The Heart Is Not a Size (4 page)

“Hey,” I asked a guy who looked as if he might work at Longwood. “Did some kid just run by here?”

“Blond?” he said. “A girl?”

“No. A boy. Red shoelaces? Curly hair?”

The guy stood and thought before he shook his head no and wished me luck. But a miracle was what I needed. Luck never cut it with Kev.

Maybe someday we’ll all be standing around the track cheering for my breakneck brother. Maybe we’ll be saying, “Remember when?” But that day I wished I’d doped up the kid’s sneakers with lead. I wished I had a chain and he was tethered to it. Running, I had to strategize on the fly—choose a path he might be on, change course when I couldn’t find him. “Kev!” I kept calling, but he never answered. Finally I asked a woman with a stroller. “My kid brother,” I said, and I tried to explain. When she said no, she hadn’t seen him, I asked an old man who’d come along. I couldn’t keep the awful possibility of the Meadow from my thoughts, for if Kev had gone that far and had started down that path, chances were I’d never find him. Chances were I’d have to wait for my brother to find me, and Kev never does take initiative.

Panic, I’m telling you, begins in the heart. Panic is big buzzard wings banging wretched and trapped against the bones of your ribs, knocking your windpipe loose, swiping your logic. Panic makes you stupid when you have to be smart. It makes you stop in your tracks when what you must do right then is run. I lost my brother at Longwood Gardens for an hour that day,
and in the midst of my chase I lost myself. I can’t even tell you what happened next, except that I was sobbing, hardly breathing by the time I saw him—Kev sauntering his way toward me on the path, his hair like a rooster crest on the top of his sweaty head.

“Jesus, G., what’s with you?” he said. Then we went to find the café. Kev didn’t care at all that I’d been scared, just thought I was being big-sister weird; and it would have done neither of us one bit of good to explain to our mom what had just happened. You can feel as if you’re dying when you’re inside a panic attack. Then, when you realize you’ll probably survive, the red, hot, sizzled part of you just wants to run and hide.

It’s no good trying to explain panic after the fact. It wouldn’t have helped to get my parents involved, or at least I couldn’t see how. I could only fix myself. I was old enough to have figured that out.

The day after Mack’s meeting, my cell performed its faithful “You’re Beautiful” ring tone. I flipped it open to Riley. “Oh my God,” she was saying before I’d even said hey. “My mother,” she continued. “She’s
worse
than a freak show.”

My mom and dad were out—some charity event. I’d finally gotten Kev through his homework by turning it into a game, giving him a penny for every math problem he solved. Geoff was upstairs and online, Facebooking with the Syracuse crowd. Even if he was hardly one of us anymore, even if in his mind Geoff had long since moved on, Kev still had the power to annoy him. To march him straight back into the circle of family.

“So, in the car back, she’s, like, not even speaking, right?” Riley was saying. “My mother—all dumbstruck. Like
that’s
normal. Then we get to a mile from here and she says, ‘No daughter of mine,’ then goes totally flabbergasted, speechless. ‘Mom? Are you all right?’ I ask her. And she says—and I mean, this was her big moment, Georgia—‘Hygiene, Riley. It’s so important.’ And I say, ‘Hygiene, Mom? Hygiene?’ As if I still go around wearing embroidered pinafores and patent leather slippers. As if she hasn’t figured out that dirt is not the world’s worst evil.”

“Sounds like she blocked the transformation stories.”

“I guess.”

“But it doesn’t matter, right? Because you’re the one who’s going.”

“I guess.” And here Riley paused the way she can when she’s balancing the scales of justice in her mind. “I guess so. Yeah.” She was so up and down. So hot and cold. There was no Riley middle.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing, really,” she answered. “It’s just…Do you still think, Georgia, that we should go? I mean, after the presentation and everything? We won’t know anyone but each other. Not at first, at least. It sounds more like work than like fun.”

“Picture the summer without Juárez,” I said. “What do you see?”

“Windows down, air conditioner on, ear buds in. Anything that I want is mine.”

“And?” I pressed.

“Pretty,” she said.

