The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  “Yes. All of this. Extremely very nice,” Tillie says, flat.

  “You know, you might want to grow a spine,” Molly says. “No offense, and I don’t want to, like, put you back in whatever that was? But people are going to not like you. Especially if you’re … Never mind.”

  “Especially if I’m what?” Tillie feels her heart speed up again and she’s so, so tired and on the edge she can’t believe it.

  “You’re different, okay? And yeah, it’s good to be different. I’m actually more different than—ugh. Never mind. It’s just, if you get up onstage and you bleed your soul out, what do you expect? This is high school. You think people are gonna run to you and be like, Wow, that was awesome? No. People are going to use it against you. Welcome to the world, Tillie. This is why I choose not to share every little thing about me to the entire world.”

  Tillie hangs her head and closes her eyes. What kind of world is this, where people are always looking for ammunition, and is that a world she wishes to be in? But what’s the alternative? She doesn’t want to die. She just doesn’t want to be here. And thinking about that totally unfixable contradiction makes her arms go cold, and her head starts to spin, and yeah. She’s back in.

  “Tillie,” Molly says. Now her old friend is looming over her, and her face is half-concerned and half-angry. “Are you on drugs?”

  “I went to the bridge yesterday,” Tillie says, her voice soft, her spirit utterly defeated.

  Michael’s warrior brothers make a house call.

  This is what brothers do, Morris said on the phone earlier, and true to form, every one of them, including Reggie, who is ninety-one and uses a walker, arrives at his front door and makes himself at home, even though none of them but Morris has ever been to the apartment before. All Michael he can do is sit on the couch and stare out at the Hudson River.

  Soon they are gathered around him, and Jack is lighting sage and then waving it up and down each man’s body as a cleansing ritual, which has always been the part of ManKind Project that means the least to Michael, but he goes along with it because the rest of it has saved his life. And they’re going to have to save it again, because he has nothing left.

  Instead of a formal meeting, once they’ve smudged, Morris takes over and asks, “What do you need?”

  Michael doesn’t answer right away. He can’t.

  “We’re here. We’ll just hold space,” Morris says. It’s something they say, and frankly it’s something that, four years ago, before this weekend, Michael would have laughed at. The image of a person holding space. But now he’s so glad, because these men, these brothers, are here. Holding his space.

  For minutes. Many. He’s not sure if it’s minutes or hours, and thoughts jump around his addled brain and none of them are worthy of verbalization. Who’s coming to the funeral? What’s the conversation with the folks at Fieldston going to look like? Will they look at him with so much pity?

  Finally, when the thoughts slow to a crawl, he says, “I want to be held.”

  The men stand, Michael in the middle. And once he is enveloped by them, and their hands are there, strong, on his arms, around his back, he begins to shake. Like a whole-body earthquake. No sound. Just shaking. This horror quakes through him and finally reaches his mouth and he screams, and the sound that comes out of his mouth is not his. It’s a raw grief in a tone that seems like it comes from elsewhere. Above or below but not in him. It continues. And the men soak it in, and they hold him tight, and they cry, too, a wailing wall of men, caring for a fallen brother.

  Molly can’t believe what she’s just heard. “You what?”

  “I went to the bridge. I didn’t want to jump but. I also kind of, I don’t know. I didn’t want to deal with being me anymore. Being me is not a joy.”

  Molly sits back down against the wall. Her mouth forms an O. And Tillie’s glad in a way, that she’s finally rendered Molly speechless. And also, in a way, that she knows. So she’ll stop saying horrible things.

  “Jesus,” Molly says.

  Tillie nods.

  “Did my …?”

  Tillie shakes her head. “No. Not really. I mean. Not entirely. My life’s shit in lots of ways. It wasn’t like, you made a mean video and I jumped off a bridge, okay? You don’t have that power over me.”

  “Okay,” Molly says. “God.”

