The Last September: A Novel

“You’re soaked,” he said. “You’re shivering.”


The itchy scarf crackled with ice as he unwound it from my neck. Then he pulled me in and kissed me, almost as an act of charity—a Good Samaritan performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I could feel my blue lips returning to pink against his; I could feel a raspberry stain, pixeled from the cold, spreading across the base of my collarbone. I could feel the tug of the future—even if in that moment, all the future meant was a place to curl in closer.

A WEEK LATER, ELI and I met for breakfast at Dot’s Diner. He ordered a Belgian waffle, which took a good thirty minutes to arrive at our table. We talked about his party and his Russian Literature seminar.

“Goddamn core curriculum,” he said. Eli was premed, acing bio and chem classes but struggling with the written word. The opposite of me. I offered to help him write his term paper.

“Could it come to that?” he said, digging into the finally arrived waffle. “A freshman writing my papers?”

“Helping you with your paper,” I corrected, not out of any particular moral high ground; I just didn’t want to write an entire twenty-page essay. We split the bill and stepped outside into high-altitude sunlight. A warm stretch had hit, and dingy, hardened clumps of snow huddled against the curb—the only remnants of the storm. Eli slipped on Vuarnets, but I could tell from his brow he was still squinting.

“So,” I finally said, after battling against it the past hour. “What do you hear from your brother?”

His eyes weren’t visible, but he let out a little sigh. “Not much, Brett,” he said. “Not much at all.”

I waited for something more, and when he didn’t provide it I elbowed him lightly in the ribs. Charlie and I had spent our night together in the single bed in my dorm room. The next day we came here, to Dot’s Diner. I had slid into my side of the bench, expecting him to sit across the table, but instead he slid in right beside me. We spent most of that day leaning into each other, clinging to each other. It never occurred to me that our imminent separation—after such transcendent and life-altering togetherness—was any less painful for him. When Charlie left that afternoon, he’d told me that he didn’t have an email address, and neither of us had cell phones. Not everybody did, back then, the late nineties. I told him not to call me on the dorm phone.

“Write instead,” I said. “Nobody writes letters anymore.”

It had been almost a week and I hadn’t received a letter yet but was determined not to despair. Charlie wouldn’t have written his first day home in Hyde Park, where he was going to culinary school. He would, I thought, have written his first letter to me the next night and mailed it the following morning.

“Eli,” I said now. “Is that all you’re going to say?”

“For the moment, yes.”

I pushed him again, hard enough that his shoulder banged against the window at Nick-N-Willy’s. The pizza baker paused, catching his dough in midair to glance over at the thud. Eli righted himself and brushed off his coat.

“If I hear from him,” he said, “I’ll tell him to call you. Okay?”

“He said he would write.”

Eli nodded, unreadable, his eyes still hidden behind dark glasses. We turned and started heading up Ninth Street. Usually after a big brunch Eli and I liked to hike up the Sanitas Trail off Mapleton. I had my hands in my pockets, staring at my feet as they alternated on the crooked sidewalk. Obviously Eli was doubting it, the connection between Charlie and me. As worry fluttered, I tamped it down by remembering the way Charlie had looked at me and the fact that he was the one who’d had set the whole thing in motion, back in Eli’s crowded kitchen. Why would he have done that if he hadn’t wanted to be with me? My concentration on these matters was so complete that when I lifted my head to look at Eli, he wasn’t walking next to me anymore. I stopped short.