by Jeff Zentner
Buford gives me a quizzical look.
“But you can’t have any, Bufie Bear,” I continue. “Because I can never remember the two hundred and sixty-seven different human foods that are poison to dogs, so I play it safe.”
Buford gives me a forlorn look. He is aware on some level that there are things in the world he’s not allowed to eat, and this causes him great sorrow.
“Jo?” My mom’s sleepy voice startles me.
“Hey, Mom. Sorry for waking you up.”
“I’m glad you got home safe.” She pads in and sits beside me.
“Sorry. I know you hate it when I do this.” I hold up the spoon and the ice cream container.
“I do. But you wouldn’t be my Josie if you didn’t do it anyway.” She regards me in her bleary, unfocused, contacts-out way. “So? How’d it go in Florida?”
“Well, I’m eating ice cream from the carton with a spoon, which is one of the most clichéd ways writers of film and television convey that someone is undergoing emotional turmoil, so you tell me.”
Mom rests her chin on her palm and strokes my hair with her other hand. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”
I inhale deeply through my nose. “It feels weird to wish something had gone better but also be glad it went how it did.”
“Learning what you don’t want can be as important as learning what you do want.”
“Yeah, well. Anyway. You and Dad win. I’m doing the internship. Congrats.”
Mom stops stroking my hair and folds her arms on the table. “It was never about getting our way. We win when you’re happy. That’s all we want. I know it might not seem like it, but I think you’ll be happy getting out and seeing more of the world.”
We look at each other for a long time. “I’m worried about Delia,” I say finally.
“You’re a really, really good friend to her.”
“I think she would disagree right now.”
“She’ll remember.”
“People keep leaving her behind. I wanted to be better than that.”
“Pursuing your dreams isn’t the same thing as leaving someone behind.”
I nod and scrape at the dregs of the ice cream carton. “Tell that to Delia.”
“I think Delia will land on her feet,” Mom says. “She seems to have a certain gutsiness.”
“I hope.”
Mom stands, leans over, and kisses me on the top of my head. “I’m going back to sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I catch her in a side hug. “I love you, Mom.”
“Love you too. Put your spoon in the dishwasher.” She starts to leave but turns in the doorway. “I’m proud of who you’re growing up to be.”
I tear open the ice cream carton and lick the sides. “And why wouldn’t you be?”
She smiles and disappears down the hall. I hear the soft click of her door shutting.
I sit there for a while, too tired even to get up and go to bed, and let the buzzing of my thoughts harmonize with the hum of the refrigerator. Then the fridge goes silent and the kitchen is quiet like loneliness.
I wonder if it’s how Delia feels all the time.
* * *
•••
It’s Thursday and I still haven’t heard from Delia. Total silence. I texted her a couple of times but got no response. It’s time for more active measures.
I’m sitting in Delia’s gravel driveway. It’s late enough that she should be home from work. I keep trying to think of what to tell her, what to say to make things right. But we’ve never been the sort of friends who make planned speeches to each other. I get out, walk up to her door, and knock.
I’m about to turn around and leave when I hear a thumping and the door swings open. It’s Delia. She looks resigned and sad, but not angry to see me.
“Hey.” I wave awkwardly.
“Hey.” She waves awkwardly.
“Hey,” I say in a dumb-person voice and wave goonily.
“Hey,” she says in a dumber-person voice and waves even more goonily.
This goes back and forth for a while until we’re both smiling.
“Are we still friends?” I ask.
Delia comes outside, closing the door behind her, and sits on the front steps. “Of course, dummy.”
I sit next to her. “We’ve never gone so long without talking. I wondered.”
“Haven’t felt like talking to anyone.”
“I hoped it was that and that you didn’t hate me.”
“I’m so sure.”
We watch moths flit and dance around in the light of Delia’s mom’s sign.
“It’s not even you,” Delia says. “Mostly I’m still processing my meet-up with my dad.”
“Was it horrible?”
“It wasn’t horrible. Like he didn’t slam the door in my face. But it sucked in how little it was what I’d hoped it would be.”
“What did you hope?”
“I don’t even know. That’s the frustrating thing. But whatever I wanted, it wasn’t what I got.”
I just listen.
Delia continues. “What I got was that he was cowardly and small. He ran from my mom and me because he was scared of the responsibility. It feels weird that something that affected my life so much is the result of someone being afraid. I almost wish he left because he hated me.”
I put my arm around her. “I’m really sorry, DeeDeeBoo. You deserve better than that. I love you.”
She lays her head on my shoulder. “I love you, JoJoBee. I’m really sad I’m losing you too.”
“You’re not losing me. You’ll always have me.”
“But you’ll be far away.”
“Five hours.”
“Do you have to leave?” Delia asks plaintively.
“I can’t do what I want to do with my life if I stick around here.”
“It’s what you’ve wanted since you were little, huh?”
“Yeah. But it still guts me to leave you.”
“I get it. I wouldn’t make you want less for yourself, even if I could.”
