A World Without You

  I’m half-asleep when someone knocks on my door. “Yeah?” I call.

  Mom steps inside, holding two letters. “Mail!” she says brightly as she tosses one of them to me. It’s from James Jefferson High; inside are details for the class trip to Europe this summer.

  “What’s that?” I ask, looking at the open letter still in Mom’s hand. The Berkshire Academy for Children with Exceptional Needs logo is emblazoned across the top.

  “Bo’s school wrote us a letter,” Mom starts.

  “Is he in trouble?”

  She shakes her head and passes the letter over to me. I get the impression that this whole “mail call” thing was just an excuse to show me the letter. I read quickly. The first page is a cut-and-paste form letter that was probably mailed out to every family. I already know most of it—that a girl from his class, Sofía Muniz, committed suicide. That government officials have been observing the students, and that the board will be voting to determine the school’s future in a few weeks. Parents are invited to give their opinions by phone or email.

  The second page includes a personal note from Dr. Franklin, describing how the situation with the officials and the investigation affect Bo specifically. He warns us that Bo’s therapy isn’t working as well as he’d hoped, that he’s changing his meds again, that Bo may have to be transferred to a new facility regardless of the school’s fate.

  “Huh,” I say, handing the letter back to Mom.

  “I just wanted you to know,” Mom says. “We should be extra careful around Bo. It’s a . . . sensitive time.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Mom asks.

  “I’m not the one who needs to be talked to.” I don’t break eye contact, the challenge between us clear. But when Mom leaves my room, she doesn’t go to see Bo. Instead, she heads down the hallway to consult Dad.

  Typical. She has the perfect way to start a conversation with Bo, but instead, she’s going to squirrel away the letter and her fears behind Dad’s office door. It’s like they’re actively trying to keep the silence, as if silence was the best—the only—possible option for this family.

  I play on my phone until well past midnight, but what I really want is a distraction. I want my laptop back, and I’m a little pissed at the way Bo took it. I mean, I don’t really care, I wasn’t using it, but he didn’t even ask. He acted like I wasn’t even in the room. And besides, it’s mine.

  I push myself off the bed and throw open my door. Bo’s light is off, and I can hear him snoring on his bed, but it’s easy to break into his room, considering he has no door. My laptop’s battery light glows just enough for me to find it on his desk, and I creep inside his room, stepping over his dirty clothes on the floor, and snatch it back.

  It’s not until I’m sitting on my bed, my laptop plugged into the charger and open on my pillow, that I notice there’s a small drive attached to the side. It’s broken and jagged, but the actual drive seems to work. I click on the USB icon and find video files. Each file name is just a series of numbers, but it doesn’t take long to figure out they’re dates and times. I select one at random, and in the brief instant between when the file loads and starts to play, I worry that I’ve just stumbled onto Bo’s private porn stash.

  But the video just shows a room. Dr. Franklin’s office. There he is, behind his desk, taking notes.

  I crank up the volume on my laptop as Dr. Franklin pauses his work and the door opens.

  Bo is the first person in the room. Other kids, ones I recognize from Bo’s school, follow. They all sit in a circle as if they’ve done this a hundred times. It’s all routine for them.

  I lean in closer, the screen illuminating my face.

  “Good morning,” Dr. Franklin says. “I trust you all had a good Monday?”

  Bo looks over at the girl he’s sitting beside. She’s short, with brown skin and black hair. “The best,” he says with a smile.

  Is that his girlfriend? I wonder. Bo’s chair is scooted close to hers, but she hasn’t moved closer to him. He keeps looking at her; she sweeps her hair over one side of her face, the side closest to him, like she’s trying to hide. But then she tucks some of her hair behind her ear, and her hand drops beside his, her fingers brushing his open palm.

  Dr. Franklin starts what looks like a group therapy session, with a theme of reading other people’s emotions and caring about their comfort zones. He has one of the boys, a tiny little guy who’s practically paper-white, stand in the center of the room for a demonstration about appropriate ways to treat people. Seems a bit cruel. The kid’s shaking like a leaf, but most of my attention is on my brother.

  I’ve never seen him like this. Unguarded. Real.

  And more than that, I’ve never seen Bo as anything but my brother. Every time in my whole life that I’ve ever laid eyes on Bo, he’s just been my brother. If I saw him in a crowd of people, like at an assembly, I would think: There are all those people, and there’s my brother. He was separate. He was defined.

  But here, in this video, at Berkshire Academy surrounded by people he knows that I don’t, I’m seeing him not as my brother but just as a person. A stranger, even.

  It’s fascinating but also a little creepy.

  I’ve never seen him wear such a puppy-dog look on his face, like the one right now in the video, as he stares at the girl sitting beside him. It makes me want to know her. Is she cool? Is she using Bo? Does she feel the same way toward him?

  On the screen, Dr. Franklin turns toward the girl. “Sofía,” he says, “do you have anything to add?”

  She shakes her head mutely.

  So that’s Sofía, the girl who killed herself. Dr. Franklin told me that she and Bo had been close, and now I can see the way he feels about her. More than “close.”

  He loved her.

