This Is What I Want to Tell You (3 page)

I left before anyone was up. I left Lace a note and I left Noelle the last bowl of cereal and I biked to school. Lace would quietly fold up the note and save it somewhere, in a drawer or a box of hideous handmade Christmas ornaments or something labeled
Boo’s first day of school notes
.

She calls me Boo.

She says I was scared of everything until I was five years old. The truth is, I still let her call me Boo as long as no one else is around.

Noelle won’t even know I left her the last bowl of cereal. She won’t know I ate the end piece of a stale loaf of bread. But I feel better anyway. I know what it is I feel guilty about, but if something as little as cereal helps, well, whatever works.

It took me just under twenty minutes to bike to school, and it was still cool enough that the wind felt good on my face and my fingertips got chilled. At school the sun burned an early morning hole just over the track, where I tied my bike to the fence and ran exactly nine laps. By the time I was done, my sweat felt like a second skin. It was all I could do to breathe. It wasn’t so cool anymore. It was straight up, middle-of-summer hot. With every lap I took I’d tried to make what I was thinking about be anything other than Keeley. Than my sister. Than both of them in the same brain. It was just too weird.

I started writing to him in my head that morning, before I put ink to paper.

Dear Dario,

It’s the first day of junior year. Not that this first day is any different from any other. What I mean is, you’ve never been here. The concept of missing you isn’t something I can really say I get. The concept of having a father and then not having one isn’t something I know. But I’ve found myself thinking what it would be like if I could ask you about these things—about Molly from last year or what to do when my mom and sister seem kind of crazy or now—about Keeley. I’m supposed to be a man but I can’t help thinking no one ever showed me what that is supposed to look like. That maybe that is why I ride the middle all the time—never offending anyone, never getting a hard time, but never much standing out either. For a long time we blamed you for anything that seemed bad in our family—my sister and I did. But now I’m starting to think that blame gives you too much credit. Anyway, you’re not here to deny or defend so what’s the point.

* * *

I walked my bike into the school lot and locked it to the still-empty rack. I crossed through the basketball court, filling up now with early morning players. I nodded a few greetings and a lot of the faces nodded back. It was the first day of school and there wasn’t anyone I was looking for and there wasn’t anyone I was afraid of. It had always been that way. I kind of slid through the rules, and that was fine with me.

I found I was all good as long as I stayed on the cross-country team. I could do all of the socially unacceptable academic things I wanted—honor roll and debating and Model U.N. and Literary Mag, slipping under the social radar as long as I was a runner. I could walk that line.

Plus, you’re good-looking, Noelle said last spring.

Was I? I believed her. The way it was with Noelle and me, we said what the other couldn’t see or admit—we never bullshitted. We couldn’t. We shared the same instincts.

After Noelle said that, I started to notice the way some of the girls looked at me, like I could have gone up to any one of them and started talking and maybe even invited her to a movie or whatever and it would be okay. She’d probably say yes and it would all be pretty easy.

But nothing about that appealed to me. All I’m saying is, I didn’t feel like hanging out with some girl who had nothing to say, who was boring as hell, just because I could.

The locker room was empty. Anyone who was in school this early was on the basketball court. After I took a shower I left my running clothes in my locker and went out to the courtyard. It was filling up now, a lot of yelling and shrieking and high-fiving and hand-shaking and awkward standing around. I made a beeline for the Class of ’76 oak tree and sat under it and took out my book. I was still reading
Walden
, which Lace had given me over the summer. The thing is, it bored the hell out of me and half the time I wanted Henry David Thoreau to shut up and relax a little bit. But there were two things that kept me reading.

1. It was my dad’s book. That’s a long story, but having a book that had been in his hands, that said Dario Avelli in scratchy faded-black ink on the inside cover, a name he’d written when he was maybe just a little bit older than me, inside a book he’d carried around with him and given to maybe the first girl he’d loved, all of that made me unable to stop reading it.

2. The truth is, even with all the rambling that sometimes drove me to nodding off, I was kind of into the ideas HDT was talking about. The idea of isolating yourself from everything so you could understand it better. That part I could get.

Hey, you.

I looked up. Keeley was standing over me. It was hard to see her—the sun came down the back of her, gold where her hair was and green where her sweater was, and the front of her was dark, shadowed.

Hey. I closed the book.

You totally left me, Noelle said, standing behind her.

Hey. I stood up. I’m sorry, I wanted to run before …

Whatever, Noelle said. Listen, I need to find Jessica. K, are you coming? Do you wanna just see me in Chem?

Noelle was already walking away.

Okay, Keeley said. I didn’t know if she was talking to me or Noelle.

Hi, I said again. I felt ridiculous.

Noelle is being so weird with me. It’s like she knows. How could she know?

Keeley was talking about it out loud now. That made it real. I’d kissed Keeley Shipley.

She doesn’t know, I said. I wanted to talk about anything else.

Hey, listen, I said. The activity fair is now, before first period. I want to sign up for Model U.N. Do you wanna come?

Okay. Keeley finally looked at me. She smiled. God, she was beautiful. How had I never noticed that? Everything about her looked like she just shot out this glow, like without even trying she lit up.

