The Beauty That Remains

by Ashley Woodfolk

  “That was Bram,” she says as she twists her hair into a bun and sticks a chopstick from the counter through it; easing back into mom-mode without even realizing it.

  “He always drew a crowd. Everybody loved him.”

  “Especially cheerleaders,” I mutter, and she laughs a little, but a second later, when I look back up, she’s staring at me kind of seriously.

  “You and Yara seem like you’re in a good place,” she says.

  I shrug. “We’re okay, I guess. She seems like she wants to be friends or something.”

  I tell her about her inviting me to come over with them. Then I ask, “Is Yara this…handsy…with everyone?”

  “I think so,” she says, kind of laughing. “She braided my hair the first day I met her.”

  I’d forgotten how easy Ms. Lassiter is to talk to. It’s hard to forget that she’s where Bram got his looks, but after hanging out with her for fifteen minutes, I remember that she gave him all his infuriating charm, too.

  “I’m glad you and Yara are becoming friends. You guys knew him better than anyone,” she says, ruffling my hair a little. “I was a little worried that you’d blame her.”

  I frown and stop fiddling with the mugs. I was lining them up according to color: reds and oranges, then greens and blues.

  “Blame her? For what?”

  “For what happened,” she says. Ms. Lassiter lowers her voice and glances over her shoulder. The cheerleaders have switched on the TV and are watching The Real Housewives of Somewhere. “With Bram,” she almost whispers.

  “Why would I blame Yara?”

  “I thought you might think…” Ms. Lassiter trails off when Paige comes into the kitchen. I hand her two mugs with coffee and one with hot chocolate. The other girls trickle in to grab hot drinks, and the whole time my insides are screaming because I want to know what the hell Ms. Lassiter is talking about. We finally hand Yara her hot water, and then she takes forever picking out a flavor of tea.

  When she leaves, I look back at Ms. Lassiter. She hands me a mug, but I just put it down on the counter and wait for her to say whatever she was about to say.

  “He had so much going on,” she says. She cradles a cup in her own hands and then sits down at the small kitchen table. There are only two chairs. “There was that tape and all the awful messages people were sending him. He lost his scholarships. Did you know about that?”

  I shake my head. I didn’t even know he had scholarships. Ms. Lassiter stirs her coffee and then clears her throat the way Bram used to.

  “There was a random drug test at school. And I guess he failed it,” she says. She shakes her head. “I should have known. His behavior was a little off, but I never would have guessed that he was…on drugs. A mother should know these things.”

  I shrug because I don’t know what I can say, but she probably doesn’t know he was dealing, either.

  “I know that losing the scholarships was bad—he desperately wanted to go to college. And I know that he was probably so embarrassed about that and everything else that was happening. But it was a rough patch. It would have been fine if he’d given it some time—I tried to tell him that. Money was tight, but we could have figured out how to pay for school.”

  “But wait—what does any of that have to do with Yara?”

  Ms. Lassiter sighs. “Well, I thought you’d think this all happened because Yara broke up with him, but I just wanted you to know there were so many things piling up. And you know Bram. It was like he didn’t understand that there are some things that are out of his control. He was so stubborn. He refused to ask for help.”

  She shakes her head again and looks out the window. She’s crying a little. A pigeon is perched on the ledge, and it shits right there while we’re staring at it.

  I hand Ms. Lassiter a napkin from the dispenser, but all I can think is: When did Yara break up with him?

  “Do you mind,” I ask her before she can say anything else, “if I go to his room?”

  She presses her lips together. “No, of course not, honey. Do whatever you need to. If there’s something of his you find in there that you’d like to take with you, just let me know.”

  I nod and head to the back of their apartment. Bram’s room is at the end of the hall. I wonder if Yara broke up with him because of what happened at the party with Nico or for some other reason, because they were definitely still together after the sex tape was released. Yara either believed all the rumors—that I was behind it, that it had been recorded months before—or she just forgave him.

