My Beating Teenage Heart (25 page)

I watched her all the time, all the time. I was so much older than her that it felt like second nature. My mother lost her at Toys “R” Us once, while she was trying to pick out a present for Skylar to bring to a birthday party. I was checking out video games when it happened, in a completely different section in the store from the two of them. I didn’t even realize Skylar had wandered away on my mother but I found her anyway. This was when my sister still had ternt sectilong hair and my eyes zoomed straight over to her lingering by a display of plush toys.

I was already holding her hand by the time they made an announcement that there was a lost child in the store. Somehow I found her all those years ago, when it probably didn’t matter because my mother or an employee would’ve spotted her in the next minute or so anyway, but when it really mattered I wasn’t watching. I let my sister disappear.

April 22 felt like it was just going to be like any other day. At the time it seemed there wasn’t a single clue that it would be any different. But when I look back now I can see them all lined up in a neat row.

That Friday morning I woke up a little late and wolfed down leftover cold pizza before jumping in the car. In English Rob Chen and I presented a media ad we’d made for Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers.” At lunch Ty and Rory were still pumped from the soccer team’s win over Crest-gate High the day before and Mr. Cirelli was back in econ last period after two days off with food poisoning.

It was supposed to rain all day but the downpour had trickled down to nothing by about four-thirty. My parents’ friends, Barbara and Sean, were having a twenty-fifth anniversary party and I’d promised my folks I’d babysit Skylar. My mom and dad went early to help Barbara and Sean set up. Normally Jules would come over and hang out with me while I was babysitting but she and Renee had tickets for a play.

I heated up chicken nuggets and broccoli and cauliflower in cheese sauce for her and threw together a stir-fry for myself. All that was fine—Friday, April 22, as it should’ve been—but after dinner, while Skylar was watching TV, I went up to my bedroom, closed the door and picked up my guitar. “I’ve Just Seen a Face” was one of the tunes I’d been working on for Boleyn’s. Overall it’s a pretty easy song but the intro was tough, especially for someone who was still trying to come to grips with some of the basics of guitar playing. Sometimes I spent hours just practicing a good steady strum, trying to lay a solid foundation for myself. Staying in time and developing a sense of rhythm are harder than you might think. Or it was for me, anyway.

There were lots of songs I associated with Jules, but in particular “I’ve Just Seen a Face” made me think about when I first started getting to know her on the New York trip. Even though I already knew who she was on a superficial level, the real Jules came as an amazing surprise. It’s like that line that goes, if it’d been another day, I might’ve looked the other way. The more time I spent with Jules, the more aware I was that I easily could’ve missed out on knowing her, and the gladder I was that I hadn’t. There’s such simple happiness in that song, a sense of wonder that I totally understood.

When I played “I’ve Just Seen a Face” it was like Jules was in the room with me, like I was reexperiencing all our best moments together. So I wasn’t happy when Skylar crept into the room and interrupted me. Sometimes I’d let her watch me play but only when I was ready—mentally prepared—and besides, Skylar didn’t want to watch me that night. She was in the middle of her own obsession.

A couple of weeks earlier when we were awhent t my grandparents’ (Dad’s parents) house for dinner, my grandmother had pulled out a family photo album and Skylar had pored over her baby photos (mine too but hers more). It got late and we had to leave before she’d finished flipping through them all. Then, on April 21, my grandmother dropped in for a visit and brought the album so Skylar could see the rest of the pictures. The one Skylar liked best was from when she was about two years old. She’s sitting in her old baby car seat with all her winter clothes on, including a red and gold Winnie-the-Pooh ski hat, and waving through the open car door at my grandfather snapping her photograph.

“Do we still have that hat?” Skylar wanted to know.

“It’s probably packed away with the rest of your baby things down in the basement,” my mom said.

“Can we find it?” Skylar asked. “I want to see it.”

Again, it was too late. “Not tonight,” my mom said. “You need to start getting ready for bed.”

