“I swear he’s gone,” I tell him.
Daniel gestures to the sectional in the adjacent living room. “About time. Everyone take a seat, please.”
“Hold on a second,” Aminah says, repeating what Cameron said earlier but using a little more vinegar. “Something’s up with—”
“Oh, something’s up all right,” Daniel continues. “Seats. Now.”
We sit, one by one, Aminah tallest on the left with Cameron splitting the difference between her and me. We sink into the crinkling leather, our height leveling as Aminah slumps down in frustration and I straighten out in anticipation.
Daniel strides over and plants himself in front of the gigantic wide-screen. It creates a backdrop that outlines the slender tautness of his track-and-field physique. “Okay. As you now know, Michael Turrey is my neighbor.”
I relax into my seat. For a split second, I thought he, too, might want to talk about me.
“Now you have a face to go with the home. Putting all that aside for a moment—” He makes a point to look at us one by one. “I have something I need to confirm for you all.” He pauses for gravitas. “I’m gay. This is something I’ve known for a long time. Forever actually. Not sharing this with you was nothing personal. Just something I wanted to explore on my own while finishing high school. I don’t believe any of you have ever had to declare your presumed straightness to me, so my proclamation of homosexuality is more of a courtesy. My graduation gift to you all,” he says with a bow.
The three of us exchange looks while Daniel moves to a chair. We’ve anticipated this speech probably as long as Daniel’s planned it, his steady delivery a dead giveaway of more than a few practice takes in his mirror. Not that any of us ever needed it confirmed to accept him. He’s shown us in more ways than he’s ever had to tell us, anyway. But the way he clears his throat, like there’s more to the story, has all of us scratching our heads.
Daniel sits, living for our confusion, always appreciating an upper hand when it comes to secrets and big reveals. “Now, onto the real news,” he starts. “The night before graduation, Michael and I got drunk on his roof. It’s something we’ve done a few times a year since we started high school. Might’ve even started toward the end of junior high. I don’t remember anymore. We sit up there with bottles of our parents’ liquor, and we talk about whatever. Life. You know the kinds of conversations. Stargazing talks. We get drunk, crawl back in through his window. He passes out on his bed. I stumble home. That’s how it’s always been. Until the other night—”
My cell phone starts going off, one of the new constants in my life. The incessant vibrating has been very ignorable until now, when it’s somehow so intrusive that we all hold our breath as it buzzes against my jean shorts. I fumble to silence it. “Keep going. Sorry about that.”
Daniel absentmindedly strokes his forearm. I’ve sideswiped his storytelling momentum.
“Please. I have to know what happens next,” I say.
“Fine. It was just getting good.” He brushes off his arm and sits up. “Back to the other night. We’re up there, chasing vodka with Mountain Dew. We finish up our talk and crawl in through his window. I go for the door. Like always. Michael stops me. He says, ‘Just crash here.’ I go to make a spot on his floor. He says, ‘No. Stay up here.’ I get into his bed. We’re both lying there, staring at the ceiling, not talking. I can feel it in the air. Tension. The covers shift, and before I know it, Michael Turrey’s on top of me.” Daniel pulls the drawstrings on his swim trunks to make a popping sound against his skin. “And that’s all she wrote.”
“What?” Cameron screams. She’s so loud she scares herself.
“Whoa!” Aminah yells.
“What happened after that?” I ask.
“I’m sure you can put together what happened after that.”
“I still want to hear it!” Aminah pleads.
“Let’s put it at this. Michael Turrey did not require a proclamation of homosexuality from me.” Daniel winks. “I was drunk. He was drunk. I don’t know what either of us was really thinking. Now here he is coming to my house all cozied up to one of my best friends, and we haven’t even talked about what happened. He had to go!”
My phone buzzes again, just once. I pull it out of my pocket. It’s a voicemail from Turrey. My mailbox is now completely full.
“Well, Daniel, I’m proud of you,” Cameron says. She’s beaming with tipsy pride.
