A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend (12 page)

One time, Julia had a fight with Ollie, and I’d told her every single bad joke I knew and finally said, with more desperation than anything else, “What’s brown and sticky?” I saw this tiny smile tug on the corners of her lips, and she blew her nose and wiped her eyes and whispered, “A stick?” Probably she’d been more amused by how hard I was trying than by any joke I could think of, but when Ollie called a couple hours later, he was a little puzzled to hear Julia giggling on the other end of the phone line. And, also, when she asked him what was brown and sticky.

I remembered all those quiet moments that melted into each other: rope swings, watching MTV while we were supposed to be doing our geography homework, running around the neighborhood past midnight just to be delighted that we could, the swimming pool, driving around the city three days after Julia got her license. It was good. Really and truly and honestly. It was good because it was simple, uncomplicated; there weren’t any uncomfortable questions or awkward silences. We trusted each other. And once, when someone passed by in the hallway at school whispering something about me being a lesbian, she flirted with me shamelessly until the bell rang, in front of Ollie.

She was that kind of friend.

And the truth is, there was more electricity in those moments than there has ever been, before or since, with anyone else.

I should be able to admit that. I should be able to say that out loud. “Julia,” I said, toward a field where there was nothing but a few brown milk cows. “I think maybe—”

And I faltered, because I didn’t know what to say.

I was thinking about Jon at the funeral, and what he owed to Julia. If I had anything left to give her at all, it would be to not look away. To risk what I’d come all the way here to risk and let things get more complicated, if they had to. To be able to say, if only to myself, what I really had inside me.

But I couldn’t put that in a box where I could give it a label and a meaning so that I could see what direction it was pointing me in. I couldn’t put a happy ending on it. It was too late for that now and I didn’t even know what a happy ending would look like. I just wanted to find some meaning in the strange things running around inside my heart. I wanted to be able to kneel down with my face in the dirt like an archaeologist and brush the dust off these memories and find out what was true underneath them. It seemed like the least I deserved, when everyone else seemed to have found their direction right away, while I was left wandering. I was one of those people who stumbled into things, who followed whims and took side roads, instead of finding some goal to pursue forward with unflagging commitment. I didn’t even know what I wanted to be when I grew up, what I wanted to major in when I went to college. And I had always been blithely convinced that if I followed the side roads for long enough I’d trip over something wonderful, that thing you never know you’re looking for until you land on it that suddenly makes the universe a much bigger place than it ever had been before.

I wouldn’t find anything if I didn’t keep going.

I kept remembering Julia and me lying on the floor of her bedroom, road map spread out between us. Her knees bent so that her little red shoes pointed at the ceiling. “This,” she said with conviction, “is going to be fantastic.”

Once I’d been buzzed by a car on the way to her house, and my bike fell on top of me, and I couldn’t manage to get up again. Four cars passed by without stopping, and the one that stopped was hers, and she held my hand all the way to the emergency room.

I held that in my head. I grabbed that moment and held it close to me like an amulet: the warmth of her hand, and the way it made me forget how my ankle screamed out in pain whenever I moved it the wrong way.

I picked up my bike again, breathing hard. Water bottle on the down tube. Helmet clipped under my chin. Right foot hovering just over right pedal as I glanced back and launched myself over the pavement. Trembling and terrified but moving again, moving
forward
, slowly, both hands grabbing the brakes.

And then the wind grabbed me, and blasted the sweat on my forehead into my eyes, and I was carried off in air and motion.

I
t was strange to think that Julia could die and I could bicycle halfway across the country and school would be exactly the same as it always had been. Knots of people just outside the classroom doors, determined to get in every possible word before the bell. Air-conditioning that never worked quite as well as you wished it would, or else too well. I was sweaty from riding to school, and shivered in the too-cold air.

Heather slid into the seat next to mine in first-period English and alternately chewed on her pencil and took notes for the next forty-three minutes, except for when Dr. Vesper had reached the romantic poets section of the syllabus, and she passed me a note that said

I answered with a question mark. English wasn’t my thing.

She drew a smiley face underneath it with sharp eyebrows and a wide grin, and I couldn’t help looking over and grinning back at her.

Later, I passed her in the hall on my way to lunch. She was sandwiched between three other girls, the kind of people you really want to hate, but on top of being pretty and popular and smart and athletic, they’re actually nice people. And Gwen too, though unlike them she wasn’t too busy taking care of orphaned kittens to pay attention to me. Gwen didn’t go out of her way like Heather used to, but if she saw an opening for sarcasm and petty cruelties, she didn’t let it get away.

And they were all giggling together.

Yeah. Like I predicted. Heather had found her people in all of half a day.

I stood off to the side and gave Heather a little half wave. “Cass,” she said. “I’m just catching up with my friends from middle school—you don’t mind, right? I’ll see you after school, what room is it?”

“Two eighteen. Sure, it’s fine.”

There wasn’t any way to say that it wasn’t fine, and it should have been fine. They were her friends too, even if she hadn’t seen them in a while. But it seemed like this was the natural order of the universe, the way to which things would gradually revert. Of course Heather would have better things to do than hang out with the drama geeks.

I went over to the tree where everyone was sitting, and unwrapped my sandwich and grapes and carrot sticks. And we talked about the usual first-day-of-school things, which teachers were rumored to be terrible and whose schedules required the most running back and forth. But I wasn’t really there. The last time we had been under this tree sharing anything but a stony silence, the last time we’d been under this tree being silly and happy and kind to each other, Julia had been there. The gaping hole of her gone-ness opened up all at once, and I couldn’t bear it.

It was like a betrayal, to think that our lives could keep rolling on without her.

I stayed quiet and smiling, willing myself to not let the others catch my mood, as they kept talking about things that suddenly seemed too small and worthless.

