Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  My fingers trace out the words on the granite stone.

  The R.

  I see it on flesh instead of on rock.

  RORY DAMIEN SULLIVAN. OCTOBER 18, 2009–JUNE 9, 2010. Instead of a poem or quote, it simply says WE WISH WE’D HAD YOU LONGER.

  My hands are trembling as I continue tracing out the letters, and my eyes cloud with tears.

  “Hi, Rory.”

  I have no idea what to say or if I’m doing this right. How do you miss—someone you don’t remember?

  Didn’t I love him? How is it possible not to miss someone you once loved? Or is it possible that I have missed him, just without knowing? Is it possible to miss someone in a quiet, unspoken way, the most hushed of whispers instead of a shout? Is the world shaped a little differently for me because I once had someone I loved, someone I lost?

  Some of my anger toward my parents returns, but it’s overridden by a sadness I can’t shake and guilt that something in me didn’t just know without having to be told.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, choking a little on my tears. “Sorry for not watching you more closely that day. You should still be here. With us.”

  I sit back on the ground now and dig my fingers into the snow. “You know, I obviously don’t have the details, but I’m pretty sure I liked being a big sister. Being your big sister. I bet I liked carrying you around and playing games with you and watching you toddle around. I bet I played my viola for you constantly. I was kind of obnoxious about it back then.” I laugh a bit as I speak. “So, sorry if you didn’t like that.”

  It hits me then that he used to be a person, not a concept, not something that happened to us. He liked and disliked things; he took up space and had a particular voice and smell. He was going to grow up and do stuff someday that people would have remembered him for. It feels unfair that he will never get the opportunity, that he’s been hidden here, buried without having had a chance to expand his world. To make friends and go to school and find people who wouldn’t forget him.

  It is the saddest thing in the world that you can take away a person if you take away the people who knew them. And we basically did that to my brother. By not talking about him, my parents and Caleb erased him twice; it’s like he never existed.

  Suddenly I am crying again, full-on sobbing in a way that forces me to gasp for breath. I just keep thinking, I’m sorry. I love you. I don’t know how I know, but I do.

  All those moments when I’ve wished for a more complete version of my family, less broken, I’ve been missing the brother I lost. My parents’ separation, me and Caleb’s relationship. His absence has been all around me every single day.

  “I think I’ve missed you my whole life,” I tell him now. “I always will.” Consciously, from now on. And although it feels stupid and like not nearly enough, there is a little relief, a little comfort, in knowing that. Missing a person every day for as long as you live is not something everyone has the right to. But he is my brother, and I am entitled to miss him, and I finally understand that I have, in a way, all along.

  “I would have come sooner,” I say now. “And more often, if I’d figured it out. I will come more often.”

  I take a deep breath and touch the granite stone again.

  “I wish I knew, Rory.” How to change what happened. What to say. You. If you were as much like Caleb as you look in that picture.

  I wish I’d known all along that I missed you.

  AFTER

  January

  Memory Zach is gone when I return to my car, but I decide to wait until I’ve seen the real Zach before I bring him back.

  After I leave the cemetery, I get onto Park Avenue, retracing my steps from yesterday exactly, and wind up outside Meridian High again ten minutes before school lets out. But this time I stay in the car and wait for students to start trickling out to the parking lot.

  I keep my eye on the bright blue car that Zach and Raj drove off in yesterday.

  This time, they burst out of the building together, talking and laughing as they walk toward the parking lot.

  I slouch in my seat while they climb in the car and it wails to a start. Zach pulls out, drives to the exit of the parking lot, rolls to a stop at the yield sign. I watch him roll down his window, and his upper body pops out of it as he yells something to a boy on a skateboard. The boy turns around and gives Zach the finger, laughing.

  I see Zach laugh, too, as his window goes back up. I can’t tell whether his smile is the same as my Zach’s smile, the Zach I’ve been remembering or conjuring up or whatever the name for it is.

