Althea and Oliver Read online

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) LLC

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 by Cristina Moracho

  Unsatisfied

  Words and Music by Paul Westerberg

  © 1984 NAH MUSIC (ASCAP)/Administered by BUG MUSIC, INC., A BMG CHRYSALIS COMPANY All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Moracho, Cristina.

  Althea and Oliver / Cristina Moracho.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Althea and Oliver, who have been friends since age six and are now high school juniors, find their friendship changing because he has contracted Kleine-Levin Syndrome”

  — Provided by publisher.

  ISBN 978-0-698-15256-4

  [1. Best friends—Fiction. 2. Friendship—Fiction. 3. Coming of age—Fiction.

  4. Sleep disorders—Fiction. 5. High schools—Fiction. 6. Schools—Fiction.

  7. Single-parent families—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M788192Alt 2014

  [Fic]—dc232013041135

  AUTHOR’S NOTE: Kleine-Levin Syndrome is a real affliction. Incredibly rare, it affects its victims, to some degree, in the way that I’ve described, and in reality, as in the book, there is no cure. However, I’ve taken a great deal of artistic license with KLS. Oliver’s experiences—as well as those of the other boys—are in no way meant to be an accurate portrayal of what it’s like to live with it. For more information on KLS, please visit the Kleine-Levin Syndrome Foundation: klsfoundation.org

  Version_1

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  Acknowledgments

  About The Author

  For my parents

  LOOK ME IN THE EYE

  AND TELL ME THAT I’M SATISFIED.

  WERE YOU SATISFIED?

  —THE REPLACEMENTS

  chapter one.

  “WOULD YOU RATHER walk barefoot across a mile of Legos or get a tattoo on the inside of your eyelid?”

  “That’s fucked up.” Oliver’s words are blurry with fatigue.

  “That’s sort of the point. Pick one. Don’t think about it for too long.”

  Althea is doing her best to keep Oliver awake until they get back to his house. The windows are rolled down and the car is whipped full of angry March air that beats her blonde hair around her face like a belligerent pair of wings. A screeching punk rock lament is on the radio. She shouts over the music as Oliver struggles to keep his eyes open, his head lolled back against the seat. Her voice and the chill of winter and the metallic thrum of electric guitars grow remote as he drifts off.

  He thinks of the delicate skin on the soles of his feet and winces. A mile is too far. “Tattoo. I’d rather get the tattoo.”

  Althea’s race to the house won’t change what’s about to happen, but she’s driving like it means something, mouth cinched into a determined knot, speeding through a yellow light. “We’re almost there,” she says.

  “Let me sleep,” he says. “Shush.”

  “Don’t shush me.”

  “You love it when I shush you.”

  It doesn’t matter. He’ll be asleep in minutes, wherever he is. Home in bed is his first choice, but he could do worse than the shotgun seat of his best friend’s Camry. An hour ago he passed out in sixth period chem lab, dangerously close to a Bunsen burner.

  “I’m so tired,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “What about you? Which would you rather?” asks Oliver, enunciating with effort, his tongue thick and uncooperative.

  “The tattoo. Obviously.” Althea punctuates her point by honking at the driver in front of them, who’s creeping along College Road too slowly for her taste.

  He unzips his jeans. Lifting his hips off the seat, he shimmies until his pants are around his ankles. He’s wearing his favorite cherry-red boxers, and the sight of them is briefly cheering.

  “What’s wrong with your pants?” Althea asks.

  “I’m trying to eliminate obstacles,” he says.

  “You should have done the shoes first.”

  “Fuck.” Looking down at the hems of his jeans, caught on the heels of his tennis shoes, he finds the task at hand insurmountable. He kicks feebly, and his feet get tangled in denim. He makes a strangled, wordless sound of vexation.

  “Just leave it,” says Althea. “I’ll fix it when we get there.”

  For her benefit, Oliver sits up straighter, resting an elbow on the open window and propping his head on one hand. “I got one.”

  “Let’s hear it.” She turns the volume down so he won’t have to shout over Rocket from the Crypt.

  “Would you rather . . .” His head slumps forward, but he rights himself quickly. “Would you rather . . .” Althea turns onto their block and his resolve weakens. He’ll be upstairs in just a minute, under his down quilt, and he won’t have to fight it anymore.

  She smacks his arm. “Oliver!”

  “Okay, okay.” They’re pulling into his driveway now. “Would you rather kill a puppy with your hands—”

  “Like, strangle it?” says Althea, turning off the engine and unbuckling her seat belt.

  “Whatever, or, like, drown it in a bucket.” Oliver fumbles for the belt release button.

  “I don’t like this already.”

  She comes around to his side and crouches by the open door. Reaching beneath his crumpled jeans, she unlaces his shoes and eases them from his feet. The pants slip off without further opposition. “Okay,” she says, patting his ankle.