“Please don’t say things like that. You know I can’t take it.”
“Too bad.”
“You need water,” Aminah tells Cameron.
“We’ve got to find out what’s up with Michael,” Daniel says.
“We do. But first, Petra.” Aminah straightens out, and her presence grows along with her height.
I throw Turrey’s voicemail to speaker as a distraction. For the first two seconds, it’s ambient driving noise. Then Turrey’s unsteady voice. “Hey. I just got a call from Fly’s sister. Shit’s not looking too good. Fly’s in surgery, and something’s not going right. I’m still driving. I’ll look around for your ring, but I probably won’t be able to bring it back if I find it. Sorry.”
14
Katie sobs in a gasp-for-air-dry-heave way. Her husband rubs her back. Turrey zones out. Brooke Delgado leans into someone’s shoulder and cries. Spencer’s dad clasps his hands in prayer. The other unidentified faces provide their own variations on those same reactions. Then there are us. Four ducks in a row, blocking the entry, kicking metaphorical rocks in contemplation.
“Do you think—?” Cameron whispers in my ear, afraid to finish her sentence. This is as quick as I’ve ever seen her sober up.
“I can’t tell,” I answer. “I hope not.” I close my eyes and make a wish that everything will be all right.
With my eyes shut, a flash of a dream comes to me. I could walk on water, but it hurt me. Burned me. I was trying to escape the pain and find a way out of Daniel’s pool when Martin appeared. He called out to me. I remember his face, which wasn’t quite his, but still I knew it was him. When I reached where he stood, he said, “I’m stuck,” and “I can’t wake up.” It looked like there was more he wanted to say, but he couldn’t.
Then Cameron woke me up.
It’s funny how dreams morph without notice, cutting out before you hit the ground from a fall or stopping right before a big reveal. Why couldn’t I let myself understand what my version of Martin wanted to say? I must be trying to make sense of how a person’s body can be alive but their mind asleep. Seeing Martin’s eyelids flutter, knowing he’s somewhere in there, but he’s too battered to get out. He is stuck.
Yesterday, he was just the kid next to me at graduation. Lighthearted and goofy, working so hard to make me laugh that I started to forget how I’d sworn off boys. Now he’s the focus of everyone’s attention, all of us hoping against logic that he can pull through an accident that left half of him obliterated. Everyone in here must be clinging to their memories of him, afraid they could slip out of reach and become too distant to feel.
The alarming vigor with which Katie still weeps is both terrifying and amazing to me because it reminds me of how we are capable of feeling so deeply that it can torpedo through our very being. I bet she’s thinking of how she used to punch Martin’s arm when he annoyed her. Dare him to do something humiliating like eat dog food or hop the fence of the graveyard by the school. Katie must have had her own versions of all the power-play moves my older sisters had for me. Like any older sibling does, she probably exercised her power of seniority in between bursts of protectiveness.
Stone-faced Turrey must be wondering why he wasn’t in the car.
Maybe Brooke is letting absence make the heart grow fonder. Everyone might know they aren’t together, but now that Martin could be gone, every word he ever said or wrote takes on new meaning. Hormones get swapped for love in retrospect.
In a ro
om full of retreading, mine is the weakest of all. I have less than twenty-four hours of reference to cling to, most of which was spent in this hospital constructing my impression of Martin through people who know him far better, making up a backstory and inner life for all of them.
But I might have been one of the last people to spend time with him.
My head and my heart don’t know what to make of it, and I suddenly wish I’d just listened to myself when my inner voice said to stop while I was ahead. I never listen to myself.
I’m in so deep.
The four of us commit to finding a spot. Nervous shifting makes the vinyl seats squeak louder than the two TVs overhead. A dance of sorts ensues, each of us shuffling back and forth as we try to discern what Daniel wants to do about his proximity to Turrey. Boldly, he shoulders up to him, placing me in the next seat and Cameron and Aminah on the floor in front of us. They lean back into our knees.
