What We Saw (2 page)

I'VE BEEN WORKING
up the courage to open my eyes again.

I tried once about ten minutes ago. Stab of light. Vise on my brain. Jackhammer in my stomach. Deep breaths.
Don't throw up.

Lately, I've been having these moments where I examine my life and think,
Kate Weston, how did you get here? How did this happen?
Sometimes it's a situation so excellent I'm convinced I did something truly selfless in a past life to gain the extreme good fortune of my present.

This is not one of those situations.

When I woke up, I was pretty sure I'd managed to park the
old pickup I inherited from Dad last year on top of my own head. A glimpse of the curtains as the room spun by confirmed I'm in my bedroom and not in the driveway. This allowed me to rule out a dinged-up Chevy Silverado as the source of my pain and work backward through the events of last night to find the true cause. I did so while holding one pillow over my head and moaning, facedown, into another. After several minutes of deliberation, I'm pleased to announce I've reached a verdict:

I blame John Doone's grandma.

If Betty Lee Troyer hadn't decided to try sushi for the first time at a mall food court in Grand Island, Nebraska, a few days before Christmas, she wouldn't have spent the last two weeks of December in the hospital. If her mother hadn't been in the hospital, Margie Doone wouldn't have postponed the family ski trip until spring break so she could rush to Grand Island. If the Doones had gone skiing over Christmas instead of spring break, John would've gone with them. Instead, he stayed home alone so he wouldn't miss the final basketball practices before the state tournament. If John hadn't had the house to himself, he never would've been allowed to throw a party that inspired its own hashtag. And if there had been no party last night, I wouldn't have lost count after three shots of tequila, and wound up lying here terrified to open my eyes again.

I waver back and forth between the fear of dying and the fear that I will not die—that instead this pain will continue indefinitely. There are a few snapshots of last night in my head—animated GIFs at the very best. No video so far. The only thing
I remember for sure is more of a feeling than a conversation.

Something about Ben.

His arm around my waist, propping me up. His hand in the pocket of my shorts, fishing for my keys. His breath on my neck as he said he wasn't letting me drive my truck home. I know we were on the sidewalk, but I can't remember what I said back to him. Maybe “thank you”?

His cheek against mine. Spring breeze. Goose bumps. That grin.

“Sure,” he whispered. “What are friends for?”

I do remember one thing for certain: Ben, leaning in toward me. So close our foreheads touch. Closer than we've been in a long time.

It was different.

It was more.

More than chivalry. More than playing soccer as kids. More than just friends. The certainty of this is a laser, slicing through the thick fog of too much tequila. I replay the scene. This time I remember how close his lips were to mine.

And the hiccups.

The first one occurred at exactly that moment, his forehead resting against mine. Any other girl in any other town in any other state on any other sidewalk with any other guy—that's a sure bet, right? I mean, forehead to forehead? You just close your eyes and lean in.

Not me.

Nope, one inch from the lips of a guy who's had a few beers
on a night when Coral Sands, Iowa, is the center of the universe? Kate Weston comes through with the hiccups. Just the way I roll.

He laughed as he pulled away, taking my keys with him.

Shit. The truck.

Did Ben drive me home in
my
truck or his? This thought pulls me into a panic. My stomach rolls like a ship in heavy seas, threatening to crest my tongue and spill across the rug. If I left my truck across town, I won't have to worry about the alcohol killing me. My father will be happy to assist.

My phone chirps and flaps across the nightstand, a rooster that's been crowing for the last ten minutes. Each new alert sends a rattle through the fossils I've arranged there, little petrified skeletons, three of the specimens for geology that Ben and I collected last fall. Who knew Rocks for Jocks would get us talking again? Eyes still closed, my fingers fumble for the phone, knocking a piece of coral to the carpet. Finally, I squint at the screen. Seven texts from Rachel Henderling.

The last one is a picture of me from last night.

It isn't pretty.

I appear to be a member of the Cross-Eyed Zombie Invasion. There is a strand of my own hair stuck in the corner of my mouth, and my arm is thrown around Stacey Stallard's shoulders like she's my best friend.

