JENNIE
March 18
I don't hear from Lisa for a day, then two days, then three days. By the time I get home from school on Wednesday, it's snowing. The roads are white, and I've wiped out a half dozen times on Leroy. I find my mom in her office and ask if I can borrow her car.
It takes her a moment to find her voice. "Where are you going?"
"To Joy's house." Joy Park lives on the other side of town. I'm amazed at how easily the words come out of my mouth. I act like the fact that I'm asking if I can drive her car, when I haven't driven in a year, is no big deal, but my mom is staring at me. She continues to stare as she hands me her keys and follows me to the door and down the sidewalk. And then I can see that she's not just staring, she's crying.
"I'm sorry," she says, wiping at her eyes. "We just weren't sure … we didn't know if we'd ever see you drive again. The accident changed a lot of things and it took a lot of things. Not that driving, in the great scheme of life, is so important, but you shouldn't have to think twice about it at your age, except to be careful.…"
She's kind of babbling, but she looks happy, which only makes me feel worse about lying to her. I hug her before climbing in behind the wheel. I wave and smile and start the engine and say out loud,
"Okay." I pull away slowly, still waving and smiling but wondering what in the hell I think I'm doing.
I'm shaky at first because it's been so long and I wasn't sure I'd ever drive again either. I jerk myself black and blue because I keep hitting the brakes. But then I think of Jisoo beside me, letting me drive home after I got my license. You can drive me everywhere now, little sister. You'll be my chaufdeur. I'll sit in the back, put my feet up, and just enjoy the view.
I look over at the passenger seat and I can almost see her, smiling at me, not even glancing at the road, as if she doesn't need to look because she trusts me to know what I'm doing without her help. I can see her leaning back against the door, knees under her chin, laughing at something, or singing along with the music. I can almost hear her.
By the time I get to Manoban's neighborhood, I'm cruising along smoothly, like someone who's been driving for years. A woman answers the door, and this must be his mother because her eyes are the same bright-brown as Manoban's. It's strange to think, after all this time, I'm only meeting her now.
I hold out my hand and say, "I'm Jennie. It's nice to meet you. I've come to see Manoban." It occurs to me that maybe she's never heard of me, so I add, "Jennie Kim."
She shakes my hand and says, "Of course. Jennie. Yes. She should be home from school by now." She doesn't know she's been expelled.
She is wearing a suit, but she's in her stocking feet. There's a kind of faded, weary prettiness to her. "Come on in. I'm just getting home myself."
I follow her into the kitchen. Her purse sits on the breakfast table next to a set of car keys, and her shoes are on the floor. I hear a television from the other room, and Mrs. Manoban calls, "Ella?"
In a moment I hear a distant "What?"
"Just checking." Mrs. Manoban smiles at me and offers me something to drink—water, juice, soda—as she pours herself a glass of wine from a corked bottle in the fridge. I tell her water's fine, and she asks ice or no ice, and I say no ice, even though I like it better cold.
Sorn walks in and waves hello. "Hey."
"Hey. I came to see Manoban."
They chat with me like everything is normal, like she hasn't been expelled, and Sorn pulls something out of the freezer and sets the temperature on the oven. She tells her mother to remember to listen for the buzzer and then tugs on her coat. "She's probably upstairs. You can go on up."
I knock on the door to her room, but don't get any answer. I knock again. "Manoban? It's me."
I hear a shuffling, and the door opens. Manoban wears pajama bottoms and glasses. Her hair spikes up in all directions, and I think, Nerd Manoban. She gives me a lopsided grin and says, "The only person I want to see. My Jovian-Plutonian gravitational effect."
She moves out of the way so I can come in.
The room has been stripped bare, down to the sheets on the bed.
It looks like a vacant blue hospital room, waiting to be made up for the next patient. Two medium-sized brown boxes are stacked by the door.
My heart does this weird little flip. "It almost looks like—are you moving?"
