So here's the thing: I'm not supposed to be here. Not like I've ever felt like I'm supposed to be anywhere. I'm never white enough. Never Asian enough.
Never ... enough.
But here I am in Bumfuck Nowhere, Oregon. There are more trees than people around.
I miss the sounds of life, you know? People on the streets. Sirens. Honking and talking and the lights and the buzz that come with a bunch of homes crammed into a tiny space.
But here, it's quiet and spread out, and crickets chirp—like, actually chirp. The shadows the trees cast everywhere make it all even greener, until you're so soaked in the palette you might as well be a leprechaun.
I'm not supposed to be here, yet I am. Flung into the middle of the Oregon wilderness with my not-so-long-lost-just-deadbeat father. But I guess some things force some deadbeats to rise to the occasion—the occasion here being there was no one else left.
Mom was gone. And that felt so real and so fake at the same time.
I didn't want to move here. I told him as much. Once I realized who he was—which took a full ten seconds after I opened the door and stared at this frayed man, with gray in his hair, trying to place him.
I guess he was lost in a way. Lost inside fuzzy memories that don't go past three years old. It's kind of hard to remember that distant a memory.
And now I don't just get to remember. I get to live with it. With him. In the land of green and silence and no public transportation.
It's, as they say, fucked.
I know I should be glad Marco didn't abandon me completely. He could've let me go into the system. I think I'm supposed to be glad he didn't.
Pretty low bar, if you ask me. But that's kind of my life lately. All I've got is crumbs, and I keep scrambling for them because there's nothing else.
Marco doesn't know how to be a dad. And even if he does figure it out, I certainly don't know how to have a father, and I learned the hard way that the only person you can need without getting hurt is yourself. So I think we're pretty much screwed, both of us secretly counting down until I'm eighteen and I can get out and he can be rid of me.
Such a low bar. Is this what Mom wanted for me? God ... who am I kidding?
She wasn't thinking about me. I have to tell myself that she wasn't thinking about me. That if she had been—if my name or eyes or smile or any part of me had broken through the fog that'd settled over her—she wouldn't have done it.
The thought of me would've stopped her. (Because I wasn't there to stop her.) Told you I was scrambling for crumbs.
I'm awake before my alarm, so I turn it off and pull the covers back over my head, even though it's already hot at nine in the morning. I hear Marco in the kitchen, rustling around getting ready to leave for work as I hide in my blankets. He's restless. A restless soul. She used to call him that, the times I got her to talk about him, when I was younger and interested. When I was younger and thought Maybe he'll come back.
She'd smile when she said it, but it was a strange mix of bitter and sweet. Like she could never figure out which way to feel about him. I wonder if she ever did. Figure it out.
Was there clarity at the end?
Regret?
Did anything break through the gray-thick fog that had cloaked her and our apartment and our lives for those months before...?
I can't think about it. If I do, then I'll think about that day and the weeks before, and that will lead to the months when I was telling myself it was okay, but I knew it wasn't. And it'll all circle into: Why weren't you better, Lisa? Why weren't you faster? Why didn't you realize how bad it was?
There's no good or easy answer to any of the questions, so I'm just gonna keep running from them, thank you very much.
Marco leaves for work, and now that the house is empty and there's no risk of awkward breakfast time, I fling myself free of the blankets. I've been here for over a week, but my boxes are barely unpacked. If I unpack, then it's permanent.
But it's not like I'm deluding myself. I know I'm stuck here. I'm just delaying the unpacking a little. Even though it's inevitable. That's why there's that whole saying about people denying the inevitable. It's a human condition or something.
I'm acting perfectly normal.
He's left coffee in the maker. I stare at it for a second, wondering if it's a peace offering. He bitched at me the second morning I got here when he caught me drinking it. Like it was gonna stunt my growth or something. Like he should have a say in what I put in my body, after all these years of ignoring me.
If it's a peace offering, it makes me even madder than if he just forgot. I know I'm supposed to be grateful ... and I think there's a part of him that's kind of confused I'm not. There's that low bar I was talking about again. An ant could hop over it.
On the fridge, there's a note and a twenty-dollar bill tucked under a plastic grape magnet: MOVERS FOUND YOUR BIKE. GO MAKE FRIENDS.
I pocket the twenty and trash the note. I try not to think about the countless notes I have tucked away in a tin somewhere in those boxes I haven't unpacked. My mom liked scribbling stuff down for the fridge. Quotes and song lyrics and jokes and affirmations. Sometimes, when she was low, I could track when she was pulling out of it because she'd start filling the fridge door again. But it hadn't been a sure science.