It was a cute hat and a really cute photo of her. I could understand why she wanted to find it, but when Skylar walked into my room that Friday and made me stop playing guitar to see what she wanted, I was annoyed. “Wait until tomorrow and Mom can help you find it,” I told her. “I wouldn’t even know where to look.”

“All the boxes with baby stuff are probably close together,” she said. “If you come down with me I can do most of the looking myself.”

“If you can look yourself, why aren’t you doing it right now?” I asked, impatient to get back to “I’ve Just Seen a Face.”

I was sitting on the bed, my guitar still in my hands, and Skylar peered insistently down at me. “But the boxes are so heavy, Breckon. You know I won’t be able to lift them.”

“I said
later
, Skylar. You don’t need to find it right this second. What did I tell you about bugging me when I’m in the middle of something?”

Skylar frowned and shuffled over to the door with her shoulders drooping. Then she closed my door hard—not hard enough to be considered a slam exactly, but firmly enough to let me know she was angry.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I didn’t think I was being tough on her and anyway, Skylar wasn’t the type to hold a grudge. It really couldn’t have mattered less that I didn’t drop what I was doing to help her find her old Winnie-the-Pooh hat.

Until about thirty minutes later.

It occurred to me that if Skylar and I were going to take Moose for his nightly walk (which was usually my dad’s job) that we better do it before she had to get ready for bed. And then, maybe if there was time, I’d help her look for that hat.

I set down my guitar and went down to the family room to find my sister.
Wolverine and the X-Men
was on TV and she’d left what looked like an unfinisiketify">I hed drawing of a spaceship hovering over a bunch of trees laid out on the carpet. Moose barked from outside, not at me but at a squirrel scampering by him in the backyard. I stared at him through the family room sliding door. Skylar must’ve let him out.

I checked the kitchen next but she wasn’t there either. “Skylar?” I shouted, not because I was worried but because it was usually the fastest way to locate her.

Moose barked again from the backyard. Seeing squirrels in his territory always set him off.

I stepped out of the kitchen and back into the hall. I was about to tackle the stairs, figuring she must’ve been up in her room, when I noticed that the basement door was ajar. I don’t know how I missed that before—we usually kept it shut. But obviously Skylar was so excited about the hat that she hadn’t waited for me.

“Skylar!” I called again as I pulled the door open wide.

The basement lights were on. We’d never finished the basement, and naked bulbs cast a creepy, stark light into a dungeon-like space.

I thought that somehow the image at the bottom of the stairs was a trick of that light, like when you think you see something out of the corner of your eye that isn’t really there. My brain couldn’t register the image at first.

Then my body went cold. My heart punched my rib cage. I ran to my sister.

She was lying on her back with her neck twisted to the right and her eyes shut. Her feet and calves sloped up the bottom two steps of the stairway. One of her arms was down at her side, the other bent up at the elbow and with the wrist swiveled at an awkward angle so that her fingernails pointed to the concrete floor beneath them.

Concrete
. Her head smashed on concrete. Her face looked smaller, empty, like the real Skylar had seeped out.

But there wasn’t any blood. Nothing to see.

I knew enough not to move her. I watched her chest and it didn’t rise. I held my palm less than an inch from her lips to feel the warmth from her breath but there wasn’t any.

My heart slammed against my chest. Again and again and again. My lungs evaporated and left me gasping. This wasn’t real.

It wasn’t like Skylar to fall for no reason.

She shouldn’t have gone without me.

Why didn’t I help her when she’d asked?

How long can a person survive without oxygen?

How long had she been lying at the bottom of the stairs?

I was wasting seconds Skylar didn’t have. I sprang up the stairs, fighting for breath, snatched the cordless phone from the kitchen and dialed 911. Then I sprinted back to the basement with the phone pressed to my ear, nearly tripping myself halfway down the stairs.

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I lunged for the handrail and found my footing.

My eyes still couldn’t believe what they were seeing. My body was in denial. I couldn’t speak loud enough for the 911 operator. I had to say my address four times. “I think she’s dead,” I kept saying. “I think she’s dead.”

