My Beating Teenage Heart Read online

  After classes I head over to Jules’s house with her and she gives me another handful of pills. At the end of the weekend Lily goes home to Sunita and although Lily’s not a loud person, the house is so much quieter and emptier without her. Before she leaves she says that my grandparents are going to be around a lot and that she’s going to call and email and I should come up to see her and Sunita in Ottawa some weekend.

  I tell her sure, that I’ll do that, and I try to keep doing the school thing, because I know I should keep busy, but by Tuesday—my fourth day back—I’m skipping classes. Tuesday it’s just social science, Wednesday’s the whole day except homeroom and Thursday it’s the afternoon. Mostly I just drive randomly in any direction, pulling on and off the highway until I need to eat. One day I end up at Niagara-on-the-Lake, which is so picturesque that it looks more like a theme park they’d sweep clean and lock the gates on at night than a place anyone could actually live. Another time I try to watch an “us vs. menacing aliens” movie at the multiplex but it’s not any easier than doing homework.

  Anything other than walking, breathing or driving is beyond my capability, and while a small piece of me wants to pile on the distractions until I can’t see out from under them, the larger part knows that no matter what I’m doing there’ll always be too much time without her. It’s an endurance test I can’t win.

  I still think about going away someplace my parents would never find me but I know I won’t, that I’ll keep doing these empty things over and over again until the end. Trying to hide from something that doesn’t have to catch up to me because it’s never left behind. I may as well be in the worst place imaginable—the one she’s missing from the most—because I can’t make her absence hurt any less. It’s like there’s no other choice but to run towards the pain.

  So I do it. I leave the theater in the middle of a battle scene, drive home and tear up to her room, almost like there’s been some kind of mistake and she’ll be there, just like she would’ve been that Friday nearly two weeks ago, hours before we got to the part of the night when she walked into my bedroom and asked me to help her scour through dusty boxes in the basement to find what she was looking for.

  “Hey, Skylar,” I’d say, before she even had the chance to get the question out. “Let’s go look through those boxes downstairs.”

  And I’d never take my eyes off her. I’d go first and make sure she was careful. We’d rip into the cardboard and leave a mess that would make my mom purse her lips when she saw it later but Skylar would have what she needed. She’d be safe. We’d all be happy. Life wou kppymom purseld continue the way it was meant to only I wouldn’t take it for granted this time; I’d know how lucky I was.

  I’d make any kind of deal to have a second shot at that.

  I’d take six months left to live or a lifetime without legs to have that conversation with my sister again and do it right. I’d take anything.

  And that is the way I rewrite history, sitting in Skylar’s room like a stone that will never stop falling, never stop sinking.

  nine

  ashlyn

  If I didn’t know who Skylar was, her bedroom might make me guess she was a boy. She has the kind of bed you need to climb a ladder up to and a computer desk underneath it, maximizing space. The walls are painted aqua and decorated with two posters—one of the solar system and the other a photo of a polar bear lying down with its front paws folded up underneath itself. The bear’s staring straight at the camera as if observing the photographer, taking its own mental photograph. Lower to the ground, the majority of wall space has been dedicated to shelving and storage bins that are filled with action figures, racing cars, dinosaurs and other unidentifiable weird creatures. The pink beanbag chair under the window looks like it was intended for another room. I wonder if it was a gift from someone who didn’t know Skylar very well because there’s nothing else in the slightest pink about that room. There are some crafty and scientific-looking kits amongst Skylar’s things but not one thing that wouldn’t fit on either the boy or unisex shelves of a toy store.

  As I take stock of Skylar’s room, I realize that while my younger self wasn’t quite as much of a tomboy as it appears that she was, I wasn’t a frilly girl either. While I’m still waiting for the majority of my own memories to fall into place, much of my early childhood has gradually returned to me. A bit more seeps back every day, in a roughly chronological order. I now know that at Skylar’s age I liked dinosaurs as well as dolls and that I had an illuminated ant habitat that glowed in the dark. My sister, Celeste, who only likes pretty insects such as butterflies and ladybugs, deemed it “kind of gross” but I bet Skylar would’ve liked it. I bet she would’ve wanted me to take it into the bathroom, away from any natural light, close the door and flick the light switch off so we could watch the ants’ industrious little tunnels glow green against a black backdrop.

