“It’s . . . perfect!” Diego sat with the book in his lap, just staring at it for a moment before opening the rest of his gifts. Along with the book, I got him a pair of real flip-flops, Doctor Who pajama pants, and a one-pound bag of cereal marshmallows. “What am I going to do with all these marshmallows?”
“I don’t know, but everyone should have a bag of emergency cereal marshmallows.” I pulled a last gift from the bottom of the bag.
“Henry!” Diego frowned but accepted the gift.
“The others were . . . you know . . . This one is special.”
Diego tore into it with the same zeal as the others but froze when he saw the front. It was a simple black journal with leather front and back covers, and pages with a deckle edge. But it wasn’t the journal that had caught his attention; it was what was etched into the front.
REMEMBER THE PAST,
LIVE THE PRESENT,
WRITE THE FUTURE.
Diego traced the words. I couldn’t tell if he liked it or not. He’d practically gone catatonic.
“I thought you could use it to record all the stuff you want to do,” I said. “I don’t know. It’s stupid. If you hate it, I can take it back.” Of course, I couldn’t take it back because of the etching, but whatever.
“Thank you, Henry.” It was only three words, but it felt like more to me. It felt like a wish that we could go back and forget I’d accused him of breaking Marcus’s windows, that we could forget about his past and my Jesse and meet at a time before tragedy had consumed either of us. But that wasn’t possible, and this was all we had. For these last thirty-five days we could be friends, and that would have to be enough.
Diego handed me my gifts.
I looked at the wrap job, and grinned. “That was so sweet of you to let those poor orphans with no fingers do your wrapping for you.”
“Whatever,” Diego said. “It’s abstract wrapping. You just don’t understand my art.” There were four badly wrapped gifts in all. A book about rockets and space travel written in 1948, a retractable fountain pen, a bottle of dark red ink that looked like blood, and a star chart.
“You shouldn’t have done all this.”
Diego grinned like crazy. “There’s one more.” He handed me an envelope. “Open it.”
I expected it to be a card, and I felt like a jerk for not getting Diego one. Only, it wasn’t a card. Inside were two tickets to see Janelle Monáe in concert. I’d only mentioned liking her once. “I can’t believe you remembered.” I turned the tickets over, scanning them for the when and where. The show was at a club in Fort Lauderdale. On February 2, 2016. “Diego—”
“If the world doesn’t end, we can go. Or you can take Audrey if you want. Either way, I thought having something to look forward to might help you make your decision.”
“You still want me to press the button, even after what I did?”
Diego smiled. His hand twitched like he wanted to touch my cheek but was fighting the impulse. “I still want you to want to press it.”
28 December 2015
I wish I could say that it was my idea, but that honor belonged to Jesse Franklin. Jesse believed stories were the collective memories of the world, recorded in books so that each of us could know who we were before we became who we are. He said that’s why people love The Catcher in the Rye when they’re teenagers, but fall out of love with it as adults. We’re all Holden Caulfield at fifteen, but when we grow up we want to be Atticus Finch. I didn’t exactly buy Jesse’s theory, but I stumbled upon the copy of To Kill a Mockingbird he’d loaned me, and it came back to me. That’s when I knew what I needed to do.
Audrey and Diego were both in on the plan—it’d been easy to convince them. Convincing TJ to let us into Nana’s room without her permission required a more devious approach.
“And that, gentlemen, is what boobs are good for,” Audrey said as she shut Nana’s door behind us and dropped the box she was carrying onto the empty bed. We hadn’t spoken about breaking into Jesse’s house, and I was happy to forget it had ever happened.
I rolled my eyes, but I doubt we would have gotten in without her. “You can finish patting yourself on the back later. Mom said she’d have Nana here by three thirty, which leaves us less than an hour.”
Diego scanned the bare room. “Where should we start?” It was difficult to resist holding his hand or leaning over to kiss him. I caught myself a couple of times, forgetting we’d agreed to just be friends, and I wondered if it were easier for Diego.
“Let’s start at the beginning.”
It took the entire hour, all three of us working quickly to finish before Nana returned. That didn’t include our preparation from the last two days. This was my belated Christmas gift to Nana, and one that she wouldn’t need to remember to appreciate.
Mom wasn’t in on the plan. Not the real plan. I’d only told her that I wanted to hang something in Nana’s room at the nursing home as a surprise, and convinced her to delay bringing Nana back after spending Christmas with us. My phone buzzed, letting me know they were close. We finished in a mad rush, and were waiting outside the door for Nana when she arrived.