Three Quarters Dead

by Richard Peck

  SHE WAS ALL right, I suppose, as grief counselors go. She didn’t tell me to turn my frown upside down or anything. She didn’t try to patch me up with bumper sticker slogans. But needless to say, she wasn’t helping. How could she? Something had been taken away from me that no adult could give back.

  We’d had some bad sessions in that poky, windowless little cell of an office down at the end of the counseling wing. Every third meeting was with my parents, and they were the worst times. Even Dad didn’t get it— that you don’t make new friends in high school. Not at Pondfield High School. You’re lucky if you hang on to the ones you have.

  “Honey, there must be plenty of kids who’d be glad to—”

  But I had to cut him off. He didn’t get it. It wasn’t his fault, but he didn’t get it.

  Also, he couldn’t see what an honor it had been. I was only this first-semester sophomore last fall when Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie took me in. Me. A nothing little tenth grader who knew zero about layering or labels or who was in charge. Even Dad didn’t see the miracle of it.

  My mother was way worse, of course. “Honey,” she said, “Tanya and Natalie were seniors. They wouldn’t have even been here next—”

  “So you’re saying they might as well be dead because they were going to graduate anyway?” I said, really screaming at her. Besides, Makenzie was a junior, and she’d have—

  “I’m not saying that,” my mother said. “But you can’t blame me for being grateful you weren’t in the car with them. And I think you need to use this time to—”

  “Don’t tell me to go out and get new friends!” I screamed. “Don’t you start.”

  “I wasn’t going to tell you that,” my mother said. “I was going to say that maybe now you can begin to find out who you are.”

  Me? Who was I without them? My mother so didn’t get it. My clueless mother. She couldn’t see I was three-quarters dead myself.

  TODAY, THOUGH—NOW—everything was different.

  I was smiling inside, grinning from ear to ear, all the way along the hall of the counseling wing. I’d turned my frown upside down because this big rock had rolled off me. Because Tanya had texted, and the nightmare was over, almost.

  THE GRIEF COUNSELOR was Ms. Gordon, but she’d asked me to call her Rosemary. I didn’t want to, so I hadn’t called her anything. She seemed to live and work out of an oversized tote bag with her other shoes in it. The only thing on her desk was a box of Kleenex.

  I was braced for her when I heard voices coming out of her office. I’d forgotten this was a session with parents. They were there early, talking about me behind my back, which I didn’t particularly like. I stopped outside the door because my mother was talking.

  “I should have done something sooner,” she was saying. “I should have nipped this in the bud. After that business last Halloween at the latest. Kerry was just too . . . grateful to be accepted. She was swept off her feet and didn’t know which way was up. She didn’t know what was real. These girls were too old for her. I was so busy playing hands-off suburban single parent and giving her all the freedom she—”

  “Why are you overanalyzing this?” my dad said, breaking in. “You overanalyze everything. We’re talking kids here. Kids. They’re resilient. They move on. I never had a friend in high school I couldn’t do without. All Kerry needs is time to—”

  I walked in then. Dad was on one side, his chair tipped back, having his say. And looking at his watch. My mother was on the other side, as far from him as she could get. She was wearing her quilted Burberry and her concerned look.

  I walked in, and I didn’t need this now. I so totally didn’t need any of this.

  “I’m fine,” I said to them in the old voice I hadn’t used in weeks. “I’m done here.”

  Then I spun around and got out before anybody could say anything. Ms. Gordon could keep her Kleenex. I wasn’t even numb now. I could feel my feet, slapping along the floor tiles. And where was my backpack? And my books? And what class did I have third period? Language Arts? Something. And what were we discussing in that class? Lord of the Flies? Whatever.

  I was fine because Tanya had texted. And everything else had been a . . . mistake. A cosmic mistake. And I had to be on the 3:50 train into the city because in another miracle, Tanya had texted me.

  I’d known all along this entire . . . situation had been too bad to be true.

