The Last Time We Say Goodbye

  “It’s about ten minutes, I think,” Steven calculates.

  But the Lemon doesn’t start.

  I turn to my friends, panting a little. “Tell me one of you drove.”

  El doesn’t have a car, and Beaker looks guilty. “No,” she says. “I got a ride with Antonio.”

  I turn to Steven. He shakes his head. “Sarah has the car today.”

  I try the Lemon again, but it’s no use.

  Why? I think. Why will the universe not give me a freaking break?

  “Lex,” Steven starts nervously. “What’s going on? Do you think that Damian is . . . Why do you think that Damian’s going to—”

  I shake my head. “Be quiet for a second, okay? I need to think.”

  So I think as hard as I’ve ever thought. I strain every neuron. And I see the answer.

  I dial and lift the phone to my ear.

  “Come on,” I whisper. “Come on. Be awake.”

  “Hello?” says a sleepy voice. “What’s up?”

  “Seth,” I breathe in relief. “This is Lex. I need a favor.”

  “Sure, Lex,” he says. “Your wish is my command, yo.”

  “Thanks.” I meet Steven’s eyes. “Seth, I’m going to need that ride.”

  35.

  TWELVE MINUTES LATER I’M FLYING UP North 27th Street headed out of town, my teeth chattering, my hair tucked into Seth’s helmet, holding Seth tight around the ribs.

  It’s warmer out now, but still chilly. Over our heads white cirrostratus clouds are stretched in rows across the sky, cut by the sharp trail of a plane descending into the Lincoln airport.

  “Are you all right back there?” Seth yells.

  “Can we go any faster?” I yell back.

  We’re going so fast already, but Seth pushes the engine harder, making the telephone poles start whipping by us at an increased rate.

  I’m so cold I can’t feel my face.

  We turn on West Mill Road and head out into the deep farm country, cornfields and more cornfields. The snow has melted, leaving the muddy brown fields stubbled with the dead cornstalks from last year. The farmers will plow it all under soon and plant again. The air smells like cow manure and fresh water and growing things.

  It smells like spring.

  I hope we’re not too late.

  Seth asks for the number again, and I yell, “2585,” and he slows way down and yells, “I think this is it up here.”

  We pull off onto a long driveway and drive up to a gray two-story house.

  I recognize Damian’s car parked out front. “Yes, this is it.”

  Seth takes us right up to the front step. I clutch at him as he leans to put his foot down.

  “You’ll have to get off first,” he says. “Just swing your leg around.”

  I dismount in the most awkward way possible and take off the helmet. I hand it back to Seth. We both step back to get a look at the house.

  “Whoa,” Seth says. “Gothic. I bet this place is haunted.”

  Ramshackle is the word I would use. It’s your basic two-story farmhouse with the windows that look like eyes and the door like a mouth. It needs a new paint job and maybe a new roof, and it does look like something out of an old black-and-white horror movie, but it has good bones, as Beaker would say.

  I climb the porch steps and knock on the door.

  Nobody answers.

  I knock again, harder. I find a doorbell, but when I press it I don’t hear any sound.

  “I don’t think he’s home,” Seth says.

  “No, he’s home. That’s his car.” I point. I bang on the door with the flat of my hand. “Damian! Open up! It’s Lex!”

  No answer.

  He’s mad at me. Maybe I shouldn’t scream “it’s Lex” quite so loudly.

  I try his cell again. I try the home number. We listen to it ringing inside the house.

  I feel more desperate with each ring. “Damian!” I scream. “Come on!”

  Seth looks worried. “Lexie, what’s this about? Why are you so . . . freaked?”

  “Damian was Ty’s friend. Ty’s and Patrick’s.” I bang again. “Damian!”

  “Yeah, so. . .”

  “So he’s depressed right now. And I did something on Saturday that upset him, and he didn’t show up to school today, and he posted this poem on the internet, and . . .” I call the house number again. “Come on, pick up, Damian.”

  It rings and rings.

