by Cynthia Hand
“Where have you been all day?” he asked when he saw me coming down the stairs, his arm swinging back as he delivered the virtual ball to the gutter. He groaned.
“Around. I saw a movie at SouthPointe.” I replied. “Wow, you’re not even good at virtual bowling.”
“Shut up,” Ty said good-naturedly, and reset the Wii so that we could both play. “Loser buys the winner McDonald’s.”
Then he proceeded to kick my bowling butt.
“How was the movie?” he said after a while.
“Okay. Heavy on visuals, light on plot,” I replied. I was going to leave it at that, but I wanted to tell him. I wanted to share part of this monumental day in my life. So I said, “I went with Steven.”
Ty’s eyes didn’t leave the TV screen. “The guy from your math club or whatever?”
“Steven Blake. Yes.”
“What did you used to call him? Like his geek nickname?”
“Oh,” I said, laughing that he remembered. In middle school we all used to have nicknames: Mine was Luthor, after Superman’s Lex Luthor—the world’s greatest criminal mastermind. Eleanor’s was Roosevelt, which she loathed and rallied to change to Rigby, after the Beatles song, but never pulled off. Beaker’s was the only one that actually stuck past 8th grade. And Steven’s was—
“Hawking,” I told Ty.
“After the star guy.”
“After the world-famous astrophysicist and cosmologist, which means he studies the origins and structure of the universe.” Sheesh. Star guy.
“Yes!” Ty rolled a perfect strike. I was beginning to suspect that he was hustling me for McDonald’s. “So you went on a date. How was that?”
“It wasn’t supposed to be a date, but it ended up that way. It was good. Really good, actually.” I picked up my controller and immediately bowled a gutter ball. “Crap.”
“I approve of this Hawking dude,” Ty said as I lamely managed to knock down a few pins on my next roll. “Of course, if he breaks your heart, I’m going to have to beat him up. Brotherly duty, you know.”
“Thanks.” I smiled and nodded and didn’t say anything else Steven-related that night. We bowled, and I lost. We must have gone to McDonald’s, but I guess I blocked that part out.
That was the last time I agreed to play Wii with my brother.
It was also the last time we had anything resembling a “real” conversation about our personal lives. When he said he approved of Steven.
I wish I’d told him more. I could have talked about Steven—although not about the kissing, because no brother wants to hear about his sister making out. I could have told him about how brave Steven had been, to just ask me point-blank like that, how gentlemanly he’d been for the rest of the time, and how, in spite of my modern-feminist misgivings, I’d kind of liked that. I could have told him about the paper daisy, or the things I liked about Steven: the way he made me laugh, how he infected me with his enthusiasm, his wonder, and made me feel like I was pretty when nobody else had ever really made me feel that way, which shouldn’t have been so important but was.
I could have shared that with Ty. If I had, maybe he would have felt comfortable doing the same. Maybe he would have let me in, that snow day when we talked about Ashley and the breakup, instead of insisting that it was nothing, that nothing had happened, that everything was fine. Maybe he would have given me the details I need to understand what went down between them, the facts I’d use to figure out what to do with this letter.
Because he didn’t hate Ashley. She might have broken his heart, but he still put her picture up in his collage.
Which meant that he still considered her a friend.
18.
ON THURSDAY I CAUSE some general confusion among our respective friends by asking Sadie to eat lunch with me. I pick a table for us in the cafeteria where I can keep an eye on Ashley Davenport. The letter is stuck under the edge of my tray, where my food sits untouched. I’m too busy to eat. I’m watching this girl who was so important to my brother that he wrote her a letter before he died. I’m planning to make my move.
I’m thankful that seniors and sophomores, by sheer coincidence, have the same lunch period. So far I’ve learned way more about Ashley in the cafeteria than I did in the gym. Like: she waves at nearly everyone who passes as they make their way down the lunch line (she’s friendly), and they wave back (she’s popular). She picks all the tiny chopped carrots out of her salad (she’s trying to lose weight?), which she nibbles with her fingers (she has bad table manners?), and she laughs a lot (she has good teeth).