  The girls sit for a while, breathing like they’ve just run a marathon. Nothing needs to be said, and everything still needs to be said, and Tillie, for the first time, begins to feel like it’s okay to be there, like the weirdness of the situation dissipated the moment she told Molly, and yeah, half of her wants to make sure Molly doesn’t tell the whole world, and the other half is like, fuck it. Tell everyone. She doesn’t care anymore. She stares at the peach and cream walls, and the rich, dark brown wooden bookshelves built into the far wall. She fixates on this small crack in the concrete on the corner of the white ceiling, inches away from the intersection of the far two corners. She stares, and as she does it’s like tunnel vision overtakes her body, and the crack grows, and her head begins to buzz, but not in a bad way. In a way that feels almost serene, almost like she’s at home again after a long absence. Which is weird, given she most certainly is not at home.

  “Do you ever just stare at a wall and suddenly the size of it gets bigger?” she asks.

  Molly laughs a little. “Um. No. Not really.”

  Tillie laughs, too. “I know. I’m the weirdest person on the planet.”

  “Not the weirdest. Just. Superlatives. You’re superlative girl.”

  This snaps Tillie out of her odd staring daydream.

  “What?”

  “You’ve always been. When we were friends way back when, it was always like, this is the best lipstick ever, or being grounded is the worst thing ever. Superlative girl.”

  Tillie focuses on her old friend’s face. “You know, that’s a new one to me. I’ve never, ever thought of that before.”

  Molly smiles a little. “Well, you’re a bit dramatic. You know that, right?”

  “Now that one I’ve heard.”

  “Not that it’s a terrible thing to be dramatic. I mean, I could be more—never mind.”

  Tillie doesn’t ask what, but a part of her wants—needs—to hear. Needs to go back. To fifth grade, and lying on the rug in Molly’s room, talking about random things, like how llamas spit rather than bite when they get angry, or how a narwhal’s long unicorn-like horn is actually an enlarged ivory tooth that can weigh more than twenty pounds. And fashion stuff, like trips down to SoHo to buy colorful scarves and even berets for a while, which Tillie could totally get into, and off-the-shoulder tops, which Tillie could not. And the time Molly was mad about being made to clean her room while Tillie was there—they were like sisters back then—and Molly was narrating her cleaning out loud as she did it, angrily, and she took this big stuffed animal bear from her bed and put it on a rocking chair and said, “Bear. Chair.” And then they laughed so hard that Molly’s anger broke in a millisecond and they both almost had snot running from their noses.

  This was before the whole popular-kid dynamic started in sixth grade. When they went to tennis camp and immediately Molly had all these mostly white girls surrounding her, and they were squeaking about makeup and boys, and Tillie felt like she’d arrived on another planet. And Molly made sure Tillie was included that summer, even if she was on the outskirts of cool, the large Asian girl in a sea of mostly white faces. But come sixth grade, it was different, and the sleepovers were different. She felt Molly’s urge to be elsewhere as if their friendship were watermelon taffy, its sweet pinkness stretching to the point of almost breaking. And then it did break. Spring of sixth grade. A Friday night in April, the leaves on the ubiquitous London plane trees that line city streets just starting to bloom. The first dance with the Allen-Stevenson boys at the Goddard Gaieties. They arrived together, but then Molly saw Gretchen, and they did this clapping thing Tillie didn’t know about, and they laughed and hugged
and Molly lifted her right foot back almost coquettishly as they embraced and it was like watching a horror movie, because Gretchen was obviously evil. Tillie backed into the corner and watched, and suddenly there were three girls and three boys dancing in the center of the room to Beyoncé’s “XO,” and Tillie felt the tears well up, and there was nowhere to run, but there was Molly’s mom, chaperoning, so she went to her, because Molly’s mom was almost her mom, in a way, with how much time she’d spent at Molly’s over the years, and almost immediately she got that it was all wrong. Molly’s mom didn’t hug her tight, didn’t comfort her and tell her it was okay to be excluded, or to be different. She rolled her eyes and said, “Till, get a grip. It’s not cute to cry at a dance. Go to the ladies’ room and get your act together.”

  Tillie did go to the restroom, and she stared in the mirror and thought, This is my life. This is how it’s going to be from now on. And truly that was right. At school on Monday it was different. Molly had new friends and it was understood that Tillie was cut loose. No breakup. Just an understanding.

  These memories make Tillie feel like slugging and hugging Molly simultaneously, and she doesn’t know what to do with that. So she just says, “What could you be more?”

