A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (9 page)

And I so wanted to, because it would have been much simpler.

We’d been twelve years old together. We’d shared the convictions that only twelve-year-olds can share, that love is simple and powerful and easy and inevitable. And so much more inevitable when it’s three in the morning and you’re sheltering from a storm, with my hair still damp, and the rain drumming on the roof, and all of a sudden his hand was on my shoulder—

And he kissed me.

“Oh. Gosh.” I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Um.”

And then I started grinning to myself, without any thought behind it but a Wow! I have been kissed, for the very first time ever! There is a person somewhere in the world who actually considers me kissable!

“What?” His fingers nestled in the tangles of my damp hair.

“I want to tell all my friends, right now. I want to wake them up in the middle of the night just to say that I have had my first kiss and it was in a motel hallway with a bass player whose T-shirt I was wearing. And I really shouldn’t have said that, should I?”

That last part was because he was looking at me all disconcerted. Of course he was, and I could hardly blame him for that. But there was something about being far away from my life and from everyone I knew. I could be anyone and it would never get back to them. And I didn’t have to care, and I didn’t have to be sensible.

And I realized, almost at the same instant: I wanted to tell Julia. It threatened to knock all the elation out of me, and I chewed on the inside of my mouth to make it stop. I got up and went to the window, which was locked and mosquito-screened so that I couldn’t actually lean out of it the way I wanted to, but I looked up toward the corner of the sky that I could see and yelled, “Julia! You saw that, right? You totally saw that!”

I laughed; I laughed, maybe for the first time since she died. Because I had been kissed, and because I was yelling up at no one in the sky like a lunatic, and because I knew or felt or imagined that Julia was right there with me, clapping her fingers together in that happy-excited way she had, and giggling, and swearing to embarrass me by calling everyone she knew.

“I’m not actually insane,” I said, turning around. “I mean, I can understand why you might think that and it’s all right if you do think that, but I just wanted to say that for the record.”

“Lots of people have an imaginary friend . . . I guess,” he said, in a certain it-takes-all-kinds voice that said he’d seen stranger things.

“Well, more dead than imaginary.”

The door creaked open and someone I assumed to be a band mate stumbled out, dressed only in boxer shorts. “Anybody want to explain what’s going on?”

“Got locked out,” said Kris. “I was a little too eager not to see you having sex.” He bowed slightly to me. “Your shower awaits.”

“Oh, I—I’m okay.” I felt intensely awkward. Like I wanted to get out of here fast before I had to poke at any more sensitive places. “Let me just camp outside your room tonight, and I’ll give you your shirt back in the morning.”

He shrugged. “You can give it back next time you go see us play.”

T
he bakery was decorated in crayon-bright colors that almost reassured you that nothing bad could ever happen. We got a small, high table by the window and ordered cakes that were tiny and perfect, layered with chocolate and fruit.

“Of course I had to be dumb enough to pick the place I always used to go with Gianna. But I’m not going to think about that now.”

“It’s out of the way.” And also, as far as I could tell, out of the way from St. Joseph’s, and from Heather’s place.

“That is the point.” She raised her eyebrow and stuck her fork into three layers of chocolate mousse. “She used to get antsy when we sat by the window . . .”

“You didn’t want to talk about it.”

“I lied. And plied you with pastry.”

She smirked, and I smiled back, a little befuddled. I was okay with us being civil to each other. I was okay with us talking through our issues. But since when were we
friends
?

But I got the sense that this wasn’t the right time to argue with her. So I didn’t. “You can do that, if the food’s this good.”

“So. Last night my sister and brother and nephews came over for supper, and while I was sprawled out on the floor in the middle of playing knights-and-dragon with the little guys, there’s a knock at the door and it’s Gianna. And we have a great big screaming fight right out there on the porch. And all I can think is—for months I wished that I could introduce her to my sister and brother and little nephews, and
that’s
how it finally happens.

“Karma,” Heather said, pointing her fork at me. “You see? The universe has dealt with me for everything I did to you.”

I didn’t see.

