READYING THE COLORS by Amy Fanning
Kelsi knows the scent of a school bus: plastic, bananas, B.O., baloney, and something she can never put her finger on, something like rain, like a puddle rainbowed with oil.
On boarding the Greyhound from San Francisco to Chicago, though, she detects no banana. In fact, there are only pleasant smells at first, smells she likes, the smells of leather and diesel and the driver’s coffee and the good chemical smell of her new backpack, which she loves, loves the criss-crossing elastic straps and the plastic clasps that fasten together with satisfying clicks, loves the tough red fabric zipped around enough space for a week’s worth of supplies, space enough to turn you into a self-sustaining adventurer, independent and free, space you absolutely need if you’re going to hike the Pacific Crest Trail with your father, which Kelsi absolutely isn’t going to do.
Still, she loves the backpack.
Kelsi texts her sister: On the bus to Chicago. Stinks like ass.
There is no reply. Not after five minutes. Not after ten.
Kelsi puts in her earbuds and leans against the window. Outside, fields tumble past, one after another. Gold. Green. Brown. Occasionally houses move slowly across the window, so slowly it seems she has all the time in the world to study them, then they are gone, all at once, sucked up like cartoon houses into a tornado. Some look like where Superman’s Earth parents might live – two-story, white with blue trim, porches. Most, though, are shacks that remind her, again, of cartoon houses, the kind that lean into the wind with fierce, strained expressions on their wooden faces. She could live in one of them, she thinks. Bring food and her sleeping bag out here, her good new pack, reinforce the walls with 2x4s. She knows how to do things like that because of her father, who grew up on a farm and used to build pens for the sheep and pigs.
Kelsi catches a boy, 19 or 20, hair combed down over his eyebrows, looking at her from across the aisle. He is turned so she can almost see what’s printed on the front of his t-shirt, but she doesn’t want to stare. The bus is full and there are people talking in loud voices, yelling into cell phones even though the driver told them not to and looked at Kelsi with hard eyes when he said it.
“You know me,” a man says into his phone from somewhere in the back. “You’re gonna disrespect me? I’m gonna disrespect you right back.” Then he laughs: the sound of seals. The woman in the seat next to Kelsi is silent, eyes closed, clutching her purse to her chest. She has stirred only once, to reach into the purse and extract three grapes, which she ate one at a time, moving her jaw in an over-and-around sawing motion, mantis-like, as if she were skinning the grapes with her teeth before swallowing.
Kelsi feels the boy still looking. She zips her hoodie up higher, all the way up, but is otherwise still, focusing on a point just over his shoulder, as if intent on the view. She lets her eyes drift closed. She can sense his examination of her face, her mouth, the nearly hidden column of her throat, and it is the way a dry paintbrush moves against your skin: needling, pleasant.
She turns back to her own window, daydreaming of paint. In art class, Kelsi doesn’t create her own pieces, which probably means she should earn an F, especially because it’s the second year of high school and it’s supposed to be serious, but the teacher gives her a B because Kelsi helps out with supplies and cleaning and has passion for color. This might actually be true, Kelsi hopes it is, but Kelsi’s sister Melanie would say – if Melanie were still talking to her, that is – that the teacher just wants to give Kelsi a good grade. Kelsi is a pretty girl, and as Melanie has told her again and again, pretty people get more stuff.
Stuff they don’t deserve. Stuff they didn’t earn.
Jesus must have been pretty, Melanie always used to say, and Kelsi always laughed, even though she didn’t get it. Jesus, in Kelsi’s opinion, had a pretty rough go of it.
The clouds beyond her window make her think of the way you can slap a blob of white paint into blue and cut it with a knife until it’s nearly, but not quite, a uniform shade, so there’s a moment when it’s almost purely blue with only the faintest imaginable streaks of white. Those streaks remind Kelsi of veins, of eyeballs, of her father’s cataracts, which he had to have surgery on because he’s so old, 30 years older than Kelsi’s mom, the one Kelsi heard a neighbor lady call a “Playboy bunny,” the one who probably got things she didn’t deserve, hadn’t earned.
Kelsi’s mom is embarrassingly pretty, but she has some good qualities, too. She loves to garden, for example – their backyard is filled with redwood boxes she built herself, inside which grow purple-hearted cabbages and chard with massive leaves free of nibbles even though Kelsi’s mom never sprays insecticide.
She used to make Kelsi deliver vegetables from the garden to their neighbors – paper sacks full of zucchini the size of terriers, striped green skins, gnarled stems. But it didn’t do any good. No one ever invited her mom for coffee or to play cribbage. And when she started showing up at the Pilates studio, the sight of her fatless length of torso and burnished, impeccable thighs sent the neighbor ladies to Zumba instead.
