A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (18 page)

I got up, because I couldn’t look at her anymore; I paced to the vending machine and went through my pockets to find enough change for a soda. “I don’t know how I can go back to them.”

“Them?”

“Look, you don’t want to hear the whole stupid story. I got in a fight with some of Julia’s friends. Not a big deal.”

“How long do you think you can hide out?”

Until Oliver says he’s sorry,
was what came into my head. Until Lissa or Amy sends me a single word to show they even know who I am. I swallowed it, ashamed. Ashamed too of all the times I’d checked my e-mail hoping for a word from one of them. And now I finally got it, and it wasn’t what I wanted to hear, it still wasn’t an apology or an admission that Ollie had been wrong, or anything at all that could push us back to being friends again.

I shouldn’t want that. I couldn’t help wanting it.

“You want to go, fine. You want to stay, fine. But I didn’t ask to get mixed up in any he-said, she-said, everybody-hates-me . . .”

“There’s a reason I don’t tell you about this kind of stuff. I’m trying not to mix you up in it.”

We got our clothes folded and drove back home in a grumpy silence.

I didn’t go to bed that night. I grabbed a book light and sat down at the flimsy metal card table on the kitchen side of the counter that divided the kitchen off from the rest of the apartment, with my map and my ruler, using a broken pencil to scratch out calculations in the margins. I counted the days I had left before school started, not worrying about the return trip; I could get on a bus when I got to the West Coast. The sixth of August now—that left me with twenty-four days. Counted that against the 1,692 miles I still had left to travel.

More than seventy miles a day.

It was too far. It was way too far, to go across Arizona and New Mexico in the blistering heat (and the wildfires that lit up the whole southwest when we turned on the news). It would be dangerous to try. I’d end up collapsing at the side of the road in some godforsaken desert town, dehydrated, heatstroked.

It was a no. It was one of those vast immovable concrete-wall kind of nos. Not just a no from the real world and the laws of physics, but a no from deep down inside me:
I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough. I have stayed here instead of going forward because I am weak, and scared, and useless, and there’s no point to this anymore
.

A great mass of grief rose up in my throat at the unfairness of the world. It didn’t seem right that I could go so far and try so hard and fail like this. If I could have a noble failure, that would be different; there wasn’t anything noble about being lazy and scared and infatuated. And if I tried to go on now anyway, it would be for nothing.

I felt so childish and small, that I had tried to do this thing that everyone else said I’d never be able to do, and it turned out that they were right. I wasn’t any different from a seven-year-old kid, outraged at her family, who runs away from home and makes it all of three or four blocks before turning back. They’ll all be sorry when I’m gone, I’d been thinking, just like that kid I used to be—and still was.

This was different, though; this was a betrayal.

I had loved Julia so much.

I had gone across five hundred miles and two states trying to understand that and figure it out and remember her and pay tribute to her and somehow, somehow, share these days and these nights with her. And in the end I had betrayed her. I’d chickened out and chosen laziness and selfishness and I’d abandoned her.

She was dead anyway. It couldn’t make that much difference to her whether I abandoned her or betrayed her or attempted some futile quest of a road-trip for her sake.

It didn’t matter, because she was dead.

It had never hit me like that before: that it was absurd to dedicate myself to a dead girl. That I had tried anyway, and failed.

That she was dead.

I laid my head on my arms, with the metal of the table pressing hard against my elbows, and sobbed and sobbed until I couldn’t possibly have any more sadness in me, but it kept on rolling over me in waves that knocked me over as soon as I thought I could breathe again.

That’s how Maggie found me when she got up the next morning. Exhausted, hot, nauseous with tears.

The next thing I knew, I was picking up the clothes I’d left on the floor and throwing my things together into my panniers, without bothering to be neat about anything.

I was talking without knowing what I was saying, not listening to my own words.

“I should’ve been gone a long time ago, instead of just letting my time slip away from me.”

“Nobody’s ever kept you here except yourself.” There was ice in her voice; I couldn’t bear to listen to her. “This was a bad idea from the start.”

“Yeah, but it was your bad idea too.” I shouldered past her as I went to gather my toothbrush from the bathroom. There was no room in here, everything was too close. I couldn’t get away. And I still had to get my notebook, my granola bars, my purple T-shirt that was lying on the floor—

“And I took responsibility for that part, so maybe you could do the same thing. What have I ever been to you, anyway, other than a distraction from your stupid dead girlfriend, while you waited for your friends to come around and realize how horribly they wronged you?”

“Don’t even,” I said. “Don’t even start, when you don’t understand any of this.”

So she left, slamming the door behind her. Then, from behind the door, she yelled, “I’m not going to stand out here in the rain forever, so if you want to grab your stuff and leave, just do it.”

I tried to cram everything I had into my panniers. It didn’t work very well, because I didn’t bother to fold anything, and I ended up letting them overflow and carried the rest in my arms to where my bike was locked under the metal stairs. I tried not to look at her.

I repacked my panniers and managed to get everything in there this time. I felt the bottle of orange nail polish in my hand again, hard, cold. It was drizzling and cool as I rode my bike toward the edge of town, the sun lurking pale and distant behind clouds.

W
e had only a week left before the premiere. If I came in at seven to work on putting things together before school, there were always a few other people who’d come in early too; and if it was already getting dark when I left, there were always a few other people staying later. Other times I’d worked on helping out with the sets, people slacked off, joked around, pretended to get work done. This time there wasn’t any pretending, except when we strenuously denied the existence of
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad.

The worst part was the lights, because I did not like high places, and I did not trust electricity. I knew enough that I would not do something silly to get myself electrocuted—but still, I was never quite sure that if I did everything right, the electricity would keep its end of the bargain.

