Everything That Makes You (17 page)

Fi knocked on her advisor's door. The loose glass pane in the chipped, wooden door rattled. The door swung open, and Fi faced Brenda Lyon, cochair of the English department and Fi's assigned freshman advisor.

“We said four.” Professor Lyon glanced at her watch.

“Right. Sorry, lacrosse practice went a little long.”

Fi sat down on an unforgiving wood chair on the “guest” side of the desk. Lyon settled into a plush, leather one on hers.

This would be their fourth meeting—one each for first and second semester course selection, one in between to discuss Fi's uninspiring academic performance. Lyon always looked exactly the same—tightly pulled back graying hair, starched blue button-down, black skirt.

For the next three to four minutes, Lyon clicked through her computer. Fi eyed it from the back, as it coughed up her secrets like a traitor.

Finally, Lyon looked away from the screen. “I thought we'd come to an understanding about this semester, Fi.”

“I'm sorry?” Fi asked, playing innocent.

“We're almost to midterms, and you're barely keeping your head above 2.0.”

“Spanish and sociology should be Bs.”

Lyon glanced back to the screen and raised an eyebrow. “How do you figure that math?”

“Well, I mean I'll get there by the end of the semester. Not immediately.”

“It'll take an incredible amount of work. Dedicated work.” Lyon looked back to the screen, shaking her head. “You'll forgive my skepticism.”

“It's been a hard year,” Fi muttered.

“Fi,
every
freshman has issues with transition. It's tough to adjust to the independence and responsibility. But you still have to.”

“My issues are a little different.”

“How so?”

“My boyfriend died nine months ago.” She felt a wave of nausea the second the words were out of her mouth. Why did she keep using Marcus as a bargaining chip?

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Lyon said, considering her a moment. “Have you thought about taking some time off?”

“Um, no.” She only needed a second to mull over the idea. “But I don't want to do that.”

“I can't give you another chance, Fi. You have to buckle down here.”

She looked Lyon in the eyes. “I can work.”

Lyon drummed her fingers against the desk, watching Fi. “Okay. But it's going to be hard.” She angled back to the computer, clicking on a few screens. “You're on academic probation.”

“Oh. Okay.” After a moment, she added, “What's that mean, exactly?”

“You have until the end of this semester to get a minimum of 2.25 in all your courses. If you skip any classes or fail to complete assigned work, your professors will be required to notify me. And you cannot participate in any extracurricular activities until the probation period ends.”

Fi nodded as Lyon went through the rules. A little extra work, a tighter rein on her schedule—she could do that. She
would
do that. But at that last bit, Fi held up a hand. “Wait—um, what qualifies as an extracurricular activity?”

“Any school-sanctioned groups that aren't linked to your academics. Student government, academic organizations, service clubs.”

“Does that include the lacrosse team?” she asked as calmly as she could manage.

“Yes.”

“Can we come up with other terms? So I can stay on the team?”

“There
are
no other terms. Probation is the only option you've got left.”

“Right, I just think I can handle the work
and
the team.”

“If you're on probation, your coach cannot
allow
you to play. It would violate a handful of school rules—and jeopardize the team's standing within their athletic league.”

Fi dug what was left of her fingernails into her palm. She could feel skin peel into them. “And if I fail probation?”

“The fact that you're considering that as an option isn't giving me a lot of confidence, Fi.”

“Lacrosse is all I have right now.”

“So finish probation and get it back. But if you fail probation,” Lyon said, leaning forward, “you won't have Milton either.”

Fi closed her Spanish book with a smack. Both her and Jackson's coffee mugs trembled on the table. “I'm done.”

“Are you fluent yet?” he asked, frowning at the coffee puddle under his mug.

“Only if you need directions to the library—or to buy cheese.” She stretched, speaking through a yawn.

“Is it totally pathetic I want to go to bed”—Jackson yawned back, looking at his watch—“and it's only four?”

She had gone to bed at four for weeks after the funeral. Thankfully, it'd been a while since she'd been that bad off.

She stood, throwing her books into her bag. “I feel like a slug. I need to work out or something.”

Even though she was teamless, Fi had started running ladders and throwing against brick walls. All the parts of her that had softened were slowly hardening. It was kind of lonely, though—no other girls, no Ryan, no Trent.

Jackson was still leaning like a lump over his chair. “Want to learn lacrosse?” she asked him.

Jackson raised his eyebrows. “Why not?” he said, and piled his things together.

