Page 11 of A Curse for the Homesick

DEAR TESS

2014

Delia’s first day back at school was also the day Harvard and Yale emailed me with the news sorry, unfortunately, but thanks for applying . I was standing with Kitty, Linnea, and Henrik on the sidelines of Soren’s soccer game. My phone said it was past nine at night, but because people kept falling over and looking woefully injured, the game dragged ever onward.

Henrik kept saying, “See, this is why I prefer rugby.”

Kitty kept saying, “See, this is why I prefer stabbing myself with knitting needles.”

I had enough of a natural intuition for sports to know that Soren was good. Probably not the best, but a solid contender for second. He was a midfielder, which seemed to involve a lot of running back and forth very quickly. Every time he went past us, his hair all sweaty and windswept, Linnea would cheer and Kitty would hurl abuse, just to see if he’d react. He didn’t. I didn’t cheer because being yelled at sounded distracting and embarrassing for both of us, but I was wearing one of his jerseys, a green one with his number and the name Fell on the back in block letters. It was the most girlfriend-y thing I had perhaps ever done, and I had taken it off and put it back on again four times before Kitty and Linnea had dragged me to the game.

Delia stood slightly farther down the field with two of her friends. I’d seen her in school, and we’d made eye contact briefly before she’d looked away again. According to my mum, Delia had called her a few more times from Ramna Skaill. My mum hadn’t told me what they’d talked about. Just skeld things was all she’d said.

Thomas’s funeral had been on Christmas Eve. I’d sat between Soren and my dad and kept thinking I was going to cry but never did.

My phone vibrated just as Soren passed the ball to someone else on his team. I looked at it covertly and saw the emails. Kitty shot me a sharp look, and I hid my face with my hair.

She was the only one who knew which schools I’d applied to, or that I’d applied at all, now that it was obvious I wouldn’t be swimming at a university level. Linnea hadn’t asked. Soren studiously mentioned nothing further than one month in the future. Kitty, however, who’d gotten her acceptance to Oxford weeks ago, had berated me until I’d told her the list of universities my mum and I had put together.

It had been too late, by then, to apply to Oxford too. And since Stenland, in a fit of patriotic isolationism, had declined to join the EU, there was no great financial benefit to choosing a European university over an American one.

When I looked at my list of schools—Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etcetera—I felt like someone was going to laugh at me. I hadn’t meant to apply exclusively to schools with impossible acceptance rates, nor did I think I was smart enough to do well at them. But the only American universities that offered financial aid to international students were the ones with endowments greater than the entire economy of Stenland. According to the statistics my mum had emailed me, my grades and test scores were average for accepted students. Most schools did not have any students from Stenland, which might’ve worked in my favor if they wanted to add another country to their tally. But mostly, I was relying on the personal essay my mum had helped me write. It was about curses and translating Stennish poetry and being hewn by a place you wanted to escape. I thought it was good. The Ivies did not. Stanford would email me the next day, but my hope for a different answer was so small I couldn’t look directly at it. I buried my phone in my pocket and stared at the soccer pitch.

If I was accepted nowhere, I supposed I could go live with my mum. But she was seminomadic, bouncing from tourist visa to tourist visa, always circling Edinburgh but never putting roots down full-time. And besides, what sort of life would I have? Trailing her around the world, wondering if my dad considered it a betrayal? I thought of him telling me that the island picked people they believed could do bigger things, and I wondered if escaping counted as a bigger thing even if you weren’t escaping to anything.

Soren stole the ball from someone on the other team just as they were lining up for a shot to tie the game. When the referee blew the final whistle moments later, all our classmates started cheering. Soren fought his way through hands clapping him on the shoulder, and he picked me up and kissed me in front of everyone. His lips tasted salty, like sweat. Everyone cheered even louder then, and when he started to pull away, I kissed him harder.

* * *

Kitty must’ve known the Stanford decision was coming the next day because she suggested the five of us hike up the highest point in Stenland to keep me from checking my phone every four seconds. She spent the whole time complaining, but her complaints were charming and specific: “There’s a very sharp rock in my shoe whom I’ve decided to name Edgar, and though he is small, he is mighty, like the proletariat to the oligarch that is my foot.”

