No One Here Is Lonely

by Sarah Everett

  It can make you forget, she’d said.

  Is that what Will’s mother is doing? Is she forgetting her son?

  “Where are you going?” I ask, but she’s busy fiddling with the phone she’s just pulled out of her pocket.

  “Will,” she says, speaking to it. “Eden is here.”

  She’s talking to Will.

  “Eden! Hi!” Will says, upbeat as always.

  “Hi!” I say, trying to match their level of enthusiasm. There’s something strange, though, something newly embarrassing about talking to Elyse’s Will.

  I think of skinny-dipping with my Will, of kissing him, and my face feels warm.

  “We were just about to have dinner,” Elyse says, moving into the open-plan kitchen. “Do you want a drink? Anything to eat?”

  “No, I’m okay,” I tell her.

  I watch as she dishes salad onto a plate, then pours a glass of milk, the whole time keeping a running commentary with Will.

  “I feel so rude eating in front of you, Eden. But I’m ravenous. I’ve been packing all day,” she says.

  “No, it’s okay,” I tell her. Then, “I just came to…um, see how you were doing.”

  She puts down her fork, swallows the bite of food in her mouth and turns to me, her eyes filling.

  “That is so sweet of you,” she says. “Thank you. You chose a good one, Will.”

  “She gets the Mom seal of approval?”

  “She definitely gets the Mom seal of approval,” she says, placing a hand on my shoulder. A wave of guilt hits me again, like I should tell her that I wasn’t Will’s girlfriend. Not before he died, anyway. But I can’t make the words come.

  Carrying her plate, she leads me back to the living room. “I wish he would have let me meet you…before…”

  Before the accident.

  Before he died.

  Of course she doesn’t use those words.

  “Instead, all I knew about you was that we had to have rice cakes and Nutella in the house when Will’s friend was coming over. Oh, and the occasional guitar pick I found lying around.”

  Will had a girlfriend before he died? A real one?

  And she played the guitar?

  Plates are shifting in my mind, pieces crashing into one another, when Elyse draws me out of my head.

  She’s grinning at me, the widest smile I’ve ever seen on her face. “I have to tell you something,” she says, and her voice shakes with something that sounds like excitement.

  “Me?” I repeat dumbly, because what could she possibly want to tell me?

  “I’m leaving for Oregon tomorrow. We’re leaving for Oregon.”

  “You and…Will?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Of course you’ll still be able to speak to him, don’t worry about that, but there’s this…With all the data Will left behind, with everything he gave to In Good Company, there’s this possibility…there’s the possibility of reanimation.”

  She trips over her words in her excitement and there is something raw, almost feral, about the look in her eyes.

  “What does that mean?” I ask.

  “A body,” Will says from the other end of the line. “It means they might be able to upload me into a body.”

  “Oh my God,” I say, breath caught in my throat. “That’s…that’s…”

  Will.

  Alive again.

  In a body.

  “His body?”

  Elyse shakes her head. “It would be a type of machine,” she says.

  A robot.

  “But I’d be able to see him, to touch him.”

  It’s everything I’ve wanted since I’ve been talking to Will, for him to have a face, to be able to grasp his hand. He wouldn’t look like Will. He wouldn’t even look human, but it would be better. It would feel even more like he is here.

  “Oh my God,” I say again, and both Elyse and Will laugh.

  “I knew she’d be excited,” Elyse says, and it’s the first word I’ve been given for the way I feel. The room spinning, my heart thumping, the words replaying in my mind.

  Will.

  In a body.

  “That’s amazing,” I say.

  “I know,” Elyse says, squeezing my hand. “It’s a long process. There are many steps involved, and of course it’s expensive and still very hush-hush, but it’s worth it. It’s worth it if…”

  Her eyes are filling again and she lets out a little sob.

  I watch her, unsure of what to do. After a moment, she collects herself.

  “We’d been fighting a lot before the accident. It was like he was turning into someone I didn’t recognize. Someone his father wouldn’t have known.”

  “What did he do?” I ask, surprised.

  “He wanted to throw everything away. He wasn’t going to take his scholarship with the Bruins.”

  “What?” I reply, and my voice is shrill.

  “He said he wanted to try something different. I thought it was because of you, to be honest. That it was the influence of the girl he’d started seeing, and him being all secretive about you didn’t do anything to convince me otherwise.” I stare at her, dumbfounded.

  She continues. “But then I met you and you were sweet and soft-spoken and I could see what he liked so much about you,” she says, patting my hand. “He never told you any of this? About not going to State?”

  I shake my head, not quite processing what she’s saying. Will wasn’t going to play lacrosse at State? “No.”

  “Well,” Elyse says. “It doesn’t matter either way now. The important thing is we get him back. I didn’t think I’d ever have a chance to apologize to him for how I reacted when he told me about college, and now I will and…”

  Her voice trails off.

