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  For Elouise, my heart in the wild

  ONE

  It’s morning again, and I’m waiting for the school bus like a loser. It has now been two months of mornings without Camille pulling up, stereo blaring, in her hand-me-down Ford Taurus. Lately, since she started dating Hunter Collins, the music had changed from soulless pop to moody indie bands neither she nor I had ever heard of, which, quite frankly, seemed a little ridiculous in contrast to her windswept deep brown hair, wholesome cherubic face, and homecoming queen status. Equally ridiculous was loud music on a country road at seven thirty in the morning, pulling up in front of a barn-turned-house-turned-pottery-studio-slash-showroom.

  Now there is no ride. I must walk the quarter mile to Grandma’s house on the other end of the property, where the school bus picks me up because that is technically my address. I could have told the driver to pick me up where I actually live—“the slave quarters,” as Mom likes to call it—but I couldn’t bear to burden him with the knowledge that not only did my best friend die two months ago in a horrible car accident during which I was driving, but I am also poor and living with a crazy “artist” in a glorified shack owned by a grumpy old lady who wants nothing to do with either of us. That’s too much bad fortune for most people to bear. People like you to think they care, that they’re endless pits of compassion, but in reality, information like this makes them start sweating and getting all squinty, and all they want to do is get as far away from you as possible before they catch whatever you have.

  So I keep quiet and let people think the more pleasant stuff about me: straight A student, soccer star, full athletic scholarship to the University of Michigan in the fall. That makes them happy. People love to hear about the kid with the great future ahead of her. I don’t tell them how that shining future has dimmed about 50 percent. I don’t tell them that Camille was supposed to be my roommate, that we had already secured our dorm room for next year. I don’t tell them about our plans, the life stories we’d been writing together since we were little kids, how we were going to be together for the rest of our lives. We were going to move to San Francisco after we graduated, get an apartment together, be maid of honor at each other’s wedding, have kids at the same time and raise them like siblings, buy houses on the same block, and after our husbands died we’d become roommates again, sharing an apartment in some hip retirement community where we’d race each other in our motorized wheelchairs. I don’t tell anyone about how we were supposed to be together. Forever. Always.

  But enough about that. There is no use whining about what could and should have been. Camille is dead and I am not. What I need to do is focus on the future, when I can leave this place and all of its history behind, when all of this will fall away, when everything and everyone will be new and fresh, when I will be new and fresh, and the world will be full of possibility again.

  It’s been two months since Camille died, and I haven’t cried yet.

  In theory, I know this is supposed to be the saddest I’ve ever been in my whole life. But in practice, I feel nothing. You may wonder how this is possible. You may think something is wrong with this girl. But no—I am in fact handling this in the most logical and efficient way possible. Focused. Unsentimental. These are good things. They are signs of a successful, determined individual. Mom, however, disagrees. But she is not a successful, determined individual. She is a mentally unstable, failed artist on food stamps who sells tourists pottery out of a shed in Middle of Nowhere, Michigan.

  Mom takes twisted pride in the belief that her apocalyptic mood swings make her some sort of authority on feelings. On the day of Camille’s funeral, she held my wrist in her fingers, and after a few seconds said, “Good, a pulse.” I just shrugged and started walking without her to Grandma’s for a ride, because (1) it was time to leave for the funeral, (2) I don’t have a car, (3) Grandma does, (4) I haven’t been too into driving after the accident, (5) Mom never got her license, and (6) even though she hates us and wants to spend as little time with us as possible, Grandma was still, like everyone in the next three counties, going to the funeral, and knew it would be way too evil, even for her, to refuse us a ride.

  So Mom grabbed her purse and followed me out the door in her way-too-red-for-a-funeral dress and said, “Kiddo, if I wasn’t there to see you come out of my vagina, I’d think you were a robot.” She says I didn’t cry as a baby; I would just frown and make a forceful yet passionless squawk to make my requests known.

  I didn’t cry then and I didn’t cry at the funeral. I performed my duty, went to the church, hugged Camille’s parents, hugged her/our friends, hugged a bunch of people I barely knew, sat somber as the priest and various people spoke about how great she was. I watched the casket being lowered into the ground, but I knew she wasn’t really in there. It was just her body, just her bag of bones, not her soul. That flew away the moment her head smashed in. It could still be flying around, lost on its way to wherever souls go when their bodies fail them. Camille could still be around here somewhere, invisible, looking for a new home.

  While everyone cried, I remember wondering who mows the grass at the cemetery. How long does it take to mow all that grass? When the mower guy is finished, does he have to go back to the beginning and start all over again? How does he feel driving over graves, with the blades chopping mere feet above skeletons? These are the things I thought instead of ­crying.

  If Camille were here, she’d tell me I’m being crazy, that I’m in denial about my feelings. She’d have some great explanation for why crying is good, something about the great landscape of human emotion, the importance of catharsis, how holding back feelings is the cause of psychic distress and even physical illness. She was a big fan of feelings, and she could be very convincing. She was a lot smarter than anyone knew.

