I don’t know what could explain this.
I tried to be there, to be the family Carlos needed. I gave him a place to crash when things got hard, took him to movies and concerts and games to distract him, spent many afternoons playing video games. It was no hardship—I loved hanging with Carlos, even when it meant I hardly ever had time to be with anyone else.
I don’t know what I’d do— Carlos said once, voice rough, and I squeezed his shoulder, didn’t let him finish because I didn’t want to hear without you, didn’t want to consider that possibility.
Now I wake up every morning at the crack of dawn, a reflex from the last two years of early morning crew practices. I’m halfway dressed before I realize I’ve got nowhere to go and no one to meet me there—no Carlos to harass as he rubs at his eyes and waves me away, mumbling, I’m tired, fuck you, D, you morning person.
Sometimes I dial his number on my phone, or check my Facebook expecting to see he’s tagged me in some dumb video post about goats, or open up our text thread like I’m going to send him a message. But the last message I sent him was months ago. It said: dude, you ok?
He never replied.
Sometimes I’m so angry at Carlos, I want to grasp him by the shoulders and shake him and demand: Why? Why did you do that?
But to do that he’d have to be here, close enough for me to touch.
Sometimes I don’t believe it.
Sometimes I think: No way, Carlos would never do that. It’s impossible for him to be dead at seventeen. He was too young, too stupid to die.
There were too many things he hadn’t done yet.
I rise, rubbing at the chilled skin of my arms, and walk.
When I arrive at my house I don’t go in the front door. Instead I wander around the side and push open the gate to the backyard, ambling across the grass to a wooden bench situated beneath a huge oak tree.
I slump onto the bench and stare into the warmly lit windows of my family’s kitchen. I can see my mom and dad talking and cooking, can hear the quiet strains of some blues record seeping through the windows. I stare at my family’s kitchen full of golden light and warmth and food.
Somewhere nearby a child shouts and giggles. In the distance I can hear the whir and clank of a passing train. A car horn sounds, followed by shouts, then silence. It’s September and it feels like winter, chilly and sharp, and leaves crackle under my feet like sparking fire.
I slide my key into the lock of my front door and twist until it clicks. The house smells like dinner, sweet potatoes and chicken and greens. My mom emerges from the kitchen with a tired smile on her face and an apron tied around her waist, dark eyes shimmering. She wraps her arms around me in a hug, and for once, I let her hold me.
“How did things go today?” she asks.
“Good,” I say. “I’m alive.”
“Well, I should hope so,” she says, pulling back and looking into my eyes.
“That Othello dude is pretty messed up,” I say, and she laughs.
“He is, baby,” she says softly, and brushes a stray curl of my hair out of my eyes. “But you know, he was in love.”
Melanie
We fought the day you got the news.
It was a stupid fight too—I don’t know what it was about. I don’t even remember.
I was pissed all day, whined at Tristan: My mom is so lame, oh my God, I hate her.
Tristan just patted me on the arm and said, Let’s go buy something, like . . . boots.
But we didn’t go, because Dad called when I was still at school and said I needed to come straight home. You sat me down at the dining room table and sipped tea while he said a bunch of words I didn’t understand: Terminal. Progressive. Potentially fatal.
I did understand two words: CANCER and LATE.
All of a sudden I was angry for different reasons, so angry I wanted to tear down the walls you’d painted in alternating stripes, purple and blue.
I wanted to say: How could you not know? Why didn’t you go to the doctor more? You always know everything, how could you not know this?
But there was no space to say that.
There was no time.
You didn’t throw things like you used to when you got angry, lamps and dishes and sometimes even a painting pulled off the wall. I wanted you to. I wanted you to break every dish in our kitchen. I wanted you to scream. I wanted you to be something other than blank, other than accepting.
I wanted you not to give up.
Why did you give up?
CHAPTER FOUR
Quick. Four guys you’d do at this school.” Tristan puts up a hand preemptively. “Four guys who are not me if I was straight.”
I open my mouth, then close it, glaring at Tristan.
“That’s not fair. I don’t like this game.”
Tristan flips dark hair out of his eyes and lifts his eyebrows.
“Life isn’t fair, Melly. Answer the question.”
“I don’t like the guys at this school. They’re dumb. Can we do movie stars instead?”
Tristan is examining his nails. “You’re embarrassing yourself. Just answer the question.”
I let my eyes skim the playground. The pickings are slim. There are a bunch of white dudes in one corner near the fence wearing skinny jeans and band T-shirts and kicking around a Hacky Sack. I recognize one of them, Terrence Drake, from my physics class. He’s got nice eyes—hazel, with long eyelashes. But he makes people call him “T-Dog” and smells like patchouli, so he’s out.
Some guys from the basketball team are playing on the court. A few of them are shirtless, and I can see the way Rihad Jones’s muscles tighten when he lifts his arms and releases the ball with a flick of his wrist. The hoop doesn’t have a net, but I can hear them making swish noises whenever someone makes a shot. Guys who generate their own victorious sound effects? Hoo boy.
