The Beauty That Remains

by Ashley Woodfolk

  After that, even though you’re still gone—I still don’t know where I fit without you, and we’re all still sad—everything feels a little better.

  I have another cup of foamy beer with the girls, and we talk about music. Alexa puts a fishtail braid into my hair, and Margo shows me a couple of photos she took at the last show they went to together. Faye pushes one of her earbuds into my hand, but I pass it to Alexa instead of listening myself. I don’t know when I’ll get back into that scene. I can’t imagine going to see a new band and knowing you’ll never get to hear another song.

  A little while later, I start playing tug-of-war with one of Perry’s friends from the football team. He brought me another drink and then started tugging at one end of my scarf. It’s starting to feel like a real party because the music’s been turned all the way up and the girls are giggling and yelling things at us. “You can take him, Autumn,” they shout, as if he and I were putting on a show just for them, and it feels better than I want to admit to be a part of the group again. The guy is trying to drag me closer to the water, and I’m laughing hysterically and resisting. He’s laughing too, which makes me keep yanking, but suddenly, his whole face changes.

  He drops my scarf so fast that I fall backward into the sand. He winces and mumbles, “Sorry, Autumn. I gotta go. I’ll, uh, see you at school or something.” It seems like he’s looking at someone just behind me as he walks away. When I turn around, Dante’s standing there, with his hands stuffed into his pockets, and he looks pissed.

  He reaches down to help me up, but I move away from his hands, shake my head, and stay in the sand.

  “It’s better if we just don’t. Don’t you think?” I say, thinking about him touching that other girl.

  Your brother looks at me like I’m a stranger. But before he can say anything, Perry materializes from somewhere. I’d forgotten that this part of South Shore is basically his backyard. He has to be buzzed if he’s willingly coming over to me and Dante after their fight. That fight is probably why his friend dropped my scarf so quickly.

  “Hey, dude, no hard feelings, right?” Perry says.

  I look over at Dante. Your brother shrugs. Nods.

  “Cool,” Perry says.

  It’s taken two weeks for Alexa and Margo to apologize to me when I hadn’t even done anything. Dante tried to kill Perry, and they’re just, like, I know you punched me a bunch of times, but it’s cool. Boys are so weird.

  Perry looks down at me.

  “Okay, A?” he asks.

  I want to talk to him even less than I normally do, so I nod too and pray that he’ll just leave. I probably haven’t thought of you for more than an hour, but then he says your name.

  “Parties are more of Tavi’s thing than yours, aren’t they?” he asks me, stooping so that we’re face to face. And there it is all over again: your name and the present tense. The memory of you going to Alexa’s party without me. And now, Dante’s face in the yard when he told me he didn’t go to the party with you because I didn’t go. I look away from Perry, knowing that if my face hasn’t turned red from the beer, it’s probably flushing now from me trying so hard not to cry. I puff out my cheeks and scan the beach for Willow. I can’t remember where we parked the car.

  When I turn around, Dante’s still standing there. Seeing him is the end of any hope I had of holding it together. The way I feel must be evident on my face because Perry reaches out to me and says, “Hey, what’s wrong?”

  He’s wearing a stupid fitted baseball cap with the sticker still on the bill, and it’s barely propped on top of his head. And just as I look up at him, a big gust of wind blows it away. But he barely even flinches. He just keeps watching me.

  Crappy beach parties in winter would be better with you here. Everything was better with you. And I can’t talk to Perry—I can’t even look at him—without feeling like you’d still be here if you’d never fallen in love with him.

  When I start sobbing into my gritty hands a minute later, both Dante and Perry try to help me up. Instead of reaching out for either of them, I crawl away from your brother and scream at your ex.

  “She was coming to see you!” I shout to make Perry get away from me. I don’t say your name, the way he always does, but I can tell by his face that he knows I mean you. “She wanted to get back together!” is what I yell next.

