Every You, Every Me

by David Levithan; photographs by Jonathan Farmer

  Charlie was drunk one time and asked me why I wasn’t the one sleeping with you. That’s how he put it. told Katie she was out of her mind. But he didn’t recognize Sparrow, either.

  Who else would know? When you were here, in this cafeteria, Please come back. Please. you’d usually sit with Jack and his friends. When he talked to you, you seemed to fit in, but when someone else was talking, or he would be distracted, you just looked lonely over there. At least to me. But whenever I would tell you that, you’d say, “I’m fine. I just slip out of it, you know?” And I’d say, “I’ll catch you,” and you would say, “It’s not the kind of slipping you can catch.”

  “Where did you get that?” Fiona asked. She wasn’t staring at the photograph—her green eyes were focused on me, only me. “If it was your photo, you’d know who was in it.”

  “I found it,” I said, knowing how lame this sounded. “In the hall. I figured whoever it was would want it back.”

  “I still think it looks like you,” Katie said.

  “Whatever,” Charlie said.

  I felt foolish for trying. And part of me wanted to give in to the foolishness—to make copies of the photos and hang them around the halls like Wanted posters—asking Have you seen this man? Maybe offering a reward. As a way of solving this uncertainty mystery. Only, if I did that, the photographer would know. She would see it, and she would retreat. She’d cover her trail. You and I are walking in the snow. “Why are you walking backwards?” I ask. You point in the direction we came from. “So they’ll think that’s where I’m going.” You point to where we’re going. “And that’s where I’m from.”

  I changed the conversation. I thought I’d gone unnoticed. But after school, Fiona tracked me down.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  I shoved my books in my locker. Closed it.

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You’ve been weird for a week now. Something’s going on.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumbled. Then I realized I was staring at the ground, not her. She’d never believe me if I didn’t look at her. So I did, and the expression on her face was part pity, part annoyance, part understanding.

  “It’s like—” she said. Then stopped.

  “What? What is it like?” I asked.

  11B

  That night, I broke about a hundred promises to myself and looked at your old online profile. I thought maybe there’d be some answers there. Or evidence.

  It said your last log-in was the day in the clearing. You must’ve checked it before we went to school. Before the three of us left to hang out. Before.

  Fiona’s expression didn’t change. “It’s like right before it happened with Ariel, Evan. I know I wasn’t there, but I was around it. I saw things. I remember how overwhelmed you were.”

  “It’s not like that,” I argued.

  It was painful to see you frozen like that, frozen in time. It wasn’t like you were smiling in your profile picture, or even happy—even though there were times you were happy anything something and there were times you were smiling kittens! playing poker!; you just weren’t the type to parade them. Instead it was a shot I had taken of you leaning against my bed, staring me down. I’d been so excited when you chose it for your profile pic. So honored. Ridiculous.

  I clicked on that picture to see more pictures.

  “Then what’s it like? What’s going on?” Fiona asked.

  There was no way for me to tell her. Because I felt that if I told her one thing, I’d have to tell her everything in order to explain it. Everything.

  I could feel all the memories pressing against the leaky wall I’d put up to hold them back. The pressure was enormous, and I had to throw my body up against it in my mind, this was all in my mind so the memories didn’t drown me. I was not going to look at the familiar pictures the parties, making faces into the camera phone, the birthdays, the two of us—I was looking for something unfamiliar, something I hadn’t noticed before.

  “Evan,” Fiona said, not reaching out with her hand, but with her voice, “I’m on your side.”

  “But who’s on the other side, Fiona?” I had to ask. “Is it her? Does that mean you’re against her?”

  Fiona pulled back. “Evan, something’s wrong with you. Even if nobody else can see it, I can see it.”

  I found one. Three weeks before it happened. A couple of days after the photos we found in your house.

  The fingernail wasn’t yours.

  But the skin with the heart … the skin with the heart …

  “I’m not saying there isn’t something wrong,” I told Fiona. I was tired. It felt like years of tiredness. “But you can’t help.” Because she wasn’t there the last time, was she? “Really, it’s nothing. I really have to go.”

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember.

  Now Fiona risked it. She reached out. Put her hand on my shoulder. Squeezed. Said, “You don’t have to do anything. You don’t. It’s over.”

  It was like I had never seen you before. Not in that one spot.

  How can we remember every part of the body? Even on someone we love?

  Fiona waited for a response. Not even an answer. A response.

  There was no tag on the photo. No comments. No signs.

  “It’s never over,” I said. “It can’t be.”

  And I walked away.

  11C

  I spent the rest of the night scouring your profile. I didn’t play music or say a word, so the only sounds my parents would hear, if they woke up, would be the light click of my fingers pressing the keys.

