I shift around on the big feet that he apparently loves, but I don’t say anything.
“So, in a unanimous vote of one,” he says, “you get the Best Boyfriend award. Which beats the Flirtiest Guy in any race, every time.”
I look back at the car, because otherwise I’ll try to get him to kiss me. And, as a joke, I guess—thinking it might lighten the mood—I grab A Tale of Two Cities off the hood. “Well, I have something for you, too,” I say, stalling and half turning away from Kieth. I covertly tear out a random page and then hand it to him as if it is a deep and poignant present. “Here.”
But Kieth studies the page like it’s a treasure map, and when he looks back up, his eyes are rain clouds. The weather has finally arrived.
“There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair,” he says.
I’m not sure why, but he says it again. And then again, like he’s memorizing something. Forever an actor. Then I realize, duh, he’s reading from the book. He holds up the page for me to see, and those words—“There is prodigious strength in sorrow and despair”—are circled three times in light-blue pen.
“That is beautiful, Matty,” Kieth says, now all-out crying. I’m talking me-level tears. It is both impressive and disconcerting. All summer long I’ve wanted him to lose it, just once, and now I’m like Wait, you’re stealing my routine. “Thanks, seriously.”
Holy Buddha. He thinks I underlined it. And had the page all picked out to give to him, like it’s a real gift.
“I’ve been too hard on you for being emotional.” He waves the page around, laughing at himself, wiping his nose across his arms. They are lean and long, punctuated only by this turquoise-bead bracelet that I won for him at the arcade, that he wasn’t supposed to wear during the show—but that he never took off, ever.
I remain quiet.
“There’s nothing weak about crying, you’re right. I’m sorry I gave you crap for that. I’m gonna frame this quote for my dorm, maybe.”
Come on, roller coasters. Come on, distant screaming crowds. Now isn’t the moment for silence, but even Pennsylvania’s infamous cicadas have shut up.
“Can you just not be the sweetest guy of all time today?” I finally say. “I’ve been waiting for this since June.”
It’s not fair. With him coming down and me tearing up, we have evened out. We are together, at last, a matching level of emotion. Just in time to say good-bye.
The box under Kieth’s arm shifts—ca-chunk—the sound of lipstick and mouthwash and a weird, lone Adidas soccer sandal. The whole thing nearly topples from his grip, so I reach to help him. We lower the box to the ground and I notice a glimmering wedge of foil shining from on top of his otherwise dull belongings.
“You want that?” he asks, just when I’m back in love.
“What is it?”
“Pizza, from the awards party. Left over. I lost my appetite. You should take it.”
Well, dammit.
I pick the pizza wedge up and am about to launch into an “I am lactose intolerant, and you know that! I told you that on our first and second dates!” speech, when Kieth pulls me into a hug.
He smells like the jean jacket smell I’ve come to associate with the concept of “boyfriend.” Boyfriends smell like Tide detergent and Degree deodorant and a little bit of sweat and a little bit of Aveda and a little bit just Kieth. But maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe that isn’t the boyfriend smell.
“Having you out there every day made it so easy to perform this summer,” he says. We’re still hugging. Theater people. “Like, it gave me an incentive to give it my all. Nobody else in my cast had that.”
Kieth pulls away. I don’t know what to say back. My heart throbs. My ankle throbs. I hope none of this will hurt so much once he’s in a different time zone.
“Good luck,” I say, “at school.”
“You’re supposed to say ‘break a leg.’ It’s bad luck to say good luck.” His lip trembles. His face is red. I really am the best boyfriend he ever had. I get to own that.
Both of us go to kiss each other, and so neither one of us does.
“Jinx,” I say. A schoolyard joke for myself.
“I should probably take off.” Kieth picks the box back up. “I’ve got this early flight, and I’m already annoyed because—”
“You’re sitting on the aisle, but you’re pissed the seat won’t recline because it’s in front of an exit row.”
He smiles and nods. “You remember everything. It’s freaky.”
You remember nothing, I’m thinking, it’s annoying.
But I just say, “Get outta here.”
And he does.
He glances at my dad’s Honda, pauses for a sec, and then disappears between two vintage VW Bugs. I am somehow reminded of when Stacy Hoffner, my best friend in third grade, moved away to Youngstown, Ohio. We were going to be best friends forever, and then we weren’t. I was going to have a hole in my heart for all time, and then I didn’t. I moved on—even if some part of me stayed scarred by Stacy leaving me. But the thing about scars is that, as much as they knot you up, they can make you stronger, too. Collect enough scars and you get a whole extra layer of skin, for free.
I wave at the back of Kieth’s head, though I might just be seeing things at this point.
Yeah. He’s gone.
But when I turn to get inside the car, Kieth’s jean jacket is still on the hood, next to my book, set a foot apart like an old couple. I take out my phone to text him “you forgot something!!” And right as I’m about to hit Send, his own message dings in.
“Keep the jacket,” it says. “it was cuter on u anyway ”
And against all odds, I’m smiling.
