The Sea of Tranquility

by Katja Millay

Dying really isn’t so bad after you’ve done it once. And I have. I’m not afraid of death anymore. I’m afraid of everything else.

The loud sounds make it impossible to hear the soft ones, and the soft sounds are the ones you have to be afraid of.

Panty-Combusting Ken comes complete with Piqued Princess Barbie: unachievable measurements, designer purse, and annoyed scowl included!

“NAH-stee-ya,” Margot enunciates, and I inwardly cringe, acutely aware of the audience around us. “Nastya Kashnikov. It’s Russian.”

If self-adoration were cologne, he would be the boy you couldn’t stand next to without choking.

When I look more closely, there’s no one even hanging around in the immediate vicinity. It’s like there’s an invisible force field surrounding this space and he’s the only one inside it.

Instead, when they get to me, I sit stone-faced and silent. Ms. Jennings looks at me expectantly. Check your roster. She’s still looking at me. I’m looking at her. We have a weird staring thing going on between us. Check your roster. I know they told you. I’m trying to will her telepathically now, but I am sadly lacking in the superpower department.

That’s a good thing, because my darkest secrets would probably give her nightmares.

Every choice I’ve made since my life spontaneously combusted has been questioned. There has never been a shortage of people standing by, waiting to pass judgment on the way I choose to deal with things. People who have never been through any sort of shit always assume that they know how you should react to having your life destroyed. And the people who have been through shit think you’re supposed to deal with it the exact same way they did. As if there’s a playbook for surviving hell.

I like names. I collect them: names, origins, meanings. They’re an easy thing to collect. They don’t cost anything and they don’t really take up any space. I like to look at them and pretend that they mean something, and maybe they don’t, but the pretending is nice. I keep most of them on the walls of my bedroom at home—home where I used to live. I keep the ones that echo. Good names with significance. Not the crap everyone seems to be using these days. I like foreign names too; the unusual ones that you rarely see. If I ever had a baby, I’d pick one of those, but babies aren’t really something I see in my future, even the far off one.

I live in a world without magic or miracles. A place where there are no clairvoyants or shapeshifters, no angels or superhuman boys to save you. A place where people die and music disintegrates and things suck. I am pressed so hard against the earth by the weight of reality that some days I wonder how I am still able to lift my feet to walk.

Fortunately, since I was walking pathetically slowly to make the most of my stalking experience, I don’t end up face-first on the ground.

The insults here are really subpar. At least they could throw something mildly entertaining at me if they’re going to make me turn around. I look to my right to find the fountain of wit that spewed that gem at me. Several girls surround Sarah and are looking at me and, yes, still giggling. I guess I congratulated myself a minute or two too soon. I mentally run through my options: A) hurl said shoe at them, B) hurl insults at them, C) ignore them and walk away, D) smile my most demonic and unhinged smile at them. I’ve chosen D, the only real option of the bunch.

I feel like I’m waiting here. Waiting for something that hasn’t happened yet. Something that isn’t yet. But that’s all I feel and nothing else. I don’t know if I even exist. And then someone flips a switch and the light is gone, the room is gone, the weightlessness is gone. I want to ask to wait, because I wasn’t finished yet, but I don’t have a chance. There is no gentle pulling. No coaxing. No choice. I’m wrenched out. Yanked, as if my head is being snapped back. I’m in the dark and everything is pain. There are too many sensations at once. Every nerve ending is on fire. Like the shock of being born. And then, there are flashes of everything. Colors, voices, machines, harsh words. The pain doesn’t flash. The pain is constant, steady, never-ending. It’s the only thing I know. I don’t want to be awake anymore.

I ran and ran and ran. There was no slow warm-up. There was no pace or purpose. There was only away.

The only reason I ran was to suck every ounce of energy out of myself so that there was nothing left to use for regret or fear or remembering.

“It’s on the bathroom floor.” He’s smiling at the carpet, not at me, when he says it. “You seemed really disgusted by it for some reason. Ripped it out from under your shirt, through your sleeve, in one fluid motion and flung it across the room. It was pretty impressive.”