  So they stuck it out for a while, but I guess at some point they didn’t. And since everyone is still treating her like the grieving girlfriend, I bet no one knows they broke up. I guess everyone has secrets, even sweet little Yara.

  I start to see how Bram could have been unraveling with all the things that were going to shit. His life was collapsing in on itself. Imploding. It’s not hard to imagine all the little pieces adding up like Ms. Lassiter said. Throw drugs into the mix, and yeah—a person you think you know well can easily become a stranger.

  I ease my way through Bram’s bedroom door more slowly than I entered the bathroom; then I slowly glance around.

  The bed is stripped, and the dresser is cleared off almost completely, and it smells wrong—like cleaning chemicals and artificial lemon instead of Axe body spray and hair gel. The hardwood floor is shiny, and his rug has been vacuumed clean—no food crumbs or random socks in sight.

  I suddenly realize that the police were probably here at some point going through all his shit, looking for clues. Maybe Ms. Lassiter cleaned because they dusted for fingerprints and touched his stuff. She had to wipe away most of the traces of him to get rid of the traces of them. It’s depressing as hell to think about.

  Even though the furniture and floor are pretty sterile, his walls seem mostly untouched. There are posters of a few crappy Top 40 bands that I hate, and one small framed picture of Bram and his mom. There’s one of those strips from a photo booth stuck into the edge of his mirror. When I get closer I see that it’s him and Yara smiling, him and Yara sticking out their tongues, him and Yara…making out.

  I turn around, and there are black-and-white photographs of graffiti and street art decorating almost half of the north wall. And I can’t help but grin. Because of course Bram was a goddamn secret hipster.

  There’s one street art photo in particular that catches my eye, new since I was last here. It’s of a big piece of paper that’s been plastered on a brick wall. In the middle of the white is a single sentence in typewriter font:

  For the sensitive among us,

  sometimes the noise

  is just too much.

  I pivot again, and I see the image of the headstone from Slaughterhouse-Five: “Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt.” It looks like he ripped the epitaph right out of the book. I run my fingers over the letters of the quote, missing his corny, happy-go-lucky attitude like crazy. But apparently, he hadn’t been that person in a long time.

  I hear a noise, and when I turn around, Yara’s standing in the doorway watching me. And I feel strange. Not mad. Not sad. Just weird.

  She steps into the room and closes the door behind her. She looks around, and her chin starts trembling, and before I can say anything, Yara is crying.

  I’m not one of those people who melts at the sight of a girl crying, but Yara is such a girl. Something about her standing there, in her pink Uggs and polka-dot leggings, just rips me up. She looks too…innocent.

  “Hey,” I say. “Don’t cry.” I feel like such a cliché, but I point to the bed.

  “Want to sit?” I ask her. She sits down. I stay standing and shove my hands into my pockets.

  “I know Ms. Lassiter told you,” she whispers. “I was talking to her, and she said she was so glad we were getting along, and I knew.”

 
; I nod.

  “I kinda freaked a little bit when I realized. Luckily, no one else was in the kitchen. I asked her not to say anything to anyone else. And I know you hate me, but no one else knows so you can’t tell.”

  “It’s not that I hate you,” I say, realizing it’s true. “I just—” I’m not sure how to finish, so I go with “Look, I won’t say anything, okay?”

  “I don’t want them to blame me,” she says.

  I tell her I get it, because I do.

  She mostly stops crying and wipes her eyes with her sleeve, and I feel more relieved than uncomfortable when she stands up and hugs me. She walks over to Bram’s mirror and fiddles with the photo strip.

  “He talked about it sometimes. He talked about it the night we broke up,” Yara says.

  “What? Dying?” I ask, and she nods. “Shit, Yara.”

  “I know,” she says. Her eyes are full again, and her voice is shaking. “We broke up. He basically said he wanted to die. Then two weeks later he was gone. I should have told someone,” she says so softly that I barely hear her. She takes a deep breath and looks at me. “I have dreams where he’s still alive because I told someone.”