  ONLY TWO OR three people got on at our station. I kept my head down. The train was mostly empty, running against rush hour. I wrestled out of my backpack and settled next to a window. The train jerked and rolled, and it dawned on me that at this particular moment in time nobody on earth knew where I was. The plastic seat sighed under me.

  And in that exact second my phone rang. I froze. Why hadn’t I shut it off? I didn’t need anybody trying to stop me. I didn’t even want another message from Tanya because I’d already had the one I wanted. Needed.

  I rummaged in my backpack for the phone. It was my mother’s number. I tapped her straight to voice mail. I’d already left her a message that I was going to Dad’s up in White Plains. Which was enough. The White Plains train flashed past this one right now, loaded with commuters heading home.

  From the corner of my eye I glimpsed my reflection in the window here on the shadowy side of the aisle. I sat shoulder to shoulder with myself. The two of me, the dead one I’d been and the live one now that Tanya had texted.

  Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie. Their names sang in my heart and hip-hopped in my head. If only I’d known this morning that I was going to meet up with them, I’d have kicked myself up a little when I was getting dressed. Put forth a little effort on my hair. I wore it long and smooth, longer than shoulder-length, like Natalie’s. But I hadn’t done anything about it for days. I hadn’t cared what I looked like for weeks. I’d have worn the same top two days running if I could have made it past my mother. I just didn’t care. I kept to the dress code with a collar on my shirt. I tied a sweatshirt type top around my waist. I just didn’t care.

  The week after Easter there’d been a school day hot as June. One of those days when you can almost see the buds popping on the trees. Tanya had pulled her shirttails out of her waistband and tied them in a knot. You couldn’t be sure if you were seeing her belly button or not.

  She cut the dress code that close, and by lunch every girl in school had tied her shirttails in a knot and was showing skin. Every girl and three or four guys from the art department.

  THE TRAIN WAS braking for the Riverdale station already. My throat began to close up a little bit. The city was just ahead, tall and gray into the sky. I wanted to fast-forward and be there because doubts were creeping into my head. They nagged me like a mother.

  What if that message Tanya texted was just . . . in my mind?

  What if it was only something I wanted, not something that was?

  Maybe when you’re as lonely as I’d been, you hear things and see things that aren’t true. Maybe I was losing my—

  No. That message was real. Totally. And nothing else was. That message had . . . punched the restart button and changed everything back to the way things were supposed to be.

  The train lurched and rolled on, and just ahead across a river Manhattan rose. The windows at the tops of the high-rises burned with gold fire from the sinking sun.

  125th Street then, and the plunge into the tunnel under Park Avenue. I could find my way around the city, more or less. As a family, when we’d been a family, we used to come in for The Nutcracker and ice-skating at Bryant Park and Dylan’s Candy Bar at Sixtieth and Third. Only this past Christmastime Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie and I had come in for the Rockettes’ holiday show. We’d changed clothes at the apartment where Tanya’s aunt Lily lived. It wasn’t that long ago. It was when things were real. I knew my way. I just didn’t know what I’d find when I got there.

  If anything.

  The doubts nagged, and my heart pounded. We were coasting to a stop along the platform way d
own under Grand Central Station.

  Just as I was struggling into my backpack, a guy stood up from his seat ahead. We’d meet at the door.

  He was a blond-headed guy in Lacoste and long shorts, carrying a see-through garment bag with a blue blazer inside. I looked again, and it was Spence Myers.

  Spence Myers with the triple 800s on his SATs and early admission to Georgetown. I clenched up like a fist. It was like I hadn’t really escaped, or made a clean break. I panicked, but fought it.

  I pulled me together. What did it matter? As a rule, you can see seniors, but they can’t see you back.

  “Kerry?”

  We were meeting at the door, stepping out onto the platform. He was pulling the iPod out of his ear. I thought about my hair. The sweatshirt sagged around my waist.

