My Heart and Other Black Holes (3 page)

BOOK: My Heart and Other Black Holes
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“You’re home early,” she finally says. Every day, her accent becomes less and less Turkish and more and more southern. Actually, “southern” would be the wrong word for it. People in Kentucky don’t have southern accents. They have bluegrass accents. Their accents are distinctly less charming than southern accents. Think less
Gone with the Wind
, more Colonel Sanders. I’ve worked hard not to develop one. But
now I wonder—if I’m never going to turn seventeen—what was even the point of mastering how to speak normally.

“I don’t have to work today.” I don’t mention that I was told not to come in because I would make the customers “uncomfortable.” Mr. Palmer is nothing if not the king of euphemisms. He and my mother would probably get along splendidly, considering my mother refers to what happened with my father as “that unfortunate incident.” Or used to refer to it that way. Recently, she’s been pretending like it never happened. As if simply not talking about something makes it disappear. Newsflash: It doesn’t.

Georgia marches into the kitchen. She drops her pom-poms on the scratched wooden table. Her honey-colored hair is slicked back in a high ponytail. “You’re going to be at the game tonight, right?”

She’s asking Mom, not me. I’m invisible.

Georgia is my half sister. We have the same mom, but you’d never know it from looking at us.

“I’m going to try my best to make it,” Mom says. Translation: Hell will freeze over before Mom isn’t at the game. Georgia’s only a freshman, but she’s on the varsity cheer squad. Apparently, that’s a big deal. Though it seems to me that unlike other sports where JV and varsity are determined by skill level, in cheerleading, JV and varsity are determined by cup size.

“It’s the play-offs,” Georgia reminds her. Her tone is
calm, the tone of someone who is used to being in control, used to getting what she wants. Georgia’s good at that. She’s always been a schemer. When everything went down with my dad, some of the heat fell on her too, but she somehow managed to use it to her advantage.

I remember one day, a few months after my dad was officially convicted and locked away, I saw Georgia talking with a boy in the hallway. I hid around the corner so I could spy on them. I was ready to intervene if she needed my help, but the thing about Georgia is she’s never needed my help.

“Yeah,” Georgia answered the boy’s question, which I’d been too late to overhear. She nervously fingered the shell necklace I’d given her for her birthday two years ago. “Aysel’s my sister, but he’s not my dad.”

“But did you ever meet him?” the boy asked Georgia, his voice eager. I stared at the back of his head, tufts of light corn-colored hair, and guessed it was probably Todd Robertson, a boy from my grade who everyone thought resembled the leading actor in that summer’s popular vampire romance movie. Georgia was in sixth grade at this time, but from the way her eyes glossed over as she stared up at Todd, I guessed she knew exactly who he was.

I watched Georgia wrinkle her nose as she considered his question. “Yeah, a couple of times.”

“You did?” Todd pressed, clearly hopeful that Georgia had some kind of inside scoop.

“Oh yeah,” she said. “He was basically family.” Todd leaned closer to her.

“I can tell you some crazy stories if you want,” she added, in a flirtatious promise.

I remember being furious that she was willing to trade our family “secrets” for popularity, but I’ve finally learned to let it go. Georgia is Georgia, I know what to expect. Anyway, you can’t really blame someone for surviving.

The same can be said for my former friends, not that I ever had that many. Most of the ones I did have scattered as fast as they could once the news of my dad’s crime traveled through the halls of school, but some of them actually tried to stick by me. Especially Anna Stevens, my former best friend. When everything happened, Anna tried her best to comfort me, but I pushed her away. I knew it would be the best thing for her to disassociate herself from me, even if she didn’t. I like to think I did her a favor in the end.

Georgia sashays around the kitchen table and takes a seat. “I think we have a really good chance of winning tonight. Could be historic. You have to come, Mom!”

There’s a long pause in the conversation. Mom takes a deep breath and then says, “Why don’t you come with me?”

I look behind me, certain that Mike, my younger half brother, must have walked in, but it’s unlike Mike not to make his presence known. He’s always bouncing his basketball inside, even though Mom has repeatedly told him to
stop. I don’t mind it, though.

“Are you talking to me?” I ask with perfect seriousness.

