That smell again—salty-sweet, like the ocean. The senses came one at a time with him. Hearing, seeing, smelling. She felt herself falling toward him and didn’t want to stop. “Why . . . would we do that?” she asked. “Not talk?”
Kyle scratched his head. “Guys do it. You could say something important and the other person takes it the wrong way. Or ignores it. Or thinks it’s dumb and makes fun of it. So you don’t talk. It’s safer. That way you don’t lose anything.”
Lose anything . . .
Casey began walking up the path, toward the darkness and the woods. “Kyle . . . have you ever had some piece of you that you wanted to lose?”
He laughed. “Um, that’s a hard question. I have to think about that. Have you?”
A reply caught in her throat. Their footsteps echoed over the light-flecked pond, hers sharp and quick, his calmly thumping. They were alone, she was alone with Kyle Taggart, and she realized she’d imagined this before, she’d invented this moment in her mind a dozen different times, and not once had she gotten it right. He wasn’t doing much, but he was opening something inside her, and she felt herself expanding, like a ripple on the pond. The world began to spin, picking up speed, threatening to sweep her into a limitless void, and the only thing that grounded her was his presence, warm and listening and kind.
“My name isn’t Casey.” The words were out of her mouth before she could retract them.
“My name isn’t Kyle,” she heard him say. “It’s Roland. Roland Kyle Taggart. But don’t tell anyone or I’ll have to shoot you.”
Shoot me, shoot me quick . . . She was leaving the ground now, whirling, coming apart. She closed her eyes against the dizziness, swallowing against the truth, but it was too late, and there was no going back. Her voice seeped out thickly, like a reopened wound. “I’m Kara. Kara Chang. Does that name ring a bell?”
“Nope.”
“That’s good . . . I was worried . . . they never released my name, you know . . . ”
“Um, what are you talking about?”
Time, too, was spinning now, rewinding, forcing her to see clearly . . . Late-morning sunlight, dappled through a plane tree. The chatter of squirrels, the screech of a bluebird. Wisteria, Korean spice blossoms. Sight, sound, smell. A perfect spring day. She looked at him, and if his face had shown shock or ridicule she would have exploded, but it wasn’t that way at all. His eyes were inviting, accepting. Speak. “I was driving to the 7-Eleven for my mom,” she said. “It was April, and I’d had my license for two months. I was good at parking . . . driving in traffic . . . obeying the speed limit, the signs and lights . . . We’d had a huge rainstorm the night before but it was sunny and gorgeous. I must have been doing, like, twenty or twenty-five . . .” Her voice seized up, and she began to shake.
“Come on, Case,” Kyle said, “let’s sit.”
Casey nodded. She steadied herself as they sat on a bench that was way too cold and shrouded in darkness. A shadowy pair of ducks, heads tucked under their wings, floated by like discarded hats.
“I—I wasn’t doing anything wrong,” she went on. “I knew the corner pretty well. I’d walked by it a hundred times since I was about eight, but still, when you’re a kid you don’t notice everything. Westfield has a lot of big old maple trees lining the streets, and there was a huge one on the corner, just swooping down. I remember noticing the beautiful light spring green as I passed. I—I didn’t see him until I was in the intersection. I couldn’t have.”
“Him?” Kyle asked.
“It. A car. He was driving pretty fast, but it was a busy street, and he wasn’t doing anything wrong. He didn’t have the stop sign. Anyway, it all happened so fast—I jammed my foot on the brake, but he was already in the intersection, right in front of me, almost as close as you are. I was doing thirty or so, which doesn’t feel fast, but it is. I hit him. Right in the side. I must have yanked the steering wheel pretty hard and spun around, because I ended up through the wall of the house across the street and into the living room. I blacked out until they were loading me on the ambulance. That’s when I saw the tree . . . and the people . . . and the sun on the other car . . . it was all twisted, and I remember thinking it looked so peaceful, like a sculpture. I knew the people who lived inside the house I’d hit, and I asked if I’d hurt them. The EMT workers told me no, no one was hurt in that family. That was what stuck in my mind, no one was hurt, which I took to mean what I wanted it to mean—and then I blacked out again.”
