The Me You See

  the me you see

  Shay Ray Stevens

  This is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events

  portrayed in this novel are either

  products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright 2014 by Shay Ray Stevens

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Design by Moore Creative Studios

  Editing by Todd Barselow

  ISBN: 978-1502402455

  This book is protected under

  the copyright laws of the United States of America.

  Any reproduction or unauthorized use of

  the material within is prohibited

  without the expressed consent of the author.

  To those who have figured out who they are

  apart from what people say they should be.

  Table of Contents

  -Naomi-

  -Shawn-

  -Heidi-

  -Niles-

  -Taylor Jean-

  -Kristopher-

  -Anna Marie-

  -Gabriella-

  -Paul-

  -Raynee-

  -Elliot-

  -Pastor Walter-

  -Gage-

  -Stefia-

  the me you see

  -Stefia-

  I lay sprawled out on the stage with two bullets in my chest. Gurgling. Spitting. Gagging on blood. I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t breathe. I stared up at the lights and fixated on the question of why no one had bothered to pull the curtain.

  End of the show, folks.

  But they didn’t pull the curtain. They couldn’t look away.

  Carly held on for a minute. She had turned quickly when she saw the gun and was hit right in the ear. The bullet came with a pop and cracked its way through cartilage and bone and finally came to rest somewhere in the fleshy part of her head. I don’t think she felt anything. There is comfort in that.

  Erick was also shot in the head but from a different angle. It was nothing like in the movies. Death from a gunshot wound in real life is nothing like a gunshot wound on the big screen. Being shot in real life is somehow less dramatic. Bodies move differently. I guess it’s something you can’t fake for the camera.

  Tony ran and was hit in the back. He fell forward, his chest slamming into the black wood of the stage floor while profanity sloshed out of his mouth. He gulped for air and died mid-inhale. I thought about Tony’s younger brother, a master video gamer, and wondered if he’d be able to shoot the pixelated bad guys anymore without thinking about his oldest brother’s very public demise.

  A bullet caught Bobby’s arm which spun him around. He pleaded and said, “Stop. You don’t mean to do this. You don’t want to…” The second bullet went right through his face; centered between his nose and left cheekbone. His cheekbones were so nice. It’s how he got that modeling job with Dinecktos. They hadn’t even had to airbrush him. I remember he had been pretty proud of that.

  Aubrey hid behind the curtain and was shot three times. I don’t know where she was hit but within seconds she had crumpled down and sat with her pretty white lace costume in a puddle of her own blood.

  Then me, Stefia. Two in the chest, one in the head. Down I went, the last to go. There’s no time to think when you’re looking down the barrel of a gun. That whole life flashing in front of your eyes thing? It’s a total crock of shit. I’m telling you, there’s no time to think about what you haven’t done or should have done or want to do. There’s no time for any of it.

  I spit. I gurgled. I choked.

  I died.

  That’s how it happened.

  Everyone thinks that death is dramatic but really it’s quick. It’s so quick. It is done and over with and the people who are left alive hold on to that last convulsing messy breath, and that’s what they remember. That’s what sticks with them.

  It’s what they see.

  It’s like when you’ve got that dog that looks so pathetically ill and you can’t decide whether or not to put it to sleep or let it hang on for one more day. And you finally decide that it’s time to let the dog go and you take it in for its overdose of anesthesia and you sob and sob because he’s taken his last breath. And you hold onto the hurt of those last minutes. How it was hard to breathe. How he was in so much pain. But really, the death isn’t what hurts.

  And maybe that’s what I want people to know. Because people will worry and wonder and talk about it. It’s not the death that hurts. It’s all the stuff that leads up to it.

  Actual death is quick.

  We all think we are so protected. So careful. We think we take the right precautions to be safe. And yet the irony is that the things we need to worry about, we don’t. We don’t concern ourselves with the random things that blindside us on some stagnant Thursday in February. We don’t care about things that we don’t believe add up to the big picture.

  But it all adds up. The little pieces make up the big one. And we are so unprotected.

  He just happened to be there. He just happened to stand up and draw his gun. Did he even think about it? Did his day start out the same as any other and just happened to end with a gun in his hand?

  Lubbock said what we see depends mainly on what we look for. And really, life is all about what we see. It’s the visual. The presentation. That’s how we take it in and figure out what’s what.

  In the end, we are only the stories that people tell about us.

  This, then, is the story of me.

  Or at least the me you see.

  -Naomi-

  It’s quiet like death but smells like pancakes. I open my eyes and blink.

  Once.

  Twice.

  Three times.

  I think I hate this day.

  I pull on yoga pants and the bright pink hoodie I’d hung on my doorknob the night before and schlep down the stairs. No one says anything when I enter the living room even though twelve people stand there. The room is so quiet and their thoughts so loud I can almost read them across their foreheads like a crawler on the bottom of a news screen.

  Poor Naomi.

  It’s so sad.

  What a shame.

