I Will Save You (23 page)

“When you barely make a train like that,” Olivia said, setting her bag on the empty seat next to her, “it’s a good omen.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff,” I said.

“Good omens?”

“Yeah. Or things being meant to be. Like in the story about one-hundred-percent perfect love.”

She rolled her eyes. “You don’t know much about girls, do you?”

I shrugged.

“The ones who claim they don’t believe in fairy tales are the ones who believe the most.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

We both watched out the window as the train picked up speed, gliding us through the beach part of Encinitas and Cardiff. Outside our window passed the top of Moonlight Music, where Olivia played me her song, and the big white walls of the self-realization place and the part of the tracks where Devon once stood playing chicken with a train.

Olivia pointed at the campsites as they moved past and we looked at each other and smiled ’cause it’s where we’d just come from and where we met, and I thought how it’d be if I stayed there the rest of my life, even when I had a wife and kids. Like, what if I just bought a family-sized tent and kept working for Mr. Red, and what if Olivia was the wife?

And then I thought something else. What if I’d been from Cardiff from the beginning? Would I be different?

I tried to decide about that as I looked out the window. The blue ocean going by, the sun’s shiny glare floating on top. The surfers waiting for waves, sitting on their boards like we did the night of the kelp beds. Whitewash crumbling toward shore, where tiny kids stood with buckets and shovels, digging or building castles or burying each other.

What if instead of being born in a trailer in Fallbrook I’d been born as one of those little kids on the beach playing in the sand?

Were people who they were ’cause of their genes, or was it more to do with where they were born, and who their parents were, and what they saw growing up?

What if I never had to go to Horizons?

And what if I’d never met Devon?

The train moved along with my thinking.

•  •  •

Olivia had been away at SAT camp for the three days since I caught Devon watching her tent. According to her, as soon as she got back this morning she dropped her bags off in her tent and came straight to get me. She said she had an epiphany while doing an eight-page worksheet of sentence-completion problems. When I asked her what her epiphany was, she wagged a finger at me, said it had to remain a secret until we got to her favorite cliff spot at Torrey Pines.

The train dinged as we slowed to a stop at the Solana Beach Station. The doors slid open and a bunch of people got off and new ones got on and then the doors closed and we started going again.

I got a weird feeling maybe Devon was on the train now, but I looked all around and didn’t see him. Eventually, I knew I had to warn Olivia about catching Devon outside her tent with a knife in his hand. But a train ride didn’t seem like the right place.

“I’m so happy to be back,” Olivia said.

“You didn’t like your camp?”

“Try spending eight hours a day doing reading comprehension questions and essay-building strategies.”

I tried to remember myself in school, sitting at a desk like everyone else, the teacher putting something on the board. It seemed like forever ago.

“Or studying five hundred new words a night. Getting tested on them the next morning.” She shook her head and looked at me. “You know what ‘clairvoyant’ means?”

“I think so.”

“ ‘Able to see the future.’ ”

“Exactly,” I said.

“That’s the first part of my epiphany. I had a moment of clairvoyance. I was doing this one problem and all of a sudden I was picturing us at Torrey Pines, looking over the ocean and talking. Then I saw myself showing you what I’m supposed to show you.”

“Me and you were there?” I said.

“Yep. And it was sunny like this. And you were even wearing those same cargo shorts.”

I looked down at my shorts, one of the pairs Devon had stolen.

“PS, that’s a joke,” Olivia said, smiling. “You wear those shorts
every
day. Get it?”

“I don’t wear these ones—”

“I’m kidding,” she interrupted, and then she punched me in the arm, laughing. “You don’t have to take everything so seriously, you know.”

“I know,” I said.

I thought about what Olivia had just said. About her picturing us together, even when she was away at camp. “You know that book you told me about?” I said.

“The One-Hundred-Percent Perfect Girl?”

“No, the one about the guy who had to blink his one good eye to write it.” I still hadn’t told Olivia I lost the book she’d just loaned me.

“
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
.”

“Yeah. I think it really
was
a triumph.”