It was called Fell Mountain; Soren claimed no relation, but there had probably, at some point, been one. The land sloped down on either side of us, scraggly hills of green and gold and red. We hiked along a ridge of crumbling rocks until we reached the summit, and from there we could see the ocean in three directions. There was a cairn at the top, taller than Kitty but not as tall as Linnea. About my height. Soren put another flat stone on the tower, and it wobbled but didn’t fall. Henrik opened his backpack and started distributing oatcakes he’d bought at Hedda’s, then whiskey he’d stolen from his mother.

“You can see Ramna Skaill from up here,” Linnea said, pointing.

We all followed her finger. The tower looked so innocent in the soft spring light—a historical artifact from an age already gone by. The waves against the shore were bright and gentle. I could see, scattered around the perimeter of the island, some of the statues left like sentinels, a warning. But from up here, they could have been anything. Just craggy bits of stone on this craggy bit of island.

“If we ever become skelds,” Linnea said, “you two would be keepers, right?”

“Of course,” Henrik said, but at the same time, and more loudly, Kitty said, “Well, don’t fucking jinx us.”

“I was just wondering,” Linnea said.

“Soren and Lukas and I talked about it ages ago,” Henrik said, as casually as if he were discussing what he’d eaten for breakfast. It was the first time it had ever occurred to me that Henrik and Soren might feel the weight of the island’s certainty—that Kitty, Linnea, and I would become skelds—the same way we did. “We made a pact.”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Because we’re not going to become skelds.”

At the edge of the ridge, the ground fell away. We were as high as the misty clouds rolling off the sea. My cheeks felt damp with fog and sweat. I yelled, and my voice ricocheted around the hills and across the waves.

Kitty made a frustrated noise and pressed a hand to her ear. “Warn a person before you do that.”

Henrik scrambled to his feet to stand next to me and started shouting, “Echo! Echo! Echo!”

When I felt Soren behind me, I put my hand out automatically. The backs of our fingers touched. He didn’t shout anything; he just gazed out at the rocks rolling into grass rolling into sea with this perfect, peaceful expression. He shut his eyes, just for a second, and then tilted his head to the sky. When he exhaled, I could see the mist of his breath. Then he looked at me, and the expression didn’t change. Like he cared for the island the way he cared for me. Or like he cared for me the way he cared for the island.

I had gotten so good at not thinking about leaving him.

* * *

We all went back to Soren’s house for dinner since he lived the closest to the trailhead.

“It is the only useful thing you live near,” Kitty said in the car. “And it’s not, if I’m being honest, that useful.”

“Not true,” Soren said. “I also live near Stenland’s only puffin sanctuary.”

“Well, thank god for that,” Kitty said.

Elin was out of town for the weekend visiting a cousin in Tórshavn, but Lukas was there when we got back to the house, sprawled on the couch with his phone in front of his face.

A few weeks before, I’d finally decided we’d known each other long enough that I could ask him to explain the nails in my tires. We’d been alone in the kitchen at the time. He’d been making himself pre-dinner and had his back turned when I’d asked.

“Because I wanted Soren to make a move, and he was never fucking going to, was he?”

I’d blinked. “I always assumed it was because you hated me.”

“Hated you?”

“Because of my mum.”

Lukas had gone quiet. Finally: “Maybe that too.”

“It’s okay if you did. Or do. Only fair.”

I’d watched the tension in his back, the defensive curl of his shoulders. “Can you imagine what it’s like? To have him as a brother? He just does everything he’s supposed to and doesn’t complain. He has no idea how it feels to be angry all the time.” A pause. “I owe him so much.” Another pause. “Sorry about the tires.”

I’d reached out, taken his hand, and squeezed it. He still had not turned to face me. Then he’d squeezed my hand back and walked away, and we never talked about it again.

After the hike, when we got back to the house, Lukas said, “Oh, good. I was getting hungry.”

“You could’ve made dinner,” Kitty said.

“I don’t come into your home and judge you,” he said.

“You absolutely do. When I was fourteen, you said my room was too pink.”

“It was very pink,” I told her.

“That’s unfeminist.”

Kitty, Linnea, and Henrik joined Lukas on and around the couch and put on a film about superheroes that looked remarkably like the other films about superheroes. I sat on the counter, swinging my legs while Soren chopped things. Over the past few months, Elin had decided she was going to become a baker, so she’d left Soren with mounds of pizza dough. It all struck me as very fancy and gourmet, having homemade pizza, aside from the fact that we would be topping it with sheep-milk cheese. Since beginning to date Soren, I had eaten my body weight in sheep-milk cheese.

