by Sarah Ockler
Matt’s the one who introduced us to HP a few years ago. They weren’t even popular yet, but he’d been a fan in the early years before they were a group, back when Joe did mostly solo stuff out of local bars in Buffalo. He’d call us into his room and play these random tracks he found online, blasting notes and beats from his speakers. If it was late at night, he’d pass around his headphones, bobbing his head until we caught on and followed suit. Frankie and I liked them immediately, though I no longer remember whether it was because we really got their music or because we just believed Matt, pulled into his contagious sunshine enthusiasm without question. Either way, it didn’t take long for HP to become our favorite group. By the time they released their first mainstream album, we were old fans, thanks to Matt.
By the time they released their second album, Matt and I had already kissed.
He surprised me with a copy of it the next day, all the lyrics printed out and stapled together. Read them, Anna. Really read them.
By the time they released their third album, Matt was gone. He never got to see them in concert.
“All right, y’all,” Plazma’s lead singer comes back onstage, nearly hoarse after their intense set. “Put your hands together for those badass East Coast rockers we’re all here to see — Joe, Brandon, Jay, and Scotty-O! Helicopter Pilot! Make some noise!”
Frankie and I are up from our seats with the rest of the auditorium, cheering and screaming and shouting our unrequited love. Even Red and Jayne are clapping along, bumping hips and laughing in that awkward dance that parents do when they’re trying to be cool, but I’m happy to be here with them.
For three hours, Frankie and I sing and dance and laugh until our breath runs out, our hair falls, and our makeup fades. Nothing else matters — not my drowned journal or Matt or Johan or Jake or any of the secrets and lies between us. It’s just us and the music, the universal language of love and hope and loss and everything else.
After two standing ovations and two encores, Helicopter Pilot finishes with their classic first single, “Heart Shadow.” When Matt died, Frankie and I listened to it over and over in her room, drowning out the din of murmuring sympathies downstairs. I haven’t been able to listen to it since those long, dark days, and the first words yank me right back there, right back to her room, right back to us, two broken dolls falling on the floor against the bed.
Black heart shadow,
Set my mind on fire, suffocated by the ashes.
Black heart shadow,
Spin around laughing as the space you fill collapses,
Spinning in circles as the space you left collapses.
When I think back to last year, those times in Frankie’s room when we just wanted the world to end, I can’t believe how much she’s changed. Maybe Dad was right to say that Red and Jayne aren’t dealing with her. But maybe Frankie Perino doesn’t need her parents to deal with her.
I watch as she closes her eyes and sways in time with the most painful song in our shared history, drifting to that faraway place where I can’t follow.
I watch her waving arms and the borrowed earrings that dangle in her auburn hair.
I watch her and think, maybe Frankie Perino doesn’t need me, either.
“Meet us out front as soon as you’re done,” Uncle Red says as he heads to the parking lot after the show. Frankie and I line up at the souvenir booths to get HP T-shirts, standing in silence as we inch forward, still buzzing and alive from the show. There’s not much anger left between us, just a great divide — like best friends in high school who go to different colleges, lose touch, and move on in parallel lives that never cross until years later, in a random bar or grocery store, and after a brief hug and five minutes of small talk, they both realize that the threads that connected them so long ago have frayed and blown away, leaving nothing to discuss.
So they nod and smile.
And bid one another farewell.
Wandering through my own thoughts, I lose Frankie when the line splits into several clusters down a long table of sweatshirts, T-shirts, CDs, and bumper stickers. I buy a black HP shirt and walk to the other end of the crowded table in search of Frankie. Beyond a group of middle-school girls trying on every single baby-doll shirt in the pile, I spot the back of Frankie’s head tilted in the undeniable position of a kiss. A tattooed arm presses into her back, his other hand firmly on her butt.
I’ve seen this disappearing before — the night of the Spring Send-off when she ditched me for Johan for two hours. I feel like I should hide in the shadows of the punch bowl table until she’s done. From the looks of it, she’s getting farther with Tattoo Boy near the T-shirt table than she did with Johan on the soccer field.
I give her two more minutes before issuing a warning shot in the form of a cough. She unhooks her lips from her new friend long enough for a “What?”
“Our ride is here,” I say.
She turns back to the guy. “The limo driver doesn’t like to wait,” she tells him.
He shrugs and lets her go, one hand still hovering near her ass. “This is Rat,” she tells me. “He’s the Plazma bass player. You know, the openers? He’s, like, totally close with Jay Garra in HP. He was going to introduce us, before you interrupted.”
“Um, okay. Cool.” I don’t bother telling her that the Plazma bass player doesn’t have tattoos — something I noticed easily from our fifth-row vantage point.
“Garra’s got a way with the ladies,” the Plazma wannabe announces with a wink. “So do I — it’s a bass player thing. What’s your name?”
“My name is Leaving. Leaving Now.” I grab Frankie’s hand and pull her toward a row of cars lined up in front of the exit as she blows a kiss to Rat.
“That makes, what, seven for me and — how many for you? Just one, right?” She yanks her hand away and throws a satisfied smirk in my direction.
