“Annie, chill,” Violet says.
“Sorry, I don’t mean it that way,” Annie says, giving me another one of those winces, as if she’s doing something painful, like getting her eyebrows waxed. “I’m worried about you, Kit. You should talk to us. We’re your best friends.”
“I just need a little space,” I say. “It’s obviously not you guys, it’s me.”
“Why are you talking like you’re breaking up with us? It’s not you, it’s me. I need space.” Annie laughs, trying to lighten the mood. As if she can turn my words into a joke, and we can giggle our way out of this one.
I almost say: OTT.
I almost say: Laughs need to be earned now.
I almost say: Please just stop.
I almost say: I’m sorry.
“It’s so not a big deal. It’s lunch,” I say.
“Kit means she’s having a tough time. Because of everything,” Violet says. I shake off my irrational annoyance at her euphemism. Everything is obviously my dad being dead. Why can’t she just say that instead?
Even when the doctor came out of the emergency room to break the news to my mom and me, he used what my English teacher likes to call “purple prose.” We’ve lost him, he said. He’s gone. Like my dad was a credit card left behind at the supermarket or a puppy that slipped out the front door.
Yesterday, David just said the words right out loud. The unvarnished, ugly truth.
“Duh. That’s why you have friends in the first place. So we can help you,” Annie says. I look at her, wonder how she defines helping. Probably by trying to revive the old Kit. The pre-everything Kit. But that’s impossible. The old Kit is as dead as my father.
We lost her, I think. She’s gone.
“This isn’t healthy. The way you’re shutting us out,” Annie says.
“Healthy,” I repeat back in a flat tone, because suddenly I don’t know what that word means. What does healthy have to do with how I’m feeling? The sort of unimaginable pain that makes it hard for me to get from one moment to the next? I know we’ve only been standing here for minutes, but it feels like hours or days. Time has turned interminable and impenetrable, something to be endured and passed through, however possible. Health isn’t a factor. This can’t be fixed with talking or green juice. Everything will not be fixed by a forty-eight-hour cleanse.
I wish I could say all this out loud, but I can’t. I don’t know how.
“Girls!” Mr. Galto, the newspaper adviser, calls to us from inside the classroom, sighing the sigh of teachers immemorial. As if we are difficult inmates instead of AP honors students. “If you want a chance at editor in chief, you better get yourselves in here.”
Since I’m not gifted athletically or musically or anything -ically, I’ve been gunning for the EIC position for forever. Violet and Annie both want it too. It’s how girls like us pad our college applications without having to sweat or join marching band. Today is the day we officially put ourselves up for nomination. I’ve missed a few deadlines lately, but I’m hoping my get-out-of-jail-free card extends to extracurriculars.
“Please,” I say to Annie and Violet, which is the worst word I could have used, because that look is back. Real pity this time. I can see it through my grief haze.
“Please what?” Annie asks, her voice so gentle that it almost breaks me. Annie is not supposed to be gentle. Annie is supposed to be aggressive and sometimes a little mean because she’s the only one of us who takes risks and gets shit done.
Annie is supposed to tell me to get over it and stop wallowing, and maybe we could have a fight about that—about how little she understands what’s going on with me right now—since anything would be better than this.
My lower lip starts to quiver, and I realize that if I stand here for one more second I will burst into tears, right in the hallway. Just after the last bell. When there’s maximum foot traffic.
Nope. Not going to cry here. Not going to happen.
“Last chance!” Mr. Galto calls from inside the room.
I do the only thing I can. I split. I throw away almost three whole years of work on the newspaper and my one shot at editor in chief.
I sprint down the hall.
When I finally get to my car, which I realize as soon as I get in is the last place in the world I want to be, I crank the windows wide open and blast the air conditioner. I turn up the radio. The tears don’t come.
I’m too shaken to put the car into drive. Instead I sit and stare at the clock on the dashboard, marvel at how the numbers stay still.
“Please, please, please,” I whisper again and again and again, an empty chant, because I still don’t know what I’m begging for.
—
The landline—which has an actual spiral cord and is attached to the wall, like this is the eighteenth century or something—rings. Our just in case of an emergency phone that my dad insisted we install even though we each have our own cell. That’s how he was. Every year, in celebration of his birthday, he’d change the batteries in our fire alarm and carbon monoxide detector. In the event of a Category 6 hurricane or a zombie apocalypse, we have a kit in our basement full of dried meats and canned foods and gallons of water. And on the fridge, there’s a laminated card with the number for poison control, even though I’m sixteen and unlikely to accidentally swallow a dishwashing gel pack.
“You never know,” he used to say. “You just never know. Unimaginably bad stuff happens.”
My dad was orphaned in his early twenties. Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer within a year of each other. Bone for my grandfather, breast for my grandmother Katherine, my namesake.
“Alliterative cancers,” my dad would joke. “A freak thing.”
It never occurred to me to think about what losing both of his parents must have been like. What it cost him to be forced to speak so casually about it to me, who was so stupid, who had never before weighed the magnitude of forever. Who laughed at the juxtaposition of the words alliterative and cancer like that was such a clever thing for him to say.
My mom told me that my father totally changed after his parents died. He stopped drinking beer with his buddies, put away his electric guitar, and cut his nineties-grunge hair. He started taking their relationship, which they’d both assumed was just a college fling, more seriously. He applied to dental school, despite having no particular passion for teeth or gums or the diagnosis of gingivitis. Practically overnight, he graduated to adulthood. He picked stability and practicality over passion.