Short Story 1

November 2015

His name was Everett. And he was like the sun. I heard him from around the corner and followed the sound of his ukulele; back against the wall, sitting on tile floors he pulled me to him with the strings of his instrument.  Sometimes he played the violin.

On Fridays we jammed; lunchtime around a piano and empty instrument cases scattered like so many open coffins. There were guitars, on a good day two or three, usually a ukulele, a violin, and always someone on the piano. Usually a line for the piano. I was always in that line, and one day Everett and I sat down together and played a duet. 

Those days we walked small-town streets and neighborhood trails and most of the time we were whistling.

“Amy!” he called. He was laughing, coming behind me down the hall.  There was nothing inside of me that didn’t warm up when I saw him—Everett coming toward me with his easy walk and carrying a guitar case, hair combed back, bright shirt loose and fingers drumming at his side.  

“What took you so long?”

“I lost my keys.  Again.”  He grinned.  I laughed with him.

Our school was brick walls and white tile floors.  Rooms full of desks and chairs and a kid named Everett who stayed up in the hills after school writing music.  A boy who didn’t seem to notice our insecurities, he just made us smile.  

He was quiet.  He wore glasses and grinned whenever we said his name and his grin made us grin and made things seem brighter; those days were winter afternoons spent walking on sidewalks from class to class thinking about next Friday.  These were cold nights in a yellow pick-up truck driving somewhere, windows rolled down. My hair tangled in the wind and my face stung from cold air. Everett was quiet but he was the center of the universe, the only one that ever pulled us all together and he was only a kid with hair like feathers to his shoulders. He was only a kid who rode bikes and made rhythms and hated small talk but really, he was an artist. We listened to him; we listened to his music because it came from his heart; we listened to him like he was our heartbeat, breathing for all the rest of us; we listened to Everett because when he spoke poetry came out, words that broke down our walls and covered me in a tarp and tent and firelight and made life seem authentic, made me into someone more real than I thought I was.  We didn’t question his ability to create. Everett did things that we never could.  

He laughed as he drove. I was in the passenger seat and it was snowing, small flakes coming at the windshield and we felt like a spaceship going into warp speed. “Listen,” he said.  “Can you hear it snowing?” We skied that day and he crashed and I didn’t, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He rode a motorcycle sometimes.  He didn’t own one but his parents did and we didn’t know much about his parents except that he didn’t talk about them.  He rode with his hair out behind him like a river and his eyes watered and his face crinkled and I can almost smell the gas can and his callused hands and his poetry notebook, all fresh, all somewhere on that bike, making some kind of music.  

He loved that bike but Everett was a nature kid, the kind who went outside to be closer to the trees and to think about reality and to write slam poetry. I saw him once outside of town, hands clenching a pen, shoulders hunched and his eyes searching the horizon as if looking for some great discovery of life, ready and waiting to capture it.  He sat on a rock, guitar case beside him in the dead grass.

Everett looked into your eyes and smiled. “How’s it going?”  he would ask; sometimes that was all he said and some days there was more.  Blue eyes open and wide. 

I saw him on Friday.  We jammed and I sat down at the piano and played Clair de Lune. My fingers touched the keys but it was my heart playing, falling into the keys and pulling away and my soul was somewhere far away from that room, sitting right above us on the rooftop becoming something lighter than my fingers.  I played and the keys were my partner and we were in love, I played and it ended and the air was different in that room and Everett said nothing at first, then he sat on the bench and his hair swung at his shoulders and he said, “Can you teach me how to play that?” 

“Yes.”

That Friday in class we were given our prompt; “Write about death,” said Nelson.  

Saturday I wrote.  I wrote good things; good things about bad things and about heaven and about death.  The whole class wrote.  We wrote about death, and then Sunday came.  

Sunday the second day of the month.  9:00 church meant helping my brothers get ready, three little boys into suit coats and suspenders and jackets.  Blonde hair combed and sprayed.  Bags packed.  Scriptures in hand.  I got a phone call.  

Everett?  Did I know Everett? Yes. What? No, I knew a different Everett.  Different Everett.  I knew Everett who closed his eyes when he thought.  I knew Everett who laughed with blue eyes.  I knew a different Everett.  Everett with one corner of his mouth tugging into a smile, freckles on his nose, looking into my wide eyes.  Everett who made me want to smile.  I knew Everett Mills.  The phone slipped.

Her voice is burned into my eardrums.  I hate her voice, that woman on the phone.  Burned into my memory with the 8:36 am on the oven and the weather and the red shoes on my feet. It was sunny outside.  Sunny and the mountains were grey and cold and my fingers were numb and my ears were numb from listening and my throat ached and my eyes hurt.  I couldn’t see for what felt like a long time.  And when I did it was him smiling, eyes shining looking into mine and I heard his laugh. 

I tried to wake up but sorrow beat me with its switch and tears kept staining my fingertips, kept me awake.

His words were in my mind, they were beaten into my soul, stamped into my lungs and every breath formed the shape of his hands and the sound of his voice. 

Angry thoughts poured from my brain down my throat and made my heart ache harder.  