But then out of the corner of my eye I see Damon, walking across the blacktop wearing low-slung jeans and a gray polo shirt. He tugs a hand through his hair as if trying to smooth it down.
He turns, his mouth widening into a smile, and lifts one hand in a wave.
“Hey, Melanie,” he calls.
I give him this pathetic little half wave in return, a scrunching of my fingers that probably makes me look like I’m physically disabled.
“Well,” Tristan says, looking at me with narrowed eyes. “I think we have number one with a bullet.”
• • •
That afternoon as I get ready to go to work, I stare at the photograph propped up on top of my dresser. Carlos looks out into the middle distance, like he can see something I can’t.
Was. He was a cool guy.
Carlos looks like he could be some boy I have class with, some guy I might see hanging around the 7-Eleven, smoking cigarettes and harassing the ladies. Like he could be one of those boys on the basketball court, a choice in one of Tristan’s dumb lunchtime games of questions.
But he’s not, is he? Because Carlos is not around, period.
Keep it, Damon had said as he slid the photo across the table.
Keep what?
“Mel, you ready?”
“Be down in a minute,” I shout down the stairs, and slip on my jacket.
I feel Carlos in the room as I leave, feel him staring at everything but me. I wonder what he sees off in that middle distance: if maybe it’s Damon, if maybe he’ll let me in on his secrets.
• • •
At the restaurant, I settle down in a chair in the kitchen on my break, tugging the grief book out of my backpack and flipping it open.
My aunt Frannie gave me this gem of a book at the funeral, because there is nothing you want to do more after your mom dies than read a book about death.
How are you holding up, sweetheart? Frannie asked, cupping my cheek with one cool palm.
&nb
sp; I shrugged. What should I have said? Not well. Not well at all.
She was a beautiful woman, Frannie said, sniffling. She was the best sister and mom anyone could ask for, and that’s something. Isn’t it?
Yeah, I murmured. Yeah, I guess.
Frannie reached into her purse and pulled out a slim book, which she pressed into my hands. It was coated in plastic, laminated like it was meant to be read in the tub. The cover read Understanding Grief in big block letters. I squinted. There were Russian dolls on the cover, the kind that nest inside of each other, maybe some kind of metaphor about taking apart the layers of sorrow?
Read it, Frannie said.
She pulled me into a hug, the book pressed between us.
After the funeral I left it on my bedside table, determined to never look at it again. But then one night I found myself thinking about my mom and wishing so hard that there was something somewhere that could explain the way I felt, and there it was. This will be stupid, I thought, and opened it.
It wasn’t.
So I kept reading it, a little bit every night before I went to bed, and then sometimes before school, and then I started carrying it around with me for those moments when I think: I need some answers.
Today is one of those days.
I read:
Grief is complicated. People who see the grieving process as a path toward closure are missing the point. Grief is not about closure; it is about coping in the present. We may spend our entire lives grieving for someone, and this can still be a way of coming to terms with that loss.
If it’s not about closure—if it’s not about letting go—then what is it about, exactly? How do we “cope in the present”? Is it about keeping someone close? Because I kept my mom so close those last six months, I sometimes felt like there was no space between us, like we were one and the same. So close I could see all the things the cancer did to her, all the ways it burned her up and tore her apart. So close I would see her on the back of my eyelids every time I closed my eyes and tried to sleep. So close that sometimes I felt like I couldn’t breathe because she couldn’t breathe. So close I could see life leaving her behind.
I sat by her bedside for all those hours and watched death take her away from me. Now I’m supposed to keep her close?
“You look real busy.”
I jump at the low, rumbly voice behind me, but when I turn it’s just Macho. He leans against the wall and gives me a crooked smile.
“Not busy. Reading,” I say, and close the book with a snap.
“What are you reading?” Macho asks.
I slip the book into my bag on the floor. “Nothing.”
Macho gives me a careful look, then slides into the seat next to me.
“I been listening to the new Beyoncé. It’s off the hook.”
“I’m not against Beyoncé, you know,” I say. “But why not Aretha Franklin? Some Etta James?”
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Aretha or Etta,” Macho says. “But those ladies don’t shake their ass like Beyoncé does. That’s all I’m sayin’.”
I toss a straw wrapper at him, which he dodges expertly, laughing. “You’re an idiot,” I say.
“You know something?” he says. He runs one finger over his bottom lip, a thoughtful tick. “You look a lot like your mom when you do that. When you give me the bitchy face, with your eyes all narrow and your eyebrows up.”
“Oh, thanks,” I say. “Thanks a lot.”
But Macho smiles that little smile of his, and I know he means you got her inside of you, girl.
The thing about keeping her close—I don’t think I get to choose.
• • •
Starbucks, four o’clock on a Friday afternoon: Caffeinated Corporate Wonderland. Two old ladies stare at my scarlet-streaked hair. I consider taking out a couple of my piercings and shoving them up their pointy, lifted noses. It hasn’t been a particularly good day. I had gym class. It’s never a good day when I have gym class.
“Volleyball was clearly a sport invented by the devil,” I tell Tristan. “Satan plays volleyball. Satan loves volleyball. Satan holds volleyball championships in hell, possibly every day.”