  I remembered setting up our profiles together. How we had no idea that the random things we typed down in a single moment would then linger for years, mostly because we were too lazy to change them. That one snapshot of favorites, of self-description. For relationship status, we said we were married to each other. But eventually we changed that.

  I went through all your other photos, but there weren’t any surprises there. Then I looked at your comments page. Even after what happened, it remained active—in the days and weeks after, people wrote down that they missed you, that they prayed for you, that they remembered you. Even Jack. I was shocked to see his name and face there. And his comments.

  FEB 11, 2:12 AM

  come home

  FEB 15, 12:22 AM

  miss you

  FEB 25, 3:02 AM

  I’m sorry

  FEB 25, 3:10 AM

  Forgive me

  As if you were reading it. Could you see it? Was there any way? As if he was going to get you back. Not Forgive us but Forgive me.

  I scrolled back to before. I saw the comments I’d left.

  JAN 11, 6:20 PM

  Whatre you doing Saturday? I have something fun we could do.

  JAN 13, 11:11 AM

  Hey, Drama Girl. This is Comedy Boy telling you to

  “turn that frown upside down” (erg erg erg)

  JAN 21, 11:13 PM

  You still up? Call call call.

  JAN 21, 12:05 AM

  The sound of your voice = contentment.

  If only you knew, Comedy Boy. If only I could tell you.

  I looked on the days 11/11, 11/14 when the photos were taken, but there weren’t any comments that were out of the ordinary. Just me and Jack and two from Fiona and one from this guy Kilmer, who was always trying to convince you to leave Jack do yoga with him.

  When I felt the comments were going to overwhelm me, I moved on to the friends page. You had 232 friends—maybe half of whom you’d actually met. I was looking for Sparrow, looking for some clue. First I checked out the profiles of the people I knew, the people from our school. Even with my friends, it had been a while since I’d read their whole pages—usually it was just the updates. There were things on there I didn’t know and probably should have—Matt’s favorite bands, or the fact that Fiona used to go to school in Georgia before she moved here. I clicked on all of their photos, hoping for
some kind of intersection, but none of the mysterious photos appeared. If there were any pictures of you, they were offhand, refracted. You never looked absolutely the same—it was like every picture brought out a slight variation. I wondered if it was just because it was a different moment, or maybe each photographer brought out a different you—you could not be who you were without taking into account who was watching. I thought of what you’d say every you, every me and then stopped thinking about it. It was too hard.

  Instead I thought about the word profile and what a weird double meaning it had. We say we’re looking at a person’s profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it’s the whole them we’re seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you’re only seeing half the face. Like with Sparrow, whoever he was. It’s never the way you would remember seeing them. You never remember someone in profile. You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.

  I turned to the people I didn’t know on your profile. People you had once known who’d moved away. Or people you’d met over summers, or online. You could have one conversation with someone because you liked the same band, and then they’d linger on, attached to you, forever. I read where they lived California London Florida Montreal Chicago, and even though I knew they wouldn’t have flown in to leave photos in my locker, I checked out who their friends were and what their photo albums looked like. I should have felt like I was knowing you more by learning about all these people, but instead I felt I was knowing you less and less. She might not have really known these people, I tried to convince remind myself.

  It was three in the morning, and I was looking at the profile for a girl named Kelly in California. She loved the Beatles, Alice Walker, her two cats, and a mix of bad teen drama and bad reality TV. I clicked on her friends, moved to the second page … and there he was.

  11D

  11E

  Sparrow. Only that wasn’t the name underneath.

  It was Alex.

  I clicked on Alex’s profile. It said he lived in the same town in California as Kelly. That made no sense to me. Hadn’t he been here? I clicked on another of his friends. Same school, same town. So it couldn’t be a lie.

  Then I clicked on his photos.

  And I found you.

  And him.

  And her.

  11F

  11G

  11H

  11I

  11J

  Ariel, look at me.

  Look at me.

  Look at me.

  11K

  I sat there in the dark, staring at you. The screen was the only light on in the room, so I imagined your image projected into every corner. I was seeing it, but I was also within it. That last photo, you a blur. I was a blur, too. I was being erased because I would not stop for time.

  11L

  You see a photograph and you try to make yourself be there. But you can’t. Even if you were there. You can’t.

  And if you weren’t there, you retreat into desperate invention. You weave your own fiction and try to convince yourself it’s fact.

  It doesn’t work.

  A photograph is a souvenir of a moment.

  It is not a moment.

  It is the looking at the photograph that becomes the moment. Your own moment.

  I was losing myself in there.

  Because.

  Because.

  Because you were everlasting in sunshine curious all right the kind of beautiful that I remembered.

  “Let’s go into the woods and take some pictures,” you said. “I found this old camera.”

