Installment 10

Clio

My day was pretty much shot. Everything was going all wrong at once; were I not so miserable the thoroughness with which my life was being destroyed would have been downright comedic. It was like my world was the most elaborate domino set up imaginable - and all around me the toppling was picking up speed.

The only saving grace was the fact that I would be seeing Isaac in thirty minutes. I put down the copy of Plato's Symposium that I have so desperately been trying to translate from the English of the translator to the kind of English I would understand, somewhere between Toni Morrison and Danielle Steele. I was failing not only miserably, but also with flair. The particular volume my teacher had put in the bookstore for us had both the original Greek on one side of the page and the English on the other, and I had just read a page and a half of Greek without even noticing. My comprehension was, remarkably, only slightly higher when I read the right column. On the bright side, though, I would now be seeing Ike is 28 minutes and 45 seconds.

I was grateful at lest for Natalie's absence, all I needed was her hanging around and bugging me with her constant activity. Yeah. The only issue was my own nerves were so rapidly turning me into an even more obnoxious version of Nat. I couldn't sit still. Maybe I wasn't quite at the alphabetizing CD stage, but I suspected I might have been rapidly approaching it. The shrill ring of the phone was a welcome channel for my nervous energies.

"Hello?" I muttered into the handpeice, scanning through the preset radio stations on Nat's stereo. Celine Dion and Barbara Striesand wailed loudly in a desperate assault for an instant before my reflexes reacted almost without thought and I hit the up button to make the horror go away. "When the night is dark and stormy…." Isaac's voice pleased me and I finally climbed back onto my bed, still waiting for a response from the other end of the line.

"Hey!" This version of Ike's voice pleased me even more, because judging from its grainy tone it was coming from the call box by the door downstairs.

"You're early!" I exclaimed, kicking Plato onto the floor with a thoughtless shove.

"Yup. Couldn't wait." I smiled into the phone, already shoving my feet into my sneakers and grabbing my jacket.

"I'll be down in thirty seconds."

"I'm counting starting…now." Ike laughed, sounding almost as happy as I felt. Three whole days without him. Three days of tenuous room-mate relations and homework. Three times I had gone to sleep with the warmth of his embrace an ever-fading memory.

Keys clutched in one hand, I exited my room, smiling for absolutely no good reason.

Isaac

I had missed Clio so much. It was ridiculous, really. I had spent more than 17 years without her, but now even a few hours seemed a trial. I waited for Clio by the front door to her dorm and pondered the odd desire to see her constantly that had been plaguing me of late. Okay, of the past few months. Okay, ever since I first laid eyes on her sweet smile and listened to her gentle voice.  

I wondered to myself if Taylor had felt like this when we were in LA recording the Middle of Nowhere. The current status of my little brother and his honey was apparently non-existent, but back then Taylor had certainly seemed to exhibit the symptoms which I was barely surviving. It would be torture to be without Clio for six months - I suddenly found a never before imagined sympathy for Tay's constant homesick whine.

Without warning I was struck from behind and a warm pair of arms wrapped around my waist. "Hey!"

As I turned to pull Clio into my embrace I realized one more thing: how amazing it must have been for Taylor when we finally finished the album and came home. Missing Clio had made this moment all the sweeter, and I could barely fathom the sensations that soared through me at this moment multiplied out to fit a six month absence. "Hey," I replied, pressing a soft kiss on Clio's smooth cheek. She looked even more perfect than I had remembered: something in the gold of the dying sunlight as it reflected off her hair, gleaming like fire; or in the wide smile on her lips that climbed effortlessly into her deep green eyes; or maybe even something in the strength of her arms around me; took all the things I thought knew about the world and flipped them upside down.

"I Missed you," I whispered, stepping back. I felt kind of silly admitting to this, but I couldn't stop the words from tumbling out of my mouth. I had missed her, and so many things that I had promised myself I would tell her were running through my mind that I barely knew where to begin.

"Missed you, too." My first indication that something was wrong came to me as we began the considerable trek to where I had parked the Cherokee. Walking along, side by side, I was casting occasional glances in Clio's direction, reassuring myself that she was actually there and not some cruel figment of my imagination, but as she slid one cool hand into mine my glance at her changed to a question. Clio had always been nervous enough touching me when were alone together, and in public even the slightest bumping of our hands as we walked along would have been ground for her to blush slightly and step back. Now without hesitation she had taken my hand, not that I minded, not that I wasn't fairly floating feet above the puddle strewn pavement by the time we got to the car.

I unlocked Clio's door first and waited for her to get in before closing it and heading to the driver's side. "Can we go somewhere?" She asked as I merged into traffic and took the road leading out of the downtown are and towards my house, where we had planned on watching my family's ancient copy of Monty Python's Holy Grail and just hanging out.

"Where?"

"Don't care. Anywhere. Just… somewhere." Clio shrugged, leaning against the passenger side door and playing with her fastened seat belt. Her cheer seemed a little forced, and I once again found myself wondering if something was wrong.

"You don't care?" I asked, getting a little concerned.

"No, just somewhere we can hang out…" was her reply. After thinking for a moment an idea found its way to me, and I knew exactly where to take Clio. It was someplace I treasured but rarely had time to visit, a place I wanted to share with her because I knew that she would feel its specialness just as acutely as I.

"Alrighty." two lefts later we were at the entrance to the interstate, heading to Jenks, the suburb where my Grandparents had lived.  Four years ago when my Grandmother had died Grandpa had sold their house in order to move to Louisiana to be near his last surviving brother, and so visits to their former property had become rare. I still liked to go back though, still loved the feel of memories sliding wraithlike through the air around me.

"Well, where are we going?" Clio's grin was bright, and my sense of apprehension faded a little. Why should a sudden good mood put me at unrest?

"I can't tell. Secret." Her disarming smile made me smile, and her laugh always made me laugh, too. Clio's happiness was an inescapable glow around me, just as her sadness was an inescapable shroud.

"Ah." We both settled back, and I focused on the music that was drifting softly from the Jeep's CD player. I didn't recognize it at first, but after a moment I realized it was one of my mother's cheesy pop discs, something in the arena of Duncan Sheik, and I nearly turned on the radio before the lyrics sunk in. "When I'm without you it's just not the same, don't misunderstand me, I'm feeling alright, but when I'm without you the day turns into night." The soft sounds of guitar and the plaintive vocals gave me pause. Not exactly my kind of music, but the next line sold me on the song: "and then I'm with you, no longer alone, when I'm with you it feels like I'm home."

I shot a look at Clio, to see her contemplatively staring at me. We exchanged a smile as Duncan continued on: "you dream of a future, a possible place, where we lie together face to face. And I'm looking forward, I will not deny, I dream of a future made for you and I." Our glance separated at these words. I felt them with every inch of me, and I longed to tell her that my new, and only, goal in life was to spend every breath at her side. "Call me a child, call me naïve, The world is much brighter than it ever used to be," Duncan Sheik was exactly right.

A sudden fit of daring seized me as the song ended and silence filled the air between us. I looked at Clio's profile, and wanted to touch her. Not in some "hey baby," kind of way, but just to pull her near, to feel the warmth of her against me and to smell that mixture of lilac shampoo and Abercrombie Fitch perfume that has come to represent the heighth of Clio-ness. She was sitting awfully close to begin with, what could I do? Say, "slide on over?" I would feel even dumber than when I made the "I missed you" crack.

It was so hard - whenever she's around whatever natural stupidity alarms that have been built into me shut off, and I'm filled with a feeling of safety. I can say what I think, maybe for the first time in my life, without having to fear someone's opinion. Even at home with my family there's always some - boundary. I love them, and I know that no matter what they'll always do their best to understand me, but I also know that they never really will, at least not in the way that Clio does. After several moments of deliberation I reached out one tentative hand and rested it on her Levi's covered knee. I negotiated a one-handed turn and then looked over to see how my move had faired.

Clio's lips were parted in a faint smile, but as she looked over and met my gaze she reached down and lifted my hand. The faux pas was unthinkable. Clio had always had issues with closeness, so what had I, the supposedly loving boyfriend, done? Grabbed her. I felt a blush singing its way through my veins, and looked disappointedly back at the road. When, after an instant, Clio didn't release my hand I felt a little better, and later when she lifted my arm and scooted across the seat until our legs were touching and ducked her head to slide my arm across her shoulders I felt a hundred times happier. Her movement had taken all of twenty seconds, but Clio's startlingly bright eyes had never left my face. As she leaned against my side I could feel the gentle expansion of her ribs in a sigh, and I realized that I had better pay attention to the road. We were almost there.

This was nothing less than exactly what I had been longing for on those expansive non-Clio days: the reassurance of her touch, the sympathy of her ears, and the peacefulness of not needing to talk because I know that all the words in the world can't convey what my eyes are able to in a fraction of a second. I guessed that all that practice driving with one hand while eating ice cream was finally paying off as I rubbed the back of my hand against her neck beneath her sleek hair, laughing to myself and indescribably glad that I had chanced a first move.

"Surprise. Here we are, madam, I hope it's to your liking." I finally said as we pulled into the empty parking lot that had been our destination.

"I'm sure it shall be," Clio mimicked my practiced Monty Python accent with surprising success. "We're at a church?" She asked, surveying the dark windows of the brick building that sat across the wide expanse of young green grass that surrounded the black concrete car park.

"Yup. Well, it's a church now, but it used to be my Grandparents' house when I was little." I informed her, grabbing a hand and setting off towards the building.

"That's neat." The sun was nearing its setting point, and soon the March air would take on an uncomfortable chill. But now it was perfect.

"Yeah, but kind of weird to come back and see the same house but know it's totally different inside." I explained, leading Clio onto a gravel path that led around the "Holy Redeemer" sign that now graced the former front lawn of my Grandparent's house. We headed into a stand of tall pines behind the building, still holding hands.

"Where are your grandparents?" She asked, quickening her pace to keep up with me.

"My Grandmother died when I was 13, and my Grandfather moved to the town where he grew up right afterwards." I explained, continuing our foray into the apparent wilderness. "He always jokes about their house having seen so much happiness that the only thing that could have done it justice was to become a church. Which it did."

"That's so sweet," whispered Clio, squeezing my hand. "I'm sorry about your Grandmother."

"I missed her a lot at first, they used to spend a lot of time at our house and even babysat for us when we were younger. I kind of don't think about her that much anymore," this was sad, but true. The first few days after her funeral I had been unspeakably sad, and worried about what had happened to her. Even having grown up going to church every Sunday, and living in a religious home, it was still hard for me to imagine Heaven. The thing that had made me feel better, though, was kind of bizarre. My Grandmother had loved to garden, and she was amazing at it. But one plant, I think it was a Christmas Cactus or something, had never bloomed for her. After she died, though, my mom had taken it home so my Grandfather wouldn't have to worry about it, it had immediately sent forth tons of little red flowers. I didn't know what it meant, and I still don't, but I think that maybe that plant's sudden flourishing had her way of telling us that everything was going to be okay. "I still love to come here, though."

"I can see why," Clio interrupted as we came away from the darkness of the trees and into the rapidly darkening clearing where I had spent so many summer days as a child.

Clio

The rhythm of Isaac's warm hand stroking my neck had made me so happy, as did the feel of his body pressed against mine, that when we finally got where we were going I was almost reluctant to get out of the car, despite his tempting surprise. It had been more than worth the sacrifice, I decided when he led me into a clearing in a forested area behind what had once been his Grandparent's house. When he told me what his Grandfather said I had wanted to cry, it was so sweet and sad all at once that my emotions were barely containable.

In the center of the clearing was a small pond, still partially covered with a thin skin of ice. It was almost as though we had walked into a painting by Monet -- the sun, slipping by slow degrees beneath the horizon, set the world awash in waves of delicate hue: lavender, pink, dusky blue, and red, all meeting and mingling to become a beautiful haze hovering in the distance. The world was a study in an instant of light, reflected in the water and dancing along the green treetops. "This place is amazing," I breathed, cautiously taking a seat next to Isaac on an upraised rock near where we stood.

"Wait until you see it during the summer," Ike responded, looking around us for an instant before halting his swiveling gaze on our feet. I wondered if he had meant what he said. "Wait until you see it during the summer," I repeated to myself. The summer was many moths away, and I would be home, far, far away from this blissful boy and his beautiful world. "Nobody else really knew about it back then because it was kind of remote; we used to swim here all the time. My Grandmother taught Zac to swim here one summer. He used to be so afraid of water that he wouldn't even take baths."

All this reminiscing made me miss home even more than I had before, if that was possible. "How'd she get him in the water?"

"She got in with him, and just stood there until he got so bored that he went deeper. It was odd, but I guess just what he needed." Isaac's voice was faint, and I could almost see the image of a kindly old version of Diana standing in the small lake before us, shivering and bored Zac by the hand.

"How do you do it?" I asked thoughtfully, acutely aware of his leg brushing against mine as we balanced semi-precariously on the rock out-cropping. "Staying away from here, I mean… being away from everything you know?"

"It's not hard for me. Whenever we travel I have everything I really care about with me, my family and stuff." Ike paused for a second, darting a glance at me. "Or I used to," he amended tenderly.

"I guess that's the secret then. Family." I was talking more of my own situation than his, although my words applied to both. Maybe the reason why I hated ORU so much was because I was away from my family. All of a sudden schools nearer home began to look enticingly attractive. I flashed momentarily back on some long-forgotten high school lecture on the Bronte sisters, and remembered my teacher's exact words. "Charlotte and Anne went off to college on the continent, but Anne was so homesick that after less than a semester she went back. She never left the moors again, and never married. But some say she was happy."

Would I ever get over this hatred for my surroundings? Was going home the answer? Or was staying here and getting used to it, like Zac in the lake, the way to go. I guess it's to late for me now anyways. How could I be happy anywhere without Isaac? But he would be leaving soon, when their record was done, and going off to a life I could never be a part of, and barely even imagine.

***

"So we finished the second song last week…" Isaac and I had sat on the rock in what had been his grandparent's backyard until the sun disappeared and the air became uncomfortably cold. I didn't care, though, because all I knew was Isaac's soft voice, and the feel of his callused hand in my soft one.

"You're shivering!" Ike interrupted his story of the music business and its travails, sounding surprised.

"It's kind of cold," I replied, not wanting to have to move, but knowing that we couldn't stay out here all night. I slid a little bit closer to him on our perch, glad for such a good excuse.

"We should go anyways. My parents are probably freaking out. I told them we were going to hang out there tonight." With these words Ike arose, pulling me with him. "Can you still come over?" He asked as we headed back down the path to the parking lot, stepping carefully in the inky black of the encroaching night.

"Sure." It was funny, deciding for myself like this. I've become used to it over the past few months of freedom, but every once in a while the fact that I'm utterly free to do whatever I want catches up to me. There's nobody to tell me when I have to be home, or to when I should do my homework, or how to spend my time. So I will do what I want, and right now the only thing I long to do is be with Isaac for as long as I possibly can.

When we arrived at the Hanson house twenty minutes later all of the windows visable from the road where dark, and the only illumination to guide us to the front door was the faint glow of the stars above in the sky. "Everyone must already be in bed," Isaac remarked, unlocking the door and holding it open for me. "Why don't you wait down here and I'll go grab the Holy Grail. I left it up in my room."

"Okay," I hung up my coat in the hall closet and wandered towards the sun room. One of the many things Isaac and I have in common, we discovered quite some time ago, is an obsession with Monty Python. Personally, I think it's an obsession with British accents. Some of the stuff they do is just ridiculously stupid, but somehow phrases that would just sound silly in an American accent, like "We are the knight who say nee," is hilarious when delivered by someone who sounds like they just stepped out of London. I smiled as Ike's amazing rendition of the infamous swallow speech invaded my mind.

I headed into the sun room, hearing strains of a faintly familiar tune emanating from this area. I had decided that Taylor must have been up, but as soon as I entered the nearly totally dark room I realized I had been wrong.

Diana stood in the center of the pleasantly decorated room, wrapped in a flannel robe, her youngest daughter in her arms. Long braids hanging well past her waist, Diana was silhouetted in the illumination that crept into the house from a streetlamp outside, the only brightness in the room. "You're a part of me," she sang softly, not noticing me in the doorway. I finally placed the words as being part of my favorite Billy Holiday song, Everything I Have is Yours. "I would gladly give the sun to you, if the sun were only mine," she continued, apparently trying to calm little Zoë into slumber. She swayed gently with the scratchy song, tenderly rocking the infant. "I would gladly give this Earth to you, and the stars that shine."

The sweetness of Diana's voice and the warm comfort of the scene before me compounded all of my sadnesses of the past few weeks. Homesickness washed over me in waves, and I leaned against the door jamb, fighting off tears, a battle I've become entirely too used to of late. I acutely missed my mother, and the comfort of a structured world, a world in which I understood everything and everyone. The familiar universe of my childhood seemed so distant that I could barely dredge up its memory, and I longed to be like Zoë -- to have my entire life ahead of me, but not to have to care. The only things that mattered to a four month old were feedings and naps, and perhaps the warmth of protective arms. "Everything that I posses, I offer you. Let my dreams of happiness come true… I'd be happy just to spend my life waiting at your beck and call," Diana's voice was much higher than the scratchy tones of Billie Holliday, but she sang the words with such emotion that it more than made up for the difference. I wondered what it would be like to be her, to be married, to be certain of the future, to have a house full of people who loved and depended on you, and to know that you have made your decisions in life, and to know that you had made them well.

"Clio!" Mrs. Hanson finally noticed me after the song slid to a halt and she had placed a sleepy Zoë, blue footed pajamas and all, in a playpen in the corner of the room. "I didn't hear you guys come in." Diana flicked on a lamp next to the couch and took a seat, patting the cushion next to her.

"She's such a little darling," I said, sitting on the gingham printed couch, watching Zoe's tiny back rise and fall with her breaths through the bars of the white and blue play pen.

Diana placed an extended finger before her lips, a warning for me to be quiet. "I've been trying to get her to sleep forever. She's just like Zac used to be; the world is far to interesting a place and she doesn't seem to want to miss one moment of the activity around here."

"Hopefully she'll calm down before adolescence…" I laughed, imagining two Zacs running around. The world decidedly needs only one of that rambunctious boy. In fact, the world has barely survived one of that rambunctious boy.

"That's what we all said about Zac, too. But he keeps me young." Diana laughed, a smile twisting the corners of her mouth.

"I hear you're listening to Billie."

"After you mentioned her I dug up this record. It was my Mom's, but I had forgotten all about it." She picked up a version of the flat cardboard containers they used to keep vinyl albums in and handed it to me. It was definitely old, maybe even an original copy from the forties. I read down the list of familiar songs, sighing softly; they reminded me of my introduction to the Blues as a child at home with my mother. I had been just starting school when my mom, then a worker at an office in Arnette, had been on strike. Every day I would come home from first grade, full of exciting news of loose teeth or how mummies were made, and she would be sitting at home listening to an album not so different than this. It had been newer, indeed, released many years after Billie Holiday had died, but the songs had been the same. My mother would sing these words under her breath as she listened my tales or helped me with my penmanship, and I, much to my shock, found myself longing to hear her painfully off-key rendition of any one of these songs.

"I haven't seen you much lately, with the boys recording all the time. How are you doing?" Diana tucked her legs underneath her and pulled her long nightgown over them, leaving it nearly brushing the blue carpeted floor.

"I'm fine," I answered softly, once again knowing that I was anything but.

Isaac

I came downstairs, clutching a battered rental case, only to discover that I had been mistaken when I said that no one was up. I found my mom and Clio sitting side by side in the sunroom, talking quietly to avoid waking Zoë who was nestled down in the worn playpen that had housed each Hanson child in turn.

"I don't know… I'm just sad." Clio was saying in a tone of voice I barely recognized. "I got a terrible grade in one of my classes, and then my parents told me they couldn't come up to visit this weekend." I hung in the shadowed doorway, unnoticed by the two people I watched.

"That's too bad," I could practically hear the sympathy in my mother's voice as she comfortingly rubbed Clio's back, just as she would have to quiet Mackie woken up from a nightmare. "Why don't you just go home to see them?"

"The bus is really expensive, and it takes almost a whole day to get there. Spring break's in a couple of weeks; I'm just going to have to wait until then." Why hadn't I heard any of this? I wondered as they continued talking in hushed tones. Clio and I had just spent an entire afternoon talking, yet she hadn't mentioned something that mattered so much to her that she was either very near tears in my living room, or actually crying.

My Clio-induced good mood began to slip away, but my mother's next words caused me to jump. "Why don't you spend the weekend here?" her serene voice floated out to me, "You can get off campus for two whole days, and away from that roommate of yours. You'll feel so much better when you go back." Super mom strikes again, I thought to myself, watching the master in action.

"I shouldn't. Thank you so much, though." Clio stammered, uncertain. Knowing her as I do -- or I guess after what I've seen in the past few minutes, knowing her like I think I do --  I could tell she wanted to say yes, but was afraid of overstaying her welcome. This was one thing she would never do here; everyone loves her, even Taylor's ornery cat actually seeks her out for her long and thorough back scratches. My mother is practically as big a fan of Clio as the cat, and I know that she's being genuine.

"Oh come on, you'll have a great time. The kids will love having you around, and Isaac will be delighted at the news!" My mother coaxed Clio, still rubbing her back even though the tears have apparently stopped flowing. Careful to cough in order to warn them of my presence, I entered the room. "Ike! You're just in time to help me convince Clio to stay here this weekend." She momentarily shifted her attention to Clio, "the couch folds out, and you'll be able to watch MTV all night."

"You know, Clio, when my mom makes up her mind about something like this there's no stopping her. You should just give in now." I sat down as close to her as I dared with my mom in the room, but it still somehow felt miles too far away. Clio's eyes were rimmed with red, and I did my best not to look directly at her.

"Well, now that you bring up MTV," she replied, sniffling faintly.

"Maybe you can even get Taylor to do his math homework." Mom suggested, and we all laughed at the improbability of anyone completing that feat.

Installment 11

Taylor

I sat in the darkened recording booth, keyboard before me. We've been here for eight hours already, just laying down track after track of vocals and music, and, frankly, it's starting to get really old. About two more takes and I'm going to have to start bringing up child labor laws.

It's my own fault, I guess. Judging from the annoyed expressions and rolling eyes of not only my brothers but also Mark Hudson, the man who's producing the song we're working on right now, they think so, too. It's just so hard to concentrate sometimes - especially on days like this. The first thing I had heard when I woke up twenty minutes late for our session had been the musical clanging of my mother's favorite windchimes out on the back porch. I had just lay there beneath a cool sheet, and listened for far longer than I had had any right to. Ever since Masrissa's family had given those long, tubular chimes to my parents as an anniversary gift last year I've loved their gentle, twinkling refrain. This last thought was enough to get me up and moving, if for no reason other than in hopes of erasing it.  Despite my attempts to banish all Marissa-associated mental activity, I can not escape the random pattern of its delicate notes. They cling stubbornly, just beneath my thoughts.

Not the best way to start a day when I knew we'd be recording one of the songs for our new album that had been a solely Hanson created piece. In truth, it had been mostly a Taylor piece. Ike had worked out a problem with the melody and Zac had helped with the chorus, but it  had mostly come from my own tortured psyche when we were stuck in New York doing the David Letterman show last December. "Always you," I had entitled the song on a cold and lonely winter night in Central Park, longing for Rissa. Every one who's heard us practice it claims it to be Hanson's best song yet, but that doesn't make it any easier for me to wipe away its associations.

I wonder if maybe this could be my way to win Marissa back. We had once read something online called a fanfiction story, which had been, much to my chagrin, written about me. It had been funny - making me out to be some ethereal god or something, and putting big flowery words not seen in the western world since the death of Charlotte Bronte in my mouth. The ending, though, kept running through my mind. I, or, to be truthful, the Perfect Taylor the author had created, had sang I Will Come to You to the heroine to tell her he/I liked her. After presenting the main character with a rose, Tay-Tay (the girl always called me/him by my least favorite nick name. When Ike had brought it up during an early interview I had nearly killed him) had sang it to her in a crowded arena, dedicating it to his "true love."

This scenario poses many problems, however, not the least of which is the fact that the girl would have been torn to shreds by our well-meaning, if occasionally overprotective, fans. But maybe just singing would do it.

"Taylor!" Mark's voice rang out though the intercom, sounding frustrated. "What the he… what are you playing?" I stopped the instinctual motion of my hands across the keys to stare blankly at him through the large window between the production board and me.

"What?" I asked, totally befuddled. I had been playing along, letting my mind wander, and couldn't think of anything that might have been amiss.

