Sam
Alex
Ella
Yolo
I’ve been trying. I’ve been remembering all the things I’ve done wrong. I’ve been going over and over the summer I spent the last year trying to forget.
Yolo is already here.
And who else?
It could be all of them.
It could be one of them.
The one I want the most.
Which one would that be?
I’d say the same thing to any of them that I’ve been saying over and over and over again for the past year. But maybe this time, it will work. Maybe this time, it will be enough.
I have enough letters to spell
I’m sorry.
95.
once
It was May 31 and I was fourteen, reading a book in the bathtub, with a big slice of cake and a huge scoop of ice cream on the edge of the tub next to me. It was a book my mom had given me for my birthday the year I started hearing the cold lonely sound. She had read it, too, when she was younger. It was her very own favorite copy.
It had a sunset-colored cover with a watercolor of a small house on a lake. Her name was written on the inside cover, and the edges were wavy with water damage from when I’d dropped it in the bathtub once before. There were eleven marks on the inside, one for each time I’d read it. I read it a bunch when I first got it and then every year on my birthday. The book was calledTuck Everlasting, and it was about a girl who met a family who could never die.
“July, come on,” Jack said. “I have to get in. I left my cleats in there.”
I glanced over. His baseball cleats were, indeed, under the sink.
“It’s my birthday,” I said. “I get to do whatever I want. And I don’t want to get out yet.”
“I have practice,” he moaned. “Pleeaaase.”
“I’ll be out in five minutes if you leave me alone,” I said.
I could tell by the silence on the other side of the door that we might have a deal.
After I put a spoonful of chocolate ice cream into my mouth, I turned the page.
I readTuck Everlastingevery year because I loved it, and because I hoped that if I read it enough, the idea of dying not being the worst possible thing would rub off on me. And I read it every year on my birthday, May 31, because that felt right.
I turned the page again. There it was, one of my favorite parts, when Tuck explains to Winnie, the heroine, why he wishes he could go back and become mortal again.
You can’t have living without dying. So you can’t call it living, what we got. We justare, we justbe, like rocks beside the road.
I thought of things like this as handholds. Reading a book on my birthday, running in the morning, making Rice Krispie treats with my dad on Sunday afternoons and eating them straight out of the pan, playing video games with Jack, going rock climbing with my mom. That was probably what had given me the idea to call them handholds, actually.
They were the things I could hold on to so I could keep from falling.
