“Fuck what Heather wants. This is important.”
He gives me a skeptical look, as if he’s not sure I can handle any of it, any of my life right now. But then he turns the car around and heads toward the child care center.
I’m still crying at intervals. I can’t help it, can’t stop myself. My best friend, she fucking tried to kill me; she was that messed up. I’m trying not to fall apart in the front seat of Tristan’s car. Trying not to bash my head into the glove box again and again and again like I did with the steering wheel yesterday at the lake.
My entire body feels cold. Ice has stabbed through my skin, sunk into my bloodstream. It’s spread throughout my body. God, I’m freezing, freezing, freezing.
Tristan pulls up outside the center. Kills the engine. “What are you going to do?”
“What I should have done ages ago,” I say.
What I should have done for Amy when I realized that something was up with her.
I can do this, I tell myself. I can do what I’m going to do now, and I can know that it is the right thing. I can hope that, maybe, it will make a difference.
It’s the first time in years that I’ve bothered to wear a seatbelt. I unbuckle it and open the door.
“Do you want me to come with you?” Tristan asks. He’s looking at me, and I love that he’s looking at me. That he can still look at me as if he cares when I can see in the side mirror that my hair’s a bird’s nest and my mouth’s become an ugly, ugly line of pain.
“No,” I say. “I’ll be fine on my own.”
And for the first time in my life, I think it might be true.
I find Heather sitting on the bench in the corner of the courtyard. The green paint goes well with her pink-and-peach floral blouse. Some kids are curled up at the end of the slide, waiting for their friend at the top to come down and barrel into them.
“Hey,” I say when I’m standing in front of Heather. “What are you going to do about Casey?”
“What are you doing here? I thought I told you to get out. I meant to never come back.”
“Yeah, I don’t care,” I say. I’m too cold to care right now. I dig my fingers into the pockets of my jeans, duck my head, and glance at her. She must have noticed how messed up I look, because she’s got this curious look on her face and she isn’t yelling at me or attacking me.
It doesn’t matter. I’m just here to do what I have to.
“What are you going to do about Casey?” I ask her again.
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s wrong with her.”
“What’s wrong?”
I rub a hand over my forehead. “I don’t know. Something. Her mother smokes cigarettes when Casey’s around and doesn’t give a damn. And Casey likes to say the word fuck way too much—”
“Bet you taught her that...”
I ignore her shitty comment. “And she’s obsessed with her future, and she thinks she’s a green-shaped blob, and she doesn’t believe in happy endings. She’s a ten-year-old nihilist, Heather, and you have to do something about that.”
“She’s entitled to view the world the way she wants,” Heather says. She watches the kids on the slide as if they’re the most fascinating things in the world. And maybe they are. Maybe humans, especially children, really are the most fascinating things in the world, because they’re cruel and innocent and beautiful and terrible all at once.
And then they grow up into people like me and Amy, and they’re just terrible and cruel. And I have to keep speaking, have to convince Heather, because I don’t want Casey to lose the parts of her that are innocent and beautiful.
“Sure,” I say. “For sure, she’s allowed to have her own views. I’m not asking you to teach her to think she’ll get a happy ending. I’m asking you to do something to show her that a world without happy endings is still worth it. That being is worth it.”
“Are you high?” She’s standing up now.
“No. I’m not high.”
Why is it that when anyone says anything that matters, people assume drugs are part of the equation? I’m brave enough to say stupid philosophical shit without being drunk or high.
“Look, you have to leave—”
“Have you heard that girl laugh?” She has the laugh of a dead girl. The laugh of a dead girl who tried to kill me. A dead girl whom I’m pretty sure I hate right now. “Have you looked at her eyes? You must have noticed that she cries every day? Seriously, I would go to her school with this, but I don’t know where it is; and I would go to her mom with this, but to be honest, she freaks me out.” I pause, take a deep breath. “So I’m coming to you, because you’re trained to deal with kids, and you can get her help.”
Heather stares at me. Readjusts her floral blouse. “Well—”
“Just get her help,” I say. And I’m so glad, as I walk away from her, that I imitated my mom’s meeting-adjourned voice perfectly.
When I get back into the car, I tell Tristan, “Now take me home.”
And he says, “What did you do?”
“Stopped Casey from turning into Amy, hopefully.” I crash my head back into the headrest and close my eyes.
“So you still love her then?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, I’ll forgive her. Just not now.”
I think I’ll forgive her, anyway.
Please, god, let me forgive her. Let me forgive her tomorrow, because I can’t live with this storm of sadness and anger brewing inside my body. I don’t want to remember Amy this way.
Chapter Thirty-Three
TOMORROW TURNS INTO the next day, which turns into next week, which turns into next month.
But I do forgive Amy gradually. Bit by bit. With all my memory snapped into place, it’s impossible not to remember everything before that cold night. Impossible not to remember more than the fact that she tried to pull me off a roof.
The day she photocopied her homework for me to copy.
The day she taught me how to pick a lock ’cause I was always forgetting my locker key.
The day she spent two hours braiding my hair so that I’d look “pretty” for some guy I’ve forgotten.
