Chapter Two
1. ARIA
It’s over. The day is over. Aria collapses into the softness of her white hospital sheets and closes her eyes. Within her, the Monster’s armies rip through her with pounding victory drums and stomping victory dances. Her heart races. Her brain slows. An icy headache mushrooms in her skull.
“Let me go,” she begs the Monster. “Leave. Please.” Her head itches. Is her hair going to fall out? Aria loves her auburn hair.
Someone knocks on the door.
“Visiting hours are over!” she calls. That’s not true. They don’t end for another hour.
The door opens and there stands Penny. Aria shifts away in the bed as though blessed darkness would swallow her up. “I heard about your . . .” Penny starts. She looks at her shoes. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” she says harshly. The Monster laughs at the lie.
Penny, never very good at picking up hints, does not leave. “Look, Aria, I’m a good secret keeper. And I don’t want anything from you. It just helps sometimes to tell someone what’s going on.” She closes the door behind her and sits in the visitor’s chair by the bed.
Aria sighs. Then she tells everything. “Penny. I need your help. Soon the chemo will start and I’ll lose my hair, so I want to shave is off now, you know?” She pulls all meaning out of the words, like none of it matters, like this is not one of the hardest paragraphs of her life. “Will you come with me? Just, you know, be there?”
Penny grins. “I will totally come shave your head.”
2. ZACH
Nighttime falls and silence wraps around him. He listens for his little brother and sister, for his parents, for Grandma, and then he tiptoes to Dad’s liquor cabinet. Quietly, quietly, he slides out a bottle of vodka and shuts the cabinet.
It is a ritual. It is a ceremony. He slips three cans of Red Bull from his school backpack and sets them on his desk in a triangle. He puts the vodka in the center of the triangle, and then he opens his notebook and uncaps his pen. It’s been a long time since he was able to get all the ingredients for a night like this, and it feels so, so good to finally do it again.
It has to be precise. A sip of vodka. A sip from each of the cans of Red Bull, going clockwise. More vodka. Three sips of Red Bull, counterclockwise. It takes hours, because each sip has to be savored, weighed o his tongue, tested for potency. It is three in the morning when All four bottles are empty.
Zach can’t stand up. He can barely breathe. He is weightless. His heartbeat moves his whole body and throws the room into spasms. Delight laces through him. But he’s same enough to remember the rules of the game. There are no sounds. He can’t laugh when his socks seem funny, or cry when his bedspread seems tragic, or scream when the pounding of his heart takes over his soul. He bites his tongue until it bleeds.
And then, like an epiphany, he sees his notebook on the table. He sees the pen lying perpendicular to the lines of the page. Someone even had the decency to uncap it for him.
And he’s writing. Words flicker inside him, licking at the hull of his heart and burning at the edges of his arteries. He can’t make out the words on the page, but he is entirely sure they are wise.
When he is sober, when his hangover fades, he will open the notebook again. He will look at these words and weep, for the beauty there will astound him.
3. KAINAN
Who is Kainan Manz?
Who is Kainan Manz?
The old answer hovers just out of grasp, a carrot before a mule. Kainan is an honest boy. No! That’s a lie!
So, then, who is Kainan Manz?
Kainan wakes up sweating. His chest pounds as though he’s been running. He becomes aware quite suddenly that he has been digging his fingernails into his thighs.
Before he knows what he’s doing he is out of bed and scrambling into his workboots and winter jacket. He splashes out the door and runs across the yard, running just for the sake of getting away. There was another thing, another reason for this midnight fleeing. It too lingers just out of reach.
Aria has cancer.
Aria, the girl he kissed in kindergarten, whom he comforted when she cried, whom he really and truly loved, was dying.
He skids to a halt. His ears burn with the cold. His throat and mouth are sticky from running. His sides ache. Darkness plays between his ankles. Kainan looks down.
He stands at the top of a cliff, somewhere on Mr. Jansen’s farm. The toes of his boots stick out over the edge. Kainan’s eyes widen with the sheer impossibility of stopping so suddenly and with such perfect timing.
I don’t want to die.
Another part of him, a darker, deeper side of Kainan, raises one eyebrow. Then why are you standing at the top of a cliff in the middle of the night?
Kainan sighs. As he walks home, across the fields of cut corn and browning grass, The Question circles over and over through his brain.
Who is Kainan Manz?
4. LIZ
Arithmetic lies to her. In sultry tones the numbers spout their seductive untruths, dragging her in. If only one and one was always two. If only one and one did not sometimes equal drunken fights, bruises, dishes strewn across the linoleum.
So Liz comes to a logical conclusion. Numbers, with their sweet persuasion, are not to be trusted. They must be carefully watched, second-guessed, triple-checked.
Math class. Liz glances at Kainan’s paper on the desk beside her. Kainan is blind to the deceit. On his paper, square calculations line up like soldiers for the slaughter.
On Liz’s paper: between the lines, scribbled, uneven solutions.
Life minus love equals the absolute value of zero.
Body minus soul equals mirror image.
Poetry divided by meaning equals the negative square root of the reciprocal of nothing.
Why is this happening? Only days ago, math and its uncomplicated logic was her salvation. Now she cannot bear the tiny untruths that grow and grow and GROW until they
Explode.
Why?
People say Aria D’Amor has cancer. They say she’s going to die, that she is reacting badly to radiotherapy. Liz and Aria were friends, once upon a time. Maybe her ex-best-friend’s immenant untimely death has sent Liz soul-searching. Maybe it is her drunken father and his gun, his violence, and her mother’s submissive behavior. Maybe it’s in the air. Autumn, the season of death, always bothers her.
Maybe it’s being fifteen.
Maybe it’s being female.
Maybe it’s being human.
5. PENNY
Supposed to be with Aria, shaving her head. She is supposed to be strong, supportive. But this is far more important than a friend’s hair.
It’s a thrill. It’s a rush. Blood splatters. Her wrist runs crimson. Anger and love, violence and lust. Red. Somewhere inside this pink skin package is a key, a door, a wondow. Somewhere within, beyond the crimson, is a soul? Where? Where?
Penny presses harder. Blood spurts like it hasn’t before. There’s blood on the ceiling, dripping into her hair. Aria doesn’t have hair anymore. Penny doesn’t stop. Cut deeper. Find the soul.
Her head spins. So red, so red! Her legs tremble. Her throat catches. Penny tumbles to the pink bathroom floor, awash in her own blood. The world runs red, and then, finally, black.
