“We want you to take our car,” Tessa jumps in. She’s wringing her hands together, stretching her fingers from the back knuckles out. “And we have about five thousand dollars we could offer you.”
“Tessa…” Simon warns. “We discussed how we were going to go about—”
She presses on. “We can probably get a little bit more. We’re not very what they call, I guess, liquid right now. Our assets, I mean. And I know time is of the essence, with your birthday coming up. But please, Lake. We’ll do whatever we can. You have to know we’re good for it. Just give us time. Name your terms.”
I’m bright red with shame for her. For Tessa of all people to cross the line from crass to flat-out illegal—I never would have expected that in a million years.
I hear a man yell as though it’s coming from a dream—or a nightmare. Will’s dad appears in the center of our clump of bodies. “I can’t believe you people.”
Mourners turn to stare. The rabbi puts down a deviled egg. I count the seconds between heartbeats. One…two…And then Ms. Bryan is there too. Three…four…
“This shiva is for Penny,” Simon says sternly.
Logan doesn’t hear or doesn’t care. “Jolene, they are trying to buy Lake’s resurrection off of her.”
My mom flails her hands. “No one is doing anything. Lake is leaving.” The color has returned to her cheeks. Bright-pink brushstrokes.
“Stop it, Mom,” I say, pulling my arm away from her.
Ms. Bryan spins on Tessa. “How could you lower yourself to that, Tessa? Pay her? Really? We’ll call the police on you. We will tell the bureau about this. Don’t think we won’t.”
Tessa’s eyes bug like she’s been holding her breath too long, and she bursts out, “Then Lake would lose her resurrection altogether! Then where would we all be?”
“I can’t believe you—” Ms. Bryan’s shirttail frees itself from her skirt.
Tessa bares her teeth like a cornered animal. “You think I don’t know about your little dinner with Lake?”
Ms. Bryan wraps her fingers more tightly than I’m sure she means to around my elbow. “Lake, we know your resurrection can’t be bought. You loved Will.”
“Oh, stop your manipulative bullshit, Jolene,” Tessa snaps.
Mom puts herself physically between the two women and holds out her hands. There are no more seconds between heartbeats.
“Stop,” I repeat, but this time to Penny and Will’s moms. “You two are friends. Best friends.”
No one hears me, though. No one is paying attention to me at all.
A sob escapes Tessa and it sounds like a drain coming unclogged and then there’s a lot of water. Everyone’s grief is spilling out onto me and it’s bigger and pushier than my own, and I want to scream and run until there’s space enough for all of my sorrow. These people really think that I don’t want Penny and Will and even my older brother back enough for myself? Do they think I want to be the best, if not only, option to get their kids back? It makes me sick. But no one else from our nice private school would even consider using a resurrection choice on anyone but family or close to it.
In the midst of the shouting, there’s a tug on my wrist. I look over to see a face cut in two and a pair of eyes that look comfortingly lopsided.
I let him drag me from the group of adults, who don’t seem to notice me leaving, but I don’t let him lead me away from the house and from the yelling. Instead, we wrap our fingers in each other’s and I pull him up the stairs. I wish I could pick up the phone and call Penny. I imagine her listening to how fucked up this whole week has been. Matt. Will. Her parents. She’d know what to do.
I am pretty sure that I am crying, though I don’t pull my hands away to check. I only know that my face is hot and that my nose feels stuffy. “What happened to you?” I ask with a hint of accusation.
“I was giving you space,” he says as if in echo of the exact words I was thinking moments earlier. Space for my sorrow, space for me. But I don’t think I want that space from him.
We walk down an upstairs hallway decorated with framed school pictures of Penny in chronological order from kindergarten all the way to eleventh grade. I stare at the blank place on the wall for senior year. And then I sink down to the carpeted floor and moan into my hands. “They don’t think I miss her,” I say. I rock, hugging my legs and pushing my kneecaps deep into my eye sockets until I see stars bursting in my vision. The pressure squeezes out tears that flow faster and harder. “They don’t think I’d give anything to have her back if I could.”
