This Is the Story of You (2 page)

At school it was fourteen of us in the Class of O'Sixteen—give or take, less is more.
Maybe where you're from they need three buildings skirted out with parking lots (students to the right, teachers in the shade) to accommodate the up-and-coming citizens of the world. Not in Haven.

First of all, we had our Modes, or else we walked. Second of all, the old bank they'd converted into our school fit us just fine. Into its basement (south to the vault's gloomy north), they'd carved a cafeteria that equaled Gym that equaled Arts and Music that equaled Study Hall or, also, Assembly Hall. On the three upper floors, in tall, pilaster-peeling spaces, they'd arranged four classrooms per. First grade through fourth: Level 1. Fifth grade through eighth: Level 2. Ninth grade through twelfth: Level 3. Sometimes we could hear the kids on Level 1 singing their Duck, Duck, Goose. Sometimes, from Level 2, the reverbing of
Of Mice and Men
. Sometimes Mr. Friedley would stand at the bottom of the spiraling central steps with the hole up through the middle and roar:
Go forth and conquer.
History was ceaseless in the repetition of itself. We lived with a severe case of déjà vu.

Except: On this particular day, when the weather was so revved full of allure that classes migrated to the exterior world, there was the dawn of something new. It was homeroom, just after the bell. We had already pledged our allegiance.

“Class,” Ms. Novotny said, a new guy standing by the door. “This is Shift.”

The guy turned his head inside his hoodie. He crammed his fists inside the pockets of his green-and-purple madras shorts. He slapped the heel of one flip-flop, then
slapped slapped slapped
toward the single extra chair, sat his long self down, hood still up, eyes averted. He was a transfer from someplace, but nobody knew where. He'd come by way of the bridge, unless he'd come by way of boat; there was no big reveal. He had a slim spiral-bound notebook in his hand and a uni-ball Roller clipped to the peak of his hood, and maybe Shift was his first name, or Shift was a trick name, and maybe he wouldn't be staying for good, but I felt sure of this: We'd never seen him before.

“Hey, Shift.”

“Hey, yeah.”

“Cool.”

Eva's eyes like anime.

Deni with a calculating stare.

Me pondering the one word, Shift. Class? Order? Family? Species?

First period was birds by the dunes. It was Ms. Isabel already down in the lobby, her long cotton coat hanging past her anklebones, the lavender sleeves rolled to her elbows, a fat dahlia stuck in the current of her auburn dreads. Ms. Isabel was a big believer in songbirds. She said tanageroriolevireothrustwarbleryellowrumpnorthernwaterthrush like it was all one word. She hauled her science books around in a saggy roller cart, tucked the cassette deck into her purse, sank extra batteries into her pocket wells. “Listen,” she'd say. “Identify.” Making as if birdsong was Spanish, the only second language actually offered at Alabaster.

I was good, far more than medium good, at naming all those birds.

Birds were Ms. Isabel's dinosaurs, her dreams, her proof that it was our privilege to save what could still be saved of our world. “Every feather counts,” she'd say. “Every song.” Ms. Isabel taught activism by way of appreciation. Respect. Preserve. Study the signs.

On the day that Shift showed up, Ms. Isabel was waiting on us in the lobby for the after-homeroom bell, waiting and not looking up through the aperture in the spiraling stair, not watching us single-file out of homeroom and down the Level 3 hall and toward the marble stairs worn to a thin shine by so much climbing. The jingle bells around Becca's ankle went first. Marco and Mario—tallest and shortest, Filipino and Italian—went next, then Dascher with her brand-new anchor tattoo, then Deby, Becca's skinny twin. Then Taneisha with her platform wedges and her arm full of bracelets that jingled louder than Becca's bells. Then Chang with a fluorescent disc in her backpack's pocket—Chang, captain of Alabaster's most award-winning sport, which was Ultimate Frisbee, which only I sucked at. Then Ginger, first in the class, her headband worn like a crown over her broom of curls, Queen of Alabaster, that was Ginger. Then the others, and after that it was Deni and me, side by side, those aviators on her head, her brother's army jacket tied by the arms around her waist. Deni kept twisting on the steps, looking back, hunting out Eva, who was in back of the pack, Shift beside her, neither of them talking, at least according to Deni, who was doing all the spying.