Kelsi knows the backstory of these clouds, the barely there twists and wisps. They started out as regular clouds, white and pregnant with moisture, but because everything in the universe is moving away from everything else, at least according to Mr. Greenstadt, the physics teacher, the clouds unraveled, turning from ball to string and pretty soon, she thinks, they will be nothing at all. Like the universe, which can’t wait to get away from itself. All because of dark energy. Mr. Greenstadt says that not only is everything rushing away from everything else, but it is doing so faster and faster as time goes on, which makes no sense unless you account for dark energy, a giant invisible hand pushing toward ultimate loneliness, which is how Kelsi described it in her report. In the margin, in emerald ink, Mr. Greenstadt wrote: Poetic!
She texts again: Can’t believe ur still ignoring me. The letters i-g-n-o make something blossom inside her throat.
Her phone stays dark. At least her parents haven’t tried to reach her. She knew they wouldn’t but still she’s relieved. She told her mother she was spending spring break at the beach with her friend Dana’s family. Dana will cover for her if she has to, but Kelsi knows it won’t be necessary. Her parents will be much too embroiled in the unmaking of their marriage to check up on her.
She turns away from the window and looks across the aisle. The boy is staring again, eyes glistening and alert under his brows. The air between them rustles.
Here is another thing she didn’t earn, Kelsi thinks. Didn’t deserve. Melanie is right. Kelsi is a pretty girl. She’s heard her mother remark on it often enough in one of those self-satisfied conversations of hers, the pair of them as alike as two coins from the same mint, Kelsi’s father likes to say.
Yes, I know it, her mother might croon into the phone. Kelsi really is a classic beauty.
This is not exactly true, to Kelsi’s way of thinking. A classic beauty is Cleopatra. Or Helen of Troy. Kelsi and her mother are more Kate Upton, less daughter of the gods. Strong faces with sculpted cheekbones and alien-large eyes set wide.
Kelsi knows her sister would not be considered a classic beauty, but Kelsi privately thinks Melanie the loveliest girl in all the world. Her heart swells at the thought of her sister’s face. That pink skin, face poreless as a baby’s, features nearly as small, snub of a nose, eyes of sea-blue rimmed in pink, and an upper lip that disappears into gum when she smiles: these combine to give Melanie the look of a pampered rabbit, a child’s stuffed toy, a Beatrix Potter illustration, delicate as watercolor, a translucent suggestion on the page.
* * *
They make it to Los Angeles by 5:24, one minute ahead of schedule. Here they have an hour layover, and Kelsi will have to get off this bus and onto another.
Just as she steps into the aisle to shuffle out with the other passengers, the boy, who must have waited in his seat for her, touches her arm, a graze, more a tug on the sleeve of her hoodie than actual contact. She looks down. His t-shirt reads: The Ego Is Not Your Amigo. Her sister would like that shirt, Kelsi thinks.
“Hey,” he says. “You stopping or changing here?”
She nods before realizing it’s a choice. She keeps nodding, unable to decide if she should lie, conscious of the growing space in front of her, the anxious heat of the bodies behind, an elderly lady making coughing noises, trying to hurry Kelsi along. She thinks about stepping into the empty row in front of the boy, leaning over the seat so she doesn’t seem rude, but knows this will make her look eager, as if she likes him.
“Want to grab something to eat or something?” he asks when she doesn’t speak and he’s nervous now, flipping his bangs out of his eyes, not quite looking at her. In this desert light, she can see the hairs assembled across his chin, the sketch of a beard. He is hardly older than the boys at school, and thin, but there is something different, some thickening in the bones of his face so, if she were to paint him, there would be more shadow.
The lady behind her chuffs out a breath and shifts forward, seconds away from saying something, Kelsi can feel it. The bus driver is on his feet now too, looking back to see what’s the holdup, gaze searching and landing on Kelsi. She feels her tongue inside her own mouth, cowering, curled backward in retreat, her face flushing in the awkward way it does, so unlike her mother’s, which is always serene, confident, eyebrows lifted, hint of arrogance. How many times has she witnessed an encounter like this one, out with her mother somewhere? The man at the dry cleaner’s: “I just have to tell you,” he says, leaning so close even Kelsi, small, clutching her mother’s hand in hers, smells the tomatoes and onions on his breath, “I just have to say you are an extremely attractive woman. I just had to say that.” Or her father’s professor friend on Christmas Eve, words vodka-carved into rough shapes: “Christ, Stephen, how did you do it? Look at that thing.”
“Excuse me,” the lady says. “Seriously.”
Kelsi glances back, aims a smile at the lady, her mother’s smile, the smile of a woman you don’t want to disappoint. “I’m really sorry,” Kelsi says. And to the boy: “Maybe later.” A little shrug. “I’m going to walk around a while, earn my meal.” This, too, her mother’s line, corny and oldfashioned to Kelsi’s ears. The word meal.
