This is Not the End

by Chandler Baker

  When the barista comes back with a sloshing mug and a small cup, both with saucers underneath, he pushes Ringo’s credit card back toward him. “First-timers and their enablers on the house,” he says. Then to me, “We run on the addiction model. When you need your next hit, you’ll know where to find me.” He slaps the towel over the countertop and then heads off to tidy up around the espresso machine.

  “This way.” Ringo jerks his head and we both try to balance our overfull cups as we snake our way to a corner of the shop I can’t help but notice is already occupied.

  A hunched-over girl with purple cat’s-eye glasses and a curly black ponytail glances up from her keyboard. “Hey, Ringo, didn’t expect you here so early today.”

  “Emergency evacuation,” he says, taking a sip of his espresso, then jerking away when it turns out to be too hot.

  “Lake, this is my friend Margaret Zee. Margaret, this is Lake.”

  “Howdy,” she says, continuing to type at an alarming rate of speed.

  “Margaret codes software a few days a week to earn extra cash,” he explains. “Then there’s our proverbial old married couple, Vance and Kai—” Two reedy boys with skin tones on the opposite ends of the spectrum look up and give a short wave and a smile. They are leaning into a single pair of headphones that is plugged into a clear plastic case with a miniature vinyl record spinning inside. “Simone, she works here but is on break; and Duke, as in Ellington, but he’ll answer to his real name too, which is Daljeet.” I take in the list of people rapid-fire. Simone’s blunt-cut bangs frame an angular face where it’s peeking out from a black-and-white magazine featuring a photograph of Frank Sinatra on the cover. And finally: “I’m sorry, who’s Duke Ellington?” I ask.

  “Duke’s that guy.” Ringo points over to a tubby Indian boy wearing a black T-shirt with a smiley face on it. “Duke Ellington is a famous jazz musician. No relation unless you count their fantastic taste in music.”

  “Right,” I say, rocking back on my heels. “Quite a crew you’ve assembled.” I feel a flush of self-consciousness, realizing how insulated and how homogenous and white St. Theresa’s—the world I’ve been committed to since eighth grade—is.

  And then there’s the fact that, of course, I’ve assumed Ringo would be a loner. Why, because of a stupid birthmark on his face? God, I really am a jerk.

  “Can we crash here?” Ringo asks Margaret while at the same time pushing a large stack of textbooks from one of the chairs at her table.

  “How do you two know each other?” I ask Ringo, but it’s Margaret who answers.

  “I used to be an assistant for Professor Littlefield. I sort of adopted Ringo after that.”

  “Topic of conversation,” Ringo begins to Margaret, “is how much Lake’s life blows.”

  “I’m intrigued,” she says. “Ceiling fan, breeze, or gale force?”

  Ringo looks to me for an answer. “Hurricane,” I say. “Category five.”

  She frowns, impressed. For the first time, she stops typing, leans in on her elbows, and waits for me to continue.

  I chew the inside of my cheek, unsure that I want to spill my guts to Margaret. But Ringo leans back in his chair and takes a long sip from his cup. “Go on, Margaret can be trusted.”

  So I do. I catch Margaret up on the car accident, then tell them both about the ambush by Will’s parents, and end with the destruction of the only known note-slash-clue left over from my dead boyfriend, which was destroyed by my older brother. In the process I learn that double-double means double sugar, double cream, and actually start to like the house-blend coffee that Ringo ordered me and the pleasant buzz of energy that seems to help me think more clearly. The only things I don’t tell them are about Matt’s paralysis and my promise to him and, most importantly, about how I’ve already broken it.

  “So,” I finish, “I have to resurrect one of them and people at my school are taking bets and the problem is I have no idea what I’m going to do or how I’m going to figure out where Will was trying to send me.”

  Margaret finishes listening to my story. She pulls her cheeks in taut and lets out a long low breath. “That…sucks.” She adjusts the glasses on her nose. “Like…an octopus tentacle…or…” She scratches her temple.

  “A space vortex,” Ringo says.

  “Exactly.” Margaret resumes typing—bang, bang, bang against the keyboard. “Resurrections are…” She glances up from the screen. “Have you told her?”

