Arden Grey

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-4197-4600-0

  eISBN 978-1-68335-949-4

  Text copyright © 2022 Ray Stoeve

  Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura

  Published in 2022 by Amulet Books, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

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  To queer friendships, in all their

  magical and life-giving forms

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jamie is trying to cheer me up again.

  “Imagine Tanner gets caught in a wrestling hold the wrong way and his arm is slowly twisted off,” he says. He grips the pull–up bar in his bedroom doorway, feet dangling in midair above the carpet. I grimace. Tanner may be the worst human in the world, but grievous bodily harm isn’t my style.

  “An expression! Ladies, gentlemen, and nonbinary honored guests, I see an actual facial expression.” His wide smile answers my frown. Another pull–up.

  I stare out the window at the October rain lashing the glass, the sky a single shade of pale gray. Seattle living up to its stereotype. Jamie grunts from the doorway, biceps flexing as he rises and lowers, face almost as red as his ginger hair. This is probably the kind of thing some people find hot, watching a guy work out. Not me. Jamie and I have been best friends since freshman year of high school, and sometimes people think we’re dating, but that’s just weird. I don’t like anyone like that. Not boys or girls or anyone else. Why would I need to date when I have friends?

  Okay, one friend. But the point stands. I’m not interested in any of that stuff—not romance, not sex.

  In the doorway, Jamie blows air like an orca surfacing, his pull-ups slowing down.

  “Are you done yet?” I ask.

  “Nope. Gotta get those muscles. Make the most of that testosterone.” Another pull-up. “Hashtag trans guy life.”

  “Hashtag trans formation,” I say as his chin barely clears the bar.

  “She’s cracking jokes now, folks! My work here is done.” He lowers himself to the floor and bounds across the room, flopping onto the bed next to me. “So what are we watching tonight?”

  I let him scroll through Netflix until he finds some mindless action movie. This time it’s Point Break, some classic from the eighties, maybe the nineties, I’m not sure. Jamie loves old movies.

  The screen goes black, the production company logos fade in and out, and the first scene begins. We’re going to be up way too late watching, but it doesn’t matter. I’m always tired now, like my body is a suit of armor I can’t take off.

  Sometimes I wonder when I’m going to cry. I haven’t yet. Not even the day it happened.

  It was September, the third day of school. I’d just gotten home to find Mom and Dad in the kitchen, sitting on opposite sides of the counter but not talking to each other, their faces still and serious.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. Mom always worked late, and Dad usually got home after me, so I knew something was up.

  “Honey, could you go sit in the dining room please? We need to talk to you and Garrett about something,” Dad said. His smile looked painted on.

  I did what he asked. He called Garrett down and they took seats across from the two of us.

  “Evelyn, do you want to . . .” Dad trailed off, looking at her.

  Mom nodded. She looked at us, her eyes clear. “Your dad and I are separating for a while. Things haven’t been working between us for a long time, and I’m going to go stay with a friend in San Francisco while we take some space.”

  She folded her hands, watching us, like it was the most normal thing in the world to say. Like she’d just told us we were going on vacation, not that our family was ending. I knew I was supposed to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything. My whole body was frozen.

  “You’re getting a divorce?” Garrett said finally. His voice sounded like he was choking.

  “No, just separating. We need some time to think about what’s next,” Mom said.

  “Uh huh.” He pushed back his chair so hard it fell against the wall. Dad flinched. Mom usually would have snapped at him, but she just watched. “Have fun in San Francisco.” He spat the words at her and left, charging up the stairs to his room. A moment later, his door slammed.

  I shut my eyes tight. That was a month ago, and I’m still thinking about it. What exactly stopped working for her? The marriage? The family? Did she leave because of her and Dad, or was it Garrett and me, too?

  Jamie pokes me. “You okay?”

  I look at him. His brown eyes are warm. I try a smile, manage a lips-closed line with the ends upturned. Good enough. “What did I miss?”

  “Keanu’s a new FBI agent and he’s gonna help investigate this ring of bank robbers.”

  I nod and try to focus on the movie. I don’t really care what’s happening. The question is just an anchor, a way to hold myself in the moment. If I stay here, I won’t think about back then.

  Sometimes, when I wake up in the morning, I imagine that this will be the day I start over. I’m going to walk into school and be someone else, someone loud and funny, with a posse of friends. Someone who wears bright-colored clothes and dyes her hair and isn’t afraid to speak up in class. Or speak up in general. But instead, I get up and put on jeans and a black t-shirt, comb my shoulder-length brownish-blond hair, and stare at my one eyeliner pencil before deciding, again, not to wear makeup. I don’t know what I’m so afraid of. But not knowing doesn’t make the fear go away.

  On Monday before school, when I’m done with my daily emotional crisis, I sit on the steps and wait for Jamie’s mom to pick me up. Most days I bus, but it’s raining (surprise!) and Jamie texted to ask if I wanted a ride. I huddle under the awning on the front porch until they arrive. Jamie presses his face against the car window, smooshing his lips and cheek flat against the glass as I walk up to his old red minivan. Inside, heat blasts from the air vents and Heart wails from the speakers.

