This feeling—the rise and surge of it—is too much to be contained by everyday.
And I know, I know that one minute, he’ll be everywhere, all in my head and on my lips and against my skin. I’ll be the stars he sleeps under at night. Intense like that. And the next day, without warning, he’ll be so distant I have to use a telescope just to find his eyes.
And that’s okay. I can’t blame him. I’m not the one he mourns. I’m not the dream ghost with her perfect sawdust cupcakes and her grave.
But hear this, heart! Hear this, head! With Charlie’s hand on my waist and his song at my shoulder, I’m not holding back anymore. I’m not going to regret a single dance, a single kiss.
Even if he isn’t my One. Even if there is no such thing as a One.
Because there is such a thing as now. And for now, I’m alive.
That’s not my fault. It’s not my burden.
Lindsey
So you dumbledore that night?
Um?
Autocorrect, barge! I turned it back on and this is what I get.
Your phone loves HP, Linds.
You can’t stop the wizard love.
Do you remember that night when we were at Matt’s party?
Yes.
When was that?
A while ago. End of September?
Like when?
Will check.
September 28
Why?
Oh.
??
I need to talk.
We are talking.
No, for real. Come over.
Lindsey answers the door in her pajamas, eyes swollen. Her mom is home, back in her bedroom, but the apartment always feels crowded when I know her mom is here. Not that there’s any less space, just more electrons bouncing off the walls.
“You want to go out to the coffee shop?” I ask, but Lindsey swipes her mouth with the back of her hand, like she ate something messy, or she’s trying to keep a burp in, and then leads me back to her bedroom.
She curls on her bed, making room for me at her feet.
“What’s up?” I ask her.
“I think something horrible happened,” she says. “When I was at Matt’s party, I was wearing those white shorts, remember?”
“I guess,” I say.
“I remember. I love those shorts. I only wear those when I know I won’t have my period. This I’m sure of, because you didn’t really know me then, but in seventh grade, I was wearing a white skirt and I started my period and we had a substitute in Ms. Mosley’s civics class, and she wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom and I was bleeding through, and David Sirrine… was David Sirrine.”
“That little turd.”
“Yeah, well, now I only wear white if I’m sure I’m not going to start. So, that was the end of September, right? Which means it was over a month and a half ago when I had my last period.”
“Crap, Lindsey, don’t you keep better track than that?”
“No. It just, you know, it’s pretty regular, but generally my life doesn’t revolve around my menstrual calendar, sorry.”
“A month and a half? Gah! You’re not—” I lower my voice, aware that Mrs. Barrow is only two rooms away. “You’re not pregnant?”
Lindsey doesn’t answer. She just cradles a hand to her stomach and moans.
“Sweetie.” I rub her bare feet and up her ankle and shin. “Oh, sweetie,” I say, not really thinking about what I’m saying, just trying to make comforting sounds, as if I were talking to a sick cat.
“N-nooo.” Lindsey shakes her head and pushes herself up. She puts her hand on mine, stilling it. “It’s not that.”
“You’re not pregnant?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“Then what?”
“I think I was,” she splutters. Bending forward, drawing up her knees. “I started bleeding this week, but it was, you know, weird. Too red, and the cramps were pretty bad. But I just thought it was my period. Like maybe late, but it was more spotty. I didn’t really think about it. But then, last night, it was—different, a clump. And I knew something was weird about it. It was, you know, not normal, kind of translucent. It was—I’m pretty sure it was—” She stops, takes a deep breath.
I lean in and give her a hug. Her shoulders shake as, noiselessly, she sobs. “Oh, Lindsey,” I say, not sure why she’s crying.
“I think I must have been—I didn’t even know—I lost, I lost it,” she whimpers.
“Uh—” I start to say, thinking, It’s not like you wanted a baby, right? At our age…? But I’m getting better at listening to shoulders. I swallow my words, pat her back gently, and murmur, “It’ll be all right.”
That seems pretty feeble, though. It’ll be all right? How the hell could I possibly know that? I have no clue what’s coming—and whether what comes is all right or not isn’t necessarily up to me.
Lindsey keeps weeping, like she’s the one lost. Her sobs come out muffled against my shoulder, hiccup-y, but still way too intense. The arm of my shirt is damp now with something, and I’m not sure if it’s snot or tears.
I switch to “Shhh, shhh,” though I’m not sure that’s any better. Isn’t that like telling her to shut up?
“It was—was—I didn’t even know—and now it’s gone.” She draws out the go-o-o-o-ne like a country singer.
“Shhhhhhhh.” I’m saying it for real now because the last thing I need is for her mom to come in.
I have to ask. “You would have wanted it, then—a baby?”
She pulls back and squints at me, like I’m the too-bright light on the other side of a dark room.
“I don’t know.” Her voice is careless. She tries to work up a smile. “Maybe not.”
I give my head the tiniest shake. The shake that says, You don’t have to put on a smile for me when your heart is ingesting itself. The smile slips from her wet face like it was made of oil.
“It’s probably hormones,” she mumbles, going back into the hug.
“It’s okay.” I pet her hair. “It’ll be all right.”
