You Are the Everything Read online

  “That’s not true,” you lie, even though it is. “I don’t think that.”

  “I can be an asshole, too, you know,” he says.

  “You never even use that word! When you say it, it sounds weird. Like you’re talking in a foreign language or something!”

  “Asshole,” he says again, raising his eyebrows.

  “See?”

  “It’s not a comfortable word for me,” he admits.

  “Exactly. Ha. That’s because you’re a good person,” you say. You pretend to write it down. “I’m putting that into evidence.”

  “No, it’s because my dad would kill me for saying it,” he says. “It’s really important to him. He has this thing about rising above. He rises above by talking in a certain way. It’s hard to explain.” He laughs. “He likes it when I read Shakespeare out loud after dinner. And it’s okay. It’s like he needs it. It’s fine. I don’t mind doing it. I used to think kids would think I was a freak, but mostly they don’t say anything. Maybe they don’t notice.”

  “Yeah, right, they don’t notice. What a dreamer. Everyone notices! It’s weird, Elyse. It’s like showing off. Rise above, my ass. He just sounds pompous. I don’t know why you’re so into him. He’s not so special, he just thinks he is.”

  You swallow around the lump in your throat. “I think you’re special,” you say. “I mean, I like it. It makes you sound sophisticated, I guess. And there’s nothing wrong with being different.”

  “But it’s my dad’s idea, not mine. It’s his idea of who I should be. I sometimes feel like we’re all playing a part on a show that we didn’t sign up for. Maybe we did. I’m not allowed to watch television so maybe this is actually a reality program and we don’t know we’re on it and it’s all some kind of a test.”

  “There was a movie like that. I think Jim Carrey was in it. It was messed up. But even then, no one would fake a plane crash. That would be impossible. So we can probably pretty much rule that out.”

  “I never saw that movie.”

  “You need to watch more movies that aren’t just one long car chase. Broaden your horizons, dude!”

  He shrugs. “I’m reading all the books my dad tells me are classics. He says they are important. They’re pretty boring. But . . . I don’t know. I guess reading them makes me feel like a better person.”

  “Heavy,” you say.

  “Well, some of them are so boring that I’d rather be engulfed by flames than have to read them,” he says. “Does reading boring books make you a better person?” He pauses, scratches his shoulder. “I always tell my dad that I think they’re great.”

  “Well, look, there is nothing good on TV anyway.”

  “What do you do at night?”

  You shrug. “I . . .” You frown. “I was going to say that I draw but I guess I don’t do that much now. I think I . . . Well, I go for rides. When I’m in the house, I just . . . I don’t really know. I lie on my bed. I look at stars through the skylight. I try to remember things. I think.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “Duh, of course I know. I don’t read classic literature, but for sure that’s a better answer.” You mock-punch him in the arm. “I guess I’m not as good a person as you are, Saint Josh.”

  “Ha ha, you’re very funny.”

  You laugh, to show him you know he’s kidding around, or this is as close as he gets to it. Then you choose your next words carefully. “I still think you’re inherently good, even if you do have all this pressure because your dad has such specific ideas about what’s good and what’s bad. I mean, some teenagers would take one look at ‘classic literature’ and totally refuse, but you love your dad—even if he’s super weird—and you don’t want to disappoint him.” You mime a check mark. “Check. Good person points.”

  He doesn’t answer right away. “Thank you, Elyse Schmidt,” he says.

  “You’re welcome, Josh Harris,” you say.

  “I think you’re a good person, too,” he says.

  “Yeah, well, you’re wrong. I’m not. I don’t know what I am. I won’t even watch my parents’ stupid TV shows with them and I sure wouldn’t read for my own good, or whatever. And I’m not always thinking nice things. I’m not always like, ‘Yes, ma’am, you can touch my arm on the off chance that it cures your incurable cancer!’ If I were a good person, I’d let people rub my whole body if it could fix whatever is broken about them. Think about it. If there was someone you could touch who could fix all your broken parts, would you touch them? I totally would. Which makes me a hypocrite.”

