The Love That Split the World (6 page)

“I care about you,” I tell him. “You’re a good person.”

“But,” he says flatly.

But I’m still reeling from the fact that you disappeared a second ago.

But I’m too busy trying to figure out what’s happening to me to have this conversation again.

But I’m worried that I started liking you because you made me feel normal, in the most Union sense of the word.

But you can’t stop trying to turn me back into the Natalie you fell in love with, the one who tried desperately to be the quintessential prom queen instead of the girl with two mothers, two fathers, and two nations.

“But I’m moving to Rhode Island, for one thing,” I settle on.

“Why does it have to be Rhode Island?” he says.

“I don’t know. Maybe it just can’t be Kentucky.”

He laughs harshly. “What, you need to make sure there’s nothing else better out there?”

“I’m not going to college to look for a boyfriend, Matt. I’m going to figure out who I am and what I want to do. Why are
you
allowed to figure those things out, and I’m not?”

“Oh, right, I’m sexist. I forgot,” he throws back.

“Well, I didn’t hear
you
offering to go to school in Rhode Island,” I shout. “You’re so convinced you know exactly how your perfect life should unfold that you haven’t noticed it’s not what I want and that
I’m
not who you want. You like me
despite
the things I care about—can you imagine how bad that feels?”

For a moment we’re both silent, staring. I wonder if either of us really sees the other clearly anymore or if we’re stuck looking at the frozen images of who we used to be. It’s the only explanation I can think of for why Matt would still want to be with me when we’ve grown to disagree on approximately everything.

The Rachel and Tony disagreement has been resolved, and the front truck has jolted to life, to the applause of all except for us.

But while everyone else is cheering and hollering, flipping off younger teammates and shouting proclamations of love at a disapproving Ms. Perez, I’m watching Matt turn away from me toward the place where minutes ago I watched buffalo grazing.

I’m feeling cold and lonely, and still I’m looking at a puzzle whose pieces don’t make sense.

Buffalo and unlit hallways, mysterious boys on the football field, and Grandmother’s stories. A warning and a ticking clock. A painful hollow in my stomach. What is Grandmother trying to tell me?

6

At eight
P.M.
on Thursday night, we arrive at the school in our pajamas. We check in at the front doors where Mr. Jackson, Officer Delvin, and a slew of parents glance in our bags and make sure we’ve brought our signed waivers before sending us downstairs to the cafeteria, where pizza and pop await.

At ten o’clock, they project a Nicholas Sparks movie in the gym, which seems like asking someone in a nostalgic, sensitive, emotionally heightened state to get impregnated in a bathroom stall, but hell! It’s only rated PG-13, and we’re graduating! I spend those two hours like I spend every hour lately: miserably checking for e-mails or missed calls from Dr. Alice Chan.

After the movie, it’s back to the cafeteria for more sugar, in the form of an ice cream sundae bar. While Megan and I are in line to make our ice cream mountains, she nudges me and
points to the corner table where Matt and Rachel are waiting for Derek to get back with the bathroom pass. Rachel, Matt, and Derek are among a coterie who have clearly had a few too many tiny, smuggled-in tequila bottles, and the bathroom passes have become a hot commodity as the football players and their girlfriends start to fall like dominoes to Jose Cuervo.

Rachel’s slumped against Matt’s shoulder, her mouth smushed open and her head dropping as she nods off every few seconds. As his glossy eyes find mine, I see that Matt doesn’t look so great himself.

“You’re going to have to talk to him eventually,” Megan says, as if reading my mind.

“I know,” I say. We haven’t shared a single word since our fight on the float, which might make this the longest stretch we’ve ever gone without talking. My chest feels like it’s tied
into knots. Even when I’m
not
thinking about it, my body feels the wrongness of being at odds with him. I never wanted it to be like this—half the point of breaking up was avoiding getting to a point where we hate each other, and now it feels like we’re teetering on that line.

“Sooner might be better,” Megan says.

“Maybe.”

“Like, ideally by Saturday night.”

“Ugh, his birthday party,” I groan, remembering. “I was thinking I might skip it and do something fun, like dust my entire house, instead.”

“Nat,” she says gently. “I leave for training at Georgetown in, like, sixteen days. I don’t want you to be alone all summer.”

“How dare you initiate a countdown,” I say sullenly. “I’m
doing my best to stay in denial.”

She frowns and gives me a hug. “Me too.”

