The Last Time We Say Goodbye

  “Yes, that’s what you’ll have to do, honey,” Mom said. “You’ll have to save up.”

  Ty nodded, but it was a resigned kind of nod. He knew there was no way for him to get a real job with all his extracurricular activities—basketball being the big one.

  I tried to soften the blow. “But come on, what would you do with a car, really?”

  His eyes flashed. “I’d drive to school. I have my license. I’d take girls out on dates. I’d take road trips, get out of the state of Nebraska for once in my stupid life.”

  Mom and I exchanged worried glances.

  Ty closed his eyes and sighed. “Anyway, it’s fine. I just thought I’d ask.”

  And he went back to shoveling in his food.

  I was thinking, as I finished up my own breakfast, that I could give him the Lemon. Once I got to MIT, of course. I wouldn’t need a car there.

  It was the Lemon, but still. It was a car. Maybe Ty could do what I had never bothered to attempt: he could fix the Lemon up.

  But I didn’t say any of that. I didn’t tell him.

  Mom finished her coffee. “It’s off to work I go,” she said cheerily. She paused as she got up from the table to smooth down a tuft of Ty’s hair that was sticking up in back. “Have a good day, my beautiful children.”

  I probably rolled my eyes. Ty and I finished eating, and I left him to wash the dishes. Because it was his turn. I was nearly out the front door when I stopped to call out something like, “Hey, you better get with it or you’ll miss the bus.”

  Ty appeared in the doorway. “I’ve got a ride with one of my buddies,” he said.

  A lie.

  I didn’t know that it was a lie. So I said whatever it was that I said, and I left the house.

  That was the last time I saw him alive.

  The last time.

  But in the past few months I’ve found a way to reconstruct the rest of December 20. I can put the pieces together. I can figure out what happened from there.

  First, Ty finished the dishes and ran the dishwasher. Because it was his turn.

  Then he waited for the school to call the house to inquire about his absence. He told the secretary that he was home sick, the stomach flu, he said, couldn’t keep anything down, he said, and that Mom forgot to phone it in but he’d get her to call from work later.

  Then he walked 7 miles in the ice and snow to the nearest city bus stop.

  He rode a bus into Lincoln and disembarked at the Westfield Gateway Mall.

  This, according to a wad of receipts I found in his back jeans pocket in his clothes hamper, was what his next few hours looked like:

  11:17 a.m. Foot Locker, Nike LeBron XI basketball shoes, $199.99

  11:33 a.m. Lids, Trailblazers T-shirt, $24.00

  11:49 a.m. Sunglass Hut, Ray-Ban polarized sunglasses, $149.95

  12:14 p.m. Panda Express. Shanghai Angus Steak bowl, $7.95

  12:36 p.m. MasterCuts, shampoo and cut, $25.00

  1:02 p.m. American Eagle, Slim Straight jean, dark tinted indigo, $49.95

  1:25 p.m. Precision Time, Toxic Area 51 men’s watch, $189.00

  2:18 p.m. J.C. Penney

  Hanes 4-pack boxer shorts, $40.00

  Gold Toe 3-pack crew socks, $17.00

  Levi’s reversible belt, $30.00

  Dockers trifold wallet, $28.00

  Dockers faux-leather black bomber jacket, $140.00

  Brighton collage picture frame $60.00

  All total, he spent $960.84, which we discovered later he stole from a jar that Mom had hidden in the back of her closet for emergencies. Almost exactly a thousand dollars, once you include the sales tax.

  He could have almost bought a car for that.

  Then he rode the bus back and walked the 7 miles so he could arrive home around 3:40 p.m., just in time to pick up the phone when Mom called to check on him, which she always did when he got home from school. He told her he had a good day.

  Then, as far as I can figure, he spent the next 2 hours putting together the pictures in the collage out in the playhouse.

  At 6:07 p.m., he ordered a pizza: Canadian bacon with pineapple, his favorite.

  If it took the normal amount of time to be delivered, the pizza would have arrived by 6:45.

