My Heart and Other Black Holes

  He puts his hot dog down on a piece of newspaper and gets up and grabs two plastic cups. He unscrews the cap off one of the bottles of wine. The bottle sways in his hand as he says, “You’re right. We are being classy. Hot dogs and wine.”

  I know he’s teasing, but it’s my first time drinking wine and I can’t help but be a little bit excited. A month ago, I would’ve told you there was nothing in the world left to be excited about. Who knew something as silly as wine would do the trick? I try to maintain a neutral facial expression so I don’t give myself away. He pours us each a glass and then hands me mine.

  “Thanks.” I put the glass down beside me and barely manage to balance my half-cooked hot dog. I guess the only thing worse than a half-cooked hot dog would be a half-cooked hot dog complete with a dusting of dirt.

  “We probably should have gotten napkins,” he says in between chews.

  “Probably.”

  He finishes his hot dog quickly. Maybe his was undercooked too. I force myself to gulp the rest of mine down and then take a swig of wine. It’s sour and I cringe.

  He laughs. “Not much of a drinker?”

  “Guess not.”

  He holds his plastic cup out toward mine. “To Aysel, my Suicide Partner.”

  I clink my cup against his. “To not being a flake.”

  That really makes him smile and he chugs down the rest of his wine and then goes to pour himself another glass.

  The sun is starting to set in the sky and I have no concept of what time it is. I think about pulling my cell phone out of my pocket and checking, but then I realize it doesn’t matter. All that matters is this day feels so much shorter than most. The days with Roman always feel the shortest.

  I flip over onto my stomach and stretch out. Roman lies down beside me on his back, his eyes glued to the sky. “I’m sorry we weren’t able to find your dad.”

  I slide my tongue over my teeth, tasting the wine’s tart aftertaste. “Maybe that guy, Jacob, will call.”

  “Maybe.” Roman puts his hand on my lower back. “But maybe he won’t. You’ll be okay with that, right?”

  I don’t know the answer to his question. I guess I’ll try to call the facility myself if Jacob doesn’t call with information. But like I said, I just don’t know. A few birds squawk at one another and take flight from a nearby tree. The fluttering of their wings startles me for a moment and I sit up. I would’ve thought the closer I got to death, the less on edge I’d be, the less afraid I’d be. It’s turning out to be the opposite.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, taking his hand off my back and tucking it in the pocket of his pants.

  “No,” I say. “It wasn’t you.”

  He raises his eyebrow. “The birds scared you?”

  I want to tell him that everything scares me now. But I stay silent and let him ramble on about how birds are harmless. He is drinking more and more wine and I am trying to keep up, but my head is dizzy and my eyelids are starting to feel heavy.

  I roll over on my side to face him. The fire is still going strong and the tendrils of smoke cast shadows over his thin cheeks. He’s been chugging the wine in silence and I know I should say something that will make him understand how I feel, but I’m already on rocky ground and I don’t want to make it even worse.

  “I’m scared too, you know,” he finally says. I can smell the wine on his breath as he lifts his face, moving it closer to mine. “But also excited.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. My brain feels like it’s swimming. “Have you ever heard of Einstein’s theory of relativity?”

  He takes another long sip. “There you go again with science. You’re a real nerd, aren’t you?”

  “I think to be a nerd you have to be smart.”

  He draws his eyebrows together. “You seem pretty smart.”

  I wink at him. “I put on a good act.” I sit up and pour myself a little more wine.

  “So tell me about it.”

  “The theory?” The wine has started to taste less sour. I don’t know if that’s a sign I’m getting used to it or a sign that my taste buds are drunk. I don’t even know if taste buds can get drunk.

  “Yeah, Einstein’s theory. Your nerdy theory.” His words are sloppy and blurred together. It’d be kind of cute if it wasn’t also kind of scary.

  “You know he had two theories, right? The special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity.”

  Roman shakes his head. “I don’t know shit about Einstein. And honestly, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t really care about the guy.”

