“What?” I ask. “Why are you looking at me like that? Why aren’t you saying anything?”
He sighs and runs his fingers through his hair. “I thought you came to talk.”
“Yeah, but not to a brick wall.”
“About that.” He rolls his neck. He looks physically uncomfortable and I wonder if we should change seating. “I’ve been thinking maybe I’m not the right person for this….” He must note my dropped-jaw expression, because he trails off. “Or something.”
“What are you talking about? Did I do something?” I pin my gaze to the cream swirls in my coffee.
“I, um,” he starts. “Shit, Lake, okay, I need to tell you something.”
Here it comes. I don’t know what the it is, but I wait for another collision, another impact to knock me off my feet, to break my bones, to finally break me.
He checks over his shoulder as though to make sure no one is eavesdropping. “You see, I’m not exactly an unbiased listener,” he says. “Not the way you think I am anyway. I think it’s only fair to tell you that…I used my resurrection choice.” He plays nervously with the scar on his temple.
My eyes grow wide as golf balls. “You did? Why didn’t you tell me?” Questions start to pile up like water from a spring.
“Because I was embarrassed, I guess.” He catches himself worrying over the scar and pulls his fingers away to spin an empty saucer on the table between us. “You’ve met my mother.”
“I’m not sure I would call that much of a meeting, but sure,” I say, tucking my heels underneath me.
He takes a deep breath. “My mother is resurrected. By me.”
“Oh.” I’m confused. “But…she doesn’t seem very…grateful.”
“That would be an understatement.” He picks at the frayed hole in his jeans. “It’s, well, it’s complicated.” When he talks, it’s with the reluctance of somebody wrenching words out of his throat with a pair of pliers. “Look, all I can tell you is that you think what you’re going through right now is the problem, that choosing is the issue. But resurrection isn’t necessarily the solution you think it’s going to be.” There is an edge to his voice that I don’t recognize. It’s a piece of him that doesn’t sound fragile at all, but instead forged in a part deep inside him where there is red hot anger that can turn nice, soft feelings into steel.
His words feel like fingernails tearing at a spot in my heart. I can tell he wants to stop talking about it, to leave it at that, but I can’t. “What do you mean? You got your mother back.”
He grinds his jaw back and forth. Then he puffs his cheeks out, exhaling for what seems like an eternity. “My mother was a professor. She argued against the ethics of resurrection her whole life. She built an academic career on her opposition of it. Not just that, but she really believed in what she said and wrote. When she got sick with cancer, I swear, she was proud. She could finally put her money where her mouth was. She would die and that would be it. She’d put into practice what she had advocated in her academic career. She’d go down as one of the greats. I think she thought she’d be like Socrates or something. A fantastic mind that wasn’t fully appreciated until after her untimely but noble demise.”
He shakes his head thoughtfully. “It probably could have been cured, you know. Her cancer. Seventy-five–percent chance. That’s what the doctors said. But she wouldn’t do chemotherapy. She wouldn’t do anything.” There’s a lump forming in his throat. I watch the veins pulling tighter, tighter, tighter, and when he swallows it looks like he’s fighting down a mouthful of screws. “Then in the hospital…she looked so tiny.” The memory is etched on his face. “I held her hand as the cancer ate her from the inside out, but there was this light in her eyes, like she was excited to go. To leave me. I don’t have a dad, I could have been put in foster care. I had a few friends then, but nothing holding me together, plus this big, giant, well, thing on my face that I’ve had since the day I was born and…and still she wanted to go. I—I couldn’t stand it. She had the doctors pull her off any form of life support early, before my eighteenth birthday, just to prove a point—that she could be resurrected but had chosen not to.
“I stayed in the hospital for three days with her. She screamed in pain for hours at night but wouldn’t let the doctors give her anything that might prolong her life. It was the pain that killed her in the end, actually. She had a heart attack. I was furious at her.”
I set my coffee mug down on the ground beside the sofa and scoot closer. “That must have been awful,” I say and think about how Dr. McKenna first told me that there are no magic words, just regular ones that fail us when we need better ones to say what we feel. But at least I have to try.
“Believe it or not, my mother—‘Mom’ back then—had this brilliant and crazy fun mind. She invented games for us with nothing but a few strings and a half-empty box of checkers, that kind of stuff. When I was a kid, those things were huge for me because I only knew Smelly Ellie and, well…” We both smile at that. “I loved my mother. Afterward, it turned out that she’d provided instructions to me about how I was supposed to publish this paper that she’d written. Her great manifesto, I guess. I couldn’t even read it. A month later, when I turned eighteen, I turned in a resurrection application with her name on it. She hasn’t spoken more than a word at a time to me since.”
“But, you’re her son.”
“She’s a proud woman and she hates me for ruining her legacy. I can see it every time she looks at me. Honestly, it’s all been such an ordeal. I feel like just knowing about the possibility of resurrection or the nonpossibility of it—it—it made it impossible to move forward with anything until after it was all over and everything was totally wrecked. I started going to therapy. I thought that it would help to talk about it. Most days it does. My mother ignores me most of the time. Forgets to pick me up. Or maybe she means to leave me, since that was her original intention. I don’t know.”