  Seth looks at the house with a new awareness. “So you think he might off himself?” He glances at me, cringes. “Sorry. You think he would . . .”

  “I think he would. I have to get in there.”

  Seth pounds on the door. “Damian! Come on out, dude!”

  I go around the side of the house, checking the windows. They’re all locked. I try the back door. Locked. I try the other side of the house.

  On that side I suddenly become aware of music floating down from a second-story window. Acoustic guitar. Then a lone male voice.

  Robert Plant’s voice. From “Stairway to Heaven.”

  “Damian!” I holler up at the window.

  No answer. No movement. Nothing.

  Seth comes up beside me. He squints at the house. “Hey, there’s a light on,” he says.

  “I’d bet money that’s Damian’s room.” I glance around wildly. There’s no way to get up there, no convenient, helpful tree or gutter to climb. I cry out in frustration and head back to the front door, Seth trailing me.

  “Are you going to call the cops?” he asks warily, like he gets why I would need to do that, but he’s not too fond of the police.

  “No. It would take too long. I need to get in there now,” I say, my mind going a mile a minute. I turn to face him. “Pick the lock.”

  “What.”

  “He’s in there. He could be dead already. He could be dying. Right now. Do it, Seth.”

  Seth glances toward the bedroom window. “You think he’s killing himself right now.”

  “I think there’s a strong possibility. If we’re lucky, he didn’t do it fifteen minutes ago. I know he was alive an hour ago. But now I don’t know.”

  He rubs a hand over the back of his head. “Man.”

  “Pick the lock, Seth.”

  “Hey. I don’t know how to pick a lock. What, did you think that just because I smoke and ride a motorcycle and I have some tattoos, it must mean I’m a criminal? Hey, what are you doing now?”

  I don’t look up from my phone. “Googling how to pick a lock.”

  “You’re—”

  I dump my backpack out onto the grass and sort through what comes out until I find two large paper clips. I get to work shaping them into lockpicks.

  Sometimes it pays to be a nerd and carry around a large assortment of office supplies as a general habit.

  “Whoa,” Seth says. “I don’t know if I like this. It’s illegal, right, breaking and entering?”

  I’m on the porch by this point, crouching in front of the door.

  “You’re making me, like, an accessory,” Seth says.

  I push the straightened pin into the lock. “You’re free to go.”

  He doesn’t go, though. He watches me as I try and fail and try and fail again.

  “Okay, so, you can’t pick the lock, so what are you going to do n—”

  “Here.” I hand my phone to him. “Read it out loud to me—the part with the raking. It says the squiggly paper clip is the rake, and the straight one is the tension wrench, but then what does it say?”

  He stares at me. “Lexie.”

  “Help or go, Seth. Help or go.”

  He sighs and clears his throat lightly. “‘First, slip your tension wrench into the bottom of the keyhole and use gentle pressure in the direction you want to turn the lock. Then, take your rake and quickly slide it back and forth to jostle the pins into place.’”

  “Go on.” I swipe at my forehead with my sleeve. “What next?”

  “‘After raking back and forth through the loc
k, quickly jerk the rake out of the keyhole while attempting to turn the tension wrench. If everything has gone just right—’”

  There’s a loud click. I turn the knob. The door swings open.

  “I can’t believe that worked,” Seth murmurs.

  I’m already taking the stairs two at a time. I’m sprinting down the upstairs hall. “Damian!”

  I follow the music to the last door on the left. The song is in the hard rock part of it by this time, loud and wailing. I try the door. It’s locked.

  I left the paper clips downstairs.

  I imagine Damian behind this door, his body sprawled on the carpet, his wrists cut and bleeding, his eyes open but unseeing.

  “Whoa, Lex, wait!” Seth’s coming up behind me as I raise my foot and kick at the door hard. It crashes open on the first try, the cheap particle board door splintering, and I push into the room, Damian’s name on my lips.

  He’s there.

  He’s sitting at his desk in his boxers, staring at me, his mouth fallen open. The music is so loud around us I can’t hear anything else. I stand there, chest heaving, staring.

