The Beauty That Remains

by Ashley Woodfolk

  He just showered. His too-black hair is wet, and he smells just like you. Without really deciding to, I lean toward the familiar scent. Or toward him. Maybe he’s the one who moves. Either way, there was space between us, and then suddenly, there isn’t.

  He nods at the scarf and says, “You should take that. Tavia would have wanted you to have it.”

  Our shoulders are touching, and I can feel his warm skin through the thin fabric of my shirtsleeve. I can feel his breath on my cheek as he says it.

  I lick my lips and try not to breath in the vanilla-y scent of him too deeply.

  “Did you use her shampoo?”

  His thick hair is dark as a shadow, and he runs his hand through it, then sniffs his fingers. I watch him out of the corner of my eye.

  “Is that weird?” he asks me.

  I shrug. “No, not really.”

  But when he sniffs his fingers again, something about his normally serious face being all scrunched up makes me laugh.

  It feels wrong like it did in health class. But it’s worse here, in your room, only a few days after we left you all alone, underground, in the rain. So I change the subject. I tie the scarf around my wrist, and I tell Dante about the day we bought it.

  He watches me quietly as I talk, and his thick eyebrows lift as he grins. The story isn’t really funny, but Dante laughs a little, too. And for a second, I feel better than I have in days.

  When the moment passes, though, Dante picks up one of your frilly socks from the floor and starts to cry.

  Usually, when someone cries, I don’t know what to do. But right now, Dante smells exactly like you, so that makes things easier. I pull him toward me, and he buries his wide face in the narrow space between my cheek and shoulder. I hold his head and breathe in the vanilla scent of you that’s spilling out of your closet and seeping from your sheets and that’s threaded through your brother’s hair.

  But then I think about that night. About being with him while you were all alone. And I pull away.

  He stares at me. His cheeks are pink, and his eyelashes are long and black and wet. His lips, for some reason, seem swollen, and he looks a little hurt, a little pissed, a little…something else. I look down at the scarf on my wrist.

  “I’m not going home,” I tell him. “But…I can’t sleep in her bed.”

  I can’t lie on your pillow or crawl under your sheets now that you won’t ever touch them again. I still can’t wrap my head around how gone you really are.

  Dante nods, like he understands, and gets up, scrubbing at his eyes with his sleeve as he leaves your room. When he comes back, he has two pillows; an air mattress; and a thin, blue blanket.

  He points over his shoulder, to his room across the hall.

  “You can sleep in there,” he says, and the thought of being in his bed makes everything about me run hot. I’m blushing all over the place, but he’s leaning over with his back to me, plugging in the electric pump for the mattress. His dark hair is like a curtain between us, so he doesn’t see.

  As little as I want him to notice me right now, I still want to touch him. I want to say thank you to him for letting me talk about you, which is what I needed from our friends so badly at school. I want to thank him for offering me his room, but I don’t have the words. It’s so bad that I squeeze my fingers together, just to be sure that I won’t reach for his shoulder.

  I step back and take a deep breath to pull myself together, then shake my head when he turns back around. “I can’t spend the night in your room, Dante.” I say. He bites his lip in a way that makes me have to look at anything but him, so I stare at the air mattress. “I have to sleep in here.”

  The house is so quiet that the sound of the electric pump fills the air like applause. And when Dante starts drumming his fingers against his knee, I wish I could hear whatever rhythm was filling his head. I wish I could clap or sing along.

  I watch him, hugging one of the pillows to my chest, thinking about last summer and how you and I went on the road with his band for those three days. I start humming, even though I don’t mean to. Instead of leaving when the mattress is plump with air, Dante looks up at me through his lashes. His eyes are still a little wet.

  I was humming the chorus from “Unmasked,” but I stop when he looks at me, even though the lyrics are still floating through my head.

  “That’s our song,” he says. I assume he means him and me, so I blush again. A second later, I realize the “our” he means is probably his band.