“So, you think if you hadn’t resurrected her, that everything would have been fine? But that would have been so unfair to you.”
“I think the very existence of resurrections at all created a mess that no one, including me and anyone else, is equipped to clean up. Resurrections were just there, looming over us, and the idea of them didn’t leave us any room to heal, if that makes sense.” Two sides of his face. Two ways his life could have gone. Just like mine. “Using my resurrection destroyed everything. I just think you should know what you’re dealing with.” The edge has returned. Sharp and forged hard as steel.
I stare at him, shaken, because the only thing I can think of is Matt. What Ringo’s mother did was cruel. Who cares about an academic career when it comes to the people you love? But what he says about the mere existence of resurrections stops me dead. Without them, how might Matt’s life have been different? The very idea of the resurrection has been looming over Matt for years, keeping him from healing.
I have never thought to wish away resurrections entirely—especially not now that Penny and Will are gone. But I can’t help feeling ill. Because for the first time, I consider that if the thing that could save my two best friends didn’t exist, my brother might have stayed my brother, even if he couldn’t walk. He could have changed. In other ways. He could have been the old Matt.
Back when I was first learning about quadriplegia, my research turned up all sorts of people with his condition. Ones that had gone on to get married, have children, become activists, travel. Why couldn’t Matt have been one of them?
The answer seems obvious now: because of me.
Competing emotions war in my head, swaying me, pulsing against my temples until I have to reach up and press my thumbs into the sides of my skull. “Ringo,” I tell him, ripping myself from my own problems to deal with the ones that have just been laid bare in front of me. “You’re the kindest, least selfish person I think I’ve ever met. Aside from Penny, but don’t feel bad.” I let out a sad laugh. “Because you’re basically competing with a saint there.”<
br />
Me. My resurrection. Mine. Matt can never allow himself to get better because I exist and so does my choice. I push the thought back hard with every ounce of strength that I have. I cannot feel guilty about this. I have to be strong.
His mouth quirks. “I’ll try not to be too offended.”
I close my eyes, open them, and take a deep breath. “I don’t think you could have done anything differently.” I want to tell him the reasons for my own family’s dysfunction too, because I want to make him feel connected. But I can’t.
He stares at me seriously. “I could have chosen not to resurrect her.” Then he breaks and looks down to readjust his position on the couch. “I just want you to know what you’re dealing with.”
“But…it’s different, right?” I say, not wanting to sound dismissive but wanting him to see. “Your mom didn’t want to be resurrected.” I pick up my mug and find that my hands are shaking and I don’t even know why. The liquid in the cup is tepid and I swallow it down while pulling a face.
“How do you know what your friends want, though?” he says.
I pick at the side of one nail absently. “I think that’s why I have to find the wishes,” I reply. “So I know.”
He doesn’t look away from me. Not for a second. Not to blink. His demeanor reminds me of a more human version of Matt, and I wonder briefly if it’s their shared familiarity with being stared at that gives each the ability to look into other people long enough to make their insides turn into writhing earthworms. “I think you know you’re placing too much faith in them,” he says.
But he doesn’t know what he’s talking about because he doesn’t know Will and he doesn’t know Penny and neither of those things is his fault. It just sucks that he was stuck with a sorry excuse for a mother instead of a best friend and a boyfriend who could create a family out of fossilized bones and a few drops of blood and the light of a full moon.
I could list all the things that I love about Penny Hightower:
The jangle of her bracelets that lets me know whenever she’s near
Her capacity to love
The way she cries when she thinks of dolphins getting caught in tuna nets
The hemp necklace she spent a week making and which I managed to lose less than two days later (she didn’t get mad)
How she’s not embarrassed to be scared of little things like spiders and heights, but not afraid of big things like what’s going to happen after high school
Her advice
But right now what I love most about Penny is sitting on her roof and the sparkly twinkle in her eye when she turns on her side and tells me she has a crush on Noah Ramsey.
Her pale hair fans out from underneath the elbow crooked to support her head. We’re both in bikinis and her skin is turning red around the triangles of fabric covering her chest.
I turn on my side to face her. “Noah Ramsey? You’re sure?”
“I know. Weird, right? I mean, I’d never really noticed him before. But he’s heading up this food drive for the middle school, which is really admirable, don’t you think? And I don’t know.” She smirks. “He has nice eyes.”
I try to picture Noah Ramsey’s eyes. They’ve certainly never stood out to me as noteworthy, but I want very badly to believe that they’re nice. Really nice. Nice enough to make someone forget about another boy’s completely, no-second-guesses-about-it nice eyes.
Come to think of it, Noah’s eyes may be blue. With dark, full eyelashes. Yes, I think that’s right. I bet those are nice eyes.
“So I asked him to go to the beach with me tomorrow,” Penny says all casually, like she has ever asked a guy on a date. Ever.
“You asked him out?” I push myself up on my elbow and gawk at her, because even though I want this to be true, a real friend can’t let this pass by unexamined. And I’m a real friend, I remind myself.
“You could act a little less surprised.” She shuts her eyes and points her face up to the sun. Her mouth quirks.
