Chapter 22 Amanda Kent

CHAPTER 22 AMANDA KENT

2000

Bolton Landing

The summer before sixth grade, Annie and I spent the first week of July playing Super Mario Bros . on the original Nintendo system. Playing video games made us feel restless and irritable, but we couldn’t seem to help ourselves. We’d mix up a batch of Crystal Light and lie on my den carpet with our heads on pillows, alternating turns and shrieking each time a turtle shell or mistimed jump sent 8-bit Mario plummeting upside-down into the underworld.

At some point, Annie sprung off the floor and said, “I can’t take it anymore,” then she ripped the cartridge out of the console and faced me. In her best Terminator voice she asked, “Permission to destroy?”

I leapt to my feet, glad for this sudden change in the day’s trajectory. I pinned my heels together like the officers I’d seen on TV, rolled my shoulders back, said, “Permission granted, sir,” and watched as Annie flung the cartridge across the room like a Frisbee. Not exactly a well-conceived plan of destruction. The gray square hit the far wall and dropped, still in one piece. Annie raced over to collect it, and we inspected it together. Nothing seemed amiss.

“Maybe we see if it still works?” Annie said, already putting it back in the console. She shut the lid and hit Play, and we stood back and watched as the game tried to bring itself back after our murder attempt. The screen blinked; the game was straining to build the full expression of its world but was unable to—something internal had broken.

Annie and I glanced at each other. I was waiting for her to tell me how to feel about purposefully breaking something of value. “We had to,” she said, shrugging. “It was like we were disappearing into the game.”

The reason I’m telling you this story is because the morning I woke up in the hospital, it felt very much like I was a video game that wouldn’t load properly.

As I was first waking up, I was curious, like I was a detective solving the mystery of what was happening to me—the who, where, when, why of it.

Who: me, I think; yes, me.

Where: unclear to start, but I heard a rhythmic beeping and saw the fuzzy outline of a machine that told me… hospital.

When: rewind, rewind, rewind—the zip line, the fall, those were the nearest memories.

Why: I’m hurt, but how badly was not a question I was ready to consider.

(Sometimes, even now, I’ll wake up feeling the same as that morning. Just my brain’s way of messing with me. When I feel that happening, I force myself to sit upright and turn on the bedside lamp. Then I breathe deeply many times, and the panic usually subsides.)

Back to that very first morning. I had one eye open. Someone had curled themselves into a chair in the corner of the room, huddled beneath a too-small blanket. Was it Annie? I couldn’t tell. On the windowsill next to the person who was probably Annie was a coffee cup from the local shop, Spot, and seeing the logo of the brown dog with its red tongue calmed me. The familiarity made me feel safe.

My throat was dry and painful, and I wondered if I had strep or maybe laryngitis and that’s why I was in the hospital, not because of the zip line. I was trying so hard to stay awake, keeping my one eye fixed on the coffee cup, but then I was being pulled under again, swimming back toward a memory.

Toward Annie. She was wearing the blue peacoat she found at Goodwill that had these buttons that looked like sideways wine corks. It was free period, and we always went to Spot during free period. The key to coffee, Annie said, was adding enough cream and sugar so that it was more like a milkshake.

We had a love-hate relationship with Spot. We loved how close it was to school and that they served coffee out of this old trolley car painted blue with yellow accents. We hated the name and logo. (The coffee also wasn’t very good, but we didn’t know that back then.)

“Just, like, who names their dog Spot?” Annie said the first time we went together—sophomore year, I think. “Did they sit down to think of dog names and just run out of energy?”

“Maybe the process overwhelmed them,” I said, and she gave me that look of hers, one eyebrow slightly lifted, when she saw we were about to have a bout of cleverness.

“It can’t be more overwhelming than, you know, actually having a dog, can it?”

“I don’t know, let’s give it a try. What would you name your dog?”

She dropped her head back and looked to the clouds for an answer. A few seconds later, she said, “Um… Lucky?… Patch?”—apparently she’d seen 101 Dalmatians —then she paused, added, “This is harder than I thought.” It was unusual, Annie not having the perfect comeback, and I watched with amusement as she put both hands on the sides of her head and looked at me in horror.

“Oh my god, I’m so bad at this,” she said.

(She was never bad at anything.)

“You try. What would you name your dog?”

That was easy. My dad had dogs around his shop, so since I was little, I’d been dreaming about the day I could have my own and what I’d name them. Then at one theater camp in middle school we did A Midsummer Night’s Dream and I knew.

“Puck,” I said. “I’m gonna name my dog Puck.”

Annie leapt to her feet and looked at me, impressed. “Oh my god that’s perfect! Did you just come up with that on the… Spot ?” She winked at me after this last word, trying to win back some cool points with a lame joke.

After that day, every so often, we’d be sitting on one of the benches that looked like it was salvaged from a train station and Annie, out of nowhere, would just say a name: Cicero, or Poe, or Henry V, or Hamlet. The first few times it happened, I was lost and in need of more context. I’d respond, “Wait, what?”

“Persephone,” she said one afternoon during March of senior year. I know for certain it was March because when a cold gust of wind blew a few minutes later, Annie said, “March,” while subtly shaking her head and I knew to finish it with “in like a lion, out like a lamb,” and we high-fived without looking at each other—our tradition throughout every March since fourth grade when our favorite teacher Mrs. Rogers had us cut flowers and lions out of construction paper and taped them up in the hallway outside her classroom beneath the proverb, a project that delighted us to no end.

In response, I furrowed my brow, which she properly interpreted. She interlaced her hands behind her head, said, “I know, I know—it’s not a dog name.”

“It is, however, a great name for a human character.”

She nodded. A minute later she tried again: “Dante.”

“Hmm,” I said, really considering this one; I took my position seriously. “A strong candidate for sure, but really only if you get, like, a Doberman.”

Annie sighed. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” Then she looked at me and said, “Do you think I owe the owners of Spot a formal apology?”

I was waking up again and now Kerri was right there, holding my hand. She seemed both relieved and terrified that I was awake.

“Hi,” I croaked.

Kerri instantly started crying and lifted my hand to kiss it. My hand felt weird, like when I woke up in the middle of the night and my arm was asleep and it felt like someone else’s arm.

“Where did Annie go?” I whispered, sure she’d been there earlier, curled up in the chair.

Kerri just looked at me, didn’t say anything.

And I swear, this is when fear started seeping into my bones, when the pieces started to slide together—the hospital, my throat, the zip line, the heaviness of my body, Annie there with me in the pool, but then gone.

How big and scary this must be to have chased her away.

“I don’t know where Annie is,” Kerri said finally.