There is a crease all the way across his forehead, from one side to the other. “What are you talking about?”
“I listened to the song, to ‘Anna.’ It says ‘Go with him’ and I know you meant Will, but I don’t think it’s supposed to mean Will. Not now, not after…Will loved Penny and Penny loved Will or if they didn’t they would have.” I shake my head and I realize I sound like an insane person, but I press on. “I—I just wanted to kiss you because maybe I don’t have to resurrect Will, you see. It doesn’t have to be him.”
He grabs me by the shoulders. His chest is rising and falling fast. His eyes flit between mine like it’s hard to take me in all at once. Then his eyes leave my face altogether and they look past me to the van where Matt is waiting. “At Penny’s you said: What if there was a third option for your resurrection choice.” I don’t say anything. Penny knows my secret. Penny is dead. “Matt said in there that by your birthday he’s going to be dead. You’re saying not Will. I’m guessing not Penny. You’re kissing me. You’re acting crazy. You’re saying that this is because of everything I said.”
He heard Matt.
“So here’s what I think. You would help Matt kill himself? You would—you would do that—and—then…?” He blinks. “And that’s because of something I said?” He pinches the bridge of his nose and I wish he’d hold on to me again, even if out of anger. “Resurrections ruined my life, Lake. Have I not made that clear? Why do you think I’m in therapy twice a week? Because it’s fun?” He spins away from me and circles back. “This is sick. You are acting sick. Every part of this, the way you’re doing this, the way you’re treating me, like I’m a security blanket to make you sleep better at night, it’s sick. I keep trying to convince myself otherwise, but it’s clear you don’t really give a damn about what I think or what I’ve gone through. I thought you got it, Lake. I thought you were coming to it on your own, but look around at what’s going on in your life and why it’s going on. Ask yourself the answer. What are you missing?” He’s practically shouting now. It scares me. “I think I need to back away now. I’m sorry for raising my voice. I think I just…This isn’t healthy for me. You’re not healthy for me. I apologize if I gave you the impression that I can handle this. Turns out, I can’t.”
I cry all the way home. Matt and I don’t say a word to each other. We both have too much on our own minds and also, I feel like I’ve taken a bath in boiling water.
Everyone I love has been picked away from me—Will, Penny, Matt, my parents, Ringo—and without them I’m not sure how there can possibly be anything left.
Mom must sense something’s wrong because she’s waiting for us, and I leave her to take care of Matt, pushing past her to get inside and to my room. I read an article once explaining that sick animals hide when they’re ready to die. I imagine myself hiding beneath the covers and never waking up.
Instead I fall asleep at some point, but it’s a fitful sleep and I keep having dreams about losing my virginity, about holding Penny’s pinky, about Matt falling so far that he never hits the bottom and about Ringo—What are you missing, what are you missing, what are you missing?
Hours and hours later the tendrils of morning light come for me, snaking their way into my bed and peeling my eyes open against my will. My eyelids are crusty. There are dried salty streams coating my cheeks, and my face is swollen.
The world is still here, though. My mattress is soft underneath my weight. Sunshine bathes the landscape. The saliva in my mouth is sour and stale and my stomach grumbles for food. In the last month I’ve learned a few things about grief, and my least favorite one is that the universe doesn’t quit turning just because a corner of it is crumbling.
I’m nauseous this morning, but not terribly. Actually, I wish I was sicker so that I could curl myself into a ball and melt into the bed. Time is stupid and weird. It never moves at the pace I want it to and it makes things better, even the worst things, even if only by a hair, even if just enough to get up, for instance, even when I don’t want it to.
At the door of my bedroom I listen. The house is quiet. Safe. I tread carefully into the kitchen and pour myself a glass of milk. The house is so silent, it sounds like there’s static electricity buzzing in my ears. Through the window I see that outside the day is bright and windy. Gusts whisk the ocean into frothy whitecaps. The rocks spout white, as if the jetty were a giant whale.
Is Ringo right about me? Am I sick?
On the beach below, half of my sandcastle wall is still intact, but only the back section. The tide has eaten through the center of the sand wall and swallowed parts of each of the towers, which now stand lopsided, ugly, and sad, the roofs caved in on all of them.
My boyfriend is dead, Penny is dead, my brother is paralyzed. Will and Penny’s families hate each other. Harrison’s uncle is a lunatic. Ringo’s mom is alive but not living. My parents can’t hold on to two ropes that are pulling in opposite directions and they can’t get over what happened to Matt, maybe not ever. I have a choice that’s unfairly huge. I am not God. Hell, I’m not even class president. I’m just a seventeen-year-old girl and I didn’t sign up for this.
I try to retrace the steps to the first moment when my life started falling apart. Looking back now makes my current circumstances seem all but inevitable. For five years, I’ve been breaking too, just like Matt. From the first moment I woke up and I wasn’t in the same family as my family anymore and I quit talking to Jenny and I skipped soccer practice and changed schools and Matt hated me.
I repeat that again in my mind. Jenny. Soccer. Changed schools.
And again.
Jenny. Soccer. Changed schools.
And Matt hated me.
My gaze collides with the jetty and I start to add a few things.
Asthma—poof!—gone. The summer I turned hot. The way Coyote Blue looked at me.
My brain feels like it’s trying to walk through drying cement. Sludge, sludge, sludge. But I have to keep going.
I turn my hand over and study the silver scar from where a dog bit me when I was fourteen and a half years old.
My fingers carve through my hair, holding it back in a makeshift ponytail and then releasing it. No, I think. I start doing the math in my head. When I was thirteen Matt was seventeen. Seventeen years old.
My mouth and ears tingle. No, no, no.