The Year They Fell Read online

  3.(1415)(9265)(3889)(7932)(3846)(2643)(3832)(7950)(2884)(1971) …

  Major glitches are not powered through. They do not subside with the recitation of numbers, not even if I made it to a googleplex. Major glitches feel as though they will continue until my heart explodes or my brain spontaneously combusts in my skull cavity. They terrify and haunt me. I never talked to Mom about the glitches. She had enough of her own worries to deal with. And they weren’t part of The Plan. Every day at the clinic I see people who have thrown their lives away. That won’t be you. My son will be stronger than that.

  I believe I managed to keep my glitches hidden from everyone, in fact, except Mr. Unsinger, the school custodian. Once during third period, he opened the door to his cramped supply closet to retrieve his mop and found me among the cleaning supplies, reciting numbers and struggling to siphon oxygen into my lungs. He wanted to call the nurse, but I begged him not to. I grabbed his wrist and didn’t let go until the anxiety passed. Mr. U never tried to pull away. He didn’t even ask any questions.

  “My sister used to get these episodes,” he said. “After her first baby was born. Said she thought she was having a heart attack. Not for me to say, but you should talk to someone. Till then, use the space any time you need it.”

  On the day after Mom’s service, the glitch started while I was filling out an insurance form online. I got to question number four: Cause of Death. I started to type “Plane crash,” but I realized that didn’t truly answer the question. What was the cause? What was the reason?

  I went straight for Mom’s tiny bedroom closet, which was mostly empty after I’d spent the morning packing her clothes for donation. I’d left only one item hanging there—the red sweater with the cracked button she’d worn on the morning she told me that Pop left. I was seven.

  “Where did he go?” I’d asked.

  “I’m not sure, sweetheart.”

  “When’s he coming back?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “Last night when he kissed me goodnight, he said what he always says. ‘I’ll see ya when I see ya.’ It doesn’t make sense.”

  “No. It doesn’t make sense.”

  I sat on the floor of the closet, clutching Mom’s sweater, reciting digits, until the doorbell rang. And rang. I checked my pulse, took a deep breath, and diagnosed myself as ready to step out into the light. I hurtled down the stairs, but my legs tangled and I tripped, landing hard on my tailbone before bouncing the rest of the way to the floor. I limped to the front door and opened it to see Dayana repeatedly jabbing at the bell.

  “Took you long enough,” she said, a bag slung over her shoulder. Then she saw my face and added, “I mean I’m sure you were busy what with your mom crashing and all. Oh shit, sorry.”

  “Dayana…” Dayana’s father, Nelson, walked up behind her. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. He looked twenty years older.

  He put out his hand. “Hello, Harrison.”

  When I was a kid I loved hearing him talk. My mother’s Jersey City accent sounded like a tin can banging around a washing machine compared to his. Nelson had this formal way of speaking and his accent bounced and flowed like it was carried along by an ocean breeze. I especially liked the way he said my name. Ha-dee-soon.

  “We have come by to see if you might be in need of something from us,” he said. “Have you heard from your father? I have made attempts to contact him, but the phone number I had was disconnected. I left a message for his brother. I am not for sure they are speaking these days.”

  “I sent him an email,” I said. “Since I’m only seventeen, I needed him to be declared my legal guardian. He doesn’t have to actually guard me. But without his signature they won’t allow me to stay in my house. I want to stay in my house.”

  Dayana looked down and rubbed her hand back and forth against her forehead. Lately she’d been covering her skin in a pale and cakey substance that made her look sickly and hid any trace of her freckles. When we were little, the older kids around the neighborhood sometimes made jokes about those freckles.

  Maybe if you connected the dots they’d teach you how to speak English.

  She couldn’t understand what they were saying, of course. But Josie did. And she didn’t like it. She’d take Dayana’s hand and march her right up to the bullies and insist that those freckles were marks left by fairy dust. They meant that she was special and magic. That explanation always seemed plausible to me. I knew she was special.