I lower my shoulder back to the spread-out towel. Boys at St. Theresa’s have been invisible to Penny and me since I first started school there, except for Will. Noah Ramsey.
“He said ‘yes,’” adds Penny.
“Obviously.” I snort. Every guy at St. Theresa’s would sell a kidney to go out with Penny.
“So…” Penny doesn’t open her eyes, but continues to bask. “How are you and Will?”
My abs tighten. It’s been a week since the death party and Penny and I haven’t discussed the demise of Matilda Thorne or the fact that Will and I were holding hands.
“Is he a good kisser?” Her voice is classic Penny. Light. Floaty. Sweetly optimistic.
I bite my lip. Relief is already washing over me. “I wouldn’t know,” I confess.
Penny reaches over and pinches my side. “Well, you’d better get on that, Dirty Devereaux. Because I’m going to need details. Stat.”
I just nod, smile, and let my heart fill up like a hot-air balloon.
This, I tell myself. I have to remember this. I reach my pinky over and hook it into Penny’s. No matter what, I will never let myself forget that just because I don’t make out with Penny—assuming Will and I ever make out, which I’m pretty certain we will, and soon—doesn’t mean our relationship is any less important.
I want to cut through my skin and hand her a piece of my beating heart so she knows that everything is going to be fine between us. Always.
“Penny?” I say, knowing that what I’m about to tell her will amount to the same thing. “If I tell you something, can you promise not to tell anyone, not even Will?”
“No secrets,” she says with a smile.
“Secrets,” I say to the sky. If I stare at it long enough I can forget a world exists below us at all. “Just this once. Will couldn’t keep it and it’s too important.”
I turn my head to watch her. She shimmies, adjusting for comfort on the roof shingles. “Okay, yeah, anything.” She squeezes my pinky.
“I’m going to resurrect Matt, Penny.”
She abruptly lurches upright, gives me a confused look, then flips onto her belly. She props her chin up on her crisscrossed forearms. “Matt’s not dead.” Her voice is low.
“Yeah, exactly.” I’ve finally done it, I’ve betrayed my family. I’ve told the big, hulking secret that has been pulsating like a fever blister inside the walls of my home. And I don’t feel bad about it. “My parents promised him. So that he would stop trying to kill himself.”
She bites into her forearm, holding in a yelp. “Matt’s tried to kill himself?”
“Only if you count every chance he gets.”
She turns serious. “You should have told me.”
“I couldn’t. It…could ruin everything.”
She nods, then shudders.
“What?” I demand.
Her eyebrows swoop up. “I’m sorry, it’s just, the whole idea, it’s unnatural.”
“My parents helping my brother commit suicide? Yeah, it’s disturbing.”
She hums softly. “Or…you know, maybe it’s all of it.”
***
For the record: Penny went out with Noah Ramsey exactly twice and claimed that he kissed like an iguana.
I’d be lying if I said that the conversation with Ringo hasn’t been bugging me. Not just about his mom, which is depressing, sure, but about Penny and Will.
I’ve gone to the coffee shop three times since Ringo told me that he used his resurrection choice. Sometimes I chat with Margaret about the books Matt used to read me because it turns out she’s a huge fantasy nerd too. She even has a C. S. Lewis quote tattooed on the inside of her arm, and I think in a different life she and Matt probably would have made a good couple. I finally did get the chance to ask her about the other address in the ChatterJaw thread and she’s been going crazy trying to uncover who it is. I think it’s become a point of pride for her to figure it out, because she says the user’s IP address is guarded and encoded, like they are protecting mat
ters of national security. She asks if I know anyone who would have that kind of capability and I tell her that I can’t think of anyone except for her.
On the other end of the spectrum is Simone. It turns out she and Ringo went on a couple of dates last month, so she’s the least friendly of the bunch to me, but I gather that she’s sharp-witted, bitingly funny, and militant in her defense of both feminist ideals and Virginia Woolf, when she’s not working behind the counter or bussing tables anyway.
Much of the time spent at Neville’s, I share a set of headphones with Duke Ellington while he loads playlists onto my phone, mostly of Beatles songs that he thinks Ringo would like me to know by heart. I’ve learned most of the lyrics to “We Can Work It Out,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and “Blackbird” and like to surprise Ringo by singing bars from the songs at random. I get a kick out of the way his face transforms, how his eyebrows lift a full centimeter when I catch him off-guard with a new verse that I’ve memorized, how he occasionally takes my hand and twirls me around and stops me by the waist before spinning me back out again.
Mostly, I like the distraction of the coffeehouse crew. It’s so different from Penny and Will. Everyone comes and goes as they please and no one worries about things like secrets being told when they’re not around.
I realize now that some of the pain I’ve seen drawn on Ringo’s face isn’t just an illusion created by the birthmark, it’s the real, raw kind of pain that bubbles up to the surface like water in an unwatched pot. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy surprising him with the song lyrics so much. It’s fun to see that pain evaporate, if only for a second.
He’s more honest about it all now and that weirdly helps us both. I’ve started to think about pain the way I think about lifting a heavy sofa—it’s easier to move around if there are two people carrying it, one at each end.
This is Not the End Page 20