Juniper Lemon's Happiness Index Read online

  From it, he removes a small scrap of paper.

  “What is that?”

  Brand smoothes the crumpled scrap in his palm: a torn corner of something, white on one side, tinny silver and gumdrop colors on the other.

  “In fifth grade,” he says, hoisting himself to sit up on a filing cabinet, “I was rooting through my mom’s desk drawer for some candy. She always had something—M&M’s, Laffy Taffy, some ready snack to chew on over paperwork.

  “When I looked there this one morning, I found an open tube of Life Savers. I started to sneak a couple out, peeling back for the red ones, but as I was closing the drawer . . .” His nostrils flare. “I heard a sound. I turned, and she was standing in the doorway. She’d been watching the whole time.

  “For a minute she just looked at me with this face. I’d thought she was mad at me. Trying to figure out a punishment.

  “But when she came over, she just opened the drawer again, took the Life Savers out and closed the rest of ’em in my hand. She said, ‘Keep ’em, honey,’ and kissed my forehead.” He stops, smiling thinly to himself. I can tell that this isn’t where the story ends, though.

  “What happened?”

  Brand’s smile lengthens a slice, but doesn’t warm his eyes. “I thought it was my lucky goddamn day. I went off to school, Mom to work; I ate the whole package on the bus. After school, I came home and she didn’t.”

  “She—?”

  “Left us. Just walked out and never looked back.”

  I look at the wrapper in his palm. The plastic is worn with age, the colors faded, white along the creases. I think about what I might say to console him, to commiserate. But I know how hollow such words can be.

  “And you’ve kept the wrapper all these years?” I ask instead.

  The corner of his mouth tweaks. “It’s the last I have of her.”

  I don’t know what to say. “I’m so sorry, Brand.”

  Brand stares at the wrapper, his gaze turning inward. Then he crushes it into a ball and chucks it across the room.

  “So am I.”

  - 74 -

  Tuesday comes and goes, still no Index card. Grudgingly I resign myself to the idea that 65 is gone and probably not coming back to haunt me; if someone had found it and was going to say something, they would have by now.

  But I continue diving, at least in the recycling out back, for “found” material for my art projects—and another reason.

  One made of Axe and cigarettes and gummy bears.

  I’m dying to ask Brand more about the party—about what happened, who he knew there, if any of those people might be YOU—but as soon as I’m actually looking for him, I can’t seem to find Brand anywhere. Not even in Dumpsterland, where I’m sure he’ll swing by for a smoke break. I wonder if he’s avoiding me. If he thinks we got too personal before.

  I hope not.

  Fortunately I have other resources, and don’t just twiddle my thumbs waiting on Band Boy.

  “Hello, Juniper,” says Sponge, clacking away at his laptop as I approach his table.

  I nod. “Sponge.”

  He sticks out his hand, and when I deposit the Pieces there he graces me with his businessmanlike smile.

  “Well?”

  Sponge leans in as if to divulge something sensitive. “3 Hall,” he says, and subtly nods like this is code for something.

  “3 Hall?”

  3 Hall is the westernmost of three central hallways at Fairfield. It’s the wing where pretty much all of the arts (excepting art) are taught: theater, choir, band, literature, and, for whatever odd reason, weight lifting.

  “3 Hall,” Sponge affirms.

  “Okay . . .” I frown and tighten my eyes. “What about 3 Hall?”

  “Whoever your sister was seeing—she met him there after school. I’m sure of it.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’d always pass her on the way to Chess Club and AD.”

  “Can you be more specific? Like—what room? Which end of 3 Hall?”

  Sponge clicks his tongue. “Sorry. I never turned to watch. I usually passed her on the A-Hall end, but she could’ve been going anywhere.”

  “3 Hall?” I repeat.

  “3 Hall.” Sponge nods.

  “Is that seriously all you can tell me?”

