All the Ugly and Wonderful Things

by Bryn Greenwood

She lived with me for almost two years, and in all that time, she touched me twice.

She held out her hand and I went to her, even though I wasn’t brave enough to touch her with Aunt Brenda there to see.

We were alone, so I held her hand.

Mr. Arsenikos said if you knew the constellations you would never get lost. You could always find your way home.

I didn’t know why Mama wanted me to kiss him, when she was the one who said the mouth was a dirty place. In case it was a trick, I only pretended to kiss him.

The Giant needed me, the way Donal did. That made me brave enough not to run away when he laid his hand on my head.

asking was only to leave a quiet space for me to say something if I wanted.

like stairs from the moon down to the meadow.

After Liam and Butch took Kellen away, I thought about how he left spaces for me when he talked. If I saw him again, I decided I might put words in those spaces.

Wavy?”

Every time my arm twinged, whenever I did any work on my bike, I thought about the way the girl laid her hand on my cheek and said my name. I spent years trying to get people to stop calling me Junior, but damned if that wasn’t the first time I really felt like Kellen was my name.

“Hey, Wavy,” I said. I thought that was her name and the way she looked at me, like she was surprised I remembered; it musta been.

I wanted to bury my face in his shirt and smell him, the way I did when he wrecked, but I wasn’t brave enough, and he was carrying bags of food and scary news.

Ricki always said mean things about Kellen, but she was stupid. You’d have to be stupid to like Liam and not Kellen.

“She won’t come to you,” Dee said. “She won’t sit on anyone’s lap except Kellen’s. He’s your boyfriend, isn’t he, Wavy?” Wavy nodded.

Goddamn, I was done with Liam Quinn. Or I woulda been done with him, if it wasn’t for Wavy.

I had all the time in the world for her.

I couldn’t pass myself off as Val, but I was getting pretty good at playing Liam.

“I just turned twenty-four,” he said.

“You need to figure out how to live here or you need to get the hell out.

That’s what happens when your mom grabs you by the hair, clamps her hand over your mouth, and gives you a good shake while screaming in your face, “Don’t you ever talk to people! You don’t talk to anyone!” That’s what Val did to Wavy when she was about three years old.

I never heard another peep out of that little girl.

“What the fuck is she doing here?” Sometimes I thought Daddy couldn’t see Wavy, but he pointed at her. “But you said you wanted the kids to move down here. You—” “I said, ‘The kid.’ Donal. Not her.” “You—what do you want me to do?” Sandy said. “Get her out of here. Take her back up to the farmhouse.” “I’ll take her,” Kellen said.

Wavy’s the only girl who gets to ride.”

“Why is it dirty? You liked it,” she said. “Because you’re thirteen.” There were a lot of other reasons I shouldn’t have been fooling around with her, but that was the big one. “You’re not old enough.”

I mostly liked high school. I liked learning things. How numbers worked together to explain the stars. How molecules made the world. All the ugly and wonderful things people had done in the last two thousand years.

In the meantime, the things that hurt other people healed me.

I didn’t care what Brenda said, but I loved Wavy and I’d lost her, and I wasn’t even allowed to say that.

You make people interested in you by keeping secrets, not by passing them out like candy at Halloween.

The quizzes helped Renee empty her heart, and she filled it so quickly with the wrong things, it was no wonder she needed to empty it.

Renee ate in darting little bites and without chewing enough. The same way she filled her heart. Too quickly, and with too much talking and not enough feeling.

Those letters seemed so wonderfully tragic to me. Each one a message he would never get. A note in a bottle, bobbing on the ocean. Lost.

She also cooked a mountain of food, and went around the party encouraging people to eat. That was how she showed affection. When I went through some soul-crushing breakup, she made elaborate meals and desserts for me.

I liked to play at tragedy, but she drank it out of her baby bottle.

No woman had ever looked at me the way she did, or touched me that way. Like she wanted me, like I was worth wanting.

“Judge Maber called. She said, ‘Tell Miss Quinn that she was right. She is just as real as I am.’”