What You Left Behind

by Jessica Verdi

  “Morning,” Mabel says as she gets in the car. The curtains at her living room window move a little, then are pulled tightly closed.

  “Do your parents know about any of this?” I ask, backing out of the driveway.

  “No way.”

  “But they know you’re going somewhere with me.”

  “They do now.”

  I give her a side-eyed you’re making no sense expression, but I’m brought up short when I get a good look at her. She looks different than usual—no makeup, hair pulled up in a floppy loop on the top of her head, hoodie, sneakers. She looks more like Meg than she ever has.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she asks.

  Oh. I was staring. And I guess I took my foot off the gas pedal, because the car is creeping to a stop. I pull my eyes back to the road and shake my head. “There’s not enough time in the world to even begin answering that question.”

  Mabel doesn’t say anything.

  “Anyway,” I say, clearing my throat, “your parents. What do they think you and I are doing together at seven a.m. on a Monday?”

  Mabel shrugs. “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

  I squint at the road. “Explain, please.”

  She sighs. “They’ve barely blinked at me this entire summer. I could’ve dyed my hair neon green and I honestly don’t think they would have noticed. But then Mom saw your car in the driveway and suddenly started demanding answers. I told her it was too little too late. She doesn’t get to know things.”

  “They probably think I’m gonna get you pregnant too.”

  Mabel actually laughs really hard at that. “Ryden Brooks’s master plan to inseminate all the Reynolds women. Look out, Mom, you’re next!”

  I laugh a little too. But really, it’s not that funny.

  We get to the storage center, and I pull up in front of number 1017. We stare at the garage door, neither of us moving.

  “Okay, well,” Mabel says, unbuckling her seat belt and getting out. “Let’s get started.”

  The storage unit is completely full. I start to feel sick. Meg’s bed frame. Her dresser. Her bookshelves. All of it was part of her, part of her life. And now it’s junk, thrown haphazardly into a cold metal garage off the highway, left to be forgotten.

  There are boxes everywhere—and they’re all unlabeled.

  I put Hope’s car seat on Meg’s desk and pull my keys out of my pocket. “Where should we start?” I ask, but Mabel’s not really paying attention to me. She’s standing near the door, absentmindedly flicking the knobs on Meg’s floor lamp back and forth, staring at the room full of stuff. Her eyes look like filled-up fishbowls, and when she blinks, the tears pour down her face.

  Don’t do it, I tell myself. Do not cry.

  In one swift move, not giving myself time to think, I pull the nearest box over to me and slice the tape on the top open with my key.

  Clothes. T-shirts, actually. The ones she used to wear before her belly swelled to the size of a soccer ball. I push the shirts back into the box and move on to the next. More clothes. Same for the next three boxes.

  What the…

  Is that mine?

  I move the pile of Meg’s sweats aside—the big, baggy ones she wore in the later stages of her pregnancy—and pull out the thick navy-blue thing. It’s my varsity soccer pullover hoodie, complete with the Downey soccer logo, Brooks, and my number: 1. I didn’t even realize it was missing.

  “Hey, Mabel?”

  Her face is dry now, and she’s sitting on the concrete floor a little ways away, quietly going through a box of books. “Hmm?”

  “Did Meg wear this?” I hold up the sweatshirt.

  She smiles. “All the time. She slept in it most nights.”

  “How long did she have it?”

  “I don’t know. A few months, I guess.” She looks confused. “Why, didn’t you give it to her?”

  I shake my head. “She must have swiped it from my room. Or maybe I left it at your house and didn’t realize it.” For some reason, she didn’t want me to know she had this sweatshirt, just like I didn’t want her to know I had her notebook. Maybe it was the same story. She loved it, it made her feel close to me, and she didn’t want it taken away. The thought makes me smile. I’m not crazy—about this, at least. She really did love me too.

  I slip the sweatshirt over my head, even though it’s getting kinda warm in the storage unit. It still smells like her.

  Tears prick the backs of my eyes, but I sniffle and press the sweatshirt-covered heels of my hands into my eyes to push them back. When I open my eyes again and the blurry spots fade, I notice Mabel watching me. She doesn’t say anything though.

  Hope wakes up then and starts to whine. I put on Joni’s Washington Square Park audio file and tuck my phone into the car seat with her. She quiets down immediately.

  “What’s that?” Mabel asks.

  I shrug. “Just some New York sounds. She likes it.”

  Mabel grins. “So cute.”

  We go through a couple more boxes until we find some containing journals. That’s when the work really slows down, since we have to go through each book, scouring for any sign of a checklist. Mabel says we should just look at the inside back covers, but that’s lazy. We don’t know Meg put the checklist in the same spot in each book. I don’t want to risk having the right journals in our hands and disregarding them.

  An hour later, we still haven’t found the ones we’re looking for.

  But honestly, we haven’t gotten very far. We’re still on the first box. Because we keep stopping to read.

  June 1.

  This must be the journal that immediately follows the green one, the one from the beginning of our relationship that I’ve had all along.

  Mabel might be happier than I am that Ryden and I are officially going out.