In the coffee shop parking lot, Fi tossed her bag in the trunk and fished through the pile of lacrosse gear. After grabbing one of her sticks, an old one of Ryan's, and a few balls, Fi and Jackson walked in perfectly parallel paths to the neighborhood park across the street. Good thing it had lights, because it was already getting dark.

“So this is a stick.” She handed him Ryan's, pointing to the different parts. “The shaft. The head. The ball goes in the pocket. See how your pocket is bigger than mine?” Jackson's eyes raised, and Fi shook her head. “No jokes I haven't heard. Grow up.”

He smirked. “The guys have big balls?”

She groaned. “We use the same ball. But you're allowed to check in the men's game and not in the women's. The deeper pocket helps.”

Taking a ball and her stick, she walked a few feet away. “Put your hands here and here. Bend your knees as you catch.” She tossed the ball lightly. Jackson caught it. “Now shift your hands to here and here to throw. Like this.”

He watched her and did a fairly good imitation. They tossed back and forth a few minutes, and as he looked more comfortable, she showed him how to cradle so he could run without losing the ball, and how to reach out and catch with one hand. They talked rules, teams, leagues, the differences between the men's and women's games.

“You're not bad,” she said. “It's awkward at first for a lot of people.”

“How was Marcus?”

“I never taught Marcus.”

He looked surprised. “He wasn't interested?”

“He never seemed up to it.”

Jackson sighed, shaking his head. “He never got to do anything.”

“Because of y'all.” Fi was only half-surprised when this blatant challenge came out of her mouth.

“We didn't have much choice,” Jackson said, narrowing his eyes.

Fi frowned slightly. “I keep waiting for a hateful comment.”

“Believe me, I'm biting my tongue.”

“Why?”

Jackson studied her for a long moment. Then he took a deep breath and slowly lowered the head of his stick to the ground. The ball rolled out of it, resting at his feet. “The day before he died, he wanted me to read to him. We'd gone through everything in the house, so Mom had to scrounge up some old poetry book for us.”

“Okay.” She had no idea what this had to do with anything.

“So there was this poem. I can't remember much of it, but I'll remember those last two lines the rest of my life. He made me read them over and over.”

“What were they?” she asked, a little terrified of the answer.

“
The winter of love is a cellar of empty bins / In an orchard soft with rot
.”

The
soft with rot
part sounded so familiar, but it took a few moments before she made the connection as to why. “He was mumbling that to me,” she said. A clear image of Marcus, gaunt and pale in his dining room deathbed, lit up her brain. She hadn't thought of him like that in so long. “The last time I saw him.”

“He said it was you,” Jackson said, suddenly looking as somber as she felt. “You were going to be those empty bins, once he died. And it was maybe the saddest thing I had ever heard.”

“The poem?”

“No, his voice. How he sounded. Like—like, all the joy he always felt just got sucked out of him all at once. It was tragic.” He looked at her now. “It was the same way you looked, at the funeral. You looked just as tragic as he sounded.”

She swayed on the spot, either because she might faint—or the earth was actually shifting beneath her.

How could her heart keep
breaking
? It was the most fragile, delicate thing. Why wasn't it more like her broken ankle—stronger when it healed? “I don't need your pity, Jackson.”

“It's not pity,” he said. “It's guilt.”

“Is that supposed to be
better
?”

He shrugged. “It's the best I can do by way of apology.”

As backward as their friendship seemed, she thought they'd been drawn together because each
understood
the other. “So being friendly now is just an apology for how mean you were to me before?”

He sighed, spinning his lacrosse stick where it rested on the ground. “You're right, we did keep him on a pretty tight leash. He bitched, complained, tried to find loopholes, but three able-bodied control freaks versus one guy who gets out of breath eating cereal—not a fair fight.” He shook his head. “But, no, it's an apology to him—not you.”

“Do you even like me?”

“You're fine. I mean, I don't really know you.” He held up the stick with a shrug. “Besides your obsession with this weird sport.”

Fi looked from her stick to his and back. She remembered sitting in Ryan's room years ago, asking him what she was good at, what defined her. The list was just as pathetic now as it was then. After all this time and all this pain, she added up to nothing more than Marcus and lacrosse. The two things she loved. The two things she'd lost.

For no reason she could explain, she spontaneously let out a cry—a guttural yell—and hurled her stick as far away from her as she could. She even took a few steps for momentum, like she was throwing a javelin.

She sank down to the grass, pulling her knees into her
chest and wrapping her arms around them. She saw Jackson's feet in her peripheral vision—how they turned away from her, hesitated, then turned back and walked over.

