And I don’t know what to do. I will never know what to do, not ever again.
I spin on my heel, thinking nothing but feeling everything amplified. If emotions could be loud, mine would be deafening. I want to know why, why, why, why, but there is no one left to tell me.
“Damn it.” I kick the waste bin beside Will’s desk and it goes clang-bang onto its side, spilling crumpled papers and chewed-up erasers onto the carpet. “Damn it, Will! Damn it, Penny!”
I feel like I have been sprinting for weeks and all of a sudden look down to see that I’m out of runway with nowhere to go. I don’t want to live inside my own body. I want to take my fingernails and claw my way out, but I can’t. And in the next moment, I don’t even know why I had that thought or why I have any thought.
I’m hyperventilating now. I’m not sure when that started. But I am walking around the short track of Will’s room with a heaving chest and I can’t catch my breath no matter how shallow the pumping of my lungs becomes. I clutch the side of the bed, clutch the quilt that, of course, reminds me of him.
I jerk my hand back. My knees quiver. I turn and sink to the floor with the bedpost at my back. Breathe, Lake, I command myself. In and out. Now. Do it. Breathe. Unlike when I had asthma, my lungs try to obey, working hard to slow down, to find a rhythm.
But what now?
I press my phone into my forehead. Nothing coherent comes to mind.
Except that I wish someone were here.
Which makes me think of Ringo. Which makes me think of “Anna.”
And I find myself pressing my thumb to the screen and punching “The Beatles” plus the song name together into the search function of my phone. I just want one single thing to make sense and I also hope that maybe Ringo is right, that there is a song for every moment, and that perhaps I can borrow his for now.
I hold the speaker next to my ear as the song begins with a midtempo guitar and drums. I close my eyes and listen while attempting to drown out every other thought. The beat is deceptively happy. My lessons with Duke Ellington have taught me to tell the voices apart and it’s when John Lennon first takes the microphone that I know that the melody is only a fa?ade.
Anna comes to the singer asking him to set her free. Anna believes that another boy loves her more than the singer, so rather than state his case, the singer tells Anna to go with the other boy. He sets her free. “Go with him,” Lennon sings.
And I hear Ringo’s message. Go with Will.
And I’m hollow. I stare at nothing in particular. Ringo is trying to give me what I want, but how is that possible, when not even I know what that is anymore? I might not want to be set free. And does being set free mean I have to go with Will?
I have no clue whether I’m doing the right thing, but I type out a text to Ringo. I need to talk to you. I send the message. Then add: and Margaret.
My abdomen clenches. Then I’m nearly jumping out of my skin at the sound of a soft knock on the bedroom door. “Uh, Lake?” Jeremy hovers in the doorway. His eyes are red and bloodshot and his mouth droops open. “It’s been an hour.” He sounds embarrassed.
Look natural, I tell myself. Nothing to hide. “Thanks, Jeremy.” I smile warmly. “I’ll just be one more second, ’kay?”
Even in Jeremy’s clearly impaired state, I notice him scan the room, and maybe I’m paranoid, but I can’t help but feel it’s with a bit of suspicion. “All right,” he says. When he doesn’t move to leave right away I think that he might wait for me, but after an uncomfortable silence, he fades into the hallway and then I hear footsteps pounding down the stairs.
Quickly, I grab an old shirt out of Will’s closet, wrap it around the computer, and tuck it under my arm. The shirt is a reminder of Will, I’ll tell Jeremy if I can’t stash the computer in the back of Matt’s wheelchair fast enough. That should do the trick.
With a final glance back, I steal the key to my boyfriend’s private life and all the things he may or may not have hidden from me—and leave.
I drive faster than I should toward the coffee shop, faster than I knew I was able to, as fast as I’ve driven anywhere since the car wreck, fast like I don’t even care about it, fast like there was no car wreck in the first place. Fast because everything is a wreck.
I glare into the rearview mirror without letting my foot off the gas a single inch. “I don’t know if you can tell, Matt, but I’m having a major life crisis right now and you are high.”
“A little.” He chuckles. “Like on a scale from ground floor to airplane. I’d say I’m no higher than an office building, though.”
We should be there in seven minutes. So my world should hold up for at least seven more minutes. “I didn’t say anything about smoking pot,” I snap. “That wasn’t part of the plan.”
“But you didn’t not say anything about it either. Wait,” he says, tilting his head, “is that what I mean to say?”
“It was implied!”
“Maybe your plan wasn’t my plan. Did you ever think of that?”
I roll my eyes. Six minutes. “You’re impossible.”
“Im-poss-ee-bluh,” he says in his best French accent. “Besides, you should relax, Lakey Loo. I’ll be dead in less than a week. Who cares?”
I step harder on the gas, willing the minutes to cut in half. Ocean, condos, marina, all blur across the window. “You don’t know what you’re saying, Matt.” I dismiss him.
“Dead.” He laughs and I wish I could punch Jeremy in the mouth. What was he thinking letting my brother smoke pot? “Man, isn’t death funny? It’s just…it’s ridiculous. It’s, like, it’s like this. It’s like the only sure thing in life is that we die and yet…and yet…here’s the crazy part: we keep being surprised when it happens.”
Four minutes. Another mile and I’ll be able to make out Neville’s. I turn in my seat to give him a proper withering stare. “Can you puh-lease pull it together,” I say.
“‘Can you puh-lease pull it together,’” Matt mimics.
So now he acts like a real sibling. Fan-freaking-tastic.
Green light. Green means go. Go to figure out who my boyfriend was, who my friends really were. Go, go, go. “Oh my god, I’m going to kill you if you don’t cut it out,” I snipe back at him.
“Well that would work out nicely.”
Two minutes.
“Stop it,” I tell him. My mind is racing with the car and not all in one direction. Like: What would life be if Matt hadn’t gotten himself broken? Would he be a writer? Would he have a girlfriend who he brought home from college at Thanksgiving and on Christmas? Would he have ever played a sport, even if it was only junior varsity? Would we have stayed close? Would we have found new books to read and would we have inside jokes? Would he buy me beer, be a protective older brother, would we have secrets from Mom and Dad? Would I have ever met Will and Penny, or are there no such things as soul mates after all? One minute. “You’re going to meet some new people in here. Be nice. Okay?”
“Aye-aye, captain.”