JENNIE
151 days till graduation
Three thirty. School parking lot.
I stand in the sun, shading my eyes. At first I don't see her.
Maybe she left without me. Or maybe I went out the wrong door.
Our town is small but our school is large. We have over two thousand students because we're the only high school for miles. She could be anywhere.
I am holding on to the handles of my bike, an old orange ten-speed inherited from Jisoo. She named it Leroy because she liked being able to say to our parents, "I was out riding Leroy," and "I'm just going to ride Leroy for a while."
Seulgi stalks by, a bright-pink storm cloud. Jaehyun saunters behind. "She's over there," Seulgi says. She points a blue-nailed finger at me. "If you break her heart, I will kick that skinny ass all the way to Kentucky. I mean it. The last thing she needs is you playing with her head. Understood?"
"Understood."
"And I'm sorry. You know. About your sister."
I look in the direction Seulgi pointed and there she is. Lalisa Manoban leans against an SUV, hands in pockets, like she has all the time in the world and she expects me. I think of the Virginia Woolf lines, the ones from The Waves: "Pale, with dark hair, the one who is coming is melancholy, romantic. And I am arch and fluent and capricious; for he is melancholy, he is romantic. He is here."
I wheel the bike over to her. Her dark hair is kind of wild and messy like she's been at the beach, even though there's no beach in Bartlett, and shines blue-black in the light. Her pale skin is so white, I can see the veins in her arms.
She opens the passenger door to her car. "After you."
"I told you no driving."
"I forgot my bike, so we'll have to go to my house and get it."
"Then I'll follow you."
She drives slower than she needs to, and ten minutes later we reach her house. It's a two-story brick colonial with shrubs crowding under the windows, black shutters, and a red door. There's a matching red mailbox that says MANOBAN. I wait in the driveway while she sorts through the mess of a garage, searching for a bicycle. Finally she lifts it up and out, and I watch the muscles in her arms flex.
"You can leave your bag in my room." She's wiping the dust off the bike seat with her shirt.
"But my stuff's in there.…" A book on the history of Indiana, checked out from the library after last period, and plastic bags of various sizes—courtesy of one of the lunch ladies—for any souvenirs we might collect.
"I've got it covered." She unlocks the door and holds it open for me. Inside, it looks like a regular, ordinary house, not one I'd expect Lalisa Manoban to live in. I follow her upstairs. The walls are lined with framed school photos. Manoban in kindergarten. Manoban in middle school. She looks different every year, not just agewise but personwise. Class-clown Manoban. Awkward Manoban. Cocky Manoban. Jock Manoban. At the end of the hall, she pushes open a door.
The walls are a dark, deep red, and everything else is black—desk, chair, bookcase, bedspread, guitars. One entire wall is covered in pictures and Post-it notes and napkins and torn pieces of paper.
On the other walls there are concert posters and a large black-and-white photo of her onstage somewhere, guitar in hand.
I stand in front of the wall of notes and say, "What's all this?"
"Plans," she says. "Songs. Ideas. Visions." She throws my bag onto her bed and digs something out of a drawer.
Most look like fragments of things, single words or phrases that don't make sense on their own: Night flowers. I do it so it feels real. Let us fall. My decision totally. Obelisk. Is today a good day to? Is today a good day to what? I want to ask. But instead I say, "Obelisk?"
"It's my favorite word."
"Really?"
"One of them, at least. Look at it." I look. "That is one straight-up, upstanding, powerful word. Unique, original, and kind of stealthy because it doesn't really sound like what it is. It's a word that surprises you and makes you think, Oh. All right then. It commands respect, but it's also modest. Not like 'monument' or 'tower.' " She shakes her head. "Pretentious bastards."
I don't say anything because I used to love words. I loved them and was good at arranging them. Because of this, I felt protective of all the best ones. But now all of them, good and bad, frustrate me.
She says, "Have you ever heard the phrase 'get back on the camel' before?"
"Not until Mr. Black used it."
She leans over her desk, tears a piece of paper in half, and writes it down. She slaps it on the wall as we leave.
Outside, I climb onto Leroy, resting one foot on the ground.
Lalisa Manoban pulls on a backpack, her T-shirt riding up across her stomach where an ugly red scar cuts across the middle.
I push Jisoo's glasses up onto my head. "Where did you get the scar?"
