“I’m terrible at gifts, Audrey.”
Audrey tried to reassure me. “Pshaw. What are you talking about? I love my talking Gollum doll. Nothing says best-friendship like an emaciated demon who hides under your pillow snarling, ‘My precious!’ even after you remove his batteries and drown him in a bucket of water.”
I laughed so loud, it sounded like a seal barking. I don’t know why I’d bought that doll except that Audrey once said she loved The Lord of the Rings. It was so creepy, I hid it in Charlie’s closet until I was ready to wrap it. “Did Jesse ever show you the smittens I got him for his birthday?”
“What the hell is a smitten?”
“It’s a mitten that two people can wear while holding hands.” Audrey turned red; I thought she was choking on her tongue. “Come on! I thought it was cute!”
“We live in Florida!” Audrey linked her arm through mine and pulled me toward the coffee shop. “Tell me what you know about Diego.”
“He’s a good kisser.”
“Yuck. Other than that?”
The more time Diego and I spent together, the less I felt I knew about him. Every layer I peeled back revealed a hundred more. “He likes to read. He’s an artist. He doesn’t drink.”
“That’s a list of stuff,” she said. “What do you know about him?” Audrey ordered us coffees while I tried to come up with an answer. I knew loads about Jesse—he loved baths but hated hot tubs, he listened to self-important indie music, cologne made his eyes puffy, he never washed his jeans—but Diego was an enigma. Even though he’d finally fessed up about being in juvie, that had only raised more questions.
I wracked my brain for something. “He’s sweet,” I said. “He’d give you his last dollar. Nothing scares him. He cuts a path through this world like he’s got a plan, but I’m pretty sure he’s making it up as he goes along.” I sat down on the ledge surrounding one of the fountains with my head bowed. “I don’t know, Audrey.”
“Stop stressing. You’ll figure something out.”
“I shouldn’t even be doing this.”
Audrey sat beside me and rested her head on my arm. “Doing what?”
“Looking for a gift for Diego, thinking about Diego, imagining that we might have a future together. Even if the world doesn’t end, he’d still end up abandoning me.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Jesse did. It’s my fault he’s dead.”
Audrey slapped my shoulder. “Are you soft in the head?”
“Jesse always said I didn’t love him the way he loved me. He must’ve been right; otherwise, he wouldn’t have killed himself.”
She took my hand and kissed my fingers. My knuckles were still scabbed from punching the drywall with Charlie. “Jesse didn’t die of a broken heart, Henry; he died of a broken brain.” I tried to interrupt, but she cut me off. “It took a lot of therapy for me to understand that Jesse committed suicide because he was sick. It wasn’t my fault, it wasn’t his fault, and it sure as hell wasn’t your fault.”
“I should have been a better boyfriend.”
“Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never get to stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another. Jesse got worn down and didn’t think he could fight anymore.”
“Why? Why did he do it, Audrey?” My voice caught in my throat, and tears weren’t far behind, but I didn’t care. Fuck it, and fuck them.
“I don’t know.” Audrey shook her head.
To Jesse’s parents, I was just some boy their son was dating. I’d eaten dinner with them a couple of times, but the conversations were awkward and unmemorable. “Sometimes I think about going to their house and asking to see Jesse’s room one last time. He had to have left something behind explaining why he killed himself.”
“What if he did? What then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Would it make you feel better?”
“No, but at least I’d know the truth.”
Audrey said Jesse’s suicide wasn’t anyone’s fault, but I think we all shared the blame. Me, Audrey, Jesse’s parents, the kids at school. Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light. You can’t see a black hole, but if you look closely, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it—the way it changes the orbits of solar systems or draws off a star’s light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center.
Maybe we couldn’t have stopped Jesse’s collapse, but we should have seen it happening. If I can figure out why, I can stop it from ever happening again.
Audrey tossed her empty coffee in the trash. “You want to get out of here?”
“I still don’t know what to get Diego for Christmas.”
“You’ll figure it out, Henry.”
“And if I don’t?”
Audrey took my arm and led me toward the parking lot. “Then give him the gift every horny teenage boy wants for Christmas.”
“An Xbox?”
“I love you, Henry.”
“I think he already has an Xbox, Audrey.”
24 December 2015