What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  “They’re all cool. And maybe a little shy. Not the type of people to feel comfortable doing a showcase.”

  “Logic dictates that we shouldn’t do one, then,” I say, and play a quick riff to let him know the conversation is over.

  —

  Later, when I practice my daily krav maga, instead of using my go-to fantasy that I’ve been jumped in the street by a gang of thugs who mistake me for a rival gang member—admittedly an unrealistic story, since I do not live in a place known for its drug wars—I let myself picture someone stealing Kit’s purse on Main Street. In my mind, I chase down the culprit and neutralize him with a swift groin kick and then an uppercut elbow. True, in krav maga you are supposed to avoid confrontation and attack only in self-defense, but tonight I allow myself this exception. As I sweat and kick and punch, over and over again, I get to picture Kit’s face, her cheeks pink, just like they were at lunch today. But instead of signaling embarrassment, this time she’s signaling pride.

  Violet and Annie are waiting for me outside the computer lab after school, and they have that look on their faces that I’ve come to think of as faux pity: eyebrows scrunched up, concern dripping from their half smiles, like they’re about to stage an intervention. Or like they are human emojis, premanufactured to send a particular message.

  Or maybe it’s real pity. I can’t tell. Either way, I don’t like the way it makes me feel.

  Reminders everywhere.

  “Hey,” I say. I keep it casual. Pretend I haven’t broken many of the unspoken rules of our friendship or that I don’t know what’s coming. I’ve ignored their calls and texts. I defected from our lunch table without explanation or reason. I never did give Violet my opinion on her high-waisted jeans. “What’s up?”

  “I think we should talk,” Annie says, and though she’s trying to be nice, I get the sense that underneath she’s pissed off but that she knows she’s not allowed to be. My dad dying is the world’s best and worst get-out-of-jail-free card. Violet puts an arm around my shoulder, and I try my best not to flinch. I don’t want that kind of hug—a buck up, camper half hug—but I play along. I blink back the first sting of tears.

  Violet’s dressed in her usual über-preppy uniform: a button-down shirt with a collar, her blond hair kept off her face with a brain-squeezing headband and twisted into a complicated braid that rests on one shoulder. She looks like a J.Crew model. She’s basically the whitest person I’ve ever met. Annie’s white too—Mapleview is not a particularly diverse place; the default here is white—but she’s less overtly white, if that makes sense. She’s not at all preppy like Violet, and her parents don’t golf at an exclusive country club or try to casually mention something about India or a random Indian person they know every time they talk to my mom. Annie’s parents are liberal Jews who met while working for the Peace Corps in Kathmandu. They seem to understand that the world is a big, diverse place, and that different is not the same thing as scary. It’s amazing to me how many people mistake the two.

  If I hadn’t known Violet since we were in the fourth grade, when her family first moved to Mapleview from Connecticut, I’d never have guessed that she and I would be best friends. The thing is, stiff collars and twee belts and subtly racist parents who have mastered the art of the micro-aggression notwithstanding, Violet’s actually pretty gooey inside. She’s the first to let me know if I have something caught in my teeth or stuck to my shoe. She writes long, inside-joke-filled messages in my yearbook in pink and purple ink. When Violet first heard about the accident, she drove straight over to my house and waited on my front stoop until my mom and I got home, and then she hugged me before I even had a chance to get out of the car. She’s been doing everything right, been following the Best Friend Handbook to the letter. It’s not her fault that I suddenly don’t know how to talk to my friends. That I’d almost prefer it if they got pissed at me instead.

  My friendship with Annie and Violet has always worked because we balance each other out. Annie’s clashing prints and crazy jumpsuits, clothes perfectly aligned with her personality. Without her, I’m pretty sure we would spend every Saturday night in Violet’s basement eating Oreos and vicariously party-going via Instagram. Annie makes us live bigger lives, which of course are still of Mapleview dimensions, which is to say very, very small. But, you know, still bigger than they would be otherwise.