Ringo has sunk down next to me. He hasn’t let go of my hand. I struggle to breathe through my stuffed-up nose.
“I wish I’d gotten to meet her,” Ringo says.
“But”—sobs are still erupting out of me at short intervals—“if she—were here—we never would—have met.”
He hums and I pry my face away from my legs far enough to see him studying a photo of Penny with braces, circa seventh grade. “You keep forgetting we already had.”
I let the meaning of his comment go unexamined. I am too tired. I let Ringo’s hand go too, though I’m thankful that it had been there to lead me away. With Penny and Will, I didn’t need anyone else. Ringo couldn’t understand that. The three of us were different. Special. At least I thought so. After a time, I push myself upright. I can feel the tears already crusting on my skin. I take soft footsteps into Penny’s room, like I’m walking onto holy ground. It still smells of incense, and the longing in me presses out against the borders of my skin, throbbing.
Carefully, I touch her belongings. Seashell necklace. Moroccan scarf. Honey lip balm. Penny. I try to imagine the words she’d say if all this were over and she found me at the cliff. She’d look at me and know what I’d been through, sucking the week’s worry in like she could take it all back from me. Together we’d talk about Will every day. She’d weave a basket out of palm fronds or something and we’d send parts of his memory out into the ocean and she’d know exactly the right words to say.
My fingertips land on a well-worn spiral notebook. I hesitate before flipping through it. I’m flooded with thousands of Penny’s words all gathered up like an answer to a prayer. I hesitate, checking over my shoulder to see Ringo squinting at a framed picture of Will, Penny, and me with our tongues out, all dyed red from cherry slushies. I slide the notebook into my purse along with the lip balm and zip it closed. Finally, it feels like I have a piece of Penny to carry around. I relax for the first time since I entered the Hightowers’ house.
“Over here, Ringo.” I cross the thin rug to the window, wedge my fingers under the the edge of it, and jiggle open the frame. I turn to gesture for Ringo to follow.
“Look, I know you’re going through a rough time, but jumping? Not the answer.” His head is cocked to the side like a bemused dog, so I can tell he doesn’t think I’m actually suicidal. But he still doesn’t appear to be keen on following me out an open second-story window. Sensible. I can respect that.
So I demonstrate by hoisting one leg through the opening, then the other, and soon he can see that I’m crouching comfortably on the roof. It takes only another moment’s hesitation before he joins me.
“Welcome,” I say, taking a seat on the sandpapery shingles. “This was our spot. Mine and Penny’s.” The view is of the backyard and of overflow parking of the attendees from the Hightowers’ synagogue. Weird. Never in my worst nightmares did I dream of coming out here and looking down at…this.
“It’s, uh, cozy.” Ringo’s hip is pressed against mine. We’re hemmed in by the slope of the roof beside us and the edge below. “So what exactly are we doing up here?”
“There’s oxygen up here,” I say, somberly.
Ringo shakes his head. “You really should get some help with that oxygen addiction of yours.”
I nudge him with my elbow. “Penny and I used to sunbathe out here. Or sometimes when I slept over, we’d sneak out the window and fall asleep. I know, I know, it sounds dangerous, b
ut we’d hold hands so that if one of us began to roll off, the other one would wake up to save her.” Ringo pulls one eyebrow up. “Okay, so, it wasn’t, like, a foolproof plan. But no one died, right?” We both go silent.
I chew the inside of my cheek, searching and thinking—for what, I’m not quite sure. In the end, I start weighing whether or not to tell him this next thing and then find a strange compulsion to do it. “We tried pot up here. Just once,” I add hurriedly. “It was dumb. Penny got this joint from some guy in her yoga class.” I rest my chin on my bent knees, embarrassed now that I’ve begun. “I’m not even really sure it worked. We felt, like, a little, I don’t know, fuzzy. Penny said she hated it. I thought she was just being dramatic.” I turn my cheek to my knee and peer at Ringo. “You ever tried it?”
Ringo snorts softly. “I’m more of a ‘Just say no’ guy.”