  Then they get out onto the road, and before I think about it, I’m pulling my seat belt across my body, starting my car, too.

  At a stop sign about a block away, Zach signals left. I let a car between us and then follow them.

  I know what I’m doing is crazy—illegal, even—but I can’t bring myself to stop.

  I desperately want to know this Zach.

  I want to know what he knows about me.

  Following them starts off fairly easy, straightforward. And then, just like that, I’ve lost them.

  I’m on a one-way street, silently kicking myself for trying to play detective and letting a car between us, when a flicker of bright blue catches my eye.

  I heave a sigh of relief and keep my eyes fixed on the car.

  Zach is not a good driver, if this exhibit is anything to go by.

  He speeds up unexpectedly, turns wildly, suddenly slows down. At one point, it almost seems like we’re driving around in circles, but eventually he and Raj end up in front of a string of restaurants downtown. They turn into what seems to be an alley. I’m almost a hundred percent sure that there’s no exit from it, so I pull up to the curb. I’m trying to decide what to do next when someone raps three times on my window. I jump so high I nearly slam my head on the roof of the car.

  It is Raj. He is speaking, but I can’t make out what he’s saying.

  He signals for me to roll my window down, and although I’d rather say “no thanks” and speed the heck away from here, I do.

  “Hey,” he says sternly. “Can I ask why you’re parked here? You’re not allowed to be here.”

  He gives no indication of remembering me from the theater or from when I used to date his best friend, but I notice he’s craning to see into my car, that his eyes are narrowed at me in suspicion.

  I stare blankly at him and then scan the street, desperate for an excuse. “Oh,” I say. Why are you acting like you don’t know me? That’s what I want to say. Instead, I say, “Food. I, uh, this restaurant.” I point at the nearest restaurant. It has a BRAND-NEW! TRY US! sign in the window. “Is new. I wanted to see.”

  Raj looks in the direction I just pointed. “That’s my mom’s new restaurant. You’re going there?”

  “Yeah,” I lie. No, you idiot. I should say no, but I nod stupidly. “Yeah, so where”—is Zach?—“do I park? Legally?”

  Raj frowns, hesitating. “Over there,” he says finally, pointing across the street at an empty parking spot. I maneuver my car into the space, take a deep breath, and climb out.

  Raj has already gone through the doors of Real New Delhi, and I follow behind him, eager to find out where Zach disappeared to. Or, worst case scenario, leave with a belly full of Indian food.

  The smell of curry envelops me as soon as I walk in, and my stomach rumbles, reminding me how little I’ve eaten the past few days. I can feel saliva building up in my mouth, and I’m beginning to think this is the best decision I’ve made all day. That is, until I see Zach in the doorway of the kitchen. He’s concentrating on tying an apron around his hips, over his jeans, and there’s a yellow pencil in his mouth. When I walk in, he glances up and meets my eye. We hold each other’s gaze for a long moment, and then he turns, expressionless, and heads into the kitchen.

  “Ma, we have a customer!” Raj yells, materializing behind the counter.

  “Sit them!” a woman, presumably Raj’s mother, yells back.

&
nbsp; Raj sighs heavily and walks toward me reluctantly. You’re not allowed to be here. For some reason, I’m not wanted here, and it makes my throat tight. “Please sit. Can I get you a drink to start with?”

  “Um, some lemonade?”

  Why aren’t they acknowledging me and why do they seem to hate me?

  “Okay.” Raj nods and disappears into the kitchen. I’m scrambling to leave when Raj’s mother, a short, skinny woman with a warm smile, appears. She convinces me to try today’s special. She asks whether it’s still cold out and if anyone else is joining me, and then Raj places a glass of lemonade in front of me. His mom returns to the kitchen, but Raj leans against a wall, arms crossed, pretending not to watch me.

  It’s difficult to swallow with the feeling of hostility all around me, and even though my meal is incredible, all I want is to get out of here.

