“So on a scale of one to ten, how much do you miss me?”
“You, huh?” she said, like my arrival on the other end of her line had been inevitable, sooner or later, which I suppose it was. “Calling for news from home?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Do I want it?”
“Eh. You know how rare real news is around here. Less likely than a snowstorm.”
“Has the Shamrock gotten over all the excitement we gave them?”
“Couldn’t tell you. Lindsey and I have been sticking closer to home lately. Less drama around here.”
“Yeah,” I said. “That makes sense.”
“The only problem that presents is that we sometimes run into Jay, who of course always asks about you.”
I sighed. “He knows as much as you do.”
“Yeah, but we could never admit that.”
I could hear her moving on the other end of the line, realizing that this wouldn’t be a short conversation. Settling in, getting comfortable, making whatever was in the Tupperware less salvageable still.
“He brought a girl to Charley’s the other day,” she said.
I thought she might’ve been trying to hurt me, but I also knew it was at least as much because she considered it disloyal not to tell me.
“Oh, yeah? Lindsey didn’t mention.”
“She is such a pussy,” she said, probably just because she was hurt I had been talking to Lindsey and not her, a fact I’m sure she already knew. “I might’ve had to cut a bitch,” she said, showing she meant no harm. “The new girl, obviously, not Lindsey. But when Jay introduced us and she said ‘Hi’ I realized she had halitosis, and figured she had enough problems.”
“Well, that’s good to know,” I said, suppressing a laugh, but hoping it wasn’t true. “Thanks for telling me.”
I pictured Jay holding doors and pulling out chairs, for the right sort of girl now, and smiled.
“Have you seen him?” I asked.
“Dude, did you leave the planet in addition to the state? He’s dead.”
“Nice try, Nina. You know who I mean.”
“Yeah,” she conceded, after a pause. “I did.”
“And?”
“I e-mailed him one night, a few nights after the Shamrock. Wasted, of course. And we met at a diner halfway between his dorm room and my mom’s house the next afternoon. It was the exact halfway point—you know how precise he can be. And we had a few laughs, but he got ketchup on his goddamn upper lip that stayed there the rest of the meal. He’s the only person I know who wouldn’t have been able to feel that.”
I bit my own lip to keep from laughing, knowing it was true.
“Was it good? I mean, was it awkward? Back to the scale of one to ten.”
“I mean, it was the middle of the day, and we were sober—his idea again—but it was okay. I guess it was about a seven, but then at the end he brought it up a little, his score.”
“Get some,” I said.
“No. He said—how did he put it? He said, ‘It’s weird, isn’t it? Before today all that felt like a million years ago, but seeing you here, it’s like no time at all. I feel like I just saw you yesterday.’”
“Poetic.”
“Right? That’s some Sam Decker/Abby Madison shit right there,” she said. “Their characters, I mean.”
“Yeah. I knew what you meant.”
“And then he said—and this is the only thing that made me think I might want to see him again—he said, ‘Except now we’re of age.’”
“I don’t get it.”
“Yeah, well, you wouldn’t, would you?” she said, a new hardness in her voice. I thought we might finally be at the place where it all caught up to me, too. Not just the Shamrock. All of it. After all, I had been there that night, too. I had left when Lila had stayed. I started thinking of the best way to end the call, one I could live with when I looked back on it all. I started to panic at the blankness I drew, when she started talking again.
“We were gonna get married.”
“Back then?”
“Yeah. We were gonna wait until we turned eighteen. When we were ‘of age,’ as he put it. Like it was some sort of goddamn Victorian novel. He had the exact day count.”
“Wait, I’m still confused,” I said, my voice a register higher than it had been. “I never heard a word of this.”
“He used to slide me a piece of paper with the day count on it, every day,” she said, ignoring my surprise, talking to herself.
I remembered the night we played hide-and-seek, and what I had seen in the bushes. I had thought it was a big, milestone event, but it was actually a daily ritual. Which somehow only made it feel more sacred.
“But you didn’t even see each other every day,” I said, arguing, really, with myself, putting it all together.
“Yeah, we did. He used to park his car across the street after he dropped Lila off at home and wait for me. Usually when I snuck up on him in the car he was studying. Even when he was being bad he was good.”
I heard the pride in her voice and knew this was a thing she had loved about him, though she never would have admitted it.
“Jesus,” I said. “I had no idea.”
“I know. I didn’t want you to. It was the only thing like that that had ever happened to me, and I wanted it all to myself.”
She must’ve known that was going to sting, and spared me having to answer.
“I think that’s why I was so crazy back then,” she said. “You know how I can’t stand to wait. If it hadn’t been the prank war, it would’ve been something else.”
I could hear her chewing her nails, her fingers muffling her words a little, which she did only when she wanted to convey a word or emotion other than the one she was actually feeling.
“You weren’t so crazy,” I said. “Or if you were, we all were.”
“When I got there—to the center, for my term—I kept waiting for it. The daily count, I mean. It was almost fun, thinking about all the ways he would think up to get it to me. I wasn’t mad at him, I never was. It was almost a month before I realized I was never going to get anything from him.”