“I spent a good year or two being a total bitch because I didn’t want anyone to find out that I was gay, including myself, and by the time I managed to deal with my issues and get myself a girlfriend . . . she was the one who could absolutely not deal with the remotest possibility of anyone finding out. I mean, we both wanted to keep things secret. I didn’t want to get suspended, I wanted to stay on the nuns’ good side, I wanted to keep my friends. But if we’d been found out, I’d have survived. Eventually the dust would have settled and I’d have picked myself up. Not Gianna. Her family’s so conservative that she isn’t even allowed to kiss a
boy
until she’s practically married, and she really and truly bought into it. She’d have a crisis of conscience and break up with me on Monday, and by Thursday we’d be back together again. So we kissed in supply closets and passed notes to each other in really terrible Latin, or ciphers, and . . . that kind of secrecy was fun for about twenty minutes.”

Heather laughed sadly, her head bent low, black hair hanging down the sides of her face.

“I loved her, I did. And when I realized that I loved her, I also knew that I didn’t really have a girlfriend. I had a fantasy of what having a girlfriend might be. It wasn’t ever going to be real. I was never going to bring her over and introduce her to my little nephews, and I was never going to be able to call her at midnight because I needed to hear her voice, and we weren’t going to fix up a cute old Victorian house together and keep iguanas.”

“Iguanas.”

“I’m allergic to furry things. Besides, they’re cute in a sort of ugly way. Anyway. After long enough—after I’d lost my best friend because I was keeping too many secrets from her—it was all too heavy and everything fell apart. Her being scared and guilty all the time, me being mad that I couldn’t have more than what we had. We were bound to get caught eventually, and then it would be my fault that I’d ruined her life. And then, well, things got worse, and just when I thought I was okay, I’m not.” She snorted, seeming exasperated with herself. “Tell me about Oklahoma.”

“Oklahoma?”

“I’ve never been. God willing, I’ll probably never have any reason to go. So tell me.”

“Oklahoma was hard,” I said. I didn’t want to say any more. But she had given me so much. Opened up to me more than I wanted, offered more than I could carry. I searched for something I could give in return, something safe and worthless, and there wasn’t anything. “I had my first beer and my first girlfriend and my first breakup, and then I had Oklahoma.”

“Oh,” she said.

I could see her trying very hard not to look surprised.

When the waitress came by with the bill, she glanced over at Heather. “You bring all your girlfriends here?”

“Only the pretty ones,” she answered without skipping a beat—and I couldn’t figure out what to say. In the end we went and sat on the bench outside, crisscrosses of wrought iron under my legs, hot from the sun.

“Got my schedule in the mail on Friday. Have you looked at yours yet?”

“Just glanced. But I’ve got Vesper for English.” I stuck out my tongue. “First class of the day.”

“Hey, me too!” Her face lit up, for some reason I couldn’t fathom. (She did know we were supposed to be enemies, right?) “What’ve you heard about Vesper?”

“I heard he gave a student negative three on an essay once.”

“Out of six? Like an AP exam?”

“Out of a hundred.”

Heather sucked in a breath. “Well, you know what? Not gonna worry about it. Because that is the least of my worries.”

“So what’s the most?”

She raised her hand as if she were about to tick off a monumental list on her fingers, and then she put it down again. “I wish that I could start with a blank slate. I wish I could waltz in there with a fake name and stubbornly insist that I didn’t have a clue who this Heather Galloway person might be.”

“Is that why you went to St. Joseph’s?” The question popped out of me before I’d had time to think about it.

She nodded. “I guess I was trying to get a blank slate with myself. I might’ve been dumb, but I wasn’t so dumb that I didn’t notice what a bitch I was. I thought maybe . . . I had some vague idea that I would figure out how to sublimate all my passion into, you know, being a clarinetist or something. Or something would change, somehow, and I’d know what I was supposed to do. Maybe it even worked.”

I thought about that.

“Maybe that’s karma. Maybe it’s not the universe trying to punish you in appropriate ways for everything you’ve ever done wrong—it’s just that you carry with you who you’ve been and what you’ve done. And that’s enough justice.”

That’s when I made up my mind.