  Okay, that’s probably not true. But she is super excited about it. She knows how much I like him. She’s also beyond thrilled that she knows someone in high school besides me and Alan. Someone “cool,” as she puts it. Because she’s going to be a freshman in the fall and having a connection to one of the most popular guys in school “will totally up her cred.”

  I don’t know, I think Alan and I are pretty cool.

  The only thing Mabel’s not happy about is the fact that I haven’t told him about the cancer yet. She keeps saying I’m lying to him and it’s not right. But I’m not lying. I’m just not giving him the whole truth. There’s a difference.

  I know I’m going to have to tell him eventually. Once he knows, it’s going to change everything, and things are so good right now. Is it really that bad if I’m selfish for a little while longer?

  June 12.

  I told Alan the miserable truth today: I go back in for round 2 two weeks from Monday.

  “Not the best way to start summer vacation,” he said over the sound of that god-awful 50 Cent song he’s always listening to.

  “It’s okay. I’m glad it’s not happening until school is over. They say the aftereffects will be a lot worse this time. I don’t want to have to miss any of my finals.”

  Her second chemo session. The one that never happened. That’s what they were talking about.

  I pulled my art history notebook out of my bag and began to copy Alan’s notes since I missed class to go to the doctor. Turns out the title Judith Beheading Holofernes isn’t exactly a metaphor—yikes.

  But Alan was staring at me like he was trying to figure something out.

  And then he snapped.

  “How can you act like this is all no big deal?” he shouted. I don’t know if I’ve ever heard Alan shout before today. “You have cancer, Meg. And it’s getting worse. But you act like all you care about is school.”

  “You don’t get it.” I tried to sound tough, but it came out sounding pathetic.

 
“Well, please, explain it to me. I’m all ears.” Alan pushed a button on his computer, and 50 Cent mercifully vanished. The room was silent. Alan’s arms were crossed over his chest.

  I took a deep breath and said the things I’ve been feeling for a while that I never told anyone.

  School is important. It’s one of the only things in my life that hasn’t changed since my diagnosis. And as long as I can go to my classes, learn things, and do my homework, it feels like there’s still an order to everything. So the idea of having to miss a bunch of school, the one routine in my life that still feels normal, because of the disease that has made everything else abnormal, is not okay.

  Alan spun his cell phone around and around on his desk, letting my words sink in. When he looked up, there were tears in his eyes.

  I really, really hated seeing him like that.

  He let out a huge, steadying breath. “I didn’t mean to yell at you,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay.” It really is.

  “But can I say one more thing? Being that I’m your best friend and care about you a lot?”

  I smiled at that. “Sure.”

  “I miss seeing you happy. You’re so serious all the time. I know it’s for a good reason, but I think that by trying to stay detached from the cancer stuff, you’re missing out on other stuff too.” He looked at me intently, like he’d just said the most profound thing ever uttered by humankind. And you know what? He had. But I didn’t see it yet. I was still clueless.

  “Um…what?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Does the name Ryden Brooks mean anything to you?”

  I felt my face get red.

  “You love him.” It wasn’t a question.

  I looked down at my book, but I wasn’t looking at the words anymore. I nodded.

  “You should tell him. Everything.”

  He sounded just like Mabel.

  I tried to flop back on the bed in exasperation, but I wasn’t feeling great, so it ended up being more of a ginger lean-back.

  “Live your life, Meg,” Alan said.

  I’ve been thinking about that since leaving Alan’s house earlier today. And he’s right. There are things I want to do before I die. And Ryden’s a huge part of that.

  I stare at the page, putting the date and context of the entry together with my own memory of that time in my head. The very next day after this was written…

  I think I need to have a little chat with Alan.

  “We have to go,” I say to Mabel, standing up and brushing the storage unit dust off my soccer shorts. “Same time tomorrow?”

  “You got it.”

  • • •

  By the time I get to Alan’s to drop off Hope, that journal entry has replayed in my mind at least twenty times.

  Alan comes outside to meet us. “Hi, Hope!” He opens the back door of the car, unbuckles her car seat from the base, and grabs her diaper bag from the floor. She squeals in delight as he makes a stupid face at her.

  I get out of the car. “Hey, Alan, you got a minute?”

  “Yeah, sure. What’s up?”

  We lean against the car, and my words come out all flat and accusing. “Why did you convince Meg to have sex with me?”

  Alan sucks in air so fast he starts coughing. “What?”

  “I read some of her other journals. Mabel got us into the storage unit. She wrote about a conversation you had, when you told her to ‘live her life.’ And the next day, she told me about the cancer and asked me to have sex with her. She was so intense about it, like if she didn’t do it right then and there, she would never get the chance again.”

  I run my sneaker back and forth over a loose piece of the driveway blacktop. I don’t usually talk this directly with my guy friends. We tend—tended, past tense, since, you know, I’m kinda low on the friend supply lately—to stick to more surface conversations. And I especially don’t talk this way with Alan, who was always Meg’s friend first and foremost. But I really could not give less of a shit anymore. “Why did you have to go and put that thought in her head?”