Brooke wafts the dampness of her washed hair toward me, smelling like a Hollister store mixed with Herbal Essences shampoo.
“I’m Brooke,” she says with an unthreatening smile. “I’ve been meaning to say hi.”
I introduce myself, and through a nod she welcomes me as a comrade, much like Katie and Turrey before her.
“Can you believe any of this?” Her hands coax her phone into waking. The lock screen photo is one of her and Martin at prom in matching shades of orange.
“No,” I answer, incapable of delving beneath simplicity into a situation so far beyond my grasp.
“Has anyone heard anything?” Aminah, the only one brave enough to ask, gently inquires.
“Someone came in and told us there have been complications. That was a while ago.”
“Wow,” I whisper.
The past two days of my life have been defined by waiting. Maybe all of life is defined by waiting. Waiting for food. Waiting for the bus. Waiting for test scores. Waiting for school to end. Waiting to graduate. Waiting to fix a problem. Waiting to fix the fix. Waiting to hear the fate of another person’s existence. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
Death is just another milestone. Another thing we spend our whole lives working toward, waiting for, and it’s all over in an instant. We’re in a room designed solely for waiting, for building the bridge to the other side of something, and it seems that the little details that happen here, in between one thing and the next, are what define a life. So while I have the time, I’ll define mine how I see fit.
Maybe willpower alone can erase all of my problems.
Brooke has no shortage of questions to ask me. How do I know Martin? Where did I go to middle school? Who were my teachers? What classes did I take this year? How could we have both had gym fourth period? Who was my teacher? Did I ever see her there? Wouldn’t it have been cool if we had talked then? Where am I going to college? Am I as nervous as she is?
My last two answers hiccup off my tongue. I want to think of nothing beyond this very moment. I want to keep waiting.
Genuine enthusiasm shines out through Brooke’s eyes. Her ability to stay so engaged keeps me pulled inward, not wanting to give away too much too soon, stockpiling for conversations yet to come.
I think I understand how it works between her and Martin. It’s as if I can see it as he would, piecing together what Turrey told me with what I’m experiencing now. She’s stunning and charming and so free to share herself. So eager to know the people around her. So present in every moment. I see how that could make you love her, but it could also feel like too much in high doses.
She crosses her legs, and a flash of black ink pops out against the deep tan of her skin, just sneaking out from the hem of her leggings. “Real or fake?” I ask, my first attempt at being on the other side of the questioning.
Her eyes stop moving. Now they are still, gazing, almost startled. “You’re the first person to notice since I got it.” She tugs the legging down over the bumpy bone of her ankle so the ink is no longer visible. Before I can ask more, she’s rummaging through her purse. “I do a good fake one though. Can I?”
She digs out a black marker with a thin tip and starts drawing flowers on my arm. I almost ask more questions. I want to know more about her and Martin, but she starts humming a soft tune to herself, and I figure the distraction is nice for her. Another way to survive the waiting. Her sandpaper voice, full of gentle runs and steady rippling vibrato, calms me.
Aminah and Cameron solve a magazine crossword puzzle with a startling lack of bickering, passing the glossy page back and forth with penciled-in answers, knowing they could use pen but not bothering to show off. Since we listened to Turrey’s voicemail and rushed back to the hospital, they’ve become unreadable. They’re waiting too. Waiting to find the right time to corner me.
Katie’s crying dies out. Her husband pulls out his iPad and props it on his knees. They share a set of earbuds. She rests her head on his neck. What they’re watching must not matter much. They both blankly stare at their handheld movie theater.
Daniel twists around pieces of my hair, avoiding eye contact with Turrey while still engaging him in conversation.
“How’s your toe?” Turrey asks. “Is it broken?”
“False alarm,” Daniel responds, tugging so hard on a clump of my hair that my eyes water.
Aminah told him her lie on the way over, and Daniel screamed for thirty seconds straight, almost turning the car around.
“I couldn’t find your ring,” Turrey tells me.