  “What are you doing in town?” said Spence Myers like we were old pals. He was editor of the school newspaper. Back at the beginning of the year I’d thought about going out for it, working on staff as a lowly sophomore gofer or something. But then when I got in with Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie, when would I have had the time? I needed to keep my time open. And in fact they were the only way Spence could know who I was. Because I was on the fringes of Tanya’s group.

  “I—I’m just coming in to have dinner with my dad,” I said. “We’re taking a late train back.”

  It was a Friday night. It made sense. Why shouldn’t I be in town with my dad? I hadn’t thought about needing an alibi. But here one was. It practically jumped out of my mouth.

  “You?” I said, like we stopped for a chat in the school hall every day or so.

  “Party tonight,” he said. “Then I’m staying over for an interview in the morning,” Spence said. “It’s for a summer internship with a nonprofit. Then back for the prom tomorrow night, and the after-prom thing at Chase’s. Big weekend.”

  Huge, I thought, almost losing the thread of why I was here. Why was I here?

  “Who are you going to the prom with?” I asked him. It seemed a mature question. While in my head I could hear Tanya saying, “Not Spence Myers. . . . He has some growing up to do.... I’ll get back to him later.” I could hardly hear anything else.

  “Bunch of the guys,” he said, “keeping it real.”

  I didn’t know where to go with this. He was a senior. He was all about internships and keeping it real and the prom with guys and early admission to—

  “How are you doing?” Spence said to me as the gates got closer. “You still seeing the counselor?”

  He knew that? I never thought people could see me unless I was with Tanya and Natalie and Makenzie. If then.

  “Not anymore,” I said. “Today was the last session.”

  “Ah. Well, it’s good if you can move on,” Spence said. “You have to.”

  He had. But then, had I ever seen him and Tanya together, just the two of them?

  “It was all a mistake anyway,” I said.

  And he probably thought I meant seeing the counselor was a mistake. That’s what he probably thought.

  WE WERE OUT in the station now, where National Guard soldiers patrolled in camouflage, with guns. People were everywhere, and sound bounced off the marble walls. Now we were crossing the concourse, this gigantic space with more people surging in every direction, swinging laptops, running for trains. Everybody moving from one world to another. And way up above all the stars of the galaxy, all the astrological signs, lit up against the turquoise blue ceiling.

  I was a little numb again. It was all Bright Lights, Big City, and I was strolling through it with a major senior guy, so there was nothing particularly real about any of this.

  “Your dad in Wall Street?” Spence asked.

  “What?” My dad? Wall Street? My dad was in White Plains, miles from here, where he lived and worked. “Oh. Right. Yes, he works on Wall Street.”

  Lie Number Two, and Wall Street was downtown. Tanya’s aunt’s apartment was uptown. Two different directions. Two different trains. We were past the big clock and the newsstand now and almost at the subway entrance.

  “You?”

  “My folks have a place on Sixty-ninth,” Spence said, “Lexington and Sixty-ninth. I’m staying there tonight.”

  That meant he’d be getting an uptown train. And I needed an uptown train too because Tanya’s aunt lived on Seventy-second Street. But I’d just told him my dad was in Wall Street, or on Wall Street—however you say it. So I ought to be looking for a downtown train. He was pulling a subway pass out of his pocket as we headed down another flight in a mob of people.

  MY HEAD WHIRLED. I supposed I could take a downtown train. Then get off somewhere and switch over to an uptown one. But I could also get totally lost and end up living permanently in the New York subway system. Or Brooklyn. It was like a—I don’t know what—like a bunch of mole holes. A maze. And the signs made no sense. None. You had to know what you were doing.

  I’d be lucky to get on the right train, let alone get on the wrong train and then change to the right one. I had to get away from Spence. Here’s how bizarre this whole business was—I was trying to dump one of the major senior guys in school. Also the best-looking. I was so off my turf I couldn’t believe it. Also, I wasn’t used to making my own decisions.

  “You go ahead,” I said. “I have to buy a ticket.” He had a pass. He could just go through the turnstile and . . . vanish down the mole hole. This lower level was teeming with people. If enough people got between us, I could just melt away, delete myself.

