The Last Time We Say Goodbye

by Cynthia Hand

  She’s not an a-hole, I think. She’s a nice girl.

  But that doesn’t change how I feel.

  “There’s nothing I want to talk about,” I say. “Not with you.”

  She puts her hand on my arm. Gently, but insistently. “Wait. I know you saw me and Grayson in the cafeteria yesterday. You looked upset, so I thought, you might have thought . . .”

  “I might have thought what?” I challenge. “That you cheated on my brother?”

  Her eyes widen. “But I didn’t cheat on Ty. I would never. He broke up with me, not the other way around. I would never have cheated on Ty. I—”

  “But what about the fight? When Ty punched Grayson? Why would he do that?”

  She bows her head. “I was . . . sad after Ty broke it off. He didn’t even tell me why. He just came up to me that morning and said things weren’t working out between us. He said he was sorry, and then he walked off. I was shocked. I thought we were—I cried. I was upset. People thought he was being a jerk. And the next day Grayson said something rude to Ty about it, and . . .”

  “Ty hit him,” I fill in.

  She squeezes my arm. “I wasn’t into Grayson back then. We just started dating like a week ago. I swear.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  Her lip starts trembling. A tear shines on the edge of her eye.

  I wish I could cry so easily.

  “Your brother was an amazing guy,” she continues. “Everybody liked him. They were only mad at him because of me, but they would have gotten over it. . . . I don’t know why he would . . .” She pauses, of course she does, but then she looks at me like I’m going to tell her now, why Ty did it, why someone like my brother, who everybody liked, who was cute and funny and popular, thought his existence was so terrible that he chose to end it.

  Because I’m his sister. I should know the reasons why.

  “I should have realized that he was . . . I didn’t know . . .” She lets go of my arm and presses her lips together, like she’s about to start really crying. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry, Lex.”

  “I have to go.” I back away from Ashley, then push out of the bathroom and into the noisy, crowded hall. I walk on autopilot back to my locker. I lean against it, watching everybody pass by, ready to head toward class, ready to start their days.

  I lean my head back until it touches the cool metal of the locker, and close my eyes.

  She didn’t dump him. She didn’t cheat on him.

  It’s not her fault.

  She doesn’t even know why he broke up with her. Which makes Ty the a-hole in this scenario.

  My eyes snap open. I unzip my backpack, pull out my five-subject notebook, and retrieve the letter. I don’t give myself any time to think about what I’m doing. I don’t make a plan.

  I just head down to room 121B.

  I wait outside the door for the students to trickle in.

  “Hey, Lex,” Damian says, slinking up to me. He gives his head a little shake to get his hair out of his eyes. Smiles. Fidgets. “Fancy meeting you here.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you finish Heart of Darkness?”

  I nod distractedly. “Oh, the horror.”

  He laughs. “The horror. So what are you doing here? Not that I’m complaining. But aren’t you a little old for this class?”

  “An errand,” I say. “I’m running an errand. Hey, uh, it’s good to see you, Damian, but you should probably . . .” I gesture toward the classroom. “I don’t want to be responsible for you getting marked tardy.”

  “It’s good to see you, too,” he says, smiling his painful-looking smile again, and then he goes to take his seat.

  Ashley shows up just as the bell rings. This time she doesn’t bowl me over when she appears from around the corner. She slows down when she sees me, suddenly unsure of herself. Then she stops.

  “Hi,” she says.

  “Hi,” I say back. “Sorry about before. Sometimes I get overwhelmed by . . . everything.”

  She bites her lip. For some reason she looks frightened. Maybe she can sense what’s coming.

  “I was wrong, earlier,” I say quickly, and before I can lose my nerve, I pull the letter from the inside pocket of my coat and hold it out. It trembles between us. “This is for you. From Ty.”

  If it’s possible for her face to get any whiter, it does. Even her lips drain of color. She doesn’t reach for the letter.

  “Take it,” I say, thrusting it at her. “He wants—he wanted you to have it.”

  She takes it.

  I feel lighter the second the envelope leaves my hand.

  Ashley stares down at it, her eyes tracing Ty’s sloppy letters spelling her name.

  “I didn’t read it,” I feel compelled to tell her. “I don’t know what it says, but it’s for you.” I can’t think of what else to say, and we’re both late to class, so I whisper, “I’m sorry,” although I don’t know what I’m apologizing for, for Ty or for me, and then I walk away.

  I hope it’s the right thing. It feels like the right thing. Probably. Maybe.

  But at least it’s all over with now. It’s done.

  9 March

  My parents used to tell this story, over and over, year after year, about the first time I ever saw Ty.

  According to family legend, I was playing at the park by my house when it happened. I was on the swings being pushed by my grandmother, who’d been looking after me while my mother was at the hospital. When my parents came into view, walking slowly across the grass toward us, Grandma lifted me out of the bucket swing, set me on the ground, gave me a little push, and said, “Go. Meet your brother.”

  I ran to my parents.