  Sometimes I wonder, if I’m here watching Skylar’s family, does that mean she’s over in Cherrywood, watching mine? Considering that what’s left of me revolves around the space Skylar left behind, it doesn’t seem right to me that we can’t meet. Given our deceased states you’d think that, at least, should be possible.

  I conjure the image of Skylar’s face from various photos I’ve seen around the Cody house and whisper her name in my mind, trying to coax her towards me. I’ve taken to talking to Breckon recently too, or rather, nppymohousthinking to Breckon. He worries me most when he’s alone because then I’m not sure what he’ll do. At times his eyes fill with desolation, his neck and shoulders become rigid and the sound of his breathing crackles against the air. It seems to me that the atmosphere around us could turn to ice, break into shards and drown him.

  Breckon has that very look in his eyes now, in Skylar’s room. He’s been sitting motionless in the middle of the beige carpet for the last twenty-seven minutes, color draining from his skin until it’s a pasty shade of white that makes him look more like a ghost than I do. Moose, who was a step behind Breckon as he flew up the stairs, attempted to climb into his lap but was instantly dislodged. Instead he sits two feet away, as near as Breckon will tolerate.

  The dog is company whether Breckon wants it or not. I’m not even a voice, not even a wisp of a thing, but I stay close to him and say, as I’ve said before lately, “She wouldn’t want this.” I think the message in as reassuring a tone as I can muster and for that, my mother is my example.

  When I was small she’d sense, when I was too quiet, that something was wrong and would lay her hand on the top of my head and say, “Why so glum, chum?” I wasn’t sad very often back then but there were instances when I measured myself against my sister and knew I fell short. At a friend’s sixth birthday party I leaned back in my chair and one of the slats broke as the chair crashed to the floor with me in it. While visiting my grandmother, sometime during that same year, I picked the dead leaves off one of her plants, and with the unhealthiest plucked started in on those next in line until soon the plant was almost bald, only five green leaves clutching sadly to its stem.

  At times like those I was harder on myself than my grandmother or my friends’ parents were; I knew Celeste would never make such mistakes. But my mom’s warm voice, the tickle within it that reached out to cheer me up, would lift my spirits again.

  So this is what I do with Breckon. I think of what my mother would tell him if he was me. Often I tell him that Skylar’s okay and that he doesn’t need to worry about her. I don’t know that for certain but considering my own circumstances I’m fairly confident that Skylar’s personality still exists—swimming amongst the stars maybe or hovering around someone else’s bedroom the way I am now.

  I know Breckon doesn’t hear me or feel my presence but I can’t stop trying. Moose and I have that in common.

  Breckon’s still in Skylar’s room, in almost a trance state, when his father arrives home. He doesn’t hear Mr. Cody’s approach and it’s not until his dad’s standing in the open doorway that he takes any notice.
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  Breckon’s father looks much older than he does in the family portrait hanging in the kitchen. He’s folded his shirtsleeves up and his tie has been loosened and hangs askew. “Here you are,” he says with a twinge in his voice.

  At first Breckon remains still. Then he takes another moment to collect himself, stretching out his hand to run it over Moose’s fur. “Did school call you?”

  “They say you’ve been missing classes all week,” Mr. Cody confirms.

  “Not all classes.” Breckon’s eyes are on Moose rather than his father.

  Mr. Cody jangles his keys in his pocket. His eyes skim Skylar’s room and hold on the WALL-E robot in the farthest corner.

  “We should just … leave it,” Breckon murmurs, motioning to the room. “Leave everything how it is right now.”

  Mr. Cody steps inside Skylar’s bedroom and picks up the nearest dinosaur, a poseable protoceratops. He pries open its jaws and then snaps them shut again. “No one’s going to change anything,” he says. “Not anytime soon.”

