Her parents worked together, in the same office, the office of whirring drills and crying children, the office of the mingling smells of mint and artificial fruit flavors, the office she had adored as a child. Their practice was part of a sprawling, sparkling suburban medical park—her father referred to it as Sick City. All the buildings were identical on the outside, so patients routinely showed up at the dentist for a colonoscopy, or the orthopedist for a pap smear. But past the waiting room there was no mistaking where you were, and at the age of six or seven there was nowhere Meredith would have rather played, no amusement park more wonderful than those half-dozen chairs and the swiveling tables and the lights that dropped down from overhead like alien instruments. This was a game she and Evan especially enjoyed: Alien Examination. One of them would put on a surgical mask and the protective eyewear, the other would lie on the chair cloaked in the heavy x-ray blanket. The alien examiner would pull the light down and shine it on various parts of the specimen’s face, prodding with a gloved finger at mouth, nose, eye, ear: What does this do? How does this work? What do you use this for? How lucky she and Evan had been—she knew this even (especially?) when annoyed by them now—that their parents had let them play with everything in that office, let them have the run of the place on Sunday afternoons while they caught up on paperwork. She and Evan could have broken those chairs in a hundred different ways during Alien Examination, but they never did.
“We could walk that trail in the park,” her father said. Ah, the oft-mentioned wooded trail in the park adjacent to Sick City, a pretty jigsaw-puzzle image full of personal promise. It was not really for the sick; it was the place already healthy people went to get even healthier.
“Maybe,” her mother said vaguely.
Perhaps, Meredith thought, it was only for Evan that they kept doing it, this pointless exercise, so things would seem normal. Her mother was standing at the counter pouring Evan a tall glass of milk. This was something he could not do for himself anymore. He could not pour a simple glass of milk. Meredith had watched him try, early on, and miss the glass entirely, as if he were actually, entirely, blind. “Some things are just a little different,” he’d told her, soaking up the puddle of milk beside the glass, “but some things are impossible. Pouring—impossible. I can see the glass. I just don’t know where it is.”
“Today I will slay dragons,” Evan said, taking the milk from his mother’s hand. “I will dig to the center of the earth. I will reconcile warring nations. And I will learn to play the violin.”
“Modest goals,” her father said. “Is that it?”
“That plus a big piece of pie,” he said. Then he winked at her. Meredith hated the wink now. Hated it. It bothered her that when her brother winked, he could not see at all. Why should that bother her? It was his wink, his darkness. Still, she couldn’t stand it. “What d’ya think?” he asked her. “Care to join me?”
“Sure,” she said. “I’ll pencil it in.”
?
At home there was Evan, and half-blind Evan was still Evan, still the safety net, whether he could actually catch her or not. At school there was no net.
The distance between home and Parkway North Middle School, a distance Meredith traveled by herself between 7:42 and 8:05 every single morning, seemed vast, a lonesome valley of suburban achievement, purring cars in driveways, crows the size of small cats milling about on rolling lawns, joggers attached to their NPR podcasts. She walked alone not because she had no friends, but because all her friends took the school bus. She lived—by some trick of fate, some ignorance of her parents when they’d purchased their dream home in their dream suburb prior to having school-aged children—in the unlucky zone just barely inside the 1.25-mile radius that required her to walk to school. Everyone who lived more than 1.25 miles from school got to take the school bus. And not that she would have loved the school bus—she knew this from friends and field trips, and, to be honest, from movies—but the school bus definitely seemed easier than walking, especially when it was rainy or cold. Her house was 1.19 miles from school, which she knew precisely because when Evan had started sixth grade, her father had driven the route twice to check to make sure the district transportation committee was right. Alas. And so she walked, alone, and at some point in the last quarter mile a giant bus barreled past her, sending her hair fluttering, and she would quicken her steps so that she could meet her friends when they disembarked, so they could enter at the glass doors as a unified front.
Numbers were essential. Solidarity was all.
?
It had been all downhill since fifth grade. Sometimes Meredith looked back on that golden year and felt a pang of nostalgia so keenly that she thought she might actually die. Fifth grade. Yes there were cliques, but the cliques didn’t really mean anything in fifth grade. They were pretend distinctions between groups that rarely, if ever, translated into any real action or consequence. In fifth grade you were still friends with everyone, whether you liked it or not, because it was easier for the adults that way. Your parents didn’t particularly care if you wanted to carpool with someone else to swimming lessons; it was convenient for you and Amanda Hammels to travel together, even if you never talked to each other in school, so, by god, that was the way it was going to be. Your teachers assigned you to groups with the expectation you could and should be able to work with anyone. Yes, in fifth grade there were some girls flirting with makeup and, yes, there were some girls flirting with boys, but it was all still as artificial as glittery lip gloss, all part of a world that no one yet really belonged to or understood. Plus, in fifth grade you could remember even further back, all the way back to first and second grade—you still walked down those same halls!—when some girl might have wet her pants or a boy might have cried for his mother or any number of humiliating things that held you all together, put you on an even playing field. As long as you were in that elementary school, in that physical space, everything that happened had happened equally to everyone.
But middle school? A different story. Turned out, what happened in elementary school stayed in elementary school. In sixth grade the playing field lurched to an impossible angle. How did it happen, the summer between fifth and sixth grade, how could it happen so abruptly that a level playing field could tilt so violently, tilt precisely like the Titanic, in a matter of mere hours the night before the first day of sixth grade? Meredith had seen the movie and this was the image she couldn’t get out of her mind: everyone tumbling from the top of the ship down to the bottom, sliding, skidding, careening, frantically grabbing hold of bolted down deckchairs and stair railings. The sliders were clearly the ones who had not anticipated the tilt. Anyone who was going to get off the boat safely had gotten off already. When? In June?
Too late! The last days of August, sixth grade begins, the great slide happens, the playing field tilts, and Meredith finds herself clinging to the ship, somewhere near the middle, around the shuffleboard courts, say. She is not down at the bottom near the icy water, but she can feel the chill of it below her dangling feet, and she has no idea what’s happened.
She had not gotten the memo about the iceberg.
And since then, since literally that first day of sixth grade, over two years ago, she had been trying to get her footing, trying to find her place.