Georgia doesn’t say anything, but I can see her face twist up like she just chugged rotten milk. She’d never insult me in front of Mom, but she’s doing everything she can to signal that she doesn’t want me to come. What can I say? I have a gold-star rating in the embarrassment department.

“Yes, I’m talking to you,” Mom says, and I detect a slight quiver. Sometimes I’m convinced even my own mother is afraid of me.

“Thanks for the invite, but I have a lot of homework.” I walk over to the cupboard and grab a chocolate-chip granola bar. It’s weird, I know. But sometimes, I’m ravenous. It’s almost as if I want to eat as much as I can to fill up the empty void inside of me. Other days, I can barely bring myself to nibble on a piece of toast.

But even if today I can muster an appetite, I’m mostly taking the granola bar for show. I don’t want to give my mom more reasons to worry about me. I know she’s not-so-sneakily studying me for signs, searching for any clues to my questionable mental state. I’m doing my best to hide it all from her. Once I’m gone, I don’t want her to feel guilty thinking there was something she could have done.

“Good luck tonight.” I give Georgia a fake wave and then head up the stairs to my room. Well, our room. But since she’ll be at the game, it’s my room for tonight. Once I get
to our room, I crawl into my bed. I pull the charcoal-gray comforter over my head and pretend like I’m in the middle of the ocean, waves crashing over me, my lungs filling up with water, the whole world turning black. I try to imagine my potential energy turning into kinetic energy turning into nothing. As I hum Mozart’s requiem, I wonder what it will feel like when all the lights go off and everything is quiet forever. I don’t know if it will be painful, if in those last moments I’ll be scared, but all I can hope is that it will be over fast. That it will be peaceful. That it will be permanent.

April 7
, I think to myself. Soon enough.

Sometimes I’m convinced it’s a sign of my own insanity that I still feel comforted by classical music when it was my father who first introduced me to it. He loved it. Bach, Mozart, you name it. The clunky cassette tapes were among the few things he brought with him when he came to America. When I was younger, he used to pop a tape into his old boom box that he kept on the counter at his convenience store and would tell me a story of his childhood, playing chess with his father on a smooth board made of alabaster stone or measuring people’s feet at the shoe store his uncle ran. While he talked, I would dance around the store, moving clumsily as the notes rose and fell with the tempo.

Then one day he forced me to sit. “Really listen, Aysel,” he urged, his dark eyes wide and focused. “All the answers are in this music. Do you hear them?”

So I’d listened and listened. Straining my ears in an attempt to memorize every note. I never really heard the answers, but I nodded like I did. I didn’t want my dad to get mad and turn the music off, or lock himself in his bedroom for hours like he sometimes did. With my dad, you always had to tread lightly, like you were walking on icy pavement—it was so fun when you were gliding, but it was very easy to slip.

I squeeze my eyes shut and force that memory out of my mind. I roll around in bed, humming Mozart’s requiem over and over again, and I’m able to find only one answer in the notes: April 7.

The walls of our old frame house are thin, and I can hear Mom and Georgia rattling around in the kitchen. I imagine them hugging. Georgia wrapping her arms around Mom’s thin waist and Mom running her fingers through Georgia’s shiny ponytail. The two of them fitting, interlocking, like mothers and daughters are supposed to. Fitting in a way that I never have. My edges have always been too sharp, my grooves too deep.

That’s what they should write on my tombstone: Aysel Leyla Seran, the Girl Who Never Fit.

And since I’ve never fit, not really before my dad lost it, and certainly not after, Mom’s life will be so much better without me. When I’m gone, she won’t have to be reminded of my dad every time she sees my angular nose or curly
black hair. Or my round cheeks and dimples. I know it’s my dimples that get to her the most. Luckily, they’re only really noticeable when I smile, and it’s not like I’ve been doing a lot of that lately.

Without me, my mom won’t have to stay up at night, worrying that the criminal gene, the murderer gene, was passed to me and that any day now, I’m going to blow up the school or something awful like that. I know she can’t live through it all again—the police, the media, the gossip. I know she doesn’t want to think about it, but deep down, I can see her struggling with her fear and her doubt. Her sideways glances and cautious probing questions are all her way of determining just how much of a mental case I am.

I want to say that I know for sure that I’m different from my dad. That my heart beats in a different rhythm, my blood pulses at a different speed. But I’m not sure. Maybe the sadness comes just before the insanity. Maybe he and I share the same potential energy.