  “Juniper . . .” My informant reclines and turns up his palms. “My brain is not a search engine, okay. Got a lot in storage, but gotta sift through all the entries by hand.”

  “I know . . .” Boy, don’t I.

  Sponge opens his payment and throws back a candied shot. “If I come up with anything else, I’ll let you know.”

  - 75 -

  The next day I consider 3 Hall for myself. After school is the first Booster meeting for which I am actually present, so once Nate and I have drafted up fliers for our services (“Got cause? Get funds!”), our tour to put them up in the halls gives me ample time to look around and speculate.

  Where, for one, had YOU been coming from when he met Camilla? Was his last class down the corridor? Did he drive here from another school? Camie could’ve gone to meet him out the visitor’s entrance.

  Or:

  What if 3 Hall was more than a meeting point: a destination? Now that I’m looking, I see plenty of places for paramours: dressing rooms, storage spaces, a utility closet. Could YOU have had special access to one?

  It does not escape my notice that the band loft is one such private place.

  Or that Brand has a key to it.

  “You okay?”

  “Hm?” I snap to and realize I’ve been staring at the choir door, or rather elsewhere in thought. Nate stands ahead of me, looking back. “Yeah. Coming.”

  I shake myself and catch up with him. He hands me another flier, one of the last in the stack.

  “Amazing that we almost missed this.” Nate nods at a wall of cork between trophy cases, what’s considered the most prominent news board at Fairfield. Directly opposite the visitor’s entrance, it’s the location of choice for announcements and spirit messages and sign-up sheets.

  It was where they posted audition results for Bye Bye Birdie last year, and Lauren jumped up and down and uncharacteristically screamed with me when I got the role of Ursula, the main girl’s best friend.

  “Kind of crowded,” Nate says, grounding me in the present. “Does no one ever take things down?”

  Although the school year has just begun, he is right: The space is already plastered with try-out sheets, student campaign posters, fliers like ours.

  “It’s kind of change-as-you-go. Give me a sec, I’ll find something old to take down.”

  I glance over the papers, inspecting dates, and am about to remove a flier for the Club Fair when I spy the word Leonardo. I peel up another sheet so I can read the rest: “THE ORIGINAL RENAISSANCE MAN: the art and inventions of Leonardo da Vinci.” It’s an ad for a museum exhibit in Portland.

  “Find one?”

  “No...“ I trail off in thought. Has Leo’s admirer A heard of this? “Still current. I was just—”

  But then I spot something else: a portrait of a girl in a teal shirt with long lemon hair. A portrait I know every bit as well as the article it appears in.

  Camilla’s memorial announcement.

  I drop the page above it as if burned.

  “Juniper?”

  Nate searches my face with concern. When I don’t meet his eye he looks from me to the dropped page and peeks cautiously under it.

  I sense, more than see, him stiffen.

  “Oh,” he says, quiet.

  I smile through the moisture in my eyes. If I don’t, I know he’ll just ask me if I’m okay, and I am so, so tired and heartsick of answering Yes when that’s so indescribably far from the truth.

  “I guess you’ve heard,” I say instead. My voice i
s steady, but its tightness betrays me.

  Nate winces. “You might say that.”

  I mop my eye with a palm. “Might?”

  For a moment, Nate hesitates. Then he says, “I thought you might appreciate the chance to be someone other than a surviving sibling for a while. Even if it was only with me.”

  I look down at the floor. He’s right: It’s hard—it hurts to be defined by your losses.

  But it’s also impossible not to be.

  “If there’s ever . . . anything I can do,” Nate continues.

  I smile at him weakly. “Thanks.”

  “And I’m not just saying that.” The addition is quick, and he seeks out my eyes as if to prove himself. “I mean it. You think of anything, you let me know.”

  “I will,” I agree, sniffling. “Thanks.”

  With a shaky exhale, I take up the Booster flier with both hands again. How do people recover from these public slips?