I remember how mad Will had been when he found out we’d tried it without him. I wanted to explain to him how, once we were dating, I owed Penny her own special things so that she stayed mine too. I needed them both. Will and Penny, Penny and Will. The universe demands balance, as Penny would say.
“Okay, then.” I bump my shoulder into his. “You tell me something.”
“Like what?”
“A secret.” I bob my head to add a silent Duh. “I told you one and now you have to tell me something. That’s the way it works.”
“Excuse me? Referee?” He mimes looking around. “I believe I’ve been entered into the game against my will.”
“Well?”
He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. I realize that I really like his hair. Or at least I notice it a lot. Ringo has nice hair. Why am I thinking about his hair? This has to be the most anyone has ever thought about hair in a thirty-second period. Lake…
“My real name’s…Christian.” This snaps me out of my hair haze.
“Christian?” I roll the name over my tongue. “Christian…as in feeding the multitudes with loaves and fishes, walking on water, resurrecting on the third day Christian?”
“At least one of those fits.”
I form my fingers into a makeshift picture frame, squint one eye closed, and view him through the diamond-shape opening. “Nope.” I frown. “Doesn’t fit. Christian? Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“That’s a lame confession anyway. Your name? Try again, please.” I lift my chin in defiance. At eye level, a group of palm fronds rustles in the wind.
“One for one,” he says. “Those are the rules.”
“And here I thought I was in charge of the game.” Below us, a few mourners trail off to their Mazda Miatas and Mitsubishis. Two women clasp each other in a long hug. “Okay, fine.” I take a deep breath and watch Ringo out of the side of one eye. “But I have to warn you. After this one, I’ll have taken a decisive lead on the scoreboard.” He nods once for me to continue. “Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Sometimes,” I say, “I hate my brother. Like really hate him. I think he’s a jerk. More than a jerk. A world-class villain. An asshole.”
“And you called my confession lame?”
I hold up one finger because I can tell what he’s thinking: What siblings don’t argue? But that is so not the case with Matt and me. “I hate my brother. I think he’s a jerk and…he’s in a wheelchair. Yep, everything’s paralyzed from the neck down.” I eye Ringo sideways. I see the corner of his mouth tug. “I know. You’re not allowed to hate people in wheelchairs, especially not your brother, but I swear,” I continue, clenching my fingers into a tight fist, “sometimes I don’t even believe that we’re related. Now who’s the jerk?”
Ringo plays with the laces of his shoes. I’m waiting for him to tell me what a heartless, insensitive little girl I am, but instead he says, “I tried to remove my birthmark. I mean, not personally. I had surgery.” He shakes his head and throws a pebble that he found on the roof off the edge. “All this talk of how I’m so okay with it. The birthmark is part of me. I’m Ringo, for God’s sake. And here I tried to get it removed. I wanted to be normal. Just to know what it’s like. Now I just have these stupid scars.” He turns and points to a spot near his temple. I see them now—three raised and jagged lines, kind of like a burn, branded on the skin. It looks painful. “Guess who just moved to the top of the leader board.”
I don’t know what to say. The confession is sad—heart wrenching—but his face feels like a puzzle that I can’t figure out. Maybe his face feels that way to him too.
Sadness stretches out between the two of us. I notice that it’s less heavy when we’re here sharing it together. It makes me want to stay with him forever, perched on the top of my best friend’s roof. So I do what I have to in order to stay. I add to the sorrow with another offering of my own. “What if it’s not just Penny and Will?” I blurt out.
“What if what’s not just Penny and Will?” Ringo blinks as though coming out of a daze.
“My decision. Who I’ll use my resurrection choice on. It may not only be…between two people.”
Ringo sits up a little straighter. A warning dings quietly inside my head. “Who?” he asks.
Am I really ready to betray my family like this? Just this small piece of information places another crack in the foundation of our family’s pact, our code. But does it matter anymore? I’m not resurrecting Matt. It won’t happen. They’ll be responsible for nothing. Jitters crawl up my arms and around the back of my neck.
“You first,” I say to buy time, and it’s like placing a quarter into a slot machine. “You owe me another confession, and hold on, hold on—I know what I want it to be.” His mouth closes. “Tell me why you visit Dr. McKenna.” I clasp my hands under my chin to wait eagerly for the answer.