  He ate three pieces, then wrapped the rest and stuck it in the fridge to save for Mom and me.

  He put his plate in the dishwasher.

  He spent some time doing regular stuff on the internet. He clicked on 3 fairly random links.

  He set his new clothes—basketball shoes, socks, underwear, jeans, belt, wallet, Trailblazers T-shirt, bomber jacket, sunglasses—in a neat pile on top of his bed, for him to be buried in, we could only assume.

  He made 2 phone calls, both to numbers that I don’t know and I haven’t had the guts to call to find out.

  He sent 1 text.

  He wrote 1 note.

  Then, at 7:49 p.m., just as Mom was getting ready to get off her 12-hour shift, he went into the garage.

  He loaded the gun. He took the safety off.

  He called 911.

  He pulled the trigger.

  The bullet struck him in the chest, severing his subclavian artery.

  It took him 30–60 seconds to bleed out.

  And then he died.

  33.

  IN THIS DREAM, TY AND I are rock climbing, something we never did in real life. Okay, not rock climbing for fun, I surmise from our apparent lack of ropes and harnesses.

  Cliff climbing.

  On an at-least-five-hundred-foot cliff.

  Fun times.

  We don’t talk in this dream. We focus on making our way up the rock face. It reminds me of the Cliffs of Insanity from The Princess Bride, the blue endless sky above us, the blue crashing ocean below us. Only there’s no Andre the Giant to take us up. No rope to climb. We just have to make it on our own.

  About twenty feet from the top, the ledge I put my weight on crumbles from under me.

  I start to fall. I open my mouth to scream, like screaming is all you can do when you’re about to plummet to your death, but before the sound leaves me Ty catches my hand. He pulls me to a safer spot.

  “Thanks,” I breathe.

  “You really messed up,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “No, with Damian. That was a disaster.”

  “Yes. Yes, it was.”

  “You should apologize.”

  “I plan on it.”

  “You should work it out beforehand,” he advises. “You’re not very good on the spot.”

  “Oh, thank you, Ty. Thank you very much.”

  “No problem.”

  “How are we going to do this?” I ask him, craning my neck to look up the cliff.

  “I don’t know. Be more careful,” he says.

  The words have just left his mouth when he falls. It’s not like it was with me a few seconds ago, all slow motion where I have time to scream and he has time to grab me. He reaches up, grabs a rock. He makes a distressed sound, like whoops. Then he’s gone.

  I look down just in time to see his body hit the rocks before a wave crashes over him.

  34.

  MONDAY MORNING.

  I have a speech. An apology. A plan.

  That’s the funny thing about plans.

  The first thing that goes wrong is that I wanted to drive to school today, in order to get to school early, in order to have plenty of time to seek out Damian, but then the Lemon doesn’t start, and I spend so much time trying to get it to turn over that I miss the bus. I call Sadie hoping to get a ride, and—get this—she informs me primly that she took the bus herself. To save money. For her college books, she tells me.

  Right.

  I do finally get the Lemon started, but I don’t get to school until after the first bell rings, so there’s no time to head to room 121B with the crudely crafted paper flower I made for him yesterday, which says I’m sorry on every petal.

  It’s lame. It’s pathetic. But I’m hopi
ng it will work.

  Then we have an impromptu danger drill at lunchtime, where we all have to pretend that there’s a shooter on campus and get under the tables and lock all the doors, so I don’t see Damian then, either.

  But I can track him down during eighth period, I rationalize.

  During sixth period, as everyone’s getting set up for gin rummy, the game of the hour, I ask Miss Mahoney if we can talk.

  “Absolutely,” she says. “What’s up?”

  “I wonder if there’s some extra credit I can do, to make up for my lousy midterm.”

  “Of course. Or you can still retake the test, if you’d like,” Miss Mahoney says without hesitating, which is funny because there is no “of course” about it. “Will Friday work for you? Lunch hour?”

  “Friday will work.”

  “Excellent. Friday it is.”

