If Birds Fly Back Read online

  “Savannah asked about you,” Micah says on the phone that night.

  I’m stretched out in the low grass across the street from Ana’s condo. Braving the itchiness because I want to see the stars.

  “Since when are you hanging out with my ex-girlfriend?” I say. Not in an accusing way. I’m just shocked.

  “Dunno. Since you left.”

  “Er—okay. What did she say?”

  “Nothing much. Just asked what you were up to. I told her you’d ditched us for a bunch of old people.” A pause. “Hey . . . are you still . . . I don’t know, into her?”

  A better question is: was I ever? Once I got past the awesome fact that she wanted to stick her tongue down my throat, there wasn’t much to be into. Whenever we kissed, my eyes were always open. One or two times she caught me. (“God, Sebastian. Weird much?”) And it was weird. Like my brain was beeping: Does Not Compute, Does Not Compute!

  Today with Linny, things computed.

  I say, “Nah, man. You know we broke up weeks ago.”

  “Oh, good. Because I am.”

  “Am what?”

  “Into her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I know it’s probably weird for you, but . . . she’s so . . . well, she’s smokin’.”

  I probably should feel strange about my best friend dating my ex-girlfriend (and genuinely using the word smokin’). But when I say “Then go for it, man,” I know it’s the truth, and it doesn’t make me feel at all defective.

  “Good,” Micah says. “I’m gonna ask her to prom.”

  I almost laugh. “Dude. Two problems. First, prom isn’t for another eleven months. Second, you’ve already graduated high school.” A third problem that I refrain from mentioning: at our senior prom (where Savannah was my date), Micah spent the majority of the evening splayed out in the boys’ locker room after a freak allergic reaction to shaving cream. (Long story. Don’t ask.) You’d think he’d forever have a Pavlovian response to all dance-based activities.

  “Hah!” he exclaims. “Here’s where you’re wrong. Savannah’s almost a senior, so she’ll have a prom.”

  “Okay, good luck with that.”

  “You sure you’re all right with this?”

  “Positive.”

  “Because all you have to do is give the word, and—”

  To prove to him I’m not about to fling myself off the nearest cliff, I tell him about Linny. The limited amount there is to tell.

  Immediately, he says, “What’s her last name?”

  Dangerous territory. I do know it from her Silver Springs ID badge. But if I give him that, he’ll be analyzing her Facebook photos within five seconds.

  “You embarrassed or something?” he says. When this fails to get a rise out of me, he switches tactics. “Oh, come on. It’s the least you can do after abandoning me this summer.”

  Fine.

  Sure enough, a few seconds later—“Dude, she’s hot. Like, hotter than your mother.”

  “I really wish you’d find another comparative.”

  “And I really wish my parents would buy me a Porsche for my eighteenth birthday. But”—he starts singing—“you can’t always get what you waaa-aaant.”

  “SHUT UP.”

  “Okay, no more Mom jokes. But seriously, even this girl’s friends are hot. How much is a plane ticket from LA to Miami?”

  “An entire Chinese fossil collection.”

  “Cool. You must introduce me to this blond-haired vixen called”—a pause as he’s probably squinting at the page—“Cassandra.”

  Cass, Linny had said. I didn’t know she was . . .

  Cass. The girl who filmed everything.

  My voice is a bungee cord ready to snap. “Why don’t you focus on one girl at a time? Savannah. Prom. Remember?”

  “Touché, mi amigo. Unless your mom accepts my Facebook friend request. Then I’ll have to reconsider.”

  Another reason for not telling Micah about my predicament: that would lead to a discussion about how lucky Álvaro is for sleeping with my mother. I’d rather dip my head in gasoline and then light myself on fire.

  “Hanging up now,” I say.

  “Sayonara.”

  13.

  Linny

  WHO: French ballroom sensation Brigitte Beaulieu

  WHEN: Four days in 1959

  WHY: There were rumors that she and her dance partner were fighting. She reappeared at a dance competition in London where she and her partner were scheduled to perform. “I refuse to go out there without him,” she reportedly told the judges. “I cannot go on without my best friend.”