  Molly dramatically sighs. “I don’t know,” she says, staring at the ceiling, her arms splayed out palms up, exasperated. “Real, maybe? Like I think my rep is probably that I have my shit way together. There are things about me that I don’t share, Tillie. Life is like a museum, and you have to curate. And I wish you didn’t have to, because sometimes stuff gets lost.”

  “Yeah?” Tillie asks.

  “Yeah. And no offense, because I’m not saying it’s your fault, exactly, but the suspension? If you had any idea what Gretchen and Isabella were doing, moments before I did whatever, and I’m sorry, by the way, that sucked, but theirs were way meaner—not about you, okay—and they’re in school right now, and I’m not, and that’s on my permanent record, so I can basically say goodbye to Penn, or Brown, even Michigan, probably, because who fat-shames a classmate on video? How the fuck do you explain that one in a letter, and come on. I know we’re not, like, friends anymore, but seriously. Does one stupid joke mean I don’t deserve to go to a good college? And don’t even get me started on Gretchen and Isabella. I just have this sense they’ve moved on, and here I am, and I actually can feel it happening. My popularity, my position, disappearing, over a mistake. So I’m not super rosy, either. Not going to jump off a bridge, but, yeah.”

  Tillie laughs. It’s the only thing she can do. And then the weirdest thing happens. Molly laughs, too.

  “Too soon?” Molly asks.

  “You think?”

  Molly cocks her head in a sympathetic way and says, “Sorry. I don’t know why I do that. Or I do, but whatever. I could be nicer, right?”

  “I think there may be room for growth in that area,” Tillie says, and they both laugh again, and Tillie hopes to god that Molly gets it. That this laugh isn’t an it’s all good laugh. Because it’s not all good. There’s this fury still in her chest, and if she were an actual visible person, someone might see it. But she is not visible. This is the way you laugh when there’s literally nothing else your body can do.

  “So why are you here?” Molly asks, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “In my living room? And not in, you know, school? Where I can’t be but very much wish I was.”

  They’re still sitting on the living room floor. Tillie hears the edge, and there’s a part of her that wants to go off on Molly, but it’s like she can’t. For whatever reason, she does not have the permission to do that, ever, in her life.

  Maybe it’s Molly’s tone, though, that at least allows Tillie to tell the truth.

  “So my mom was like, ‘We need to get you help.’ Which I get, by the way. I’m depressed. Obvs. But I’m depressed because of things. Yeah, your video wasn’t great for me, but it’s not just that. It’s … the guy. From the thing. Amir is his name. I was really into him, and then he was just gone. And what do you do with that? When you finally let a guy get that close to you and you trust him and then it’s all gone.”

  She wipes her eyes, which are totally dry. Molly’s looking at the floor in front of Tillie, like there’s something there that needs wiping up. There isn’t.

  “And stuff at home is … Never mind. It doesn’t matter. It’s just hard right now and I got a little whatever. So my mom took me to see a doctor this morning and she’s all wanting me to go to some inpatient facility in Vermont. Which I am absolutely not doing. So I bolted. Not, like, I ran while they shouted at me to stay. My mom was in the bathroom I guess when I went out to get her to come in, and I just kept walking. I don’t know why. And here I am. So.”

  Molly’s stare continues, but her face gets more and more inscrutable to Tillie. Jaw set, eyes glassy. Is she bored? Alarmed? Annoyed?

  When it’s clear Tillie is done talking, Molly looks up, not exactly into Tillie’s eyes, but at least close. She sits up so that her spine is straight against the wall behind her.

  “Okay, then,” she says.

  “Oh yeah. I have no phone. Because after I left I found out my mom was tracking me, and I just left it on Eighty-Third Street. It lives there now. In this hole in the pavement. That’s how serious I am about not going inpatient.”

  Molly swallows and puts her hand on her throat.

  “Okay. So. You have no phone, your mom is looking for you, and she wants to have you committed?”

  Committed. The word sounds so wrong to Tillie. She’s most definitely not insane. She’s sad. Committed makes her think of straitjackets and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was the main-stage play the spring before Tillie’s tenth-grade year. This is different. This is … Tillie.

  “I’m not crazy,” Tillie says, her throat tight.

