“Oh right, I forgot. Your life isn’t perfect. You get B’s instead of A’s. You’re not some brainiac or an ice dancer,” she says with an eye roll, but there’s a little hint of a smile on her face, like she thinks we’ve gotten all our anger out of our systems. Like we can now go back to some semblance of normal. “Your poor parents.”
You never expect the things you tell your best friend, the things you confide in her, to come back and haunt you. You never expect to hear them in her voice, taunting, unrecognizable.
But the final straw, the thing that really changes everything, is when I catch a whiff of Lacey’s breath, a hint of cheap beer and God knows what else.
I feel like I’m about to burst into tears, and not for the first time today. But I refuse to do it in front of Hail, refuse to do it in front of her.
“Go home, Lacey,” I tell her, tired.
“Wow,” she says, disbelief in her voice, and she starts to back up. Like I’m being unreasonable. And maybe that’s the actual final straw, the thing that makes me lose my last strand of patience.
“Why are you being such a bitch?” she spits.
“Why am I being such a bitch?” I repeat. “Because I needed you today, Lace. I really needed you and you weren’t there for me.”
“Because I have other things going on, Eden, okay? Because it’s fucking summer and I have a job and I have a life and we’re eighteen, not eight, and maybe, just maybe, we don’t have to do every single thing together.”
The words rush out of Lacey in one fell swoop, and as soon as they are out, I can tell that she regrets them.
“What did you say?” I ask, voice low.
She hesitates. “I just mean…like, I can’t always drop everything to be there for you.”
“I didn’t fucking ask you to!” I spit. “And I never said we had to do everything together.”
“Right, but you…” She fiddles with the sunglasses perched on top of her head.
“I what?” I ask.
“You’re pissed at me because I didn’t go to camp, and you have every right to be. I flaked, I get that,” she says. “But then you should have gone, if you wanted to so badly. You didn’t have to stay because of me.”
I open and shut my mouth, unsure of what to say.
“And it’s always like that. It’s like we’re not allowed to be two separate people.”
I am silent for several seconds before I say, “I stayed because camp was our thing, together, and I didn’t want to just leave you this summer.”
“You wouldn’t have been just leaving me!” Lacey says, exasperated. “It would have been fine. I would have been fine.”
“I never, ever said we had to do everything together,” I say, feeling my eyes start to water.
“Of course you didn’t say it, but we both know it. I have to hold your hand for every single thing. That’s the only way you ever do anything. The one time I didn’t, you bailed on skinny-dipping.”
“Oh my God!” I say, frustrated. “This is because I didn’t go skinny-dipping with a bunch of creeps from school? I can do it, okay? That’s what you want me to do? I’ll do it.”
“It’s not just skinny-dipping. I get that you need me, but I can’t…I won’t always be here.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, and my voice is shaking. “What?” I push.
“You’ll freak out,” she says, not looking at me.
Oh God.
“I won’t,” I say, feeling my stomach start to churn.
“You will,” she insists.
“I won’t,” I say firmly, trying to assure myself as well as her.
“I don’t think I’m going to State,” she says after a moment. She watches me carefully after saying those words and I watch her back, inspecting every inch of her face for a smile, a crack, any sign that she’s joking, but it doesn’t come.
“What do you mean?” I ask, trying to keep my voice calm.
“I think I’m going to LA in the fall,” she says, staring down at the ground.
“Lace,” I say. “But you promised…your mom…”
“I’ll deal with that,” she says with a wave of her hands. “I’ve been talking to my dad about moving in with him at the end of the summer.”
I suddenly feel light-headed, feel the urge to sit down. I lean back against the car, no longer caring about Hail watching our conversation.
“Are you okay?” she asks after a moment.
“Yeah, of course,” I lie, because I can’t admit that my plans for the next four years are unraveling before my very eyes, that I can’t see myself roaming a college campus alone in just a couple of months, that my breath is feeling caught in my throat.
“Promise?” she asks, and I nod. Another lie.
“The sooner I go, the sooner I can get started trying to get signed and working on my own music and everything.”
“Oh” is all I manage to say.
“I’m sorry. I know I should have said something earlier, but I wasn’t sure and I didn’t want to upset you.”
“But now you are?” I ask. “Sure?”
She nods.
Hail taps once on the windshield, and Lacey glances toward him.
“I have to go,” she says.
“Okay,” I tell her.
She turns and reaches for the passenger door.
She raises her hand as she slides back into the car and I wave back and there’s something different about how we say goodbye tonight, something final.
I turn around and go inside.
I don’t hear them drive off.
I CAN’T MAKE myself get out of bed the next morning.
When Mia comes in to check on me, I make her tell Dad that I’m not feeling well and can’t go to work today. Mom sticks her head in to check on me a few minutes later and I pretend to be asleep.
