Our Song (28 page)

“Hey bud.” I curled up under the blanket on the couch next to him. “Watcha watching?”

“Hailey’s Picnic,” he said, his eyes glued to the blaring commercial advertising face soap.

“It’s
Hailey’s Clinic
, silly,” I said, ruffling his scruffy dark hair. The red button was alight on the cable box. It had been recording the show, week after week, long after I had stopped watching it. My heart ached thinking about Noah keeping my old habits alive without me.

“You can skip the ads,” I said, showing him the fast-forward button on the remote. “You just press here.”

“I know,” he said matter-of-factly. “I like the commercials.”

I laughed and sank deeper into the couch, letting the words and images of the beautiful, frolicking women on the screen
wash over me. They looked so happy and carefree, like nothing could ever get them down. I glanced over and watched Noah bopping his head to the ad’s catchy jingle. I wished I could take him in my arms and never let go, that I could protect him so he wouldn’t have to go through what I had, so he wouldn’t have to die in order to find a new lease on life.

“Are you really leaving?” Noah asked, still nodding along to the tune.

“What do you mean?”

“Mom says you’re going away next year to college. Is that true?”

“Don’t think about that now,” I said, stroking his hair. “It’s a long way off. But I’ll tell you what. I’ll make you a copy of my playlist before I go. So you can think of me when you listen to it. That way it’ll be like I’m always here. Deal?”

He nodded and rested his head against my shoulder. We sat silently staring at the screen, until Noah eventually fell asleep. His small hands, smeared with green marker, gripped the edge of my shirt while his chest heaved slowly up and down, just like Nick’s had the other night. I gathered him in my arms, the blanket still tangled around his body, and carried him to his bed. The gentle rhythm of his breathing against my body was soothing, steady and constant, like a heartbeat. It was the first time I had hugged anyone in a long time, and it felt nice.

The house was quiet. My father had gone back to the office or to the hotel to meet his mistress or wherever he went at night. There was no sign of my mother in the kitchen or in the greenhouse, which meant it was safe to assume she was asleep.
I hurried back to my room to change. I was about to put on a pair of jeans and a sweater when the black dress I had bought with Annie, the one with the plunging neckline, caught my eye. I thought about what she had said that day, how you don’t buy a dress like this for an occasion, you create the occasion for the dress.

I had found my occasion. I slipped it on.

“Where you going, Ollie?”

Noah was standing in front of the hall bathroom, dressed in his Spiderman pajamas.

“Hey bud, what are you doing up?”

“You’re awake, too.” His cheeks were puffy from sleep.

“That’s because I have to finish some homework.” It was simpler than explaining what I was really about to do.

He squinted his eyes. “Why are you dressed up?”

“I’m just playing around in my closet.” I had gotten used to lying to my parents, but I hated lying to Noah, especially since I knew he’d believe anything I said. “You should go back to bed.”

I waited until he retreated back down the hall and disappeared into his room before sneaking down the stairs and out the front door.

THE SCHOOL LOOKED
different at night. With all the lights out, the concrete building practically disappeared against the dark sky. But it wasn’t creepy or intimidating. If anything it was the other way around. Once all the students and teachers were gone, it was just a place like any other. Because it was the people who mattered. Not some pile of bricks or stones.

“So, what are we doing here?” Nick asked.

“You’ll see.”

I led him down the path around the school until we got to Mr. Owen’s classroom. It was on the basement level, but the windows were accessible from the main path. There was always at least one left open to help dilute the funk of Mr. Owen’s notorious body odor. He must have had some kind of condition to go on reeking like that year after year.

“Are we breaking in?” Nick asked, sidling up next to me. He was so close our arms touched, igniting a round of goose bumps.

The irony of breaking into the same place I always felt desperate to escape was not lost on me as I crouched down on my
knees, slid my fingers through the narrow opening, and lifted. The window wouldn’t budge, layers of paint jobs sealing it in place.