“That’s right, Frank. One for me. Just one.” I smile and head to the car with my HP shirt tucked securely under my arm, the beats from Scotty-O’s intense drum solos still pounding inside my chest.
thirty
It’s bedtime on the eve of our departure. I change into my new shirt and a pair of jean shorts and slip between the sheets, but I’ve no intention of spending my last few hours in Zanzibar Bay sleeping near Frankie. Before turning off the light, I again set my phone alarm on vibrate and tuck it carefully under my pillow, T minus one hour and forty-five minutes.
I’m totally awake when it buzzes against my cheek. This time, Frankie’s in bed where she belongs, mummified in the sheets and sound asleep.
Already dressed, I grab my flip-flops and sneak out of the room. I do a quick hair and breath check in the downstairs bathroom and wind my way over the familiar path to the Shack — to Sam — one last time.
Sam and I walk back out to the Vista and spread out a blanket in the sand, hoping for the same seclusion we found the other night. I tell him about dinner and the Helicopter Pilot show, from which I’m still radiating.
“Does this mean you and Frankie are speaking again?” He plays with a loop of my hair, wrapping and unwrapping it around his finger.
“Sort of,” I say. “Well, no — not really. It was kind of a temporary stay of execution.”
“I’m sure you’ll work it out eventually.”
I sigh. “Let’s not talk about Frankie right now.”
Sam nods and pulls me closer. We curl up together on the blanket, watching the stars and not talking. I’m lost in the night sky, floating overhead and seeing us from above, following in the dust of a shooting star.
“It’s going to be weird when you go,” Sam says, squeezing my fingers and pulling me back to earth.
“Don’t think about it yet. We still have a few hours.”
He smiles and kisses me, slowly moving us into the same position as the other night. This time, I don’t forget. This time, as he lies on top of me, pressing his bare stomach against mine, pressing me against the blanket and the blanket against the sand, I realize it’
s no longer something I must endure; no longer a mysterious passage from point A to point B that will allow me to move forward in an otherwise stalled life.
The air is warm, the waves blowing kisses at our feet. Out on the horizon, the sun starts hinting as the moon still glows, their light momentarily occupying the same space, each one making the other more enchanting. As the stars slowly fade to make room for the pink of morning, I know that this is probably the last time I’ll see him, and that no matter what my life brings, it will never again be more special than it is in this moment, day and night simultaneously lighting up the black ocean just for us.
I pull Sam’s sweatshirt on over my bare skin and lie next to him on the blanket, staring at the sky.
“It’s strange,” I say, rubbing my feet against his. “I feel like I should be sad, but I’m not. It’s not that I won’t miss you, but it just feels like —”
“Like everything is okay anyway,” he says, finishing my thought.
I smile. “Sam, thanks for listening to me yesterday. You know, about Frankie and Matt and all that stuff that happened.”
“Don’t thank me,” Sam says. “You know she got stung by a jellyfish?” I laugh, thinking back on the theatrics.
“The invincible Frankie was taken down by a jellyfish?”
“A baby one. But when Red told us about the concert, she was magically cured. It was quite a miracle, really.”
Sam laughs, locking eyes with me before pulling me on top of him for one last time.
After, the light sky tells me it’s time to head back. I still have to pack, and Red and Jayne will wake up soon to start loading the car for our return trip.
I slip back into my own clothes and return Sam’s sweatshirt. “Keep it,” he says. “Something to remember me by.”
“I don’t need a sweatshirt for that,” I say, already putting it back on.
“Then keep it because it’s cool.”
“Deal.”
Sam packs up his blanket and turns in the direction of our beach house, reaching for my hand.
“I’m gonna walk back alone this time,” I say. “I want to say goodbye to the beach. Besides, they’re going to be up soon.”
Sam nods, slipping his hands behind my neck and pulling me into a deep kiss.
“See you around, Anna Abby from New Yawk,” he whispers.
I touch my fingers to his lips, look into his eyes for the last time, and walk away along the shore. I turn back only once, watching him move down the beach until he fades into a thin beige line, a black dot where his T-shirt ought to be.
I really don’t even know you, and yet, in my life, you are forever entangled; to my history, inextricably bound.
Back home, everyone is still asleep. My body is exhausted, but in this moment I feel too alive to sleep. Instead, I walk in through the front, cross the main floor, and open the sliding deck door to head back outside.
The sun isn’t fully up yet and the air is still cold, infused with tiny drops of ocean mist. I walk barefoot across the wet grass like I did on our first day and situate myself on the bottom step, letting myself become hypnotized by the lull of the waves. A lone seagull paces the shoreline in front of me like he’s waiting for news, but all other land, air, and sea residents are in hiding, leaving me alone with the gull to think about all the times I could have told Frankie about how I accidentally fell in love with her brother.
The night of my birthday party, before the promise, I could have pulled her back into the house under the guise of a female crisis and told her about my wish and how it came true.
All those times at the house, stealing looks at Matt over dinner. Borrowing his books. Hanging out in his room, waiting for her to interrupt. We could have sat her down and told her.