“And the people in the other car?”
“I didn’t know until my mom told me,” Casey said. “After I’d come home. She could barely get the words out. One person was in it. A guy named Kirk Hammond. He’d gone out to buy a birthday present for one of his kids, a Tickle Me Elmo. The present survived.” Casey felt the memory pressing against her chest and throat, pushing upward into her face. “He didn’t.”
“Oh my God . . . ” Kyle muttered.
The tears came down so heavily she couldn’t even hold her head up, so she let it drop between her knees as her chest heaved and heaved and heaved. “The newspapers blamed the town,” she continued. “The branch on the old maple tree at the corner had split in the storm and drooped down, blocking the stop sign. It should have been removed. Nobody was mad at me. The press, the TV reports, all blamed the town of Westfield. Even his wife told me it wasn’t my fault. She forgave me. But the look on her face . . . ”
Kyle put his arm around her and rocked slowly back and forth.
“I made it to the end of the school year. We were thinking of staying on, but all summer long people were asking about it, my friends, everybody looking at me all funny, like they thought I was going to fall apart—and as the school year got closer I kind of freaked out. My mom started looking for houses in a new place, far away . . . ” The spinning had stopped, and she wasn’t aware of time anymore. A minute could have been an hour, and it didn’t matter because feeling was all, the warmth of Kyle’s body as he moved closer and wrapped her in a flannel-warm cloak of comfort and forgiveness. She closed her eyes, feeling weightless, and tasted the shock of his lips. They were soft and sweet and strong, and she kissed him hard, taking from him, feeding a hunger she never knew she’d had. Something coursed through her body, something brighter than light, igniting her as if she had been dead and brought back to life.
Kyle is kissing me.
The thought hung like lights reflected in water, rippling, unreal, burning, blinking in and out of reality. She didn’t know herself anymore; she was liquid now, too, melting against his chest. “Kyle . . . I’m . . . ”
She cut herself off from saying sorry. She wasn’t sorry. She knew everything had changed now. Not only between her and Kyle, but between her and everyone else.
“Wow,” he whispered.
“Shhhh,” she said. The party had ended at Olympia, and the sound of crickets swelled around and beneath them like a blanket.
She let her head rest against his shoulder and felt herself sinking into a kind of peacefulness that seemed utterly new and strange and yet familiar. Maybe for just this moment, everything was all right.
A short time later she felt herself jerking downward and realized she had fallen asleep.
“I’ll take you home,” Kyle said gently. “You’re tired.”
“Don’t you have to meet someone?” Casey asked.
“No problem, I’ll drop you on the way.”
She wanted to say yes. She wanted a life of yes with Kyle. But as his eyes caught the streetlamp light and she noticed the pearls of vapor that clung to his hair, she knew what her answer had to be. There could be no car ride after this. Someday she would be comfortable, but not yet. The moment was too fragile, too perfect. “Walk me to the sidewalk,” she said with a smile. “Then you go ahead. I hate cars. I want to walk.”
He grinned. “You feeling better?”
“Yeah. I really am.”
They walked to the curb, and he slipped into his car and waved good-bye. “See you Mo
nday!” he called out.
Casey held her arms out to the side and began to spin. Everything seemed somehow clearer—the edge of the walkway, the corner of the park caretaker’s hut, the feathers on the sleeping ducks, the stars. Had she really kissed Kyle? Had this night really happened?
For the first time since the accident she felt things might get better.
Casey took the long way home, around the pond, detouring west along Porterfield Place, all the way to the village green. It was another of her favorite places in Ridgeport, a wide oval of fresh grass with a gazebo in the center and surrounded by wooden benches. Stores lined the streets, mom-and-pop shops alternating with a Starbucks here, a McDonald’s there—all of them with hand-painted signs out front. A neon-free zone.
The stores were shuttered, windows deep and black. On one of the park benches a couple was kissing. Feeling like an intruder, she turned to go.
She stopped in her tracks at the sight of the car parked at the curb, empty but familiar.