  “No, take your time,” he said. “I’ll wait with you till your train comes. It’s a zoo down here, and there are weirdos.”

  He waited while I stood in the ticket line. I had this much time to think. And to wonder, in spite of my grief—would it have killed me to keep using lip gloss?

  He was still there when I came back, dry-lipped, ticket in hand. “Actually,” I said, “I’m meeting my dad uptown. He’s having a drink with some people. At somebody’s . . . apartment.” Lie Number—

  “Come on then,” Spence said, and I followed his swaying garment bag through the turnstile. He had a college haircut already, the blond hair at the back just brushing his shirt collar. In fact he was an Abercrombie & Fitch ad, except he had his shirt on. Now we were elbowing our way down more crumbling steps to the number 6 uptown train.

  On this platform the tricky part was to keep people from pushing you onto the tracks. Some of these women were armed with handbags the size of Hummers. A train was charging in, a number 6. The tracks lit up.

  If enough of a crowd got between us, I could just dart into a different car. It was dawning on me that Spence and I were headed for the same subway stop, Sixty-eighth Street–Hunter College. I began to edge away, but he slipped a hand under my elbow to keep us together. A perfect gentleman.

  Then we were in the subway car, plastered against complete strangers. “What stop?” he mouthed through all the noise.

  Why didn’t I say the stop after Sixty-eighth Street–Hunter College? Why didn’t I just stay on the train when he got off and then walk back or something? Because I didn’t know the stop after Sixty-eighth Street–Hunter College.

  “Sixty-eighth Street–Hun—”

  “Me too.” Spence nodded, and the train thundered on.

  WE FOUGHT OUR way up out of the ground onto Lexington Avenue against a tidal wave of Hunter College students going the other way.

  It was almost dark now up here on the street. “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Where you heading?”

  “Seventy-second Street,” I said. One of my rare true statements. But what direction should I—

  “I’ll walk you to—”

  “No, it’s okay,” I said.

  “Then I’ll peel off at Sixty-ninth,” Spence said. “My family’s place is at One twenty-nine, up there on the corner.” We were walking past the big stone castle part of Hunter College. “Didn’t Tanya’s aunt Lily live on Seventy-second?” he said.

  “. . . Somewhere around
there,” I said.

  I guess I could have told him I was going to see her. Pay her a call. But Tanya’s aunt Lily officially lived in Paris. She was a stylist, or had been. She wrote about fashion or something. She wasn’t in New York that much, and Spence might have known. Who knew what people knew? Besides, I didn’t want him walking me right up to her door. I couldn’t chance it.

  Tanya’s aunt Lily had been there at the memorial service, from Paris. She must have been her great-aunt or something. She was an old lady, dressed all in black. A lot of people were that day, except hers was Paris black. She was the only woman at the service in a hat. With a big black brim.

  Joanne had picked her up at JFK Airport and had taken her back there that night. I don’t even know why I knew that, or remembered. I was missing whole blocks of time.

  “You going to be cool?” Spence was saying to me. We were at the light at Sixty-ninth.

  “I’m going to be fine,” I said. “I’m practically there.”

  “If you’re sure,” he said. “See you at school.”

  I watched him cross Lexington Avenue, all the way up to the canopy of his building. Then I walked on toward Seventy-second Street and let the sidewalk crowds swallow me up.

  That was the moment I was most alone. The sun was still bright on the windows of the penthouses, but it was evening on the street. When I turned into Seventy-second Street, I saw I’d have the doorman to deal with.

  In movies New York doormen wear top hats and gold braid and open the doors of limos. In real life they wear parts of their uniforms and stand out by the curb, having an endless conversation with each other. With any luck I might just breeze into the door of Aunt Lily’s building. Whisk right in.

  The canopy was dead ahead. And what was I heading for? Anything? Nothing? In two minutes would I be walking back the way I’d come, from one emptiness to another?

  Trees grew in pots beside the front door. The doorman was there, blocking the way. Just my luck. A young guy. The night shift? He looked me over.