The Boy and Girl Who Broke the World Read online

  “I have five dollars. Grandma paid me for stuffing her medical billing mailers.”

  “I thought you said she was a travel agent.”

  “She does a lot of things. It’s weird how she seems to work all the time but hardly makes any money.”

  “Tell me about it,” I say. I get off my board and carry it. I’m afraid if Billy keeps running, he’s going to have an asthma attack. “How long did you work for?”

  “I don’t know,” he pants. “Like, four hours.”

  “You’re working for a dollar twenty-five an hour. Dude, your grandma’s running a sweatshop.”

  He blinks, considering this as he walks. Then he turns to me and smiles his toothpaste commercial smile. “But having five dollars is better than not having five dollars.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Do you have a driver’s license?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you drive?”

  “None of your business.” I’m not going to tell him it’s because my dad’s van is the most embarrassing vehicle on the planet.

  “If I gave you a short skateboard, could you do tricks?”

  “What is your problem?”

  “I just really want to see you do tricks.”

  “I’m not a circus animal.”

  “Do you want to go to Taco Hell?”

  “I hate Taco Hell.”

  “Why?”

  “I work there.”

  “Are you working tonight?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want to come over to my house?”

  “I guess I don’t have anything better to do.”

  I can’t remember the last time I went over to a friend’s house.

  Friend. I guess Billy’s my friend. Poor bastard.

  We’re just about to get off school grounds when a nearby mouth breather shouts, “Way to go, Billy Goat! You got yourself a girlfriend.”

  They all look the same—these large, soft boys. Doesn’t matter if they’re from Carthage or Rome. They’re all named Graylon or Grayson or Braydon, and they are the reason for every stereotype about small towns. This one is accompanied by two of his female counterparts, these girls I can barely tell apart who are all named Kayla or Kaitlyn or Katelyn. Who the hell decided it was a good idea to wear sweatpants with high heels? I imagine knocking them over with my skateboard, and the thought almost makes me smile.

  “Are you, like, Quillalish or something?” one of the girls says.

  “She’s not Native American,” Billy says. “She’s half Filipina.”

  “Fili-what?” the guy says.

  I cringe. Why must Billy be so earnest? If he is unwilling to be embarrassed about the clueless things he says, then that means I have to do it for him, and that is not a responsibility I signed up for.

  “She looks Carthagean to me,” one of the girls says.

  “Ewww,” says the other. “So that’s what that smell is.”

  “Yeah,” says the first girl. “Smells like fish.”

  No one could write dialogue this bad. My life is a teen movie that tanked at the box office and ruined several people’s careers.

  It’s time to put an end to this worthless conversation. “I smell loose morals, subaverage intelligence, and three dead-end lives,” I say, grabbing Billy’s arm and dragging him the rest of the way down the stairs before he has a chance to be nice to them.

  “Bitch,” one of the girls says, and I tug Billy a little too hard because I know he wants to look back with his big doe eyes and beg for forgiveness, because I can already tell he’s the kind of person who gives assholes way more than they deserve.

  “Why don’t you go back to Mexico?” the other girl shouts after us. They’re so ignorant, they can’t even do racism right.

  “Come on, dude,” I say to Billy. “If you look at them, it screws up the drama of our exit.” I put my arm around his skinny back and hold on tighter than probably necessary.

  “Hey, Billy Goat,” Graylon or Grayson or Braydon yells. “You heard from your uncle lately?”

  If Billy were a dog, he’d be a golden retriever. One of those good family dogs. The ones who have been bred to never bite. The ones who stay loyal even when their humans are assholes. I’d probably be a Doberman. Skinny but muscular. Shifty-eyed. The kind that bites a lot.

  BILLY

  MY HOUSE IS ONE OF the biggest on first street. You could say it’s also in the worst shape of any house on First Street, but I like to say it has the most character. There’s a hole in the floor of the upstairs bathroom where you can see all the way to the kitchen below. Every day it seems like something new breaks and the house leans more to the south. When I was little, I used to race my cars by letting them go at the north end of the living room, and I wouldn’t even have to push them to make them move. Grandma always says the house would probably be condemned if anyone official cared. But luckily no one in Rome cares about much of anything.

