The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World Read online

  As far as I’m concerned, Carthage, Washington, is a ghost town, and that makes the people who live in it ghosts too. The whole place is just a memory of something that used to be. And maybe that something used to be worth caring about, but not anymore. The joke of a downtown is mostly boarded-up storefronts for drug dealers to lean on. The only places to work are in the land of parking lots on the edge of town—fast-food restaurants, chain stores, the crumbling mall. Half the boats at the fishing docks have FOR SALE signs on them, and the other half are mostly-drowned houses for rats. The only thing the railroad’s good for anymore is a way for drunks to find their way home from Larry’s bar at night. The old sawmill is a home for raccoons and junkies.

  What are you supposed to do in a town where there’s nothing to do? Most everyone my age is so bored, they do whatever it takes to temporarily solve their boredom problem, just hoping they’re not the one who gets pregnant or killed by an overdose or car crash this year, as if babies and death are things you catch, as inevitable as a cold.

  But not me. Maybe something about growing up in a bar has ruined the whole being-reckless thing. Or maybe it’s the fact that I don’t have any friends to be reckless with. Or maybe I’m just smarter than everyone else. But probably not the last one.

  I think I made a mistake giving that Billy kid my number. He called me as soon as school got out, but I strangely wasn’t annoyed, which I should have been, and that annoyed me. Billy wants something from me, and I don’t like people wanting things from me; that’s one of the main reasons I stay away from them. But Billy’s not letting me do that. I have a strange feeling that this, that he, is the beginning of something that’s going to get way out of control. But I’m strangely not annoyed by that, either.

  I tense when I hear the sound of a car approaching. The only problem with empty roads is when they stop being empty. “Looking good, baby,” some douchebag yells out of a truck. I roll my eyes. Even sexist pigs in other places probably have more imagination than the majority of people here. I try to skate faster, but it’s no use. I’m a skinny girl on a cheap skateboard and no match for this dude in a giant truck blasting aggressively bad music, as if his truck isn’t offensive enough with its unnecessary size and ridiculous bumper stickers:

  KEEP HONKING—I’M RELOADING

  CAUTION! THIS VEHICLE MAKES FREQUENT STOPS AT YOUR MOM’S HOUSE

  I’M ONLY SPEEDING CUZ I REALLY HAVE TO POOP

  Keep it classy, Carthage.

  The truck slows to a stop in front of me. I feel the familiar tightening of fear in my chest. Do boys even know this feeling? Do they have any idea what it’s like to be a girl alone on an empty road?

  I give the truck the finger as I pass it on my skateboard. It follows me, and the driver yells the things guys yell, and I could ignore him for the rest of my life if I had to, but I just don’t have the patience today, so I turn around and say, “Hi, I have AIDS and gonorrhea and a very small tail fused to my spine. Want to fuck?”

  He immediately stops doing the thing he was doing with his tongue between his fingers and scrunches his face up like I’m the most disgusting thing in the world. “Freak,” he says, and drives off, and I am left again with the sound of waves lapping against the rocky shore, and the seagulls squawking about who knows what, and I have proof once again that loneliness is far better than the companionship of any of the losers I’ve met in this town during my very long and excruciating seventeen years of life. I almost wish the King would just go ahead and get World War III started like everyone’s talking about and put the planet out of its misery. Humans were a mistake. Give this dying place back to the seagulls and raccoons.

  When I get home from work, I stop in Larry’s bar before going to our apartment in the back. I cringe as soon as I see him, remembering his promise/threat as I left home this morning that he was going to dye his hair before opening the bar. There are black stains all over his ears and around his hairline, but the worst part is that he doesn’t even seem to notice. He has a big dopey smile on his face, like he’s just grateful not to see any grays. As if pretending to not be old enough to be my grandfather makes up for the fact that he looks ridiculous.

  “You look ridiculous, Larry,” I tell him.

  “And you look lovely as usual, Lydia,” he tells me.

  His positivity is infuriating. No matter how mean I am to him, he is still somehow capable of pretending this is exactly the life he always wanted. As if “refusing to make space for negative energy,” or whatever the hell he calls his New Age denial tactics, actually makes the negative stuff go away. If it were only that easy.

  I’m nothing like him, in so many ways. It’s hard to say if this is a good or bad thing. All I know is if you put the two of us next to each other, you’d never guess we’re related. I look exactly like my mom—brown skin, brown wide-set eyes, oval-shaped face with high cheekbones, and long straight black hair—while my dad is basically a stereotype of every potbellied old white guy who is not aging gracefully.

  He’s behind the bar, drying glasses. I’m the only one in here besides Old Pete in his usual booth, but Pete’s more furniture than human at this point. I would rather be somewhere else, but I just got done with my shift at Taco Hell, the TV in our apartment is broken, and I don’t have any friends, except for maybe potentially that Billy Goat kid, but the verdict’s out on him, so my activity options are limited. Technically, it’s against the law for me to be in here since I’m underage, but no one cares about laws like that in Carthage. Even the county sheriff comes in here to drink, and all he does is wink at me and tell me to work hard in school.