  “Anyway, I just thought you’d like to know. I thought you deserved to know that there was a chance, a possibility.” She’s beaming again.

  “Thank you,” I say.

  The rest of the visit goes by in a strange blur, of details about her trip, her excitement, her hopes of having her son back again. Touching him.

  She shows me pictures on her phone of what she calls a humanoid, with porcelain, doll-like skin. Created by some billionaire scientist trying to prove that robots are not so different from us.

  It is lifelike, but not exactly human. From far away, you might think it is.

  She tells me Will’s will have his face, his caramel complexion, his data. She cries as she speaks, and I can’t tell if it’s purely excitement or the fear that even this will not be enough.

  “You’d come and visit him, wouldn’t you?” she asks, and I promise I will.

  Soon we are hugging goodbye and I’m getting into my car, dazed.

  Will might be coming back.

  Holy shit.

  Holy shit.

  And there’s only one person in the world I want to tell.

  I drive toward Lacey’s house.

  LACEY OPENS THE DOOR.

  I’m relieved, because it could have been Oliver, Oliver who didn’t look at or speak to me all day today. Oliver who I kissed.

  “Hey,” she says, eyes wide when she sees me.

  “I have to talk to you,” I tell her. I hesitate before following her up the stairs. “Is, um, Oliver around?”

  “He went for a run,” she says, giving me a strange look.

  Then we’re in her room and her guitar is leaning against the wall and she’s opening the window to climb out onto the roof, but I can’t move.

  Can’t breathe.

  Can’t make myself follow her outside.

  “Are you coming?” she asks, turning around to look at me.

  She reads the look on my face immediately. She’s always been good at doing that.

  “Eden?” she says, her v
oice a whisper.

  “Tell me,” I say in a voice so steady and still it doesn’t sound like it comes from me.

  She turns watery as she stands there in an oversize hoodie, looking small and afraid, afraid of me.

  “Tell me.” This time my voice is louder, a desperate edge behind it, like it’s masking a scream.

  Lacey wraps her arms around herself.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “For what?” I ask, even though I already know.

  Of course I already know.

  I knew as soon as Elyse said the words. About rice cakes and Nutella, about finding guitar picks lying around her house.

  “I slept with Will,” she says, and with those words, all the air rushes out of the room. “Before…”

  She doesn’t say the words either.

  I sit down on the bed, cradling my head.

  “Eden, say something,” Lacey says after a minute, her voice stretching with panic.

  “You knew,” I say. “You knew how I felt about him.”

  “I’m sorry,” she says, and she’s starting to cry. “It only started about a month before he died. The first time, it just happened. We were at this party and I’d been drinking too much and all of a sudden, I woke up next to him.”

  I shake my head.

  No.

  Not with Will.

  “It was only going to be that one time. It was a mistake, but Will…he said he had feelings for me, that he wanted to be with me. I told him we couldn’t. Because of you.”

  He knew.

  Will knew how I felt about him before he died.

  He’d seemed like he’d had something to say to me that night. Had he been trying to talk to me about that? Trying to talk to me about Lacey before I freaked out?

  “But we just kept…I don’t know,” she says, running a hand through her hair. “I loved him and I wanted to tell you. So many times, I wanted to tell you…and then there was the accident, and he was just…gone.”

  She is still crying, hysterical now.

  “He was just gone, Eden. And it…it didn’t make any sense to do that to you. To take him away from you even more,” she says. “Then you told me you kissed him and I started to question everything. Whether it was all a joke for him, whether he ever even cared about me….Why would I tell you about us if we never even meant anything?”

  My head is throbbing so much I can’t think.

  I don’t understand what is happening.

  She takes a step toward me.

  “Eden, I am so sorry.”

  “Megan didn’t find his jacket. She didn’t give it to Lauren or Alex. You had it all along.”

  It’s such a small thing, and so obvious now. So obvious, in fact, all along. But I believed her. I believed her because she was my best friend, because I didn’t think she would lie to me—that she would have any reason to do so.

  “I’ve been speaking to him,” I say now. “Every day I’ve been speaking to him.”

  “I know,” Lacey says, her voice small. “I heard you that night when you were drunk. I told you not to call him,” she says, and for whatever reason, this is what makes me finally snap, what makes me explode. The fact that she’s trying to act now like she tried to protect me.

  “You told me not to call him because it was creepy.”

  “It is,” she insists. “You’re talking to someone who’s…he’s…gone,” she finally says, and she hiccups a sob. She folds into herself then, cradling her knees in her bed, and seeing that—seeing her mourn him, miss him, the way someone who loved him would—makes my stomach roil.

  She lied.

  All this time, she’s been lying to me.

  “You made me think it was me,” I hiss. “That I was too much. That that was why you wanted us to spend the summer apart.”

  “That had nothing to do with…”

  “Yes, it did. You felt guilty. You were scared that one day I’d put two and two together.”

