Sarah Stevenson - Underneath (Sarah Jamila Stevenson)

“Dad, you were like our guard dog,” I say, knowing it’s inadequate to what I’m really feeling. But I have to say something. “You were great.”

“Grrrr,” he says, a little weakly.

“If it’s all the same to you,” my mom puts in with a small smile, “I’d rather be married to a lover, not a fighter.” All of us, including Auntie Mina, laugh a little louder than is strictly necessary.

“Now I think we need some chamomile tea,” my mom continues, steering Auntie Mina ahead of her toward the kitchen and yanking my dad up from the couch. “We all need to unwind after that. And then, I think I’d like to talk about restraining orders.”

My mom is kind of a fighter herself. She doesn’t usually show it—her days of protesting ended, she claims, when she graduated from college—but if she thinks injustice is involved, she can’t help herself. It’s just the way she is. She starts bringing up advocacy and civil rights, equality and respect, and we all roll our eyes and say she must have lived in Santa Cruz too long, but she’s right.

My parents might be bizarre, but at times like these, I really do love them.

After all, I’m a little bizarre too.

From Shiri Langford’s journal, September 25th

It’s all arranged. By next weekend, I won’t have to worry about any of this. Or about THAT.

Sunny, if you’re reading this, I wish I could explain everything, but I can’t. Just know that it wasn’t anyone’s fault, it was me. I just couldn’t do it anymore. Any of it.

I’m afraid of what you’ll think of me. I’m afraid you’ll think I’m a coward.

I am. I’m sorry.

Later that evening, I pull out Shiri’s journal. I haven’t looked at it in a couple of weeks but I’ve been thinking about what she said, about Auntie Mina being more sensitive to other people’s emotions. I’ve been wondering, again, where it fits in with my underhearing. With our underhearing—mine and Shiri’s. I know I won’t be able to figure out anything I haven’t already, but I still feel like looking at it.

As I’m taking the journal out of the desk drawer where it’s been lying incognito, it slips out of my hands and falls to the floor, splayed open face-down. I pick it up and smooth out a few creased pages, and that’s when I notice a folded page, almost at the back of the book. The top half is torn off—it’s just the bottom half of the page—and it’s been folded so the outside edge doesn’t show, which was why I didn’t see it before. I might never have seen it if I hadn’t dropped the book, unless I’d gone through every single page one by one. And I guess I didn’t.

My fingers tremble a little as I unfold it, though I tell myself there probably isn’t anything there. But there is. The small half-page is full, cramped with writing.

Something looks familiar about it, and on instinct I flip to the front of the book where I’d stashed her note to me. I pull it out. It’s on a half-sheet of paper. I flip back to the folded page and set the note above it, torn edges together.

It’s a perfect fit.

Dear Sunny: I don’t expect you to understand any of this yet, but we’ll always have yesterday … and today, and tomorrow. Maybe one day you’ll figure it out. I never could.

I said in my last entry that I couldn’t explain it even if I wanted to. By now—if I’m right about what’s been happening to me—I think you’ll know what I mean. I know that’s a cop-out, but I’m too weak and scared to try anymore, and all I can think is that if I tell anyone else, I’ll lose them, too. I don’t want to lose you. I’ve already lost Brendan; I’ve lost Mom. When I tried to tell her about Dad, she didn’t want to listen. And I couldn’t prove anything. It’s a curse, being able to do something nobody else can. If it ever happens to you, you have to promise me you’ll be strong. Be stronger than I was.

I love you, Sunny. And tell Mom I love her, too.

I sit on my bed for a while after that, staring at nothing.

Then I pick up the journal again and go downstairs.

Auntie Mina is in the living room with her laptop, the TV on quietly in the background. I can hear Mom in the kitchen, and I don’t know where Dad is. That’s fine, because I have something I need to say to Auntie Mina in private.

She looks up when I walk in and immediately sets her laptop on the coffee table. Silently, I sit down next to her. I think about my words for a moment more, and although she eyes the book in my lap, she doesn’t press me.

“The day Shiri died,” I begin, then stop. I have to swallow past a lump in my throat. “Before I even found out what happened, I got this in the mail.” I pick up the journal, the plain navy-blue book that literally fell at my feet so many months ago, and place it gently into her hands.

With trembling fingers, she opens the cover; flips through page after page, reading some, skimming others. I stay quiet. I don’t point out anything, I don’t ask questions. I don’t even watch her reading—I pretend to look at the television screen, though if you asked me what I was watching, I would have no clue.

After several minutes, I hear her close the cover with a quiet rustle of paper.

Auntie Mina puts her hand on mine.

“Thank you, Sunny.”

I wipe my wet cheeks. “It’s yours. I think you should have it. I’ve already read it.”

“Well,” she says, and then pauses, seems to rethink whatever she was about to say.

What she says is, “Shiri … she was always different.” Her voice is sad, but she doesn’t seem devastated like I was afraid she might be. Like she would have been even a few months ago.

Shiri was different. That was what made her who she was, that was why she was special and why she was so much more than a cousin to me. Why I wanted to be so much like her.

Past tense: wanted.

I realize something more, and I say it to Auntie Mina.

“I’m different, too,” I say, but what I mean is, I’m different from Shiri, not just from everyone else.

“Yes, you are,” she says, and hugs me tightly. Somehow, without explaining it, I’m certain she understands.

The next day, when I see that neither Mikaela nor Cody is at the picnic table behind the art building, I sit down gingerly. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m a little afraid that Becca and David and Andy are all going to turn and glare at me, tell me to leave, but they don’t.

David says hi, shyly, looking up briefly from his sketchbook. Andy nods and continues snarfing down a meatball sandwich, talking with his mouth full about a concert he wants to go to in Hollywood somewhere. Twelve o’clock and all’s well.

Becca says, “Hey, is Mikaela okay?”

“I don’t know,” I say cautiously. “I haven’t talked to her since two days ago. Is she sick?” I worry again that I should have called her after I left Cody’s, but then, I didn’t have a chance.

“I think she’s hung over.” Becca smirks. “She called me around eight last night and gave me a mini-lecture about how Siouxsie and the Banshees are historically underappreciated as the root of modern underground music.”

“Oh.” I hesitate, then tell a white lie. “All I know is, Mon-

day after school I dropped her and Cody off at his place. Maybe they were partying last night, too.”

“Without us? Bitches,” Becca says cheerfully. “Cody never has parties at his place.”

David nods in agreement. “Mostly we go out to Soto Park,” he says quietly. “Not lately, though. Too muddy.”

“And now they’re missing the most awesomest lunch in the world .” Becca pulls a crinkle-cut pickle slice and a piece of wilted, paper-thin lettuce out of her veggie burger and throws them at the nearest tree. “Well, maybe she got a little hot goth-boy action.”