Len.
I can feel something slashing through the grief, gnawing its way closer and closer until it’s right at my chest, reaching for my heart. It’s guilt, so much of it that it catches in my throat and makes it difficult to breathe.
I should never have agreed to that date with Len. I should have said yes to Rob. I should have pulled him straight inside and made him get into the shower and comforted him and told him I was there. He was drunk and hurting. How could I have turned my back on him?
I grope for the phone on my nightstand and furiously punch in Charlie’s number. She picks up on the first ring.
This is something I love about her. She always has her phone on. Never on silent or vibrate or even quiet. Always on full blare. One time we got kicked out of seeing some chick flick because her phone kept blaring—Jake kept calling—and she wouldn’t shut it off. She’s available. No matter the time of night or morning, and for a second I am more grateful for that than I’ve ever been for anything else in my whole life.
“Hey, baby,” she says, like she isn’t sleeping. Like she isn’t even tired.
“Can you come over?”
“Duh,” she says. “You think I’d abandon you to the wiles of driving? Not a chance.”
“Can you come over sooner?” I ask. My mom touches my leg underneath the covers, and I blink back tears. The sound of Charlie’s voice and my mom’s touch all at once like that feel like too much. “Please.”
“Yeah,” she says, and I can see her nodding, already out of bed. “What happened?”
“Just come over.”
Charlie and I became friends in the sandbox the first day of first grade, but we met before then. We didn’t know this until last year, though. We were looking through old photo albums at her house, and there was a picture of us as toddlers dressed in swimsuits at the beach with our moms. There are other people there too. This girl Asara Dool, who moved before high school, and a few more, so it’s clear this wasn’t a playdate for the two of us, but there we are, in a picture together. Charlie had a second copy made and gave it to me in a frame last year. She had written on the back in gold Sharpie one word: evidence.
I think about that now. About her dress hanging in mycloset and my earrings in her drawer and the Swedish Fish on my desk and the million little pieces that remind us that we’ve been friends since before we can even remember, that she was there before I even knew who she was.
“She’s coming over,” I tell my mom when I hang up. I say it firmly, deliberately, like it’s somehow going to change things. Like all that needs to happen is that Charlie needs to know.
I look at my dad. He’s been quiet, his hand on his forehead and his arm across his chest. Usually when things get tense he makes a joke. My mom says she can always count on him to lighten the mood, even when she doesn’t want it lightened, but today there is absolutely nothing to say to make things better.
Our phone rings, and for a second I think it’s Charlie, but I haven’t even put down the receiver. Time is doing something funny. Doubling back on itself so that it’s hard to tell when things have occurred. It feels like my parents have been sitting on my bed for years, like there was never a time before I knew Rob was dead. Which would mean—and I can’t even believe I’m thinking this—that there was never a time he was alive.
At the same time, I expect him to come waltzing through my door. To suggest we skip the last day and go see a movie.
My mom stands up, and for the first time I realize she is dressed. Fully dressed. She has on black pants and a cream sweater and even pearls, which she never wears. I imagine her getting dressed this morning, choosing an outfit that would be able to take her through whatever today might bring. She doesn’t look like herself, and I know she put these clothes on after she heard. That she took the time to look presentable, that she needed to pull herself together in order to stare down the pain she was about to cause me. Before she came in here and told me that Rob was dead.
“I’ll get that,” she says, and she looks at my dad. She puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, and he stands up.
“I’ll come with you,” he says.
My mom looks from me to my dad, and I can tell she’s nervous about leaving me alone.
“I’m just going to get dressed,” I say. “Then I’ll come downstairs.”
My mom looks relieved, but not much, and she kisses me once on the cheek before she disappears with my dad down the hallway.
When I’m alone, it starts to sink in, to bear down on me from all directions so that it feels like I’m suffocating, drowning. I once read somewhere that if you are in a burning building, you should drop to your hands and knees because the airis cleaner down there, or something. I do that now. I’m on the ground in my room, coughing and sputtering, when Charlie steps inside.
“Oh, God,” she says, in my doorway, and then she’s on the ground next to me, gathering me into her arms.
Scene Two
The funerals take place threedays later. Rob’s is in the morning, Juliet’s in the afternoon. We’re not invited to Juliet’s. My uncle calls and tells my father he doesn’t want him there. They blame Rob’s family for the accident. And, by association, mine.
Juliet’s parents are the only ones who think it was Rob’s fault, though. There are huge skid marks on the road by the Cliffs where Rob’s car went over, and no evidence of any oncoming traffic. The rumors at school are that Juliet grabbed the wheel and led them off the road, free-falling to the water. Tormented, tragic love. Or at least that’s what Olivia said. The worst part is, the rumor keeps building on itself, picking up tiny kernels of truth and spinning them into unrecognizable form. Juliet couldn’t stand that Rob still had feelings for me. She foundout we were seeing each other. If she couldn’t have him, no one would.…
Charlie helps me pick out a dress. A black one from Macy’s that feels like plastic when I put it on. Tight and hot and sticky.
“You look nice,” Charlie says with a sad smile. She has basically lived at my house since she came over the other morning. I think she left once to get a toothbrush and change of clothes, but that’s about it.
