Ashes and Ice (2 page)

I laid there awhile and slowly, very slowly, I began to see the world—-and myself—-for the first time. I propped up on my elbows, looking at my body sprawled on the grass of the forest floor. I felt like some new and empty thing, without any knowledge beyond the moment before my eyes fluttered open, but there I was: not naked and new, but worn and dirty, with a long, leather coat that tapered close to my waist and flared out over fitted cloth britches and leather boots. I knew what all of these clothes were as though I somehow remembered putting them on in front of a mirror. The feeling was vague and fleeting as were so many others tethered precariously in my head, drifting far out in the tide of my memory, but also desperately holding on. I tried to reel them in, but as hard as I pulled, as hard as I concentrated, the thoughts floated away.

The only memory that ever crystallized was of an old man. I clung to it, replayed it in my mind over and over, struggling to grasp at a second more after the image faded, but I couldn’t. This memory remained exactly the same.

“Look at this child with jade eyes,” the old man pinched my chin with calloused, wrinkled fingers. He peered down his nose with eyes creased by smile lines and a brow etched from years of deep contemplation. “Jade eyes are heavenly.”

His age was even more apparent in the rough growl of his voice, yet it soothed me like the waterfall whose crash on the rocks roars and yet is serene. His eyes continued to search my own, “But a jaded soul will fall into darkness.” He locked his gaze upon my face as if he was studying an unknown creature. “My little Jade, guard your spirit,” he whispered a warning. He parted his lips to speak, but shook his head and said no more. He turned and reluctantly took a step toward the alley.

I stared after him. His words linger in my mind. I still felt the cold of his elderly hands where they caressed my cheek. His memory is the only image that consoles me in my loneliness. His touch and gaze are the last physical contact I remember. Yet, even when I close my eyes and picture his withered face, I know he knew something that he refused to tell me. He was simply a curious soul looking into the secrets of the soulless. And yet I still loved him. He is all I know to love. Jade, as he called me, is the only name I know.

This Clara girl is still watching me, waiting. “Jade.” I say, “My name is Jade.”

Clara dresses me up for over an hour at the store and heaps the entire mass of clothes on the counter. She rings it up, smiles, then swipes a card through a beeping thing attached to another beeping thing. She pushes the heap across the counter toward me.

“Take it!” She beams, “It should be illegal for a girl with legs like yours not to rock all the skirts and boots she wants. Besides, all the stuff in here is second hand.” She picked up one of the skirts, black and puffy with a little pink skull on it. “This skirt is three bucks. THREE BUCKS!” She shakes her head. “The stuff rich kids throw away is amazing. Randy, my boss, takes all this used stuff other people just throw out and sells it.”

“I…” I know that she has done me a kindness, and this mound of fabric is being given to me, but I am not sure exactly what to say or even how to accept it. I am nervous, nervous about speaking, moving, thinking, about doing something wrong.

Clara raises her eyebrow, “Well…”

“Thank you.” The words are thin, fragile, but I mean them.

“You’re welcome. Now listen, I need to close up. Where do you live?”

I realize , even with me half-naked in a cubicle for over an hour, I have talked very little. This girl knows nothing about me, but with her eyes so open and honest, I wish I remember secrets I could tell her, because I think a girl as kind as her deserves to hear them.

The dead girl’s glassy eyes and fiery hair whisper to me. I have a secret. One I won’t ever tell. Ever.

“I—I don’t…”

“Wait a second…” Her eyebrows dance together in a scrumpled line. I wonder how she does that. “Do you have a place to stay?”

“Well, no, but…”

“That settles it. You are staying with me.” She says it like an announcement.

“No, I shouldn’t, I—I really…”

The argument was short lived. For the next hour, Clara herds me around people and cars and trolleys, down shiny roads with pretty, white houses to steep inclines where dark, deteriorating houses loom. Clara pulls me toward one of them and ushers me into her apartment.

Clara’s apartment is a single room with blotchy paint and photographs of hundreds of different people in dark make-up and clothes as bizarre as her own…well, as my own, now. We stand amidst clothes tossed on the floor, people staring at us from the walls, and towers of little thin boxes standing tall among the wreckage. I also smelled something rotten from the area of the kitchen. A cockroach scurries over my boot. I flinch back and knock over a tower.