  “I just meant—”

  “I know what you meant.”

  Dante would always find me in the audience when the band played that song live, and grin because he knew it was my favorite. And he’s still looking at me now, so I wonder if he’s thinking about that. I know I am.

  “Would it be weird if I sleep in here too?” he asks.

  We both just want to be close to you, and this room is as close as either of us is going to get. I shake my head.

  I lie down on the air mattress, and Dante lies on the floor right beside me. He falls asleep quickly, and his snore is soft and steady, and I almost feel better in your room with him here. But I can’t sleep. I keep thinking about how awful school is without you. I keep thinking about Alexa’s party. I reach for my phone and dial my voice mail. I push it to my ear.

  “Summer,” your voice says. “Spring. Winter. Autumn, my love. Where are you? There are cute boys here, and a few cute dogs, but there are no cute yous. Let’s change that, and soon.”

  You pause, but I know you aren’t done. I reach out to touch a strand of Dante’s wavy hair and keep listening.

  “I’m sorry, okay? What will it take for you to forgive me? Should I sing, horribly, in public? Should I sing, horribly, and embarrass myself on this park bench right now?”

  There’s a rustling sound, and I assume it’s your collar rubbing against the phone’s receiver. You sigh at this point in the message. I don’t even have to close my eyes to imagine your puffed cheeks, your rolling eyes. But I do close my eyes. I’m that desperate to see you.

  “Fine,” you say, and then you start singing. It must be a song your mom taught you because it sounds like Spanish. And even though this is your version of bad singing, I still think it sounds pretty good.

  “Happy?” you say a minute later, and then, in a much smaller voice, “Call me.”

  I don’t even remember what I was mad at you about.

  If I were normal, listening to the message would make me laugh, imagining you standing alone in a crowded park, singing at the top of your lungs as an apology. Or maybe it should make me cry, hearing the humanness of you: how your mood could shift from playful and confident to vulnerable and sad in only a few minutes. But I’m not normal, so I don’t react at all.

  And I also don’t sleep. I stare at the back of your brother’s head, his hair tousled and so, so black, and I play the message again.

  BRAM IS BORED so he tries a makeup tutorial.

  121,164 views | 2 months ago

  “Absolutely not,” I say to my mom.

  We’re sitting in the kitchen, and she’s trying to make me take the phone. She just called Bram’s mother for God knows what reason. And I don’t know how the hell it came up, but now she knows that I haven’t talked to Ms. Lassiter since Bram died. Not even at the funeral. That might make me an asshole, but I can barely deal with my own feelings right now. Between Aden blowing up my phone trying to find a drummer and having no idea where to start, and attempting to not fail my senior year of high school, I don’t have the brain space left to deal with her, too.

  “Mother. No way. I don’t even know what to say.”

  I stand up and back away from the phone, but she follows me with it. I roll my eyes and cross my arms, but she won’t let up.

  “I wasn’t even friends with him anymore,” I plead, a w
hiny last-ditch effort. But my mother covers the mouthpiece with her hand.

  She says, “Logan Gale Lovelace. If you don’t take this phone right this second, you can say goodbye to practicing with Aden this weekend.”

  Even though Aden and I have been hooking up more than practicing, she doesn’t know that.

  My mother is tiny and freckled and fair. She’s what a small vanilla latte with a dash of cinnamon sugar sprinkled on top would look like if the drink could become human. But she’s scary as hell sometimes. She does that little mom-nod, with her eyebrows lifted and her lips pursed, like she’s saying, Did you hear me?

  I drop to my knees and breathe out an impressively throaty “Ughhhhhhh.”

  But then I take the phone from her hand. I put my thumb over the end button, like I’m gonna hang up without saying a word, and I toss her an evil smirk. My mom doesn’t miss a beat. She mouths, slowly, deliberately, Don’t. You. Dare.