I used to spend excessive amounts of time thinking about what I’d be doing over the next twenty or so years. It usually had something to do with playing the piano in concert halls all over the world. Which would mean lots of world travel that would include stays at fabulously glamorous hotels with fabulously fluffy towels and fluffier bathrobes. There would also be the unbelievably hot, musically gifted, swoon-worthy princes who would tour with me and inevitably fall obsessively in love with me. Because that happens. I would be revered for the talent that came from my father’s side of the family and the beauty that came from my mother’s. I’d wear elegant gowns in colors that haven’t even been imagined yet and everyone would know my name. Now I spend my time thinking about what I’ll be doing over the next twenty or so hours and hoping it involves something resembling sleep.

I don’t think she’s my biggest fan, either. She hasn’t told me outright, but she glares at me like I spend my free time murdering puppies, so it’s an educated guess.

They should give him a dedicated phone line in the workshop, because every time the phone rings, the same thing happens: Turner answers, Turner summons Josh, Josh leaves. He gets sent out a lot. Shelves need fixing? Call Josh Bennett. Drawers stuck? Get Josh. Need an exquisitely crafted, custom built dining room set? Josh Bennett is your man.

There are twenty-seven bones in your hand and wrist. Twenty-two of mine were broken. Relatively speaking, my hand is kind of a miracle. It’s full of plates and screws, and even after several surgeries, it still doesn’t look quite right. But it works better than they thought it would. And it’s not like it can’t do anything; it just can’t do the one thing I want it to. The thing that made me, me.

It was better than being normal. I never gave two shits about normal. I wanted extraordinary.

These days I’m missing everything. I’m haunted by music; music I can hear, but never play again. Melodies that taunt me note by note, mocking me with the simple fact that they exist.

Music should flow so that you can’t tell where one note ends and the next begins; music should have grace, and there is no grace left in my hand. There are metal screws and damaged nerves and shattered bones, but there isn’t any grace.

I stand back up and turn around, looking for something to occupy my time, and she’s standing at the top of my driveway, just outside the threshold of my garage. I’m glad I don’t gasp or anything equally pathetic because if I did, I’d probably have to cut off my balls and hand them to her. I wouldn’t deserve them anymore.

Eventually, my body healed as much as it was going to. My mind started getting put back together, too. I think it’s just that the pieces got put back a little out of order. It seems like the more my body healed, the more fractured my mind became, and there aren’t enough wires and screws to fix the breaks in it.

“You have no reason to trust me.” “No, but I trust you anyway,” she says, walking out toward the driveway. “And I’m supposed to trust you?” I say to her back. This girl really is crazy if she thinks she’s walking in here, out of nowhere, and expecting me to do that. She stops, turning to level her eyes at me before she goes. “You don’t have to trust me. I don’t have any of your secrets.”

I feel like grabbing my crotch and checking to see if my balls are still there, because I think they may be in her pocket and I need to get them back.

“You’re not what I expected you to be like.” I catch her eye, and she actually looks a little surprised and a lot curious, which I think she tries to hide. “How did you expect me to be?” “Quiet.”

My mother’s voice. It’s the first thing I remember after I opened my eyes. My beautiful girl. You came back to us. But she was wrong.

If Edna St. Vincent Millay was right and childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies, then my childhood ended when I was fifteen.

I just got too old, too fast. All at once. And she wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

Asher might be my younger brother, but I don’t think he realizes it. He would beat the world down for me if it would make things better, and I think he feels like a failure because it won’t.

My parents had me in therapy before I even left the hospital, which is the recommended course of action when the devil finds your fifteen-year-old and the afterlife spits her back out.

They tell you it was random to make you feel blameless. But all I hear them telling me is that I have no control, and if I have no control, then I’m powerless. I would have preferred being blamed.