  “Sorry my house is kind of a dump,” I say as I lead Lydia past the doorless hallway closet piled with trash bags full of old clothes.

  “It smells like something died in here,” she says, leaning her skateboard against the wall.

  “There’s a possum family that lives in the crawl space under the house.”

  “There’s a bunch of drunk old men who live in my house.”

  “Does it smell like dead things?”

  “Dead souls.”

  “You’re the first friend I’ve had over in a long time,” I say. “Sorry my grandma’s kind of a hoarder.”

  “She should go on that show.”

  “She’s on the waiting list.”

  “Cool.”

  I have a funny feeling that Lydia’s presence in my house has somehow changed it. I suddenly notice a bunch of things that weren’t here before—the cardboard boxes stacked almost to the ceiling, the broken bookcase covering most of the window, the mountains of bags from Thrift Town’s “Twofer Tuesdays” sales that Grandma never bothers to unpack. But they’ve always been here. It’s just my seeing that’s changed.

  “At least she’s a clean hoarder,” Lydia says. “At least there’re no cats or rotten food all over the place.”

  “I feel like now that you’ve been in my house, we can tell each other everything.”

  “Fine,” Lydia says. “I’m not really in the witness protection program.”

  “My uncle’s Caleb Sloat.”

  “I already figured that out.”

  “My mom died of a heroin overdose two weeks after I was born.”

  “My mom died in a car crash while she was trying to abandon me.”

  I swear the house shudders, like a tiny earthquake, and I feel wobbly for a second. It rattles sometimes when a lost semitruck goes down our road, but never quite so powerfully, and not with such impeccable timing.

  “Did you feel that?” I say.

  “Feel what?”

  “Never mind. Do you want to sit on the couch?”

  “Are cats going to come out of it?”

  “Probably not.”

  “Okay.”

  Lydia sits down in Grandma’s spot. No one’s ever sat in Grandma’s spot before, not even me. The house shudders again.

  “Do you have any food?” she asks.

  “Not really,” I say. I ate the last two packs of ramen for dinner last night. “I think there’s some mustard in the fridge? Grandma’s supposed to go grocery shopping tonight.”

  “That’s all right. I’m used to being hungry.”

  “Me too.”

  The light coming in from the one window that’s not covered by something is making everything kind of golden, and even though the room is full of old cheap stuff, something about the light makes it look enchanted, like we’re in a fairy tale and all this junk is actually antiques with magic keys hidden inside, and all the dust floating around catching light is actually some kind of fairy powder. It’s like a little bit of magic blew in and made everything buzz and shine. Maybe e
verything’s not as ugly as it always seemed.

  “Do you like Rainy Day Knife Fight?” I ask.

  Lydia is the orphan princess locked in a tower, and I am the brave knight who saves her.

  “Their music makes my ears bleed.”

  Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe she’s the one who saves me.

  “They’re pretty popular, though,” I say. It’s strange—I usually try to avoid talking about my uncle and his band with people. But for some reason I want to talk about it with Lydia. I want to talk about him.

  “Popular does not mean good,” she says. “In fact, being popular is most often a sign that something is garbage. The majority of people in this world have no taste. Therefore, if they like something, it must be bad. That’s just science.”

  “But what if they never got popular?” I say. “What if they never got discovered and they stayed indie or whatever you call it? Would you like them then?”

  “I don’t like anything that comes from here.”

  “What about Unicorns vs. Dragons?”

  “Especially Unicorns vs. Dragons,” Lydia says. “And the author of that crap is from, like, Delaware or something.”

  “Did you know he’s getting out of rehab soon?” I say. “My uncle.”

  “Everybody knows that,” she says.

