*Please don't write titles in full caps*
CHAPTER ONE
1. PENNY
She studies herself. Skin, legs, arm and hair bare their secrets to the mirror. She is only fifteen. She should not have so many scars. She should not have so many flaws. The black pits of her eyes gleam with . . . what? Knowledge? Compassion? Perhaps, but there is something else, something laced with cruelty. Penny’s eyes gleam with such a vanity as she has never seen. And her friends think of her as empathetic. Penny laughs a barking, haughty laugh at their foolishness.
She sees her hands. Her fingers-what long, strange appendages- are coated with a rainbow of acrylic paints. It seems a ridiculous joke that someone as self-obsessed as Penny LaCarte should attempt to create something beautiful.
Who is she beneath all this pink skin? There must be more, beneath tibia and fibula, beneath retina, scapula and metatarsals. Or is she nothing more than the pride in her eyes, the ironic untruth in her always-searching hand?
It is not good enough. She is not good enough. Penny turns and vomits on the pink tile floor.
2.
We are fifteen. We are painfully, achingly, horribly fifteen. For us, every moment is an agony. Every minute tingles with problems we cannot solve and promises we cannot keep and truths we are not strong enough to tell. We are fifteen, and all we have is each other.
We won’t tell you. We’ll say we’re friends, classmates, study buddies. But we’re lying. We are each other’s worlds. We are fifteen together, and that is enough.
It is so precarious, this unity of ours. Sometimes it seems that everything up until this moment was merely a coming-together, a beginning; and everything after this moment will be a slow atrophy of everything we have worked so hard to create. Now, we cling to each precious moment of togetherness. Our eyes expand with the strength of our longing for now.
“Let’s take a bus across America,” suggests Liz eagerly. “We can, like, tool around San Francisco and stuff.”
“Vegas, baby!” cries Kainan. Dollar signs flash in his eyes.
“Oh my gosh, this is gonna be so much fun,” Penny says in a baby voice.
But we won’t tour America. Kainan’s family is moving to Washington D.C. at the end of the year. Liz is full of empty promises. And Penny, Penny has her own journey to complete.
Still, we dream. We pillow our heads on each other’s shoulders and wrap our fingers around the slender ideas of our friendships. We know, with blinding certainty, that this moment is all that is promised to us.
3. ARIA
Aria awakes screaming. She awakes with the Monster parading its heavy, dripping legions through her veins and the word “cancer” stewing in the corners of her mouth like the aftertaste of flat soda. Her body opens up its secret passageways to make room for that sly, creeping evil.
What happens now? Doctors in white coats flash confident smiles, but their mouths spit out lies like the fires of Hell. They speak words like “astrocytoma”, “paresthesias” and “photodynamic therapy” like any of it means something. All Aria can think of is the way all those words taste like rotting cider. Everything, everything is going to rot.
Aria isn’t a fighter. All her life she has scooted around the edges of life, smiling politely and lowering her chin, moving over to make room for the people who were going to do something with their lives. How can they expect her to fight something like this? She can’t. She won’t. Aria looks up at the doctor and fire spurts from her eyes. “Go to Hell,” she says, and turns away from him.
4. KAINAN
Kainan fell in love with Aria the moment he met her. Maybe it was her smile; maybe it was he artistry in her hands; maybe it was the way her soul seemed to listen out from every inch of her. He watched her as she sat in the sandbox on their first day of kindergarten, shaping sand castles with her hands. Now Aria wants to be an architect.
That day, he walked over to her and bent over her shoulder. He kissed her cheek, realized what he’d done and ran away to where a bunch of boys were playing Toilet Tag.
Four hours later, during naptime, Aria got off her little sleeping-mat and came over to him. She knelt down beside him and whispered in his ear. “Boys have cooties,” she said, and walked away.
Until three days ago, Kainan had not told a lie in his entire life. When he was younger it was a game; how long could he go? And then it became his compass, his guide; his truthfulness led him through life the only way he knew how. And yet, sitting with Aria on her living room couch, watching The Titanic on cable, he looked her in the eye and spoke his first ever untruth.
“Me either,” he said. “I don’t believe in true love either.”
Where does he go now? Without his honesty, what is Kainan Manz?
What is Kainan Manz?