“Gotcha,” he says, a bitterness that makes her feel guilty and then irritated, and then guilty.
“Really,” she says, moving quickly now, the bus driver watching. “Catch you later.”
See, she can be good at this, acting cool, woman of the world. Except now, she realizes, she will not be able to hang out in the bus terminal. Now she’ll have to leave, walk around a strange neighborhood, pretend to care about calories. But her courage wells up once she’s away from the bus, the awkward exchange with the boy, and in the late-afternoon sun, the light. She has come so far already. Look what she’s done, what she’s doing.
The terminal squats at the back of a parking lot, the lot a blacktop veldt with sparse clusters of shrubs and palm trees, a billboard with the Greyhound logo out front, a silver dog flying over a blue background. Kelsi heads out, settling her backpack on her shoulders, the good dense weight against her spine.
Across the street, there are shops with rolled-down corrugated metal doors, a stucco building with dirty canvas awnings like drooping eyelids. One shop, #A, is open. In the window, an EBT/ATM sign and plants in terracotta pots. She jaywalks; there are no cars, only a man in a long shirt and baseball cap pushing a cartful of boxed taco shells.
Kelsi starts to feel a bit dizzy from all of these new things to look at. She has to stop herself from swaying, from rocking back and forth on her feet looking for a comforting rhythm. There are so many things to see and the fear is starting to lap at her heels a little. She needs to keep moving. If she stops, the fear might rise beyond her heels, might start gnawing at the backs of her calves. It’s like standing on the sand when the waves come in, how for a long time you think you’re far enough back, and for a long time you are, and then all at once you’re soaked to the waist.
She is very hungry now: tells herself, as her father might say, that everything will look brighter if she has a bite to eat. She needs to find something and get back to the station in time to catch her bus. Other than the Korean baked goods, though, which look fancy and expensive, nothing seems promising.
Kelsi walks to the corner. There are three parked GMC vans, each with a piece of metal that doesn’t match, like prosthetic limbs – white hood on a green van, gray unpainted side door, a roof entirely eaten by rust. Next to these, a tall white building, empty, behind a wrought iron fence with cyclone razor wire on the corner of – she looks up – 7th and Decatur.
She is so hungry.
There is a McDonalds, her phone tells her, three blocks away. There is no way she could get lost, miss the bus. It’s three blocks, practically around the corner, and she’s got her phone.
Still.
Kelsi turns toward the bus station. She feels better with it in her sight. She checks her phone. 5:43. The afternoon sun is deeply slanted now, as if it’s actually being delivered to the earth on meteorological arrows, like the weather map on the news. Long slabs of light, an egg-yolk orange, paint the vast Greyhound parking lot, glance off silver bumpers and glass windshields and gather, finally, in the farthest corner of the lot, where a big white truck sits, its silver panels open like wings on one side. Her stomach rumbles in excitement. She recognizes this kind of truck, the kind that sells pierogi or tacos or gyros. She can get something to eat, something cheap, without even leaving the block. This seems like a special kind of – what is that word, Kelsi thinks as she heads back to the parking lot, the one that means a thing happening at just the right moment? Not luck, exactly. Paradox? No: synchronicity. One of Melanie’s words. And Melanie loves food trucks. Back when she was still writing to Kelsi, Melanie would often describe what eating at college was like, how she and her friends would pool their money and buy a peach pie at the grocery store to split for lunch, or how they’d go to “the pub” for 2-dollar Tuesdays or to the food trucks, where Melanie would feast on greasy lamb kebobs on a bed of rice so big she’d have to carry the box home in both of her small hands.
“Hola, bonita.” The man at the truck window has silver hair and wears a clean white shirt under an apron streaked with orange. “What can I get for you today, bonita?”
Kelsi does not feel uncomfortable. She is used to this kind of attention. She’s not sure how she developed this skill, but somehow she can tell the difference between older men she needs to be afraid of, and those she doesn’t. This man, with his friendly smile and his hands busy wiping the counter while he talks, doesn’t scare her. He is not serious. He is admiring, in a casual sort of way, not contemplating. The ones who think about you, those are the ones to watch.
Kelsi orders two carnitas tacos and a Coke for eight dollars. The tacos she loads up with as many radishes and jalapenos as she judges generously reasonable, slathers them with tomatillo salsa, and settles herself beside one of the silent Greyhound buses resting in the parking lot. Using her backpack as a table, Kelsi leans against a tall tire and eats, the smell of taco mixing deliciously with rubber and warm asphalt.
She texts Melanie: In LA. Eating tacos. U wd love it.
There is no response, of course, but Kelsi doesn’t mind so much. There are moments, like this one, when she only wants to send out a few celebratory words, only wants to tell her sister that she’s accomplished a great feat: taking a trip alone, not getting lost, feeding herself.