  “You guys, this whole lunch thing doesn’t rise to the level of needing a ‘talk.’ I’ve just been a little MIA,” I say, and use this opportunity to shift my backpack to the other shoulder, a way to dislodge Violet’s arm without being rude. “I’ve just been busy.”

  Annie’s been the source of my entire social life since elementary school. She’s the reason we spend most afternoons at the Pizza Palace as satellites to planets Justin and Gabriel; she’s the reason we have front-of-the-caf seating; she’s the reason we get invited to actual parties. In my world, there’s no such thing as busy without her.

  “WTF?” Annie asks. She sometimes speaks in Text, a habit I just can’t get behind.

  In my head, I respond in kind: OMG FML TTYL.

  “Annie, chill,” Violet says.

  “Sorry, I don’t mean it that way,” Annie says, giving me another one of those winces, as if she’s doing something painful, like getting her eyebrows waxed. “I’m worried about you, Kit. You should talk to us. We’re your best friends.”

  “I just need a little space,” I say. “It’s obviously not you guys, it’s me.”

  “Why are you talking like you’re breaking up with us? It’s not you, it’s me. I need space.” Annie laughs, trying to lighten the mood. As if she can turn my words into a joke, and we can giggle our way out of this one.

  I almost say: OTT.

  I almost say: Laughs need to be earned now.

  I almost say: Please just stop.

  I almost say: I’m sorry.

  “It’s so not a big deal. It’s lunch,” I say.

  “Kit means she’s having a tough time. Because of everything,” Violet says. I shake off my irrational annoyance at her euphemism. Everything is obviously my dad being dead. Why can’t she just say that instead?

  Even when the doctor came out of the emergency room to break the news to my mom and me, he used what my English teacher likes to call “purple prose.” We’ve lost him, he said. He’s gone. Like my dad was a credit card left behind at the supermarket or a puppy that slipped out the front door.

  Yesterday, David just said the words right out loud. The unvarnished, ugly truth.

  “Duh. That’s why you have friends in the first place. So we can help you,” Annie says. I look at her, wonder how she defines helping. Probably by trying to revive the old Kit. The pre-everything Kit. But that’s impossible. The old Kit is as dead as my father.

  We lost her, I think. She’s gone.

  “This isn’t healthy. The way you’re shutting us out,” Annie says.

  “Healthy,” I repeat back in a flat tone, because suddenly I don’t know what that word means. What does healthy have to do with how I’m feeling? The sort of unimaginable pain that makes it hard for me to get from one moment to the next? I know we’ve only been standing here for minutes, but it feels like hours or days. Time has turned interminable and impenetrable, something to be endured and passed through, however possible. Health isn’t a factor. This can’t be fixed with talking or green juice. Everything will not be fixed by a forty-eight-hour cleanse.

  I wish I could say all this out loud, but I can’t. I don’t know how.

  “Girls!” Mr. Galto, the newspaper adviser, calls to us from inside the classroom, sighing the sigh of teachers immemorial. As if we are difficult inmates instead of AP honors students. “If you want a chance at editor in chief, you better get yourselves in here.”

  Since I’m not gifted athletically or musically or anything -ically, I’ve been gunning for the EIC position for forever. Violet and Annie both want it too. It’s how girls like us pad our college applications without havi
ng to sweat or join marching band. Today is the day we officially put ourselves up for nomination. I’ve missed a few deadlines lately, but I’m hoping my get-out-of-jail-free card extends to extracurriculars.

  “Please,” I say to Annie and Violet, which is the worst word I could have used, because that look is back. Real pity this time. I can see it through my grief haze.

  “Please what?” Annie asks, her voice so gentle that it almost breaks me. Annie is not supposed to be gentle. Annie is supposed to be aggressive and sometimes a little mean because she’s the only one of us who takes risks and gets shit done.

  Annie is supposed to tell me to get over it and stop wallowing, and maybe we could have a fight about that—about how little she understands what’s going on with me right now—since anything would be better than this.

  My lower lip starts to quiver, and I realize that if I stand here for one more second I will burst into tears, right in the hallway. Just after the last bell. When there’s maximum foot traffic.

