Bright Before Us (10 page)

Sitting in that deceased truck, I knew that life, for me, could always go on—that life, for me,
would
always go on. I was still years away from this moment in the boys' bathroom—sobbing, bereft, half-high on pills—still years away from this compelling evidence that I had miscalculated the future ease of my life. I was seventeen and already certain that my time on earth would never carry an ounce of tragedy. I was seventeen, and already disappointed.

I stared at my chest in the child-height mirror, crying into my sleeve. I felt myself succumbing to a genuine uncertainty: I had no idea how I would survive the day.

But I did. And I did it by doing one thing at a time—bending to wash my face, tucking in my shirt, counting to ten. Then I had the first clear-headed thought in recent memory: don't let today be different. I watched my hand open the door to the auditorium, where Dr. Jennifer was just finishing up. At the sight of me she stood and waved good-bye to the kids. They looked to me for direction, and I told them to please gather their things and line up. Dr. Jennifer gave me her card as she left, shaking my hand and avoiding my eyes.

I walked my class down the hall to our room. I brought up the rear and took deep, nourishing breaths. Just maintain, I thought. Do whatever you have to do to survive this. The kids stayed quiet, moving forward in institutionalized cadence.

After they had settled in, to the degree that any group of second graders can, I told them to gather on the carpet for another two chapters of our group-reading book. They stared dumbly up at me. I knew they had assumed the day would be devoted to grief management; they had been certain I would take my turn dispensing wisdom, showering them with an intense interest in their feelings.

Carpet, please. I did say that out loud, right?
I heard my voice quaking. They stood, chairs scraping, and began to gather. I had a sudden brainstorm, an answer to my most immediate problem.
Be right back,
I told them.

I left a classroom of small children alone to go out to the car, open the glove box, and fish two more painkillers from the bottle. Edmund—my pet, my favorite student, one of the boys who had serenely stood there with a corpse as I shouted at them to leave—watched me from the window. I waved. He waved back, frowning. The hand
holding the pills went instinctively behind my back; I had a momentary fear that Ed understood what I was doing.

The principal returned that afternoon, opening the door and
then
knocking on it. She sat in my classroom for nearly two hours; when she left it was clear she wanted to stay longer but couldn't spare the time. In those two hours I felt the atmosphere compressing, as more and more time passed without any further acknowledgment of what had happened on the beach. I observed the slow degradation of her pleasant, comforting smile—first a beaming presence, and then a thin-lipped glower, and then a cold frown. The principal saw that I had no intention of addressing the subject again. She heard me slur my words. And though I worried in some corner of my consciousness that I was signing my own termination, I couldn't bring myself to give her what she wanted. My mouth, that afternoon, refused to form the words
Class, tell me what you saw, tell me how you feel.
I watched her reconsider her own faulty thinking, kicking herself: you don't ask,
Do you need time off?
You dictate. You insist. And then, cyclically, I erased all those thoughts—wasn't I just being paranoid? Wasn't I just overreacting, as I so often do?—only to watch them slowly return—I was, my excuses and grief notwithstanding, going to pay for this, and it was going to hurt.

But all of that was still an hour or two away. Walking back to the building, I took the pills with a bottle of stale water from the car's cup holder and came back to find the kids all off-task. I turned to the light switch next to the door and shut it off, capturing their attention.
Quiet, please,
I said. And, one by one, each child put a finger over his or her lips and another in the air, to let me know they understood.

A
sk me what I most remember about high school and the answer is the back of your head—the freckled nape of your neck that was so soft it looked out of focus. Your last name was Lucas and mine Mason, so in high school you sat in front of me in every class. It was easy to cheat off of you; a lucky thing, since you did well in school and I never cared to. Sometimes I saw you writing long, spiraling lines of text, winding in circles around the page. I imagined they were poems, lists, entries in some kind of strange diary. Once, Mr. Zelner, a human steel-wool sponge, caught you writing one in tenth grade driver's ed and snatched it from your desk. You looked like he had yanked a hair from your head.

Don't write letters in my class,
Zelner said, crushing the page into a compact ball. He sank an arthritic jump shot, the paper arcing into the trash.

I froze. A letter? I ran down the list of possible recipients, sweating.

It was in Zelner's class, sophomore year, that you told me your house was haunted.
I'm serious,
you said, because my expression warranted convincing. The front hall closet in your house reeked of roses. Not the faint, earthy tang of a garden, but the syrupy choke of drugstore-grade perfume. And it was contagious—a jacket hanging in there for an hour emerged as ripe as if a bottle had broken in the pocket.

Come look,
you challenged me,
and tell me if you find anything rose-scented.

So one Saturday I took the bus up Nineteenth Avenue, ready to prove you wrong. We were supposed to see a movie, but the afternoon got away from us as we pulled out unmarked boxes, baseball mitts, board games coated in dust. The smell was astonishing. It was the difference between air and fog; you could almost see it. We searched the corners, the baseboards. We ran our hands blindly over the high shelves, provoking a mouse-turd rain. In the end, we found nothing rose-scented besides the junk we had dislodged, and, once we were done, ourselves. I was freaked out. But it was my job to stop
you
from freaking out, so I spoke:

Of course not,
I said.

