A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (11 page)

He hadn’t left a message.

Even now, almost twenty hours later, I kept hearing the honk of that horn, kept feeling that twinge of my hip and my arm hitting the pavement and the bike sliding out from under me. And I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help thinking about Julia, singing along to the radio or tapping her fingers on the steering wheel as she tried out melodies, and then—startled, panicking, realizing that things were going wrong, that she was going too fast and the road was too wet.

It wasn’t Oliver’s fault, I told myself. I had been telling myself that for months and months and I never made myself completely believe it. She was over at his house, late, and that never happened on school nights—but she had her secret project, and he was feeling neglected, and she made an exception.

She lost track of time. By the time she realized how late it was, it was pushing impossible for her to get home by curfew, but she decided to chance it. Even though it was pouring rain outside, and pitch-black.

It was not Oliver’s fault.

He told me all of this, when he felt guilty, and I didn’t need to know any of it. I didn’t want to know any of it. And I couldn’t do anything about his guilt, not when I was thinking, in my worst moments, if it hadn’t been for him . . .

I’d been having a lot of worst moments.

But I managed to keep telling myself it wasn’t fair to blame him over and over, though I couldn’t make myself believe it, until I told him that I was leaving. Until I was standing in front of him clutching that Tupperware urn like he might rip it out of my hands. And everything I said was wrong, and he jumped on every wrong thing I said, and I could hear the words hovering on my tongue.
I’m not the one who said Julia should blow off her homework and come over. I’m not the one who let her go out into that kind of weather at midnight.

“Do you really think you’ve been as good a friend to Julia as I have?” I snapped, and Oliver just stared at me. Like he’d heard everything that I was thinking and trying so hard not to say out loud. Well, he’d said his piece to me, and now it was my turn.

He shook his head slowly. “How could I even expect you to understand?”

I guess he was right. I guess I didn’t want to understand. And no matter how much time passed that day, no matter how far away I was here at the place on the side of the road where I could blame no one but myself, I could still see his number on the screen of my phone and think nothing except for this: that I didn’t want to understand.

I
t was my turn to make dinner the night we almost lost our stage and Heather hatched her brilliant plan, so I used it as an excuse to leave before I could think any more about my crazy new feelings. There was a fantastic swooping downhill on the way to my house, and I loved the way I would sail down at twenty-five or thirty miles an hour with a shriek and a squeal. After that, two and a half miles of hills that rolled up and down—a just-right kind of distance. Two and a half miles was almost enough time to turn things over in my head, so that I could come up with an alternative to acting as if I’d just been hit over the head with something heavy.

But twenty-five minutes later, I realized that I wasn’t used to the idea at all. There was just a kind of dazed blankness where my brain generally purported to be.

I pondered the way I would wait to hear her shoes on the stairs in the mornings. How I used to listen with a mix of guilt and anxiety and dread, and now—I was a little disappointed if she waited too long to show up. And she always came halfway down the stairs to wave hi to me even if she was spending the whole day rehearsing. And if I came up to sit in the audience for a few minutes and watch, she always hammed it up.

She liked me, once upon a time, before I’d been remotely able to think that was even possible.

When had that stopped seeming embarrassing, a convenient excuse to disarm me so I couldn’t fight back?

No. I had a better, simpler question than that. Do I say anything?

Are you insane? I answered to myself in the next moment. First of all, drama, by definition, already has enough drama. This, Julia had explained, was why you shouldn’t date people when you were doing a play with them. “I mean, it’s not like anyone listens to that,” she’d said. “Everybody dates everybody anyway, because you’re together all the time, and you’re pretending to be in love with each other, and it’s kind of intense. But you shouldn’t. So it’s actually a good thing that Oliver hasn’t asked me out yet, even though he’s really hot, and really nice, because it would just be too much drama.” That was, of course, right
before
she asked him out. It seemed like forever ago that I was too young to realize why she wouldn’t listen to her own advice.

I liked things the way they were. The past days had been peaceful and calm and happy, working in silence, listening to Heather’s CD collection, and talking about safe topics. School. Movies, until she got exasperated with the way I always answered “Haven’t seen it” when she mentioned one, and asked me if I lived under a rock.

“It’s a very nice rock, I’ll have you know, and you should come visit sometime.”

It should have been like in fourth grade, when the movies I wasn’t allowed to see made me the weird one, the target for jokes, but it wasn’t. Because of Heather, who laughed about it and took seriously the pleasures of terrible movies—but also because of me, because I had become more than the things I couldn’t do. Because, maybe, I was starting to understand something of peace, and something of integrity, that went further than arguing about whether
Star Wars
counted as a war movie.

Things were like that. Things were good. And she had had a very unpleasant breakup not too long ago.

And, and, and.

I moved through the routine of putting a pot of water on the stove to boil, and taking the bag of vegetables out of the freezer to thaw a bit, and kept worrying at it like a loose tooth—one minute resolving not to think about it because thinking the same things over and over and over wasn’t going to help, and then the next minute coming back to it anyway, because it was there. Until my mother said sharply, “Cassie, that’s about to boil over.” And I remembered that I was in the middle of something, and put the pasta in the water, and the vegetables in a saucepan. I felt awkward all of a sudden, trying to figure out how to patch up the silence. In the weeks since I’d come back the air was full of all the things my parents and I weren’t saying to each other, and I wasn’t sure if I ever really expected that I could leave and come back and pretend that nothing had changed, but I wanted that anyway.

“Mom,” I said. “The PTA is upset that we’re doing a musical about ninjas. I don’t think they’re gonna shut us down, but they came pretty close.” And maybe I hadn’t let myself think about that too much, because—since I’d come back, at least—I could make all the excuses I wanted about fictional violence, but I couldn’t think about
not
being a part of this thing that had so much of Julia’s heart in it.