I fold the book and the pizza wedge inside the jacket and slide into the front seat, where my butt crunches into something foreign. It’s the damn Best Boyfriend award. I uncrumple it and place it on the passenger side, and then it’s all too quiet in here. Quiet in that loud way. So, when I turn on the car and this old-school song comes on the radio, I let it play. Let it blast, even, like Dad’s car is the amphitheater inside the park. Except that in here I’m safe.
It’s a decent song, as sixties songs go. At least it isn’t a knockoff. And not to be the grandchild of hippies but, like a trance, the optimistic thrum of the acoustic guitar sort of hypnotizes me into reaching over, to rip open the foil, and—I guess for old times’ sake—take a giant, careless bite out of the forbidden pizza.
It’s more delicious than a memory can possibly live up to.
See, a memory doesn’t remember the way the congealed tomato sauce comes back to life when you bite into it. The way the greasy crust tastes like sleepovers and inside jokes and curfews. The way the cheese holds it all together.
It’s going to make my stomach hurt, but it’s worth it. It’s pizza. What is life without the occasional risk of pizza?
After I demolish the slice, I switch on my lights, shift into drive, and—without even thinking twice—reach across the seat, pick up the Best Boyfriend award, and use the back of it to wipe off my mouth. Then I’m outtie, past the state’s second-tallest roller coaster and onto the familiar country road. Two songs later, I merge extra-smooth onto the parkway. Usually I suck at yielding, but tonight I nail it, winding the bend toward the underpass, licking my lips into a guilty pizza grin, and holding my breath when I go through the mountain tunnel that always takes me back home.
“There must have been some kind of mistake,” I said.
My clock—one of the old digitals with the red block numbers—read 2:07 a.m. It was so dark outside I couldn’t see the front walk.
“What do you mean?” Mom said absently, as she pulled clothes from my closet. A pair of jeans, T-shirt, sweatshirt, socks, shoes. It was summer, and I had woken to sweat pooling on my stomach, so there was no reason for the sweatshirt, but I didn’t mention it to her. I felt like a fish in a tank, blinking slowly at the outsiders peering in.
“A mistake,” I said, again in that measured way. Normal
ly I would have felt weird being around Mom in my underwear, but that was what I had been wearing when I fell asleep on top of my summer school homework earlier that night, and Mom seeing the belly button piercing I had given myself the year before was the least of my worries. “Matt hasn’t talked to me in months. There’s no way he asked for me. He must have been delirious.”
The paramedic had recorded the aftermath of the car accident from a camera in her vest. In it, Matthew Hernandez—my former best friend—had, apparently, requested my presence at the Last Visitation, a rite that had become common practice in cases like these, when hospital analytics suggested a life would end regardless of surgical intervention. They calculated the odds, stabilized the patient as best they could, and summoned the last visitors, one at a time, to connect to the consciousness of the just barely living.
“He didn’t just make the request at the accident, Claire, you know that.” Mom was trying to sound gentle, I could tell, but everything was coming out clipped. She handed me the T-shirt, skimming the ring through my belly button with her eyes but saying nothing. I pulled the T-shirt over my head, then grabbed the jeans. “Matt is eighteen now.”
At eighteen, everyone who wanted to participate in the Last Visitation program—which was everyone, these days—had to make a will listing their last visitors. I wouldn’t do it myself until next spring. Matt was one of the oldest in our class.
“I don’t…” I put my head in a hand. “I can’t…”
“You can say no, if you want.” Mom’s hand rested gently on my shoulder.
“No.” I ground my head into the heel of my hand. “If it was one of his last wishes…”
I stopped talking before I choked.
I didn’t want to share a consciousness with Matt. I didn’t even want to be in the same room as him. We’d been friends once—the closest kind—but things had changed. And now he wasn’t giving me any choice. What was I supposed to do, refuse to honor his will?
“The doctor said to hurry. They do the visitation while they prepare him for surgery, so they only have an hour to give to you and his mother.” Mom was crouched in front of me, tying my shoes, the way she had when I was a little kid. She was wearing her silk bathrobe with the flowers stitched into it. It was worn near the elbows and fraying at the cuffs. I had seen that bathrobe every day since Dad gave it to her for Christmas when I was seven.
“Yeah.” I understood. Every second was precious, like every drop of water in a drought.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take you?” she said. I was staring at the pink flower near her shoulder; lost, for a second, in the familiar pattern.
“Yeah,” I said again. “I’m sure.”
* * *
I sat on the crinkly paper, tearing it as I shifted back to get more comfortable. This table was not like the others I had sat on, for blood tests and pelvic exams and reflex tests; it was softer, more comfortable. Designed for what I was about to do.
On the way here I had passed nurses in teal scrubs, carrying clipboards. I passed worried families, their hands clutched in front of them, sweaters balled up over their fists to cover themselves. We became protective at the first sign of grief, hunching in, shielding our most vulnerable parts.
I was not one of them. I was not worried or afraid; I was empty. I had glided here like a ghost in a movie, floating.
Dr. Linda Albertson came in with a thermometer and blood pressure monitor in hand, to check my vitals. She gave me a reassuring smile. I wondered if she practiced it in a mirror, her softest eyes and her gentlest grins, so she wouldn’t make her patients’ grief any worse. Such a careful operation it must have been.
