Every Moment After

by Joseph Moldover

  “You think too much, Cole. That’s always been your problem.”

  We pass Rosie Horowitz and two of her friends, sitting on the hood of her dad’s Mercedes. They watch me without saying anything.

  “So long, Rosie,” I call to her. “Take care.” There’s no point in being an asshole.

  She doesn’t say anything. “Take care, Matt,” one of her friends sings to my back after we’ve passed. Fuck them. We reach my truck, and I throw my backpack into the back.

  “You going to check your sugar?” Cole is a mini version of my mom sometimes.

  “I’m fine,” I tell him as I get behind the wheel and start the engine. He stands by the open passenger-side door, looking at me.

  “I can drive if you want,” he says.

  “I’m fine. I’ve been diabetic since before I could talk. You think I can’t tell when my sugar’s low?”

  Cole keeps staring at me. I hate it when he does this. I stare right back. The sun is behind him, and for a moment he looks so much like he did in the picture, I can’t stand it. His eyes have the same look: sad, accusing, like he’s thinking something that he’s not going to tell you. I shrug and check my phone. “Now you’re going to have to wait,” I tell him. “It needs a blood calibration.” I get out of the truck, retrieve my backpack, and get my kit out. Cole watches as I prick my finger and catch the drop of blood on a plastic strip sticking out of the glucometer. After a moment, the meter beeps and then reads eighty-seven. Totally normal. “There,” I say, holding it out for him to read. “Happy?”

  “Thrilled.”

  We both get in and sit, the engine running, watching as the rest of our class scatters. Luther in his pickup, Rosie in her Mercedes, Chris Thayer driven by his mom in their special handicap van, Eddie Deangelo in a rusted-out hatchback.

  “Eddie said something about a problem with cash,” Cole says.

  Fucking Eddie. I didn’t want to talk about this today.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell him. “It’ll work out.”

  “Are you out of money?”

  “I have the money; it’s just that my parents are watching my account. I can’t get it.”

  Cole takes a deep breath and lets it out slow.

  “Don’t start,” I tell him. “This is why I didn’t tell you right away.”

  “What happened?”

  “I screwed up, okay? A few months ago, I took too much out all at once. A present for Rosie; this really nice necklace. Stupid. I didn’t even know they pay attention to the account, but they do. They track it, and we had this big talk, and . . . I don’t think I can pull what Eddie’s asking for.”

  He shakes his head. “I just feel bad that it’s not going to work out.”

  “Christ, Cole, show a little spine, will you? Of course it’s going to work out. Eddie and I set something up. A trade.”

  “For what?”

  “Okay, so, the fridge in your living room, with your dad’s stuff in it . . .”

  “His meds?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Dad’s old pain meds?”

  “And weed, right?”

  “We’re giving Eddie drugs?”

  “Well, what else are you going to do with it all?” I feel bad saying it, but it’s true. Cole’s dad has been gone for almost a year now, but his house hasn’t changed. The hospital bed is still set up in the living room; there are piles of boxes with medical supplies. Mail is piling up. It’s not a good situation.

  “There’s not too much left,” Cole says.

  “How much?”

  “I don’t know; I mean, he used a lot . . . he used a lot of meds, at the end.”

  “I told Eddie we have a whole refrigerator full.”

  “We don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  I had told Cole to make a plan. A month ago, when he was coming to school every day looking like the world was ending. When he was sitting up all night writing poetry that doesn’t even rhyme. It was all because Viola is going off to the West Coast and he’s staying here to take care of his mother and he had no idea, absolutely no fucking idea, what to do about it. So I told him that he’s the most creative guy I know and that he should come up with the craziest, most incredible, best plan he could to win her heart and that I would make it happen. I’d set it up.

  And he did it. Cole made a plan. A great plan, which turns out to require help from Eddie Deangelo, and Eddie doesn’t work for free.

  “It’ll be fine,” I tell him, slapping him on the knee. The parking lot has emptied out while we’ve been sitting here. I shift into drive. “I want to go somewhere.”

