A Million Miles Away (5 page)

The woman turned to her computer. “If he enlisted around here, I might have a record of his address, but I can’t give that to you.”

“What about—” Kelsey began.

“Nor can I give you his location in Afghanistan. But I might be able to talk to someone who can reach his parents. What’s his last name?”

Kelsey’s mouth, which had opened to tell her, closed. She didn’t know Peter’s last name. The person who knew his last name was now nothing more than disintegrating dust and molecules, sitting in a tin can.

All she could do was shake her head.

“You don’t know it,” the woman said. She wasn’t being mean. It was just the truth.

“Nope,” Kelsey said shortly.

The woman took her hands away from the keyboard, and they hovered for a second, not knowing what to do.

Kelsey pictured herself from the woman’s view: a morose teenage girl in Victoria’s Secret sweatpants, refusing to take off her sunglasses, asking her to search the entire army database for a boy named Peter.

A laugh escaped the woman, but she wasn’t mocking Kelsey. She could tell by the way her eyes wrinkled when she laughed. It was just funny, that’s all.

“Pretty ridiculous, right?” Kelsey stood up. “The whole thing is just goddamn ridiculous.”

The woman stood with her. “I’d help you if I could.”

Kelsey turned. “I’m gonna go now.”

“Just a minute,” the woman said. Kelsey paused in the door. “Eat something, all right? You look like you need to eat something.”

Kelsey nodded. Something was rising in her throat that she had to push down. She sped home with the radio turned all the way up, not really hearing the music. The brown tint of her sunglasses made everything look like an old-fashioned movie.

When she came in the front door, her father was standing in the middle of the circle of sad adults. They were all holding hands like a bunch of preschoolers. Tears were running down her dad’s face, through his beard. Though the room was completely silent, no one had noticed she’d come in. Or that she’d left, for that matter.

Kelsey’s eyeballs felt on fire.

She ran up the stairs as quickly as possible, but she couldn’t un-hear her father’s voice. “This is part of a poem I’ve memorized. It helps me. If you’d like, you can repeat it after me. Okay. ‘As there is muscle in darkness’…”

A chorus of voices. “As there is muscle in darkness.”

Michelle’s room stayed dark, even during the day.

“‘There is cowardice to holding on.’”

“There is cowardice to holding on.”

He continued, “‘A cottonwood flare’…”

They echoed, these strangers. “‘A cottonwood flare’…”

Kelsey kicked open the door to her room. She could still hear their voices. There were cottonwoods lining her street, lining the highway where her sister veered off the road, lining every street in Kansas.

“‘A hand to straighten her collar’…”

She slid open the screen to her porch. Her and Michelle’s porch. She kicked over the potted trees that were meant to be a barrier, cursing them.

“‘A bravery in good-bye’…”

She collapsed on Michelle’s side, putting her cheek to the wooden slats still splattered with the outlines of paintings, her palms pressing where the two of them stood not long ago.

By this time, Kelsey was crying. Her sobs shook every muscle in her body. Every new breath could not come fast enough, and with each exhale, she said her sister’s name.

Not out loud, but speaking it with every ounce of her being. She was putting it into the air, and realizing, then, that each time she said the name was another time Michelle would never hear it. Each time Kelsey said it, a little more of Michelle was gone, and she would never come back.

CHAPTER SIX

It was basketball season. Kelsey had to make changes in the Lions Dance Team halftime routines in order to accommodate the wooden court. Their newest dance was to a mash-up of a popular indie song and its hip-hop counterpart: a lot of shifts in speed and general tone. Sexy but innovative. Tight formations with subtle movements, all in sync. With ten minutes left in practice, they still hadn’t gotten the timing of the final cancan line. Kelsey and Gillian paced in front of their team, chests heaving, their red practice shorts soaked in sweat. Ingrid, who could never seem to get in shape, was practically purple in the face.

“I’m not mad at you guys,” Kelsey announced. “Just totally focused. I promise you, if we do it again, it will be perfect for Friday.”

“And it has to be perfect,” Gillian added, tightening her sleek black ponytail.

“This could be the one we use for competition, ladies. Okay, Ruben?” Kelsey lifted a hand to the scraggly junior who was in charge of sound. “One more time. Cue it to 2:57.”

Kelsey stopped in front of Hannah T. “Hannah, try your part a beat faster. Cool?”

“But won’t that throw everyone off?”

“Try it.”

Kelsey took her place in the center with a bowed head, hands extended. This portion of the routine required total concentration. She would begin by completing a backflip into a split, and move directly from there to the standing line.

The music started and Kelsey was lost in her body, exactly how she liked it.

It had been six weeks since she returned to school. People had finally stopped randomly touching her on the arm, looking for signs of watery eyes or suicidal tendencies.

The backflip was smooth, though it could have used a little more bounce.

It had taken her several weekends home drinking sugar-free Red Bull to catch up on her missed schoolwork, but Davis had helped her fill out useless biology worksheets and copy and paste Spanish essays into Google Translate.

The splits were seamless.

The University of Kansas Rock Chalk Dancers weren’t holding tryouts until May, but Kelsey had memorized their requirements: quadruple pirouettes, fouetté turns, leaps (right, left, center), turning discs, kicks, fight song. She would learn the jazz combo online, which would be posted two weeks prior. She would also be taught a short hip-hop combo at tryouts.

Kelsey pulled her legs together into a stand, and when the wave of legs came her way, she kicked straight, high, head up with a smile, like she had always been taught.

Hannah T., toward the end of the line, hit her mark. A full bow by all of them at once, then the finish: arms up and crossed with one another at a perfect diagonal. They had nailed it.

The Lions Dance Team burst into triumphant shrieks and high fives. Friday was the first home game, versus Blue Valley North. They were so ready.