“Maybe we can stay in denial together forever?” I suggest.

“I think I’ll notice the Nat-shaped hole that will form in my heart when I’m not seeing you every day,” she says.

“No, I mean, maybe there’s a town called Denial, and we can literally move there and forget about college.”

“Okay,” she says, pulling free. “That sounds nice. We’ll move to Denial.”

At one
A.M
., the boys are sent to set up their sleeping bags in the gym, and the girls are banished to the library, where our respective chaperones check off our names and very definitely lock us in. At first the room bubbles with conversation and laughter, but soon we fall into whispers and hushed giggles, until a chorus of deep, measured breathing takes over. One by one, the stragglers drop off into sleep too, and still I lie awake, staring up at the ceiling.

Tonight marks one full week since I last saw Grandmother. That’s one less week I have to save whoever’s in danger, and I haven’t gotten so much as an out-of-office automatic reply from Dr. Alice Chan. I toss and turn all night, worrying about Grandmother and where she went, about who might be in danger and what life will be like without Megan, and Matt, and even Rachel and Derek and everyone else I know.

Finally, hours after the last set of lungs slips into a steady rhythm, I feel myself drifting toward sleep, and my mind swirls away from everything dark and unsettling toward all that is warm and magical. That night on the football field with Beau, and all the enchanting nights that came on that field before it,
when the crowd bristled with excitement, voices going hoarse from screaming into the wind as the sun slid down and the stars slid up to replace it on the far side of the sky.

I see the purple of twilight, hear the chorus of cheers punctuated by the whistling of fanatical parents, feel the buzz of people falling in love with each other, with the field full of gnats and lightning bugs, with the nighttime itself.

I’m almost asleep, flat on my back, when my stomach lifts up toward my throat and the world is rearranged once again. The walls, the bookshelves, the ceiling disappear, leaving behind only a wide night sky.

I sit bolt upright and stare up into the deep blue and the sparkling stars overhead. I look around and find myself alone on top of a grassy hill surrounded by forest. I know where the parking lot should be, where the golf course should begin just beyond a thin range of trees, but neither exists in this place. Instead, at the bottom of the hill, I see a few buffalo lying stretched out in the grass, their thick eyelids soft in sleep. Some are clumped together in twos so that their enormous heads rest on one another; others slumber a few yards off on their own. I hear myself laugh.

It sounds a little bit like I’m being strangled, probably because all the air has left my lungs. I stand and turn in place as all of me is filled with simultaneous dread and awe. My stomach settles and, like that, the library’s back, as if the whole thing never happened. Except that now I’m alone in it. The other girls aren’t there. Neither are the chaperones, the sleeping bags, or any of the duffel bags except for mine.

“What’s happening to me?” I whisper to the empty room.

The clock above the doors reads 4:34
A.M
. The library is too dark, too quiet. I’d take the sleeping buffalo over this any day. For a few minutes, I just turn circles, waiting for everyone to snap back into place. Eventually, though, I’m too anxious to sit still any longer. I need to think. I need to figure out what’s going on. I grab my duffel bag and dig through it. Megan had planned on running this morning around six, and I’d brought a sports bra, shorts, and running shoes on the off chance she could convince me to get up with her. Good sleep is so rare for me that, when it comes, it trumps everything. Especially early morning exercise.

I dress as quickly as I can, conscious the whole time that the building could disappear or the people in it could reappear without any notice. Then I slip into the hallway and wander through its emptiness, my footsteps echoing. The front doors are locked from the inside, but Officer Delvin is nowhere in sight, and, squinting through the darkness, I see the parking lot’s empty too. I let myself out, prop open the door with a stopper, and sweep my hair up into a ponytail as I make my way across the asphalt. At the edge of the lot, I break into a jog and turn down the sidewalk toward the football stadium and field houses, momentum carrying me fast past them to the intersecting street beyond. I don’t know where I’m going—whether I’m going to run the six miles home or turn back to the school at some point—but moving has always let me get out of my head a little bit, and when I return, it’s usually clearer.

Dance used to do that for me too: a place where there was nothing to do but
be me
and let everything else fall away. For a lot of the girls on the team, it was all about the performance, but for
me, I think it was always about communication. I know I was supposedly too young to remember those tantrums Dad brought up the other day, but I do. I remember feeling like my throat was closing up. I remember feelings so big and unnamable that all I could do was cry, or sometimes scream. The smallest thing could set me off, anything I thought was unfair or intimidating. When I was a little bit older, I remember fighting to hold those unfocused emotions inside, and sometimes feeling so aimlessly frustrated that I’d shriek into my pillow at night. And then I remember taking my first dance class, a ballet-inspired workshop for kindergarteners, and how everything changed.

