What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  We cross at the light, and I let Kit lead the way. I have thirty-three dollars and fifteen cents on me, more than enough cash to pay for a meal for both of us in most of Mapleview’s under-two-dollar-sign Yelp-rated restaurants. I doubt Kit would pick three dollar signs.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you all this,” she adds. “I haven’t even told Vi or Annie.”

  “We’re friends.” I say it like it’s no big deal, like it’s the truth and has always been the truth, and also like I’m not suddenly terrified that just by uttering the words out loud I’ve put myself in the “I will never get the opportunity to kiss Kit Lowell” zone. “Anyhow, I wish there were a way to fix this for you. I would undo it if I could.”

  “You’re sweet,” she says, and that smile is back, the one that I’m starting to realize is not a smile at all. It just resembles one in form. The snow is starting to fall harder now, in bigger geometrical formations, rendering the possibility of two matching ones infinitely more remote.

  “You know what we need? To rip a major hole in the space-time continuum. And then we could go back in time and fix everything for you.” I realize with a pang that time travel would do nothing to fix me. I’m different at the genetic molecular level. We’d have to alter my dad’s sperm or my mother’s egg, which would, in effect, undo my very existence. I don’t want that. “Have you asked your mom why?”

  “Why she cheated on my dad?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No.”

  “Maybe you should. Could help close the loop.”

  “You are obsessed with this loop concept.”

  “Think about the infinity sign,” I say, and I wait for her to do it. To imagine it. She stops walking and so I assume that’s what’s happening. She’s letting me paint pictures in her mind. Picture me kissing you, I want to say. Picture that. “You see how it just flows into itself. Or even the concept of pi. It has an order and a rhythm and doesn’t end. Ever. Continuous flow. That’s how everything should be. Closed loops. Just ask your mom why.”

  “I like your new haircut,” she answers, apropos of nothing, and then reaches up—to touch my head, I think, but then she jams her hands back into her jacket pockets. “Your outsides match your insides better now.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I reply.

  She doesn’t answer me, though. Kit just stares up at the sky and lets the snow bathe her face with its infinite variation.

  I pull out my phone. Text my mother. One word and a question mark: Why?

  She writes back immediately.

  Mom: Let’s do this in person.

  Me: No. Just tell me. Simple question.

  Mom: It’s complicated.

  Me: Try me.

  Mom: You won’t understand.

  Me: Never mind.

  Mom: I was lonely. And stupid. But mostly lonely.

  —

  “I texted and asked and my mom says she was lonely,” I say to David, ignoring the absurdity of the whole situation. Me sharing the intimate details of my family life with him of all people. That we are sitting here in McCormick’s, eating hamburgers in a purple vinyl booth, like an almost-date. That he looks like an ad from a magazine for boxer briefs and I’m dressed again in my dad’s shirt, making the same mistake twice. That I’ve listened to David in the first place and broken my silence with my mother and texted at his casual suggestion. That we keep talking about this concept of open loops, like everything can be fixed if we just put our collective brain power into it.

  He smiles, like this is good news.

  “That makes sense,” he says.

  “No, it doesn’t,” I say. “Nothing makes sense.”

  “It’s sad to think about, though,” he says, as though he didn’t hear me. “Being married and still being lonely.”

  “She’s just making excuses for herself.”

  “Have you ever heard of twin prime numbers?” David asks. I see him revving up to a new topic, and I can’t decide if I want to go down this road with him. My mind feels mushy and overused. Maybe this wasn’t a good idea. Skipping class, taking this long walk in the snow. I liked holding David’s hand, though. That part—the snow dampening my face, letting my tears mix without anyone seeing, his fingers snug in mine—that was nice. His hand was heavier than I would have guessed. More solid. Like he could keep me from flying away.