  They’d prepped me about this, of course, with months of talking about a new baby brother and what a good big sister I’d be, feeling Mom’s distended belly, singing to it, reading books about how we have to be quiet when the baby’s sleeping and we have to sit down to hold the baby and never poke the baby in the eye. They’d shown me the new baby’s freshly painted room and moved me into a “big girl bed” so he could have my crib. They’d even bought me a T-shirt that had the words BIG SISTER in silvery sparkly letters across the chest. I was wearing it, that day. Or so they tell me.

  It was a lot of hype. Too much hype, probably.

  When I reached them, my dad knelt and showed me the blue-wrapped bundle in his arms: a tiny disgruntled person with a round, purplish face, eyelids that were so swollen it was hard to tell what color the eyes were, and a head that bore only a small thin tuft of brown hair.

  He wasn’t the best-looking baby, my brother.

  I looked at him.

  He looked at me.

  Then he went cross-eyed.

  “He’s not cute” is what I famously said, clearly disappointed. “I thought he was going to be cute.”

  Apparently I’ve always had a problem with calling it like I see it.

  But then I laid my hand on the top of the baby’s nearly hairless head. “Hello, brother,” I said, by way of introduction.

  “Tyler,” Mom provided. “His name is Tyler.”

  “Ty,” I confirmed. “Can I hold him?”

  I sat down cross-legged right there in the grass, and Dad laid Ty carefully in my lap. I looked up at Mom and smiled. “He’s mine,” I announced. “My baby. Mine.”

  Yep, that’s how the story goes. 2 minutes into meeting my baby brother, I claimed him as my own personal property. He may not have been cute, but he was my brother. Mine.

  I realize that almost everybody has a story like this. It’s not unique. I read somewhere that approximately 80% of Americans have at least one brother or sister. There’s a predictable formula to these stories: Older sibling meets younger. Older sibling says something cute (or rude, or funny, but always cute) and everyone laughs, and the older sibling eventually gets used to the idea that he/she isn’t the center of the world anymore. There’s a reason we tell these stories again and again—because they define us.


  The first time I was a sister.

  The first time we were all together as a family.

  Now I try to remember that day as more than a story I’ve heard. I try to call up the wind on my face as I ran across the field. My heart thumping. My dad smiling as he crouched down. The smooth heat of Ty’s head under my fingers. The smell of baby powder and garden roses. The grass prickly against my knees.

  But I don’t know if any of that is real, or just a bunch of happy details I imagine to fill in the blanks of my parents’ fairy tale, which they’ve told so many times it’s started to feel like memory. I was 2 years old when Ty was born.

  But I do remember this:

  He cried. I think he cried every night, really, but I remember this one particular night. I woke to the sound of him crying, a thin wail that filled the house. I got out of bed and padded in stocking feet into his room, then boosted myself over the railings of the crib and lay down beside him.

  He stopped crying to look at me.

  I pulled his blanket back over him. He’d kicked it off. He was cold.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of you.”

  We stayed that way for I don’t know how long, looking at each other.

  Then Dad was there, smiling down at both of us, his hand cupping the back of my head, and he said, “Well, look at you two, all quiet and cozy. You calmed him right down. Well done, Peanut. Well done.”

  And I remember being proud. I had made things right when they were wrong.

  20.

  ON MONDAY, SADIE SHOWS UP at my back door before school. Just like when we were eight years old, when she’d stand on the steps and tap on the glass sliding door, like Can Lexie come out to play? until Mom heard her and let her in.

  “Lex!” Mom calls down the hall. “You have a visitor.”

  I come running.

  “Think fast.” Sadie throws me a Pop-Tart, cherry, my favorite—she still remembers my favorite. “Breakfast is served,” she says.

  I glance over at Mom to see if she’s offended by the notion that Sadie apparently believes she has to feed me, but Mom is leaning against the kitchen doorway smiling the nostalgia smile.

  “I thought we’d wait for the bus together,” Sadie says cheerfully, even though I know she doesn’t typically ride the bus. “Two freezing ass—backsides are better than one, I always say.”

  “Indeed,” I say.

  Mom laughs in that muted way she has now of just breathing out her nose. “It’s good to see you again, Sadie. How are you?”

  “I’m stellar, thanks,” Sadie answers. “What’s going on with you?”

  It’s an awkward question these days, but better than “How are you?,” which we can never answer truthfully, and Sadie asks it in a completely casual tone. Mom doesn’t lose the smile.

  “Lex got into MIT, did she tell you?”

  Sadie swings her gaze to me. Blank face.

  “Massachusetts Institute of Technology,” I explain, my cheeks heating.

  Mom puffs. “It’s the best mathematics program in the country.”

  Sadie gives a low whistle. “Congrats, Lex. Wow.”

  I stare at my sneakers. “Thanks.”

  “She’s going to do amazing things,” Mom says.

  Sadie nods. “No doubt.”

  This is getting to be too much. “Come on.” I grab my backpack in one hand and readjust my grip on the Pop-Tart with the other and lunge for the door. “We have to go if we don’t want to miss the bus.”

  “You girls have a good day at school,” Mom calls as Sadie follows me out.

  Like we are eight years old again.

