The Bridge

by Bill Konigsberg

  That thought makes him wince. Ugh. Wylie and Marissa and all them. He told them he was going to be famous. Ugh. How do you come back from that?

  It doesn’t matter. It happened. It’s over. It wasn’t real, and now he wants real.

  He’s not been a fan of realness before. It feels brand-new. It seems like the kind of thing that could get boring, and that scares him, imagining a staid, unexciting life without too many ups and downs. But lying there, he can imagine, too, a life in which the peaks and valleys of his sine graph shrink, and elongate horizontally. That’s always scared the shit out of him. The idea that he might not have those peaks that sustain him during the valleys.

  But yeah. Lying in bed with a new medicine in his head and his dad sitting there in case he’s needed, Aaron gets for once that the x-axis is what’s real. Stick close to the x-axis for now. That’s what he wants most of all.

  “Can I play you a song?” his dad asks.

  Aaron, staring up at the ceiling, isn’t really sure he feels like listening to music. But he says, “Sure.”

  His dad fiddles with his phone and soon there’s some light percussion and then ambient keyboard, and then a cherubic female voice, the voice of a girl who absolutely, one hundred percent knows there’s pain.

  He listens, first with his head down on the pillow, looking up, and then he rolls over and looks at his father, watching him.

  “When I came home from college, back when I was so down? Nan put this on for me. It wasn’t my deal. I mean, grunge rock was just beginning, and liking the über-sentimental pop music of Wilson Phillips wasn’t remotely cool. But. It pierced me, you know? I listened to it over and over. Hold on for one more day. I’d sit on the window seat in the living room, looking out over the Hudson, while Nan bustled. You know, I don’t know if she knew this before she passed, because I’m pretty sure I never told her. But this song … saved my life.”

  His dad’s voice is like honey over the chamomile song, which soothes his manic bones, and Aaron knows this. He knows that this is one of those moments he’ll remember all his life, and he loves that.

  CHAPTER 10A: MAY 4

  It feels oddly good to be back at school for the talent show, and at the same time, Aaron knows this qualifies as one of those weird and questionable moments, like when someone is too sick for school but not to play baseball, or something like that.

  “You sure you want to do this?” Marissa asks.

  She and Wylie are sitting on either side of Aaron in the second row, and part of him is totally sure. The other part of him is not sure at all.

  “I’m good,” he says.

  What he is sure about is Wylie and Marissa, who enveloped him in a three-person hug as soon as they saw him outside the auditorium. It was pretty clear that people knew. That people talk, and his behavior had been weird, and then he was gone, and who knew how these things happened? Word had gotten around. He knew it the moment Marissa asked him if he was okay, right after the hug. It was an okay with an unstated last time you were here, you were decidedly not okay.

  “I’m so embarrassed that you saw me when I … wasn’t good,” he says now.

  Marissa squeezes his arm. “Don’t be. We kinda got that something was up. It’s okay. Like really, really okay. We’re just glad you got help.”

  They don’t know about the bridge. Maybe they never will. Who knows? It’s all new.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you thought something was up?” Aaron finds himself asking.

  Wylie and Marissa look at each other, and Aaron feels a little like a science experiment, which isn’t the greatest feeling ever.

  “We weren’t sure you should, like, interrupt a manic person,” Wylie says.

  “Sounds like you’re confusing that with ‘never wake a sleepwalker,’ ” Aaron says, and Marissa cracks up and puts her head on his shoulder.

  It’s odd, having this connection. People who are actual friends, or maybe friend candidates. It’s like a language he doesn’t know yet, but he likes the idea of it a lot.

  And now, the unveiling of something real: “In My Corner.” Not the disco dirge version, which Aaron can hardly think about because it’s so part of his illness. But, like, the real version, sung slow. He’s brought accompaniment, and he already gave the track to the sound girl, and his butterflies have butterflies that have butterflies. It’s like the pretty insect version of a Russian doll inside a Russian doll, and on and on and on, living in his chest.