“One hundred fifteen over fifty,” she said, after reading my blood pressure. They always said that like you were supposed to know what the numbers meant. And then, like she was reading my mind, she added, “It’s a little low. But fine. Have you eaten today?”
I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “I don’t know. I don’t—it’s the middle of the night.”
“Right.” Her nails were painted sky blue. She was so proper in her starched white coat, her hair pulled back into a bun, but I couldn’t figure out those nails. Every time she moved her hands, they caught my attention. “Well, I’m sure you’ll be fine. This is not a particularly taxing procedure.” I must have given her a look, because she added, “Physically, I mean.”
“So where is he?” I said.
“He’s in the next room,” Dr. Albertson said. “He’s ready for the procedure.”
I stared at the wall like I would develop X-ray vision through sheer determination alone. I tried to imagine what Matt looked like, stretched out on a hospital bed with a pale green blanket over his legs. Was he bruised beyond recognition? Or were his injuries the worse kind, the ones that hid under the surface of the skin, giving false hope?
She hooked me up to the monitors like it was a dance, sky-blue fingernails swooping, tapping, pressing. Electrodes touched to my head like a crown, an IV needle gliding into my arm. She was my lady-in-waiting, adorning me for a ball.
“How much do you know about the technology?” Dr. Albertson said. “Some of our older patients need the full orientation, but most of the time our younger ones don’t.”
“I know we’ll be able to revisit memories we both shared, places we both went to, but nowhere else.” My toes brushed the cold tile. “And that it’ll happen faster than real life.”
“That’s correct. Your brain will generate half the image, and his will generate the other. The gaps will be filled by the program, which determines—by the electrical feedback in your brain—what best completes the space,” she said. “You may have to explain to Matthew what’s happening, because you’re going before his mother, and the first few minutes can be disorienting. Do you think you can do that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I mean, I won’t really have a choice, will I?”
“I guess not, no.” Pressed lips. “Lean back, please.”
I lay down, shivering in my hospital gown, and the crinkly paper shivered along with me. I closed my eyes. It was only a half hour. A half hour to give to someone who had once been my best friend.
“Count backward from ten,” she said.
Like counting steps in a waltz. I did it in German. I didn’t know why.
* * *
It wasn’t like sleeping—that sinking, heavy feeling. It was like the world disappearing in pieces around me—first sight, then sound, then the touch of the paper and the plush hospital table. I tasted something bitter, like alcohol, and then the world came back again, but not in the right way.
Instead of the exam room, I was standing in a crowd, warm bodies all around me, the pulsing of breaths, eyes guided up to a stage, everyone waiting as the roadies set up for the band. I turned to Matt and grinned, bouncing on my toes to show him how excited I was.
But that was just the memory. I felt that it was wrong before I understood why, sinking back to my heels. My stomach squeezed as I remembered that this was the last visitation, that I had chosen this memory because it was the first time I felt like we were really friends. That the real, present-day Matthew was actually standing in those beat-up sneakers, black hair hanging over his forehead.
His eyes met mine, bewildered and wide. All around us, the crowd was unchanged, and the roadies still screwed the drum set into place and twisted the knobs on the amplifiers.
“Matt,” I said, creaky like an old door. “Are you there?”
“Claire,” he said.
“Matt, this is a visitation,” I said. I couldn’t bear to say the word last to him. He would know what I meant without it. “We’re in our shared memories. Do you … understand?”
He looked around, at the girl to his left with the cigarette dangling from her lips, lipstick marking it in places, and the skinny boy in front of him with the too-tight plaid shirt and the patchy facial hair.
“The accident,” he said, all dreamy voice and unfocused eyes. “The paramedic kind of re
minded me of you.”
He reached past the boy to skim the front of the stage with his fingertips, drawing away dust. And he smiled. I didn’t usually think this way, but Matt had looked so good that day, his brown skin even darker from a summer in the sun and his smile, by contrast, so bright.
“Are you … okay?” I said. For someone who had just found out that he was about to die, he seemed pretty calm.
“I guess,” he said. “I’m sure it has more to do with the drug cocktail they have me on than some kind of ‘inner peace, surrendering to fate’ thing.”
He had a point. Dr. Albertson had to have perfected the unique combination of substances that made a dying person calm, capable of appreciating their Last Visitation, instead of panicking the whole time. But then again, Matt had never reacted to things quite the way I expected him to, so it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that, in the face of death, he was as calm as still water.
He glanced at me. “This is our first Chase Wolcott concert. Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know that because the girl next to you is going to give you a cigarette burn at some point.”
“Ah, yes, she was a gem. Lapis lazuli. Maybe ruby.”
“You don’t have to pick the gem.”
“That’s what you always say.”
My smile fell away. Some habits of friendship were like muscle memory, rising up even when everything else had changed. I knew our jokes, our rhythms, the choreography of our friendship. But that didn’t take away what we were now. Any normal person would have been stumbling through their second apology by now, desperate to make things right before our time was over. Any normal person would have been crying, too, at the last sight of him.
Be normal, I told myself, willing the tears to come. Just now, just for him.
“Why am I here, Matt?” I said.
Dry eyed.
“You didn’t want to see me?” he said.