A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (4 page)

Jon and Julia dated for three weeks in eighth grade, and then, without much explanation from either Jon or Julia, we were all friends again, and went on as if nothing had happened. She must have known, but he didn’t come out to his parents, and to the rest of us, until last year. Nobody was surprised—he was always a little, well, fabulous—and my skin crawled with the wink-and-nod of it all. It just wasn’t right to speculate and make assumptions about someone who happened to like musicals and great shoes. People had been making assumptions about me too.

Something happened after he came out, and everything got very tense for a while. It’s one of those stories that hangs in the air but never gets discussed, and if you’re lucky you’ll hear it through the grapevine, but if you’re me, then you’ll never summon up the courage to ask anyone about it directly. Whether he quit or got kicked out, he was out of the church choir, out of church altogether. He flew his Gay Pride flag high and made lewd comments about Bible study club. There was a weird atmosphere when we went over to his place, like he would spontaneously combust if he stayed around his parents for any longer than absolutely necessary. I could see why. There were actually Precious Moments cross-stitches hanging on the wall. And one in Jon’s room, which he had pointedly taken down and laid facing the wall, because “You never know. I might have a person over. Someday.”

So yesterday he’d said he wasn’t coming to the memorial at all. But here he was.
Oh, because Julia can talk him down from just about anything
, I thought—and I caught myself thinking it, and had to remember again that she wasn’t here anymore.

The organ sounded, and feet shuffled. Jon tugged at my arm and I got up, a second after everyone else. The choir started filing to the front, a wave of bright white. I fumbled around in the hymn book, blinking until I could see words again, with Jon’s finger pointing me to the right spot. I looked up at him then. I could not remember ever seeing him so hard and determined and sincere.

He took three steps to the left, and he was among them, black suit sticking out, but they parted and rearranged themselves to let him in. Had he planned this, is that why he’d dyed his hair and worn a suit? Or was it just a sudden, certain whim? I hoped for a second that it wasn’t a prank, but of course it wasn’t. He carried himself like one of them, one of the ones who could sing about God without any sarcasm or bitterness showing through. Right now I wouldn’t even have trusted myself to do that.

“The king of love my shepherd is, whose goodness faileth never. I nothing lack if I am His, and He is mine forever.” I kept my finger on the lines, in the hymn book, not trusting myself to look up at him.

Just the day before he’d sworn off the funeral.

“In death’s dark vale I fear no ill with Thee, dear Lord, beside me.”

Today I could make out his voice, even in that crowd of twenty or thirty. At first he sang loud, and defiant, his voice ringing high above all the rest.

And then, at the end, even that was gone. It wasn’t a protest, a point to make. He just sang.

 

 

We came down to the cemetery with flowers a few days later. Didn’t go near Julia’s headstone, though; we walked long, slow circles around the perimeter, saying almost nothing. Oliver and Jon and Lissa and Amy and me, and I realized again that they all would have been friends with each other anyway, because they all worked on the same plays and saw each other in music theory class, but the only tenuous thread that connected me to any of them was Julia.

“What was that about?” Ollie finally asked, and we all knew what he meant.

Jon shrugged. “I have a bad habit of doing the first thing that pops into my head.”

“But it’s you,” Amy said, exasperated, and we all knew what she meant.

He shrugged again, a studied, elaborate gesture. “Yeah, and it’s exhausting being me, sometimes.”

“Weren’t you scared somebody was going to take it the wrong way?” I asked. “Like it was some political thing, or whatever?”

“What do I care if they think that? It’s not like I was singing for them.”

He broke off from the path we’d been circling and wended his way among the gravestones. “Julia’s the only person who really argued with the pastor on my behalf, and argued with me on his behalf too. Like she was trying to get two of her friends to stop having a stupid fight.”

“That’s how she was,” Lissa said, winding her fingers around thin dark braids. “Remember in tenth grade when our social studies teacher wanted us to pretend that American history was a medley of freedom and rainbows without any complications like genocide? That would’ve ended in a riot if not for her.”