Kelsi has never smoked, never even tried a cigarette before, but if she had one now she would light it, just for the effect. She sees herself from a little ways off, a disorienting but thrilling ability she’s had since she was small: the camera hovering 20 feet over her head or, as it does now, gliding along a parallel latitude, revealing the geometry of her long legs, bent at the knee as precisely as an insect’s, as extremely, the calves neat, tucked into the backs of the thighs, the slanted light pooling on the roof of the bus and spilling over, lighting the long girl up in gold.
A shadow separates from the hulking mass of the bus, blotting Kelsi out from the waist up. She blinks, aware of her skin, of the asphalt warm everywhere it touches her body, even the soles of her feet through her boots.
It is the boy in the t-shirt. He has sunglasses on now, mirrored and hip, the individual hairs on his chin darker and longer than she’d realized, standing out as if painted on his skin, which is the blue-gold of cold sand.
“Hiding from me back here?” he asks.
His expression makes her think of a fight she had not long ago with her mother, her mother saying, Swear to God, Kelsi. Wipe that smirk off your face this instant. Swear. To. God.
Kelsi knows the purpose of the smirk, the feeling of it from the inside: a flexible degree of disdain, greater or smaller depending on the insult, a shield against future hurt or disillusion. Maybe, because she understands the smirk, she should feel some sympathy for him, but she doesn’t, because now she is occupied with the problem of motion. She doesn’t want to stay seated, not with the boy, even as skinny as he is, looming over her, her head level with his thighs, her neck crimped so she can look at him. She wants to get up, wants to be eye level with him, wants her legs under her so she can flee or kick if she has to, wants her backpack on her back.
This is a problem, though, because at least here, beside the bus tire, she is somewhat protected from his gaze. If she gets up, it will be a show no matter how she does it. She could tip forward to a crouch, push herself up in a power move from the thighs, but then her pelvis would roll toward him like an invitation and she’d feel exposed until she managed to straighten completely. Her other option is to turn over on her side, take a knee, plant one foot and push off to rise. This would keep her center hidden behind her legs, but she’d have to stick out her bottom at least a little as she lifted up from hands and knees.
Kelsi hates that she can’t read boys the way she can older men, hates this discomfort and confusion and that other feeling too, a feeling unnameable but the same as when you step off a curb or a stair and the ground is farther away than you think, a buckling in the stomach and the knees.
She gestures with her empty taco container. “Do you see a trash anywhere?”
When he glances over his shoulder, she gets to her feet, scrambling, nearly leaping, and slides into her pack.
“Over there.” He points toward the taco truck. His face is puckered, a little annoyed, as if she’s changed the subject, which she has, but also hopeful, wanting to help her, to be a hero.
They walk back to the station together, Kelsi setting a brisk pace. “I have to be off,” she tells the boy, her phone in her hand. “My bus leaves in eight minutes.”
She’s reverted to a kind of speech so oldfashioned it can only be her father’s. Have to be off. She wishes she could stop, wishes she could simply act like her normal self, but this boy makes her feel miserably nervous and insecure and haughty all at once.
He looks at her, surprised. “You going to Chicago, too?”
Some feeling sinks and surfaces, bobbing inside her chest. Destiny, Mr. Greenstadt said once, is the way people a long time ago explained the brain’s pattern-making compulsion. You shouldn’t think of this as a gift, he went on. It’s something the brain does. It keeps us alive as a species. It starts wars.
While they’re waiting in the long line to board the bus, Kelsi thinks about destiny. The boy extends his hand. His name is Evan.
“Kelsi,” she offers, “with an “i,” just to have something to say, though it comes out as if she’s daring him to mock her. In fact, the name on her birth certificate is Kelsey, e-y, but in 4th grade she’d insisted on the “i” and had been so vehemently opposed by her mother she felt unable to give in, even now. Wasn’t it enough that “Kelsey” meant fierce island? Wasn’t it enough to be destined at birth for loneliness, not only by dark energy, but by her own name?
“How old are you?” he asks.
It occurs to Kelsi that there are many twists and traps in this question, many loaded coils for which she should choose the proper trajectories, but she simply can’t summon the energy.
“Sixteen,” she answers. Truthfully. Casually.
They are shuffling nearer the doors.
“Whoa,” he says, raising his hands, like a character in a play. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”
And it must be a play she herself has written, because Kelsi knows what he is about to say, knows the way his mouth will look even before his lips curl open on the first syllable.
Don’t say it, she thinks at him. Don’t say it. Don’t say it. Don’t say it.
“Jailbait,” he says, smirk in place, hands still raised, a dangerous animal graciously refusing to be dangerous.