Into the sun we went, our ragtag O'Sixteen fourteen plus one.

The sky so blue. There was an American kestrel overhead. There was a trio of finches on the telephone line, already losing their luster, and right around Oyster Way, where we turned, we spied a lesser yellowleg, its wings brown and spotted like Bambi.

“Early proof of the start of migration season,” Ms. Isabel said, parts of her words rippled back by the breeze. Early proof of migration starting too soon.

We all stopped. We duly noted. I glanced east, over one shoulder, past Chang and Taneisha, past Dascher and Becca, and there was Eva, her smile megawatt. Next I saw why: Shift. Hood up, madras shorts, and Eva's power binoculars pressed to his eyes. Those were Barbie-pink binoculars—pinker than Pepto. They were an Eva find at the St. Mark's White Elephant Sale; I had been there, and so had Deni, when Eva had negotiated. Eva took that pink prize wherever she went—to the beach, to the birds, to the lighthouse—and now, for that moment, she had given it up; she had placed it in the hands of Shift, a guy nobody knew.

“What's that about?” Deni said, because she'd turned, too.

“Guess she thinks he could use a little help with the birds.”

“Eva, the naïve.”

“Eva, the generous.”

Eva, who saw things nobody could see, who chose
Vanishing Cities
as her Project Flow. All the hotels, the streets, the kitchen chairs, the bedrooms that lived invisibly—that had been swept away by winds or cracked by earthquakes or gobbled down. To Eva every inch of before was romantic history. Everything was submerged or on the verge of going under. Atlantis, for example, which Plato said was swallowed by the sea. Port Royal, Jamaica, which fell, in 1692, into its harbor after an earthquake rattled it around. Fifteen thousand people, Eva says. A city bigger than Boston. Gone. Disappeared. Just like Edingsville Beach, South Carolina, two centuries later—high rent and hoi polloi, a “playground for rich planters” (she read, from some book) that went down on both knees to a sweep of hurricanes. Shishmaref is disappearing, Eva would say, pointing to a place just below the Arctic Circle on a map. Venice will soon be gone. The Maldives. She'd lean close. She'd whisper the names. She'd sit back and close her eyes, and we'd watch the trance that she'd become, that she was. She was pretty on the outside. She was even prettier inside. She kept time and all its layers whole in the channels of her mind.

But back to Deni, who was giving me one of her stares beneath her spectacular eyebrows.

I stared back, shrugged, understood. Worrying was Deni's Job Number One. She'd lost the big things in life. A brother first (Afghanistan) and then a father (hole in the heart). The news that had changed Deni's life and consequently had changed Deni had arrived in suits seven months apart, a knock on the door—the army people, the police—and who could blame her for the thoughts she had, the days she didn't trust, the plans she was forever putting into place, the precautions she took.
Shore Up.
That was Deni's Project Flow. Dams, dikes, levees, green-blue corridors, sea gates, surge control, blue dunes, oyster reefs, wrap the city of Manhattan up in plastic, float Venice on buoys.

Do something.

Mitigate the risks.

Do not disappear.

Deni was cautious on behalf of every one of us.

Deni was taking care.

“We'll keep an eye on her, okay?” I said.

“Smells like trouble,” Deni said. “Her giving her find over to him.”

“They're just binoculars.”

“We're talking about Eva,” she said. “And a guy who calls himself Shift.”

Down Oyster Way. Toward the sanctuary. Across the crushed shells where the cars of summer parked. Toward the stubby bushes and the narrow boardwalk with the thick-rope rails and the sign: respect. preserve. That's where the sanctuary began. Ms. Isabel, up in front, was dialing the buttons on her lavender coat as she thought. She was lecturing about the stress on birds of changing climates, environmental heat, environmental endurance, and now she was turning the dahlia in her hair, as if she could somehow turn clocks back to a time when birds could fly wherever they wished—no factories, smokestacks, hot air, ozone blips. Keep walking. We did. There were swans in the pond that we passed—
our
swans, we said, of the family Anatidae, of the genus Cygnus—Anatidae and Cygnus being the kind of words that hold a thing in place, keep a swan from vanishing. There were red tips on the black birds in the trees. There was a tanager on a brambly branch and it opened its mouth to sing.