"You're playing some other song. Can we please just do this like in practice?" Zac got up and left the booth where he had been sitting with Mark, and even without hearing it through the soundproofed walls I knew he had slammed the door behind him.

"I'm sorry," I could almost feel his thoughts. Taylor, the professional one, the perfectionist, the peace keeper, couldn't even manage to play a song he wrote himself without flaking out.

"It's okay, Taylor. Let's just try it one more time; then you can get out of here. I know it's been a long day for you guys." He didn't know the half of it, or at least I don't think he does. I told my family that Marissa and I had broken up, but seeing as how we're not supposed to talk about girls in public it's not like I had to write up a press release on the subject or anything.

Launching into the opening notes I hummed along, determined to focus. About half way through Always You I realized what other song I had been playing, and missed a note in the time it took me to cringe. It had been Phil Collins. Of course. When Marissa and I had first gotten together we had become addicted to Phil, and in the process bought pretty much every CD he had anything whatsoever to do with. It had been an awesome excuse to buy the Miami Vice Soundtrack, something I've wanted for years. This song was from the Genesis days, and its words, which my evil mind had apparently stored away for a sensitive moment such as this, literally burned.

"Is there nothing I can say to make you change your mind? I watch the world go round and round and saw you turn mine upside down... throwing it all away." I did my absolute best to shut it off, to just forget it all and play the notes of my own song, but it didn't work. I didn't feel "always you" anymore, it was consructed of emotions too distant, too painful, to recall. My love, my certainty that Rissa and I would always be together, had built that song; when she left, and said those awful things to me, it had been destroyed.

"Taylor," Mark sounded defeated. "Tay. Just stop. We'll pick up again tomorrow. There's no reason to be working this hard. We've got weeks before Mercury is expecting this." I didn't stop. To prove it to myself that I could do this I kept going, moving my fingers in the prescribed pattern over the keys, hearing the music I had created, but, for the first time, not feeling it.

Isaac and Zac didn't talk to me for the entire ride home; they just exchanged semi-worried glances over my head and sat silently, listening to the radio.

"Well, guys, how'd it go?" My mom asked, finally breaking the noiseless cocoon which we had wrapped around ourselves.

No one answered. "Fine," I said, unable to stand the quiet reception to her question. "Who will light up the darkness and who will hold your hand? Who will find the answers when you don't understand? Why should I have to be the one who has to convince you...I don't want to go." The words of the Phil Collins song assaulted me. I don't want to go. I didn't want my relationship with Marrisa to be over; but I suppose I don't really have any say in the matter - judging from the many times I've called her house, or written her a note, or tried bumping into her in places I knew she hung out. She doesn't even answer the phone any more, I think maybe because she's afraid it will be me. This is one of the moments when I wish I could throw away the music. It always fills me; I can never escape songs, other people's, or mine, and usually I don't even want to. But now I long to be normal -- to not feel the music in my veins, to not hear it resonating in my mind.

As soon as we pulled into the driveway I hopped out of the van and went immediately to the basement. What I thought that I would find there I have no idea, and staring at my own beat up keyboard didn't make me feel any better. The walls crowded around me, full of drawings that I had devoted half my life to creating - little spaceships, mountains, trees, and all the things of the world that my imagination could stretch to encompass waiting out there in the huge, unexplored world. Now it looked so stupid and childish; the bright colors were empty, and cold. I didn't want to look at them. I didn't want to see them every again.

My footsteps thundered up the stairs, and I burst into the kitchen to find my dad occupied peeling potatoes for dinner. "Dad!" He jumped at the enthusiasm in my voice and turned to look at me. I imagine I must have presented quite the picture: my hair still messed up from a long day wearing earphones, my too baggy cords almost falling off, and my eyes glittering with inspiration. "Do we have any paint?"

"I think so. Probably in the tool shed from when we painted the porch. What do you want it for?" My father's suspicion was immediately aroused. He has, after all, spent the last 15 years with me, and has come to recognize the bizarre mood shifts I can barely control.

"I just want to clear some space on the wall downstairs. I've got a new idea," I replied, already half out the door in search of my second favorite artistic medium: paint.

"If you want to wait until after dinner I'll give you a hand."

"No thanks, dad. I have to do this by myself."

Marissa

"Marissa?" the sound of my name being bellowed in a highly annoying tone shocked me from a pleasant daydream. Some of my happiest times of late have been spent immersed in my imagination, the real world having become far too sterile and mundane to hold my attention for any length of time

"Huh?" was my graceless reply. The warm sunshine that leaked into the semi-darkness of the classroom in which I have Latin every afternoon, creating an interesting pattern on the shimmering bald expanse that is the cranium of my teacher, Mr. Higgins.

"Conjugate I love, please." How ironic, I thought, the stabbing world making a harsh cameo in my blissful oblivion.

"Amo, amas, amat," I began, grateful that I actually knew the word. Latin, in my opinion, is a dumb, dumb subject. In the entire school year I've learned one thing: if I lived in ancient Rome I would have spoken something in the neighborhood of roughly a sentence a decade. The rest of my time, I've decided, I would have spent conjugating. My pride soon faded, however, as I came to a screetching halt at the end of my knowledge. The word for "to love" had certainly been deemed worthy of studying by my obsessed-with-love mind, but now I was having issues. I gazed hopelessly at Sarah, who was sitting at the next desk over looking apprehensive. She knows I don't know the answer.

"Amamus." The teacher supplied, in curious monotone.

Sarah was mouthing the words, and I was being to regret not practicing the fine art of lip-reading more often. "Amant, amatis." I lamely finished, only after Sarah had been forced to scribble the answer on her notebook and nudge it in my direction.

"Thank you very much for your time, Marissa. And you too, Sarah. Nice to see you helping your hapless friend." I was boiling at these words. I'm one of the good guys, despite Mr. Higgins' opinion. I come to class every day, and almost always prepared. For some reason all he cares about, though, is the Hanson bookcover I had papered my thin Jenny's Latin tome with. It had been a gag gift from Caroline and Sarah on my birthday, and I've just never taken it off. I used to like to be able to sit in class, sweetening my time with the sight of Tay's sublime face. Why it's on now, however, is another question. It should have gone with the purging of my room, but I had just put it off, preferring to torture myself, I guess. "You may now go back to whatever teen idol induced day dream you were indulging in." Mr. Higgins turned back the dusty chalkboard, and began writing out the words I had just supplied him with.

It was a good thing that the bell rang at that exact moment, for had it not he would have found himself dodging one hurled Latin text. Having played softball for the past two years of high school I'm relatively sure I would have hit him, too. I stood hastily, grabbing my jacket and backpack. But before throwing my Latin book into my bag I tore the offending orange hued cover off with a pleasing ripping noise, stuffing it into the trash can by the door. Mr. Higgins watched me walk out of the room with what I imagine was a smug grin warping his features, a single bushy eyebrow arched in my direction.

"Rissa, don't even listen to him. He's a creep." Sarah comforted me as we headed out of the building and towards her mother's car, both grateful for the endless school day finally reaching its close.

"I know, but it was stupid to leave that on, anyways." Sarah, being a little old for a Sophomore, had gotten her license last week, and this is to be our first solo excursion in the Gold Nugget, her parent's oddly colored Saab. "Really stupid." I sighed, waiting for her to get into the car and unlock the passenger side door.

"Forget about it. Today's the day, baby!" Her exuberance at finally being liberated from the mommy-taxi prison is evident in not only her words, but the wide grin that she can't seem to wipe off her face.

"Where're we going?" I asked, trying to play along. Taylor had contaminated every inch of my life. I couldn't get away from people who knew him, or knew about him, or things that made the memory of him sing in my mind.

"I think the mall, right now. Later… who knows." Being Sarah, she cautiously backed out of the parking space that she had secured this morning, and put the car into gear.

"Off we go." I added, catching a bit of her hyper mood.

We finally arrived at the mall with a squeal of ties after doing everything imaginable to avoid the left hand turn off the throughway. "I wonder if Jack's at work?" Sarah inquired as we entered the hugely impersonal mall, gawking at the bright colors and the constant motion.

"This is rather a high traffic moment," I warned her, hoping to avoid potential embarrassment. Not that hanging out in DZ isn't the best calming agent in the world, but I'm not sure I even want to be calm right now. Misery fits me so well that it's hard to even want to escape it.

"Let's go here," I dragged Sarah into the nearest music store and headed to the new releases.

"These all suck," she said, flipping through a rack of low-priced CDs that Record Town is apparently approaching paying to get rid of. "Well, here's some Phil Collins…" she thoughtfully added, holding a black CD towards me.

"I don't like Phil Collins, thanks." I quickly walked away, leaving Sarah to stare puzzled in my wake. I didn't even want to think about Phil Collins, because he is one of a multitude of Taylor-related things. I'll never so much as look a jelly-belly in the eye again, let alone listen to our old favorite songs.

I wandered to the listening station and hastily pulled a set of earphones on, hoping to avoid explanation for my erratic behavior. A song was already playing softly; it's silken notes blending with a dark voice to send chills up and down my spine. "Everything that I have is broken in two, everything that I am revolves around you, you just don't know what a girl goes through." I turned back towards the front of the store, trying to get Sarah's attention to point out the song to her. She would love it, what with her weird chick singer leanings. My eyes stopped long before I identified Sarah, though. I was drawn to a form standing just outside, a form I knew better than my own. A form I have seen nowhere but in my dreams for over a month. "As the moon rides away from the sun, she takes on his light and reflects it. I relate them to us just for fun," The song slid on as I stood, mouth agape, and watched Taylor Hanson through the plate glass window of the store. "There's a parallel that's unexpected, every star in the sky reminds me of you, twinkling in my eyes the way that you do, and I don't know why I get so blue…no matter where you go...living in a world of strangers… so we go for what we know."

I was torn between hiding behind the rack of CD's before me, and doing exactly what the song dictated -- going for what I knew. He was right there, so close I could see the long, thin tail of hair that he refuses to cut hanging almost halfway down his back, but I couldn't touch him. He was standing in the center of a crowd of squealing girls, apparently trying to back away. My own doubts weren't the only thing holding me back, shy of joining the crowd there was no way I could go to him. Even though I wanted to so badly my eyes teared up at the force that was required to hold me still; he looked so good, so beautiful, so perfect.

"Marissa." Sarah had come up beside me, and she watched the scene unfolding in the hallway with half apprehension and half pleasure. "Are you going to go out? He's right there…" Her quiet words turned whatever was left human in me into something else. Something I didn't want to imagine.

"No." I replied, returning the bulky black headphones to their hook and walking silently out the other exit to the store.

Installment 12

Clio

"Ike, come on! I have to work, seriously." I warned Isaac over the phone. I can feel him smile, and hear his thoughts.

"I'll be good… I'll just do my math homework. Come on," he coaxed. "I haven't seen your room yet." Ever since our three day separation of two weeks ago Isaac and I have been spending even more time together, although I was beginning to put my foot down when it came to school work it was hard to say no to him.

"Well," I looked around. It looked as though a small tornado had whistled its way through the room, miraculously sparing my half yet ransacking Natalie's. She wouldn't be home tonight, thanks to her yo-yo boyfriend. One day she wants him, the next she hates him, but today was apparently a want, judging from the message on the erasable whiteboard on our door. "Clio," it had read in her barely legible writing, "gone to bf's… be back tomorrow." I certainly hadn't minded, it just meant more time for me to work undisturbed by her random follies. "You have to promise you'll be quiet." I warned, examining the fern that Nat has been trying to grow of late.

"I'll be there in ten." With a click the phone died, and I giggled to myself. Depression is a hard thing to hold onto around a boy like Isaac, even when faced with a pathetically dying houseplant.

Before he arrived I intended on getting the place cleaned up to some extent, at least shoving Nat's junk under her bed and throwing her covers up over her wadded sheets.  I was busily working away towards this goal when I felt hands on my face covering my eyes.

"Guess who?" A pretty good Elvis impersonator said from somewhere behind me.

"Elvis? Is that you?" I asked, feigning hysteria.

"You know it."

Isaac

Clio's room was amazing, I realized as I looked around after our little Elvis exchange. From the second I entered I could tell which side was hers. From the brightly painted papyrus sheets hanging in perfect symmetry on her walls to the deep green comforter and the stuffed llama it all screamed, "Clio."

"So? Is it all that you hoped and dreamed?" She joked, turning off the radio and coming to stand beside me.

"And ever so much more." I replied, looking down at her and marveling over the clarity of her skin and the way she seemed to glimmer in the sunlight that streamed in her open window. What is it about her, I asked myself, that made me want to hold her so badly? Was it the rarity of her smiles? Or the way she holds herself stiff and upright against the world? Or was it even the soft side that she so rarely shows, the Clio who cried over a bad grade?

"Want the grand tour?" She asked, gesturing around the room that could be no more than ten feet by ten feet.

"How much are the tickets? I don't know if it's worth it." Despite my words, my mind kept wandering back to last night: how red her eyes had been and how quiet she had been for the entire movie.

"Well, they're pretty expensive." Clio answered, standing on tiptoe to kiss my check. "See? I told you."

"Well, you know. Maybe I should give you a tip or something. I bet this is going to be an amazing tour."

"If you must." No slight peck was this, but a full on the lips kiss that left me yearning heatedly for more. Clio shyly smiled down at the floor and pushed her hair behind her ears as we pulled apart, and the only thought in my mind was how much I loved her. That little smile can push back the pain of seventeen years of life, and make me feel like Mackie, eternally happy and careless. I could feel the words in my mouth, and hear them in my head, but orchestrating the two was more than I could handle. So I simply stood quietly as Clio pointed out the highlights of her room.

"Bed. Dresser. Rug. Nice, eh?"

"What are those?" I asked, pointing at the wall hangings.

"They're hieroglyphics." Clio answered, matter-of-factly, apparently thinking I should have known this. "They're bits from some random love poem that one of my teachers got me when she went to Cairo a few years ago."

"You going to translate for me?" I asked, leaning over and examining the tiny drawings that comprised the language of the Ancient Egyptians.

"Ike, I so have to work. I'll translate later. Promise."

"Okay."

Clio grabbed her book and stretched out on the carpet, holding the thin volume above her. I got my books out of my bag, but couldn't really do anything other than watch her read. The musical notes whose invasions I have become so familiar with in Clio's presence once again crept into my mind, and I eventually tossed my calculator aside and began hastily jotting them down. She has such power over me, a power I don't think she understands. A power I know I don't understand; something in her words strikes long hidden cords within me, and I am filled with certaintity that I'm not alone. It's weird to feel like this, and scary how much Clio has come to matter to me.

Clio

"What are you reading with such a serious look on your face?" Isaac inquired, sliding from his perch on my bed to kneel above me, one knee on either side of my waist.

"Plato," I replied, sticking out my tongue. "I already read most of it, but we've got a test on it on Monday."

"You don't like it?" Isaac's eyebrows raised devilishly to punctuate his question, and I couldn't help but smile up at him and set my book aside long enough t brush my fingers gently across his faintly prickly check. I had so much left to read, but I couldn't manage to care with Ike sitting so close, and his eyes burning deeply into mine.

"Oh, I don't know. It's got its points." And I love you, I yearned to add. I've never said those words to him before, even though I've been feeling them ever since that first day I met him.

"Like what?" He leaned over me to brush his lips against my collarbone, leaving a trail of skin so hot I could almost imagine it glowing.

"Well, there's one part when this playwright, Aristophanes, tells a story about love. He says that mankind once angered the gods," I didn't know why I was continuing. The seeking mission of Isaac's lips had extended to my brow, my ears, my chin, and I was sure he wasn't listening, but on I pressed. "So the gods decided to punish them, and cut each in half. One half was male, one half female," my words faded as Ike's hands worked their way up under my shirt and his lips pressed against mine with an electric fervor I've never before experienced.

"Don't stop." He whispered hotly in my ear. "I want to know everything you know…" I wrapped my arms around him as he fumbled with the tedious buttons that ran up the front of my shirt, "I want to understand you even more." Words and touch, I long ago realized, were two separate things. I have, over my life, been touched by a thousand hands. But in that same amount of time only a precious few words have truly invaded my mind, and filled me with their mere presence. These words that Isaac blessed me with were such inovations, tender and loving, and completing in an utter way.

"For all of time, the gods said, people would be only half of what they once were, always empty and alone by definition." I swallowed, pulling Ike's sweater over his head and kissing his newly bared skin between each rapidly spoken, breathless word. "They might not be able to explain it, but some part of them would always be missing." I sighed softly, lost in the symphony of his caress, as he reached beneath me to unhook my bra and remove it. "They would spend all their lives looking for the rest of them, the person to fill the void in their souls, and they would only be completely happy after they had found them."

His hands were at the waistband of my jeans, opening the button and deftly sliding the zipper down. His touch was so intoxicating that all my world was focused on keeping him near me. "I'm only 17," his words were gentle, yet nearly as palpable on my skin as his hands. "But I already found my other half. Guess I'm just lucky."

"I love you so much, Isaac." These were the only words I could tear free, the only words that I ever wanted to say again, the only truth.

Isaac

Clio was going to cry. I could see tears building up, beginning to slide onto her eyelashes and making her eyes shine even more brilliantly green than they always did. "I love you, too." I answered, kissing her eyes. Every instinct I had swore to the truth of my words. That Plato character had been right; all my life I had been looking for one thing, this perfect girl who lay beneath me, blushing pink from my touch. "I love you," I repeated as she pulled me down onto her, my bare chest against hers, her lips linked inexorably to mine. "I love you," I whispered once again. Saying it felt so good all I wanted to do was keep saying it, screaming it, letting everyone in the world know that I loved Clio Chambers to an incomprehensible depth.

She cared about me. I knew it. I could feel it racing along her skin, and taste it in the depths of her hungry kisses. Then why didn't she talk to me? Why had she told my mother those things, cried in my mother's arms, when she could have cried in my arms? Words were a bond between us, as were glances, and touches, and thoughts. But she had had a problem and not come to me with it. The reality of this last thought stung, and to keep it at bay I concentrated on touching her in all the right places, kissing her and licking her on all the spots I knew would feel the best to her.

"Let's…Let's…" her eyes were closed as her hands ventured down to the buttonfly of my jeans. "Let's get up on my bed." The words were a statement of intent, I knew. I had succeeded in making her want me physically; the way she moved against me and sighed as I explored her most secret places told me this. I would have Clio; I would love her totally and without reservation, just as I loved her ever since I laid eyes on her. It didn't matter that she didn't care about me enough to share her pain, to share the sad things that made her cry, along with the happy. I could love her enough for both of us.

"Okay," her breath was warm on my skin as we climbed to our feet, still kissing. I was just enough taller than her to rest my chin on her head, and I held her like that for a second, waiting for my breath to slow. "Do you want to do this?" I slid my hands from her back to run them through her hair, smoothing its ruffled mass.

"So much it hurts," she didn't stop working on my jeans, proving her point. Could I do this? I asked myself. I cared about her so much already, and this further intimacy could only draw me further into the depths of her green eyes, perhaps never to return again. My next thought was simple and automatic - the voice of the most basic zones of my body and my mind - could I not do this?

"I don't have anything," I amended both vocally and mentally. Without a condom nothing could happen. I'm not stupid, and to protect both of us I realize we'll have to stop… unfulfilled. Disappointment surged through me. Why had I never thought to buy a condom? I was a grown up, I could go into any drug store in the world and grab a box of 40, but why had I never done it?

"Nat does. I know where she keeps them." The second Clio took to grab a small, shining foil package from her roommate's dresser was cold, and painful. I pulled off my jeans and lay on her comforter, watching the muscles of her back move smoothly under her pale skin as she shut the drawer.

"I have to say it one more time," she laughed, trying to surreptitiously cover herself as she joined me one the bed with a squeak of the bedsprings. Her tone became serious, though, and she met my gaze for a lifetime before saying the three simple words I most longed to hear: "I love you."

I pushed her tenderly onto the bed, and began the procedure that I've dreamed of for my whole life. I began to give my virginity to the only woman I've ever loved, the only woman I could ever love.

My world, encompassed a thousand times over in her embrace, shattered and redrew itself first in brilliant shades of passion and fever, and then finally in the gentle shadows of contentment. When it was over, I wanted to die. It had been to good, to perfect, to sweet to allow me to return to earth. Her arms, her body, contracting around me, had been heaven.

Before our gasping breaths had stilled I had to go; we both knew that I couldn't spend the night. My parents would be waiting anxiously by the door, even if the electronic summons of my beeper had been dulled by its position beneath our abandoned clothes on the floor. Every inch of me was touching her; the pale white of her skin and the scent of lilacs were slowly driving me insane.

"I… have…go…," my phrase was broken up by long intervals of kissing, but she, of course, understood.

"I wish you could stay," we snuggled closer, bare skin against bare skin.

"Me too, but I'll see you tomorrow. And this weekend." I reasoned with my own stubborn mind, which was demanding that I do just what she said. Demanding I stay all night, and do what we had just done a thousand times, or a million, or however many occasions would fit into the next fifty years of my life. "I love you." I chanted the words like a mantra, pulling her closer for an instant before raising from the warmth of Clio's bed to find my clothes.

She watched me as I dressed, a subtle smile playing at the corners of her mouth. "I love you to," she answered. Clio stood cautiously, covering herself with her sheet, and came to my side for a final kiss.

"You're beautiful." I pushed back the white flannel sheet, and she left it dangling precariously around her shoulders as we stood, inches part, just drinking each other in.

"You're amazing." She said at length, sounding near tears once again. Her next kiss was forceful and tender all at once, and so I left, having entered her room half a person an hour ago, I left it a complete man, with the honey of her lips still a warm memory on my flesh.

Clio

I've waited my whole life to feel full, to feel some indescribable completeness that I could never quite grasp, no matter how hard I've tried. I've sought it in more places than I care to remember, and, truthfully, in more places than I can count. As I lay on my bed, Isaac's parting words still dancing through my mind, I wondered if perhaps I have finally found it.

"You're beautiful," he had said. Maybe he was right. Maybe he had always been right, and I had just never seen it. The thought that I could be beautiful, even if only to one boy, lifted the corners of my mouth. I tried desperately to remember every word his caress had evoked within me, but even as memory stretched towards them, the thoughts slid past me like cars on a train. I could see them, I could feel the air they displaced with their might, but I couldn't touch the distant ghosts of them. At length I gave up and simply let it all wash over me in sensuously delicate waves of satisfaction.

It amazes me that I have had this body for nearly 17 years, yet I never knew - never even imagined - the sensations it could be wracked with. The pleasant fullness, the feeling of Isaac all around me, totally dominating my senses, had changed me forever. I can't help but have this weird feeling I now know why every one is always saying to wait for marriage. What I had just experienced with Ike was so special, so personal, that I couldn't dream of sharing it with someone I cared less about. It had not only been his body, I'm sure, that had sent me spiraling into a perfect, free world of physicality and emotion, but also it had been his mind. He had said to me the most perfect words in the world: "I love you," so many times that I could barely separate the instances. The afternoon had been a long haze of 'I love you's: from him, from me, from every inch of our bodies to the most remote regions of our souls. Under the covers I was cold without him, cold and empty. I rolled over to face the light yellow cinderblock of the wall, and stared at its pitted patterns until sleep finally overtook me.

Taylor

Every day I spend more and more time in the basement. It's hard for me to pull myself away even to record, but my brothers are always around to do it for me. I'm relatively sure they think I'm crazy. I am, in fact, relatively sure that they're right. Why else do I still long to talk to Marissa? Why else do I stay down here as the most beautiful days of spring meander past, beautiful days that once would have brightened my mood? Now they did nothing but point out the multiple shortcomings in my life.

Recording was awful. It was like neither Ike or I could fully concentrate, and thanks to this fact we've fallen behind our contractual obligations to Mercury. My family treats me like some fragile child's toy that is always one jolt away from shattering. I haven't seen any of my friends since Marissa and I broke up, at first because I was too busy doing everything I could to try and get her back, and now because I'm to busy moping. I work on this mural that no one will ever see, and I drown in an ever deepening pool of self pity, lacking even the ambition to save myself.

"Taylor, please try and keep those clothes clean." My mother's voice invaded my thoughts as I stood contemplatively before the whirlwind contrasts of my newest artistic endeavor.

I looked down at my jeans, cautiously brushing away a bead of paint that has already sullied them, even though we've only been home from the studio for twenty minutes. "Gothca," I replied, blotting a small brush on a paper towel to get rid of some of the excess paint that was dribbling from the bristles.