  Even as a child, I wasn’t one to believe in magic and fairies. But Josie believed and so did Archie and that was enough for me. At home, Mom and Pop were always screaming at each other. Calling each other names. Slamming doors. At school, my friends and I were in this bubble. Archie would draw us as superheroes or kid astronauts. And it felt real. Realer than what was happening in my house.

  “You have no other family who is able stay with you? I do not think you should be alone, Ha-dee-soon.”

  There was no one. Mom’s parents died when she was young, and I’d never even met Pop’s family. “You’re lucky,” he’d told me once when I asked about it.

  I assured Nelson I would be fine on my own. I preferred it, actually. Nelson invited me to go along for lunch with him and Dayana. His treat. I thanked him for his offer but declined. Be polite, but don’t take handouts. You don’t want to owe anyone but yourself. Mom had broken her own rule once when Pop left, and we nearly lost the house. She never let me forget it.

  “If you need anything at all, please do ask,” Nelson said. “Your mother—she was very proud of you. You were her everything.”

  Dayana leaned in and said something softly in her father’s ear. He paused, then nodded, and walked back to the car, leaving Dayana behind. She waited until he drove off, then pulled the saddlebag off her shoulder and unzipped it. “I brought you something,” she said. As she headed toward the glass coffee table, an irrational thought careened through my brain. Fairy dust … She’s brought me a bag of fairy dust. We’ll pour it over my head and everything will be back to normal. Fairy dust keeps planes in the air.

  She turned over the bag and onto the coffee table poured pill vials of all variety. “For you.”

  “Wow, that’s … Thank you? What a kind thought. No one’s ever … Are those prescription?” And then I found myself blurting, “Are your parents really alive because he was too lazy to get his passport renewed?”

  Dayana blinked. “Have you been talking to my mom? I’m sorry. I mean of all the people to be chosen…”

  “No, it’s excellent. Wonderful luck. I mean, my mother, she— Thank you for the drugs, but I have work waiting and Jack still hasn’t gotten back to me on the subject of tutoring, so—”

  “Harrison?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’re you gonna do?”

  “Do?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, your mom’s dead. You’re alone in this house.”

  “Senior year starts tomorrow,” I said. “I have to keep up my GPA in order to retain my position as number one in the class over Mackenzie Markowitz. I’ll be sending in my application early to Harvard. I’ll move to Cambridge, stay in Boston for med school, followed by an internship at Mass General—either cardiology or pulmonology. After that … I’m not sure yet.”

  Dayana clearly didn’t know how to respond to The Plan that Mom and I had been formulating for over a decade. Maybe she was expecting me to collapse in hysterics or drain a whole bottle of her pills. But I hadn’t cried a single time since I heard about the crash. According to the websites, I was probably in shock. Not like Josie, but in shock nonetheless. Or maybe I didn’t break down because Mom prepared me. Over and over again. I won’t live forever, Harrison, and you can’t count on your father. But even if I’m gone I won’t leave you. Just like my parents never left me when they died. She told me this the day after Pop left. And at least once a week every week after that.

  Dayana picked up a pill bottle from the table, shook several green tablets i
nto her hand, and swallowed them dry.

  “I need to go back upstairs and finish my essay,” I told her. “I don’t want to lose momentum.”

  She looked disappointed. “Can I hang out? I promise I won’t bother you. These are good for anxiety, but after I take them I need to lie down for a few minutes. Plus, I don’t really feel like going home. There’s a lot of crying.”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  She followed me up the stairs and back into my room. I sat down at my desk as she wandered around, checking out the books on my shelves.

  “It was Nelson’s idea to come over here,” she said. “He showered and shaved and everything. He and Vanesa are still barely talking, but since the crash, it’s like they’ve switched places. I know they could’ve died and all, but it’s totally fucking bizarre.”

  “She wasn’t even supposed to go on the trip, you know.”

  “Your mom?”