“
Too
pretty,” I said. “Think about it.” Kev had made his way upstairs. I took the phone around to the foyer so that I’d be near if there was trouble. Once Kev had come shooting around the spiral stairs headfirst, like an earthbound rocket. Once I’d found him trying to slide
down the big oak banister. Once I’d found him urging a friend to leap for the crystal chandelier.
I will if you will,
I had heard him dare.

“It’s going to be hot in Juárez,” Riley said.

“That’s a fact.” I took a cautionary glance up at the stairs.

“We’re going to hate the toilets.”

“They’ll be gross.”

“We’re going to be sleeping next to a bunch of kids we hardly know in a beat-up church in an across-the-border country. And then there’s the fact of those
muertas
.” For at the meeting Mack had spoken of them; he had laid bare the facts. He’d said that in Anapra we would be among the families who had lost sisters and daughters to a wave of crime that wasn’t entirely in check. “We’ll be part of the healing,” he’d said. Then he’d moved on, giving no one much time at all to dwell.

“You come up with some of the wackiest ideas,” Riley said.

“I’m going to go, Ri. You go if you want to.”

She was silent; I waited through her silence. “Seeds” is what she said at last, and then she started to laugh.
Upstairs, Kev was banging on Geoff’s door and Geoff was telling him to quit. Now Kev was yelling at Geoff, and Kev was calling for me, and Ri was back inside silence.

“We’re going to Juárez” is what she finally said. Definitive and certain.

“Both of us?”

“Yeah.”

“Cool,” I said, a single, grateful syllable.

“And tomorrow we go shopping.”

“Shopping?”

“For the wardrobe,” she said. “The Juárez trousseau.”

“You’re as crazy as your mom,” I said.

She laughed. “Not even a possibility, Georgia.”

five

Y
ou can’t ride a bike to the mall from where I live. You have to wait for a ride. My mom did the drop-off; Riley’s mom would collect. Within a year both of us would have our licenses. It was Saturday morning, and the place was mobbed. I felt like the Hulk beside Riley, who seemed even smaller than usual, all belted into her father’s old Brooks Brothers shirt and her legs sheened over with spandex. She had kept her spangled sunglasses on. She’d painted another streak of orange into her hair—a broad stripe, like a hair band. She had on a pair of giraffey-tall shoes that
had the skinniest, most impractical heels.

Spring break was a week away. A man wearing a big-eared bunny suit was passing tinfoiled chocolates to the shopping clientele, the same man, I swear, who does Santa. I took two of the eggs off his furry paw, said thank you to the piece of mesh that only half disguised his face. Riley took precisely none.

“They’re
free
,” I said, imploring.

She wasn’t tempted. I peeled away the tinfoil from the chocolates, one by satisfying one. “Best chocolate on the planet,” I said, exaggerating.

“Then take another,” Riley said. Which made me feel like the Hulk Times Two, and made her seem even smaller. I minded, a lot, that she wouldn’t eat the chocolate. I minded the thought that crept in. Riley was too small. Some part of me knew it. Another part of me didn’t want to know.

“You’re a royal pain in the butt, Marksmen,” I told her.

“I’m concentrating,” she said.

And she was. Because we’d come to the court in the middle of the mall; there were choices in every direction. You could go east or you could go west or you
could keep on going north, which would take you to a bridge that floated you high over a sea of parked Beamers. On the other side of the bridge you’d find a second, newer shopping complex that was linked, way beyond, to a brand-new third. I always got to this court and its spoked-out choices and ached, all of a sudden, to give it up and get myself home. Riley, though, was a master navigator. She had the blueprint of the mall and all its stores imprinted on her brain, kept running lists in her head. I let her think for both of us, on behalf of the Juárez trousseau, on behalf of my not thinking about why she was too small.

“I have it all figured out,” she said now, hiccuping a little laugh, adjusting the glasses on her nose.

I rolled the chocolate foils into two tiny aluminum balls and tossed them into the nearest metal can. “Don’t worry. I’m not asking questions.”

Everything is polished to smoothness in the mall—the granite floors, the skylights, the panes of glass, the music that falls from you can’t tell where—and the weather is always mid-May—perfectly perfect. Riley and I were with the mob and against the mob, around and down and through, until we found our way to a
boutique named Diamonds, which was narrow and dark beyond its glass front and abundant inside with stacked, racked things. Diamonds was a shop for girls our age, all trends and tightness; and that meant, of course, that it was flooded with mothers—with women whose number one m.o. was to outyouth their daughters.

