Everything That Makes You (11 page)

Now, Fi inhaled the scent of magnolia blossoms and grass, and the cedar of this hard deck. Her butt was sore, the pollen made her sniffle, little beads of sweat trickled down her back. Still, this self-imposed exile was better than the air-conditioned pleasantries of the reception. Even if she had to share it with Jackson.

More to herself than anyone, Fi spoke out loud. “I don't know what to do now.”

Jackson looked toward her, the top of his head dangling between his arms, his chin resting on his shoulder.

“I mean,” she hesitated, not sure how to explain it. Not sure why she felt compelled to tell Jackson of all people. “I don't know who I
am
now.”

He just nodded.

“Before I met him, all I cared about was lacrosse. Then, I don't know, all I cared about was
him.
” She glanced at the date square on her watch. “There's a camp at Northwestern in a
few weeks—Marcus wanted me to go, but I just can't. It's like, none of it matters at all.”

She'd emailed the coach the day after Marcus died. In a long, rambling message, she explained about the broken ankle–coffee shop coincidence that brought her and Marcus together, how wonderful a human being he was, so full of big ideas and dreams that would never get to come true, how he had just died and left her alone, and how could anything really matter after that, she was sorry she wasted the coach's time but she wouldn't be coming to the camp.

Fi got a reply the next day—a concise two lines to Fi's fifty.

Fi, I am so sorry for your loss. He sounds like a wonderful person. I wish you the best in whatever you choose to do. Candace Starnes.

Jackson kept looking loosely at Fi—kind of at her, kind of not really. Eventually, he said, “It's like Picasso. Cubism.”

Fi wrinkled her brow at this subject change but nodded at him to go on.

“That's what it feels like. Someone took reality, pulled it in all directions, cut the stretched out bits into pieces, and then glued everything back together in all the wrong places.”

Fi had never heard so many normal, nonvenomous words come out of Jackson's mouth. “Why do you hate me?” she asked.

“You took my brother,” he answered simply. He sounded numb.

Fi recognized the tone—it's how she sounded, too. “He was with you more than me.”

“He was dying.” Jackson looked away from Fi, to the tree he didn't climb. “I didn't want to share.”

That
she understood in the deepest part of her soul.

Fi studied him in profile. The past month hadn't been kind to Jackson. He was a thinner, paler version of himself. He looked a little more like Marcus this way. “Why are you talking to me now, then?”

“No reason not to. Marcus isn't here to fight over.” He looked back at her, resting his head against his upper arm, as he'd done before. “And you're the only one who misses him almost as much as I do.”

“You look great. Don't worry.” Her dad placed his hands on her shoulders, equal weight on each, and turned her away from the mirror she'd been obsessing in front of. “It's remarkable, the difference.”

She gave her best
I'm fixed now
smile, though moving into the dorm today, and officially becoming College Fiona, brought back some of the old nerves.

Fiona's right hand went to the bottom edge of the single fine scar line, the boundary between what was hers and what was borrowed. It was strange, how the pain had faded—from the old scar, from the surgery. No feeling at all replaced it.

Only when following doctor's orders did she let her fingers creep over the line into “foreign territory.” He'd told her to apply some creams and to test for the return of sensation. Fiona wanted to correct him on this last bit. Sensation would never
return—
not unless the original owner came back from
the dead and took this missing piece back.

She didn't like to touch it, but she had no trouble staring. All her life, she'd ducked past mirrors. Now she sought them out. In just four months—all her doctors commented on the speed of her recovery—her face had transitioned from an unsettling raw look to the deceptively clear skin she had now. The faint oval outline that would likely stay with her forever—the New Fiona/Old Fiona border—had become less purple, less “angry.” The surgeon said in a few years it would barely be noticeable, especially around the hairline.

The scar didn't bother her, anyway. Ryan said it added character. “Tell people you used to be a pirate,” Lucy had offered.

Her dad was still looking at her, shaking his watery-eyed head.

She patted his shoulder. “Okay. Deep breath. We need to go.”

“This isn't natural,” he said, picking up her bags. “Having two children start college in the same year.”

Fiona snorted. “That's what happens when you have kids ten months apart.”

He winked at her. “Caroline, I'm checking out,” he called toward the closed bathroom door. “Come down when you're ready.”

Fiona leaned over to pick up a bag. “Nothing over ten pounds,” he snapped.

“I know,” she groaned. Only two weeks left of Healing
Period Restrictions. She'd take the drugs forever, but she would be glad to be done with the weight limits and the creams.

She was ready to
start
.

Plus, she hated feeling useless. When they moved Ryan into his dorm six weeks ago, all she could do was sit on his unmade dorm bed and text updates to Gwen.
He & his roommate are picking desks and beds. He's putting shirts in the dresser. Mom's teaching him the right way to fold.

