by Cynthia Hand
Which brings us to Steven, who is sitting across from me with a very good hand. How do I know? He’s trying to be all stone-faced, which he fails at in every way. It’s one of the things I used to like so much about Steven—his inability to hide his feelings. You can reliably see what’s going on in his head through those big brown eyes of his. Which at the moment are definitely happy about the cards he’s been dealt.
So yeah, he has a good hand, but three aces good? Probably not.
“I’ll see your bet, and raise you fifty Skittles.” I count and push the candy into the center of the table.
The players suck in a collective breath—that’s a lot of candy.
Steven looks at me dubiously.
“Well?” I say, a challenge, and I think, Just because we broke up doesn’t mean I have to go easy on you. Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you have to go easy on me.
But before he can respond, Miss Mahoney calls my name.
“Alexis, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Singling me out. That can’t be good.
I put my cards facedown on the table and make my reluctant way over to her desk. She’s chewing on her bottom lip, another ominous sign.
“What’s up?” I chirp.
“I wanted to talk to you about this.”
She pushes a piece of paper across her desk toward me.
Last week’s midterm.
Worth 25 percent of my total grade.
Upon which, next to my name, is scrawled a big red 71%.
I push my glasses up on my nose and scan the innocuous piece of paper, aghast. Apparently I got the answers to three whole problems outright wrong, and she gave me only partial credit on a fourth problem. Out of ten.
71 percent.
Practically a D.
I swallow. I don’t know what to say.
“I know this stuff,” I say hoarsely after a few excruciating seconds, looking it over yet again, seeing my own glaring errors so plainly it feels like some kind of cruel practical joke.
There goes my 4.0, I think. Boom.
“I’m sorry,” Miss Mahoney says quietly, as if everybody in the room isn’t already straining to hear this conversation. “I can let you retake it on Friday, if you think that would help.”
It takes me a few seconds to understand. What she is sorry for. Why she’s offering me a do-over when she never gives do-overs. Your grade is a fact, she always says. You must learn to deal with the facts.
I straighten.
“No. I’ll take it.” I grab the edge of the paper and pull it toward me, pick it up, fold it in half to hide the grade. “I’ll do better on the final.”
She nods. “I’m so sorry, Lex,” she says again.
My chin lifts. “For what?” I ask, like I don’t know. “You didn’t bomb the test. I did.”
“I know things have been hard since Tyler . . .”
And she pauses.
God, I hate that pause, while the person speaking searches for the most watered-down way to say died, like calling it by another name is going to make it any less awful: terms like laid to rest, like death’s some kind of nap; passed or departed, like it’s a vacation; expired, which is supposed to be more technical but really sounds like the deceased is a carton of milk, a date stamped on them, after which they become—well, sour milk.
“Killed himself,” I fill in for Miss Mahoney.
At least I’m determined to be straight about it. My brother killed himself. In our garage. With a hunting rifle. This makes it sound like the most morbid game of Clue ever, but there it is.
The facts.
We must learn to deal with the facts.
“I’m fine,” I tell her. Then, again: “I’ll do better on the final.”
She stares up at me, her eyes full of that terrible pity.
“Is there anything else?” I ask.
“No, that’s—that’s all, Alexis,” she says. “Thank you.”
I go back to the poker table. I can feel the stares of the other students on me, my friends, my classmates, most of whom I’ve known since at least sixth grade and have done Math Club or the Science Olympiad Team or Physics Bowl with over the past four years. All now thinking I must be so cold and clinical, to say it like that. Like I don’t care. Like I clearly didn’t love my brother if I can just rattle off the fact that he’s dead so easily.
I sit down, slip the offending test into my backpack, and try to face my friends. Which is turning out to be kind of impossible.
Jill’s eyes are shining with tears. I can’t look at her, or I know she’ll start full-out sobbing. Which could set off every girl in the room, except possibly El. Because hysterical girly crying, unlike suicide, is definitely contagious.