He sat down a few feet away, kicked his legs out straight, and leaned backward against his elbows. He didn't speak, so Fi didn't know if this was one of those coffee-shop-comfortable-silences, or if he was waiting for her to say something first.

“If I never met Marcus, I'd be at Northwestern. I'd still have it,” she said.

“Have what?”

She pointed in the general area of her thrown stick. “I couldn't love them both at the same time. I had to pick one.”

“Looks like you picked wrong.”

Fi groaned and buried her head in her knees. “Do you really think so?”

“God, I don't know.” He sighed. “He was happy. I was furious. Now you're miserable, and I feel guilty. Flip side—what? Y'all never met? He and me, we'd have been the same we always were. You'd have been the same as you were before you met him. You and I could have avoided this weird . . . friendship or whatever.”

“I'd have been the same,” Fi repeated. She wished she knew which was better.

Since May, it had felt like horrible, cancerous thoughts had been eating her from the inside out. “A few months ago, you said that everywhere you looked, you saw some connection to him.”

“Yeah,” he said cautiously. “So?”

“Do you think anyone, you know, got his organs?”

“I know Mom and Dad signed the papers, after. I don't know what actually got donated, though.”

“Do you think it would have hurt him?”

Jackson exhaled. “He was dead.”

“Do you think he's happier now?”

“I don't know.”

She looked at the sky, like she could squint out the view past the clouds. “Do you think he can see us?”

“Jesus, Fi.” Jackson flopped backward in the grass with a groan. “What do you want from me here?”

Marcus would have answered. He would have talked for hours about all of this with her, analyzing all the philosophical angles. “I want you to be him.”

“Well, he's dead.” Jackson stood up from the grass. Bits of it stuck to his holey, worn jeans. “I'm not a substitute.”

That's obvious.
“What are you then?”

Jackson shook his head and turned. He spoke over his shoulder as he walked away. “Just a bitter, alive guy without his freaking twin.”

Fiona was looking out the common room window. The sky was a smooth, cloudless blue, and the trees stood perfectly upright. Usually, the wind blew them around so wildly, they might javelin themselves through the window.

“You're not coming home?” her mother was asking, over the phone.

“Everyone else has a different spring break. No one will be in town.”

“Your father and I will be here.”

As tempting as
that
sounds . . .

A few weeks ago, she'd had the same conversation with David, only he was asking her to visit UT. “I can't afford a ticket,” she'd said. If she wasn't going home, her dad sure wasn't going to fly her to Knoxville to see her boyfriend.

“I could come to Chicago,” he'd said. “During my break.
We could see a Cubs game. Try that stuffed pizza you talked about over Christmas.”

“Yeah, you'd like it.”

“Great. So, should I buy the ticket?”

“Sure,” she'd said, wishing she felt more enthusiastic about the idea. “That'd be fun.”

She hadn't shared David's travel plans with her mother, who was still complaining, long distance. “You're just going to stay up there, alone?”

“Lots of people are staying on campus,” Fiona said. Jackson, for example.

“I wanted to take you shopping.”

Good Lord, the woman had a one-track mind. “I have plenty of clothes.”

“Everything has holes. It looks ratty.”

“I'm in
college,
Mom. No one cares how I dress.”

“You should care,” she said. “You have so much to show off now.”

Translation: You really looked like crap before.
“Mom, will you just give it a rest?”

“Watch the tone, young lady.” After an uneasy pause, her mom added, “I didn't push you before, because you were self-conscious. But now, I don't see why—”

“You didn't push me?” Fiona gave a bitter laugh. “Are you kidding?”

“I'm sorry?”

“You've been trying to improve me since I was
five
.”

“I am your mother,” her mother said. “It's my job to make your life better.”

“Make
me
better, you mean.”

“I didn't say that.”

“You didn't need to. You've had thirteen years to make it clear.”

“Fiona, what on earth are you talking about?”

As her mom spoke, Jackson walked in. He leaned against the common room wall, watching her. She must have looked as angry as she felt, because after a second he mouthed,
The best friend?

How many of her dramatic moments was this boy going to witness?

“Forget it. I gotta go,” Fiona said—and then she hung up
on her mother.
She stabbed the phone's
off
button and threw it to the couch across the room.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“My mother. She drives me crazy.”

“It's fifty degrees outside.” He pointed out the window. “That should cure you of just about any negative emotion.”

“It's not even windy,” she said, like it was the
weather
curing her—and not Jackson, standing there, looking adorable. He wasn't bundled up, just in a long-sleeved Henley and those jeans she coveted.

