A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (5 page)

It wasn’t as if I stood out. I couldn’t wear designer labels, and usually Mom just raised her eyebrows if I picked up something with rhinestones or sequins or anything that she called a ridiculous fad. I wore jeans and T-shirts and didn’t care, really, one way or another, but Heather had seized on what she could.

Middle school is like an iceberg, though, everything dangerous under the surface. I heard plenty of rumors and innuendo about me thirdhand, even though she almost never said anything I could confront her directly on, if I’d had the guts to confront her in the first place. But then I’d overheard her teasing Jon—I couldn’t even remember now what it was about—and I told her to lay off him. It was right before sixth period, and the halls were packed with people going off to their afternoon classes or squeezing as much social time as possible into the last few minutes of lunch. And she turned right at me and said, loud enough for everyone to hear, “
You
just leave me alone, dyke.”

So how did that matter less than whether she could sing, or look convincing with a balsawood sword? It mattered less because this whole production wasn’t about me. I knew that. But that didn’t make it easier.

 

 

“I took ballet for a little while,” Heather explained, down in the workshop. “Had the right sort of figure for it, at first, if not the enthusiasm to keep it up for too long, but it taught me all kinds of things.” And she spun around in a loose pirouette as if to make her point. “Overscheduled overworked overachiever. You know the deal.”

She always seemed to be down in the workshop with me in the evenings. She’d been put to work on the costumes, finishing off seams and hems, and adding trim; she spent a lot of time with her face bent over her work like some Renaissance maiden doing embroidery, if the Renaissance maiden had neon tights and a skull and crossbones babydoll T-shirt. It wasn’t as if I could raise any objections against her sitting there, mostly quiet, changing the CD in the stereo every now and then—but I had to wonder. I tried to “Mmhmm” in a way that suggested I didn’t care all that much about what she had to say.

“So, when I decided to transfer, my mom thought I should get involved in some kind of extracurricular over the summer so that I would make a couple friends before school started. Also to give me something better to do than mope and watch reruns of
What Not to Wear
. And I saw the flyer for
Ninja Death Squad
, and I thought maybe I would be good at that, and maybe it would be fun. I didn’t know you were involved, and if I had I wouldn’t have even bothered, and then all of a sudden it turned into this big thing—”

“Why are you down here all the time?”

She shrugged. “This is the workshop. I have work to do.
Quot erat demonstrandum.
”

“I guess.”

“I don’t have anything better to do anyway. The people I thought were my friends aren’t. I’m not going to call them up and ask them if they want to check out that cute boutique that just opened up.” She sighed. “What you mean is, it’s weird, and even if we’re technically on speaking terms with each other nothing’s really changed and it’s not like we’re anything close to friends. So why would I stay here?”

“Yeah. I guess that is what I mean.” I thought she was half joking when she said that all she wanted was for us to peacefully ignore each other. But that’s exactly what we’d been doing for these past few days.

“Because it’s never going to get any less weird if I don’t,” she finally said, carefully.

I chewed at the bottom of my lip. “I don’t see that it’s going to get any less weird either way, but this CD has been on repeat for the last two and a half hours.”

Heather picked up her CD wallet, and when I put down my wood and my sandpaper, she lobbed it at me. I threw my arms up and it bounced off, and I just managed to catch it before it hit the ground.

I saw some things that I recognized, and some that I didn’t, and toward the end I came to a couple of silver CD-Rs, marked only with a date. Curious, I flicked open the CD player and started the music.

Heather stiffened a little in the first couple seconds, as if she herself didn’t know what she was afraid of, and then as the drum part came in she swore under her breath. “Jesus.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” she said, voice lower. She just stalked to the stereo, changed the CD, and went back to her seat.

“I don’t even know what I did wrong, so don’t act like I did it on purpose.”

“Forget about it.”

And she looked down, her face half an inch from the blue silk of the kimono she was sewing, where it was hopeless to try to get a word out of her.