  “Told me what?” I pivot toward Ringo.

  “Nothing,” he says, and shoots Margaret a dirty look, which she doesn’t catch since she’s already returned her attention to the glowing blue screen in front of her. “We’re talking about you, your problems,” Ringo continues. “That’s enough ground to cover.” I narrow my eyes, but he presses on. “So draw straws,” he says.

  “Be serious.”

  “I am.”

  I glare at him.

  “Fine,” he says.

  Kai moves between tables and drops a sheathed record in front of Ringo, who says a quick thank you before Kai returns to his headphones.

  “You need a new way in,” Ringo continues. “If this search for the Holy Grail that your boyfriend has laid out for you is the only way you feel you can make a decision, then you have to get to the end of it. Just think—what’s going to lead you there?”

  I twist my fingers in my lap. “Yeah, you’re right. I guess. I don’t know.” Matt said he wanted something in return that wasn’t my resurrection, but I don’t know what it is that he’s asking for. Ringo seems to be telling me to open Pandora’s box and find out, but I’m not sure I want to. I sigh. “There’s another thing. I found this anonymous post on our school’s ChatterJaw account. It said something I didn’t understand about how I wasn’t going to resurrect Will because there was trouble in paradise.”

  “Were you in a fight?”

  I’m quickly discovering that Ringo is the easiest person to talk to that I’ve ever met and I try to weigh how much I should watch my tongue before saying, “No. Of course not.” Will and I did bicker with each other plenty, usually about stupid things, like when he talked too loud in movie theaters or how he always had to make small talk with strangers. Penny was always our tiebreaker. In a few quiet Penny sentences, she could tell us which one of us was right without making either of us feel wrong. “But…it’s bothering me. Like why does someone think that they know Will’s and my relationship better than I do?”

  “So ask the person who posted it,” Ringo says.

  “It’s anonymous.”

  The clack-clack from Margaret’s keyboard pauses. “I’m offended,” she says. “You are sitting in front of the wizard.”

  “Gandalf, Dumbledore…” Ringo lists them.

  “Merlin,” she says.

  “You can find out who posted it?” I ask. “Anyone?”

  She twists her mouth and pinches one shoulder to her ear. “Almost anyone. It has to be tied to a traceable e-mail address that the user has logged in with. So, like, there are limitations. If someone didn’t use their normal account, used an alternate IP address, maybe if they went private, but otherwise, yeah. Show me the post.”

  And so I do.

  “Need another one while we wait?” Ringo points to my empty mug.

  I give him a thumbs-up, then lean over to him and say softly, “I like your friends.” I scan the crowded corner. I’m not even sure what half of them are doing, but I’ve never been someone with a large group of friends. Obviously, since my entire social crowd has been wiped out in a single car wreck. It’s lively and the relationships seem more fluid and less intense than I’m used to.

  Ringo winks and it wrinkles the uneven skin around his eye. “Be right back.” He raps the table twice with his knuckles and disappears toward the front counter.

  Despite what I had just said, my chest instantly tightens as I look around at the group of faces with whom I know I don’t fit in. The swell of being on the outside, of not belonging, gro
ws inside me, like yeast rising up my throat and closing off my airways. The terrible part of it is that I had thought I was past this. I believed that Penny and Will would always be around to insulate me from this very feeling. That it was okay for me to never have to start a conversation with anyone new because Penny didn’t feel awkward anywhere she went, because Penny would be there all day every day. Penny and Will were my miracle when I had no one else, and here I am alone again and I am starting to wonder if anyone will notice if I get up and run.

  But then Kai, who is straddling the back of his wheeled chair, plants his feet on the concrete floor and pushes toward me. He comes zooming over in one athletic arc and catches himself on the side of the table.

  He grins, flashing blindingly white but crooked teeth. “What kind of girl are you?” he asks, rubbing his chin into the hand that’s resting on the seatback. He stares up at me with dark eyes. His black hair is buzzed into a high-top fade with not an inch of fuzz at the line where it reaches his ears.

  I reach for the mug of coffee and take a sip, realizing too late that it’s empty. “That’s, um, a loaded question.”