For one hour each week, I’d toddle around in a ruffly black leotard and pink tights, skipping across the floor in pre-
chassés,
spinning around in preludes to
chaînés.
We imitated animals and growing trees and whirlybirds falling from branches, pantomimed holding beach balls and swimming. We made ourselves as big as we could, and then as small as possible.

But most of all, I remember the great bodily relief I felt as I sank into the passenger seat on the drive home after my first class. I felt empty, in a good way. Like the things I couldn’t find words for had found a way out, and now I could relax. Now I could enjoy the warm, cozy silence between me and Mom.

Probably my favorite thing about that class, and dance in general, was seeing the way the same movements could look so different when performed by different bodies. When I joined the dance team in middle school, I learned how to manipulate my natural inclinations so that I could be exactly in sync with everyone else, but when I lost Grandmother, my talent for blending in began to make me sick. It felt more like hiding than syncing.

As I run, I pass through the fog of memory and back into the sweltering heat and still-dark morning, turning right along the white fence lining Matt’s family’s property and picking up my pace. As my limbs loosen, my muscles heat, my heart rate increases, and my mind slips into its sweet spot: the unequaled silent peace you get from exercise. Somehow I skip the horrible middle part of any workout when my body’s usually screaming and my mind can’t stop repeating
I hate this, this sucks, I hate this
, and dive straight into the nirvana of being soaked in sweat. Unbothered by the thick clouds of mosquitoes riding the grass around my ankles. Moved by the intense thumbnail of sunrise visible beyond the hills.

I run across the tumbling fields, down to the Kincaids’ big white farmhouse and their junky rental property adjacent, then turn and start climbing back toward the stadium and track as the sun crests the trees. The gates are locked, but I climb the chain-link fence pretty easily and make my way down the bleachers toward the field just as the world—my world—is bathed in rosy light. Except it’s not
just
my world anymore. Someone else is down there, running on the track.

I lean out over the railing and watch the boy circling the field. He’s tall and broad but fast, too—a football player for sure, I’d guess a running back. At the far end of the field, he curves around the track, and I feel myself smiling involuntarily when he notices me.

“What are you doing, sweating all over my track?” I shout down to him.

He comes to a stop in front of me, resting his hands on his hips as he catches his breath. “Well, nice to see you too, Natalie Cleary.”

7

“Do you live around here?” I ask.

He walks forward to the bleachers and reaches his hands up through the chain link separating me from him. His white T-shirt is worn out and horribly mud- and grass-stained, the sleeves cut off to reveal long stripes of tan skin on either side of his rib cage and stomach. “Not too far,” he says. “What about you?”

“Down off Wetherington,” I tell him. He nods but doesn’t say anything, and his smile is unnerving. I nudge the fencing with my foot. “What’s that look for?”

“Nothin’,” he says. “Those are nice houses.”

“And?”

He looks out across the field, the intense yellow of the rising sun catching his hazel eyes and painting caramel highlights at the tips of his hair. “You dress real nice. I bet you
come from a nice family.”

It occurs to me that maybe my calling in life is just to make Beau say
nahs
as many times as possible. “They’re nice,” I say. The elaborately strapped gray sports bra and moisture-wicking running shorts are also probably the nicest clothes I own. My mom thinks workout gear is sacred, and thus is constantly throwing out my old stained stuff and replenishing my supply. “What about you? You play the piano like Mozart—your family must be all right.”

Beau lets go of the chain link, walks around to the steps, and comes to stand beside me. When he leans out over the railing he eases his arm up against mine, and I’m careful not to move at all, so he won’t either. I want to stay there, touching him. “I live with my brother, Mason, and sometimes my mom,” he says. “She made me take lessons when I was little because
she wanted to date the teacher, and now when I wanna play, I come over to the high school.”

“I see.”

“Which one of those guys from the other night was your boyfriend?” he asks.

“Neither.” I feel my blush worsening, and when it’s at peak severity and my whole head might actually be on fire, I add, “I don’t have a boyfriend.” I risk a glance at him. He’s looking at the field, but the corners of his mouth are turned up, and I like the way his eyelids dip when he smiles.