She seems like a nice girl. A lovely girl, like my mom said. Inside and out.
Over at my regular table, Table Dweeb, as we like to call it, Beaker catches my eye. She keeps looking worriedly from me to Sadie and back again, like she can’t believe this turn of events: me and the shoplifter. What the heck is going on? She may be forced to stage some kind of intervention. Next to her, El glances over and gives me a smile, which I don’t know how to interpret. I don’t know what to make of her smiling at me. Maybe now it’s easier for her to like me at a distance?
And then, of course, there’s Steven. He’s reading, his tall frame curled awkwardly in the metal cafeteria chair, his head bent over his book. He pushes his glasses up on his nose and drags his lower lip between his teeth, something he does when he’s thinking all the deep thoughts. He rests his forehead against his fist, then jots something down in the margins.
I love that he writes in books.
“Hey,” Sadie whispers to me urgently. “Here’s your chance.”
I look up at Sadie. “What?”
She jerks her head in Ashley’s direction.
I turn back. Sure enough, Ashley’s friends are getting up. They give their faint “see you at practice”s and “love you”s and then they’re gone. Ashley sits picking at her carrot slivers alone.
It’s like the universe is giving me this opportunity. If I believed in that sort of thing.
Ashley reaches into the backpack at her feet and pulls out a book: Persuasion, by Jane Austen.
Yes. She even freaking reads classic literature. This girl is too good to be true.
It’s time. I slide out the letter and stand up. All of a sudden my heart starts beating like a brass band. Whomp whomp whomp.
“You can do it,” Sadie whispers.
I can do it. I can take twenty steps across the cafeteria and hand a letter to a girl.
I can say: Hi, Ty left this for you. So . . . here.
And then I can give it to her and I can turn around and walk away.
So I won’t see her face when she reads it.
Or maybe she won’t read it here, with all these people around. Maybe she’ll go to the library and find that empty corner behind the stacks. That’s what I would do. Or maybe she’ll wait until she gets home.
And maybe I should be more discreet. We’re in the middle of a crowded cafeteria. People will notice. People will be listening.
I could say, Hi, can I talk to you? and lead her to that empty corner of the library, and give it to her there.
If she’d come with me.
But people would notice that too, and then they might ask her about it.
I could mail it to her.
But then maybe her mom would find the letter first, and read it, and maybe there’s sensitive information in there. Ty could have mailed it to her if he’d wanted that. Maybe her dad would read it and maybe she and Ty had sex and he wrote about that and it would ruin her relationship with her father forever.
All of this goes through my mind and more, more questions, more junk, more variables.
I’m ten steps in the right direction now. Ten to go.
Someone says Ashley’s name. She looks up from her book and lays it on the table and smiles blindingly, a happy, excited smile. She jumps up and throws herself into a guy’s arms.
Not just any guy, either. Grayson.
One of my brother’s friends.
“I was
just thinking about you,” Ashley says.
They kiss. Not a long kiss, nothing passionate or showy or French, but a quick peck that says, We’re together. We kiss all the time, and it’s no big deal.
I’ve stopped walking. I’m standing there five steps away, watching them kiss. They pull back from each other and Grayson says something I don’t understand in his deep, rumbly-jock voice, and then he glances over Ashley’s shoulder right at me.
It’s clear that he recognizes me. His expression tightens into one part pity, one part I don’t know what, like the sight of me brings an unpleasant taste to his mouth. The same look on his face as when he and Fauxhawk brought that box to our house three days after my brother died, when the school gathered up all remaining evidence of Tyler James Riggs and delivered it to our front door.
They took Ty’s name off the roster. They even expunged his school records for the year, as if they could erase his existence altogether.
I’d bet good money they didn’t do that kind of thing with Hailey McKennett, who lost her battle with cystic fibrosis two years ago, or Sammie Sullivan, who died of complications from pneumonia, or Jacob Wright, who was killed in a car crash driving home drunk from a party at Branched Oak Lake last summer. Jacob got a tree planted for him at the front of the school, a plaque under it that I pass every day walking in that reads WE’LL MISS YOU, J. Sammie got a moment of silence during first period that year and an entire page of the yearbook devoted to her memory. They read Hailey’s name at graduation.
