The Blue Girl (7 page)

I stand there in the kitchen, looking at this boy of mine. If I close my eyes, I can hear the girl's breath whistling behind me when I ran out to the car. It was like a song.

I say,
Never mind the pies, it's time for you to go to bed
.

For once the boy listens. He ambles out in that way he has, head hanging low, his feet seeming to float.

Alone in the kitchen, I whisper that I'm the one who took the pies. The pies are mine. And there will be more.

Caroline

Epidermis
.

Pigment
.

Melanin
.

Every time Mr. Davis teaches something new, I can't think about the words on the next test, all I can think about are cells. If I could cut my body open like a frog, I wonder how many cells would be inside. I wonder if I could count them all, and if I could, how long it would take. I imagine it would take my whole life, that I could probably spend all my remaining days counting and never finish. It would be a goal though, something to strive for, and I need goals, that much I know. Maybe if I spent all my time counting my cells, I wouldn't be thinking of Ethan's brain filled with all those mixed-up synapses, or Greg's brain filled with endorphins. Instead I could think about the difference between voluntary and involuntary impulses, and what
would happen if the involuntary part of my brain just stopped firing neurons. I'd stop breathing, like the blue girl at the lake. I'm not even sure I really saw her anymore. Was she really blue, or did my brain etch a picture into my memory, making me think I saw her? Really, what guarantee do we have that we're going to keep breathing from minute to minute? How do any of us know whether at any second—like right here, right now—we won't just stop?

My obsession with my brain has gotten worse. Every night, and sometimes during the day, especially during biology, I keep thinking about my brain. When Mama talked to me over her pies, I'd wonder if she knew I was thinking about my brain instead of listening to her. I did try to listen as she talked about her mother, my grandmother from Russia, and sometimes I'd think about asking for a taste of the chocolate or the vanilla-scented filling, but then I'd start thinking about my brain sending its hunger messages to my stomach, and I would will it to stop. I imagined my thoughts swimming along the convolutions. I thought I could feel my neurons firing like gunshots.

At night in bed, I keep thinking,
What if something happened to my basal ganglia? What if my cerebellum stopped functioning? What if the neurotransmitters dried up? What if the pathway between my spinal cord and cerebral cortex got clogged? And what if my gray matter turned blue?

I think about my heart and my lungs all the time. It's all tied into my brain, which I have no control over, and sometimes when I sit in Mr. Davis's class, I keep thinking that my brain has turned against me.

It says on the web that we're only born with a certain amount of gray matter and no more. It's finite. I don't think Greg has much gray matter at all, since he doesn't even understand biology. Rebecca has more than Greg, but I don't think she has as much as Audrey. I think Audrey has the most. Much more than I do. When Audrey pulled the girl out of the lake, I stood there with my eyes closed just like everyone else. Audrey is the one who knows what to do.

What if Audrey's gray matter turned blue when she saved her?

Not long after she saved the girl, I slept at Audrey's house. I hadn't slept there since her father got taken away, and Mama thought maybe it wasn't such a good idea, sleeping there with Audrey's dad not long out of the hospital. But she relented because Audrey's mom needed us to stay with Buck. She didn't say why, but the three mothers were going out. That was the first night I smelled the vanilla and chocolate in the air at Audrey's house, the same smell that floats through mine, but I didn't mention it to Audrey, because she looked so tired. I think our moms were putting something over on us.

We were sitting in the den with the television off, Audrey and her little brother, Buck, and I, drinking Cokes. Buck was supposed to be in bed, but Audrey always lets him stay up. Her father played that weird basketball game of his in the living room. We watched him for a while, and I even clapped once when he scored a basket. He smiled at me, a half-smile out of the side of his mouth. I almost missed it. Buck and Audrey stared at me when he smiled, and I felt the way I do when my brain seems to turn against me and I go all red in front of other people. I tried to distract her by asking where her mom was, where she'd gone with Mama and Libby.

Audrey said,
She thinks it's a secret
. She laughed when she said that. I laughed, too, but I don't know why I laughed. I didn't get the joke.

Buck said,
Watch this, Caroline, this is about her
, and then he held his breath until his face started to go red and then blue. He fell on the rug. Audrey's father didn't even look at him, he just kept shooting the Nerf ball. Audrey had to jump off the couch and make Buck sit still until he caught his breath again.

That's enough about her
, she said. She said it in a gentle way, though, not angry as I would have been if Greg had done something like that in front of my friends, holding his breath and falling down. It's bad enough Greg keeps
pawing at one of my best friends and keeps going on and on about the blue girl. After it looked as if he'd settled down, Audrey walked Buck to his bedroom. I leaned over on my chair to hear.

Tell me again
, he said,
tell me about her again
.

Audrey leaned down and said,
Not tonight, Bucky, go to bed now
.