Kelsey gave her girls a thumbs-up, told them what time they should show up at the locker room, and went straight to the bleachers to find her stuff. She didn’t like to linger. Lingering meant memories, and she didn’t like those. She had to keep moving.

Gillian and Ingrid caught up with her.

“Whatcha doing now, Kels?” Ingrid asked, awkwardly poking her in the bare stomach.

“Oh, my God,” Gillian said, staring at her phone. “Check out this guy who friended me on Facebook. He is so cute. Let’s go stalk him.”

Ingrid grabbed her duffel bag. “Let’s go get frozen yogurt and stalk Gillian’s boyfriend.”

“He’s not my boyfriend,” Gillian replied.

“FroYo, Kels?”

“I can’t,” Kelsey said automatically.

“Why not?” Gillian said, furrowing her brow.

“I have to—” But Kelsey didn’t really have anything to do. She had hurried through all her homework in free period, and probably wasn’t going to study for her finals that much, anyway. “I have shit to do.”

Ingrid grabbed Kelsey’s wrist. “Can you let us be friends with you? For once? It’s been a long time.”

Gillian caught Ingrid’s eye and shook her head, as if to say,
Let her be
. “Text us if you feel like it, okay?”

Kelsey softened, pushing out a genuine smile. “I definitely will.” She zipped up her puffy jacket and waved good-bye to her teammates. Soon.
Just not now
, she thought.

When she arrived home, all the lights in the house were out, except for one lamp in her mother’s office.

She kicked off her boots.

“Kelsey?” Her mother’s voice had become so thin, like it would snap at any minute.

“Yep, it’s me.”

“Why are you home so late?”

“Dance practice went long.”

“Come here.”

She found her mom already in pajamas, her glasses on the tip of her nose, poring over final papers next to a glass of red wine.

“Have you eaten?”

“I’ll find something.”

Her mother tipped her head back, examining her over the top of her lenses. “You look so unnaturally tan for winter.”

Kelsey said nothing. She had been using her allowance to go to the tanning salon since she was sixteen. It was part of who she was, who she liked to be. And all the Rock Chalk Dancers got tans. Or most of them, at least. Her mother knew that.

“If you could, I need you to rummage for a few things.”

Rummage. Kelsey’s stomach dropped. That was the family’s code word for entering Michelle’s room. They had “rummaged” for things like her overdue library books. They had “rummaged” for her prized prints and paintings, which Lawrence High wanted to put on display.

Her mother handed her a list: Grandma’s necklace, email password, cancel Facebook.

“I would do it myself, but I don’t know how to work the Facebook.”

Kelsey’s jaw clenched. She had done so well at avoiding it this week. She had kept moving. “All right.”

Her mother sighed. “I love you, Kels.”

“I know. I love you, too.”

At the door of Michelle’s room, Kelsey flicked on the light. The room had started to lack any sort of smell. It had smelled like coconut and oil paints and even dirty laundry for days and days after, but that was all fading. Cacti in pots at the foot of her bed had gone brown from lack of care. Dust collected on the frame of the print of a Campbell’s soup can on the wall. Grandma’s necklace was easy to find because Kelsey had borrowed it before: a gold chain with an emerald hanging from it, lying on Michelle’s dresser, next to her wooden rings and nail polish.

The email password was more difficult. After booting up Michelle’s laptop, Kelsey had searched everywhere for some small piece of paper on Michelle’s desk, or maybe a file on her desktop with all of them listed, but no luck.

She tried all combinations of “password” and their birthday. Then “warhol” because that was the artist Michelle was obsessed with. Still nothing.

As for Facebook, Kelsey was glad to discover she didn’t have to sign in to cancel the account. Apparently, you could just write an email to the company.

“Dear Mark Zuckerberg,” she wrote. “Please delete my sister’s Facebook page. People write stupid posts on her wall, pretending to be sad, but they are full of shit. Plus, she will never see them because she is dead. Thank you, Kelsey Maxfield.” Then she attached a link to Michelle’s obituary in the
Lawrence Journal-World
.

Kelsey had no trouble crying anymore. She cried in her room, mostly. She cried in the girls’ bathroom sometimes, ducking in from the halls when she could feel it coming on. And she was crying now as she pressed
SEND
. She didn’t stop herself. It was the one thing she could do that didn’t ask her to think, to remember, to pretend that everything was going to be all right.

When she cried, Kelsey didn’t have to do anything else.

Suddenly, there was a strange sound. A sort of musical beep, over and over, coming from the computer. A green phone icon appeared. “Peter,” the name read.

Peter? Peter. The mysterious Peter. Before she knew what she was doing, Kelsey wiped her nose and pressed
ANSWER
.

A fuzzy image, cutting in and out, filled the screen. Then it became Peter’s face. He was sunburnt, smiling, laughing, leaning back in his chair with what appeared to be relief, then coming forward, touching the screen where he must see her. Kelsey hadn’t seen someone so sincerely happy in a long time. He was mouthing words, but no sounds matched them.

“What?” Kelsey said. “I can’t hear you!”

The words finally came, as if they were traveling through water to reach her. “I’ve been trying to get you for two da—!”

There was a green tent behind him, with sunlight filtering through. He was calling from Afghanistan. He was calling for Michelle.

Peter mouthed more words. They came to her as, “Can’t say where I am, but we’ve ju— got set— after going through all these little towns. Is the connec—?”

“The connection’s pretty bad,” Kelsey said loud and clear. “Listen, Peter—”

Peter hadn’t heard her yet, because he was still glowing, his movements in choppy poses. His audio broke through. “I missed you— Where have you bee— What have you bee— doing?”

She tried again. “This is Kelsey!”