But Ty got his locker packed up and delivered promptly back to my mother, before we’d even had a chance to bury him.
Because it was suicide.
Because they don’t want to seem like they’re condoning it.
Ashley sees Grayson’s expression and turns to see what he’s looking at. She sees me standing there frozen. All at once a myriad of emotions pass over her face: confusion, pity, embarrassment over kissing Grayson, and, oh yes, there it is, an emotion I’m most familiar with these days, rising in her deep blue eyes.
Guilt.
I know guilt when I see it.
I do a quick 180. I leave my tray on the table and walk stiffly past Sadie and her questioning expression, past my other friends, who are looking at me too, out of the cafeteria. I go to my locker, set the letter in its place in the five-subject notebook on the top shelf, and slam the door.
I’m angry, it turns out.
The image of my mother’s face swims up in my mind, when she took the box from Grayson after he rang our doorbell, the way she tried to smile at him, to thank him, before she brought it back to the kitchen table and opened it and started crying all over again, lifting out Ty’s gym shoes and his extra deodorant and the tiny magnetic mirror that he used to smile into every day.
A-holes. All of them. A-holes.
And Ashley was kissing Grayson. My brother’s a-hole friend. The guy, if the slightly crooked nose is any indication, who Ty punched that day when he got suspended from school.
Over Ashley. Ty punched him over Ashley.
I have to consider the possibility that Ashley Davenport, that lovely girl, inside and out, the right kind of girl, the nicest, might be the biggest a-hole of them all.
“Is there still a shredder in Dad’s office?” I ask Mom when I get home.
She frowns. “Yes. Why?”
“I got a credit card application in the mail,” I explain smoothly. “I would have just thrown it out, but then I remembered that you and Dad always shred that kind of thing.”
It’s getting marginally easier to lie to my mother.
“Oh,” Mom says. “Yes, that sounds like a good idea.”
Still in the cold anger I haven’t been able to shake from school, I head down the hall to Dad’s old office. The door to this room is usually shut, as if Mom can’t stand the sight of his absence. When he lived with us he kept the door open, so he could catch us as we walked by. “Hey there, Peanut,” he’d always say when he spotted me. And I would stand in the doorway for a few minutes “shooting the breeze with the old man,” as he called it, telling him about my day at school or whatever book I was reading or the square root of some number I’d memorized.
I don’t stop to look around as I enter the office. I go straight to the shredder. I turn it on.
I take the letter out of my bag.
I want to destroy it. I want this whole mess to be over with, Ty’s unfinished business, his presence, real or not, lingering in this house, his problem, his, not mine. I want to go to college and leave this part of my life behind. Start over. Be someone else besides the-girl-whose-brother-died. I’ve earned that, I think.
I don’t want to think about Ty anymore.
I finger an edge of the envelope that’s curling up, the glue there coming unstuck. I’ve been handling it too much and the paper is showing some wear.
It would be so easy to open it and find out everything.
I want to get his explanation. In his own words, I want him to tell me why.
I catch a whiff of my brother’s cologne.
“What? You want me to give it to her?” I say.
There’s no answer.
Then I ask him the question that’s been on my mind all this time. Even though he’s probably not even here.
“Why her? Why Ashley? Why would you write her a letter, and not write one to me? Didn’t you have anything worthwhile to say to me?”
No answer. But the silence feels like an answer.
I swallow.
I think about the text.
“I refuse to feel guilty about something you did,” I mumble, but I don’t mean it.
I do feel guilty.
Every single day.
I turn the shredder off. “I got into MIT,” I whisper to the empty room.
He would have been proud of me, if he were alive. He would have known how much it meant.
19.
