A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (22 page)

He tossed them to me. I shoved my sneakers back on and rode my rented bike back to the car and grabbed the two little boxes that I’d come for. Somehow it didn’t seem right to put them in a plastic bag and ride back balancing them from the handlebars, so I settled for carrying them under one arm and walking the bike the long way back to the beach, to the sand castle.

I knelt on the sand and removed objects one by one, talking softly to myself.

“Aquaman lives in the castle.” He balanced precariously on the top of the building inside the walls.

“With Fishgirl,” Lissa suggested, still touching up the towers with little suggestions of turrets.

“Or Fishboy,” Jon insisted.

“Either way. He has a car, which can drive underwater.”

“A car?”

I carved out a little driveway and placed my little metal car there. “It’s okay because it runs on biodiesel.”

I kept sticking things into the sand: hawk feather at the top. Dried grass and corn husks and flowers lining the outer walls. And, unexpected and out of place, there was Julia’s orange nail polish, grabbed at the last second, which ought to have been in one of the bags that got stolen. I left in such a hurry that I hadn’t even thought about what I was putting where, and—that was the only reason I still had it.

Oliver knelt down on the sand, reaching out toward these small things but hardly touching them, not taking a turn with the story.

“Fishgirl left Aquaman because he was cheating on her with Fishboy,” Amy continued.

“Who was her twin brother,” Jon added.

“Fine,” I sighed, “hash out their dirty laundry for all the world to hear! It was a very painful experience for everyone involved.”

“Not as painful as when Stingray went postal because his girlfriend got drunk at a party and started flashing people,” Lissa said with a slight smirk.

“You don’t want to mess with Stingray,” Ollie added solemnly. And, finally, he smiled at me.

I kept up my interior decorating while they piled on the story, having come to the unstated consensus that the sordid—and increasingly gory, thanks to Amy—sea life soap opera was the most important thing in the world.

Just as they were describing in unfortunate detail the circumstances that led to Fishboy’s tragic demise (which was in turn responsible for the neglectful and eccentric interior decorating), I put my last marble into place. I was done. And I moved on.

“Come over here,” I called, moving out a little toward the water. “I’m sure Fishboy didn’t enjoy that fishhook through his eye, and the other places, but it can wait.”

And they did.

I started digging a hole, and everyone else scooped out a little sand, until it was too large for a little breeze or wave to stir it up and fill it in.

The box that held Julia’s ashes felt cool and feather-light in my hands. Oliver and Jon and Amy and Lissa were staring at me, waiting for me to make a move.

As I put the box into Oliver’s hands, our fingers touched. I looked up at him, at those eyes I still could hardly meet, not sure if I could be forgiven for this crusade, and for taking the ashes. He answered me with a cautious nod, balancing it on his fingers like some fragile and dangerous thing, and gave it to Jon. We passed it around that circle once, and then put it down onto the sand.

That was where we poured out Julia’s ashes. All of us, together, taking our turns in silence. Right between the sea and Aquaman’s mansion. At the midpoint between us and our adolescent silliness, and the infinite that connected everything.

“You can see the ocean from here,” I said.

“Waterfront property in SoCal,” Amy commented. “That’s hot.”

And we had to laugh, because what else was there to do?

I cupped my hands around my mouth and threw my head up toward the sky.

“I love you!” I yelled.

I felt way too many eyes on me and looked down, more than a little embarrassed. “I had to make sure she could hear.”

“Everyone within a forty-mile radius heard that, Cass,” Jon said.

“Good.” I realized that I was smiling, partly with shyness and partly with satisfaction.

Ollie was looking at me strangely—I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to feel anxious or guilty or what. And then he grabbed me and pulled me into an awkward hug. We both loved her. And for the first time that felt like a bridge between us instead of a wall, like the biggest and most important thing we had ever shared.

“We’re okay, you and me,” he said directly. “You know that, right?”

“I shouldn’t have—”

“Me neither.”

