A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (2 page)

Yeah. He’d lost his girlfriend. He was barely holding it together.

Three years since the last time I saw her, and you’d think that time would heal things. Maybe it should have; maybe it would have, if only Julia were here, if only I didn’t have to handle it by myself. Julia should have been in the basement with me right now, rehearsing her ninja princess lines. That’s why I left in the first place.

I’d agreed to be here, though. I’d tried to run away from it and I was done running now. Heather didn’t know how much I owed to Oliver. She didn’t know that I wouldn’t quit now even if she turned on the viciousness I remembered. I was doing this for him—and for Julia, of course. Heather had nothing to do with it.

“You get yourself cast as the lead in my dead best friend’s play, fine. You take the closest thing to friends I’ve got, fine. But you expect us to be all chummy to each other, when I haven’t even heard you say you’re sorry?”

“I’m not saying it now,” she said. “It’s too cheap to apologize and not be able to give you an explanation. And it’s even worse if I
do
give you an explanation. Oh, feel my pain! I am entitled to get away with all the stupid stuff I pulled because no one understood me!” She put her hand over her chest and struck a dramatic pose.

“Yeah, it’s cheap. But you’ve given me
nothing
so far, and I still wouldn’t trust you as far as I could throw you.”

“Bet you could throw me pretty far, though.”

She sat down in front of me, legs crossed, elbows on her knees, tugging at her skirt to keep it modest. From up close, I could see the Hello Kitty designs on her sneakers. “So I’m not going to apologize. Yet. I’m just going to say, a lot can change in three years. Go on that for now. I’ve seen your glitter-painted anti-war signs. Aren’t you supposed to be the kind of person who’d make peace with Satan himself?”

“Satan didn’t call me a dyke in front of the whole school.”

“I bet he would have. He’s mean like that.” She smirked a little, the kind of smile that has begging and pleading hidden underneath it, and an apology too: mean like that. It was probably as much as I could hope for.

“Look, Cassandra
. . .
I’m not asking you to be my friend, or even pretend to be my friend. Actually, please don’t pretend to be my friend. I had enough of that last year. I’m sick of it. You’ll be doing the backstage stuff, I’ll be rehearsing, so we’ll barely even have to look at each other.”

“So basically we can ignore each other. Like we were going to do anyway.”

“Exactly. But I wanted to formalize this whole process of ignoring each other.”

“You’ve been thinking about this for a while.”

“I figured you were going to come back eventually.”

She was right, and I knew it, and she knew it, but it still stuck in my throat. “Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How come you’re transferring back to public school?” Which is to say, my turf, the place where I was safe from you. Heather had transferred to St. Joseph’s after middle school. You don’t just switch schools when you’re about to start your senior year. It’s too many people, too many memories, to leave behind.

“Later,” she said, at the sound of stomping on the stairs. “I gotta go rehearse. You wouldn’t want to come up and watch, would you?”

I shook my head. I hadn’t even worked up the courage to read the play yet—to see everything that was Julia’s in her words. And her ninja bloodshed too. I’d never been good with violence, which is why Amy thought it was hilarious to show me all the disgusting stuff she found on underground YouTube knockoffs, but it was unbearable when I was still getting used to the idea that death was something that could happen to real people. “Too much work to do down here. We’ve only got a month to get everything finished, and after school starts I’m not going to have any time.”

“Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug. “I think you’d like it, though.”

As if she knew anything about me and what I’d like.

 

 

And then, not half an hour later, Lissa yelled down the stairs, “You’ve gotta come up and watch this.
No
is not an optional answer.
Later
is not an optional answer. Understand?”

So I dragged myself up the stairs and into the theater. It was just Amy, Lissa, and Jon on stage, no costumes, nothing resembling a set, no instruments to back them up, but Lissa started off singing:

Amy next:

And Jon:

Then, three-part harmony in soprano, alto, and tenor as they launched into the chorus:

Wow.

In March I’d missed a problem on a math test because I’d gotten careless and divided by zero. Not a big deal, to get a 95, but it was such a stupid mistake, and Julia had tried to console me. “Ninjas can divide by zero,” she said.

“No they can’t.”

“And why not? Ninjas can do lots of stuff.”

“Because it’s not a matter of having lots of skills. It’s mathematically impossible. There would have to be some number that you could multiply by zero to get a non-zero number, and there isn’t. It doesn’t work.”

“Maybe there is such a number and it’s just being stealthy,” Julia had said, and it was dumb but it gave me a mental image of numbers dressed in black hiding in the woods, and that made things better.

And now that little inconsequential moment, that moment that I barely even remembered, was in this song, in this play.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. With Heather a couple rows behind me, all I could do was bite my cheek and look the other way. I wasn’t going to make myself a target again.