  “Do you have siblings?” I busy myself with removing the Club Fair flier, then spread ours out over the space so I don’t have to look at him.

  “Had,” he answers as I push in a tack. My ears perk up. “A stepbrother. But we were never all that close. We only lived together about a year before our parents divorced each other.”

  “Oh.” Not dead. Just estranged. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. My mom was a lot happier once we moved back to Eugene, I think.”

  “Moved back?” We start down the corridor again, somewhere farther to put up our last copy. The relief is instant, like a fresh breath of air.

  Somehow Camie papered over was even worse than a hole.

  “From Aloha,” Nate supplies. “Where my stepdad lived.”

  “Wow.” And here I’d been hogging the hardship card. “I didn’t realize you’d done so much moving. All that rooting and uprooting must be hard on you.”

  “It is.” Nate frowns at the floor. “At least, until you make a good friend.”

  He peers up at me from the corner of his eye, surprisingly shy all of a sudden.

  This time my smile holds its footing.

  “So . . .” I indicate a spot near the auditorium. Nate nods and passes me the final flier. “Have you spent every year at a different school?”

  “Sort of. More like split years.” He snaps a piece of tape from a small dispenser. “Freshman year was half Eugene, half Aloha; sophomore half Aloha, half Eugene. Now Fairfield.”

  “Geez. What a whirlwind.” I move my hand from one corner to the next so that Nate can tape them down. “Did it at least make the school year go faster?”

  “Actually, I think it made it longer: The moves just sort of all ran together, one forever blur of everything in boxes.” He seals the last edge with his thumbs and shrugs. “I guess time’s irrelevant when your terms of measurement change.”

  *EXTRA CREDIT. Compare an element in Great Expectations to the same element in a book of your own choosing. Expand, and be sure to provide sufficient context.

  Time

  “Listen:

  Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”

  So begins Chapter Two of Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut. The passages that follow describe how Billy moves forward and back through the years, seeing his birth and his death and all events in between—though he has no control over which he’ll visit next, and the scene can change as quickly as a stroll through the door.

  This is the complete opposite of Miss Havisham, who stops all the clocks in her manor at twenty minutes to nine and shutters herself in to rot upon learning her betrothed has swindled her.

  Billy is floating; Havisham is stranded.

  I wonder: Which am I more like?

  Unstuck: when the death of someone you love unmoors you from the present and you drift to either side of it—to the moments that were, that will be, that won’t ever—and you can suddenly see, all of time spreading out before you like a stain, what a small, quick thing in the universe is the flame of a single, wild life.

  Stranded: when the death of a loved one slams a door between you and the world without her, shutting out reality. You can close your eyes to changes—to the falling leaves and new TV shows and rising gas prices—

  But not to the cobwebs of time.

  Not to the number on the top of your Index card, which only goes up.

  New Units of Time

  days it’s been

  holes discovered

  firsts

  secrets

  silences (Mom, Lauren, Heather)

  friends lost

  friends made

  traditions changed

  atonements

  topics talked around

  bad dreams

  careful dinners

  places Cam was papered over: the world forgetting

  - 90 -

  The first Friday in October, I’m diving for found materials when I uncover another strange letter from A—this one addressed to “Oscar.”

  Dearest Oscar,

  Is there anything you’ve written that is not devastatingly perfect? The Importance of Being Earnest was hilarious. The Picture of Dorian Gray crackled with wit. Today I read “The Nightingale and the Rose” and wept.

  Where have all the poets gone?

  Love,

  A

  ∞

  I haven’t read any of the works mentioned, but I’ve heard of The Importance of Being Earnest enough to know that “Oscar” is Oscar Wilde. First da Vinci; now this?

  Who is this A person, and why can’t she find a nice genius from her own century?

  I turn the paper over. Although the back of the page is blank, there’s a faint impression of letters in the upper right-hand corner. I squint and bring the paper near my face, trying to make them out: “[something] de l’eau,” it says. “De l’eau”? What is that—“of water”? “From water”?