  “Autumn, don’t,” Dante says. But I don’t listen. We’re all at this stupid party as if everything is normal, so I might as well tell the truth. Perry looks at me with something close to hope in his eyes, and it just makes me angrier. I don’t want him to feel hopeful. I want him to hurt too.

  “She wanted to get back together,” I say again, anger seeping into my low voice. “And she died on her way here, to your beach. To your house.”

  I’m drunk, so I’m not even close to being done, but Dante pulls me up out of the sand and brushes off my clothes, like I’m a kid climbing out of a sandbox, even as I try to pull away from him.

  “Did you drive here?” he says to me.

  I roll my eyes. “I’m not an idiot.”

  Faye runs over and says, “She came with Willow.” Alexa and Margo are still by the log where we were sitting earlier, but they’re watching us, too. I’d forgotten they were even here, and their faces are full of some mix of sadness and concern. Alexa looks like she might cry, and it just makes me angrier.

  I’m stumbling, and still kind of sobbing, and by then, other people start to notice. Dante picks me up and throws me over his shoulder when I won’t start walking on my own, and I hit his back, but he won’t put me down. As he carts me away, I look back at Perry one last time. In a voice that sounds nothing like my own I screech, “She’s dead because of you!”

  Dante finds Willow. He puts me down right in front of her and says, “I think you should get her out of here.” His jaw is working hard, and my hands are shaking like crazy.

  I’m crying so hard that I can’t even say what I want to say to him. But I look behind him, at the girl he’d been flirting with, and I choke out a “Her?”

  He must understand, even though I’m coughing and crying and sniffing. I’m sure my face is covered in sand, and I probably look terrible. But Dante just frowns at me, and I don’t know what his frown means. When Willow sees the state I’m in, I don’t have a chance to figure it out.

  Before, it was like I was drowning. The water looked smooth, but I was thrashing around under the waves, struggling to breathe. Now I’ve broken the surface, and people can see me. But I’m too far away from the shore to be rescued.

  I curl into a ball in the backseat while Willow drives us home. She sneaks me up to the bathroom, and I shower until my whole body is pink with heat and my head is a little clearer. I let her tuck me in.

  I wake up in the middle of the night, in my room, alone. I roll over and grab my phone, and before I start writing an email to you, I press my earbuds into my ears and play the only screamy song UL ever recorded.

  I feel so angry that it’s scaring me.

  BRAM IS BORED so he sniffs a kitten (even though he’s allergic).

  5,523 views | 6 months ago

  Yara and I have talked and texted almost every day since Ms. Lassiter’s birthday. She seems to feel as guilty as I do about Bram, and I can’t hate her, knowing that’s true. I walk down the halls at school, and it feels strange to see people and want to talk to them. I’m no good at having friends, but I guess I’m trying.

  “Hey, Yara,” I say. I walk over to her, and Paige is there too, so I wave. Yara slaps my arm and says, “Oh my god, I thought you were skipping or something. Where have you been all day?”

  I shrug. I was hiding out in the nurse’s office because they reopened the gym. Until today, the doors had been crisscrossed with caution tape since the gym leads to the locker rooms—the scene of Bram’s suicide. I had phys ed fourth period, and there was
just no way I was stepping foot in there. So I immediately claimed I had a killer migraine. The nurse’s office was pretty comfortable, so I just stayed in there till fifth. I have a feeling I’ll come down with a headache every time phys ed shows up on my schedule for the rest of the year.

  “The gym opening back up is super depressing, right?” Yara asks.

  “You could say that,” I agree.

  “I know,” Paige says. She smacks her lips together. “We’re going shopping after school. Retail therapy. Wanna come?”

  “He can’t,” Yara chimes in. “He has to go into the city for actual therapy today. Right?” She looks back at me to confirm.

  I nod, trying to remember when I told Yara my therapy schedule. Paige knocks her hip into mine before the three of us start down the hall together. Yara grabs my hand. If she touches you once, the girl doesn’t stop.

  “Maybe we can just get ice cream real quick?” Yara says. “Since you can’t shop.”

  “It’s twenty fucking degrees out,” I mumble.

