The Sea of Tranquility(92)
Author: Katja Millay

I guess we didn’t have to wait until tomorrow for everything to go to shit again. It’s happening right now.

My hands are in my hair and I can’t stop walking around the room because I have so much pent-up aggression and I don’t know where to put it. Now I understand the running. I think I could run out of this room right now and not stop for miles. I take a breath and start again because I can’t seem to stop talking, either.

“All I know is that something happened, or more likely, someone happened who f**ked up your hand and did a job on the rest of you in the process, and I can’t fix it.”

“No one asked you to.” The words are fierce and bitter. Her eyes turn almost feral. “Everyone wants to fix me. My parents want to fix me. My brother wants to fix me. My therapists want to fix me. You’re supposed to be the person who doesn’t want to fix me.”

We’re both exasperated now. We’re both angry, and for some reason, it’s a relief. It makes me feel like, maybe, I’m not the only one in the room.

“I don’t want to fix you. I want to fix this.” I throw my arms out but I don’t even know what I’m referring to. Her? Me? The whole f**ked-up world?

“What’s the difference?”

What is the difference? I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t one. Maybe I do want to fix her. If I do, is that wrong? Does that make me the ass**le in this scenario?

“I don’t know,” I answer, because it’s the only thing I do know. I sit back down at the table and drop my head into my hands.

The emotions in this room are bouncing all over the place and I can’t keep up. It’s after four o’clock in the morning and I feel like my entire body has been wrung out and I’m just done.

“I thought there was something wrong with you, too.” Her voice is calmer and she sounds apologetic, like she thinks she’s insulting me. But she isn’t. “I thought you wouldn’t care that I was wrong, because you just understood what it was like. I figured if I didn’t ask you, you wouldn’t ask me, and we could just pretend not to care what happened before. I guess it doesn’t work that way.” She half shrugs like she’s known this all along, but she’s finally coming to terms with it. “I just wanted one person who would look at me and not want to see someone else.”

“Who looks at you like that?” I lift my head up and lower my hands so I can see her face, and I can’t imagine anyone looking at this girl and wanting to see anything but her.

“Everyone who loves me.”

“Who is it they want to see?

“A dead girl.”

CHAPTER 51

Nastya

On Tuesday during fifth hour, Ms. McAllister continues the poetry unit. We covered the same lesson earlier in my class and now I just get to listen in and try not to stare too much at the beautiful, priceless boy in the back row whose heart I stomped all over. I don’t even know how long we ended up talking on Saturday morning. I know that we didn’t resolve anything. There wasn’t anything left to resolve. We had already put everything through the shredder and it was just gone.

I walk through the aisles, passing out a list of discussion questions on the poem Renascence by Edna St. Vincent Millay. I pass Ethan Hall’s desk and he checks out my face again. I’ve been able to do a good job covering it, but you can still make out the bruise.

“So you’re beating your girlfriends now?” he directs at Drew. A hint of smug satisfaction crosses his face like he’s telling me I got what I deserved for rejecting him. Maybe I did get what I deserved, but it wasn’t for anything I did to him.

“No, that’s your thing,” Drew replies, unfazed.

“She did it in kickboxing.”

I turn to catch Tierney Lowell glaring at Ethan. She’s the only other person aside from Drew, Josh and I who knows what happened with Kevin. I’m not surprised to hear her chime in. It’s Drew she’s defending, even if she won’t admit it. I nod almost imperceptibly in thanks to her, because if he won’t acknowledge it, I will.

When I pass Kevin Leonard’s desk, he reaches out to grab my hand and say something. He looks embarrassed, but before he can touch me or open his mouth, Josh kicks the back of his chair. Hard. Kevin drops his hand and looks down at the paper in front of him, muttering sorry under his breath, which I get the feeling is directed at Josh, not me.

Josh slides the handout across his desk when I place it there, but he makes no move to acknowledge me at all. I don’t even exist. I’d trade my hand all over again to take back everything I did and hear him call me Sunshine.

“Who can explain what the poem is about?” Ms. McAllister asks to get started. She places the leftover handouts on top of a beautiful handmade oak podium that magically appeared in her room a week ago. It’s a mystery where it came from.

“Trees,” someone calls out.

“There are trees in the poem. That’s not what it’s about,” she says.

“Aren’t poems supposed to be short?” Trevor Mason asks. “Because this one was like a hundred pages long.”

“Hyperbole, Mr. Mason,” Ms. McAllister replies.

“Hyperbo-what?”

“Exaggeration, you tool,” Tierney shoots at him and then rolls her eyes, looking up to the ceiling before exhaling in defeat. “I’ll just take the detention.”

Ms. McAllister walks to her desk and fills out a detention slip.

“Who’s the tool now?” Drew says, smirking at Tierney. He lifts his head to catch the glare of Ms. McAllister who’s still at her desk, pad of detention slips in hand. Then he glances back to Tierney. “Yeah, I know. Just give me one, too.”

“Someone still needs to answer the question at hand.” Ms. McAllister passes off the slips and returns to the front of the room.

Even if I wasn’t watching the class, I would have been able to hear the collective turning of every head in the room when Josh’s hand went up. Even Ms. McAllister looks like she doesn’t quite know what to make of it.

“Josh?” she says tentatively.

He doesn’t speak for a second, looking pained, like he already regrets drawing the attention.

“It’s about the dream of second chances,” he says finally. He hasn’t raised his eyes from the paper on his desk and I feel him looking at me without looking when he uses his grandfather’s words. “The narrator doesn’t respect the beauty of life and the world around her, so it crushes her into the ground and once she’s dead, she realizes everything she took for granted and didn’t see right in front of her while she was alive. She’s begging for another chance to live again so she can appreciate it this time.”