A Million Miles Away (20 page)

“But before we get into that,” Mrs. Wallace continued, “we have to go back to the beginning. Well, a little after the beginning. We have to go back to 1848. Who can tell me what happened in 1848?”

“Pre-Raphaelites,” someone muttered.

“Exactly,” Mrs. Wallace said, pointing her remote to the projector with a dramatic wave, moving to the next slide. “The Brotherhood, as they say. Kelsey, read those names.”

Kelsey stumbled through the list.

“This is a list of people in Rossetti’s salon, one of the most exciting places to be if you were an artist at that time. They were rebelling against flat, conventional composition. People standing still in perfect portraits: boring! They wanted layers, asymmetry, backdrops, romance!” Then Mrs. Wallace smiled, pacing back and forth in her corduroy jumper. “And what do you not see?”

Kelsey eyes scanned the pale faces in the frame, burning to answer the question, but nothing popped into her head. She was stuck.

“Let me put it this way,” Mrs. Wallace said. “What does Rossetti’s salon and a boys’ locker room have in common?”

Kelsey cried out. “Oh! No women!”

“Bam. Right on the nose. And there’s your problem right there.…”

The rest of the class, Kelsey was riveted. Mrs. Wallace had a way of talking about the most minute details of what they were seeing so that they expanded into very big, important facts. The facts didn’t just relate to whatever time period they were studying, they were facts about the way a person looked at anything: a movie, a billboard, her mother’s decorating style. All of these types of seeing influenced one another, and they all found their root in the past.

Today Mrs. Wallace ended the class with a video clip, and as they watched, Kelsey felt something wash over her. The video was supposed to be an example of the way feminist art had evolved, to the point where the artists would use their own bodies as a canvas.

Kelsey didn’t know exactly what this meant. She imagined them painting on themselves.

And then, the artist danced. She danced in a way Kelsey had never seen before, but understood all the same. The dance awoke something in her, the same sort of feeling she would have if she had answered one of Mrs. Wallace’s questions correctly, but bigger than that. Better than that, because she could imagine herself in the artist’s shoes, losing herself to her limbs and torso and the music that played. It was as if the artist were answering a question Kelsey had asked since she was a little girl. The artist’s name was Maya. Maya Deren. She reminded Kelsey of her sister. She reminded Kelsey of herself.

When the video was over, Kelsey fought the urge to applaud.

The bell rang, but before she could gather her things, Mrs. Wallace put a hand on her arm.

“Forgetting something?”

Kelsey was still lost in thought. “Huh?”

“I graded the paper you handed in before break.” Mrs. Wallace looked at Kelsey, her eyebrows raised. “The paper on Cubism you handed in a day after the deadline? Remember?”

“Oh, yeah,” Kelsey said, clearing her throat. Her face burned. She was working harder, but it didn’t seem to be good enough. “Thank you. Sorry about that.”

Mrs. Wallace tapped the paper in her hands with plain, shorn fingernails. The grade wasn’t visible. “Well, you’ve never been famous among the administration for being on time for class, or present, for that matter. I didn’t expect a lot—”

“Yeah.” Kelsey sighed.

Mrs. Wallace continued, “When you gave me an A-plus paper, I was very surprised.”

She smiled as broadly as Mrs. Wallace could smile, which wasn’t very broad, and put the paper in Kelsey’s hands.

Kelsey flipped it over, her eyes wide. Sure enough, at the top near her name there was an A+. She could see small notes Mrs. Wallace had made here and here:
Creative observation
, she had written, and,
Well said
.

At first, all Kelsey could do was look back and forth between Mrs. Wallace and the paper. Breaths replaced words. It was the first A+ she had ever received.

“I can’t believe it.”

“Believe it,” Mrs. Wallace replied, and went back to her desk.

Kelsey left the room with a fire underneath her. She couldn’t wait to tell Peter, and to tell her parents. Her mother and father had always told her she could do better. But she often wondered if any of them really thought she could, including herself. She had tried her hand at studying before, and always lost interest. What was different now?

She paused in the hallway, the faces filtering around her, remembering the person who she had done this for in the first place. She had been moved by this subject in the way her sister was probably moved by it every day. Her eyes blurred with happy tears.

I get it now, what you saw in it all
, she told her sister, wherever she was.
I see what you see
.

4/26, 11:55 pm

From: Farrow, Peter W SPC

To: Maxfield, Michelle

Subject: A short list

The things I would rather do than go on patrol:

• Talk to you
  
• Take you on a date
  
• Make out with you
  
• Play music for you
  
• Listen to you play music for me (not on a guitar, just on the radio or something, no offense)
  
• Make out with you
  
• Read your letters
  
• Talk to you through a computer screen
  
• Make out with you
  
• Sit and stare off into space while thinking about you
  
• Stand and stare off into space while thinking about you
  
• Walk and stare off into space while thinking about you
  
• Sleep and stare off into space while thinking about you
  
• Bathe and stare off into space while thinking about you (sorry if that’s explicit)
  

Tomorrow we go out for a few days. I’ll try to email you again, but I can’t guarantee it won’t be complete gibberish. I’m having trouble making my hands or brain do anything else but… yeah. You get it already. I love you. I’m in love with you!

—P

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The mutters of fifteen members of Kelsey’s dance team echoed throughout the Lawrence High gym, but Kelsey wasn’t listening. She went in phases with the real world: Sometimes, she wanted to describe every detail in her head to Peter, just to know that he, too, had once tasted food, seen sun, tripped over a rug. But sometimes, everything in the world felt somehow unnecessary, because she didn’t need any of it if it wasn’t a part of him. The Lions Dance Team was waiting for Gillian to arrive at the last—and most important—dance practice of the year. Today, they voted on next year’s captains.