It was the most she had ever said about her time there.
“I don’t think he would have mentioned the of-age thing if he were still pissed, though.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so, either.”
“Are you ever coming home?” she asked, and I knew we were done talking about Max.
“No,” I said. “At least not for a while.”
“Yeah.” She exhaled slowly and I knew she had lit a cigarette. It was usually only a matter of time after the nail thing. “I figured.”
“But hey, if you and Max get married, I’ll come home and sing at your wedding.”
“Jesus, reason enough to leave that boy alone.”
“Okay, fine. No singing. But I’ll be there and wear a dress that doesn’t show you up.”
“I don’t know about all that,” she said. “But let’s just say you come home no matter who I marry.”
“Obviously. But never say never.”
She coughed, but more to fill the silence than on account of the cigarette, I knew. She was a pro, by then, at those.
“I like Max, is all I’m saying,” I said.
She still didn’t say anything, and I could picture her cigarette ash getting longer on the other end of the phone, and how the lights were probably dim enough for the orange-red tip to glow. She would’ve turned the lights down so they didn’t wake her mother, who would have had to get up early the next morning. Elaine definitely would have been in bed by then, unless she was out on a date.
“Yeah,” she finally said, her voice echoing across the empty kitchen. Or maybe it was shaking. I was too far away to tell. “I guess stranger things have happened.”
• • •
After I picked up the rock that night, I kept walking. I scrapped the diner idea and headed for Jay’s. I had never made any big decision in my life without consulting him first. Not because of any wisdom I smelled on him, but because he was always there.
All the lights in his parents’ house were off when I got there, but he was in the driveway, leaning over the guts of the used car he had spent two high school summers saving for. In general, he spent one hour buried under the hood for every five hours he spent driving it, but he loved it anyway. I stood there for a minute, watching him before he noticed me, marveling at how natural he looked in that position.
He smiled when he finally looked up and saw me, serenely, like he had been expecting me there, or I had been standing there all along, but knowingly, too, like we were in on some sort of inside joke. Like we both knew the line I had come to deliver, which maybe we did.
“There she is. I was wondering what you had gotten into that made you disappear like that. I can’t wait to hear all about it.”
He hadn’t texted or called at all that day, after my night of unreturned calls and texts. He knew when to give me space, which was another reason I didn’t appreciate him nearly as much as I should have.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was a strange night. Truly. I’ll tell you about it sometime, but it’s going to take a while, and I don’t think this is the night.”
“It’s okay. A little mystery only makes a person more interesting to other people.” He wiped the wrench in his hand on a dirty hand towel and sat back against the car. “And I figured you were with the girls.”
“I was.”
“So what’s up? Are you hungry? We could go out.”
I looked down at my shoes, realizing I hadn’t rehearsed so much as an opening sentence. I blurted the first thing that came to my mind, realizing as I heard it that it was true.
“I’m tired, Jay.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding. Glad to have a clear problem to solve. “Let’s go inside. We can order food and watch TV. There’s a Sam Decker movie marathon on just about every channel. You know, since he died.” A look of panic crossed his face and he froze. “Wait, you knew that, right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
His shoulders fell in relief.
“I know how much you loved him.”
“Yeah. He was one of our favorites.”
“So should we hit the couch?”
I shook my head.
“That’s not the kind of tired I mean. I think that would only make me more tired.” My eyes filled with tears, knowing that once I started this I wouldn’t be able to stop it.
“Okay,” he said, not looking at me. He could never stand to see a girl cry, for as long as I’d known him.
“Everything seems to make me tired these days. Work, and hanging out after. Eating out and staying in. Even drinking with the girls. It all makes me feel old. Like there’s nothing I haven’t seen or done before.”
“So maybe you should go do and see some things you’ve never seen or done before.”
He said it like it was the simplest thing in the world. Like tying your shoe or stamping a letter.
“Yeah,” I said, smiling at him, but also really crying now—steady tears, little sniffles, snot dripping from my nose, the works. I was so grateful, I almost fell in love with him. It was almost enough. “Maybe.”
“You know,” he said. “When you didn’t call or text me last night, I got this feeling. Like you were gone. Not in a bad way. Hurt or in trouble. Just gone.”
“I’m sorry,” I said again, not sure of what else to say.
“No,” he said. “Like I said, it wasn’t bad. I was happy for you. And it felt, a little, like—I don’t know—like you weren’t in any one place, but everywhere, you know? Part of the atmosphere. Like Santa,” he said, laughing at himself a little. I laughed, too, and nodded.
I stuffed my hands in my pockets and looked back down, not sure how to end a conversation like this, or if it was okay to hug him. I had spent so much time thinking about what it would be like to see him every day for the rest of my life that I hadn’t bothered to consider what it would be like not to see him again.
“I did love you, Maggie. For what it’s worth. Do.”
“Yeah,” I said, looking back up at him, knowing I owed him at least that. “I know that.”