The day she said, seriously, with a poker face and tears in her eyes, “I’m bulimic.”
That was why Mark liked her better when she was fat. That was what he was trying to say: Amy, we love you either way. Amy, you don’t have to slowly kill yourself, because we love you.
My response to Amy’s news? I put my arms around her and squeezed hard, as if that would prevent her from slowly disappearing. I nodded into her shoulder and said, “I’ve noticed.” Because it’s hard not to when your best friend begins to turn into a wraith.
I remember all the times I let Amy down. The time I was supposed to wait for her at the movies when we were twelve, and I got impatient because she was five minutes late. I left without her. I left my friend behind, practically stood her up.
The time I spilled coffee all over her favorite book, and she just laughed it off. And of course, that time in ninth grade when I waged war with Amy over some stupid boy we both liked. She got together with Mark later that month, and it all blew over.
The memories flit into my mind, each one a little piece of sunlight pushing away the overwhelming black hate. Piece by piece by piece it disappears.
Tristan helps, too, by being his softly logical self.
He drives me home now. We’re going out or something—I’m not really sure what to call it. It’s not as if we can tell people “See, we enjoy saving each other.” And Mark puts up with it, even though sometimes I can see from the way he looks at my Explosive Boy that he’d rather punch him in the gut than on the shoulder. That he’d rather say “Fuck you” than “Hey, man.”
Mark has a hard time getting over things. Kinda like me.
It happens one morning as I’m about to head to school.
I feel at peace with Amy.
Mom’s sitting on the couch, dressed in a blue suit, puzzling over a crossword in
the newspaper. When she hears my feet creaking over the wooden floors, she looks up and smiles. “You look happy this morning,” she says, tilting her head to one side. “It’s a good look for you, honey.”
Mom has surprised me by not giving up on me after that night when I told her to leave me alone. She has continued to try and worm her way into my life. She still doesn’t feel like a mother to me—we’re not close, but we manage to exchange words beyond hellos and good-byes these days without fighting. She’s been kind enough to not make me see Roger, despite my departure from the child care center.
I’ve told her that only I can put myself back together. She doesn’t believe me, but she’s giving me a trial period. No truanting, no bruises, no blood. But if I slip up—or rather, fall down—it’s off to Roger with me.
“Do you need a lift?”
“No, it’s okay. Tristan’s picking me up,” I say.
She purses her lips, because she doesn’t exactly approve of Tristan. But she doesn’t say anything, just takes a sip of her orange juice. She’s giving me my space these days, not trying to barge her way in after ignoring me for years.
“Hey, Mom,” I say to the back of her head as I walk behind the couches to the foyer. “Thanks, you know, for making an effort with me lately.”
She’s trying harder than Dad, at the very least. He’s taken up a job in a different state. It’s been weeks since I’ve spoken to him, because to be honest, it’s too painful to hear the disappointment in his voice. The disappointment that, even from a state away, seems so endless. I don’t know if he’s disappointed in me or Mom or himself. Maybe all three. I guess I understand in some ways. How do you keep on going when you’ve watched so many of your dreams die?
Mom turns to face me. “I’m so glad to hear you say that,” she says. To someone who didn’t know her, her voice would still sound glossy, but I can tell that it’s lost a layer of its usual polish. “Have a nice day.”
“You, too.”
And then I’m out the front door.
I get into Tristan’s car, and the smell of gasoline and gunpowder envelopes me. Every time I get into this car, I remember the day I found out what Amy did. I remember banging my head against Tristan’s steering wheel, honking the horn, and willing my thoughts to stop, stop, stop.
And every day when I’ve remembered this, there’s this pinch of resentment in my chest. How could Amy do that to me?
Today, all I can think is that our friendship was always flawed. Our friendship was weathered wood at the beach, salt worming its way into the cracks. Everything eroding. It’s not like I didn’t know that before. And it’s not like she wasn’t drunk off her ass.
She didn’t know what she was doing. She just loved me like anything—and she didn’t want to be alone.
I will never forgive her for what she did to herself. But I will forgive her for what she did to me.
“I forgive her.”
“Who?” Tristan sounds confused.
“Amy.”
“Oh.” He eases his foot onto the accelerator and pulls out of my driveway.
Silence. Beneath us, wheels slice across the road. Above us, birds wheel across the sky. At the first traffic light, Tristan asks, “Do you think Ethan forgives me?”
I smile and nod. “He may even be thankful. It was his choice, Tristan, and it seems like he had good reason. He was going, anyway; he just picked his own terms is all.”
Tristan nods, but his eyes disappear into the landscape, into the trees in the distance that look like purple bruises against the mist-white sky. Sometimes I sit in on the wakes he holds for Ethan. We just sit in Tristan’s room, arms around each other, watching smoke curl away from the incense sticks that his dead brother used to love.
Sometimes Tristan can’t hold back his tears, and the words flow out of him because he’s overflowing and can’t keep them in. Sometimes he’ll whisper, “My fault.”
Deep down, I think he knows it isn’t his fault. But he needs to think it is, because it’s easier to blame himself than it is to blame his brother. Because admitting he’s not at fault would mean admitting that his brother shouldn’t have put him in that position in the first place.