  Maybe if I had agreed to help Larry like he asked, his hair wouldn’t have turned out so bad. But what self-respecting girl wants to help her old-ass dad dye his hair? At least it’s better than that time he got the dream catcher tattoo on his shoulder when he was going through his Native American phase and was convinced he was part Quillalish, even though he refused to take one of those DNA tests to prove it, and even though northwest tribes traditionally have nothing to do with dream catchers. White people love pretending they’re Native American, and they don’t care which kind.

  Larry says living with a teenager makes him want to stay young, as if that’s a good thing, as if it isn’t completely inappropriate that he’s obsessed with that horrible teen series Unicorns vs. Dragons that some second-rate author from somewhere else set here. It’s almost like he’s proud to be from the shit hole that is Carthage, Washington. I think he actually believes the great battle in Book Four took place in the woods behind his bar, and the fact that he’s lived here his whole life means he has some role in the bestselling series, the movie franchise, the freaking theme park that used to be in Florida when Florida still existed, as if that is some excuse for the walls of his bar (where grown men go to drink) being plastered with posters from the book. Sometimes I think my sixty-five-year-old father is more like a teenager than I am. But if you gotta drink, you gotta drink, absurd posters or not, and the old drunks of Carthage need a place to go. If I were an alcoholic, I would totally drink alone.

  I think Larry really, truly believes that unicorns live in the forests around here, that local tribes have been using unicorn saliva in traditional medicines for generations, and that dragons actually live on top of Mount Olympus in the middle of Olympic National Park and want to eat everyone. People believe what they want to believe, regardless of facts. For Larry, believing in unicorns and dragons probably feels better than seeing what’s actually going on in his life, which is nothing.

  Despite how many times I’ve pointed it out to him, the fact that the dragons favor the blood of white people over that of the Indians because it tastes “purer” doesn’t strike Larry as a little racist. Or the fact that the vegetarian dragon hero keeps his unicorn love interest chained up in his mountain cave to “protect her” doesn’t strike him as the least bit rape-y. People can overlook all kinds of problematic stuff when they want to believe in magic.

  �
��Want a pop?” Larry says. “I cleaned the lines so it doesn’t taste like moss anymore.”

  What is it about this backward little pocket of Washington that makes everyone call soda “pop”? People have TVs, for Pete’s sake. They should know better.

  The TV news is on low in the corner. Something about the King’s new girlfriend being a reality star half his age. “Can you believe this guy?” Larry says. “He saw her on TV one night and told his people to bring her to him. And now she gets Secret Service protection on her way to sleepovers at the White House.”

  If there were more people in here, he probably wouldn’t have said that. Fog Harbor County is definitely pro-King territory. The people who get fucked over the worst seem to love the King the best. Go figure.

  “Kinda like you, Larry,” I say.

  “What?”

  “The King ordered up a girlfriend, kind of like how you ordered up a wife from the Philippines.”

  He freezes for a moment. I hold my breath, waiting for any tiny sign that he’s going to lose his cool. But he just smiles and sighs. “Lydia, your mother was a nurse at the hospital here on a work visa. We met at bingo. You know that.”

  “And then she ran away as soon as her citizenship went through.” I don’t say the part about how she died in a car crash just a mile from home the night she tried to leave us.

  “Lydia,” he says, “why do you say things like that?”

  Why can’t he just get mad? Why can’t he just hate me as much as I hate him?

  I don’t say anything. I hate this conversation. I hate all conversations involving that woman. So why did I bring her up? It’s almost like I want to torture myself. Like I want to torture everybody.

  The answer to Larry’s question is I don’t know why I say things like that, why I have to be so mean to my dad, why I insist on demeaning the woman who was supposed to be my mother. Maybe it’s because hating her, hating them both, is easier than the alternatives.

  Larry looks at the TV for a moment, then at Old Pete nodding off in the corner. “What should we have for dinner?” he finally says.

  “I brought home a bag from Taco Hell,” I say. I pull the greasy sack from my backpack, a collection of now-cold mystery foodstuff that had been under the warmer too long and was about to get thrown away. I look inside, see a mess of greasy paper and cracked taco shells, close the bag, and throw it on the bar.

  “Thanks, honey. You’re so good to me,” Larry says.

  If this is good, what the hell is bad?

  “We need to eat more vegetables,” Larry says as he looks inside the bag. “I’m afraid you’re going to get rickets.”

  “What exactly is rickets?”

  “Beats me,” he says. “I think we have a can of green beans in the cupboard. Want to heat that up?”

  “Whatever, Larry.”

  It doesn’t really matter that she died. I would be motherless either way. This way is actually better, because I don’t have to spend the rest of my life wondering where my mother is or if she ever regrets leaving. She’s dead. It’s over. So I don’t have to wonder about anything.

  BILLY

  EVERYONE’S PESSIMISTIC, BUT I THINK the union of Carthage and Rome High Schools may be the best thing to ever happen to Fog Harbor, or maybe I’m just speaking from my own personal experience, because so far it’s pretty much the best thing that’s ever happened to me, because all of a sudden I’m brand-new to someone, and I’ve never been brand-new to anyone. Except for maybe when I was born, but I don’t remember that, and I’m pretty sure no one was happy to see me then, because according to Grandma, it was a “total shit show.”