  “I make you care about Einstein?” I bite on the rim of my plastic cup.

  He gives me his half-moon smile, all crooked and sweet. “I can’t help but care about the things you care about. I feel like we’re kind of connected in that way now.”

  I find myself smiling. My cheek muscles feel different—they’re like a room that hasn’t seen light in years that suddenly had all the blinds pulled open and the sun is beaming in at full volume. And I can’t help myself, my smile keeps stretching, wider and wider. That’s the nicest thing Roman has ever said to me. Hell, that’s the nicest thing I can remember anyone ever saying to me in the last three years.

  “I made you happy,” he says. His words come out heavy and slow.

  “Yeah, you made me happy.”

  He shakes his head and closes his eyes. He’s swaying back and forth like one of those hula dancers that people put on their dashboards.

  “What?” I say, and reach over to tap his shoulder.

  “I can’t make you happy. We can’t let each other make each other happy.”

  I pause, decoding his sloppy, slurred sentence. I lean in toward him. “Would that be so bad?”

  He snaps his eyes open. They’re bright and glossy, and at the same time, light and watery. “That would ruin everything.”

  It takes me a second to find my grounding again. I pick up a twig and start dragging it across the grass. “But you told me at the carnival that when I talked about science, it made you happy and maybe . . .”

  He raises his hand in the air, signaling for me to stop talking. “It doesn’t matter.” He points at me and then back at him. “This can’t matter. This is temporary.” His eyes widen and I can see that red semicircles are forming around the bottom of them. Too much wine for FrozenRobot.

  “Look, Aysel.” He reaches out and squeezes both my hands in his. “I know this is confusing. We’re in a strange and fucked-up position and we can’t let ourselves get fooled by the situation.”

  I try to jerk my hands away from his, but he doesn’t let go of them. His fingers dig into my knuckles. “The situation?”

  “The fact that we’re Suicide Partners. We have this intimacy and, yeah, sure, we have chemistry.”

  “Chemistry?” I can’t help but laugh.

  “Okay. I’ll leave the science to you.”

  He leans in close to me, his nose bumps against mine, and I can feel his eyelashes fluttering on my skin. I lift my chin and our lips meet. It’s clumsy, but it’s perfect. I can’t stop thinking: We’re kissing, I am kissing FrozenRobot, we’re kissing. It rings in my ears like a cheesy mantra.

  I keep kissing him back and I try not to think about whether I am doing it right or wrong. My heart is pounding, which I think means I like it, and I hope his heart is pounding too. I know humans have been kissing since the history of time, but right now, in this very moment, it feels like kissing is a secret that only Roman and I know about.

  After what feels like only a second and also a hundred years, he pulls away slowly and brushes a strand of hair from my face. “We do have chemistry,” he says.

  I give him another smile. That’s two. I can’t develop a smiling habit. I wouldn’t even recognize myself if I became someone who smiles voluntarily. “I guess we do.” I take a breath and notice that the air has changed flavor from campfire smoke to sweet vanilla and there’s a soft sound in my head that I don’t quite recognize but reminds me of pennies
being tossed into a fountain. The pitter-patter of wishes, desperate wishes.

  He nuzzles his head into my neck and I try to relax my body and pretend like that’s perfectly normal. Then he wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me down to the ground with him. We lie there in the darkness, in silence, a few feet from the tent, my spine against his stomach, his hands on my sides. I’ve never been so aware that I am made up of bones and skin, and I can practically feel my bones inching closer to the surface of my skin, aching to get even closer to his.

  Out of nowhere, he whispers, “But this can’t change anything.”

  I squirm so I can press myself even closer to him. I can feel his beating heart—it is wildly alive. There’s a burning in the pit of my stomach and it feels nothing like the black slug chomping away at my happiness. There’s a light fizziness where there used to be unbearable heaviness, and I wonder if my potential energy is changing. I imagine graphing the whole process like a scientist would chart her lab experiment. My whole life is starting to seem like an experiment.