  “Hi, Ms. Lassiter,” I say, my eyes rolling up to the ceiling. I lie across the floor dramatically, like it’s my bed or a stage. But then Ms. Lassiter clears her throat in the same rhythm that Bram used to; three beats instead of two: Ah, ah-hem.

  That alone removes the sarcasm from my voice. Knocks the attitude right out of my posture. I sit up and take a deep breath. That alone nearly rips me in half.

  “Hello, Logan, honey,” she says. Even though she cleared her throat, every word she speaks is still thick with sadness. “It’s so great to hear your voice.”

  I nod. Then I realize she can’t see me nodding. I cringe, thankful she can’t see that either. Neither of us says anything for way too long, and I start to get goose bumps, something that always happens to me when I feel this fucking awkward—my skin starts to crawl. Then, because I don’t know what else to say, I mutter, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  As soon as I say it, I regret it. And I want to throw the phone across the room because I feel like such a phony using that line. A loss is something that’s missing or something you can’t find. And Bram was a person—a vlogger, a football player, the boy I loved, her kid, for fuck’s sake—and we both know exactly where he is: gone.

  “Th-that’s not what I meant,” I stammer. “I meant to say…” And my lips start to quiver a bit. I look up, and my mom is staring at me, like she’s done something wrong. Like she regrets making me take the phone. And I desperately want to toss out some smartass comment, but I can’t. I’m too busy trying not to cry right here on the cold tiles of the kitchen floor. So I just stand up and walk away from her. I go down the hall and lean against the door to my dad’s study. I clench my teeth so tightly that my jaw starts to hurt.

  “I meant to say…this fucking sucks. Excuse my language, Ms. Lass, but it does,” I say, slipping into what I used to call her when I went to her apartment every day. When Bram and I were crazy in love. “I mean, why did something so messed up have to happen to Bram? He was one of the good ones, you know? He was…better…more…”

  But I don’t know what he was better or more than. I just know that he was.

  Then I’m crying, and it’s so damn pathetic. Ms. Lassiter is quiet, but I can hear her soft breathing, so I know she’s still there.

  “I never said sorry after our fight.” My voice is so soft it’s almost a whisper. “And now I’ll never get to tell him I’m sorry. It all seems so stupid now.”

  She sniffs, and I know that she’s crying too, which makes me feel like the biggest asshole in the world. I push into my dad’s study, and I slip open the drawer where I know he keeps his bourbon. I lean the phone against my shoulder, unscrew the bottle, and lift it to my lips, digging my nails into my palms against the violence of its burn.

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. “Is it weird that I miss him, even though I hadn’t talked to him in so long?”

  Ms. Lassiter swallows so loudly that I hear it through the phone. She says, “No, sweetheart, of course it isn’t.”

  “It’s just that…not talking to him by choice, and knowing that I can never talk to him again, is so much different than I expected it to be.”

  I press my head against the wall and squeeze my eyes shut, trying to will the tears to stop filling my eyes and falling. I take another fiery swig from the bottle: hot liquid courage. I say, “You don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to. And I know I’m probably an insensitive jerk for asking.” I still myself. I wish I were talking to her in person. “But, Ms. Lass, I feel like I’m losing it. This just doesn’t seem like something he would do, right?”

  Ms. Lassiter takes a deep breath.

  “Well, he’s been different since this summer. We were put in a tight spot, financially,” she says. “I got laid off and couldn’t find work for a while. And you know how he was.”

  “He wanted to fix it,” we both say at the same time.

  “Exactly. That’s why he started making those videos,” she continues. “And when they started making money, they helped for a while. But he changed. He…wasn’t really acting like the Bram you knew, the Bram I knew, anymore.”

  We talk a little while longer, and by the time I hang up, the phone is almost dripping with my tears. I hide my dad’s bourbon behind my back, leave his study, and edge up the stairs without drawing attention to myself. When I get to my room, I close my door slowly, even though a part of me wants to slam it shut.