  Maybe it’s the room, or Yara’s tender eyes, but I say, “I have dreams where I’m killing him. Where I’m the reason he’s dead.”

  I look at Yara, wishing I could blame every bad thing that happened to Bram on her. And part of me does blame her. But no more, I guess, than how much I blame myself or the guy in the video. The trolls, the drugs, or Bram himself.

  “If it’s anyone’s fault,” Yara says, “it’s Nico’s.”

  I pull my hand away from hers. At some point she started holding it.

  “Wait…what?” I ask.

  “Yeah. He’s the one who got Bram started with the drugs. He’s the only reason Bram was using.”

  She sees how shocked I am by this information. “He told me Bram was his dealer,” I say.

  She rolls her still-wet eyes. “It was the other way around.”

  I’m having a slight problem keeping my shit together. I was going to try to be Nico’s friend again, maybe even ask him to play in my band, and he lied to me? But I don’t have any time to digest the news because Yara keeps talking.

  “I’ve been seeing someone; like, a therapist or whatever. And part of my treatment—God, I feel so stupid saying that—is that I’m supposed to figure out a way to, like, say goodbye. Since I didn’t go to the…funeral.”

  I look over at her again, wondering why she would skip the funeral, wondering why I didn’t notice her missing. The church was packed, filled with everyone from geeks to jocks, but I bet the absence of someone as high-profile as Yara—one of the most popular members of the cheerleading team and his fucking girlfriend, as far as everyone there knew—probably didn’t go unnoticed by most.

  “So I’m having this thing at my house next Saturday. It was my mom’s idea, but I basically have to go along with it. It’s a candlelight vigil, where me and a few friends will, like, talk about him.”

  She walks back over to the mirror, so that her back is to me, but her reflection is looking at mine.

  “I’m really glad you came today. It’s honestly a relief to have someone who knows about the breakup besides me and Ms. Lassiter.”

  She sits on the bed beside me again.

  “I was going to ask you this in the car, but do you want to come to the vigil? My parents won’t be there or anything; it’s more for us to try to get over what happened. To, like, deal with it in a way that makes it less scary or whatever.”

  We hear music playing a few minutes later, and Yara and I look at each other. We want to see what’s going on, so I don’t really have a chance to answer her question. She dabs at her face in the mirror for a few minutes, and when she’s ready, we walk into the living room. Ms. Lassiter, Paige, and a few of the other girls have pushed the coffee table against a wall, and they’re having a dance party in the middle of the floor.

  An EDM song is playing, one of Bram’s favorites. So when Paige grabs one of Yara’s hands, and one of mine, I hesitate, but only for a second. I can’t do anything about the Nico news here, and this is a damn good song. I strut to the middle of the room. I bust a few of Bram’s signature moves, and Ms. Lassiter laughs. I dance with Yara and Paige and then all by myself, until my feet ache, and later, after I hug Ms. Lassiter goodbye and we all head for the door, I tap Yara on the shoulder.

  “I’ll come to the vigil,” I say, thinking of Gertrude. She’ll eat this up. “I want to say goodbye to him the right way too.”

  But first, I need some answers from Nico.

  BAMF // SASHA’S SENSES REVIEW…TIDY DARK PLACES

  Looks like: idk, homework? Lots of big words in these lyrics.

  Sounds like: the pretentious a-holes you hear at coffee shops, tbh

  2/5

  “Come somewhere with me after school?”

  Jerome doesn’t use question words like “will” or “can” or “do.” He just starts with the part of the sentence that counts most, and I kind of love that about him.

  He’s wearing a blazer with elbow patches today. I wonder where he gets these clothes—if they’re hand-me-downs or if he picks them out at thrift stores or consignment shops just as they are.

  I don’t ask him, though. I don’t ask Jerome much of anything because I’m worried that if I start asking questions about him, he’ll start asking things about me. But I do feel like I can’t avoid the conversation he wants to have about “us” for much longer.