  A. Water.

  Angela Waters??

  Excited, I fold the page back down and pocket it. The other A note is in the art studio; I can easily compare them and determine if the authors are the same. My haul is getting pretty sizeable, anyway.

  I tie off the sack I’ve been working on and redeposit it. But just as I stoop to collect the day’s findings—

  “What do you think you’re doing?”

  I whirl around.

  “Seriously. What’s with all the paperwork?” Brand indicates the armful of scrap papers I have all but dropped in surprise. “I thought you were looking for an index card.”

  I stare at him, fingers still tensed in start. “What is wrong with you?”

  “Plenty. But let’s not lose perspective—I’m not the one rooting through dumpsters and pocketing weird shit here.”

  “It isn’t shit,” I sniff, defensive. “It’s . . . recycling.”

  “Says the one dressed for radiation.” He tips his chin at my feet.

  I’m still wearing rubber boots.

  I fold my arms. “I had a bad experience.”

  Last week an Icee exploded right on my foot when I found it in with a recycling bag, felt something wet, and reflexively dropped it. I’m still not over my sticky blue Converse.

  “Besides, if you’d talked to me in the last two weeks”—even I am surprised at how bitter I sound that he hasn’t—“you’d know I’m not looking for that card anymore. This is for a project.”

  “What project?”

  I open my mouth to answer him—and then decide I don’t have to.

  “Hey,” he says as I start away. “I’m talking to you.”

  “You’re the one who’s been gone,” I fire back without turning. “If anybody gets to ask questions, it should be me.” I had really thought we connected back in the band loft. But since then it’s like Brand’s dropped off the planet.

 
“Oh. I’m flattered you noticed, Lemon. D’you miss me?”

  He follows, uninvited, toward the studio. I grumble under my breath. I still really want to ask him about who he might’ve seen at Shawn’s party, or if he saw Camilla talking to anyone, but I also haven’t totally ruled him out as Mr. Mystery, either. He’s younger, he was there that night, and, as I realized putting up fliers with Nate the other week, somehow has access to a private room in 3 Hall.

  “Brand.” I bite back my irritation and face him. “I need to ask you about Shawn’s that night.”

  “The party?”

  “Yeah.”

  Brand makes a face. “I’ve already told you what I know. Besides, I spent the night playing—it isn’t like I saw much.”

  “Yeah, but—” The words die in my throat as he catches up with me. “Brand, are you limping?”

  The dip in his gait is even more pronounced as he swaggers to avoid a drain. “What of it?”

  Now I hurry after him. When I fall into step beside him, I see the shadow around one of his eyes is a shade greener than normal. “Jesus, Brand. What happened?”

  For a moment he looks confused; then something registers, and Brand’s stern face slackens to neutral. He blows out a sigh. “I had to . . . settle up with this punk-ass sophomore last week. He pushed his stuff and tried to pocket the profit. Things got ugly.”

  I stop in place. “You—?”

  Brand stops, too. “Fuck, no. I fell off my RipStik in the skate park. You believe that mafia shit?”

  What, the rumors that he has uncles in it? With his cheekbones?

  When I respond “No” a beat too late, Brand gives a crooked smile.

  “So where’s this ‘project’ of yours?”

  ∞

  “I guess it’s more ‘projects’ than ‘project,’” I confess when we enter the loft in the art studio.

  The space is modest and crowded. A large worktable takes up most of the floor and drowns in my ongoing projects: a comic made up of sketches, doodles, and phrases cut from found notes and papers; a collection of java jackets stacked against a sprawl of red D and F grades (title: “Supply vs. Demand”); map templates labeled not with countries and capitals, but the cut-out names of people, events, and titles that belong to them. Stacks of used and unused materials lay everywhere, more in bulging folders in a drawer. Many pages I have cut things from hang on clotheslines, X-Acto holes revealing light like a city of windows.