Her heart in her throat, she turned toward the park bench and walked slowly, silently closer. The two people there were oblivious. A giggle fluttered in the night air, a toss of hair that shone in the pale light of the streetlamp.
Casey shrank into the shadow of a shop entrance. Her eyes locked onto the scene she hoped would somehow magically turn out to be an illusion, a case of mistaken identity . . . .
She heard his name ringing out in a familiar voice, all tinkly and teasing.
For a long moment she stood motionless, feeling the pump of her heart, the air’s coolness on her cheeks. She took a deep breath and exhaled, her breath leaving her like a shapeless solid thing, screaming noiselessly into the sky and dissipating among the stars.
She saw Reese’s face briefly as it turned upward, then disappeared into the broad profile of Kyle Taggart.
Save the People
November 6
19
“IT IS OKAY, HARALAMBOS. YESTERDAY I THINK we will have good business because of Election Day, but I buy too much food,” said Mr. Michaels as he jumped out of the Kostas Korner van, decorated with its famous dancing half men, half goats (which had been scrubbed clear off in certain places where obscene drawings had appeared). He was a man on the go, and he hurried to the back of the van, flinging the doors open. “So . . . I give to your skinny friends.”
“Dad,” said Harrison, looking over the familiar plastic-covered platters, “this is great. Really. But we have work to do. We can’t really stop everything for a big banquet.”
This wasn’t great. It was wrong. So wrong.
You could cut the air in rehearsals with a cleaver. The last month had been awful. Dances were lackluster and unimaginative, the singing dull. Casey and Brianna were at each other’s throat, and each of them was snippy to everybody else. Dashiell seemed depressed; no one was talking to Reese; Lori seemed nervous; and Charles was on the verge of divorce with the Charlettes. Even Mr. Levin and Ms. Gunderson seemed to be entering a cooling-off period.
Harrison had been hoping for a big rally today.
It was so the wrong time, the wrong place, for an unexpected and unwanted shipment of Greek food.
“Banquet? What banquet?” Mr. Michaels shrugged, his smile transforming into a look of deep hurt—and Harrison was reminded for the thousandth time where the theatrical gene in his family had come from. “Is just a little moussaka and yogurt and sliced lamb and taramosalata—”
“And baklava,” Harrison added, “and custard and honey cakes—Dad!”
“What? You don’t like Kostas Korner food?”
“I love it, you know that! But it’s too much. This is a rehearsal, Dad. If they eat all this, it’ll turn into nap time!”
“Naps is good!” Mr. Michaels bellowed with laughter as he began stacking platters on his forearms. “Show me where to go.”
You couldn’t fight it.
A crowd was forming around the van now. “Niiiiice,” said a blond girl Harrison vaguely knew.
“It’s not for you,” Harrison muttered, reaching in reluctantly to grab another platter.
“Plenty for everyone, especially the pretty girls!” Mr. Michaels called over his shoulder, managing to throw a hammy wink to Harrison. “Ooh-la-la! God bless America and don’t forget the Greeks!”
“Your dad is cute,” the girl said.
“Never saw that man before in my life,” Harrison said, thrusting an enormous platter into her arms.
He followed his dad into the auditorium. Mr. Levin was chewing out Vijay about a lost prop. Brianna was buried in her homework. Reese and Kyle were off in the shadows doing God knew what. Casey was running around, replacing masking-tape markers on the stage floor.
Casey straightened up. “We need Jesus and Judas for the tap dance!” she called out, reading from her schedule. “And then we go straight to the junkyard for the crucifixion!”
Harrison could see his dad flinch. This was not what they’d taught in the Saint Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church Sunday School. He knew he would hear about this later. Christos DANCING? Tsk tsk tsk . . . model U.N. . . . politics . . . Intel science . . . THIS is what you should be doing.
“GOD BLESS AMERICA AND DON’T FORGET THE GREEKS!” Mr. Michaels’s booming voice stopped all the other noise.