  My mind begins to drift as Breckon and his father speak, my personal history beckoning me. Until this second I didn’t remember Farlain Lake, yet I went there with my cousins several years in a row. My dad’s friend lent us his cottage for two to three weeks every summer while he wasn’t using it. Aunt Sandra, who had fallen in love with my future uncle Ian in Edinburgh while discovering her Scottish roots, would fly back from Scotland with her family to go to Farlain Lake with us.

  My cousin Ellie was half a year older than my sister, and from our very first visit there they were inseparable. Ellie and Celeste tried to negotiate a bedroom swap that would result in them sharing a room while I bunked with Ellie’s brother, Callum, who, though only fifteen months older than me, seemed to find me babyish.

  At least, this is what I had put his reluctance to play with me down to when I was six. As a result, when my parents consulted me about the proposed swap, I told them I didn’t want to share a room with a boy. I was so sorry for that the following year that it stuns me to think that I could ever have forgotten about those summers. The next year, when I was seven—while Ellie and Celeste would do fashion shows on the sand, play badminton together and hog the DVD player watching movies starring teenage guys they pretended to drool over more than I imagined they really did—I’d beg my dad or Uncle Ian to take me out in the canoe or plead with Mom or Aunt Sandra to watch me swim. Sometimes all us kids (except my brother, Garrett, who was too young) would play a four-person version of baseball or, on a rainy day, have a game of hide-and-seek in the cottage, but I would’ve spent the better part of that second holiday struggling to keep myself busy or hanging out with the adults, if not for the change in Callum.

  On the fifth day of that first week I was making a humungous sand pizza on the beach at the foot of the cottage’s property. When my dad noticed me struggling to form a perfect circle he’d suggested using the top of a trash can as a mold, which I did, and I was in the process of adding bits of plastic foods (sliced mushrooms, tomatoes and olives) from one of Garrett’s play sets when Callum walked down to the sand to see what I was doing.

  “I wish we could have real pizza,” he declared, looking down at my sand one. “At home we order pizza from Domino’s all the time.” The way he said that doesn’t look anything like you’d read it on a page—his sentences, like Ellie’s and my uncle Ian’ se Ihe said ts, were filled with hills and valleys. Their words danced.

  That year my mom and aunt happened to be on a joint health-food kick and were determined that we all avoid junk food for the duration of the trip, so I knew how my cousin felt. Back then I believed most green vegetables were inedible and was tired of avoiding all the lettuce, bok choy and peas appearing on my plate at the end of the day. “I wish we could have chocolate,” I told him. “Or Cheetos.”

  “What are Cheetos?” my three-quarters Scottish cousin Callum wanted to know, his green eyes focusing on mine.

  “They’re sort of like chips, but cheesy,” I explained. “When you eat them all the orange stuff comes off on your hands but they’re really, really yummy.”

  “I wish we could have those too then,” Callum said.

  It’s funny, I remember how the sand smelled while we were hanging out at the beach at that moment—and how I had the taste of Cheetos in my mouth from thinking about them. And I remember wondering if Callum would walk away soon, like he usually did, and whether he would stay longer if I was boy, especially a boy older than seven.

  “Do you want to play war?” Callum asked me. I temporarily forgot what war was. “I brought cards with me,” he added.

  “Okay,” I told him. I could feel bits of sand between my teeth as I smiled. I always managed to get sand everywhere.

  “I’ll get them!” he said, smiling back at me. He raced towards the cottage and brought the cards down to the beach with him. We sat on the sand beside my pizza and played war and then quadruple war for hours. The tide came in, the sun hung low on the horizon and Celeste was dispatched with the message that if we wanted to stay outside we’d need to come into the cottage for a minute so our mothers could douse us in mosquito repellent.

  “Why don’t you bring us the spray?” I asked my sister in a pleading voice.

  “Because Mom says you need to come in,” she repeated. “You know you always have to put on long sleeves and pants if you want to stay out when it’s getting dark.”