I almost got up and went over to them. I wanted to whisper,
Yes, please, Audrey, tell it again. Tell us about how you saved her, Audrey. Did you feel it, all that blue skin and body? Do you think it got inside you?
because Audrey's so skinny now, with blue veins under her eyes. Audrey doesn't seem to worry if her brain might turn blue, not like I do.

Even though Audrey saved a girl who was almost dead, she doesn't think the things that I do, about whether she's turning blue inside, or whether she'll stop breathing. I didn't even see much of what happened, since I had my eyes closed most of the time, holding on to Mama, but now I'm the one who worries about dying.

The night of that sleepover, Audrey didn't sleep. I woke up almost every hour and heard her father shuffling around the living room playing his game. At about three or four in the morning, I got up to go to the bathroom and saw him sitting on the floor with the ball between his knees.

Doesn't it ever stop?
I asked when I got back to Audrey's bedroom. I was on the floor in my sleeping bag, and Audrey was in bed with the palms of her hands pressed against her eyes.

No
, she said.
It never stops
.

I should have said something then, anything. Audrey's become so pale and thin lately. That night she looked compressed somehow. Can someone's body compress itself? She yawns all the time and nods off during tests. I let her cheat all the time. It's the least I can do. I may have issues with my brain and worry about it all the time, but at least I don't have to live with the memory of saving the blue girl.

I have to study for the biology test so I won't fail like my brother, Greg. Mr. Davis says if you understand the cell, you understand the universe, but I don't think that's true, because no one understands the blue girl. Not even Mr. Davis. He doesn't even think she exists.

I try to understand my cells. At my desk I lift my arm up to the light and imagine them flaking off or circling together trying to build more skin. It makes me feel better to think about my skin regenerating itself, growing, working to keep me alive.

If I can stop thinking about my cells long enough, maybe I can figure out why the girl is blue. Rebecca wants to know. Greg wants to know. No one says,
I want to know
, but
I can tell. I can see the wanting in their eyes. Audrey wants to know more than any of us, even though she won't say so. I want to know, but I think Audrey's desperate to know most of all.

It's embarrassing to have an older brother in the same class. Greg doesn't seem to care, even though everyone thinks he's obnoxious and slightly stupid, but in a cool way, as if being an idiot is cool. They want to be like him, and I can see Rebecca staring at his crotch sometimes. I wish she wouldn't look at him that way. It makes me think of all the arousal her sympathetic nervous system is going through. I would rather not think about anyone's sympathetic nervous system or its arousal, but I can't help it. Rebecca's been different since the summer, since her boobs grew and she started sweeping her hair to one side.

Extracellular matrix
.

Vacuole
.

Bacteriophage
.

I cannot make the words penetrate my brain. The words are like dead cells that won't regenerate. Last year, before the blue girl came and almost drowned, I was acing earth science. I got a 97 on the final exam. Mrs. Gordon, the teacher, wrote,
Bravo, Caroline!!!
with three exclamation points. I used to be able to read the glossary in the back
of the book and memorize all the terms in one try. When Mr. Davis made us map out gene combinations, I got up and filled in all the dominant and recessive genes without even studying.

I wonder if there's a recessive gene for blue pigment in the skin.

When Mama goes out, I stay on the computer all night. She doesn't like me spending that much time on the computer. She says it will ruin my eyesight and give me wrinkles in my forehead from squinting. She doesn't say it, but I know she thinks I don't need one more thing working against me when my waist is already rolling over on itself and my thighs are too thick. This morning I put pins in my hair to keep it off my face, and when I asked Mama how it looked, her face told me everything.
It looks nice, Caroline, very nice
, she said, but I knew it wasn't true. Mama's a very bad liar.

On the web I look up “epidermal pigmentation.” It says, “Sorry, no matches found.” I take one of the butterflies out of my hair and think about how many skin cells I might've killed just from sliding the pin against my scalp. It almost makes my cry. I type in “blue” and “skin.” It says, “The word ‘and' is very common. Try another word.” My neurons feel like they're on fire. I type “blue skin” and up come all these hits. I remember Mr. Davis
talking about random selection, so I close my eyes. I hold my finger out to see where it lands on the screen.

It's a questionnaire. I hear Greg thumping around downstairs, looking to steal Mama's pies. They smell so good, a sweet, creamy goodness that seeps right into the fat cells. Mama is right about that much.
They're for a bake sale
, she says whenever we ask her, and to me, Greg says,
When has there even been a bake sale in this fucking town?
And I say,
Shut up, Greg, those are Mama's pies
. He wants them, but he knows better. Mama loves those pies.

It takes ten minutes to download the questionnaire because my computer's so slow. Last week I asked Dad if he would think about getting me a new computer if I get an A in biology. He just looked at Mama and shook his head, and when we were alone, Mama said,
Don't ever look to a man for happiness, Caroline
. I told her I wouldn't, but I still want the computer.

The list is long. I print out the most important questions on page one: