Notes to Self (20 page)

I’m terrified of storms. Especially hurricanes.

They let us leave school early the day Hurricane Frances hit, when I was in fifth grade. I was supposed to take the bus home and stay in our apartment’s innermost room, the bathroom, with Dad. Mom would be home from work as soon as it was safe to leave. But when I got home, Daddy wasn’t there. He got Mom’s message confused somehow. So I took my fishbowl (pre-Zelda I had a goldfish named Charlie) with me into the bathroom and sat there alone for two hours, waiting. When Mom found me, by myself, she flipped out. Dad didn’t have a chance when he finally got home. She was angrier with him than she’d ever been, too angry to even try to hide it from me. The next week he moved out, even after she said she’d overreacted.

I started noticing lights turning back on in the Fun Towne midway and heard strains of some song playing far away. I had to get back to school to find my mom and go to Emily.

I heard a cough. It sounded familiar, which was impossible. I turned.

Josie Palomino, looking even more the drowned rat than I did.

I almost stood up and started running again, but she said, “Wait,” in a small voice.

“Why?”

“Just…what were you doing?” She didn’t sound threatening. She sounded like I felt, drained and sorry.

“I was, um, I was praying I guess. I couldn’t think of anything else to try. Did you follow me? All the way from school?”

She ignored the question, but I saw that she still clutched her car keys in her hands. She drove the world’s oldest Ford Escort. “Yeah. What are you, Catholic?”

“I’m not anything. Are you?” I thought about how sometimes, when I was freaking out about something, it seemed like the most perfect song in the world got played on the car’s radio, and how when I was younger, I thought God lived in there and gave me messages in song lyrics. Probably better to not try to explain that to Josie. Or to anyone. It made me sound like one of those raving lunatics who begged for money at the major intersections.

“Baptist.” She put her hands in her pockets, left the keys in one of them, and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. She opened it, pulled one out with a tiny lighter, and shoved the pack back in her pocket.

“Oh.” I had no idea how I could possibly be talking religion with Josie Palomino under the Sling Shot at Fun Towne, but that’s exactly what I was doing.

“I miss her so much,” she whispered as she exhaled a plume of smoke, just loud enough for me to hear. She came over to sit by me, not exactly facing me, but not
not
facing me, either. I didn’t get up. I noticed she sat in a spot on the concrete that was still wet, but we were both pretty soaked so I guess it didn’t matter. Her black eye, courtesy of me, looked pretty bad. It was time to go, time for me to meet my mom, but something made me wait.

“I miss her too,” I said. “I wish it were me in the hospital. I wish I had broken her fall that night.” Emily had saved me by being my friend, and in return, I had done exactly nothing for her.

“I’m sorry.” Josie bit her fingernails. I risked a glance in her direction. Her skin looked paler than usual. She looked a lot younger than she did just a half-hour ago in school. I guess it was because all of her makeup was gone, rubbed off in the fight or in the rain.

“Um. Why…” Since she was acting human, I wanted to ask her why she’d been so mean to me since the accident, but it didn’t make any sense to ask.

“Why am I such an asshole to you?” she mumbled, arching her pierced eyebrow. I wondered if I should run before she decided to get revenge for the black eye.

“Um, yeah.” I wanted to shrink. I wanted to shrink down into the sand and disappear.

“You stole my best friend.”

“I what?” That was not what I was expecting at all.

“You stole her. Emily. She was mine, and now she’s not.” She said it matter-of-factly, almost like she accepted it or like it made sense. I wondered if she sounded that way because Emily might never be anyone’s best friend, ever again. I shivered and dug my fingernails into my palm to stop myself from sobbing.

“I’m sorry. I’m sure I…I’m sure I didn’t mean to.” I knew Emily and Josie had hung out a lot more before that day when Emily and I made the donut run in the middle of Color Week. But I had no idea they were
that
tight.

“She thought that if we all three hung out together that you wouldn’t stick around. That you’d get freaked out and ditch her and she’d lose her chance to be different.”