"I only wish you could have gotten me sooner." She sighed, holding up a pair of my cords from her position in front of the washing machine across the cement cavern of the basement. It's easy to see a large stain stretching form mid-thigh to knee.

"Oops." The answering sigh was nothing short of gushing.

"Mom!" I could hear my little sister, Jessie, upstairs, shouting. This sound was immediately followed by a tinkling crash. "Avery broke your vase!"

"Did not! MaMa did it!" Avery's high pitched wail assaulted my ears as mom raced up the stairs with that special mommy warp speed only women with young children can attain. I phased out the ensuing ruckus and began laying shades of blue on the wall. It's almost done, I guess. I haven't really had a plan as to where it was going - I just applied the paint where and how my mood dictated. While not being ready for the Louvre just yet I suppose it's pretty good, considering. I blandly wonder what I will do when it's finished. If it's ever finished.

"Tay?" A new voice, a quiet one, breaks my concentration.

"Yeah?" I turn around to see Mackie sitting on the bottom step of the wooden stairs leading down from the kitchen, the lower half of his face stained red by the popsicle which he is enthusiastically devouring.

"What are you doing?"

"Painting." I informed the inquisitive four year old, continuing with my methodical work.

"How come?"

"Because I feel like it."

"But what about the old stuff? You covered over my favorite space ship." I can't help but smile at Mackie's genuine alarm at the loss of his favorite drawing.

"I'll make you another one."

"I don't really want another one." He answered mournfully, carefully performing a sideways bite as the popsicle dwindled. "Why doesn't Rissa come over anymore?"

My charitable mood towards my littlest brother faded as his line of questioning wandered towards a subject I'd rather have avoided. "She doesn't want to, buddy"

"Are you going to get another girlfriend now?" I almost dropped my brush as this question hit me. A new girl friend?  As much as I would like to, I can't deny that the thought had crossed my mind.  It was lonely without Marissa. But that itself was the problem.. I wasn't simply lonely.  It was all about missing her, and I'm begining to be afraid that that gaping void in my life can't be filled by anything but her. Marissa is perfect. She says what I think before I think it; she's my best friend. And I miss her. Still.

"No Mackie."

"Why not?"

"I don't want another one." Why did I suddenly feel like crying? I'm Hanson man. Hanson men don't cry.

"Like my spaceship."

"Like your spaceship." I whispered, turning back to the shadowy mural I have created.  

Isaac

I didn't stop thinking about Clio the next day. Everything I saw reminded me of her, from the flowers that were just beginning to push their heads tentatively above the dark soil in my mother's garden, to the sight of a sweater she had forgotten at my house the last time she came over to do her math tutor thing.

Thursday seemed especially long without her, but between our hectic schedules we had no time to see each other. I was to be holed away in the studio all day with my brothers, putting the finishing touches on Taylor's newest song, and Clio had to write another installment in her seemingly never-ending stream of papers. By the time the rest of my family was in bed I couldn't take it anymore, though. The darkness of my bedroom was broken only by the occasional flash of headlights peeping beneath the lowered shade of our window, and the quiet, rhythmic breaths of my already sleeping brothers were the only noises. Still I couldn't loose myself in sleep; I couldn't submerge myself in dreams which I knew would be sweet, and scented with lilacs.

Finally, too frustrated to just lie still, I hastily shoved my covers to the foot of my bed and cautiously lowered myself to the floor. I took care to make no noise, stepping over the scattered legos that always seem to grace the thick blue throw rug on our hardwood floor, and avoiding the boards that 17 years of experience told me would squeak in protest under the slightest weight.

After wandering through the house in search of something to divert my too alert mind I wound up in the kitchen. Everything looks different at night, I thought to myself after tripping over Zac's neglected roller blades. Objects that in daytime were supremely familiar, like the worn apron that always hangs on the back of the door to the kitchen, took on a new life. They were odd, unfamiliar, chock full of both possibility and danger. I sat unmoving in the dark for what seemed like forever, staring at my hands. I still couldn't really believe what had happened in Clio's dorm room; I couldn't, in this cold night, think of anything other than the perfection of feeling her all around me. I wanted to talk to her, and explain what I felt. Tell her that for some reason she haunts me, and that the only goal I can imagine mattering in my life is to be with her always. I've never felt like that before about anyone, and it's scary and exhilarating all at once. I've found someone who makes me happy with her every motion, her every word. All Clio needs to do is say my name and I slide away from reason to loose myself in the sound of it, a willing victim to an unkowning siren.

The phone, a dark hulking mass hanging from the dark green dividing wall between the sunroom and the kitchen, beckoned to me. I could talk to Clio in seconds, if I only dialed 7 numbers which I had long ago committed to memory. But it was late, protested the square, glowing green numbers of the digital clock on the stove. At length I finally decided that I didn't really care what time it was; I had to hear her speak or die.

"Hello?" The voice that answered the phone after the first ring wasn't scratchy with sleep as I expected it to be.

"Hey," I whispered, not wanting to snap the peaceful mood that had come over me at the smooth tones of her voice.

"Isaac…" Clio answered, pleased. "I was just thinking about you."

"I've been thinking about you all day." The words escaped before I could censor them, but I didn't even mind, other than to feel a little sheepish. Sometimes I wonder if she's alarmed by my persistence. I call; I write her email messages; I invite myself over almost constantly.

"Same here…" she whispers now too, and I can hear her moving around in the background.

"Are you in bed?"

"I am now…" The rustling I had heard stopped, and for several instants all I could hear was the faint sound of the cars rumbling along in the interstate in the distance.

"I just wanted to say goodnight." Clio's sigh was soft, and I could almost see her, lying under her thick comforter, beneath a false glow in the dark cosmos, eyes closed and chest rising and falling ever so slightly with each breath.

"I love you."

The intimacy of her words rang through me, and I smiled before replying in kind. "I love you, too."

Clio

I woke up on Friday morning smiling. What a ridiculous thing to do: wake up smiling. But I suppose I had good enough reason; I think about Isaac Hanson almost all the time now. It can't be healthy, and it would be absolutely scary if he didn't prove to me in little ways, like 3 am phone calls, that he was feeling the same way. The mood followed me through my morning routine: a shower with the lilac body gel I know Ike likes, a raisin bagel, and the ceremony of watering Nat's forgotten fern.

Natalie and I always walked to our first class together on Fridays, they were in the same building, but a floor apart. "Hold on… I have to check my mail," Nat muttered, pulling her arms through the straps of her red North Face bag as we walked past the wall of mailboxes. The tiny window of mine displayed a white envelope, for a change, so I speedily twisted the combination lock, hoping for some goodies from my parents or a note from my Grandmother.

What I pulled out was more of a shock, however. It was a thick, business-sized envelope with a Chicago address. A Chicago address belonging to the admissions office of a particular University with one of the best Egyptology programs in the country. I went through my day in a daze, walking zombie-like from class to class, not able to bear opening the envolope, despite the painful knowledge that it rested in my backpack.  The original responses to my transfer applications had come so long ago, and I had never even opened them. Always they were in the back of my mind, though, a dark hovering specter. I didn't want to get in. If I got accepted to even one of the four schools I had applied to that would mean a decision, and a big one. Go or stay. But I didn't have the self-esteem to survive if all of the letters were rejections.

I finally gave in at about three o'clock, just before the ending of my last class of the day. Diana would be picking me up in front of the English building in less than five minutes, and I would be going to spend the weekend at their house. The weekend with Isaac. I quietly tore open the firm package, and, keeping one eye on the professor in the front of the large lecture hall, pulled out its contents. Who would have thought that three pieces of paper, two thin, one thick, could matter so much to me?

"Clio," The first page began in handwritten script. "Congratulations on your acceptance into the school of Egyptology at the University of Chicago," I let out a breath that I suspect I may have been holding ever since I had filled out the creamy white pages of the application a lifetime ago. "We at the history department have reviewed your record, and have decided to award you with the Presidential grant, which is given to one transfer student every semester. Tuition is fully covered by this free gift from the University…" The words got better and better as I read on. Free tuition. Guaranteed admittance into all of the classes I wanted. A new life.

My only worry was if it was a new a life I even wanted.

Installment 13

Isaac

"I want to see pictures of you as a baby." Clio informed me when she came over after her classes let out on Friday afternoon. I was still rather in shock that my mother had suggested she spend the weekend at my house, even with my full awareness of Mrs. Diana Hanson's supermom instant.  It was just out of hand. Not that I minded or anything.

"Uh, I don't know about that," I answered in a deadly serious tone. "I was not an attractive child." It was true. I had spent my entire life being second to Taylor in looks. Even as little kids it had always been, "Taylor the cute one," and, "Ike the funny one." Isaac whose blue eyes wouldn't pave his way in life. Isaac who decided one day to write music to be special, just as it had always been Isaac who had waited as long as he had drawn breath for the person who stood beside him in the hallway of his parents house.

In the past these thoughts might have annoyed me. No matter what I tell people, I know that I am a little bit jealous of Tay. It seems like life is guaranteed to be easy for him just because he got good genes, but over the past few months with Clio this envy has faded. I could remember thinking as a little boy that if only I had looked like Taylor life would be so much more simple. Maybe it would have been, but if I was some swimsuit model of a man I couldn't be the person I am right now, and I couldn't be experiencing what I was pretty sure was the most powerful emotion in the world as I watched Clio struggle out of her heavy backpack. So, I supposed, all of my sufferings and shyness of childhood had been more than worth it after all.

"Oh please! How could you have been an unattractive child and be so fine now?" Clio had by this point removed her sneakers and thrown them, along with her fleece coat, into the hall closet. She punctuated her ego-boosting comment with the briefest of pecks on my cheek, which she had to stand on tiptoe to deliver.

"Well, when you put it that way..." I laughed, wrapping my arms around her waist and returning her kiss ten-fold. With one of her frigid hands in clutched in one of my warm ones, I led Clio to the sunroom where my mom keeps all of the photo albums. This room was another testament to my mother's preternatural maternal instinct; several bookshelves were filled to the point of bursting with albums packed with memorabilia of all of her children. The goodies included things as varied as the trophy Avery had won for being the first kid in her pre-school class to be able to tie her shoes, to pictures of every Hanson performance, to Tay's soccer blue ribbons from his seventh grade league.

I pulled out one of the early volumes, a thick green book stuffed with carefully mounted pictures, and lay on my stomach on the hardwood floor. Clio stretched herself out beside me and nudged my shoulder with hers. "Well, let's see the goods!" It was so easy, to be here with her like this. I would have thought there would be some sort of awkwardness between us now, considering what we had shared, but instead I felt more closely connected to her than I ever have before. It was like she was my best friend, and I had known her forever. Words were no longer obstacles; they simply flowed comfortably from our lips without any nervousness, and in their absense there wasn't a problem wasn't a problem. The silence was a snugly comfortalbe quilt wrapped companionably around us, a sweet luxury.

"Don't say I didn't warn you," was my stern reply. The first few pages went by fast, me in diapers, me in the bathtub (mental note: destroy that one, preferably along with the negatives....) When we came to a page with only one picture on it, me, Tay, and Zac in the pre-Hanson days, wearing matching jean shirts, sitting on the deep green front lawn laughing, Clio made me stop.

"Look at you," she smiled faintly, engrossed in the snapshot. "You were so happy." I looked at me, all right, and saw my crooked teeth, my bad clothes, and my too short for comfort hair. I shook these reflections easily from my mind, and shut the album, grinning wildly at Clio.

"Not as happy as I am right now..." I couldn't help but reply with a kiss, eager to be pull her close and try and show her what I hadn't been able to tell her on the phone last night.

Clio

Ever since opening the letter from The University of Chicago my mind had been racing. What could I do? The opportunity to go to school without paying tuition was an amazing one; as things stood right now I was going to be in debt well into my thirties with college bills. Leaving ORU after only one semester and attending a school that was willing to pay my way would solve a lot of problems, and on top of these financial concerns was the snappish voice in the back of my mind that kept saying how much better a degree in ancient history from the oriental institute would look than one from Oral Roberts.

"Random question," I said, rolling over onto my back and watching a twinkling set Christmas lights run their eternal race up and down the dark wooden mantelpiece above the fireplace in the sunroom.

Ike turned to lie on his side next to me, his head propped up on one hand. "Shoot," he said, looking down at me with an expression so sweet on his face that I shivered involuntarily.

"It's March. Those are Christmas lights. What's wrong with this picture?"

"Avery and Jess throw a fit every time anyone makes a move to take them down. I imagine the next time we go away my mom will get the cleaning lady to disappear them in hopes that they won't notice." Ike paused reflectively and watched the sinuously climbing lights for a moment before returning his gaze to my face.

"What's wrong?" His gentle voice sent tremors of sadness through me.

The flashing Christmas lights and the pale mid-afternoon sunshine that slipped through the half open blinds were the only brightness in the room, and I watched the lights make deliciously perfect crayola colored patterns on Isaac's already beautiful face. "How do you know there's something wrong?" I asked, putting off the inevitable moment of reckoning. I wanted to talk about this with him, but I couldn't imagine what he would say. I felt like I was making too big of a deal out of a basically simple decision and laying far to much weight on our relationship.

I didn't think I could stand it if Isaac casually dismissed my dilemma, though. After all, why should he care? I'm sure that there are a hundred thousand girls out there who would love to be in my place, and he would have no problem finding one of them if I left. He said the words "I love you," I had heard them and felt them, but it was still hard for me to believe it all, despite my own feelings.

"Well, you saw the picture of me with a buzz cut and didn't laugh. That's can only mean two things... a) that you're clinically depressed, or b) you're actually blind and have been hiding the fact really well..." Isaac said in a hushed voice, placing his free hand on my stomach and leaning closer.

"You were cute." He is cute. And somehow I feel like I can still see that little boy from the picture taken on his front lawn staring out from behind the deep brown eyes of a nearly grown man. Those eyes lit his face with something I only wanted to imagine being devotion and love. For me.

"God, you must have something truly horrific to say if that just came out of your mouth and you've still got a straight face. Do you have Ebola or something?" Ike's hand slipped under my shirt, and he began tracing an ever-widening set of concentric rings around my belly button.

"I got a letter from the University of Chicago today." I slowly answered, reveling in the sensation of the rhythmic motion of his hand beneath my shirt.

"Really." He stopped for an instant, and watching me thoughtfully.

"They want me to go there. They even gave me a scholarship. A big one. No tuition to pay…" I could see him flinch, even though he was obviously trying to hide it.

"You're not thinking about going, are you?" Maybe my dreams were coming true. Maybe Isaac Hanson really did feel about me like I did about him. Why else would that mixture of horror and pain thicken his voice?

"I am. Thinking about it, I mean. It's such a good school…"

"ORU is a good school to. And you've already been there a semester, why bother starting over somewhere else?"

"I don't really like it there, Ike." We had never talked about this. I suspect that he knows just how I feel about my school, but I've never brought it up and am hesitant to do so even now. Being with Isaac is perfect - an escape from an unfriendly and hostile world - and I don't want to pollute it with all of the grime and dirt of reality.

"Why not?" Softly, ever so softly, he sinks down onto the carpet beside me, his face a mask of control.

"I just don't. The classes are dumb, the teachers are ridiculous, and the code of rules is out of hand. I don't know why I went there in the first place. Well, I do. Because it was close to home, and easy to get into."

"Don't leave me." I flipped over onto my side to face him, and moved closer. There were only inches between us, and as we lay there I could see a thousand colors playing against the brown of his eyes.

"I don't want to leave you. Just here." It took me a long time to answer, because I was far to mesmerized by the red, green, and blue of the Christmas lights on his pale skin to formulate a sentence. Isaac reached out a tentative hand and ran it up the side of my neck before burying it in my hair.

"You're going to leave me." The little boy from the picture said in a dismayed and certain voice. The sunshine was gone from his eyes, and his face hardened even more.

"It's not you. I love you more than I ever thought I was capable of loving anything that wasn't stuffed and bought at FAO Schwartz. But I hate my life. I hate Oral Roberts. I hate the kids, the professors, and the fact that I can't get any of the classes I want here." This bitter complaining wasn't helping anything, but I couldn't stop the words from pouring, impassioned, from my mouth.

"Drop out then," Ike cajoled. "Stay here." He paused for a long moment, his eyes never leaving mine. "Marry me."

Isaac

"What?" My breath stopped when I realized what I had said, and my heart stopped when I realized that I meant it. I had asked Clio to marry me, to promise that we would always be together, to become even more of a part of me than she already was. I think this may have been building up in my mind all along; first it had been her face, and then it had been the beautiful golden red hair that I was currently twirling leisurely around my fingers as I watched a look of shock cover her delicate features. But it had become so much more, the way she talked and the way she thought, and finally it had all added up. I loved her - every inch, every success, every failure. I don't think I could change this even if I was so inclined.

"You heard me." I replied quietly.

"Be serious." Clio dismissed me, sounding less than certain. Looking into her green eyes, so clouded with confusion, it was all I could do to draw breath.

"I am serious." I slid across the thick carpeting of the sunroom floor, so close that our bodies gently pressed together and I was able to softly kiss the sprinkle of freckles that dot the bridge of her nose.

"I wish I could." She sounded so weak, so defeated at that moment that I hurt for her. "I wish I could just give up. Not care anymore…" Tears were glistening in the corners of her eyes, and she blinked rapidly, flinching in an attempt to hide them. After a struggling instant she sighed a long, silent exhalation of breath that brushed warmly on my neck, sending chills up and down my body. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be; it's okay. Everybody is unhappy sometimes." It was a truth hard lessons had taught me long ago, but I didn't know if that was what Clio needed to hear right now. The urge that made me want to be able to make her life perfect, to give her the heaven she deserved, in any way I could, demanded these words of me.

"I'm sad all the time and it only gets better…"she froze mid-sentence, her eyes cautiously measuring my reaction to her words. After a second of silence as I waited for the next words, for her to tell me how I could make her happy, Clio pulled back and moved several feet away to sit Indian style and lean against the couch. She sat in stony silence, watching the Christmas lights work their way through another of their cycles of endless repetitions.

"Why haven't you ever talked to me about this?" Why don't you tell me when you're sad?" I was pleading, begging, but I couldn't stop. "Am I some kind of toy to you? Something to play with when you feel like but not really care about? Someone to use for sex?" The words were stupid, and offensive, but their meanings had long haunted me. Clio had gone to my mother to cry, when all I wanted in the world was to be here for her in every way possible. How could she really love me if she didn't want to talk to me?

"Please don't think that," Clio finally looked at me, sorrow radiating from her gaze. "It's not true." Tears began weaving sullen pathways down her cheeks, and her voice broke at the last word. "I just want us to be okay. Everything else in my life is so messed up that it's like I don't have anything anymore…just…. Please let us be okay." Thick desperation was thinly veiled by her voice, and as I watched she wiped her eyes and straightened her shoulders. I had never imagined how unhappy Clio must have been, being too wrapped up in my own happiness. How could I not have known? How could she have hidden this from me when I thought of her every minute of every day? Even when I had caught her crying to my mom I had thought that it couldn't have been a big deal, just a momentary sadness. But that couldn't be the case, whatever it was that was making Clio, strong Clio who's never afraid of anything, cry can't be little. "Let us be okay," she softly entreated one final time.

"Shh…" I used the same tone of voice I had seen my mother use on a crying child a thousand times in my life, a good number of them directed towards me. "We're fine. I just don't understand how you can go."

"I think I have to. It's kind of stupid," Clio shrugged apologetically before continuing, devoid of tears. "When I was a little kid, in second or third grade, we learned about the pyramids. How there were hundreds of them, but they'd all been found and explored." As always, talk of Egypt brings out the brightness in her eyes and a faint smile into her tone.

"I was annoyed. Of course. Someone else had beaten me to it. Then we learned about the Valley of the Kings, where all the Pharaohs of the 18th dynasty had been buried. And they told us that every single tomb had been found there, too." Clio was now animated, and a slight flush climbed up the exposed white of her neck. "I argued with my teacher for days. I was so sure they had saved me a pharaoh, and that there must be one waiting for me somewhere, that it made me mad when she didn't believe me. If I stay here, if I become a teacher or whatever my parents want me to be, even if I marry you…" the last phrase was delivered in a gentle tone, and even though she was in the midst of what Taylor might have called a "hissy-fit" it was obvious she was trying not to hurt my feelings, "it'll be just like admitting that she was right all the time. That there wasn't a Pharaoh left for me, and it didn't matter anyway because I wasn't even going to try."

We both sat, still with thought, for several moments. The Christmas lights kept flashing, spinning and racing along their cord, and I just sat, unable to say anything. What was there for me to say, after-all? That Clio should give up her dream? That she should forget about something that could make her sound like that? Her fascination with another place and another time fills her voice with life and returns that peculiar gleam of hers to the green of her eyes, and now all I want to do is tell her it's dumb. I ache to beg her to stay here with me, and not ever leave. "Ike?" Clio breaks through my haze of contemplation, "I think I want to know if you'll hate me if I go."

There are two ways I could answer this question. One is selfish, and desperate, an attempt to hurt her so badly that she won't even have the desire to leave. I could tell her what a stupid idea it was, that she would only be happy with me, or I could tell her that the odds of her becoming some famous archeologist were astronomical. But I couldn't do that. "I don't think I could ever hate you." I choose the other answer, the one that hurt me the most, the one that I knew was right anyway. "I wish you would stay. But I guess I understand. I couldn't give up the band, not even for you. I'd do anything else in the whole world, but not that. Because it makes me special." I maneuvered myself to sit next to her, shoulders just brushing.

"But think how it could be," I continued, grasping one of her hands tightly. "When I asked… when I said I wanted to marry you I wasn't kidding." It was true; I've known all along that I could make Clio happy, if she only gave me a chance. It seemed so weird, I thought as I marveled once again at the gentle strength of her hands, that just a few months ago I had only heard of one Clio - only one goddess. But now there are two, and at least one of them is, in some small way, mine.

Clio

I fought back the sea of tears that threatened to burst forth as Isaac came to sit next to me and hold my hand. "We'd get our own place," he began describing, in soft tones of conjecture what it would be like if we were married. "Every night would be a slumber party, and every morning I could wake up looking at you…" How could he possibly be so sweet? I couldn't imagine how he could love me this much. Imperfect Clio, who says stupid things and can't even remember the combination for her mailbox, has someone who cares about her so much that he wants to marry her. I didn't doubt that Isaac cared about me anymore, the sadness in his voice when he asked what he was to me, if I liked him for only physical things, was enough to reassure even me. It was true that I loved Ike's touch, and the smell of him, and the way he felt lying naked next to me, but that wasn't all that made him so special.

"And we'd spend all of our time with Ike junior," I had to add, smiling for the first time in our short exchange.

"Yeah. Ike Junior. I like the sound of that." Isaac wrapped an arm protectively around my shoulders and I allowed myself to lean against him.

"I love you; not just for this," I punctuated my pledge with the softest of kisses, knowing that there was no way to express how I felt. Even as I reached back into my mind for the words that have been my constant companions in life, I couldn't find appropriate mirrors.

"How come you went to my mom then? How come you told her about your problems and not me?" Isaac pulled away to watch me, waiting for answer, looking a little betrayed.

"I don't know. It's not like I thought ahead or anything. She was just there, and so nice."

"You can always talk to me, you know."

Words finally came to mind, and they were the truth. I didn't know if I was ready to share them, though, because they were still a little too fresh and tender. "I was afraid you wouldn't want me any more," they scraped like sandpaper against my tongue, but I was glad when they had been said. "I thought that if I complained to you I wouldn't be fun, or cool, or whatever."

"Do you remember," Isaac asked at length, raising our clasped hands to examine them, "the first time we kissed?"

"Yeah," I laughed ruefully at the long ago ashamed I had felt at my forwardness. It seemed so silly now, so pointless.

"You read my palm and said that I'm aggressive about getting what I want. I think I must be, because this time I definitely got what I wanted. You."

Installment 14

Taylor

The Friday night that began Clio's tenure as a guest at our house everyone decided to go out. Mom and Dad were going to take the girls to go see some play at our cousin's elementary school, and Ike and Clio wanted to go to the movies. Amidst all the noise and confusion of their arrangements I ended up in the basement, my secret hideaway, painting. Certain bits of the wall had been covered with three or four layers before I was finally satisfied with them, and others had been left bare.

"Taylor!" My Father came thuding down the stairs, sounding more like a fifteen-year-old boy than I usually do.

"You're coming with us to the show, right?" He knew very well that I had no intention of watching a bunch of third graders perform Wind in the Willows, but his tone implied more demand than inquiry.