  “Nope,” I say. I take a bite of hamburger, think about Annie’s obsession with the concept of mindfulness. She’s always telling me it’s important to be in the here and now. To taste your food. To feel your breathing. To notice when you go from sitting to standing. Since her parents’ divorce, her mother has gone total hippie. She takes Annie on meditation and yoga retreats and burns incense in the house to get rid of bad energy, and whenever I go over there, she tells me all about her adrenal fatigue, as if those are words I understand put together.

  Of course that stuff has trickled down to Annie and then out to me and Violet. And so I decide to be here, in the now, whatever that means. I taste my burger; I really taste it. It’s over-ketchuped and too pickle-y. The here and now is overrated.

  I let David fill our table up with conversation, his words like cartoon bubbles taking up the space I can’t seem to fill. Which is a long way of saying if he wants to talk prime numbers, so be it.

  “Twin primes are prime numbers that differ from each other by two. Like three and five. Or forty-one and forty-three. But what’s cool about them is that they still exist even as you go higher and higher. Even though, as everyone knows, the gap between primes grows the higher the numbers.”

  “Of course everyone knows that,” I say.

  “Right, so it’s this strange, wonderful phenomenon.”

  What does that mean, I was lonely and stupid? My mother is the smartest person I know. And I say that while I’m sitting across the table from David Drucker, who scored the highest on his PSATs of anyone in the tri-state area. Though my mother rarely lets her nerd flag fly, when she does, her brain is a phenomenal thing. I wonder if that’s why Jack liked her. Wait, was it like? Or was it love? Did Jack love her? Does he love her? Are they going to get married and Evan and Alex will become my stepbrothers, and we’ll go on family vacations all together again, and we’ll pretend that it’s not weird we’ve found ourselves in this new, previously unfathomable combination? Will we pretend that my dad never existed in the first place?

  “I’m not sure what prime numbers have to do with anything,” I say in a gentle voice.

  “Prime numbers have to do with everything. But to clarify, that’s what I imagine falling in love is like and then staying married. You start out as low twin primes and as time goes on, if you manage to defy the statistical odds and not get divorced, you become like those rarer twin primes, still only separated by two. That’s an amazing feat.”

  “How romantic,” I say sarcastically, because to me the idea of falling in love, admittedly something I’ve never had the pleasure of experiencing, has nothing to do with prime numbers or mathematics or even quantum mechanics. It’s more like music or art or poetry. Something awe-inspiring and beautiful. Maybe even surprising, like how I used to see my parents’ relationship.

  “It actually is. Super-romantic.” David looks down and fiddles with his straw. I think he’s blushing, which makes me blush, even though I have no idea what he’s talking about. Of course, when a good-looking guy uses the word romantic in all seriousness and blushes, whatever the context, even if you are talking about prime numbers, you’re going to blush too. It’s reflexive. It doesn’t mean anything. “I just thought, like, maybe your parents were, um, prime numbers that were drifting apart, and that’s why your mom felt lonely. Because her twin was too far away.”

  “Maybe,” I say, not able to share his sympathetic views. I don’t think my mother was lonely. She was just selfish. Or even worse: horny. Ew. I am seriously feeling ill.

  “Is that why you were crying? Because of your mom and dad?” David asks. I haven’t quite g
otten used to this about him. As if the only way to go is straight through.

  And, of course, there’s the flip side to David’s directness. I don’t really want to talk about my crying.

  “It’s just…a lot of things.”

  “You look beautiful even when you cry. I mean, not that you don’t look beautiful when you’re happy. Of course you’re beautiful all the time. But out there in the snow, you were stunning.” My stomach tightens and I let out a little laugh. No, more like a gasp. What are you supposed to say when a guy says you are beautiful? This has never once come up. My body warms and buzzes with his words.

  My mind is racing. McCormick’s is a good place. They sell milk shakes and have a little sign discouraging you from talking on your cell phone. I like sitting here with David, basking in his undeserved compliments.

  “Thanks,” I say finally, after what feels like a long time in which I’ve been trying to think of what to say next. “Thanks for that.”

  “You’re welcome.” He jumps up, reaches out for my hand, and I let him take it. “Now let’s go check out the place your dad died and close that loop.”

