“He started writing me these letters from school, like really, really, really long letters, full of all this stuff about how one day we’d be together, and how we were soul mates and how much he loved me. And no matter what I said or did, he couldn’t be convinced otherwise. It’s like the more I told him we were never going to be together, the harder he tried to impress me. He bought some heroin this one time. I don’t even know where he got it, but he had it with him when he came home for winter break. I remember when he showed it to me, he was just so excited about it, like I was going to be so impressed.” Nina looks at me and shakes her head. “I wasn’t.
“Fast forward to the next summer, two summers ago, right after Jason and I both graduated. It was Jason’s eighteenth birthday, and his best friend, Max, was in town staying at the Mothership, which is where he always stayed when he was visiting, and so we were having a little birthday party there for Jason. It was just me and Jason and Max and a few other kids hanging out. And I had gotten this snowboard for Jason that I knew he would love. It was expensive though, I had to get a credit card so I could pay for it. And I knew he’d never let me get him such an expensive present unless he had to,” Nina smiles, “so I drew all over it so there was no way he could bring it back. And I’ll never forget his face when he opened it, his eyes just got huge and he couldn’t stop smiling and he got a little choked up even, like, in front of his friends and everything.” Nina smiles, pressing her lips together hard like she’s trying not to cry. “He said it was the very best present he’d ever gotten and asked if I would take a trip cross-country with him for our one-year anniversary, which was in about a month, at the end of July. He said we’d just pack up his old blue Volvo and hit the road, crashing with friends on the way, and then we could stay at his stepdad’s house in Big Sur and he’d teach me to snowboard and we could give his present its first trip down the mountain together.”
“Wait, Jason had a blue Volvo?” I tip my head to the side.
“Yup,” Nina says. And then she tips her head to the side, too. “Oh shit, that’s what Sean was driving when…” Our eyes meet and I nod. Nina sighs and shakes her head.
“Go on,” I say.
She continues. “It was around three-thirty in the morning and Jason and I were getting ready to leave the Mothership so he could drive me home, but we were both being really slow about it, I think because neither one of us wanted the night to end. I mean, it really had been just the most wonderful, perfect, amazing night. And that’s when Sean showed up, acting all casual like it was the most normal thing in the world for him to be there. Except the Mothership was about twenty miles from their house and Sean had walked there. To see me. Jason wasn’t mad or anything, because he never really got mad, he was just worried about Sean and didn’t want him to get in trouble for sneaking out and wanted to get him back home as soon as possible. At that point I felt like it would probably be better if I wasn’t even in the car with them, so I said I’d just stay over at the Mothership. I always tried to make sure I was back home by the time the sun came up, but that night it seemed like the only other choice was a really bad one. So Jason came over and said good-bye and that he’d come back and pick me up in the morning and he’d get the snowboard then, too. And then he just gave me a quick hug and we didn’t even kiss or anything because Sean was like just standing there glaring at us. They walked out waving. And then at the last second Jason stuck his head back in the door and said something about how we could get waffles in the morning, and then he mouthed ‘I love you,’…” Nina looks down, “and that was it.”
“So that was the last time you…” I start to say. I bring my hand up to my mouth. I can’t even bring myself to finish the sentence.
Nina nods. And takes a deep breath. She wipes her face quickly with her hands, because she’s crying a little, and I wipe my face with my hands because as it turns out, I am crying a little, too. “The next morning I called Jason and he kept not picking up his phone and I was figuring he left his phone on vibrate or something. So I just kept calling and calling. And then finally his mom answered.”
Nina looks up at me. My heart squeezes in my chest. “She sounded really weird on the phone, it was like I was talking to this robot or something who’d been programmed to sound like her. I was trying hard to be extra friendly because I always had the feeling she didn’t like me. I was saying something about the wallet she’d gotten for Jason for his birthday, how nice it was and everything but she just cut me off. And she just asked me if I’d seen Jason the day before and I said yeah, that I had. And that we’d had a birthday party for him. And then she said, and I remember, these are her exact words, she said, ‘Well, Nina, your little birthday party killed him.’ And at first I somehow didn’t even think she meant literally, I thought she just must have meant she thought he was really hungover or something, which didn’t even make any sense because he’d been driving and he would never drive if he’d had anything to drink. But then she started saying all this stuff about the preliminary autopsy reports and how they suggested a heroin overdose. And it was obvious from the way she said it that she thought it was my fault.”