A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

Table of Contents

 

 

“As poignant as it is life-affirming and as tender as it is vibrant. A must-read for adults as well as teens.”

—Steve Kluger, author of
My Most Excellent Year

“Emily Horner has written a book that could well be called
Much More than a Love Story.
It’s about friends, and hope, and letting go, and learning to love again. The story will make you want to grab a bike, take a spin, and remember how good it feels to be alive!”

—Alex Sanchez, author of
Rainbow Boys
and
The God Box

“A story so compelling, so moving, so satisfying, so honest that it kept me up way past my bedtime!”

—Nancy Garden, author of
Annie on My Mind

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An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. · Published by The Penguin Group

 

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Horner, Emily.

A love story starring my dead best friend / by Emily Horner.

p. cm.

Summary: As she tries to sort out her feelings of love, seventeen-year-old Cass, a spunky math genius with an introverted streak, finds a way to memorialize her dead best friend.

eISBN : 978-1-101-42749-1

[1. Friendship—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Sexual orientation—

Fiction. 4. Love—Fiction. 5. Lesbians—Fiction.] I. Title.

 

PZ7.H7828Lo 2010

[Fic]—dc22

2009023820

Dear Julia,

 

I’m writing this because I still turn around whenever I hear your name, and I just turned around.

This Julia is eight years old. She’s in the booth behind me with her mother and father and older brother. She has just visited the orthodontist, and there is nothing in this world that could console her. Certainly not the promise of being able to chew gum again someday. I want to tell her that it’s going to be okay, except that for the last two months people have been telling me it’s going to be okay, and they are all wrong and I want to bite their heads off.

I’m writing this on a napkin at a hot dog place outside a town called Dwight, Illinois. As long as days last in the middle of June, I was still surprised when the sun started to go down and I looked at my watch and it was eight o’clock already. Fifty-some miles on my bike today, and I’d better start looking for somewhere to spend the night.

I am going to California, just like we planned. I’m riding my bicycle there, and I know it’s an impossible distance—the rest of Illinois, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California. I’ve been doing the math, on napkins or in notebooks, to make it look like less of an impossible distance. I’ve got 2,391 miles left now, and that’s not a number that means anything, but the precision is comforting. Seventy-nine days between today and the last day of August, when I’d better get on a bus back home before school starts. Divide it out, you get a little more than thirty miles a day, and there’s something reassuring about the calculations. Like how we always did it when one of us was freaking out that we would never have time to write that fifteen-page paper, or never be able to save up enough for decent seats at the theater. It makes it look possible. It makes me forget that I can’t do this and I don’t expect to.

 

But somehow, it’s real. My mother gave me a cell phone and a credit card and sunscreen, and I am prepared for anything that could conceivably happen. And condoms, also. I can see the theoretical value in being prepared for anything, but—I just wish that you were here so I could laugh it off and make some bad joke about that being about as necessary as a zombie contingency plan. Instead of thinking about what I can’t bring myself to say.

Of course I do have a zombie contingency plan. You know how Jon wants everybody to have zombie contingency plans.

I don’t know whether I should call Oliver back. I pick up the phone and I can’t do it.

I don’t even know what I should do with this letter, because I’m writing as if there was somebody I could send it to, and there’s not.

There’s just this Tupperware box in the pannier of my bike, and it’s so light. So terribly light, with nothing in it but your ashes, but it’s not light at all. Whenever I think about it, I can barely move.

And yet somehow I keep moving, because it’s just me perched on twenty pounds of steel in motion, with infinite possibilities stretching out in front of me, a vastness that gives me vertigo. The heat on my forearms, and the wind in my hair sweeping in through the helmet vents, and the resistance against my legs as I shift the gears down to muscle myself up the hill. It turns my whole existence into my legs pedaling, my body leaning into the turns, my fingers on the brakes, my eyes on the street. It is so fast and beautiful and all-consuming that my brain doesn’t have room for anything else, and I like it that way. It means I don’t have to think about you.

 

But I do anyway.

What I am thinking, when this all looks pointless and hopeless and dumb, is that you haven’t seen the ocean yet.

I’m going to shove myself up these hills. I’m going to sleep on hard ground in my little tent. I’m going to show you the ocean.

You’ll be waiting for me there, yeah?

I
spent the summer with the smells of rain and grass and sky, and the horizon stretching out for ten miles in front of me. The basement workshop was a foreign country now, with blood and rust and sawdust in the air, and fluorescent lights that popped and flickered, and air-conditioning that made me shiver and rub my shoulders even though it was the middle of August. But I was alone with my thoughts, like I’d been all summer, and that was fine by me.

In front of me I had the sketches that Lissa drew, and an entire book of Japanese architecture marked up with Amy’s sticky notes to show how the castle and the shrine were supposed to look. But I started with something simple, marking the contours of the wood cut-outs that were supposed to stand in for bushes. Ruler, protractor, French curves.

I fell into concentration and wasn’t sure how much time had passed when I heard a voice say “Hey” from the stairs.

“Hey,” I said. I glanced up, but I couldn’t see anything more than a pair of feet from where I was.

“I was going to do some sewing down here, is that cool?”

“It’s cool.”

“Got some music, if you want. No show tunes.”

“Thank God.”

She came into view little by little—white and pink sneakers. Tights striped in rainbows. A black skirt that puffed out at the sides. A tiny girl, barely five feet, her hair tied back with a lime green scrunchie—she looked as if she’d come right out of the halls of middle school. And it was too late to say no, it was not cool, please go away.

“Heather.” I said it like I was expecting her to say,
No, I’m Heather’s good twin
.

“Guilty as charged.” With barely a nod, she sat down over in the empty seat by the stereo and handed me the CD wallet. “Choose something.”

She’d hardly said a sentence to me and already I was freezing up and wishing I could throw the CDs at her. I would’ve been ashamed to pick a fight over it. She hadn’t done anything wrong except waltz in pretending not to know me, as if there wasn’t any history between us. But I wasn’t going to go pawing through her CD collection so that we could have a secret musical soulmates thing just because we both liked Arcade Fire. So I handed it back to her.

The first song sounded of suicidally depressed fine gravel. She started sewing; I went back to my pencils and plywood. All we had to do was be civil to each other. We only had to hang out in the same room for a while, hang out with the same friends for a while, and when the play was over we’d be able to get lost from each other in the high school crowds. In the middle of two thousand students, you should be able to avoid the one you can’t stand, even if you are both rabid overachievers. Oliver told me as much, more than I wanted to hear, and when she was sitting across from me, small and harmless with needle and thread, I could almost believe it.

She stopped the disc to put in a different one. “Maybe something just a teeny bit more cheerful.” Some bouncy jangling guitars came on, but I only heard about half a verse before she stopped that too.

Quiet again. She looked me in the eye. “We’d better talk.”

The folding chair where I was sitting creaked as I swiveled around. “Can we just ignore each other like we were supposed to?”

“I want a truce.”

“A truce.” I repeated it back to her, not really believing it.

“We have got to be civil to each other for Oliver and Jon and Lissa and Amy and everybody. You probably know that better than I do. I’m not going to quit working on this play, because I make a damn fine ninja princess, and you’re not going to quit, so. As far as I can see, we don’t have much choice.”

“Does this look like open warfare to you?”

“Well, no.” She chewed on her lip. “But look at the Cold War. Everything’s all frosty and sort of polite, but the minute you make three wrong steps—poof, you’ve got nuclear winter. You can already hear everyone trying to walk on glass, you know? Like everyone’s going to start yelling at everyone if someone says the wrong thing. I mean, Ollie is—” She shook her head. “Well, you know.”