Very in Pieces (29 page)

WHEN I COME OUT
of the house, the sun is shining right into my eyes, like walking into a solar flare. I am being blasted clean, shaking off what happened with Ramona, the conversation with Mom.

I step forward, and the glare fades.

“Will you take me to the beach?” Ramona is leaning against the front of Nonnie's car. My car.

“What? Now?” It's ten thirty. I'm supposed to meet Mr. Tompkins for our presentation in an hour, and then my meeting with Professor Singh. It's twenty minutes to the beach, and that's pressing it.

“Never mind.” Ramona's hair falls in front of her shoulders. There's a huge tangle in the back. She used to howl so much when she got her hair combed that Mom would throw up her hands and walk away. Only Nonnie could do it. She'd use her fingers, and they would sit together singing songs while Nonnie untangled her snarls.

Your choices don't shape you, they shape people's perceptions of
you.
But maybe that's not the whole story. Maybe your choices can shape how you see yourself.

“We can go.”

We drive out of town and over the bridge. Ramona stares out the window as we pass the malls and Chuck E. Cheese's, where we both had birthday parties as kids. Mom stayed firmly planted at one of the tables, sipping a Diet Coke with her fingers pressed to her temples, willing away the noise around her. She wouldn't let us go in the ball pit because she said kids peed in it. I wonder if Ramona is remembering these things, too. I turn to ask her, but her eyes are closed.

I ease into the traffic circle, gripping the steering wheel more tightly, still nervous about rotaries. We drive past the motels and then onto the winding road that leads to the ocean.

I keep driving to the parking lot at the beach. I'm not sure if she just wanted a ride, or for me to come with her. She doesn't move to get out of the car. We can hear the ocean but can't see it over the concrete wall. Still she stares out in that direction, tugging on a ratty lock of hair.

“You can't just take someone's name away from them,” she declares.

“Excuse me?”

“It's like pulling the foundation out from under me. I always thought I was named for one thing and now you tell me it's really another. That's not fair.”

“I'm pretty sure that's not what rocked your foundation,” I mutter, and instantly regret it as she turns silent again.

I try to really look at her, then, to take her all in, but my eyes fixate on a small tear in her jeans around which she has drawn teeth, so it looks like some weird inverted mouth.

She shifts in her seat, which makes a rustling sound.

“Are you still with Dominic?” she asks.

I consider saying that I never was with Dominic, but that isn't exactly true. “Maybe.”

“He found me. He did that for you.”

I wonder if this could be an opening, if she is inviting me to talk about what has been happening with her. I trace my finger along the steering wheel. There are so many questions, so many places to start. I don't want to mess it up. “What are you trying to say with it? The sculpture, I mean.”

She looks straight ahead through the windshield. Her head, I realize, almost touches the fabric ceiling of the car. She's taller than me now. She seems to consider the question for a while, or maybe she is just zoning out. Finally she says, “I didn't know what else to do.” She won't look at me as she speaks. “I was angry and sad and scared and it was like if I didn't do something or make something it would just overtake me.”

“You didn't seem sad.”

“How do you seem sad?” she asks. “I was. I
am
, and you and Mom and Dad knew just how to act, but everything I did was wrong.”

I suck in my lower lip.

“I know that everything I did was wrong, and you looked so disappointed, but I didn't know what was right. And it was,
like, itching me. And then I saw those bottle caps and there were the Moxie ones, and I thought of Nonnie—those were
her
bottle caps. She was dying, but they were still around. And I thought how the house is like her, and I wanted to put them on the walls. So I did.”

That never would have occurred to me. Not in a million years. I would have picked them up and put them in the trash where they belonged and that would have been the end of it. If I had been the one to find the bottle caps first, maybe none of this would have happened. We'd both be home in our beds snug and happy.

But of course, nothing is that simple.

“So why'd you start going to the dump?”

“We weren't throwing away the things that I need.”

Of course. I mean, really, no sarcasm: of course. If you're building a statue with trash, then you go to the dump.