  “She hated being the fifth wheel or seventh wheel with the other couples. But Jack’s and Archie’s moms convinced her. I heard them talking when I was tutoring him. ‘You deserve fun, too, Jen.’ ‘We miss you, Jen. The kids are seniors. We made it!’ Jack’s mom even offered to pay. They wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  “Oh.” She stopped at my porthole window and peered down onto the Clays’ patio. “Why did you go to the party?”

  “I don’t know. Mom and I had agreed that I’d spend the night outlining my essays. I spoke to her right before they boarded the plane. The music was loud and the connection was spotty. I could barely hear her. I hung up before we even said goodbye. I never did that. I thought she would call back. I waited hours. I was closing the blinds when I saw Archie down there on the patio. He was struggling with the keg and getting beer all over his shirt. I felt … affronted.”

  “Affronted?”

  “Insulted. Offended. I’m Jack’s tutor. Or I was. Mom babysat all three of us for years when we were repaying the loan from the Clays. I thought, What am I doing in this room? If Archie Gallagher is at this party, then why not me?”

  She put a hand on the streaked glass. “Why not you?”

  “But I was sorry as soon as I got there. Archie was the only person I really knew and I don’t really know him anymore either.”

  Dayana turned away and sank down on my bed. She picked up a photo of me and Pop on the beach from when I was four. He was in the water up to his waist while I stood on his shoulders, holding on to his hands.

  Dayana lay back, one of her oversize black stomping boots now dangling off the end of her foot. “I remember him,” she said. “Your dad. He always called me Dana. And rolled his r’s like he was trying to sound Spanish. ‘Hola, Dana. Yo soy Rrrrroberrrrto.’ Oh, and he wore sandals and he was missing a toenail. Freaky.”

  I nodded. “His right big toe. He used to say it gave his foot character. He lost it in a surfing accident when he was a teenager. Although every time I asked him about it, he’d invent a different story about the incident. Sometimes it would be a rival surfer who cut him off, or a once-in-a-decade rogue wave that appeared in a flat sea and slammed him into the jetty. Once he told me he’d been attacked by a hungry great white.”

  Dayana had dozed off on my bed. She murmured and turned her head, leaving a smudged streak of pale makeup on my gray pillowcase. On her cheek, I could see an exposed swath of freckled skin. A girl in my bed. I’d imagined many such scenarios with many different girls. Celebrities, classmates, teachers. Suddenly, the room felt ten degrees warmer. My hands were slick. My heart raced. “Excuse me, please,” I said to unconscious Dayana, before rushing back toward Mom’s closet and sweater.

  When I stepped back out this time, Dayana was gone.

  * * *

  The alarm on my phone trilled at 6:14 A.M., but I had already been awake for hours. I can’t say for sure whether I slept at all the night before my first day of senior year. I ran through the day’s schedule for the hundredth time. First period—AP calculus. Math had always come easily to me. Math made sense. Equations made sense. A + B = C. Everything had a purpose and a reason. I tried to write an equation for Mom’s accident. Anguilla + Bad Luck = Crash? But equations have variables and constants. There was no constant here, unless you counted Mom being gone.

  I silenced the alarm and walked to the bathroom. To save time, I’d slept in the blue button-down and chinos my mother had bought me for my first day of senior year. She liked to brag that at seventeen I already dressed like the man I would become.

  I walked to the mirror and shut my eyes, visualizing my day just as Mom had taught me on the morning I started preschool at Sunny Horizons. It was the same technique she taught her patients at the rehab clinic where she worked as a counselor. Imagine how you want your day to go. Set goals and picture how you will achieve them, just as I’ve been visualizing your life since before you were born. I envisioned myself driving Mom’s red Saturn to school, sitting in class, memorizing the course syllabi—attacking senior year with renewed purpose. I saw myself feeling solid and safe and in control, and making it through day one without the use of Mr. Unsinger’s supply closet.

  I lifted Mom’s keys from the hook by the door and was heading for the driveway when I realized I’d forgotten something very important: the traditional first day photo. Mom had snapped the same picture of me on the front porch from preschool to junior year, pasting them in a brown-and-gold album. I’d watched her doing it last year and it struck me how all those photos fit across two pages. Nearly my entire life contained in one collage. How many pages did Mom’s life fill? Four? Five? Less than the menu at a diner.