  “Your mom hasn’t changed much,” Sadie comments as we stand waiting.

  It’s funny, her saying that.

  My mom has changed so much since Sadie and I were best friends.

  I have changed so much.

  But every now and then it’s like we’re allowed to act like our old selves. It comes back. If only for a moment.

  “I gave the letter to Ashley,” I confess to Sadie when we’re sitting in the front seat of the bus, the heater blowing loud and hot across our knees.

  “Whoa,” Sadie says. “What made you decide to finally do it? Last time I saw you—”

  “I talked to her,” I say before she recounts her own rendition of the Ashley-kisses-Grayson debacle. “She told me her side. Ty dumped her, not the other way around. Apparently he didn’t even give her a reason. So I thought the letter might provide some explanation.”

  “You still didn’t read it.”

  I shake my head.

  “God,” Sadie says. “You and the iron self-control.”

  We don’t talk for a while. Sadie plugs some earbuds into her phone and I do the same with mine. Sadie’s music choice: rap, by the sound of it. Mine: Rachmaninoff. We cruise along through the endless white cornfields. Then Sadie pulls one bud out and turns to me.

  “So, Massachusetts,” she says. “That’s a long way.”

  “Yes. It is.”

  “It’s good news, though, right?”

  “Right. But it’s going to be hard, leaving my mom.”

  “She’s not going with you?”

  I frown at her, boggled by the idea. “You don’t usually bring your parents to college with you, Sade. That would be weird.”

  Sadie gives me a half smile. “I’ll look after her, if you want.”

  “What are you going to do after graduation?”

  She shrugs. “Find a job.”

  “You’re not planning on college?”

  “School’s not really my thing.” She grimaces like the idea of college is physically painful.

  “You’re smart, though, Sadie,” I argue.

  She looks startled.

  “You are,” I insist. “You should go to college.”

  She sits back, surprised and pleased, and stares out the window for a while.

  “I’m not smart like you are,” she says.

  “Well.” I hold up my hands. “Nobody’s smart like I am. Obviously.”

  She grins. “Right. You’re MIT material.”

  “I’m MIT material,” I agree, and it feels good, that someone else knows.

  We go back to listening to our respective music for a while. Sadie’s head bobs. I close my eyes and try to get lost in the Piano Concerto no. 2.

  Sadie taps on my arm. I pull out my earbud.

  “You were brave, giving the letter to Ashley.” Her black-ringed blue eyes, so close to mine, are earnest, admiring. “That took guts.”

  “It took forever before I actually did something about it,” I say.

  “True, but you did something.”

  True.

  “And now Ty can move on,” she says, lowering her voice when she says his name so people don’t hear. “He can be at peace now.”

  I don’t know whether or not to believe her. But, for once, I hope she’s right.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Maybe now things will start to get back to normal.”

  When we get to school, it’s immediately apparent that something’s wrong. It’s too quiet. Students are standing in groups, whispering, the boys with their heads down, the girls looking tearful. Even the teachers are somber as they shuffle toward their classrooms.

  Something has happened.

  I don’t like the way people are looking at me. There’s a new awareness in their stares, which burns me before they turn away and go back to their hushed conversations. Something has happened that involves me in some way.

  My brain goes straight to the letter for Ashley. It must have had something to do with me, and she must be telling people about it.

  I knew I should have read the dumb letter. Why didn’t I read the dumb letter?

  I spot Damian standing by the door to the counselor’s office. He’s crying. He sees me, and he starts crying harder.

  My heart is ice as I approach him.

  “Hey,” I rasp nervously. “Are you okay? What’s going on?”

  �
��Patrick Murphy is dead,” he chokes out. “He was a sophomore. He was my friend. He was—”

  I know who Patrick Murphy is. One of the three amigos.

  “How?” I ask, but part of me already knows the answer.

  “He killed himself.” He wipes a fat tear that rolls down his chin and gives me a look that’s pure despair. “At the train yard, about an hour ago.”

  My vision goes white. I lean against the wall and wait for the color to return. When it does, I’m so angry my hands are shaking. I know it’s inappropriate and completely selfish, but at that moment, I’m furious at Patrick. Not for doing something so stupid as dying. Not that. But for the way I know my mother’s face is going to look when she hears the news. I’m mad at the way, just five minutes ago, I’d finally felt like I had the ground under my feet for the first time since Ty died.

  And now this.

  Damian goes back to crying, hard, like he doesn’t care who’s watching, his thin shoulders racked by sobs.

  I think, if I put my hand out and touch him on the shoulder, will it make it better or worse for him?

  I think, if I put my hand out and touch his shoulder, will I be able to hold it together myself?

  I think, no.

  “I’m sorry,” I murmur. I don’t know if he hears me.

  Then I back away.

  There are so many people crying. I walk among them like a zombie. I think, I have to keep moving. I have a big German test later. I have to keep my grades up for MIT. I have to pass with flying colors. I have to keep going.

  But the ground is flying out from under me.

  Something roars in my head. I hate everything, in this moment. I hate the world. I hate life.

  Ty.

  Now Patrick.

  Another boy dead.

  21.