5. PENNY
Aria’s phone call hurts in more ways that she can count. She pictures Aria without her golden-brown hair, without the auburn locks that Penny has loved since they were children together. On the phone, Aria sounded terrified. Of course she was terrified. A nice man with a stethoscope just delivered her death warrant.
Penny bites her lip and stares into the mirror. Why does she feel this way? Is it just Aria’s sickness? Is it because Kainan is moving away? Her world is spinning out of control.
Penny has this much: she has the bathroom. Here, she is completely in control. Queen Penny, ruler of the showerhead and the toothpaste and the Daffy Duck soap dispenser that belongs to Penny’s little sister Marie.
She rules the sink; with a flick of her wrist on the faucet she can bring forth water. She rules with razor; with a little pressure from her fingers she can command it to break skin. She rules herself; she commands herself to bleed.
Is this her? This hot red liquid wells from somewhere deep inside her. Red is the color of love. Red is the color of anger. Truly then, Penny is nothing but crimson. She presses harder. Love and anger and pain intermingle and drip onto the flesh-colored floor.
6. ZACH
Monday falls upon them like a death sentence. By bus, by car and on foot they converge upon the big square building that, when they are alone, they call “The Prison.” They carry textbooks like shackles. They do not look into each other’s eyes; perhaps they are afraid to see themselves reflected there.
Zach watches from a corner as the crowds separate into groups. He watches the smiles, the hugs, the swaggers. In Zach’s eyes, the world shatters into a thousand fragments of conversation, a million shards which pierce his skin. He cannot pull them free.
“The Patriots won yesterday.”
“Did you write that essay?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ugh, she’s such a bitch! I hate her!”
“That’s what she said.”
Sometimes he wonders if anyone, anyone at all, is listening.
When the bell rings, it is a blessing. Zach files to class and sits in the back, where the stoners stare into space and draw penises in the textbooks.
Mrs. Epstrom turns around to write on the chalkboard. Her ass, which is not too terrible for a teacher’s ass, jiggles beneath her navy blue skirt. In the desk beside him, Chris Hanson whistles. Mrs. Epstrom ignores him. “Your assignment was chapters forty through forty-eight of Moby Dick. Please raise your hand if you read it.”
Only Zach raises his hand. Chris Hanson snorts and Zach wishes he had the god sense to act like a stoner. The teacher smiles tightly. “Excellent. Zachary Barnes. Why don’t you tell us about the symbolism of Moby Dick? What can we take from Chapter Forty-two?”
Zach glances at the morons around him. He thinks about Herman Melville in his study overlooking the Hudson; he pictures the author gently penning that infamous chapter, lovingly wrapping the reader in the symbolism of the White Whale. He pictures Captain Ahab’s mad pursuit of that goodness, that truth. Zach stands up. He walks out of the class and leaves the door open behind him, a challenge, a dare.
He has vodka in his locker.
7. LIZ
It’s the rules that call to her. It’s the excitement when everything falls into place like the even, square blocks on a Tetris game. Liz loves this new, exciting form of math. If you obey the rules, you can do anything.
Euclidean proofing homework packets lie before her. It makes perfect sense. She lays out her thinking-statement, reason, statement, reason-like an unfolding tablecloth and smoothes her fingers over the creases.
Yes, she thinks. Here, here, are the secrets of the universe.
It’s easy. Comfortable math words roll through her head: congruent, supplementary, perpendicular. They taste like raspberries. Everything is logical. Everything is perfect.
Outside her bedroom, her father is yelling. The smell of bourbon curls under the door of her room. Something shatters. Liz’s mom gives a sob, a shriek. Liz closes her eyes. She turns on Franz Ferdinand and slips in her ear-buds. “You see her, you can’t touch her. You hear her, but you can’t hold her.”
Math problem two. Statement, reason. Statement, reason. Perfect.
SLAM!
What was that? A gunshot? Dad has a gun?
Dad yells, “Damn it, Sylvia!” Outside her room, things fall to the ground with varying thuds and clatters.
Liz turns the music all the way up. Her hand quakes. She drops her pencil. Tears splatter on problem three. Where are the reasons? Where are the reasons?
Franz Ferdinand screams in her ear. “She’s not so special so look what you’ve done, boy. She’s not so special so look what you’ve done.”