I could have told her after the funeral, as we locked ourselves in her bedroom and listened to Helicopter Pilot CDs.
Or when she told me that made-up story about Johan.
All those times, I couldn’t protect her; not from the one thing that really mattered — losing Matt.
I could only protect her from the secret. I could only shield her from the knowing; from the imagining; from the inevitable suffering attached to those endless what-ifs.
What if he didn’t die?
What if it didn’t mean anything?
What if it meant everything?
One night, Matt kissed me. The next few weeks shot through me in a blur, a bullet speeding at the sky with no end in sight. When he pulled me close to him behind the house that first night, I saw our whole life together in the flash of his lips on mine; living next door to Frankie and her future husband so that our kids could grow up best friends and Twinkies like all of us.
But when he died, I saw — nothing. There was nothing left to see. It happened and it was impossible and beautiful and then it ended before it even really began, leaving nothing behind but secrets and broken hearts.
And in this moment of pale dawn in the hours before we leave California, I finally realize what has been the hardest thing for me about Matt’s death. It isn’t that I lost a brother, like Frankie, or a son, like Aunt Jayne and Uncle Red. The hardest thing is that I’ll never know exactly what I lost, how much it should hurt, how long I should keep thinking about him. He took that mystery with him when he died, and a hundred thousand one-sided letters in my journal wouldn’t have brought me any closer to the truth than I was the night I pressed my fingers to the sea glass he wore around his neck and kissed him back.
For over a year, the letters were my only connection to him; the only evidence that I didn’t imagine our brief time as other. When I first saw my journal helplessly floating on the waves, I felt a loss so immediate and overwhelming it was like being back in the hospital lobby when the doctor told us they couldn’t fix him. One minute, the journal was in my hands, soft and familiar and real; the next minute, it was gone.
Just like Matt.
And just like Matt, I need to let it go.
thirty-one
The sun peeks out from the morning haze behind me, turning the sky light orange. It’s still cold, and I pull the sleeves of Sam’s sweatshirt over my hands to warm up my fingers. When a silent shadow falls over the stairs and spills onto the sand next to me, I jump.
“Frankie? When did you get here?”
“Just now,” she says, her bare arms crossed over her thin cotton T-shirt, eyes red. “I woke up last night and you were gone. When you didn’t come back first thing this morning, I got scared.”
I pat the step, motioning for her to sit next to me. She inhales deeply, triggering a chain reaction of sobs.
“I’m sorry, Anna. I’m so sorry. I came out here the other night to see if your journal washed up on the shore, but no luck. I never meant for it to happen like that.”
It stings, and I want to walk away. To let it all go. To forget.
But Frankie and I are essentially on equal footing. I owe her just as much an explanation as she owes me.
“Why did you read it, Frankie? Why did you take it in the first place?”
She tells me that when she put her camera away at the party, she saw the journal sticking out of my backpack. She was drunk and wanted to see if I’d written anything about Sam.
“I never expected to find stuff about — well, what I found.”
“Frankie, I know I should have told you about Matt. But he wanted to tell you himself, and I promised I wouldn’t say anything. He wanted to be sure you were okay with it. He thought it would be best to wait until you had some time alone with him in California. That’s the only reason I didn’t tell you sooner.
“Then, the night before you left for California, everything happened so fast — I didn’t want to disappoint him. I didn’t want to break my promise. I didn’t want you to hurt anymore. I wanted to be there and —”
“It doesn’t matter, Anna,” she says. “Matt was my brother. And I’m supposed to be your best friend. It hurts me that you kept a secret like that. You should’ve told me.”
I look down the shore as the sun stretches over us. The runners are out now, following their familiar courses along the hard-packed sand close to the water. Two women pass us side by side, serious and intent and breathless.
I know I should’ve told Frankie. I wanted to tell her. And I — Matt — we — would have told her, but then… When I promised Matt I wouldn’t say anything, I didn’t know it would be for all eternity. If I thought he was going to die before confessing to his little sister, I would’ve added some fine print to our agreement.
“I’m sorry, Frank. I should have told you. But —”
“A whole month,” Frankie continues. “And not just that, but all the time before, all the time you loved him. You never told me about your feelings for him. It’s like all the times we hung out, he wasn’t your friend. It was always something more for you. It was always a lie.”
A lie? It hits me like a sledgehammer, releasing all the hurt and sadness and confusion I’ve held inside for the last fourteen months. I jump up without speaking and bolt to the shore, unable to hold it in any longer.
“How could you leave us like this?” I bawl at the sky, tears spilling into my mouth, ignoring the blurred runners who pass behind me without slowing. Just another drunk little girl, they must think. “Tell her!” I shout. “Tell her you made me promise! Tell her it’s your fault! Tell her it was a lie for you, too! Tell her you loved me!”
Tell me you loved me.
I look out over the ocean, all the way to Japan, waiting for an answer.
Shhh, ahhh. Shhh, ahhh.
Nothing.
“Anna, I’m sorry, all right?” Frankie stands at the edge of the tide in tears, pulling the sleeve of Sam’s sweatshirt against my wrist. Her eyes are heavy, old, the broken brow sagging and listless.
