A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (23 page)

That was when I kissed her. I leaned down over her and covered her mouth with mine, touching my hand to the bare curve of her shoulder blade to pull her closer. We parted trembling, nearly frozen in place.

“No rooftops. Check.”

We could’ve stayed there all night, but the classroom door swung open and Amy stared at us. “Um, hi? Not to interrupt you two, but we’re going on in five minutes, remember?”

“Five minutes figuratively or five minutes literally?” Heather asked.

“Literally!”

“Okay, okay, okay, I’m coming,” Heather insisted.

I went back to the auditorium with my legs feeling cold and weak. Good, but like my heart was worn out and exhausted.

I nearly missed Ollie when I passed him in the hallway—he had to reach out and grab my arm before I saw him.

“What are you doing here?”

“Watching a play,” I said innocently. “I heard
Our Town
was a masterpiece of drama.”

“Is there anything you wanted to tell me?”

“Ask me later. I gotta run and get a seat. I’m hoping for something in the blood-spray rows.”

He shook his head.

 

 

The auditorium was packed. There’s nothing like good gossip to fill the seats, and we had enough of that to go around—not just that we were putting on
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
instead of
Our Town,
but that the lead had broken up with her girlfriend and it was going to be a complete train wreck. People love a good train wreck. And they seemed to love the signs sternly warning people from sitting in the first three rows if they did not want to get splattered with corn syrup.

Those rows were full.

Hunting for a seat, I realized that someone was waving at me—and there, near the front but just outside of the blood-spray rows, my parents had saved me a place between them and Julia’s mom.

Even though I’d said I wasn’t coming.

“Are you sure you want to be here?” I said. “It’s kind of violent.”

“I’m not expecting a play called
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
to be particularly peaceful,” Mom said matter-of-factly. “Don’t we always go see Julia’s plays?”

And we did, so that settled it.

“Isn’t that a girl you know?” she murmured, looking at the playbill. “Heather Galloway?”

“You might have heard me complaining about her three or four dozen times in eighth grade.”

“That’s where I remember her name from!” She looked at me with concern.

I was trying to be casual, but the words ended up tumbling out in a pile. “And by the way, is it okay if she comes over for dinner sometime?”

“I don’t see why not.”

And I wondered if she knew more than she ever said she knew. If she wanted me to have more space to make my own mistakes and my own discoveries than I even had by myself on the open road.

There were a lot of things I had never said anything about. Almost everything that happened over the summer, everything that happened in Missouri. But I thought that I could start talking now.

It was seven minutes past six, and everyone had put away their playbills and started playing games on their cell phones. Out of habit, rummaging through my backpack to see if I had something to read, my hand closed over something that I recognized right away. I turned to Julia’s mom.

“Sheila,” I said. “This probably sounds kind of strange, but he came to California with us, and—I think you should have it.”

A little plastic Aquaman, chewed and battered from being thrown out of a minivan window long before I ever picked him up off the highway. “It doesn’t necessarily make sense,” I said.

She took it as if it was a mysterious relic, and passed it over quietly to Julia’s dad. “I’m not sure that singing, dancing ninjas make sense. It doesn’t necessarily have to make sense.”

I smiled, and I thought again about what Heather had said about poetry. How it was okay for things not to make sense.

At fifteen minutes past six, even I was starting to get twitchy. Somebody yelled out, “I want ninjas!” and someone else yelled out, “
Our Town
isn’t supposed to have ninjas!” and I didn’t know if they were in on the joke or not, but another person yelled out, “Ninjas!”

“Ninjas!”

A figure stepped out from the curtains, all in black and nearly invisible, holding out a sword that looked convincing, at least from this distance. “There will be silence,” he said.

And there was.

And the curtain went up, and Loud Ninja and Buddhist Ninja and Flamboyant Ninja appeared in the woods, Loud Ninja bragging about how great ninjas were and squeaking out the high notes of “Ninjas Can Divide By Zero.”

The shogun’s army fell on them just as they finished singing, and the slaughter began. Blood was spurting stylishly all over, and everything was a confusion of black with glints of silver, and the orchestra started to swell up, and—it was perfect. It was real.

Ninja Princess Himiko started to fall in love with Hiromasa, and I recognized her, anxious and guarded and fierce and then grinning like everything was going to be all right. Still not trusting him all the way, though, until Hiromasa managed to smuggle out plans to the booby-trapped castle—only to discover that Loud Ninja and Buddhist Ninja, attempting to spy on him, had been captured. Hiromasa realized that the terrible rule of the shogun justified the rebellion, and the ninjas had been right all along, and as he sang “Loyalty Is Overrated,” he and Himiko started to plan a raid on a castle to free the captured righteous.