  “Let go!” you screamed. “Let go of me!”

  “You have to let go,” the counselor told me. “Let go of what you’re holding inside.”

  I can touch the picture but it’s not your face.

  I can touch the screen but it’s not your face.

  Let go.

  11M

  I pulled back and remembered what I was doing. Investing Investigating.

  I looked at the dates Alex/Sparrow had posted the photo—11/13.

  And there she was.

  The photographer. Untagged. Nameless.

  And I had no idea

  none

  who she was.

  All this time, I thought if I could glimpse her, I would know.

  I checked all of Alex/Sparrow’s profile. I checked all of his friends for someone who looked like her. I went back and checked all of Ariel’s pictures, all of Ariel’s friends.

  No recognition.

  No similarities.

  She knew me, but I didn’t know her.

  So then I did something stupid. I didn’t think about it. I just did it.

  I sent Alex/Sparrow a message.

  11N

  How do you know Ariel?

  11O

  It was morning already. At least where I was.

  In California, I imagined Alex/Sparrow was still sleeping, postponing all my answers with his dreams.

  12

  I was waiting for Jack with printouts the next morning.

  He looked annoyed to see me there in the smoking section, outside school. He checked for permission and lit his cigarette before saying anything.

  “What is it now?” he finally asked.

  I wondered what would have happened if we’d met up like this before you went over the edge. Would we have been able to stop you if we’d talked about it?

  “I think I know who the photographer is,” I told him.

  I showed him the photos.

  “Who is she?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  He looked at me hard. “I thought you just said you knew.”

  “Well, I know what she looks like. She’s right there. Do you recognize her?”

  “She looks familiar.” He studied the photo some more. “But I couldn’t tell you where from. Maybe she goes here. But maybe she just reminds me of someone.”

  I thought of Venn diagrams, those two overlapping circles. And how the translation of “You remind me of someone” is that piece in between, that common space that’s the only piece we’re seeing.

  “I didn’t sleep last night,” I told him. “I was up all night looking at her profile. Looking for Sparrow and this girl.”

  “I don’t know who she is,” Jack said, handing the photo back to me. “Sorry.”

  I found myself saying, “I wish she had a sister.”

  “What?”

  I didn’t know why I’d thought Jack would understand. Too often I thought he’d have the same impulses as me, just because we’d both loved you.

  “If Ariel had a sister,” I explained, “we could ask her. Show her the photos. Because we can’t do that with her parents. They hate us.”

  “I don’t think they—”

  “They do, Jack. They hate us.”

  We went to your house the week after. To hear the news firsthand, instead of through gossip and rumors. They let us into the house, but it was clear that they didn’t want us to stay there. They told us what the doctors said. It was what we’d already feared.

  Jack ground out his cigarette and put his hand on my shoulder.

  “Ev, I don’t know what to tell you. We don’t even know if it’s the same girl who’s leaving the pictures for us. Don’t you think if these people were really important to Ariel, she would’ve told us about them?”

  I was calmer now that he was using words like we and us.

  I’d felt that way with you, too. Whenever you talked about we and us, I felt things made sense, that we were going through everything together, that if I could take it, then I could carry you through. It was only when you splintered off into your own lost I that things became complicated, overwhelming.

  “I don’t know where I am, Evan.”

  “I’m seeing red everywhere. It’
s just … everywhere.”

  “I am underwater right now. You don’t understand. I’m underwater.”

  “I need a gun.”

  “Evan? I need—”

  “Evan?”

  Jack was waving his hand in front of me.

  “Evan.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t do that!” He was angry. “Jesus, not you, too, okay? Not you, too.”

  We just stood there for a moment, neither of us knowing what to say next. Just like old times. And then a girl asked, “Is this a bad time?”

  “Hey, Miranda,” Jack said, his tone lightening.

  I didn’t know whether to say hi or not. Miranda Lee wasn’t someone I usually said hi to. She’d never been mean to me or nice to me or anything. She’d never been anything to me. She was one year younger than us and played sports, which was probably how Jack knew her.

  “Hi,” she said to both of us. “What’s going on?”

  I still had the photos out. I quickly put them back in my bag.

  “Evan was just showing me some of his pictures,” Jack explained smoothly keeping you a secret. “He’s working on a project. It’s pretty cool.”

  “Cool,” Miranda echoed.

  “Yeah, thanks,” I said. “Anyway, thanks for taking a look, Jack. I guess I’ll be going. I mean, I was already going, so it’s not you that’s making me go, Miranda. I don’t want you to think that.”

  “Oh, good,” Miranda said. She didn’t sound sarcastic. If I’d said something like that to you, you would have been merciless. You had no use for sputtering.