A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (3 page)

“Cassandra? I saw your bike outside.”

“Yes, I’m riding the same bike I had in middle school. Very funny.”

“Listen,” she said, “if you need a ride to the home improvement store, I’ve got plenty of cargo space.”

I started to say that I was fine, I didn’t need it, but the home improvement store was way on the edge of town, never an easy ride—and not now, with the pink bike that I’d outgrown a couple inches ago, that lacked the rack trunk and panniers that would have made hauling cargo a lot easier. Not when I’d have to figure out how to balance with lumber strapped to the seat with a bungee cord. And I was sparking with the energy of having a fun and interesting job to do, the kind of energy that makes you want to pounce on a job right away without making a plan or waiting for everything to line up perfectly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, actually, I kind of do.”

I looked at her, trying to find something on the surface that would tell me who she was and why she did anything she did, and I couldn’t even begin to guess at her motives, or figure out whether or not I could put even a thread of trust in her. But she just shrugged and started to walk to her car, waving me forward over her shoulder.

I took the front wheel off my bike and loaded it into the trunk of her little black SUV, and we were off. For a while we didn’t talk, and Heather spun between the radio stations so that we would have something to break the silence.

“So, are you ever going to explain why you’re not going back to St. Joseph’s next year?”

“Oh, you know Catholic schools. The gangs, the drugs, the violence.”

“No, really.”

Quiet. “Aw, hell,” she said in the end. “I guess I have to start somewhere. Have you ever had one of those breakups that is so boiling-in-oil painful that you can’t even stand to go to the same school anymore, lest you catch a glimpse of their face in the hallway and start crying all over your math test?”

“No,” I said honestly. “But I get the running away from your problems part. It’s stupid, though, right? They always end up following us around anyway.”

I looked over at Heather, her head silhouetted in the driver’s-side window, resting just for a moment on her outstretched fingertips. “It doesn’t work?”

“Well,” I said ruefully, “maybe next time I’ll try something faster than a bike.”

M
onths before Heather came back from St. Joseph’s, months before Julia died and I got it into my head to ride my bike to California, it was just a normal winter. A normal Saturday night in February, when Jon picked
Rent
and Amy picked
Zatoichi: The Blind Swordsman
and we watched them back to back on the big screen in Ollie’s basement. It didn’t feel portentous. It didn’t feel like the beginning of something.

Oliver and Julia curled up on the couch, heads together, nuzzling each other in the show-offy way high school couples have; Amy had her perch on the computer chair where she could look up movie trivia; Lissa was standing by the doorway in a T-shirt that had been stitched together out of three different ones, stirring cookie batter and defying anyone to call her domestic. Jon and I were lying on our stomachs in front of the TV, sharing a bag of Cheez Doodles. A merlot from Ollie’s parents’ wine cellar was going around too—that, the big-screen TV, and the grand piano were the main reasons we usually hung out at Ollie’s. I think the merlot is some explanation for what happened after we had watched the movies and flicked through all the commentary that we wanted to see.

Julia sat up and declared, quietly and sincerely, “There should be a musical about ninjas.”

“Sweet,” Ollie replied.

“And there would be a song called ‘Seasons of Blood.’”

Then, of course, someone started singing it.

When Julia was fourteen, she went away to drama camp for a summer. That was the summer after eighth grade, the summer after we’d decided that neither one of us would ever be cool, or popular, but we could at least stick together. She came back an inch taller and bubbly in a way she’d never been before—and all of a sudden she had friends. That first day of high school, she dragged me to the theater nerds’ lunch table and introduced me to everybody she’d met over the summer and cracked jokes and talked about the auditions next week, while I sat there quiet and anxious. They crowned Julia Queen of the Nerds, and no wonder: She was brilliant with lyrics and a melody. She had written odes to the school attendance policy, the ancient physics teacher, the swim team (whose record was an astonishing 0-9), and Newtonian mechanics, all in notes passed during eighth-period physics.

