We Won't Feel a Thing (8 page)

He lowered his cheek to the quilt, and for a long moment he closed his eyes and breathed in her apple-pencil smell.

Then he picked up the essay and scrolled back to the start.

***

An elephant, sad and doomed, stared at Rachel from one accusing eye. She stared back, and then bit his trunk off.

She sat at the dining room table with the laptop, devouring iced animal crackers from Mr. Woodlawn’s secret snack stash. As she snapped off heads and paws and tails, she tried not to ponder her score on the screener. Her earbuds blasted Thirsty Herd.

Rachel browsed Grammarfail for five minutes, reveling in lush indignation. She looked up several photos of baby ravens and allowed herself moments of meltiness. Then she called up her Tackboards of Inspiration on Tackity and prowled her archive marked FUTURE PERFECT: skyscrapers, carved mahogany desks, black trench coats with high collars and zippers like glittering scars. She imagined herself enfolded in the comforting chaos of New York, stalking her own kingdom like a vengeful queen. She’d be fine without Riley. New York would make sure of it. In a city of 8.3 million, there had to be one other person who’d indulge her obsessions and get her jokes.

An acoustic love ballad tickled her ears. Rachel ripped out the earbuds.
Et tu, Thirsty Herd?

“You want to leave? Why
haven’t
you?”

She eyed the basement door. Mr. and Mrs. Woodlawn were still at it. She heard snippets over the dishwasher’s hum.

“…depend on me for everything!”

“…so smug I just want to…”

“At least I don’t pretend…”

Clutching the laptop to her chest, Rachel tiptoed through the mess they’d left in the kitchen. Rings of Fruity Os crunched into pink dust under her feet. She put her ear to the basement door.

“—money on organic milk, and those pink silk pants you strut around in like you’re better than everyone!” A crash interrupted Mr. Woodlawn’s rant. “I want to hack them up every time you wear them!”

“Your denim shorts fill me with rage,” Mrs. Woodlawn shot back, adding two tinny clangs and a clunk. “You have the wardrobe of someone proud of mediocrity.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means I’m disappointed in you.”

“Yeah, well, so am I!”

“I’m disappointed you have an interesting profession but aren’t actually interesting.”

“I’m disappointed I married a classy lady who turned out to be mean.”

“You made me mean, Ed! You
turned
me. When I’m by myself I am a
very
kind person!”

“Well, you make me boring! ‘Cause I’m afraid to talk. There’s lots of stuff in my head, all the time. You have no clue.” Some knickknack bonked the painted wood paneling. “You think you’re a writer but you’re not even interested in the inside of people!”

Rachel hugged the laptop. She had never heard them speak like this; she hadn’t thought either of them capable of such dazzling honesty. What would it be like if she and Riley had stuck with DERT? She flashed on herself in a robe of a thousand pelts, pulling him close and saying anything and everything.
Riley, I want to pretend we just met…I want to forget your life story so I can hear it again for the first time, and I want to make out with you desperately on the couch until—

The bird clock in the kitchen sounded, the loud dry rattle of a kingfisher. Rachel startled. Eleven o’clock.

Their results would be in any minute.

She thumped up the steps and into their room. Riley sat in front of the sandcastle dollhouse, his back to her.

Something was wrong. She could tell by his shoulders.

“Ri.”

He leapt to his feet. He held out both tablets, a flame of panic in his eyes.

She backed away. “Results?”

“No.” He waved the two screens. “Our
essays
. Look.”

Rachel paled. “You didn’t.”

“I had to.”

“RILEY EDWARD WOODLAWN.”

“Just read!”

Rachel tossed the laptop on her bed and hunkered down in the pillow nest. Riley scooted in next to her. She placed the tablets side by side and glanced back and forth at their essays, scanning the bold font she had chosen, his silly lowercasing she always teased him about.

From sentence one, she knew they were in trouble.

***

It started in California.

it started in california.

We were nine years old, and we’d known each other for six months. We were staying for a week at the Mermaid’s Mirror Inn, which belonged to Riley’s Aunt Jerrie. The fruit basket she’d left in our adjoining suites came with a pink card that said “WELCOME WOODLAWN FAMILY!”