She has time only to look up at him, to meet his eyes for a long moment, to see the skin around his nose whiten, the blood moving into his cheeks, and then she is boarding, climbing the steps and finding her seat, settling herself and her earbuds into place and leaning against the window, the parking lot through the glass glazed a dirty green tint.
She doesn’t move, but knows the boy, Evan, has taken a place across the aisle, away from her. She knows without looking that his face is mottled, grape-colored; his eyes, behind heavy lids, seek the floor. He has ruined all possibilities between them, and he realizes it, and for that she likes him much better.
* * *
From Los Angeles the bus turns east toward Nevada and, though California has always seemed so narrow to Kelsi – the way it looks on maps, a crescent of land clinging to the rest of the continent – it turns out to be broad through the middle, massive and empty. The hue of the earth deepens from dun to ochre, though she doesn’t know whether this is from iron in the soil or a trick of the dying light, the sky a sudden violet ebbing toward black.
Maybe this she could paint, Kelsi thinks. This scene from the window, this deepening landscape.
Probably not, though. She can see herself readying the colors, mixing the perfect yellows, but there the vision ends.
It is three hours before they reach their next stop, Barstow, only halfway across the state. Night has fallen. Inside the bus, the light has gone murky. Kelsi has the strange feeling they are no longer part of anything at all, that none of the people on the bus, except possibly the driver, exist anymore, that they won’t exist again until they surface in Chicago. Like being on a submarine, she thinks as she drifts off to sleep. Not really part of the sea; absent from the land.
She wakes at dawn. What wakes her is not the sky, a weak watery gray, but a sound. The bus’s engine has registered as silence since they left Los Angeles; this is something else: an animal roar, oceanic in scope.
Motorcycles.
Outside her window, two dozen or more motorcycles hug the flank of the bus. She lifts her head, rises to one knee in her seat. The motorcycles are everywhere, everywhere she looks, leading in front, chasing from behind, engulfing them on all sides.
The bus driver is talking into his radio. Kelsi tucks her other leg up on the seat to gain height and peers over the headrests. Through the windshield she watches as the lead motorcycles perform some kind of routine. Almost a dance, she thinks. They ride three across, trios stretching to the horizon, and follow a choreography, exchanging places again and again, the motorcycle on the right swapping with the one in the middle, swapping again with the rider on the left, all three slowing down and speeding up in smooth, coordinated motions. Like braiding hair. Exactly like that. So that all down the line, the effect is one of rippling, of forever folding inward.
Evan, the boy, is awake. Their eyes meet and she turns away, settles herself down into her seat. These motorcycles are the powerful kind, Harleys, and she feels the engines as much as hears them, like thousands of plucked strings. There is something else, too, inside the din: the riders themselves, yelling and whooping and cawing.
They are as alike as any army in uniform, these riders. They wear helmets, not the thick kind that cover the whole head and face, but shiny beetle caps set close to the skull. They wear black leather vests – rockers, she remembers, a word from a television show she wasn’t supposed to watch. On the backs of the rockers, patches form two crescent shapes around a center image: a skull on fire. The top patch reads, “Tinder & Spark”; the bottom, simply, “Utah.”
A rider draws close beneath her window, the buzz of his engine rattling the glass. The motorcycle has those tall handlebars, which Kelsi can’t remember the name of, and which she knows should look ridiculous, but instead seem impossibly cool. Risky. Truant.
Morning light sculpts the rider’s arms into sinuous shapes, the skin itself tattooed with angels: angels in chains, angels on horseback, angels with snakes in their wings. He seems different somehow, from the other riders. His face, maybe. The other faces she’s glimpsed are heavy and wind-bit and tough, but his is young, the face of a silver screen pirate, chiseled bones and blue hollows. Wild.
She feels wild, too, the noise consuming all the space in her head as she waits for the rider to look up at her, waits for him to sense he is being watched and turn and catch her, which he will because our brains, Mr. Greenstadt told them once, have a whole system, a web of cells, devoted to tracking the human glance. She could look away before it happens, and probably she should, because she knows, too, what will happen after that. The rider will see her, her face, the one she didn’t earn and doesn’t deserve, and he will grin and wave or he will pound a hand against his chest as if his heart is racing and she is the cause or he will blow her a kiss or make other faces, other gestures, blunt and rude. These are all things that have happened, many times, and so she knows how it will go.
Only, he doesn’t look.
Kelsi shifts in her seat, turning her face away and then back quickly, letting her hair flutter. The human eye is expert at detecting motion.
Still he doesn’t look up. She counts to ten. And then twenty.
Look at me, she thinks.
Look at me, look at me, look at me.
These are not good thoughts. These are not the thoughts of a good person. Melanie would not have these thoughts.