  Dad sits at the kitchen table with Aunt Melanie. They don’t make eye contact. They don’t talk. No one says anything.

  No one ever says anything.

  It turns out the pancake smell comes from freshly baked caramel rolls that the neighbors brought over because at times like this, people bake and bring it all to you because they don’t know what else to do. We’re supposed to eat the caramel rolls and chew our way through the sadness and frustration and wordless discomfort.

  But no one touches the caramel rolls. No one says anything.

  No one ever says anything.

  To be fair, people often stay quiet simply because they don’t know what to say. My sister Stefia never had that problem. I could depend on her to break the silence, to interject something funny or witty or intelligent. Stefia kept a multitude of words on the tip of her tongue, ready to aim a much needed phrase at just the right spot. Invariably, her remark was perfect and people always listened.

  But then, that was Stefia. When she spoke, people gathered at her feet. My sister could have read the ingredients from a bar of soap and her audience would have proclaimed it to be the most magical thing they’d ever heard.

  Stefia had been poured from of a tall glass of perfection; my mother’s alluring beauty and my father’s come-what-may disposition had been flawlessly combined into one person and offered to the rest of us as a gift. I always imagined that God had placed her in my mother’s womb with a note that said, “A masterpiece. Enjoy.”

  But then the shooting happened, and she fell as though the walls of the Sis
tine Chapel itself had crumbled, leaving nothing but shattered fragments on a squalid floor.

  So now we cry. We look at caramel rolls. And we tiptoe around a loss of words because the person who used to speak for all of us is no longer here.

  **

  I know that Things Happen. Kids get run over by cars. Houses catch on fire. Cars bust through ice and sink to the bottom of lakes. People get shot.

  It’s reality.

  I know about reality. In reality, people leave and don’t come back. I remember waking up four years ago when I was twelve and knowing in my heart that my mom was not coming home. We had piled her mail in the middle of the dining room table and one of the cats had jumped up while chasing a fly and knocked the pile over. No one picked it up.

  That’s how I knew she wasn’t coming back. Because no one cared enough to pick up her mail.

  Eventually mom’s toppled pile of letters and bills grew into such a mess that we were actually kicking them around. People talk about having a giant elephant in the room—which generally can only be felt, not seen—but our giant elephant was physically manifested in a growing pile of mail.

  After two weeks of tripping around mom’s junk from the postal service, I suspected nothing had been added to the mountain in a while. A week later, I was positive no new envelopes addressed to her had been delivered to the house. I was old enough to realize mom was somewhere and had requested an address change. That was about the time dad yelled at us all to throw the pile away. So Stefia and Gabriella and I all tossed piece after piece of mail into a giant contractor’s garbage bag and lugged it out to the trash can at the end of the driveway.

  An elephant made up of an absent person’s mail is heavy and hard to dump.

  Dad sat all three of his girls down that night and said, “I don’t know where your mom is. I don’t know why she left. All I know is she’s gone.” Then he went out into the garage to work on his car, like he’d done nothing more than tell us the internet was down or the coffee pot was broken.

  Gabriella pounded her fists into the beanbag chair she was on and cried. Then she flung obscenities that an eleven-year-old shouldn’t know at the air dad had left when he walked out the front door. Stefia, almost fourteen, sat on the couch and stared blankly out the window at the huge tree in our front yard. I was twelve and figured the best thing I could do was leave the house and run down the sidewalk as far as it would take me. Because I was twelve, and I didn’t know how to change what had just happened.

  I haven’t seen mom since I was twelve. I haven’t heard from mom since I was twelve. I know she isn’t anywhere around this town because people can’t hide here. If you’re in Granite Ledge, somebody knows where you are. And no one knows where my mom is.

  I lean my back against the kitchen counter that holds the caramel rolls and wonder, does she know? Has my mom heard? Is she even still alive to attend her oldest daughter’s funeral?

  Oh. God. What if she shows up?

  And what if she doesn’t?

  Dad says it doesn’t matter either way. And maybe it doesn’t. I’m all for reality but sometimes I think my dad is a total pacifist. Stefia called him Gandhi one time and he looked out the window at a chickadee in our bird bath and said, “One day, you will understand.”

  I keep looking for One Day on the calendar but it hasn’t come up yet.

  My mom should not have left, but she did. That’s reality.

  Someone should know where my mom is, but no one does. That’s reality.

  My sister is dead and mom probably doesn’t even know.

  And that’s reality.

  **

  People will accuse me of painting over the past to say all the things everyone expects to hear after someone dies, but trust me when I tell you that I grew up believing that having Stefia as a sister was a promise that everything would be okay.

  After mom left, life at home was a silent but swirling storm of disorder, and Stefia’s sleight of hand kept me in the eye of that storm. She was my protector. My comedienne. The one who distracted me from the physical absence of a mother and the emotional absence of a father who either couldn’t—or just plain wouldn’t—say anything.

  No one ever said anything. So Stefia had to.