You frowned.
You don't think people stick around waiting for their final wish to be fulfilled?

We stood there, silent: you, embarrassed, and me, embarrassed for you. It was uncomfortable, seeing someone want so badly to believe. Finally, I began restacking the
board games.
I think they decompose,
I said,
and that's pretty much the end of it.

 

Though I had said this several years earlier, after your parents died I was scared that you remembered it. If there was no afterlife, your parents weren't just dead but permanently so, without hope of reunion, without the redemptive existence of a “better place.” But if there
was
an afterlife, then it was possible there were ghosts. And if it was possible that there were ghosts, then it was possible your parents were among them, wandering, waiting for their last requests to be satisfied. A classic lose-lose.

 

After Mel's Drive-In and our walk in the park, we went back to your apartment. The lights had come back on, and in the streetlight glow I shut off the engine, still squeezing your fingers. If a move was to be made, it was now. I scanned my brain for something to say, but you beat me.

Have you even called her?
you said.

Our fingers recoiled.

The car ticked, the engine settling. I swallowed.
You really know how to pick your moment.

You slipped your hands under your knees.
Go home, Francis.

No,
you said,
but I assume she is.

 

You may not believe me, but I'll say this anyway. In all the years I had liked you, I had never thought of you the way
I did other girls—bending them over things, whispering nasty coital rejoinders I would never utter in real life. I thought instead about us watching a movie on a couch. I would shut off the overhead light. I would choose a film we would need to be quiet to understand. I wanted to be quiet with you. Your head would rest on my shoulder, my hand on your knee.

The fear I had felt on your stoop was now diluted by recurrence: what had happened there was now of a piece, part of a pattern, and both times it had been
your
hand reaching out, touching me. You told me to go home, yes, but it was empty; the last thing we said that night was
See you soon.
I knew what you were doing. Once we had caved in and become something more than friends—in spite of my obligations elsewhere—you could pretend you had resisted.

That night, I did call Greta. I waited until I knew she was halfway through her shift, dispensing fried eggs for five-percent tips at the diner on Market Street. I stuttered through a willfully upbeat message, keeping it short and vague, and went to bed feeling like I had paid off a bill.

It was two years after we cleaned out that ghostly closet, a few months into our senior year, that you and I had the fight. It resulted in a long period of silence between us—in a grandiose show of my hatred I asked permission from each teacher to switch my seat. Most of them distractedly complied, letting me publicly drag my desks through the dingy orange classrooms, the hole behind you like the site
of a pulled molar. I may as well have written it on my forehead: Fool in Love.

Only Mr. Wilkerson, our AP Economics teacher—a pony-tailed wearer of purple slacks, who showed us
Roger and Me
and got misty-eyed during the Beach Boys–scored montage—refused to redraft his seating chart so late in the year.
So you and your girlfriend had an argument,
he said.

She's not my girlfriend,
I said.

He sipped his coffee.
You're almost an adult now; deal with it.

And so each time he asked us all to pair up for an assignment, I watched a red bloom spread across your freckled neck. I came to dread Wilkerson's class. Once the anger dissipated (it took perhaps a week), being that near to you was torture.

I missed our small, stupid diversions. Driving through rain puddles to create stegosaurus fins of water above my truck; playing badminton in the lakeside park in Berkeley; eating supremely unhealthy food. We had been perpetually without destination, and often we just went places and watched strangers. There was a game we played. I would goad you into saying something mean about passersby—something that came naturally to me. You were so reluctant, so unwilling. Each time, finally you would give in and speak with only moderate unkindness, and then hide your face behind your hands, laughing.
I don't trust people who aren't mean,
I said to you once.
They're hiding something.

And then, though I had been a normal kid with pals and laughs and weekend hijinks, I killed my whole social network with that stupid, belabored fight: when we drew up our opposing sides, everyone chose you. I didn't speak
to you for seven months. I ate lunch alone like the kids I had once made fun of. All the while graduation loomed; a massive gate, we believed, to the unchained future—low-tier state schools, unexpected offspring, a sedentary attachment to the outlying suburbs. One could weep for all we didn't know.

 

That year, I wore a leather cord necklace that never left my body. When it fell off one day I failed to notice; I undressed for bed to find it gone. You came into Wilkerson's class the next morning with a fidgeting quality about your hands and I knew immediately that you were going to speak to me. My heart clenched in its small chamber, and then your gaze paused at my chest, my chin, my eyes. You set the necklace down on my desk.
I found this outside the science building.

I refused to look at you—even as I did it, I hated doing it—and you waited, and then finally turned away, sitting down.
Thank you,
I said to your back, shoving the necklace into my pocket.

That night I retied it around my neck, thinking about how it was hidden, almost always, by my shirt. Thinking about how one would have to look very close to see it.

The next day you came to class with the invitations to your graduation party and wordlessly set one on my desk. I put it in my pocket and spent the rest of the day verifying periodically that it was real. After school, as you walked toward the bus I ambled a few yards behind, solidifying my courage. You sensed someone there, I guess, because you did that old trick: you followed a passing car with your eyes, all the way around. You saw me and stopped,
three sidewalk cracks between us. I tossed a tentative
Hey.
You started to answer but sneezed, your
Hello
coming out at ninety miles an hour.