“Here, let me have a go.” He kneeled beside me and wedged his hands beneath the splintered wood. Just the accidental swipe of his wrist against mine sent a tremor through my body. “On the count of three, okay?” I nodded. “One, two, three.”

We leaned all our weight into the frame and hoisted. I was trying so hard I could feel veins and vessels straining under the effort. There was a slight budge, followed by another almost imperceptible shift. A few seconds later, the window came flying open.

With the resistance gone, we fell back onto the grass in a fit of laughter. We stayed like that for a minute, spread out like angels under the moon. Even though it had a couple more days to go, it looked full from that angle, like it might burst. I felt the same way.

The window was much higher than the classroom floor, so I slid through slowly until my feet hit the ground. Nick jumped down right behind me without hesitation, landing on top of a desk. The rancid stench was as strong as ever, like the walls were sweating out Mr. Owen’s smell. I covered my nose and ran out into the hall.

“Wait up!” Nick called after me, jogging out into the dark corridor.

“Catch me.” I darted around the corner. The sound of Nick’s footsteps echoed behind me down the hall.

When I got to the darkroom, I leaned against the door and waited for Nick to find me, like a game of hide-and-seek.

“This the end of the road?” he asked, appearing a few seconds later.

My stomach fluttered.
Or the beginning
, I thought as I unlocked the door.

“Wait,” Nick said as I reached for the light switch. He shut the door behind him, launching us into total blackness. “Stay like this for a second,” he whispered, like he was sharing a secret. “I like the dark.”

We stood inches apart. He was so close I could detect hints of licorice and fresh mint on his breath, feel the static between our clothes. When he finally hit the switch, illuminating the room, I almost forgot why we were here.

“You took these?” he asked. The finished prints dangled like flags from the clothesline where I had left them to dry.

I nodded as he examined each photo as if he were in a real gallery. He stopped when he got to the one of him lying under the tree. The one that was solarized.

“I may have taken a couple of you,” I said, trying to read his expression, if he saw the same thing when he looked at his face as I did.

He grinned knowingly and continued down the line. “What happened to this one?” The background was blown out, as if it were a close-up of the sun. A swirling mass of black and white emerged where our heads should have been. Two abstract blobs melting into each other in the middle. No light had gotten in the room when I developed it, so I knew it hadn’t been solarized like the other print.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “It just came out that way.”

“It looks unfinished, like it needs more time to develop.”

But I got the sense that he wasn’t talking about the photo, that he was really talking about us. He draped his arm over my shoulder, just like the other night, and pulled me in closer. He felt so solid, so secure, like I really could melt into him. He reached his hand up into my hair, tickling the base of my skull. When his fingers found their way across the bumpy patch of my scar, he didn’t flinch or pull away. And neither did I. It was the final part of myself I was ready to reveal.

“I’m so glad I met you,” I whispered in his ear. “After my accident, I was so lost.”

“Olive,” he whispered back. “Don’t. It’s okay.”

“I want to.” The skin beneath his fingers tingled, like a current coming to life. Dr. Farmand had been wrong. My nerve endings weren’t dead or permanently damaged. They just needed the right touch to bring the feeling back. “You make me feel safe. Safer than I’ve ever felt.”

I reached up and caressed his cheek. It was much softer than I expected, even with his facial hair that was now approaching a full-on beard.

Nick released his hold on my neck and stepped back. He was gone, no longer with me, the electric current dead. “Olive…”

“You don’t have to say anything.”

“I don’t think I can see you anymore.” His voice was firm, leaving no room for interpretation.

“What?” I shook my head, trying to process what he just said. “But I don’t understand…”

“Look, I never meant for you to take any of this seriously.”
He suddenly seemed rigid, like a different person from the one captured in the eight-by-ten dangling in front of us.

“Then what
did
you mean?” My head started running through all the possibilities of what had gone wrong.

He bowed his head. “There are things you don’t know.”

“Like what? That you have a girlfriend?” I was shaking so much, my voice vibrated inside my head. I couldn’t believe this was happening. Again.

“I never died. I didn’t have a near-death experience. I was faking it.”

