"Jack helped."
She nods, grinning wryly. "I guess. A little."
"Do you remember the first time we met at Avery's party? And he made you cry?"
"Oh god, I was such a crybaby. I can't even believe how dumb I was. And that was just, like, ten months ago. I could've had a baby in that time."
"A crybaby," I insert.
"All babies are crybabies," She counters. I take on a wise old man squint and voice as I postulate.
"But are all crybabies...babies?"
Kayla courteously punches me, then sighs and leans back in her seat.
"Jack was the first one to bring it up. He made me start questioning everything - why I was hanging with Avery, did I really enjoy her company, how much of my feelings were hidden behind the shopping and the gossip. Without him, it would've taken me a lot longer."
"Wouldn't have killed him to put some damn sugar on it," I grunt. "Willy Wonka does it all the time, and he's fine! Crazy and possibly homicidal, but fine."
Kayla laughs and shakes her head. "You know Jack. He doesn't work like that."
I smile, the thing a little twisted but still whole. Kayla puts her hand on my shoulder.
"You two are...the same. I didn't notice it before, but Wren pointed it out to me. He's right. You two really are the same. So I think...I think even if he's gone now, he'll be back. People like you - you don't find very often. He'll be back."
"And when he comes back, I will behead him." I announce.
"You'll greet him," Kayla says sternly. "With a hug."
"I will greet him with a hug. To his torso. Which will be missing a head."
Kayla slaps her palm to her face, and I hug her, laughing. Laughing warm. Laughing true. Laughing for the first time in what feels like forever.
I'm not really losing my best friend.
We're just going our own ways. We're scattering ourselves to different winds, but we'll come together again. We are exploring a globe in different directions. Like Columbus and Magellan, boldly going where no stinky sixteenth-century European explorer and his crew of scurvy men has ever gone before! Except one of them died of fever, and, like, mutiny, I think, and the other was pretty much a racist bastard who enabled hundreds of years of genocide, so in a fit of good judgment I decide to nix that metaphor entirely.
"Thank god," Kayla breathes. "Can you get out now?”
-5-
3 Years
45 Weeks
0 Days
I've come to the very original and unique conclusion that leaving home sucks ass. No one else has ever, in the history of humanity, come to this conclusion. No one except me. I am special.
"Isis, we're late!"
And late. I am very late.
Being late doesn't deter me from being proper about farewells, though. As Mom starts the car, I stand in the doorway and breathe in the musty air of eighteen years worth of angst. I didn't spend all eighteen years here, but all the shit that happened in the last year and a half made it feel like that long.
Goodbye, little room.
Goodbye, girl I used to be.
I hug Ms. Muffin close, and leave.
Mom drives slow and carefully. I sip ginger ale and watch the highway flash by. Suddenly, a terrifying thought hits me upside the head with its sweaty palm.
What the hell did I do with my teenage years?
I didn't volunteer, or do sports. I didn't become a radical warrior princess on my sixteenth birthday, complete with a talking cat and magically-appearing clothes. Hogwarts didn't even send me a letter and I haven't actually forgiven them for that. Wait until I go to London and find Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters and slip through to the other side and unleash my rage. I'll make Voldemort look like a sock puppet. And I'll make-out with Draco. And I'll train a bunch of house-elves to fan me and bring me grapes -
I stop when I realize I'm writing mental Harry Potty fanfiction on my way to college. Focus! I need at least seven whole focuses if I'm going to make a fabulous impression. Or any impression at all. I'd rather make a bad impression than no impression.
As Mom pulls onto the exit, I sigh.
I didn't even kiss a boy. For realsies, anyway. Not-drunk.
I did other things. I held hands, and hugged. Nameless pretended real hard to be nice using hugs and hand-holding. Once or twice he even hinted he thought I was pretty. But it was an act, just to build me up before he tore me down. And it was all before the big it. Little it. It's not even worthy of a prefix. It's just 'it'.
I have to leave that behind, too. There's no room for that. Not if I want to move on with my life. I've done my best to bury it, ignore it until it goes away, and it's sort of worked. I got far enough to sleep in a bed with Jack without freaking out. So I'm getting better, and that's real good to know.