  —

  Over the course of the three-block walk, I think of and abandon at least five different excuses to turn around. I never really meant it seriously, I tell myself. I never had any intention of embarking on what David has named the Accident Project. For David, obviously, this is nothing more than some sort of equation, or a puzzle to be solved. Another one of his open loops to close. He can’t tell that I’m sweating, even though it’s freezing out, or that I feel dizzy with fear.

  And then I see the intersection of Plum and First. This corner is on the way to the grocery store, to the ballet classes I took until third grade, to Violet’s house, to Star of Punjab, to a million other landmarks of my childhood. The playground where Kenny Kibelwitz kissed me on the lips as part of a dare when we were ten. The park where, on many Sunday mornings when I was little, my dad and I would set up a picnic blanket and have a tea party with my teddy bears while my mom slept in and caught up on her “beauty rest.” Here it is, this intersection, looking as innocuous as always. No shattered glass. No flowers to mark the spot.

  My phone dings, a text message, and I assume it’s from my mother. I don’t want to think about her, because thinking about her leads me to this inescapable fact: My dad did not die peaceful or happy with his place in the world. My dad died betrayed. Minutes away from a freaking divorce filing.

  Right over there, right over there, right over there.

  X marks the spot with a circle and a dot.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket with the hand not holding David’s. A text will buy me some time. Thinking about my mom having sex with Jack is preferable to thinking about the fact that my dad was mutilated by a navy-blue Ford Explorer. Pain, it turns out, has a hierarchy.

  Not my mother after all. It’s a text from Violet instead, in all caps, three exclamation points. Weird. Annie’s the text screamer among us. The one who deploys excessive punctuation for no reason. I’M HUNGRY!!!! she’ll write. Or MY SHOES ARE KILLING ME!!!!!! AHHHHH! Violet prefers all lowercase, her texts as dainty as her clothes.

  Violet: omg, kit!!! have you seen this?!?!

  There’s a link to someone’s Tumblr: “The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview.” Whatever. I don’t need to read another one of my classmate’s dumb offensive blogs. Last year someone anonymously posted a “How to Get the Ladies to Sex You” guide, which was as disgusting as it sounds. I decide not to click. Whatever.

  “The snow makes this more complicated,” David says, and drops my hand to reach into his backpack. He pulls out measuring tape. There’s something about the gesture—the fact that he brought measuring tape to school—that brings more tears to my eyes. I wonder what else is hiding in his bag. I picture a compass and maybe a scientific calculator. I imagine he’s fully prepared for the zombie apocalypse, just like my dad. “I don’t think it’s falling that fast, so we can just measure its density once, and take that into account.”

  I have no idea what it is we’re actually doing. What are we measuring? I think about the word density and suddenly don’t remember what it means.

  “The report said your dad died at six-fifty-two p.m. Do you know if he died on impact? Because if he did, that can be the time we work back from.” David’s voice is flat, dimensionless.

  “I’m not sure this a good idea.” I say it out loud, that which has been repeating in my head. Not a good idea. Not a good idea. Not a good idea. And also this: Run, run. run. “Let’s not do this.”

  David turns and looks me up and down. I’m trembling from head to toe.

  “This is hard for you,” he says matter-of-factly. As if it is just occurring to him.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “It’s just a place. If you want, I can pull up our coordinates. That way it’s not even a place,” he says, and then he does it. He gives me our location based on latitudinal and longitudinal measurements. If my ears weren’t whooshing, if my stomach wasn’t pulled tight into my throat, I’d laugh. “If you don’t want to do this, we don’t have to. But I don’t like that you aren’t sleeping. We need sleep for our bodies to function efficiently.”

  “He died afterward. Not in the car. At the hospital,” I answer, and match his tone. Clinical detachment. Maybe I can do this and not shatter like the Volvo’s windshield. And if I don’t break, I like to think I have a chance of getting better. Or at least closing my eyes at night and not opening them again until morning. Maybe there is a good reason we are doing this. Answers. I could use some answers.