  NOTES: How can Grace go on without me? How can any of us go on without her?

  On my honor, Sebastian will never see that beach footage. Too many close-ups of him, too much given away. The bright side is, he thinks I’m “hot,” although his perception is skewed: he’s never seen Grace. Everything I am, she is times a thousand—the type of reckless beauty that should be heralded with trumpets. She’s a teensy bit darker than me (just enough for people to notice, and for ruder people to comment on), and I’ve always been jealous of her skin tone. When we were little, I imagined Grace as every beautiful girl in the Nigerian folktales that Mom would read us.

  Compared to her, I’m . . . Well, there really is no comparison.

  At home, I check the mail (hopes up, then nothing) and sink into the weatherworn hammock in our backyard, which is mostly palm trees and vines. We have a pool, but MomandDad filled it in with gravel and dirt a few years ago—why would Grace and I want to swim when we could be studying? Now it’s a massive planting bed for their miniature orange grove.

  Tonight’s muggier than it’s been all June (and the boob sweat’s already lining up in formation), but somehow I can’t stomach the thought of reading Midnight in Miami inside the house.

  No. Outside feels freer.

  So I grab Hector, carry him into the backyard, and let him do turtle things as I research. Resting the book in my lap, I flip it to the back, where Álvaro’s smiling wide, dressed in a white pantsuit and ruffled top like the Cuban Austin Powers. And the chest hair. So much chest hair.

  I only get past the first few sentences—

  We sit by the pool, as we do on blistering days, and sip pineapple slush through short straws. We are good with our mouths but terrible with words.

  “Eduardo?”

  “Sí?”

  “The towels.”

  —before someone bangs on the back gate, the one MomandDad erected along with the colossal fence to avoid witnessing Mrs. Landry’s naked sunbathing. Getting up, I peek through the keyhole to see Cass in my driveway, the straps of her lime-green bra popping from beneath her tank top—the same bra she urged me to buy at the mall two winters ago. “It’ll push your boobies up,” she said, and I countered, “So you buy it.” There was no way I could toss it in the laundry without a speech from MomandDad about the oversexualization of minors.

  “Linny, come on,” Cass whines, twirling a piece of straw-colored hair around her index finger. “I can see your eyeball.”

  We haven’t talked since she uploaded that video. Even during eighth grade, when her mom forced her into wilderness camp in the Poconos, we never lasted more than twelve hours without contact. But now, every time my phone flashes CASS, I contemplate chucking it into the nearest body of water, because filming Álvaro during a breakdown was distinctly uncool—and I still feel like it almost mucked up everything.

  Taking a deep breath, I open the latch. “Hi.” I don’t mean for the word to sound aggressive, but it almost has teeth.

  Cass has a smudged appearance, like she hasn’t washed off her eye makeup for days. “Hey,” she trills in a breezy way that makes me bristle. “I rang the doorbell but no one answered, so I figured I’d check back here.”

  Here’s the part when I’d normally invite her into the backyard, ask if she wants lemonade or a Diet Coke, but instead the air ices between us, even in the blistering heat.

&nb
sp; Cass inspects an electric-blue fingernail. “So I’m guessing you got my texts? I sent like a gazillion.”

  I deleted like a gazillion.

  “And my Facebook messages? And my calls? Jeez, Linny, I thought you were dead or . . . something.” What she doesn’t say, probably wants to say: Or gone like Grace.

  “Well, I’m not. Obviously.”

  I get the distinct feeling this is not unfolding as she expected. With her high-heeled sandal, she kicks at a chunk of dirt next to the fence.

  “Anyhoo,” she says, forcing a smile. “Are you like . . . friends with him now?”

  I shake my head. “What?”

  “With Álvaro. I saw you at the beach. I was waving and calling your name and stuff, but you guys were already heading back to the boardwalk.”