Kelsey forced herself out of a daze to look at the clock on her phone. 4:18.

“Where is she?” she asked Ingrid.

“Beats me,” Ingrid said, rotating her blonde head to look around the gym, as if Gillian were hiding in a corner. “Maybe she forgot?”

“No way,” Kelsey said dismissively, and then corrected herself. “I mean, that could be it, but I wouldn’t think so.”

She reminded herself to be nicer to Ingrid, the only real friend she had left at Lawrence High. “So,” she said, giving her an affectionate rub on the back. “How’s your mom?”

As Ingrid was about to answer, the gym doors opened with a bang.

Gillian walked, slow and deliberate, to where they were gathered on the bleachers. She stood in front of the group.

“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I must have gotten the time wrong.”

Kelsey scoffed and stood, taking a place next to Gillian facing the group. She muttered, “I said four o’clock yesterday. You were right there.”

“Anyway,” Gillian said, putting on a fake smile as if Kelsey wasn’t right next to her. “Let’s begin. For the freshmen unfamiliar with nominations and voting, here’s how this works.…”

As Gillian spoke, Kelsey felt her pocket vibrate. The phone lit up with a notification from Michelle’s email, which she had guiltily loaded onto her own phone. From Peter. “Tried calling you,” the subject read. He would have to wait. A minute later, however, her phone was lighting up again.

Kelsey glanced down. Another email from Peter, no subject. The content read, “Hello?”

“Take these pieces of paper,” Gillian was saying, “and write down the name of the dancer you believe shows the most leadership, strength, and creativ—excuse me.” Gillian was looking at her. “Could you not?”

Kelsey apologized, and a minute later, her phone buzzed a third time. “Why is your phone disconnected?” Her phone? Her mind raced. Peter must have been trying to call Michelle’s old phone number for some reason. She would have to make something up later.

Her team was now voting and it was her job to collect the ballots. Kelsey went around to each dancer with a happy face, though she was composing a reason for Peter’s call in her head.

Then, a fourth email read, “I’m in KS. Call me ASAP at my home #.” He had included a number with a Kansas area code.

Peter was here? Peter was home. Why was he home? Was he hurt? Kelsey’s stomach dropped, and she felt faint.

She backed away from the group, holding up her phone. “This is an emergency; I’m really sorry.”

Kelsey caught a glance of Gillian’s face as she left the gym, knotted in concern. She sent a flicker of gratitude to her friend as she exited the school doors, dialed, and then—

“Hello?” The voice sounded like Peter, but it was his home line, so she had to be sure.

“This is K—Michelle Maxfield. May I speak with Peter?”

“Hi! Hi. It’s me.”

She put a hand to her chest. He was safe, at least safe enough to be at home, on the phone. “What happened?”

Five minutes later, she was in the Subaru on her way to El Dorado.

When he gave her the news, Kelsey tried not to sound too relieved.

Peter’s mother had had a stroke, and when his father was able to reach him in Afghanistan, he was given special dispensation to return home temporarily. The stroke turned out to be milder than they initially thought. His mother was now in stable enough condition to wake up on and off, but she was still showing symptoms, so she would be kept at the hospital for observation.

The prairie lining I-70 whipped past her, and now she was deep into the Flint Hills, rising in waves just as she had described to Peter so long ago.

He had asked her to come see him.

“Are you sure?” she had replied, because this was a time for family.

He had told her that aside from his family, she was the only person he wanted to see.

He wanted her there, and she would go to him, and even if she couldn’t touch him, even if she couldn’t put her hands on his face and her mouth on his like she wanted to, she would be happy enough at the sight of him in the same space as her, the sound of his voice, the mere feeling of him in the next room.

It would be enough that he had the ability to enter the same room, and put his hand in hers, to send warmth throughout her body, to her fingertips, her hair.

That Peter would not be just the idea of Peter, even for a short time; this was enough to press her foot down on the gas until the landscape became a blur.

Physical possibilities. Land moving under her tires. The miracle of physics. She would see him in three hours.

At the hospital, Kelsey followed the attendant in scrubs to the second floor, and there, in the hallway waiting for her, Peter stood in his fatigues.

“Peter,” she said.

He turned, and his face lit up. There was the old Peter, the smile that reflected on the walls.

She squeezed him, feeling the chain of his dog tags against her chest. “Did you come here straight from the plane?”

“This morning,” he said, still holding her. “I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours.”

Peter took her hand, leading her into the room. Carnations, daisies, and chrysanthemums bloomed from every corner, covering up the smell of stale bleach.

Peter’s mother was pale but sitting up, her hospital gown under a zip-up sweatshirt that read
EL DORADO WILDCATS
.

She looked at Kelsey with the same blue eyes Peter had.

“This is my mom, Cathy.”

Kelsey smiled and found another pair of blue eyes in a girl slightly younger and shorter than herself, with sandy hair like Peter’s, pulled into a high ponytail. “That’s my sister, Meg.”

A stocky, brown-haired man with a thick mustache nodded at Kelsey and put an arm around his daughter. “And my dad, Bill.”

Peter touched the small of her back. “Everyone,” he said, “this is Michelle.”

“Hello,” Kelsey said, waving to all of them and none of them, trying to unclench her jaw at the sound of Michelle’s name. “I’m glad you’re all right, Mrs. Farrow. It’s so wonderful to meet you.”

Peter’s mother gave her a small smile in response.

“Nice to meet you in person. Is it one ‘l’ or two?” his father asked.