Forever Changes (14 page)

Inside the room, Stephen Pelletier knew Brianna had died by the sudden silence where her labored breathing had been.

In the hallway outside the room, the nurses knew Brianna Pelletier had died by the great gulping sobs coming from the big man holding the small, lifeless body of his precious daughter.

John Eccles, wearing a suit from his closet so old it now qualified as vintage, walked up the steps to the pulpit.  Every seat was full, and most people were crying.  In the middle, Ashley sat between her mother and father. In the front row, Brianna’s father and her three friends sat together, holding hands.  In the very last pew, Brianna’s mother sat alone.

John Eccles reached into his suit jacket, pulled out what he’d written, and smoothed it onto the podium.  The microphone picked up the sound of crinkling paper and broadcast it to the congregation.  He took a deep breath, and then he began to speak.

“I was Brianna’s calculus teacher.  One thing we learn in calculus class is the value of infinitesimals.  I won’t bore you with the details, but, essentially, quantities which are very small are incredibly important.

“So it is with Brianna’s life.  Though she lived a short time—an incredibly short time, to my old brain’s way of thinking–let us not measure the value of Brianna’s life by its length.  Let us not say, if only she had done this, if only she had done that, if only she’d lived to do
x
,
y
, or
z
.  The fact that you are sitting here today means that you were touched by Brianna Pelletier, that her life was valuable to you no matter its length.  Perhaps she touched you with her kindness; perhaps she inspired you with her intelligence; perhaps she brightened your day with her sense of humor; perhaps, in her generosity, she gave you her own bottle of an electric blue sports drink.

“Whatever the case, you know that Brianna’s life was precious, valuable, wonderful.  So let us not think about what Brianna didn’t do.  Let us think, instead, of what she did, of the ways in which she touched us all.  Let us hope that, someday, we too may touch people as she has done.

“When we lose someone important to us, we feel their absence as a horrible void inside of us, a void that will never be filled.  They are dancing in infinity, but we long for their presence, and we struggle to understand the best way to honor our memory of them.

“What would Brianna have us do?  How can we live so as to honor her, to honor the role she played in our lives, her importance to us?  Those of you who are still alive in five, ten, fifteen, fifty, sixty years, living lives so far removed from Brianna, how will you honor her as she deserves to be honored?

“I propose we honor Brianna’s unfairly brief life and her importance to us by striving to live as she lived:  by being courageous and doing things that are difficult for us, things we are afraid of.   By living vibrantly, as she did, by celebrating our talents and planning for a future that is uncertain for all of us, by not letting those things which are hard for us deter us from experiencing all we want to experience.  And first, and foremost, by being kind and loving to one another, so that when we too come to die, we shall be missed as sorely and painfully as we now miss Brianna.  We can honor her by living our lives as she did hers:  beautifully.”

John Eccles stepped down from the podium.  The pastor asked everyone to rise and join in singing “How Can I Keep From Singing.”  As the congregation sang, Stephen Pelletier, shoulders heaving with grief, bore the urn containing his daughter’s ashes from the church.  Behind him, crying and still clutching each other’s hands as though to keep from sinking into a sea of despair, walked Stephanie St. Pierre, Adam Pennington, and Melissa D’Amico.

Three thousand miles from Blackpool, a woman picked up her phone and called her father.  He didn’t answer, and she left a message.

Day turned into night, and, at two o’clock in the morning, Melissa, Stephanie, and Adam walked to the moonlit beach.  Each carried a small container of ashes given to them by Stephen Pelletier.  Drunk on grief and tequila, each of them dipped a hand into their own container of ashes, drew out a handful, and sprinkled it onto the sea.

“Goodbye,” Adam Pennington said through his tears.  They stood and watched in the moonlight as the waves lapped unceasingly at the shore and the tiny cloud of ashes that had once been part of the body of Brianna Pelletier dispersed, each particle now floating amidst a number of water molecules as close to infinite as the human mind could comprehend.

            Twenty-five miles away, a graduate student sat in a basement at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, grateful to have been able to book any time at all on the supercomputer, even the hours between two and four a.m. on Sunday morning.  As the ashes that had once been the body of Brianna Pelletier struck the water in Blackpool, a supercomputer in a basement in Cambridge running a program written by a graduate student sent a signal to a monitor.

The monitor displayed a number.

The number was incredibly large.

The number was prime, and no human being had ever seen it before.

Thanks to Suzanne Demarco for helping me to live and write more beautifully.

Thanks to Dana Reinhardt, who helped me find this book inside a sprawling mess of a first draft.

Thanks to Janine O’Malley for believing in this book and for working so hard to help me make it better.

Thanks to Doug Stewart for ongoing friendship, encouragement, and general awesomeness.

Thanks to Casey Nelson, Rowen Halpin, and Kylie Nelson for inspiration.

Special thanks to Michelle Manes, who helped me correct an apparently egregious mathematical error in the first edition.  Any remaining mathematical idiocy is of course my own and not Michelle’s.

Thanks to everyone at pressbooks.com for creating a tool that made it so easy for me to prepare the electronic edition of this book.

Thanks to Arthur Lee and all the members of Love for the title and for music that moved me, Adam, and Brianna.

Brendan Halpin is a teacher and the author of books for adults and young adults including the Alex Award–winning
Donorboy, Forever Changes,
and the Junior Library Guild Selection
Shutout
. He is also the coauthor of
Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom
, with Emily Franklin, and
Notes from the Blender
, with Trish Cook, both of which the American Library Association named to its Rainbow List. Halpin’s writing has appeared in the
Boston Globe
, the
Los Angeles Times
,
Rosie
and
Best Life
magazines, and the
New York Times
’ “Modern Love” column. Halpin is a vegetarian, a fan of vintage horror movies, and an avid tabletop gamer. He lives with his wife, Suzanne, their three children, and their dog in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood of Boston.