  “Arden!” Jamie’s mom Kim beams at me, then guns it away from the curb. She’s cut her hair again, in what Jamie and I call the “Ellen DeGeneres”: short, blond, and very, very gay. Jamie’s other mom, Lisa, is more of a Ponytail Lesbian.

  “Your hair looks nice,” I say.

  “You’re so sweet. You always notice. Unlike some people,” she says, arching an eyebrow at Jamie.

  “You’ve been getting the same cut for three years,” he says.

  “Just wait. I’ll come home with purple hair and then you’ll really freak.”

  The day is a series of tests in Navigating the High School Hellscape: essay research in English, group work in French, an actual test in history, and biology. Yeah. Biology doesn’t need to do anything special to suck. It exists in Permanent Trash World.

  Mr. Bones (his actual real name, Jamie checked) passes out a worksheet on genoty
pes and phenotypes. I bend over my paper, leaning my head on one hand while I fill it out. Across the room, Tanner and his friends are joking and laughing. Some of the girls sit on their desks, legs crossed. When they talk, the boys watch them and look at each other like they know some secret the girls don’t know. Tanner gestures wildly, words exploding from his mouth, interrupting Caroline Summers midsentence, and his buddies join in, all of them talking over each other. The girls laugh. Tanner looks over at me and catches my eye before I can look at my worksheet.

  “Ar-den!” He singsongs my name like it’s two words instead of one. I ignore him.

  “Arden! Arden! Arden!” He’s chanting my name now. The girls giggle. My heart beats like a washing machine and rage rises in my chest like dirty water, but I can’t give in, can’t give him the satisfaction.

  “Tanner.” Mr. Bones’s voice echoes across the classroom and all chatter grinds to a halt. I stare at my worksheet but I’m not seeing it. “Office.”

  “I wasn’t even doing anything, Mr. B!”

  “Now, Mr. Olson.”

  I hear a heavy sigh and the exaggerated thumping of books into a backpack, and then the door opens and slams shut. I stare at my worksheet and focus on the rage, imagine it’s a typhoon sucking Tanner down into the ocean and drowning him, his square white face swollen, stupid fauxhawk waving like seaweed. Maybe grievous bodily harm is my style after all. I focus on the rage and I don’t cry. I don’t cry. I don’t cry. Around the room conversations bloom again, seeding through the desks until the noise level is back to normal. I avoid looking at anyone for the rest of the class.

  The bell rings and right on cue, it’s Mr. B with an Arden could you stay a moment please? Everyone else piles out the door like the floor is made of lava as I walk over to Mr. B’s desk.

  “How are you, Arden?” he asks when the classroom is empty.

  I shrug. “I’m fine.” I look at his desk, all the items organized into containers: paper clips in a small glass box, pens in a mason jar, papers filed neatly into an upright metal organizer divided by class period.

  “What’s the deal with you and Tanner?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That didn’t look like nothing.”

  I look up and meet his eyes, focused on me under the bushy eyebrows Jamie and I giggled about when we were freshmen. His gaze is laser-sharp, a microscope under which I am frozen. “How long has this been going on?” he asks.

  “Last year,” I mumble. I’m not about to tell him how it all started. Please god, don’t let him ask. “It’s really not a big deal. I just ignore him.”

  “Well, maybe other teachers have let it slide, but I want you to know it’s not going to fly in my class.” He steeples his fingers, gaze steady on me. “Please let me know if there’s anything I can do.”

  I nod. I just want to get out of here.

  He looks up at the clock. “Don’t let me keep you from your lunch.”

  When I get home from school that afternoon, I’m tired. I’m achy all over and my head hurts like I’m getting sick. Maybe I am. I could take a shower and sit outside in the rain for a little bit, and then maybe I’ll get sicker and I can stay home tomorrow.

  I don’t do that, though. I go into my room and lie down on the rug, earbuds in, and turn the music up as far as I can before it hurts my ears. I unfocus my eyes, watching the floaters slide down my retina, blinking them back up again and again, as Tegan and Sara sing in their jangly voices about a ghost.

  As long as I can remember, I’ve done this. This lying-on-the-floor thing. Garrett, in all his thirteen-year-old little-brother wisdom, thinks it’s weird. Why don’t you just lie on the bed, he always asks. But there’s something comforting about the floor, the shiny red-brown hardwood under the flat striped rug holding me up. The bed is too soft. Sometimes I like to lie underneath it, though. It feels safe there, closed-in, like nothing can get to me.

  I fix my eyes on the white ceiling, shaded blue by the light blue walls, and drift away into my mind. Mom is waiting for me there. The morning of the day they told us, I saw her standing in her and Dad’s bedroom, staring out the window. I stopped in the hallway and watched her, but she was somewhere else. I could have said good morning, but I didn’t. It was easier to avoid her.