“Bird manners,” Ms. Isabel said, and we took out our notebooks and our pens; we drew, as she had taught us to draw, the shape of the wings and the song.
If you look at the
world, you will love the world
—that was Ms. Isabel's motto.
If
you love the world, you will save it.

We looked. We drew. We listened. We walked deeper in. Through the green shade, beneath the tree cover, into the smell of pine, old moss, cracked shells, root rot. In a soft clearing of pine needles, we stopped and formed a circle and for the first time that day Ms. Isabel actually looked at us. She stopped thinking about the birds. She started counting.

Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Shift.

He was leaning against a giant oak—his hood up and Eva's binoculars still hanging from his neck by a cord. He had one knee bent and one flip-flop foot pressed against the tree bark. He was taller than the rest of us, and his eyes were so unreadable that he might have been wearing shades. There was moss furring up the branches above Shift's head, nests in the knot of some foothold, wings up high, deer in the shade. There was a breeze in the tops of the trees, two dragonflies with silver wings, the stirrings of a hawk.

“Shift,” Shift said.

She took him in. Paused as if he were another foreign creature, a bird of paradise, a strange new species. “Shift,” she said, and then she wrote it in the book she carried, and that was that. We stood in that circle on the pine-needle floor, the smell of salt and feathers and green so close. She took a yellow book out of her bag. She began to read. “‘People change the world,'” she started, then flipped to another page. “‘Faustian restlessness is one of the defining characteristics of humans,'” she read. She touched the dahlia in her hair and turned more pages, careful, squinting. She began again:

“‘The Neanderthals lived in Europe for more

than a hundred thousand years and during

that period they had no more impact on their

surroundings than any other large vertebrate.

There is every reason to believe that if humans

had not arrived on the scene, the Neanderthals

would be there still, along with the wild horses

and the woolly rhinos. With the capacity to rep-

resent the world in signs and symbols comes the

capacity to change it, which, as it happens, is

also the capacity to destroy it. A tiny set of genetic

variations divides us from the Neanderthals,

but that has made all the difference.'”

She stopped, looked up, caught our eyes, had our attention. “Elizabeth Kolbert,” she said.
“The Sixth Extinction.”

She turned her head toward a rustling in the trees. We turned, too. It was there—the great blue heron with its bearded feathers, its yellow eyes, its strength:
Ardea herodias
. “Ruler of the earth, according to the Seminole tribe,” Ms. Isabel said, leaving Elizabeth Kolbert for her birds. We watched the mighty creature crunch its neck, then stretch. It spread its rusty feathers. It shook its plume.

“The Bird will make sure that all things are put in their proper places on earth,” somebody said.

Ms. Isabel turned.

“You know the Seminole legend, Shift?” she asked, because he was the one who'd said it.

“I guess.”

“Somebody teach it to you?”

He shrugged.

“Hmmmm,” she said, writing something in her book. “Hmmmm. Yes. Thank you, Shift. The heron,” she now said, to the rest of us, “puts things into their places. According to legend. Just like Mr. Shift said.”

Twelve, thirteen, fourteen.

Shift.

Midmorning that day was Algebra 2: (
xy
)(
n
) =.
It was Deni with her stare on and Shift with Eva's binoculars, and Eva looking possessive, rubbing her finger under her nose like she does when she is dreaming or thinking or wishing. “I can see all the way to Atlantis,” she'd say, dreamily. “I can see Last Island.”

“Atlantis is gone,” Deni would correct her, but Eva never listened.

Focus on the math, I thought. Focus on the quiz. Focus with the sky so bright above us.

=

x(n)

multiplied by y(n)

Math was symbols. I preferred words.

I sketched taxonomy charts in the margins of the worksheet. I got called on for an answer, and I was wrong. “You should do your best in everything,” Mickey would say when the report cards came in. “I am,” I'd tell her, and she couldn't prove me wrong. Nobody knows (for real, for true) how hard someone is trying.

Lunch was the sandwiches we'd brought from home on the picnic tables with the graffiti carved into the weathered wood:
taneisha + tiny tina
. That was last year's news.
ultimate frisbee
. That was forever.
italian love songs rule
. Which is what Mario sang, with his baritone voice; you couldn't believe the size of the voice that short kid had. There was graffiti from now and graffiti from years ago, rumors of graffiti from The Year of Our Birth. We couldn't prove it, but we thought, maybe. Maybe that Cupid. Maybe that arrow. Maybe that
marry me, please, bruce springsteen
. Maybe that broken heart was from someone we knew. Maybe it belonged to our mothers.