Thursday afternoon, after school, I’d been up there for the better part of an hour, and was starting to get shaky on my feet, but I had that maniacal intensity of purpose that wouldn’t let me take a break just yet. I told myself I’d just keep going a few more minutes, just set up one more light. And then—when I was up on the ladder with maybe eight feet between my shoes and the ground, one of the lights cut out. I started poking at it, and gingerly started to unscrew it from its socket, when a spark flew out and flashed in my eyes.

A second later I was holding on to the ladder so tightly that my fingers hurt from pressing into the metal edges, and breathing in and out very carefully, as if one wrong move would be enough to send me toppling down.

I didn’t look down when Heather called up to me, “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I got spooked, that’s all.” It felt like a very, very long way down.

“Take a break. It’s going to start getting dark soon, and Lissa brought us some snacks.”

“Okay,” I said. And then, trying to take a step down, my legs froze into place. I couldn’t get myself to move.

I stayed there at the top of the ladder, willing myself to get over it and come down.

“I’m not fine,” I managed to say. “I’m scared up here.”

The ladder wobbled a little. I drew in a frightened breath, and then heard Heather’s voice from below. “I’ve got the ladder. My hands are just under where your feet are. Take one step down. I’ll make sure you don’t fall.”

Forcing myself to breathe slowly, I lifted one foot off the step, and it hung in the air for a too-long minute.

“Right below you. About a half inch more.”

I stretched my leg just a little farther down, until miraculously I felt the hard ridged steel under my sole.

“There you go. You’re okay there.”

She talked me down four steps that way, and each time I was a little less terrified to look below me, and finally I let go of the frame of the ladder and grabbed on to her outstretched hand so that I could come down the rest of the way.

Back on solid ground, I burst into the anxious laughter that comes from deep in human history when it meant Ha! False alarm, that’s not a bear coming to eat us, you can stop panicking now.

“Your hand,” Heather said. I looked down. Where the edges of the ladder had bit into my hand, sharp lines of blood were limned across my palm, crossing the faint lines left from the first time I’d cut myself in her presence; and Heather’s hand was touched with red too.

I sighed as I went to the first aid cabinet. “I’m not so fond of heights.”

“I know,” Heather said, and it took me a few moments to remember how she could have known that.

In seventh-grade gym class—it rained that day, so we were rotating in small groups through various activities in the gym, mostly unsupervised. And as I was most of the way to the top of the climbing rope, Heather and one of her friends decided that it would be hilarious to start swinging the rope below me. I couldn’t get down. And I stayed there, hanging on desperately to the knots under my hands and feet, until class ended and the coach chewed me out because he hadn’t seen me at any of the other activities I was supposed to be doing, and all of this had passed beneath his notice.

I laughed awkwardly again. “I’d forgotten about that.”

“I didn’t.”

She sat down on one of the rubber-covered stepstools scattered around the dim mess backstage, looking away from me, and by the time I sat down beside her I’d made up my mind.

“Heather—look, I’m not saying it’s okay, because it’s not, all right? But that’s not what I think about when I think about you anymore.”

“What do you think about, then?”

“You kissed me.”

That made her look at me, finally. Her face flushed a little. “I didn’t mean to.”

“I don’t expect you to still be pining over someone you used to like way back when—God, when you liked the Backstreet Boys—but I just wanted to say it. Because it’s true.”

“Not pining,” she admitted. “But I look at you and you’re so . . . awkward, and scruffy, and fearless, and just intensely yourself, and I remember why I fell so hard for you. And in another universe, who knows?”

I reached out and put my hand lightly over hers, and she let it stay there just for a moment before she pulled away.

“But in
this
universe it’s not a good idea.”

“Because of the play? We’ve only got a week to the premiere.”

“Not because of that.” She chewed on her lip. She seemed to be searching for words that weren’t there to be found. “Because, to you, I’m always going to be that girl you couldn’t stand, ever since third grade.”

“It’s not like that.”

“But it will be like that, when I screw up and act like a total bitch, when you realize that I haven’t changed as much as you wanted.”

“You don’t know that.”

She shook her head. “I was scribbling your name in my notebook and then blacking it out with Magic Marker, and I was so sure that you were fine, you were okay, you didn’t have problems like I did, and I sort of hated you for it. But the you who is in my heart and in my memory, who I had a ridiculous crush on, who I’m still a bit angry at, never really existed in the first place. It’s got nothing to do with the real you. So—” She smiled regretfully. “You can tell I’ve thought about this way too much trying to pretend it’s not a bad idea.”

“What’s so bad about a bad idea? Sometimes those can turn out all right in the end.”

Everything I’d done since Julia died had been a bad idea. All of it from the beginning to this moment. And I didn’t know if I would take it back, or if I wouldn’t, if I had the choice—but it was a path that had led me, wandering and lurching in the dark, to here. That was all right with me.

“And sometimes they don’t. I’m not ready to step into another heartbreak with my eyes wide open. I’ve been through that already.” She let out a long breath, not completely hopeless. “I need to think about this. Not that I haven’t thought about this already, but I need to think about this.”

“You’re probably right,” I murmured, even though she wasn’t. She was wrong. But I didn’t want to fight with her, didn’t want to press her into a corner if she was just trying to be nice. So I tried to smile, which didn’t work that well, and we started to clean up—we were meticulous about that, trying to avoid raising any suspicions about how late we were at the theater.

Inside, I was wincing. I hadn’t been expecting more, no; but I’d been hoping, without even realizing it, hoping that she would be surprised and gleeful and ready to kiss me again. And that was totally unreasonable, but I hoped anyway.

She offered me a ride that evening, like usual.

I rode home by myself.