  Arguing with Cass is like entering a duel: you know there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll get fatally shot. This has always dissuaded me. Not today. Today, a primordial sound escapes me—so forceful that I almost swivel around to see if a more powerful being looms behind me. “Ugggghhh,” I say, “are you stalking him now or something?”

  I’m acting irrational. I know I am.

  I peer down and see Hector munching a lettuce leaf by my foot. Even he looks judgmental.

  Cass’s eyebrows scrunch together as she jerks her head back. “Oh my God, are you kidding me? I was just there. And now I’m just trying to have a conversation with you. You know, stay involved in your life?”

  There was a time when that was all I wanted. In elementary school, she collected friends like Girl Scout badges, and I felt privileged just to make a cameo in her harem. She was Grace’s friend first—because everyone wanted to be friends with Grace—but soon none of our scripts read right without each other. (We even had the same phases, like our Pocahontas phase, when we were convinced that we could speak with trees.) Maybe it sounds stupid, but Grace and Cass elevated me somehow, like their whirlwind personalities were bold enough to make up any lack I had.

  You can probably guess what happened. Things changed. As much as I want to think the YouTube video was the trigger, Cass and I were fracturing long before then. Like, five months before. I texted her the picture of Grace’s good-bye note, and she biked right over. I can still hear her pounding on our front door. When I opened it she gasped, like I was about to tell her Grace disappeared all over again. We hugged in the doorway, and when I released her, neither of us knew what to say. It was horrible. Grace was the glue between us, and now we were unsticking. I felt like everyone could see the cracks.

  So we no longer sneak into clubs with fake IDs; we no longer have sleepovers on Grace’s bedroom floor; we no longer call emergency tie-dye dances in Cass’s hippie-colored garage.

  We are no longer us.

  Why didn’t Grace realize that would happen? And why isn’t she here to see what’s happening now? It’s like she set fire to our lives, then walked away.

  “Say something,” Cass shouts abruptly.

  I shout back, “What do you want me to say? That I think what you did was really intrusive and crappy?”

  “Yes! Fine! Just as long as we’re talking, because we don’t talk anymore, Linny. Do you realize that? And I don’t mean just for the past three days.”

  I square my shoulders to her, facing off like we’re in a Western film. Instead of guns for weapons, we have guilt. “We talk all the time.”

  “Sure. I tell you about the new boy I’m dating. You tell me how many hallways you mopped at Silver Springs. We talk about nail polish and the weather and bike tires and— God, we never talk about her.”

  Grace.

  It’s not one of those if-we-don’t-talk-about-it-then-it-won’t-be-real type of things. I literally don’t have the vocabulary. No one has invented words for the things I need to say.

  Echoing my thoughts, Cass yells, “Why is that?” The only noise is the wind swiping a few blades of grass across the driveway. “I’ve been reading a few books on loss and stuff, and you’re really supposed to talk about it.”

  “Cass. Those books are about people who’ve died.”

  She pauses. “Doesn’t it feel like she has?”

  Just for an instant, I want to tell her: I’ve thought this, too. But it’s worse. Barring suicide, death isn’t a choice. Leaving is. But then I think: Who are you, Linny? What type of person has thoughts like that?

  There’s another long silence between us. Finally, Cass says, “Say something.”

  “I’m angry, okay?”

  “And you think I’m not? You think I like that she’s gone and all that’s left is—”

  I step backward. “Me?”

  Cass takes a remarkably deep breath, like she’s inhaling a hurricane. “You know that’s not what I was going to say.”

  “No. No. It’s fine. I feel that way, too. It seems like the world’s most unfair swap. Out of the three of us, she’s not who I’d choose to go away.”

  She bites her lip, hard, her whole face going red. “Thanks for that, Linny. Thanks for that.” Her voice is rough, like she’s speaking through steel wool. “I took down the video, you know. Last night.”

  And then she closes the gate herself, leaving me incredibly alone. I want to shout after her: “You probably should have opened with that!” Instead, I count the blades of grass around my feet as thoughts needle the back of my mind.

  I’m unsure of who I am without Grace.

  And I don’t like who I’m becoming.