Harrison cringed. It was his dad’s trademark saying, the words hanging in different forms all over the restaurant—stitched into samplers, framed, emblazoned on T-shirts. Everyone in town knew it, but if Harrison heard it one more time, he was going to throw a plate of baklava at the wall.
As his dad headed for the grand piano, Ms. Gunderson sprinted ahead of him. “Um . . . sorry, no food or drink on the piano, please!” she said, nearly prostrating herself on top of it.
“No problem!” said Mr. Michaels, who then made a great ceremony of lining the edge of the stage with Kostas Korner platters.
“Harrison?” said Mr. Levin, checking his watch. “Is there some occasion?”
“An overflow of food,” Harrison replied.
The auditorium fell silent. Reese stared down at the food with a disbelieving sneer. Casey sidled forward distractedly. Brianna looked up and then back down into her homework. Ethan and Corbin came forward, running lines and improvising jokes.
Mr. Michaels glanced around bewilderedly. “Well . . . isn’t anybody hungry?”
Mr. Levin hopped down from the stage and smiled graciously. “This is . . . uh, very generous of you. Drama Club—how do we show our gratitude?”
Ms. Gunderson began playing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” and one by one, everyone joined in. Lori wailed on a high C at the end, which made Mr. Michaels shout “Bravo!” and let out an earsplitting whistle of appreciation.
Soon everyone was thronging around the food. Harrison looked at the clock and watched two hours of rehearsal go up in smoke with just over a week left until opening.
Mr. Michaels threw back his head and laughed, reveling in the adoration.
Harrison ducked into the hallway before he could hear the words God bless America . . . one more time.
20
From:
To:
Subject: update
November 14, 6:32 P.M.
Dear Stavros,
Tomorrow is DRESS REHEARSAL. Are we ready? Hell no! Do not try to take the train here (were you going to?) If you don’t hear from me, it means I’m hiding in humiliation. Thanks for sending the Shakespearean insults, you may have to use them on me after this disaster is over, you benighted addle-pated clotpole.
Till then,
Judas
“Play those keys, honey!” Reese shouted the final spoken line of the song “Turn Back, O Man” in a Mae West accent while flinging her legs over the upright piano, barely missing a square hit on Lori’s left temple. Her feet landed on either shoulder of Kyle, who was pantomiming playing the tune.
“Urf,” Kyle said, looking up directly into Reese’s twilight
zone.
“Break!” Mr. Levin called out from the darkness of the house.
Harrison took a deep breath. They were supposed to run the play straight through. But what had started as a dress rehearsal had degenerated into Reese Van Cleve Night. She’d been kicking higher, singing louder, and acting broader than everyone else in the cast. They’d had to stop the run-through twice. They hadn’t even had a chance to iron out the problems in “All for the Best.” Kyle had such a mental block against the choreography. Harrison’s shins were covered with scars from his wrong-sided kicks.
“Uh, Reese, where did that move come from?” Brianna asked from the house.
“Like it?” Reese said brightly.
“Uh . . . no, Reese,” Mr. Levin said. “Not appropriate, sorry.”
Charles, who had emerged from backstage to investigate the commotion, let out a scream. “Oh! We’re doing that kind of play?”
Reese swung her legs around and jumped off the piano. “The true professionals are never understood,” she grumbled to Harrison.
“Maybe you should stop practicing your Tony speech and actually interact with the other actors,” Harrison said.
Reese eyed him up and down. “Maybe I need something to interact with, honey. And I don’t mean a platter full of moussaka.”
Hopping onstage, Mr. Levin pulled Reese aside. He liked to keep his comments private with each actor, but Harrison could make out a phrase here and there: “It’s an ensemble piece . . . give and take . . . too late for surprises . . .” Reese was not taking it well. From the expression on her face, she looked as if he were telling her to wear curlers and sing in Swedish.
Then, with a barely audible fwoomp, the entire auditorium went black.
All conversation stopped.
“Dashiell?” Mr. Levin called out. “What happened?”
“Sorry, I was testing the override!” Dashiell cried from the projection booth. “I’ll set it back . . . wait. Aw, scheiss. It froze.”