  “His music kind of sounds like here, you know? Like fog and rainstorms and rocks on train tracks and old trees cracking.”

  Lydia looks at me for a long time without saying anything, and something about it makes my stomach feel mushy, but not in a bad way. I said something weird like I usually do, but I think maybe she’s close to the same kind of weird that I am, and maybe she actually thought it sounded smart.

  “Yeah,” Lydia finally says, and then she looks out the one window that is not covered by a broken bookcase or piled boxes, as if she’s expecting someone or something to arrive at this exact moment. As if she knows something I don’t.

  “Do you like your uncle’s music?” she says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I think I just like hearing his voice.”

  I decide I am probably not the knight who saves Lydia. This is not that kind of story at all. She is not a princess, not someone who needs saving, but something closer to a wizard. This is one of those stories where the kid grows up thinking she is some kind of wrong and broken version of a normal girl, but the whole time she actually has superpowers, and that’s why she feels so different.

  “Yeah,” I say about nothing in particular, and I look out the window too.

  Just then, a huge gust of wind blows and the whole house creaks, every single wall and floor and beam and window and nail and screw. Everything shakes and shifts a few more inches to the south, and I feel myself move with it. My body is displaced. I am suddenly in a different part of space.

  “I think we’re going to fly away,” Lydia says calmly.

  “This is how it starts,” I say, and I’m not completely sure what I mean. But Lydia knows, and she nods in agreement, and something is settled, and something is just beginning.

  LYDIA

  MY LEGS BURN. I LOVE the way my legs burn.

  Cheap speakers blast music from Larry’s old stereo in the corner. It’s amazing, all the cool weird CDs you can find at Thrift Town. No one in this town has any taste. They throw away everything good.

  It’s ridiculous that people actually pay thousands of dollars for dance classes and college when basically everything you need to know is on the Internet for free. Not that I’m not still pissed at Larry for not paying for dance classes, and not that I won’t be pissed at him until the day I die, but at least there is an infinite number of YouTube videos of technique instruction and choreography, and there are plenty of websites about dance history and theory, and there are even teachers who answer my questions when I e-mail them. Maybe my makeshift studio in the garage behind the bar isn’t quite ideal, and maybe I don’t have a teacher on hand to correct my form, and maybe I don’t have any partners to dance with, but I think I’m doing pretty damn well, all things considered, and the best thing is I don’t have to deal with anyone knowing there’s actually something in this world I give a shit about, that there’s something I love so much I’d die if I lost it.

  The thing is, you can’t tell people your dreams. When someone knows what you love, they know how to hurt you.

  Or worse, what if they start dreaming for you too? What if you become responsible for not only your own disappointment, but theirs, too? That’s certainly not a responsibility I want.

  Ever since Billy and I started hanging out, it’s like everything has come alive in some strange new way, and all the green things are growing an extra few inches every time I blink, like if I close my eyes for too long I’ll wake up to find myself covered in vines and moss and they’ll be dragging me through the mud away from civilization to be consumed by the forest. It’s like I can smell the appetite of this place. It’s mud steam and fir needles. It’s the ocean breeze, salt water, decomposing seaweed. It’s the tang of creosote from the docks. As ridiculous as those Unicorns vs. Dragons books are, at least the author got the setting right. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it’s starting to smell like dragons.

  I’m used to being alone, but now all of a sudden I’m not, and I find myself almost not hating the world for whole minutes at a time when I’m with Billy, which is pretty much a miracle. I’ve only ever felt that peace in here, never with another human, at least not recently. But as nice as it is, I know it’s only temporary. The minutes always pass. No one can ever really get inside another person. That peace is not real.

  I’m not going to tell Billy about my dancing.

  This pain is what’s real. When my thighs burn so hot I can barely walk afterward, when I push myself to the point of agony. The pain tells me I’m worth something. It tells me I’ve finally earned the right to catch my breath. My body is all that exists. It is the only thing I can depend on. Music or no music, there is a rhythm that cancels out all the other noise, all the nonsense that keeps screaming for attention, all the pain of the world outside.

