“There’s this hidden attic space, the door was behind a bookcase in his closet. I was up there, and I found something. His house key was there.”
He narrows his eyes, just slightly.
“He took your money,” I add, begging him to line up the pieces in the same way. To hear the same ghost story, imagine the same moments, see the same outcome.
And so I say the thing I’ve not given voice to, but the thing that’s been whispering in my head. That terrible hope. “Max, what if he’s not dead?” I whisper through my fingers.
But he shakes his head, eyes closed. “Don’t do this, Jessa.”
“Don’t do what?”
“Make it harder. Make it worse.”
“How is him being not dead making it any worse?”
He looks over my shoulder, at the lights on the wall. His face changes as his eyes water from the glare. “I want to believe you, that’s why.”
I was Caleb’s girlfriend, but that’s not the hardest. Max was his best friend. How many years of his life were mixed up with Caleb’s? And now I was feeding him this hope, from nowhere, when he had already grieved for all we had lost.
Max isn’t at school. I’ve checked the parking lot, and I’ve waited by his locker, and he’s not here. The warning bell rings, and it’s time to make a decision.
I’ve called him. Twice. Once last night, after we left in separate cars from the pizza place—he didn’t pick up, and I didn’t blame him. I figured he didn’t want to hear it again, the ghost story I let Mia feed me, that I wanted so desperately to hold on to.
But I tried again this morning, and nothing. So I send him a text: I’m worried.
Because it’s not a cool thing to do, to not answer. Not for us. Not for people who know where it might lead.
He responds right away: I’m fine. Not feeling well.
I know I’ve done this to him. So I make a decision. The second bell rings, and I’m officially late, and Screw it, I think. For the second time in my high school career, I skip a day of school.
—
I drive by his house, but nobody appears to be home. His car is gone, but I ring the bell anyway. I wait one minute, two, and when the silence stretches on, I send him a text: I’m standing outside your front door. Where are you?
He writes back immediately: Just thinking. Go back to school.
Which means he’s not driving around. I can think of two places off the top of my head where he’d go to think, if he was thinking about Caleb. There was just one place if he was thinking of the things I whispered to him last night.
I drive slowly, expecting things to look different on the approach. But it’s all the same, perfectly normal: the strip of stores lining the road, a restaurant, then thicker trees, and a sign: BRIDGE FREEZES BEFORE ROAD.
Max’s car is tucked onto the shoulder of the road just before the bend. I ease my own car next to it, rocks and unpaved dirt crunching under my tires. I’m surprised by the change in incline, the way the car leans too far, and I’m suddenly caught in a tangle of fear—that there’s a tipping point, and I have to be careful not to breach it. But the car remains steady. I remain steady.
It’s chilly outside, but the sunlight hits the road, and the glare burns my eyes as I step across the divide from pavement to bridge.
—
I find Max in the center point of the bridge, sitting on the spot where the guardrail has been replaced. It’s a little brighter, a little smoother, and it draws the eye, standing out. Max is staring deep into the water, and he doesn’t notice me approaching.
“Max,” I say. He swivels his head, but nothing more.
I cannot stop the way my heart melts at the look. The way I can’t help moving closer.
“You shouldn’t be out here, Jessa.”
I don’t know if he means because it’s a school day, or because of the bridge, or because of him.
“Neither should you,” I say.
“The cameras saw his car pass the bridge, and never come back. They found pieces of his car in the river.” He chokes on the word pieces, forcing it out.
“I know,” I say.
“And it happened before, years ago, with the Coats guy. With the ocean currents, they didn’t find him for another four months.”
“I know that, too,” I say. It’s why the police are still checking, still waiting, but they aren’t holding their breath in the meantime. If the river wasn’t moving as fast; if the weather formation and the Gulf Stream weren’t crossing that exact same time of year…
But my mind still clings to this terrible hope, picturing him kicking out the window, swimming for the shore, pulling himself up onto the mud, coughing up water, catching his breath. Did he walk back up the slope, to the road? Did he make it?
But there’s one piece that doesn’t fit. That makes the whole puzzle fall apart: he didn’t come back.
Max must be thinking the same thing. He’s staring off down the meandering river, the current a deceptive calm, a still blue. “I don’t know anything about him. I don’t know why he took that money. I didn’t understand what was happening.”
“Because he didn’t tell us,” I say.
I stand beside him, on the safety of the road, and he pivots his head. “What kind of best friend was I, then? That he wouldn’t tell me? That I wouldn’t notice?”
I know what he’s thinking, because I’m thinking it, too. We had been preoccupied. We thought we were getting away with something. We thought we were the ones with the secret. And we tiptoed around him, grateful when the conversation slid to anything mundane.
We did not want to hear, I need to talk to you about something.
We did not say, What’s the matter, Caleb? Because we were scared what that might force into the light instead.
“Remember the day you jumped?” Max asks, looking straight down, where his feet dangle against the concrete below the guardrail. I want to reach out and grab his shirt, keep him from falling.
“I didn’t jump,” I tell him. “I wouldn’t have jumped on my own.”
He shakes his head. “We thought we were invincible. That nothing could really touch us.” He looks at me. “I lied to you. You could’ve drowned. Or hit your head. Or broken your leg.”
And it’s then I know what I must do. It feels inevitable. I cannot stop the momentum. I take off my sneakers, placing my socks inside. I strip off my sweater, but leave the rest. I’m standing in the November chill in a tank top typically worn underneath a sweater, and the black pants of my school outfit. I start to shake; I have to move.
I stand on the edge, just out of Max’s reach. “Jessa,” he warns, and then I leap. The cold air beats against my face, and it feels like it might carry me for a moment—and then I fall, and fall fast, the relentless pull of gravity drawing me toward the harsh and bitter shock of water.
I hear Max hit the river a moment after me, the sound echoing under the water, and when I break the surface, he’s calling my name in the shadows of the trees.