We're both holding tiny glasses upside down, and there's a strange green stripe, which I can only hope is a lime, peeking out from between my lips where my teeth should be. Stacey's
eyes are wild and her cheeks are flushed, but a big smile is plastered across her face. If it weren't for the bottle of Cabo Wabo tequila on the Doones' kitchen island, she might be standing at the top of a mountain after a brisk hike, a cold wind in her face.

I just look trashed.

The phone buzzes in my hand. Rachel again:

DEF your new profile pic.

DELETE THAT NOW.

Dunno. You look pretty hot.

#NOW

LOL. OMG. Ok ok #DONE

Ugh. What. Just. Happened?

My phone rings the moment I press send.

“Good morning, sunshine!” Rachel's voice is so perky I wince.

“What the hell are you doing up so early?” I croak.

“Those preschoolers don't teach themselves Sunday school.”

“Will you be teaching them to make the margaritas you mixed last night?”

Rachel giggles. “You're the one who switched to shots.”

“Which I would not have done if that margarita hadn't gotten me hammered. I can't believe they let you step foot in that church.”

“Please. Even Jesus turned water into wine. If I can find a guy who performs that miracle, I'll never let him leave.”

A guy.

Leaving.

My truck.

Jumping out of bed, I pause only briefly to adjust myself to the fresh hell of standing upright. “Shit.”

Rachel scolds me for my language on the Lord's day. I would usually retort that he is her Lord, not mine, but right now I need all potential deities on my team.

Running down the hall to Will's room, I blow past our family Wall of Fame. Fifth-grade me leers back from a gallery frame: braces, shin guards, rubbery sports glasses strapped across the wavy hair bursting from my braid in all directions. Over the past few years, my exterior has been transformed by contact lenses and a flat iron, but most days I'm still surprised not to see that little mess in the mirror.

Will's bed is empty, and I scale a mountain range of high-tops and basketball jerseys like the Von Trapps escaping over the Alps. The window in his room faces the driveway, and as I pull back the curtain, I take in the glorious vision of my truck parked at the curb.

“Yes!” I hiss this at the phone while performing an unplanned fist pump that sends an electric shock through my forehead, as my stomach reels in a hoedown of misery.

“What?” Rachel is confused.

I take a deep breath and grasp the back of the chair at Will's desk, trying to persuade my insides not to rebel. “I wasn't sure how I got home. I guess Ben drove me back here in my truck?”

“Uh, yeah. He was gone from the party for like an hour. Must've walked back.”

“Wait, he went back to the party?”

“The night was still young. You were toast by ten forty-five.”

“Again, your fault.”

“Whatever. I left a little before midnight. Ran into Ben coming up the Doones' driveway. Oh—” She pauses.

“What?” I ask.

“Just a tweet. Looks like we aren't the only ones who had fun last night.” She giggles. “And there are some Instagram pictures to prove it.”

“Who is it?”

“Crap. Gotta go. I have to get there a few minutes early so I can make copies of the coloring sheets. Text you later.” Rachel yells down the hall for her mom to hurry, and my phone beeps that the call has ended.

“How you feeling, rock star?”

Will is standing in the doorway. He's wearing the shiny gray basketball shorts he sleeps in and stretching, his fingers hooked onto the top of the doorframe. I am briefly dumbfounded. When did he get that tall? His hair is doing its own electromagnetic experiment, and as I take a step toward him, I trip on a pair of Nikes and collapse onto his bed with a groan.

He laughs. “That good, huh?”

Will slips into the room and closes the door behind him, gingerly sitting next to me so as not to bounce my head. A blurred memory of slipping past him in the hallway last night
flashes before my eyes.

“You're not gonna tell Mom and Dad, are you?”

“Depends . . .” There's a smirk in his voice. I squint at him through my headache.

“On what?” I try to affect my imperial Katherine the Great voice. He's not buying it.

“On whether you take me with you next time.”

It takes every ounce of strength I can muster to sit up, grab a pillow, and swing it at Will. He catches it easily with one hand and tosses it back at me. We both laugh, me grasping at my head and begging him to make it stop.

“You were pretty wrecked last night,” he says. “I think I should chaperone next time.” Ignoring him, I gingerly pick my way across the mounds of stuff between me and the door. He jumps up and clears a path. “Please?”

I stop and try to press one of his enormous cowlicks down on the side of his head. It springs back like a hydra—messier, angrier. “Let's see if I survive
this
time.”

A grin spreads across his face. “That's not a no . . .”