"I drew it on. It's been my experience that girls like scars even better than tattoos." She straddles the bike, resting back on the seat, both feet firmly planted. "Have you been in a car since the accident?"
"No."
"That's gotta be some sort of record. We're talking, what, eight, nine months? How do you get to school?"
"I ride my bike or walk. We don't live that far."
"What about when it rains or snows?"
"I ride my bike or walk."
"So you're afraid to ride in a car but you'll climb up on a bell tower ledge?"
"I'm going home."
She laughs and reaches out for my bike, holding on to it before I can take off. "I won't bring it up again."
"I don't believe you."
"Look, you're already here, and we're already committed to this project, so the way I see it, the faster we get to Hoosier Hill, the faster you get this over with."
We pass corn field after corn fild. Hoosier Hill is only eleven miles from town, so we don't have far to go. The day is cold but bright, and it feels good to be out. I close my eyes and tip my head upward.
It's a remnant of the Jennie who came Before. Normal teenage Jennie. Jennie Unremarkably-Kim.
Manoban rides along beside me. "You know what I like about driving? The forward motion of it, the propulsion of it, like you might go anywhere."
I open my eyes and frown at her. "This isn't driving."
"You're telling me." She weaves across the road in figure eights, then around me in circles, then rides beside me again. "I'm surprised you don't wear a helmet or full-on body armor, just to be extra safe. What if the apocalypse happened and everyone but you turned into zombies, and the only way you could save yourself was to get the hell out of town? No airplanes, no trains, no buses. Public transportation is completely broken down. The bike's too exposed, too dangerous. What then?"
"How do I know I'll be safe out of town?"
"Bartlett's the only place that's been affected."
"And I know this for sure?"
"It's public knowledge. The government has confirmed it."
I don't answer.
She figure-eights around me. "Where would you go if you could go anywhere?"
"Is it still the apocalypse?"
"No."
New York, I think.
"Back to Korea," I say. What I mean is the Korea of four years ago, before we moved here, when Jisoo was a sophomore and I was going into ninth grade.
"But you've already been there. Don't you want to see places you've never been?" She pedals along, hands in her armpits now.
"It's warm there and it never snows." I hate snow and will always hate snow. And then I hear Mrs. Kramer and my parents telling me to make an effort. So I say, "I might go to Argentina or Singapore for school. I'm not applying any place less than two thousand miles away." Or any place with an annual snowfall greater than one inch, which is why NYU is out. "I might stay here though. I haven't decided."
"Don't you want to know where I'd go if I could?"
Not really, I think. "Where would you go if you could go anywhere?" It comes out bitchier than I mean for it to.
She leans forward over the handlebars, eyes on me. "I'd go to Hoosier Hill with a beautiful girl."
A grove of trees stands on one side. Flat farmland spreads out on the other, dusted with snow. Manoban says, "I think it's down that way."
We leave our bikes by the tree line, and then we cross the road and follow this dirt path, only a few yards long. My legs are aching from the ride. I feel strangely breathless.
There are some kids hanging out in the field, swaying back and forth on the fence. When they see us coming, one of them bumps another and straightens. "You can go on ahead," she says. "People come from all over the world to see it and you ain't the first."
"There used to be a paper sign," one of the other kids adds. She sounds bored.
With an Australian accent Manoban tells them, "We're here from Perth. We've come all this way to see the highest peak in Indiana. Is it all right if we scale the summit?"
They don't ask where Perth is. They just shrug.
We turn off into the grove of brown winter trees, brushing branches out of our faces. We duck onto a narrower dirt path and keep going, no longer side by side. Manoban is in front, and I pay more attention to the shine of her hair and the way she ambles, loose-jointed and fluid, than I do to the scenery.
Suddenly we're there, in the middle of a brown circle. A wooden bench sits underneath a tree, a picnic table just past it. The sign is to our right—INDIANA HIGHPOINT, HOOSIER HILL, ELEV. 1257 FT. The marker is straight ahead—a wooden stake poking up out of the ground in the middle of a pile of stones, no wider or higher than a pitcher's mound.
"This is it?" I can't help saying.
Some high point. It's amazingly underwhelming. But then what did I expect?
She takes my hand and pulls me up after her so that we're standing on the stones.
In that instant her skin touches mine, I feel a little shock.
I tell myself it's nothing more than the understandable jolt of actual physical contact when you aren't used to it from someone new. But then these electric currents start shooting up my arm, and she is rubbing my palm with her thumb, which makes the currents go shooting through the rest of me. Uh-oh.