  The idea was that a song would be an earnest, emotional way to return to school. He’s been home for a week, hibernating and feeling mostly awful with some okay times thrown in. Therapy every day. Dr. Laudner had a lot of questions about whether he ought to return with a song, and Aaron was like, it’ll be fine. It’ll be good. “In My Corner” is a little depressing, maybe, but that’s okay, too, and he’s going to be out about his depression. He wants that, because he wants people to know him.

  “You sure you’re okay?” asks Marissa, when he’s been apparently staring off into space for who knows how long.

  “Yes, no, maybe.”

  That’s the thing. He has so many more questions than answers, and aside from sitting at home for a couple weeks or months until he’s stabilized, it kinda seems like his job is to be okay with the questions, and the unsureness, right now.

  “I’m sure the song is really good, Aaron. But you don’t, like, have to do this. You can just come back. You can—”

  “Let him do it,” Wylie says. “I mean, if he wants to?”

  There’s a question in there, but Aaron has no more answers. Just a lot of fear. In his throat. Down his pipes and into his lungs.

  He knows he’s afraid he’s about to mess up publicly again, adding to whatever legend is forming about Aaron Boroff and his epic weirdness. But there’s something even bigger than that rattling around in his brain.

  A bigger fear. That he’s not going to be able to make it to the next time he is in a good place.

  That’s a new thought for him. He files it away under things to say to his dad. His dad always knows what to say back. And maybe Dr. Laudner. Yeah, maybe. Maybe he’ll start talking more in those sessions.

  This makes him feel ever so slightly better.

  Then it’s his turn, and then he’s walking up the stairs, and people are clapping, and then he’s standing at a microphone, and it’s wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

  All wrong.

  So when the piano music starts, he takes a deep breath, awkwardly leans into the microphone, and says, “Off. Turn it off, please.”

  The music goes off. He stands at the microphone, looking out at a sea of expectant faces. Some more friendly than others.

  He says, “They say tragedy plus time is comedy. I wonder what mania plus not that much time is?”

  A couple laughs. Including, notably, Marissa and Wylie. Thank god for the Jones-Joneses. He smiles and looks down.

  “Maybe mania plus not that much time is singing an okay song at a talent show and hoping people think it’s AMAZING.” He laughs, a real, half-nervous laugh. More laughter from the audience, and it spurs him on.

  “Am I, like, the least likely person to be manic depressive, by the way? I’m the middle-of-the-road kid, except I’m really, really not. That’s an awkward place to be. People see me and they’re like, ‘Aw, he’s so nice and quiet’ and meanwhile my brain is going … AAAAGGGHHHH!”

  He pantomimes his brain exploding and people laugh and he laughs, too, because it is, actually, really funny to him. It’s a lot of things. It’s sad as fuck. But also it’s funny, the way he had this mask on all the time.

  And his impulse is to go on about all this, because people would laugh, because they’d see the humor, and the best jokes are aimed at oneself, and, man, there’s a history of depressive and probably manic comedians, isn’t there? All this shoots through his brain in like a nanosecond.

  But then his gut steps in.

  He doesn’t need to do that, actually. To get the laughter. To w
alk offstage the most popular, the most funny, the most anything.

  He smiles, and then he purses his lips.

  “So, um. I’m coming back to school Monday. It’s gonna be weird, because I guess I’m weird. I don’t know. So. I’m kinda scared. But. I’m gonna try it, I guess. Thanks for listening to me. Thanks.”

  And as he does walk offstage, the craziest thing happens. Raucous applause. Whistles. More than he ever got through singing or performing. He closes his eyes and puts his head down, because a part of him likes it … too much, probably. His gut tells him that the best thing for him to do in this situation is keep his head down and hear the applause without soaking it in. To enjoy it without settling in for a huge fantasy of what it all means.

  CHAPTER 1B: APRIL 17, 3:57 P.M.

  Tillie isn’t ready for what happens next.

  The boy pulls himself over the railing until he’s sitting on the ledge as if he’s on a swing set, swaying in the wind, except there’s no swing, just a thin piece of metal under him. She’s like, No, wait up. Wait for me.

