Cameron inhales for what must be the first time since I started spewing my fantasticality. “Does this have anything to do with what happened at Daniel’s yesterday?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.”
“Survey says for best accuracy, you have to choose one answer. I don’t know is not an option.”
“I didn’t graduate,” I whisper. The right answer to the wrong question.
Confused, Cameron falls onto the buttons inside the elevator. I stare at the illuminated numbers to avoid her gaze. “I don’t get what you’re saying,” she says as she presses two again and again, hoping it will override the fact that she’s also selected every other floor. “Graduation is literally the only reason we’re here right now.”
The earth shakes, pulling us down.
“I never took my Honors Algebra II final.”
“Hornsby? Wasn’t Daniel in that class with you? You were sick on finals day, but you went back the next week and took it. You got a C minus, and it murdered your GPA.” Pressing two, pressing two. Pounding on two. Holding two.
“No, I didn’t.”
“But you said…”
The elevator stops. Doors open. Not our floor.
“You said…” she repeats, her voice getting smaller. She releases the two.
“I said a lot of things.”
The doors close. Down we go.
“I have too many questions to pick one,” she starts. Her breathing speeds up. She’s picked one all right. “How could you be at graduation without a third math credit?”
I speak to the floor numbers. “My parents worked out a deal with the school. I had to go in and sign a form and all this stuff, basically promising to take the final with the underclassmen on Monday. Tomorrow. Wow, it’s tomorrow,” I realize, panicked for a moment. I shake it off. “If I don’t pass, I have to take summer school, and I’ll lose my scholarship at Notre Dame. Probably won’t be able to go at all. But they let me walk because my parents were like Caroline and Jessica blah blah blah, and final transcripts don’t get submitted until next week. It’s a whole thing.”
We jerk forward. The doors open. Still not our floor. I grab onto the handrail to steady myself.
She shakes her head, trying hard to comprehend this. “Why didn’t you just take a math class senior year?” She squats down to try and catch my eye.
Tears have formed. If I look at her, they will fall.
Doors close. Down again.
“I don’t know,” I say.
I know, of course. But it’s starting again. The words and the memories are creeping out of my attic and onto the main floor. Ryan’s left hand is pressed over my mouth. His right is moving lower, probing.
Cameron hugs me. Her body works as a dam, stopping the flow of memories from breaking me. “Eleventh in the class with a missing credit.” She strokes my arm. “Steve Taggart probably carries a lock of your hair in his wallet.”
I fake a smile for her. “Probably. He knows about the missing credit somehow.”
“Leave it to Taggart.”
“Enjoy your valedictorianism, Stevey. It’s on the house.” The elevator doors open to reveal a bright purple wall. Every hall on the way up was blue. “Ugh. What did I tell you about the way back?”
“Actually, you didn’t tell me anything about it,” Cameron says. Knowing she just successfully navigated us into and out of a delicate conversation, she doesn’t press further. “We’re going to Martin’s, aren’t we?” she asks instead.
“We have to now.”
“You’re right. This is so much weirder than I could have ever thought.”
18
When someone dies, you’re supposed to go through a series of feelings about it. Stages of grief or whatever. What do you do when you’re the one that people think died? Telling Petra about the pact should get everyone to believe that I’m alive. Right? There isn’t a soul in the world who knows about that aside from Spitty. You’re not gonna get any better proof than that.
Right?
How long ago was it that I laughed this off and thought of it as one of my dreams? That is what is killing me, in the nonliteral sense. I have no idea. What if it’s been like thirty years, and I’m some vegetable, and Petra’s some freakin’, I don’t know, astrophysicist or something, and she’s just having some random dream about that guy she met at graduation? Or worse, what if they buried me, and I’m suffocating inside my casket, and no one knows it and, and, and—
Shit.
What stage is this?
• • •
Wake-up-before-dawn Aminah tried to follow me and Cameron to Spencer’s room, lost us on the way there, and then somehow found us on the purple floor. “Whatever you two are up to, I’m making myself a part of it.”