“I’d do anything for you. Even if you leave and then come back. Like, a long time from now.”
I nodded to show him that I knew that, too.
I thought for a moment of the glow of Sam Decker’s skin, and the watt of his smile—what an achievement it had felt like to be the cause of it. It already felt far away, farther away than countless Saturday afternoons spent giving myself over to the purple velvet of the movie-theater chairs as the light went dim and Abby Madison and Sam Decker took over the world. I knew then that, for the rest of my life, that night would feel very far away, sacred and distant at once, like a piece of music played by someone you love that reminds you of something you can’t place.
“It was never like the movies, though, was it?” I asked. “You know, that crazy kind of love that everyone’s always after.”
I didn’t say it to be cruel. But to suggest that maybe our movie loves were still out there, for both of us. I was not a sentimental girl. I didn’t often make statements like that—talk in riddle or post inscrutable but suggestive music lyrics to my Facebook feed like so many other girls, about imperfect love and inefficiencies of the heart. But if this line of conversation upset or confused him he didn’t show it.
“No,” he said. Right away, like he knew exactly what I was talking about. “I guess not. Not like the movies. But nothing ever is.”
• • •
At what may well have been the first of the sleepovers that would see everything from Lindsey’s education in how to use a tampon to the first instant message any of us ever sent, and, yes, the birth of the prank war, we were all keeping Nina company for what may well have been the very first time. I know it was early, because we were only just old enough to understand the concept of death. Not fully. But just enough to understand that sometimes things were here and then gone in some permanent way. We were old enough to have some sense of its finality, but not old enough to lock up any talk of it far away from idle conversation, as if any breezy, casual mention might be taken as invitation. We were still curious enough to want to exchange notes on what it entailed, because we didn’t know yet that, like everyone else, we would go through our entire lives without ever landing on a firm answer.
Nina told us that the woman who did her mother’s nails had had to cancel her mother’s appointment that afternoon so she could go home for her father’s funeral, a piece of news that had made us all fall silent, though we weren’t sure why. Nina asked us what we thought happened when you died. Not testing us, the way she would have been if she had asked us five years later, but really wanting to know. I don’t remember, but I’m sure Lindsey said something about heaven, always convinced that her mother was somewhere better than she would’ve been if she had lived. And I imagine I said I didn’t know, because even then I was not imaginative or eager enough to lie to make myself sound smarter than I am. But I remember almost word for word what Nina said, because it was just the kind of thing she was capable of when she wanted to be—unexpected, but just right; the kind of thing that stuck with you and drifted back up in the middle of other, unrelated thoughts and conversations long after you heard it, sometimes for no reason that you could think of when you tried. She said she thought that when you died you got to watch your life from the beginning. Not fast, in one big flash, but like it was a movie. And you would know, watching your movie, what you didn’t when you were living it. That the last Starburst you ate before you threw up Starbursts at the outset of the five-day bout of flu that assaulted all fi
ve of your senses when you were seven was going to be the last Starburst you were ever going to savor, and that while for the rest of your life the smell of Starbursts on someone else’s breath would make you homesick for being young, the taste of them would make you nauseous. And that after the last meal you would ever sit at with both of your parents before they told you that one of them was moving to Orlando or Tallahassee or the moon, you would miss the taste of the very pot roast you complained about the very last time you ate it. It was your father’s mother’s recipe, so your mother would never make it again after that dinner. And at the very end of the movie you could take the time to process and acknowledge the things you had taken for granted at the time—the last time you would ever walk into an air-conditioned room after even a minute out in hundred-degree heat, or hear a small child laughing by the side of the ocean. The last present you would ever open truly believing it came from Santa Claus. The last bowl of macaroni and cheese, the last episode of your favorite sitcom. The last new dress. The last orgasm. And you could maybe even enjoy the drama of your own death, the way you do at the end of Love Story and Titanic. I remember she said that’s probably something people bragged about in heaven—the crazy or glamorous or tragic way they died—the way people on Earth brag about how long their people have lived in this country or the exotic places from which they came. They would deliver these details, when describing their movie to potential viewers, because that was how you became friends with someone in heaven: You got them to watch your movie, and you watched theirs. They would master their delivery, pausing in just the right places, for maximum effect. Capturing perfectly the texture of the piece of steak that just wouldn’t slide down their throat, or the ad on the side of the bus that shattered their skeletal system. What the breath of the man trying to save them with CPR tasted like.
Maybe because, as on most topics, I took Nina’s word and made her opinions my facts, that’s always how I’ve thought about death, which I became grateful for after Sam Decker died. Maybe only selfishly, since it meant we got leading roles in his movie, getting as much screen time as we did in that march to the big finish. Or maybe only because it means we got to give him a little of what he gave to us, which I suppose means that, for all the things we couldn’t give him that night, we were friends. I have always thought of reciprocity as a central tenet of friendship, probably because of something else Nina said or did. Everyone knows that the end of any story has a huge effect on the whole thing. Maybe we gave him an ending that made the movie he was left with okay. It took only one night to learn how hard he was on his own movies.
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