  Alan pushes off the car and faces me. “Dude, I never said that. All I said was I wanted her to allow herself to be happy. Trust me: your sex life is not very high on my list of concerns. I have my own to think about, you know. And let me tell you, it’s in desperate need of some attention. I’m starting to feel like Lane Kim.”

  I stare at him. “You know I have no idea what you’re talking about, right?”

  Alan sighs. “I miss Meg. She always used to get my references.”

  There’s nothing to say to that, really.

  After a short pause, Alan says, “Lane Kim is this Korean character on this old TV show Gilmore Girls. She was played by a Japanese actress, which is complete bullshit, but I guess I can forgive them because they made the effort to include a Korean character on the show.”

  “And…um, why do you feel like this not-Korean Korean girl?”

  “Oh, because she doesn’t have sex until she gets married and in the meantime lives vicariously through her friends’ recounting of their own experiences. It’s completely tragic.”

  “So what you’re saying is, you want a girlfriend.”

  “That’s what I’m saying, yes.”

  “You could have just said that.” A thought hits me, and even though I’m already late for soccer, I say, “Hey, Alan?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you ever feel, uh, that way about Meg?”

  Alan looks at me sideways, like he’s not sure if I’m setting a trap. “Um. Why?”

  “I don’t know, just wondering, I guess.”

  “Well…yeah. At times.” He steps away. “Don’t punch me.”

  “I’m not going to punch you.”

  “Appreciate it, man, thanks. Don’t worry, nothing ever happened between us. I told her once in seventh grade that I liked her. She said, and I quote, she ‘didn’t want to ruin what we had by trying to make it something it wasn’t.’”

  “That sounds like something she would say.”

  Alan smiles. “Yeah. Wise beyond her years, that one.”

  • • •

  Coach is pissed that I was a half hour late to practice again, so he makes me stay late to lug all the equipment back up to the gym by myself.

  “Listen, Brooks,” he says, walking casually alongside me as I sweat my ass off, dragging a mesh bag of balls up the hill. “I know things are tough for you at home right now, and I know you’ve had to make some sacrifices, but I need you to know that I’ve got a lot of interest in you from several D-One schools.”

  “Several? UCLA is one of them, right?”

  “It is. Their recruiter is coming to see you play our third game. I get the impression that if things go well, he’ll be ready to make you an offer that night.”

  “Holy shi—I mean, really?”

  “Yes. So if you want a real shot at playing in college and potentially going pro, you need to step it up. That means no more being late, no more dragging your feet during drills, no more spacing out on the field and letting goals go by that you should be stopping no problem. Understood?”

  I nod, wiping the sweat from my face as we reach the locker room. “Understood, Coach. One hundred percent.”

  “Glad to hear it. Don’t let him down. And don’t let me down either.”

  “I won’t, I promise.”

  “Hit the showers and go get some rest.”

  But rest will have to wait. I race across town to Alan’s, then my house, then Whole Foods. I’m seventeen minutes late punching in.

  Joni’s stationed at the register across from me. She shakes her head all mock disappointedly and taps her watch.

  “Sorry,” I mouth across the aisle.

  She smiles and goes right on scanning and packing.

  Two hours an
d countless times of asking “Did you bring your own bags today?” later, Joni turns off her light and comes over to my station.

  “Break time?” she asks.

  “Yeah, let me finish up here, and I’ll meet you in the break room.”

  She shakes her head. “Meet me out front.”

  “Why?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” she says, skipping off before I can say anything else. I smile. You can’t say Joni doesn’t keep things interesting.

  I find her a few minutes later, sitting on the curb outside the exit. I lower myself down next to her—it feels good to sit down—and hand her an aluminum hot/cold bag.

  “What’s this?”

  “Pizza.” I open my own bag and pull out a slice.

  “You’re feeding me?” she asks.

  I take a huge pepperoni-filled bite. “You always feed me.”

  Joni looks at the bag. “Is it pepperoni? I actually don’t eat meat…”

  “I know.” How did I know that? I don’t think she ever told me. Must have figured it out from being around her, I guess. “Yours has broccoli and shit on it.”

  “You know, I don’t usually eat shit,” she says, grinning. “But the broccoli part is good. Thanks, Ryden,” she says through a mouthful of veggies and cheese. “That was very…maternal of you.”

  I almost choke on my food.

  Joni looks at me. “What?”

  “Nothing.” I swallow slowly, making sure it goes down the correct pipe this time. “So why did you want to meet out here?”

  She points straight ahead, past the trees, to the horizon. “Sunset. Pretty, no?”

  I look down at my sneakers. “Yeah.” Pretty, sure, yeah, whatever. Also, say, the number one most clichéd romantic thing in the world.

  Joni nudges me with her shoulder. “Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist. I’m not hitting on you. I just didn’t want to stay inside all day. We only have so much summer left. We’ll be back at school next week.”

  “Yeah. Senior year.”

  “Woooo! Seniors! Kings of the school! Paaaaar-tay!” She waves her hands over her head. I know her well enough to know she’s being sarcastic.

  I laugh, and she calms down, giving me an eye-rolling grin.