  “Aysel,” he says as he holds me tight, his lips brushing against my hair. “You know this can’t change anything, right? This type of happiness is fake, it’s fleeting. We need to remember why we want to die. I need to remember Maddie. And you need to remember your reasons.”

  My reasons. That sounds so vague. But I guess I haven’t really told him my reasons, since I’m terrified of how he’d react if he figured out who my dad is. And maybe that’s why I haven’t told him. Not because I’m scared that he won’t want to die with me anymore, but because I’m terrified that he’ll still want me to die. That he’ll agree that I should die.

  I guess he’s right: I am a flake. But maybe meeting Roman has helped me to understand myself better. Yes, I’m broken. And yes, he’s broken. But the more we talk about it, the more we share our sadness, the more I start to believe that there could be a chance to fix us, a chance that we could save each other.

  Everything used to seem so final, inevitable, predestined. But now I’m starting to believe that life may have more surprises in store than I ever realized. Maybe it’s all relative, not just light and time like Einstein theorized, but everything. Like life can seem awful and unfixable until the universe shifts a little and the observation point is altered, and then suddenly, everything seems more bearable.

  “You know?” he presses. “Us doing whatever we’re doing, becoming whatever we’re becoming, it doesn’t change anything. It can’t.” His actions don’t match his words, though, because as he’s talking, he’s pulling me closer.

  “I know,” I whisper.

  But deep down, what I know is this: Everything has changed.

  SUNDAY, MARCH 31

  7 days left

  I’m woken up by the glare of the morning sun. Roman’s arms are still wrapped around me and I roll away from his grasp. We fell asleep a few feet from the tent, and my shirt and jeans are streaked with muddy grass marks.

  I pull my phone out of my pocket and see I have a missed call and voice mail from an unknown number. I start to walk away from where Roman is sleeping, but I stop when I hear him sleepily groan in my direction.

  “Where are you going?” He sits up and rubs his eyes. “What time is it?”

  “Almost eight a.m.”

  “Ugh.” He flops back down on his back and squeezes his eyes shut. “It’s too early and too bright.”

  “Someone had too much wine,” I say in as normal a voice as I can. I know he said that last night didn’t change anything, but I don’t know how to act like things haven’t changed. He’s no longer FrozenRobot, my Suicide Partner from the internet. He’s Roman, the boy who kissed me by the river and held me all night. To me, there’s a difference. A big difference.

  He’s no longer the person I want to die with; he’s the person I want to be alive with.

  “I’ll be right back,” I say, and head off toward the river. I walk down the same path I did yesterday. I look at my phone’s screen again. I missed the call around 7:00 p.m. last night. Maybe I’d already drunk too much wine to notice my phone vibrating.

  I press my ear to the phone and listen to the message. It’s Jacob, the guard from the prison, calling with information about my dad. My breath shortens as I replay the message. Jacob located someone who works at Saint Anne’s Behavioral Health Hospital who knows something about him. Jacob gives me the name of the person, Tara Woodfin, and her number. I replay the message again and then glance down at my phone. It’s probably too early to give Tara a ring, especially on a Sunday. I’ll have to wait a bit.

  Once I get back to the campsite, I find Roman in the same position I left him. He’s lying on his back, his eyes squeezed shut and his face frozen in a painful frown. I kneel down beside him and shake his shoulders. “Come on, we should go. Let’s take down the tent.”

  “Why do we have to leave so early?” His speech is still slurred and he rolls over on his side.

  I walk over to the tent and try to figure out how to collapse the thing without breaking it. I fumble around with the poles until I figure out that they can be removed from the tent’s flaps, and once they’re out, you can bend them in half. I’m sure there’s an easier and prettier way to take it down, but Roman’s too zoned out to judge me, and if he has his way, he’s never going to need to use this tent again anyway.

  The thought is almost unbearable, and I push away the sinking feeling, swallowing the lump in my throat. Stay busy. Don’t go there. Once the tent is collapsed, I shove all the parts into the bag Roman packed it in. There’s no order to it, but I’m sure Mrs. Franklin will fix it once we get back.

