She started with, “I was always jealous of Claire,” but I didn’t hear whatever she said next, because I felt a hand on my shoulder and I turned. It was a boy’s hand. “Emma,” someone said, and I flinched. Christian Aramond.
“Um,” he said. “So, I, uh . . .”
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why are you sorry, Christian?” I asked, trying to sound more patient than I felt, as always with him.
“I wanted to apologize for something I did.”
“Okay.”
“But I only did the thing because I wanted to fix it, not because I wanted to, you know, hurt anyone or . . . I know that sounds . . .”
In honor of the occasion, I tried especially hard to mask my annoyance. “What, Christian?” I asked, failing.
“So, um, my skateboard? I just . . .”
My voice dropped with my stomach, as if they’d been holding hands. “That was you?”
“You’re a fucking asshole, Christian,” Logan hissed.
He sounded like he was crying. “I didn’t want to—I just wanted to move it out of the way after, so you would know, you know, that it was there, and that I took it away, but then Logan—” Had he been trying to wound me? Or save me? Maybe this is weird, but I felt distinctly like I didn’t care.
“Fuck you, Christian,” Logan said. “How dare—”
“No, it’s okay,” I said. “Forget it, Lo—let’s drop it. Just . . . why did you even bother telling me?” I don’t know what I expected. That he’d been moved by our Mayburg meetings, or by Claire’s vigil?
“Mr. Hawes told me I had to . . . but Emma, it’s—”
“Forget it. Please.” I didn’t want to talk to him, or hear anything else about it. Ever again.
I turned to Logan. “Did you do something for your birthday?” I asked, as afraid of her answer as I had been about anything.
“No, I . . . I didn’t, because I—” she said, and her voice was broken into a lot of just-stepped-on pieces.
“Because you . . . ?” I asked, and even though I tried to sound worried and sad for her, the words were shimmering with relief and joy.
“I was waiting until we’re friends again,” she said.
“Shhh,” someone said from behind us. We shut up and I tried to listen. UFO-spotter Jason Kane was up at Claire’s grave, speaking now, and I felt bad that we’d talked over him, which probably seemed intentional and mean, especially given that he was saying, “. . . and Claire didn’t laugh. So, uh, I just wanted to say that. And neither did Blythe Keene. Okay. That’s all.” There was a silent pause and then some slow rustling, so I assume he walked back to wherever he’d come from. Logan put her hand in mine again.
Right as I started wondering why the quiet was lasting too long, a man said, “Hello, kids,” and I knew. The quiet changed then, became thousands of feet deep, went blue and almost solid. It was so silent that I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I felt the air moving behind the man, through the trees that lined the side of the cemetery facing the street. I thought I could hear, almost see, the grass against his shoes, parting and flattening where he stood. I imagined his shoes were black and polished, and thought of Sebastian, unloading flowers at his graveyard job last summer. I thought of Claire, underneath where we were standing, dead; how the word underneath doesn’t come close to the literal thing.
“I just wanted to stop by and say hello,” the man said. “Mrs. Montgomery couldn’t make it, but, well, we both wanted to say we hope you kids have a good summer, okay? Be safe.”
“Thank you, Mr. M.,” Amanda Boughman said. I wondered what Blythe was doing, whether she was looking at Claire’s dad, or holding hands with Dima, or looking down at the ground. Then Amanda asked, “Um, Mr. M.? Is it okay if we keep on with our vigil?”
I didn’t hear anything; maybe he nodded, or maybe he shook his head. Either way, people were too shy to keep talking about Claire in front of her father, so then Josh said a little too loud, “Well, maybe now is a good time—for our quick dip in Claire’s honor.”