“So now I know why you haunt the band room,” I say, breaking the silent tension between us. “But why do you run on our track?”

“
Our
track?” he says. “I thought this was
your
track.”

“Well, I’m really good at sharing, especially things I hate using.”

His eyes rove over me. “You’re here right now.”

“Yeah,” I say, because
I had a vision of you
might come off a little too strong.

He pushes his hair back from his face. “Do you wanna come over?”

“What—right now?”

He shrugs. “Whenever. Now. We have cereal.”

I laugh. “What about milk? Do you have milk, Beau?”

“Mason usually just uses beer, but yeah, if you want milk, I can get you milk, Natalie. There’s a gas station right up the road.”

“You know what? I’d try it with beer,” I tell him.

“So you do?” he says. “Wanna come over?”

“I can’t right now.” I wave vaguely toward the school. Beau nods, and I hurry to add, “But some other time, later in the day, would be good.”

“Okay.”

“Do you have your phone with you? I could give you my number.”

He feels his shorts pockets. “Nah.”

I realize then that I left
my
phone in the school, although I
did
manage to bring the pepper-spray can Mom attached to my keys, which I self-consciously remember I’m wearing on a wristband. “You could find me online,” I offer helplessly.

“Okay.”

“Or you could find me here again.”

“On your track,” he agrees.

“Yeah.”

“That you never use.”

“Well, it’s a small town,” I say. “How hard could it be?” A little voice in my head points out that I’d never seen Beau until a week ago.

“I’ll find you,” he says.

“I hope so.” I turn to go, chest fluttering and abdomen incongruently cramping inward from the run.

When I get back to the parking lot, it’s still empty, but as I’m standing there, there’s a flicker of color and form across the asphalt as the cars—mine included—appear for the breadth of a blink. I stand there watching until it happens once more, this time for three whole seconds. That seems like a good sign, so I go inside. As far as I can tell, the school’s still empty, but after my conversation with Beau nothing feels as eerie as it did before my run, and I’m not as anxious either. Perhaps misguidedly, I’m totally confident the world
will
go back to normal soon, just like it has all week. So I go down to the locker rooms and rinse off as quickly as possible before I head back up to the library, crossing my fingers that I can get in without any trouble.

When I get there, it’s the same as I left it: void of everything except bookshelves and one lone sleeping bag and duffel. The clock on the wall reads 6:01, and, because I have no clue what else to do, I get in my sleeping bag and lie back down, watching and waiting for the world to right itself.

Next thing I know, someone is shaking me awake. My eyes pop open onto a pair of round blue ones, framed with sheets of straight blond hair. “Good news or bad news first?” Megan says.

“Bad news,” I croak.

“Okay, well, that’s the wrong order, and the good news is: I know you very well, and I didn’t even bother trying to get you up to go running with me this morning, so you’re welcome.”

“Thanks,” I say, though my mind is still sorting through the fog of knowing that I absolutely
did
go running this morning.

“The bad news is, you have to get up right now, because breakfast started ten minutes ago, and everything’s obviously super greasy and everyone’s obviously super hungover so it’s sort of a fly-to-bug-zapper situation.”

“Rachel’s going to eat all my bacon,” I whine, running my hand over my face.

“No one wants to see that happen. Please get up.”

“I left,” I tell her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, it happened again. First, the school disappeared and I was lying in a field. Then the school was back, but everyone else was gone, and I left. I went for a run, and I saw Beau down at the stadium.”

“Oh my God. Natalie Cleary is dreaming about a boy who isn’t Matt Kincaid. I’m so happy I think might explode.”

I shake my head. “It wasn’t a dream. Beau was one hundred percent real. And the other stuff, it was like the other times, like when I see Grandmother. I can’t really explain it.”

“That’s so weird.” Megan sits down beside me. “So . . . did anything
happen
? With Beau, I mean.”

“He invited me over.”

“In what way?”

“There are multiple ways someone can come over?”

“So many ways,” Megan assures me.

“Are these ways, like, the front door, the back door, the bedroom window, et cetera?”

“Sometimes,” she says. “What was his energy like?”

I bury my face in my hands because I know exactly what she means, and I know the answer, and I don’t want to tell her. “Please don’t make me say these words aloud.”

She breaks into giggles and lies down beside me. “What does he look like?”

