Her hair falls across my arm as she leans even closer, making my skin prickle. “With that scar, you look like Harry Potter. Without it, you’d practically be Prince Charming or something.”
All thoughts of my head injury disappear, because… Prince Charming?
“Oh no,” I laugh. “Is that the kind of fairy tale you write? Are you filling kids’ heads full of that nonsense?”
If I learned one thing from what happened with Kim, it’s that I’m definitely no prince. And love is not a fairy tale, no matter how perfect the story sounds. I don’t believe that anymore.
Our images blur as it begins to rain, heavy drops rippling across the pond’s surface.
“I hope it’s not nonsense,” she says, her voice quiet. “I hope there’s something better ahead to believe in.”
She raises her face to the sky. I take in the pink of her lips, the openness of her face to the rain. In that moment I want to tell her everything. Because even though it seems so impossible after all that’s happened, I want to believe there’s something better ahead too.
But the rain starts falling too hard, and before I can make up my mind, we have to leave.
* * *
That night I sit at the kitchen table, twirling and untwirling spaghetti around on my fork, my hair still wet from walking home in the rain.
“Well,” my mom says, scanning me with that X-ray vision all mothers have, “she sounds like a nice girl.” She takes a loud, crunchy bite of garlic bread.
I stupidly told Mom about Marley when I walked through the front door, soaking wet and holding a daisy. She asked me where I got it from, and my broken brain couldn’t think of any other possible reason I’d be holding a daisy.
I’m realizing now that any excuse would have been better than telling her the truth.
I tighten my hand around my fork as she presses for details.
“I barely know her,” I say, stabbing another bite of spaghetti. “Don’t make this a thing, okay? She’s just… easy to be with. She… gets what I’m going through.” I shake my head. It’s not like I met her in the park or the mall. It was a cemetery. And not just any cemetery. It was in the middle of the cemetery where Kim was buried. “But, I mean… shit.”
We stare at each other, and she reads my mind with yet another mystical mom power.
“Kim would want you to be happy.”
“Mom, I told her I’d love her forever. Even just being friends with someone new feels wrong.”
“That’s not very fair to you, is it?” she asks.
I let my fork clatter against my plate. “How could you even say that?”
Not very fair? What isn’t fair is that Kim’s life was taken away from her because of a fight and a freak storm. The least I can do is keep this promise to her.
“Kyle,” she says calmly, ignoring my outburst, just like she always does lately. “I just meant that you have a lot of life left to live. You never know—”
“No,” I say as I push back from the table and stand up, the chair legs squeaking noisily against the ground. “I do know. Kim was the only one for me. And I’m the one not being fair to her.”
With that, I storm downstairs to my room, and a new kind of clarity forms.
If I can’t go to the cemetery just for Kim, I have to stop going.
I have to stop seeing Marley.
11
I head to the cemetery a week later to tell Marley I can’t see her, the warm fall day taking me through the winding paths of the park as I search for her around every bend, between every cluster of trees.
She’ll probably think I’m some kind of weirdo, coming to find her just to tell her I’m going to be ignoring her from now on. I mean, what am I even going to say?
Hey, if you happen to run into me by my dead girlfriend’s grave, don’t expect a hello.
I roll my eyes, even though that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Because it feels like that’s what I have to do to do right by Kim.
My thoughts wander to my fight with my mom last week, frustration and guilt sitting heavy in my stomach.
She’s been such a broken record lately. You have to keep moving forward. Stop lingering in the past.
I tried to talk to Sam about it during the morning run/walks we’ve started going on every Friday, but it’s no use. He says it’s not lingering in the past; it’s just keeping her memory alive. They’re always trying to tell me what I should do and how I should heal, without bothering to give me any useful specifics.
I take a long, deep breath, trying to shake the feeling that I’m trapped. Stuck somewhere between Kim and Sam and my mom, unable to cross the start line.
A yellow-and-white striped shirt catches my eye, the lines thin enough for the two colors to blur together.
Marley.
She’s standing by a huge cherry blossom tree, her long hair catching the breeze and dancing around her shoulders, down to the small of her back.
I watch as she reaches up to carefully break a stem off the tree, something about the movement familiar even though I hardly know her. She smells the jumble of tiny pink flowers at the edge of the branch, face deep in concentration.
I find myself wondering what she’s doing before I remind myself why I’m here. Maybe I should just leave it to chance. She hasn’t seen me yet. I start to turn around and leave.
“You’ve decided not to see me anymore,” a voice says, stealing the words right out of my head. I look back to see Marley studying me, her serene expression gone.
I pause. How did she…? It doesn’t matter.
I look down at the cherry tree twig in her hand as I avoid the question. “What’s this one mean?”
“What do you want it to mean?” she asks, turning it right back around on me. It catches me off guard. She’s the first person to ask me something like that in a long time.
A new start. I catch the words just before they come out, the answer suddenly right in front of me. A way forward that doesn’t feel wrong.
“I don’t… I don’t know,” I say instead. I should be shutting the conversation down, saying goodbye.