  I pluck the front of the shirt he’s wearing under the blazer, and the fabric is surprisingly soft between my fingers. Something about the way he’s looking at me makes me want to press my cheek against his chest. He takes my wrist in his hand and pulls me closer, like he knows or something, and I settle my face there right against his heart.

  “Where do you wanna go?” I ask him. “I’m kind of grounded.”

  “Nowhere far,” he says. “Trust me.”

  And even though we’ve only been kissing for six short weeks, I do.

  I leave my bike locked up outside of school and we hop on the bus as soon as the bell rings. And I close my eyes and kiss him for most of the twenty minutes it takes the bus to go seven stops, hoping I can delay the inevitable.

  “We’re here,” Jerome says, and when I open my eyes, we’re at the stop closest to Rohan’s house.

  “But why are we here?” I ask him as he takes my hand and leads me off the bus. Jerome doesn’t answer. With his fingers curled around mine, I wonder if this is what it would be like to be officially his. For him to be mine. And because I’m so distracted by the question of what it would be like if we were boyfriend-girlfriend and not just make-out buddies that I forget about my question until we get to Rohan’s.

  “J,” I say when we’re standing outside of Ro’s garage. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s kind of a surprise.” he says, and since we’re still holding hands I allow myself to be led forward.

  * * *

  —

  They’re all in Rohan’s garage.

  Callie is sitting on the floor, her long, denim-covered legs twisted into a pretzel. Deedee is leaning against the far wall with her earbuds in, her thick hair wrestled into two adorable puffballs, one on either side of her head. Rohan is sitting on a milk crate, strumming his acoustic guitar.

  “Hey, guys. What’s up?”

  No one says anything for a few seconds, which is super weird, but they look at one another, which is weirder. Deedee takes her earbuds out, and her and Callie’s eyes meet. And Rohan looks right through me, at Jerome. That’s when I see Deedee’s eyes get a little shiny. I look around at my friends, and the whole setup, with everyone hanging around awkwardly, not quite looking at me seems all too familiar. Then it hits me, where I’ve seen this exact scen
ario dozens of times before.

  “You guys. Oh my god. Is this an intervention?”

  I start laughing. I know from the show that this is supposed to be a serious moment, but I don’t think it needs to be. And I want to keep the mood light, keep everyone happy. That’s what I’ve wanted all along.

  “Dee, you don’t need to cry,” I say.

  But then Jerome’s deep voice sweeps around from behind me like a warm breeze, and his words are so gentle that they immediately make my smile disappear.

  “My granddad died last year,” he says.

  I turn to look at him. His eyes are misty, and he looks like he needs a smoke.

  “I know he was old, so it’s different from Sasha. But it messed me up for a while.”

  This is the most I’ve heard Jerome talk (maybe it’s the most I’ve let him talk), and I stare at him, feeling sad that I’m learning something so important only now. “I didn’t know that,” I say, looking up at him. “I feel like I should have known that.”

  Jerome shrugs. “It’s cool.”

  But it really isn’t. Every person is a well, and everything I know about Jerome could fit on a leaf floating atop the dark depths of him.

  “I couldn’t take it, you know?” he continues. “He lived with us near the end, so after he died, I would do weird shit, like stand in his room for hours not doing anything. Just staring. Then I started getting nervous about stuff that never made me nervous before.”

  My palms get sweaty in crowded spaces now. I can’t misplace anything of Sasha’s without losing my cool. I nod.

  “I had a few panic attacks after that.”

  I’m staring at Jerome, wondering how he could kiss me when he knew exactly what was up with me. But then I start to think that maybe that’s why we started kissing in the first place. We kissed for the first time after one of my track meets, when I just kept running past the finish line and out of the gym because someone called me Sasha by mistake. I remember bumping into him in the hall and noticing that he was wearing bright red suspenders, and he coached my breathing back to normal. I’d known him for a while, but in that moment, I wondered why I hadn’t ever noticed how kind his eyes were. I wondered why I hadn’t talked to him more at shows. Then I kissed him.