All I know is that I’m not going to stick around and find out if I become a monster like my dad. I can’t do that to my mom.

I can’t do that to the world.

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 13

25 days left

T
he only good thing about Georgia cheering at the basketball game is that I have the house to myself, which means I can use the computer. Normally, I can’t ever use the computer. Or at least I can’t use it without unwanted supervision. Our household has only one computer and it’s from the Ice Age. It runs slower than a three-legged dog and its keyboard is sticky from all of the fruit punch Mike has spilled on it.

Though Mom thinks Steve is the man of her dreams—wealthy, successful, honest businessman—the truth is Steve works on the line down at the Sparkle toothpaste factory.
Sparkle, manufacturer of second-rate toothpaste and mouthwash, basically keeps Langston’s economy running. Sure, Steve’s gig on the line is an honest living and he has so far managed to keep himself out of prison, which is more than you can say for my dad. But it doesn’t mean that Steve can afford to buy all of us our own laptops, so we’re stuck with this clunker.

But tonight, the clunker is all mine.

I log on to Smooth Passages. It takes about ten minutes to even load the home page; Steve doesn’t believe in paying for high-speed internet access, either. Once I’m finally logged in, I see I have a message from FrozenRobot:

If you’re really serious about this, we should arrange a time and place to meet. But you have to be serious. I don’t want a flake.

—Roman

I can’t believe someone with the screen name FrozenRobot is accusing me of being a flake. Looks like his real name is Roman. I’m not sure how much better that is than FrozenRobot. I resist the urge to make a
Julius Caesar
joke.

I type back to him, sans Shakespearean jeers:
I’m as serious as a heart attack. No, but seriously, I’m not a flake. Like I said, I’m from Langston. Where should we meet?

I hang around the website a little longer. According to the
boards, Suicide Partners ElmoRains and TBaker14155 took the plunge. I don’t know how SovietSummer231 obtained this information, but hopefully FrozenRobot and I will have the same kind of success. I shiver and swallow the hard lump in my throat. God, this whole thing is so twisted. I stare at the living room ceiling. I wonder if I would have the guts to string myself up. If I could muster the courage, I wouldn’t need to deal with this Smooth Passages business.

The clunker makes a sound similar to a doorbell. My shoulders jerk forward and I see FrozenRobot responded to me. Looks like he’s not out at any play-off games either. I open the message:

How about tomorrow night at 5:30? We can meet at the root beer stand off Route 36. Do you know where that is? It should be pretty close to you. I’ll wear a red hat so you know who I am.

—Roman

I’m a little weirded out that FrozenRobot aka Roman wants to meet in such a public place. I guess that means he’s not a serial killer or rapist or anything. Then again, I’m not sure it’d be so bad if he was a serial killer. At least I’d get it over with quickly. Unless he’s one of the types who’s into torture. That’d be no good. I don’t want a long death; I want an instant one. I’m a coward like that.

I tell him that 5:30 tomorrow at the root beer stand is fine. I get off work at 5:00 tomorrow, so I’ll just lie to Mom and tell her I’m working late. It’ll be easy. I don’t really like FrozenRobot’s choice of venue, but I don’t want to start the whole thing off by being difficult. The root beer stand is popular with kids like my sister. It gets really crowded after football and basketball games. Cheerleaders share ice-cream floats and basketball players scarf down chili cheese fries. Vomit.

It goes without saying it’s not my scene. Not that anywhere is my scene.

I log off the computer and head back upstairs. I pull my physics book out of my backpack. It’s strange, but the closer I get to death, the more I want to learn. I guess I don’t want to die a complete dumbass. I open my notebook and scribble down the problems at the end of the chapter that Mr. Scott assigned.

We’re starting our unit on the conservation of energy. According to Mr. Scott, energy cannot be created or destroyed—it can only be transferred. Potential energy can turn into kinetic energy and then back into potential energy, but the energy can’t ever just go away. This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. I read over the first practice problem again: “A sky diver has a mass of 65 kg and is standing in a plane that is 600 meters off the ground. What is the diver’s potential energy before jumping from the plane?”

BOOK: My Heart and Other Black Holes
12.22Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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