Everyone We've Been Read online

  After Dr. Kennedy leaves, Nurse Megan follows her, winking at me in the doorway. “I’ll see if I can find your friend.”

  “Thanks,” I say nonchalantly, but I feel my cheeks heating up. Thank God my skin is dark enough that you can barely tell when I’m blushing.

  I’m curious to know what she’ll find out about the boy. Does he live in Lyndale? What is his name? How injured is he?

  I lean back and shut my eyes, trying to appreciate the lessening pain in my head, courtesy of the painkillers.

  A few minutes later, Nurse Megan bursts into my room.

  “Good news! Your young man is doing well. Broke his elbow, but they’re putting it into a cast as we speak,” she says.

  “Oh, thanks,” I say, suppressing the urge to say not my young man.

  “His name is Bo, in case you were wondering,” she says, coming around to my side of the bed. When she reaches me, I see that she’s frowning. “Not that it’s my place to judge, but he’s a little bit sour, isn’t he?”

  “Sour?” I repeat while the image of his smile flashes in my mind. God, she didn’t tell him I was asking for him or anything embarrassing, did she? I mean, maybe it freaked him out and that’s why he seemed annoyed….

  “The lip rings. The black hair. I’m sure it’s my bias talking because my daughter’s ex—well, one of them—was exactly like—”

  “Oh, Goth Guy!” I say, remembering the glare he’d given me for talking. “That’s not who I meant.”

  “It’s not?” She is visibly relieved. “I thought he seemed a little old for you, too. Who do you mean, then?”

  I describe him again, the best I can. I tell her we picked him up at Raddick, where the elderly couple got on. That he’s tall and has a local accent and wasn’t wearing glasses.

  “Hmm, maybe I missed him. I have to do some charts, but I’ll check with the ER after. He might have been taken to another unit.”

  When Nurse Megan comes back a few minutes later, she still has no lead. “There’s no record of him. He was probably well enough not to be admitted,” she says, sounding disappointed that she won’t get to play matchmaker tonight. “Sorry.”

  “That’s okay,” I say, feeling silly.

  It’s silly that I sent my nurse on a wild-goose chase to find a boy I spoke to for a few minutes at most. It’s silly that the memory of his smile is stuck to my mind when I don’t know the first thing about him.

  Still, it feels a little sad to think that I’ll never know his name.

  “I knew something like this would happen.” Those are my mother’s first words when she bursts into my hospital room. “I knew it.”

  She seems to be on the verge of tears as she outmaneuvers the bandage on my arm to envelop me in a tight hug. She smells like the berry tea she loves, and I shut my eyes and breathe in the scent of her. I don’t know whether it’s exhaustion or the scare of the bus crash, but my own eyes prick with unexpected tears.

  I blink them back quickly, because if my mother is always looking for reasons to worry, I am always looking for reasons not to worry her.

  “And you wanted to drive tonight,” she says when she finally releases me. “It’s snowing now and it’s coming down hard. Even getting here, I had to go at a snail’s pace. You’d have been sitting alone in a ditch somewhere.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say, technically apologizing for what could have happened instead of what did. “Where’s Caleb? Did you call Dad?”

  “I did,” is all the acknowledgment she gives my last question. “Caleb was having car trouble again, and I wanted to get down here as soon as I got the call, so I couldn’t wait for him to get home. He told me to tell you he’s glad you’re okay, though,” Mom says, sitting on the edge of my bed.

  “Thanks,” I say. What Mom doesn’t know is that “car trouble” is code for the rare occasions when my older brother goes to a party. They are usually high school parties, because parties thrown by people who go to the community college he attends in Lyndale are famously lame. Though maybe nothing is lamer than the fact that he has nowhere better to be on a Saturday night, despite having graduated from high school a year and a half ago. The worst thing I can imagine is being stuck the way my brother is, held in place by some invisible force, your entire life on repeat, when there’s so much else out there.

  “What have they done to you?” Mom asks, jostling me out of my thoughts. She’s inspecting my bandage now, the thin hospital gown I’m wearing.