I went back to my own work and didn’t look up until I heard a crunch of metal. Shards spiked out from under her Doc Martens, catching the harsh light. Heather’s chest was rising and falling slowly, in what seemed like an intense effort to keep everything under control.

“So, the thing is,” she said. And instead of telling me straight off what it was, she stared at me, and looked down, and stared at me again. I averted my own eyes. The ceiling was stark, bare, affording me no distractions.

“That’s the mix CD that my ex-girlfriend made for me.”

I stared at the ground, trying to get my head around this, trying to understand what she’d said.

Her chair clattered as she got up. “Wait,” I said, and she sat down again, but I didn’t know what I was asking her to wait for. I didn’t have anything to say to her.

There was just this blankness. And all these things I couldn’t understand about Heather, suddenly starting to make sense.

I looked up at her, and started to try to say something—I wasn’t even sure what—and she flinched away.

“Look, I’m a hypocrite, okay? And I’ve reaped everything I’ve sown, and to be honest, it sucks, so—whatever you have to say to me, don’t think I haven’t told it already a dozen times to myself.”

At this point I was obligated to say something sensitive and understanding. What I actually said was, “Well, good.”

“So are we even, at least? Or, since obviously you’d go all the way to Oklahoma to get away from me, do I have to prove I’ve filled up my quota of suffering?”

I kept staring at her, not saying anything, mad at myself for crossing a line and mad at her for throwing it back in my face when it didn’t come to a tenth of what she’d said to me.

“Let’s just forget I said anything,” Heather said.

“It wasn’t personal. Me going to Oklahoma, I mean.”

“Like hell it wasn’t.”

“Personal would’ve maybe gotten me as far as Missouri. Yeah, I was mad at you. And I was mad at Ollie for picking you. But after that burned off, the rest of it was me wallowing around in self-pity, waiting for somebody to pat me on the head and tell me I was special and please will I come back?”

I tried to smile at her, willing her to smile back. And when she didn’t, I started telling her about the way the sky looks when you roll out of bed half an hour before sunrise and point your bike westward again.

W
hen Ollie gave me the libretto, I didn’t read it. I didn’t even glance at it, and that was the beginning of the end. It was too hard to deal with him. He’d been going out with Julia for two years, practically since the beginning of time, and he was miserable. He skipped class and locked himself in the piano room. We tiptoed around him, trying not to say or do anything to set him off. I got the feeling that he couldn’t stand me right now, because I couldn’t stand him and his my-grief-is-deeper-than-yours when I was just trying to get up every morning and make myself go to school and try to keep my attention on the creepy afterlife stuff in
Hamlet
when the sudden awareness that I couldn’t go see Shakespeare in the Park with Julia this year would knock the air out of my lungs.

We still met under the oak tree, passing around sketches of set designs or costume designs, or in the piano room, where Ollie tweaked chords and harmonies and tempos. But we stepped on each other’s toes, and Amy and Lissa nearly came to blows about whether a chord should be D major or D minor.

And more and more, I got the feeling that when Ollie said “we,” he didn’t mean me. He was building a cocoon around the drama people, the ones who were going to turn
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
into a reality, and while they were chattering about their ideas and starting fights, I was sitting on the outside, watching. Julia had been the one link to these people I wasn’t even really friends with, but who I liked anyway, who I wanted to like me. Even without her, I wanted to be part of this family, and I just wasn’t.

I was drifting by myself.

Before, I’d been starting to make other friends. Once in a while I went over to have lunch with some of the guys I knew from mathletes (even though some of them needed to be reminded about how to talk to a girl, rather than to a girl’s chest). I wasn’t the complete dork I was in middle school. Or, if I was, Julia’s friends had been making me realize what it was like to be part of a whole tribe of dorks, giggling over the same campy movies. Amy would go on about the tiniest plot details of a movie no one had any interest in seeing, and Jon had almost no impulse control, and Lissa would just blink at you in silence if she was angry, and they were all dorks and no one cared. With them, it was okay if I was a dork too. I wasn’t disqualified from friendship.