Daniel and Turrey were both awake and deep in conversation by the time we figured out how to get back to the waiting room. The mention of a still-unexplained but exciting task was enough to get both boys to sign on board. And that’s how Daniel’s Prius became the unofficial Believe Marty Can Fly shuttle bus. Eco-friendly means space efficient, which actually means Turrey’s right elbow in my rib cage and Cameron’s left leg hooked over mine. Aminah managed to get shotgun without a single argument, which is no real surprise. The air seems to gets tighter when she wants something.
I don’t mind. Close quarters are becoming more comfortable than distance.
Daniel taps his hands against the steering wheel. “I’m thinking now is a good time to tell us what we’re doing.”
“Going to Martin’s,” Cameron says. She adds a nod to encourage a normal reaction from the rest of the car, as if this is a logical place for us to go this early in the morning. Or ever really.
“What?” Aminah asks. She’s been a little distant since she found Cameron and me. It seems like she could tell a moment passed between us, and it’s probably eating her up inside that she wasn’t a part of it.
“Why?” Daniel asks at the same time. Both of their heads jerk in unison to see me in the back seat. Before my mouth can open, there’s a knock on the passenger side window.
I look past Turrey’s hulking figure and see Brooke Delgado waving. “What are you guys doing?” she asks. Her words are muted by our glass barrier, but she enunciates every syllable so we understand.
Daniel mimes a sign of the cross. I lean over Turrey and open the window a sliver. This is another chance to get more information. I’m not passing it up. “There’s room up front,” I say.
“Looks like Michael should’ve sat shotgun,” Daniel snarks.
Aminah opens her door. “Don’t start.”
Brooke snuggles in. The essence of her Herbal Essences has not yet faded. She forever smells newly showered. “I saw you guys leaving, and I followed. I’ve been inside this hospital for so long, I’m desperate for fresh air.” She takes in everyone’s faces one by one. Turrey twitches when she meets his eye. “Where are we going?”
“Apparently, we’re off to Martin’s,” Daniel says. He catches my attention in the rearview mirror then breaks momentarily to glance at Turrey. I raise my brows to let him know I caught that. He looks away.
“Is that where his family went?” Brooke asks. Her seat belt hiccups as she tries to pull it across both bodies in the front seat. “Sorry,” she says to a grumbling Aminah. “It’d be ignorant not to be cautious.”
“Six people in a car best for four,” Aminah replies, the unspoken part of her sentence saying, We’re already ignorant.
“If you knew anything, you’d know they’re with his aunts,” Turrey mutters.
Brooke continues radiating friendliness in our direction. She must not have heard him.
“Spencer asked me to check something out,” I tell her. My cheeks warm from the heat of everyone else’s confusion.
Brooke turns her torso toward the front of the car again. Sh
e flicks her wrist as if dismissing the mere mention of Spencer’s name. “I hate him.”
Turrey’s arm muscles tense against my side.
“Couldn’t even stay sober for his own graduation,” she scoffs. “This is his fault.”
In all the fuss, no one’s talked about the why of it. At least not to us outsiders. I think back on Turrey’s reaction to Aminah’s offer to make margaritas. Spencer’s hospital room. The lack of flowers. The nurse ignoring us.
“Fly was drinking too,” Turrey says.
Brooke whirls back around with such ferocity that her hair flips into Aminah’s mouth. “How do you know that?”
“Because unlike your fake ass, I’m actually his friend.”
Daniel pulls out of our parking spot and rolls the windows down. Aminah turns up the radio until it’s blasting. It doesn’t help. Everything becomes so quiet that noise sounds like nothing at all.
• • •
All I can do is believe. I am a Cubs fan for Chrissake. My people waited 108 years for a World Series win. I know a thing or two about keeping the faith.