  “Where?”

  “I want to go out to the lake.”

  “I should get home.”

  “It won’t take too long.” I pull out of the lot and onto Knickerbocker Road. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something. You want to drive this in the fall?”

  “Your truck?”

  “Yeah. It’ll be better than your car in the snow.”

  “Anything would be. You’re not taking it with you?”

  “Freshmen don’t get parking spaces.” My dad could buy me a permit, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be that guy who gets to have a car on campus just because his parents have money.

  “Sure. Sweet. Thanks.”

  “You got it.” We pull out onto Route 21 and speed up. It always makes me feel good to do something for Cole. I turn the radio on, lean back, and take a deep breath. We drive quietly until we get to the lake. I park on the far side of the lot, underneath the trees so it would be hard to see the truck from the road, and we get out. My phone beeps, and I glance at the screen. My blood sugar is falling: sixty-nine, with an arrow pointing down. I take an apple from my backpack. Cole comes around to stand next to me.

  “What are we doing here?”

  “There’s something I want to do.” An owl hoots once from the woods, then again, and then is silent. We stand very still, looking across the lot, across the beach, down to the water. “I want to go for a swim.”

  “Funny.”

  “Come on.”

  We cross the lot and step onto the sand, pass the shuttered and locked Snack Shack, and head down to the water’s edge. They don’t open until ten, but who knows when the staff starts to show up? I set my bag on the overturned lifeguard boat and start to undress.

  “You have to be kidding me.”

  I stand in my boxers and look across to the far shore. Each bite of the apple seems very loud on the empty water. Cole’s dad used to row us around out here when we were kids. He knew the scientific names for everything we saw: fish, bugs, plants, whatever.

  I finish and throw the apple core high into the air, far over the lake, and pain shoots through my elbow and down to my fingertips. “You know what I want to do?” I ask, shaking my arm.

  “Go skinny-dipping with your best friend the morning after graduation?”

  “I want to swim this motherfucking lake. I want to swim straight across it, across the middle, across the deepest part.”

  “Why?”

  I step into the water. It’s surprisingly cold. I trudge out until it reaches my knees.

  “This seems like a really bad idea,” Cole says to my back. “Was that a glucose alert before?”

  Cole worries about my blood sugar more than anyone other than my mom. “I’ll be fine with the apple.”

  “You should wait and retest. What am I supposed to do, swim out if you get into trouble?”

  I’m up to my thighs.

  “Whatever you do, don’t you dare call 911.” I’ve had enough of that for three lifetimes. The East Ridge ambulance probably had a special hotline for my mother when I was a kid. She used to call if my sugar was even a little bit out of whack.

  “I don’t think I could launch the boat by myself,” Cole says. Of course he couldn’t; the thing must weigh at least twice what he does.

  Upper thighs. I don’t know what he would do.

  “I’m going to check you on your phone w
hile you swim,” he says.

  “The hell you are.”

  “Matt, tell me the password to your phone. I’m going to track you.”

  “It’s one, two, three, screw you.”

  “If you don’t let me, I’m calling your mom right now.”

  He’d do it. It would be out of love, but he’d do it. I tell him the password.

  “You’re going to stop when it gets to your balls,” he says.

  I throw myself forward into the water, the cold striking me all at once, eyes closed, kicking first and then starting to pull with my arms.

  We learned about the lake in fourth grade, when we studied the Native Americans who used to live in New Jersey. They had a name for it, which I forget, and a legend, which I half remember. It was something about a girl, some sort of princess, who lost the love of her life. The lake was made of her tears, and when it was full, she swam out into it and was never seen again. They said it didn’t have a bottom, just like her sorrow; that it went all the way to the center of the earth. That’s obviously not true, but it is supposed to be really fucking deep.

  “Sixty-one!” Cole calls. I glance over and see him, walking along the shore, climbing over some rocks, my phone in his hand.