  Nope. Not going to cry here. Not going to happen.

  “Last chance!” Mr. Galto calls from inside the room.

  I do the only thing I can. I split. I throw away almost three whole years of work on the newspaper and my one shot at editor in chief.

  I sprint down the hall.

  When I finally get to my car, which I realize as soon as I get in is the last place in the world I want to be, I crank the windows wide open and blast the air conditioner. I turn up the radio. The tears don’t come.

  I’m too shaken to put the car into drive. Instead I sit and stare at the clock on the dashboard, marvel at how the numbers stay still.

  “Please, please, please,” I whisper again and again and again, an empty chant, because I still don’t know what I’m begging for.

  —

  The landline—which has an actual spiral cord and is attached to the wall, like this is the eighteenth century or something—rings. Our just in case of an emergency phone that my dad insisted we install even though we each have our own cell. That’s how he was. Every year, in celebration of his birthday, he’d change the batteries in our fire alarm and carbon monoxide detector. In the event of a Category 6 hurricane or a zombie apocalypse, we have a kit in our basement full of dried meats and canned foods and gallons of water. And on the fridge, there’s a laminated card with the number for poison control, even though I’m sixteen and unlikely to accidentally swallow a dishwashing gel pack.

  “You never know,” he used to say. “You just never know. Unimaginably bad stuff happens.”

  My dad was orphaned in his early twenties. Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer within a year of each other. Bone for my grandfather, breast for my grandmother Katherine, my namesake.

  “Alliterative cancers,” my dad would joke. “A freak thing.”

  It never occurred to me to think about what losing both of his parents must have been like. What it cost him to be forced to speak so casually about it to me, who was so stupid, who had never before weighed the magnitude of forever. Who laughed at the juxtaposition of the words alliterative and cancer like that was such a clever thing for him to say.

  My mom told me that my father totally changed after his parents died. He stopped drinking beer with his buddies, put away his electric guitar, and cut his nineties-grunge hair. He started taking their relationship, which they’d both assumed was just a college fling, more seriously. He applied to dental school, despite having no particular passion for teeth or gums or the diagnosis of gingivitis. Practically overnight, he graduated to adulthood. He picked stability and practicality over passion.

  Now I think about the box that my dad so carefully created for me—not just the one in the basement, but this safe town, this house with an alarm system, this family of three—and how it did nothing to protect us after all. Those were just things my dad did to make himself feel better. I realize we all walk around pretending we have some control over our fate, because to recognize the truth—that no matter what we do, the bottom will fall out when we least expect it—is just too unbearable to live with.

  The phone rings again, and I jump, like I’m in a horror movie. I’m equally scared to answer and not answer.

  “Kitty?” It’s Uncle Jack, my dad’s best friend and my godfather. He was my dad’s freshman-year college roommate, the best man at my parents’ wedding, and a frequent houseguest over the past year since his wife left him. Last month he added the job of executor of my father’s estate.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, because this is the in case of emergency phone. It is used to report emergencies.

  “Nothing. Everything’s fine. Well, not fine, but you know. Is your mom around, by any chance? I called her office and they said she wasn’t in.” My mom left for work as usual this morning, looking even better than yesterday.

  “Sorry. Not home.”

  I’ve known Uncle Jack my entire life—the “uncle” being an Indian honorific we use out of respect even though he’s not technically family (or Indian, for that matter). He used to pull pennies out from behind my ear, bend his thumb so it looked like it split in two. He came to my eighth-grade graduation ceremony just because he wanted to see me cross the stage. He has been saying the same thing in different ways for the past month, and I don’t want to hear it again. It was just a freak thing.

  I think about how the police told us about the malfunctioning traffic light (there was a work order to fix it later in the week), that when they administered a Breathalyzer about two hours after the accident the other driver was under the legal limit. That there was no crime here. Nothing to prosecute. I think of the way the other car plowed through the intersection into my dad. Literally. Into my dad. That’s what killed him: the impact.