“At first it wasn't about her poetry. I just did what I thought was right, but then I read some of her poetry, and I had more ideas. So I had to start getting stuff to make them. I had to skip school because the dump isn't open the rest of the time. And anyway, the art seemed more important than anything we were learning. I couldn't concentrate.”

People grieve in different ways, that's what Ms. Pickering had told me, and I thought she was stupid to make such a banal statement, especially when she didn't know anything about our family—only what she thought she knew. But in the end she was right, wasn't she?

“It really wasn't about ‘Detritus'?”

“The bottle cap poem? I hadn't even read that one when I started working on it.”

“But it's exactly like the poem. Everyone says so.”

“People always see what they want to see. What they need to see. They take the pieces that they can understand and match it up to what they think they know and then they decide what the art is all about.”

I think about patterns in math, why I like them, because you need real evidence. But maybe I was just fooling myself. Maybe it was just what I thought I knew, just like with the sculpture and Nonnie's poetry and even Nonnie herself. Everyone thought they knew exactly who she was, even me. Even her. She had toiled over her words, trying to get them just right. In spite of it all, though, people still didn't know her.
I
didn't know her. Or maybe she had been different people for different audiences, a kaleidoscope that shifts as it passes from hand to hand.

Maybe we are all like that. We are all grotesque, glamorous, sunny, and shadow. We are all pixies in polyester nightgowns and plums to be plucked. We are all of these things. Maybe none of us can be pinned down as easily as a butterfly in an insect collection—or Nonnie's lightning bug.

“What about the poem tree in your room?”

Her whole face, it's like the life drains right out of it. Her lips purse, and I figure that is it. I've blown it. She isn't going to talk to me anymore. So I turn my head and look at the stand that sells sodas and ice cream in the summer, and wonder how
long I have to wait before I can suggest we go home. There is still a chance I could make the conference and the meeting with Professor Singh. Then she says, “It's messed up. It's messed up that she used us like that, that she took that from us.”

“Took what?” I ask. But I know. Our virginity had been offered up for discussion to the public before we even had a chance to realize what it was for ourselves, to decide what we wanted to do with it. But it hadn't been that way for me—I hadn't been plucked like a plum, or conquered, or anything remotely close to it. We had fumbled awkwardly.

My head snaps around to look at her. Had she—? As if reading my mind, she blows air out slowly. “I'm still a virgin. Don't worry.”

“I'm not worried about
if
. I'm worried about how and who and where. And why.”

“Well, you don't need to worry at all.” She seems disappointed by this fact. I want to tell her not to be, to wait. I want to explain how you could never tell how it was going to be—boring or exciting or clumsy or lovely. You can't foretell that.

She looks so tired—dark circles under her eyes, chapped lips. And thin. Frail. I want to wrap her up in something—a blanket, my arms. When I was four, I started calling her my baby. I helped her get dressed every morning and tucked her in at night. My mom had laughed at how charming it was. I want to do that again, to be for her what our parents cannot. But I can't.

“Let's go,” she says. She pushes open the door, and the cool
air pours in, like breathing life back into a corpse.

I check the clock. Eleven o'clock. Still time to make it back.

She runs from the car, and I run after her. Up the stairs, over the wall, and down onto the beach. Our feet grow heavy in the sand. She tumbles forward, not even trying to stop herself with her hand, just rolling forward and onto her back, looking up at the blue sky. I jog to catch up with her, then sit down beside her.

“It's a water buffalo,” she says, pointing up. I look up at the sky, expecting to see a fluffy cloud in the shape of a water buffalo, but there is just a bank of gray clouds.

“I love the sculpture. And the tree in your room. I love them. They're beautiful. And honest. And you know I don't know how to talk about these things. I don't have the words to say what I mean, but the way I feel when I look at them, it makes me hopeful.” As I say the words, they become true. Because I know now that she created the art, and it all clicks into place for real, and makes sense. She does miss Nonnie. She hated her and loved her, and she misses her.

She sits up with her knees drawn into her chest. Her breath scratches in and out.

“I'm sorry,” I say, and I wonder why the words we have are so weak. “I haven't been a great sister.”

“You've done your best.”

“I didn't know—I didn't know anything.”