In the Australian accent she says, "What do we think?" Her hand is firm and warm, and somehow, big as it is, it fits with mine.
"If we're here from Perth?" I'm distracted by the electric currents and trying not to show it. If I do, I know she will never let me hear the end of it.
"Or maybe we've come from Moscow." She has a good Russian accent too.
"We are seriously pissed."
In her own voice she says, "Not as pissed as the folks over at Sand Hill, the second-highest spot in Indiana. It's only 1,076 feet, and they don't even have a picnic area."
"If they're second, they don't really need one."
"An excellent point. As far as I'm concerned, it's not even worth looking at. Not when you've got Hoosier Hill." She smiles at me, and for the first time I notice how dark her eyes are. "At least it feels that way standing here with you." She closes her dark brown eyes and breathes in. When she opens them again, she says, "Actually, standing next to you makes it feel as high as Everest."
I yank my hand back. Even after I let go, I can feel the stupid current. "Shouldn't we be collecting things? Writing stuff down? Shooting video? How do we organize this?"
"We don't. When we're in the act of wandering, we need to be present, not watching it through a lens."
Together, we look out over the circle of brown and the bench and the trees and the flat, white landscape beyond. Ten months ago, I would have stood here writing this place in my head. There is this sign, which is a good thing, because otherwise you would never know you're looking at the highest point in Indiana.… I would have thought up an entire backstory for the kids, something epic and exciting.
Now they're just Indiana farm kids hanging on a fence.
I say, "I think this is the ugliest place I've ever seen. Not just here. The whole state." I hear my parents telling me not to be negative, which is funny because I've always been the happy one. It's Jisoo who was moody.
"I used to think that. But then I realized, believe it or not, it's actually beautiful to some people. It must be, because enough people live here, and they can't all think it's ugly." She smiles out at the ugly trees and the ugly farmland and the ugly kids as if she can see Oz. As if she can really, truly see the beauty that's there. In that moment I wish I could see it through her eyes. I wish she had glasses to give me. "Also, I figure while I'm here, I might as well get to know it, you know—see what there is to see."
"Wander Indiana?"
"Yeah."
"You look different than you did the other day."
She glances at me sideways, eyes half closed. "It's the altitude."
I laugh and then stop myself.
"It's okay to laugh, you know. The earth's not going to split open. You're not going to hell. Believe me. If there's a hell, I'll be there ahead of you, and they'll be too busy with me to even check you in."I want to ask what happened to her. Is it true she had a breakdown? Is it true she OD'd? Where was she at the end of last semester?
"I've heard a lot of stories."
"About me?"
"Are they true?"
"Probably."
She shakes the hair out of her eyes and stares at me good and hard.
Her gaze trails slowly down my face to my mouth. For a second, I think she's going to kiss me. For a second, I want her to.
"So we can cross this one off, right? One down, one to go. Where to next?" I sound like my dad's secretary.
"I've got a map in my backpack." She doesn't make a move to get it. Instead she stands there, breathing it in, looking all around. I want to get to the map because that's how I am, or used to be, ready for the next thing once I've got it in my mind. But she's not going anywhere, and then her hand finds mine again. Instead of snatching it back, I make myself stand here too, and actually it's nice. The electric currents are racing. My body is humming. The breeze is blowing, rustling the leaves on the trees. It's almost like music. We stand side by side, looking out and up and around.
And then she says, "Let's jump."
"Are you sure? It is the high point of Indiana."
"I'm sure. It's now or never, but I need to know if you're with me."
"Okay."
"Ready?"
"Ready."
"On three."
We jump just as the kids ramble up. We land, dusty and laughing.
In the Australian accent Manoban says to them, "We're professionals. Whatever you do, don't try this at home."
The things we leave behind are some British coins, a red guitar pick, and a Bartlett High keychain. We store them in this hide-a-key fake rock that Manoban found in her garage. She wedges it in among the stones that surround the high point. She brushes the dirt off her hands as she stands. "Whether you want to or not, now we'll always be a part of here. Unless those kids get in there and rob us blind."
My hand feels cold without hers. I pull out my phone and say, "We need to document this somehow." I start taking pictures before she nods okay, and we take turns posing on the high point.