"No, I just cleared some things out. Giving a few things to Goodwill."
"Are you feeling okay?" I try not to sound like the blaming girlfriend. Why won't you spend time with me? Why won't you call me back? Don't you like me anymore?
"Sorry, Jendeuki. I'm still feeling kind of under the weather. Which, when you think about it, is a very odd expression. One that finds its origins in the sea—as in a sailor or passenger feels seasick from the storm, and they send her below to get out of the bad weather."
"But you're better now?"
"It was touch-and-go for a while, but yeah." She grins and pulls on a shirt. "Want to see my fort?"
"Is that a trick question?"
"Every one needs a fort, Jendeuki. A place to let her imagination run wild. A 'No Trespassing/No Girls Allowed' type of space."
"If no girls are allowed, why are you letting me see it?"
"Because you're not just any girl."
She opens the door to her closet, and it actually looks pretty cool.
She's made a kind of cave for herself, complete with guitar and computer and notebooks of staffpaper, along with pens and stacks of Post-its. My picture is tacked to the blue wall along with a license plate.
"Other people might call it an offie, but I like fort better."
She offers me a seat on the blue comforter and we sit side by side, shoulder to shoulder, backs against the wall. She nods at the opposite wall, and that's when I see the pieces of paper there, kind of like her Wall of Ideas, but not as many or as cluttered.
"So I've discovered I think better in here. It gets loud out there sometimes between Ella's music and my mom yelling at my dad over the phone. You're lucky you live in a house of no yelling." She writes down House of no yelling and sticks it onto the wall. Then she hands me a pen and a pad of Post-its. "Want to try?"
"Just anything?"
"Anything. Positive ones go on the wall, negative on the floor over there." She points to this heap of ripped-up paper. "It's important to get those down, but they don't need to hang around after you do. Words can be bullies. Remember Paula Cleary?" I shake my head. "She was fifteen when she moved to the States from Ireland and started dating some idiot guy the other girls loved. They called her 'slut' and 'whore' and worse and wouldn't let her alone until she hanged herself in a stairwell."
I write Bully and hand it to Manoban, who rips it into a hundred pieces and throws it on the heap. I write Mean girls and then shred it to bits. I write Accidents, Winter, Ice, and Bridge, and tear at the paper until it's only dust.
Manoban scribbles something and slaps it to the wall. Welcome. She scribbles something else. Freak. She shows it to me before destroying it. She writes Belong, which goes on the wall, and Label, which doesn't. Warmth, Saturday, Wander, You, Best friend go up, while Cold, Sunday, Stand still, Everyone else go into the heap.
Necessary, Loved, Understood, Forgiven are on the wall now, and then I write You, Manoban, Lalisa, Lisa, Lalisa Manoban, and post them up.
We do this for a long time, and then she shows me how she makes a song out of the words. First she rearranges them into a kind of order that almost makes sense. She grabs the guitar and strums out a tune and, just like that, starts singing. She manages to get every word in, and afterward I clap and she bows with the top half of her body since she's still sitting on the floor, and I say, "You have to write it down. Don't lose it."
"I don't ever write songs down."
"What's all that staffpaper there?"
"Ideas for songs. Random notes. Things that'll become songs. Things I might write about someday, or started once but didn't finish because there wasn't enough in them. If a song's meant to stay around, you carry it with you in your bones."
She writes I, want, to, have, sex, with, Jendeuki, Remarkable-kim
I write Maybe, which she immediately rips up.
And then I write Okay.
She rips this up too.
Yes!
She slaps this onto the wall and then kisses me, her arm circling my waist. Before I know it, I'm on my back and she's looking down at me, and I am pulling off her shirt. Then her skin is on mine, and I'm on top of her, and for a while I forget we're on the floor of a closet because all I can think of is her, us, her and me, Manoban and Jennie, Jennie and Manoban, and everything is okay again.