Melanie would not want to be admired for something she hadn’t earned. Melanie would not be scared of having something one second, of not having it the next. Melanie would not expect, as Kelsi’s mother might say, to have it both ways.
But at that moment, the rider looks. A long look, leisurely, and there it is: the wide grin. Kelsi gasps, actually makes audible noise. His face is so beautiful, so symmetrical it reminds her of a geode she has at home on her bookshelf, those perfectly refractive crystals. His face is a kind of jewel, she thinks. He mouths something at her, mouths two words and revs the engine, the bike shooting forward, a popping sound like a gun, an explosion of speed. And Kelsi watches, a feeling of lifting and fluttering in her lungs, as the rider passes the bus by a breath, whips sharply to cut in front, and disappears from her view.
Later, Kelsi will find the motorcycle online: a Harley-Davidson Softail Classic with ape hangers. Weight: 730 pounds. She will stumble onto YouTube videos, including one called “How to Lift a Fallen Harley,” which she will watch again and again, and which stars a woman about Melanie’s size, with Melanie’s ribbon-like arms and legs. “I can’t lift 700 pounds,” the woman will say. “It’s not possible.” Then a close-up of her face, her smile going sly: “But,” she will say, “the impossible is sometimes necessary.” At this she will squat beside the bike, lean against the seat, and – letting the smooth edges of the tires act as a fulcrum – use the power of her legs to tilt the bike upright. Voila! she will say. The almost impossible, made possible.
Even a half-loaded Greyhound bus, on the other hand, is impossibly heavy, massive at 22 tons. The difference between the bus and the motorcycle is the difference between a grown man and a rabbit. And, much like the sound of a grown man crushing a rabbit beneath his boot, or so Kelsi imagines, the sound of the bus traveling over the Harley-Davidson Softail Classic and beautiful rider is surprisingly lush, full of crinkles and pop, a wet metallic ripple, and then done. There are shouts, and screams too, and then the terrible cry of the brakes, the passengers plunging forward and back, slamming into their seats, and there is pushing, everyone desperate to get off, off and away, as if the danger is somehow inside the bus and not beneath its 22 tons of bulk.
Later, Kelsi will wonder about the bus driver. She will feel sorry she didn’t say something to him, touch his arm, tell him it wasn’t his fault. Later, she will remember his wails into his cell phone: He cut right across me. He just dove under the tires. Oh God. Oh my God.
At this moment, though, there is no thought for other people, not even for the rider himself, with his beautiful face, that geometric perfection of cheekbone and chin. Those two mouthed words. At this moment there is only motion, the boy Evan taking her arm, the two of them gliding through the swarm of people and down the highway, back the way they’ve come because they can’t stop moving and so they walk and walk the long miles to the last exit, an exit which curves down into a town so small Kelsi thinks there must be some other word. Not a town, but what? A village? A hamlet? The only words in her head are old-fashioned words again, and none seem to fit this depression in the earth, this scattered collection of houses, manufactured, those single-wide trailers at the edges.
They stop there, at the top of the exit, looking over the roofs of the manufactured homes to the grassy fields beyond. There is no traffic on the freeway. No movement from the little town. It is probably, Kelsi thinks, the quietest place she has ever been in her whole life. No screen doors slamming shut, no dogs barking. There are no planes overhead, no rumble of farm equipment. No insect buzz, no lawnmowers sputtering. No birds.
“ ‘Watch this,’ ” Kelsi says. She feels Evan shift beside her. “That’s what he said to me.” Above her, the sky is painful, early-morning bright, depthless in a way that hurts her eyes. “That rider. He looked at me before it happened. He said, ‘Watch this.’ ”
Evan is silent.
Kelsi does not tell him that boys are always saying things like this to her. Not the boys her own age. They’ve known her too long. They look at her and see all the other ages they’ve been together. They find her strange, the way she’s changed in these too-desirable ways. But the seniors, the ball players: Did you see that pass? That basket? Did you see I got into Berkeley? Did you see? They are forever asking. Watch this.
“I’m sorry,” Evan says. “For before. I shouldn’t have said that. About you being jailbait.”
“Okay,” Kelsi says.
They watch the sky and the fields. She tells him she thinks the rider was only trying to join the braid, the ever-shifting chain the motorcycles made all the way down the freeway, which was beautiful in a way. Mesmerizing is the word. One of her father’s favorites. He’d told her once about Dr. Mesmer, who believed living beings are altered, like the ocean, by the movement of the planets, movement that gives all creatures a certain force, an energy. An energy you could transfer to others. Heal them with it, Mesmer thought. Evan has never heard of this before. Kelsi tells him her father is a professor and likes to know about things like where words come from. He likes origins. Also he likes younger women. Her own mother, she tells Evan, is much younger than he is, and beautiful, but his new girlfriend is younger and more beautiful still, and he is so in love he’s having a hard time pretending to be unhappy at how unhappy he’s making Kelsi’s mother. And Kelsi. And even his other daughter, the one from his last marriage, Melanie, who hasn’t spoken to any of them in five months, who told their father she just couldn’t pretend to be part of this embarrassment of a family any longer. She just couldn’t take it.