  And sweet Stefia, oh, the words that fell out of her mouth, the way she could make it all better. The simple manner in which she could twist her lips around a word and shape it into something useful. Something helpful. Something needed.

  I remember countless late summer storms when the wind would howl and I would cower in the corner of my closet. There was no way she could have heard my whimpers over the bellowing of the wind, but Stefia would know I was scared and would come find me.

  “Naomi. Naomi…” she’d call as she came down the hallway from her room to mine.

  She was only a year older than me but decades braver, and she’d speak with the most soothing honey soaked voice, coating me with an impenetrable shell of protection.

  “We’re going to be okay, Naomi…”

  God, I hated those storms. They’d whip up and turn the sky a shade of green black that made me think of the Wicked Witch from Oz. The wind would scream in competition with the sirens that served as its warning. It would roar against the house, pushing with a full-mouthed howl, threatening to collapse the walls and bury us within.

  “Come out, Naomi. Come on.”

  But I couldn’t. My legs would soften into useless rubbery pegs, unable to hold my weight, and I would shrink into the corner, concealed by hanging clothes and forgotten toys.

  Then the closet door would squeak open and Stefia would crouch inside to find me huddled behind a mess of things. She’d move whatever totes I had pulled around myself as a shelter and squish herself next to me.

  “We’re going to be okay. I promise.”

  She’d hold my hand, humming and singing; a warm pillar of strength next to my shaking body. But somehow, even though I trembled, I knew that if Stefia’s words covered me, I was safe from the storm.

  “See, Naomi? The storm is over. Everything is okay.”

  No matter what the angry sky tossed at our little house, I always survived. And I believed it was simply because Stefia said I would.

  **

  After mom left, people teased my father that with three daughters born within three years, his life would be one estrogen fueled disaster after another. They advised him to not get in the middle of the cat claws that were sure to fly between his girls. But that’s really not how it was. Well, at least between two of the three of us.

  It wasn’t that Stefia played favorites, or that she only had enough love to pour out on one of us. I honestly believe even now that Stefia had enough love to fill up anything that breathed. So it wasn’t that Stefia didn’t adore or wasn’t kind to Gabriella. It was that Gabriella didn’t want kindness shown to her. Stefia had always chased after Gabriella, ending up in places I know she really would have rather not been, just to haul her sister out of trouble. Always. The scuffle down at the riverbank by Beidermann’s. The car accident when Gabriella got her first minor consumption. Jimmy Kreeger’s party. Stefia was there when dad couldn’t be—when dad wouldn’t be—like a sister and a parent and a friend all rolled into one.

  Gabriella just didn’t want anything to do with it.

  I’d only seen Stefia cry a handful of times in my life. Most of them were because she couldn’t reach someone who needed reaching. Most of the times, that person was Gabriella.

  “I can’t get to everyone. I get that,” Stefia said to me one night. She and I were lying in the grass at Pine Tree Park, looking up to the sky for shooting stars that weren’t there. “You’d think if I could affect someone from the stage, I could do the same with someone in real life.”

  I didn’t say anything, mostly because I was one of those people who didn’t know how to say things that wouldn’t come easily. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I really thought maybe there are some people who don’t want to be reached.

>   And then, ironically enough, there are others who don’t even realize they need to be.

  **

  I swipe my finger along the screen of my phone to unlock it and check my Facebook newsfeed. Normally I wouldn’t think of looking at my phone in a room full of grieving, voiceless relatives because I was raised with manners. But since no one is talking to me or looking at me or even acknowledging that I’m still breathing even though my older sister isn’t, no one will notice anyway.

  Everything happens for a reason.

  God never gives you more than you can handle.

  He has a plan.

  Praying for Granite Ledge.

  The thing with Stefia was that even though she always knew what to say, it wasn’t always what people wanted to hear. She could soothe you with her words, or she could set you straight. And it makes me wonder what Stefia would say in reply to the prayers and inspirational memes being posted today—the day of her funeral. I mean, is plastering some sympathetic words over a picture of a candle or a pristine snowy field supposed to help?

  If Stefia were here, she’d compose something about how people post things to make themselves feel better about whatever has happened. Then she’d add that I should stop being so cynical.

  I smirk at the thought.

  I’m not a cynic, though. I’m a realist. By the end of next week, will anyone on Facebook remember what they are praying for? Will they even still be praying?

  Aunt Melanie walks past me. She eyes the caramel rolls, and then turns towards me to look over my shoulder at the newsfeed I’m swiping through.

  “Our thoughts are with the families of the victims of the Crystal Plains Theater Massacre,” I say, mocking what I read from my phone. “Wait. Now it was a massacre?”

  “Honey…” Aunt Melanie’s voice trails off, unable to finish a sentence that she wasn’t sure why she’d started.

  “The death of six people is not a massacre,” I say. “The Native Americans were massacred. The victims of the Holocaust were massacred. But the shooting at the theater?”