  “Did I say you were?”

  “Your tone kind of did.”

  “God,” Molly says. “It’s the facts. You’re supposed to be in a hospital, but instead you came to my place.”

  Tillie’s insides twist again, and part of her wants to punch Molly in the face, hard. She bites her lip, harder.

  “God,” Molly repeats, this time muttering it under her breath.

  This was a bad idea, Tillie realizes. She doesn’t feel better. If anything, she feels worse, because now it’s out. That she’s hurt. And Molly’s right. You put things out there, and people use it as ammunition.

  “Come on,” Molly says, standing up.

  Tillie looks up at her. “Where are we going?”

  “My room, okay?”

  This is not what Tillie expected Molly to say, but she slowly stands and follows Molly there.

  Molly excuses herself for a moment, and Tillie stands there at the door, awkwardly.

  Molly’s room, unlike Tillie’s, is nearly unrecognizable from five years earlier. Whereas Tillie’s is still pink—she remembers how much it mattered that she and Molly had matching pink rooms—Molly’s pink walls are gone, replaced with glossy white with purple dots that probably were painted by some famous artist, knowing Molly’s A-list mom. The wooden floor they used to sit and play jacks on is now concealed with a Persian rug, and turquoise designer sheets cover her unmade bed.

  “Wow,” Tillie says when Molly returns to the room.

  “Wow what?”

  “I just haven’t been in here in a while.”

  “Yeah, well,” Molly says.

  “What’s that?” Tillie says, pointing to the book sitting open and facedown on the bed.

  “Nothing,” Molly says, lunging for the book and putting it behind her back. Tillie almost laughs. “Just … mind your own business.”

  “Okay, then,” Tillie says as a twinge of something passes through her chest. Like it’s too soon. To be here. As if there’s unfinished business. As if a different, better Tillie would—should, maybe—go apeshit on the place, in retaliation for the video that ruined her life.

  The girls look at each other and Ti
llie shrugs and sits in the one chair in the room, a designer wooden desk chair that has seemingly replaced the bear rocking chair. Molly has put the book under her mattress like it’s a secret and Tillie is like, Is it porn or something? How weird.

  “Do you remember Jukebox?” Tillie asks.

  Molly laughs despite herself and rolls her eyes. “Oh God. That.”

  It was maybe fourth grade. They made up a skit for Molly’s mom. Molly dressed up all pretty and she was in an old-fashioned bar like they’d seen in this movie and there was this ancient jukebox with all these songs. They used a chair with a blanket over it as the jukebox, adorning it with a piece of paper on which Tillie had written A JUKEBOX.

  “What should I play?” Molly said, and then she’d hit a button, say “Boop!” in a high voice like that’s what happened when she pressed a button, and then Tillie would start singing a Justin Bieber song, until Molly would “Boop!” again and Tillie would sing a different song.

  Tillie could hear Molly’s mom cracking up, and it was hard not to laugh herself. They were so funny!

  “Or Pony Town,” Tillie says. She can’t stop remembering.

  “Huh?”

  “Pony Town?”

  Molly shrugs. “Sorry. Must have been someone else.”

  But it wasn’t, and Tillie knows it.

  Man. Pony Town. She almost describes it, because she’s pretty sure Molly would remember. That lasted until fifth grade for sure. But she knows she can’t. That Jukebox or not, Molly is too sophisticated to remember something like that fondly.

  These ponies were supposed to be cake decorations, but her mom didn’t use them. So Tillie took them into her room, about ten of them, and she made up this world where they were the townspeople and she drew stores and places on loose-leaf paper. The horses all got names, like Jackie and Esmerelda. Some were boys, some were girls. And they’d go to the candy store, or the gym, or the beach. It was kind of based on West Hampton, where they went one summer. And her dad came in that first time, and he loved it, and he made up voices for the different characters, and they just played for the longest time. Tillie wanted that day to never end. And for years later, she’d take out the horses and keep the story going, even when it was probably too young a game for her but she didn’t care, and she remembers how she showed Molly, and Molly made it a story about all the girls going for Nathan, this good-looking horse-slash-boy, and Tillie didn’t really want it to be about that, but she played along because that’s what she did.