If I had to decide who, out of all of us, this whole shit situation was the hardest on, I’d say it was my father. My father is a quiet badass. Gentle, protective, and if need be, murderous to protect his children. Like all fathers should be. The problem is he didn’t protect me. Because he couldn’t. No one could. But I don’t think he sees it that way.

“Maybe nobody knows how. Sometimes it’s easier to pretend nothing is wrong than to face the fact that everything is wrong, but you’re powerless to do anything about it.”

It’s a little bit devastating being surrounded by people who can do what you can’t anymore. People who create. People whose souls no longer live in their bodies because they’ve leached so much of themselves into their work. Josh. Clay. My mother. I want to steal from them to let myself live.

“I’m not trying to capture one face. I’m trying to capture all the faces.” He stops to see if I’m getting this. “Most people have more than one. You have more than most.”

He tears apart faces and puts them back together whole, like I would a piece of music. I could play it a hundred ways, imbue it with a different emotion every time and try to find the truth of it. He does that with faces, except he’s not putting the truth in, he’s drawing it out. He’s looking for the truth of me. I wonder if he’ll find it, and if he does, maybe he can show me where it is again.

My jealousy is a living thing. Shifting, changing, growing. Like my rage and my mother’s regret.

“It’s a chair. Stop overanalyzing it. I’m not selling it and I’m not giving it to someone else. I made it for you. It’s yours.” He pulls away and stands up straight. When his hands are gone from mine, I realize that it’s the first time he’s ever really touched me, and I wish he’d put them back. “Besides, it already has your name on it.”

I know at that moment what he’s given me and it’s not a chair. It’s an invitation, a welcome, the knowledge that I am accepted here. He hasn’t given me a place to sit. He’s given me a place to belong.

It amazes me how people are so afraid of what can happen in the dark, but they don’t give a second thought about their safety during the day, as if the sun offers some sort of ultimate protection from all the evil in the world. It doesn’t. All it does is whisper to you, lulling you with its warmth before it shoves you facedown into the dirt. Daylight won’t protect you from anything. Bad things happen all the time; they don’t wait until after dinner.

I have one of Josh Bennett’s secrets now. He gave it to me. I wish I could give it back.

Sometimes people will try to tell you some funny thing they remember, which usually isn’t funny at all, just sad. Then you stare at each other uncomfortably until they finally get up to leave, and you thank them for coming, even though they just made you feel worse.

“Sunshine?” She doesn’t respond, so I follow her in and find her opening the freezer and shoving no fewer than four half-gallon containers of ice cream into it. “What are you doing?” “What does it look like?” she snaps. “You get knocked up?” She whirls around on me. “What?” Guess not. I hold my hands up, palms out in surrender. She’s obviously not in the mood. “Sorry, just”—I motion toward the open freezer, her hand still inside on one of the containers—“a lot of ice cream.” “Right, because I’d have to be pregnant to want ice cream. Next you’ll be saying that I must have my period because that’s the only reason girls have for getting pissed, but of course since you’re a guy, you won’t actually say period, but something prickish like on the rag.”

Of course if I were to take the books at their word, I’d also have to believe that all teenage boys go around calling girls baby, because apparently that’s the express train to romance. He was an asshole a minute ago, but then he drops the baby on you and it’s all over. Uncontrollable swooning and relinquishment of all self-respect activated. Ooooh, he called me baby. My panties are wet and I luuuuuuuv him. Do real boys actually call girls baby? I don’t have enough experience to know. I do know that if a guy ever called me baby, I’d probably laugh in his face. Or choke him.

I’m not sure when she made the decision to speak to him, but I know it wasn’t at this moment. I may not have figured out much about her, but I have picked up on the fact that everything she does is a choice. She considers the repercussions for every action she takes. The girl does not understand the word spontaneous. She plans every breath.

“You’re right. He doesn’t look at you sideways. He looks right at you and doesn’t even try to hide it. The only thing I’ve ever seen him drool over as much has four legs and is made of mahogany, but I don’t think he’s planning to ask it out any time soon.”