  Slowly he reaches up and turns off the speakers.

  I feel like I’ve gone deaf. “Damian,” I manage to get out. “You’re alive.”

  “Uh,” Seth pipes up from behind me. “I’ll be outside, ’kay?”

  Damian closes his eyes and opens then again slowly, like he must be hallucinating the sight of me.

  I’m so happy to see him alive that I can’t help but smile.

  “So,” I say after a minute. “This is awkward.”

  He scratches at the side of his neck. “Can you turn around or close your eyes or something so I can put my pants on?”

  “Sure.” I clap a hand over my eyes.

  “Not that I haven’t fantasized about a situation like this,” he says. I hear the whisper of denim, the zip of a fly. “Okay.”

  I lower my hand. He sits down on the end of his bed and puts on a T-shirt and socks. He motions for me to sit in the desk chair where he was sitting a minute ago.

  I sit.

  “Okay,” he says. “Let’s start with, what are you doing here, Lex?”

  “You weren’t at school today.”

  “I was sick,” he explains.

  “You don’t look sick.”

  His face is turning red. “I was embarrassed. I didn’t want to see you. Okay?”

  I nod. “I was worried about you.”

  “Why?”

  “I read your poem.”

  His eyes brighten. “You read my poem.” He tries to keep his voice steady, casual. “What did you think?”

  “I thought you might . . . I thought you were feeling so bad that you . . .”

  Finally he understands. “You thought I’d be like Ty. And Patrick.”

  I let out a breath. “Yes.”

  His watery eyes meet mine. He brushes his hair out of his eyes and leans forward, settling his weight onto his knees. “I’m not like Ty and Patrick,” he says very slowly, like he wants to be sure I understand every word. “I don’t want to die. Things can get bleak sometimes, at school. There are bullies, right?”

  “The carrion few,” I supply.

  He glances away, laughs weakly. “Right. But I don’t have it in me to . . . It’s just high school, man. Those guys are just high school guys, and in ten years they’re going to be working for people like me. I know that. I have to make it through two more years, and then I’ll be home free. I swear, I couldn’t ever do what Ty did. I would never.”

  He takes a deep breath and lets it out. “I’m sorry if my poems made you think I would.”

  “I’m sorry that I inspired one of those poems,” I reply.

  I feel something sharp in my pocket, poking into my hip. I remember what it is and pull it out.

  Ty’s shark necklace.

  I hold it out to Damian. “Here. I found this.”

  He takes it and fingers the edge of the tooth gently. Suddenly there are tears in his eyes.

  “I should have told you,” he says. “I’ve been working up to it, but I didn’t know how.”

  “Told me what?”

  He swallows. “Ty called me, the night he died.”

  It feels like my heart’s stopped beating, but I know it hasn’t. If my heart stopped beating I would die. But here I sit, alive. Breathing. Listening.

  Damian’s voice wavers as he keeps talking. “I knew that Ty sometimes thought about . . . what he did. Two years ago, the first time he tried, with the pills, he told me afterwards.”

  “He told you?” I never knew that Ty told anyone.

  “We were playing this song by the Doors—‘The End’—and he told me. I said, you know, we can talk about how things suck and how our parents are assholes and how the future isn’t exactly super bright, but I still think life’s worth living, don’t you? And he said, yeah, he knew that. And I said that if he ever felt that way again, like ending it, that he should call me. And he said he would.”

  “And he called you,” I whisper. “You talked to him.”

  Damian nods. “But he didn’t say anything that night about wanting to die. It wasn’t that unusual for him to call me, actually, not so unusual that I thought anything was up. We’ve kept in touch, even though we don’t hang out much at school. He calls—he called me sometimes and we’d talk about how life blows and people are morons and how most people don’t understand what it’s like when your life just goes to crap and there’s nothing you can do about it. He read my poems sometimes, too. So that’s what we talked about that night. The same old stuff.”