“I really tried with Jack Divine, boo.”
“I believe you.”
“Like legitimately, if you knew what we went through that night. He’s seriously a piece of work.”
“How so?”
“Well, for one thing, I’m like ninety-nine percent sure his ‘assistant’ Celeste who you emailed with is actually him.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yep. And Lawson ended up knocking out Yuri.”
“For reals?”
“Yep. Divine told Yuri to get money from us. So Lawson did some MMA move on him and choked him until he passed out. When we left Divine, he had his arm stuck in a clothing donation bin.”
Delia snort-laughs. “Come on.”
“Oh, oh! And we had just come from the office of a dude named Wald Disme.”
“Wait, like Walt—”
“NO. NOT AT ALL LIKE WALT DISNEY. He was very emphatic about that. Anyway, Disme had barely told me about doing battle with a bunch of hornets at a construction site when Divine’s scary Austrian professional shot-putter ex-wife showed up and threatened to burn down the building. So we had to escape.”
“I deeply regret not being present for all of this.”
“It’s funny in hindsight. I can’t emphasize the hindsight part enough. Oh, and fair warning, Divine said that he was going to tell everyone in Hollywood not to work with us, so…”
“I wonder if he’s still stuck in the donation bin. Maybe he chewed his arm off like a coyote.”
“Lawson wedgied him super hard. He bid us farewell by saying we were in trouble if we injured his anus.”
“As one does, I suppose.”
We crack up. When our laughs subside, I ask, “So what
are you going to do about the show?”
Delia gives a resigned shrug. “Keep it going, I guess. For a long time, I thought I was doing the show because it would be a connection to my dad. But even knowing that’s not going to happen, the show’s really all I have.”
“I think you should keep it alive.”
“It’s not going to be as good without you.”
“Dude, you’ll be great.”
“Think how much Larry Donut’s going to hate our show if it diminishes even one iota in quality,” Delia says.
“I’m imagining Larry Donut watching and fuming while eating a giant mixing bowl of melted cheese with a wooden spoon.”
“Gahhhh! My name is Larry Donut and I hate this stupid show, but I love my melted cheese bowl.”
“I mean, Larry Donut can legit blow it out the back of his gross Utilikilt for all I care,” I say.
“That’s the healthy thing to do, I’ve heard. Good for your liver.”
“That is not a thing. Where is my anger-cheese bowl?”
Once our laughter subsides, Delia starts talking again. “I’m sorry for what I said about you not being a guest on the show ever. Obviously, I want you to do the show with me any time you can.”
“I’d like that a lot.”
“Rayne and Delilah forever.” Delia side-hugs me.
“Rayne and Delilah forever.” I hug her back tighter.
“Did you and Lawson bone in Orlando before I got back?” Delia asks after a pause.
I laugh. “No. We’d had a horrible night. I didn’t want to cap off our evening of follies by taking a trip to the bone zone.”
“But you guys way made out.”
“Sure, sure.”
“I was afraid I was gonna walk in on you two bone-zoning,” Delia says.
“I missed you so much the last few days.”
“I missed you. It’ll suck living in different cities.”
“Yeah, it will.” I stand and open Delia’s front door. “Now, I believe we have a show tomorrow night to prepare for.”
“You’re gonna love the movie I picked. Or hate. Maybe hate.”
“You knew I was coming over?”
“Of course. We have a show to do.”
Summer passes like a cloud moves across the sky. While you watch it, it seems to creep along. But if you look away for a second, it’s almost gone.
I work a lot. I get a second job at the new organic grocery store in Jackson. I’ve made friends with a couple of coworkers there and pal around with them sometimes. One of them is this guy named Dax, who’s a guitarist in a halfway decent metal band. He seemed adorably overjoyed when I came out to one of his shows. He loves horror movies and started watching Midnite Matinee after we met. He and I have plans to do Thirty-One Days of Horror in October, where you watch a horror flick every night. I’m looking forward to it. He’s easy to spend time with and nice to look at.
I hang out with Josie whenever she’s not working or with Lawson. We text until the early-morning hours and we’re both ready to pass out. We do our show, and Lawson helps when he can. Each week I try to envision myself doing it alone. It never gets any easier. But I do my best to step up a little more each time.
I savor the days we have left together. I hate thinking about how our remaining weeks could be counted on one hand.
Toward the end of summer, there’s a big solar eclipse. Everyone’s saying it’s pretty rare, and it turns out Nashville is one of the best places in America to see it. So Josie and I drive the couple of hours there and buy little cardboard eclipse glasses. We find a quiet corner of a park to watch it. As it starts to happen, the light turns a cool, flat sepia. For a while, we joke around, but as it reaches total eclipse, the world darkens and turns to dusk in the middle of the day. The cicadas and the crickets begin humming and chirping, but otherwise, there’s a deep and heavy stillness, as if the world has gone inside a blanket fort. The sound of the space between heartbeats.
