No One Here Is Lonely

by Sarah Everett

  It didn’t occur to me that she might have been crying for hours already.

  “It’s Will,” she said. “There was an accident last night.”

  It didn’t make sense.

  They were words and they were hanging in the air and she’d said them, but they didn’t make sense.

  What does it mean to be here one moment and then gone the next?

  What does it mean that I’ll never see his face again, never laugh at one of his jokes, never catch his eye across a room?

  What does forever mean?

  Lacey and I had been using it all our lives. Forever.

  You’re taking forever.

  It was forever ago.

  Best friends forever.

  But that night, it had a different meaning.

  Will was gone, and he was gone forever.

  MY HANDS NO longer belong to me.

  They are short-circuiting, trembling like they have jolts of electricity and I can’t grip my keys and I can’t grip my steering wheel.

  I need to get to the hospital.

  But I can’t.

  Because what if he’s dead?

  What if he’s gone?

  I try again to start the car.

  My fingers don’t listen to me.

  I reach for my phone, stab at the screen to reach my Contacts.

  I need him.

  I need her.

  I have to get to the hospital.

  But Will isn’t here.

  Will can’t drive me, can’t make this better, can’t erase this day.

  Lacey.

  I have always needed Lacey.

  I can’t do this without her.

  I can’t say goodbye to my father alone.

  But Lacey isn’t here either.

  I start to hyperventilate because seconds are passing. And my dad. I don’t know if he’s okay.

  If he’s going to be okay.

  And I can’t drive.

  I can’t breathe.

  I can’t do anything.

  I can’t drive myself to the hospital.

  I drive myself to the hospital.

  I FIND HER in the waiting room with her elbows on her knees, leaning forward, and her face is bloated, her eyes swollen, but they have been that way for days.

  I’m afraid to walk toward her because I’m afraid to know the truth.

  If he’s here.

  If he’s going to be okay.

  My mother glances up and sees my face. She stands and meets me in the middle of the hallway and I bury my face in the crook of her neck.

  And she says, “He had another TIA. He had another TIA, and then he fell and hit his head, but he’s going to be okay. He’s going to be okay,” she says again, like she’s trying to reassure herself.

  And I nod because I believe her.

  I have to believe her.

  He has to be okay.

  * * *

  —

  I get to see him a few minutes later.

  He looks small in the hospital bed, a bandage wrapped around the right side of his head.

  “Eden,” he says, sitting up straighter in bed when he sees me, and I hurry over to his side. Sam and Mia are on a couch beside his bed. I bury my face in his chest and he wraps an arm around me.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” he says as I start to cry.

  “I’m right here,” he says.

  And it’s true.

  He’s here.

  There’s a big difference between here and not here.

  Will told me that.

  Tonight, right now, my dad is here.

  * * *

  —

  “You didn’t answer your phone,” Mia says, a while later. We are in the hallway just outside Dad’s room, and Mom is in there now with Sam. My parents are being cordial to each other, but there’s this tension beneath everything, this reminder of how broken things are between them.

  “It was on silent and I was at Lacey’s,” I say.

  “Oh,” Mia says, a touch of annoyance in her voice.

  “She was with Will,” I blurt out.

  “Who’s Will?”

  It comes crashing out of me, the entire story. From the day I returned Will’s jacket to the night I called him to earlier this evening when I went to visit his mom, when I found out about Lacey.

  “Holy shit,” Mia says when I’ve finished explaining, her eyes wide. “So you’ve been talking to him all this time?”

  And then the worst thing happens.

  I start crying and I can’t stop.

  I’m crying because I’m relieved, because my dad is going to be okay. I’m crying because of Will, because he was never mine. And most of all I’m crying because of Lacey, and because of all the ways I thought I knew her, all the things I thought were true that were all imagined.

  Mia looks typically horrified at my tears, but then she does something that reminds me how much she’s changed. She reaches out and hugs me.

  “It’s okay,” she says.

  “It’s not,” I sniff. “Everyone keeps saying that but it’s not okay. I have no one. I’ve lost Lacey, I’ve lost Oliver, I’ve lost Will.”

  “You never had Will,” she says, and her voice is soft, but it cuts, hearing the truth out loud.

  I step out of her arms and wipe my eyes on the backs of my hands.

  After a second, she says, “So that’s everyone?”

  “What?” I ask.

  “You said you had no one left. Because you’ve lost Lacey and Oliver and Will. That’s everyone?” There is something about her voice, a clipped tone to her words.

  I shrug.

  “You know what, Eden?” she says. “That’s why you’re alone. Because your world is this small.” She holds her fingers close to each other. “Because you act as if the whole world revolves around one or two people, and it just doesn’t. You have a family, okay? You have Sam and Mom and Dad and me.”

  “It’s not the same,” I say.