  “Let’s not work by time, then. Let’s figure out where the car had to have stopped before there would have been a collision. Would that be okay with you?”

  I don’t answer. We are now at the corner, staring at the middle of the intersection. There are no cars around. If I wanted to, I could walk right into the center of the road.

  There’s nothing here. Just some trash dancing in the wind.

  “We’re missing a bunch of variables, but I think we can make reasonable estimations.”

  I am going to throw up. Because it’s replaying right in front of me, as if I were watching it live. The screeching of tires. An explosion of blue. Everything turning black. The smell. Oh God, the smell.

  “I’m sorry, I can’t,” I say, and turn around and put my hand over my mouth. I bite back the bile. No, I do not want to throw up in front of David. I will not display my digested burger on the pristine snow. Still, the trembling is getting worse, and the nausea curdles into vertigo. The world starts to spin and the ground begins to undulate, like I’ve stepped into a three-dimensional fun house mirror. I need to get out of here. Now.

  “If you want I can do the math without you,” he says, but to my back, because I’m already running, slipping on the wet ground, hurling myself as fast as I can to get away.

  After Kit ran away from me, I spent another fifty-five minutes outside in the snow by myself, measuring velocity and rate of acceleration and doing calculations in my head and on my phone, since I didn’t have my notebook to write them down.

  Now that I’m home, I need to readjust after all that time alone, after all those words and numbers tumbled and boomeranged in my brain. After watching Kit’s departing back, and wondering why she left me there without so much as a goodbye. I know that if I were someone else, I’d get that elusive subtext that everyone else seems to come preprogrammed with and understand why she suddenly, without warning, found me so disgusting. That’s the only word I can use to describe the look on her face: disgust. Did she know I wanted to kiss her?

  I’m not ready for Miney, who greets me at the door as if she is going to hug me. The purple stripe in her hair is blaring. Like a trumpet. No, like car brakes screeching to a halt.

  “It’s everywhere,” Miney says, and I notice she’s still in her odd-duck pajamas. Again, she hasn’t left the house. Her eyes are red-rimmed but not crusty. Not pink eye, then. If she had an inf
ection, there would be secretions.

  “What’s everywhere?” I ask, but I don’t really care. All I am thinking about is Kit’s hand in mine, how she makes me brave. How did she know I wanted to kiss her? I already know I’m a terrible liar, but it’s not like she asked me outright: Do you want to kiss me?

  “Your notebook.”

  I have no idea what Miney’s talking about. What does that mean, my notebook is everywhere? A notebook is a fixed object. The laws of physics don’t allow it to be in more than one place at a time. Unless we are talking about the multiverse, but Miney doesn’t understand the concept. I’ve tried explaining it lots of times.

  “Someone put it on the Internet,” Miney says, and hands me her phone. Tumblr. The title: “The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview.” My body shakes, just once, as if absorbing a single blow.

  “Oh,” I say.

  “Oh? That’s it?”

  “I thought they stole it for my physics notes. That they would give it right back when they realized it wasn’t going to be helpful. Why would they do this?” I’m not sure why I even bother to ask, because I should know by now I will never understand the answer. Why anyone ever does anything. “My notebook was supposed to be private.”

  “Who did this?” she asks.

  I don’t answer. It doesn’t matter. My notebook is no longer a tangible thing. It’s like a dead person’s consciousness. There but not there. Everywhere at once.

  “Little D, who?” Miney grabs me by the shoulders, forces me to look her in the eye.

  “Justin Cho and Gabriel Forsyth.”

  “I’ll kill them,” Miney says, which is a nice offer, but I don’t want her to go to jail. Then I wouldn’t be able to talk to her whenever I wanted. We’d have to sit across from each other in a dirty vestibule, converse through bulletproof glass. Miney is a picky eater. She’d hate prison food.

  “Maybe people will stop reading as soon as they realize that it’s private,” I say, hopeful. Still stupidly hopeful. I never learn.