"No thanks, dad. I'm almost done here…"

"It's not going to go away. I promise. Just come with us, it'll be fun." With this he began gathering the brushes and cans of opened paint that I had left lying on the newspaper with which I had covered the floor.

"I think I'll just stay in tonight, I don't feel too hot." My father was standing over the laundry sink, his black hair blending in the darkness of the room, busily washing brushes.

"It'll do you some good. Come on, go put on some decent clothes. We have to hit the road in," my dad checked the glowing face of the watch my brothers and I had gotten him last year for Christmas before issuing a dismayed, "about negative five minutes. Get a move on."

"Noo…" I whined pathetically to myself, watching my father retreat into the brightly lit kitchen above. I didn't want to go anywhere, let alone to an auditorium packed with 200 simultaneously screaming and giggling kids. There could be a riot or something.

I finally followed him, welcomed to the above ground world by an explosion of sound from from the telephone hanging in the kitchen. "Taylor? Get that for me, would you?" My mother was busily forming little round balls of cookie dough and promptly flattening them the counter, which is currently glaringly white form the massive amounts of flour that it is covered by.

Maybe it's Marissa. The thought skittered through my mind so fast I almost didn't grasp it before it disappeared into the mists of my unconscious. It's not Marissa, I reminded myself. It's never going to be Marissa again. The thoughts saddened me, and seemed to weigh heavy on my shoulders as I picked up the receiver, "hello?"

"Diana?"

"No. She can't come to the phone right now… can I take a message?"

"Yeah, this is Nina's mother. I'm really sorry about this, but she broke her arm this afternoon and isn't quite up to taking care of Zoë tonight. I hate to do this so last minute…" I felt bad, I really did. Nina has been babysitting Zoë forever, well, it seems like forever, and she's cool. But at this moment the only thing I can think of is that this may be my escape route from going to the play. You can't very well bring a three-month-old to something like that - now can you? And there just happens to be one person in the house who doesn't want to go in the first place…

After quickly saying goodbye to Nina's mom I turned almost triumphantly to my mother. "Nina broke her arm! She's not going to be able to baby-sit tonight, but I can watch Zoë if you want." What a selfless son I am, I thought to myself as I attempted to sound humble.

"Tonight is going to be a family night. You go change," My mother waved a flour doused hand in my direction and frowned. "I'll find someone else. Not a problem." She muttered, rinsing her hands in the sink and throwing the now completed tray of cookies in the refridgerator. "Go on!"

"Fine."

Marissa

I didn't understand how the night air could feel so cold on my skin. It's warm out, the trees are budded, birds are signing. It's the perfect spring day, but even as Sarah and I sit on the patio by the currently empty pool in my backyard I just can't enjoy it.

"I like Jason a lot, but not that much. I mean, he's going to school 1,000 miles away. I haven't seen him forever." Sarah and her boyfriend of two years just broke up, and I'm amazed by her calmness. She's sitting on a wooden deck chair next to me, busily flipping through my mom's Glamour and talking in a matter of fact tone about how they "called it quits."

I wish it could be that easy for me. I would just make up my mind and the rest of me would follow, just like it has for Sarah. But whenever I see the sky this particular shade of deep blue it fills me with an indescribable pain, knowing that Taylor and I are sharing this world. No matter what happens, that can't be taken away from me. But I wish I could still be his world, instead of just in it.

The phone rang from its spot beside Sarah, and she grabbed it expectantly. Our friend Caroline was supposed to be calling to finalize our plans to go see Titanic for the 4th time each tonight, but I could immediately tell that it wasn't her by Sarah's facial expression. "Okay. What time…. I'll tell her."

"What's up?" I asked, watching Sarah's face suspiciously. She was resembling a Wily E. Coyote a fraction of a second after he realizes he's going to catch the RoadRunner.

"You have a babysitting job." Sarah answered curtly, standing to tug on the legs of her jean shorts and walk towards the doorway to the kitchen. "At the Hansons'"

Taylor

When I went upstairs in an attempt to hide from my parents for awhile, futilely hoping that they would forget about me if I stayed out of their sight, I found Zac perched on the narrow, white painted windowsill in our room. "What's up?" I asked, hurling myself onto my bed with a satisfying thump.

"Not much." Zac answered, continuing to stare out the window, his face reflecting the soft pink rays of the sun as it began to surrender to night.

"Are they making you go to the play, too? Or am I the only one they feel the need to make suffer tonight?" I rolled onto my stomach and leaned the upper half of my body over the edge of the bed, searching for my secret Jelly Belly stash. Well, not so secret after I dip into it in front of Zac, but this is obviously an artificial flavoring emergency.

"I'm coming too… and I really don't mind." Zac finally regarded me coolly from behind his yellow brown eyes, seemingly waiting for some sort of reaction.

"What's up with you?" I haven't seen my little brother a lot lately, between being miserable in the basement with my painting and being miserable, well, everywhere else, I haven't really kept up with family goings on. It's almost surprising that I share fifty percent of my genetic material with the boy who is standing before me, the boy with whom I also share a bedroom, and yet don't know anything about him, really. His hair is getting longer, I note, and seemingly even more blond. I can see a thousand memories written across his skin, memories of thick summer nights spent catching fireflies, memories of Christmas mornings in Darth Vadar pajamas under the tree, memories of crying together when my Grandmother died. But I don't know him, not anymore. I can't decode the changes in his eyes as he watches me pull the heavy bag of red jelly beans from a remote and dusty corner beneath my bed, and I can't predict what he's about to say.

"We're going to leave soon, you know."

"Yeah. Ten minutes, I heard. Then Frog and Toad crying from stage fright and wetting themselves…" I responded, munching heartily on the rapidly diminishing kidney shaped bits of heaven.

"No, I mean, leaving. Really. The tour and stuff…" When had his voice gotten so deep? And when had the glow of laughter stopped hanging like a halo around him?

"Not for a long time. And you know we may not even do it at all…" I answered, thinking about it myself. This break has been terrible for me. The Marissa thing… it was too much to bear. The recordings we've done over the past few months are good, but Mercury is keeping them under wraps until after we re-release the Boomerang and MMMBop. In truth, I would love to go on tour. To be on the road again, far away from all the familiar, stifling worries that seemed to hover over every inch of my hometown.

"I'm going to miss it here when we leave again. And this time I bet it's going to be for even longer," Zac muttered, snagging his overly long hair in one hand and grabbing an elastic with the other.

"But think of how much fun we'll have, and all the cool new places we'll get to go." A pep talk for Zac was not my first priority right now, and I'm sure he could tell from the weakness of my words and the long breaks between them.

"I guess."

"Do you regret it?" I asked, softly. What if we had never gone to LA to record Middle of Nowhere? I pondered how different my world could be, almost wondering how I would answer that question if it had come from my brother. I think I do. Maybe leaving here for so long was what made Marissa break up with me, maybe she even met some other guy when I was gone. If I had stayed, maybe we would still be together.

"No. Not at all." Zac grabbed the bag of jellybeans from my clutches and threw one high in the air, only to be pegged on the forehead on its downward arc.

"That was feeble."

"I know, but not as bad as you…" Zac was silenced mid-insult by my mother's voice cutting through the midafternoon quiet. A sharp rap on the door was followed by her entry, Zoë on hip.

"Come on guys, down to the car. Marissa's here and we have to get going." She said, jostling Zoë and casting a critical eye around our room. "And when we get back you two can further indulge me by cleaning this place up a little. We have a guest, after all."

"Yeah, mom." Zac and I were too lost in our own thoughts to fight back, so we just filed mechanically out of the room behind her.

"Who'd you get to baby-sit?" Zac asked as we headed down the stairs, flicking off lights along the way.

"Marissa." My mom answered, not missing a beat. "You boys go out to the car and I'll give Zoë to Rissa."

I stopped, one foot hanging uncertainly midair. "Who?"

"Marissa. She just got dropped off, and if we don't get a move on we're going to be late." My mother didn't seem to see the significance in this revelation. Marissa was in my house. Right now. My heart stopped, and a shaky breath slipped its way from my lungs. I was so torn, at that moment. I still missed her so much, but one part of me was mad, and too hurt to just march downstairs and tell her for the billionth time that I love her. That fact apparently doesn't matter, anyway.

Zac shoots a questioning look in my direction before arrowing off towards the garage, several light years to slowly for my taste.

Marissa

He didn't even come find me before they left. I sat in the sunroom, holding Zoe's warm body cradled in my arms, and waited after Diana exited the room. I stayed there, unmoving until I heard the crunch of gravel in the driveway. Sarah had some nerve, saying I would baby-sit here. Every sight is painful, and as I watch Mackie intently acting out some drama with his Power Rangers figures on the floor I wonder if Taylor had once looked like him. The hair is right, maybe a little to blond, but the same texture. The youngest Hanson boy hadn't been gifted with Taylor's shivery blue eyes, however, and as he sat quietly on the carpet I could see a lot of other differences.

"I'm glad you're back, Rissa." Mackie's somewhat shrill little voice shocked me out of my reverie, and I found myself smiling. That's one way he's like his older brother… he really knows how to charm the girls. The sweet look on his face as he stood and walked to join me on the couch would capture a lot of hearts someday.

"I'm glad to be back, too. I missed you." It was true. I had missed Mackie, and this room, and this house, and the smell that always seemed to hover in it, some kind of mixture of fabric softener and potpourri.

Taylor

The play was horrific; it was terrible; it was my worst nightmares brought to life by a demonic troope of third graders. Judging by the indulgent grins on the faces of my entire family, including Zac, the little traitor to puberty and early adolescent rebellion, they were quite enjoying it. As the musical wore on I became increasingly aware of the other people who were packed into the small auditorium reacting to our presence. I think every one in Tulsa knows about us, even if they're not huge fans it's kind of hard to have avoided MMMBop for the past year. The glances they shoot in the direction of our all Hanson row aren't hostile, or unfriendly, or even worshipful as one might expect. They're just curious, like people at freakshow, ogling the wolf boy and the bearded woman.

All I could think of was Marissa. She had never cared that we were famous, had never bought a teen magazine for our picture, had never stared like those strangers. Her stares had been different, softer, like the drifting of ocean water against my skin. How could she be in my house right now when I'm trapped here? My head throbs, and I know that staying here isn't going to work out. I need to go talk to Rissa right now, and try to make her understand one more time why she can't live without me - because I can't live without her.

"Mom," I tugged at the sleeve of my mother's purple shirt, trying to get her attention. I couldn't breathe; the air was closing in around me like cellophane, and the stares seemed to weigh heavy on me. "Mom!" I repeated, loudly enough to earn a few annoyed glances from a middle-aged couple sitting in the row in front of us. "I have to go outside…" I carefully whispered when she leaned my way, followed by a thin cloud of her comforting, mommy-like perfume.

"Don't wander off, honey," was all she said before returning her eyes to the brilliantly lit stage.

I was too busy fleeing up the red-carpeted aisle to answer and was far to freaked out to care. I didn't know what was wrong, but my breathing was coming in quick, nervous gasps, and the room around me seemed to swirl in an uncomfortably rotating pattern. I just wanted to go home. I just wanted to go home to Marissa. So I did.

Marissa

"I want some grape juice, please." Mackie asked from his seat at the kitchen table. This hasn't been as bad as I had thought it might be; the house was curiously devoid of Taylor, even when I walked past the darkly paneled door to the garage, where Hanson does a lot of their practicing, I can't imagine him here.

"Sure." The pooh cup is light yellow, just like the one I used to have when I was a little girl. The cases of Dr. Pepper hidden in the corner beside the fridge didn't even cause me to flinch, and I silently congratulated myself for my fortitude. It was over, I thought, weak with relief. I had done what YM had demanded of me, and I could stand right here, in the same spot that I've seen Tay stand a thousand times, peering into the refrigerator in search of goodies, and not even care. Not even feel tears building up behind my eyes; not even want to just sit down on the cold looking cream colored tiling and cry until I'm drained. No, I promised myself, I don't feel those things at all.

As I cautiously handed Mackenzie the half-full glass of juice I heard Zoë revving up to a crying fit from her playpen in the sunroom. "Be careful with that." I warned, heading in to check on the littlest Hanson.

Zoë was the sweetest baby I've ever seen, shockingly enough. Usually when I end up babysitting for kids they're criminals in training, tearing apart supposedly childproof gates in the blink of an eye and just generally preparing for a future behind actual bars. Even the older Hanson kids fit neatly into this mold; they may be incredibly sweet and well meaning, but they're also an impossibly effective demolition crew.

"Rissa!" The panicked scream I heard from the kitchen was no doubt about to become exhibit 'A' to prove this point, so I quieted Zoë as best I could before sprinting back. Mackie stood in the center of the floor, his little jeans and white tee shirt stained an attractive shade of dark blue. The Pooh cup was upended at his feet in a puddle of doubtlessly already congealing juice.

"Oh Mack…" I lamented, pulling his MC Esher shirt over his head. "We have to get these washed right away or that's never going to come out." Yelling wouldn't help any, despite my desire to do a lot of it.

"I'm sorry…" He pleaded, puppy dog eyes on full power.

"It's okay, not that big a deal. Why don't you go take off those pants and get some new ones? I'll throw this right into the washer and you can bring your jeans down." I remembered when Ike had gotten this shirt for Mackie, and I knew the little boy treasured it. Making him feel worse by complaining was going to solve about as many problems as yelling.

"Kay."

As he hurried off towards the stairs I couldn't help but add, "be careful up there," in true temporary mommy fashion. It's revolting, really, to discover that I have maternal instincts. All I could think about as these words slid unplanned from my mouth was Sarah and I walking into the side entrance of J.C. Penny's at the mall last week and both of us grinding to a halt directly in front of a rack of little frilled dresses. They had been for children, and we had been at the mall to buy her brother a birthday present. There was absolutely no excuse for the ten-minute pit stop we had made there, exclaiming in long, girlie sighs how sweet the miniature dresses were. I can't imagine what it will be like at 30 if right now I can't walk by a baby gap without being filled with an intense longing to go in and examine the tiny jeans, the miniscule socks, and all the random adorable stuff they always stock. It's not enough to make me what to have an actual child, thanks to learning many times over the extraordinarily hard way that kids were a lot more than mannequins.

The washer and dryer, I had long ago discovered, were located in a nook in the basement, the doorway to which was in the kitchen, opposite the huge, stainless steel refrigerator. I fervently wished I hadn't been reading "The Shining" before bed last night as I plunged into dark maw of the wide doorway, reaching anxiously out for the dangling cord for the overhead light. What was revealed when I finally blessed the room with the flat, sterile light of the florescent bulbs was enough to almost cause me to meet an ignoble end on the cold, hard cement at the foot of the stairs.

Taylor

The walk home wasn't so long, only about two miles. It had apparently been raining while we were in the auditorium, and the cool of the spring air felt sharp against my hot skin. Wandering down the rainslicked black streets, all I could hear was the soft hum of crickets and the gentle thud of my Airwalks on the pavement. The completeness of my isolation struck me as I crossed an empty street, waiting for the walk sign to buzz its permission, despite the lack of traffic. I just wanted to go home, to escape the vicious currents of reality that have held me in thrall for my entire life. The bitter realization that I control nothing, not my body nor my mind nor any aspect of the world around me, had come to me long ago. I'm just another person, one soul, burning faint, barely distinguishable in the ever-swelling sea of humanity.

Why can't it be different? I demanded, picking up speed as the silver disc of the moon began to peek from behind a thick, black bank of clouds. I'm different; I have to be. So why can't I tell people how I really feel? Why didn't Marissa believe me when I said that I loved her? Never before, or since, she touched me have I felt so connected, so at peace. Together we were more than a blip, more than just a pale glow in the world. We had burned bright, discernable from the masses. We had been different. Or so I thought.

I eventually began to run, pumping my legs strongly and savoring the sweet smelling wind blowing the hair away from my face and tugging at my baggy clothes. Scenery slid by, a blur of unimportant greens and blues, and I continued running. Ribs aching, chest heaving with rapid breaths, I slowed only when the brown of my house finally came into view. I stood, gasping, on the front lawn for an instant, watching the dark windows reflect the headlights of a passing car. Marissa was in there, and it was now or never. Talk to her or forget about it. Life couldn't wait forever.

After the lightheadedness of my sprint dissipated I went in the front door, careful to make enough noise to alert anyone in the house as to my location. She would come to me. At least there was that. Ultimately I would not be the one who was weak, who had swayed, who was too incomplete to live without another. The entryway was dark, and I could see the faint twinkle of the red and green Christmas lights that still decorated the sunroom reflecting off the shinny hard wood floor of the hall. The kitchen too was quiet, deserted save for a wad of purple stained paper towels on the floor.

As I stood in the center of the room I realized the basement door was open, and the light was on. This made my stomach turn uncomfortably with the thought of Rissa seeing my attempt at art. I wondered if she would remember when I had told her about my subject, and what it meant to me. She would probably laugh, I decided, heading down the squeaky stairs and into my future.

Marissa

I stood in at the foot of the basement stairs for several lifetimes before I heard the crash of the front door slamming and feet advancing above my head. I could tell who it was by the tread on the floorboards, and by the quickness of the step, and soft sigh that echoed through the empty basement as Taylor made his way down the stairs. I walked forward, barely aware of what I was doing, and ran my hand along the thickly layered paint that fascinated me so.

"Sorry's just not going to cut it, is it?" I asked weakly, staring at the wall before me. It had once been covered with hundreds of hours worth of little cartoon people, spaceships, mountains, and trees, but now all that was gone, washed into oblivion by a layer of white. This was not what amazed me, though, that task had been left to what had replaced Taylor's childish endeavors. It was as if he had turned into Picasso overnight, the wall had, under his ministrations, become a writhing tapestry of deep crimson and endless black. At first I had not been sure about the subject of Tay's newest graffiti, but after a moment the familiar curve of a building I had once heard about seemed to struggle its way out of the prism reflected chaos of this new nightmare world. It was the Taj Mahal.

Memories washed over me, silken as salt water and hot as flame. We had been draped on the couch in the Hanson's sun room, the same one I had been sitting on only moments earlier, and Taylor had had his head in my lap. He had watched me so hard… watched me until my skin fairly crawled with the scrutiny of his azure gaze. "What!?!" I had finally demanded, rubbing my hands through his cornsilk-soft hair.

"Aren't I allowed to look at you?" He had playfully asked, smiling an almost blindingly bright smile up at me.

"Uh… maybe. I'm just wondering if I have creamed spinach on my face of something…" One rapid mental inventory later proved I was looking okay today, despite my facial features.

"Nope. You look perfect," gently he reached up and smoothed a finger along my cheekbone, eliciting a sigh from me. His hands were so right on my skin… so perfect.

"What brought this on?" I couldn't help but ask, kissing the tip of his finger.

"Oh, I don't know." My brows had raised in disbelief, I imagine, and he finally continued. "Today my mom told me about this building in India. It's called the Taj Mahal." I had heard of it, in passing, but never really seen it. "This king, Raja I guess they're called, built it for his wife." Taylor's smile died at that instant, and I could see something strange in his eyes. Some new emotion, some new thought, something I couldn't understand. "She died. He built it to remember her."

"That's so sad," I had answered, not really seeing the motivation behind Taylor's words.

"It was sadder because it made me think about you." It didn't make sense that some thousand year old building could make him think about me, and I think my confusion showed through my eyes. "Because I thought about how miserable I'd be without you."

I had almost cried right then, cried at how sweet Taylor could be. I wanted to cry now, standing before Taylor's creation. I had left him, and instead of hating me he had spent who knows how long in this eternally semi-dark basement painting the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I lost my breath at the sight of it.

The gentle throb of his breaths, and the ceaseless drumming sound his fingers make against the stair banister, are the only indications of a life force other than my own in the room. The near silence in the room was so deafening I almost wondered for a second if Taylor had left. "You can't imagine how badly I want to say no," Taylor's voice, filled with self loathing, carried through the chill air of the basement. "I don't even know if I need you to say you're sorry at all."

I knew exactly what Taylor meant by those words, even if he didn't. I'm a part of him, just like he is a part of me; I had been so wrong to deny this, especially for my own protection, and we had both suffered. We had come together in a storm of magic, but our first meeting had been built upon over the year, and it had grown broader, forming a bridge between us. Because he loves me I don't think he needs the words. I could never really leave him and hope to survive, because he was my life support, and my safety.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered, filled with exquisite relief. Finally the tears came, quickly sliding down my chin and beginning to soak my shirt.

The very next sensation I experienced was the familiar warmth of Taylor's hands on my shoulders as he turns me around, gently guiding me into his welcoming arms.

"Do you want to know why?" I asked, knowing that blubbering was just around the corner and burying my face in his shoulder. I breathed him in, trying to share his strength.

"Why?" He holds me so tight I feel as though I'm in the grip of one of the boa constrictors that have so fascinated Mackie ever since the Hansons had visited Jakarta. But no harm would come from this embrace, and the only devouring to follow would be beautiful, the culmination of everything I've learned and imagined in my life.

"Because you're so beautiful. How can I be with you? You're perfect, and I'm just me. I was so afraid…" the tears were thickening my voice, and with each word it grew harder for me to speak, "that you'd leave me that I left you first." I clung to Taylor, arms twined tightly around his neck.

"You are beautiful," his voice was husky and soft, and his breath caressed my skin as if to prove his words. "I've told you that a hundred times, and I'll tell you it a hundred more if that's what you need to believe me. I don't want anyone but you…" He began to back away, but I didn't want to let the moment pass. I was too comfortable, too warmed by his touch to let it slip away again. With him here, in my arms, I knew the truth in his words. It's only when Taylor is absent, and I can no longer feel his heat, or see the crystalline blue of his soul, that I forget. It slides away from me with all the things I've lost in my life, the billion tiny beliefs that once made this world not only bearable, but magical also.

"La catarata…" He sighed, "I'm sorry too. Sorry these past months have happened. And terrified that I did something to make you feel like I didn't care about you," Tay's words died away, and he pulled me to sit beside him on the bottom step, beneath the rectangle of light cast on the dark floor through the open kitchen door.

I had no idea what to say. That I had been stupid? That I was some paranoid maniac that could never be happy because I was always afraid? Both of these were true, but I didn't think I could articulate them. His warmth was comfort, his smell was comfort, and I watched Taylor's gently shaking shoulders, horror filling me. I was the crier. I was the one who couldn't deal with life, the one who had only my tears as a vent in the hard times.

"I don't how you can make me so happy and so miserable all at once. I thought about this happening a lot…" he was crying, softly, weakly, defeated. "It never happened like this, though. " I had to lean closer to make to the faint, halting words. I did this. I made the one person I love hurt like this. Suddenly my own sufferings of the recent past didn't matter. I had done this, caused it. Should I hug him? Wrap a comforting arm around him? "You were going to beg me to come back, and I was going to make you suffer. Say, 'I'll think about it,' or something. But I can't do it." A bitter chortle followed, and I watched as Taylor straightened from his hunched position, his golden hair catching the meager rays of light in the room and reflecting them.

"I'm sorry," I lamely repeated, feeling like a broken record on "lament" mode. I couldn't think… I couldn't see… the only thing that mattered was Taylor. And the pain I had caused. My next move wasn't a matter of thought, or planning, or pride. It was every inch of me moving towards him, sliding down the steps to kneel before him. "I'm sorry." Tay didn't look up, or budge, until I moved up to the stair directly beneath his huddled form and ran a hand through his hair in an attempt to see his face. "Let's just forget it ever happened and go back to the way things used to be. It was so amazing being with you whenever I wanted…I'm sorry." Again and again I repeated the only phrase that came to mind, the phrase I wished with every fiber of me would wipe away the memories and allow us to return to our past.

"I don't think they can be the way they used to be. I mean," Taylor sniffled, shrugging his hair forward to cover his face. "There's something wrong; that whole situation didn't come from nowhere. You felt like I didn't care about you enough, and that's got to be my fault. So it can't go back to the way it was."

"It's not you, not at all. I told you that I broke up with you because of me. You're perfect," I continued to kneel between his legs, and leaned forward to wrap my arms around him. He sat there stiffly for an instant, not responding, but I didn't move. I pulled myself even closer, and finally I felt him gingerly returning my embrace.

"I'm not perfect. At all." The warmth of his arms flowed through me, and we melted together, weakly clutching. "You're smarter than me, and funnier." Taylor twined his hands through my hair pressed against me more insistently. "Did you know I drool when I sing slow songs? No perfect being would ever do that." I could almost feel him smile, and I gently pressed my lips against his neck. "I was so lucky to have you," Taylor whispered, seemingly to himself.