  “So what?” she says.

  “It’s ice cream,” Paige agrees.

  My phone rings as Paige impersonates me. “ ‘It’s twenty fucking degrees,’ ” she mutters, and Yara laughs. When I pull it out and look to see which one of my parents is calling (because they’re the only people who ever call me), it isn’t either. It’s Nico.

  I’ve been trying to figure out what to do about him. I’ve been texting him about music stuff, like everything’s cool between us, even though whenever I see him at school I want to kick his ass. Still, I’m surprised to see him calling me. I know I need to talk to him about Bram again, but I’ve been putting it off.

  Now he’s on the phone, and I can’t exactly ignore that. I untangle my fingers from Yara’s, and I tell both girls I’ll be right back.

  “Nico?” I ask as soon as I’m alone, and he laughs. The TV is on way too loud in the background, and I’m just about to tell him to turn it down when he does.

  “Hey,” he says, like we call each other on the phone all the time or something.

  “Uh, hi?”

  He laughs again, and then I hear slurping and the unmistakable sound of ice hitting glass. Nico’s pulling desperately at the last bit of a drink.

  “You wanna come over?” he asks me, and his words are slurred. It’s the middle of the day, Nico’s drunk, and he’s inviting me over, like it’s not a Tuesday, like he shouldn’t be at school right now.

  I’m already in trouble for skipping classes, so I hesitate for a minute, but only for a minute. Because even though things are a little better at school, I still can’t stop thinking about Bram. I need to find out what was going on between the two of them, because I know from Yara that he lied to me. And I haven’t forgotten that Bram was beat to hell when he was found. I want to know the truth about that night, and drunk people tell the truth. Nico lied to me once already. I know he knows more than he’s saying.

  “Sure, I’ll come over,” I say. “Send me your address.”

  Nico hangs up hard and fast, like he has another call or somewhere else he has to be. I shoot Yara a text and tell her something came up so no ice cream for me, and Nico’s text arrives with his address a minute later. As I exit the building, I wonder why I didn’t just leave school the second I saw the open doors to the gym.

  When I get to Nico’s, he wrestles me into a headlock and laughs at how my hair is sticking up all over the place when he’s done. I have to try really hard not to hit him the second he backs off, because he’s always fucking annoying, but it’s harder to let it slide, now that I know he’s also a liar. He pours an inch of whiskey for me into a short water-stained glass and says his dad won’t miss the booze. I mix it with a warm Cherry Coke that I pull from my backpack.

  “Cheers to us changing clothes where a kid fucking died,” Nico says, lifting his glass. I guess he was at school this morning, and he had the balls to do what I didn’t—leave. He’s smiling, but his eyes are a little glassy, and he’s wasted, so the gym being reopened is obviously a big deal to him. I wasn’t expecting him to be so emotional. It turns my anger with him down to a simmer. “It’s pretty messed up, don’t you think?”

  I nod and take a sip of my drink, trying not to think about how disappointed Gertrude would be. I silently convince myself she’d be cool with me drinking, considering the gym drama.

  “I hid in the nurse’s office all afternoon,” I tell him.

  Nico thinks that’s hilarious.

  I try to find my footing in this room, in this relationship. Is Nico—the guy who kissed my ex, the guy who introduced him to drugs—a drummer, a dealer, a liar, or my friend? Or is he somehow all of those things at once?

  Nico stands up and stumbles a little as he walks over to a record player in a far corner of the apartment. He pulls out a record from his parents’ pretty extensive collection and presses it into the player with more care than I’ve ever seen him use with anything else.

  When the music starts, it’s a song I love and one that demands all your senses. I close my eyes for the first few bars. When I open them, Nico is holding out his hand. “May I have this dance, Logo?” he asks with a grin.

  I swallow what’s left in my glass and then oblige because I hope dancing will be a way to open him up, to ease into asking him more about Bram. I was pissed when I got here, but it’s funny how quickly booze can make bad feelings float away.

