Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

“In a second.” I can’t leave yet, because I’m struck by David’s stone eyes. His body seems relaxed, like the kingdom is already his, but the expression on his face . . . it’s full of worry, and concern he’s trying to hide. I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren’t enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.

I sit with my friends for lunch. And yet I don’t. That is to say, I’m among them, but I don’t feel with them. Used to be I could easily fit in with whatever friends I was hanging out with. Some people need a clique to make them feel safe. They have this little protective bubble of friends that they rarely venture away from. I was never like that. I could always flow freely from table to table, group to group. The athletes, the brainiacs, the hipsters, the band kids, the skaters. I was always well liked and well accepted by all, and I always managed to fit in like a chameleon. How strange, then, that now I find myself in a clique of one, even when I’m with a group.

What’s going on? I’m in the back car of a roller coaster at the top of the climb, with the front rows already giving themselves over to gravity. I can hear those front riders screaming and know my own scream is only seconds away. I’m at the moment you hear the landing gear of a plane grind loudly into place, in that instant before your rational mind tells you it’s just the landing gear. I’m leaping off a cliff only to discover I can fly . . . and then realizing there’s nowhere to land. Ever. That’s what’s going on.

Since she faces the saline spray, her copper skin has already turned green, but she wears it majestically, nobly. “You’re like . . . the Statue of Liberty now,” I tell her, but it doesn’t comfort her. “Am I really that lonely?” she asks. “Lonely?” “That poor shell of a woman must forever hold her torch aloft while the world does its business around her,” Calliope says sadly. “Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?”

“How could you not know it was gone?” Dad shrugged. “Driving’s automatic,” he said. “You don’t think about those things. All I knew was that I felt somehow . . . impaired.” I didn’t get it at the time, but that feeling—knowing something is wrong, but not being able to pinpoint what it is—is a feeling I’ve come to know intimately. The difference is, I’ve never been able to find something as easy and as obvious as a rearview mirror lying at my feet.

And yet I do. “I have connections, too,” I tell her. “Sometimes I feel inside the people around me. I believe I know what they’re thinking—or if not what, then at least how they’re thinking. There are times that I’m certain I’m tied to people on the other side of the world. People I’ve never met. The things I do affect them. I move left, they move right. I climb up, and they fall from a building. I know it’s all true, but I can never prove what happens to people I don’t know in places I can’t see.” “And how does this make you feel?” “Wonderful and terrible at the same time.” She tilts her neck to look into my eyes, instead of looking forward at the sea. It’s a harder move than folding her arms to hold me. I hear the straining squeal of bending copper. “We are not all that different, then,” she says. And I know for the first time that I’ve truly pierced her loneliness. And she has pierced mine.

The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when “should be” gets crushed by what is. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because “what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.” Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

Beautiful people are often forgiven for many things—and maybe she’s gotten through life that way, but I don’t forgive her for anything—and I don’t even know what awful things she’s done other than showing a lack of parental fitness. The thing that infuriates me most about her, though, is that she has the gall to make me appreciate my own parents more.

If you think about it, the public perception of funky brain chemistry has been as varied and weird as the symptoms, historically speaking. If I had been born a Native American in another time, I might have been lauded as a medicine man. My voices would have been seen as the voices of ancestors imparting wisdom. I would have been treated with great mystical regard. If I had lived in biblical times, I might have been seen as a prophet, because, let’s face it, there are really only two possibilities: either prophets were actually hearing God speaking to them, or they were mentally ill. I’m sure if an actual prophet surfaced today, he or she would receive plenty of Haldol injections, until the sky opened up and the doctors were slapped silly by the Hand of God. In the Dark Ages my parents would have sent for an exorcist, because I was clearly possessed by evil spirits, or maybe even the Devil himself. And if I lived in Dickensian England, I would have been thrown into Bedlam, which is more than just a description of madness. It was an actual place—a “madhouse” where the insane were imprisoned in unthinkable conditions. Living in the twenty-first century gives a person a much better prognosis for treatment, but sometimes I wish I’d lived in an age before technology. I would much rather everyone think I was a prophet than some poor sick kid.

“Please stay broken, Callie,” I pray. “Please stay broken as long as I am.” I know it’s selfish, but I don’t care. I can’t imagine not seeing her smile. I can’t imagine not keeping her warm. No matter what I promised her, I can’t imagine being here without her.

Still, if you’ve got to bring yourself within inches of your life just to cry for help, something’s wrong somewhere. Either you weren’t yelling loud enough to begin with, or the people around you are deaf, dumb, and blind. Which makes me think it isn’t just a cry for help—it’s more a cry to be taken seriously. A cry that says “I’m hurting so badly, the world must, for once, come to a grinding halt for me.”

And suddenly I realize something terrible about my parents. They are not poisoners. They are not the enemy . . . . . . but they are helpless. They want to do something—anything—to help me. Anything to change my situation. But they are as powerless as I am. The two of them are in a lifeboat, together, but so alone. Miles from shore, yet miles from me. The boat leaks, and they must bail in tandem to keep themselves afloat. It must be exhausting. The terrible truth of their helplessness is almost too much to bear. I wish I could take them on board, but even if they could reach us, the captain would never allow it. Right now it sucks to be me—but until now, it never occurred to me that it also sucks to be them.