It wasn’t until I saw my mother later that I was lucid enough to consider how terrifying the basement could’ve seemed to someone like Skylar, who was only seven years old and hadn’t stopped thinking about ghosts since that haunted-house documentary. And she’d gone downstairs without me anyway because that’s what she was like. She wouldn’t have wanted the fear to stop her. In a way that makes me proud of her. She wouldn’t give in like I am now. She’d fight.

But I hope she wasn’t afraid when she flicked on the light and started down the steps.

It’s all bad enough without that thought. It’s really all bad enough.

More than I can take. The fact is, I don’t have it in me to live with this anymore.

I’m sorry Skylar sorry Mom and Dad sorry Jules and anyone else who’ll be sad, but I’m not as strong as you want me to be. I’m really not strong at all.

I’m done.

twenty
                            
ashlyn

Sometimes I try
to think back to the moment before the darkness and the stars. Was that previous moment the instance of my death or was there something in between? Instinctively I know I’m almost there now, my memory restored until what must be the precipice of my final days on earth, and I’m wondering—as I wondered about the time beyond my second year at Farlain Lake—if I truly want to know all my own secrets.

What if I can’t handle them?

And will the good about being Ashlyn Baptiste outweigh the bad?

Now that I remember being fifteen (and almost sixteen) I know that one of the things that I wanted for my adult future was to have the chance to really help people. I hadn’t figured out yet whether that meant being a social worker, a psychologist or even a school guidance counselor. Becoming any of them would have meant that one day I would’ve been better at helping Breckon Cody than I am now. I wish I could borrow that knowledge from the future I’ll never have.
Why not?
I ask the universe.
If it would help him, why not let me?

The universe never answers. No one does. There are no deals when you’re dead. If there were deals to be made I wouldn’t be deceased, I’d be walking around in my Ashlyn skin, delighting in things like the feel of raindrops on the back of my neck, dancing with my friends as we sing so hard="0"j#x2019;t b that my voice gets hoarse, soaking in a hot bath with strawberry-scented bubbles, and staring at Ikenna Shepherd’s beautiful face from across our shared history class.

Ikenna …

I would have kissed him and more if I’d had the chance. I thought there’d be more time. More time for everything.

I never got to explore most of the exotic places I yearned for. There were two family trips to Florida (mostly just Disney World and SeaWorld), multiple ones to Vancouver to visit Mom’s parents, two to Scotland to see Aunt Sandra and one to England. The first time my family went to Edinburgh I was ten and Callum and Ellie were away at summer camp for the entire first week. My aunt and uncle rented a minivan and drove us up to Loch Ness and around the Highlands. The second week, when my cousins were back home, it rained nonstop and I caught a nasty bug and had to be taken to my aunt and uncle’s doctor for antibiotics. I spent most of my time in bed in the second guest room, a room that I was initially supposed to share with my sister, but she slept on the family room couch rather than risk getting sick.

Uncle Ian moved the small TV from his and my aunt’s room in with me to keep me from getting bored, and I watched repeats of old American sitcoms, hours and hours of
CSI
and a collection of British shows including
The X Factor
, one show called
Casualty
about a hospital and another called
Waterloo Road
about a school.

The second trip to Scotland when I was fourteen (during ninth grade) was much better. I stayed healthy, for one thing, and though it was Christmastime, the days were mild compared to Canada. We spent three days in London—visited Buckingham Palace, Harrods, the British Museum, the Tower of London and the London Eye—and then caught a train to Edinburgh, where my aunt and uncle met us at the station. One day my aunt took my mom, Celeste, Ellie and me to Glasgow to see the biggest shopping mall in Scotland. The stores were mostly different from the ones at home and my mom let me and my sister each buy some new clothes. Then we stopped in at a restaurant called Wagamama and ate big bowls of ramen noodles and sticky rice.

I didn’t think it would feel right being away from home at Christmas but I was wrong, it felt more like Christmas than ever being with my cousins and aunt and uncle for the holidays. The Edinburgh Christmas lights and decorations were beautiful. We stared down on them from the Ferris wheel in the center of town and then went ice-skating at the Winter Wonderland outdoor rink in Princes Street Gardens.