I brushed my hair out of my face. “You can’t always make me safe,” I said. “Just by having a parent home with me every evening, or grounding me, or giving me a chaperone every time I want to go out past nightfall. That’s not how it works.”
There are dangers everywhere, I wanted to explain to her. On the school bus, in the cafeteria, at Start, inside of me. No parent—no one at all—can step in and vanquish every one of them.
“I know that,” Mom said. “But I want to always make you safe.”
We got out of the car and joined the rest of the family in line at Antonio’s. Neil can handle standing in line for roughly three seconds before he gets bored and starts roaming and twirling around poles. Alex quickly convinced him to play a game where they pretended to be lions who were being harpooned by hunters, so they started crawling on all fours, stepping on other customers’ feet. Steve said reasonable things like, “Champ, the floor’s pretty dirty. Do you really want to get dirt all over your hands?” while I pulled out my iPod and pretended like I had never seen these people before in my life.
At last we got to the front of the line. “What can I get for you?” asked the guy behind the counter.
I looked up. I knew that voice.
It was Char.
The guy taking our pizza order, the guy in a tucked-in white button-down shirt and an apron, the guy speaking to my mother right now, was Char.
When he saw me, his eyes widened. He opened then closed his mouth.
“Roooawr!” Alex shouted from underfoot.
“One plain pizza, please,” Mom said to Char, fumbling in her purse for her wallet. “With soy cheese.”
It had been just over a week since Char and I had last spoken, since he had told me he didn’t want to see me anymore. A week isn’t very much time. Weeks often go by where nothing much happens at all.
But so much had changed in this past week. Even Char, here in the fluorescent lights, with his tomato sauce–stained apron, did not look quite the same. And while a week ago losing him cut me to the bone, today I saw him and just felt sad. I was sad that Char was never going to be the person I hoped he would be.
But I was never going to be the person he hoped I would be either. And I was just fine with that.
“Do you take credit cards?” Mom asked.
“Sorry, we’re cash only,” he replied.
This wasn’t how I imagined things going. But imagination is so often no match for the absurdity, the randomness, the tragedy of reality.
“So what brings you all to Antonio’s today?” Char asked as he made change for my mother.
“Just celebrating our kids,” Mom answered. “That lion on the floor just had the best booth at the second-grade fair.”
Alex made mewing noises and crumpled to the side, like the safari hunters had successfully stabbed her. She fell onto my feet, which seemed maybe like progress, since earlier she wouldn’t even let me touch her. I thought about how funny it was that Alex’s cobbled-together poetry hut still counted as “the best” for my mother.
“And this one”—Mom put her arm around me and squeezed—“is about to be the disc jockey at the best party this town has ever seen.”
“Mom!” I hissed. I wriggled out of her embrace.
On the floor, Alex also hissed. The murdered lion had somehow turned into a snake.
“She gets easily embarrassed,” Mom told Char. “Teenagers.”
If I had one of Alex’s imaginary hunting sticks in hand, I would not have hesitated to ram it into my mother’s mouth at that moment.
“Sounds like a big night,” Char replied. He looked me straight in the eye, as he had so many times before, and I wanted to throw my arms around him just about as much as I wanted to punch him in the stomach. “Good luck.”
I unstuck my tongue from the roof of my mouth. “Thank you,” I said.
A bell dinged. “Pizza’s up,” Char said. He reached behind him and handed the box to my mother. “Have a nice night, folks.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” I said as we turned to go. “I will.”
Together, the Myers household walked out of there: the founders of BOO OIL, a teenage DJ, and two mountain snakes, slithering all the way out the door.
19
When my phone rang a couple hours later, I knew who it was. I knew because this was one of the only phone numbers programmed into my cell phone, which my parents had kindly given back to me at school this morning. After what had happened last night, they said they wanted to know that they could reach me.
“Hello, Amelia,” I answered.
“Elise?” she said, her voice tentative, gentle, hopeful.
And just the way she said my name sent me back, back almost ten months. I looked over to the corner of my room, like I expected to see a ghost of myself still there, back pressed up against the wall, left arm cradled up to her chest, right hand holding the phone that connected her to Amelia Kindl.
“Elise?”
“Hi, Amelia.”
“What’s going on?”
“I cut myself.”
“Oh, no! Are you okay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are your parents there? What happened?”
“I cut myself. Three times.”
“You poor thing. How?”
“With an X-Acto knife.”
“Wait. What? Elise, what did you say?”
“My dad really likes to cut out articles from the newspaper. You know, to give to people when he thinks they’d be interested. Well, mostly just me. I don’t think he cuts out stories for anyone else.”
“Elise, is your dad there with you? Is anyone there?”
“No, it’s just that’s why he has an X-Acto knife. For the newspaper.”
“Are you bleeding?”
“Yes, but it doesn’t actually hurt that much. It’s weird; it doesn’t hurt as much as I thought it would. When I was six years old I got mad at my mom and slammed the door, only somehow I slammed the door on my fingers. There was blood everywhere that time. It hurt a lot more than this. It was an accident, though.”
“Elise, I’m going to call 911, okay?”
“You don’t have to do that. I think it’ll be fine.”
“No, I want to do it, okay? I want to help. Can I put you on hold so I can call 911?”
“You want to help me?”
“Yeah, I do. Of course I do. Can I put you on hold for just one second?”
“Great. Since you want to help me so much: do you see me, Amelia?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Do you see me! I’ve gone to school with you every day since sixth grade. Do you understand me? Do you understand why I did this to myself? Do you see?”
“Sure, Elise, of course. Let me—”
“Then can you please explain it to me?”
“I’m calling 911 now. Help will be there soon. It will be okay.”
“But can’t you just talk to me?”
Nothing. Just silence. And then, sirens.
“Elise, are you there?” Amelia asked, her voice in my ear jolting me back to present day.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Great! Look, I’m calling to apologize about Marissa. I only found out this afternoon that she’s the one who was writing that whole blog about you, and I feel awful about it. Just awful. I shouldn’t have accused you of saying mean things about me online, because of course it wasn’t you at all, but I thought it was.