And that was the weird part, wasn’t it? I was the pacifist one, at least in theory. But she was the one who actually knew how to cool tempers and smooth rough bits over and smack people and tell them to grow up when they needed to hear that. Not me.

Jon shook his head. “I just wanted her to stop it, and let me be. I thought I was being all bad-ass by refusing to have anything to do with them.”

He knelt down to the ground, by her headstone. Picked a blade of grass, and peeled it apart, gathering all the pieces in his hands. That was familiar. When we all used to sit under the big oak tree to eat lunch, he would shred the grass obsessively when he was nervous. But this time he was doing it with such meticulous slowness, as if fighting a losing battle against the habit.

“After they’re dead seems like a stupid time to finally listen to someone, and it seems like everyone keeps trying to tell me what I can feel or can’t feel. I’m still trying to figure out if I believe in God or I don’t believe in God or believe in a God I don’t even want anything to do with, whether I’m even supposed to hope against all the hope in the world that there’s still a place for Julia somewhere. I thought it was that complicated. But it’s not. I just can’t not sing for her. I can’t.”

And where it was just us, away from the nineteenth-century hymns and the stained glass, they picked up songs and sang at her grave. Not sad songs, but songs she liked, songs she’d hum while doing homework or dance to when they came on MTV. All of us, grass-stained and heartbroken; me, off-key and singing anyway. Because Julia used to tell me to.

We started reassembling our old routines, bit by bit. We started hanging out under the big oak tree for lunch again. And then, one day a week and a half after the memorial, Ollie came up to us holding a huge sheaf of paper in his hands.

“You know how Julia was working on a big secret project?”

“Wait, that was a
real
secret project?” Amy said. “I sort of assumed the secret project was making out with you.” And I snickered, even though I shouldn’t have snickered, because every so often I would e-mail her or pass her a note inviting her somewhere, and she’d just answer CAN’T, SEKRIT PROJECT. And then I’d assume the same thing.

“Much more exciting than that,” Ollie said, and he started passing out his photocopies—thick enough that they were held together with the big industrial-size staples. The first page bore its title in a big typewriter font:

“This is what we’re going to do,” Ollie said.

I
t’s intimate, putting on a musical. Like staying with someone else’s family. Everyone was working on the same thing (even when they were doing it separately, and in silence), and we were in each other’s hair all the time, having tiny arguments about what music to listen to or eating our sandwiches together in the classroom we’d commandeered, or having collective meltdowns at three in the afternoon when everyone was tired and cranky and on their last nerve. I was in the habit of staying out of it, working in the basement, making my own plans on my own time. It felt comfortable that way. But more and more, I tried to push myself upstairs, and eat lunch with the rest of them, and remind myself that these were my friends too. They weren’t just putting up with me.

For three years now, they’d been trying out for nearly every play the school put on, throwing themselves into large parts or small parts or no part at all except helping out with the technical bits. This was different. We didn’t have a teacher organizing everything and telling us what to do; we just had Ollie, and he wasn’t organized enough to tell any of us what to do.

But even though we had less than two weeks to go before school started, and I didn’t see how we were ever going to finish on time, somehow we were pulling things together. Oliver was slowly assembling a band out of the school orchestra and the school jazz band. Lissa took over control of the freshninjas from Amy, and for all that she was a short, quiet girl with a hint of a Haitian accent, she knew how to yell when something needed to get done, and intimidated them so much that they settled meekly down to the painting and sweeping and turpentining that she assigned to them.

I’d read enough of the play by now to know about the freshninjas. In the second scene—right after Loud Ninja, Buddhist Ninja, and Flamboyant Ninja, as played by Amy, Lissa, and Jon, sing their song about how great ninjas are—the ninja princess’s entire clan gets attacked by the army of a feudal lord. Nearly everyone, in both the army and the ninja clan, dies in an impossibly gory spree of blood spatter, leaving the ninja princess and the three surviving ninjas to seek vengeance. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised that it was easy for Ollie to find forty people who wanted nothing more than to die a suitably bloody and spectacular death onstage.