We stand side by side and stare up at the moon covering the sun. I feel so tiny—a cog in this immense heavenly machinery—the way I felt standing in the ocean with my dad. But being there with Josie, I’m okay with it. There are times when there’s solace in smallness. It puts the bigness of problems in perspective. As long as there’s someone by your side to remind you that you’re not nothing.
I don’t know why, but I start crying. I look over at Josie, and tears streak her cheeks too under her goofy eclipse glasses.
There’s something about witnessing something holy with someone you love, because you take that sacred thing and weave it, like a golden thread, into the fabric of your togetherness.
Making something with someone you love is the same way.
As we stand there together in the moon’s shadow, for that brief moment, I wish I could tell time stop and it would obey, as if time were the one thing that wouldn’t leave me behind.
On TV, expressions of love are grand and cinematic. They happen under literal fireworks or in the pouring rain.
But in real life, sometimes what happens is you get done watching a movie with a boy who took you by surprise with the way he slipped into your heart, and you walk out to the parking lot, where he opens the door of his pickup truck for you because he’s charmingly old-fashioned in all the good ways. You unlock his door for him, and he gets in. He goes to start the truck but stops, and you ask him what’s up, and he says he has something to tell you and he’s having a tough time forming the words. And you’re a little scared until finally, he says he’s gotten a job as a trainer and grappling instructor at a gym in Knoxville, and he’s lined up a place to live with a couple of other MMA fighters.
And then he looks you in the eyes and says that the reason he did that is because he loves you and the thought of your being far from him made him heartsick.
You turn the fiery pink of a sunrise inside.
So you tell him you love him too, and that it would have also hurt too much to let him be far from you, so this is a pretty cool new development, to say the least. You try to think of a quip to help you deal with everything you’re feeling, and you’re coming up empty for once, but he saves you by kissing you, in a way both urgent and gentle, and he tastes like movie theater popcorn butter and salt, and you can’t get enough of him, and because he is a very good kisser, in addition to every other good thing he is, you kiss until you fog up the windows on his truck, and a cop knocks on your window to make sure everything is okay, which it very much is—more so than it’s ever been.
You maybe take a break from kissing and cry a little bit because you’re so ecstatic, and it might be the first time that’s ever happened to you—crying from joy—and you feel as though a massive burden has been lifted from you because you didn’t realize how scared and sad you were to leave behind your best friend and the boy you love in order to chase a dream. In fact, you were starting to question the worth of your dream.
You ask him if he’s really sure, because you know how loyal he is. He tells you he’s sure—that he can be a champion anywhere he goes, under anyone with whom he trains—and the look in his eyes (he has nice eyes) tells you that you now occupy his top tier of loyalty, which is a sublime place to be.
Sometimes things are better on TV, but this is better in real life.
On TV, expressions of loneliness are grand and cinematic. Walks through cemeteries with swelling strings playing. Plucking petals off a rose while rain cascades down your windows.
But in real life, sometimes what happens is you’re picking out a final movie for the show you do with your best friend (and you know it’s not really the final movie because you’ll surely do other shows with her as a guest, but still), and a rogue wave of loneliness breaks over you with such intensity that it literally drives you to your knees and robs your breath. It reminds you of the one time you stood in the ocean, with a father w
ho abandoned you, and you felt the cool water wash indifferently over your feet.
And so you kneel on the cheap carpet in your cramped bedroom in the double-wide you share with your mom—who does her best—and you try to breathe through the crushing weight in your chest, and you wonder if you’re going to be okay, and you reflect on how little dignity there is in loneliness, because by definition, it’s a burden you bear alone. You wish that being lonely was something you could get good at, the way Tibetan monks can control their body temperature with their mind. Or the sort of thing you could find exaltation in, the way all sorts of monks everywhere did.
But then you think about how, to experience loneliness, you have to feel the absence of somebody, and you’d hate to have gone through life never having anybody, so you’re grateful in a weird way.
On TV, things are uncomplicated, with lots of fanfare. But sometimes real life is better, in all of its complications, in all of its everyday, quiet ache.
I thought my excitement about my internship would take the edge off my melancholy over doing our last show, but it doesn’t. I still have a last-day-of-sixth-grade feeling. All year you’re excited for school to end so you can move on to junior high, but then the day comes and you realize that something that was an important part of your life is dying. And endings are still so new that you don’t know quite how to feel.
You find an excuse not to run out the door when the bell rings and school’s out. You talk to your teacher one last time. You use the restroom one last time. You take a circuitous route back to your classroom. On your way out, you look back and sigh, and you experience this deep wistfulness, and you wonder if life is just a series of endings. New beginnings don’t make endings any easier.
Tonight it’s only me and Delia, no guests, the way we started. The way we’ll finish. I’m glad it’s this way.
I keep looking at Delia. She’s working with all her strength to be brave. I sense her almost chanting it to herself like a mantra. She seems like someone holding a bucket over a nest of angry wasps (or maybe hornets determined to shut down an ill-conceived theme park). They’ll get out if she lets the bucket drop, and her arms are getting tired and shaky.