I laugh, and give him a little push so I can get to the doorknob. “I'll think about it. Just don't tell Mom and Dad.”

“What are you doing today?”

“First, Advil. Then, a shower. I haven't allowed myself to dream beyond that.”

Will smiles as I step into the hall. “Brush your teeth,” he whispers. “You smell like the bar at Don Chilitos.”

I try to punch him in the arm, but he dodges and pulls
the door closed. Off balance, I stumble gently into the Wall of Fame, narrowly avoiding a collision with a picture of me and Ben. We are in second grade, standing in the front yard, soaking wet. I am wearing a red swimsuit with white polka dots. Ben has on little board shorts covered in cartoon monkeys. I should text him to say thank you for getting me home, but back in my bedroom my fingers pause over the screen, and I toss the phone on my bed. Something about that shot of us in the hall changes my mind. If I can rally after my shower, I'll go over to his house and offer my gratitude in person.

Still smiling about the picture, I gulp down three ibuprofen, holding my hair out of the sink and slurping straight from the tap. We were playing “rainstorm on the beach” the day that shot was taken. Mom had put the sprinkler next to the sandbox, and Ben tried to explain what it felt like when the surf boils over your toes.

Stepping into a steaming shower, I remember the question I asked him that day.
Can you see all the way to the other side?

He answered me with wide blue eyes and awe in his voice.

There's only one side. The waves go on forever.

IOWA WAS ONCE
an ocean.

Sounds crazy, I know, but it's true. Three hundred and seventy-five million years ago, there were no cornfields. Only a large, shallow sea filled with trilobites and mud worms and prehistoric fish, all splashing around in the soup, trying to turn their fins into legs—probably so they could walk to California before the ice age hit.

After surviving this winter, I understand that urge. Sometimes we have snow in March, but today the sun is warm on my face, and I'm glad I'm walking over to Ben's instead of driving. It'll take twenty minutes, and after this year's deep freeze, the last week of upper sixties has felt like a heat wave. It's supposed
to be seventy-one degrees this afternoon—practically bikini weather. I want to soak up every ray I can. Turning the corner at the end of our block, I stare up the gentle slope of Oaklawn Avenue and try to imagine my landlocked farm town as an ancient tropical paradise.

Mr. Johnston explained all of this last fall, the very first week of geology. Rachel's hand flew up as soon as he said the words
Devonian Era
. I knew what was coming before she opened her mouth. She's my best friend, but a true forward: aggressive on the field and off. The only things Rachel loves more than scoring are the fight to get the ball, and her Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

“Isn't it true that this is all just a
theory
, Mr. Johnston?”

“Just a theory?”

“This whole three hundred and seventy-five million years ago thing. I mean, no one was around to see that. There's no proof.”

Mr. Johnston turned thirty on the first day of school. I always forget how crystal clear his green eyes are until he pulls off his funky horn-rimmed glasses, which he did right then.

“Is that the point of science?” he asked Rachel. “Proof?”

“Well, yeah,” she said. “Isn't that why we observe stuff? To prove theories are right or wrong? That's why all this evolution stuff is just a theory. Because you can't observe when the world began, so you can't prove it.”

“There's no such thing as a ‘proof' in science,” Mr. Johnston said, and put his glasses back on. “You can have a proof in math
or in logic, but not in science. Anybody tell me why?”

Lindsey Chen tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and raised her hand. She's a defender on the field, always a surprise to the opposing team. They write her off as a “little Asian girl” and are unprepared for her to be both fleet and fierce.

“Yes, Miss Chen?”

“Math and logic are closed systems. Like in algebra, there's only one possible answer to a problem. You solve for x.”

Mr. Johnston nodded. “Exactly. There's no such thing as ‘proving' something true or false with science. It all comes down to what we mean when we use that word
theory
.”

He asked who could tell him the difference between a scientific theory and what most people mean when they say theory. Mr. Johnston pointed toward the back, and I swiveled around in surprise when I heard Ben's voice.

“I have a theory that the tacos in the cafeteria are made out of stray cats.”

Mr. Johnston laughed along with the rest of us. “Yes! But is that a
scientific
theory, Mr. Cody?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

Ben shrugged. “I don't have any observations to back it up. Just a hunch. Based on taste.”