She slid her laptop bag over her shoulder—three-point-one pounds, she'd weighed it—and her mom emerged from the bathroom. “Fiona, it's cold outside,” her mom said, looking her usual, perfect self. “Put something else on.”

Weather appropriate gear—her mother's new obsession. Yesterday she'd ransacked Michigan Avenue, bringing back bags full of gloves, scarves, coats, and pullovers. Picking through it—how had her mother managed to find
frilly
fleece?—Fiona had said she'd packed Ryan's old coat.

“You can't walk around campus in that old thing,” her mom had said. “How would that look?”

As Fiona had learned since the surgery, this brand-new, high-end cheek had
not
lessened her mom's quest to make her suitable—i.e., better.

“I'm fine, Mom,” she said now.

In the elevator, Mrs. Doyle looked at Fiona through the mirror. “How lucky you healed so quickly. No one would ever know.”

We'll keep it our dirty little secret, Mom.

“Are you okay? Nervous?” her mom asked. “It's a long way from home.”

“I'll be back in three months,” she said, desperately hoping to avoid a heart-to-heart in the Holiday Inn Express elevator.

“You've never been gone so long before.”

Fiona had never been gone at all. The longest time away had been the nights she slept over at Lucy's.

Who was she kidding, that she could do this? Start a new life, as New Fiona? Make new friends? Compete with some of the smartest kids in the country?

The elevator doors opened to the lobby. “Mom,” Fiona said, faking calm and gesturing for her mother to go first. “What could possibly happen in three months?”

It turned out she had nothing to be nervous about. Fiona loved college.

Loved it.

Even though she'd lucked into a single, she shared a suite and bathroom with six other girls, whom she liked. The first night, Lexie From Des Moines commanded they all bond over popcorn and pictures. The girls cooed over Ryan. Lexie called David her HTH—
hometown honey.
No one asked about the scars, because Fiona had passed around pictures she
wasn't
in.

When she talked in class, when she met new people, when she walked around campus, there were no double takes, no
furtive second glances. Well, that wasn't exactly true. There were a few. But they were the good kind.

The first time it happened, she and the other girls in her suite had gone to a party. A cute hipster guy scanned their group as they walked in. When his eyes caught Fiona's, she bristled, expecting the recoil. Instead, he gave a flirty smile.

She gaped at him, not thinking to smile back—so he moved on to Bethany From New York, who was more skilled at flirting.

Not that she was looking to meet boys. The few other times the eye-lock thing happened, she stumbled away, clueless about what to do next. Anyway, she and David never had gotten around to the awkward “What exactly are we doing?” conversation. Dating other people hadn't been strictly
forbidden
—but she was pretty sure it wasn't
encouraged
.

Notwithstanding the unclear dating guidelines and her inability to flirt anyway, Fiona embraced her growing social life by following one simple rule: say yes.

Zoey From Chicago: Want to go to
Much Ado About Nothing
? The theater department's putting it on.

Fiona: I'll be there.

Miriam From St. Louis: There's a weird lecture on German philosophers in the student union. Come with me?

Fiona: Sure, sounds fun.

Bethany From New York: Battle of the Bands on Greek Row!

Fiona: Let's go!

Lexie From Des Moines: You've never had kimchi? We must go eat Korean food RIGHT NOW!

Fiona: Hang on, I'll get my wallet.

Yes, I'll go to that party. Yes, I'll come to dinner. Yes, I'll hang out.

Yes. Yes. Yes.

She rarely second-guessed the “Yes” philosophy. Maybe when Miriam talked her into spending Evanston's last warm Saturday in a dark theater watching an art film about doors—wide doors, glass doors, sliding doors, revolving doors. By the end, she just wanted to walk through the closest one.

And maybe these Tuesday and Thursday mornings spent in the “Musical Theory Circle” were nearly as weird as that movie.

She was required to take a music course for her scholarship, and this was the only class with openings. A
lot
of openings. According to the syllabus, the class would expose her “musical expressions to the echoes and undertones of all the discarded creations preceding it.”

There were ten of them in Circle, and, like Fiona, most had guitars, though a few had violins. A boy in her geology course—which pretty much everyone called “Rocks for Jocks”—lugged an enormous double bass to every class.

Professor Edward Fleming, aka “Flem,” bowed to the girl with the clarinet and said, “Ah, the mighty reed.”

He said this every time.

Flem had thinning brown hair, which hung in a sad ponytail. In addition to his
endless
supply of neck scarves, he also sported a goatee and pipe.

That's right, pipe.

“My fellow explorers!” said Flem. “We continue our quest! Let us push past our boundaries and reveal the hidden worlds of music seeking to be traveled!”

According to Flem, this was to be accomplished by dissecting 1980s power ballads.