“Oh, yeah?” She made a face and said: “That’s a pretty random thing to bring up, don’t you think?”

I shrugged, told her: “I read it while you were at your SAT camp.”

“Seriously? You went out and bought it?”

“I liked it a lot,” I said.

Olivia stayed looking at me for a while, then she put her hand over my hand and smiled.

Torrey Pines State Beach

The train dinged again as we slowed to a stop, and when the doors opened this time, Olivia grabbed her bag and my arm and said: “Come on, this is us.”

She led us out of the station and onto a paved path toward a sign that said
TORREY PINES STATE BEACH
. But you definitely couldn’t see any beach. It felt more like we were hiking into the mountains.

I watched Olivia walking slightly ahead of me, and I got this feeling. I knew I’d never forget this. Me and her walking together through trees and bushes. Going on a train together. Her putting her hand on mine.

But then another feeling interrupted me. Devon and his knife. Him staring at her tent door. Hurting her. Without thinking I blurted out: “Someone’s stalking you.”

She gave me a weird look and kept walking. “Someone’s
stalking
me?”

“It’s this guy I know from Fallbrook. You saw him surfing.”

She stopped and looked all around us, like she was making fun of me. “Oh, my God. Where’s this stalker now? Is he here? Is he watching us this very second?”

“I’m serious, though,” I said. “He was by your tent before you left. In the middle of the night.”

She shook her head and gave me a dirty look and started walking again. But I could tell she was worried.

“I don’t know what he wants,” I said, following her.

“How do you know he’s stalking
me
? I share a tent with Jasmine and Blue, you know. And they’re like ten times prettier than I am.”

I thought about that as we turned onto a narrow dirt trail. It was true that Devon thought Jasmine and Blue were prettier. But this wasn’t about how people looked. It was about Devon’s revolution and him getting back at me.

Or what if Devon had changed his mind about Olivia?

What if he thought she was pretty now?

We came upon two old people sitting on a bench. The wrinkled man had a wooden cane across his lap and he was wiping his face with a cloth. The woman had on a white bonnet and as we got up to them she waved.

Me and Olivia waved back.

“Kidd, no offense,” Olivia said, soon as we passed them, “but what were
you
doing wandering around in the middle of the night?”

“Me?” I said, trying to think.

“Yeah, the girls have seen you. Walking around the beach. What are you doing up so late?”

“Nothing,” I said. “Sometimes I can’t sleep.”

I looked at her and thought:
Making sure nobody hurts you
.

She patted me on the back. “I’m giving you a hard time. But seriously, Kidd, the campsites are a safe place. What happened with us and those college kids, that’s as bad as it gets here. And that was like a mile away. So is it cool if we drop the stalker talk?”

I nodded.

I didn’t wanna make her scared. I just knew I had to bring it up.

As we got higher the trees and bushes we passed grew thinner, and so did the trail. I watched for spiderwebs since I’m so scared of spiders and tried to put Devon out of my head. Maybe Olivia was right and I was worried for nothing. Maybe he was just putting on an act to scare us. He’d done it before, back when he was still living with me at Horizons.

Olivia’s Epiphany

Olivia led me through a slight break in the bushes to a small grass clearing where below us the giant blue ocean sparkled in the sun and drifted in the sideways wind like grass blowing. We went to two flat rocks near the edge of the cliff and sat next to each other.

It was the most amazing view.

“This is where I go sometimes,” she said. “By myself.”

“I can’t believe how far you can see.”

“Yep.” She patted the rock I was sitting on. “Usually this one’s empty.”

I smiled.

We both stared at the ocean.

“Did you know the waves are supposed to be huge this weekend?” she said. “Like the biggest they’ve been in years.”

“Mr. Red will be happy.”

She nodded. “Do me a favor, by the way. Don’t go any closer to the cliff. It’s a straight drop.”

“I won’t,” I said, looking at where the cliff ended. We were so high up it made my stomach feel weird.

“Last year these two kids from La Jolla High jumped. They made a suicide pact. It was in all the papers.”