  “Why, because we’re related?”

  “Because Lacey understood me,” I spit. “Because I never had to explain anything to her. Because we went through it all together. It was like we were extensions of each other.”

  “You’re not, though,” Mia argues. “You’re nothing like Lacey.”

  “Just because we have different personalities…”

  “It’s not about personalities, it’s about who you are, and Lacey is…well, she’s Lacey and you are you. There’s a big difference.”

  “But,” I start to argue, but my voice fades.

  Lacey is Lacey and I am me.

  It seems so obvious, so clear, but it’s the first time it ever makes sense to me. That we are not extensions of one another. I am not Lacey’s other half, and she is not mine.

  We are whole people.

  I am a whole person.

  Even if I’m not my sisters. Even if I have no idea what I want to be. Even if all I ever am is ordinary.

  “I know it sucks,” Mia says. “Losing a friend. But it’s not the end of the world. It really isn’t.” She pauses for a moment, looks thoughtful. “I thought it was the end of the world when I decided to drop out of the conference and head home. I thought I was throwing away everything I’ve ever worked for and it was going to be a waste of my summer, and maybe it is. But you know what? It’s not the end of anything; it’s the beginning. For you, for me. And it’s okay.”

  She turns and heads back into Dad’s room, and I’m left standing outside, her words replaying in my head.

  How can it not be the end of the world?

  How can it not be the end of the world when all our plans for this summer, all our plans for college, everything we’ve ever done or been or wanted to be is over?

/>   What about all the things we planned to do?

  What Lacey said that night was true.

  I have to hold your hand for every single thing. That’s the only way you ever do anything.

  But then I think of Will and all the things I did with him. I think of the talks we had, of the plans we carried out, of skinny-dipping at Camp Rowan, of the tattoo on my ankle.

  When I didn’t have Lacey, I needed Will.

  You never had Will.

  Mia’s words ride over Lacey’s now, echoing in my head. And Oliver’s.

  It’s not real.

  And yet I did those things. I went skinny-dipping. I went to Camp Rowan. I got a tattoo.

  I did those things.

  And it occurs to me that maybe Lacey was wrong after all, maybe I was wrong.

  All this time, I didn’t need Lacey.

  I didn’t need Will.

  I had me.

  “EDEN!” His voice sends a trail of goose bumps along my skin. It is familiar and friendly, safe, but it unsettles me.

  It’s lunchtime and I’m sitting in my car outside More for Less.

  “Hi, Will,” I say, and my voice sounds different already, like I’m trying not to cry. He notices.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  “Tell me what’s wrong.”

  I want to. I want to tell him about the fluorescent lights in the hospital, about the bandage on my father’s head. I want to tell him how my hands felt like they belonged to someone else in my driveway, then all the way to the hospital. I want to tell him that my father is coming home tomorrow, and I’m not sure if it’s because he wants to or because he has to. That I don’t know how long he’ll stay, if he will.

  This isn’t the way any of this is supposed to go.

  Instead, I say, “Tell me something good.”

  He hesitates. “Okay. Well, it’s summer,” he says. “You like your job. You’re leaving soon, for college.”

  He says all the right things, remembers all the things I’ve told him, big and small.

  “Tell me about Lacey,” I interrupt.

  “She’s your best friend,” he says after a beat. “She plays the guitar. She’s short with brown hair….Is this a test?”

  Yes.

  “No.”

  “Okay,” he says.

  “Tell me about lacrosse,” I say.

  “Um, like the rules? Of the sport?”

  “No,” I say. “About you and college.”

  He’s silent for a moment. “I’m confused.”

  He doesn’t know, because he isn’t Will. He might be like Will, might sound and think and laugh like him, but the real Will was more than anything that could be distilled into a computer program. He had secrets and flaws and things only he will ever know.

  Will might have left something behind, just like he wanted, but it wasn’t himself.

  “Tell me about the day we met,” I say.

  “The day you…called for the first time? The first night we spoke?”

  “Okay,” I say, but it’s not okay.

  I want to hear about his first day in Erinville, the day he walked into our fifth-grade classroom, tall and lanky with wild black hair. Miss Dennis commissioned Lacey to look after him, to show him around the school.

  She met him before I did.

  All this time, I didn’t remember that, but he would, wouldn’t he?

  The real Will.

  He would know who he met first, who he loved, who he thought of last. He would know that it was never me, that he was never mine.

  I want to hear it now, from him.

  “Did you know I liked you?”

  “I do seem to recall you mentioning it,” Will says, playful.

  “Before,” I say. “Before you died. Was that what you were trying to say the night of the accident?”

  Silence lingers between us.

  “Eden,” he says. “Is everything okay?”

  “I have to go,” I tell him.

  Tell me not to, I think.

  Tell me to stay. Tell me something that isn’t just an echo of what I’ve already told you, and I will.