“I didn't tell you. I wouldn't tell you. I don't want it to go away, you know?” She waves her hand in a circle as if that explains what she means.

A seagull soars over the water, and we both watch its trajectory.

“It's like I go and go and go and I get an idea and I can't stop and so the other days I need to rest.” She looks up at the sky and digs her fingers into the sand as if holding herself down. “I just want to be even. Like you.”

“I'm not always even,” I tell her.

“Yes you are. I always feel like I'm walking on the deck of a ship in a storm.” She shifts her gaze from the sky to me. “Do you ever feel that way?”

I have to tell her the truth. “No.”

She nods and then her body seems to curl in upon itself, like she is morphing into a spiral shell. Her face is between her knees, and her shoulders move up and down with each breath.

Her breaths fall into a long, easy pattern. Perhaps she is sleeping. Her hair tumbles forward, and I reach out to brush it back. She lifts her head. “Come swim with me.” She stands up, and starts pulling off her oversize sweatshirt.

I don't like going in the ocean in the summer anymore, let alone the fall. “Are you crazy?”

She laughs. “Evidently.” She beams down at me, and I can't help but crack a smile. But I'm not going swimming. We'll get hypothermia. She starts shimmying out of her jeans. I shiver looking at the gooseflesh on her thin legs. “Come on, don't make me go alone.”

She is down to her mismatched bra and underpants. Her hip bones press against her skin. She gives me another pleading look, then starts running toward the water. “Ramona!” I call.
“Ramona, wait! It's too cold.”

Her thin frame rocks in the knee-deep water. When she shakes, it is like she is wavering in her very existence. Like everything else in my life that I thought I had, she could just fade away and disappear. Nonnie died—that is the simplest and hardest of all. Dad will leave once he can figure out how. And Mom. I've always thought she was so alluring, so above it all, but disappointment and envy have hollowed her out. It's like you go through your whole life thinking you know your family, and then you wake up and a curtain's been pulled back to show you that you don't know anything.

But there is one thing I thought was lost that I can get back. So I start stripping off my clothes. She looks back, sees me, and grins. Jumping from foot to foot, she waits for me.

My skin puckers with goose bumps almost immediately, and I run through the lapping waves to meet her.

She pulls me on into the water. It is like walking through ice. She pulls me so fast the water seems to be overtaking us.

Then we dive. It takes my breath away, the cold. I come up gasping, my lungs tight. Blinking my eyes, I see her laughing, the spray from the ocean hitting her face. She turns that sunny smile on me, and I laugh, too. Her fingers slip from mine, but she is okay. She isn't slipping under. And if she does, I'll be here. I'll always be here.

I turn to her and shout it. “I'm here!” She jumps up through the crest of the wave, water drops spread out around her, as if she's transformed herself into a mermaid. “I'm here!” I yell
again, and feel the weight of it as a small pit in my stomach.

She turns to me, floating down through the water. “I know,” she replies, so softly I can't hear her above the surf; I have to read her lips. “I'm here, too.”

The sun slices through the clouds, just a thin line, and just for a moment, but for that time, we are illuminated. Hand in hand as the water laps against us. Her fingers are thin and slick, and I'm afraid she is going to slip away. But then she grips me, just a little tighter.

Thank you to early readers for your insight and support: Manda Goltz, Deva Fagan, Saundra Mitchell, Cheryl Renee Herbsman, and Lisa (L.K.) Madigan. Thank you to Sarah Pikcilingis for talking with me about math and the ways in which it is beautiful.

I am grateful to everyone at HarperTeen, starting with Alexandra Cooper: you saw what I wanted to do and helped me to get there. Thank you to Alyssa Miele for your thoughtful comments on the manuscript, and to Rosemary Brosnan for signing on to this book. Erin Fitzsimmons and Kate Engbring, thank you for the lovely jacket design.

Thank you to Sara Crowe for always being a champion for my work and looking out for me.

Thank you to my family, immediate and extended: the Frazers, the Blakemores, and beyond. Nathan, Jack, and Matilda—endless gratitude.

And finally thank you to Larissa, Cara, Jen(n), Jessie, Sarah, and Lindsay. You're the best at being you.