  But he doesn’t wait.

  He’s gone.

  One moment the mysterious boy she’d just walked past was there. The next? Gone.

  She squeezes her eyes shut. She cannot watch him fall. When she hears the most distant of clacks, she keeps her eyes locked shut.

  What? What just happened? What the—?

  She is so, so stupid. She’d walked past the kid, who was about her age, and she thought he was, like, a poet or a painter, looking out at the city, memorizing it for his art. That’s seriously the thought she had because she was so fixated on her own crap. Stupid and selfish, she thinks. She should have said something and it would have made him not do that. So, so selfish.

  Also: Totally not going to jump now. Who jumps off the George Washington Bridge second?

  She slowly walks toward the spot where the boy was, just a minute ago. She feels dizzy, like the time she was mugged when she was eight. An outsize thing has happened and her body doesn’t know how to react. It’s so weird to her, so random. If she’d come an hour earlier, she’d be dead. Now she isn’t, but this stranger is. It’s like he saved her life, kind of, because in the echo of that distant clack, she can’t really imagine—was she actually going to? Drown in the Hudson? Where it’s so cold? Over what? Stupid Molly Tobin and her mean video? Fucking Amir? Was he worth it?

  She puts her hand on the dilapidated rail, approximating where the boy’s hand was. No spot is particularly warmer than any other. It’s like he was a ghost. There are no signs of his existence in the hard-blowing wind. If she leaves and doesn’t say anything, no one will ever know. Boy evaporated.

  He was looking right at her. Before he jumped. They were staring at each other. She was the last person he saw on this earth. She is so not worthy of that role.

  What made him do it? It must have been way worse than what’s going on with her.

  She walks back toward Manhattan and climbs down the stairs. Totally numb and not knowing what the right thing to do is, she zombie walks to the subway station at 175th Street and Fort Washington Ave.

  Once she gets there, the warmth of the station does nothing to stop her chattering teeth.

  A boy is dead in the water.

  She’s pretty sure her teeth will be chattering for a while.

  Britt is practicing her routine to Cardi B in the living room when Tillie trudges in and drops her backpack on the floor by the coat closet. Her little sister has the moves down, but the feeling is totally wrong, which is a good thing because Britt is ten and Tillie thinks it’s super creepy that Mom and Dad think it’s okay to let her ten-year-old sister sway her hips so provocatively. That is so clearly part of the reason this world sucks, and here it is, in her living room.

  And in such a fucking adorable package. Everyone loves Britt. How could they not? Long blond hair, rail-thin arms and legs, no hips, dimples. Everything Tillie’s not, never was, never will be. Watching her little sister shake her tiny butt, she wants to hate her, but she just can’t. Instead, she’s totally Team Britt. She’s the captain. Kind of agrees with her dad, who so clearly feels that the Stanleys should never have adopted a dark, chubby Korean girl because you never know. One day you can’t conceive, and the next? Surprise! You can. Oh, joyful day.

  “Watch, Tillie!” Britt yells over the music. “I added this new part.”

  Tillie takes what just happened and scrunches it up into a tiny ball and stores it in her jacket pocket, and she smiles at her little sister, and she watches. Britt bends at the knees and undulates her full body from her knees up to her head. She’s all personality, and it jumps off her as she moves, and it looks awesome. Shocker. Who cares if Britt has no fucking clue what she’s dancing to and what the moves mean? Who cares if Tillie as a poet does really connect to her art, but since it’s not pretty, no one gives a shit?

  “So good,” Tillie says.

  This makes Britt smile. And then, like she has too much love for her tiny body to contain and she has to let it out, she explodes onto Tillie, running over and hugging her big sister tight. It’s so weird how all this girl eats is candy, and she’s just a rail.

  “Now you go,” Britt says, pulling at Tillie’s arm.

  “I go?”

  Britt puts her hands on her skinny hips and tilts her head to the side.

  “I need backup dancers. Duh.”

  Tillie laughs, despite herself. Where this girl got her personality, Tillie will never know. Their dad isn’t exactly a YouTube celebrity, and she can’t even imagine her mom copping an attitude, ever.