  “Who? The aliens?”

  Showing no relief that my sense of humor is still intact, Mom ignores me. “The nurse said they were keeping you overnight for observation because you lost consciousness. And that they had given you something for your head? How is it feeling now?”

  “Better,” I say.

  “When they called, I thought…” Her voice is shaking and she looks small in this brightly lit room, the way I felt when I first woke up. Maybe hospital rooms make everyone small. “If something had happened to you, Addie…I was so afraid.”

  “I’m okay,” I tell her.

  She nods, but she doesn’t seem convinced. To my mother, it’s always as if the worst has already happened. Or that it’s always, perpetually, on the verge of happening. “Thank God you were close to Lyndale,” she says, rubbing my back while I lean forward.

  “Your father is in Florida tonight.” She says this as if “Florida” is code for the second level of hell, and not where he always has his layovers. In fact, before my parents split up five years ago, they used to talk about us moving there permanently, since my dad seemed to spend more time there than he did with us in Lyndale. “I called him, but it went to voice mail. I had to email him. To tell him his daughter was in the hospital.”

  “He’s probably sleeping off his jet lag or something,” I say, but Mom just half snorts, like she can’t even bother with a full one.

  She settles into the rollaway bed Nurse Megan arranged to have brought in for her and turns on the TV, flipping distractedly through the channels. Naturally, she stops at Channel Se7en, the station she works for, and we watch it for a while until Nurse Megan knocks and brings Mom a blanket. I told Mom she could go home and come back for me tomorrow, but she dismissed the suggestion like it wasn’t even an option.

  An hour later, with the TV off, I start to feel groggy and my mind slowly hums to a stop. It’s peaceful and quiet when I drift to sleep. But then, what feels like mere seconds later, my eyes fly open and every trace of sleep is gone.

  In the dark, my mind is wild with thoughts of spinning buses. The foreign shadows on the hospital wall morph into ghosts.

  You’re awake.

  You’re alive.

  It’s okay, I tell myself.

  “Air on the G String” reverbs through my mind, the whole evening reverbs through my mind, and I think of the boy again and wonder where he is tonight.

  “Go to sleep,” Mom says softly into the darkness.

  “How do you know I’m not asleep?”

  “Mother’s intuition.” I hear the smile in her voice. My mother told me once that with both Caleb and me, she would stay awake watching our chests rise and fall at night when we were babies to make sure we were alive. She felt almost that her watching us kept it happening—the rising and the falling of our chests, the breathing. And she’d do it until Dad dragged her away from our cribs and to bed. Knowing we were okay made her sleep better.

  I hate that she still believes the closer we are to her, the safer we are. Her belief kept me from sleepovers and swing sets and the underappreciated horrors that are bouncy castles (she actually says this about them), and sometimes I’m afraid it could keep me from the rest of my life. She would wrap me and Caleb in Bubble Wrap and tuck us into her china cabinet if she could.

  Usually I have no patience for her obsession with keeping us sheltered, but tonight her presence makes me feel safe and stable, like the bus has finally stopped spinning, like everything is going to be okay.

  “Night, Mom.”
r />   “Good night, Addie.”

  I try to fall asleep so she can.

  “Lord in heaven, girl!” Katy says in an over-the-top Southern accent (my fault for telling her about my nurse) when she sees me on Monday, holding her arms open all the way from her locker to mine, a length of about fifteen lockers. When she reaches me, she crushes my body against hers. “I nearly had a Cardiac Event. I should have gone with you!”

  I laugh, choking a little on her lavender perfume. “Why? You’d just have gotten hurt and given your mother a Cardiac Event.”

  “I would not,” she says indignantly, referring to the insinuation of getting hurt—not the part about her mother, because Katy’s mother would have had a heart attack, and Katy would have enjoyed it.

  I peel off my coat and stuff it into my locker. “Let me take a good look at you,” Katy says, clasping my cheeks in her palms. “You look like you got punched.”

