The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  Tillie is thinking that it’s not enough. Donuts and coffee with someone random isn’t enough. She half hopes he’ll say, Well, it was nice meeting you, I guess I’ll see ya around, so that she can go back to the bridge and finish what she started. And she’s half petrified that he’ll say that and she’ll have to figure out how to not follow through. The pull is so, so strong, but there’s this fierce, small part of her that doesn’t want to die. Who knows she just … can’t. Die. It would kill Britt.

  They walk aimlessly down Fort Washington, retracing their steps from the bridge. As they traverse the underpass of the George Washington Bridge’s bus station, a sense of utter doom closes in on Aaron. This. This is it. He tried, he failed. Time to exit mundi. He stops walking.

  “So,” he says.

  Tillie looks at the ground and puts her hands in her coat pockets. “So.”

  “I guess …”

  Tillie swallows. She’s not sure what he guesses, but she knows it’s the end. Of what, she isn’t sure. Their acquaintance? The world? Are they both going to the bridge? Together? Will they take turns, go one at a time? Cold, cold water. She shivers. She’s not at all ready for an ending.

  They are interrupted.

  “Have you heard the good news?” an older white woman with too-bright orangey lipstick asks them. She has a red-and-brown knit cap pulled down so low that she almost doesn’t have eyes. She smells of too much perfume.

  Tillie and Aaron look at each other and they break out laughing.

  The woman flinches, a tentative smile disappearing from her face.

  Aaron steps forward and stretches his arms down, hands open, as if he wants to catch something the woman is about to throw at him that will change his life.

  “Tell me!” he says. “Please. I need some fucking good news.”

  The woman smiles politely. “Okay, now,” she says, retreating. “No need to—”

  “No, seriously,” Aaron says. “This isn’t a day for just good news. It has to be incredible. And yes, I mean fucking incredible, don’t pardon my language. So lay it on me, lovely woman of good news. Tell me. Please.”

  The woman walks away, shaking her head.

  Tillie looks at Aaron like he’s a stranger. “Where did that come from?”

  “I don’t know. It just felt right in the moment. I really did want the good news, by the way. I wanted it to be all Jesus-y good news, and then I wanted to tell her I am an unrepentant gay boy and see her head explode.”

  Tillie laughs. “Okay,” she says. “I get that.”

  “Feel like walking?” Aaron asks. “I suddenly feel like walking all the way downtown. Or downer-town. Where do you live?”

  They start walking. “Upper East Side,” Tillie says.

  “I’m Upper West. Praise the fucking lord.”

  “You’re a little weird, aren’t you?”

  “I’m a lot weird,” Aaron says.

  “Good. I’m weird, too.”

  “Amen to that. Let’s be two weird people walking down through Washington Heights, speaking only of light things. I have no more heavy in me.”

  “Deal.”

  As they walk, Tillie thinks about how arbitrary life is. Not just with Aaron, but how she has no idea why she wound up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in her life, like a sort of lottery winning that’s a bit like the lottery in Shirley Jackson’s short story, where the winner is stoned to death. Because surely she is lucky, and surely she has been stoned, emotionally, for so long now, and this neighborhood, these quiet, tree-lined streets, might well be more like where she belongs, but in reality she doesn’t know where she belongs because she doesn’t know where she’s from. She knows she was born in Gyeongsangnam-do Province, but she doesn’t know what that means, really, in terms of who her birth parents were, why they gave her up, any of that. And living a life where you don’t know your starting point is just … Sometimes she just feels utterly without a base.

  Aaron thinks about music. About how it would feel to perform at a talent show and NOT leave the stage and feel like maybe the people saying he did good are lying, maybe they’re all laughing at him, and yet. The compulsion. He can’t not. It’s in his DNA, almost. This need to say certain things, do certain things. He hates it sometimes, and other times he loves it very, very much. It keeps him alive.