I’m sorry, she’d texted Kelsi. But I need a break from all of you. I’m dealing with enough of my own stuff and I really need boundaries right now.
Kelsi had felt all of this would be all right, that everything would turn out in the end, or by summer at least, because she and her father still had the Pacific Crest Trail. They’d always gone backpacking together, Kelsi and her father. Two or three nights, usually, but once for a whole week in Alaska, where they walked along the Nenana, a glacier-born river, which, under a morning sky, is the cold white of blue stars. This coming summer, the summer before her junior year, her father promised they’d hike as much of the PCT as they could in one month. Four weeks. While he’s still young enough to do it, he said.
But now, she tells Evan, there’s Alexis. Alexis, the most brilliant graduate student her father’s ever had, Kelsi heard him say over the phone. Brilliant, and effervescent. Like the most delicious breath of spring air. And to Kelsi: You’ll really like her, I think, kiddo. And then, just last week: What would you say to having Alexis come along with us, huh? On the trail? Give you two a chance to get acquainted. You could really show her the ropes, backpacking. What do you say?
Kelsi hadn’t been able to say anything.
The next morning, she’d bought her bus ticket to Chicago, texted her sister that she was coming, like it or not, that she wouldn’t be ignored any longer and that she, Melanie, had better be there to meet Kelsi on the other side.
Now, from one of the aluminum trailers, a woman in a bathrobe steps out and lights a cigarette. The world is starting to wake up, the air thickening with light and then, finally, with the sounds of birds.
“Head back?” Evan says.
As they walk, Kelsi tells him about art class, and about Melanie, who looks like a Beatrix Potter illustration and is the best person Kelsi has ever known, and also about Kelsi’s name, fierce island, and about dark energy. And loneliness.
There are still long shadows over the fields, lavender over the golden grass, and amethyst where the shadows touch the deeper green. This, Kelsi thinks, is what she loves about hiking trips with her father, this discovery of the minute variations in all sameness. All images are images of light, her art teacher likes to say. Through a forest, on and on you walk, and it’s all the same, and it’s dazzling in its variety: the fierce chartreuse of canopy leaves, bathed in sun; the secretive green-black undersides of ferns on the forest floor; the muscular clutching of slug and lichen and moss, color of camouflage.
“But isn’t dark energy . . .” Evan’s voice trails off, humbly.
He’s being careful with her, Kelsi realizes. Has she earned that?
He clears his throat. “I guess I mean, isn’t dark energy what holds the galaxy in place? Isn’t it what keeps the moon and the earth together with the right amount of,” here he makes wavy motions with his hands, “gravity?”
At the word gravity, a vision, a flash, there and gone, the beautiful rider on the motorcycle, the terrible wet crunch, but Kelsi smiles at Evan anyway, liking his optimism. She decides not to say that even the earth and its moon are drifting apart, a little each year, the earth’s sloshing tides gathering strength like a child on a swing, the moon knocked back by the friction. This is no time to say such a thing, and anyway it won’t matter, about the moon, not for a long long time.
There are no sirens, but Kelsi and Evan come to a new line of orange cones on the road and then there is the bus, and the ambulance, and a fire engine, and the lights spin and flash, but the paramedics, the firefighters, they seem calm, standing and talking to each other, walking slowly around, checking on the passengers, who huddle along the shoulder, some with navy blue blankets across their shoulders, just like TV. Just like TV, a dark shape, draped in black plastic, unmoving on the highway, the fallen Harley beside it, glittering.
Something happens to Kelsi’s shoulders and elbows, her knees and ankles and all the little gears of her body she’s never thought of before, gears that normally allow her to hinge and pivot and travel along. They loosen. They let go and she falls, easy as sliding into water.
When she comes back to herself, she is sitting with Evan beside the road, a blanket around her own shoulders now, a bottle of water in her hand.
“You should eat,” Evan says, and gives her half a granola bar, which is chewy but also sharp and scrapes the roof of her mouth in a way that feels good. From this angle, sitting on the ground, she can see that behind the fire engine is a sheriff’s car, with its green and gold emblem, and there beside it the bus driver is talking with big hand gestures to an officer who nods in the way of someone being told the same story again and again.
The day starts to warm, the sunlight flattening from gold to white, the asphalt cracked and smelling thickly of tar. Some of the passengers use the blankets for shade, holding them aloft until their arms tire, then letting the fabric settle over their heads like veils. Kelsi does this too, but Evan just squints into the sun. He needs the vitamin D, he tells her.