“What do you mean?” I was baffled at what Josie was saying, but I would’ve given anything to keep her talking. I held my breath to stop myself from asking a million questions.
Let her talk
, a little voice in my head instructed.

“She thought we weren’t good enough to hang out with you, that we were too trashy. She wanted to be better; she wanted to be
you
.”

“I…I don’t understand. I live in a gross condo with my mom. She’s a waitress. My dad left. He’s a drunk.” It was like Josie was speaking in gibberish. I stared at her. My entire life since the fall had been totally bizarro, but this conversation took the cake.

She made a sound that was halfway between a scoff and a laugh. “Yeah, but everyone knows you’re smart. And you look kind of like that chick from that one show.”

“What? What one show?”

She laughed then, but it was a harsh laugh. I hugged my knees again. “That one. With all the rich kids? Anyway, it wasn’t really because of that. It was because you were good. It doesn’t matter where you live. People just know.” She said the last words slowly, like the final score of a game that people really, really cared about.

“And you’re not, um,
good
?” I wasn’t sure what Josie meant, but I was starting to get an idea. Being back in high school for two weeks was enough time to understand how labels worked. Some kids were good, others were not, end of story. Even the teachers played into it. Like, if a good kid was late to class, they’d let it slide, but if a fuck-up dashed in after the bell, detention. It wasn’t fair, and even with a piece-of-shit memory, I was willing to bet it had started a long time ago. I wondered about the kids who
everyone
had decided were bad. The lost ones, the problems. What became of them when they were adults? Did people ever change their minds?

“No, I’m not.” Josie said.

People accepted their labels and grew into them, eventually taking them on with pride. I wondered if it was too late to convince Josie she was wrong. I knew Emily didn’t think Josie was bad. Emily was just one of those people who could only be best friends with one person at a time. She wasn’t perfect. None of us were.

“How can you tell?” I prayed I wouldn’t say something wrong. She’d probably punch me and my mild TBI would become major.

“Jesus Christ…you know.” She mimicked sucking on a joint.

“I, um, see. And Emily didn’t?” It was a stupid question. I knew Emily was straight edge.

“Not when she started hanging out with you. Her parents probably threw a party after they met you the first time.” Josie laughed.

“I doubt it.” I didn’t remember talking much when I met Emily’s parents the first time. I think they’d been in the middle of giving each other the silent treatment.

We sat quietly for a few moments as I considered what to say next. I didn’t feel especially happy to hear that I fell under the category of “good,” even if it was probably the most important fact about my identity. I supposed it was convenient—certainly useful—but it felt so meaningless, and the whole system made Josie, and probably everyone else, miserable.

“Look, it’s all stupid, okay. I’m not
good
. I’m not even particularly nice.” Josie was guilty of the same thing as everyone else: thinking the quiet people were sweet.

“Yes, you are. You ring the Salvation Army bell with your mom at Christmas,” Josie said. “I saw you.” My mom volunteered as a bell ringer every December and I went with her and stood by the little red bucket. Our station was outside Target, and I tried not to die of embarrassment when I saw people I knew. But the truth was, I liked doing it. People who usually wouldn’t even look at you wished you Merry Christmas. When I was littler, they always told me that Santa was going to put me on his “nice” list.

Our eyes met, then skittered away from each other. Fun Towne was a carnival again, getting louder by the second. Any moment some carnie was going to notice us sitting under the maintenance ladder and hustle us out of there.

Josie sighed and threw a pebble at the steel support digging into the ground ten yards away. “I’m sure it was her idea to climb up this piece of shit, anyway.” Josie took a slow-motion swing at the base of the Sling Shot.

“You think so? Why?”

“That girl loved a good view. She had, like, this collection of pictures she’d cut out from magazines of good views. Her dream is to own a penthouse apartment somewhere on the eightieth floor.”

“I…I didn’t know that. Cool.”

“Yeah. She was going to be an airline pilot, but then she started reading about how that job sucks balls now.”

I knew what I had to do. I turned away from Josie and began climbing.

“Stop it,” she growled. Her words weren’t clear, but I still heard her. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Josie’s face. She looked both surprised and horrified. She started climbing, berating me all the way. “This is stupid, Robin. You don’t have to do this. Emily would kick my ass if she knew I let you do this. Stop.”