Kyle’s sentencing starts this week—with Lindsey and Taylor and me scheduled to testify on Wednesday morning. Whatever this sadness is, I know it’s the last thing Lindsey needs right now. I rock her gently, and wonder how we’re going to find the strength we need to stand up there and face our would-be killer.
Eve
The night before I have to be at the courthouse, Charlie stays late in my room, door shut. My father is uncharacteristically okay with this. Perhaps the catatonic-squirrel vibe I’ve been giving off for the last couple of days has convinced him that I’m better off with company—or maybe he’s just convinced I’m currently incapable of carnal relations.
Lying down, I curl on my side and Charlie curls around me, a question mark in a question mark. The small lamp on my bedside table casts a dim cone of light that doesn’t fully reach either one of us. He fiddles with my ear.
“When he killed her,” Charlie says, his voice wavering between a whisper and a choke, “it’s like he killed me, too. But I had to keep breathing. I was supposed to protect her, but I didn’t even see it coming. And the worst part was—the worst part”—his hand stills, and I feel the tension in him, like he’s made of electric wire—“she must have hurt so much. She didn’t have to hurt like that.”
I reach up and my fingers find Charlie’s forearm. I pull his arm around me, then trace the veins on his wrist. I don’t know the words to say, so I just hold him and hope my hands can somehow speak how sorry I am.
“I hope he fries.”
“What?” My hand stills.
“Kyle.”
Charlie breaks away, sits up on the bed, leaning away from me, elbows on his knees. “He should suffer, like he made her suffer. Worse. It should be worse.” He looks back over his shoulder, and his eyes make a flat space in the center of the room.
I’ve had the same thought. But how could anything they do to Kyle be worse? It’s not like they’re going to rape him and
shove a crowbar down his esophagus. No matter what, they aren’t going to bash his skull in and ditch him by the side of the road.
Yet, hearing Charlie say it out loud—hearing him wish Kyle dead—seems cold. Like he’s the killer.
I’ve known all along what this trial is about. But I’ve been focused on my part, having to see Kyle again, having to stand there and speak. I’ve tried to block out everything else—what comes tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, when they decide whether Kyle lives or dies.
“You think he should be executed?” I ask Charlie.
He looks at me like there can only be one answer.
A life for a life.
A jagged sort of logic. What Kyle did can’t be undone. What other end could it come to?
I shift toward him. “Is that what Jamie would have wanted?”
He turns so I can’t see his face and shrugs. “I don’t know. She was—I can’t say what she would have wanted.” He sighs. “But it might have been better for her if she hadn’t been so nice.”
I curl back into my question mark, facing the wall. Close my eyes.
All this year, I’ve been playing what happened over and over in my head. Like one of those times, I could make it different. I could do something or not do something, and it would all be changed. The fourteenth time, or the twenty-fifth or ninety-eighth time, it miraculously wouldn’t have to end that way.
But there’s no redoing the past.
And this—the idea of killing Kyle now—it seems… I don’t know.
I feel Charlie’s fingers at my temple, brushing back my hair.
“Go to sleep,” he says softly. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
I reach up and tug on his finger. Just a little tug to let him know I’m still awake.
“She had such small hands,” Charlie says, his voice distant. “Sometimes when she touched my face or something, I could hardly feel it. She was that gentle. And he crushed her. Ten bones in her right hand were broken. I read the report. Ten bones in that one little hand.”
His fingers slip away then, and I hear the door open and close behind him.
Dawn
It is her hands I dream of. She wets sand, scooping large globs of it into a heap, pressing and pushing to shape it.
A seagull lands by her knee.
What are you making? I want to ask her, but I know she will not hear me. I am nowhere in this dream. Unseen. Invisible even to my own dream-eyes.
I hold up one translucent hand, and through it, I see the sun rise.
Ready
“Want to head over, jelly bean?” My mom pats my back, smooths my shoulders.
“We’ll be early,” I say.
“Might as well,” my dad says. He closes his laptop, stands, and stretches. He usually seems so distant, like he’s thinking about a perplexing chemical reaction, jewel-colored liquids fizzing in his brain, even when he’s guzzling down artichoke dip across the booth at Red-n-Mac’s. But now he peers at me too closely, with a vague sort of tender regret. Like he did when I was four and a big kid at the playground called me a name I didn’t understand.
Charlie went to the courthouse first thing this morning, but I don’t have to report there until ten thirty. I took the entire day off school anyway, though, and have already eaten a bowl of cereal, a yogurt, and three and a half muffins. Not smart, since the last thing I need is to puke up a bunch of curdled raisins in the middle of my testimony. But I was up early, showered, and dressed by seven, and there was nothing to do but eat and stress and tug at my mom’s pantyhose, which keep slipping down my hips.
In addition to the hose, I’m wearing my mom’s skirt, jacket, and one-inch pumps. All uncomfortable and all periwinkle blue.
I text Lindsey a picture and she texts back a mirror shot of herself in a black-and-white pinstripe blouse, cute black capris, and killer heels.