We were anything but a family.

rachel was with us because my mom’s old friend arthur seton died. i never met him because he lived in chicago and he never visited, only sent letters. my mother cried for two days and then she and dad sat me down and announced that arthur’s granddaughter would be coming to live with us. and i would have a “new sister.”

“Don’t ever get attached to people,” Arthur Seton would always say. After my mother took off and left three-year-old me with him, he treated me with remote affection, as if I were a stray cat with six months to live. I liked the jobs he gave me as I got older: mixing his vodka gimlets while he wrote, helping him correct English quizzes, cleaning our cluttered apartment and his pipes that smelled like burning vanilla. When he died and his will routed me to his old teacher friend instead of my blackjack-dealer uncle in New Orleans, I was less than thrilled. Anne and Ed Woodlawn’s mutual dislike hung in every room, like a stinky fog. And their son was too tragic to be any fun.

i was a neurotic kid. by the time i was six i had about seventeen phobias and eight bizarre habits and i tugged my hair so much it had started falling out in spots. i think i weirded my parents out, like i wasn’t a real kid but a golem made from everything bad between them. dad got a second job and was gone a lot. mom taught me at home—she said it was because puckatoe schools were awful but i think it was so people wouldn’t judge her for having such a strange son. she was a good teacher but a bare-minimum mom. she checked out every night at seven to write, and i was on my own in my big lonely second floor room. the only thing that helped was drawing, painting, making pictures from bits of paper and rock.

He loved art and had ridiculous girly Cupid curls that stuck up everywhere. He was afraid of blood, thunder, oceans, spiders, birds, needles, shadows.

And me.

when rachel came i could hardly talk to her. she spent all day driving my mother nuts, talking back during lessons and questioning whatever new teaching fad mom had latched onto that month. then at night she stayed on her side of the room with the mirror door shut, drawing red daggers on her jeans and glaring at books of twisted fairy tales where the bad guys won.

He’d peek at me through the crack in the door, and sometimes he’d slip a sketch of an ominous castle under my door. It was kind of cute, but I tried my best not to care about him. I ruled myself. I lived in a tower surrounded by thorns.

I told myself that, until California.

we were going, dad said, to visit his sister jerrie. she’d been having a tough time since her wife marisol left her, and wouldn’t it be fun and wow my first time on a plane and all that.

I thought Riley was going to die. He breathed into a paper bag for half the flight, and then as soon as we climbed up the pink, sparkly steps of the Mermaid’s Mirror Inn, Aunt Jerrie took him under the wing of her purple kimono and started yammering about his nemesis: the ocean.

“ten o’clock tomorrow, we’ll go for a swim! you’ll love it!” which was so not going to work, because the ocean as i understood it was a kingdom of terror. rogue waves and undertows and hungry things with razor teeth? NO NO NO.

I started feeling bad for Riley. At lunch, he kept staring at his coconut shrimp, tugging his hair. He was missing all the art around us—the sea monster statues, the fountain mosaics, the chartreuse tentacle chandeliers. I knew what he was thinking. He was thinking
ten o’clock tomorrow
on an endless loop, the ocean encounter looming like the gallows.

While I pondered how to help without appearing to care, Aunt Jerrie went on and on about Marisol, who did all the hotel art. “It never gets better, never,” she said. “Every day I still think I’ll hear a knock, and it’ll be her with a bouquet of daisies, and she’ll say…”

I tuned her out. I felt choked by the sadness of others, as if they were clinging to my neck to keep from drowning. I tuned back in a half hour later, when I heard:

“No, no, I’ve shut 7B up for good. It’s a shame—that
stunning
ocean view wasted.”

I smiled. Because I knew what we were going to do that night, once the whole place was asleep.

that night in the room we were sharing, i felt her hand on my back through the blankets. i heard a jingle and when i sat up, she was sitting on my bed and dangling a key. the key said 7B. i was like, where’d you get THAT, and she was like “behind the front desk” and she said it with such cool confidence that the knots inside me untied and i started to suspect she was a queen from some secret world, and she’d come to save me from being afraid of the entire universe. “don’t you want to open this mysteeeeeeerious door? see what’s inside?” she said. and i don’t know how, but then i said YES.