Heather and I spent two more days in the basement workshop, not talking and hardly even glancing at each other, and then Ollie called everybody up for a meeting in one of the theater’s little classrooms—hardly more than an ancient scratched coffee table surrounded by a few seats. We looked at each other like we were both waiting for the other one to sit down first, still not quite ready to declare peace. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore and slouched down on the scarred magenta beanbag chair, and Heather perched on the arm of the old couch where Ollie, Lissa, and Jon were already sitting. Amy glanced from Heather to me and back again, blinking sharply. And then, when the silence threatened to stretch out unbearably, she said, “So, I know I said I wasn’t going to see
The Ossuary 2
because the original was just a lame rip-off of a decent Korean gorefest, but I was really bored last night, and of course they had to cut out all the weird dark humor. And they put in this dumb plotline about the hero’s dysfunctional family, and how his alcoholic mother walked out on him and he had to raise his little brother himself, and the little brother got in with a bad crowd and ended up in a gang and then he got shot and that’s why he’s a creepy dead guy. Which is much less interesting than the war dead in the original.”

Sometimes people had to remind Amy of the difference between inside thoughts and outside thoughts, but that was the exact right thing to say. Jon started to argue with her about exactly how bad the movie was, and I just leaned back and ran my hands over the bookshelves of beat poets and Stephen King and V. C. Andrews that had been left by another generation of theater geeks. But then Ollie stood up, and we all settled down and waited for the meeting part of the meeting to start. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked down as if he didn’t want to be in charge, didn’t want to be six feet tall and practically a senior.

“Lissa, costume status?”

“The sewing machine is off limits to all the freshninjas, as of now,” she said. “One of them who will remain nameless just wrecked three yards of the cheap satin, which, I will admit, is a royal pain to sew. And that goes for you too, Heather, freshninja or not.”

I raised a hand, embarrassed at always being four steps behind on their inside jokes, embarrassed at having been away so long that I didn’t know what was going on anymore.

“We had way too many volunteers,” Lissa explained. “Mostly freshmen who didn’t have anything better to do with their summers, hence freshninjas. So we picked the ones who promised to pull their weight with the technical stuff. We’d be even more behind schedule than we are, otherwise.”

“Not really,” Amy said. “It’s all I can do trying to herd a pack of fourteen-year-olds who were raised by wolves, and who think that the proper use of a bucket of paint is to pour it over someone’s head.”

“Like you’ve never poured a bucket of paint over someone’s head,” Oliver said.

“You were there. You knew he had it coming.”

Oliver started to smile, but covered his mouth, shaking his head in resignation. “So we have tons of problems, and nothing that’s news. Right?”

Nods all around.

“And I guess everybody knows what they’re supposed to be doing except for Cass.”

“I do know what I’m supposed to be doing,” I said. “Right?” The kind of grunt work I’d always volunteered myself for. Or gotten myself volunteered for. Building sets, painting them, maybe helping with the lights if they didn’t have anyone better. Unless they didn’t need me because they had enough freshninjas for the technical parts.

“Did you read the play yet?”

“No,” I admitted. “I know, you gave it to me ages ago, I’m getting to it, really, but it’s not like I have a part—”

“But you do—in act three. The whole castle has to be booby-trapped. It’s like the Temple of Doom on a lunch-money budget. And you are in charge of it. It’s in the script that way.”

“Me.”

“Who else is going to do it?”

“Well, I—”

“Why do you think Julia wrote it in? Look, she wrote a part for the flamboyant gay guy, she wrote a part for the good-looking tenor, and she wrote a part for the girl who can do calculus in her head. This is all math and physics, and no one else could get it right.”

“Come on. Nobody can do calculus in their head.” Okay, so I was a mathlete. So I had joked to Julia sometimes during physics class that the point of physics was to calculate trajectories for catapults—catapults would make cafeteria food fights so much more sophisticated, after all.

“I don’t know if I should be building weapons,” I said, not so much because it was true as because I was a little overwhelmed. “Lissa—you know what I mean, right?”

She shrugged. “I may not believe in killing animals, but you have to admit, sometimes human beings have it coming. Especially fictional ones. It’s not as if anyone’s actually going to get hurt.”

I thought about this. I was just this girl who hung around the theater geeks and pretended to know what they were talking about, and didn’t even care except that if Julia was around I’d be happy to paint some sets or figure out the lights. It made me feel good, wanted. How much had she known about that?

“You don’t have to do it,” Ollie said.

But I was already gnawing on things in my mind—how am I going to make this? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could put in some crossbows? Did they have crossbows in feudal Japan? Could I maybe hide some shurikens inside the walls? Did we care about historical accuracy, considering that we were making a musical about ninjas?

All I said was, “I can handle it.”

Even Heather had stopped mattering to me, for a minute or two. I was too busy chasing one thought after another, grinning inside at the thought of unleashing my special effects upon the school auditorium. And grinning because Julia planned things out this way.

Administrative odds and ends kept the meeting going, conversations I couldn’t understand. They’d been doing this all summer while I’d been away; they had their own shorthand. But after a while we started putting away our sketches and papers, and people started drifting to their separate tasks or their weekend plans. Heather left, and then I looked around and she was there again.