“They died?” I said.

“Instantly. That’s an insane drop.”

I thought about why two people would jump off a cliff together. It seemed like the worst possible way to die, slamming into rocks, breaking their backs landing on the sand.

I snuck a look at Olivia.

She was staring at the water, her lips slightly apart, her perfect blond hair coming out from under her hat and blowing in the breeze. She reached in her bag and pulled out a Chap Stick and put some on her lips and then stuck it back in her bag.

“Okay,” she said, and she looked at me. “Now, for what I came here to show you.”

“It’s not the view?” I said.

“Unfortunately, there’s more,” she said. Then she shook out her hands and said: “God, I wish I wasn’t so nervous.”

She picked up a little stick off the ground and spun it around in her fingers and looked up at me. “So, there’s a reason I mostly hang by myself and why I almost passed on the campsites this summer.” She paused for a sec and said: “There’s a reason why I’ve never had a real boyfriend.”

I stared in Olivia’s eyes, waiting for her to say more.

“How’s that for an awkward transition?” she said, tossing the stick at me.

Her eyes were sadder than I’d ever seen them.

“So anyway,” she went on, looking at the ground. “I was born with this rare skin disorder called Sturge-Weber syndrome. Ever heard of it?”

I shook my head.

“Well, that’s because
nobody’s
ever heard of it. Except the people who have it. It’s congenital and neurological, which basically means it’s with you right from the start. My case isn’t nearly as bad as some people’s, so there’s that. But it’s manifested on my face and scalp as port-wine stains.”

“Stains?” I said.

She sat there a minute, playing with a new stick. “A bunch of really ugly birthmark-looking things.”

Olivia wasn’t looking at me as she talked. She stared at her stick or the ocean or the top of my head, but never in my eyes. Which showed how hard it was for her to talk about.

“When I was eight, my doctor showed me a magazine picture of some Russian guy named Mikhail Gorbachev. I remember my mom was sitting next to me with tears in her eyes. And the doctor was so awkward. He just showed me the picture and explained what the man had, and then he looked in my ears and down my throat and declared me completely healthy otherwise. But that night my mom held my hair to the side in front of the bathroom mirror, and we both stared at the pale pink mark going down my cheek, the mark I’d been staring at for as long as I could remember. She said it was a port-wine stain, same as the Russian man had. That’s what the doctor had been trying to tell me.

“But mine was so much lighter. And smaller. You could barely see it when Mom covered it with her makeup every morning before I went to school. I figured the doctor had made a mistake.”

Olivia turned and tossed another stick at me.

I watched it hit my shirt and bounce onto the ground.

She picked up a rock this time and stared at it. “As I got older, though, the stain got bigger. And darker. I started measuring it every Sunday night with a ruler. I took pictures. I kept a journal of how it was changing. By the time I got to high school it was the shape of California and it was almost eight inches long, if I counted the part on my scalp. And you could see it no matter how much makeup I caked on. That’s why I always wear this stupid hat now. So people don’t have to be disgusted by me.”

A tear went down Olivia’s face, but she quickly wiped it away. “My dad gets frustrated with me. He says there are millions of people worse off. And I know he’s right. But is that supposed to make it easier when I look in the mirror? All I see is this huge, gross stain.”

“You’re not gross,” I said.

She wiped another tear and gave me a tiny sad smile. “There’s a doctor in New York who’s come up with this experimental laser treatment. Supposedly the results are really promising so far. My dad said he’s gonna take me. But he wants to wait until more people have had the procedure. Just to make sure. Next summer, he tells me, before I go off to college.”

“They can remove it?”

“According to all the articles I’ve read. In the meantime, though, I feel like I’m just going through the motions until my real life starts.”

I remembered my therapist telling me that same thing when I first got to Horizons. She said I wasn’t taking an active part in my own life. And in order to make progress I had to stop going through the motions. I didn’t mention it to Olivia, though. I just let her talk.

“Anyway,” she said. “That’s why I brought you here. For some reason I feel like I need to show you.”