  He shakes his head. “I should have known something was wrong. He’d just broken up with Ashley, and he was low; he seemed like he was stuck in his own head, and I should have figured out that something was off.” He snuffles. “I’ve thought about it so many times since then, been over the entire conversation back and forth, looking for clues that I should have picked up, but . . . sometimes I think he just called me to say goodbye.”

  He clutches the shark tooth in his hand and starts full-out crying. I move to sit on the bed next to him and try to hug him, and he lets me for a little while. Then he pulls away and drags his hand through his hair and sighs.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t save him,” he says. “I would have tried.”

  My heart aches for him, because those words are my words, and those thoughts are my thoughts, and I finally understand why they don’t matter.

  “You couldn’t have saved him,” I answer. “Nobody could have saved Ty but Ty. And you’re probably right. He wasn’t calling so that he would be talked out of it. He was calling to say goodbye.”

  Damian nods miserably.

  I squeeze his shoulder. “You were a good friend to him. And to me. Thank you for that.”

  We sit for a minute not speaking. Then I ask him, “Are you okay? Do you need to write a poem to get it all cleaned out?”

  He laughs. “I’ll back off the black-hearted poetry.”

  I shrug one shoulder. “I’m not a book critic or anything, but I like your poems, Damian. Although I wouldn’t give you a cup full of pity and pain to drown yourself in. I’m all out of pity.”

  I stand up and go to the window. Outside, the sun is setting over the cornfields, a marvelous haze of fire orange and royal purple. I watch a vee of large birds—sandhill cranes, I think—riding the air.

  Migrating home.

  There is so much inside me in that moment, I feel like I’ll burst. So much I understand now that I didn’t yesterday. So much to say.

  “Lex?” Damian asks from behind me. “What are you going to do now?”

  I turn. “Actually, do you mind if I borrow a pen?”

  31 March

  I need to tell you about that night. I know you already know the details. You were there. But I need you to see it from my perspective, so you will understand why I did what I did.

  That night we had dinner at the Imperial Palace. You had lemon chicken, like you
always do, and I ordered kung pao chicken. Over dinner we were talking about MIT and Harvard and Beaker maybe going to Wellesley and how we had at least 70 days left before we heard anything, and how hard it was to wait. March felt like eons away, that night.

  After dinner you took me to the natural history museum at UNL. It was closed for the night, but because your sister works there, she let us in. I knew you were planning something spectacular by the look on Sarah’s face, the way she kept smiling at me. You left me in the elephant hall, staring at the giant fossilized bones of prehistoric mammoths and camels and rhinos that used to roam the grassy plains that once stretched across the middle of the country hundreds of thousands of years ago, while you and Sarah disappeared for a while to set things up.

  Then you came and got me. You blindfolded me, but I could tell you were leading me to the planetarium. How many shows had we seen there, Steven, really? You sat me down on a soft blanket. I could smell candle wax and your aftershave. There was music playing—Mozart, I think; you’ll have to tell me sometime, what, exactly it was—a soft serenade of piano and violin.

  You took off the blindfold.

  We were sitting on a red plaid blanket, like we were having a picnic in the woods, with two short white candles burning in the center, and a bottle of sparkling cider in a bucket of ice, and two plastic champagne glasses. On the planetarium ceiling, thousands of tiny blue lights shone down on us: not stars or constellations, but particles.

  “It’s from the show on dark matter,” you said.

  I craned my neck to gaze up. “I thought dark matter was invisible.”

  You leaned back and put your arm around me, pulling me to your chest, and I relaxed into the heat of your body.

  “It is invisible,” you said. “Well, theoretically, it is. Scientists have never been able to prove that dark matter exists, you know.”

  I did know.

  “We can only truly conceive of the fact that it’s there because of the way the galaxies behave as they move through the universe, and how the light will always bend around it.” You shifted your body closer to mine. You looked down at my lips. I knew you were going to kiss me. Your breath, which smelled like lemons, bathed my face. You looked into my eyes.

  “Anyway,” you murmured. “It’s pretty.”