It gives me a little bit of hope where there used to be none.
Jack helped me realize that I'm not unloveable. I'm not hopeless.
I'm not all ugly.
Or maybe I realized it on my own. Either way, fighting with him helped me realize lots of stuff. I grew up all kinds of ways.
A sharp pain radiates in my chest, but I brush that dirt off my shoulder and watch Mom's smile.
"There's the sign, sweetie. Get the map out, will you?"
OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY looms in green and white on the side of the road. I pull out the brochure map and direct her onto the campus. Trees and rosebushes bloom like crazy, the emerald green lawn dappled with buttery, late-afternoon sun. The buildings are all old brickwork, ivy sprawling across windows and roman columns. The dorms are shabbier, but just as big. Hundreds of kids are walking around, their parents walking with them, or standing outside the car and hugging them one last time, or helping them carry baggage into dorms.
Mom parks and gets out and my stomach drops with excitement as I fumble at the door handle. This is it. This is how my childhood ends.
I finger the cigarette burns on my wrist, and make sure my sleeve is covering them. I take it back. My childhood ended a long time ago.
Mom can't really pick up my heavy suitcase or backpack, so I drag them up the stairs and she follows. The room is tiny and white-washed and on the second floor, right next to the fire escape. There's no carpet, just cold tile, and the beds are so high up they seem made for, at the very least, Hagrid. Two beds are tucked into opposite ends of the room, a window glaring between them. Two desks are just beside the bed, with ass torture implements of the highest caliber - wood chairs. Two closets wait to be filled with shoes or condoms or failed exams or whatever else college kids fill empty spaces with. Broken dreams, maybe.
My roommate has already claimed the left side, so I plop my stuff on the right. Mom fusses around with the bed sheets she packed, and makes my bed. I watch her work, knowing I'll miss the sight of her doing little things like this. I inspect my roommate's closet - a guitar, lots of army surplus jackets and hiking boots. She's littered her desk with silver jewelry - studs, rings with skulls, necklaces with spiked orbs of death. Yep. We'll get along just fine.
Mom finishes the bed, and we walk downstairs and sit on the lawn, soaking in the sun. Mom holds my hand, stroking it with her thumb.
"I'm sorry, Isis," She tries.
"For what? Not birthing me a week or two later? I SO wanted to be a Leo. None of this Cancer nonsense."
Mom smiles wryly. "No, not that. For...I don't know. I feel like I didn't do a very good job. But I suppose every parent feels like that."
I squeeze her hand. "You did the best you knew how. Auntie understood. We both did."
She nods, and squeezes back. "I'm just glad I could be with you for your last year at home. Even if...even if it was difficult."
I know what regret looks like, now. I saw it in every line of Jack's face at the funeral. I'll never forget what it looks like, even if the Zabadoobians abduct me and bleach my brain. Mom wears it like a shawl, lightly, but holding it around herself, drawing it taut. I throw my arms around her, and bury my head in her shoulder
.
"It's okay. I had fun. It was hard but I had fun and I learned stuff, more stuff than I ever learned in my life, so I'm real happy I came to live with you. Thanks for being the best mom ever."
She puts one arm around me and into my hair, and starts crying.
"I love you, Isis."
"I love you too!" I laugh, the tears springing up. "I'll miss you."
I'll see her more than Kayla, but it still stings. I'm about as good at goodbyes as Tarzan is at wearing clothes.
At least Leo's in jail. She'll be safe for a few years.
I watch her go with a sinking heart that sort of dovetails into a swoop, and lifts back up as I face the school again.
I'm alone.
Nobody knows me at Ohio State. I have to start all over. Hundreds of freshmen stream past me on the sidewalks, trampling green lawn and my pure maiden heart as they look right through me. I’m more faceless than Emperor Palpatine before he took his hood off. A massive banner over the huge glass-faced library reads; WELCOME BUCKEYES!