  Fort Washington curves onto Broadway at 159th, and finally things look, if not specifically familiar, at least more like what Aaron thinks of as New York City. The green scaffolding, the discount shoe stores and bodegas with oranges and mangoes and tomatoes in cartons out front. Aaron asks Tillie about her favorite band, and Tillie says she likes everything, and Aaron says, “Oh.” Tillie asks Aaron one thing he’s looking forward to, and that one takes a while to answer.

  “Hugging my dad, I guess,” he says.

  This hits Tillie so hard that she actually cannot speak. She walks and lets the cold evening wind keep her eyes bone-dry.

  As they pass the entrance to Columbia University on 116th Street, Aaron says, “What’s your favorite bacteria?” and Tillie, more because of the pent-up tension in her throat and less because this amuses her, cackles. Aaron smiles, grateful. Making people laugh. It’s up there with masturbation, Froot Loops, and having people like his songs.

  “I like good bacteria,” she says.

  “Ah, yes. But more specifically. What kind?”

  “Um, the kind that come from probiotic yogurt?”

  “Mmm, yes,” he says. “Deliciously good bacteria.”

  By the time they’re south of Ninety-Sixth Street, the streetlights are on. By the time they hit Seventy-Ninth Street, their feet are tired, and Tillie is extremely aware that this walk has probably saved her life, because she’s now too exhausted to jump off a bridge.

  Aaron, too. He’s aware that all he wants to do now is sleep.

  They stand, not looking at each other, in a quiet sort of comfort.

  “So are you gonna be …?” Aaron asks.

  “I think so,” Tillie says.

  “Me too,” Aaron says.

  It’s not like they’ve just got the magic cure for suicidal thoughts, and they both know that. But at least they’re still here.

  “So maybe we should text in the morning?” Aaron asks.

  Tillie takes his phone and plugs in her number. “Yeah,” she says.

  “Thanks for, um …”

  “Yeah,” Tillie repeats.

  They aren’t looking at each other.

  The saving my life is understood.

  CHAPTER 2D: APRIL 18

  Aaron wakes up, and here’s his old best-worst friend again, the empty bone crush. He knows he’s supposed to get out of this bed and keep on doing what he’s been doing, as if nothing’s wrong. But he doesn’t want to move, at all. There are thousands of decisions to make in a given day, and he feels as if he can’t make a single one of them.

  His dad’s typical knock-pause-knock-knock-pause-knock-knock-knock rhythm takes Aaron out of his half slumber.

  “How’s Aaron?” Dad asks from behind the door.

  Aaron can’t do this one more time. How does anyone do anything? he wonders. But he knows he can’t ask his dad, because that conversation would be unbearable. So instead he groans dramatically, because it’s part of the routine.

  “Aaron is vaguely okay,” Aaron mutters. “Come in.”

  His dad opens the door, looking ready to take on the universe. He’s wearing a beige polo shirt that is slightly too short for his growing paunch. It’s all so sad, the human body. Someday Aaron’s gonna look like that, and that’s if things go well.

  Aaron yawns and stretches. “You are aware, of course, that you have a head start? That by waking up earlier than me, you have time to get your brain and mouth working together, right? Because I have not had that luxury.”

  His dad scratches his head in a mocking way. “Well, gee. I wonder how you could get a better head start so you could match wits with your father?”

  Aaron smirks. �
�I wish I could figure out where I get my sarcasm.”

  His dad bows, which is a total Aaron move.

  Then he raises his eyebrows and asks, “Is there a withhold going on here, Aaron?”

  Aaron laughs. He’s a really good actor, and nonchalant, irreverent Aaron is one of his best characters.

  It always throws his dad offtrack.

  Tillie wakes up and looks around her very pink room and thinks about how it’s way more pink than she wants it to be.

  Sometimes Tillie is two different people. There’s the real Tillie, the one in her brain, the one whose voice she hears. That Tillie’s room should definitely be black. And there’s the person who is, aside from when she’s performing, always trying to be what everyone else wants her to be. Looking at her pink room, which has been mostly unchanged since prepuberty, she realizes this lack of update is how she tries to keep her exterior looking a certain way, in case her dad wants to come in some night and just hang out and talk like they used to do.