I felt like I’d just been kicked, like the wind had been knocked out of me. It was the last thing I expected him to say, a factual omission I never imagined. I searched his face for some hint that this was all a bad joke. But it was unflinching, a mask with no remorse. A spark of anger flared up inside me as his words began to sink in.

“Then why were you at those meetings?” He kept staring at the floor. His silence only made me angrier. At him, at Annie. At the whole word. “Was this all just a big game for you? Trolling the meetings for vulnerable girls so you could take them back to your rotting mansion to seduce them? Because what kind of freak fakes a near-death experience?”

Nick whipped his head up. There was no sign of the softness or the hope or any of the other things I convinced myself that I saw when I looked at him. “I figured it was a good place to meet crazy chicks. And you know what? I was right.”

The room started spinning, slowly at first, picking up speed until everything blurred together—the dangling prints, the
trays, the chemicals, and Nick disappearing at the center of it all. My legs started moving mechanically, like they belonged to someone else. They carried me out the door and back down the unlit hall. It felt like I was drowning underwater, fighting to get to the surface, the world distorted and unstable around me.

I made it to the front entrance and crashed through, setting off the alarm. I sucked in the crisp air, each breath cutting into my lungs like a knife as the siren bellowed out around me. The pain ran so deep, the only way to stave it off was to keep moving, to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

The moon followed me no matter which way I went, like it was mocking me. I ran until my legs cramped and couldn’t carry me any further, until I exhausted my body beyond the point of pain, until I couldn’t feel anything and collapsed on the path leading up to our front door.

“HERE YOU ARE.”

I jerked my head around and squinted at the narrow-shouldered silhouette looming over me. It was Derek. I was huddled in a corner cubicle at the back of the library and must have fallen asleep.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said.

“Well, you found me.” I sat up, pushing my hair off my face. I was sure I looked a mess, but I didn’t care.

He pulled a chair over from the next cubicle. “Were you sick?”

I hadn’t been to school in almost a week, not since the night I’d come here with Nick. It was the last time I’d heard from him, too. Unlike with Derek, I wasn’t filled with some delusional hope that Nick would come back, that we could gloss over his lie. I was certain it was over and that I’d never see him again. My father had come home that night to find me out on the front steps. He carried me to my room and woke my mother, who got me undressed and into bed. She didn’t ask me where I’d been,
why I was so dressed up, or how I’d ended up on the doorstep in the middle of the night. Probably because she’d been too consumed with the fact that my father had just come home at two in the morning. I wondered if she’d smelled another woman’s perfume on his jacket or spotted a lipstick stain on his collar. She didn’t press me the next morning either, or object when I said I felt too sick to go to school. It was like I suddenly had this power over her that made her walk on eggshells around me. Or maybe it was that I was finally catching up on homework, and that was all that mattered. I’d been holed up in my room, tackling months of missed assignments. It was ironic how after the accident, doing homework reminded me too much of Derek. Now, it helped me forget Nick. One week later, I didn’t feel sad or depressed or even angry anymore. I didn’t feel anything at all.

“Are you stalking me or something?”

“Why, do you want me to be stalking you?” Derek laughed like I was flirting with him. I wasn’t. I was just talking to him like a regular person, not someone I needed to impress. He tipped his chair back, balancing it on its two hind legs.

“Careful,” I said, instinctively reaching over to stop him.

“Still looking out for me.” He tipped it forward and leaned his arms on the table. “You always have.”

Now he was the one who was flirting. A rush of heat rose to my cheeks. Why was I blushing? “I have a lot of work to do,” I said, turning my head so he couldn’t see my face.

“It’s Senior Spring. Everyone knows grades don’t matter anymore.”

“I’ve missed a lot this year,” I said, smoothing my hand over
my notebook. I stopped short of telling him about my conditional acceptance to Georgetown. It no longer concerned him.

“What are you reading?”

I was still trying to get through
Mrs. Dalloway
. For some reason it was the one assignment I couldn’t face. “It’s for a term paper.”