  “I got, like, four hours of sleep on Saturday night and then three last night,” I say, suddenly self-conscious about my puffy eyes. I’d been hoping they weren’t obvious.

  “Poor thing,” Katy hums. The pain in my head is completely gone, and my thick black hair is covering the bruise on my temple. “And the arm?” She gives my bandaged arm a thorough inspection, then says, “Shouldn’t affect your playing. I give you a few more decades.”

  “Thanks, Doctor.” I pick up all the books I’ll need until third period.

  Katy is carrying her own violin case, even though we’ll have time to go back to our lockers before orchestra; she claims to need the time to socialize between periods. Even now, as we make our way to English class, she’s waving at and small-talking with people all the way down the hall.

  Sometimes the fact that Katy and I are best friends seems like a minor miracle. When I changed schools after the first year of middle school, I found a small group of girls to follow around for the next two years, never fully included and never getting beyond surface-level friendship. Katy moved here from D.C. in ninth grade with her mom, and from the second she laid eyes on me in the viola section, she hated me. I realized quickly that she was jealous of my playing, and I tried not to take it personally. Mrs. Dubois is a little partial with solos—I’ve had seven in our last nine concerts, even though the viola is not the most popular solo instrument—and it wasn’t the first time a fellow musicophile hadn’t liked me.

  I learned fast, though, that Katy’s hatred was on a different level from any I’d been used to. Acting was, after all, her first passion; music was her second, her backup. I’d walk into practice and the laughter would abruptly stop, with Katy shooting me a quick look of disdain or guilt, making it seem like her group been talking about me, even if they hadn’t. Or if I whispered to ask which bar Mrs. Dubois was talking about, she’d turn icily, pretending she hadn’t heard.

  It was three months after she’d moved here—when she found out through the grapevine that I had no intention of ever applying to Juilliard, her holy grail—that she started speaking to me. That day, Mr. Quinn had been showing us a video in bio class, something about how new memory procedures had revolutionized neuroscience and the treatment of trauma, and we were supposed to be taking notes so we could debate the ethical pros and cons. I’d just scrawled Informed Consent on the top of my page when Katy, who was sitting behind me, tapped my shoulder with her pencil. I turned, and she tilted her head in the direction of Mr. Quinn, dozing with his mouth open at an empty desk near us, a tiny line of drool beginning to snake down his chin. I couldn’t suppress my grin, and Katy coughed to cover a laugh.

  Before we bonded over music, Katy and I bonded over people. Over Mrs. Dubois and the loud, clashing patterns she wore, though she herself was timid and sweet and so quiet we couldn’t hear her speak unless we were silent.

  Today, as she passes us in the hallway, Mrs. Dubois is wearing one of her signature outfits, a flowing turquoise skirt with bright yellow diagonal stripes, and a brown shirt with orange polka dots. One slight lift of Katy’s left eyebrow, her patented expression, and we both giggle quietly.

  We bonded over Paulie Wentz, a perpetually sunburned wannabe surfer, whose presence in senior high orchestra can only be explained by Mrs. Dubois’s adamant belief that music is about not how well you play but how joyfully you play. Paulie is joyful all right, and actually a nice kid, but there is no better description for his playing of the French horn than glorified fart sounds. Katy and I physically have to turn our bodies away from each other when he plays, or we will be gone forever.

  And we bonded over Gilbert and Sullivan. Katy is Gilbert, since my last name is Sullivan, but their personalities fit us, too. Sullivan composed some of the most incredible operetta music, and Gilbert wrote the stories that went along with the music. To Katy, it is the other way around—the music molds around the story, covering it, accompanying it, but for me, the music always comes first. It has to. We argue about it all the time.

  We disagree on Juilliard, too. My first choice is NYU, major undeclared, but Katy swears she came out of the womb intending to go to Juilliard for theater.

  “The plan was for the doctors to cut the umbilical cord, clean me up a little, and then send me straight there. But my mother missed the memo and kept me for seventeen years.” She says this with such solemnness that I always laugh, no matter how many times I’ve heard it.