“You watching this?” Deni, leaning over her chicken salad, said.

“On it,” I said, looking up from my Tupperware applesauce, Mott's, not homemade; Mickey wasn't a homemade-sauce mother. And there was Eva, at table number three, her binoculars still on borrow.

“Not like he needs the binoculars to see the mayo on his wheat bread,” Deni said. “I can see the mayo from here.” If there was any condiment of which Deni vociferously disapproved, it was mayo. Shift was sinking fast.

“She looks happy.”

“That girl has no defense system,” Deni said. “She'd flunk a test on precautions.”

“Guy knows something about herons,” I said. “And Seminoles.”

“Guy got lucky.”

“Guy isn't half-bad-looking.“

“Please. Can't even see his face, thanks to the hood.”

The breeze blew in. It teased our wax paper, Ziplocs, paper bags, catching us in a scramble of chase and snatch. By the time we had collected our things, the bell had rung, and Mr. Friedley was out, sending us back into the school and up the spiral stairs and onto Level 3. To Pompeii and the city. To Trap the Metaphors, which involved, on that day (I remember this) cirrus clouds, rain in buckets, sun on the anchor of one shoulder.

We had Art after that—the sound of our charcoal sticks working in time to the tune the kindergartners were singing until Mr. Friedley came by and asked for silence. After that, it was 3 p.m. and the bell was ringing and the school day was finally done. We gathered at Alabaster's door. It was the hour of the Slurpee.

“Yo,” Deni said to Eva, practically accosting her. “You coming to Rosie's?”

Which wasn't usually a question anybody ever asked, because Slurpees in off-season was our best-friend tradition. Slurpees was our gathering hour, our talk-it-over time, our gossip. Slurpees was unhitching our Modes from the racks at school, strapping our backpacks to our shoulders, and going.

But there was something about the way Eva was standing there, her ribbons of blond hair twining around her neck, her color high, her hands distracted, and Deni knew. She had her antennae way up, she was expecting as much, she was on the defense, standing close.

“Not so sure,” Eva said.

“Not so
sure
?” Deni pressed.

“Think I'll skip it today.”

“Something else to do?”

“Maybe?” Eva shrugged. She looked at Deni, looked at me, looked at her ten sparkle-decaled fingernails. “You have a Slurpee for me, okay?” Eva said to Deni, sweet as Eva always was, because Eva wasn't the kind of girl who would hurt on purpose. She was just the kind of girl who loved too much, stretched too thin, went way out of proportion too quickly, saw things that weren't there. The kind of girl who would loan her best find to a guy who'd kept his hood up all day.

We turned. There, on cue, was Shift. His flip-flops were a little sandy with the outdoor classes' wear and tear. He was standing among us, but mostly standing beside Eva, her binoculars dangling casual at his neck.

“Shift,” Deni said.

“Yeah?” he answered.

“Shift. That's your name.”

“Um. Yeah.” His voice was a big shrug, like he'd been asked the question a thousand times before, like the uncoolest of uncool things would be to stand there and explain.

“You coming?” Deni finally asked me.

“I'm coming,” I said.

I keyed on my roller skates. Deni revved up her Gem. We left Eva where she was, pink up high in her cheeks.

Shift.

First name?

Last name?

We had no clue.

We rolled, we glided to Rosie's. We had one Slurpee each, and then we split another, and then Mr. Carl, Alabaster's janitor, drove up in his 1962 Wrangler—top down, radio on. Rosie brought him a double cone of orange spice as if she operated a drive-in, but fact of the matter: Rosie was Mr. Carl's wife.

I caught the sound of the radio on his weather station. Some bunch of clouds forming way south and east. Clouds with the air of Africa in them, and the wetness of an ocean, and the height of a skyscraper, the reporter was saying, which was what the reporters on weather were always saying, nothing to write home about, something far away, and they were just words.

We'd been through every version of weather on Haven.

We knew water inside and out.

Some reporter on the radio couldn't scare us.