  I point and leap and spin, and sweat whips off me, showering the duct-taped boards under my bare, calloused feet. I see myself in the fractured shards of mirrors I glue-gunned to the wall. This is how I know myself—in this tattered leotard; in these ripped tights; in this broken, salvaged room. This is the only place I’m real.

  This is the place I come when I need to remember who I am. This is where I come when I need to forget everything else.

  But I had dreams about my mother last night. This is not normal. Not only have I trained my body all by myself, but I’ve trained my mind, too. For years, whenever a thought of my mom comes creeping in, I’ve just pushed it away, into the dark, like I have muscles in my brain that have gotten stronger and stronger, along with my legs. I thought my mom was gone. I thought I got rid of her. I thought the dark places gobbled her up and she was no more, but maybe she’s been lurking there, waiting to come out, like a crazy, hungry ghost.

  I don’t want her back. Because with her comes the old Lydia, and I definitely don’t want her—the girl who used to cry all the time, who used to follow Mom around and grab on to her leg until she had to kick me off. Mom was always tired, and I was the needy little girl, begging her to love me more. But she never could.

  I cried when she died. I cried at the funeral. I cried when Larry told me we couldn’t afford dance lessons anymore without Mom’s income, and paying the bills was more important than my dreams. I cried and cried and cried until everyone was sick of me and I was sick of myself, and then I decided not to cry anymore. Because I realized, what was the point? It didn’t fix anything. The more I cried, the less other kids wanted to play with me. I was the weird girl who cried, and then I wasn’t, then I was just the weird girl, and everyone else stayed the same, and nobody cared how much strength it took for me to stop crying.

  It wasn’t one of those dreams full of metaphors and emo
tions. I didn’t wake up in a pool of sweat, or terrified, or missing her, or any emotion, really. Mom was just there, as if she was always there. We were eating breakfast. She had her nurse’s scrubs on, and it was a rare occurrence when she looked more beautiful than tired. It was nine-year-old Lydia sitting there next to her, but teenage now-me was watching from somewhere else, from a cheap piece of art on the wall maybe, one of Larry’s framed posters of some famous painting in an attempt to look classy, but really it just looked sad. And my eyes were inside it, and my nose, too, because I could smell the way the house used to smell—like clean laundry. Mom was always doing laundry, even when she was so sad she couldn’t do anything else. She used extra dryer sheets because she wanted everything extra soft.

  And that’s it—that’s the entire dream. Just my dead mom and my dead little self, sitting there eating breakfast, as if it were any normal morning, as if Mom wasn’t planning her escape, as if she wouldn’t die in a few days trying to leave us.

  I dance harder. I dance so the pain will push the dream away.

  Then something catches the corner of my eye. A figure, moving, small and quick. I turn my head, and it is gone. Probably one of so many feral creatures that live here in the shadows.

  And now the shadow is just a shadow. The wall is just a wall.

  BILLY

  “I’M BY NO MEANS AN expert on vegetables,” Lydia says as we cross Main Street in downtown Rome, which is totally empty except for a few people milling around outside the methadone clinic. “But I’m pretty sure lettuce is not supposed to be white.” She’s been telling me about what goes into the tacos at Taco Hell. I think she’s trying to scare me, but mostly she’s just making me hungry.

  I get depressed every time I go to Grandma’s office, so I avoid it as much as possible, but I need a computer with Internet to do research for a report for my American Patriotism class, and we don’t have one at home, and I can’t use the computer lab at school like I usually do because the Coding Club meets there on Wednesdays, and even those guys pick on me. But I don’t care about that today, because Lydia agreed to come with me, even after she said it’s not healthy for people to spend so much time together. If it were up to me, Lydia and I would hang out every day after school and both days on the weekend, but she has a job and something she calls “boundaries” that I still don’t quite understand, though it’s been covered plenty of times on my therapy talk shows.