So I believe that time hasn’t slipped that far past me. I believe that if I want to be back on the side of existence I’ve known for eighteen years, more than I’ve ever wanted anything, I will be brought back. I believe that I’m like first baseman Anthony Rizzo—game seven, bottom of the tenth—and the ball is a little high coming toward me, but dammit, I’m gonna catch it, because catching it means it’s done, the curse is over; the Cubs win the World Series.
You know what? At this point, I’m not above skipping to the bargaining stage. Spitty didn’t stop for the red light, but I was the one who let him drink and drive. I will take responsibility. Mama Dorothy’s always telling me that when your chips are down, and you’ve really screwed up, sometimes a genuine apology is all you can give, because you can’t go back in time and change what you’ve done.
So I, Martin Frederick McGee, am sorry.
• • •
Not a word, aside from Daniel’s phone giving directions, has been uttered in the car since we left the hospital. As we unpack ourselves onto the driveway, we shake the cold silence out of our limbs. I step on a dried-up egg yolk. There are two more splattered onto the garage door.
In the early morning, when the night sky starts flirting with daylight’s soft pinks, the McGee house doesn’t look like the 1970s horror set I remember from Friday night. A garden in the front yard bursts with carefully maintained flowers surrounding a sign that reads Welcome to the McGees! Flanking the sign are four gnomes to represent each member of the McGee clan. Turrey’s shoes crush tulips as he walks over to the little red-hatted man with Martin’s name carved into the back. He picks up and drops the odd figurine in one swift motion.
“Are you for real, Spits?” he mutters, wiping egg yolk remnants onto his mesh shorts. “How can this kid be eighteen years old and still think it’s funny to egg people’s houses?”
When Cameron, Aminah, and I came to Martin’s for his party, I noticed something sticky underneath my feet as we walked up the driveway, but I didn’t think twice about it.
Turrey lifts the gnome up again, a two-finger pinch now, and removes a key taped to the bottom.
The rest of us migrate to the entrance. Turrey keeps the key held at chest level, a little bit away from him—a sacred object. The beginning of answers to questions not everyone knows they’re asking. He parts the crowd to push the teeth into the lock. My heart is a balloon with a pin through it, waiting to be popped.
The front door swings into a clapboard hallway starved for light. A linoleum path leads into a carpeted living area straight ahead and a tiled kitchen to the right. Two staircases go up and down on the left side of the hallway. Shoes line the space between. From the first upstairs step, a backpack spills its contents out onto the ground. We stand facing this portal into Martin’s life, our energy so stale it’s decomposing. This is happening. We are here.
And Martin isn’t.
Turrey positions himself in the center of the doorframe, blocking entry. One by one, the others turn to face me, slowly and deliberately, like a winning hand being shown card by card.
It’s as if I’ve had my eyes closed and I’m blinking them open for the first time. Being silently confronted by this ragtag group of old and new strikes me as the most hysterical thing that could possibly happen. Nothing I knew of the world two days ago exists anymore. The gap between what used to be and what is just closed. I didn’t mean to be, but I was standing in the middle of it all when it happened. It’s the funniest thing. I laugh and laugh.
And then I’m crying.
I squat down on the concrete slab in front of Martin’s front door, everyone else watching me as I laugh and cry like it’s the most obvious marriage of emotions one could ever experience.
“Petra?” Aminah asks. “Are you okay?” She shoots a look to Cameron.
“I’m sorry to do this. It’s just so funny. How I’m here. Why I’m here. None of it makes any sense at all,” I say.
Brooke squats in front of me. Her eyes, constantly and beautifully water-stained, meant to feel everything all the time, try to send me comfort. “It’s okay,” she says as she holds my shoulders.
“No.” I shift my attention from her glistening tears to Martin’s backpack. “It’s really not.”