  Maybe some people don’t like things being brand-new, like how the Rome kids refuse to sit by the Carthage kids and everyone scoots their desks all the way to the side of the room so it’s just me sitting in the middle all by myself like an island who wants to be friends with everyone but who nobody wants to be friends with. Maybe the reason some people don’t like new things is because they’re happy with the way things are, or even if they’re not exactly happy, even if they’re kind of miserable like Grandma, they think keeping things the way they are is easier and less scary than changing them. They’re so used to being miserable, it’s almost comforting. That’s probably the way most of the people around here feel, and I’ve felt that way most of my life too, but things feel different now for some reason, and I’m pretty sure they’re different for my new friend Lydia, too. Because we’re different. We’re the kind of people who want to be brand-new.

  I know that’s a lot to say about someone you just met, but it’s the second day of school and I’m in Miscellaneous Science and for the first time I can remember someone sat by me on purpose, and when I asked Lydia to be my lab partner she said yes, and even though I know I’m not usually the best judge of these things, I’m almost positive she’s not doing it to play a trick on me. We’re the only two people in the entire school from different towns who are talking to each other, and that makes us pretty special if you ask me.

  After those guys made fun of me in the locker room last year about not having any armpit hair, Grandma, in one of her rare instances of niceness, told me about how everyone comes of age at different times, how I’m just a late bloomer and that’s good because it’s better that I stay her sweet boy as long as possible instead of turning into a sex-crazed pervert too early like most guys do, including Uncle Caleb, who supposedly got a girl pregnant when he was fourteen and Grandma had to pay for the abortion because no one else would. I’m not sure about that last part, but I think it’s true about the late-bloomer stuff because I finally got armpit hair over the summer, and I have a friend now who also happens to be the coolest person I’ve ever met, and I believe everything happens for a reason so there’s just no way those two things can be a coincidence, and maybe now I’ll finally be someone besides the kid who gets shoved in lockers and has a famous uncle, and maybe now I’ll finally be able to shake off the label of “Smelly Kid” I got in third grade when our washing machine was broken for three months and Grandma couldn’t get it together to go to the Laundromat.

  Maybe all sorts of things will change now too, like maybe there will be some kind of scandal involving the student body president, and the student body will decide to impeach her, and when they ask themselves who has impeccable integrity and sound judgment, they will immediately think of me, because I will be the most ideal ruler, able to cross divisions and bring peace between the students of Carthage and Rome, and the students will bring that peace into their homes and change the hearts of their parents, and the parents will bring the peace to work and change the hearts of their coworkers, and it will be contagious and the whole county will be transformed and everyone will finally get along, and it will all be because I saved the day.

  And then maybe Uncle Caleb will come home and he won’t be so sad and angry, and we can hang out like we used to when I was a kid and he would pull me around town in that plastic wagon I was too big for, except now maybe we can go somewhere besides One-Armed Gordon’s house, and we can do something besides me just sitting there while they get drunk, and maybe Caleb can tell me about the world outside Fog Harbor and how to get there and how to get good enough at something that people think I’m important.

  “Billy!” Lydia yells. “Are you even listening to me?”

  “Yes?” I say, but I wasn’t. I was busy imagining a world way bigger than this one.

  “You’re supposed to put your safety goggles on.”

  And maybe Lydia and I will be elected Prom Queen and King, and Grandma will finally be proud of me for something and she’ll stop being mean and actually let me pick what we watch on TV for once.

  “Are we doing the experiment now?” I say. “Does this go in here?” And I pour a beaker full of clear liquid into a jar full of white powder just as I realize Lydia’s saying, “Noooooo!” and the next thing I know, there’s a loud boom and people are ducking for cover.

  Lydia’s face and goggles and
hair are covered in thick white foam that, for all I know, could be dissolving her skin, and I go through a complicated series of emotions in a very short period of time—first, panic that I may have just killed my new best friend, then delight that I have a new best friend, then despair again that I may have just lost her, then surprise that she’s not screaming in agony, then relief that her skin does not appear to be dissolving off her face, then guilt that the rest of the classroom is still running around screaming, then the bubbling of joy as Lydia removes her protective goggles to reveal the perfectly clean outline of skin around her eyes as she smiles a big slow Cheshire cat smile and says, “Rad.”

  LYDIA

  THAT BILLY GOAT KID KEEPS following me around, and there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s like a baby duck or something, like he imprinted on me because I’m the first person who’s ever been nice to him, and now he’s mine forever, whether I like it or not.

  “Can you do a trick for me?” he says between heavy breaths as he jogs behind me. Technically I’m not supposed to skate on school grounds, but security has their hands full breaking up all the fights between Carthage and Rome kids.

  “I don’t do tricks,” I say.

  “What’s the point of having a skateboard if you don’t do tricks?”

  “It’s a longboard. It’s for transportation.”

  “Bicycles are better for transportation.”

  “Bicycles are expensive and they break and you can’t carry them around.”

  “The bus is good too.”

  “The bus smells and costs money.”