Ringo presses his lips together, starts to speak, thinks better of it, then finally begins. “Let’s just say I have Mommy issues.”
“Come on. That’s way too vague.”
“So was yours.”
“Touché.”
Mommy issues. His mother seemed to be a special brand of awful. I hate her on his behalf, the way she leaves him at his appointment for hours at a time and won’t look at him or get off the couch. All I know is that at least in some ways, Ringo’s just as messed up as I am, if not more, and again I get the sensation that I’m sharing the weight of my sadness with someone, and I like that.
From the roof, we watch birds flying home to their nests for the night. The breeze picks up and it’s as though the wind, like an invisible paintbrush, is gently sweeping the sunset colors across the sky. The warmth of Ringo’s body next to mine feels comforting, the way warm sand does after a swim in the ocean.
After the accident, I felt like I’d been stripped bare and left alone to weather the elements, but here Ringo is and I have to admit—even though I don’t want to—that life, in this minute, feels tolerable.
I find the back of his hand resting on the shingles and place mine over it before knitting my fingers between his. “So, do all moments have Beatles songs?” I ask. “Or just certain ones?”
“The memorable ones do.”
“And what if there’s no perfect song? For that moment.”
“The Beatles always have the perfect song. For every moment. Trust me.”
“Then tell me this one.”
“You already had your question.”
“What song is it?” I insist.
This time he tilts his chin like he’s listening to a melody. He doesn’t move his hand. “Too cheesy if I go with ‘Penny Lane’?”
My face lights up. “Penny has her own song?”
“One of the best,” he says.
And I’m about to ask him to sing the Beatles for me, when a clang at the window behind us makes me jump. Logan Bryan has grabbed the back of Ringo’s shirt and is yanking him back through the window. I have to acknowledge that for a split second I saw Will latching onto Ringo and it took the breath clean out of my lungs. Maybe that’s why it takes me a second to react.
“Let
go of him!” I screech, grabbing onto Ringo’s ankle.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Logan’s face is red and splotchy, but he releases his grip on Ringo, whose shirt is now stretched out around the collar. Logan is huffing and puffing and his hands are on his hips, like he’s recovering from running a mile.
Ringo rubs his neck and looks at Mr. Bryan. “Who are you? What is your problem?”
“I’m her boyfriend’s father, pal.” He thumbs his chest. “You do remember him, right, Lake? Your boyfriend, Will?”
My mouth falls open at the accusation in his tone. “Of course I remember Will. What are you talking about?” Logan hasn’t cooled down from the confrontation downstairs, or if he has, the sight of my fingers entwined with Ringo’s must’ve got him heated right back up again.
“Really? Because you look pretty comfortable up here with—” It’s then that I see Will’s dad take in Ringo’s face for the first time. “Him.” The last word lands with a dull thud, his anger tempered slightly, replaced with something uglier and a little meaner. “Is he that easy to replace, Lake?” There’s a special emphasis on the word that, which I’m sure isn’t lost on Ringo. “He loved you.”
Shame burns through me like a fever, but there’s anger there too, ripe and ugly. “How…dare you,” I say to my surprise—and clearly to Ringo’s. “What do you know about love?”
Logan looks like I’ve smacked him. I might as well have. I rise to my feet on the roof and stand staring down at Logan, the small man on the other side of the window. “He”—I point to Ringo—“is the only person who will even listen to me. You guys are down there acting like monsters and…and…” My foot slips. The sole of my shoe skids on a shingle. My kneecap cracks onto the roof. I grab for something solid, but it’s my plastered arm that reaches out and I’m skidding. My shin launches into thin air.
I scream. Images of the car crash sneak in. A river of blood. Two legs and pale white bone.
The skin on my inside forearm peels up like an orange rind and I jerk to a stop. Ringo is scrambling from the windowsill, skidding butt to heel down after me. His hand closes over my wrist. I’m panting. I rest my forehead against the rough surface. Shaking, shaking, shaking.
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