Then I heard Josh grin, I swear. And I remembered suddenly that I’d seen his dimples when we were kids, and that they were uneven—the right one up by his cheek, the left lower. “Ready?” he asked us. We headed toward the woods. I checked the band on my sunglasses and held on to Logan as we walked, a group of us, back into the woods until we were at Point Park Beach. We shed our clothes and I decided not to think about the fact that I couldn’t see anyone; figured Logan would tell me later who swam in what. She and I had bathing suits on under our shorts and T-shirts. We stood for a short beat, facing the darkening lake: Logan, Amanda, Blythe, Zach, Josh, Carl, Coltrane, Deirdre, and a bunch of other kids, although I didn’t know exactly who. It smelled like water moving, grass and flowers in a riot of sunshine and spring, the world ramping up for another round of living and dying. I could hear people shouting, but not their words. I thought of Claire’s dad’s voice, his hello, his kids, his be safe, the sound of wishing so desperate and blindingly bright in each word that my eyes hurt.
I thought about be safe as we all felt for each other’s hands—if I’m being totally honest, I was hoping to be next to Coltrane, so I could hold his hand, but I was disoriented and ended up between Josh and Logan. I held tight. Then we ran, our feet crunching twigs and leaves until the ground turned to sand. I held my breath, trusting Josh and Logan to keep hold of my hands. When our feet hit the water we let go. We were laughing, splashing, running shallow until the lake deepened and slowed us down, swept us up. The water came to meet me, and I braced for a moment before I dove under, to the quiet, dark blue. I held my breath, pushed my arms forward and my legs back, stretched and moved and sliced through the water so smoothly and powerfully that it gave me a surge of courage. When I came up for a breath, breaking through the cool surface into the air, I said Claire’s name out loud. And then I listened to the other voices nearby, like lightning bugs in the dark, little flashes of remembering. And I turned and swam, supported by the water and my own breath, back toward my friends.
• • •
It’s staying light later, and last week we went to the Mayburg place even though there was no reason except that as usual, we have nowhere else to hang out. At least nowhere that our parents aren’t hovering above us. A bunch of us stayed at the Mayburg place through dinner; we decided to order pizza and have it delivered to the closest highway exit. Then we were eating pizza and it was dark out and our being there morphed from whatever we’d been calling it—a meeting, I guess—into a straight party. It was like a shift in the color of the night, and as soon as it happened, I wanted to go home.
I was standing in the doorway, wondering how I’d get home alone—I knew Logan wouldn’t want to leave and I didn’t even want to ask her. I was also worrying about whether I’ll always hate parties, when an orange voice asked, “Can I get you a drink?”
Josh Winterberg. I said, “Sure, of course, yeah, thanks,” embarrassed that I had been standing there like a terrified animal about to get plowed down in the road. Not to mention, why had I felt the need to use so many words when I could have just said “yes, please” like a normal human being? But he didn’t seem to notice, just handed me a cool, plastic cup of something, which he must have already been holding. It smelled pink, like lemonade, icy, sparkling. It smelled like summer. I took a cold sip—it was some kind of Kool-Aid or juice, and I thanked him again and then he said, “So, uh, do you want to go outside for a minute?”
I said, “Sure, okay,” and he kind of took my elbow, which made energy shoot through my arm like I’d plugged it into a socket. We walked outside, until he was like, “So, um, should we sit here?” And I had no idea if we should sit there or not, so I said yeah, okay, and he took my elbow again and helped me sit down on what turned out to be a log. I could hear him breathing. I was nervous enough that it took me a second to realize h
ow nervous he was. But once I did, it made me want to slide my hand into his, so I did. Mine was cold from being scared and his felt big and warm, like an oven mitt or a glove. He wrapped it around my hand right away, like he was happy about it. I suddenly couldn’t wait to tell Logan, even though she was obviously way beyond thinking that holding hands with Josh was a big deal. I had the mood-wrecking thought that if I told my mom, she might be the only one as thrilled as I was. We sat there on the log, listening to the noise of the warm night, crickets, dry grass, and the lake, close enough to where we were sitting that we could hear it.
“So, um, I mean, that note I left at the vigil? The one that was—whatever? It was from fifth grade.”
I waited.