  “I’d like to touch your whole body,” he says, raising that one eyebrow again. “You can cure my broken parts.”

  “Ugh,” you say. “You’re right. You’re not a good person. You’re a boy, being led around by your penis.”

  He laughs. “Sorry,” he says. He doesn’t sound sorry.

  “Jerk,” you say.

  He laughs again.

  “You won’t even fight with me. Why don’t you ever want to fight?” You hit his arm again, this time less gently. “Pow, pow.”

  “I’m not a fighter,” he says, simply. “Life’s too short for that.” He pushes himself up on his elbows. He lowers his forehead to yours and stares into your eyes until you are dizzy. His eyes are blacker than the sky. Unbroken by stars, falling or otherwise.

  “Kiss me already,” you say. “You good person, you. Whisper me the plot of War and Peace or something.”

  Josh Harris kisses you in a way that erases the field and the music and the crickets and the stars, which aren’t falling, and the plane that crashed in the mountains in France one long year ago. “It’s about war,” he whispers. “I’m guessing the end will bring peace. A boy is in love with a girl, but she is unfaithful. He’ll forgive her, I think. It’s . . .” He concentrates on kissing you for a minute. “It’s really boring.”

  “Stop,” you say. “I’m already bored. Let’s stick with kissing.”

  Josh Harris kisses you and kisses you and kisses you. The thing with being kissed like that is that you become nothing more than a body, another human body, under this huge net of stars. And it’s so easy to be just a body.

  It’s getting to be so easy to be you-and-Josh-Harris.

  15.

  Your bedroom in your new house is exactly the dream room you imagined for most of your childhood. It is storybook perfect. It is the whole top floor of a century-old house that has been painstakingly remodeled to feel both fresh and new, and like something from a museum. The room itself is a converted attic with sloping ceilings. Everything is painted white. You have your own bathroom attached, with a black-and-white tile floor and skylights and huge green plants that hang from hooks in the ceiling, spilling their rich greenery everywhere, chlorophylling the air, which smells like the air in a greenhouse, extra-oxygenated and scrubbed clean by the leaves, so many leaves.

  You have skylights above your bed, too, so that you can lie in bed and see the stars. You can open them up and the night air rushes in through the cracks and it’s like being outside without being outside. You have a closet with a secret door in the back and beyond that door, a tiny room with a round window. You’ve set up a reading nook, piled with your favorite graphic novels for inspiration and big pillows that would make an ideal place to sit to draw your own comics and to think about Josh Harris. You have a desk in there where you keep your favorite drawing pens in mason jars, waiting for you to want to draw again. You will, one day. Eventually. You’re sure of it. You just haven’t been able to, since Before. On the other hand, maybe Josh Harris was the only story you had to tell and now that he’s your reality, you’ve got no need for an imaginary existence.

  In your drawer, you have some old sketchpads. WEIRD WAYS TO DIE is your favorite one, but also SELFIE DEATHS, which is one hundred panels you drew inspired by internet stories about people who died taking selfies. Clim
bing onto train cars to take a pic of yourself and being electrocuted is a surprisingly common way to die. Who knew? (You’re getting good at drawing trains.) Another common one is accidentally shooting yourself in the face while pretending to shoot yourself in the face. The moral of that story is pretty obvious but people are dumb so you guess as long as there are train cars to climb on and guns to point at yourself, people will keep doing it, and keep dying.

  You’re definitely not inspired to draw people dying anymore. What kind of crappy person draws something like that?

  Over the window in your reading nook, you have hung the peach silk scarf that you bought in Paris. Someone—your mom, you suppose—must have cleaned it and mended the tears with tiny stitches done by hand. You can’t even see them unless you look super closely, and even then, like the scars on your body, you have to know exactly where to look. That dumb “sophisticated” scarf and those nearly invisible stitches torture you. You don’t want to remember but they make you remember and then you do want to remember and then you think, Kath. You run your fingers over the material again and again, compulsively, when you see it. It’s so impossibly smooth and perfect, but now there are the bumps of the threads, reminding you and reminding you.