I stay in bed all morning, reeling from the last twenty-four hours.
Finding Mom in Sergiy’s arms.
Lacey blowing me off, our fight.
Then the thing that stings the most after sleeping on it—the fact that Lacey isn’t going to State with me.
The fact that when she bailed on camp, she was bailing on something altogether bigger, something that meant way more.
I’m going to college on my own.
I have no flotation device, no life vest, no partner for group projects, nobody to explore campus with.
Lacey is going to LA.
And even worse, even more painful than the words she did say, are the words she didn’t.
She feels like I’ve been holding her back, like I’m a burden.
How long has she felt that way?
How long has she been plotting her escape?
I remember the day she got home from seeing her father, those tiny, almost imperceptible differences in the way she stood, the things she said, the things she did. Then the more glaring differences—her hair, the drinking, Hail and Libby and Vance.
She’s been separating herself from me for the past year.
I’ve just been too stupid or too blind to notice.
Tears rise in my eyes but I blink them back.
I won’t let myself cry.
I won’t let myself do the thing I most want to and call Lacey.
Instead, I go with doing the thing I least want to.
I climb out of bed and drag myself downstairs to scrounge up some breakfast. I have to blink twice when I see Mia. She’s sitting with her legs folded underneath her in the living room, watching TV. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mia this idle in eighteen years. Even when we were kids, she was always doing something, mixing potions or reading books or tagging along wherever Mom went.
Once I’m dressed, I find my keys, head outside and climb into my car.
I drive around aim
lessly at first.
The world suddenly feels made up of places I need to avoid. Dad’s work, Mom’s work, Lacey’s house.
I end up at Avery Park.
It’s just before one p.m. and full of little kids and their parents, the kids dangling upside down on the monkey bars and running up and down the slides and teetering on the seesaw.
I make my way over to the tunnel and there’s a little girl climbing to get to the mouth. I watch as she is swallowed by the dark, then spit out the other end. She is giggling when she comes out and immediately runs back to the start to go through again.
I wait until she’s gone through one more time and then I climb on and slide through myself.
It is a relief shrinking down to fit through holes that once seemed big enough to swallow me, and I think of Lacey and Oliver, how we dared each other silly, spun around in giddy circles, how we were each other’s constants.
Things are so different now, it makes me want to cry. It makes me want to crawl back inside the tunnel and hide away until the world resets itself, until we go back to being the versions of ourselves that I recognize.
But I can’t do that, can’t just wait for everything to become simple again.
I have no choice but to leave the tunnel.
I’m walking back to my car when I hear my name.
I turn around and Will’s mother is a few feet behind me.
“Eden,” she says. “I thought it was you.”
“Hi, Mrs. Mason,” I say. My smile falters when she’s close enough for me to make out her face, to see how sunken her eyes are, to see the circles around them like they’ve been ringed in permanent marker.
“Oh, please call me Elyse,” she says, and her voice is small. In fact, all of her makes me seem gigantic in comparison. Her collarbones stick out at sharp angles and she’s drowning in a long knitted sweater even though it’s more than eighty degrees out.
“It’s good to see you again. Do you live around here?” she asks, and I remember for the first time today that she does. Will did.
“No. I drove here to…I just needed to think.”
Her eyes grow unfocused while I’m answering her question. “Do you mind…Could we sit?” She points out a bench not far from us.
She seems exhausted, as I follow her to the bench, and I’m hit with this overwhelming sense of guilt. Why didn’t I go back to check on her after the first time? Has she been eating? Has she been sleeping?
Does she have anyone checking up on her?
“Will made me come outside.” She blurts it out of nowhere, a statement meant for the middle of a conversation, not the start of one.
“What?” I say.
“Will told me to come outside. To take a walk,” she says, and all I can do is stare at her.
Will.
“I just talked to him a few…a while ago,” she says, like she can’t place anything in time. The only word I can use to describe her is dizzy. She seems off balance and tired and sad, and I understand that it’s because he’s gone, that she’s spinning with grief. But I don’t know what to say to her, how to respond to what she’s just said.
“You talked to him?” And then it hits me.
Will.
In Good Company Will.
And I feel both relieved that’s what she meant and disappointed that’s what she meant.
“Have you talked to him?” she asks.
I don’t know why I do it, but I lie.
“No.”
She nods, is quiet for a few seconds before she says, “I couldn’t bring myself to for a long time, even after I gave you his number. It doesn’t make any sense.”
I don’t know whether she means being able to talk to him or the fact that he’s gone.
“It feels…,” she says, searching for the right word.
“Like him?” I offer, remembering what it felt like to talk to him last night. It felt easy and real, like I’d dialed my friend Will’s number and talked to him about my best friend being a bitch. It felt like what might have happened a month ago.