Clara laughs. “Two minutes in my house and you are already breaking stuff.”

I fall to my knees, reaching to pick up the boxes with more faces and images sprawled on the tops of them. “I’m sorry!”

“Don’t worry about the DVDs. Have you seen the rest of this place? It is positively atrocious.” She passes a finger over one of the thin boxes. “Let’s pick one! It is Friday… perfect movie night!”

Our movie night stretches into two consecutive movie days. Clara doesn’t have to work the weekend and I, well, I have nowhere to be and I like the idea of not leaving the house and not leaving her because she is such a lively thing.

When she asks me my last name and I hesitate, she says “Jade Smith it is,” and winks at me.

I cock my head to the side and give an appreciative nod. “Yes, that’s me.”

I don’t play football or any other sport. I tried track, even made the team, but it was a long time ago, and I’ve never actually been in a race because…well, because it was that first race when Dad got sick. I was at the start line when he fell over in the bleachers. I ran to him that day and I’ve never worn a number on a track again.

And finally, the kicker, the overbearing reason why I am as I am and content with the complacent suckage of my life: my dad’s dead. It’s with that thought I finally lean over and slap off the alarm.

The silence is ugly. Before, there would have been jazz music blaring from downstairs. The house was never silent before, it was always loud, sometimes too loud, filled with sarcastic, loud whoops and hollers and music, lots of music. Now, it’s just fragile, soft voices and dead air. Dead, just like Dad. The hush fell over our old plantation style home the moment the ambulance came for him, the moment we all held our breath as he left never to come home. It’s like the house itself has a heart, and as the paramedics left with my dad on the gurney, sirens blaring, the heart stopped beating and it hasn’t started again.

I sit up in bed, my sweaty hair sticking to my forehead. I seriously need a shower.

Monday. Why is school such a necessary thing for kids to endure? With all the paper shuffling, book reading, boring teachers, and the constant threat of social humiliation, at least for me, I am sure the whole high school experience straddles the border of hell.

“Connor?” My mom whispers from behind my closed door, interrupting my ritualistic morning rant.

“Yeah, Mom?”

She peeks in, “O.K. I just want to make sure you are up.”

I groan. Of course I am up. Anxiety is rarely easy to ignore. It twists my gut in knots. It really doesn’t matter I am a senior. I have never moved up from the hazed-freshman status. Luckily, I am perfectly invisible most of the time. For some, it would be torture—to go in and out as non-existent in a time where all value is placed on those who are in the spotlight. Sure, I secretly imagine being the center of attention. I guess I live vicariously through others. When the quarterback makes a touchdown, when a group of kids head to the beach, when a guy smiles with his arm wrapped around his girl, I envy all of them. But if I was destined to be the invisible by-product of social deprivation, I guess I am bad-ass at it. I pull on jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of tennis shoes.

When I reach for my messenger bag on the oversized beanbag, I realize the chair is empty. Propped up next to it is my old guitar. I shake my head as I look at it. It’s dusty, unused. I keep putting it far back in my closet, but Mom keeps dragging it out hoping one day she’ll hear me playing it like I used to. The damn guitar sits there like an accusation, like a pile of Playboys that should make me feel guilty. I grab the guitar and stuff it behind a pile of clothes in the closet.

“Connor?” Mom calls again, this time from downstairs.

7:21am.

Damn, where is my homework?
I pivot around trying to eye my bag with no luck. I leave my room, close the door, and run down the rickety oak steps. I skip every other step. I am not sure how old the house is, but I know it is old. I used to think ghosts lived in the crawl space under the stairs. I got accustomed to jumping two at a time so I stayed just out of their reach. The habit stuck.

My homework and bag are on the banister by the door. I shove the homework into my messenger bag along with my notebook. I won’t be late for school. The only thing worse than having to exist in the tumultuous state of hell, aka high school, is that treacherous moment when you can’t just slump into your chair during the morning shuffle, but actually have to face twenty-five pairs of eyes watching you find your chair in silence.