  As she showers, as the water pelts her back, she thinks about how the times she gets really hurt are the times she lets her guard down. Like with Amir. Like how he let her in, lured her into dropping her guard. He danced the floss for her day they met. When a guy is willing to do that, it’s like, yeah, Tillie’s gonna open right up, too, and she did. She let him see the real her, the pink and the black, and she told him about what it feels like to be adopted, which is not something she shares. And he said, “I get it. It’s maddening sometimes to be seen for one thing and yet to really be so many things.”

  YES. That, Tillie thinks, rinsing the soap off her legs. When people see her, she sometimes feels like they are reacting to her looks as if her looks ARE her. Which is so, so wrong. She’d never do that to someone, but people do it to her all the time like it’s no big deal.

  As she puts on her acne medication, she looks in the mirror.

  I’m Tillie Stanley. Today’s going to be different. I’m going to not worry if someone decides to confuse me with my labels. I’m going to let the whole thing with the video wash over me like it never happened. And I’m not going to think about my dad, because it’s not worth it.

  She stares at her reflection in the mirror, and she smiles ruefully.

  Yeah, right.

  Aaron sits next to Topher Flaherty on the subway. Topher goes on and on about some group called Rage, the Flower and a rave that was, apparently, lit, and as Aaron half listens, he is trying to remember whether Topher was on the email list he’d sent out two nights ago with “Walking Alone.” Topher is kind of an on-the-bubble friend. They know a lot of the same people but have never hung out outside of school. Probably he wasn’t on the list. Aaron doesn’t want to have to wonder if Topher hated his song. It’s not a very Rage, the Flower song. Probably. He has no idea.

  He could ask, but no. He’s learned his lesson. Asking too many questions on the subway yesterday got him up on a bridge. The hollowness in his gut is still there today, but it’s a different shape. Because yesterday, walking not alone, helped. He felt just the slightest bit connected to something, and now instead of being able to park a motorcycle in his gut, maybe a small tricycle would fit better.

  He thinks of Tillie. He hopes she feels the same slight improvement that he’s feeling, that her yurt of emptiness has been reduced to a single-person tent, perhaps, and that weird analogy makes him laugh.

  “What, dude?” Topher asks.

  “It wouldn’t translate,” Aaron says.

  “You okay?”

  Aaron says yeah. “Just thinking of something.”

  “Cool,” Topher says, because he doesn’t care. No one really cares.

  Sarah, who sat down next to him when she got on at Eighty-Sixth, asks him about Spanish homework, which he has not done.

  “No hice nada,” he says.

  “And how, exactly, does that help me?” she asks.

  “In no way that I can explain at this juncture.”

  “Maybe Ms. Higuera won’t check?”

  “Maybe. As long as she’s wearing something floral, I’m cool with it.”

  Sarah laughs. “I’m guessing yes.”

  “Oh good,” says Aaron. “I may fail out of school, but at least I’ll get to see another lovely floral pattern on Ms. Higuera.”

  Walking to homeroom, he quickly scans for an Avenue Q cast list. Nothing yet. There is, however, a sign-up sheet for the talent show two weeks from Saturday. He grunts. These people can’t even be bothered to listen to one song—

  He stops himself. That doesn’t mean they didn’t like it. It means they didn’t hear it.

  He stares at the Sharpie hanging from a string off the bottom of the sign-up sheet, and he has this delicious fantasy about singing “Walking Alone” in front of the whole school, and the applause, applause, and how, after, kids will congratulate him and see him in a different light. And Evan Hanson. He’ll come up after everyone else is gone, and he’ll have a special gift for Aaron, who is such a talented singer-songwriter and deserving of extremely special gifts.

  Aaron smiles dopily and adds his name to the bottom of the list.

