“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”
“What I’m trying to say—badly, I guess—is that we each have the way the world sees us, and you were the very first person at this school, maybe the first person pretty much anywhere besides my immediate family, who looked at me and saw more than the weirdo flapping kid that everyone here has known as David, or I guess shithead. You listened to me talk. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. It was like the equivalent of being given a better name.” She nods, and I wonder if she will get up and leave and we are done. Not friends. Not enemies. I tell myself I can count that as a win.
“I still…I mean, are we just not going to talk about what happened? Your kind of weird wasn’t good or charming the other day. It was cruel. You hurt me,” Kit says. “And I don’t really care what your name is. Stop changing the subject.”
“We never started on the subject—” Kit sighs, so I clear my throat. Begin again. “You’re right. I’m so, so sorry. I can try to explain what happened, I mean, with my brain, because I hope you know I would never, ever, ever be intentionally cruel, especially to you. You’re my favorite person. The thing is, I get hyperfocused, and that’s what I was thinking about, the nugget inside, the answer, not what it all meant, actually. Does that make sense?”
Kit shrugs, a gesture that is in my mental Pictorial Dictionary of Ambiguous Gestures, and I don’t know what to do. If I should keep talking or stop.
“I’m sorry. And I hope you can forgive me,” I say, and I turn to look at her. Not her clavicle or her jaw or her left arm. But right in the eyes, where it’s hardest.
“I dunno, I guess,” Kit says, but she’s the one to look away first. “That doesn’t mean, though, that, like, we are suddenly besties again or something.”
“We were best friends?” I ask. Of course she’s mine, excepting Miney, who is family and therefore doesn’t count. Never thought I would count as hers, though.
“I just mean I know I was the one who asked you to start the Accident Project in the first place. I know that. The whole thing was super messed up. I know I didn’t tell you the truth, or at least not the whole truth, but you shouted out my biggest secret—the worst thing that has ever happened to me, the worst thing that will hopefully ever happen to me—to the whole world. Like it was nothing. Like you didn’t give a crap about my feelings.”
“I’m sorry. Not just for the shouting. Or how inappropriate I was. I do stupid things like that sometimes. I am sorry for all that, of course, but what I’m most sorry for is that any of it happened to you in the first place, and that I haven’t said that out loud to you. It’s not fair. The fact that you were driving that car—the inexplicable cruelness of that bad luck—is the only thing in the world that I can think of that can’t be explained by math or quantum theory. See, I don’t usually use words like bad luck, and yet there are some things so totally out of our control that science hasn’t even come up with a label for them. And they suck. And you don’t deserve any of it. The accident wasn’t your fault. Even the math says—”
“Okay,” she says, cutting me off, like it’s some sort of decision, like she’s uninterested in my fault algorithm. Of course, I have no idea what that decision is or if it has anything to do with me at all.
“You couldn’t have braked. There was nothing you could have done,” I say, thinking this is the one last gift I can hand over, even if she’s not sure she wants to hear it. After this, I’m all out. No more food or drawings. It’s me.
“Of course I could have braked. I could have been faster with my foot. There must have been a moment—that’s all I wanted to know. The when. So I could see it differently. Even if it was just in my mind,” she says, looking out into the distance. I follow her gaze but don’t know what she’s staring at. All of Mapleview, I guess.
“No, you really couldn’t have. If you’d braked, then everything would have been worse. Someone else would have died too, Kit. There was a Mini behind you, so if you stopped short, that car would have been crushed from two different sides. Both cars would have been hit. I can show you the model and the simulation I made, if you want.”
“I don’t think so,” Kit says. “I mean, thank you, but there are some things…I just…can’t.”
“This wasn’t your fault. Mathematically or legally. There is nothing you could have done. So instead of trying to watch it happen differently, why don’t you try to not watch it at all?”
She looks up at me, her face full, but I don’t know of what.
“I didn’t meet her. The woman driving the Mini. I don’t even know her name.”
“You saved her life,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says, and nods, but she’s again like water. Her smile is slippery and starts to fall off her face. “Thank you. Again. This was really nice of you.”
“You saved her life,” I repeat, because I don’t think she’s hearing my certainty. That this is a fact.
“You really think so?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. I know so. Math doesn’t lie.”
“People do, though,” Kit says. “All the time.”
“Not me.”
“No, not you,” she says, and her smile firms up a little.
“So we’re friends again?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, we don’t have to sit at the same lunch table—you looked happy back with Annie and Violet—but it would be cool if we still talked sometimes. Like at school during other periods.”
“Of course we can talk,” she says, and I feel my stomach fill with relief. I have not lost everything.
“Just to be clear, I assume that there will be no more kissing?” I ask. She laughs, loud and hard, and it feels as good as it did the very first time I made her laugh. When it comes to Kit’s laughter, I don’t care much about my intentionality.
“We’ll see about that.”
“So…so…there might be?”
She elbows me, a friendly nudge, I think, and I nudge back. I take this to mean a warm no, thank you.
“Right. How about hand-holding? Can we do that?” I ask.
“David?”
“Right. I’ll stop talking. We can just sit here quietly together.”
“That would be a good idea.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
David and I are sitting in the bleachers and all of Mapleview is spread out before us like a restaurant menu, and it’s that hour in a late winter day when everything turns the same color of washed-out gray. The air is so thick, I feel like I could slice it and serve it like pie. Our small town looks even smaller from up here.