I nodded. We were okay, and I could deal with going home, I could deal with facing Heather.

Me and Julia, we’d made it out here after all.

W
ednesday night, the phone rang and I leaped for it.

“Cass?”

“Yeah.” My heart fell when I heard Ollie on the line, after two days of hoping that it would be Heather.

“You realize it’s Wednesday?”

“Yeah.”

“You realize we open in two days?”

“We’re ready. We’re set. I’ve got nothing more to do.”

“You couldn’t find a better week to pick a fight with Heather?”

“Oh,” I said.

“I’m not trying to pry into your personal life—”

“Then don’t.”

“But if we do not have a lead, we do not have much of a play. And right now we have a lead who would rather be spectacularly mopey than be a ninja princess. And there’s only, like, three minutes of spectacularly mopey in the script.”

“And that’s supposed to be my fault?”

“I don’t know,” Ollie admitted. “Nobody seems to want to tell me anything, and I know better than to listen to rumors, and maybe she’s miserable because her puppy died or something—”

“Iguana,” I said quietly. “She’s allergic. She wants an iguana.”

“And if that would make her give a halfway convincing performance, I would buy her an iguana. Just fix it, okay? Please?”

I sighed. “Why does it have to be my fault?”

“I don’t know whose fault it is. I don’t care whose fault it is. I just don’t want to deal with it anymore, and in case you’re wondering, Heather got the same lecture.”

But she hadn’t done anything about it yet.

“Oliver, I don’t know how to fix this. If I had even the slightest idea, I would be over there in ten seconds to say the right things and do the right things and make everything okay again. I’m lost here.”

“Say the wrong things, then, as long as you can say them by Friday.”

But I couldn’t. I already knew I couldn’t.

I did not know what to do.

 

 

I came at it from every angle, gnawed at it in class and when I was trying to get to sleep, but I didn’t get anywhere. I couldn’t even seem to find a foothold.

If Julia were here, I’d call her and she’d come over and she would know what to do, and even if she didn’t, she would try to cheer me up and I would manage to be cheered up by her trying.

It had been so long since I’d talked to her.

Friday afternoon I needed something to do, to distract me from the play that night, which I would not be going to see. If it was going to be a disaster, and if it was going to be my fault, I didn’t want to be anywhere nearby. Instead, I rode to the chichi grocery store, the one that played classical music and sold organic everything, and picked up a little bunch of lilies and daisies in white and pink and yellow. And I went down to the cemetery.

Even though Julia had been cremated, she still had a little memorial stone there, beside her grandmother.

“Hey,” I said nervously. I had so much to tell her. And I didn’t have a clue how to start.

My backpack felt way too heavy, and I shrugged it off my shoulders, then remembered why it was so heavy.
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
, lyrics and music, worn out at the corners from being dragged around in my backpack and read and reread. I smoothed it out, flipped through the pages. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to screw this up for you. I didn’t even mean to get involved in the first place. I just wish that you were still around and we could argue about whether ninjas can actually divide by zero.”

I put my flowers down on her headstone and sat on my knees and hung my head low so that she could hear me.

“Julia? You remember when we promised each other that we’d be each other’s maids of honor? You remember when you told me that I would fall in love someday and I would love it and I would hate it and I’d eventually feel like punching someone in the face over it? You remember when someone made some stupid comment about me being gay, and you grinned and laughed it off as if—as if it wasn’t an insult to think that we might be girlfriends, you and me?”

Of course she remembered, and knew, and understood.

“Julia, I like a girl. Who isn’t you. I mean, I like you, but I like somebody else too.”

I wished that I had her to talk to, in real life. Wished that I could have told her I loved her more, when I was too frightened to, because it was saying too many things I wasn’t sure about.

But she would have understood.

I believed that as much as I’d ever believed anything.