• • •
I’m sorry for always letting Spitty talk me into doing pathetic stuff I know isn’t right. It’s not like he’d cut me out of his life if I stopped doing all of it. Yet here I am, the sad excuse of a human who spent more than half of high school pretending I didn’t like having my picture taken. Spitty was gonna give me three hundred bucks if I could go four years without letting someone get a good shot of my face. I got three years deep into this bet, ruining my sister’s wedding photos, and I still lost, because Brooke started sobbing when I said I wouldn’t take pictures with her at prom. Photos of me wearing a white suit with an orange-sherbet vest, orange-sherbet tie, orange-sherbet socks, orange-sherbet cummerbund, a top hat, and a cane are now the only semidecent ones my family’s gotten in years.
It was all just a way to pass the time. Now I understand how precious time can be. There are much better ways to pass it.
I’m sorry.
• • •
“Pick your sorry self up off the ground, and let’s do something about it,” Cameron commands. She grabs my arm and pulls me up. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are looking for a shoe box with a letter in it. A pact between Martin and Spencer. Petra says Martin told her about it in her dream last night, and as impossible as that sounds, I believe her, and so should you all.”
It might be for me sitting here on Martin’s front doorstep crying, or it might be because they do in fact believe, but Cameron’s unwavering certainty stuns everyone into complacent silence. Each face wears the same expression. For a beat, it’s all there is to see. Puzzled sympathy coming at me from every angle. Even Aminah has no argument to make, and she never goes along with anything she can’t directly fact-check.
Then Turrey moves out of the doorway, and every face drops to neutral, like curtains on the truth—back to the charade again. Cameron wipes dirt off my shorts and urges me inside.
Oh, how the air can change in a matter of two feet. It smells like laundry detergent and cigarettes and the sleepy warmth of mid-June. The linoleum creaks as I propel myself toward Martin’s backpack. An unfolded note from Brooke sits in plain view.
Fly,
Honestly, I’m so done with this back and forth.
I’m going to prom with Chris now.
—Brooke
It actually makes me laugh a normal laugh because I know that’s not what happened. I saw their matching orange outfits on her phone.
Daniel and I wore black. His choice.
Brooke herself steps up behind me. There’s tension in
her movement. She must be conscious of the note. “I think it’s upstairs. Maybe on the left?” she guesses. I look to the top of the stairs, but not before catching her snatch the paper up and shove it into her pocket.
Along the stairwell are portraits of Katie and Martin. Two ascending parallel lines, Katie’s photos track her life all the way up through college and end with a photo of her and Rick from her wedding. Martin’s stop on either eighth grade or freshman year, judging by his baby face and the tragic shaggy, surfer, bowl-cut hybrid hairstyle so many white boys have around that age. The blank spaces beneath Katie’s photos—undocumented years of Martin’s life—wait like sentences without punctuation. They lead to a door.
As I push in, Martin’s world greets me with a new rush of the same pine-scented detergent I smelled downstairs. My eye is first drawn to the enormous picture of all these Cubs players hugging and celebrating, then the framed poster for Back to the Future that hangs beside it. I never got to tell Martin I was lying. Playing coy. It’s Caroline’s favorite movie. Of course I’ve seen it.
Sitting atop the tall dresser on the other side of the bed are a few trophies, a signed baseball, a poster for Rookie of the Year, and a picture of a shocked Katie in her wedding dress being lifted off the ground by Martin, his back to camera.
Brooke is beside me now. Both of us lean in the doorway with our heads against opposite sides of the frame. “I’ve never been in here before,” she says. She walks over to the desk across from us and picks up the SENIORS hoodie draped over the chair.
Still as can be, like I’m holding a swatter tracking a fly, praying not to lose the chance to hit, I continue observing, as if what Brooke just admitted is no big deal. There’s an elaboration to be made, I’m sure of it, and knowing what I do of her so far, she won’t need prompting to give it.
A small lamp has been left on, casting light upward. It illuminates a wall calendar above Martin’s desk. Every day is x-ed out up to this past Friday—the word FREEDOM scrawled beneath the final black mark.
What You Left Me Page 10