I could go, I think. I could simply walk out, down the hall, out of the school, into the frigid 21-degree afternoon and a twelve-mile walk home. Freezing to death might be preferable to this. Miss Mahoney would let me go. I wouldn’t get in trouble.
But it’s because I wouldn’t get in trouble that I can’t leave.
I can’t have special treatment, not for this.
So I pick up my cards and try and totally fail to smile and say, as casually as I can manage, “Now, let’s see, where were we?”
Ah, yes. Three aces.
“Lex . . . ,” says El. “What grade did you—”
I point at Steven. “I believe you were going to call.”
He shakes his head. “I fold.” This time what’s written all over his face is that he has more that he wants to say. A lot more. But he doesn’t know if that’s his job anymore, to try to comfort me. He doesn’t know how to comfort me. So he folds.
I glance at El. She doesn’t meet my eyes, but shrugs one shoulder and stares at her fingernails like she’s bored. “I had the crap hand, remember?”
“Beaker?” I prompt.
Jill nods and takes a shaky breath and pushes most of her remaining Skittles to the center of the table. “I’m in,” she says.
She has nothing. A pair of queens.
I put my cards down, aces up. So hooray, I win all the candy. But it feels like I’ve lost something so much more important.
3.
IT’S LATER THAT NIGHT WHEN IT HAPPENS.
It’s a typical night, post-Ty. I’m in the downstairs den in my pj’s, lounging in Dad’s abandoned recliner. Mom is upstairs on the living room sofa, still wearing her work scrubs, reading When Bad Things Happen to Good People. She’s highlighting every few lines, the way she does with these kinds of books that people keep giving us, like every single thing the author says is aimed directly at her. But at least she’s not crying. She’s not going on about ghosts. She’s functional.
So I’ve left her studying and have spent the better part of the past few hours crunching slightly burned microwaved kettle corn and fast-forwarding through commercials on the DVR, watching Bones. I plan to watch reruns of season two until I get too tired to follow the plot, thus too tired to run through today’s little calculus debacle over and over in my head.
The evening has pretty much been one gnarly corpse after another.
I’m trying to immunize myself to the sight of the dead. To think of us, of all the living creatures under the sun, as meat. Sour milk. Green goo. Whatever. Something that, inevitably, will rot. I don’t know why, but it helps me to see death as inescapable and unavoidable and certain.
Yeah, it’s messed up, I realize. But you do what you have to do.
And so it happens that at exactly 10:11, just as I am finishing up episode seventeen, I smell my brother’s cologne.
Strong.
SMELL ME, it says. HERE I COME.
I don’t have time to process this. If I could stop and process it, I would rationalize that the bottle of cologne is much closer to where I’m sitting (in the basement, only approximately fifteen feet from the basement bathroom) than it was to Mom when she smelled it upstairs last night. It would be easy to explain away.
But I don’t have tim
e to process. Because right then I glance away from the television for a split second, to check the time on my phone, and when I look up . . .
There he is.
Standing by the door to his room in his favorite jeans and a white T-shirt.
Ty.
I don’t think.
I yelp and throw my phone at him.
He vanishes before it reaches him, like a bolt of lightning flashing across the sky, his image there and then gone. My phone strikes the wall hard with a sickening crunch.
“Lexie?” calls my mother from upstairs, her voice muffled by the layers of wood and carpet between us. “What was that?”
I can’t catch my breath.
Ty.
“Lex?” Mom calls again.
“I’m fine,” I call. “Everything’s fine. . . .” I make myself get up and go over and collect my phone. My hands are shaking as I try to assess the damage, and not just because I saw Ty. Because I’ve broken my phone.
Because there’s something on my phone I don’t ever want to lose. That I can’t lose. I can’t.
I push the power button and stare at the cracked black screen. My own fractured reflection stares back. I look completely freaked out.
The screen flashes.