"You still have me, you know." I pulled away to look into the blue abysses of Taylor's eyes, thankful to finally be back where I belong.

Installment 15

Clio

When Isaac and I finally returned to his house on Friday night I knew instantly that something was wrong. Every light in the house was burning brightly, invading the dark night with rectangles of gold, and the front door was wide open.

"Weird," Ike muttered, killing the motor of his parent's car and getting out. He walked halfway around the vehicle, displaying his chivalry once again as he attempted to beat me to opening my door. Sometimes that bugs me, and always has. After all, I'm not a child, and I can open my door quite nicely all by myself. But when it's Isaac who does it I can feel nothing other than a warm, comfortable flush purring through me. He always thinks of me first, no matter what.

"Jordan Taylor Hanson!" The shrill ring of Diana's voice caught me off guard as I slid out of my seat and accepted Ike's hand for the walk to the front door.

"Uh-uh… all three names. Tay's in huge trouble." Eyebrows raised with amusement Ike made this dire pronouncement. "Wonder what he did this time?"

"We had no idea where you were! How could you do that to us!" I could hear panic rippling through Diana's voice, and sighed. Every mother in the world has said those exact words, and often in that tone.

Isaac and I slowly walked up the paved drive, hoping to miss the confrontation, but no matter how we dawdled the curiosity was getting the better of both of us. "Mom," I heard Taylor's voice pleading softly from the general vicinity of the open kitchen window, "just listen. I knew Marissa was here and I wanted to talk to her, so I just walked. It wasn't that far or anything…" he trailed off lamely, and I could almost see him making his 'sorry I forgot about my math homework' puppy dog face in an attempt to sway his angry mother.

"Mom," Isaac called from the hallway as we divested ourselves of shoes and the light spring jackets we had worn in an attempt to ward off the still-cold April Tulsa air. "We're home!" It was a fair warning, coming from someone who has doubtlessly been in Taylor's position many a time over the past seventeen years.

Walker came out of the kitchen, looking frazzled. "Isaac, why don't get you get the couch set for Clio. Your mother and I are talking to Taylor right now."

"Uh… we heard." Isaac admitted sheepishly. "What's up?"

"He came to the play with us tonight, but left halfway through and walked home without letting us know." Ike and I traded knowing and hopeful glances. Marissa had been here all night, and Taylor's motivation for bailing on his parents seemed encouragingly obvious.

"Ouch." Isaac muttered as his dad returned to the kitchen. "I can't even believe Taylor did that. Wonder where Marissa is?"

"That's terrible. I totally think he came back to see her, and now I bet he's going to be grounded forever." I quietly intoned as we headed up the back stairs and to the linen closet, careful to avoid interrupting the free-for-all in the kitchen.

The upstairs hallway was dark as we wandered past the boys' room and towards the heavy door at its dead end. "Taylor is always doing things like that. He follows every whim without thinking about the consequences." I held my arms out and waited as Ike piled sheets, blankets, and pillows on them. "He actually did the same thing when we found out we were going to record in LA, walked all the way to Marissa's house, which has got to be ten miles at the least, and didn't tell anyone where he had gone."

"I want be all gushy about it, and think it's a sign of true love, but I think my advanced years are catching up." I admitted, fingering the satiny boarder of one the blankets I was holding and watching Ike struggling to free a deep moss green comforter from the top shelf of the linen closet.

"I know exactly what you mean. If he had just sat through the stupid play and tried to talk to her when he got home with my parents he would have gotten in no trouble."

"Funny how clear these things become when we're not involved, eh?" I asked, nudging Ike gently and smiling.

"It sure is," he planted a soft kiss on my waiting lips before closing the whitewashed closet door and leading me down to the sunroom.

Taylor

"Can we please just be realistic here for a minute? I felt really sick, and I just wanted to go home!" No matter what I said my parents weren't budging.

"Then you should have told us. Do you have any idea what could have happened to you? I've never been so afraid in my entire life!" My mother's eyes are bloodshot and as she looks at me I finally feel the guilt I have been avoiding. It was something I had to do, there was no escaping the pull that dragged me back to Marissa, but making them understand was obviously not going to be easy.

"Taylor," the smooth voice of my father, generally the voice of reason, is just as heated as my mother's as he stands up from his seat at the kitchen table and walks to stand behind her, hands resting protectively on her shoulders. "Your reasons don't really matter at this point. You can't just walk out like that without telling anyone."

I crossed my arms across my chest and tightened my lips, staring at the darkly reflective surface of the kitchen window. Fine, I screamed inwardly. They don't have to listen if they don't want to. And neither do I. The florescent light radiating from the ceiling fixtures danced in intricate patterns along the windowpane, wavering light and dark.

"Jordan! Are you listening to me?" My father asked loudly, attempting to break through my daze. I just sat, still and silent, defiantly ignoring him. "Alright then. You better go to your room right now. Your mother and I will be up with a punishment after we've calmed down a bit."

"Fine." I answered before standing stiffly and marching mechanically out of the room, deaf to whatever they were saying beyond my banishment. Walking past the door to the sunroom I spotted Isaac and Clio lounging on the bed that folds out from the couch, and heard them laughing softly. My parents allow this, my brother's girlfriend spending the night, and yet they won't just deal with the fact that I had no choice but to leave. I hadn't wanted to go to the lousy play in the first place, and to know that Marissa, who they are aware has been ignoring me for the past two months, was in my house had been too much. I had taken the only chance left to me, my only opportunity to talk to her again.

Clio was laying flat on the bare mattress, giggling softly as Ike leaned over from his spot beside her to plant a long kiss on her neck. "Stop," she finally said breathlessly, and I could see his hand working slowly up under her shirt. "Your parents are in the next room!" Her laughter was soft, and sweet, but it evoked bitter jealousy in me. Ike is always being coddled by ourparents, and everything he does is always right.

"I wouldn't worry about that. They're going to be working Taylor over for hours. We could hold a parade in here and they'd never even notice." Ike pulled away from her to mutter these words, and I watched with vague curiosity as he slid closer to her prone form.

"Well, a parade wasn't really what I had in mind…" Clio whispered, reaching up to absently twirl a strand of Ike's curly dark blond hair around one finger.

"Me neither," the rest of his response was too soft for me to make out, but I didn't care. It had all worked out, I supposed. Marissa and I had at least talked, and despite the terrors of the half-hour after my parents had driven her home, the warm feel of her still made me want to smile. I was willing to put up with a lot more than my mom hating me to be close to Rissa. In fact, as I walked into my room and flung myself down on the bottom bunk, I couldn't imagine anything that wouldn't be okay, as long as I knew Marissa would be with me.

Clio

Scalding hot water from the shower slid softly down my body as I leaned forward and rested my head on the light blue linoleum, watching thick streamers of steam floating phantom-like all around me. I couldn't bear to leave the warm confinements of the shower stall in the Hanson's upstairs bathroom; the water felt so good, and the pear shower gel that I had borrowed smelled so sweet, that vacating the premises was almost beyond my power. I straightened under the heavy stream and scrubbed the remnants of conditioner out of my hair while contemplating the evening that I had just passed as a guest in Isaac's home. Diana and Walker hadn't talked much, and Tay's absence from the dinner table had been glaring.

All of the little kids had been obviously upset by the fighting between their much admired older brother, and watching Mackie pick listlessly at his unnaturally yellow macaroni and cheese I suddenly understood what it must have been like. To live in a family like this, to have a home like this, to be so totally part of something that you were always missed when you weren't around. I had hoped that Taylor understood how lucky he was, and that he should treasure the two people who sat stonily before me, despite their anger.

"Clio!" A voice shattered my thoughts, pulling me back into the real world. "You've been in there forever!" It was Ike, judging from his words impatient that I was wasting so much time on such a trivial thing as hygiene.

"Yeah, yeah. Just a sec." I called, preparing to execute a final turn under the warm spray.

"Tired of waiting." I heard a click, and the telltale groan of the faintly rusted hinges of the bathroom door.

"Ike! Come on buddy, your parents are around!" I hurriedly turned off the water and grabbed the fluffy maroon striped towel Diana had provided.

"Everyone's in bed. It's not a big deal; I'll just sit here and talk to you as you dry off." No matter how much time I spend here the Hanson family always has a few tricks up their sleeves. I suppose because there are so many of them, and they've lived in such a confined area, but modesty isn't something I've known Ike or any of his brothers or sisters to worry about. He has seen me naked before, touched my bare skin, yet I still flushed at the thought of stepping out of the shower and into his gaze.

"What do you want to talk about, oh great one?" I asked, wringing my hair out and attempting to surreptitiously edge the shower curtain closer to the wall to reduce Ike's view of me.

"I couldn't really tell you. Perhaps why it takes girls lifetimes to shower? I mean, I get in, wash all the important parts, and get out in five. You've been in there for," a pointed pause followed, and I could almost hear Isaac calculating in his head. "twenty minutes. Gesh. World record territory."

"You're so one to pick on me, mister forty-minutes-in-front-of-a-blow dryer. God gave you curly hair. You've got to get used to it…" I laughed, knowing I had hit a tender spot. Despite my conviction that he is a god made mortal and encased in flesh, Isaac is paranoid about his looks. I suppose growing up with someone who looked like Taylor had to be a hard on the self-esteem, but Ike is truly a beautiful person. Given, a beautiful person who worries about his wavy hair and big feet, but someday I suspect he'll come around to my way of thinking.

"And you don't dry your hair?" The response to my comment was slightly indignant, just as I had known it would be.

"No, I don't. Just comb it and let it do what it will." I finally stepped hesitantly from the tub, wrapped tightly in the towel.

"Can I comb it for you?" Isaac's voice was soft, and he rose from his spot on the hamper, looking up at me with big liquid brown eyes.

"Sure," my tone matched his as I rapidly slipped my yellow nightgown over my head and blotted my hair with the now unnecessary towel.

"Come on," He grabbed my hand and led me to the couch on which I would be sleeping. "Sit," Isaac commanded, and I followed his instructions. I don't know how I can trust him this much, or how I can look at him and know that I will always be safe when he is near. But I do, and the comfort inspired by him settles slowly over me in waves as I sit cross-legged on the floor in front of him.

Isaac

"What's it like?" Clio asked as I ran the wide-toothed comb through her still dripping hair, careful not to tug at any of the knots I came across.

"What's what like?" I asked, concentrating on smoothing the silken strands and the feel of her rubbing against my legs as I sat on the edge of the bed with her on the floor before me.

"Being famous," she added after a long pause, putting her elbows on my knees. "I mean I forget sometimes… forget that you have this other life." She whispered, pulling in closer.

"It cool, I guess. I don't know how to describe it, but maybe you understand. I think I feel like you will after you get your degree in Egyptology and find your first royal mummy. I have this job, or at least that's what people call it," my words flowed freely from me, describing my life more clearly than I had ever imagined I was capable. "But I love it so much. It's like a part of me, and even if there wasn't such a thing as "Hanson" the band there'd always be Isaac Hanson, songwriter." No one had understood what this sensation, this completeness: not my parents, not my brothers, not my fans. But Clio did, I could tell from the way she leaned her head to rest against my leg, and the soft sigh that escaped from her.

"You're lucky to be so special." The awe in her voice made me smile, and I couldn't help but lean down and kiss an exposed area on the back of her neck.

"You're special too. And you know it. No one else in the world is like you…" I assured her, knowing it was the truth. When we talk like this, during the quiet dreamy times, I can almost feel the world distort, a willing accomplice to my love for her. Like the air writhing over sizzling hot pavement in the summer, reality bends to serve the two of us; we could be feet, yards, or even miles apart, but closeness still binds us inescapably.

"Do you think I can really do it?" The Clio only I know shows herself in this uncertainty. Around others her words and tone are strong and capable; she would never ask for help, never admit to fear. But together like this she softens, and so do her manners. The gentle touches, the faint sighs, are not the Clio of this world. They belong only to me, to me and my goddess.

"You can do anything at all. Anything." It's such a little thing, to drag the thick bi-colored teeth of the comb through her hair, but it is still one of the most intimate experiences of my life. All around me I can smell her, and I feel the warmth of her skin against me through her thin nightgown.

"Nat was on the Internet the other day," Clio haltingly noted, "and she said you guys are going to tour this summer." She turned, meeting my gaze with solemn pools of deep green.

"We're working on it, but it's kind of unusual for a band to tour with only one real CD," I informed, smiling. I didn't want to think about the inevitable future, and our necessary separation. All that mattered right now was this moment, and the fact that we were together. The future would have to take care of itself.

Clio

"Can I ask you something?" Funny that he would ask, funny that he doesn't know he can ask anything of me, is all I can think as I sit, enraptured by his caressing of my hair.

"Ask me anything." I replied, smiling at nothing in particular. The Christmas lights are still hanging along the far wall of the sunroom, but now they are dead and black.

"Did it hurt?" He whispered softly, running his hands across my shoulders; the feel of his fingers sliding along my sensitive skin sent quivers through me. "I mean… when we… when we… made love."

"Maybe a little," I leaned back against his knees to allow him easier access to gather my heavy hair in his hands. "But not really. Because it was like you said," I began to hotly blush, and cursed my blood for betraying me. The act we were speaking of had been an unspeakably intense experience, yet it didn't seem right to talk about it, almost as if it would be dirtied by using the ugly words that man has invented for such perfection. "We made love, and so I didn't mind a little hurt. It got better." This was the truth. There had been pain, and tearing, but the instant of suffering had been worth it.

"I wonder if it will always hut?" I could feel Ike sliding off the couch, and moved forward to make room for him on the floor.

"I have no idea," I answered as he settled on the carpeting behind me. I sat between his legs, elbows on his knees, for a second of quiet reflection.

"Will you tell me?" Ike sounded uncertain of both his words and the sentiment which they represented. "I've never, well, been a girl, so I don't know what it's like for you."

"It feels amazing, Isaac." I leaned even further back and he enveloped my in his arms, allowing me to hide in the warm shelter of him. "I can't even describe it." I wanted to, wanted to tell him the feeling of him inside me was glorious, but also that his words mattered. Knowing he cared about me, even loved me and wasn't just pretending had thrilled every molecule in me.

"I'm glad," he pulled me even closer, until I could feel the pulse of his heart. "I love being with you, Clio."

"That hurting every time thing…" Despite my best attempts at seriousness I could hear the devilish glee in my voice. "Maybe we should look into it. Do some research perhaps."

"You think?" Isaac's voice rang huskily through me, and after he spoke he nuzzled against my neck with his soft lips.

"I do." Sliding around I pulled him away from the couch, lips seeking his. "I do," I repeated, meaning the words in every way I could imagine.

Marissa

Spread flat across the bumpy cold patio behind my house I couldn't quite fight back the tears. I had gone home crying, and could still see Walker's face cast in shadows and dark, illuminated only by the faint streetlamps that lined my road.   He looked at me like I was someone about to break. They had been so mad at Taylor, so mad that it was impossible for me to drive out the memory of Diana's puffy red eyes as she had directed her husband to drive me home. Even the comforting hand she had rested on my shoulder, strong and certain, couldn't assuage my fears that they would never let him see me again. After all we have gone through, after all the struggle and terror of being without him for months on end, I was about to catch my first glimpse of the true hell that life would be without even the hope of Taylor Hanson dancing around its frayed edges.

"Marissa, we're not angry with you. Diana and I both know that this whole mess wasn't your fault, so don't worry sweetie." Mr. Hanson's voice had been both chilly and sincere as he had braked to a smooth halt in my driveway, casting an anxious look in my direction. The tears had left me shaken and meek, not quite sure of their derivation. Emotions I couldn't even begin to identify had been coursing painfully through me, emotions tinted with fear and longing, happiness and peace. Every time I finally thought I had the salty stream in check the warm itching of my eyes would begin again, and my continual attempts to stop only left me flustered and hiccuping.

"Please don't be mad at him…" I had managed to choke out in the rough, low voice of someone who knows that hysterics are just around the corner. It was all too much, and my mind wrapped around itself with the knowledge that Tay didn't hate me --maybe had never hated me.

For the first time in my life I was stifled by regrets. Always before events had happened, in my control or out, and I had dealt with them. But now, now I could almost feel the months of my separation from Taylor slipping icily between my careless fingers. I had had a chance, such a chance, to live on in peace by his side, but I had allowed it all to be wasted, destroyed by my own fears. It's gone, time that I had to spend with him. Time I could have whiled away, loosing myself in those glowing eyes; time I could have been bathing in the wonder that is his world. Now all that was left to me, as I climbed mechanically out of the Hanson's green Jeep, tears finally abating, was to wonder if we could ever go back to the way we were.

The light by the front door had been left on from me, and from where I stood at the foot of the drive as Walker pulled away I could see the darkness moving, circling around, frightened by the invading brilliance of the bulbs. I couldn't take the light, or the brightness, and so I cautiously walked around to the back door, far away from the living room. My room was dark and empty, having been divested of a year worth of picture frames, dried roses, and letters. The faint, repetitive barking of a laugh track had echoed through the house, and I had flinched.

My goal, the book, was right where I had left it, shoved under my bed in a sturdy trash bag. I would take it out now, and tomorrow the rest of its cellmates would follow, I had decided before grabbing a pen and my Walkman from my desk.

The pool cover had been drawn, and now as I sit here, nearly an hour later, my eyes still ache at the diffused light that slinks its way up through the thick blue plastic.  It is changed by its passage,  warped it until the florescent whiteness is merely a heavenly shimmer at the edge of my vision. There is no moon, and no steam to rise languidly from the choppy surface of the deep end. Nothing is the same as it had been that night last year, the one that I can almost see before me like a movie projected on my closed eyelids.

The soft lapping of water and the faint tinkle of distant windchimes soon came to be drowned out by music as I turned on my Discman. It was a familiar tune I strained to name, but couldn't quite grasp. "All of my life, I've been searching for the words to say how I feel," Phil Collins softly crooned in my ears, always knowing exactly what I'm feeling. "I'd spend my time thinking too much and leave too little to say what I mean. I've tried to understand the best I can, all my life." The tears began to return, and I pushed away Taylor's leather bound book to protect it from the sudden shower. "All of my life, I've been saying sorry for the things I know I should have done all the things I could have said come back to me." When I buried my face in my arms I couldn't see the outside world, and the light disappeared. I was all alone here, in a place so full of memories that I could barely breathe for their weight on my body. "You're beautiful. Don't ever forget that." Taylor had informed me last year, standing at almost this exact spot. His smile had been so wide and self-assured; we had had no problems back then, everything had been perfect. It had been Heaven, before I decided to mess it up by forgetting his words. "Sometimes I wish that it had just begun. I'm going nowhere there's too much I need to remember, too much to say. I've been looking, but it's hard to find the way, what's important just slips away…"

The song finally ended, and I scrubbed my sore eyes dry with the back of my hands. The light in the living room has long since turned off, and my parents have gone to bed. The air is getting colder, enveloping me in freezing breezes that leave goose bumps tingling. "Too much to say," I whispered, pulling the book towards me. I wanted to talk to him, to take comfort in his smile again, but something told me that wasn't going to happen in the near future. So instead I would write it, scribble out my thoughts in this heavy, worn book which has traded hands many a time, this tome that housed all of my hopes and dreams during the months he had been away after we first met.

I flipped past the 'I love you's to a blank page, and began decorating it with my messy handing. "I miss the way you make everything fun," appeared before me without thought. "I miss your smile, and the way you put ketchup on everything. I miss your chipped tooth. I miss you strong hands." My pen flew across the page, leaving lines and lines of slanted words behind it. "I miss the quiet way you say 'I love you', like it's a magic spell that will be spoiled if anyone but me hears. I miss the way you can never sit still, and the way your face squinches up when you're worried. I miss you…"

Ike

Clio lay next to me in the rich darkness of the sunroom, her head resting against my arm. After quietly completing our research, as she had called it, we had pulled ourselves together, but I couldn't manage to leave her yet. My parents would be annoyed if they came down and found us together like this, but I didn't really care. All that I could think about was the way her fingertips ran softly along the muscles of my chest and the faint tickle of her still-damp hair on my neck. We are so close that it has become hard for me to tell, in the dimly lit room, where I begin and where she ends.

When I was a lot younger I had had a stuffed teddy bear named Bucky. Even now, years after his violent death by disintegration in the washing machine, I remember how his furry little body fit precisely, comfortingly within my arms. Years of being my talisman against bad dreams and bogeymen had molded him to my form, but these years had been unnecessary for Clio's form to fit perfectly in the hemisphere of my embrace; as we snuggled weakly together, attempting to be as close as humanly possible, it felt like I had Bucky in my arms again. We notched together like metaphysical book ends, guarding a wealth of shared knowledge, supporting a hundred worlds.  

No matter how silly I felt, thinking these thoughts, I knew for once and for always that she was it; she was "the one." All of those songs that I had written when I was younger, about unchanging love and adoration, suddenly became real. The first albums that my brothers and I created had been all about this feeling, the sensation of comfort, that I was bathed in right now. Despite a silent wish that I could step back, walk away a little bit and become merely Ike again, I know that I couldn't: Clio is my protection and my protected, my happiness and my sadness.  She has grown to mean everything to me.

I held her almost painfully tight, stroking her velvety hair as she delicately fell from the precipice of awareness and into sleep. "You make me feel so safe," were the final works she managed to whisper, wrapping an arm around me and sighing. I watched the calm rise and fall of her chest, its rhythm a slow drumming against my bare flesh, and was fascinated by her. I couldn't tear my eyes away from the glow of her skin, the length of her hair, or the tender half-smile that graced her lips even while she was immersed in the shadowy world of dreams.

There is so much wonder to be seen in every phantasm-derived movement of her closed eyes, and in every little perfection of her form. These outward things, the full lips and slender hands, are what first drew me to Clio. I saw her as a thing, a faultless gossamer poem of bone and sinew, something to own, to control, to adore. But over the past few months they have all changed, all those early assumptions and desires. The interwoven web of our minds draws me deeper in that I had first imagined possible, past the molten green of her eyes to pull me into the center of her being. We have always been the same, she and I. The same person, the same souls, seeking the same absolution to be found only here, in our safe place, in the haven we built for ourselves out of reach of the world.

"I'll never let anything happen to you," I replied, even though I knew she was beyond hearing. There I stayed for the longest time, wide awake, simply snuggled against Clio on the fold out bed until the first rubber ducky-yellow rays of morning sun slanted through the blinds over the large bay window.

Clio

I've always thought that falling in love should be spectacular, perhaps to be followed by a splash, or at least some tactful displays of fireworks. But I realized that all of those watchings of 'Sleepless in Seattle' throughout the years had led me astray. Love wasn't flashy; it didn't rock the foundations of my world. Lying in Isaac's protective embrace last night I had discovered this for myself. It was a quiet slipping, this love, a gentle ascension into a whole that was far greater than the sum of its parts. And love certainly wasn't violent or destructive, instead it seemed to shore me up like the supports on the leaning tower of Piza. My love for Isaac was the silent kind, the kind that slowly inundated every brain cell, infusing its power along the way.

I awoke this morning alone, tucked snuggly under a thick quilt, filled with a particularly exquisite sense of well being I imagine to come from Ike's location somewhere in this very house, somewhere only a few steps away. How could I leave him? I asked myself, rolling over to stare up at the high, timid white of the sunroom ceiling. Two worlds stood open before me, like days exposed on a nativity calendar. They were perfect visions of the future, complete save for one thing… me. I could stay here, and graduate from ORU. It wouldn't be the end of the world. I knew the school, knew the people, and the degree I would receive after 4 years of hard work would be just as valid as the degree from the University of Chicago. Or I could go, choose door number two, and make myself a stranger in yet another strange land. The decision had to be made in the next few weeks, and would change the rest of my life, coloring every breath I am destined to take.

Noises came from the kitchen, along with the smell of pancakes cooking. The room was warm and bright, but my thoughts did not take a friendly path. I had to be honest. No matter what came of my turmoil, I could not always be with Isaac. There would always be his career, and my education. Maybe remaining in Tulsa would mean seeing him a little more often, but this could not solve my problems. Staying here only for Isaac, giving up a life I've always wanted, isn't something I can do. Even for him.