  I stared at my father and Uncle Ian in the distance. They were hanging out on the deck, listening to a baseball game on my father’s hand-crank radio while they watched over us. I couldn’t hear the game from my spot on the beach but they often listened to games in the evenings, and as I gazed over at them and then back at my sister and Callum, I was conscious, with every fiber of my being, that I didn’t want the moment to end. I’d forgotten how strongly a seven-year-old could want something, but an echo of the intensity with which I’d clung to that moment charges through me as the details float back.

  I really thought it might not ever be the same if I went inside—that I might never be as happy again as I was playing war out on the beach with Callum.

  “Pretty soon it’ll be too dark for you to even see the cards anyway, scar>

  “We’ll be fast,” Callum declared, already on his feet. “Come on, Ashlyn!”

  We sprinted for the cottage, changed into long sleeves and pants and allowed ourselves to be coated in bug spray. Then we raced back to the beach together in the fading light and played cards until every bit of sun was gone. Celeste was wrong—if you tried hard enough you could make out the numbers even in the dark. Callum and I kept right on playing by moonlight and my throat got dry, but I didn’t dare go into the cottage for lemonade. Our parents let us stay out on the sand for longer than I would’ve guessed, but in the end my uncle strolled down to the beach and said we could pick up where we’d left off tomorrow.

  The next afternoon, eager to cement my friendship with my cousin, I begged my father to drive us into town to pick up Cheetos and pizza. My dad smiled and said I must be suffering a fierce cheese craving if I needed both those things to satisfy it. I told him the Cheetos would be more for me and the pizza more for Callum and my dad nodded and said he was a big fan of both those things himself but that if he took us we should only tell my mom about the pizza and not the Cheetos.

  When Celeste and Ellie heard about the pizza, naturally they wanted to come too, and Uncle Ian said he could never resist pizza and to count him in. Only our moms and Garrett stayed behind. My dad let me get Fun Dip and Gobstoppers as well as a jumbo bag of Cheetos to share with my cousin. Callum said he loved the Cheetos and that the pizza was almost as good as Domino’s. As he was eating, a pepperoni slid off his slice and onto his T-shirt, leaving a red mark that he kept rubbing, smooshing the sauce into the fabric just like I would’ve done.

  The six of us were sitting outside the pizza place, taking up their only two tables, when a woman in spindly heels walked past us in the direction of the 7
-Eleven next door. The woman was holding a small black dog in her arms and Callum pointed to it and said, “Look at its wee paw.” I took a second look and noticed that one of the dog’s front legs was swathed in a light green sling.

  “Awww, poor thing,” my sister declared, but her reaction didn’t sound a fraction as interesting as the way Callum had phrased his. I hero-worshipped him more with each passing day, and at night, as Celeste and I lay in our shared bedroom, I’d repeat stories about the games we’d played and exotic-sounding things Callum had said. “He’s Scottish,” Celeste said sensibly. “All Scottish people talk like that, Ashlyn.” Then, bored of listening to me rave about our cousin, she began to tease me. “I bet you wish you’d let Ellie and me share a room now. You could listen to Callum talk all night.”

  I stopped jabbering, hearing the change in her tone, and hoped that she’d drop the subject.

  “You know you can’t fall in love with your cousin,” she continued.

  “I don’t love him,” I snapped. I hated that she was trying to turn my fondness for Callum into something weird, and I didn’t love him anyway, not in the way she meant. “Do you love Ellie?”

  “Don’t be stupid,” Celeste said.

  “You don’t be stupid,” I countered, on the verge of tears. “Just because he’s a boy doesn’t mean I love him.”

  “Fine, fine,” Celeste said indifferently. “You don’t love him.”

  The following day Callum and I went swimming together, as usual, and then tromping through the heavily treed area next to the house, unearthing bugs and pretending we were exploring the Amazon. Callum and I were as close, for the rest of that trip, as Ellie and Celeste had ever been. We played cards for hours and he taught me how to play snap and spit. We buried each other on the beach, constructed cities in the sand and kicked a soccer ball around. He tried to teach me his accent and I tried to teach him mine. We made a video of ourselves talking in the funny fake voices and when we watched it back, the ridiculous sounds coming out of each other’s mouths made us laugh until our stomachs hurt.