 

 

Heather was the last of us to show up at 218, half running with her book bag hanging open. “My eighth period is way on the other end of school. In a trailer. Which, by the way, does not have air-conditioning,” she explained, and I didn’t want to admit to worrying about whether she was going to show up.

Mr. Vaichon glanced up when we filed in. We came in together, all of us, and he didn’t look surprised to see us. “I’m sorry to hear about your ninja thing,” he said. “I talked to the principal about it, but I didn’t manage to change his mind. If there was anything else I could do—”

“Oh, there is,” Heather said brightly.

“The thing is,” Lissa said, “we want to volunteer to work on
Our Town
.”

“That sounds suspiciously like a non sequitur.”

We laid out our plan, piece by piece: We really would help out on
Our Town
and do whatever had to be done. But at the same time, we’d be moving our own props and costumes into the school, and working on our lighting and our sets.
Our Town
wasn’t until Thanksgiving—that left most of September and October and almost all of November—so we had plenty of time for both.

“How does the performance fit?” he asked.

“Just have them leave the school open late, like when you’re doing dress rehearsals. We’ll take care of the rest. And they’re going to shut us down after the first night anyway, so there’s no point worrying about a full run.”

“I can’t imagine why this doesn’t sound like a good idea.”

“We don’t want to get anyone in trouble,” I said. “But—”

“That’s exactly what’s going to happen. I’m not going to lie and say I had no idea what was going on.”

“Then just say that you’re striking a blow for the first amendment,” Jon said. “What if you were told you couldn’t put on Shakespeare because of the bawdy jokes, or Arthur Miller because of the implied social critique? You wouldn’t stand for it, would you?”

“No. But you aren’t Shakespeare.”

“It’s not just a play about ninjas!” Amy protested. “It has love and war and death and secrets and betrayals. Seriously. It’s just like Shakespeare.”

Ollie had been hanging back till now, with his head down, and his hair flopping in front of his face. Now he slid off the desk he’d been sitting on. “If Julia had lived to be thirty, she’d have been writing the musicals that people will pay a couple hundred dollars to go see. The ones people want to see eight or nine times in a row. That’s not going to happen now. So the most we can do for her is to stage
Totally Sweet Ninja Death Squad
in a high school auditorium where it’ll be seen by our parents and her parents and a few dozen nerds. We have to do at least that. Otherwise—it’ll be like this thing she cared so much about never mattered at all.”

“And why, again, did she have to write a musical about violent, ruthless killers?” Mr. Vaichon sighed. “You can do what you like. But I regret this already.”

I
rode into Missouri, into the Ozark foothills, and for a long time it was slow going, as I had to muscle my bike up one hill after another, getting off and walking when it got too steep. I was down in a valley late one afternoon when the sky started to cloud over. The air was hot and humid, and then it started to rain, so soft and warm that it was hard to tell the difference between the raindrops and the beads of sweat on my neck.

And then—I felt the bike collapse under me, felt my cheek and my leg hit pavement. No warning. One minute I was up, the next I was on the road with the bike on top of me. I dragged it to the side of the road and saw where the chain had snapped. I wasn’t hurt now, or scared, but I needed to think of a plan, fast. I had tools for changing just about everything that could go wrong with my bike, but I did not have an extra chain, and the pin was bent so that I couldn’t fix it with my chain tool. If I could get as far as Springfield, I’d be able to find somewhere to eat, and somewhere to rest, and directions to the nearest bike shop.

Measuring the distance with my finger, it looked like eight or ten miles. Eight or ten miles, that wasn’t so bad.

I started walking.

There was something hypnotic about it. One foot in front of the other. One foot in front of the other. Just keep going. Set small landmarks—the next mile marker, the next tree by the side of the road—and just try to get that far. Rolling my loaded bike beside me, I was crawling along incredibly slowly; those eight or ten miles could easily take four hours at this rate.

It wouldn’t have been so bad, but the rain started to get heavier the more I went along. Soon the drops were falling so fast and heavy that I had to rummage in my panniers for my poncho. I needed to find shelter. There was no way out but through; I kept walking.

The rain soaked my hands and my legs. Then I felt the water seeping in through the seams of my sneakers. Rain was starting to gather on the ground, ankle-deep in the ditches. And then before I knew it, it was ankle-deep even on the flat ground. My feet started to blister in my wet socks.

If I could just keep going—

An hour passed. The rain kept falling, and the water kept rising. It came halfway to my knees now, so deep and heavy that it was like lugging one of those drowning dummies through a swimming pool, painfully slow. I started thinking that I couldn’t do this. I needed a way out now. But I still couldn’t see any signs of civilization.

Abruptly, a pickup swerved in front of me, missing me by a couple inches and kicking up a violent spray of water, and stopped on the shoulder.

“What the hell?” I yelled out when I caught my breath.

The passenger-side door swung open. “Get in. It’s too dangerous to be out here.”

The voice sounded young, female, and I wasn’t sure if I should trust it but at least it didn’t fit the profile of the average serial killer. And by now I didn’t care. The water was going to wash me away.

“My bike,” I said.

The other door opened and a girl a couple years older than me climbed out, tall, blonde. She was wearing a holey MSU T-shirt.

Without saying anything, she picked up the bike and tried to heave it into the truck bed.

“It’s heavy,” I said. I snapped the quick-release for the front wheel and the back wheel and put them in first—then the panniers—then the frame. It wasn’t until we managed to shove it in there that I realized I’d have to take my chances on her being a thief or a maniac or whatever; all of my worldly possessions that I cared about were now in her truck. I wasn’t about to leave my bike, so I squeezed into the front seat. A humongous gray husky promptly waggled its way from the back and stuck its nose between my legs.