Getting in wasn’t a big deal. One jiggle of the rusted key, and the knob turned as if we were entering our own house. He was shaking like a wet dog.

a spooky tick-tock filled the quiet dark room. “whooooooooooooo,” she said in this ghostly voice and i said SHH. and then she popped on the flashlight she’d grabbed from the front desk, and WOW.

We were standing in Marisol’s old workshop. Every surface was crowded with paint tubes, brushes, canvases, tiles, charcoal pencils, clay. Aunt Jerrie had kept it like a shrine; there was still a coffee cup and a newspaper from two years ago on the center table. Finished and unfinished projects kept each other company: a half-painted tidal wave landscape, a mosaic of glittering beach umbrellas, sculptures of sirens crowned with pearls, a mermaid clock ticking patiently. And Riley was
enraptured,
by everything.

i remember wanting to hold it all at once, to get close with the flashlight and examine every single thing and see how marisol did it, so i could do it too.

He curled my fingers around cool mosaic tiles, tickled my face with soft paintbrushes. I couldn’t help smiling. When I lived with Arthur he wrote brutal, spare literary novels and taught eleventh graders how to write expository essays, and he treated beauty like a shameful closet he opened only when necessary. But beauty was a huge, joyful playroom to Riley, and he was inviting me in.

Then I invited him out.

i was like, what? out
where
?

“out THERE,” she said, pointing. “on the balcony.”

all my terror of the ocean came gushing back and i told her no, i can’t, but she grabbed marisol’s mermaid clock and said “five minutes, okay?” she grinned in the beam of the flashlight. “five tiny minutes, blockhead. you’ll get through it. just tell me some jokes or something.” she slid the glass door open with a screech and the ocean wind lifted her hair.

He fell in love.

i fell in love with it. as soon as i stepped out with her. the ocean was right there, swelling and sighing, spreading silvery waves on the dark sand and then pulling them back with a powerful
shhhhhhhhhhhh
. i stood there and stared. it didn’t seem possible that something so awesome and vast was so close to us. we never went to church but that’s what this felt like. i knew i would never be able to paint it or draw it or do it any kind of justice; the night ocean was a feeling instead of a thing, a mystery it was okay to leave unsolved.

“see what you would have missed,” rachel whispered, “if you’d stayed in your room?”

It took me a second to realize what Riley was doing. No one had ever held my hand before, so at first I thought he was gripping me out of fear or trying to tug me back inside. But then his hand stayed there, wrapped around mine in a sweet, awkward little-boy way. It was such a shock, the idea that someone wanted to hold my hand, that my nose tingled and I had to turn my head fast to hide my eyes.

i knew it was weird but i had to thank her or something. i was doing something brave. i felt like i could swim across the whole entire ocean on the back of a killer whale. as long as she was with me.

This sweetness was instantly troubling. Wicked queens were always in control, and they always operated solo (I did not count flying monkeys or ravens glowering on shoulders). When they made the mistake of loving someone, they got tossed aside for golden-hearted princesses or deceived and thrown in prison, like my beloved Queen Vesuvia in Book 4 of the Winterthorne series. But Riley didn’t seem to have any sinister keys on his person, so I figured I’d see where this went. For a while.

i knew where this was going. even then i think i did. i knew she’d be my best friend and my partner in crime and my
don’t-be-a-dumbass
life coach forever. but she would never, ever be my sister. that word would always be too small.

“We’ll come back someday,” said Riley. “We’ll live here. In 7B. Let’s make a pact.”

“Yeah. And we’ll take this with us—” I picked up the mermaid clock. “To remind us.”

“We can make them a house.”

“Make up stories.”

“Give them names.”

“Athena,” I said. “My favorite goddess.”

“Bob,” he said. “My hamster who died.”

“She’s the queen of the sea who vanquishes her enemies.”