It was normal for them to burst into song, to toss little pieces of a melody around like a game of four square, bouncing from one person to the next. It was disconcertingly like living in a Broadway musical. But then there was me, the one who couldn’t even carry a tune, and I didn’t have anything to say. By sophomore year, I’d started to wonder if someday I wouldn’t have anything to say to Julia at all.

We’d been friends since third grade, when my parents had finally given up trying to pretend it was bohemian and edgy to live in the slightly scary part of Chicago and moved to the suburbs. Even then there was a line between the kids who wore the right clothes and watched the right TV shows and the ones who didn’t—and I was firmly on the latter side. Not to Julia, though.

“You lived in Chicago!” she said. “Once my parents took me into Chicago to see the opera and we went to a restaurant where they wanted me to try the oysters and they were really gross, but the opera was the best thing I have seen in my whole life.” I’d sure never been to the opera. But it was enough to make her think I was cool, when nobody else did, and just like that we were friends.

And we stayed friends, even though we didn’t actually have that much in common, aside from being total nerds and devastatingly unpopular. I went to protests and mathletes competitions, she went to Shakespeare in the Park and the art museum. But we usually went together, even the math competition when we carpooled with this guy who planned to crack every major unsolved problem in mathematics before he got to college, and carried a book of them around so that no one ever forgot he was working on it. Even when Shakespeare in the Park did
Twelfth Night
with finger puppets. We were friends not because we always had things to say to each other but because we could sit beside each other with nothing to say; we understood each other’s little gestures and unspoken words.

When we started this year, Julia’s skin had totally cleared up and she’d turned out pretty and almost popular, nerd-popular, with a boyfriend and her drama friends. This year I called her more than she called me. This year she cancelled our plans—not often. Just a couple of times. And maybe it was just because everyone was saying we absolutely couldn’t screw up junior year if we wanted to get into college, and we didn’t seem to have time to breathe between homework and extracurriculars. But maybe not. Maybe she already didn’t need me, and she was just waiting for me to notice. But if I thought that, I didn’t say anything. I still needed her, as long as she’d keep me around.

I don’t know whether she twigged to any of this. When we left Ollie’s and got in her car she was still chattering on, with bits of plot, bits of music—“There should definitely be a betrayal in there somewhere—and, like, kotos, and shamisens, and, what else is Japanese?” And then she interrupted herself, stopped short.

“Hey, Cassie?”

“Yeah?”

“Got any plans for summer?”

So deep in winter, summer seemed like nothing so much as an illusion someone had made up to keep us from committing suicide en masse. It was way too early for plans.

“Not really. Going to music camp again?”

She stuck out her tongue. “I’ve been working double-time all year on one play after another, and if it’s not rehearsals, it’s voice lessons. Which is fine, but clearly I don’t need to go to the middle of nowhere to do more music.” She brightened. “Which brings me to my topic. Going to the middle of nowhere just because we can! You, me, here to California. How about it?”

Yes! I said in my head. “Ollie won’t perish without your constant presence?”

“He just plays up the angsty pretty-boy thing to get girls.”

“Obviously it works.”

Julia snickered, and no matter how many times it happened it felt like a surprise, and a relief, when she had a sense of humor about their being attached morning, noon, and night. She was still my Julia, after all.

“Your parents okay with you going that far?”

“My car works okay. I won’t be by myself, and it’s not like I’ll be with a guy. As long as I call home every ten minutes so they know I wasn’t carried off by bears, they’re okay with it. It’s probably the least trouble I could get into this summer.” She paused a minute, then glanced at me. “Oh.”

“Oh” meant this: When I was happy with them, I considered my parents quirky and supportive. When I wasn’t, they were outdated, overprotective fascists. We had rules like no TV in the house until I was twelve, and no cable even then. Like no car for me until I’m eighteen and have the money to pay for it myself, because of global warming and smog and how I have two legs that work just fine. They wanted to shield me from fast food, advertising, and the military-industrial complex. I wondered if there was the slightest chance they would let me take off on my own for a whole summer.