It goes on. Reboots.
I close my eyes for a few seconds. Please, I think. Please.
Miraculously, aside from the cracked screen, the phone seems fine. I scroll through the messages, back and back, through the hundreds of concerned texts that have piled up over the past six weeks, the so sorry to hears and I’m praying for you and your familys and let us know ifs, to a text dated December 20.
The night Ty died.
It’s still there.
My vision blurs so I can’t see the words, but I don’t need to see them anymore. I don’t know why, really, the idea of losing this text put me in such a panic. I will never lose this text. It will be stamped in my brain for the rest of my life.
I let myself breathe. It takes me two or three good deep breaths before I can even attempt to get my head around what just happened.
Tyler.
Ty. The word is like a heartbeat.
I stare at the spot where he was standing. “Ty,” I whisper.
But the room is empty.
My brother’s not here.
9 February
This is pointless.
The last time I saw Ty
No.
It wasn’t real.
The last time I saw Ty happy
Okay, so Ty never seemed that unhappy, really, not the kind of unhappy you need to be to
He was getting better
He’d been okay. He’d been—
Sure he was sad sometimes. Aren’t we all sad sometimes?
He had his reasons for what he did:
Dad
Megan
that girl Ashley
his stupid shallow jock friends
Mom
me
the way it must have felt like nobody was ever there for him
the general suckiness of life
But then again, life bites for most of us. And we don’t all exit this world via a bullet to the chest.
I should get this over with.
The last time I saw Ty happy, really and truly happy, was the night of the homecoming dance. October 11th. He’d asked a girl and she’d said yes. He was picking her up at 8. The first part I remember with him being happy was probably around 7:15, when he appeared behind me in the bathroom mirror just as I was finishing up my makeup.
He said I looked nice.
I made a face at him, because I hate makeup. I hate wearing my contacts. I hate the whole high school dance scene, really, the drama of it all, the uncomfortable dresses and the cheesy pictures and the lame punch everybody stands around sipping so they don’t have to talk. I get claustrophobic around large groups of people—it’s something about how stuffy the air becomes with so many bodies pressing in around you. I have to have my own space. I need to breathe.
But Steven made the argument that dances are rites of passage, and even though they are kind of torture, they are a necessary evil.
“We go so we’ll have proof that we were once young,” he said.
Really I think he just wanted to see me in a dress.
Anyway, Ty said I looked nice.
“Uh-huh. What do you want?” I asked, suspicious.
“I need your help,” he said. “It’s important, Lex, and I can’t do it without you. Please.”
Our eyes met in the mirror. We had the same eyes (Dad’s), hazel with a circle of gold around the pupil. We had the same nose (Mom’s), with the same slight bump at the bridge. We had the same brown, curly hair that always looked good on Ty with the help of a lot of product, and wild on me, because I don’t care to mess with it. Whenever I looked at my brother, I was struck by how he was like a slightly improved copy of myself, in the looks department, anyway.
His expression was so serious that I instantly caved.
“Okay, sure,” I said. “What is it?”
He held up a pair of Mom’s tweezers. “I need you to fix my unibrow.”
I pushed him away. “Yuck! No way! I am not responsible for anything hygiene-related.”
“Please!” he begged.
“Do it yourself!”
“I tried. I can’t. I don’t know how!”
“They have salons for that kind of thing, don’t they?”
“It’s too late for that. I have to pick her up in less than an hour. Come on, Lex. I look like Bert from Sesame Street. You have to help me.”
Then he turned on the puppy-dog eyes. I ended up heating the little pot of wax I use to do my own eyebrows—I’d look like Bert, too, if I left it up to nature, and while I might not be super concerned about my appearance most of the time, there was an incident in 9th grade when Jamie Bigelow called me a hairy cavewoman, and thereafter I started to pluck and shave and generally torture myself in the name of femininity.