He laughed a nervous, unfamiliar laugh. “So, I guess it’s pretty obvious it was from you,” he said. “I don’t know if you remember that you wrote it to me—about the floor hockey thing in gym? I’d saved it since grade school. But now I don’t have it anymore because I . . . um, I—” Maybe he realized that nothing he said was coming out right, because instead of finishing, he took my other hand and pulled me toward him and put his mouth on my mouth. Our noses bumped, and then his touched my sunglasses, which I reached up and steadied. My senses rushed at me, and I could feel his jaw and hands and mouth and shoulders, taste a mint he’d maybe just eaten, and a kind of boy-soap and boy-sweat-and-sneakers navy-blue feeling about him. His shirt and something spicy, maybe cologne or deodorant. I thought how the only boy in our family was Benj, and he was still so little that I didn’t really know much about what teenage guys wore or smelled or sounded like up close.
Josh held pretty still, with his mouth on my mouth, and I was trying to turn my brain off, so I could feel instead of think. Feel it, I thought. Feel his heart racing, and your own heart beating. I felt both, moving so fast I wasn’t sure whose was whose. I was giddy and breathless, trying to turn my mind down to a quiet hum, trying to focus out, to concentrate on kissing him back, on what he—and I—felt like. I had just opened my mouth a little, and put my hands on the back of his warm neck and then up a little bit into his hair. It was soft and wavy. Then I heard footsteps and Christian Aramond’s voice: “Oh, sorry, man, my bad.” Josh and I sprang away from each other, and Christian crunched away through the woods. We were alone again, but it was too embarrassing to leap back into each other’s arms.
“Well, um, I guess we better, you know, get back or whatever,” Josh said, in a voice that was still orange, but lit from the inside with embarrassment and also excitement, one that gave me the feeling of a giddy kind of falling, like a roller coaster right at the magenta moment when the rise becomes the fall. Like skiing, too, I guess, except not cold or solo.
We stood and walked back to the Mayburg place, holding hands. When we arrived at the door, he offered to walk me home, and I said, “Oh my god!”
Josh stopped walking so fast he almost tripped.
“What’s up, Em?” he asked, and I liked the way my one-syllable name sounded in his voice. It was sexy, a kind of gruff Em, the way he said it. Like he wanted something. My stomach felt fizzy again.
“I forgot about Spark,” I said. He was still in the Mayburg place, had been inside this entire time.
It wasn’t until I said the words—to Josh Winterberg—that I realized that there were moments when I was forgetting to need Spark. I wondered if I would admit this to my parents, who were pushing me to go to guide dog school and get a registered mobility-assistance dog as soon as I turned sixteen in June. I decided I wouldn’t tell them anything. When you’re little, you feel like your parents know every private thought you have. I remember vividly the moment I realized I could actually keep secrets from my parents. I was sitting with my mom on the porch and she had her knees up and her arms wrapped around them and she was looking off into the distance, thinking. And I said, “Mom?” and she didn’t hear me. And this weird wave came over me, because I knew she was far away in her own mind, and that it was a place where there were thoughts I didn’t and couldn’t know about. At first, I was sad and scared. But then, almost in the same second, I realized it was true of my mind, too; that I had thoughts my mom couldn’t know. It seems truer to me the older I get. I can even see my parents feeling and reacting to it, especially now that Leah’s off to college in the fall and Sarah’s finally working on her applications. It’s in the questions they ask us, the ways they think about our days, even how they touch or look at us; it’s like the more we know, the more they’re in a state of constant wonder.
Kissing Josh added another layer to my secret inside life, the one that belongs only to me, and that other people can’t really touch or see, even if I choose to tell them. I think I love that layer, the lava at my center.
“I’m sure he’s fine, but let’s go get Spark,” Josh said, and I liked the way Spark’s name sounded in his voice almost as much as I liked my own.
At first I thought everyone must be noticing us as we came back in, still holding hands, and I was glad. And then I realized they were probably all occupied with their own dramas. And I was still glad. I had just let go of Josh’s hand to squeeze by people and find Spark when Logan came rushing over and jumped on me. “Em! I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“I’m just grabbing Spark and heading out,” I said.
She went silent.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“It’s about Zach, he just—” she said. “Can we talk for a minute?”
“Em, you ready?” Josh said from somewhere in a crowd of people behind me.