I saw a flash of Keeley, years of Keeley, little kid Keeley. Taking off on her bike, leaning into my sister’s ear whispering, leaning over a pile of construction paper, scissors, torn magazine pages—she was always making something. A collage, a poster; on her knees over a pile of paper and glue in our kitchen and then her eyes welling up when her parents would come to get her. I don’t wanna go, she never wanted to go. And then she’d gone with them this summer. I hadn’t thought about it. She’d gone this time. And now she was here, glowing.

The library was packed with tables hawking crap—school T-shirts and pens and last year’s newspapers and promises of popularity if you signed up. Matthew Levitt was manning the M.U.N. table as usual. Damn poor Matthew Levitt. Matthew Levitt was a senior who had a ponytail and drove a vintage Chevy Nova and knew the guidance counselors by their first names and spoke quiet and fierce. I couldn’t help but think that there was a place and time where the intensity and intellect of Matthew Levitt would be really exciting. But it wasn’t here. And sometimes I couldn’t help but be afraid that my slipping under the social radar actually put me closer to Matthew Levitt than I wanted to admit.

What’s M.U.N.? Keeley whispered. She was right next to me, whispering against my neck. You’re always going to M.U.N. meetings but I have no idea what that means.

It’s, you know, like the United Nations but it’s—like we all get assigned a country and debate the issues and …

I couldn’t believe what an asshole I sounded like. It’s lame, I said. Hey, I said to Matthew.

Hey man, said Matthew, looking at Keeley.

It’s not lame. Keeley watched me sign my name. Matthew watched Keeley standing next to me. When I put the pen down Keeley picked it up.

I wanna try it, it sounds cool.

Matthew Levitt and I both stared at Keeley bent over signing her name, her blonde hair falling on the table.

Keeley left for Oxford on the first day of summer vacation. The last night of school, we stayed up all night packing her suitcase. Her bedroom is round; it’s in the turret of the house and has windows all the way around. It feels like you’re sitting in the sky. She has long silver curtains that blow out from the window like clouds and brush along the floor, which is carpeted in Turkish rugs, one piled on top of the other. Her parents used to live in Turkey and the whole house is filled with rainbow-colored rugs, each one with its own story, and each one, they always tell us, made only of all-natural vegetable dyes.

Her paintings and collages paper the walls—photographs of us and swirling watercolors and magazine pages and pieced-together quotes. Whether it’s the handmade rugs or the handmade wallpaper, it’s like everything there was done by hand.

Keeley had one giant suitcase; it was bright green and deep enough to sit inside. We filled it with carefully chosen jeans (only the faded ones), and skirts of clingy fabrics and thin T-shirts and scarves, because overseas no one wore zip-up hoodies, they only wore scarves. She was going to spend the summer with her parents while they taught a special course about the guy who wrote
The Lord of the Rings
and spent all of his time writing and drinking with other famous people at a bar called the Eagle and Child. Keeley said her mom actually wanted to have the class at this bar. Meet there every day and read his stuff out loud. I didn’t tell Keeley, because she seemed so mad about it all, but I kind of wanted to take that class. More and more when she talked about the stuff she was going to do, I realized that it was stuff I just couldn’t do—I wouldn’t get to do. Like go to England on vacation or look good in old boys’ jeans.

Keeley was going to spend the whole summer in Oxford before our junior year and her whole life was going to change. I knew it. And mine was going to sit in place.

Should I bring this? Keeley held up her favorite shirt. It was a long-sleeved gray baseball shirt and the ends of the sleeves were worn thin. When I looked up at her face, there were tears spilling out of her eyes.

What’s wrong? I jumped up to hug her.

I just don’t wanna go, she said. I just wanna stay here with you. I just wanna stay in this room. She waved around her. Keeley never liked being away from home. Even when she was at our house, we never could have sleepovers. Sometimes she’d creep up the hill at three in the morning. It wasn’t that she wanted to be there when her parents woke up. It wasn’t that she wanted to be around them. There was just something for her about the safety of her turret. About the safety of places where she could be alone.

Listen, I told her then. It’s going to be great. You’re going to England. There are going to be so many beautiful older guys with that great accent. You’ll have your own room with a view of … what’s that river called?

Keeley laughed.

The Cherwell, she said. She always knew.

She started to fold her sweater again absently.

You’ll be, like, Miss I’ve-seen-the-world, I told her. It was my job to make her feel safe with things. To make her feel better. It was her job to make me feel better. That was how it was.

God I’m gonna miss you, she said. Promise we’ll talk every day?

Every day. Maybe two times a day?

She looked at me. She bit her lip and wiped at her tears with the back of her hand.

Noelle, she said, I’m afraid we’re not going to talk every day. I don’t know why, but I’m afraid.

I remember when she said that. I remember it clearly. Because it was in that moment when I realized that, since we were five years old, I’d never not seen Keeley for more than a few days at a time. I’d never had to talk to her in any way but right in front of me. What was this going to mean? I was scared to ask her. It was the first time I was ever scared to ask her anything.

When she came back, when school started, when the summer started to fall away and the leaves were turning gold and then brittle brown, while all of this was happening, I couldn’t get close to Keeley. It was like I couldn’t find her.

And I was distracted.

* * *

The first Friday after school started, Jessica called me. I hadn’t seen Parker since the night at her brother’s loft, but I thought about him for at least part of every minute of every day.