  THE LEFT-BEHINDS (SCENE 7)

  SHOUT NIGHTCLUB, MIAMI BEACH—BATHROOM

  The lighting is low except for neon signs above the sinks. Pulsing techno music vibrates the stalls as LINNY (fifteen and a half) knocks on the bathroom door.

  LINNY

  Are you okay? Grace? Let me in.

  GRACE

  (barely audible)

  Go away.

  LINNY

  Come on, open the door.

  We hear the latch flick aside. LINNY gently pushes open the door to see GRACE on the floor, hands clutching her knees. Mascara drips down her cheeks like nail marks on a chalkboard. Her yellow wings are on full display, hugging her, but are dirty and drooping.

  LINNY crouches to the ground, obviously worried. She places two fingers under GRACE’s chin and lifts up her face. GRACE’s eyes carry a blank expression.

  LINNY

  Talk to me.

  GRACE

  Do you think I’m different now?

  LINNY

  I mean, a little, but—

  GRACE

  (sighing)

  I just—I just don’t know who I am with them.

  LINNY

  What do you mean?

  GRACE

  (after a long pause)

  The wings. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with the wings.

  Fast-forward to six thirty, when Dad drifts onto the back porch in his white coat and calls across the yard that Mom’s staying late at the practice. Since it’s Friday night, should he order pizza?

  I say, “If there’s extra pineapple,” and an hour later we’re huddled around the steaming pie in the dining room. He offers me a knife and fork, but I pick it up with my hands, like a heathen.

  When we were kids, Grace and I’d hang out with Dad all the time: Saturday mornings at the Original Pancake House, beach days during the hot, slow summer. For my thirteenth birthday, Dad gave me a Sony Trinicon wrapped in silver ribbon. It’s funny to think about that now—how he was the one to give me my first video camera—considering the whole Clay People Smashing fiasco. What’s even weirder is, he refuses to be on film, ducking from the lens like he’s dodging a wasp, or like I’m trying to steal his soul. (Mom says he’s afraid of seeing himself age on film, but I’m not buying it.)

  On Sunday nights the three of us would watch movies together, kid films like Mulan and E.T. and Finding Nemo. Eventually, Grace and I graduated to the harder stuff. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, a few documentaries, and some Nollywood films (from the Nigerian
Hollywood). I started asking questions about maybe pretty please going to New York City for film camp. Two things happened in quick succession: firstly, Mom acted like I’d just declared my intention to become a stripper, and secondly, she signed Grace and me up for a summer biomedical program. Five weeks of dissecting fetal pigs while choking back vomit. Even without Álvaro Herrera, Silver Springs beats that by a landslide of biblical proportions.

  Last year I entered Miami Beach Senior High’s seventh annual documentary competition. My film, Grace in the Wild, profiled her first live musical performance, outside of choir or band. She played the guitar onstage, sang her own songs, and looked unbelievably radiant. I cut those images with home videos of her growing up, learning to play all the instruments now gathering dust in her room. In my film, there’s only one clip of the two of us together; she’s showing off her flute skills to the camera, fingers moving up and down the keys like Pan reincarnated, but the only thing I’m interested in is looking at her.

  The movie took me ages. I worked on it every day before and after school, and for three nights in a row left flyers on MomandDad’s bed with my name circled in red ink.

  I won first prize at the competition. Neither of them was there.

  When Grace and I got home from the screening, she went ballistic in my room—gripping her curls and screaming into the throw pillows. I hated seeing her like that, so I told her it was okay. It wasn’t worth it. Just drop it. She crawled into my closet after me, bringing my head to her chest so I could listen to her angry breath. We fell asleep like that, curled together, and the next morning we pretended like there was no film at all.

  Three months later, she was gone.

  I’m almost finished with my second pizza slice when out of nowhere Dad announces, “I found your book in the hammock.”

  Oh boy.

  A lie forms on the tip of my tongue: It’s for AP English next year, I’ll say, even though the school district banned Midnight in Miami in the 1960s.