I didn’t answer her. I didn’t pay attention to her at all. I just kept climbing, hoping in some nonsense way that I’d find Em if I kept going, higher and higher to the perch she liked. I reached the platform from which—I think—we fell that night, and stopped. I wasn’t afraid.

The world looked gray and reflective. All the lights of the Highway 192 strip shined on the soaking wet pavement, dancing on the glassy blacktop and showering the dim scene with a touch of timelessness. I gazed to the west and then looked directly down, willing myself to remember the night of our fall. Emily had been slightly above; I’d started climbing down when she wasn’t done talking.

“You think you’re pretty tough, don’t you?” Josie finally reached me and pulled on my soaked jeans leg.

“I don’t think I’m anything,” I said. “I just want to figure out what happened.”

We clung to the maintenance ladder in silence for a while, until I saw Josie risk moving off of it, onto the surrounding steel scaffolding of the structure itself. I bit my lip as I watched her trying to get to eye level with me. Her movements were graceful and sure; my heart was in my throat and my mind played tricks on me for a moment as she reminded me of Emily. There was less wind, however. The air had calmed down until it was still and heavy.

“Climb down,” Josie said, getting in my face. “Now.”

“What? What difference does it make to you?” I jerked my eyes away from hers. I hadn’t come up here to have another showdown.

“Look, I’m trying to fucking
apologize
. I’m sorry I blamed you for what happened. Stop, like, punishing yourself.” She looked off into the distance.

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Alright,” I whispered in Josie’s direction. I wasn’t ready to forgive her, but I was glad she’d said what she’d said.

We looked at each other and didn’t look away right away.

“God, I wish I could remember what happened that night.” I hated to break the peace that had settled between us, but until Emily was safe, I couldn’t relax. I’d made a promise.

“Oh shit, this bar is loose. Like, really loose. Jesus, so is this one.” Josie said, jiggling one of the steel girders. “We need to get off this death trap.”

Time stopped.

I stared at Josie and she looked at me funny, as my mouth dropped open and I gasped for breath.

I remember.

It was just like this.

As the entire night came back to me, I couldn’t breathe. I started to hyperventilate and Josie said something, as if from miles away. My vision telescoped and I threw up, right there, clinging to the steel ladder. I counted the streetlights below us: one, two, three, four, five, wishing I was driving past them instead of perched above them.

“It’s freezing,” Emily said. Her voice was a little off. I looked at her and hoped she was okay. It was definitely colder than either of us expected, and I wished I’d thought to bring a coat or something on our little adventure. I shivered and tried to appreciate the almost-full moon. It had been so warm all day; only now, in the middle of the night, did the air carry with it the suggestion of autumn—and something else, maybe the ocean. I tilted my chin, searching for a ribbon of salt water in the sky.

“Yeah, whose idea was this? At least the lights are pretty.” I risked freeing one of my hands to point toward the Loop, which was lit up like Christmas even though it was just after Halloween.

“Mmm.” Em murmured, resting her head on her forearm. She shut her eyes, which startled me. This wasn’t a place you could exactly nod off. We’d climbed up the maintenance ladder of the huge Sling Shot thrill ride in Fun Towne and had to be at least five stories above Highway 192. “I like it up here.”

“Emily!”

“What?”

“Maybe we should head back.” It made me nervous that Em seemed ready to camp out up here. I waited, hoping her mood would land somewhere solid so I could figure out what to say and get us the hell off this thing.

“No, I want to stay. I can see everything.” She paused, chewing on the inside of her cheek. “Did you know this all used to be a huge swamp? Bog. Ha. Bog.”

“What is
wrong
with you?” I laughed to let her know I wasn’t serious, but the truth was, I really wanted to know. Emily had always had a goofy streak, but tonight her voice sounded a little hysterical.

“Nothing. Relax.” She was quiet for a long time. I wanted to go home; heights weren’t my favorite thing. But I could tell she needed me to stay with her. For a long time, possibly even all night if that’s what it took.