“I'm giddier than a twelve-year-old girl at a boy band concert,” he said.

“That one actually made sense,” she said.

“We should go out before the arctic tundra returns.” He held out a hand, hoisting her up.

Mother, shmother.
Grabbing a fleece, she followed him down the stairs and into the unseasonably balmy weather.

They walked side by side on the crowded campus path, squeezing close together since lots of other people had the same idea. Jackson suggested they head to the lake.

“What's the update on your music class?” he asked.

“It's my turn on Friday.” This was the last thing she wanted to talk about.

“So that's great, right? Finally get to show off your stuff?”

“It's going to be awful.” Fiona nearly threw up when Weitz handed out the performance date. February 27.

Jackson nudged her in the side. “Man, you're dramatic about this whole thing. It's just a bunch of other students and a professor. How bad could it be?”

“The class is sadistic—and the professor isn't that much better. Last class two people played. She called the pianist's arrangement ‘sophomoric' and told the girl on guitar to keep working and perhaps she'd stumble onto something worthy of revision.”

Jackson snorted. “Statistics doesn't look so bad now, huh?” Then he spread his arms toward the beach in front of them. “I gotta say, before I got here I was skeptical about the whole
beach in Chicago
thing. But when it's not subzero outside, it's pretty awesome.”

“It's a nice perk.” Fiona took in the view—clean beach
with a blue lake so big, it looked like ocean.

He walked onto the sand, stopping a few yards away from the line where wet met dry, and sat down. Looking over his shoulder, he patted the space beside him.

She sat next to him, arms wrapped around knees, but eventually both lay back, heads only inches apart in the sand. He smelled like some combination of wool, coffee, and soap—and just the littlest bit of fruit.

Fiona closed her eyes and willed her fair skin to soak up the vitamin D. She wondered if her new skin would color the same as her old skin. She'd never even thought to ask the doctor.

She turned her head toward Jackson and was surprised to see him lying on his side, elbow propped up in the sand. He was looking at her, his head resting in his hand. For a moment, that's all they did—lay there and stare. A border of deep cobalt blue rimmed his green irises. His jaw and cheekbones looked sculpted, like they belonged on a statue in a museum somewhere, not on a boy who was looking at her
like that.

God, but he was beautiful.

After a time, Jackson lifted his free hand and slowly ran a finger under the length of her scar—from the space between her right eyebrow and nose, up her forehead, then repeating the path from under her right ear, up to the outside corner of her right eye.

She didn't speak, her breath unsteady from watching him,
from feeling the gentle weight of his finger against her face.

The circuit complete, he gently rested his palm on her cheek and began tracing the scar once more—this time with his thumb on the new skin.

Under the gentle weight of his thumb, her skin felt tingly. Like a foot that had fallen asleep and was 90 percent awake again.

Oh.
Oh.

She could feel it.

She could
feel
it.

Her whole body tensed at the sensation. His gaze moved from her skin to her eyes. His palm still rested on her cheek, and his thumb rubbed lightly back and forth against the actual scar line. “Go out with me,” he said.

“We are out.” Her voice came out as husky as his, like they were in a crowded library, not alone on the beach.

“
Out
out. Friday night, after you play.” He smiled, leaning in a little closer. “We'll toast the standing ovation.”

She frowned at this reminder. “More like drink away my sorrows.”

“Or that.” He leaned closer and said again, “Go out with me.”

Fiona's previously-numb-and-now-tingling skin screamed
yes!
Her heart and spine, her muscles and bones and nerves—all her real, tangible pieces pushed her toward
yes.
But her invisible parts—those bits that felt guilty when she actually enjoyed herself; that chunk of her that knew what Friday held
in store—answered first. “I'm not sure—”

Jackson interrupted her, shaking his head but not taking his hand from her face. “Look, I get it. You've got some
complications
. Go out with me anyway.”

Fiona swallowed her fears and guilt and nodded. Jackson smiled. She smiled back. And then they were covered in the sudden, cold shadow of an enormous, fluffy cloud.

“They look so harmless up there, don't they?” Jackson said, looking up at the single cloud blocking all the sun.

Fiona wanted to spend hours out here with Jackson, but instead she stood and held out a hand. “We should get back anyway.”

It felt fifteen degrees colder on the way back. Both walked hunched over with hands crammed into pockets. The pace was faster than on the way out—their bodies a little closer, too.