“No harm in asking.” I grinned.

I didn’t even care that much whether we got a yes or a no; there was something sweet and triumphant in knowing that she would ask me at all. But even if I didn’t care that much, there was a lot of begging and pleading and promises to be careful.

In the end, it was a yes. We got photo books out of the library, Route 66: Chicago to Santa Monica. We lay beside each other in her bedroom, pointing at maps, finding landmarks and tourist traps, and checking on the Internet with the same reckless abandon of planning that we’d always thrown at everything we wanted but couldn’t have right away—as if getting all the fiddly details to line up would bring the summer on that much sooner.

 

 

Then came the May night when my parents woke me up at three, and Ollie picked me up and drove me to school in the pouring rain—the way he and Julia always picked me up so I wouldn’t get soaked—and locked himself in the music room for the whole day, and you could hear the wrong notes and the crashing chords on the far side of the hall in my French class. I couldn’t play music. I couldn’t even speak. I sort of mumbled
“Je ne comprends pas,”
I don’t understand, when Madame called on me, and let her pass on to the next person. I didn’t understand. Her goneness was too big to hold in my hands, too slippery to grab at.

It was all planned out, which towns we’d stop in for the night if we made good time, and which diners the Internet forums recommended, and which landmarks we could stop at. So the worst that could happen was that we’d get a late start, get lost, blow a tire in the middle of nowhere. This was not in the picture. It was senseless. It was random. She’d been out late, trying to get home by curfew and driving too fast, and the road was dark and twisty and slick with rain. And I wished that it could be someone’s fault, but it wasn’t. And I didn’t let myself think that it was. It was just what happened.

It pressed against my heart until I thought I couldn’t breathe anymore.

 

 

I don’t remember anything about those days. I was sleepwalking and silent. I went to my classes because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, made careless mistakes on tests. It was a fuzzy dark limbo in the space between Julia and After Julia, until the memorial drew that bright line to the other side.

 

 

I didn’t like to go to church. Sundays I went to the Friends meetinghouse with my parents, but that was different. It was small and house-shaped and I knew almost everyone at least well enough to nod and say hi.

Real churches made me nervous; everything was dark, old wood, impossibly solemn. My eyes kept darting around to every corner, as if I expected somebody to be watching me, to realize how out of place I was and how I was doing things wrong.

Last time I’d been there was Christmas, with Julia in her green velvet dress, singing about the bleak midwinter and angels we have heard on high. And I stared at her until I thought everybody could see me staring, and then I had to turn away, look at every window, at the saints and martyrs and apostles in jewel colors.

Now I tried to match stories to the stained-glass windows, but when I saw the martyr struck through with arrows, the reality of death, and the weight of it all, fell down upon me, and my jaw tensed up all the way to my neck, and the windows dissolved into bright colors and blurred shapes. I laid my hands on the sharp splintery wood of the pew in front of me and put my head on my arms.

Then I felt a hand clamp down over mine and looked up. Jon sat beside me, carefully groomed, bleached tips of his hair dyed back to a soft brown.
He
belonged here, even if he didn’t, really. He knew this church.

He leaned in and whispered, “I promised myself I wouldn’t set foot in this place again.” He quirked his eyebrows, like he might have laughed in other circumstances. “I promised the pastor too.”

“That bad?”

“You didn’t hear about it?”

I shook my head. “Not the details.”

“That’s probably for the best. Let’s just say it was pretty colorful.”

Jon was Julia’s very first friend, from Sunday school, and youth group after that, and of course—especially— choir. He sang with a clear, dark, sweet tenor that stopped people in their tracks and made them listen, and he always got the good solos. It was a voice that made the girls swoon.

He fell in with the drama nerds in ninth grade, right after Julia introduced him around, and it was like she’d given him permission to be someone he wasn’t allowed to be. It was like he’d come back from the dead, grinning at random moments and bouncing into rooms. At first I didn’t know why.