“Volleyball sucks, it’s true,” Tristan says. “Are you even listening to me?”
Truth be told, I’ve been sipping a decaf latte and trying to ignore Tristan, who’s drinking nothing at all but bouncing like he’s inhaled six shots of espresso.
“C’mon, Melanie. Please?”
Tristan is giving me the pretty blue puppy eyes, but that doesn’t change the fact that what he’s asking me to do is deranged.
“Just let me tell them we’re going with your dad to the shore this weekend,” Tristan pleads. “They’ll believe it, I know they will. They won’t like it, but they’ll totally believe it, and they won’t check either. If I tell them Bryan and I are going to Rehoboth for the weekend and his parents aren’t going to be there—”
“Oh, so it’s the no-parental-supervision thing? It has nothing to do with the super-queer sex thing?”
Tristan runs his hand through his hair, eyebrows knitting. I sigh.
“Bryan is bi, okay?” Tristan interrupts, looking flustered. “I . . . please. Please.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” I relent. “Fine. Just . . . make sure they don’t call my dad, all right? He’s really not in the mood.”
Tristan nods emphatically, beaming. “Yes. Of course.”
He clears his throat importantly.
“And . . . now let’s talk about you, dollface.”
I narrow my eyes. “What about me, exactly?”
“Well, firstly, your extreme hardcore crush on Damon Lewis,” Tristan says.
“Excuse me?”
Tristan rolls his eyes.
“Look, Mel, I’ve got eyes, and apparently—thank God, because I was beginning to wonder—you do too. I saw you scoping him out at lunch.”
“I was just spacing out.”
He nudges me with his shoulder. “You were staring, you liar. And I know you weren’t perving on those other jocks because it’s, like, against your religion, so . . .”
“How do you even know Damon?” I ask. “He’s new.”
“Ha!” Tristan slaps me on the thigh. “You are so busted.”
I exhale dramatically. “Fuck you.”
“And it might interest you to know,” he says, “that I know him because he auditioned for Othello.”
“Are you serious?”
I don’t know why that confuses me so much. Damon, a theater kid? My fake fantasy life was definitely off.
“So serious.” Tristan grins. “He’s very talented, in case you’re wondering. He got the lead! And . . .” Tristan pauses, evidently for theatrical effect. “He’s not gay.”
“You know this how?” I ask.
“I asked him,” Tristan says simply.
My mouth falls open. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope.” Tristan shakes his head. “I said, ‘Hey, Damon, nice shoes—’”
I put up my hand, fixing him with a dark glare.
“Let us remember that I’m bailing your ungrateful ass out this weekend, you dick.”
“I told him, ‘Y’know, people might make certain assumptions about you, auditioning for the play—’”
“You didn’t. Tristan!” I exclaim.
“. . . and he said, ‘I’m not gay, and I don’t care what people think.’” Tristan’s a little breathless. “Seriously, that’s what he said, Mel.” He lifts an eyebrow. “I can’t say I wasn’t disappointed, you know. He is beautiful.”
I shove him, nearly making him topple out of his chair. “Asshole.”
Tristan smiles wickedly.
“You should do something with the play,” he hints. “Paint sets, maybe.”
“Why would I want to do that?” I a
sk.
“Because proximity is a good thing,” Tristan says. “Plus, you’d be good at it. You’ve always been good at stuff like that. Like . . . you know.” His voice gets softer. “Like your mother.”
Like your mother.
When I was in middle school, my mom made me help her paint sets for the munchkin production of Little Shop of Horrors that they were putting on at the school where she was teaching art. My mom loved to do that—suggest ludicrous musicals that were totally inappropriate for small children but that would involve awesome sets. Why not eight-year-olds doing A Chorus Line? Fifth graders doing Rent? There would be at least four PTA meetings a year devoted to dealing with furious parents who thought my mom was a head case. I’m surprised she never got fired.
Those sets were a pain in the butt, but I kind of liked it. Putting paint to a surface, watching the shapes form. Creating the backdrop for the action of theater to take place. I’ve always been more comfortable being in the background anyway. This gave me an excuse.
My mom even had the decency to pretend she didn’t know about the sketchbook I kept under my bed that I’d pull out when I was bored. I’d doodle in it, copying comic book characters out of Tristan’s issues of X-Men that I knew he read because the dudes in it were so muscly and the costumes were so tight.
Now it seems so stupid, that I kept that from her, that I didn’t want her to know how much I loved what she did.
It’s been so long since I’ve looked at that sketchbook, so long since I’ve drawn anything. I’m weirdly grateful they cut the budget for the arts so we don’t have art class this year. I don’t think I could sit there in a room of other kids and explain why it makes me want to cry to pick up a pencil and learn figure drawing.
Am I ready for this?
“I’ll think about it,” I tell him, and he gives me one of his sweetest smiles and squeezes my hand, once, twice.
• • •
On Monday, I get cornered by Mrs. McAvoy after third period precalc. She seems to be under the mistaken impression that I will be doing set design for the play.
He might be my best friend, but Tristan is still a little bastard.
Speak of Me As I Am Page 6