FRIDAY. I’M ALREADY ON EDGE when I get to school. I haven’t burned the letter or shredded it or thrown it away yet, all things I’ve been tempted to do so I don’t have to get involved in this Ashley/Ty/Grayson affair. I have it with me, still stuck in the pages of my notebook. I can’t leave it home on the off chance that someone else—insert: Mom—will find it. I can’t let anybody else find it. In that way, it belongs to me.
I’m hungry. I walk to the vending machine in the corner and fish out a crinkled dollar. I missed breakfast (i.e., Mom didn’t get up to make it, and I didn’t have the energy to pour myself a bowl of cereal). I put the dollar in. The machine spits it out. I put it in. It spits it out.
It’s worse than the Lemon. “Come on,” I plead. “I require sustenance.”
Not that there’s anything good in the machine to eat. Dried fruit. Granola bars. Whole-grain pretzels. Organic gluten-free seaweed chips. This is Nebraska, for crying out loud, land of meat, potatoes, corn, corn, and corn as the five basic food groups.
I’m suddenly struck by a memory of Ty standing in this exact spot, banging on this exact machine until a bag of dried apricots dropped into the slot. He picked it up. Scowled.
“I don’t care what the First Lady says,” he complained, loudly enough that the people around us started nodding in agreement. “This is not a Pop-Tart. I need my junk food, man. How’s a growing boy to survive on all this healthy stuff? Am I right?”
He’s right.
My throat closes. I miss him I miss him I miss him. The hole in my chest explodes. I can’t breathe I can’t breathe. There are people waiting for the machine behind me, so I don’t have time to let the hole pass on its own. I stumble to the side and force my legs to move away, down the hall to the restroom, where I almost run to the last stall and sit down on the lid of the toilet and bend my head over my knees and gasp and gasp and think maybe this drug thing Dave suggested isn’t a bad idea after all.
I’m not doing well, here. Clearly.
When the hole fills in again, my body feels achy, like I’m coming down with something. I flush
the toilet as if I was in there for a good reason. I go out, take my glasses off, and splash some water on my face. The girls on either side of me don’t say anything; they just return to meticulously washing their hands.
I lean forward to take a long look at myself in the mirror. There are dark circles under my eyes, and my lips are chapped and colorless. I swipe at a wet tendril of hair that’s clinging to my forehead, but then it just sticks to a different spot. The whites of my eyes look like road maps, veiny and red-rimmed and swollen, like I’ve been crying, even though I haven’t been crying.
I look wrecked.
This whole thing has warped me, I think. I’m a board left out in the rain, and it’s impossible to go back to being straight and undamaged ever again. This is who I am now.
The girl whose brother died.
Plus there’s the fun fact that I am losing my mind. I’m here at school freaking out about a stupid letter that my dead brother wrote for his ex—why exactly?
Because some part of me thinks that Ty’s still around. Because I think maybe that drawer being open that night and that letter being in that drawer means that he wants me to deliver it. Because, no matter how much I try to be rational, some part of me wants to believe that I am seeing his freaking ghost.
This, for some reason, makes me laugh. The sound is sharp and bounces off the tight white-tiled walls of the bathroom.
Hilarious.
One of the girls next to me gets the heck out of there—she just bolts for the door. But the other girl waits for me to pull myself together. She hands me a paper towel to dry my face. And when I put my glasses back on, I realize it’s Ashley Davenport.
Awesome.
“Hi,” she says. “I saw you come in here, and I wanted to talk to you, so . . .”
So she witnessed my little breakdown. Even more awesome.
She’s wearing a bright pink cardigan over a white sequined tank top, silvery lip gloss gleaming off her Cupid’s-bow lips, and a gold heart-shaped necklace that’s resting in the hollow of her throat. She’s beautiful. What sticks out to me most about her is that she looks . . . healthy is the word that comes to mind. Not just in her athletic legs and shiny red hair and bright eyes and dewy porcelain skin. It’s more than that. She has all the signs of a person who life has left almost completely undamaged. I bet her parents are still together and still hold hands and still kiss. I bet she volunteers for some kind of charity. I bet the most tears she’s ever shed in her whole life were over her childhood dog when it died of old age.