I decided that Heather would have a blank slate with me. Maybe it was because she’d been through enough, and maybe it was because I was less and less able to reconcile the girl sitting beside me on the bench with the one who’d teased me and glared at me and made pointed comments behind my back.

I didn’t think I could find the words to say it. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to try. But that was okay.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t want to tell you that things will be okay, because I can’t know that. But I think, mostly, people can look back at what happened before and think that we’re all just piranhas who had the bad luck to get dumped in the same fish tank, and it’s kind of sad but—not the kind of thing you can really get mad at someone for. Not forever.”

“Oh,” Heather said. She let it hang in the air for a while. “Really?”

“And I’m going to say this even though you’ll be popular before the first week’s over, and I’m not exactly the person you’d want on your side. But if you need someone to stick up for you, I’ll do it.”

She was smiling at me like I’d just turned the sun back on. “You are exactly the person I want on my side.”

“Lunch,” I said abruptly. “If you go out the cafeteria doors and go left, there’s a big oak tree not too far away. You should come eat lunch with us if the weather’s decent.”

“Lunch it is, then,” she said with a faint sigh. “I’m not going to be popular, you know. Even if people have forgotten all about me being the mean girl. It’s not going to happen.”

“But you’re one of them.” Rich enough, pretty enough, self-confident enough, charming even when she was being mean, as long as you weren’t the target.

She frowned. “I don’t think I can play that game anymore. Which sucks, because I was
good
at it.”

Heather looked at me oddly, her head titled to one side. “What changed? With you and me, I mean?”

“No matter how much I wish you’d just make it simple, for some reason you keep acting like an actual human being.”

“At last, all those drama classes pay off.” Before she left, she glanced back at me. “I’ll give you a ride if the weather’s not decent, okay?”

“Definitely okay.”

She was the same person she’d always been. Sharp and sarcastic and happy to show off when she was right. And—not the same person. But it didn’t bother me as much as it used to.

W
hen I found a guitar pick, blue and orange with a skull on it, in the pocket of Kris’s shirt, the first thing I thought was that I needed to show Julia. And that’s how I started my collection for Julia: everything I wanted her to see, everything I wanted to tell her. Everything that I could fit in a small Tupperware box like the one that held her ashes.

In McLean, I found three cat’s-eye marbles at the side of the road, their glass surfaces just slightly chipped, and I remembered how Julia had brought all of her eight-year-old’s wrath on the boy I lost my marbles to in the schoolyard. And remembered how I loved my cat’s-eyes, how they looked like they had an entire universe twisted up inside them, blue and green and orange. In Atlanta—the Atlanta in Illinois, a tiny town where the water tower had a happy face painted on it—a red Hot Wheels convertible. Everywhere, dried grass and corn husks and flowers, forming a soft pad for the other things that I found; and even a hawk feather on a hot day with the sky a stark and too-bright blue.

It was the kind of day that bleached out my thoughts to a dull, relentless, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other determination to keep going for the rest of these 2,264 miles. With seventy-four days left, that made for just over thirty miles a day. I’d lost half a day in Springfield to laundry, and charging my phone at the Laundromat—I could work it out that precisely and still manage to forget that sometimes I needed to wash clothes, sometimes I needed to stop for groceries, sometimes I managed to take a detour trying to find a library and check my e-mail—but I could make it up today if I tried hard enough. It had rained in short soaking storms that did nothing to cool the air; they only made it wetter, like steam coming off a hot iron. I was aware of the heat, and sweat beading against my back and on my forehead, and almost nothing else. The road was so quiet that I let myself drift out toward the middle of the lane, where I didn’t have to worry about the crumbling pavement and the bits of sand.

Then a horn blared behind me. I steered right, hugging the edge of the road where the shoulder fell off into mud and grass. But it blared again, loud and long, and I blinked in panic and frustration, trying to figure out something, anything, to do—I couldn’t seem to get it through my head that I should pull over to let the car pass. Before I could think there was blankness, and the screech of the horn, and a rush of smoke and hot wind alongside me, and a voice yelling out “Asshole!”—and me on the sizzling asphalt, my bike toppled over on me.