Mom is sipping coffee in the kitchen. Her curls are messily swooped together in a ponytail that really doesn’t contain them. They poke out everywhere, but somehow it works. She doesn’t look unkempt, just carefree. In a way, I think she does it on purpose. She used to meticulously tie her hair back and smooth it so it looked straight and tame. Dad liked it best on Sunday mornings, when she just woke up, rolled out of bed and drank coffee on the porch in her PJs.

He would announce, “There she is!”

Mom would crook her eyebrows and say, “What?”

And dad would scoop her up and kiss her—yeah, right there in front of me, they were big on PDAs—and say, “There’s the lioness I fell in love with,” twine his fingers in her curls.

It annoyed me at first, but then as the cancer set in and dad was too weak to scoop up anything, I started missing those awkward moments I now know were precious. So now, Mom’s hair is always curly, always free, like some wild mane caught in the wind. Looking at her, I realize that’s how I like it best on her too.

She waves me over. “Bye, babe.” She tousles my hair in her hand and stretches on her tip toes to land a kiss on my cheek.

“Later, Mom.” I open the front door waves of heat and moisture collapse on top of me. How is Mom drinking coffee? Slightly insane, maybe? Louisiana is not for the faint of heart. Between the hurricanes, heat, and alligators, I think we are pretty well versed in staving off wusses. But even I, being the born and raised hard-core Louisiana native that I am, wouldn’t mind taking a dip in some Alaskan glacier water after the run to school. Against my better judgment, I take a step outside and close the door behind me. It groans shut. I roll my eyes. Even the door is lazy in the heat. I smile despite myself.

I’ve never lived anywhere else and there’s part of me that never wants to call another house my home. Its familiarity is comforting. Rickety steps, peeling paint, wobbly banister and all. It’s home.

And there is always the study—Dad’s study—which hasn’t been touched since he died. Mom ritualistically dusts it, but everything is just as he left it. Somehow, it feels like he is still in there, typing away on his laptop. I know not to go in because he is working, but I really know he isn’t there at all. It’s not quiet in there because that’s how Dad likes it. It’s quiet because he isn’t there. He isn’t here. He isn’t anywhere. No business trip, meeting, or afternoon ride. Just gone. His study humors me. Every time I pass it, for a moment, I forget.

It’s a two mile run to school. Maybe I’m not a social misfit. Maybe I simply stink from sweating, so anyone with a nose avoids me for their own good. Maybe I have to invest in some advanced-formula deodorant. I tried Axe, but it was nothing like the commercial. If anything, on me, it acted more as a repellent against any female contact. It’s okay, though.

The girls at school aren’t exactly what I am looking for. Not that I’m picky. I mean, if a girl asked me out, I wouldn’t turn her down. Mom would probably be excited I was actually venturing out of the house on a Saturday night. But the truth is, at Wayland High there are either beautiful idiots or weirdo braniacs. Maybe there are a few who dabble somewhere in the middle, but they are so desperate to be in the “in” crowd they trade in their personality for a mini skirts and birth control. As old fashioned as it may seem, I actually prefer to respect whoever I go out with. So I guess women-repellent at Wayland High isn’t so bad.

The run goes by fast. I pretty much ignore the little shops, the corner bakery, and the people meandering up and down the sidewalk. It’s all a blur in my peripheral vision. My eyes simply watch the sidewalk. My feet slap against the pavement and it feels good. I slow before getting within earshot of the school. The crowd outside school is a buzz of interaction: who’s dating who, homecoming, what’s happening in New Orleans, how Mr. O’Neal is such an ass, how hungover someone is, and of course the upcoming football game.

And in the center of it all is Dominic, the team’s quarterback. He is at the core of every ounce of envy I can muster—willingly or unwillingly. Dominic is the sun the school’s universe orbits around. I never got the memo about his gravitational pull, but apparently, everyone else did. He transferred exactly six weeks ago and in that time, he amassed a following that would make any celebrity cringe. It’s just not natural. He gets here just around Mardi Gras, starts going out with the head cheerleader, and becomes star of the football team in less than two weeks. Before his name was officially transcribed on the roster, he already had girls wearing I Heart Dominic t-shirts. I mean, what the hell?