  Winnie pops a couple slices of twelve-grain bread in the toaster and goes looking for the Fage yogurt. She doesn’t say good morning. She doesn’t say anything. A pit forms in Tillie’s stomach. It always does when they fight. It’s like a part of her, a part she needs in order to breathe, is gone, and at the same time, she was the one who sent it away.

  It happened when she got home last night.

  “Where have you been?” her mom asked. She was sitting on the couch in the living room, and Tillie could see the anger and fear in her creased forehead.

  “Out,” Tillie said, and she knew it wasn’t the right answer. She knew she needed to have a story, and not be evasive, because evasive never works with her mom.

  “Tillie. It’s eight fifteen. Where have you been?”

  Tillie glances around, hoping against hope that her dad is concerned, too. He is nowhere to be found. Probably in his fucking man cave.

  “I … took a walk, okay?”

  “You took a four-hour walk.”

  “I had some thinking to do.”

  “Till. Are you okay? I’m worried about you.”

  The truth was caught in her throat. It was the kind of thing she’d normally tell her mom, who knows she’s struggling, who knows about Amir, mostly, and knows about the video, and knows some streamlined version of what happened with her and Dad. But something warned her: danger. This was the kind of story that would make her mom take over, and she just couldn’t right now.

  So Tillie said, “Mind your business.”

  The moment it was out of her mouth, she knew she’d fucked up. She felt like covering her mouth with her hands. Instead, she stayed very still.

  “Did you just—?”

  “Mom. Please. I’m fine, okay. I’m sorry. I just need some space, okay?”

  In response, her mom had stormed out of the living room, and apparently it’s no better this morning.

  There have been times Tillie’s walked over and hugged her mom after a squabble, even though she was feeling not so huggy. But she can’t take her mom along on this one.

  Britt skips into the kitchen, sneaks up on the back of Tillie’s chair, and gives the chair and its occupant a big squeeze. Her arms barely reach Tillie’s biceps.

  Britt yells, “Tandoori chicken at lunch today! And I’m gonna try the mulligatawny this time.”

  Tillie suppresses a smile. “Cool,” she says.

  “Cool,” repeats Britt, who then goes and hugs Winnie, and for Tillie, it’s like they’ve hugged by perky conduit, and that feels a slight bit better.

  Creative writing turns into a shit show for Aaron. It starts out nice enough, with Ms. Hooper complimenting him on “Walking Alone,” to which Aaron replies that he knows it’s pretty bad, which the Google-to-Aaron dictionary translates as Please say more nice things! But then, because it’s his day, he winds up reading this story
he has on his computer because he hasn’t written anything new. It doesn’t go well. And Aaron is like, I should have just jumped yesterday. I’m a bad person and don’t deserve to be alive.

  At lunch he sits alone, his rib crush pushing out on him, feeling like it could explode his whole midsection. Then Kwan comes to sit with him, and short of running out of school and never coming back, he realizes he’s stuck in a situation his body and brain can’t really deal with today.

  Ratiya and Ebony and Josh join them, and he winds up saying sorry about sixty-seven times, and when they leave the table, he thinks it is possible that he’s never felt less worthy as a person ever, in his entire life.

  It’s hard for Aaron to pay attention in physics, and the difference between centripetal and centrifugal goes right through him, and he realizes that despite his adventure yesterday, he’s not significantly different, or better. Things don’t improve. They never do, and he’s trying to listen to Dr. Sengupta as he prattles on and on about how centrifugal force results from inertia and how centripetal is a true force, whatever that means. And he thinks about how his life is actually inertia, like it’s his natural state, his true force, and it will always be, and that’s hard for him to take, actually, this idea that nothing moves, nothing changes, and it never, ever will, and a chill forms in his gut and freezes him solid into his chair.

  When the bell rings, the funniest thing happens.

  He doesn’t move. He can’t.

  Aaron stares at a crack in the upper-left quadrant of the whiteboard, one that almost reaches the top-left corner but not quite, and Aaron tries to move it with his mind so that it’s not so imperfect and random.