  My mom doesn’t know that the day after he died, when she was taking a Xanax nap, I took a cab to the junkyard to see for myself what was left of the car. I needed to make it feel real. To have evidence that my father was in fact dead. Not lost, like the doctor said, not just waiting somewhere else for us to find him.

  There was nothing to see but Volvo origami. I took a picture, but it felt no more real than before. The accident was a blank. A story that was told to us about characters we did not know, lives we did not care about. But there was the car and my father was dead and I was not.

  I was not.

  I never got to meet my father’s parents, my other grandparents, and if I ever have kids they will not get to know my dad. If I one day walk down an aisle, my dad will not be standing next to me. At graduation, it will be just my mom in the audience watching. Every happy moment from now on will have the lingering, bitter, heartbreaking aftertaste of loss.

  “It was just a freak thing,” Jack says, right on cue.

  It’s wrong that his words so precisely echo my father’s. He uses the same empty refrain. For the first time I hear the lie implicit in them. Realize how the freakishness does nothing to lessen the reality. It’s a misdirection. It’s a verbal sleight of hand.

  Not the truth. Not truth at all.

  —

  That night, my mom comes into my room to tuck me in, something she hasn’t done in a long time, maybe years. These days we’ve been falling asleep mid-activity, stuffed with too much takeout. We just keep going until our bodies shut off.

  “Sweetie?” My mom sits next to me on my bed, which makes the covers too tight across my neck. I don’t ask her to shift over. I’ve taken four Advil to get rid of this unidentifiable feeling, a shaky emptiness, but Advil doesn’t treat whatever this is. “I ran into Violet’s mom today on the train.”

  “Yeah? She mention curry?” I ask, as if I have no idea what’s coming next. Of course it was only a matter of time before one of my friends said something to their mom and their mom said something to my mom. Like how we used to play the game telephone as kids and whisper secrets from ear to ear.

  My mom laughs at my nonjoke.

  “Not this time. But she said that Violet told her you haven’t been sitting w
ith the girls at lunch.” My mom smoothes down my hair, which is two shades lighter than hers. I’ve always wanted to color mine dark brown so we could match.

  When I was little, I was convinced that my mom was actually a superhero. That Mandip Lowell was just a secret identity; that every night, after I went to sleep, she’d spend her evenings fighting crime, kicking bad guys with a loud hi-yah! Now I think she could totally play one of those too-pretty cops on a network television drama. The kind that sprint down dead-end alleys on a studio set. Prop gun raised and pointed: Stop or I’ll shoot.

  She’s tough, my mother. And she can run in heels.

  Though let’s be honest. She’s much more likely to be cast as a terrorist or a head-wagging taxi driver or a convenience store clerk. We don’t often get to see people who look and sound like her on television.

  “It’s no big deal, Mom. I just needed a little space.” She nods like she gets it. And maybe she does.

  “I can’t stand the thought of you sitting alone.”

  “I’ve been sitting with this guy, David Drucker? He’s okay.”

  “David Drucker? Amy’s son? He used to be an odd duck.” She tugs at my hair with her finger and it springs right back into a wave. No doubt my mother is disappointed when she looks at me, her only child. Beautiful women are supposed to have beautiful daughters. At the very least, I bet she thought I’d turn out “exotic,” an obnoxious word that every biracial person has heard like a million times. Though in my case, it’s never really applied. My parents’ features have come together to form someone easily forgettable. My skin is just brown enough that in this superwhite suburb, people sometimes are rude enough to ask me, “What are you?” They seem disappointed when I don’t say Latina, which is everyone’s first guess. Like figuring out my ethnicity is some sort of fun game.

  “You used to go to David’s birthday parties when you were little,” my mom says.

  “He’s still totally weird, but it turns out he might be good-weird, you know?” I look at my mom and think about how there are no brown superheroes and about the fact that I’m probably too chubby to be on television. Maybe I should straighten my hair. Darken it too. Spend a little bit more time in the sun. That way my mom and I could look more alike. Without my father standing next to us, we don’t make that much sense together.