  I discovered the viola in fifth grade, the first year we had orchestra in elementary school, and everyone went scrambling for the flute, recorder, or clarinet. Miss Root played us short recordings of all the different instruments in an orchestra to introduce us to their “voices” so we could find which of them best matched ours. For the viola, she played Lionel Tertis’s performance of Brahms’s Viola Sonata in F Minor, and I fell in love with its full, heavy sound. Miss Root said it was one of the few instruments that used the alto clef, and I thought maybe that explained why it sounded a little bit lonely. Even when the melody it played was joyful, I liked that its sound was tinged with a trace of sadness and that the pockets of space between the notes were so deep, it sounded like you could hide entire worlds in there.

  Katy can’t understand how I could possibly be interested in another school—though the irony is that she would not have befriended me if I had wanted to go to Julliard. It’s so odd, now that I think about it, how she seemed to figure that being friends with me somehow affected the probability of her getting in, or not getting in, as the case might be. But we’d spent hours filling out application forms together and editing the essay she sent off to Juilliard in December. My NYU application was a month later, in January, and we’d worked on it together, too.

  Juilliard—being totally immersed in music—has just never been something I wanted. Music, unless you write it, is always vicarious. It’s written by a composer in a particular manner with a particular style. It’s somebody else’s story, and even if you can relate to it or find yourself in it or hide yourself in it, it doesn’t belong to you. When I explain this to Katy, she always says something like, “Well, write your own story, Sullivan.” But you actually need a story in order to write one. You need peaks and valleys, crescendos and decrescendos, and things that wreck you and put you back together. It’s not like I’m some tortured emo kid; I have a pretty happy life. But there’s something in me that’s always wanted a little more than I know.

  I love my viola. Many times a week, I play so hard I sweat, play till all the world melts away in the heat, and hours feel like seconds, or seconds like hours. And sometimes when I stop playing, the world seems so empty and quiet that I just want to curl up at the foot of my bed and cry.

  I love losing myself in the sensation of playing, in the distraction and competitiveness of orchestra, and feeling more awake than ever when I do. But I want to love something else just as much. Something that’s a part of my story. A new place, a little street-side café, a class in college I signed up for just because, a person I haven’t met yet.

  The truth is, I could probably find tho
se things at Juilliard—or anywhere else, for that matter. My mom is hoping it’ll be at the community college Caleb goes to, at least for a year. But I want to go someplace where I can’t hide behind anything—not the town I’ve lived in all my life or my overzealous parents. Not even music.

  “So do you think Bus Boy is from Lyndale?” Katy asks, rummaging in the compartment between us for something. The mall parking lot is crowded for a weekday afternoon, but there isn’t much else to do in a town this aggressively on the smaller side of medium, and I fully expect to run into half the people we’ve just been cooped up for hours with at school. “Check the glove box for me?”

  I comply, rifling through a mess of insurance cards and hair ties and tiny bottles of lotion, despite the fact that I have no idea what we’re looking for.

  I told Katy that I met a cute boy on the bus, even though a minute-long conversation qualifies more as a non-story than anything else. Still, the thing about best friends is that they make you feel like your non-stories matter.

  “I have no clue,” I say as we both climb out of Katy’s car. She stands with her hands on her hips, frowning. I can’t tell whether she’s trying to think of where to look next or just unimpressed with the lack of information I have on Bus Boy.

  “Well, how do we send out a search party if you can’t give me a less generic description than tall and cute? What did he look like? How tall is tall? What color hair did he have?”

  “It was dark and he was wearing a hat!” I say defensively. “Anyway, he’s probably not even from around here.”

  “That’s too bad. Now, if only you’d be open to letting me find you a hot guy. Or at least letting us go to places where you could meet one.” To Katy’s disappointment, the fake IDs she got us almost two years ago have gone untouched—mine, Kathleen Kelly, after the character from You’ve Got Mail, one of my favorite movies, and Katy’s, Beatrice Lane, Beatrice for the character in the play Much Ado About Nothing. “I mean, you’re seventeen and you act like the freaking black widow.”