  I have an app that’s synced with a little sensor that I wear on my side. It tracks my sugar, which is handy in a baseball game; one of the coaches watches it on the bench and gives me OJ before I even need it. Sixty-one is low, too low to be swimming, but the sugar from the apple will kick in soon. The sensor has a little delay.

  I’m pulling hard now. I feel good. I’m not scared, just focused, swimming in a straight line, farther and farther away from the beach. This is the way it’s supposed to be. No one’s going to bring me juice out here. It’s just me, alone.

  Maybe my elbow is starting to ache, though. I try to angle my arm so that I’m not flexing it so much, but I think it’s the cold. I’m getting pins and needles in the fingertips on my right hand.

  “Fifty-eight!” Cole shouts, his voice carrying across the water. Either I’m going to make it or I’m not; he doesn’t have to narrate the whole damn thing.

  My hand is going numb, and I roll over onto my back, kicking and waving my arms by my side so that I don’t have to bend at the elbow. The sky is lightening above me, but it’s still cloudy. There’s a sound in the distance that could be thunder, though it’s hard to tell with my ears underwater. Cole’s going to be shitting a brick if it is. Floating in the middle of a big lake in a thunderstorm. I smile at the sky and kick harder.

  After another minute I roll over, treading water, raising my head to make sure I’m not veering off from the center of the lake and taking a shorter path. I’m not. I’m dead center, and I’ve been making better time than I thought. The far shore is about two hundred yards off now, maybe a bit more. “Fifty-two,” Cole calls from the shore off to my right. He sounds worried. I nod and wave at him. Fifty-two micrograms of glucose per deciliter of blood. The apple wasn’t enough. I should have waited. “You all right?” Cole calls. I ignore him and start swimming again.

  I can feel my limbs starting to quiver. I glance up without stopping. Not too far now. I don’t see Cole as I turn my head to breathe. One, two, one, two, breathe. One, two, one, two . . . My head is starting to spin. I feel hollow inside. I swim hard, with everything I have left.

  I feel my fingertips brush the bottom. I try to put my feet down, and I do, but I can’t seem to take my own weight. I stumble forward one step, then two, then drop to my knees and pitch forward, my face plunging back into the lake, my arms nowhere to be found. For the first time, I panic. I’m going to drown on my knees in two feet of water.

  And then I hear the splash of running footsteps and feel hands under my arms, and I’m being pulled up. Cole has me, and all hundred and fifty pounds of him is hoisting me out of the water and pulling me toward the shore. I suck air and cough. No, no, no, this isn’t how it’s supposed to be. Even as I’m thinking it, I’m wrapping an arm around his neck and stumbling along beside him.

  Cole sets me down on the ground, hard. A moment later he’s holding something to my mouth. Warm orange juice. He must have taken it from my bag when I started swimming. He holds it up and I greedily suck it down, unable to raise my hand and take it from him. He feeds me like a baby with a bottle. When I’ve drunk it all, I let my head sink to my knees and feel the molecules of sugar spreading throughout my body, my organs coming back to life. And when I’m finally able, I raise my head and look at him.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” I say. “I was gonna be all right.”

  He crouches and looks at me in the early-morning light. His shoes are soaking wet. So are his pants, all the way up to his knees. “I think you need more juice, asshole.”

  I study the clouds, thickening over the water, and lick my lips, absorbing every last bit of sugar.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Cole asks. “Are you suicidal?”

  I’m not. I shake my head. “I just wanted to see if I could.”

  Cole sits down next to me and looks out at the lake. “Well, you did it,” he says. “Pure stupidity, but you did it.”

  “Sort of.”

  “You did.”

  I shrug. “The last couple of feet count.”

  He snorts and doesn’t respond.

  Cole won’t understand. He was there that day; he doesn’t remember a thing about it, but he was there. And I was home, reading comics in bed while my mom made tiny adjustments to my insulin levels.

  “I wanted to see if I was supposed to.”

  “What do you mean, ‘supposed to’?”

  “Like . . . just if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “The way what’s supposed to be?”