  “I was scared,” she admits. “But I also…When I got back from LA last summer, it just started to hit me how we spent all our time together, all the time. That’s why I started hanging out with Libby and Vance, because I needed space. And the reason I was even at that party the first night with Will was because you weren’t there.”

  As soon as she says the last sentence, she looks like she wants to take it back, to stuff the words back inside her, but it’s too late.

  “Because I wasn’t there?”

  “We do everything together, Eden. Everything.” She pauses a moment. “Didn’t you ever want, I don’t know, something else? Didn’t you ever want to do your own thing? To make decisions without factoring me in? Aren’t you excited about going to college and meeting new people and it not being just me and you all the time?”

  No, I think.

  “Why would I? You’re my best friend.”

  Lacey sighs, like I’m missing the point. “Right, but…”

  “But what?”

  “I like having other people to hang out with, Eden. I like hanging out with Hail and Libby and Vance, and going to parties, and doing things that are unexpected and fun and just because.”

  “We did things just because.”

  “I know, I just…” She wipes her face on the backs of her hands.

  “He wasn’t going to take his scholarship with the Bruins. Did you know that?” I spit. It’s a test, a challenge, to show how little she knew about Will. How little we all knew about him.

  But she nods.

  She nods.

  “We talked about him coming to LA with me, taking a gap year or something.”

  I have to shut my eyes. It’s too much.

  It can’t be true.

  It can’t….

  “I have to go,” I say, suddenly unable to stand here a moment longer.

  “Eden…”

  She’s calling after me, but I turn around and walk out.

  My eyes are blurring so much it’s hard to see.

  Why? Why do I keep doing it?

  Why do I keep going back to her?

  Every time I leave hurts worse than before.

  THERE’S A WREATH where it happened on Valleybend Road. A cross marking the place where Will died.

  I stand in front of it, silent for several seconds, and then it all comes roaring out of me.

  “Lacey?” I ask him, it, in surprise. “Lacey.”

  “Of all people,” I say.

  “I was the one who was in love with you. I’ve been in love with you forever.”

  And then you fell in love with my best friend.

  And then you went and died.

  And then you came back and made me believe that you could love me, that you did love me, some version of the past you.

  But it was a lie.

  I kick the ground beside the wreath and then I am crying, bawling harder than I did the day I first found out about Will’s death.

  Because he’s gone.

  He died and he’s not coming back.

  He died and he took my heart with him and now I know he never even wanted it.

  The reason he held back, the reason he never let anything happen between us, was because he never loved me.

  That night, the girl he wanted to impress—it was Lacey, all along.

  I think of all the things I’ve said to Will, all the things I’ve told him.

  None of it was real.

  Oliver was right.

  It was all in my head.

  I cry and cry until there are no tears left and after that I lie in my car on Valleybend Road for hours, because I can’t go home.

  Because if I go home, I know what comes next.

  I have to talk to Will.

  When I do, everything will be different
.

  * * *

  —

  It’s past nine when I pull up in front of my house. I move sluggishly, from my car to the front door to the living room, which is completely dark. I drag myself up the stairs, then down the hallway. The lights in Mia’s and Sam’s rooms are off too, and it’s odd, that everyone would be asleep at this time, but it’s just another thing that is off-kilter in my world tonight. And frankly, I don’t have the energy to care.

  I don’t turn on the light in my bedroom.

  I flop onto the bed and stare up at the dark ceiling, at the string of light zigzagging through the blinds.

  There’s only one person’s voice that will help, only one person who can make this better.

  And I know I shouldn’t, that tonight changes everything, but I have to hear his voice.

  Maybe he can explain to me himself what happened.

  Maybe he can reassure me that it wasn’t true—that none of what Lacey said was true.

  He can’t.

  But maybe.

  I reach for my phone in my messenger bag on the floor beside my bed. My phone has been on silent, and when I look at the screen now, I see five missed calls.

  Two from Mom.

  Three from Mia.

  Two voice mails.

  Immediately, I know something is wrong.

  I sit straight up in my bed and listen to the last voice mail. Left over an hour ago.

  Mia’s voice is wavering and I can tell immediately that she’s crying.

  “Eden,” she says. “It’s Dad. You have to come to the hospital.”

  I MOVE LIKE a robot, like something else is controlling me.

  Panic floods every inch of my body and my hands are shaking too much to start my car. And Dad.

  He has to be okay.

  He has to be okay, because I just saw him, earlier today. And he was fine.

  He told me everything was going to be fine.

  I call Mia and then my mom, but neither of them answers.

  I would feel it, if it was something serious, wouldn’t I?

  I would feel it, if there was something wrong?

  If he was…

  * * *

  —

  Lacey told me he was dead.

  It was over the phone and her voice was shaking, stuffy like she’d been crying for hours already.