  As I head toward the cooler to grab a bottled water for Roman, I notice his backpack slumped next to it. I peek at him to make sure he’s still sleeping and unzip it. I pull out his sketch pad. I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help it.

  I sit down cross-legged on the ground and flip through his sketch pad. My breath catches when I reach the last page, the drawing of me. The girl I’m staring at is not me, but she is me. Her large eyes are focused away from the viewer, but there’s something in them I don’t immediately recognize: hope. Her posture looks straighter than mine, like she’s stronger, more resilient.

  “Thank you, FrozenRobot,” I whisper to myself. I tear the drawing out of the sketch pad. I don’t care about how angry he’ll be when he realizes I took it. I need it. I need it to remind myself that I can be this girl, that this girl is inside of me. This hopeful, strong person. I fold the drawing into a tiny square and slide it into my pocket and then carefully put his sketch pad back inside his bag.

  As I pull a water bottle out of the cooler, I think about what I have to do. I have to do for Roman what he has done for me: I have to show him the person still inside of him, the person he thinks is gone and defeated. A boy full of adventure and talent, with a sloppy smile and an infectious laugh. A boy with eyes like summer grass and sunshine that see things most people don’t, and hands that create incredible sketches. I close my eyes and remember holding his hand at the carnival, how solid and tight his grip was.

  I have to help him save himself. I have to.

  Taking a deep breath, I muster the courage to walk over to Roman. I crouch down beside him and press the cool bottle to his forehead. “Wake up.”

  “Hey!” he yelps out in surprise.

  “I figured that would feel good.”

  “It does, thanks. It just startled me a little.” He takes the water bottle from me and rolls onto his side so he can gulp down a few sips before pressing it against his forehead again.

  “I’m going to put everything in the car and then we can take off. Okay?”

  I’m about to get up, but he reaches for my hand and pulls me back down to the ground beside him. “I wasn’t so drunk that I don’t remember last night, Aysel.”

  I stare at him blankly. I can’t say what I want to say, and I figure silence is better than all the words he doesn’t want to hear. And besides, I don’t want to speak u
ntil I have the right words. The magic words. The words that will convince him to live.

  He shakes his head and takes another gulp of water. “Don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  I stay silent and run my tongue over my teeth, searching for the right words.

  “Aysel,” he says as he reaches for my hand again.

  I grip his hand and stare down at it. The hand that drew that picture. “Jacob called,” I say.

  His fingers softly massage mine. “And?”

  “He gave me the name of someone I can call to get some information on my dad.”

  Roman drops his gaze to the ground but keeps my hand in his. “We might not have time to visit him before . . .”

  “I know, but . . .” I pause and inhale, letting the cold spring air fill my lungs. “About last night. I know you told me not to let it change anything, and maybe last night in particular didn’t change anything, but I’m starting to think that maybe we should stop and really consider . . . everything.” I stare down at our hands.

  He drops my hand and scoots away from me. I take a sharp breath. “Look, I knew it was a bad idea. It’s just you’re, you’re, you’re . . .” He sputters like a stalling car’s engine.

  “I’m what?”

  “You’re you. You get it. You get all of it. And you’re sad like me, and as screwed up as that is, it’s pretty beautiful.” He reaches over and brushes his hand across my face, touching my hair. “You’re like a gray sky. You’re beautiful, even though you don’t want to be.”

  But he’s wrong. It’s not that I don’t want to be. But I never wanted to be beautiful because I was sad. FrozenRobot of all people should know that there is nothing beautiful or endearing or glamorous about sadness. Sadness is only ugly, and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn’t get it. I think what he means to say is that he and I are ugly in the same way and there’s something familiar, comfortable, about that. Comfortable is different from beautiful.

  I think about his drawing of me. The girl that he drew, she was beautiful. That girl wasn’t a gray sky. She had hope. Hope is beautiful.