We’re decked out like old-fashioned stewardesses. It seems weird that we’re dressing up to see the guy who wanted to kill us. But whatever. Society.
My parents have both taken the day off work, and I take a second to thank my lucky stars that I got them in the birth lottery, not Mrs. Barrow who, from what Lindsey says, is out of town again.
When we get to the courthouse, we check in and are told to wait on the benches in the hallway outside the courtroom.
People in suits walk by every so often, carrying folders. No cell phones are allowed in the building, and I didn’t bring a book, so I now have even more time for stressing and tugging my hose. Nothing to eat, though, so there’s that.
When Lindsey comes in alone, I meet her at the doorway with a hug. It’s like a reunion, even though I saw her yesterday in person.
She’s added a black bandanna-kind-of-thing around her neck and some muted red lipstick.
“You look good,” I tell her. “They said we’ll have to wait a while.”
“I thought as much, which is why I brought these.” She draws a beat-up pack of playing cards out of her back pocket.
“You’re on,” I say.
She’s been more herself this past week. A bit subdued, but I can tell she’s trying. Looking for a miraculous spot of turf where she’s not self-destructive and not high and not sad.
We find an empty bench down the hallway where we can spread out the cards between us.
“Rummy? BS? War? Crazy Eights? What’s your poison?” she asks.
I know better than to play BS with Lindsey. She’s told me before I’m a horrible liar, and even though I think I’m decent, she can always spot the fib.
“War,” I say, because I know we don’t really need to pay attention to play such an easy game, and I want to talk.
We shuffle and deal. I take her three with a jack. She takes my queen with an ace. “How are you doing?” I ask her.
“With what?” she asks.
“With… everything.” I gesture vaguely to indicate… vagueness.
“Well, in particular, this sucks,” she says, smiling philosophically, laying down a ten. “But it’s always sucked, hasn’t it?”
“What about the other thing?” Since Sunday, Lindsey and I had talked around her miscarriage rather than actually talked about it. But I know she knows what I mean.
“Better.” She takes my four and lays down another ace.
I hope for a low card, turn over an eight.
“I was…” She pauses, trying to find the word. “Shocked. Maybe that made it worse? Or maybe just more confusing.”
I push the cards toward her pile. “I’m sorry. You know, that you had to go through that.”
“Me too.” She’s looking at me full-on now, and her look is a lacy landscape cut from paper. Beautiful, but too fragile. “Everything I thought. You know, Robert and all that. I had all those big plans. It was a fantasy. But now, it’s like it wasn’t. I just didn’t know it wasn’t.”
We leave the cards abandoned between us. Lindsey shifts so her back is against the wall. She stares at the door to the records office across the hall. “There was something real there,” she says. “Someone. Someone I could have loved.”
I take her hand and squeeze it. It’s still like she’s talking a foreign language. But I didn’t understand it before either, when she was all hyped up on Robert, and the way I responded then—well, I screwed that up.
I guess it doesn’t matter if I get it or not. It doesn’t matter what I think or how I feel. What matters is that she thinks what she thinks and feels what she feels—and my job as her friend is to take the time out from my own bullshit long enough to actually hear her.
Taylor Avril, who has come here with her mom and Kai in tow, walks down the hallway with new hair. A silver pixie cut that makes her look a little like a middle-aged woman on a yogurt commercial, but cuter.
“You guys up for this?” she asks. She looks as nervous as I feel.
I shrug. Lindsey nods. Taylor checks the clock on the wall.
“Ten twenty-nine,” she says.
I take a breath, like the
next minute might change everything and I want to be ready. But the minute passes: 10:30. 10:31. 10:32. Taylor’s mom sits on a bench across from us and digs in her purse, while Kai and Taylor stand in the nook beside the water fountain and breathe in each other’s faces.
Eventually, around 10:43, a woman in a pantsuit tells us things are running later than expected. “Hold tight, hon,” she says to Lindsey in that southern way of making everyone, even strangers, her baby. “They’ll be calling you in one by one. Just keep your ears open, there.” She points to a speaker above a doorway and moves on down the hall.
Lindsey and I finish our game of war, which she wins, though she doesn’t rub it in like usual. My mom walks over and smooths my hair. She tries to play it casual, but I think she just wants to touch me. “How’s it going?” She nudges my chin up so I have to look into her bright eyes. The smile she gives me is the one that means I’m her baby and always will be, that I am beautiful and brave and she would do anything to live the next half hour for me, but she can’t so here’s this smile instead.
“Okay,” I say. “Good.”
She lets go of me and squeezes Lindsey’s shoulder. “Let me know if you girls need anything.”
Like how about another life. One where the biggest stress I have is what to order from the cabana boy.
By 11:10, we’re laying down cards in our third game, and except for the thwap of the cards on the bench between us or the shuffle of some random thirsty soul to the water fountain and back, it’s turned quiet in the hallway. Too quiet; tomb-like. My nerves might as well be stretched out on some medieval torture device.
That’s when the speaker crackles, “Taylor Avril, report to Courtroom Four, please. Taylor Avril, Courtroom Four.”
How She Died, How I Lived Page 21