It’s hard to admit you’re guiltless sometimes, because it also means you’re not at all in control. I would know. Sometimes I still try to persuade myself that I killed Amy. I pushed her; she didn’t pull me. It was my fault. If only I hadn’t—
But there are so many if onlys, and it never changes reality.
I want to do something for Amy. I want to say goodbye to her.
After all, we weren’t invited to the funeral. I wonder what would happen if the real story ever got out, if Mark played that video he still has.
No one’s watched the video yet except Mark, who saw the beginning and stopped it. And I realize that it’s the perfect way to say good-bye to Amy.
If we bury it, then we can say good-bye.
“I want to bury Amy,” I whisper, to no one in particular.
Tristan catches my words, of course. He’s too attentive sometimes, too interested in helping others for his own selfish reasons. A part of me loves him for it, but a larger part of me just wants to hit him until he realizes that this doesn’t have to be his penance.
An even larger part of me knows it won’t make a difference. Nothing will change the way he thinks.
“She’s already buried.”
“Thanks for that, Captain Obvious.”
He pulls into the school parking lot and slides into a spot next to Cherry Bomb. Last week Mark decided he was going to start living life by screwing up everyone’s expectations of him. He painted a frangipani on the side of his car like he’s always wanted to do.
It’s dumb, but a balloon of pride swelled up in my chest when he did it.
Tristan and I sit in the car, neither of us speaking. Our relationship is built around comfortable silences that neither of us feels a need to fill. After a while the right words come to me, so I say them. “I know she’s already been buried, but I don’t really think her spirit was in her body. We still have it, you know? It’s in that dartboard, and it’s in those crazy posters, and it’s in that video Mark has.”
Tristan nods, because he gets it. I love that he gets it. That he gets it—me—makes me kind of crazy about him.
“I’m ready to say good-bye,” I tell him as his arms fold around me and he holds me so tight I think I’m going to break. “I want to say good-bye.”
After school we head to the barn. Mark, Petal, Tristan, and I. We find the space on the floor that is the least covered in bird shit and push away the hay with our feet.
“Now what?” Petal asks.
“Now we get dirty,” Mark says.
Like the nature boy he is, he drops to the ground and sinks his fingers into the earth. Damp and rich, it’s easily moved beneath his fingers.
“Are you three going to help, or am I going to have to throw dirt at you?” He smiles sweetly up at us. Mark’s words shoot straight these days. Always. The sideways words and sideways smiles floated away that day at the lake.
I drop to my knees, and Petal and Tristan follow. We all sink our fingers into the dirt. It goes on for a while, us digging through the sticky earth in the barn as if we’re little kids playing in a sandpit.
Slide in fingers. Grab a bunch of soil. Flick it into growing pile.
Rinse. Repeat.
But there’s no real rinsing; and by the time we’re done, the dirt has wandered up my fingers and over my forearms. Black smudges cover us as we prepare to bury Amy.
“Deep enough?” Petal asks. “Wide enough?”
“It’s grave-sized,” I return. “A bit shallower, but I think that’s okay.”
I stand up, brush some of the dirt away by swiping it on my jeans. It clings to my shoes, my socks. When I walk, my feet smear dirt through the yellow hay.
Permanent stains.
Amy’s death will be a permanent stain on my life. It’s not going away. But go
ddammit, I’m going to learn to live with, and love, this stain. This will help me to...I don’t know what. Be a better person? That’s an untrue cliché. It will help me to find myself. This will—has already—drawn out elements of me that I didn’t even know existed.
Apparently, I’m not half as bitchy as I thought.
“Ella?” Tristan shakes my shoulder. “You look a little spacey. Bad memories?” His lips tilt up at the edges.
Oh, right. We’re standing in front of Amy’s dartboard. Countless nights spent on her bed during the tenth grade when she first started smoking. I’d cough like anything to let her know I thought the habit was disgusting and then we’d throw darts at this board.
Good times.
The bad memories are more recent.
Pick Me Ups. Tristan, face full of fear and me yelling at him to just throw the fucking dart at me.
“Right,” I say. “It’s time to bury the memories.”
Bad and good.
He helps me take down the dartboard and carry it over to the grave. Mark and Petal are standing by. Petal has the dress she borrowed from Amy the night of my seventeenth-birthday party and never got to give back. Mark has the records, wrapped up in crazy life-sized posters of Freddie Mercury and Cherie Currie.
He swallows, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down. “Should someone say something or something?”
“Or something,” I say. I suck in a deep breath, smell the lovely bird shit stench that pervades the barn. There’s something beautiful about how imperfect this is. “Let’s watch the video.”
Mark’s brought his camera, and the memory card’s in this time. We’re all jostling for a glimpse of the tiny screen. I slide my fingers through Tristan’s as Mark fiddles with his camera, trying to get the video to play.
Our hands fit perfectly and I draw comfort from his warmth, and Mark’s and Petal’s.
And then the video is on, and I get lost inside the fragmented images that roll across the screen.
Dark night. Silver stars.
Our bodies, heads cut off. The camera spins, topples onto the roof and then the world tilts on its axis. Blurry and terrifying and unknowable.
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