“Isn’t that Lauren Carmichael’s mom?” Riley whispered into my ear as we walked in; and I said, “Oh my God, it is,” because there she was, Lauren’s mom, posing in front of the three-way mirror in a little spring kilt and cut-to-the-naval blouse. She had a Cleopatra necklace at her throat and a couple of platinum chains around one ankle; and if she’d had to bend down to, say, strap on some sandals, we’d have seen what you never want to see of a full-grown woman’s rear end.

“Pretty,” Riley muttered, pushing her shades up off her eyes now and planting them firmly over her new orange stripe, behind her ears.

“They should keep to their own stores,” I said.

“You should tell that to my mother,” Riley confided. “Once, I swear, she was in here when I was, trying on some real low capris with a lacy sort of a tee.
She didn’t even see me; that’s how self-absorbed she was. Couldn’t take her eyes off the mirror.”

I rolled my eyes. “There should be laws,” I said.

Riley laughed, one of her best, big, out-loud laughs, then turned and started sorting through the racks, piling herself up with whatever she might want until she was cascaded with clothes.

“You want me to hold some of that?” I offered.

“Nope,” she huffed. “I got it.”

“You want me to, like, get you something else?”

“Georgia,” she said. “Georgia, Georgia. Why don’t you think about yourself for once? Look around. Pick out something nice. Go back there. Try it on.”

“I’m not the Diamonds kind of girl,” I said.

“You could be,” she said, “if you wanted.”

“Right.” I picked up something red and sheer and low-cut and clingy and pressed it to myself. I traded that for something flouncy. I pulled one of those two-inch sweaters off a shelf. “I’m being strictly God honest,” I said. “How gross would I look in all that?”

“I thought we were going to a thing called Transformations.” Behind all her prospective clothes, Riley was starting to sound exasperated.

“The world, Riley. We’re transforming the world.”

“And where is it, again, that you live?”

“The world.” I blushed. “I guess.”

“So get with the program. Start with yourself.”

“I think you’re missing the point here, Riley.”

“You are such a
dose
,” she said, but she was smiling. And then she was backing away and turning a corner until I couldn’t see her anymore. She’d disappeared behind a changing-room door. I could hear the clattering of hangers, the whooshing of clothes, the riptide sound of zippers. I went over to where she was. On the other side of the door, the commotion continued but Riley herself was bizarrely quiet.

“Hey,” I said after too much time had passed.

“Hey,” she said back, her voice thin and distant.

“You okay back there?”

“Nothing fits,” she said.

“Because you’re too skinny,” I said.

“No. Because I’m too fat.”

I sighed real loud. It had to be a joke.

But Riley wasn’t laughing. She was clattering with the hangers again. She was banging things around,
fitting her feet into her shoes, opening the door to the changing room. She’d thrust her sunglasses back down to her nose. The orange stripe around her head looked flushed and oddly disturbed.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Riley said, pushing past me now. “Okay?”

“Riley,” I said. “Riley?”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“I got that,” I said.

I had to take a running start to catch her. There wasn’t time to say what I was thinking.

six

T
he next day I waited for Riley to call. She didn’t.

I called her three times.

She didn’t answer.

seven

T
wo days later, Riley was, apparently, Riley. She had gotten to school before I had and pulled a beaded bracelet through the handle of my locker—beads like crystals, like little aquamarine chips that had been wired together in however many rows of five across. It was a Riley Special, fitted with a clasp. I put it on before I dialed my combo. Between third and fourth periods I saw her down the hall from me, caught inside a hurricane crowd. I raised my arm and the bracelet flashed. I’m sure I heard her laugh.

That afternoon I was hardly home when “You’re
Beautiful” started singing. I threw my backpack down on the family room floor, then flew up the stairs, past Kev’s room and into my own. I said hello and flopped onto my bed. Riley said hi and I smiled.

“Great bracelet,” I told her.

“Yeah.” She was slightly out of breath.