I stood still for a minute, waiting for Spark, who I could now hear padding and panting his way toward me, and Josh, who was standing behind me in the mass of people.
“Of course, Lo,” I said. “Tell me what happened. Josh, can you give us a sec?”
“Sure, yeah, um, I’ll wait out front,” Josh said. I blushed.
“Okay,” I said, turning back toward Logan. “Is everything all right?”
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “Wait. Is Josh waiting out front for you?”
“I can tell him to go ahead, just—”
“Is he walking you home? Did you just make out with him? Is that where you were?”
When I said yes, quietly, she screamed with delight, grabbed both my hands, and started literally jumping up and down. She was like Baby Lily or Benj, going from crying to celebrating inside of an instant.
“What?! What are you waiting for? Go!” she said. “Do not send him ahead. I’ll walk my dumped self home. I deserve it. Walk with Josh and take his pants off and—not a germ on it!—call me the minute he leaves!” She gave me a gentle push. “But don’t do anything I wouldn’t do! Get it? Ha!”
I didn’t let go of her hand. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “I’m not leaving you here. Come with us.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t be ridiculous. I’m staying; let Josh walk you home.”
“Come with us, Lo, and sleep over. Then we’ll have time to talk.”
If Spark felt betrayed that I had left him inside while I kissed Josh in the woods, he didn’t seem to hold a grudge; he just came up beside me and nuzzled my hand. I pulled a Milk Bone out of my jean skirt pocket and gave it to him. And if anyone else at the Mayburg place even noticed that Josh and I were holding hands, they didn’t mention it. Maybe no one else is as surprised as I am that someone would want to kiss me in the woods.
As we walked, I wrapped Spark’s leash around my wrist so I could hold my white cane in my right hand and Josh’s hand with my left. I had to work to walk steadily, because I didn’t want to drive Josh up onto the embankment. I wondered if Logan missed holding my hand. She talked the entire way home. Zach had broken up with her. He had apparently known about the Brian thing, and thought it would be okay with him, but now it bothered him too much that she had lied about it or not told him the whole story or whatever, and apparently she didn
’t mind Josh—or me—knowing all the details.
When we got to my yard, Josh and I stopped. Spark barked. I laughed, reached my left hand down to pat him. “It’s okay, Spark, he’s our friend,” I said. Josh kind of leaned in toward me and Logan was like, “Jesus, you two, get a room!” But then she bounded up the porch steps, leaving us on the lawn. We stood there, awkwardly, and when Logan opened my front door I could hear the light and chatter coming from inside the house: Sarah’s voice, Leah’s, my mom’s, and then a boy’s, maybe Jason’s.
“Is there a motorcycle in the driveway?” I asked Josh. Maybe my asking this kind of stupid question would remind him that I couldn’t see, freak him out.
But he just said, “Yeah,” and then leaned forward and kissed me again. Our noses and my glasses were in the way of each other, but I kept my hands still and tried not to think. I also had a little bit of a tickle in my throat, and tried not to obsess about, what if I coughed? What if you do cough while someone you never imagined would kiss you is kissing you? Does the person faint with horror? Do you both pretend it didn’t happen? Do you say excuse me, or say nothing? How does Blythe Keene think about these things? I landed safely on the fact that Logan was staying over; we could stay awake all night analyzing the nose and glasses and possible coughing problems. And I could tell her about the feeling of Josh’s pulse through my chest and back and hips, my lips and legs. And maybe this is crazy, but kissing Josh made me realize that I was also going to kiss other people, including, I hoped, Coltrane Winslow. And maybe Seb, too, if that ever became okay with Dee. I planned to amaze Logan by telling her this.
In fact, maybe I’d shock the whole town by being “the guy about it,” and telling Coltrane I want to kiss him. I won’t botch it like I did with Seb. I’ll just call him up and ask him to meet me at Bridge for coffee, to talk about justice. Ha! He’ll like that, I bet. I like Josh, and I also like Coltrane, and I’m going to like other people, and hopefully be like Blythe—at least a little bit, I mean—picking whom I like, not just getting picked by whoever likes me.
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