Taylor

"Tay," my mother began, the stern look on her face showing her age. I maintained my position sprawled in one of the kitchen chairs, sullen and closed off. I've been awaiting sentencing for yesterday's transgression all morning, but now that the moment I've been anticipating for so long, the one that will seal my fate, is here I'm terrified. Despite the façade I am currently struggling to keep up, the calculatedly nonchalant expression I hide behind, my palms are sweaty and my heart is throbbing so strongly in my chest that with its every beat I become increasingly light headed. "Your father and I have decided that we need to be clear about why you're going to be punished, baby, it's so important…." Her determination to play at being strict disciplinarian slips in her urgency to make a point.

I don't know who they think I am that walking the streets has become unsafe, but their paranoia has changed them. I can see the way my parents look at me is tinged with fear. I try not to notice, try to close my eyes to this, but I can't hide. They're afraid that any one of a million things they cannot control will hurt me: be it unsold albums, overzealous fans, or genuine malice. I hope that someday they'll realize that - no matter how hard they work to construct a perfect world for their children - they can't stop any of these things from happening. What worries me the most, however, is that way in the back of their voices, behind all of these obvious terrors, resides their fear that Marissa will be the one who will do the hurting.

Never have my parents tried to keep us apart, and never have they suggested that our rapid attachment was wrong. They just don't get it, though… don't get it that I've given Marissa permission to hurt me. When I was younger I sneered at all things mushy, at the way Ike would name his guitars after girls he crushed on, and at the prospect of loosing yourself in someone else so much that you turn into some automated machine when away from them. Without warning, though, I have become the very thing that used to make me laugh: I hurt without her, and don't care about myself at all. Marissa could do anything and I would still go crawling back to her like some overenthusiastic and wounded puppy.

"Leaving the play without telling us was not the right thing to do," my dad takes over with a gentle pat on my mom's back. I think they must write these little speeches out beforehand and memorize them, what with their perfect delivery and timing. "And that's why you're grounded for the next week. We don't care why you left, just that you need to remember that there are…" he shots a hesitant glance at my mother before continuing in a hushed tone, "bad people out there." My father wants to say so much more, I can see in his eyes, but he doesn't have the words. Doesn't have the words, I imagine, to explain how they must have felt when they went to pack the family away in the van and found one missing, doesn't have the words to describe searching frantically through the crowds of spectators for his son. "You're only leaving the house under our supervision, and there's to be no TV, no phone, and no playstation."

I must have looked shocked, and I must have looked betrayed, because I was. My throat is tight and painful as I watch them looking at me with those dissapointed eyes.

They taught me how to love; I grew up watching them live as completely intertwined as two people could. Always they, possessors of a truly Hallmark kind of relationship, had given me the blueprints on which to build my own ideals. I remember seeing them together a thousand times, seeing their eyes light up when they were close, seeing them dance to inaudible music in a moonlit kitchen when they thought no one was looking. Everything they do, we all know, is for each other. Yet they can't understand why I had to leave. Can't understand why I needed to do what I did.

Installment 16

Clio

I could hear nothing other than the faint hum of the library's air conditioning system as I sat in the back of the third floor, ensconced within a pile of books devoted to Russian history. Times like this I remember why I have always loved reading so much; the fact that I am surrounded on all sides by walls and walls of tomes, each a time capsule filled with the accumulated knowledge of over four thousand years of mankind, makes me feel so special, and so privileged. People have lived and died for the words that I read, and each syllable is flavored with triumph. Every thought, every emotion, every dream that can exist is outlined here, somewhere within these brittle, yellowing pages. Here I can breathe the clean, processed air and think. Here everything is clear, everything makes sense.

I had spent my afternoon doing the literary kind of research that, despite its charms, pales in comparison to my new found Isaac Hanson related variety. Eeven though I can name a thousand things I'd rather be spending my time doing on this mid-spring day I still couldn't help but take a certain sense of satisfaction from the precisely piled stack of index cards that sat before me, filled with my small and precise handwriting. The paper topic is just the kind of thing to get me excited, too. The Russian revolution of 1917 and the death of the last Czar have always fascinated me, so my paper is already stretching well past the twelve page limit imposed by my professor. I this is the beauty of college, I contemplated, leaning back to stretch cramped muscles. In high school too much time is spent on busy work, and learning what the teacher feels you need to know. The teachers here at ORU seem to view their lectures as more of a starting point, though. It is a common ground that is shared with your classmates, but seeking out whatever angle of the subject matter that you find most interesting is the true task to be completed in the semester.

My reflections had finally been shattered by a loud clicking of heels along the main corridor that runs past the wide Formica table I have had to myself for the past hour, but I didn't even flinch. When someone slide into a chair across the table from me I looked up, and was shocked to find my roommate regarding me with a smile. "Well hello there, stranger!" Nat sounded unusually cheery this afternoon, only adding to the impression that she is glaringly out of place in the midst of this quiet room.

"Hey." I grined back at Natalie, watching her set her leather backpack on the chair next to her. "What's up?"

"Not much, I figured you'd be here and wanted to say hi." She informed me, reading the spine of one of the books near the top of my already read pile. Natalie is not the sort of person to often grace the third floor of the library with her presence; she fits in more neatly in the lobby with the other loud people who come to the library to be seen rather than to do any actual work. The third floor is the place devoted to purists like myself, people who value the quiet, and the feel of the stiff pages in their hands, and the view of the campus provided from this height which makes slacking all the more pleasant.

"Cool." It's hard to believe that we had come as close to killing each other as we did.  Now Nat and I are, if not actual friends, good room-mates. We leave each other alone when we need to be alone, but I've realized that I can talk to her. Sharing 10 square feet for two months gives people a surprising amount in common, actually, and so we even take occasional midnight pizza runs together these days.

"The room selection stuff for next year came in the mail," she pulled a thin pamphlet out of the front pocket of her bag and handed it over. "It's a lottery system, and because we're still Freshmen I guess we're kind of stuck." Natalie lamented. "But if we think ahead we'll get a decent room…I hear a lot of seniors are moving out of the towers so there's a chance we'll get hooked up with a suite."

All this "we" stuff was kind of weirding me out as I flipped through the brightly colored booklet, looking at dorm measurements and requirements. "So you want the towers? They are a lot closer to classes," I muttered.

"Well, if you want somewhere else I don't really care, but the towers will mean fewer whiney underclassmen like us," Natalie winked at the end of her sentence. I haven't even thought of next year here. To be frank, I haven't even thought past the envelopes which are currently tacked up on my bulletin board back in the room. They stare accusingly at me every time I sit down to do homework, those postmarks painful reminders of the decision I have to make. Odd that Nat was automatically including me in her plans for next year, but it made me kind of smile. Nice to be thought of, I concluded as she began telling an involved story about the towers. Nice to be thought of.

Isaac

When Clio left my house on Sunday night to return to what is for her the real world I was a little sad; the time we spent together was so fun, so wildly exciting, that I just wanted to never have to see it end. Monday wasn't much fun either, what with Taylor moping around grounded and my parents busy working on our summer tour schedule. I spent my morning doing the schoolwork that my mom is frantically trying to pack into the next few weeks so it won't be a consideration when we finally get to go on the road. Part of me is looking forward to the experience of touring, and yet part of me is horrified; if I can't stand to think of what life will be like when Clio is home for her spring vacation how am I ever going to be able to deal with months without her?

"Ike…" when my mother's voice interrupted my pathetic attempts at studying I wasn't too annoyed. An excuse to stop thinking about Clio for a few moments, an excuse to breathe and forget the tightness of my chest, an excuse to push my need for her into the back of my mind. "Could you run up and get your birth certificate? You father and I are filling out these insurance forms and we need to make a copy." Not a problem I thought to myself, throwing down my well-chewed yellow pencil and climbing the stairs to my parents' bedroom.

My mom has always kept all of her truly important papers squirreled away in her jewelry box, of all places, a little rectangle of wood which sits on top of the shiny, dark wooden bureau that adorns the back wall of my parents' room. My mother adores it, for its history as much as for its simple, unfinished angles. Its tale is an oft-told one in my household: it had been my great-grandmother's when she immigrated to America, and it had ridden across the Atlantic Ocean with her. It had seen Ellis Island, my mother proudly claims whenever one of the little ones asks her to tell its story.

This afternoon I didn't really pause to examine the unevenly stained wood or the missing handle of the bottom compartment where my mother keeps our birth certificates and passports when we're not using them. I just fished around, pulling out the small, worn pieces of paper that attest to the existence of my family.

There are other things in the drawer though, and one catches my attention. It's a ring - one my Grandmother, always the collector, left me when she died. There is a lot of jewelry here that has never been worn by its current owners, jewelry that she thought to set aside for her grandchildren. Taylor's is a tiny diamond pinky ring that had once belonged to our great-uncle; Zac's a thin chain exactly the color of moonlight. Mine is the slightly tarnished white-gold ring that she had been given on her fifteenth birthday by her father. It's funny to think that my Grandmother was once fifteen, that she had birthday parties and a summer job. That she was given this ring and never lost it in the next fifty years of her life. That she thought to share it with me.

I slid the thin circlet from the bag and held it to the light; it was simple, only decorated by a tiny chip of turquoise. She had never worn it, at least not in my memory, but I could remember her showing it to me one summer. We had been sitting on the back porch of her house, the back porch that now is home to Sunday school and Church suppers, drinking lemonade and swinging side by side on a hammock woven of white rope. "So my little Ike," she had said, lazily brushing away mosquitoes with the flutter of her hand. "I'm going to give you my turquoise ring. You'll want it someday."

I couldn't have been more than eight or nine at the time, and I couldn't imagine what she was talking about. "What?" I had asked, and looking back I can exactly remember her reply.

"I think you'll want it someday. You're going to have so much love to give, and you're going to be so very happy." They had been cryptic words, but now they seem to make a lot of sense. I don't get how she could have known, way back then, what I would be like. But she did somehow, and this ring, the one that I held up to the sunlight that filtered through my parents gauzy curtains just as I had held it up to the light that summer day so long ago, proves it. As I stared at the ring I realize that its odd mixture of delicateness and strength reminds me of Clio.

When I went downstairs to hand over my birth certificate I brought the ring with me. My dad was nowhere in sight, but my mother was sitting at the desk in the corner of the sunroom, her wire framed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. "Look what I found." I held up the ring, smiling. She returned the grin for a second before taking the thin paper out of my hand and returning to her paperwork. This, I could see, wasn't going to be as easy as I hoped. "I want to give it to Clio."

It took her a second to look up, and even when she did my mother had a slightly unfocused look on her face. "What?"

"I want to give it to Clio," I calmly repeated.

"Isaac…"

"Grandma left it to me."

"I know," she began with chagrin, not quite meeting my steady gaze. "Do you know how serious giving it to her would be?"

"That's why I want to do it."

"That ring is very special, Ike. What if you never get it back?"

"Mom, I think that's kind of the point." It wasn't as if Clio didn't already have a lot of things that had once belonged to me, things that I would never be getting back. She was my first love, my first everything. All I wanted to be sure of, as I stood in my mother's calculating gaze, was that she would be my only.

"I really don't think that would be a good idea," she was torn, I knew. My mom really likes Clio, and I think even likes that we're together. Her voice was soft, and pleading. "Don't ask me to crush this for you," she seemed to be begging. Age and wisdom are on her side, I guess; she's seen a lot of relationships die, and she thinks that Clio and I will just be the next one. She's just trying to protect me, I remind myself. But what my Mother doesn't know, what she's forgotten, is that age and wisdom can't be it all. There must be something to be said for youth - and for hope.

"Why not?"

"There are so many reasons," she had explained, removing her glasses with one hand and rubbing her temple with the other.

"Well, I only have one reason why I want to give it to her." I could see my mother straining with her conscience.

"Well? What's your reason?" She sounded somewhere caught between royal food tester just before the banquet and canary entering the mineshaft.

"Because I love her." The words slid easily without so much as a pause. It was weird to say this to my mother, weird to need her approval for something so personal. But I can't just take the ring; part of the beauty of me giving it to Clio would be its heritage. It would make her part of my family; it would make her one of us.

"Do what you want Isaac, do what you want." The words were short, clipped, and cursory. Immediately she turned back to her paperwork, long blonde hair shielding her face from my view.

"Thanks mom." I left the room triumphant, heading back into the kitchen to get back to my books. Okay, I silently admited to myself, to daydream about giving Clio the ring. I could hear the thundering feet of one of my little siblings enter the sunroom behind me, Avery would be my guess from the footsteps.

My suspicion was proved correct several seconds later when I heard Avie's small voice floating through the warm, sunlit air. "Mom? Are you sad?"

"No pumpkin," my mother answered softly after an interlude of shuffling.

"Then why are you crying?"

The final words I was able to hear from my Mother were laced with sniffles. "Sometimes people cry for reasons other than being sad, honey…"

Clio

As soon as I wandered into the math office on the Friday before Spring break I knew that Professor Edelbaum was having office hours. Hordes of students had clustered into the tiny space allocated as a reception area, nearly all of them blurry eyed and shaky from the lack of sleep. No, I promised myself, the feeling that flooded me as I watched them completing hysterical last minute calculations was not mirth. Definitely not. Just because I've had all of my assignments done and handed in for the past week is no reason to look down on these poor souls who were, in the immortal words of Rose from Titanic, "awaiting an absolution that would never come."

I suppose that this semester has had a lot to teach me, not just about long dead Russians or even longer dead Greeks. I've learned about myself, and how this gigantic stage in the shape of a planet works. I've done my work, because I had too. The things I've learned, from Eddie, from the Hansons, from Ike, from Nat, are not the things that I've enrolled in classes for. They're the ones that are really going to matter, though, and the ones that will shape the rest of my life.

It was funny to see the looks of fear and apprehension on the faces of this nervous horde. I could almost hear them thinking, almost see the huge red "F"s floating before their eyes. As I waded through the crowd, carefully avoiding the piles of overstuffed backpacks that have formed in on the floor in the center of the room, I couldn't help but smile. They're afraid of Professor Edelbaum; afraid of the man who allows the department's pet cat to hide, claws extended, on his shoulder as the cleaning lady vacuums; afraid of the man who volunteers for ten hours every week at the local homeless shelter. He's nothing more than a huge softie, I have long since learned, but he must be an amazing professor. I know this because behind the terror of the bad grade, behind the nauseating prospect of an extra semester spent at ORU, these people are afraid to loose his esteem. That's what really matters, we, students and tutors alike, know. Letting down a man who will give everything to you, who will drop his life and stand by you through anything from non-linear equations to a bad break up, is never something to be taken lightly.

"Ms. Chambers! Come in here!" Eddie's eternally to- loud voice cut through my haze, and I speedily gathered a sheaf of papers from the wooden cubbyhole assigned to me in one corner of the room before heading into his office. "And how are you?" Eddie was patting Billie, running his rough hands along the sleek fur of the Persian.

"I'm good," I responded, falling into the stiff-backed wooden chair that sits in front of his desk. I haven't been in here for a long time, and as I looked around I let my mind drift forward. I can almost see myself, in 40 years, leading my professional life in a room very much like this. The life sized cut-out of Albert Einstein against the back wall would, of course, be replaced with blow-up replica of Tut's sarcophagus; the leafy ferns prospering in a shaft of sunlight admitted by the tiny sunroof would be removed to make room for a cactus or two; the picture that sits in the shiny silver frame on his desk would be…. I mentally froze at this thought before forcing the rest of my comment, "how are you? I haven't seen you around much."

The picture had stilled me, and even as I tried not to stare blatantly at it my eyes were continually drawn to the crisp black and white photo. It's old, old enough for the paper to be tainted with sepia, old enough to display a smooth skinned Edie with one arm tenderly draped over his wife's shoulder. This is her, I marveled, staring at her wide smile and taking in the graceful curve of her neck.

"I've been at home a lot lately, with Agnes. But I'm doing just fine. It's good to see you." Everyone has heard the rumors, but few people have ever listened to that name flow comfortably from Eddie's lips. His wife, Agnes, has had Altzheimers disease for the past ten years. This is her, in the photograph that I had somehow never before noticed. She was beautiful, not in a Jayne Mansfield 1940 kind of way, but in a destined-to-be-with-Eddie way. She was, in all apparent aspects, his female counterpart: hair tucked high on her head in a messy French twist, clothing a little too big, face totally bare any kind of manmade adornment. "So are you going home for break?"

I had to shake myself out of the haze that had encircled me as I made up a life for these two. I know little of her, only how much he loves her. Only that the other teachers speak of her in reverent, subdued tones, only that he has never allowed her to be placed in a home, despite the attempts of their children. "Yes, actually I'm leaving tonight."

I wonder if the picture frame, were I really to be time warped forty years in the future, would be filled with a shot of Isaac and I. What would we be doing? Eddie and Agnes are standing in front of an airplane that shimmers, reflecting a streak of sunlight towards the camera, creating a brilliant star of over-exposure on the photo. It looks as if they could move at any second: as if he could lean over and kiss her cheek, as if she could raise herself on tip-toe and throw her arms around him.

"And what of young Isaac?" This question dragged me totally in the clutches of reality as I examined Eddie attempting to hide a grin by shuffling through the stack of papers in his outbox.

"He's staying…" I couldn't help but wonder if I've been even more right about Eddie than I had thought; the gleam in his eye seems reminds me of the look Mrs. Hanson wears whenever she sees Isaac and I together.

"I hear that you two have grown quite fond of each other." The sly hint in his voice was inescapable.

"Eddie," I finally asked, looking him straight in the eye. "Did you plan this?" How funny would it be, I silently asked myself, if he had known all along. If I had walked into this office on the first day of school and he had lost his breath at the sight of me, thinking that I looked like Isaac's dream; funny that anyone could be read so absolutely, so correctly.

"It was just one of those things, I suppose." He was lying. All of it grew suddenly clear: why he demanded I tutor the Hansons, why I had been placed on top of a list of tutors when I had no experience, why that glow in his eyes seems to brighten as I squirmed. Just one of those things, I think to myself. As if you find your other half every day. As if you stumble across someone who can complete you all the time… as if what Ike and I have could ever be typical.

All I could hear in the silence that had floated into the room was the soft hum of the air conditioner, and my eye was drawn to one of the bigger ferns moving faintly in the breeze it provides. "She is beautiful," I finally said, picking the heavy frame up off Eddie's desk and taking a closer look. I didn't want to talk about Isaac anymore, didn't want to think of how precarious it all was. What if Edie had never decided to make me a tutor? My hands shook at the thought, and I hurriedly returned the photo to its position of honor, not trusting myself with it.

"She is." Eddie continued to smile, but I could see a mist of sadness creep across his face.

"I'm sorry she got sick." There was nothing more I could offer him, no hope, but I felt like I had to try. This man has done so much for me, and has worked tirelessly for every person in that waiting room along with a thousand more just like them throughout the years, yet this is what he gets in return. A love that lives, but who forgets his name. A woman who he believes the world to revolve around, slipping slowly forever out of his reach. I sighed, our eyes meeting for an instant.

"That, too, is just one of those things." His voice wass not defeated, and he was not sad. He spoke in a tone full of trust; a voice that has waged its battles with the world and has come to realize that fate is, at last, in command.

Isaac

The sky was bright red, burning with some cold fire that sent a chilled wind whipping through Clio's loose hair. Standing on platform 'A' of the huge Tulsa bus station she looked so little, a tiny and uncertain blur amidst a world of sharp shapes and deep contrasts. There was no music, but in my mind I heard the words of a song ringing: "the first thing that I think of are her sympathetic eyes that see with only positive emotion… and she talks of being grumpy, but I know that grumpy's not her style." It was Edwin McCain, an inescapable new favorite of my mother's. "You're going to have an awesome vacation…" My voice betrayed me, buzzing with all of the things I think but don't want to say: my sadness that she's leaving, my fear of the future, my need for her.

"I'll miss you, though." The ring sat heavy in my pocket, weighting my already painfully dark thoughts. "And I soak up all her beauty cause I'm only here awhile… the only thing I see when she's looking back at me is the promise of how life could be…" The raspy voice of the song was like a parasite, speaking for me. I wanted more than anything to give her my grandmother's ring right here… to see the silver against her pale skin, to see if the blue of the turquoise will make her eyes look even greener in the failing light. Her bus was leaving soon; its driver had been hurling luggage into the bowels of the huge chrome monster with satisfying and rhythmic thumps.

"I'll miss you, too. But you'll be back soon." I didn't end my words, as I could have, with the painful phrase: "for awhile." Clio will never be back forever, because this isn't her home. I want her to belong here, just as I want her to be with me always. But I can see in her eyes that she doesn't feel like she belongs. Maybe not anywhere. I shook my head in an attempt to free myself of Edwin's soft guitar, but I couldn't. "And as I wrote my chest got tight for her, I know that I'm not right for her, and I couldn't live if I ever caused her pain."

I can't give her the gift now, I finally decided as Clio began to cast furtive glances at the bus. I wonder what she's thinking… her eyes have closed off from me and I could no longer see her within them. If I were to slide the adornment onto her smooth hand it would wrong, wrong because I didn't do it for the right reasons. I love her; I want her to have this part of me and my heritage. But if I gave it to her now it would be clipping her wings. Clio wants so much to be something special, and no matter how many times I tell her she already is, always has been, she doesn't believe it. Maybe she won't until she finds that Pharaoh. And if I give her the ring before she makes up her own mind, before she decides her fate, I would be ruining her chances at attaining this goal. I know she would give it all up for me, much in the same way I would give it all up for her. But she would never really be happy, even with me, if she didn't do what she's always dreamed.

"I guess I should get on…" her voice was nearly lost in the howl of the wind, but I could see her lips move, red against the gray of the night.

"Guess so." One final hug, one final moment of safety with our arms around each other, and she's gone. The surly bus driver looked relieved as he climbed into his seat, nodding in my direction.

I had watched the bus until it was a dot in the Tulsa traffic, too far away to see details, just one of a thousand cars, sliding into an infinity that I can't control. As I walked towards the car I still heard Edwin McCain… this time softly pleading… "tomorrow I'll be miles away and dreaming that she hears my voice."

Installment 17

Taylor

I'm going to do it again; I can feel it in the way my blood pounds through my veins almost painfully. I don't understand how my parents can expect me to stay away from Marissa; they know how much I care about her, and they know just what has been happening lately. So they ground me, trap me here in this house when all I want to do is talk to her, to straighten it all out, to make it all better again.

Ike is out of the house taking Clio to the bus station and my parents have long since gone to bed… slipping out of the back door and into the garage to grab my bike won't be a problem. They'll never know I'm gone, I assure myself as I struggle out of bed, still fully clothed from the day despite the advanced hour.

"Tay?" I groan inwardly as I heard Zac's voice, startlingly loud in the stillness of our room.

"Go back to bed…" I mutter in response, sliding my way over to the door and groping for my shoes.

"What are you doing?" Zac is fully awake by now, sitting up in his bed and kicking his covers back. His sheets have little soccer balls all over them, perfect black and white circles transposed on a field of deep green. Even in the dark I can see that they're a little worn, just as I can see one of my little brother's arms wrapped around his stuffed dinosaur. He doesn't go anywhere without that toy, and despite my nasty mood I feel the corners of my mouth lifting as I remember him being caught with it by a hotel maid in London. I thought he was going to die, judging from the deep crimson his entire face turned as soon as she walked in the room. But now he doesn't care, he trusts me too much to hide his comfort.

This silence from Marissa is killing me. Why hasn't she even tried to call me? Or at least written? It's been almost a week since we had our talk in the basement, and now I'm wondering if it's all been a mistake. "I'm going to Rissa's."

Zac regards me with his deep hazel eyes for a moment, looking at me like I'm a wild animal glimpsed in nature by a stroke of luck. "I thought so."

"Did you?"

"Yeah, but don't worry… I won't tell."

"Thank you, Zac…" These are all the words I spare before cautiously heading out of our room. For the first time I appreciate him, appreciate the fact that no matter how separated I feel, or how alone, he will always be there. He is, after all, my blood.

Marissa

I haven't slept much over the past three days, mostly because every time I try it's as if my mind is invaded by every mistake I've ever made when it comes to Taylor - every time I've wanted to tell him something but been to shy, every time I wanted to let him know exactly what he meant to me - played through my sleep-blurred visions like an elaborate and particularly effective horror movie. During the day it wasn't so bad, the light and the noise of life going on all around me made it possible to forget, to let my worries float away in a sea of short term occupations and emergencies. But now, when the world is so quiet that I can hear the soft tinkling noise of my mother's favorite windchimes by the front door and the rhythmic clicking of my watch from across the room, my mind automatically gravitates back to what might have happened. If I hadn't gone to that dance last year, if I hadn't babysat for the Hansons, if I hadn't let myself become so attached to Taylor.