“You have flour on your nose,” I told him.

“Mmm?” he said.

I reached out a hand to brush it off. He stood between my legs and stared at me like making pizza was not currently his top priority.

“You look good cooking,” I told him.

“You just think that because you hate cooking.”

“Possibly,” I said.

Quietly enough that no one should’ve been able to hear over the explosions happening in the film, he said, “You looked good with my name on your back.”

A rush of heat. How scary, how stupid to joke about exchanging names, to tease that I would take his. But there it was: Tess Fell . I’d always liked his name. Fell, Fell, even though I’d never wanted to marry my name away. I should’ve made a face and told him so, but instead I squeezed my knees together lightly, pressing them on either side of his hips. “Give me more free shirts, and I’ll wear your name more often.”

“I didn’t realize I was giving you my jersey permanently.”

“You were.”

His lips against my hair. “Okay.”

From the couch, Kitty yelled, “Keep it in your pants, Eriksson!”

I flipped her off, and Soren kissed me and went back to cutting things.

When Soren put the pizzas in the oven, I went to the bathroom with the gentle lighting and the red walls. I was wondering who was planning on spending the night here. Usually when I slept over, Soren would retreat to the couch in the living room once we started to get sleepy. I’d brought over a compact mirror, which now lived on his bedside table, and every morning, I woke up and checked my reflection in it. If everyone stayed, I supposed Henrik and Soren could share the living room and Kitty or Linnea could take Elin’s bed. Maybe that wasn’t smart, though; maybe there wasn’t quite enough space for everyone to wake up and find a mirror before they saw anyone. I looked at Soren’s toothbrush in the cup on the sink and thought about his name on my back.

I reached for my phone to tell my dad I wouldn’t be back until the next day.

The email said: , congratulati—

I looked at my reflection. The person looking back at me was confused.

I looked at my phone again. Opened the email.

It said: , congratulations! It is with great pleasure that the Admission Committee invites you to join the Stanford University class of 2018.

It went on. I didn’t read it. I put my phone back in my pocket and walked out of the bathroom. Soren was leaning against the wall of the kitchen watching someone on the TV jump off a building of improbable height. He lifted an arm for me to step under without really looking at me, and I slid against his chest and stared at the TV.

!

“Are you cold?” he asked.

“No.”

“You’re shaking.”

I was. !!!

“I’ll get a sweater.” I left again. Went back to his bedroom and sat on the floor in front of his bookshelves. This time, I scrolled through the whole email, but I still didn’t read it. I took a screenshot and sent it to both of my parents—my mum, then my dad—wondering if it was perhaps a rejection that my brain was too delusional to read correctly. After I did it, I felt bad about sending it to my mum first.

Both of them called. I didn’t pick up. Both of them texted.

Mum: TESS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dad: I am literally crying right now :) :) :)

I lay down on Soren’s floor and pressed my hands into my eyes. There was a knock at the door, and it was Kitty and Linnea, looking concerned.

“Are you okay?” Linnea said. “You don’t look quite okay.”

“I knew it,” Kitty said. “She’s pregnant.”

“That’s not funny,” Linnea said.

“Sure it is! I’d be an aunt. Or a…cousin-aunt? Whatever.”

I held the phone out to them. Kitty took it and started swearing enthusiastically.

A minute later, probably on account of the fact that Linnea had shrieked, Henrik and Soren and even Lukas came thundering up the stairs.

“Why are you crying?” Henrik asked Linnea, and she insisted they were happy tears.

Soren looked at me with his eyebrows knitting together, and Kitty handed him the phone. I watched him read with the feeling that I was stepping out of a plane and not sure whether I was wearing a parachute. He frowned in concentration and scrolled slowly, reading all the words I had not yet been able to read. When he finally finished, he handed Kitty back the phone and sat down on the floor and wrapped his arms around me. Linnea was explaining to Henrik and Lukas; Lukas was shouting gleeful things about American football at Kitty.

Soren kissed me slowly, my shoulder and my temple, and we were rocking slightly on the floor with his arms around me and all the noise swirling above us. I told myself I didn’t need him to say anything, but it wasn’t true. When the oven timer rang, he helped me to my feet and kissed me again, on the mouth this time, and led me by the hand down the stairs.

But he never did. Say anything.