I wrote.  Wrote lists, tried to organize the fear and organize the anger and rearrange the tears. His voice spoke in my ears. 

“Amy.” Grass was cool against my feet, I drew my knees against my chest and rested my chin on the holes in my jeans.  “I wish…” he trailed off.  Looked at me. “Why do we have to be what they want us to be?”

“What do you mean?” I said.  “We don’t”

“But you know.  We go to school so we can go to college and we have to do well so we can get good jobs so the rest of our lives can be good.” He watched the clouds, watched where the ground sloped away from us into the sky, watched the town from where we sat on the hill.  “I hate school.  I don’t want to go to college. I don’t want to go to work every day and hate it and right now all I really want to do is write.” 

My head was turned now, eyes fixed on him. My brow furrowed.

“All I want to do is write music, and slam, I would be a poet if it made any money but it doesn’t. I want to write music but when does that ever work?” Fingers plucking grass.

“You could make it work. You really could.  You’re good enough.” Cheek resting on my knees, turned sideways to him. 

“But what about everything else? Do I drop out of school in the meantime? What about my dad, or what would I tell my parents?” His voice was rising, his throat choked on the words.  “I just… I just want to make things. Brighter. If I could just make people feel things and make them happy I would be alright forever.” He brought his hands to his eyes.  Rubbed them. “Things don’t work the way I want them to.”

“Everett…” I hesitated.  He had never been like this before.  I reached between us and felt my fingers cover his. Blue eyes turned back to mine.  He was blinking away the beginnings of tears.  

“Sorry, it’s dumb.”

“No, you’re alright. It’s not dumb.” His fingers were warm and strong. Clear blue eyes. “Don’t ever stop writing. Things have a way of working out.”  

 A corner of his mouth turned up.  Barely, but it was there. His hair tossed in a sudden breeze. Clouds like ruffled waves. The horizon was turning gold.

He was Everett the bard.  Everett the boy who was more than a high school kid, who should have been famous, who would have been. The kid with so much passion his words blocked out everything but the oxygen in the room and the poetry we breathed in through our ears.  

Lists in my notebooks.  Lists in my journal.  “Things That Cost Too Much:” I wrote. “Suicide.”

Class on Monday no one talked.  There was nothing to say but I wrote a little.  What kind of sick joke was it, “write about death” and we had done it like we were wise and we had done it with Everett.  Now I wrote to him, for him. I kept him alive with the words that poured from my pen, I kept him breathing with prayers but that night I went to bed with a knot in my throat and my eyes crimson and cold.  

I was going to teach him Clair de Lune. 

Saturday night he had driven back in the pickup with friends he had laughed he wanted to hang out on Tuesday he had laughed.  

Everett from math class. From writing class. Everett who wrote. Everett who played the mandolin and the violin and the ukulele and the guitar and the piano and who wore glasses and smiled.  

Friday we all met around the piano and played our best.

A week went by.

A viewing.  His art was on the wall and his instruments were on the table but I heard his voice in my ears and he was smiling and I hated it.

A funeral. His parents. Little sisters. Step mom.  

I left early.  During the last speaker’s remarks, the formality speaker who hadn’t known him.

There was a barn in his yard, a small one with a hay loft up top and two horse stalls. The ladder was red but the paint was peeling and the wood splintered where I touched it. The loft was light with sunshine reaching through the windows onto the floorboards. I sat cross-legged in the hay and smelled the air, touched the rafters above me, leaned into the window. I lay in the hay until I fell asleep.  

Days went by and I smiled once or twice without knowing how; there was a light taken out of the world and we were a star-system without a star to revolve around, and the part of my heart that laughed had dried up and disappeared and friends couldn’t fill it.  My world was black and white, numb and aching and moving slower than I felt I could last. At night I lay down with my guilt and my pain and pretended the ceiling was a doorway to how things were weeks ago.

Everett’s poetry filled my thoughts, softened tears and at other times made me seethe at the boy who had written those words. 

The first time I laughed I was up the canyon and the trail was solid beneath my shoes.  The trees smelled sweet, they were just budding and there was color on the branches above us.  Light filtered through them and it was the kind of day he would have loved.  A friend made a joke and I started laughing and couldn’t stop, even when I realized what I was doing and even when I saw his face in my head.

My friend said “finally,” and at last I stopped laughing and felt my heart seem to melt a little and a smile stayed until I went home.  

His face in my head was smiling. I picked up the guitar and played. I sat at the piano and played.  I played until the part of me that hurt lay still and the part of me at peace stood up. I played until I wanted the world to be in color again. I played until I cried and until the aching in my body quit and the aching in my soul gave up and when I woke up the world was a little bit brighter. 

I thought school would change because we all walked around missing the same person, the same person who made us smile but really school stayed the same. A few of us, though, walked around with a kid in our hearts and poetry bleeding from our fingertips. We carried blue eyes and a smile. Mostly we carried the memory of a boy who had made us more real than we had thought we could be--the memory that we had been artists once, maybe we could be again. Very few people are made up of just skin and bones, I think. Everett was made of vision.