Ty sat on the bathroom counter while I spread the wax carefully between his eyes. I pressed the cloth down and smoothed it in the direction of the hair growth. Ty gripped the edge of the counter, hard, and took a deep breath.
“I trust you,” I remember he said. “Don’t make me look like a freak.”
“You already look like a freak,” I said, but he knew I was joking. “Okay, I’m going to count to three. . . .”
But I didn’t count. I just ripped off the strip.
Ty fell backward off the counter, howling, clutching at his face.
“Ow!” he screamed. “You crazy bitch!”
I was shocked. Ty didn’t swear. Neither of us did. When we were kids, Mom was always giving us a hard time for the way we instinctively dressed down swear words: heck, crap, dang, a-hole, butt, freaking, and so on. If it means the same thing, Mom used to scold, why say it at all? I guess that lecture affected us, because Ty and I couldn’t seem to swear with the proper conviction. Coming from us, bad words sounded stilted and unnatural.
So, wow. Crazy bitch. I’d never been called a bitch before. I found I didn’t like it.
“A-hole!” I shot back in a kind of knee-jerk reaction. “Imbecilic butthead!”
“Sadistic harpy shrew!”
“Blubbering manchild!” I retorted.
“Gleeful hair snatcher!”
“Dick!” I yelled awkwardly.
Then we were laughing. Hard. We laughed and laughed, the clutch-your-sides type of laughing where you end up almost crying. We laughed until it hurt. Then we both sighed, and Ty rubbed his face, and we went back to the mirror to inspect my work.
Which didn’t look good.
Because the hair was gone—that much was true—but now there was a hot pink stripe of angry skin between Ty’s eyebrows. It looked like he’d been attacked by a neon highlighter.
“Uh-oh,” I snickered.
“Lex . . . ,” he said, “what did you do to me?”
I told him it would be better tom
orrow.
He gave me a look.
Then he told me how he really liked this girl he was taking to the dance—Ashley, he said her name was—and he wanted to impress her, and I had just basically ruined his life.
“Hold on, don’t get your undies in a wad.” I got out a cotton ball to apply the soothing oil that comes with the wax.
The soothing oil, unfortunately, did not live up to its name. We waited 10 minutes post-oil, and his face still looked like someone had branded him between the eyes with a hot iron.
We tried icing it. We tried lotion. We tried hemorrhoid cream, which was one of my more ingenious ideas, but at the end of all that his face was, if anything, pinker.
“Lex,” he said. “I think I have to strangle you now.”
He was only half kidding.
“There’s only one thing left to do,” I said gravely.
I held up my bottle of foundation.
He didn’t fight it. He stood still while I painted on a layer of Clinique Stay-Matte Oil-Free foundation carefully between his brows. It was a shade too light for his skin, but better than the pink. I also had to cover a large portion of his forehead, so it would blend in.
“Well, now I feel totally emasculated,” he said when I was finished.
“Shut up or I’ll get out the lipstick,” I teased, and then he ran away, downstairs to apply his cologne and finish getting ready. A few minutes later Mom came home from work, and before we left she made Ty and me stand together by the front door for a picture.
“Look at my two beautiful children,” I remember she said. Ty slung his arm around me, and I leaned my head into his shoulder, and we smiled. The camera flashed. Mom turned away to dig something out of her purse, and Ty suddenly kissed my cheek, the gross, slobbery razz sort of kiss, which made me pull away and punch him in the shoulder.
“Get out of here, brat,” I said, wiping at my cheek.
Mom handed him her car keys.
“Midnight,” she said.
“Aye, aye, Captain,” he answered.
She squinted up into his face. “Are you wearing . . . makeup?”
He shrugged like he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Well, you look nice,” she said after a minute.
He did. His suit fit him perfectly, and he was dashing in it. Of course I didn’t say that, because I was his sister and that would have been weird. But he looked, I thought then, like he was finally comfortable in his own skin. Relaxed. Ready to be himself.