“More like welcome fuckeyes,” A voice to my left groans. A girl with seven earrings in one ear and a round, stocky face stands beside me. She’s heavy and tall, but not fat, her hair dyed bright pink and shaved on the sides. Her combat boots and flannel shirt tell me everything I need to know. Badass Supreme. I simultaneously want to be her and fight her just to be able to say she punched me. She blinks hazel eyes thick with eyeliner at me.
“Uh, what?”
“Was I thinking out loud? I do that sometimes. The doctors say it’s probably Tourette’s but I say it’s a higher evolutionary process of humanity. Someday the entire world will be like me and it will be rad.”
The girl’s pink eyebrows shoot up, and she laughs. It’s a full, rich laugh, like stew instead of the giggly soup of most girls’. She holds out her hand.
“Yvette. Yvette Monroe.”
I shake it. “Isis Blake. But my friends call me Crazy. Or Idiot. Sometimes both at once.”
Yvette smirks. “That makes two of us.”
It's then I recognize one of the fabulous skull earrings she's wearing. There's another pair in my dorm.
"This is going to sound slightly stalkerish, but I can't help but notice you’ve decapitated Jack Skellington and put him on your ears."
"What can I say?" Yvette shrugs. "I like bones."
"So do I, actually, because our skeletons support a massive interconnected muscular structure and without them we would be blobs of flesh. Also we wouldn't have middle fingers to flip people off with. Are you in Room 14B?"
Yvette's eyes widen. "Yeah, so you're -"
"MY ROOMMATE!" I screech. A passing guy winces and flips me off. I loudly inform him he has his skeleton to thank for that. Yvette seems pleased. She thumps her arm across my shoulders and I sink about two inches into the soft dirt.
"You first," She says, leading me back to our dorm.
"First for what? A three-legged foot race? Because I'll have you know I only have one really good leg, the other is kind of unshaved and unsexy -"
"First to spill your life story. Where are you from?"
"Uh, Ohio. Or I mean, no. Florida! Yeah, that's the one. I grew up there then moved here in senior year. What about you? Oooh, let me guess - hell. You're from Hell."
"I am definitely from Hell. Hell, Kansas."
"I like uncooked ramen noodles and driving like a maniac," I continue.
"I hate everything except bacon and pickles. And I don't drive."
"One time in third grade I stuck candy up my nose to impress a boy. Spoiler: he was not impressed."
Yvette looks impressed, then looks out the window.
"I started smoking because it's the first year of college and I already know I'm going to drop out."
And it's her honesty that kills me. It's the way she says it - all frank, undramatic, modest honesty. Something I never had. Something I should've had. Something that, if I had, would have saved someone's life, maybe.
"My friend killed herself," I say. Yvette looks over at me for a second, a minute that stretches into what feels like an hour and I never want it to end, because she's seeing me instead of looking through me like everyone else in this place. Yvette opens the door and we walk in, and she gestures to her bed.
"This is my half. That's your half."
I nod, and she smiles, pink hair lit from behind by the sunlight.
"Let's get some fucking food."
***
Fact: College is great.
I know this primarily because they serve clam chowder next to pizza and gyoza next to burritos and there is dessert every. Single. Night. If you so choose. And I hella so choose. My Hagrid bed is pretty shitty, comfort wise, but the terrifying thought of rolling off the five-foot drop at night keeps me securely in the middle and under the covers always. Yvette snores and blasts Metallica when she does her homework, but otherwise we've been getting along fine. Better than fine. She's snarkier than me, sometimes, which is worthy of at least four Nobel Prizes, and she's smart. She isn't Jack smart, or anything, but she's not Jack dumb, either. She's always hard and a little angry, but she laughs louder and gets angrier faster than anyone I've ever known, except maybe Kayla when I tell her she's pretty. But Yvette's openness is a refreshing change from last year's secrets and passive-aggressiveness. She doesn't bring up Sophia's suicide, even though I told her about it the first day to break the ice. She's not the type to pry, and I adore her for it. She smokes on the fire escape sometimes and sometimes I go up there with her and try to smoke but it usually ends up with me puking so we stop that right quick.