  Oliver emerges from the car in socks and underwear, his backpack still strapped over his black thermal hoodie. He falters, and Althea puts an arm around his waist for support.

  “Let’s remember this outfit,” she says. “I think it’s a winner. Maybe more of a spring look, though.”

  Climbing onto the porch, Oliver gropes for his keys. Across the street, their elderly neighbor Mrs. Parker is sweeping her sidewalk in a quilted navy housecoat and watching the pantsless Oliver with undisguised interest. His hand weaves in front of the lock; as his eyes lose focus, he can hear metal scraping against the door’s peeling whi
te paint. “Is she staring at me?”

  “Don’t you pay that nosy bitch no nevermind.” Gently, Althea takes the keys and opens the door herself. “What’s my other option? Besides the puppy?”

  They ascend the stairs together, him leaning on her heavily now, and she leads him to his room. Pulling back the covers on his bed, Althea ushers him into it. The sheets are soft against his bare legs. When they were kids in flannel pajamas, they used to lie under the blankets in the dark and bicycle their knees against the fabric so they could see the green flash of static electricity. He nuzzles his head into a pillow.

  “Or shoot a random person with a sniper rifle from a mile away?” he finishes.

  “Those are my choices? Drown a puppy in a bucket or shoot a stranger I can’t see?” He feels her weight on the bed next to him, her cool hand against his fevered face while she mulls his hypothetical question, her voice amused but already distant.

  “Mmm-hmm. Which one would you . . .” It’s impossible even to finish the sentence. When he wakes up, whenever he wakes up, it will feel like a shaky jump from this moment to that one. Then will come that panic of having slept through something important—a final exam, a birthday party, a soccer game in which he was the starting forward. Something is wrong with him, something must be, because it wasn’t supposed to happen again and now it has, and he wonders if he should be fighting this harder than he is, but he’s so tired and it’s completely delicious right now to be in his bed. Sometimes nothing feels as good as giving up, that guilty relief coupled with a healthy dose of I-just-don’t-give-a-fuck, and he wants to tell Althea not to worry, everyone needs a vice and this can be his.

  “I’ll tell you when you wake up. Hold that thought,” she whispers, and he’s gone.

  • • •

  Althea stays. Lying on her back, she watches the constellation of plastic stars on the ceiling slowly brighten as the remaining daylight drains away and the familiar features of Oliver’s bedroom recede into the shadows. The diminutive television perches atop the scratched wooden dresser, its rabbit-ear antenna akimbo, the red standby light of the VCR luminous and eerie. His makeshift desk was her gift on his last birthday—a piece of plywood covered in a collage of his favorite album covers, supported by two sawhorses she’d pilfered from a construction site downtown. A collection of ticket stubs from movies and concerts, pages torn from Althea’s sketchbook, and photographs of the two of them are all tacked to his enormous bulletin board. She’s memorized the photo lineup: age six, under the Christmas tree at her house, a tiny Oliver wrapped in a string of lights; age nine, Oliver proudly brandishing a cast on his broken wrist while a jealous Althea pouts in a corner of the frame; age twelve, Althea with her hands swaddled in a pair of pink boxing gloves while Oliver cowers, covering his face; age fourteen, standing on Althea’s porch the morning they started high school, Althea looking miserable and Oliver strangely enthusiastic; age sixteen, drunk at a Halloween party, dressed as Sid and Nancy, shouting something at the camera.

  If he’d stayed awake for five seconds longer, she could have told him the answer to his question, although she suspects he already knows that she would save the puppy. They’ve been best friends for ten years, and it’s not easy for them to surprise each other. The silent digital numbers of the clock radio reconfigure, moving ahead one minute. Althea counts to sixty as evenly as possible—one banana, two banana—but still arrives there first, and several more seconds creep by before the clock acknowledges another minute has passed. How many more of those until he wakes up? she wonders. Last time it was two weeks. A lot of goddamned bananas.

  • • •

  A day passes, and then another, and another. Every morning when Althea drives by Oliver’s house on the way to school, she slows, not expecting to see him waiting for her, but hoping anyway. At night she can’t sleep, and at school she can’t stay awake, despite her ubiquitous thermos of coffee. A teacher teases her for nodding off in class, suggesting that maybe Althea has caught whatever it is Oliver has. The other students titter and she slouches in her seat, mortified to have called attention to herself. During lunch she eats in her car, stretched across the backseat, propped against the door like she’s lying on the sofa in her basement, looking out the window instead of at the television. No one comes to find her. It’s not that she doesn’t have other friends, but they are more Oliver’s than hers. She keeps to herself how unfair she thinks this is, that the one better equipped to go without the other is the one who never has to.