  He narrows his eyes and looks me over like he’s trying to guess my measurements. “Liz Phair, I bet,” he says. “No, no.” He holds a finger up like an exclamation point. “Wait, something with a little more gumption. And girl power!” He claps. “Letters to Cleo?”

  He waits and it dawns on me that I’m supposed to have a response. “Are those…bands?” I venture, biting my lip. He widens his eyes and gives me a perfunctory nod as in, Hello, of course they are. “I don’t know, I guess I’m more of a Top Forty girl?” I wince, knowing full well that this is the wrong answer.

  Kai clutches his neckline and stretches out an open-palmed hand dramatically. “Jesus take the wheel!” he cries out in a theater voice. “Please, please, please, tell me you have not told our Ringo that. That boy is fragile as my mama’s wedding china and that may break him.”

  “My…musical taste?”

  The confusion and concern must be obvious on my face—Ringo, fragile? And would he really care what I listen to on the radio?—because Vance drags his chair over to us. Vance is just as thin, long-limbed, and bony as Kai, but he has the complexion of a vampire. His dark hair is tucked into a knit cap, and black-rimmed glasses frame an angular face.

  “Excuse him.” Vance nods at Kai. “His mother sent him to theater camp at a tender age and now we have this.”

  Kai makes a show of being offended. “Excuse you. The camp circuit is still buzzing over my debut as the Artful Dodger in Oliver Twist.”

  Vance’s eyebrows lift above the frame of his glasses.

  Simone glances over from behind her thick crop of bangs. “Are these two harassing you?” she asks.

  “I don’t think so,” I say quickly, but Simone gives them each a stern look anyway.

  “A makeover!” Kai bounces on his seat. “That’s what we’ll do.” He must see that I look skeptical because he says, “Oh god no, you’re gorgeous. A musical one. And Christ, just because I’m gay does not mean I can do hair.”

  Vance puts his hand on Kai’s knee, a gesture that seems loving and as though he’s trying to quiet his excitable boyfriend all at once. “He’s trying to indoctrinate you,” Vance says. “You know, we accept her, one of us, gooble-gobble, gooble-gobble, that kind of thing.”

  Kai squinches up his face and then rolls his eyes. “It’s a quote,” Kai explains with a dismissive wave. “He likes old movies too. Not one of his finer qualities.”

  “Not when you fall asleep by seven o’clock during the opening credits,” Vance snaps back.

  “Please, when I’m thirty and have a face like a baby’s bottom, we’ll see who’s complaining.”

  “Still me,” Vance replies. I bounce between them like I’m watching a tennis match. Neither Duke Ellington nor Simone seems to take notice at all, so this kind of back-and-forth must be a regular occurrence.

  I’ve almost forgotten what I am doing here and what I’m waiting for when Kai looks past my shoulder and says, “Give us the song for today,” and I turn back to see Ringo handing me a fresh cup of coffee.

  He smiles down at us. He has a nice smile, wholly untouched by the mismatched hues of his skin, and I think again about what Kai said, about Ringo being fragile, and wonder if it can be true.

  “‘Come Together,’” he says.

  “I…still don’t know that one,” I confess, but Vance is already retrieving his laptop and handing me one of the earpieces he had been sharing with Kai. He scans down a list on the screen, selects the play button, and I try to relax to the new sound of the Beatles, to live just for a moment as if the weight of everyone else’s expectations and my own need for Penny and Will weren’t crushing the air from my lungs.

  I listen until Margaret slides a scrap of paper with a name on it over to me, and the lovely tune that had been drowning out my worries turns off-key in my ears, and the juggling balls of Ringo’s coffee shop friends come crashing down around me.

  In middle school, my best friend was Jenny. A best friend was an important thing to have in middle school. Anyone who was anyone had a best friend and Jenny was a good one to have because she bought us matching bracelets, linked arms with me whenever we walked to class, and called me her BFF in a loud, brassy voice that made people pay attention. But I didn’t really like her. If I spent longer than two hours with Jenny, that loud, brassy voice began to drive me insane. And she was always wanting to choreograph dance numbers to songs that I didn’t like. In fact, given the choice between hanging out with my mom and hanging out with Jenny, I’m embarrassed about how often I’d choose my mom.