  I can’t see how she feels about him, though. She’s guarded, but not obviously depressed. I guess I figured that someone who killed herself would look sad and tragic. A total emo, dressed in black, with a cutting habit. But Sofía looks . . . normal. There’s nothing in the way she sits by my brother, in the way she listens to the others, in the way she sweeps her hair over her shoulder, to indicate that she’s going to take her own life. I check the date on the file. It’s like a countdown clock over her head. Three weeks after this video, this girl sitting by my brother will kill herself.

  I watch the rest of the video, and maybe it’s because I’m an outsider who doesn’t know her personally, or maybe it’s just because I know what will happen, but I can start to see the pieces of Sofía’s fate fall into place. It’s in the way she stands, as if just breathing is exhausting to her, as if carrying the weight of her own body around is dragging her underwater. It’s in the way she watches other people, detached, curious, like a scientist observing animals in the wild. She goes through the motions. When someone else is upset or sad or happy, it takes her a second to realize that she should mirror that emotion back, and another second for her to arrange her face into a mask of whatever emotion she’s hiding behind.

  The little details all add up to one girl’s death. Each warning sign is tiny, almost imperceptible. I watch the last few videos straight through, knowing that Sofía has only days left. Her eyes lose focus during the group therapy sessions as she gradually becomes more and more disinterested in what’s happening around her. She gives the other girl in her class a silver bracelet as if it means nothing to her, but I saw the way her fingers lingered on it in earlier videos. When Bo smiles at her, it takes her longer and longer to smile back, as if she has to remind herself what that configuration of facial features means, or maybe she’s just mustering up the energy to mimic him.

  Sometimes she is—I don’t know how to say it, and it’s weird to think this way because I never knew her, but sometimes it seems like Sofía is more herself. But then sometimes she just seems . . . absent.

 
I wonder, if I had been in Bo’s class, if I had occupied one of those blue plastic chairs, would I have noticed that Sofía was fading away? Would I have seen the signs, and would I have known what to do? Or would I have been like everyone else in the video: completely oblivious?

  That’s not fair. Not everyone’s oblivious. The doctor tries to draw Sofía out of her shell. They have a private meeting four days before she kills herself. He changes her medication, he asks about side effects, he wants her to start keeping a “feelings journal.”

  “I want you to know,” Dr. Franklin tells her, “that people love you. I know you feel alone in your family, but you’re not. People care about you. They see you. You matter.”

  “I know,” Sofía says in a soft voice. But she doesn’t sound like she believes it.

  That’s the last time she speaks on the tapes.

  She doesn’t disappear. She’s still there, in each session.

  Until she isn’t.

  There’s a jump of several days without videos, and when they resume, a lot of the sessions are what I would expect—some students cry, and Dr. Franklin helps them through it, even though he seems on the verge of breaking down too. But not Bo. I watch him. I know he was close to Sofía, that he cared about her as much or more than anyone else. But any time her death is brought up, Bo’s face falls blank. He gets a sort of dreamy look in his eyes.

  He never once seems to realize she’s gone. That she’s been gone for a while.

  CHAPTER 47

  Phoebe

  I’m still thinking about the videos when I wake up the next morning and stagger downstairs for breakfast.

  Bo’s already sitting at the dining room table, shoveling sugar-drenched Cheerios into his mouth. I almost ask him about Sofía, but I can’t think of a way to bring it up without being morbid.

  “What?” Bo asks, his mouth full.

  “Nothing,” I say, looking away and grabbing the box of cereal.

  Bo’s spoon clatters on the table, and he scoots his chair back, ready to leave. The sweet dregs of his sugary milk are still on the bottom of the bowl. I will never understand how he can possibly skip the best part, but Bo never finishes the milk.

  Rather than leaving as soon as he stands, though, Bo stares at me and then sits back down.

  “Hey,” he says.

  I look up at him, instantly on edge.

  “I just . . . are you like me?” he asks.

  “What?”

  “Are you, you know”—he pauses—“like me?”

  I shake my head silently. No. I’m not like Bo. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since Bo went to Berkshire Academy, it’s that mental issues are hard to diagnose, harder to treat. There’s a lot of trial and error. There’s a lot of hoping that this drug balances out this chemical in the brain or that this symptom being reduced makes up for this side effect. There’s not a lot of clarity when there’s something wrong with your mind. But at least when there’s not something wrong, that’s pretty clear too.

  Bo’s shoulders sort of sag with relief when I tell him there’s nothing wrong with me, and my heart clenches. I’ve wondered before if Bo resents me for being “normal,” but now I see that beneath whatever jealousy he might experience, there’s also worry.

  For the first time, I feel like Bo really cares about me. He’s been nice to me before, of course, but it’s not like he was ever my defender at school or on the bus. He let me fight my own fights. I’ve seen Rosemarie tackle a kid who was calling her brother gay, but Bo never did anything like that for me. Then again, to be fair, I worked hard to make sure I was never in a position to need help. I never wanted to test whether or not I would get it.

  I thought he didn’t care about me.

  But now it seems like he does care, at least when it matters. Maybe he’s cared all along. He’s just shown it in ways that I haven’t seen.

