We’d reached my locker now, and I was surprised to find that I remembered the combination. There were so many human bodies around me. I kind of couldn’t believe it. I pulled my locker open. I hadn’t done any homework. I was behind on everything. The hallway was so loud, so crowded. “Yeah,” I said.
“No problem. I can do this all day. This is another reason we’re destined to be together—you’re so good at not talking. So, with Elena, she put gum in my hair on purpose while I was sleeping, and the next morning I was, like, ‘Why is there chewed gum in my hair?’ and she was, like, ‘Ha-ha!’ I was, like, ‘Elena, you have no understanding of humor. It isn’t funny just to make someone’s life worse. Like, if I broke your leg, would that be funny?’ And she was, like, ‘Ha-ha!’ So I got this fancy haircut, and believe you me, I paid for it out of Elena’s college fund. My parents made me set up a college fund for Elena, BTW.
“In other news, the whole Mychal thing has made our lunch table a little awkward, so we’re going to have a two-person picnic outside. I know it’s slightly cold, but trust me, sitting next to Mychal in the cafeteria is far colder. Are you so ready to go to biology right now and just absolutely murder it? Like, in forty-seven minutes, the dead and bloodless carcass of honors biology will be laid before your feet. God, a lot happened since you lost your mind. Is that rude to say?”
“Actually, the problem is that I can’t lose my mind,” I said. “It’s inescapable.”
“That is precisely how I feel about my virginity,” Daisy said. “Another reason Mychal and I were doomed—he doesn’t want to have sex unless he’s in love, and yes, I know that virginity is a misogynistic and oppressive social construct, but I still want to lose it, and meanwhile I’ve got this boy hemming and hawing like we’re in a Jane Austen novel. I wish boys didn’t have all these feelings I have to manage like a fucking psychiatrist.” Daisy walked me to the door of my classroom, opened it, and then walked me to my desk. I sat down. “You know I love you, right?” I nodded. “My whole life I thought I was the star of an overly earnest romance movie, and it turns out I was in a goddamned buddy comedy all along. I gotta go to calc. Good to see you, Holmesy.”
—
Daisy had brought leftover pizza for our picnic, and we sat underneath our school’s one big oak tree, halfway to the football field. It was frigid, and both of us were bundled into our winter coats, hoods up, my jeans stiff on the frozen ground.
I didn’t have gloves, so I tucked my fists into the coat. It was no weather for a picnic.
“I’ve been thinking a lot about Pickett,” Daisy said.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, just—while you were gone, I kept thinking about how weird it is to leave your kids like that, without even saying good-bye. I almost feel bad for him, to be honest. Like, what has to be wrong with him that he doesn’t at least buy a burner phone somewhere and text his kids and tell them he’s okay?”
I felt worse for the thirteen-year-old who wakes up every morning thinking that maybe today is the day. And then he plays video games every night to distract from the dull ache of knowing your father doesn’t trust or love you enough to be in contact, your father who privileged a tuatara over you in his estate plans. “I feel worse for Noah than for Pickett,” I said.
“You’ve always empathized with that kid,” she said. “Even when you can’t with your best friend.” I shot her a glance and she laughed it off, but I knew she wasn’t kidding.
“So, what do your parents do?” I asked.
Daisy laughed again. “My dad works at the State Museum. He’s a security guard there. He likes it, because he’s really into Indiana history, but mostly he just makes sure nobody touches the mastodon bones or whatever. My mom works at a dry cleaners in Broad Ripple.”
“Have you told them about the money yet?”
“Yeah. That’s how Elena got that college fund. They made me put ten grand in it. My dad was, like, ‘Elena would do the same for you if she came into some money.’ Like hell she would.”
“They weren’t mad?”
“That I came home one day with fifty thousand dollars? No, Holmesy, they weren’t mad.”
Inside the arm of my coat, I could feel something seeping from my middle fingertip. I’d have to change the Band-Aid before history, have to go through the whole annoying ritual of it. But for now, I liked being next to Daisy. I liked watching my warm breath in the cold.
“How’s Davis?” she asked.
“Haven’t talked to him,” I said. “I haven’t talked to anyone.”
“So it was pretty bad.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, it’s not your fault.”
“Did you . . . do you think about killing yourself?”
“I thought about not wanting to be that way anymore.”
“Are you still . . .”
“I don’t know.” I let out a long, slow breath, and watched the steam of it disappear in the winter air. “I think maybe I’m like the White River. Non-navigable.”
“But that’s not the point of the story, Holmesy. The point of the story is they built the city anyway, you know? You work with what you have. They had this shit river, and they managed to build an okay city around it. Not a great city, maybe. But not bad. You’re not the river. You’re the city.”
“So, I’m not bad?”
“Correct. You’re a solid B-plus. If you can build a B-plus city with C-minus geography, that’s pretty great.”
I laughed. Beside me, Daisy lay down and motioned for me to lie next to her. We were looking up, our heads near the trunk of that lone oak tree, the sky smoke-gray above us past our fogged breath, the leafless branches intersecting overhead.
I don’t know if I’d ever told Daisy about that—if she lay down at precisely that moment because she knew how much I loved seeing the sky cut up. I thought about how branches far from one another could still intersect in my line of vision, like how the stars of Cassiopeia were far from one another, but somehow near to me.
“I wish I understood it,” she said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “Nobody gets anybody else, not really. We’re all stuck inside ourselves.”
“You just, like, hate yourself? You hate being yourself?”
“There’s no self to hate. It’s like, when I look into myself, there’s no actual me—just a bunch of thoughts and behaviors and circumstances. And a lot of them just don’t feel like they’re mine. They’re not things I want to think or do or whatever. And when I look for the, like, Real Me, I never find it. It’s like those nesting dolls, you know? The ones that are hollow, and then when you open them up, there’s a smaller doll inside, and you keep opening hollow dolls until eventually you get to the smallest one, and it’s solid all the way through. But with me, I don’t think there is one that’s solid. They just keep getting smaller.”
“That reminds me of a story my mom tells,” Daisy said.
“What story?”
I could hear her teeth chattering when she talked but neither of us wanted to stop looking up at the latticed sky. “Okay, so there’s this scientist, and he’s giving a lecture to a huge audience about the history of the earth, and he explains that the earth was formed billions of years ago from a cloud of cosmic dust, and then for a while the earth was very hot, but then it cooled enough for oceans to form. And single-celled life emerged in the oceans, and then over billions of years, life got more abundant and complex, until two hundred fifty thousand or so years ago, humans evolved, and we started using more advanced tools, and then eventually built spaceships and everything.
“So he gives this whole presentation about the history of earth and life on it, and then at the end, he asks if there are any questions. An old woman in the back raises her hand, and says, ‘That’s all fine and good, Mr. Scientist, but the truth is, the earth is a flat plane resting on the back of a giant turtle.’
“The scientist decides to have a bit of fun with the woman and responds, ‘Well, but if that’s so, what is the giant turtle standing upon?’
“And the woman says, ‘It is standing upon the shell of another giant turtle.’
“And now the scientist is frustrated, and he says, ‘Well, then what is that turtle standing upon?’