Mr. Johnston kept driving toward his point over the laughter. “And what do we call a ‘hunch' in science? Anyone?” He pointed at me. “Kate?”

“A hypothesis?”

“Bingo! And how is an unproven hypothesis different from a scientific theory?”

Lindsey spoke up again. “A scientific theory is the best explanation for something based on all the evidence we have so far. You can use it to make predictions.”

“Very good.” Mr. Johnston smiled
,
mission accomplished. “Remember that words have specific meanings depending on context. When we say that evolution is a ‘scientific theory' we mean it's the most likely explanation—the one strongly supported by all of our observations of the natural world.”

Rachel was waving her hand like a castaway in choppy water. “Yes, Rachel?”

“But nobody was here three hundred and seventy-five million years ago to observe anything. So, how can we say that Iowa used to be an ocean if no one saw that?”

“We observe the evidence.” Mr. Johnston smiled. “Even if you don't witness an event firsthand, there's always plenty of evidence to be found.”

Rachel rolled her eyes. “Like what?”

Mr. Johnston passed around eighteen plastic buckets, assigned partners at random, and sent us out to look for coral fossils in a ditch behind the school—roughly twelve hundred miles from the nearest ocean.

I can hear the basketball pinging on Ben's driveway from half a block away. Pausing at the corner of the front hedge, I watch him shoot free throws. He is sweaty and shirtless.

It is unseasonably warm
.

Bounce-bounce.

Bounce-bounce.

He spins the ball to his hip, then squares and shoots.

Thwfft.

Precision, timing, balance, concentration: Ben in his natural habitat.

Until that day in the ditch during Mr. Johnston's class last fall, neither of us realized we'd stopped speaking beyond a quick “hey, how's it going?”

It happened so slowly—us taking each other for granted. The ebb and flow of our separate lives became a steady current, carrying us toward different pursuits.

Ben shot up almost a foot the summer after sixth grade and traded his cleats for high-tops. The promise of Hawkeye basketball has a chokehold on this town, and any boy who crests six feet in seventh grade is drafted without mercy. The Friday night lights on the Coral Sands football field in October can't hold a candle to the ones in the gymnasium come December. Our football team has never done very well, and soccer is fine for girls, but varsity basketball? They get all the glory—and, lately, the Division 1 scouts.

Ben and I were still in classes together, but over time the familiar has a way of getting covered up by layer after layer of life, the everyday sediment of homework and practice and parties and who eats lunch where. Our moms talked a lot when his dad filed for divorce a couple years ago, but I didn't know how
to bring it up with Ben. I'd wanted to tell him that I was here for him, that I missed him, but it seemed weird to walk up and say, “Heard your parents are splitting up.” So, we just continued to nod at each other as we passed in the hallway.

Maybe digging around in the dirt made us remember being kids again. Whatever the reason, tromping through that culvert out behind the school last September, all of the ease I used to have with Ben came flooding back. It only took five minutes, and we were laughing like six-year-olds at soccer practice.

I read a novel last summer, and there was a scene where two people saw each other again after a long absence. The author wrote, “It was as if no time had passed at all.” At the time, I wondered how that could be. There's no way to stop time from passing or people from changing. Ben's most rapid and dramatic change had been his height—practically overnight—but lots of other changes had been more subtle. In many ways, Ben had grown up right in front of me, only I hadn't been paying attention. I'd missed all the tiny changes because they'd occurred so slowly.

We learned last year in biology that the cells in our bodies are completely replaced by new ones every seven years. Ben and I are literally different people now than we were as children—fundamentally changed on a molecular level.

As we dug around that ditch, I saw how broad his shoulders had become, how his biceps stretched the sleeves of his clingy gray T-shirt. An eon's worth of natural selection had come to pass. The boy who used to be shorter than me now towered
overhead at six feet, four inches. Those years between twelve and sixteen might as well have been the Paleolithic Period.

That afternoon, Ben held the bucket while I brushed off tiny bits of ancient history, but we unearthed more than a few hunks of limestone for Mr. Johnston's class. As Ben bent to grab one last piece of coral, I glimpsed the scar behind his ear, and when I saw it, a tremor fluttered through my chest.

A tiny seismic shift.

The layers inside me got all stirred up that day.

I uncovered something beautiful buried deep within my heart, and realized it had been there all along.