I can feel my lips curve into a smile. “I’d like that.”
He smiles back.
I tell him, “Fingers crossed Princeton takes me, too. If we’re there together, we should hang out.”
Kent’s whole face lights up before he catches himself and tries to play it off. “It’s a date. See you in September.”
“Easy there, it’s not a date date,” I caution him. “Don’t get the wrong idea. You’re just a worthy adversary...and a decent friend.”
“Okay,” he replies affably. After a long pause, he adds, “Yet by your logic, you’re exactly who I should aspire to be with, right? Did you not ten minutes ago tell me to set my sights on someone unattainable? Yes or no?”
“Is shut up an option?” I ask.
He laughs. “No, it’s not. All I’m saying is, who’s less attainable than you? Don’t flatter yourself, I’m not saying you’re what I want. I’m only going by your own logic, which points to you being the right person for me, the highest-hanging apple on the tree. Way I see it, you have to either agree that we’d be perfect together or admit that your theory on dating is wrong. I’m comfortable with both eventualities, although I’d prefer to have been right.”
I glance over at him again. Between the play of shadow and light, he sort of looks his age in here, which surprises me. Is it possible he’s not going to get carded for PG-13 movies his whole life?
If so, how would I feel about that? I’ve gone the perfect-guy route and it did not work out. What if I opened myself up to interesting, to quality? The last time I had my chance to do just that I didn’t and I’ll forever regret it.
I ask him, “Are you flirting with me, Kent?”
His reticent grin is heartbreakingly sincere. “I don’t have that kind of confidence, Mallory. But thank you for thinking I have game.”
Hold on, what if his saying he has no game is actually the ultimate amount of game? Did he somehow just Tom Sawyer–me into painting his fence?
Before I can ponder further, Kent strains to look out the window as we hit the intersection on Elkpath Road. “Wait. Here. Pull over here, I see something.”
I’m not even parked when he flies out of the passenger seat, practically tucking and rolling. I take off after him, in the direction of the railroad crossing.
Simone is here, I see her now, too.
Oh, no.
fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
Simone is standing by the tracks, a smallish, fattish dog at her side, facing the north. There’s a train about a mile away that should be here within the next minute or two. Her head’s down and the slope of her shoulders reads as despondent. She emanates sadness, radiates hopelessness.
My mind races with the possibilities of her intentions, all of them grim. Kent’s already running toward her, but he’s slower than I am. I sprint alongside and quickly overpass him.
I reach Simone first.
In one fell swoop, I grab Simone and wrestle her down the embankment, away from the clear and present danger of the oncoming train. Her tubby dog is rolling along behind us on the other end of his leash, profoundly confused as to what’s just happened, yet utterly delighted.
When we reach the bottom of the hill, I throw my whole self on top of her to make sure she can’t move and Kent leaps on top of both of us. He knocks the wind out of me. Somehow I assumed he’d be light as balsawood, but he has a surprising amount of ballast, like there might be some actual muscle under his jacket. He grips both of us firmly, pressing our bodies into the grass. Adrenaline courses through my system and my face is streaked with terror sweat, but something in me causes me to turn to Kent and say, “Worst threesome ever.”
My God, he’s right. I do have a twisted sense of humor.
When he laughs, he loses his grip on Simone and she struggles free partway, so I lunge and grab her legs, bringing her down again as the Metra continues to hurtle toward us.
“What in the bloody hell are you lunatics doing?” she sputters loudly, over the clatter of the oncoming train.
“We’re gatekeeping you,” I reply, putting her in a headlock and practically dragging her up the embankment in the direction of my car.
Kent grabs the leash and he and the dog trot along behind us, as we place valuable space between us and the tracks. He tells her, “You’re not jumping today.”
Simone wriggles out of my clutches and begins to pick stray leaves off herself before brushing at the dog’s sweater. “Christ on a bike, what’s wrong with both of you? I wasn’t going to leap.”
“Sure looked like it,” Kent replies. He’s bent in half, leash looped over his wrist, with both hands on his knees, panting hard. I should probably have him run stairs with me some time. I feel like that would benefit his cardiovascular system, and as his new friend, I’m obligated to look out for him, to gatekeep him in some respect.
“I wasn’t jumping,” she insists.
“Sure seemed like it,” Kent says, still gasping for air.
Yes. Cardio. Definitely.
“He’s right,” I agree.
She says, “No, no, I heard the train coming, so I figured I’d just wait for it to pass, be better safe than sorry.”
“Uh-huh, then what were you doing right by the tracks?” I ask, still completely dubious.
She looks back at the spot where she’d been moments before. “I was reflecting.”
“Reflecting?” Kent asks.
“I was standing here thinking about Stephen, wondering what must have been going through his head that afternoon.” She fishes a twig out of her hair and looks at it for a couple of seconds before letting it drop to the ground. “How much pain he must have been in to feel that taking his life was his only option. That there was no joy, no tomorrow to look forward to, no eventual happy ending. I hate that he felt he had nothing worth living for. I hate that he wanted it all to stop. I hate that I’ll never see his huge grin again.”
Her words are like a kick in the stomach.
“I miss him all day, every day,” Kent says. “You know how many times I pick up my phone and start to text him before I remember, nope, not an option anymore. Then I get mad at him, like, ‘Why’d you leave me here to deal with all this shit on my own?’ We always figured everything out as a pair, you know? We were a team, better together, like Eric B. and Rakim on Paid in Full or Kanye and anyone. I can’t do MIT without him. Like, I really don’t even know how I’ll do any college without him. And then I get mad at myself for being pissed at him. It’s this whole shame spiral.”
My thoughts bounce back and forth between Braden and Stephen. The only difference is I actually did text Braden after he was gone. And then I’d sit there, waiting for those ellipses to appear, but they never did.
Braden was kind of a throwback, though, the only person I knew who preferred email over text. People who expressed themselves with slices of pizza and taxi emojis made him seethe. That’s why he used to say “heart” this and “heart” that; he was mocking the reliance on emojis. Used to say that one day, our generation would speak entirely in hieroglyphics.