  After school she goes home and makes lemon bars; baking keeps her mind busy, requires the kind of multitasking that finally allows her to relax. At night she makes uninspired attempts at precalculus and chemistry, putting in the minimum amount of effort that will still achieve the desired result, then she shoves her work aside and takes out her sketchbook. Surrounded by music and the smell of freshly sharpened pencils, she turns off the part of her brain that’s still picturing Oliver asleep. Eager to prove that she can, in fact, amuse herself, she sketches diligently until she’s convinced she’s lost track of time, filling pages with the dinosaurs she so often sees in her dreams.

  They’ve been separated before, but this is different. It isn’t like when she was periodically shipped off to spend forced time with her mother, in Philadelphia or Chicago or Denver or any of the other places Alice had lived since leaving Wilmington; she was steadily heading westward, like a slow-moving plague spreading across the country. Althea had missed Oliver then, fiercely, childishly, missed their routines and games and easy familiarity, especially in Alice’s world of constant upheaval, where there was always a new boyfriend to meet, a new group of friends before whom Althea had to be trotted out, a new hobby or passion of Alice’s that Althea was expected to indulge.

  Something had changed in October, when her father, Garth, was out of town for a conference and she threw a keg party at Oliver’s insistence, his misguided attempt to encourage her to socialize. He had spent the entire day bubble-wrapping Garth’s trinkets and hiding them in the attic; they rolled up the Persian rugs and dragged them into the master bedroom. The trick, they decided, would be to devise an activity that would keep everyone in the backyard rather than roaming around the house looking for things to steal or destroy. Which was how they ended up filling a cheap vinyl kiddie pool with Jell-O and turning yet another keg party into a wrestling tournament. Plenty of girls were more than eager to strip down to their underwear and flounder around in the cherry-flavored mess. Althea was content to swill her shitty beer on the sidelines and lament that they should have charged money. No amount of alcohol or urging would get her into the ring until Oliver asked if she was really so afraid of a bunch of intoxicated debutantes. That did it. Removing only her flip-flops, she climbed into the pool, macerated gelatin squishing between her toes, and demanded to be challenged; an hour later, she remained undefeated. When she was finished, Oliver jumped in and tackled her, and they splashed around under a starry southern sky. They tangled with each other, their clothes soaked and clinging, their bodies dripping and sticky and smelling like too-sweet cough medicine.

  The clouds came from nowhere. A flash of lightning; someone said “Oh, shi—” but his voice was cut off by the thunder. Then it was pouring and everybody ran into the house, including a dozen girls wearing nothing but bras and panties and Jell-O, girls who would leave cherry footprints all over the floors, girls who would sit on the furniture and dry themselves with Garth’s monogrammed towels and eventually leave the Carter residence looking like the site of a mass homicide. Althea and Oliver stayed in the pool, getting rained on and trembling with each roll of thunder. She’d only had a couple of beers but was acting drunker than she was, for camouflage, because as she watched pink rivulets of rainwater stream down Oliver’s temples and wrists, she’d realized something horrifying: She wanted him to kiss her.

  He hadn’t.

  The following day, Oliver was reduced to a quivering mess,
terrified of Garth’s return; he prayed for a swift execution, while Althea insisted on playing a morbid game of Would You Rather—would you rather watch the other one die, or would you rather be killed first, knowing the other would have to watch you go? They cleaned frantically for hours. Finally, Althea sent him home because he was running a fever. He went to sleep that night and stayed that way for the better part of the next two weeks, and while he was gone she’d noticed there was something different about the way she missed him. It was colored with impatience and expectation, as if they had been in the middle of a conversation, interrupted just as he was about to tell her something important and she was forced to wait for the right moment to ask, “What were you going to say?” She was missing something that hadn’t even happened yet and couldn’t happen until Oliver was awake and accounted for and finally paying attention.

  It had been her mother, of all people, who had intuited the shift, coming right out on the phone one day and asking if she and Oliver were having sex.

  “I don’t expect your father to talk to you about birth control,” she’d begun, and Althea had cut her off at the pass, saying that her health class had covered the subject thoroughly. Nevertheless, Alice had barreled on. “Are you two still having sleepovers all the time? You’re too old for that now, you know; you can’t be sleeping in the same bed like you did when you were kids.”

  “Our raging hormones have yet to get the better of us.”

  “There are places where you can go to get the Pill. You don’t even need to involve your father.”

  “I just told you I’m not having sex. Why would I need to go on the Pill?” Althea responded.

  “You know, it can make your breasts bigger, too.”

  Althea had never told her mother of the shame her flat chest inspired, and she had marveled then at how, in their first conversation in months, Alice could identify the unbearably specific miseries Althea never shared with anyone. Althea had handed the phone to Garth out of sheer embarrassment, and he took the rest of the call in his study with the door closed. He had emerged red-faced and poured himself a scotch, and after that started leaving the basement door open when Oliver was over. Her parents’ apparent confidence that she and Oliver either were or would soon be sleeping together only made her more disconsolate as she pitched and turned in her bed at night, wondering why Oliver remained willfully oblivious to what everyone around him appeared to consider a certainty.