  Camille would tell me to snap out of whatever this is that I’m doing, and for her, maybe I would actually try. She’d look at me with her big brown eyes and I’d know I could tell her anything. I’d let her fill me full of ice cream and show me those horrible rom-coms she loved, and maybe I’d actually laugh at the parts that were supposed to be funny, and we’d fall asleep on her parents’ big couch with popcorn stuck in our hair, feeling safer and saner than I’ve ever felt anywhere. Her mom would come in on her way to bed and remind us to brush our teeth, as she has done almost every Friday night since we were old enough for sleepovers. Camille would chase me around the bathroom growling, with rabies toothpaste foam all over her face, and I’d forget what I was pretending to not be so upset about.

  It sounds cheesy and sentimental, and I hate that just about as much as I hate crying, but I would be lying if I said Camille didn’t make me a better person. Ask anyone who knew us, and they’d tell you the same thing, except probably not as nicely. She calmed me. She helped me breathe. Just being near her, just hearing her voice, made it easier for me to rein in the sadistic drill sergeant part of myself. But now that she’s not here, that part of myself seems like the only thing I have left. That demanding voice is the only one I can hear in the space where hers once was. So I listen. It’s better than the alternatives. It’s better than silence.

  But enough thinking about Camille. The more I think about her, the closer I am to slipping into crying territory, and that is not an option. I have work to do. I have the rest of my life to figure out now that she’s not in it.

  As sad as this all is, the truth is that tears don’t change anything. Tears don’t bring Camille back. But no one else seems to have gotten that memo. People for miles around, people who never even met Camille, have shed gallons of tears for the beautiful, kind, and smart homecoming queen whose life was cut too short. I know they cry for me too—the best friend, the driver of the car. Poor girl, they think. I must feel so responsible, they think. They Dr. Phil their way into a diagnosis—PTSD, survivor’s guilt. “It wasn’t your fault,” everyone reminds me—teachers, classmates, the school psychologist, the freaking mailman. I was driving the car, yes, but I was 100 percent sober. And the driver of the oncoming truck wasn’t. And his truck was so much bigger than the car I was driving. And he had the yield sign, not me. And I had my hands at ten and two. And I aced driver’s ed. They say all these things, petting me like I’m some fragile thing, praying they won’t be the one who finally breaks me. They have a vague sense of obligation to comfort me, to ask me how I’m doing, but no one really wants the truth. No one wants me to actually take them up on their offer—“Anything you need, honey. Anytime.” Their sighs of relief are audible when I tell them I’m fine. They’re off the hook, I’m not their responsibility, they can go back to their lives and forget all about me. But they still get to feel proud of themselves because they “made the effort.” They still get to be the hero even though they didn’t do any actual work.

  Who knows, maybe I am part robot like Mom says. Maybe that’s the part I got from my father. Maybe that’s the big secret—my father was a robot—and that’s why Mom refuses to tell me anything about him except (1) we left him when I was two (she says “we” as if I had a choice in the matter) and (2) he’s dead now.

  But, w
hatever. Enough about the Man Who Shall Not Be Spoken Of. I see the school bus chugging itself in my direction as I swat mosquitoes in front of Grandma’s house. “House” is actually an understatement. It’s a mansion. It has a fancy historical registry sign in front of it because it was built in 1868. A few times a year, cars full of stuffy old Historical Society of Michigan board members and big donors show up for ­Grandma’s catered soirees (which Mom and I are never invited to). She lives in there alone with eight unused bedrooms and six unused bathrooms. I stopped asking Mom a long time ago why we don’t live with her, when the house has so much extra space and is so much nicer than our place. She has never given me a good answer. She always says something like, “I lived in that museum for seventeen years and barely made it out alive. Trust me, you do not want to live in there with that woman. She’d crush us with darkness. We’re much better out here in the slave quarters.”

  I feel all eyes on me as the bus pulls up. I’m still something of a fascination for the underclassmen who don’t know enough to try to act cool and not stare. I’m the only senior riding the bus besides Jack “Booger” Bowers and two special ed kids. Just one and a half more weeks of this, I tell myself as I make my way down the narrow aisle to the back of the bus. Just six more school days and one weekend until I’m free from all these peoples’ memories. I look out the window and try not to think for the rest of the bus ride. I add up the address numbers in my head. I make up equations with the numbers I see on passing license plates. Numbers are clean. Numbers don’t have feelings.

  I can’t get off the bus fast enough as it pulls up at Wellspring High School. I don’t enter the school through the front door anymore. I don’t want to walk past all those huddles of people, all the cliques in their usual places. There are some I want to avoid more than others, the various gradations of friends and half friends. I don’t want to see their sad, expectant eyes. I don’t want to have to make another excuse for why I’m not stopping to talk.

  So I go around to the side entrance where all the computer geeks congregate. They are all so wrapped up in their various handheld devices that no one even notices me. I make a quick trip to my locker, arrive to class early, and take my seat in the empty classroom. I take out my book and homework and set it on my desk. I open the novel I’m reading and shove my face in it—the universal sign for “Leave me alone.”