 

 

Sometimes you don’t have a choice. Sometimes you just know what you’re going to do, past all possibility of being convinced otherwise.

But still, I had to ask. I didn’t want to figure things out for myself. I just wanted to hear that I was all right, and not think about anything that had anything to do with Heather. “Do you think it’s okay? That it’s kind of violent?”

Mom frowned. “When your friend Amy was over here with you and Julia to work on a project last year, she was talking to you about a movie where the killer had blades coming out of his shoes.”

“I never actually saw that movie,” I said. I felt that I had to add this just for the record, because the blades in the shoes were the least objectionable part in it.

“It made me wonder, I’ll say that. I thought I’d raised you better than that. But twenty minutes later, I wander past the kitchen again and you’re mumbling that you shouldn’t talk about beating the other mathlete team to a bloody pulp, even if it’s just a joke. I can’t say I understand it, and don’t you even think about asking to play one of those Grand Theft games, but—if you’re clear on the difference between fictional violence and the real thing, there are worse things.”

I drained the pasta and started mixing in the butter and vegetables while Mom set the table. “It’s not like it’s glorifying violence,” I said. “Not really. There’s even a song called ‘The Flavor of Blood Is Sadness.’”

“And why is the PTA more concerned about high school students pretending to be ninjas and kill each other than the military recruiting high school students to actually kill each other? I would like to know that.”

Mom could give a good rant on the military-industrial complex anytime, and I did not mind listening to her rant, because it felt like we were back in our old routines.

And it meant that I didn’t have to think too much about anything I didn’t want to think about.

G
etting back on my bike was out of the question. I kept trying, and I’d get as far as swinging one leg over the saddle and I’d chicken out again. But I needed to make some forward progress, needed to mark off another bit of road along the map. I finally started walking, balancing my bike alongside as I walked on the shoulder of the road.

Once a roadie in orange spandex braked for a second to look over at me. “Everything okay? Did you have a breakdown?”

I shook my head. “The bike’s fine, I’m fine. I’m just walking right now.”

He gave me a
whatever
kind of shrug and kept going.

I walked most of the rest of that day. When it got dark I took my bicycle headlight and held it so it flashed in my hand, and when I could barely see more than the blinking in front of me I lay down in a graveyard and went to sleep.

I woke up on a Sunday morning, too late to slip away unnoticed. Gravestones rose up around me like bed-posts. After my last couple of days, it didn’t spook me to be among the dead, but it did spook me to be here among the living again, where I could see cars pulling up into the gravel parking lot behind the church.

I got up and ran my fingers through my hair to get out the twigs and leaves that had nestled there during the night. I thought hard at people in general: Don’t mind me, don’t notice me, I’m just passing through. But a black man in a sleek gray suit called out, “Hello there.” And then: “You come on in.”

I had mixed feelings about going into this strange church. It was hard to tell just by looking at this squat, concrete, unchurchy building whether it would turn out to be the Fundamentalist Bible House of God Doesn’t Like You Very Much Right Now. But before I had time to think about it I walked up, still brushing dirt off my shorts. I found the most isolated seat in the concentric semicircles of plastic orange high-school-cafeteria chairs, acutely conscious of my beaten-up sneakers, and my scruffy scratched legs, and my sticky sweat, and my oily hair, and my smell.

I missed Julia.

I didn’t know what reminded me of her, but it was there, like something lodged in my throat. She was always there to shove me forward and tell me not to be scared. I needed that now.

I looked around, to distract myself. At a pair of middle-aged men who’d come in together and who moved together with the easy, comfortable habits of old married couples. At a mother with a little infant, swaddled in tie-die and nursing. Embarrassed, I averted my eyes—but I let out the breath I’d been holding. I was not the only one here who was hungry and sticky and smelly and out of place. I felt like I was going to be okay.

I did not feel relieved about the singing. Because I cannot sing. I can just barely carry a tune in a bucket, when it can’t be avoided, but I cannot sing.

And I remembered Julia telling me that it takes a lot of courage to sing badly. (And God doesn’t care either way, she said. The person beside you cares, but he’s not God, and who cares what he thinks anyway?) Which made me smile in spite of myself.

After the sermon we passed around little white candles, lighting them from each other’s, and spoke aloud the names of loved people who had died.

“Julia,” I said, so quietly that not even the girl right next to me could have heard it. So quietly that I felt ashamed and pathetic. “Julia,” I said again, loud. Loud like when I was absolutely sure of the right answer in class. Loud enough to startle me. But I felt better.

I didn’t join in with saying the creeds at the end, even though the girl next to me held out her binder so I could see them. Quakers don’t, because it’s too easy and too dangerous to turn God into a series of logical propositions. But all around me, the words echoed, “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world beyond.”

At the memorial I’d heard it without hearing it. It was unbearable, then, to have to set in stone what I believed, to have to organize a whole theology around wishing that she weren’t gone. This time I heard that word, “look.” Not believe, not be certain, not put an answer on it and stop thinking about it. Just look. That seemed like something I could do.

I came out of the church into the bright clear late-morning sun and tucked my stub of melted white candle in my box of treasures for Julia. I felt like she was watching out for me. I felt like everything was going to be all right even through Arizona and New Mexico and the valley of the shadow of death.

I started to take out the small things I’d been collecting for Julia, just to hold them up to the sun between my fingers and examine them closely. The bits of industrial man-made debris were hard to explain: a grimy shoelace, a battered toy from a Happy Meal, maybe tossed from a car window a year ago. But these are the things that charmed me. They seemed to carry unknowable stories inside them. Stories that even they couldn’t know.

Secrets.

I liked that, maybe because I couldn’t help feeling like I was keeping secrets from myself.