There’s too much to look at. Too many colors and people and shapes. Babies in fleece hats. Signs advertising one-day sales. An old-fashioned revolving barber pole. I turn my attention back to Kit and focus.
“The feeling was mutual.” I picture Dentist, that bright light he wore on his forehead and how he always smelled like latex because of his rubber gloves. I’d have loved to discuss meteorology with him, as my own knowledge in that area is rudimentary at best. “Who knows? Maybe the physicists are right and he’s not gone. I mean, of course your father’s dead, but I think it’s comforting to believe or at least hope that a small part of him, actually the most important part of him, his consciousness, may be out there somehow.”
“Yeah, it is,” she says.
“But it still sucks that you’ll never ever be able to see him again. I mean, consciousness is not the same thing as him continuing to be your dad. Obviously that would have been the preferable outcome.”
She snorts. I have no idea what that means. Whatever way it falls, a snort does not feel neutral.
“You sure tell it like it is. Not many people do that, you know.”
“Yeah.”
“Everyone tiptoes around me these days. Even my mom. Your brutal honesty is…bizarrely refreshing.”
I tell her to turn right, that my house is up at the corner. She pulls into my driveway, and now there is nothing left to do but get out of the car.
“Thanks for the ride.”
“Anytime,” she says, and I want to ask what she means by that. If it’s a real offer or just a courtesy. The English language, like all languages, is full of frustrating ambiguity. Well, except, of course, for Loglan, which was derived from mathematical principals of logic to avoid just this sort of confusion. Honestly, we’d all be better off if we spoke that instead.
Once inside the house, I watch from my front window as Kit’s car retreats. The distance grows between us exponentially, and I wait there, hands on the glass, until I no longer have a sense of its measurement.
Ten minutes later, my mom drives me the five miles back to school to pick up my car.
She smiles the whole way there.
To: Kit
From: Mom
Subject: The Five Stages of Everything Sucks
It’s the middle of the night. Just stumbled across this attached article re the five stages of grief:
1. Denial
2. Anger
3. Bargaining
4. Depression
5. Acceptance
Of course BACON should totally be number one on this list. Also, I’ve decided I’m skipping over the first three steps and heading straight for DEPRESSION. You with me?
* * *
To: Mom
From: Kit
Subject: Re: The Five Stages of Everything Sucks
You should really text like a normal person. Who emails anymore? Things this list is missing: Chocolate. Netflix binges. Pajamas.
As for depression, already beat you to it. Sure am #livingmybestlife
—
“Hey!” Gabriel says when I walk in to the Pizza Palace. He is overly excited, as if I didn’t just sit behind him in calc less than two hours ago. Like we are in the arrivals hall of a large international airport and I’m just back from a yearlong trip around the world. He lets go of Justin, who he has in a headlock, to envelop me in a big hug.
“Hey, guys,” I say, and move my lips in the way I think approximates a smile. It requires complicated muscle coordination. More exhausting than that time Violet made me try Pilates.
I look over and Violet jumps out of the booth, runs over to me. Annie gives me a Brownie salute, which is one of our inside jokes, and I see I’ve won her over just by showing up. That makes me smile for real, and then the smiling makes me tear up, so I stop doing it.
“You came!” Violet says.
“I can’t stay long.” As soon as the words slip out, I realize they are true. After dropping David off, being alone in the car felt unbearable, and the Pizza Palace was closer than home. Since the accident, my mom has been making me drive at every opportunity. She claims she doesn’t want me to develop a lifelong phobia, and I guess her plan is mostly working. Still, when I’m alone in the car, I flinch at passing SUVs, and I’m way too aware of how fast all the other traffic is going, how thin the line is between us, how easily one mistake can kill us all.
Cars are terrible, powerful, destructive machines. Maybe sixteen-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to drive them. Maybe no one should.
Now, here with everyone, I feel no better than I did on the ride over. I’m sweaty around my friends lately, like socializing is a form of cardio but without the postexercise endorphins or smugness. I need to beg my body to push through this.
“Can’t believe you ditched newspaper yesterday,” Annie says. “After all that work, you’re just going to throw away the chance at editor in chief?”
I shrug, and Gabriel uses that as an opportunity to start massaging my shoulders.
“You look tight,” he says. For about five minutes last year, Gabriel and I were together. One of those stupid things that happen because you find yourselves in the corner of a room at a party where everyone is drunk. He kissed me suddenly, like a bird swooping to pick garbage from a can, and after I recovered from the surprise attack, I kissed him back. That Monday, he held my hand in the hallway at school, and then we made out again later in the 7-Eleven parking lot in between taking sips of our Slurpees. Two weeks later, he broke it off, said something about us being better off as friends, which was fine by me. I wasn’t particularly into Gabriel, but it was fun having someone to kiss and hold hands with. Having, for just a little while, a pleasant distraction.
Now, though, I’d really like him to stop touching my shoulders. In fact, I wish there were a way to transfer his hands to Annie, who for the past few months has had a secret unexplainable crush on him. She’s never said it out loud, but Violet and I know she’s hoping he’ll ask her to prom. There’s nothing wrong with Gabriel on paper, but there isn’t really much there there. Annie’s not the type of girl who should have to settle for pleasant distractions. She’s too cool for that.