  Bo plays on his phone while I eat my cereal, but when I start to stand up and leave, he drops his phone on the table. I look at him, surprised at his sudden movement.

  “So, uh,” he says awkwardly. “How ’bout them Patriots?”

  I laugh. “I think they have a real shot at the Bowl next year, Dad,” I say sarcastically.

  Bo shrugs, smiling at me. “I dunno,” he says. “Just—how are things?”

  Even though I can tell Bo’s trying to keep it light, this whole conversation feels weird. I shift my empty cereal bowl from one hand to the other. “I don’t know,” I say.

  “What’re you gonna do after college?”

  I lift one shoulder up. How many different ways can I tell people, I don’t know?

  “I mean, you don’t have to go to college,” he adds. “You could just, you know, leave. Backpack in Europe or camp across America or sit out in the woods and paint or something.”

  I cock up an eyebrow at him. That’s new. Everyone’s asking me what I want to do in the future, but what they really mean is which college, which major, which career.

  I sit back down. “It’s not as simple as that, though, is it?” I say.

  “Why not?”

  Because I’m me and you’re you, I want to say. Because you get to have the unknown. That’s why everyone keeps asking me what I’m going to do when I graduate—because they want some level of certainty with at least one of us. No one knows what Bo’s going to do, but everyone knows what my future holds, even if I keep pretending like I have a choice. A nice, respectable, in-state college; a reasonable major that will lead to a career with a salary and a 401(k) and a savings account; a retirement plan. I’m two years younger than Bo, and all I know is that whatever my future entails, there’ll be a retirement plan.

  “Listen,” Bo says seriously. “You can do anything you want. You really can. You can start a company or get a doctorate or hitchhike to Wyoming.”

  “Why would I want to go to Wyoming?”

  “I don’t know,” Bo says. “I really don’t think you should go there. And, um, I want to talk to you if you ever decide to hitchhike. Seriously. But if you do it anyway, just know that it’ll be okay.”

  I squint at him. He’s really not making any sense.

  “All I’m saying is, your future is full of possibilities.” Bo looks me straight in the eyes. “Trust me, I know.”

  I snort. “You don’t,” I say, my voice full of defeat. “Because you know what I really want?”

  Bo looks at me, waiting.

  “I want the freedom to mess up,” I say. Just once, I want to be the one who’s allowed to screw up. I want the freedom to choose. Right now, I have no choice. I have to be this way. But one day, I’ll be free. I’ll be able to live my life without having to be perfect. I’ll be able to do anything I want—or nothing at all. I’ll wander around aimlessly. I’ll make mistakes. I won’t worry about being safe, being perfect.

  I won’t worry about disappointing my parents.

  At least that’s what I tell myself. Because being free? That comes at a price I don’t think my parents can pay.

  CHAPTER 48

  I was two when Phoebe was born. I don’t remember it at all, but I do remember the doctor visits.

  Phoebe was born with a hole in her heart. That sounds like a huge deal, but it wasn’t really. Turns out it’s pretty routine. But when Phoebe turned three, the doctors decided the hole wasn’t going to heal on its own, and she needed surgery. Before that, however, they did an EKG, and I got to watch.

  Phoebe lay down on a hospital bed, and Mom clutched her hand like she was saying her last goodbyes even though everyone else, including Pheebs, was pretty chill about it all. Phoebe watched the cartoon the technician put on for her, but I watched the monitor. The technician rubbed a wand over Phoebe’s chest, and a black-and-white picture of her heart showed up on the screen, contracting and expanding with every beat.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing.
r />   The technician showed me the arteries and the different chambers of Phoebe’s heart.

  “And this is what’s causing all the trouble,” the technician said. “This is where the hole is.”

  “It looks like a bird,” I said, and the technician laughed.

  With every heartbeat, the wings of the bird flapped. This was blood flowing over the loose tissue, but to me it was like one of those drawings little kids make of birds in the sky, the ones that look like elongated letter m’s. I watched, mesmerized, as the bird’s wings moved up and down, up and down.

  They got her into surgery, and she was only in the hospital for a day, and then she milked my parents for ice cream for dinner until she was sick of ice cream, and that was that.

  But sometimes I look at Phoebe and I think about how she had a bird inside her heart. On the outside, she’s just like everyone else, but I like to think that maybe she carries within her something magical and free.

  CHAPTER 49

  Phoebe

  I can’t sleep.

  Instead, I leave my room, creeping down the stairs and out of the house. The stars stretch out in front of me, glittering over the tops of the trees. Our yard is small, but it feels huge, tucked away in a clearing and surrounded by trees on three sides. A car drives past slowly, the headlights briefly illuminating the trees and casting long, creeping shadows deeper into the woods. As soon as it’s gone, the night returns to its cozy darkness. Even though the grass is damp, I sit on the little hill behind our house, staring up into the sky, pretending that all that’s left of the world is me and a hundred million stars and the blackness of the night.

  At first it’s quiet outside, but then I hear someone walking toward me from the house. I look over and see my brother’s silhouette, then I turn back up to the heavens.

  “Hey,” Bo says as he approaches.

  “Hi.”

  He sits down beside me, looking back at the house instead of up at the sky.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.