Afterward, I stare up at the ceiling, and when I look over at her, there is this strange look on her face. "Manoban?" Her eyes are fixed on something above us. I poke her in the ribs. "Manoban!"
Finally her eyes turn to mine and she says, "Hey," like she just remembered that I'm there. She sits up and rubs her face with her hands, and then she reaches for the Post-its. She writes Relax. Then Breathe deeply. Then Jennie is life.
She fixes them to the wall and reaches for the guitar again. I rest my head against her as she plays, changing the chords a little, but I can't shake this feeling that something happened, like she went away for a minute and only part of her came back.
"Don't tell anyone about my fort, okay, Jendeuki?"
"Like not telling your family you got expelled?"
She writes Guilty and holds it up before ripping it into pieces.
"Okay." Then I write Trust, Promise, Secret, Safe, and place them on the wall.
"Ahhhhh, and now I have to start over." She closes her eyes, then plays the song again, adding in the words. It sounds sad the second time, as if she shifted to a minor key.
"I like your secret fort, Lalisa Manoban." This time I rest my head on her shoulder, looking at the words we've written and the song we've created, and then at the license plate again. I feel this strange need to move closer to her, as if she might get away from me. I lay one hand on her leg.
In a minute she says, "I get into these moods sometimes, and I can't shake them." She's still strumming the guitar, still smiling, but her voice has gone serious. "Kind of black, sinking moods. I imagine it's what being in the eye of a tornado would be like, all calm and blinding at the same time. I hate them."
I lace my fingers through her so that she has to stop playing. "I get moody too. It's normal. It's what we're supposed to do. I mean, we're teenagers." Just to prove it, I write Bad mood before tearing it up.
"When I was a kid, younger than Ella, there was this cardinal in our backyard that kept flying into the sliding glass doors of our house, over and over again until he knocked himself out. Each time, I thought he was dead, but then he'd get up again and fly off. This little female cardinal sat and watched him from one of the trees, and I always thought it was his wife. Anyway, I begged my parents to stop him from banging into the glass. I thought he should come inside and live with us. Sorn called the Audubon Society, and the man there said if it was his guess, the cardinal was probably just trying to get back to his tree, the one that had been standing there before someone came along and knocked it down and built a house on top of it."
She tells me about the day the cardinal died, about finding the body on the back deck, about burying him in the mud nest. "There was nothing to make him last a long time," Manoban told her parents afterward. She said she always blamed them because she knew they could have been the thing that made the cardinal last if they'd only let it in like she'd asked them to.
"That was the first black mood. I don't remember much that happened after that, not for a little while at least."
The worried feeling is back. "Have you ever talked to anyone? Do your parents or Sorn—or maybe one of the counselors …?"
"Parents, no. Sorn, not really. I've been talking to a counselor at school."
I look around the closet, at the comforter we're sitting on, at the pillows, the water jug, the energy bars, and that's when it hits me.
"Manoban, are you living in here?"
"I've been in here before. Eventually, it works. I'll wake up one morning and feel like coming out." She smiles at me, and the smile seems hollow. "I kept your secret; you keep mine."
When I get home, I open the door to my closet and walk inside. It's larger than Manoban's but packed full of clothes, shoes, purses, jackets.
I try to imagine what it would be like to live in here and feel I couldn't come out. I lie down at and stare up at the ceiling. The floor is hard and cold. In my head, I write: There was a girl who lived in a closet.… But that's as far as I get.
I'm not claustrophobic, but when I open the door and walk back into my room, I feel like I can breathe again.
At dinner, my mom says, "Did you have a fun time with Joy?"
She raises her eyebrows at my dad. "Jennie drove to Joy's house after school. As in drove."
My dad clinks his glass against mine. "Proud of you, J. Maybe it's time we talk about getting you a car of your own."
They're so excited over this that I feel even guiltier about lying. I wonder what they'd do if I told them where I really was—having sex with the girl they don't want me to see in the closet where she's living.