  I put the bourbon on my desk, open my laptop, and turn on some hardcore rap. The really nasty stuff that mothers everywhere hate. The angry, gravelly voices just speak directly to my angsty soul at times like these. People wouldn’t guess that from the music I write, but sometimes I need this.

  My mom starts knocking on my door before the first verse of the first song ends, and I just turn the music up louder.

  I head to Bram’s channel. I should be trying to figure out where the hell I’m going to find a drummer, and soon, but instead I take a swig of the bourbon and play a video of Bram where he’s doing a makeup tutorial, which is about as far as I can get from my lack-of-a-drummer drama. It’s on mute because the music is more important than Bram’s voice right now, and I’ve watched it so many times lately that I can read his lips.

  “I don’t know how some guys do this.” I know that’s what he’s saying, even though I can’t hear him, as he tries to steady his hand to apply mascara. I glance down at my chipped nail polish and then over to the mirror at my kohl-lined eyes. He says “guys,” not “girls,” and I know that’s because of me.

  After I tutored him in math, and he taught me how to kiss (No, put your lips like this), we moved on to a mutual education in other things. The first month of our relationship, he taught me how to catch and throw a football. I’d perfected a barrel roll by winter, so then it was my turn. I showed him my dad’s record collection, and made a playlist for him with the best music from every decade for Christmas. By spring, he’d developed a healthy love for the good stuff, and that’s when he decided to teach me how to cook.

  When it was my turn to play teacher again, I decided makeup would be fun, mostly because I knew exactly how I could make his eyes pop like crazy.

  I’d gone to his apartment the day our relationship went to hell to make him up for fun. It was a really hot day in mid-July, and I remember his window AC unit was on full blast. I had goose bumps. As I carefully applied liquid liner, we were staring at each other because I’d told him not to move. He was so beautiful that I didn’t mind. When tears began to brim along the edge of his lashes, I thought it was because the tip of the brush was dangerously close to his eye and the vent from the AC was aimed straight at us. But then I realized what song was playing, and I grinned. I thought it might be the music (a song I wrote and recorded for him), and the sensitive side of Bram, the part that made him weep when he heard a beautiful song, was the side I liked best. He didn’t know, but it was the song that had gotten Unraveling Lovely to the top of the leaderboard on
the East Coast. My love for him had basically helped us qualify for Battle of the Bands, and I was planning to tell him about it that day.

  “God, you’re adorable,” I said, picking up the mascara I was planning to use next. “Are you seriously crying because of this song?”

  But when he looked away from my face and started wringing his hands, I knew something else was going on. I put down the makeup.

  “At camp,” he started, “we made some prank calls.” He said it so low, I almost couldn’t hear him. He was talking about football camp. He’d been gone for all of June and most of July. He’d just gotten back a few days earlier, which is why he’d missed Unraveling Lovely’s mini-tour.

  “Okay…,” I said. “So what? You called a strip club and asked to speak to fucking Rose Thorne or something?” I grinned. “Oh wait, or Candy…Crush?”

  He didn’t smile. He swallowed and cleared his throat a little, with three beats instead of two, like every other human on Earth.

  “No,” he said. “We called the cheer camp. And I talked to this girl Yara. She’s new, but she’s starting at Bayside next year.”

  My first thought was, What kind of fuck-up transfers for their last year of high school? But I bit my lip and stayed quiet because I didn’t know where this was going and he looked like he had more to say.

  “Since the call,” he continued, “we’ve kinda been texting. A lot. And she’s amazing.” His eyes were shining, like he was gazing up at the fucking stars instead of slowly destroying the best part of my life. He kept talking, sounding like he was her boyfriend instead of mine.

  “You’d love her,” he kind of whispered. “And I guess what I’m trying to say is…I think I already do.”

  He said it like it was nothing. Like with those words he didn’t care that he was stomping on my heart.

  It was so sudden, and I was so shocked, that I didn’t do anything for a few minutes. I sat there and stared at the one eye of his that was surround by a decorative, thick black line.