  I turn to head back to the card table, but she stops me. “Can I ask why you changed your mind?” she asks. “I mean, your original grade isn’t great, but it’s not that important in the grand scheme of things. You don’t have anything to prove to me, Lex. I know you know your stuff. So you don’t have to—”

  “I got into MIT,” I say.

  The whole room goes quiet. Miss Mahoney’s mouth falls open.

  “As in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As in the best mathematics program in the country,” she says. “That MIT.”

  “Yes. That MIT.”

  “Lex, that’s amazing!” she says when she’s recovered enough to speak, and what’s great is that I know she means it. Her face has gone pink, she’s so pleased for me. “That’s wonderful!”

  “There’s a part of the acceptance letter that warns that their offer is contingent on me passing the rest of the school year with flying colors,” I say.

  “I see. That makes sense.”

  “So I intend to give them flying colors.”

  She looks like she’s about to start dancing. “I have no doubt that you will, Lex. Wow. MIT. Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.” I allow myself to smile about it then, for the first time. I let myself feel it.

  Back at the card table my friends are all staring at me with a quiet awe.

  “Very impressive,” Eleanor says as I take a seat next to her. “You deserve it.”

  This is big coming from her, because I know she applied to MIT herself, and this must mean she didn’t get in or hasn’t heard yet.

  “Thanks, El.”

  Beaker, on the other hand, looks pissed.

  “You didn’t tell me you got into MIT,” she accuses, shuffling the cards like she’s punishing them.

  Uh-oh. I’m in trouble. “I didn’t know how to tell everybody,” I try to explain. “I think I wanted some time for the news to sink in before I went public.”

  She still looks pissed. Clearly this excuse isn’t good enough for her. She’s my best friend. She should have been the first person I called.

  “What about you? Have you heard back from any place yet?” I backpedal.

  “Williams College. Sarah Lawrence. Amherst. But I’m still waiting for Wellesley.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get in,” I tell her. Beaker’s been fantasizing about Wellesley for a while, something about it being all women and one of the best liberal arts colleges and Beaker wanting to explore career options, since in addition to math and science Beaker loves theater and plays a killer flute solo, and she doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up.

  She nods, but her expression says she doesn’t forgive me.

  We settle into playing rummy. A few minutes into the game I notice that Steven is smiling. Like he can’t stop smiling. A secret kind of smile.

  “What?” I ask finally. “What’s going on with you?”

  His smile widens. “Nothing. It’s just that I’m happy for you. Truly.”

  He picks up a seven of hearts from the discard pile and sets down three pairs of sevens.

  Eleanor snorts. “Right. You’re happy for you, too.”

  “El,” he warns. “Don’t.”

  Don’t what?

  She ignores him and turns to me like this is something that needs to be said and she has appointed herself the messenger. “He’s going to Harvard.”

  I glance quickly at Steven, who’s blushing. “You got into Harvard?” I gasp.

  “I got into Harvard,” he admits.

  This is huge. I feel the urge to hug him, to celebrate, but that would be decidedly awkward. “You got into Harvard! Why wouldn’t you want her to tell me that?”

  He scratches at the back of his neck. “It felt like we should be celebrating your moment, that’s all.”

  Eleanor smirks. “Right.”

  I still don’t get what she’s being so cat-ate-the-canary about. “What’s wrong with you?”

  She fixes me with a no-nonsense stare, like she doesn’t understand why I haven’t already figured this out. “MIT and Harvard are both in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Did you know that?” she asks.

  “I think I did know that, yes,” I say, and I understand immediately where she’s going with it.

  “I visited both campuses last year. They’re two miles apart.” She pulls out her phone (which we are not supposed to do in class but Miss Mahoney generally allows because she’s not supposed to be watching YouTube, either) and does a quick search. “Yes. It’s one-point-nine-six miles from MIT to Harvard. Nine minutes, by car. You and Steven will be one-point-nine-six miles away from each other for the next four years. Now do you see why he’s so ridiculously happy?”

  “El, come on,” Steven says, and he’s really blushing now.

