starting again.”

“It’s probably just the pressure of everything,” Jared offers. “Finals, your massively unrequited love for Henna–”

“Don’t say unrequited.”

“…your massively
invisible
love for Henna…”

I hit him on the arm. It’s friendly. More silence.

“What if I go crazy?” I finally whisper.

I feel Jared shrug. “At least it’ll piss off the Senator.”

We laugh. A little.

“You won’t, Mikey,” he says. “And if you do, I’ll be there to pull you back.”

Which makes me feel…

Okay, look, Jared likes guys. We all know it, he’s told us, even though he’s never officially had a boyfriend (because who the hell is he going to meet out here who isn’t a creepy old farmer?) and he never really talks about it or what he gets up to on those weekend evenings when we know he’s not working, but still says he can’t come out with us. And fine, he and I have messed around a few times growing up together, even though I like girls, even though I like
Henna
, because a horny teenage boy would do it with a tree trunk if it offered at the right moment, but you’re going to have to hear this the right way when I tell you that I love exactly three people in the entire world, excluding whatever this is with Henna.

Three people. Mel. Meredith. And the third person isn’t either of my parents.

“You want to talk crazy?” Jared says.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I know.”

There’s so much crazy in this world, my counting and hand-washing and door-locking and checking and tapping can seem like raging mental health by comparison. Jared’s crazy is way crazier than mine, though I don’t think his makes him lie awake at night in bed, thinking it’d be easier if he was–