This night's topic of contemplation is what would have happened if Tay hadn't left the play. He could have called me on the phone like a rational human being, I mutter to myself, restlessly rolling onto my stomach and fumbling blindly through the dark for Jordan. The huge stuffed simian has regained his place of honor in my bed since last week, but holding him tight isn't enough. What would I have done if Taylor's parents hadn't come home right then, to find us wrapped together, both crying weakly? This is a question I couldn't answer, but facts didn't come close to refraining me from formulating the words. "Taylor, I love you so much seeing you hurts." I would have said. Then I would have told him all of the things that I had written down in our book - which was now resting safely in the hands of the U.S. postal service - each and every one of them, but they still would not have been enough to express how much I've come to depend on knowing simply that he exists.

I was just about to fall into whatever fitful sleep would have been possible when a new noise jangled its way into the cacophony of the night -- this was not a squirrel playing on the trees in the backyard, nor was it my dad up for a midnight snack. My room reverberated with a soft drumming on the French doors that lead to the pool, and even before I sat up to peer through the quite, inky, black I knew what I would see. A figure, outlined behind the misty wall of my curtains, standing uncertainly in front of my locked door.

"Marissa!" Without thought of consequences I jumped out of bed and ran for the door, emotions battling to the death within me. The voice was so familiar… one I had dreamed of… one that sent streamers of brilliant fire through me. Taylor Hanson's shoulder length blond hair was disheveled, his eyes red, and his breath rapid as he stood in the faint shimmer of moonlight on my doorstep.

"What are you doing here? Do you want to get grounded for the rest of your life?" I desperately needed to sound angry, just as I wanted to be furious with Taylor. Coming here was not without risk, and I couldn't help but wonder if a few hours spent together would be worth fifty years in the basement on starvation rations if we were discovered by either set of involved adults. If my parents knew Tay was stepping into my room right now, shouldering the door shut behind him, regarding me with those cool blue eyes, they would give new meaning to the phrase "flip out." He must have walked again, or ridden his bike, in a stunning repeat performance of last Friday's disappearing act. In spite of all these thoughts, these truths and this logic, I found myself pulling Taylor into my arms before my words could even complete their journey from my vocal cords.

"They'll never know," I can hardly understand the words with which he responds, muffled as they are by my shoulder. At this point I guess it doesn't matter, I assured myself. He's here, and you have your chance to set it all right. To make him realize that it was all an ugly mistake, and how badly you need him. "I wanted to talk to you - about Friday."

Taylor began to ask me questions, and we remained so close that I could feel the heat radiating from his crystalline blue eyes. His inquiries hurt; they made me want to hide my face against him and never have to stare down reality again. "Did I not tell you I loved you enough?" Was the first, followed by: "did I ever do anything to make you think I liked someone else?" And then quiet, soft, and uncertain - "do you still love me?"

The first two questions were easy enough; I answered them with a pair of equally empathetic "no"s. But as soon as the last inquiry was uttered I was lost. What could I say? "I love you so much… you haunt me when you're not here." It was true, but what would Taylor think? The certainty of my thoughts earlier this evening have utterly fled, and I don't know what to say. I've sent him the book… is it not enough? Are there words that I can squeeze out of my constricted throat? Are there answers I can formulate in my clouded mind?

I did the only thing I could think of: I placed my hands on his shoulders and gently guided him to sit on my bed. "Taylor," I whispered, pulling off his shirt and kneeling between his legs. I ran my hands along his now bare chest, noticing how much he has changed since the last time we were together like this. His skin shines startlingly white in the darkness; as I run my lips down his neck and begin gently nipping at his flesh I can't help but see how broad his shoulders have become, and note the muscles that are growing ever more prominent as Taylor becomes a man. I can see his cheeks, still reddened from the exertion of his midnight ride, darkening into a blush as I work my way forward, drawn to him like a planet trapped in orbit around her fiery sun.

Tay moaned softly as I continued kissing him, pulling myself as close to his warm body as I can. The only thought that was in my mind at that moment, the only thing I wanted to do was to make him happy. Make him forget the past few months and smile like he used to - bright enough to blind. I would have done anything in my power, anything in the world, to make this happen, but I was still shocked with myself when I found my hands working at the buttons of his khaki pants.

"What are we doing?" His voice broke my trance, rough and weak, causing me to jump.

"Anything to make you happy," I replied, looking up at him. He's so beautiful that I can barely breathe, can barely continue on in this composite world of flaws and wrongs.

"Not that, then…" his voice was tender, gentle, and despite the words Taylor grabs my wrists and pulls me up onto the bed beside him. This time his hands are the ones guiding, as he murmurs "lay down," while applying pressure to my shoulders until I do so. "Say you love me?" Taylor is pleading. "Say you love me." Straddling me, his face hovers in the air, gentle wisps of his blond hair brushing my cheeks.

"I love you."

"We can't do it, not what you were thinking. Not to make it better." My mind agrees with him, knowing that my body can not be the answer. Maybe if I loved him less sex would be enough, maybe if we were together only for that, but we're not playing games any more. This is it… the kind of love that sonnets are written about, continents are conquered by, and dreams built upon; sex is not enough to clear away the troubles and to make our joint world bright and new again. This doesn't make me want him any less, though, and as Taylor holds my arms against the mattress above my head, it doesn't staunch the flow of desire that carries me willingly into the sea of his eyes.

"Stay here…" I whimper in hushed tones, reaching up to him with my lips, with my arms, with my entire body. All I could think about was having him here all night, even if we did nothing other than lay in each others arms. I had promised myself so long ago that he was the only one for me, but then I guess that even I had suspected that it wouldn't last. Everyone had said we couldn't be together, that at fourteen you don't know what you want. But I'm almost sixteen, and Taylor turned 15 last month. We know now, and maybe we always have.

"What?" He was tantalizing inches above me, barely allowing my lips to brush against his skin before pulling away.

"Stay here forever." I elaborated, looking up at his perfect face and into his perfect eyes, to stare directly into his perfect soul. "We'll just never leave the room."

"That's a thought…" Taylor bends his elbows, lowering his face until he could kiss my neck. There's something about that simple gesture, a thrill I can't quite understand as he gradually sinks onto me. "We'd get hungry someday. And bored." He regards me, smiling slightly, until I feel dizzy.

"Hungry, maybe. Bored? Never." I replied, wrapping my recently freed arms around his shoulders.

"You'd miss General Hospital." Even in the dim light I can see the gleam in his eyes as he delivers this, the ultimate drawback.

"Don't care."

"Wait. What did you say?" I kept struggling towards him, reaching for the only thing that could work to erase the pain of the past few months. Something in the way he runs his fingertips gently over my lips, tracing their outlines in the darkness, makes me shudder.

"I said that I don't care if I miss General Hospital."

"Woah." Taylor, balancing on one arm, reached up a strong hand to press against my forehead. "Are you feverish? I could have sworn you just said you would miss General Hospital for me. All those screaming teenies must be messing with my hearing."

"Actually, you heard right," our mouths finally connected for the longest, deepest kiss we've ever shared. This night, with the moonlight casting faint puddles all around us, is special. Different. Things said while we are together like this take on different meanings, and I know that even if I have failed to use beautiful words or elegant metaphors I have told Taylor how I feel about him.

"You'd miss General Hospital for me?" He asks, somewhere in the neighborhood of half joking. With these words Taylor moves away, sliding from me to lie limply on the other side of my double bed, half under the covers.

"You know what?" This situation had to be remedied; I could not touch him anymore. I hastily crawled until I was leaning against him, looking down into his eyes, which chased away the dark night and left only this: only the touch, only the love, only the feelings that swelled up from the hidden places within me, the ones that were beyond my ability to name.

"What?" I could instantly see what he had severed our contact; the last kiss had obviously affected him as much as me. His breaths were coming hard and fast; he shivered against me as I kissed him.

"I think I am feverish." Then the kissing began in earnest.

Taylor

Something heavy landing tore me from the dark comfort of sleep the next morning. For a single, blurry instant I thought that it was Mama, but when the object failed to move or purr after several seconds I finally fought my way into awareness to peer down towards the foot of my bed. "Taylor, you should be getting up. Your brothers have been awake for hours." My mother's voice is at once commanding and comforting as she pulls up the blinds that have been mercifully protecting me from the light of day. Disorientated and unsure I rubbed my eyes for a second, trying to hide from the invasive brightness of spring. "That came in the mail for you today, sweetie." She finally leaves the room, trailing a melodic whisper of a song in her wake.

She doesn't know; I assured myself, shakily pushing back my heavy covers to grab the thick, brown paper covered package. If my mother had found out about last night I would have probably woken up in a dungeon somewhere, confined for the next twenty or thirty years until she deemed it proper for me to once again be allowed outside alone. It's funny that I know this, that I can even understand why I would be punished for going to Marissa's house last night, yet I can't think of my nighttime voyage as wrong.

Some part of me was still amazed by what I had done, and yet another part of me was far more amazed by what I had not done. She had wanted to make love; I found myself shivering with the thrill that the mere thought of being with Marissa like that sent tingling along my limbs.

I could barely remember the walk home last night, but I'm relatively sure that my feet had not actually touched the pavement for the entire trip. I had stayed as long as I could, just watching her sleep and trying to commit to memory every little thing about her - the way her hair draped over the pillow on which she rested her head, the way her eyelids flickered ever so faintly as she dreamed, the way she smelled - trying to capture this instant forever in my mind. When I finally had slipped out the French doors to Marissa's room and began the trek home the sun had been rising, a fiery ball hanging unnaturally low in the clear blue sky.

What was it about her that could make me feel like that? What secret does she possess that makes everything seem okay as long as she is near, what power does she have to make the real world stop, allowing me entrance to some fairy tale, into a beautiful and intricate dream that makes me doubt the fabric of my world? I marveled at all these things, and every touch we've ever shared, as I turned the package over and looked for a postmark. When I finally found it I was not surprised; it was a string of words and numbers almost as familiar as my own address: Marissa Northfield, 132 Olcott Drive, Tulsa Oklahoma 074132.

This is why I love her so much, I think to myself, tearing cautiously at the paper in which she wrapped our book. I had known what the package contained as soon as I had seen her name, and had been reminded of the months we spent apart last year. Receiving this exact package had been the highlight of my week, and I had always looked forward to it so much. Weird how little things change; the sensation of anticipation that I am flooded with right now seems identical to the excitement that had sent me running to the mailbox of our California home every day. Before I allow myself to open the book, however, I get up and close the door to my bedroom, not wanting to be interrupted. Marissa must have sent this before I went to see her last night, I realized. Maybe things hadn't been as hopeless as I had feared. Maybe I wasn't the only one who had been slowly withering away to a shadow, desperate with the need to make amends.

My hair was in my way, and I shoved it out of my face, flipping through pages that I had written, and pages that had been written for me. When I found the new section I was caught breathless. How could it be so beautiful? This is the way Marissa is: she sees the word in words to rich to speak. When we are together I can watch every thought flit past the gray of her eyes, and I know that each second filters through a thousand words and sounds, seeking its true self. That is what she writes - always. Reality finds its way into her script, it drips from her precise verbs and dances along delicate nouns, showing me the world in different colors, cast in hues that I can only image. Holding the red leather bound book in my hands I, for the thousandth time since I met Marissa, thank god for allowing someone so special to love me.

I will never understand how she distills the essence of things and draws in terms of perfection and beauty in her words, and I think that I am a little jealous. I write; I write all the time, but never is it like this. My words are words, and they stay that way. When Marissa writes it's not like that at all, her words become independent agents, living and breathing without the force of her personality to back them up. This is why I write songs, and why she writes poetry. We each possess the same desire to express ourselves through writing, but we take this longing to different places. I bring it into myself and present everyone around me with what I can create, while Marissa blesses pieces of inanimate paper with a seeming life that hurts my eyes and makes it hard to think. I don't know how I will ever return this book with anything even vaguely deserving of what she has written for me.

Even after I have read the four pages of tightly packed words, written in blood red ink, I don't put the book down. Again and again I scan the paragraphs, the lines, the words, looking for some hint to tell me why she believed that I did not love her. The pain she inflected on me would never be forgotten, it was too harsh and destroying, but I will not do what my parents want. I will not slip from the world into a safe cocoon, protected from all harm. If I don't risk myself, if I don't offer everything I have to Marissa as I had before, how could we ever go back to where we were? This is when I know what I need to do.

Clio

I lay, still and quiet, on the blue green lawn of the house in which I grew up. The air wrapped thickly around me, warm and strong with the scent of freshly cut grass; a smell, I think to myself, unique to days like this, days kissed by lazy sunshine and defined by the sweet taste of freedom. A sense of contentment struggles to the front of my mind, past all the problems and troubles of the past few months. This sensation is no longer the stranger I had once expected it to remain; things are good, both here and at school. Just a few months ago I had been so certain that I could never be happy again, certain that I had outgrown the only world to which I could ever belong. Always the fatalist, I am. What had really happened, I realize, running my hands over the cool carpet of grass beneath me, was simply that my world had shifted.

It was weird to be back, weird to see little changes, like my mother's new desk in the kitchen, but mostly weird to see how life has gone on without me. I don't know what I expected when I left home last January, but somehow it seems that I should have returned to a place vastly different. When the bus I had ridden non-stop from Tulsa had turned off the interstate and headed to the Texas Transit station four blocks from my high school I had actually been shocked by the monotony of it all. The wall where Casey and I had written our initials in chalk one Halloween was just as I had left it, as were the potholes on Loomis street, and the shimmering towers of downtown that I could just see on the foggy horizon. My world had continued on without me, just as I had continued on without it.

The first full day of my vacation, already half spent, would have been perfect but for one thing, one aching absence that would not fade, and would not subside. It was ridiculous to have looked forward to break for so long and not even enjoy it, but no matter how hard I tried I could not chase Ike out of my mind. Everything that happened was instantly indexed in my thoughts as something to tell him, or something that reminded me of him, or something that he would think was funny. I don't know how I've become so wrapped up in Isaac, but it's almost scary.

He had looked so handsome yesterday, standing all alone, forlornly watching my bus pull away, and I just wanted to go back to Tulsa right now and beg him to marry me. If there was some other way around this situation I can't imagine it; I am pained without him and don't know if I can stand one week away from him, let alone the next several years.

I clench my eyes shut in an attempt to hide from these thoughts, these dreams of an impossible future, reveling in the efficiency of the senses remaining to me. It seemed as if without sight everything else took on an amazing immediacy, from the smell of the grass, to the crisp sound of the breeze in the treetops high above me, to the feel of each individual blade of grass sharp on my legs. I thought after an instant that perhaps opening my eyes would snap the world around me back into perspective and make calm the frantic patterns of my mind, but even after the world was bleached white by the burning fire of the brilliant day the yearning didn't go away. What was the point to love, a miserable voice murmured from the dark side of my consciousness, if it left you crippled and dependant?

But really, I know that I wouldn't trade what I've shared with Isaac for the world - none of it. I would suffer without him, without the big dark eyes and without the understanding I always find in his words, but the pain would only come because I had glimpsed the best humanity had in it, and because I had, for a moment, been part of the most sweet completion. I could wait forever, like this, only knowing that Isaac exists. This is good thing; I brace myself as a spattering of rain falls from the darkening sky, because I know it will be a not inconsiderable slice of forever until we can really be together.

Marissa

The mailman comes at noon, every day like clockwork; so when I heard the faint flop of the mailslot door closing in the garage this afternoon I had not been surprised. What had surprised me, though, was what he had delivered.

Two days have passed since Taylor had come to me that night. We have spoken on the phone several times, thanks to his parents' relenting a little bit on his punishment, but I will not be able to see him for at least two more days. I don't know why, but this separation somehow managed to seem far worse, far more painful, than any of the other times we've been forced apart. No matter how I ponder the enigmatic workings of my mind I can't work out this stinging need, this longing. We were once separated for six months. Almost an entire year, a huge chunk of our lives, yet the tearing I had experienced then was nothing compared to the nauseating aloneness that I was currently battling at every corner. I think it must be because he's so near, only a few miles away, and yet there is nothing I can do that will bring him any closer. I still can't believe it, really. Can't believe that he is willing to go through all this to be with me, willing to suffer through these bad times, with only the most slender of promises that better times will come.

The book was there, laying in the mail basket, encased in a small box tied shut with frayed string, wrapped in the same way as it had been a hundred times before. As I ripped into the paper I couldn't help but feeling a little like a child on Christmas morning. Each and every word I had written on its thin parchment pages had meant so much to me, had been such a complete baring of every bit of my mind to his gaze, and because of this I wanted desperately to see that he had accepted my words, taken them as the apology they were meant to be. I tore into the packaging without even checking to see if I was right about who it's from, but I know I can't be wrong, the flush of my skin can't lie, the burning of my throat is not mistaken. I'm holding my breath, I realize after a second, and as I flip through the pages it seeps out of me, slowly, like blood oozing hot and thick from a wound.

There's nothing new. I almost cry when I see the pages immediately after the ones I had filled so few days ago, pristine and white, untouched by ink or graphite.

Installment 18

Clio

I've been sitting here, perched on the narrow window seat in my bedroom, for a long time. I've seen the sun fade, lowering below the distant and unknown horizon, and I've seen the gradual pinpricks of stars take its place, bringing light to disrupt the path of the overreaching darkness. The thin glass before me is slowly turning into a mirror but I'm far too lazy to get up and turn off my overhead light. The days that I have been home haven't been much of a vacation: between visits to relatives and friends I've only had a few moments to myself in the still of my own little room.

Here is one spot that has not changed since I left: the tomes and notebooks that fill every available space have not altered, nor has the crisp sunshine yellow of my favorite sheets changed. Here it feels almost like I could slip back if I wanted, slip back into the world I had dreamed of during all those lonely days at school. But I don't think I want to, and that is what is causing faint chills to shiver through me. I've pined away to be in this exact position for months, but now that I'm here I feel lost, empty, alone.

Since I arrived home I've written three letters to Isaac, each more pathetic than the last. I would start off telling him about how much fun I was having and how nice it was to see my parents again, but inevitably anything I wrote to him descended into a fit of confession. I ended up writing how much I missed him, how badly I wanted to kiss the curve of his neck, how desperately I needed to just be near him. Those early drafts have found a home in my trashbin, shredded into so many tiny bits of Clio confetti. I can hear steps in the hallway, quiet and halting treads on the soft carpeting. The sound of soft humming and the way the linen closet door creeks as it is propped wide open are noises made only by my mother, and I can't help but wish I could ignore the plaintive knocking on my door when it comes several heartbeats after I hear the closet door shut. "Come in." I say, just loud enough for my mother to hear me in the hallway, trying to find some way to hide from the inevitable.

My reflection in the icy black of the window is now complete, although twisty and alien in its dimensions. "Well hello there, stranger. I swear I get to talk to you more when you're at school than when you're here!" On her way into the room my mother deposits a pile of neatly folded laundry onto my dresser. She doesn't move from her position by the door for several seconds, though, instead she just examines me with a faint smile. I know what is on her mind, and it's the same thing that has been haunting me for the past month; it is written across her pale face, punctuated by the glowing brown question marks of her eyes. I have told my parents about the scholarship to Chicago, but every time either one of them so much as approaches the subject I shy away. I don't want to think about it. I just want it all over, and I want it all decided for me. I almost want her to tell me what to do, to say, "you have to go to Chicago. It's less expensive," or, "you should stay at ORU. It's closer to home." That would make everything so clear, so easy.

"Casey's been keeping me busy." I quietly explain, watching my mother watch me.

"I know. I don't mind," she explains, finally giving up her post and hesitantly walking across the hardwood floor that separates us to take a seat at my side. "So have you been having a good time?"

"Yeah." I suppose that my tone isn't what it should be, but I don't have the strength to put on a happy face. Even before, even when I hated school and was horrified at the prospect of the fiery rising sun and the new day brought with it, I had made nice. I had been supergirl, too strong to ever give up. I guess what I need to deal with is that I have to give up, that there's no other choice. It's Isaac or it's a degree in Egyptology. I have to choose between my two callings, my two dreams, my two selves. And I don't know if I can do it. I don't know if I can fight back the tightening that is already beginning in my lungs, and I don't know if I can force words from my mouth. The only thing I can think of as my mother picks a piece of lint from the dark green cushion we're sitting on is that poem by Robert Frost. This is it, I know, the moment when my two roads are diverging in that yellow wood. He had it easy, though; he knew which was the road less traveled, he had some idea of what each path held. I know nothing, I have nothing but the feeling I get when Isaac smiles at me, the feeling I'm too afraid to give up.

I've always been afraid of the future, the unknown vistas that seem to so attract many people, but until Isaac I would never have spoken of it. I would never have dreamed of grabbing my mother's hand like I was a little girl waiting at the big red "don't walk sign" watching cars whiz by at dizzying speeds. I would never have looked her in the eye and said "I don't know what to do, mom." Maybe these actions have been dictated by the little piece of Isaac I like to think I carry with me, hidden somewhere within. They certainly aren't what the old Clio would have done. The girl who left here so long ago would have simply made a decision and stuck with it; I would have made a list, long and exacting, with every possible pro and con outlined in neat columns. But now I just want someone to hold on to.

"You have to do what you want to. Whatever makes you happy, honey." The polar opposite of what I need to hear comes from my mother's lips, and I can feel my brows knitting as I stare at my second self in the window glass.

"But I don't know what makes me happy! I mean… I do. But it's not the right thing." The words are squeezed out, but I'm too busy funneling all of my energy into not crying to think clearly.

"If it's what makes you happy how can it be wrong?"

"All my life I've wanted this one thing. And now I can almost have it. I can almost reach out and touch it…" I whisper, not even entirely sure what this one thing is. Ever since I had heard the stories about Howard Carter and ever since I watched Indiana Jones one too many times I've wanted to be an archeologist. But haven't I wanted to be in love for even longer than that? Didn't my theory about love at first sight dictate that I had been looking for Isaac my forever?

"Have you really only ever wanted one thing?" My mother handles crisi like a woman who's been teaching eighth grade history for twenty years: with great finesse and even greater experience. After a suitable pause for me to scrub hot tears of frustration from my eyes she continues: "When I was your age I wanted to be an artist. And a go-go dancer. And a teacher. And a player on the pro-golf circuit. And I wanted to have a baby just like you." Her hand is soft and smooth at the base of my neck, and I begin to sniffle again despite my best efforts. "Egypt is not going to get up and fly away. I promise. It will always be there, waiting for you. And if this thing that you have with Isaac is really love, then he'll be there, too."

"I guess. I think that I want to stay, but I know I should go. I can't….I don't think that I can really leave him."

"It's not like this is your last window of opportunity. The decision you make is important, but it's not everything. After all, I'm still working on my putting…" I can't help but smile a little at this. I've seen my mother putt. She's not going to be hobnobbing with Tiger Woods in the near future. Happy Gilmore is pretty much out of her league, too, as is the average five-year-old playing mini-golf. "And you can do what you have to do. You've grown up a lot, Clio. So much that I barely even recognized you at the bus stop; so much that I know you can make this decision for yourself. But if you want someone to talk to about it, I'm right here."

And of course I spill it all right then; I talk until my jaw hurts and my eyes begin to involuntarily close from sleep deprivation. I've been around Isaac for too long, I suppose, and his manner of easy confidence has rubbed off, leaving me blathering like Sally Jesse Raphael's dream guest. Mostly the things that I talk about are Isaac related: how we met, how I felt when he said that he loved me, how he had somehow become entangled within every aspect of my life. I even told her that he asked me to marry him.

As soon as the significance of this last bit registered to her my mother's graying eyebrows shot upwards and she almost involuntarily barked: "and you said…"

"What do you think? I said that I couldn't." and I've been regretting it ever since, I mentally amended.

It was easy to see her fighting motherly instincts, and before she continued a deep, heaving sigh echoed through my room. "You know that I want you to do this for yourself, but I couldn't with good conscience not tell you that I'm glad you said that. Staying at ORU because you like it is one thing, but getting married…. You're only 16."

"Ah, so you can count."

"Speaking of counting… I'd better go check on your father. He's making some cookies for you," a sly smile slides across her continence before she continues: "and I'd just as soon not be counting 911 in the near future, so he probably could use some supervision."

"Cookies? Chocolate chip I hope?" Food in my family is more than just calories or nutrition, it's love; my father tends to be a little gruff and silent at times, but he and Toll House are always there whenever I need them.