Not the last time.
GO MAKE FRIENDS. He writes that like it's easy. Like I have anything in common with anyone out there. Maybe if some other girl out there is delaying some inevitable shit, I guess. But that's not exactly something you can ask someone when meeting them. That'd just be weird.
I think about staying home all day, in defiance of his note. But Marco's still enough of a wild card that I don't know how he'd react. He hasn't yelled at me or anything. But you never know. All I've got is some stories of him fifteen years ago and the knowledge that I was easy for him to let go of.
And staying in this house with its swamp cooler and no real AC is like being in hell. So I grab my bike and ride off. Maybe I'll stay out too late. It's not like he can say he's worried. Or that I have a curfew.
I'm pretty sure it didn't even occur to him to give me one. Amateur.
The neighborhood Marco lives in is frayed at the edges, but it's trying not to look it. Kinda like him. The houses are old and as neat as you can keep them when you can't really afford to. In the tiny, mowed yards, the grass is patchy, like even the earth knows it's no use. It's given up.
"Howdy!"
It's such a weird greeting, I just stare at the lady before I zip past her.
"Yeah!" I call back, tossing it over my shoulder like a dumbass. But really, who says Howdy? Is this what I can expect? That would suck. School's gonna suck. I've got the summer's reprieve, but it's not like Marco's gonna let me ditch senior year.
I get out of the neighborhood and cross the big stone bridge that has no bike lane or sidewalk, so the truck behind me thinks it's helpful to honk every few seconds even though I'm going as fast as I can. The dude eventually just pulls ahead of me, but not before flipping me the bird. Nice show of smalltown friendliness.
As I bike across the railroad tracks, I think about trying to hop a train. Letting it carry me off to the unknown.
It's something my mom would've done back in the day, I bet. Ride the rails or whatever they call it—there's probably a cooler term. She was fearless, my mom. Totally the type to hop a train and leave everything she knew behind.
We'd always been a team, she and I. But it turned out we were playing a game I didn't understand, and we both ended up losing. All I ever seem to do is lose things.
Finally, I get a glimpse of civilization instead of just a bunch of scrubby houses and trees. It's so hot, the horizon shimmers as I spot the strip mall, making it look almost magical instead of just the source of some AC. Sweat trickles down my back as I pedal into the parking lot.
There's a Chinese place, a tanning salon called Sunkissed, with a creepy kissy-face sun logo ... and there, an arcade, with a big sign: WE HAVE AC. A few stores are boarded up next door, and there are some guys skateboarding over the speed bump. I guess you take your concrete where you can get it out here in the land of tres and two-lane roads.
I swing my leg off my bike, wheeling it toward the post near the arcade— the perfect spot to chain it up. Do you even chain your bike up in Oregon? Do people not steal here? No. Of course not. People steal everywhere.
Screech! The sound of car wheels coming too fast and too close rakes through me, and I jerk back so fast I go down, elbows scraping into the pavement, my bike clattering over me, pedal cramming into thigh as a minivan careens toward me.
My life doesn't flash in front of my eyes. It's just Ow and then Shit! And then ...
Nothing.
My eyes are screwed shut. I don't realize it until I don't feel the impact. I have to force them open, my face and body squinched, ready for the crash.
"Holy crap!"
"Oh my God—Kai!" a girl's voice says.
"What! What?! She came out of nowhere!"
"You're an idiot!" she snaps and I can't help but dazedly agree: Kai is an idiot.
I push up off my scraped elbows, wincing, and when I take in the driver who almost killed me, he actually grins at me like that's gonna charm me. There's another girl in the front seat, but she's not grinning; she looks as shellshocked as I feel.
"Kai! I can't believe you," the first girl shouts out a window, and then the door slides open and she steps out.
Striped shirt, cropped high and effortless. Some girls can just wear clothes, you know? She's a stretch of tan skin and long legs. Dark hair, brushing down her shoulders. She tucks it behind her ears as she hurries toward me. I track the movement, snagging on the color of her nails, that funny color between purple and blue: periwinkle.
I'm more breathless now than I was on the ground, when I was sure I was gonna get smushed.
Her dark eyes—bottomless, endless, fearless eyes—meet mine, and it's like almost getting hit all over. A cataclysm to the senses.
I can't zoom out. I can't get perspective.
She is the only thing I can see.