Victor Lodato - Mathilda Savitch

When I have a fit now, Ma just walks away. She won’t fight back like she did with Helene. Sometimes my fits are real, sometimes I make them up, but I don’t think Ma can tell the difference. The nightmares were real, the first few months, but it was always Da that came into my room. I still have bad dreams every once in a while, but my parents don’t know because I don’t cry out for them anymore. The Tree taught me how to breathe when I wake up from a bad dream, and how to train my thoughts. When you learn things like this, you can pretty much get along by yourself. You don’t need other people waiting on you hand and foot.

I spend a lot of time in H’s room. Sometimes I picture myself sleeping in there and Ma comes to the door and sees me under the covers and for a second she doesn’t know it’s me. She thinks it’s you-know-who. If that ever really happened, I wouldn’t say boo or anything, I wouldn’t want to give her a heart attack. I’d just lie there and keep the covers over my head and let Ma sort it out for herself.

A few weeks after Helene died, there was a night Ma and Da and I were having dinner and the phone rang. Except it didn’t come from the kitchen, it came from upstairs. It was the phone in Helene’s bedroom. Her princess line, as Ma called it. It rang like twenty times but nobody moved. The next day Ma had it disconnected. Did you ever see the movie where that grown woman goes back in time to the house she grew up in and the telephone rings and it’s the woman’s grandmother calling? And the two of them talk about nothing special but you can see the woman is crying because in the future where she came from the grandmother is dead. Movies can do stuff like that, that’s why they’re so important. Movies don’t have a problem with time and space. They’re not as restrictive as real life.

Even H’s cell phone is dead because it was crushed by the train. Apparently it was given to Ma and Da in a plastic bag. At least I have the love letters, if you can call them that. Based on my calculations there were about ten boys Helene was involved with. Not all at the same time of course, but in the last few years. Most of them I can picture because they’ve been to the house. But the most interesting one is a boy I’ve never seen, the boy of the last six months. He writes in full sentences and they’re good sentences too in my opinion. Louis is his name. LDM@blueforest.com. I’m almost a little in love with him and I don’t even know who he is. I can’t find a single Louis in H’s yearbooks so he’s probably from another school. He’s a bit of a sad sack in his messages, but he also has a sense of humor. I’m really quite fond of him.

I keep thinking to write him from my own e-mail but I’ve never done it. The funny thing is, H’s e-mail is still alive. Ma and Da set up Helene and me on the same account. When I sign on I always see H’s screen name right above mine, but I can’t get her mail because I don’t know the password. I’ve tried about a million words. I haven’t given up, though. I still make lists of words in my spare time.

Helene’s screen name is HeyGirl. I’m MattieSays. We’re both at mindfield.com. If you ever want to find us, that’s probably the best way to do it.

Anna and I are sitting in her living room. The TV is on but we’re barely watching it. Anna’s trying to get a splinter out of her finger and I’m making a tattoo of a snake on her ankle with a blue ballpoint.

“Don’t press so hard,” she says.

Helene used to draw tattoos on me. One time she made a masterpiece of red lips on the side of my shoulder. For a while I was really crazy about tattoos and I made Helene do a new one on me every week. Mostly we did it in secret because Ma worried about blood poisoning. But once, in the summertime, I was sunbathing on the lawn and she drew a giant flower right on my stomach, with the petals coming straight out of my belly button. When she was finished she sealed it with a kiss. “You’re a rock star,” she said, and I pretty much believed her.

The snake I’m doing on Anna is coming out pretty crappy and I consider turning it into an octopus. On television a man is having a conversation with a deaf boy. The boy is doing signs with his hands and grunting. Anna sighs and changes the channel with the clicker. She goes past a hundred things until she gets to the plastic surgery. At first I don’t even know what it is, for a second I think it’s a cooking show.

“Look,” Anna says, but I’m already looking. A doctor is pulling a loose piece of someone’s face, you can’t even tell if it’s a man or a woman.

“Gross,” Anna says, but she doesn’t change the channel. “Oh my god,” she says. An assistant to the surgeon is sucking up blood with a tube. I get a funny feeling in my stomach. I used to be able to watch gross-outs but lately it’s not so appealing.

“I’m going upstairs,” I say.

Anna doesn’t move, she can’t take her eyes off the stupid television.

I really can’t stand it when other people have control over the clicker. No one ever watches what you want to watch. And then they always shut the TV off at the wrong moment. When I’m watching TV by myself my rule is to shut it off only after something good has happened, or when the last words you hear are not going to hurt you. You don’t want to shut it off in the middle of two people having an argument or someone saying pig or death or my car broke down . You want to make sure the last words are something like that would be great or world of your dreams or magically delicious .

When you go up the stairs in Anna’s house, you pass all these pictures of gardens painted by Anna’s mother. The flowers are good but the people are just blobs in the distance, they don’t even have faces. The blobs are standing under trees or sitting down to blobby picnics. Why even paint people if you’re not going to give them some character?

Anna’s bedroom is the perfect room of a girl, pink and white and fluffy. Everything is in its place. It’s easy to imagine people visiting this room in a hundred years. It would be like a museum. the bedroom of a girl would be the exhibit. This would be in the future when people sleep in pods and live forever. But I bet the room would still make them jealous. A huge bumblebee is knocking on the window. I kick off my shoes and sprawl on the bed.

“What are you doing up there?” Anna shouts. “Are you coming down?”

“No,” I say, “you come up here.”

I arrange myself on the bed like pornography but when Anna sees me she doesn’t get it.

“Why are you lying like that?” she says.

“I don’t know,” I say, and I close my legs.

The bumblebee is still doing a number on the window, bonking its head. You have to feel sorry for animals like that, you really do.

Anna comes and sits next to me on the bed. She tilts her head like a doll. Suddenly she’s my nurse. She pushes the hair out of my face. Around us on the bed are pillows shaped like hearts. It really is another world.

You’re probably wondering how a person like me could have a friend like Anna. Why am I not surrounded by other brains? Why would Anna choose me is your question. But it’s not even the right question.

Beauty is not the boss. The mind is. The truth is, I chose Anna.

The beginning of Anna and me is historical. The place is the pool club at Randolph Park. The time is only five months ago.

I was sitting on a chaise longue, reading a novel. The Straw Hotel. It wasn’t on the summer reading list, I found it at a garage sale. The story concerns a woman with amnesia who might also be a killer, I won’t say in case you ever want to read it. Highly recommended.