  This year, I’d have to serve as my own photographer. I pulled out my phone, extended my arm the way I’d seen classmates do, and took my very first selfie. When I surveyed my work, I almost didn’t recognize the face in the photo. Under scraggly beard growth, my cheeks looked concave and my eyes were bracketed by dark circles. I inhaled deeply and started reciting: 3.1415926535 …

  En route to the kitchen, I took a wide arc around the coffee table, which was littered with Dayana’s pill bottles. I reached into the refrigerator for one of Mom’s kombucha drinks.

  I didn’t have a license, of course. There were too many other things to do. It’s not like we could afford a second vehicle. And I’d be moving to Boston next year, where I’d rely on mass transportation anyway. But how difficult could driving be? Everyone did it. I spent ten minutes watching a YouTube video entitled “Learn to Drive,” and I climbed into the driver’s side of the Saturn.

  In the drink holder sat an old tube of Mom’s lipstick. Lying there never to be used again. Like an artifact in a museum. Cold and lifeless.

  Often when I was struggling with a difficult math problem, I’d walk away from it and allow my brain to keep working while I did something else. It would come back to the problem when it was ready. As I turned the ignition key my brain returned to the unsolvable equation. Mom was here and now she’s not. I took the lipstick and wrote on the mirror.

  MOM + X =

  In the mirror I saw a black Jeep round the corner. Jack and Josie were already on their way to school. I wondered if they were asking these same questions about their parents. When I tutored Jack he struggled with complex equations. Was he struggling with this one, too? Was Josie staring at her mother’s lipstick? Was Archie trying to draw answers in his sketchbook? I put the lipstick in my pocket, took a gulp of kombucha, and tried to ward off a glitch as I drove to my last first day of high school.

  6

  ARCHIE

  I was almost a no-show for the first day of senior year, but I couldn’t stand another minute in the house. Josie and Jack’s party had kicked off a week of nonstop events. After the Clays’ memorial service there was the one Aunt Sarah organized for Mom and Dad. One for Harrison’s mom. A vigil at the hospital. A dedication at the town hall.

  Lucas and I went to everything. So did Harrison, Jack, and Josie. Dayana was always there, too. None of us talked much, but night after night, we al
l showed up. Just sitting near Josie made those minutes go by.

  And then suddenly it was over. No more events. No more group. No more Josie. Just Lucas and me and a quiet house.

  “Mr. Calderón dropped off some more food. I can heat it up for us,” I’d say.

  “I’m not hungry,” Lucas would reply.

  “Okay, let me know if you want something. I mean, not that you don’t know how to use the microwave.”

  Lucas spent most of his time in his room. I barely looked up from my sketchpad.

  I should’ve known something had changed when I woke up one morning to find hundreds of friend requests waiting for me. My previous record was one. But it didn’t really hit me what had happened until I showed up to school that first day. I pulled my scooter into the lot at RBHS just as Josie and Jack were parking the Jeep. Josie was wearing an outfit I’d never seen and her hair was perfect, but her eyes looked like she hadn’t slept in a week. Suddenly, a swarm of kids moved in, surrounding them. I tried to get close, but a trio of underclass girls rushed up to me. I’d never talked to any of them before and I didn’t even know their names. Without saying a word, each of these sniffling strangers took turns hugging me.

  A red sedan came screeching into the lot, forcing everyone to jump out of the way. Jack used the distraction to grab Josie’s hand and shuttle her toward the school. Harrison stumbled out of the red car and soon he had a crowd gathering around him, too.

  I thanked the three girls for their hugs and hustled to catch up to Josie and Jack. It wasn’t hard to gain ground since they were slowed down by all the people who wanted to embrace them. I could see how much each of these encounters took out of Josie. Her shoulders slumped more with every step as she dragged her designer shoes across the blacktop.