  “I don’t think I’m background dancer material,” Tillie says.

  “Anyone can!” Britt says. “You just gotta”—and here she undulates her hips in a way that Tillie is pretty sure her hips don’t go—“feel the beat!” The word feel has ten e’s, the way Britt says it.

  Tillie rolls her eyes, tries to forget about what’s there, pulsing in her pocket, that she just witnessed a boy dying, and what kind of person dances after that? After almost—

  “Come onnnn,” Britt whines, pulling on Tillie’s arm.

  “Okay. Just once,” Tillie says, taking off her coat and putting it on the floor.

  “Attagirl,” her ten-year-old sister says, and Tillie snorts.

  Britt runs over and starts the music again, and as the rap part starts in and Britt starts doing her choreography and Tillie does her best to approximate, she feels dirty, like unclean in the soul. As she unenthusiastically wiggles her midsection, she feels as if she could cry, actually, as if she’s left her body and nothing will ever be the same again.

  Britt turns and watches, and she shakes her head in frustration.

  “No, no, no!” she shouts over the chorus. “Like this!” And she runs over and puts her hand on Tillie’s pelvis and on her butt and tries to basically unhinge her older sister’s pelvis with an exaggerated, forced undulation. Tillie looks down, momentarily shocked, and Britt looks up, her mouth open and her expression wild, and in a nanosecond Tillie gets that she’s being punked, that Britt is freaking hilarious and knows that Tillie is not quite the Twerking Queen, and the sisters make eye contact and everything Tillie’s been feeling slips away and the laughter just goes.

  Britt collapses on the floor and Tillie gingerly leans down and fake punches her little sister in the shoulder, and Britt grasps her arm like she’s been mortally wounded, and, in retaliation, makes the fingers on her left hand into a V and pretends to stab Tillie in the eyes. Tillie falls onto her back, grabbing her face in mock agony, and she hears Britt kneel over her.

  “Oh no! And all over a spat between dancers!” Britt wails.

  Tillie peeks up at her little sister and her silly, dramatic face is too much and Tillie starts to laugh, for real. Britt drops the act and falls down onto Tillie’s ample torso and Tillie wraps her arms around Britt and they laugh until they cry, and Tillie feels the thing in her coat pocket across the room, pulsing. It’s her almost death, and she
just tries, tries, tries to forget. To pretend it never happened. So she can just laugh with her sister.

  Who would have—what? If Tillie had died? She pushes that away, too, and she tries to melt into the moment.

  Britt puts her mouth on Tillie’s shirt right around the belly button and blows a raspberry.

  “You brat,” Tillie says.

  “You’re the brat,” Britt says. “I fire you. As a background dancer. Because you’re mouthy and you talk back and you don’t take direction.”

  “You diva bitch,” says Tillie, mock incredulous.

  “That’s Miss Diva Bitch to you!” says Britt. She rolls off her sister and they lie on the ground and catch their breath. Tillie glances over at her sister, who is beaming. So happy. And why can’t she be? Why can’t she just—

  “Dinner’s ready,” her dad yells from the dining room. He sounds like he’s already chewing.

  Ah, yes. The reason why she can’t just.

  Tillie sits across from Britt, who sporadically makes funny faces at her. To Tillie’s right is her mom, who is a force of nature. Tillie’s respirator. Who feels like Tillie’s pulse sometimes. And to her left is a huge void, a vacuum. A black hole in her life.

  That used to be her father. She remembers the time before Britt, and how her dad played airplane with her. He’d sit down with his legs bent, knees up, and she’d stand on his knees, and he’d grab her small hands in his big ones and lie down, and Tillie would be flying like Superman, arms out in front of her, and they’d lock eyes and laugh, and the roller coaster in her belly would be the thing she’d think about as she squirmed around at night in bed, how her daddy loved her so much. Mom’s love was even then like a steady pulse, like a locomotive, and Dad’s? Incredible peaks and the valleys of his business travel. It swooned her. She was so much Daddy’s little girl back then.