A car, plain white with four doors, comes around the curve, threading easily through the traffic cones, and parks beside the ambulance. The passengers turn their heads toward this new arrival. Kelsi grips her water bottle so it crackles.
The woman who steps out wears a red blouse and a pair of astonishingly wrinkled gray pants. Her hair is the swingy kind that stops at the jaw and is pushed back from her face with a headband, red like her blouse. She moves swiftly to the sheriff’s car, no glancing around, and shakes the officer’s hand, gives him a small white card. The bus driver, though, she pulls close and hugs. When the woman turns to look at the passengers lined up waiting under their blankets, a surge passes through the group. She walks toward them with quick, bouncing steps, swinging her arms. She is not smiling except in the eyes and Kelsi can see now that she is beautiful, or almost beautiful, would be except her forehead is too heavy, bulges forward in a way that makes her look intelligent and aggressive, and her eyebrows are thick and perfectly horizontal.
“Could everyone come over here for a minute, please?” The woman doesn’t raise her voice at all, but everyone hears, all along the shoulder, and they get up and form a circle around her. Kelsi’s legs feel too light, as if she’s been running hard, but still they hold her up and she finds herself wanting to be near this woman, who seems ready to take care of everything, including all of them.
Her name is Celia. From the corporate office, she tells them, and hands out her business cards, slowly, making eye contact, making sure everyone has one before she speaks again. On the card is her full name, Celia Asensio, and below this: Crisis Response Team, Field Leader. That’s my cell phone number, she says, and tells them they can call her any time, day or night. It’s a hard thing they’ve all gone through, a really hard thing, and their emotions might surprise them, might pop up unexpectedly in the days and weeks ahead. You could be doing something ordinary, she says, and you’ll see it all, right in front of your eyes as if it’s happening again, and that’s normal. She wants them to know that the company is there for them. That she, Celia, is there for them. That there are resources. Groups. Trauma counselors.
Celia is, as far as Kelsi can tell, the most wonderful and competent woman in the world. Kelsi clutches the white card. Even after the firefighters gather the orange cones, and the ambulance and fire engine rumble away, and the officer eases quietly into his car and lets it roll down the hill, slowly so they all know he’s hesitant to leave them; after the flatbed comes and loads up their old bus with a series of thumps and scrapes and hisses; after the new driver and new bus arrive and the passengers board, sighing into the cool seats, Kelsi and Evan settling in front; after Celia guides their old driver gently into the passenger seat of her car and after they disappear west together, Kelsi is still clutching the card, which has softened like skin in her palm.
When they change buses in Denver, she tucks it into her wallet and says goodbye to Evan, whose mother has arranged a $99 plane ticket home. “She’s freaked out about the accident,” he says. He waves at her from the sidewalk.
In Iowa the sky is complicated, blue clouds layered in strips and white ones piled on top, reaching into the sky in vast plumes like volcanic ash.
Kelsi starts to text her sister that the bus is going to be late, but understands for the first time these messages are going nowhere. No one could ignore this many: they simply aren’t being read at all. Kelsi has been thinking of her sister as a kind of deity, receiving messages in some gauzy light-filled room somewhere, reading them, chuckling or rolling her eyes but never answering for some unknown but unquestionably worthy reason, something about boundaries and distance and free will. It is easy to imagine her disciplined sister behaving this way, letting herself read but not respond. But what about Kelsi announcing she was coming to Chicago? Wouldn’t Melanie have replied then, firmly: No you’re not. Don’t even think about it. She would have. But she hadn’t.
Now Kelsi feels the emptiness at the other end of her phone and knows that, when they get to Chicago, there will be no one there for her, and she will have to call her parents, who will use their magical adult powers to get her home.
So, at first, it only summons a faint ache when the bus pulls into the strangely geometrical Chicago terminal and Kelsi sees the woman with a face so much like her sister’s, like her sister’s but not her sister’s, definitely, because this woman’s face is childishly puffy under the eyes, the chin sweetly doubled, and when she turns to the side, a mound rises from her spine, her belly waxing gibbous.
Kelsi has only an instant to marvel at this, at her sister traveling a course so hidden, so private and unimagined, because it is here, looking out from the bus window, that she discovers a subject for art class, a subject she wants to paint with all the colors she’s been preparing, and it is the moment before Melanie’s eyes find hers, when Melanie is still searching for her in the crowd, the moment when Kelsi finally recognizes her sister, finally sees her, sees only her, so that all the other people and buses and taxi cabs are just bursts of color, like tiny meteor particles, small and fast enough to break free of whatever gravity had held them, streaks of yellow and red and silver, while Kelsi’s sister is perfectly still, still and round and lit from within.
Amy Fanning’s stories have appeared online in Crack the Spine and tNY.Press.