  You don’t know what you were thinking, buying that thing. You will never be a sophisticated, scarf-wearing Parisian. You are a person who is dwarfed by your glasses and can’t figure out how to get your brows to look like something fashionable, like everyone else’s. You like to wear T-shirts featuring animals with mustaches.

  You are not a sophisticate.

  You are not Kath.

  When the sun shines through the peach pattern, you can remember exactly the day you bought it, the way Kath laughed at you (“Peaches are the bane of your existence! Remember? Why are you buying peaches?”), the way the man took your money pityingly, knowing the scarf was too nice and too expensive and all wrong for the likes of you.

  You weren’t happy then.

  Now you are happy.

  But Kath is dead.

  Everyone is dead.

  Your life is completely different at the cost of two hundred and sixteen lives.

  How dare you even think about being happy?

  You hate yourself.

  You also don’t know how to stop that thought from looping.

  I am happy.

  Kath is dead.

  It’s better not to think about it. It’s better just to be, to not worry about gluing the scenes of your life together, to just be present in them, to just be happy.

  I’m doing it for you, Kath, you think, but even you don’t believe that.

  You’re doing it for yourself.

  Asshole.

  You were in your new room in your new house with your new boyfriend, Josh Harris, when the earthquake struck.

  At first, you weren’t sure what the sound was. You were deep in a strange web of awkwardness that came with showing your new boyfriend your new bedroom while both of you pretended to not be looking right at the bed, thinking things to do with sex and beds and possibilities. The roar sounded like a truck backing up, the sound becoming a feeling that rumbled through the house, vibrating pictures off the wall. Then one louder bang and the walls undulated, the floor tilted, you slid into Josh Harris and Josh Harris caught you and said, “I think something’s happening.”

  “Uh, yeah,” you said. “There are canned goods in the basement.”

  It was the first time you made him laugh. He wrapped his arms around you and you felt that laugh, the vibrations rounder and more musical than any kind of laugh you’d heard before. “I’m not hungry, Schmidt,” he said. “Maybe we should wait to see if we’ll be trapped here forever before we start eating the ravioli.”

  “Are you okay up there?” your mom called. Rumpelstiltskin started barking. Josh Harris and you fell backward onto the bed, still laughing, still vibrating, still holding on to each other, and then kissing and kissing and laughing and his hands started going to the places where boy’s hands go when you are kissing like that and you stopped laughing, but you only let his hands go to so many places before you said, “Stop.”

  And he did.

  16.

  “I’m stupidly happy,” you whisper, on the blanket, in the field, when Josh Harris pulls away, when he stops kissing you and you stop kissing him back, just for now.

  “Good. I’m happy, too. But should we have gone to the party? The first day of school’s going to be strange. Everyone will stare at us. We won’t know anyone.”

  “You’re used to being stared at!” you remind him. “People stared at us at home, too. People stare. People are stupid. Half the time they’re staring because they’re racist dicks and they’re like, ‘Oooh, a white girl with a black guy.’ The other half, it’s because we’re the ones who lived and they can’t figure out why we’re so special and then somehow in their head, they start thinking, ‘They think they’re so special!’ and then they hate us. Because: Dicks. Or, you know, they want something from us. Power. Like we have power?” You pause. “They all want us to be either gods or freaks. Those are pretty high expectations.”

  “Maybe,” he says. “It’s funny to hear you say that word.”

  “Which word? Gods? Freaks?”

  “Ha ha, no. Dicks.”

  “Dicks!” You start laughing. “Dicks dicks dicks.”