“Well, his biceps are roughly the size of my head, and his eyes look like summer incarnate, and he has two little dark freckles on the side of his nose, and a mouth that somehow manages to look like a shy kid’s one minute and a virile Greek god’s the next. So I guess you could say, pretty decent.”

“Oh my God,” Megan says. “I’m shaking I’m so giddy right now. I feel like this is happening to me. Where did he come from?”

“No idea,” I say.

“You’re going to make out with him,” she says knowingly.

I roll over and bury my face in my pillow. “What if you just jinxed me?”

“No way. I love you too much. My psychic energy is literally incapable of jinxing you. If anything, I’m willing you into this make-out.”

“Hey, perhaps you’d like to react to the fact that an entire building and the many people within it vanished before my eyes too? Or no, not really of much interest to you?”

“Of quite a bit of interest,” she says. “Slightly less interest than your incomparably soft and beautiful heart opening like a flower to Beau, but yes, I’m interested.” Her smile fades, and she squeezes my hand. “You know, I like to think of myself as
somewhat of an expert on my best friend, but the truth is I have no idea how to help with all of this. So tell me, okay? Tell me what you need, and tell me every single time you need it, and I’ll be there.”

I squeeze her hand back and swallow a lump. “You are the best person,” I tell her. “But I don’t know what I need either.”

But by the time the last Spirit Week activity, the Seeing Off, is over, and we’ve walked through the halls saying goodbyes and giving out hugs to teachers and underclassmen, I’ve figured out the only thing I really can do.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” Megan asks as we walk out to our cars. “I can make sure Dr. Chan knows you’re not crazy.”

“Good thinking. I’ll just bring a friend to see a psychologist I don’t have an appointment with, and you can open with ‘She’s not crazy!’ So she’ll know I’m not crazy.”

“I can wait in the car.”

“No, you can wait at Steak ’n Shake with the soccer team, where I know you were planning on going before I sprung this on you.”

She sighs. “Call me after the Cleary Family Celebration Dinner and let me know how things went?”

“Sure. Or maybe, like, while I’m still on Dr. Chan’s couch. If she questions my sanity, I can demand we conference you in.”

“Sounds good. I’ll put you on speaker with the soccer team. We can have them vote on whether they think you’re crazy.”

“Perfect. Thank you.”

We exchange a parting hug and climb into our cars. A few minutes later, I’m cruising on 275 East, a wide and rarely congested highway that winds out from the suburbs through a scrubby, rural valley occasionally punctuated by towns even slower and smaller than Union, pretty much until you get to the college. Though I’ve driven to NKU a couple of times for friends’ games and friends of friends’ parties, once I make it to campus, it takes me a while of aimlessly circling until I spot the psychology building: an enormous, gray-brown cement block with tiny windows grouped in twos that remind me of coin slots in an arcade game, and a faded red roof slanting up from the three narrow towers separating the two wings. The parking lot’s mostly empty, and I take a spot near the front and slip inside.

The building is chilly, if out of date and poorly lit, and I find Dr. Chan’s name posted outside a yellowed wooden door at the end of a narrow corridor. The door is cracked open but I knock anyway.

When I hear no reply, I push the door open, and it whines on its hinges. The little office is packed. A chocolate-brown desk and a whiteboard are wedged between two bookshelves, an office chair just barely squeezes in between the desk and the window beyond, which overlooks a long yellow lawn and a little blue pond. On my side of the desk, there’s another chair and a small couch, both of which are completely covered in stacks of stuffed filing folders and loose papers and books.

“Can I help you?” someone says behind me, and I spin to find Dr. Chan in the doorway. She has a short, blunt bob and a dappling of freckles across her nose. Without makeup or the structured blazer from her portrait, she’s barely recognizable. She
looks about twenty years younger than the austere middle-aged woman I was expecting, and not quite old enough to be the person who holds the keys to unlocking Grandmother’s secrets.

“God, I hope so.”

Dr. Chan sits in the chair on my side of the desk, chewing the back of her pen, apparently deep in thought. The piles of displaced files surround her ankles like eager puppies; meanwhile my tailbone’s been balanced on one corner of the paper-strewn black sofa for the length of my life—with Grandmother—story.

“Fascinating,” Dr. Chan says finally, leaning down to dig through a stack of notepads on the ground. She chooses one and flips to a clean page. “I’ve never heard of anyone having such long conversations with Them—the Others—before. And I’ve sure as hell never heard of a full-on scenery change.” She scribbles at the paper until the ink starts flowing.