  Then Zach appears again. His hair is so much shorter in real life that it makes it look darker. My breath is trapped in my chest.

  Zach whispers something to Raj as they pass each other, then opens up the cash register. He mutters to himself as he counts, glancing up at times to write something down, but he won’t look at me.

  Raj’s mom calls for him then, and he goes into the kitchen.

  I can’t get down the last third of my food. All I want is to leave.

  I’ve accepted the fact that I don’t know Zach—not really—but I wasn’t the least prepared for him to hate me.

  Did I do something to him?

  Maybe I don’t want to know how this ends.

  Suppressing the fountain of emotion bubbling inside me, I push some words out at Zach. “Can I get my check?”

  Screw finishing this meal.

  He nods when our glances meet, and I can’t read anything in the eyes that have haunted me for days. It’s all I can do to keep it together.

  He brings the check to my table—gives me a toothless smile, that pressing together of the lips reserved for strangers—and goes back behind the counter.

  I put a few bills, plus a tip, under my cup and am trying to hightail it out of there. I’m almost at the door when I suddenly hear him speak.

  “Hey, Addison,” Zach says, looking right at me. “Are you following me?”

  BEFORE

  November

  “This is a conversation for when I have pants on,” Zach says groggily, burrowing his face into his pillow. I roll onto my side beside him and prop myself up on my elbow.

  “I’m serious, Zach,” I say. “You could totally get into NYU.”

  Zach doesn’t respond, except to make a low, groaning sound into his pillow.

  “They have a really good film program, and all you’d have to do is apply. I mean, I’m sure it’s competitive, but you’re good, and I bet you could get something together, an application package, before their early-decision deadline.”

  Zach is out of bed now, wriggling into a pair of jeans that has previously on the floor of his room. I wrap the sheet around me and place my head on his pillow. It smells like the cucumber shampoo he’s just started using, and I close my eyes for a second.

  “I doubt they’re going to be impressed by homemade parody films.”

  “You never know,” I say, opening my eyes now.

  Still shirtless, Zach brings a glass of water to his lips and sets it back down on his table.

  “It doesn’t matter whether they like it or not if I’m not even sure I’m going to college,” Zach says, and I sit right up in bed. “And why would I go to NYU, of all places?”

  Because that’s where I’ll be?

  My hair must be crazy at this point, but I don’t even bother patting it down or anything.

  “You won’t go to college at all?” I ask, shock in my voice. “Because you can’t afford it?”

  “Because I might not want to go,” he says with a shrug, bending down to retrieve my jeans from the carpet and placing them on the foot of his bed.

  “Zach,” I say.

  “Addie,” he says.

  “You’re going in with a defeatist attitude. College admissions committees can smell that a mile away,” I say, half joking.

  “God, Addie,” Zach says suddenly, “could you drop it? It’s easy for you; you’re a fucking prodigy. You can get into whatever school you want.”

  I blink at him, my face slowly heating up. “That’s not true.”

  “It is true,” he says. “You could get into Juilliard but you won’t even apply because you’re desperate to hang on to this anti-conformity thing. This idea that it’s expected of you or you can’t stand to be like all the other fucking prodigies.”

  “That is not it. At all,” I say, raising my voice now, too. I’m stunned by what Zach’s saying. He’s the only person I’ve ever told about why I chose New York, about wanting it to fill something in me. How can he say that? “It’s not easy for me. You know how hard I’ve worked to stand a chance of getting into NYU—how hard I work to make good grades. I was reading books for the next school year in the summer. And even if any of what you’re saying is true, what’s your point? What does that have to do with you not wanting to go to college?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t want to,” Zach says, more softly now.

  “You did!” I exclaim, not reducing my volume. “You just said that!”

  “I don’t know what I want,” Zach says. He pauses for a moment, as if he’s trying to figure it out right now, and then he goes back to picking stuff up from the ground. “Anyway, I’m pawning the CXX.”