Jackson cracked jokes as they went, coming up with stranger and stranger suggestions for their date. Dinner was too predictable, what about visiting the International Museum of Surgical Science? Trying to climb the Bean in Millennium Park? Throwing plates at a restaurant in Greektown?

Fiona laughed at first, going along with it. A little giddy from the idea, but then her reality came knocking. “You know, maybe we should do it another day. Not Friday.”

He gave her a careful look. “Why?”

“That day's not a great one for me.”

“Right. So we give you something to look forward to—a
light at the other end of the performance tunnel.”

She shook her head. “It's not that, really. It's . . . well, this will sound stupid, but the date? February twenty-seventh? It's historically a bad one for me.”

“You have an unlucky
date
?”

Fiona nodded, feeling silly.

“That's intriguing,” he said. “Is this part of the Fiona Puzzle?”

“Like I said, it's stupid. But maybe another day?”

Jackson stopped, his expression suspicious. “Look, if you don't want to—”

“No, I do,” she said quickly. She looked at the sky, now covered in sheets of clouds. “It's just . . . I'm usually—always—cranky that day. Like . . . bitchy. I'm trying to save you. By Saturday I should be fine.”

“Tell me why.”

She took a breath. They were still stalled there, blocking the path as all the other people who'd had the same great idea fled the weather change, too. “It was the day I had the accident.” She gestured toward her face, in case he needed clarification. “I hardly remember it—the accident, I mean. And theoretically this year should be different—you know, since I'm all fixed. But—”

Jackson studied her a minute then gestured to the path, getting them both walking again. “Let's keep it Friday. If the day really is terrible, I'll grant you permission to postpone till Saturday.”

“You'll
grant
me?”

“You're welcome.”

She laughed. “I really hate it. I wish I'd just get over it already.”

He nudged her shoulder, staying closer than ever once the nudge was over. “You got some weird hang-ups, girl. Audiences
and
calendars—oh, the horror!”

“You sound like Lucy. And Ryan.”

“What you need is some Good Day Replacement Therapy.”

“Which is?”

“Balance it out. If you're destined to have this sucky day, designate a really good one, too. The day you'll always wake up ridiculously happy.” He shrugged and looked over at her, smiling lopsided. “So, what's the good day?”

“I don't know. Maybe May eighteenth?”

“What happened then?” he said, frowning.

She gestured to her face again. “The surgery. Seems appropriate, if the goal is balance.”

Jackson stopped again, eyeing her differently than before. After a breath, he pulled her off the path with him, getting them out of the way of the others en route to countless places. He narrowed his eyes, asking carefully, “So . . . what
was
the surgery?”

She touched her cheek, feeling it more in her fingertips than on her face. She
had
felt Jackson's touch on the beach, hadn't she? “A deep tissue skin graft.”

“Which is?”

“It's pretty technical.”

His brow arched upward. “Said the artist to the engineer.”

Fiona sighed. “It was a transplant. They took out all my bad skin and replaced it.”

His eyes traveled to her face, following the line of scar circling her eye. Slowly he asked, “Replaced it with what?”

“Uh, new skin.”

“Which came from?”

“Oh—an organ donor.” It was odd, how easily she let this information out. When had she become so blasé about wearing someone else? She hunched further over, feeling the cold more and more. Trying to get them back on the path, she said, “I'm freezing. Let's head back.”

Fiona turned back to the path, but Jackson didn't follow. She pointed her head toward their dorm a few times, but Jackson stayed put, his eyes locked on her face. Even so, he had a faraway look.

“What did you say the date was again?” he asked.

“May eighteenth.” She stomped her feet. “Seriously, let's go.”

He shook his head, still focused on her but not at all. “What time?”

“What?”

“What time was your surgery?” His tone was so weird. Like a strangled yell, as if the words forced their way out on their own.

The clusters of people passing looked over their shoulders at him—and she gawked right along with them. “What the heck is wrong with you?”

“TELL ME THE GODDAMN TIME!”

She recoiled back. “Afternoon. I don't know! I got there at three maybe. Why are you yelling at me?”

“When did you get the call?”

More people were looking now, whispering to each other about this one-sided public argument. Fiona wished they'd clue her in. She had no idea what was going on. “What call?”

“That there was a donor! When did you get the call?!”

Fiona stared at this boy who'd replaced funny, easygoing, sarcastic Jackson.
This
boy looked like he was drowning, right here on the snowy path. Like some great burden was pushing him under a waterline no one else could see. Like some horror, some awful thing, was suffocating him.

And suddenly, she couldn't breathe either.