  Two months is long enough for most people to stop feeling the need to hug me, which is a huge relief. Camille was always the hugger, not me. It’s been long enough for teachers to stop offering me extensions on assignments, which I never took anyway. Coach Richards stopped bugging me about my quitting track and field weeks ago, after there were no more races left to run. Classrooms no longer turn silent when I enter. People have more or less gotten used to this half version of me, the Kinsey-without-Camille, the girl with the dead best friend. They keep their distance accordingly, as if death is contagious.

  One by one, our friends have taken my hands in theirs, looked into my eyes, and, oh so earnestly, said something to the effect of “Kinsey, we already lost Camille. We don’t want to lose you, too.” For a couple of weeks, I went through the motions of caring. I sat at our lunch table pretending to eat while they talked about everything except the fact that they had already spread out to fill in Camille’s usual spot.

  They had always been Camille’s friends more than mine. I’m not like her, not the social butterfly who considers dozens of people “friends.” Truthfully, I only ever had one friend. The rest were acquaintances, people I could take or leave, people I don’t miss now that they’ve given up trying to keep me in their circle. They have filled in my space at the lunch table now too. It’s like we were never even there.

  I’ve started bringing my own sad lunch to school so I can avoid the cafeteria—PB and J or leftovers of whatever I can find in the kitchen. I’ve never liked crowds in general, but now the lunchroom is completely unbearable. The seniors seem even more manic than in years past, as if the upcoming graduation means leaving more than just high school. It means shedding the heavy tragedy that still poisons the air despite everyone’s crazed attempts at cheerfulness. They can shake off Camille’s death when they throw their caps in the air at graduation in two weeks. That will be the real good-bye, more so than the candlelight vigil, the assembly at school, the standing-room-only funeral, the interviews with news reporters who came all the way from Grand Rapids and even Chicago. In only a handful of days, high school will be over. Everyone will finally have permission to forget.

  I eat outside behind the gym, even though it’s humid and pushing ninety already, even though the mosquitoes have come early and the news has been warning that the Midwest is on track to have the hottest summer on record this year. “Global warming!” my mother always wails when it’s hot. That’s when almost anyone else around here would mutter “Damn hippie” under their breath. This is the part of the country where science is called liberal propaganda.

  But I’ll take the company of the mosquitoes over the cafeteria any day. At least I can breathe. At least I don’t have a couple hundred people looking at me and whispering, waiting for me to cry.

  I’m the only one out here except for the burnouts under the bleachers. I can see their heads bobbing through the slats, the cloud of smoke hovering in the heavy, wet air. If I was someone else, I might want to join them. I might want to deal with Camille’s death by getting lost in that cloud of smoke, by simply trading in this world for another.

  But that is not my way. I am not weak like them. I will stay in this world and I will follow my plan no matter what. I am stronger than sadness and loss and tragedy. You have to be if you want to succeed. At the end of the day, that’s what matters: Strength. Endurance. Perseverance. Moving on in spite of everything.

  * * *

  One more day, done. Just five more school days until the end of high school forever.

  The bus is loud on the ride home. Everyone is giddy with their upcoming escape. I stare out the window and try to tune them out as I watch the world go by. We drive through town before heading onto the rural roads. A few tourists wander the sidewalk like zombies, looking for things to buy. People vacation here for the lake and the dunes, but they always end up in town at least once. When they realize there’s nothing for them but a grocery store, a couple of crappy antiques shops, and a working-class town trying to survive, they head back to their vacation homes. I think they’re shocked that real people actually live here, that we’re not all on vacation like them, that most of us can’t even afford most of the stuff they do here. Except for maybe Hunter Collins’s family and their ­Midwestern empire of crappy chain diners called ­Kountry Kitchens.

  And now, as if the thought conjured him out of thin air, there he is: Hunter. Camille’s boyfriend. On the sidewalk. Riding his skateboard with a paper bag in his hand. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since the accident. I’d heard rumors that he’d gone off the deep end, stopped going to school, started drinking a lot. The bag in his hand is crumpled around the shape of a bottle.

  He has the blue eyes, tan skin, and chiseled cheekbones of an all-American boy, the star quarterback, the home­coming king. There’s a sense that he could have been any of these things if it weren’t for the slouch in his posture; the permanent scowl; the greasy, chin-length hair hanging in front of his eyes, so greasy I can’t tell if it’s brown or wet blond; the cloud in his eyes, the mix of sadness and anger. It’s like he’s a good design that somehow got mangled; somewhere on the assembly line, a piece of him went missing.

  Camille always accused me of secretly looking down on her for being popular, for being homecoming queen, for loving horses, for genuinely liking her family and her life. But the truth is I was in awe that anyone could be that happy; her capacity for joy was superhuman. There’s no wondering what Hunter saw in her. Everyone loved Camille. She was beautiful, yes, but that’s too obvious. She was one of those rare popular girls who was also incredibly kind. Not nice—that’s different than kind; that’s just acting. Camille was a genuinely good person, and genuinely cared about pretty much everyone and everything she met. She cared about me. For some mysterious reason, she loved me best out of everyone who loved her.