  We start out with just our fingers intertwined. And almost immediately, Nico twirls me. Neither of us knows what the hell we’re doing, but it’s kind of fun, anyway. I laugh when he pulls me close after the spin. We both hum and keep swaying to the music. Even though I’m shit at keeping friends, I’m bad at being alone, too. So it’s so nice to be close to someone and not want something more, and to know he doesn’t want anything from me, either.

  “You miss him?” I ask Nico. And as much as I’m asking him to get to the truth about him and Bram, part of me honestly wants to know.

  He nods and sniffs. I can’t see his face, but shit, he must be crying.

  “I thought he was just your dealer,” I say because people don’t cry when their drug dealer dies. Almost immediately, Nico’s body stiffens.

  He looks up at me with his wet too-blue eyes.

  “I never said he was just my dealer.”

  The song ends, and we back away from each other. Whatever bubble we were in thanks to the music has burst.

  “I invited you over here because I wanted to talk to someone who understood,” Nico says, as if I’m betraying him.

  “So talk,” I say, like a dick. Because fuck him for making me feel bad when he’s the one who lied. Whatever softness I’d felt for him a few seconds ago is gone. Funny how booze can make good feelings disappear, too. “But how about this time, you lie a little less.”

  Nico is normally all jokes and laughter; roughhousing and rough hugs. But now he sits on the floor. He looks different—older or something—when he looks up at me.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I know you were Bram’s dealer, Nico. Not the other way around. Yara told me.”

  He shakes his head, like I’m wrong, and I’m gearing up to argue with him when tears start falling from his eyes. Seeing that shuts me all the way up.

  “I didn’t lie,” he says, “But I also didn’t tell you everything.” He traces a circle on the floor beside him. “So here it is: I do deal. But Bram? He was dealing too. Yara just didn’t know. She assumed when she saw him with me that he was buying. But that wasn’t the way it was going down. He told me he needed to make some extra money, so I hooked him up.”

  I shut up and walk over to the whiskey, which is still on the coffee table. I don’t mix it with Coke this time—I just swallow it straight, and when my chest burns, I feel like I deserve it. Nico might have lied to me before, but I know he’s
not lying now because Ms. Lassiter told me they were broke and that Bram was trying to fix things the way he always did.

  “The party over Thanksgiving weekend was only, like, the third time I’d hooked him up with a supply, but he was burning through everything so fast. I was mostly selling at shows, and he did house parties since he got invited to most of them, anyway. He was worried what he was doing would get back to Coach, so he’d organize these drops and then text people to pick up their shit and leave their money instead of doing hand-to-hand exchanges. He asked me to help him set up a drop at that party. That’s what we were doing when he kissed me. He thought someone was coming into the room, and he wanted to cover it up. Then he kind of…kept kissing me. Said I gave him a rush.”

  That sounds like the truth too—like something Bram would definitely do. I could see him getting a taste of someone (Nico), or something (the drugs, the money), and deciding that he liked them regardless of the consequences.

  Nico keeps talking. “We made that video for fun the second or third time we hooked up. I didn’t plan to do anything with it, but then he broke things off with me out of nowhere. Said he couldn’t sell anymore and that he didn’t want to hook up anymore, either.”

  “Wait. What video?” I say. But it’s like Nico doesn’t hear me.

  “God, I was so pissed. He came over here, and we got into this huge fight. But I tried to tell him—”

  “Wait, Nico,” I say, my voice dropping. “You’re the guy in the sex tape?”

  Nico’s drunk, so he looks up, clearly confused. He wipes away the tears that are left in his eyes and says, “Duh. Everyone knows that.”

  “Um, I didn’t.”

  “Oh, well. Yeah.”

  “And you uploaded it?”

  Nico nods. “I did it to get a reaction out of him, but he kept totally ignoring me for, like, weeks after. I think he was trying to work it out with Yara. Whatever. When he finally showed up, I guess he’d been thinking about it for so long that he wasn’t even mad I’d uploaded it anymore. I think he actually felt bad.”