After a particularly sad—or hilarious, she couldn't decide which—class, Fiona called Lucy as she walked home. “I am supposed to,
ahem,
‘reinterpret “Is This Love,” 1987, Whitesnake'—that's one of my dad's eighties hair bands, by the way—‘in such a way as to reinform its relevance in modern day culture.'”

There was a pause on Lucy's end of the line. “I'm panicking. I have no witty retort.”

Fiona laughed. “Wait, there's more.” Mimicking Flem's tone, she read from her assignment sheet. “‘Surgically remove any four-count phrase of your choosing, reinterpret it and, after introducing it back to its once familiar and now foreign role in the overall body of work, allow a new arrangement to organically flow around the shifts it inspires, as a river wends its way around the randomly placed detritus of man.'”

“Good Lord, stop. It's like my kryptonite.”

Fiona adjusted her guitar case so as to hit as few passing
students as possible. Northwestern was a long, narrow campus spanning over a mile—liberal arts to the south, tech to the north, and business in between. She had yet to make a full pass from Flem to dorm without whacking someone.

Despite all these bodies, the walk was a fairly quiet one—just passing conversations in pairs and threes, the rustle of leaves in the brisk Chicago wind. Not so on Lucy's side.

“I can hardly hear you,” Fiona said, pulling the phone closer to her ear. “Where the heck are you?”

“In a café. There are about seven within ten minutes of me. I'm trying them all.”

Fiona felt a sudden pang for her coffee shop and best friend. “How's that one rank?”

“Quite low—too hipster. Good one yesterday, though. Had all this cool old movie paraphernalia.”

“I didn't know you cared about old movies.”

“I didn't either.” She paused. “It could have something to do with all the girls there.”

Fiona laughed. “So you're not the only one in New York?”

“It appears I am not, thank God.” Fiona heard rustling on Lucy's end as her best friend said, “'Kay, I gotta go to class. But, hey, be respectful to the hair band. Despite the bluster, it's a fragile creature.”

She and Lucy spoke or texted every day—pretty much the same as with David. Fiona had a standing Sunday night call with her parents, but they emailed and texted about little
things during the week. Ryan, however, was another animal altogether.

Either he was lying, or he truly had no free time. The few times he picked up his phone, he was out of breath, running from one place to another. He had mandatory athletic study halls in the library every night, so he couldn't video chat. She got occasional quick texts—
bbq here sucks
or
what's iambic pentameter
—but nothing more.

Now back in her room, she sat cross-legged on her bed and left yet another voice mail demanding he call back, though she didn't think he would.

Ever since the surgery, things felt different with him.

Fine—he had to get to Clemson early, and okay—she spent the first few weeks after her surgery as a useless lump. But what if Ryan was beginning a new life, too? What if he was leaving her behind?

She grabbed her guitar and played around with Flem's assignment awhile. The arrangement was predictable, with lots of opportunities for “reinterpretations.” She might make fun of it, but this type of work was perfect for her. After the open mic night disaster, she'd spent a year becoming Queen of the Cover Song. By now, she was a genius with nearly any cover she touched—Beck to the Beatles.

Exposing a stranger's pain to other strangers was much,
much
easier than exposing her own.

In fifteen minutes, she finished Flem's assignment. She'd
ace this class. But that anxiety about Ryan still needled, so she moved on to the meatier part of her therapy. Going between Moleskine and guitar, she picked out notes and fiddled with words—her
own
words and notes—until it felt like a real beginning of something.

My pieces got melted / The edges are jagged

I wonder if they see / Only half the pieces cover me

As always, she got lost in it. She glanced at the clock, and two hours had passed. It was probably time to put this one away, anyway. She'd figured out over the years that it worked best that way. Start it, write it down, then leave it alone awhile.

Plus, she was starving.

She walked out of her room and nearly face-planted, her foot colliding with a body sitting just outside her door.

“Ow! What the—”

A boy popped up, catching her by the elbows. “Sorry. I, uh, heard you playing. Singing.” Once sure she was steady, he let her go, ruffling a hand through dark, wavy hair and looking sheepish. “I normally don't sit outside of strange girls' doors.”

Fiona kept a wary eye on this eavesdropper. “Wouldn't
you
be the strange one here?”

“I know. It's bad, right?” He cleared his throat. “It's just . . . you sound like Lorde. But like, with maple syrup.”

Well, she'd never been compared to syrup before.

He gestured down the hall. “You going somewhere?”

The Eavesdropper was about as tall as Ryan, maybe a little broader. His charmingly imperfect smile played against a background of perfect olive skin.

This boy was
cute
. “Downstairs,” she said. “I was getting something to eat.”

“You're from the South.”

Fiona rolled her eyes. “Memphis.”

Her accent was a constant source of amusement up here. Her Yankee friends randomly commanded her to say
pie
or
my,
while giggling at her dropped
g
's.

The boy gawked at her. “No way. Where'd you live?”