You Are the Everything by Karen Rivers

Author:Karen Rivers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2018-12-08T16:00:00+00:00

18.

This little shopping excursion is part of the Program.

The Program, with caps like that. The Program is the brainchild of Dr. McDreamy, whose name you still can’t remember. The thing is that after you’ve been on a plane that has crashed, you do things like move to Wyoming to join a program run by a man who looks like a doctor on TV. That’s life.

Sometimes it makes sense, at other times not so much.

But here you are.

In a capital-P Program.

Dr. McDreamy is very big on intent.

The intent of the Program is to make you normal again, to undo whatever it was that happened to you—not to your body, but to your brain—when the plane left its flight path and dove, nose-first, into a mountainside.

Can that really be undone?

Well, with intent. Yes. That’s what he says, and he is the expert.

The intent of the Program is to fix you. The part that is on you is to continue to live life until it feels like life is not something you stole from the two hundred and sixteen people who died on the mountainside, or before the plane even fully crashed, or in the explosion afterward. Normal is sometimes easy (when you’re with Josh Harris) and sometimes impossible (when you aren’t).

Existing as just yourself feels like a lie.

Without Josh Harris touching you, you feel as though you don’t exist.

You aren’t scared, exactly. At least you don’t think you are. It’s just that without him, you feel too exposed. You compensate for that by wearing layers of clothes, even though it’s still summer-warm. Today: dark jeans; knee-high, laced-up boots (Docs); a hoodie over a T-shirt over a tank top. A cowboy hat, a real one, the first and only thing you’ve bought since moving to Wyoming.

The hat is because your hair is freshly purple. Purple seemed like the right choice for a new school, not to mention the new person you are now that you are no longer a virgin. It seemed like it would say, “I’m upbeat, yet slightly dark. Optimistic, but skeptical! Quirky, but with depth!” Also, it just shows up a lot more than white and maybe you want to be seen. White is for ghosts. Purple vibrates with life.

Purple is pretty.

“Purple is trying too hard, is what it is. Especially with those glasses, Schmidt. It’s like you Googled ‘manic pixie dream girl’ and went for it. And you know how we feel about that.”

“I know how you feel about that,” you retort. “But I’m not you.”

You have been a person with blue hair Before. (Kath didn’t like that either.) So you can be a person with purple hair now. You understand that sometimes colorful people blend in better than people with no color at all.

“You look sort of like Barbie, if Barbie had had a manic episode and dyed her hair an unnatural and terrible purple only ever seen before on the tail of a plastic My Little Pony. Not that any purple hair is natural, but there are gradations, one through ten, normal through My Little Pony’s tail color of choice.

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