Then she gets the map out of her backpack along with a college-ruled notebook. She hands me the notebook and a pen, and when I say, "That's okay," she tells me her handwriting is like chicken scratch and it's up to me to keep the notes. The thing I can't say is I'd rather drive all the way to Indianapolis than write in this notebook.
But because she's watching me, I scrawl down a few things—location, date, time, a brief description of the place itself and the kids by the fence—and afterward, we spread the map out on the picnic table.
Manoban traces the red highway lines with her index finger. "I know Black mentioned picking two wonders and running with them, but I don't think that's enough. I think we need to see all of them."
"All of what?"
"Every place of interest in the state. As many as we can cram into the semester."
"Only two. That's the deal."
She studies the map, shakes her head. Her hand moves over the paper. By the time she's done, she's made pen marks across the entire state, circling every town she knows of where there's a wonder—Dune State Park, the World's Largest Egg, Home of Dan Patch the racehorse, the Market Street Catacombs, and the Seven Pillars, which are a series of enormous limestone columns, carved by nature, that overlook the Mississinewa River. Some of the circles are close to Bartlett, some are far away.
"That's too many," I say.
"Maybe. Maybe not."
Early evening. Manoban's driveway. I stand with Leroy as Manoban shoves her bike into the garage. She opens the door to go inside, and when I don't move, she says, "We have to get your bag."
"I'll wait here."
She just laughs and goes away. While she's gone, I text my mom to tell her I'll be heading home soon. I picture her waiting at the window, watching for me, even though she would never let me catch her at it.
In a few minutes, Manoban is back and standing too close, looking down at me with brown eyes. With one hand, she brushes the hair out of them. It's been a long time since I've been this close to someone other than Taehyung, and I suddenly remember what Niki said about Manoban knowing what to do with a girl. Lalisa "Freak" or no freak, she is lean and good-looking and trouble.
Like that, I feel myself pulling back in. I drop Jisoo's glasses onto my face so that Manoban looks warped and strange, like I'm seeing her in a fun-house mirror.
"Because you smiled at me."
"What?"
"You asked why I wanted to do this with you. It's not because you were up on the ledge too, even though, okay, that's part of it. It's not because I feel this weird responsibility to keep an eye on you, which is also part of it. It's because you smiled at me that day in class. A real smile, not the bullshit one I see you give everyone all the time where your eyes are doing one thing and your mouth is doing another."
"It was just a smile."
"Maybe to you."
"You know I'm going out with Taehyung."
"I thought you said he wasn't your boyfriend." Before I can recover, she laughs. "Relax. I don't like you like that."
--
Dinnertime. My house. My father makes chicken piccata, which means the kitchen is a mess. I set the table as Mom ties her hair back and takes the plates from Dad. In my house, eating is an event accompanied by the right music and the right wine.
My mom takes a bite of chicken, gives my dad a thumbs-up, and looks at me. "So tell me more about this project."
"We're supposed to wander Indiana, as if there's anything interesting to see. We have to have partners, so I'm working with this girl in my class."
My dad raises an eyebrow at my mother and then me. "You know, I was terriffic at geography back in the day. If you need any help with that project—"
Mom and I cut him off at the same time, telling him how good the food is, asking if we can have more. He gets up, pleased and distracted, and my mother mouths to me, "Close one." My dad lives to help with school projects. The problem is he ends up taking them over completely.
He comes back in saying, "So, this project …" just as my mom is saying, "So this girl …"
Except for wanting to know my every move, my parents act pretty much like they always did. It throws me when they're the parents of Before, because nothing about me is like it used to be.
"Dad, I was just wondering," I begin, my mouth full of chicken.
"Where did this dish begin? I mean, how did they come up with it?"
If there's anything my dad likes more than projects, it's explaining the history of things. For the rest of the meal, he talks nonstop about ancient Italy and the Italians' love for clean, simple cooking, which means my project and this boy are forgotten.
Upstairs, I scroll around Manoban's Facebook page. I'm still her only friend. Suddenly a new message appears. I feel like I just walked through the back of the wardrobe and into Narnia.
I immediately research Narnia quotes. The one that stands out is:
"I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is
the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now.… Come further up, come further in!"
But instead of copying it down and sending it, I get up and mark the day off on the calendar. I stand looking at the word
"Graduation," all the way in June, as I think about Hoosier Hill, Manoban's brown-brown eyes, and the way she made me feel. Like everything else that doesn't last, today is gone now, but it was a pretty good day. The best I've had in months.