  Sometimes when I think about her, I feel like she doesn’t exist anymore. Not like she died; I’m sad, but I’m not morbid. No, it’s just like she wasn’t real, like maybe I imagined her. I know she was there, of course. She’s in our pictures: holding me at a family reunion. Watching me take my first steps. Making a goofy face behind the candles on her birthday cake. For some of our pictures she was behind the camera, before she got too wrapped up in running a gallery for other people’s photos instead of taking her own. But in my memories, she’s a cardboard cutout, a mother-shaped space. Who was she, really? Who were we to each other? I don’t know. The things I have, the things I remember, I hold tight in my fists like they’ll vanish if I let go, the same way she did.

  CHAPTER TWO

  On Saturday, the light is perfect, all heavy gray clouds and no rain. It’s a photo-adventure kind of day. Jamie and I take the train to downtown Seattle and get off in Pioneer Square. I have my Pentax K1000 with a fresh roll of black-and-white film inside it, and we wander through the alleys, admiring the old buildings and the trash and the graffiti. Jamie leans against a brick wall, fixing his eyes on a point in the distance.

  “Oh, glamour! Yes, darling,” I say, snapping a picture. “That’s the shot.” His face twitches, trying to hold still and serious, but his mouth has other ideas and a grin breaks loose across his face. The click of the shutter gets it. Hand through his hair. Click. Eyes crossed, cheeks puffed out. Click. Close-up of the ivy curling down the brick. Click.

  I’ve been taking pictures since Mom and Dad gave me the Pentax for my twelfth birthday. I thought it was stupid at first—why use film when my phone can take five hundred perfect digital pictures with one ten-second press of the touch screen? So the camera sat on my desk in my room for months, gathering a fine coat of dust.

  Then one Saturday morning I came to breakfast and found the camera sitting on my plate. Mom was away consulting for a gallery opening in San Francisco and Dad seemed more relaxed than usual, humming along with the radio while he scrambled eggs in a skillet. I picked the camera up. It was dust-free.

  “I thought we could go out shooting today,” he said. He’d always liked to take pictures, but for him, it was a hobby. For Mom, it was art.

  “Are those blueberry?” I asked as he tipped a steaming stack of pancakes onto my plate.

  “You got it. I’m not above bribery.”

  We spent most of the day downtown at Pike Place Market, exploring all the tiny shops winding down like a warren into the hillside overlooking the Puget Sound. Dad showed me Post Alley and the wall covered in gum, pretending to lick it as I squealed in disgust and snapped a photo. We used up the whole roll and dropped it off for development on the way home.

  When the pictures came back a week later, I stared at the photo of Dad until I could see every detail in my mind. He looked happy, curly brown hair a wild nest in the October wind, tongue almost touching a piece of chewed gum mashed to the wall. The rubber-duck yellow of the gum matched his raincoat. I could smell the fish from the seafood booths nearby, hear the chatter of tourists, the day unfolding in my memory like a movie. The colors of the photo were brighter than digital, unmanipulated by a filter, the slight grain of the film adding a richness and depth none of my Instagram posts had ever captured. I didn’t have a photo of every moment from that day, but I didn’t need them. This photo was the day, in one single moment.

  I started using the camera more. And by more, I mean it went everywhere with me: tucked into my backpack at school, slung across my shoulder on trips to the grocery store, hanging around my neck as I wandered around our neighborhood waiting for something to catch my eye.

  After a while, taking photos with my phone was the thing that seemed st
upid. The Pentax wouldn’t let me take a million photos of the same thing and delete every imperfect image before posting it to my Instagram where I’d never look at it again—and I liked that. With film, every image meant something. There were no do-overs. Every photo was permanent, a moment frozen forever, unchangeable, undeletable, honest. Hashtag no filter. No one can say it didn’t happen if you have a photograph of it. But I don’t show my photos to anyone, except Dad and Jamie. It feels safer somehow. I don’t know from what, but that part is important.

  Jamie and I wander through Pioneer Square to Occidental Park, a plaza sprawled out in front of an old building, both made of red brick, the building’s face covered in a layer of green ivy. A few men in big coats and ragged shoes huddle at one end. We cross the plaza and Jamie leaps up on a lamppost straight out of Singin’ in the Rain, flinging out his arm for the photo.

  We walk up through downtown and then turn right on Pike Street, starting the trek back up to my house in Capitol Hill. I love taking pictures in the city, love the whirl of faces and colors and textures, how the movement of people pulls me out of my head and into a place where I notice details no one else does. When I’m taking pictures, I am nowhere else but here, in the moment, in the image. Nothing else matters.

  By the time we’re back at my house, the black-and-white roll is finished and the rain is starting. I load in a color roll while Jamie uses the bathroom at the end of the hall.

  “Shit!” he says, voice ringing through the closed door. I walk out of my room, laughing. “I mean, not actual shit, I’m just peeing in here. I forgot to do my shot this morning. Can we go to my house?”

  I answer an affirmative, pressing the back of the camera closed and winding the film forward.

  We leave, running for the bus stop in the downpour. It’s one of those sudden, heavy fall rains, here and then over in minutes. My house is on the west side of the Hill, close enough to walk to Broadway, the main street through the neighborhood. Jamie’s house is further east, down in the valley near Lake Washington. When we arrive, the rain has stopped—clouds rolling across the sky, sun peeking through and brightening the sidewalk for seconds at a time.