  “I don’t know, Cole. I can’t explain it.” I climb to my feet, push my hair off my face, and look down at him. He’s still staring out at the water, frowning, chewing on his lower lip. Like he’s trying to figure something out. A classic Cole expression.

  “Hey.”

  He looks up.

  “Thank you.”

  “Yeah. No problem. Happy to do it.”

  I reach down, and he takes my hand and lets me pull him to his feet. He’s so light; I can’t believe he carried me.

  “You have my clothes?”

  He stares for a moment, then bursts out laughing.

  “You’re kidding.”

  He shakes his head. “I ran to get the juice.”

  I can’t help but grin. “All right. Let’s go.”

  There’s a path that runs through the woods along the side of the lake, a bit farther back from the shore. We take it, me wearing nothing but my dripping wet boxers, Cole with his soaked shoes held in his hands and his jeans rolled up his calves. The sun is totally covered by clouds now, and the trees close in over us, the lake glinting through the trunks. We walk in silence, the birds chirping overhead. Stuff I don’t usually notice, unless I’m with Cole and I’m imagining him writing some poem about it.

  After five minutes, we come to a fork in the path where it breaks off to the right, toward the beach and the parking lot, and to the left, deeper into the woods. There’s a birch tree growing at the split. We both pause. “Let’s go back, just for a minute,” I say. We turn left.

  The path gets smaller, so we have to walk single file. It twists back and forth. It’s narrower than I remember it, more overgrown. A single raindrop lands on my forehead. We round a turn, and then we’re there, in the clearing.

  I don’t know who started calling it the Monument. Probably no one knows. It’s been a while since I’ve been out here, but it’s just the same as it ever was. There are big red block letters painted onto the surface of the rock face: FUCK SAM KEELEY. Each letter almost as tall as a person, the three words laid out vertically, the first one high up above anyone’s head. They look like they’re glittering, almost like the paint is still wet. And there, lower down, alongside KEELEY, are the two smaller rows of names, o
ne on each side, nine in each. STEVEN ABRAMS, PATRICK CLEMSON, SUSAN EDWARDS, and so on. There, at the end of the second list, out of alphabetical order: PRINCIPAL SCHULTZ.

  Cole stands beside me. “I haven’t been out here in forever.”

  “Me neither.”

  There are memorials all over town; for a few years people couldn’t seem to stop putting them up. But this is the only one that really matters to us. I study the names. Cole walks over to the base of the rock. There are a few old teddy bears, some notes, and birthday cards left in clear plastic bags. He picks up a crumpled beer can. I can’t imagine the asshole who would have left it here.

  The air is very still, though the tops of the trees are waving a bit. My skin is dry now, and I feel cold. A few more raindrops rustle the leaves overhead.

  “I don’t even know who takes care of this place,” Cole says.

  “I guess people just do it.”

  “It’s the only one I don’t mind,” he says. “The only one that doesn’t make me feel strange.” I know what he means. “Do you remember,” he continues, “the first one they did? The little park, and there was a flagstone with each of their names? And we all had to come when they opened it.”

  “Even Chris. He was out of the hospital by then, right? I remember they wheeled him in.”

  “Right.”

  I hated it. I hated being there. They made me stand up with all the other kids who had been in that class, with all the survivors. I hate being called a survivor. Chris was a survivor; he got shot and lived. Cole was a survivor; the kids on both sides of him died and he didn’t. He’s the survivor, really. The famous one. Photographed as he was carried out of the school, wrapped in Officer Greg Jessup’s big cop arms, his face spattered in blood, staring straight into the camera with that look in his eyes. It’s the photo that literally everyone in the world has seen.

  Me, I was at home eating low-carb soup. I’ve never survived anything.

  I turn away from the Monument. I don’t know why I wanted to come, but now I don’t want to be here. “Let’s go.”

  I lead the way back down the path and onto the trail. We get back to the beach, I pull my clothes on, and we head to the truck. The parking lot is still empty.