I loved Matt Kincaid, from the very beginning. I may never have felt swallowed up by that love, or surprised by it—of course anyone Matt loved would love him back. He’s the boy who sees the best in everyone, laughs easily, forgives fast, gravitates toward the shyest person in the room, doesn’t gossip or judge when the rest of us do.
That was the same person whose heart I broke, and the same person who’d sobbed to me before he drove away, and suddenly I’m so angry. With myself, with him, with the intersection where he went off the road, and the rest of the world for sitting back and letting it all happen.
“I’m so sorry.” I say it over and over again, but it changes nothing, and soon my sorrys taste like poison, and I’m crying angry tears because how could he do this to me?
How could he do this to all of us?
I close my eyes against the tears, and when I open them, I see Beau sitting on the far side of the bed, his face buried in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Somehow I’ve slipped into the other world, and he doesn’t know I’m there to see it. He thinks he’s alone.
He is alone.
I am alone.
I want to go to him so badly. I want to hold him and tell him, I understand you.
Instead, I turn and run from the room, wiping tears off my chin and jaw.
Thirty minutes later, Beau walks out into the waiting room, where I’m sitting apart from a few of the younger football players. I can tell by the way they appraise him that we’re in his world. He stops to talk to them in low, soft words I can’t hear. One of the freshmen rubs at his eyes, and Beau sets a hand on his shoulder, just barely shaking his head. “. . . gonna be fine” is all I hear over the whir of the AC unit.
Beau and I find each other at the exit and walk out into the hot, sticky parking lot. His eyes are dry and determined, everything bottled back up safely inside where no one can see it. But I saw it. I see him. I wish I could hold all of him at once, but the truth is I can’t even find all of my own missing parts.
He climbs into his truck without a word. “You okay?” I ask.
He just nods. I touch his hand, and his fingers slowly, tightly close around mine.
“I’m not either,” I say.
Beau comes for me in the middle of the night, as we’d planned, and I sneak out through the closet window. I jog up the cul-de-sac to where he parked his truck, and swing the passenger door open. He’s wearing a white T-shirt, and I try not to notice the shape of his suntanned arms, his broad chest, in the dim glow of the cabin light. I’m wearing torn-up jean shorts, and I try not to notice the way he looks at my legs either. I fail on both counts, which leaves me feeling antsy and shaky and guilty on the drive over to the school.
Beau parks around by the back door. He gets out and nudges a big rock full of tiny fossilized trilobites and seashells away from the outer wall, then picks up the key beneath it before putting it back.
“How’d you get that?” I ask as he unlocks the door.
“The key? They gave it to me with my Nobel Peace Prize,” he says. “I stole it, Natalie.”
We walk down the hall to the band room as silently as possible and let ourselves inside. Beau goes over to the piano and sits, plucking a couple of keys noncommittally.
“This always works?” I ask, staring at his back.
He turns around and barely smiles. “You gonna come sit with me, Cleary?”
I laugh at the ground and cross the room, sliding onto the bench beside him. He’s warm against my side and still smiling at me. It’s almost enough to drown out the thought of a fluorescent- lit hospital room humming with monitors and machines pushing oxygen through Matt’s body. It feels so unfair for me to have the thoughts and feelings I have toward Beau right now, and I tap a key to distract myself.
“Yeah, it always works,” he says, focusing on the piano. “Before I met you, playing was the only sure way I knew how to grab hold of your world. Football was the only way I knew how to grab hold of mine.”
“You never changed worlds while you were playing?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “Doesn’t even feel like there are two worlds when I’m playing. Just the one.”
“That must’ve been a relief,” I say, “when you realized that.”
“Used to be.” He meets my eyes again.
“Alice thinks I won’t be able to cross over anymore in a couple of months.” It comes out as little more than a whisper, and Beau’s eyes dip.
“You think she’s right?”
“I don’t know. I think Grandmother could help me.” It’s not just that I have to save someone’s life—though I do. There’s a part of me that believes Grandmother can help me stay Open, and I actually want that.”
Beau’s hands start to drift over the keys, and I close my eyes. The song is beautiful, dark and thick, slow and painful. Like kissing Beau after I ran from the hospital.
Saying goodbye to Megan.
Watching a new life enter the earth and an old one extinguish.
Growing up, being stretched and stamped and squeezed through life like homemade noodles cranked through a pasta maker. As the music enfolds me, I miss dancing.
“What is this song?”