  I’ll stay.

  “Okay,” he says. “Talk to you later?”

  I don’t answer.

  “Eden,” he says after a moment. Just that word. One word. My name.

  I miss the sound of it already, tumbling from his lips.

  “Can I kiss you?” he asks now, out of nowhere.

  He knows.

  He knows I’m saying goodbye.

  “Okay,” I breathe.

  “Close your eyes,” he says, but I already have.

  He talks me through it. His lips on mine, his hands on my hips, his breath against my breath.

  I know when it’s over because it’s harder to breathe, because the air is thick again with words I don’t want to say.

  You were never real.

  You made me forget.

  You were my only friend.

  “I miss you,” I say at last, because it’s all I can think of to say and because it’s true.

  Goodbye comes next.

  He knows it; I know it.

  But it’s the hardest thing to say.

  We stay silent so we don’t have to say it.

  And then I do the bravest thing I’ve done this summer: I hang up.

  * * *

  —

  I pick up my phone again and send a text.

  It’s to Lacey.

  The first time I’ve texted her in ages.

  We never kissed, I write. I lied.

  Because he always belonged to her.

  * * *

  —

  I’m sitting in my car, blinking back tears, staring at the black screen of my phone.

  Will is gone.

  He’s gone.

  He’s not coming back.

  It keeps hitting me again and again, and I’m not sure what to do with myself.

  Who to call. How to pass the time, alone.

  I think about calling Lacey.

  I don’t.

  I think about calling Will back.

  I can’t.

  Then, all of a sudden, there is a knock on my window. I don’t know who I’m expecting, but it’s certainly not Shelby.

  I roll down the window and blink at her.

  “Hey,” she says, and there’s something strange about her expression. Something lost. “Are you busy?”

  “Um,” I respond, because I’m not finished saying goodbye to Will yet. Not really.

  “If you are, that’s cool. I just wondered if…I thought maybe you’d like to have lunch,” she says. Then, looking sheepish, she adds, “Jenn’s sick today.”

  Her face flushes like she’s embarrassed, and I feel for her. I know exactly what it’s like, that feeling of being displaced, off balance, without the person you most count on.

  I’m experiencing it right now.

  “Do you want to eat in here?” I hear myself asking, and when she nods, I open the door so she can climb into the passenger seat. It’s awkward as we both unwrap our lunches, too quiet.

  But finally I make myself speak. “How long have you and Jenn been best friends?”

  “Forever,” Shelby says with a smile.

  AFTER LUNCH, OLIVER and I accidentally make eye contact on our way into work, and I feel a stab in my chest. Guilt, but also something else.

  The sensation of missing someone.

  Before opening my till, I pull out my phone and covertly text him.

  Meet me somewhere tonight?

  “James! Someone has their phone at their station,” Kennie says loudly, and I quickly throw my phone under a stack of More
for Less flyers.

  Kennie cackles as she stops in front of my till. “Just kidding. He’s not here today.”

  I let out a relieved sigh, and she laughs again.

  “I would tell you if James was about to catch you texting. Would you tell me?” She’s giving me a weird look, and I feel like this is some kind of test.

  “Um, yeah.”

  “Because we’re friends, right?” Kennie says. I nod. “So I’m gonna need your name, if we’re going to be friends,” she says, and suddenly Friday night comes roaring back to me. My drunken blathering to Chris about my name.

  Does everything get back to Kennie?

  “Well?” she asks, and she has her own phone out now.

  “Eden,” I say, and I feel microscopic. And stupid.

  “Spelling?” Kennie asks, and I know she’s just doing it for dramatic effect, but I spell it out anyway.

  “E-d-e-n.”

  She types it into her phone, then shows me the new Contact she’s created for me. “Like that?”

  “Like that,” I say. “Look, Kennie, it was just this stupid thing where I thought…”

  She shakes her head, then hip checks me. “It’s all good. I just like to know the names of my friends.” She turns and starts to head back to her till, but then she calls over her shoulder, “I like Eden. It suits you.”

  I’m grinning as I open up my till. No one is waiting to pay yet, so I pull out my phone again and check whether Oliver has responded.

  He hasn’t.

  The whole workday goes by, in fact, and he doesn’t text back a single word.

  And I know at some point in the day he must have looked at his phone and seen it. It’s been hours.

  Maybe he’s the one person who doesn’t check his phone during work hours.

  Maybe he’s trying to figure out what to say.

  Maybe his phone is swallowing texts and he never received it.

  Maybe my phone is and I didn’t get his response.

  Maybe.

  Maybe he’s so pissed at me that he’s never going to answer me, never wants to speak to me again.

  I resign myself to this final option and am sitting in the living room, eating dinner and watching TV with my sisters, when finally my phone buzzes in my pocket.