  “Are you serious?” I ask.

  Zach nods. “My parents can barely afford to keep the store open. And here’s eight hundred dollars rotting on my table and I can’t even use it. And I’m back to smoking a fucking pack a day.”

  He sits on the bed, his back to me. And even though I’m pissed off at him and hurt at the things he said, I see the tension in his slumped shoulders. His frustration as he bends over, elbows on his knees.

  “We’ll figure it out.”

  “I have to sell it,” he says, mostly to himself now. “I shouldn’t have accepted it in the first place. I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t say no.”

  “Zach,” I sigh, and put my chin against his bare back. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

  We stay like that for several minutes, and then Zach says, half twisting so I can see his face, “Sorry for being an asshole. You are a prodigy.” A hint of his signature smile appears, but it doesn’t quite fill his face. “But I shouldn’t have said any of the other stuff. I’m just jealous you’re talented.”

  He turns around fully and kisses me.

  I say, “I’m just jealous you’re hot.”

  He bites my lower lip. “You do not need to be jealous about that. Trust me.”

  BEFORE

  November

  Meridian High is putting on a Thanksgiving production that Zach has been coaxed into videotaping for the drama department, so I have seen even less of him the past two weeks.

  Katy has informed me that Lindsay is in it.

  “If there’s any justice in the world,” I say as we are getting ready to attend opening night, “she’s playing the turkey.”

  Katy snort-laughs. “She certainly has the chin for it.”

  “What? She’s tiny!” I exclaim, laughing even though I feel guilty. But I want Katy to know I appreciate her loyalty. Soon after finding out that Lindsay had been texting Zach, Katy promptly dropped her, explaining that best friends come before the-yo-ter friends. She broke into a rant about how Lindsay’s blatant pursuit of Zach exemplified one of the major problems in show business: actors relinquishing their human characteristics in favor of more cowlike-slash-female-dog behaviors. Since they have many mutual friends, Katy is still keeping tabs on Lindsay, and she updates me on her activities from time to time.

  “Oh, honey,” she says now in a posh British accent. “As a victim of Big Belly on Tiny People myself, I can’t deny that skinny people with double chins do exist.”

 
“She does not have a double chin,” I say, because it is true. Katy just laughs.

  Zach and I haven’t talked too much about Lindsay since the day after Halloween, except for me asking a couple of times if she was still texting him and him saying no, that he’d told her to respect his decision. With how little we see each other lately, everything feels a bit harder between us than it used to, and bringing her up would only add to that.

  I glance at my phone several times before the lights go down. I texted Zach my seat number and asked about meeting him afterward, but he hasn’t responded.

  Sadly, it turns out Lindsay is not playing the turkey. We don’t even get the satisfaction of seeing her in an ill-fitting Pilgrim costume. Her character is a refugee from an unnamed European principality who transfers to an American school in time for Thanksgiving and must traverse the high school social hierarchy while learning about deeply held traditions and the legacy of our forefathers.

  “Deep shit for a Thursday night,” Katy whispers, forcing me to break into an uncontrollable fit of giggles.

  I spend the whole intermission scanning the auditorium for Zach. Just afterward, I finally find him way at the back, up in the viewing balcony, working the camera. He’s wearing an orange T-shirt and large headphones. We wave at him from our seats below, but I don’t think he sees us. He’s concentrating hard, his attention never leaving the stage.

  I keep glancing back, glancing up, not expecting him to see me since I’m just a spot, just another seat in the sold-out auditorium. But I watch the careful way he works, the stillness of his body as he goes entire minutes without moving once.

  I look back at the stage, at Lindsay’s riveting monologue, then back at him. Then back at the stage again. I can see his shoulders rising slightly with each intake of breath, falling when he exhales.

  It’s only when Katy nudges me that I realize what I’m doing.

  I’m mirroring his movements, tilting left when he does, inching forward, moving back.

  But minutes after Katy flicks my arm, I go back to doing it again.