My arm jerks involuntarily, and Brooke makes a long squiggle near my wrist. “No worries. I think I just left it at home,” I mutter.
Mr. McGee walks in, swallowing up every bit of space in my lungs on presence alone. The whole room takes a collective breath.
He walks over to Katie and whispers something in her ear. Her iPad falls on the carpet. They rush out of the room.
No one moves.
No one blinks.
No one exhales.
This can’t be the end.
Martin can’t be gone.
Part Two
15
Spencer throws the White Whale into park and makes a break for it, sprinting around the side of the high school to reach the football field. An amplified voice projects names through the loudspeaker.
“Jude Banning,” the voice calls out to light applause.
Spencer slows down. They’re only on the letter B. He has plenty of time before it’s his turn to be done with high school. The warmth of the sun against his face feels so good he stops and closes his eyes. The world burns red beneath his eyelids.
Red. Like blood.
Time hiccups.
Blood on Fly. Blood on Spencer. Blood on the pavement. Blood on his van.
Time jumps backward.
The White Whale cruises down a wide open side street, nearing an intersection. Spencer looks to Fly, who doesn’t have his hand out the passenger window like he should. What is he doing? Why is he staring at Spencer with wild, panicked eyes?
“I’m back,” Fly says, marveling at his hands and body like they are new. “I’m back!” His excitement quickly changes into panic as he realizes where he is. “Spitty, stop it!” he cries out. “Think of something else!”
There is nothing else to think of.
Crash. Smack.
I killed my best friend.
16
Petra pilots an airplane built in the style of the Wright brothers’ initial conception. It’s rickety and old-fashioned on the outside, the color of dust. Inside, the technology is greater than ever discovered. Petra is Amelia Earhart flying a solo mission. Her innate skill for navigation makes her feel this way. Invincible. The source of legends. A hero.
Dense foliage infects the center of the landscape, a dark green cluster that could pass for mold growing on bread from this high up. It’s a bird’s eye view, yet details that should only be
visible with binoculars are easily spotted, like brittle leaves on gnarled branches twisting around clapboard homes. Minuscule gaps between trees where the slightest sliver of paved roads and man-made grass can be seen.
Petra can pivot and whirl as easily as if she were controlling a video game, and she enjoys the weightless sensation akin to whizzing downhill on a roller coaster. Her bottom never touches the seat, and her stomach tilts into her skin without any of the unpleasant jerks that come at the end of a decline.
If she’s using controllers, they’re operated with her mind alone, because the ones in her hand are decorative. She clutches one for effect, but when she thinks of turning left, she does. The handles don’t move. Earth and sky alternate in view, tossing her in a washing machine of blended blue and opaque green.
She cocks her head, realizing in the midst of her intricate winding that she’s forgotten why she’s flying at all, and she hasn’t paid attention to how close she’s gotten to land. The head-whipping jolt of leveling out hits. She gets tossed into her useless navigation board. This machine she was once so in tune with has betrayed her. It’s taken her too low, skidding along the tops of leafage.
Fighting against turbulence, she pounds on buttons, knowing that it’s only a matter of time before her plane nose-dives into the great unknown, where the greenery will snarl around her as it has everything else. Rhythmic thuds rattle her as the plane bounces along. Down this far, almost inside the vegetation, she can see her parents wrapped in ivy, mere statues now, robbed of life. Her sisters Caroline and Jessica taken by the same fate. Cameron and Aminah and Daniel lie beside them, pinned to the earth by rotting branches. To her surprise, Turrey and Brooke are there too, their legs free, but their torsos tied up by vines onto something with a hint of yellow. A mailbox.
Petra gasps.
It’s her mailbox.
Standing on a visible sliver of street in front of her yard, the ivy seeming to clear for him, is Ryan Hales, stretching his hands toward the plane to get Petra’s attention. He’s screaming something, his mouth making desperate shapes. But his voice can’t break through the chaos inside the airplane. Not that she needs to hear him. She already knows what he’s saying.
What You Left Me Page 8