I'll tell her about Sophia, in my own time. Or maybe I won't. Maybe I'll just keep it inside, like I kept Nameless. But I won't let it fester, this time. I won't let it hurt me. I won't hold on to the hurt like a ball of shattered glass ever again. Some shitbaby jerk taught me better than that.
My classes are great but sort of easy, in that weird beginning-of-semester way. I mean, four teachers assigned ten page essays due next week, but forty pages is a febreeze for me. I used to write twenty pages in my radical-yet-whiny pubescent diary on the daily. The only thing that's really hard is focusing, because the classrooms are huge auditoriums sort of, which could easily be converted into gladiator rings if we moved the teacher's desk and got rid of the chairs and really, the bland walls would look so much better with swathes of blood across them and also the lights are so bright, do they shine the lightbulbs? How do you shine a lightbulb so high up? Can their janitor fly?
Next to me in our seats in the very back, Yvette informs me janitors cannot fly. Vampires, however, can.
"Vampires are gross," I determine.
"Have you even read Twilight?"
"I've read so many things that are not that."
"It was the best. The vampires were the best. The make-outs were the best."
I shudder. Yvette, in her flaming skull t-shirt and ripped jeans, sighs like a fancy princess dreaming of boys.
“Imagine having sex with a vampire.”
“Imagine going to church and praying to your lord and savior," I offer.
She laughs and goes back to facebook on her laptop. The best part about college, I've decided, is the professors don't give a shit whether you pay attention or not. Short of dropping an f-bomb super loud out of nowhere, they ignore all the internet surfing and texting that goes on. We're paying to be here, not the other way around. It'll be different when labs come around, but right now it's Shangri-La and please do not talk to me about labs because the thought of me around combustible chemicals is so exhilarating I have to fight to not pee myself constantly in anticipation. Long live science. Long live explodey things.
Mom calls every night, because that's what Moms do. That, and like, sighing. But Mom's always sighed a lot, because she's sad mostly, but also because having a borderline insane daughter like me would be trying on any mortal human's soul. Except, like, Beyonce, but we all know she isn't mortal at all and also she has Blue Ivy who I
HATE because it's so unfair because Beyonce was supposed to be my mom.
"Beyonce's music is terrible," Yvette offers as we walk to dinner.
“Ah yes,” I say. “Let me just mark that down on this neat little list I keep entitled ‘The 25 Reasons Why You’ll Be Joining Me in the Eternally Agonizing Lava Pit Portion of Beelzebub’s Kingdom’.”
"You talk to yourself so much. Is it like, a birth defect?"
"It's a side effect of the radioactive waste my mother bathed in while pregnant with me, yes."
Yvette opens her mouth to say something else, then closes it and turns the color of a ketchup sandwich - white on the edges, red in the middle. I follow her gaze to a group of girls, but before I can pinpoint which fly lady has her attention, Yvette snaps out of it, clearing her throat and grabbing a bowl for soup.
"Anyway,” she says with much difficulty. “There's a music showcase down at Emel Hall. It's mostly sweaty dudes dicking around with drums and Alice in Chains covers. You should come, and educate yourself on the merits of true music."
"Wait, whoa, are we just gonna ignore the fact you -"
Yvette suddenly repurposes a vast amount of soup as floor cleaner. “That I what?” She snaps.
"Uh, nothing. Nevermind. Yeah, I'll come. Is there a cover fee, or?"
She relaxes visibly. "It's free. I'll see you at seven, then?"
I answer with a mean air-guitar rift, and she smirks and leaves. I take my pizza slice out onto the balcony, where the dying sun paints everything in pale golds and silvers. The tree shadows grow long, tangling in the shadows of passerbys and untangling again.
And that’s when I see him.
I try hard not to see him. I really do. My brain gives a sputter, and I forget how to swallow. My skin crawls, hot at first, then so terribly cold I might as well be in Alaska. I start sweating, and my eyes dart around looking for all the exits off the terrace – the stairs, the back stairs, through the cafeteria and out the door. I don’t even think about it, I just do it. I’m reacting instead of thinking as I pick up my plate and dump it in a whirling flash, two seconds is all it takes, two seconds and the terror has a complete and total hold over me as I dash inside the cafeteria and watch him approach through the window.