“So, look—if I didn’t say anything when you were alive, it wasn’t because I didn’t trust you, or because I was afraid. It was because I didn’t understand it myself, and—more than that, it’s because what we had was always way beyond words. It’s like what Heather said about poems. They’re not for understanding. You just listen to them, and you let your heart beat in time with their music, and that’s all you need. I’m not sorry. I can’t ever regret anything about what was between us.

“I think maybe I’m going to have a girlfriend now. If we can get past this. If we can work it out. And I think maybe you’d be the one telling me every dumb joke you knew until I worked out how to make it better.

“Hey, Julia, what do you call cheese that isn’t yours? Nacho cheese!”

I lay there in the autumn sun, full of the smell of rich wet dirt and daisies and lilies, and I told Julia that I liked Heather, yeah, the same Heather we
haaated
in middle school, and was that okay? I told her that Heather had kissed me in the library, and that she had played the clarinet for me under my window, and that she had taken me out for French pastries and told me I was pretty. And she was in the play that Julia wrote, and she was going to be wonderful, because she was small and graceful and silly and sarcastic and sincere.

“I have to go,” I said. “I have to go find her and make things right somehow. I have to give her these flowers.”

I knelt on the dirt and lowered my head again, touching my forehead to the ground, and then my lips. I brushed the dirt off the petals, off my pants.

“I love you, Julia. Ever since third grade, I’ve loved you. But I think I have to love somebody else too.”

One lily for Julia, on her headstone. The rest went in the white wicker basket on my old bike. I checked my watch—six, an hour till curtains—and sped toward the school.

It was almost too late for secrecy now, so Mr. Vaichon was there with the ninja extras handing out programs, who were about to get slaughtered in the first scene. I filed backstage, toward the classrooms that had been set up for dressing rooms.

When I knocked at the first one I came to, Jon ducked out of the door. “Girls are down the hall, one forty-three,” he said. “Good luck.”

“Since when does everybody know way too much about my life?”

“It’s called friendship. Get used to it.”

I stood in front of 143. I was smudged with dirt—my flowers were smudged with dirt. But I was running out of time. I knocked. And I knocked.

“We’re getting dressed,” someone yelled.

“I just need to talk to Heather!”

“She’s getting dressed.”

“Yeah, but—”

“I don’t want to talk to you,” Heather’s voice called out.

“Please, just for a minute. It can’t wait.”

I heard something behind the door—a lot of quick, quiet talking I couldn’t make out—and then the door opened and Heather came out, looking entirely unhappy, done up in a full black-and-red kimono tied with a butterfly sash at the waist, hair hanging straight down her back.

“I have to go on in like, three minutes, and I’m trying really hard just to keep it together, and you’re not helping by just showing up here with flowers—”

“I know.”

“You’re smudgy.”

“I know.” I wiped at my face with the back of my hand, but I doubted it made much difference. “I had to go down to the cemetery and talk to Julia. Because I know I was being stupid, and I was being stupid because I hadn’t talked to her about you yet.”

“That’s what this is about?” Nothing sarcastic in that question, or contemptuous. Just a question.

“I know it sounds silly, but if we are even going to be friends, you can’t be making fun of my stupid dead girlfriend.”

She looked at me, quiet, for a long time, and barely nodded.

“I like you, a lot. And I trust you, a lot, or I wouldn’t have told you that.”

“Look,” she said. “I’ve been through the wringer of breaking up and getting back together and breaking up and getting back together. Don’t do that to me.” But her shoulders relaxed, and her frown lightened a little.

“I won’t.”

“And if you’re going to be my girlfriend, you have to be my girlfriend. Not my lab partner, not my math tutor, not my friend, my girlfriend. In public. Even when it’s scary. It is for me too.”

“I’d shout it from the rooftops.”

“Better not,” she said, the sadness in her face cracking open at last. “I’m still not telling Gran, because she would have a heart attack, and Alex and Noah because my sister says they’re too young, and if we ever happen to run into one of the nuns from St. Joseph’s we’re not together, but . . . everywhere else is okay . . .”