But after she died, I couldn’t talk to the mathletes guys about my dead best friend, and I couldn’t listen to them talk about how unrealistic the computer hacking was in the latest Keanu Reeves movie.

Even if they didn’t want me, I wanted to be with the people who understood that there was suddenly a gaping hole in the universe.

 

 

One Thursday night I got a call from Jon.

“We had auditions last weekend,” he said, with way too much nervousness in his voice.

“And I wasn’t in the way? I know. I don’t want to hear it.”

“No, you’d much rather hear that than hear what I am going to say. But I couldn’t make Oliver do it.”

I knew it was going to be bad. He said nothing for a while.

“Hello? You still there?’

“Uh-huh. Um—you remember Heather Galloway?”

How could I forget? “That’s kind of a random question.”

“I wish. She is—um—she’s our new ninja princess.”

I finally managed to say, “What?”

“I know, I know, I know. Just—don’t blame Oliver too much for it. It’s not really his fault.”

“It was his decision, right? So how can it not be his fault?”

My stomach was knotting up. I hung up the phone because I couldn’t bear to keep talking to him, and I felt guilty as soon as I had done it, but I wouldn’t call him back. And all I could do was play hypothetical conversations in my head, over and over, yelling at Oliver for all the things I’d wanted to say since Julia died, but couldn’t, because he was having a hard time and we were supposed to be gentle with him, but I was exhausted now from the effort of being gentle with him when he wouldn’t be gentle with anybody else.

 

 

That afternoon, we went to the piano room, and the topic came around to whether we should leave the lyrics alone in the third verse of one song or work them over a little because Julia had scribbled on the manuscript “Lame, lame, lame, but I’m moving on for now.” With everyone, not just Ollie, but Jon and Amy and Lissa too, trying to stake a claim for What Julia Would Have Wanted, as if they knew, as if the main thing driving forward this whole stupid enterprise was the memory of a dead girl. Which it was, I knew. But Julia wasn’t this musical, she wasn’t just this girl who could think up song parodies at the drop of a hat and tried out for every play. She was more than that.

So I threw my backpack over my shoulder and went for the door, hoping that I’d be able to escape without notice.

No such luck.

“Cass,” Oliver called, sounding testy.

“It’s gonna get dark, and I don’t ride in the dark.”

“What do you have headlights for?”

I turned around to face him again, finally done trying. “I think one fatal car accident is just about enough for this year.”

He was leaning over me, just barely, and his hand began trembling on the door frame above me.

“I don’t see that I belong here anyway,” I continued. “If you want to stay here and keep digging up her grave, knock yourselves out.”

“Fine. Go.”

I wanted to, and I couldn’t. I just stayed there paralyzed.

“I don’t have anything left.” My voice was shaking. “You have this, and you’ve got each other, and . . .”

I just had Julia, who was gone. And a map and a mix tape, but that dream was dead too, and I didn’t even have my license.

“Why did you put Heather in the play?”

“She was good.”

“That’s all?” It came out as a squeak. “She was
good
?”

“This isn’t a popularity contest. It’s not about who I think is a decent human being. But she can act, and she can sing, and she’s graceful on her feet, and I think this play deserves that much. Julia deserves that much.”

“No. She deserves better than this thing where we’re at each other’s throats and miserable. And do you really think she’d be happy about putting Heather in the play after how horrible she’s been—not just to me, to everybody who didn’t fit in? Jon, you remember what she was like to you. And Julia too.”

Jon looked at the floor. “Yeah,” he muttered. “But a constant barrage of low-grade teasing and smirking is sort of the definition of middle school. If it hadn’t been her it would’ve been someone else.”

“It was a long time ago anyway,” Ollie said. “And if you don’t get that, maybe you
should
just go.”

Please. No.
“Don’t shut me out of this.”

“You don’t get it, do you?” Ollie said. He only took a step toward me, but it made me back away until I was all the way out in the deserted hall. The others were staring at me from behind him. “I’m just saying what everybody knows. You kept leaning on Julia’s pity even after the friendship was over, and she let you.”