  My face is red, too. I turn to Steven, who’s meticulously studying his cards. “So you’re going, of course. To Harvard. Not to Yale or Dartmouth or any of the others?”

  He doesn’t smile this time, but it’s in his eyes. “That’s the plan.”

  “I bet your family is thrilled.”

  “They’re over the moon. I’m the first Blake male who’s not going to be a farmer, and they could not be happier.”

  “And how about you, is it what you wanted?” I know it is. We didn’t discuss it much when we were applying. We didn’t want to pressure each other. But it was the best-case scenario: me at MIT, Steven at Harvard.

  It meant the possibility of more.

  But that was before.

  His warm brown eyes meet mine.

  “Well, you know,” he murmurs. “I hear Harvard’s a pretty good place to study chemistry.”

  I instantly have butterflies in my stomach, and I try to squash them. I wet my lips and attempt to breathe properly. How does he keep making me feel this way, even with all that’s happened? I should not feel this way.

  I think about what Ty wrote in his letter, how it’s so obvious that Steven and I are right for each other. That we fit.

  Beaker and Eleanor have been looking back and forth from me to Steven gleefully, like they’d like a bowl of popcorn. Then Beaker throws me a lifeline.

  “Hey, are we playing cards here or what?” she asks, rearranging the cards in her hand. “Time is candy, you know.”

  We go back to playing, but Steven is still smiling.

  I have a hard time concentrating on the game.

  I’m so befuddled by the exchange with Steven, the idea of Steven at Harvard, that I forget to ditch eighth period. So I don’t remember about delivering the paper daisy to Damian until the bell rings at the end of the day.

  I check his locker. He’s not there. I try his cell phone, but it goes straight to voice mail.

  I bump into El in the commons, where everybody is milling around.

  “Lex, are you feeling all right? You look scared,” she observes.

  I am scared, for a reason I can’t quite put my finger on. Damian should be here. Why isn’t he here? A bad feeling is boiling up from the pit of my stomach. “Can you help me find Damian Whittaker?” I ask El.

  “Sure. Who’s Damian Whittaker?”

  I
fish the photo of the three amigos out of my backpack. “This one.” I point to Damian.

  “Oh, Gray Hoodie,” she says. “I know him.”

  We check the library. The gym. We start walking down the halls, poking our head into random classrooms, hoping to find him. Somewhere along the way we pick up Beaker, then Steven, who checks the guys’ bathrooms and locker room.

  No Damian.

  Back in the commons, El hacks the school’s computer system to check the attendance record. “He’s marked absent today. No explanation as to why. It’s an unexcused absence,” she says from behind her laptop. “Which means his parents didn’t call him in sick.”

  That’s when the terrible thought occurs to me.

  I grab El’s laptop and turn it toward me. I check a few of Damian’s social media websites before I stumble across a new poem on one of them:

  She makes the stars go out.

  She makes the rain.

  I give her my heart

  as a rose made of paper

  but she lets it fall

  on the dirty floor.

  She gives me a cup

  full of pity and pain

  to drown myself in.

  And this is when the terrible thought becomes even more terrible.

  “What does that even mean?” El asks from over my shoulder, reading the screen.

  The poem was posted an hour ago. I try to ignore the panicked clenching in my stomach and take out my phone to call Damian’s cell. I get his voice mail again.

  “Hi, you’ve reached Damian. You know what to do,” he says.

  I hang up. I don’t think he’d want to hear my voice right now. But I have to see if he’s home.

  “Get me his home number,” I say to El. “The landline.”

  She finesses the school’s records system again, and produces a number.

  It rings and rings and rings. No answer. No machine.

  “Lex, who is this guy?” Steven asks.

  “Gray Hoodie,” El fills in helpfully.

  I jump up. “I have to go. What’s his address?”

  She clicks some keys. “2585 West Mill Road.”

  I’m already running for the school’s front door. For the parking lot. For my car.

  El, Beaker, and Steven fall in behind me.

  “2585 West Mill Road,” I repeat to myself. “That’s not far, right?”