"Is there any other kind in this house?" These words take on a vaguely defeated tone as my mother, an oatmeal raison kind of woman, arises and heads for the hallway. Before closing my white painted wooden door she turns for a second to once again regard me, still sitting motionless by the glossy black void of my window. "And please honey, remember that if you want to talk about anything I'll always be here to listen."

She leaves in her wake a gentle cloud sweet perfume scented air, and as I look around my room I feel a little better. Maybe I don't want her to tell me what to do after all. Maybe I know what I need to do. Fumbling around on the floor for my abandoned pen and notebook I begin to formulate a letter.

Marissa

I thought I was going to faint. The world swirled around me, strange and hostile, leaving ribbons of color and light burning their way into my mind. I was almost surprised when I found myself sitting heavily on the gritty pavement of the garage floor, panicking with a fury I've never before imagined. How could this be? I flipped through the pages of our book one final time, desperately seeking any hint of what was going on. There was nothing - no words had miraculously appeared in the time it took me to recover from the initial shock. In that instant I realized that it had all been huge mistake and everything became clear; as if I had been looking at the world through a tinted window and someone had finally taken pity on me and rolled it down, allowing me to see things as they really where. Taylor had come that night to tell me goodbye, that it wasn't worth it, that I wasn't worth it. Embarrassment wrapped its chilly tendrils around me, cold like the metal of handcuffs. I had told him everything; I had put every single emotion I possessed in that book; I had trusted him absolutely. And this was a joke to him, something that didn't even warrant a reply.

"It's nothing." I whispered to myself, pulling my knees in close and dropping the book and it's wrappings to the floor with a clang. Taylor had finally figured out what I'd know for a long time - that I wasn't good enough for him. With a chilled sense of detachment I began to wonder if this was what a heart attack felt like, tight and burning.

A clang? It took me several painful instants to register the odd sound that had emanated from my thrown book. In my not-inconsiderable experience with tomes this was the first time one had ever sounded so - metallic. Holding back the hiccuping sobs that were aching to bubble forth I hesitantly prodded the crumpled packaging.

The book had not been the only thing Taylor had sent; I noted as another object, once hidden from view in the brown paper wrapping, caught my attention. It was probably the only thing in existence that could drive back my whimpers and invoke a smile, however watery, on my already tear-stained face.

I knew its curves so well, and the way the light glinted off its shimmering silver surface, and the way it fit precisely into my palm, cool and comforting. It was Taylor's world, of which I once again found myself its sole possessor. The relief that fluttered along my skin like the soft touch of sunshine left me crying even harder than I had been before. Why would he give this back to me, this charm that I had dared to think I could return to its giver, if he didn't care enough to respond to the huge portion of my soul I had bared in our book? There was a single, brutally thin sheet of paper folded into a tiny square on the floor, and as soon as my shaking hands managed to open it I recognized the handwriting instantly.

"Marissa," Taylor's quivering script began. "I can't describe it, I don't have the words to say how you make me feel. I've tried so many times, but language doesn't do it. Maybe because you're every contradiction to me: for you I'm happy, I'm sad, I long, I hurt. I could say I loved you, but that's not everything. You're my best friend; you're the last thing I think about before I go to sleep and the first thing I think about when I wake up. I want you so bad that you're in my dreams. I guess the way I should write this last sentence is different - you're not just in my dreams, you are my dreams. Knowing that you see me is all I need to make me happy, and knowing I can touch you is everything I ever wanted. I'm not the one with the magic "I love you", that belongs only to you. The words hurt me because they remind me of the power you have over me, because I don't think I can live without them. Knowing that you could just go away, just leave me and not even care, scares me more than you can imagine.

"I didn't want to write this in our book because that would just be dragging out the mistakes we've made. Something was wrong back then, something so bad that you thought I didn't care about you when you were all I thought about. So I think we have to start over, take back all the things we've said and rebuild everything… make a Taj Mahal that doesn't have to exist for sadness. But one thing will never change, Rissa, and I can't take it back. You'll always be my world."

It was stupid to sit cross-legged on the cold floor, tears slowly leaking in hot streams down my cheeks. It was stupid to re-read Taylor's note until I almost had it memorized, but I couldn't drive myself from the gritty pavement and on with life. He thinks he can't get his point across, that language fails him, but he's wrong. His words let me feel the desperation, they spread wide the desire so hot it's almost painful, and they show me just how Taylor needs me.

Isaac

Tick. It was all I could hear, this never-ending thunder of my bedside clock. It filled my mind, marking endless moments that grated across my nerves and tore razor sharp across my skin. No matter what I tried to distract myself with, from Pamela Anderson Lee on Baywatch reruns to tea parties with Avery and Jess, the constantly precise noise haunted me, inescapable and sharp.

Tick. The clock was slowly driving me crazy, and I sat on my bed, staring at it in hopes that I would suddenly turn teen-age witch and it would explode, raining down around me in a thousand shimmering pieces. Nothing happened though, and after a second I grabbed the black plastic alarm and shoved it into a dresser drawer with a slam. The noise is now muffled by fruit of the loom, but just as omnipresent. Maybe it's in my head after all, I defeatedly contemplate, lying down on the bottom shelf of the bunk beds Taylor and I share.

It's not hard for anyone to guess why I'm so irritable as late, as practically every member of my family has proven. At breakfast my mom had patted me sympathetically on the shoulder as she carried her dishes to the sink, an empathetic sigh escaping. "When is Clio coming back?" She had asked, out of the blue. I didn't even need to say a word for her to know exactly what was on my mind, exactly what was taking away my power of speech and turning me into a wide eyed mute.

Who would have ever thought that I was capable of missing someone this fiercely? Everyone would have, I silently retort, sullenly rolling onto my stomach and pulling an already slightly worn envelope out from the drawer that was currently housing my demon clock, promising myself that I would take just one more short look at it before placidly being lead off to the recording studio. I shuffled through the thick, creamy sheets of writing paper until I came to the last page. I have it all memorized, but there is something about Clio's script, about the tight letters and their gentle flow, that draws me ever back.

"I miss you," I whisper to the inanimate papers, wishing that these objects which had so recently touched Clio could transmit my longing across the space between us. What I had said was on the page, right above her looping name, but I focused instead on the poem as I mouthed the words, marveling once again that people for four thousand years have been going through the same emotions that are devouring me.

"I promised you a long time ago," Clio had explained in the note, "that I would translate the Egyptian love poem that hangs in my room, and here it is:

The voice of the swallow speaks and says:
"The land has brightened -What is thy road?"
Thou shalt not, O bird, disturb me!
I have found my lover in his bed,
And my heart is still more glad,
When he said to me:
"I shall not go afar off,
my hand is in thy hand, I shall stroll about
And I shall be with thee in every pleasant place."
He makes me the foremost of maidens.
He injures not my heart."

Marissa

Sarah and I are currently redecorating my room. Rather, I'm currently redecorating my room and Sarah is currently sprawled across the exact center of my floor reading the latest issue of Newsweek. I've already stepped on her several times in my frequent trips to and from the big black garbage bags that are on my bed, slowly being emptied of their contents.

"So it's all back to normal, is it?" Sarah asks, flipping a page or two forward in the magazine and looking up at me with a quizzical grin. "Well, I don't know if I'd even say normal," she pauses, "because most girls I know just don't have calendars with their boyfriend on them…"

"Pshah. If they had imaginations you know they would, too. There's this magic technology now called a com-pew-tor that allows you to make whatever you want out of your pictures." It's true. I just happen to be unfortunate enough to have a boy for whom many a calendar has been printed, but even if he wasn't some teen idol I suspect I'd still have the same Tay filled room. "And even for us this isn't anywhere near back to normal."

"Yeah… you're not even ignoring my phone calls yet!" Sarah laughs a little, but I know underneath her frivolity this comment means a lot to her.

"I'm too busy ignoring you in person to ignore your phone calls, actually."

"Shut up."

"Never."

Two songs of Serious Hits Live pass before either of us speaks again. "What's wrong? You said Taylor sent you the necklace back. What more do you want? A proposal the next time he's on Rosie?"

"That would be cool, now that you mention it." Sarah knows me so well it's scary. She can immediately figure out what's bothering me and then she usually tends to harp on it until I'm ready to throw jump out a window to alleviate my misery. "I still haven't seen him."

"Well why not?" The conversation has apparently grown entertaining enough for her to abandon her perusal of the magazine and roll over to watch me replace a shimmering white gold picture frame that, before the fray, had sat on my desk with a glossy eight by five of Taylor and I in it.

I've always loved the picture; it was taken on the day we had met, and neither of us had any idea we were the subject of the camera's eye. When the yearbook had finally come out in the beginning of my Sophomore year, with a huge section devoted to the Spring Fling dance, the first thing I had heard about was the huge "Marissa centerfold," as Caroline liked to call it. Taylor and I were immortalized across more than half of a page in crisp black and white, looking somehow mysterious, looking somehow ethereal. I was Cinderella bedecked for the ball, but my Prince Charming didn't have a white steed or a shiny suit or armor -- in fact Prince Charming was wearing wrinkled khakis and a white button down shirt that didn't quite fit him, but our pose makes it abundantly clear that I didn't care. The photographer must have been crouching some distance away from us, because our intersection of flesh is clearly visible as we are silhouetted in the faint light of the darkened gym. We are so thoroughly wound together that it is hard to distinguish which body part belongs to whom; my head is resting on his shoulder and we are so close that only faint pinpricks of whiteness are visible along the length of our bodies. My eyes were shut tight, my expression dreamy, as I was probably marveling at the rightness in being that near to Taylor.

"I don't know. I think I'm scared." I whisper, gaze locked on this window into my past.

"Of what?"

"That things will change. I'm afraid that we'll feel differently… because of what I said. What I did." On the slick, cool glass I trace the outline of Taylor's head bent over mine.

"Maybe it will be better...." Sarah calmly watches me wallowing in misery.

"I know, but it was like heaven to be with him. How can anything be better than that?" I finally reply after several heartbeats of uncertainty.

"That's a good question… why don't you go find out?"

Installment 19

Taylor

"Are you looking up those naked pictures of the artist-formerly-known-as Ginger Spice again?" Jessica's chirpy voice breaks through my net induced haze, and I roll my eyes at her.

"That was Zac, thank you. Ginger makes me nauseous…"

"Yeah, I know. 'Cause you're crushing so hard on Baby you hate that she used to take up all the attention."

"Oh you found me out. That's it... I secretly lust Baby." The sarcasm in my voice is so thick it's almost painful, but Jess just shrugs and wanders out of our room. I guess I'd rather she think that I'm looking up nudie pictures than know what I really am doing - reading fanfiction. It's good stuff, some of it, and what isn't is still quite the chuckle.

This occupation is taking up about five percent of my brain, and with the left over gray matter I'm desperately trying not to acknowledge the fact that I'm sitting expectantly by the phone for a reason. It's been four days since I mailed our book to Marissa, and I haven't heard anything from her. For the thousandth time I wonder if I should have done something differently, if my refusal to continue writing in it was the last straw and she's finally given up on me. My stint as a prisoner in my own house ended this morning, but I don't know what I should do. I could go hang to the arcade with some of my friends or I could sit here and doubt myself for the rest of the day; tough choice, I think to myself, sinking deeper into the murky territory of self-pity. There's something inside me that won't give up the hope, though, some tiny province of my mind that is ticking away the instants, sure that Marissa will phone and everything will be all better.

It's weird that I can care about her so much, yet there's just no way for me to express it. I remember a long time ago my mom told me about a psychologist named Jung, and his theory of the collective unconsciousness. He wrote that on some plane every single person was connected, that a piece of everyone's mind could access an unseen realm of thought shared by all of humanity. I've pondered this a lot, but I don't think he's right. How can he be, when I don't feel connected to other people at all? Really they kind of scare me with their unpredictability and ever changing moods.

In the past there were two times when I wondered if Jung had a point: when I was on stage and when I was with Marissa. Before this mess, before this loneliness and fear entered our world, Rissa and I used to be so together; whenever she was around I felt it all through me… not just in my body but in my mind. There was something between us, a bond that made me wonder if she really was able to see the world through my eyes. Marissa understood me like I don't think anyone else will ever be able to; almost as if the two of us had our own collective unconsciousness, a spot of freedom from the trap of our own minds where we could just be together. But that's all gone now, and I'm left aching for the want of it.

The screen saver has flickered to life, obliterating a haze of unread letters from my laptop's monitor. "Tay and Rissa forever," it proclaims again and again, hurting my eyes and mind with its insistence. The first time I saw these words Marissa had been sitting on my lap, watching my facial expression as expectantly as Avery when she knows a secret. I had been dizzyingly happy right then, with her wrapped in my arms, and I had known that everything would be all right. But now the same words do nothing but burn me, the huge red letters stare hatefully, taunting silently. Then I am spared the sight as the particular darkness of a pair of hands over my eyes submerges me in its depths.

"Jess! I'm doing something here…" It's not Jessica, it can't be. I can feel the identity of the other person in the room as surely as I can feel the keyboard beneath my fingers.

"You put my message back up." A hot, teasing whisper on my neck.

"I never took it down." And then Marissa is in my arms again as I pull her to me, breathing in her familiar scent. Our lips meet again and again as we drink from each other with the passion of explorers long lost in a desert who have stumbled across the green haven of an oasis, and before I close my eyes to drift away in her touch the last thing I see is the glinting silver of my world hanging around her neck, once again orbiting its proper heavenly sun.

I can't help but wonder if maybe this time everything really will be all right.

Ike

I thought about getting her roses; I thought about candle-lit dinners and champagne. Somehow, though, it all seemed so fake, like what some overly romantic guy living in Hollywood would script out for Clio's first night back in Tulsa after her spring break. I pondered the delema considerably,  wanting something special to mark the occasion, but I couldn't bring myself to resort to stereotypes. So on the day my seemingly never-ending exile from Clio was to come to a close I made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (well, they were actually orange marmalade… her favorite) and proceeded to pack up the Cherokee for what I hoped would turn out to be a romantic picnic.

"What's wrong with you?" Zac's incredulous voice broke through my haze of contemplation as he slammed his way into the garage, presumably in search of a Popsicle from the large freezer where mom stores the goodies out of harm's way.

"Eh?" I half acknowledged him as I threw a blanket into the back of the Cherokee.

"I asked what's wrong with you. The girl you're disgustingly crazy about has been away for almost two weeks and you greet her with PB&J? That's so…" Zac paused for a moment, his contorted face framed by tendrils of air turned frosty by the open freezer.

"Nice?" I suggested, hefting our cooler and adding it to the small pile that was forming in the car. "Thoughtful?" I continued, still only devoting a fraction of my attention to my younger brother.

"I was thinking more along the lines of cheap."

"Thank you, Casanova. I didn't want to do something plastic… I wanted to do something we'd enjoy." Even Zac couldn't drag my head from the clouds or convince me to place my feet on the ground today.

"Well, Audrey seemed to enjoy the plane ticket to Paris in Sabrina." Zac finally picked out a flavor that was apparently amenable to him and let the freezer shut with a bang.

"Real practical." I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by his reaction -- all those viewings of Funny Face have to have taken their effect somewhere.

"I guess not," he breezily admitted, heading back towards the kitchen.  Just when I begin to marvel at how easy it was to get rid of Zac I hear the scuffle of his Vans on the cement floor of the garage, followed by the clearing of a throat.  "Ike?" He says my name softly, and I look over to find him hovering at the door to the house with a serious expression on his face. "Good luck."

"Thanks," I answer, seeing him smile and wondering about my little brother.  Something tells me that Zac understands a lot more than I give him credit for.

 Clio

The lake behind Ike's grandmother's house is a place quite different today than it had been in his childhood. The thick, stifling heat of even this late May afternoon has drawn throngs of people to immerse themselves in its cool blue-black depths, and as we sit on a grassy bank high above the scuffle I can hear children screaming and splashing. Seeing Ike again was bizarre. Somehow I had expected a change, some difference after our time apart, but it felt just like I had left him a few minutes before, making the conversation during our picnic dinner easy and warm.

"So what did Casey do then?" Isaac was laying stretched out on the blanket, his head in my lap, listening to stories of my vacation.

"She brought the dumplings into the kitchen herself and said she didn't order the meat ones. I thought the Chef was going to have a heart attack." The little man in the white hat wasn't the only one who was shocked by my best friend's new found vegetarianism, but in my case alarm had been mingled with pride. I tried abstaining from meat once myself, but a strategically placed Pizza Hut had pretty much wiped out my chances of joining the ranks of herbivores.

"She sounds really cool," Ike's grin widened, exposing the metal wires of his braces. This is a special smile, one that only surfaces when he's totally comfortable. Other times, when he's in front of a camera or even on stage, his lips remain firmly closed in what I suspect to be a conscious attempt to keep people from seeing his dental work. But now he's not worried about anything and this simple fact makes my head swim and my pulse pound unnaturally fast, thumping in my ears.

I've been winding together a chain of bright yellow dandelions for the past several minutes, and I finally judge it long enough to suit its purpose. I'm going to tell him soon, tell him my decision, but right now I just want to enjoy the feel of him breathing in and out and to watch the dreamy expression that softens the rich brown of his eyes. "It's not exactly laurels, but I guess it will have to do." After linking both ends of the long strand of flowers I slide the rough circle over Isaac's soft curls with a laugh. When I was younger my mother used to try to convince me that dandelions were weeds, but to this day I don't buy it. They're not thin and delicate like the plants people call flowers; they don't need someone to pull up weeds or give them special treatment. They're strong and beautiful all at once, something that I think makes them a thousand times more precious than any rose or lilly.

Isaac's eyes blaze bright and he lifts himself up to press his lips against mine for an eternal instant. "I have something to give you, too. I didn't make it… but I hope you'll accept it anyways." He sits up and fumbles in the pocket of his baggy cords for a second before pulling out a small box, the sight of which makes every inch of me quiver. "This was my grandmother's. She left it to me to give to the woman I want to marry…" Ike holds the black velvet covered vessel out to me before hastily adding: "but it doesn't have to mean that, not if you don't want it to. I just want you to have it."

Isaac

Clio didn't even look at the ring. She just sat there on the red plaid blanket, staring directly into my eyes with an intensity that sent shock waves skittering through me. The hot air on my skin, the scratchy wool beneath me, the sound of a radio playing in the distance, the ring of children playing in my what had once been my Grandparent's pond, all of it faded until the only thing I could see was the burning green of her pupils. When I was very young my family had lived in South America for several years and I remember once flying over the rainforest and looking enraptured out the tiny window of the plane at the forest canopy miles below. It hadn't been uniformly green but a swirling mass of dark and light, melting together in a constantly changing tide of impenetrable brilliance. Beneath that surface, I had known, lay hidden another world, and right now I could see all of this in her eyes: every subtle gradation of shade, every wavering reflection, every sharp contrast. And beneath the brilliant mist was buried another place, a world built on the foundations of hard work and faith, a world in which everything had the capability of being perfect. It was a world I wanted to climb into and never leave.

"I don't think I can take it, Isaac." Her voice, when it finally comes, is a scratchy whisper.

"Why not?"

"Because. What if… what if a thousand things? What if you hate me someday?" Clio tears her gaze away to watch the children, and this world slides back into focus. Dave Matthews is playing in the background, a soft song I don't recognize.

"I can't hate you. Don't you know that?" I pull myself forward, ignoring the blanket bunching up beneath me, until we sit Indian style facing each other, our bare legs gently touching.

"It's such an important thing, though."

"That's why I want to give it to you." She's trying to look away, struggling not to look at me. I want to know why, I want to take her chin in my hand and draw her to me, but I just sit, patiently waiting. We're silent for a long time, and I begin to make out the lyrics of the song. "I remember thinking I'll go on forever only knowing I'll see you again. I know the touch of you is hard to remember, but like that touch I know no other."

Clio turns to me with a soft sigh, moving closer a little closer. Dave Matthew's voice continues softly, and I think she's listening too. "And for sure we have danced in the risk of each other… would you like to dance around the world with me?" Before I even know what's happening she takes the box from my hand and coolly regards the ring. "And I know you're the heaviest weight, when you're not here that's hung around my head."

"I told you why I couldn't marry you once." She concludes softly, stroking the ring.

"Why you couldn't. Not why you wouldn't." "Do what you will, always walk where you like, your steps do as you please, I'll back you up."

She concedes with a nod. "You're right." Clio finally looks back at me, and another all consuming glance eats away at my ability to think. "I would marry you in a second."

"You don't have to, though. Just take the ring and say that someday you will say yes. For now become the greatest archeologist since Schliemann. Then become Clio Chambers-Hanson." "I remember thinking sometimes we walk, sometimes we run away, but I know no matter how fast we are running some how we keep up with each other."

"I would be honored to have your name." This time I can barely hear her, but the look on her face hints at something. She has resolved some dilemma, I think, destroyed some demon. And so I take the ring back, pull it out of its case, and gently slide it onto her finger. It is a little too small, and will have to be resized, but I can't imagine anything in history ever being more beautiful than the sight of it on her finger. "I love you." She breathes, leaning in to kiss me. I'm wound tight all over, with excitement and adrenaline, and this is the salve that I need to calm my frenzied nerves.

"I love you more." I retort, watching her hold her arm out straight, fingers extended high, for a better look at the ring.

"No." Her voice is light and playful, "I love you more."

"Please. We both know I love you more. Why else would I put up with your freakish Cool Whip issues?"

"Maybe because you have the same issues, Mr. No marshmallows on my hot chocolate!?!" Rather than continue our verbal sparing I grab my Clio by the waist, pushing her down onto the blanket and maneuvering into ideal tickling position.

"Agh!" She wheezed as I ran my hands up and down the her smooth sides beneath her shirt, knowing just which spots would cause her gales of laughter to intensify.

"Who loves who more?" I demand, easily surmounting her struggles.

"I love you more! Stop…please…" I finally oblige her pleas, but not out of kindness. The fear that ripples through me is enough to sober even the lightest mood as I look down at Clio. It's so easy for me to hold her immobile like this, and there's really nothing she can do. She's defenseless, and this is what makes me cold despite the warm sun. I will never hurt her, but maybe someone else will. The knowledge that I will have to let Clio go so soon, let her out into the world without my protection, isn't something I want to deal with. I stretch out on the blanket and cautiously wrap myself around her, wishing I could always be a buffer between her and reality.

"I'm staying."

 Clio

"What?" Ike pulls away from me, and I am saddened that I had spoken. Somehow I can't believe this has all happened; I can't believe that I've found someone this special, and that I'm wearing his ring. It's just not within the scope of my imagination, but the heat of him against me, the warm weight of his arms around me, makes it all feel real.

"I'm staying at ORU next semester." Now he sits up straight, looking uncertain.

"The ring wasn't to make you stay. I don't want to trap you here…"

"You're not trapping me; I want to stay. I need to stay. The University of Chicago will keep." Isaac still won't get close, even when I move to sit beside him. "Don't get your ego all in a bunch. I would have stayed without you, and I made up my mind over break. An undergraduate liberal arts degree from Oral Roberts is enough to get me into the school of Egyptology as a graduate student. So you've only got me for a few years."

"That's where you're wrong. I've got you forever, remember?" He lifts my hand, playing with his Grandmother's exquisite white-gold ring.  With my ring.

"How could I forget?"

The sky has been darkening, and as I squeeze his hand within mine a cold raindrop falls heavily on my leg.  The air crackles above for an instant, and then the growl of a nearby thunder clap echos, bouncing and reverberating in my head.  "We had better get going."  Isaac mutters, standing and pulling me to my feet after him.

"Yeah," I'm relunctant to leave this place, to leave the soft cocoon we have built around ourselves in this afternoon spent together, but I know that the responsibilities of the real world beckon.  Tonight the two of us have volunteered to pull babysitting duty, a favor to Taylor and Marissa, who will be going out on their first official date since their break-up.  We gather the waste of our picnic, putting all of the trash back into the red cooler before heading to the parking lot.  

As I begin to climb the steep hill leading to the Hanson's car I look back for a second, watching Ike vigorously shake out the blanket that we had been sitting on; he is a single crowned  figure, tall and straight, in a deep green sea of grass dotted with brilliant yellow colonies of dandelions.  Watching him I can't help but wonder if he will want me always. The same question I am unable to ask from the other perspective, though, because I know that until breath dies in my lungs this feeling of safety, of completion, of understanding and of being understood, will never go away. Where my certainty comes from I don't know, and I don't want to, really.  If I understood how, or I understood why, I could mess it all up. There's nothing I can do, I finally decide as Isaac makes his way up the path behind me, except sit back and watch the future unfurl itself, taking comfort in the knowledge that it will always be just one of those things.

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