His car is parked in my driveway, just over to the side of thehouse. He’s been here the entire time. He heard everything. The realization knocks the wind out of me.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “Please understand. It’s complicated.”
I want to tell him how sorry I really am. How Rob is this force in my life, one I can’t turn away from. I want to tell him that it’s confusing, especially now. How it was always supposed to be Rob, but being here, with Len, makes me want to forget about that. To leave the past entirely. The problem is, I’m just not sure how to do it.
“It’s not, actually,” he says. He inhales and looks at me. Sharply. Like his eyes could cut through flesh. “Here’s the deal. I care about you. I always have. I see who you are. This amazing girl who’s smart and beautiful and intelligent and talented and who cares way too much about what other people think. You wrote me off for years, and then this miracle happened this year and you actually paid attention. Do you know why? Because for one damn minute you weren’t thinking about Rob.” His eyes narrow but he doesn’t stop. His voice is loud and strong but not angry, just firm. “I’m a patient person. I’ve waited for you for what seems like forever. But I’m not going to stick around and watch you pick the wrong person again. So the thing is, Rosaline, it’s actually not that complicated. When you think about it, it’s really simple.”
He hands me the flowers and walks away to his car. I wantto call after him, to tell him to stay, but my feet are cemented to the spot. Instead, I just stand on my front steps, holding his violets, my violets, thinking about what he just said as I watch him leave. It’s not until he’s gone and I’m alone that I realize that this time, it’s not what I want at all.
Act Five
Scene One
“Wait up!” I call. I’mflapping my arms and legs wildly, but he’s so much faster than I am, it feels like I’m not even moving, just staying afloat.
“Hurry up, slowpoke,” he calls, flipping over onto his back and doing the high kicks like those synchronized swimmers in the Olympics.
“No fair,” I say. “You got a head start.”
“Early bird gets the worm!” he says, but it comes out as “worrrr” because he’s flipped over and has a mouthful of water. He’s coughing and choking, and I paddle over, a little alarmed, but when I get there, his cheeks are wide and he spits at me, sending water into my eyes and all over my face.
“Stop!” I yell, and then he’s making a beeline away from me, kicking so forcefully I am lost in his splashes.
“Come and find me,” Rob says, and then disappears beneath the water.
I’ve heard people say that when something really big happens, the whole world stops and you become frozen in time, but that’s not how it happens for me. Instead, I’m being catapulted through time, yanked by my navel, back, back, back to before any of this began. The only thing I can think of is that summer at Camp Kwebec. Of Rob and me splashing around in our bathing suits. Of the sun and the promise of lemonade and his voice under the water.Come and find me.
I know before my parents tell me. I know the second they walk into my room to wake me. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Rob was here last night, asking to be with me, and when I said I didn’t know, I changed the course of things. Whatever it is, I’m not surprised. I don’t fight them on it the way they expected me to. I don’t even scream “No” or “Why” or any of the things people usually do in movies. Instead, I just lie there quietly. I’m already being pulled back to the pool. So far, in fact, that their words sound muffled and their faces look distorted. Like I’m watching them from underneath the water.
Rob is gone, they tell me. But not the way he was yesterday. Not at all. This time he’s gone for good.
Car crash. Alcohol. The Cliffs. The words come at me like tiny flashlights piercing the darkness, blinding and brilliant.
I don’t look at my mother’s tear-streaked face or my father’s somber expression. Instead, I look up at my ceiling.
It’s littered with stars, the stick-on kind that glow in the dark, and because it’s five a.m., and therefore not light out, they are shining up there. Rob and I used to collect them when we were little from the vending machines outside our local grocery store. My ceiling isn’t extraordinarily high or anything, but we couldn’t reach it just by standing on the bed back then, so we used to jump, with the star sticky-side-up in our palms. We got them all up there that way. There must be hundreds.
Images of Rob come to me in crystal detail. My memory is perfectly clear; it’s the present I’m having trouble with.
I see Rob standing in my driveway, yelling at me to take the training wheels off my bike. Rob and me on our back porch, making s’mores. Rob and me standing in line at the Macy’s counter, trying to sneak fake jewelry into my mom’s purchase.
“We’re going to go over to the Montegs’, to be with his parents,” my mother says. All of a sudden I snap up and awake. Juliet. Who called her? How is she taking this?
“Where is Juliet?” I finally ask. But then I see the way mymother is looking at me, and I realize—she’s gone too. Juliet was in the car with Rob. They’re both dead.
For some reason the force of this sends me sitting up, straight up. My mom’s sitting there, and my dad’s standing over us. The clock reads 5:25. I was born at 5:25, and my mom says that for the first ten years of my life it was the time I would always wake up, like it was the time I was meant to reenter the world.
Neither Rob nor Juliet will ever reenter my world. He will never show up on my front steps. He’ll never watch a movie with me or hold me close to him. She’ll never be my friend again. She’ll never forgive me.
I remember thinking in September, at Olivia’s party, that it was like he might as well have died, that death would be easier, because at least I wouldn’t have to see him. I was wrong. Death is completely different, final in a way I can’t fully grasp. Rob is nowhere on this planet. Not in Italy with his parents or gone at summer camp or even with Juliet. He doesn’t exist anymore, and he’s never coming back.
“Do you want to come with us?” I hear my mom ask.
“Can I call Charlie?” I feel like a little kid, asking my parents’ permission to buy an ice cream, but I’m not sure what to do. What is the proper protocol on this? When your best friend and your cousin die, what are you supposed to do?
“Of course,” my mom says. “Whatever you want.”
But this isn’t what I want. What I want is for today to unfold the way it was supposed to. For us to be at school. Today we are supposed to be having a dress rehearsal for the play. Rob and Juliet are supposed to be on the stage, and Len and I are supposed to be up there, adjusting lightbulbs.
