When rehearsal is over, I find Wil’s truck in the parking lot. I lean against the tailgate and the metal burns through my T-shirt and bra strap. I’m the sick kind of tired. I don’t know whether to accuse Wil of hiding something from me or fall into his arms. The kid part of me wants to slide into the cab and hide there. Burrow into the ripped cloth seats because it’s safe. Or at least I used to feel that way, wedged between my best friend and the father I didn’t get to have, as though, for a few minutes after school every day, we were a family. But that wasn’t real, because Wilson wasn’t real. He’s made my memories fiction, wiped them out with his fist.
“Sorry.” Wil comes up behind me. “Se?ora pulled me aside asked how I was doing and then she started crying, so I couldn’t really—”
I crumple under his hand.
“Bridge?” He turns me and pulls me into him, and that’s a mistake because now I’m sobbing into his T-shirt, and I have no right.
“I screwed up,” I bleat into his chest. “With Minna and Leigh—I really screwed up.”
“Here.” He holds me steady with one hand and unlocks the truck with the other. He helps me inside and then jogs around the back. I catch his reflection in the rearview: a flash of a young Wilson.
“Okay. Tell me,” Wil says when he’s next to me again.
I shake my head. “I don’t—you have too much going on.”
“Not for you,” he says. “Not ever for you. Got it?”
My face crumples like I’m going to cry again, but there’s nothing there.
“Got it?” he says again, and I nod.
“Still.” I rub the stiffness from my face. On the other side of the window, a circle of girls is hugging and wiping single diamond tears from one another’s perfect cheeks. This is what high school should have been. “I don’t really want to talk about it. Later.”
“Yeah. Sure. You just—let me know.”
“Thanks.” I sniff.
“Here. I want to show you something.” Wil leans over my lap and pulls a wrinkled yellow legal pad from beneath the seat. He flips to a page with a rectangle drawn on it. Inside the rectangle are our names.
BRIDGE & WIL
There’s an etching of a canoe beneath the words.
“It’s kind of a graduation present,” he says. All of a sudden, he looks shy. We’re kids who don’t know each other yet, but want to. We are the old versions of ourselves.
“It’s, ah . . . what it is?” I ask. My insides flutter.
“It’s a brick! For downtown. I ordered it this morning. Should be installed in a couple of weeks.” He looks proud, and he should. This is the sweetest thing. We have a brick. Wil and I will stay here together forever. We will be cemented into this place, no matter what. The faucet in me twists again.
“Wil. It’s so . . . It’s really . . . Thank you.” I lean across the seat and wrap my arms around his neck. I inhale him. I don’t know how I could have doubted him. He loves me. He would never lie to me. I know it, but it’s more than that. I can feel it.
“Yeah? You like it?”
“I love it, Wil.” I lean into him. Press my ear against his chest. Touching him quiets the buzzing doubts in the back of my mind.
BRIDGE
Summer, Senior Year
I wake up the next morning in my bed, my ear pressed against Wil’s bare chest. But the steady chant I’ve heard before is absent. I hold my breath.
Silence.
“Wil?” I sit up in bed.
His skin is the color of almost night. He is rigid, stiff lips and dripping curls sealed tightly to his forehead. He smells like the ocean. His skin is transparent, showing his insides. Beneath his skin is a pulsing, living thing. Oil-black grief, curled around his heart. Blocking his throat. Pulsing in his fingertips.
“Wil?” Sour sick rises in the back of my throat. “Wil?”
His eyes snap open.
“Help. It’s killing me,” he says.
A never-ending scream rises up in me. I scream until there is nothing left inside me.
“Bridge!” Mom’s face looms over me, dull at first, then sharper. “Bridget!” She pulls me into her lap and holds me so tight, I can’t move. “It’s okay, baby. It’s okay.”
“Mom?” Micah hovers in the doorway, wide-eyed.
“It’s okay, honey. Bridge just had a bad dream. Give us a second?”
Micah looks relieved to shut the door.
I shudder against her. She’s solid and warm. “Mom,” I moan.
“I’m here, sweetie. You’re safe.” She rocks me slowly. I wish I could stay here, curled against her, forever.
“Want to talk about it?” She brushes damp hair from my forehead.
I shake my head violently. “I can’t. I just . . . I don’t want to think about it anymore, okay? Please.”
Mom kisses the top of my head. “I’m always here, you know. Always.”
“I know,” I whisper into her collarbone. I want to stay here with her forever. Slowly, she is becoming one of the only people I have left.
I shower under an ice-cold faucet and throw on the first pair of jeans and T-shirt I find on the floor. My hair is still dripping down my back when I jump into the truck and speed out of the driveway, headed for the Mini Mart. I buy two giant coffees and start out again, all the while thinking of anything, everything other than a cold, dead Wil.
My gas light flickers on, then off again as I pull onto Leigh’s block. Her parents built the pretty stucco house when she was four. It’s the kind of house that whispers A beautiful family lives here. The kind of house that belongs on the cover of a decorating magazine, if readers could overlook the ugly-ass VW van parked in the driveway. The house has a widow’s walk, which has always been my favorite part. Stand up there and you can see the Intracoastal snaking to the end of the world, and the ocean beyond that.
I park my truck on the street and walk up the bricked drive, past the flower beds that are wet and throbbing with color. I can see through the front windows to the water on the other side. I knock. Louder, more insistent, with every passing second.
Finally, Leigh’s mother appears on the stoop. She’s wearing a plush bathrobe with matching slippers, and just the right amount of makeup to make her look awake but soft. The coffee she’s holding smells like hazelnut.
Leigh’s mom gives me a look like Good morning, sweetheart, and then she holds up her index finger and disappears inside. Leigh . . . your . . . underprivileged friend is here, I imagine.
Leigh appears on the stoop a few seconds later, in boxers and a purple T-shirt that matches the tips of her hair.
“Hey,” I say.
She squints into the sun.
“I’m, ah . . . here.” I hold out her coffee. At first I think she’s not going to take it, but she does, because she’s Leigh and she believes in caffeine even more than she believes in grudges.
She takes a sip. “You pick terrible coffee. What is this, pineapple?” She sticks out her tongue.
“Hawaiian flavor, I think.” I take another step toward her. “What you said yesterday. You were right.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve let everything in my life take a backseat to Wil. Including you. And that really sucks, and I’m sorry. And also I’ve screwed up a lot of things lately, so it’s not just you, if you were wondering.” My voice wobbles.
“You know my mom thinks you’re high,” she informs me. “Or, as she likes to put it, ‘taking the pot.’”