  He cringes. “I wouldn’t’ve expected that. I don’t know, Elyse Schmidt. You were always so quiet. You were always the good girl in the front row. I thought . . . I thought, ‘She’s like me.’ I knew we were so different and that you’d never be interested in me, but on the inside, I’m . . .”

  You giggle. “On the inside, you’re a quiet, smart girl?”

  He smiles. “Yeah, that’s it. Basically.”

  “I’m still quiet,” you point out. “I sat in the front because my eyes are bad. Anyway, you didn’t like me. You had Danika. You had everyone.” You want so badly for him to say that Danika was a nightmare, then you hate yourself, because Danika is dead. You stretch your legs out so hard that your calf cramps, which feels right, like what you deserve.

  “Danika,” he repeats, quietly.

  “Forget it,” you say. “Forget I mentioned her.”

  “You didn’t like her?”

  “I hate people. Other than you. And Kath.” You close your eyes and it’s like she’s still there, in front of you. “You know, I was thinking . . .”

  “That’s sad. I like people. I think people are mostly good, or at least okay. On the inside.”

  You groan. “Yeah, for some people, they keep that really deep inside, tucked in behind all the douchiness that they wear on the outside.”

  “Douche armor,” he says, making a face. “I think you’re wrong. You see what you want to see. I want to think everyone is good.”

  “Well, you’re wrong,” you tell him, sticking out your tongue.

  He lightly punches your leg. “Pow, pow. Don’t make me fight with you, Schmidt.”

  “As if you would.” You roll away. “I feel bad for feeling happy. Do you think it was just dumb luck that we didn’t die?”

  “I think it was weird luck. Sometimes I think it was good luck. Sometimes I think it was bad luck.”

  “Bad luck?”

  “Yeah. Because by living, now we owe something. We owe the people who died something. We owe everyone everything.” He closes his eyes. “We have to be grateful all the time.”

  “Or else what?”

  He opens his eyes and looks at you. “I don’t know! It just feels like this pressure, when really, no one probably expects anything from us, at all.”

  “Right, that’s why people back home were always grabbing at our clothes so we could fix everything that was wrong with them. What about what’s wrong with us?”

  “I think that was a really small group of people
. It just felt like a lot. Most people probably don’t think about us at all.”

  “Do so.” You stick out your tongue.

  “Uh-uh,” he says. He stretches so far that his arms and legs reach off the sides of the blanket. He fans them up and down, like he’s making a snow angel. He yawns. His tongue is covered with those small velvety bumps that remind you of something. You smell toast and laundry detergent and suddenly you feel so sleepy.

  “Pith,” you say.

  “What?” he says.

  “Nothing!” you say. “I don’t know why I said that.”

  “I thought you said Kath,” he said. “I thought you said her name.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” you snap.

  A meteor streaks through the blackness, cleaving the night sky into two halves, leaving a tail of vibrant blue then yellow then white, like a firework on the Fourth of July.

  “Wow,” you say.

  “What’s wow?”

  “You missed one! Open your eyes.”

  “They’re open now.”

  “Okay, good. Keep them open and wait.”

  You lie quietly beside each other, breathing, your leg touching his leg, your side touching his side. You should do something, you think. But what? Other girls would know what to do, lying on a blanket with Josh Harris. Danika would, for sure. Other girls would probably be having sex with him by now. You put your hand on his leg but it feels wrong, like it’s at the wrong angle or your arm doesn’t belong to you, so you jerk it away.

  You are just so awkward.

  “Look! Another one!”

  “Missed it,” you say.

  “Keep your eyes open.” He grabs your hand, hard. It hurts until he relaxes his grip a bit. Your heart is racing.

  Another meteor races across the sky.

  Then another and another, like God has thrown a handful of them all at once, a sparkler bouquet.

  “Close your eyes! Make a wish! Make a hundred wishes!”

  “I wish,” he says. He lets go of your hand and leans up on one elbow. He stares at you unblinking. “Wishes aren’t something I usually make, but if I did, you would know what I wish for.”