  That wasn’t the case with Penny and Will. Penny has this theory that soul mates don’t have to be romantic, and so that’s what the three of us are. Soul mates.

  Three months after I started at St. Theresa’s, we’re huddled together on the floor of Will’s bedroom. My back’s pressed to the closed door and I’m listening to the muffled sound of his parents’ screams.

  “Her name’s Linda,” I report back solemnly.

  “Linda?” Penny wrinkles her nose. She’s seated cross-legged with the backs of her hands resting on her knees, like she’s meditating. Her printed silk pants drape onto the carpet. Her bangles are silent. “Linda,” she repeats. “That name has a very cold energy, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve never really spent much time on the energy of the name Linda,” I whisper. Penny mouths the name Linda again, like she’s still considering it.

  Will drops his head between his knees. “That’s his secretary. God, could he be any more cliché?”

  Penny and I share a worried look.

  “I think this calls for the snack stash,” I say.

  “I’ll man the door,” Penny volunteers.

  I crouch on my knees and pull out a plastic tub from underneath Will’s bed. A limp sock comes out with it and I chuck it back under the dust ruffle. I toss the bags of powdered donuts and potato chips into the center of the space between Will and me and hand the dehydrated kale chips and almonds over to Penny.

  “Thanks,” Penny says in a hushed voice, popping a kale chip into her mouth.

  I watch her munch as I tuck my knees under my chin. Something happened earlier today, something I haven’t told either of my friends. Matt spoke to me. It was right as I was finishing getting dressed to come over to Will’s. Matt seemed nervous. He made small talk, something about a pelican he had watched dive into the ocean and come up with I-can’t-remember-what in its mouth. I was in a hurry, barely listening, trying to get over here because Will, I knew, was in crisis. But Matt had memorized the night’s showtimes at the local movie theater, memorized them so that he could tell them to me, so that we could go see a movie together. And I didn’t pay attention. I realize that now on the floor of Will’s room with the lights turned off. “I’ll be back later tonight, Matt, or tomorrow,” I told him as I scooted around his wheelchair to leave. There’s a spoiled-milk
feeling in my stomach when I linger on the image of Matt’s face too long.

  But as I watch Will, sitting inches from him—the boy who has been there for me and made me feel like I belong somewhere—I think, What else could I have done?

  “I hate him,” Will is saying and I try to tune back in. Because we are a family too. “How can he leave my mom like this?” There’s a crack in Will’s voice. I scoot nearer to him so that our hips are pinched together. I let my head fall against his shoulder. Penny gives me a sad smile. Will sniffles and I push the thoughts of my brother aside for the sake of the people who don’t make me work so hard, or make me feel so terrible, just for the privilege of loving them. That’s what family is. Will’s and my families have just somehow forgotten. “What if it’s, like, hereditary or something?” Will says. “Being a lying cheat. What if it is?” I know that what’s happening is a tragedy in Will’s life and I feel terrible about it, but at the same time I have a deep sense of rightness because he feels he can reveal this side of himself to me and to Penny. It’s my most promising sign that the weeks we’ve had since the bird won’t be just a passing phase. Will and I are here to protect Penny and I’m just now learning that Penny and I are here to protect Will.

  “It’s not,” Penny says softly.

  I feel Will shift underneath me and I move my head from his shoulder. When I do, I see that his deep-brown eyes are trained on me. “Promise me that I’ll never be like him.”

  My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. A shiver races up my spine. I tried with Matt until I could no longer try any harder and when I stopped I found this. “I promise.” My words are almost too soft to hear. And right then, I know that it’s official. I’m falling in love with Will Bryan.

  “Ssssh, sssssh, you guys.” Penny flaps an arm at us. She leans in and presses her ear to the door. She’s holding up a finger, telling us to wait. The finger slowly lowers. “Will, you’re going to have a sister,” she says.

  Margaret figures out the name of the anonymous poster in under an hour. I don’t need to take the scrap of paper on which she’d written it. I’m not going to forget a name I already know: Harrison Vines.