A few days after Heather drove me to the hardware store, I heard clashing and violence going on somewhere above my head. I crept up the stairs and into the theater, and tried to find an inconspicuous seat at the end of the fifth row. I was still a little frightened of seeing too much of Julia there, and yet . . . I wanted that too; it was really Julia, not some construct that I’d made up in my head. It was weird and silly and dramatic, and I missed that.

They were rehearsing the sword fighting now; no songs there, just panting breaths and the clicking of balsawood sword against balsawood sword. Ollie and Heather, darting close to each other and away again, parrying each other’s blows.

Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
was a pretty conventional story of revenge and doomed love. Ollie was Hiromasa, a samurai who served a powerful daimyo, a feudal lord, while Heather was Himiko, the ninja princess whose family had been killed by the daimyo’s army. Obviously, the two of them were destined to fall in love—and we all knew that Julia must have written the part thinking of herself, even if she knew she was a better writer than a singer/actress/sword fighter. And this was the scene where Himiko, vowing to avenge her family, came to murder Hiromasa, managed to catch him alone, and ended up falling in love with his swordsmanship.

She was dressed in a tight-fitting belted black gi, a cartoon picture of a ninja outfit, with a lace trim because she was the princess. Bright white against the darkness. She sank into a crouch, spun out a kick, grabbed at her ankle for a knife and leaped up again; she moved like water. Dark hair floated out around her face, seeming lighter than air for a second. Ollie attacked and she parried, and then drove him back against a wall with a knife at his throat.

“My family is dead because of you.”

“They weren’t innocents. You know that as well as I do.”

“And neither am I. What do I care about innocence in the eyes of a lord who feasts on the taxes of starving peasants? I’ll have my revenge.”

“Kill me, then,” Ollie panted.

And then, taking her knife, she drew it across his face; not to kill him, but to maim him, so that she’d be able to see him for the killer that he was, and not the very pretty man standing a few inches from her face.

“You won’t see me coming, the next time I come for you,” she whispered dramatically. “You’ll jump every time you hear a rat shiver in the darkness. Every time you hear a cicada take off from a leaf. But you’ll be dead before you can turn around.”

It was just rehearsal. No lighting, no music, no fake blood on Ollie’s cheek. None of the artifice that makes the actors change from the people you eat lunch with to imaginary people from hundreds of years ago. But it made me go wow inside, for how much of Julia I could still see in it, and for everything else. Heather played Himiko as graceful and deadly at once, swift and athletic and—impressive.

I whistled from my seat in the back.

“I am forgiven my casting decision?” Ollie asked.

I raised my hands in surrender. “Well. She does make a pretty good ninja princess.”

But it hadn’t ever been about that part, had it? It was about loyalty. It was about sticking up for one another. The same time as part of me was thinking about it logically, thinking that they’d been lucky to find anyone who’d make a really good ninja princess, the other part of me was still thinking, Why did it have to be her?

“Whoo-hoo!” she said, grinning as if all that wasn’t between us. She brandished her sword and made a few feints at Ollie—then something caught her feet and she tripped, collapsing head over heels.

She started to pick herself up, and she looked at me and just started giggling like a wild thing, and fell over again.

“You show-off.” Ollie shook his head and hauled her to her feet. And I tried not to smile. I wished I could pretend like she did that everything was okay. I’d told her I would—told her I’d try, anyway. But I kept seeing her sitting beside me in class, back in eighth grade, and whispering with her friends just loudly enough that I could pick out the contempt in her voice, occasionally smirking in my direction. Or when I was in the middle of telling Julia that my mom was taking me shopping for new clothes over the weekend, and she interrupted all fake-nice how great it was that I was finally getting new clothes, and was I going to Goodwill?