“Like him,” she confirms. She doesn’t ask me how I know this if I didn’t speak to him. Instead, she frowns, as if she’s surprised to hear the words she’s just said out loud. “Does that sound…Is it crazy?”
“No,” I say, and I’m thinking of pouring out my heart to Will and feeling like he understood. Feeling like I had one friend in the world. “How did you find out about it?”
I think for a second that I’m going to have to explain my question, but she understands. “I got an email a week after the accident. I thought it was a scam,” she says. “I was furious. But then I started researching it—In Good Company—and it wasn’t at all what I thought.” She shakes her head. “I thought it was something illicit.”
“I’d never really heard of it,” I tell her.
She nods. “There’s another company that uses the same technology. They use a Cognitive Donor’s information to create a Companion, but their Companions are programmed…differently. It’s called Necromantech,” she says, and I try not to react to what she’s just said but I’m pretty sure I make a face. “I think that’s why so many people have the wrong idea about In Good Company. That, and it just seems impossible, speaking to someone who’s…” Her voice trails off.
Dead.
Speaking to someone who’s dead.
It’s like she can’t force the word out.
“He doesn’t remember anything,” she says. “They say he’s designed to have all Will’s traits, to be like him but not a replica.”
“It’s a computer,” I say, stating the obvious.
“I don’t understand why,” Elyse says suddenly. “Why would he sign up for it? He was eighteen. There’s no way he could have known that he would…” She skips over the word. “Do you know? Did he tell you anything?”
Will’s mother is looking at me, expectant, hopeful, and somehow she still thinks that I knew Will. That I was with Will.
I start to tell her that she’s wrong, that I don’t know why he would have signed up to be a Cognitive Donor, that I didn’t know Will the way she thinks I did.
But at exactly that moment, a memory body-slams me and it’s April again, the week after my dad’s TIA, and I’m in the student parking lot at school.
I’ve just gotten out of my car when I hear someone calling my name. Of course I recognize his voice. I’d know it anywhere.
“Hey, Paulsen,” he says when he’s in front of me. He sticks one elbow onto my shoulder. “How are you doing?”
“I’m okay,” I say, even though I’m tired and scared and sleep-deprived.
“And how’s your dad?” Will asks.
I can’t help my smile. It means the world that he cares enough to ask.
“Better,” I say. I don’t add the for now that seems to hang over everything, over my family, but I think Will can sense it.
He surprises me by bringing up his own dad, the first time he’s done so since my birthday in January.
“He was sick for so long,” he says. “And then when he died, he was just gone. It’s like he vanished into thin air.
“It scares me. The thought that you can be here one day and then gone the next, and there’s absolutely nothing left of you.”
His voice breaks at the end of his sentence and he clears his throat.
“What I mean is—the important thing is that your dad is still here. There’s a big difference between here and not, you know? You shouldn’t waste the time while he’s here worrying about when he won’t be.”
The image of Will against the backdrop of a dewy spring morning fades, and I’m back on a bench with his mother and I know why he signed up for In Good Company.
“He wanted to leave something behind,” I say now, and I’m positive it’s true. “Something of himsel
f.”
Elyse nods, her eyes filling as she watches me. “I wish we’d talked about things like that more while he was here,” she says. “The last few years, after his father died, he felt so hard to reach, so distant.”
“Will?” I say stupidly, because distant and hard to reach are words I would never use to describe Will Mason.
“He could be difficult. I’m sure you know,” she says, offering me the closest thing to a smile she’s given since we met. But she’s wrong. I don’t know. I’m having a hard time imagining a Will who was anything but easygoing and calm and sweet.
“It makes me feel better,” she says. “Knowing that he had you. That he was happy before.”
I swallow the lump in my throat, try to speak, but I can’t take it from her. I can’t tell her the truth. Besides, I tell myself, who knows what would have happened if he was alive?
Will wasn’t my boyfriend, but maybe he would have been. The last night changed everything.
“I’m so glad I ran into you, Eden.” She manages another smile, and it’s only a shadow of Will’s, but she looks so much like him that it reminds me of his anyway.
I’m sorry, Will.
I think he would understand me not telling her.
No, I know he would.
“Me too,” I say.
Before she goes, she pulls me into a long hug, and I wonder about the last time she hugged anyone, the last time she talked to someone she can see.
She leaves and I watch her walk across the park, her figure growing smaller and smaller until she disappears.
INSIDE MY CAR, I pull out my phone and dial his number.
Will picks up on the first ring.
“Eden!” he says, and I think I could get used to the way he sounds whenever I call, like he’s been there all along, waiting for me.
“Hi, Will,” I say, then add, “I’m sorry. I know I promised to call back last night but everything got kind of crazy.”
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