MARIAH’S THEORY

Mariah knows how the world works.

Her first lesson came when she was 3 years old, nestled beside her grandma against the glow of a campfire. She had been throwing paper plates and plastic utensils into the flames all night long, excited by its burn. Everyone complained about the smell, but she and grandma would just smile. It was a worthy sacrifice.

By nightfall, Mariah and her grandma were the only ones left around the fire. With nothing left to burn, the pair stared into the lone log, its body thinning into a whisper beneath the pestering flames.

“This was a nice night,” her grandma said. “I had a good time.”

They went to bed happy, retiring into their respective trailers.

When her grandma didn’t emerge from her trailer, and sirens stomped through the morning serenity of the campground, Mariah got her first hint of the world’s inner workings.

Balance.

It began to rear its head everywhere. Her rich friends found themselves with divorced parents. Her poor friends were buoyed by boyfriends and invitations to every slumber party. Diabetes would strike the A-grade students into disarray. And Mariah, afraid of suffering a similar fate as her grandmother, rode the middle. Never too happy, never too sad.

Her grades were alright. Her friends were okay. At home, she would eat three meals a day, but never dessert.

“How was your day?” her parents would ask.

“Fine,” she would reply, always.

Through middle school, as these habits congealed into an honest belief system, Mariah tried to warn others of the danger that accompanied joy. They’d listen, fearful and a bit sad. One time, a teacher overheard her.

“Mariah?” he asked. “Can you stay after class?”

Mr. Colangelo explained that, though she had every right to grieve her grandma, it wasn’t right to scare other kids.

“I’m not scaring them. I’m telling them what she taught me.”

Mr. Colangelo bit his tongue, realizing this was bigger than what he could handle. After half-heartedly surrendering the conversation, he called Mariah’s parents.

She was sat down and yelled at. “Grandma wouldn’t want you scaring people!” Mariah cried, as children do. Feeling bad, her parents took her to ice cream that night, proving Mariah’s theory right once again.

High school saw Mariah confidently toeing the line. Good dates were followed by bad tests. A fun pep rally was met with a twisted ankle in P.E. Her parents’ divorce brought her a new car.

As her high school career wound down, she received unexpected and unwelcome news of her full-ride scholarship to Stanford. A more ignorant person would have celebrated. Instead, Mariah stuck herself with sleepless nights, considering the awful outcomes that such a sudden boon would create.

Over the next few weeks, as nothing explicitly bad happened, the dread in Mariah’s stomach grew more stale and violent. “It’s going to happen,” Mariah would quiver each night, sometimes to her mom, sometimes to herself. “We’re not supposed to just get things.”

“Sometimes we do,” her mom would say, simple and annoyed. “Sometimes we do.”

Mariah began to believe that, by avoiding misfortune for so long, she had become the harbinger of others’ tragedies. She developed a ravenous appetite for news, discovering all the awful parts of the world. Beheaded babies. Families drowning on vacation. Churches bombed. Disgust and guilt churned her stomach daily.

College began well, and Mariah hated it. Worse was the fact that, by leaving for college, her parents had rekindled their marriage.

“You can’t do this!” she cried upon hearing the news. “Think of everyone else!”

“What do you mean?” asked her dad. She explained her theory to them as they continued to sip wine across from the fireplace. He responded simply: “That’s not fair.”

“It is fair. That’s the whole point.” Mariah slumped into the lounge chair, her body stiff with rage. “You fall in love, you make my life better, and someone’s going to get it worse.”

Her dad smiled. “Your life is better?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t make this about me.”

“Isn’t it all about you?”

“No. It’s about… everyone. You and him and me and…” she went on, listing off the tragedies that she had researched in just that week.

Her dad stopped her. “You think us getting back together is going to lead to a famine on the other side of the world?”

Later that week, things finally turned around for Mariah. Her car battery died, forcing her to miss a test. That missed test, coupled with repeated absences, rolled into her failing out of her biology major. As failures blossomed around her, the pressure upon her chest eased up. Things were balancing out.

Her parents got remarried. In response, she dropped out of college and moved back home. Then, refusing the risk of comfort, she moved out into her own cramped apartment and started working in fast food as a way to pay her bills.

Her parents thought she had gone insane.

“What good are you doing?!” her mother screamed upon visiting the apartment, located just two blocks from their home. “Are you helping anyone with this?”

“I’m helping someone,” Mariah touted. “Someone, somewhere, is benefitting from this.”

“I’m not. I’m horrified.” Her mother collapsed into the already-stained couch, smelling of dandruff and rotten banana. “Horrified.”

And then, Mariah watched her mother cry.

“Mom,” she started, feeling her own chest crumpling. “Please…”

“I just don’t know what we did…” she sputtered. “I don’t know…”

“You didn’t do anything.” Mariah knelt into the carpet, her eyes even with her mom. “It’s just the way things are.”

Her mom stopped for a moment, staring into Mariah’s eyes. “What are you afraid of?”

“I’m not afraid,” Mariah sputtered. “That’s the whole point.”

Too tired to argue, her mom just shook her head and started cleaning. This frustrated Mariah further. “If I was afraid, why did I leave school? That was scary, right?”

Her mom shook the couch cushion, letting a cloud of Cheeto dust scatter through the room.

“What about moving here? This isn’t the safe option, right?”

Her mom slid past her and searched the cluttered kitchen cabinets for more useful cleaning supplies.

“I’m doing something good here. Okay? If I get too happy, someone gets hurt. I need to relegate it. Balance it. My last path was unsustainable. It was hurting people.”

Sinking to the floor, her mom scrubbed, struggling to chip away the spilt nail polish from the laminate floor.

Mariah continued. “I’m not hurting anyone here, okay? I’m not…”

She noticed her mother’s face, creased, wincing, holding back another barrage of tears. She held herself up, strong as she could on one weathered hand. The other hand, a raw and rusted claw wrapped around the sponge, pushed against the floor.

Mariah stopped talking, dropped next to her mother, and took the sponge.

“I can do it,” she sighed. “You can rest.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon cleaning the apartment. Afterwards, they watched a movie. Mariah’s mother spent the night, asleep on the now-fresh couch. She woke up to the smell of burnt coffee, made by her daughter.

She smiled at the bitter taste. “Mariah,” she sighed. “This is the first good morning I’ve had with you in a while.”