This was my turn. Hiromasa and Himiko sneaked through the castle. Trapdoors opened under their feet, arrows flew just barely over their heads, and as shurikens flew out of a wall toward them Himiko caught them without missing a beat. And I forgot I was watching Heather and Oliver dressed up, and it faded into this story that was strange and slightly ridiculous and above all else beautiful.

It was perfect, in its imperfections, in the way that Jon fell over himself in the middle of a fight scene and adlibbed “Live by the sword, trip and fall on the sword” into his song five minutes later, in the way that Heather’s singing voice was thin and chirpy and just right. And then near the beginning of the second act, that little scene where Himiko—now almost despondent about having vowed revenge on Hiromasa, because she was falling in love with him—sang,

And Hiromasa, unseen till now, stepped out of the trees.

And they just stared at each other, finally realizing that they loved each other, finally realizing that this was bigger than who killed who—and Heather shot a sideways glance toward the audience, the kind of glance that said “By the way, this kiss is for you.” And when she kissed him I nearly fell out of my chair.

It ended as happily as you could hope for. It ended with everybody deciding to bring down the shogun together, and singing a rousing chorus about their doomed mission. Sometime in the last few months I’d grown strangely fond of doomed missions.

I told my parents I’d be home a little late and then ran down to join them, and we all swarmed out into the courtyard, still costumed. Jon hooked his iPod up to a big stereo. The courtyard filled with electronica, three dozen ninjas waving back and forth in time.

We found Ollie, who had a dazed, self-satisfied smile on his face.

“It was a pretty unconventional production of
Our Town
,” he said. “So I got a week of detention. I think that’s enough time to start working on
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Zombies . . .
”

“What about Mr. Vaichon?”

“I managed to persuade the principal that he would never have allowed it if he had known anything about it, and we were just too convincing in our volunteer efforts with
Our Town
. It helps that we actually have evidence that we helped out with it.”

Heather grabbed a berry lemonade and dragged me along until we could hear ourselves think. We leaned against the side of the school and took turns taking sips from the bottle.

“So you talked to Julia about us.”

“Yeah.”

“Did she approve?”

“Oh, yeah, sure. Absolutely,” I said. It could have stung, but she said it as a perfectly serious question.

She smirked, looked up, and waved vaguely in the direction of the sky. “Okay, now I don’t so much want to think about her watching us.”

I rolled my eyes. “Like I didn’t hear about twice as much as I really needed to know about her and Ollie. It’s only fair.”

 

 

I smirked, and she smirked back at me.

“You want to take off, before we get busted for having a ninja rave on school grounds?”

“Definitely.” And then I had a crazy little idea.

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“In what car?”

“On my bike. Riding double. I’ve done it a ton of times.”

“That’s not safe,” Heather said. “Is it?”

“Trust me.”

She hesitated a moment. “Good enough.”

I unlocked my pink bike, and we loaded things in the panniers—the lock, her clothes, her flowers, a very carefully balanced half-finished bottle of lemonade. I hauled my bike right to the top of the hill, and got on in front. Heather squeezed in on the back half of the saddle, feet on the chain stays, her hands wrapped tight around my waist, her chest leaning close against my back.

I checked the weight, checked the balance—yeah. Safe. As much as we can ever be.

Then, with just the slightest touch against the pavement, the bike took off. It was too small for me, it put my knees at weird angles and the derailleur complained on the higher gears, but on a steep enough downhill it didn’t matter.

I changed up to a higher gear, and a higher one, and pedaled like mad just to see how fast we could get—and the wind and gravity caught us. I yelled into the air from exhilaration. And Heather yelled up into the air too, a high “Wheee!” that probably carried for miles. Then the hill bottomed out, and I had to switch back to the lowest gear and pedal with all my strength. In the dark-blue night, with my headlight blinking on and off, with Heather’s cheek pressed right up against my neck, I felt the heartbeat of the world. Like everything alive was as close to me as the touch of skin on the back of my neck. And Julia too. Julia, always.

And I didn’t care if the whole world knew it.

T
o my editor, Alisha Niehaus, for all her hard work in making this book stronger.

Thanks to my entire family, especially to my mom and my sister Meaghan for advice, moral support, and driving a U-Haul halfway across Brooklyn. Thanks to Brian Sturm for all he taught me about telling stories.

Thanks to the late Ken Kifer for his passionate essays on bicycle camping and bicycle advocacy, which first bewitched me with the idea of a girl and a bicycle and a very long journey.