What Remains (3 page)

Spencer grabs a corkscrew out of his bag and hands it to me along with the bottle of wine. “Here, do something
useful.” I take them, but I fumble around for a little bit
before Lizzie grabs them out of my hands and opens the bottle herself. She has a lot of experience with this sort of thing given that drinking is her mom's favorite hobby. Still, it creeps me out to see her in action.

Spencer sticks glittery little candles into the cupcakes while Lizzie pours red wine into three glasses. I look at Spencer because he's the word guy and I'm sure he's prepared something to say.

“You guys are my best friends in the entire world and I don't know what I'd do without you. Anyhow, I'm so glad we're doing this and, Liz, that you wanted to spend your very special seventeenth birthday with us. I hope you know how much we love you.”

She does a little curtsey and hugs both of us while trying not to spill her wine. Spencer goes to the back of one of the black cubes and pulls out three sleeping bags. Then we light the candles and sing happy birthday.

Singing with Spencer Yeats is like singing with John Lennon or someone. I can't even take my tone-deaf voice seriously so I kind of mouth the words and let him carry it until he slaps the side of my leg with the back of his hand. I let go on the “happy birthday dear Lizzie” part just as she blows out the candles.

“So what did you wish for?” I ask, even though I'm not supposed to.

“I want this,” she says, looking very sincere and not like herself at all. “I want this never to change.”

There's a pause while we both stare at her. I know we're both thinking about how much she must be feeling to actually say that. And then, as if we're sharing the same mind, Spencer and I lean in at the same time and hug her.

Who knew that they turn the freaking heat off in schools at night? I'm sure some people might have thought about that, but not us. I have a light jacket with me and Spencer is in a thin T-shirt. Lizzie is wearing something gauzy and fairy-like that definitely isn't warm.

We pull the sleeping bags together and huddle inside them, each holding candles to keep our hands from shaking. The wine helps a little, but we're almost done with the bottle and I think shivering is keeping me unfortunately sober.

I get up and grab another cupcake. “So when did you find time to make these?”

“I stayed up late last night,” Spencer says. “I was waiting for an email anyhow.” Lizzie and I share a look; neither of us has to ask who it was from.

After telling us for years that he was “just too busy to worry about relationships,” Spencer met a guy from Seattle when they were in a show together last summer. Because of the distance, they aren't really involved, but from what Spencer told me Rob has been trying to change that. Spencer has been resistant in a cagey, un-Spencer-like way, and I know we won't get any more details out of him tonight.

“Well, thanks,” Lizzie says and leans over to kiss him. I force myself not to look away and when she shivers, I throw her my coat.

Spencer collects most of the candles and puts them in the middle of the room. There's one bunch he's left in the corner and I stare at them, trying to figure out what makes them different until I realize they're those little LED candles that won't burn out. They'll stay lit all night long.

It isn't as if I'm afraid of the dark. It's more the things that hide in the dark that get to me. I mean, I'm sixteen; I know there are no monsters under the bed. But there's other stuff that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach clench: ghosts, aliens, predators, muggers, all those parts of our brains that we don't use and don't know why we have, things that can't be explained by science or by reason. It's the not knowing that makes me feel like a silly kid who needs his mommy to leave on the light. I hate that I'm like that, but I am and my best friends know it.

Spencer motions for us to gather our sleeping bags around the real candles, the ones that
will
burn out in the middle of the night, but that also might share some of their warmth with us first.

“Come on, Liz,” he says, pulling her over and rubbing his hand up and down her goose-bumped arms. “You're freezing. You're like the walking dead.” They unzip their bags and then zip the two together into one giant one and huddle under it.

This is what happens when you're three best friends. Two are always together and one is always on the outside. Not that I want to be in there with them. And not that it's a bad thing. Spencer and I jog together and Lizzie most decidedly doesn't exercise for exercise's sake. Or she and I bum around art museums and I listen to her tell me why people like paintings made up of tiny dots or the tragic stories about the painter's lives. So when they huddle up together, I don't feel left out. Not really. This is just what happens.

Or what happened.

Now that I know they've had sex, everything feels different. I don't want it to matter, but it does. Not just because I feel like they're forming a club I'm not invited to join, but because Spencer should have known better and I'm not really sure how to call him on it. Or if I even should.

“Do you think we'll see her?” Lizzie asks me.

“Who?” I ask, distracted.

“Ally Martin,” she answers and I'm glad that they can't see the expression on my face. “No, you know … ” She pauses for effect. “The ghost.”

“ARGH,” I say and put my hands over my ears like a little kid. “I'm not listening.” I'm only half joking, but I'm not sure which topic I want to avoid talking to Lizzie about more.

“Give him a break, Liz,” Spencer says. “Besides.” He points at the LED lights. “That's what the ghost lights are for.”

“The what?” Lizzie turns to him. It's clear she's not buying this at all.

“Ghost lights are the lights left on in theaters after the cast and crew have gone. They're meant to keep the muse in the house when there aren't shows going on and keep bad spirits out when there are.”

Lizzie's face contains every color of fascination now and she doesn't see Spencer turn and wink at me.

“They're also so that people don't trip over things when they come back to the theater in the morning,” he explains.

This practical explanation makes Lizzie smirk, but she says “fine” to him and then mouths “wimp” dramatically in my direction.

Spencer brushes some hair out of Lizzie's eyes and puts his arm around her. “So you're sure your mom didn't have anything planned for your birthday?”

It's a sensitive subject. When we all met in first grade, I remember her mom coming to pick her up from school and knowing there was something wrong. Her dad ran off right after she was born and her mom went through a series of crappy relationships until she settled on the loser she's with now. Even at seven I knew that the smell of alcohol and her unsteady gait made her mom something different, something bad. The idea that she would have planned anything for Lizzie's birthday was pretty absurd. She never had before. She wasn't going to start now.

“Wow, Spence. No more wine for you, it's making you hallucinate,” Lizzie says and elbows him in the ribs. “Yeah, Mom had a huge party planned with ponies, and a Ferris wheel, and fireworks.”

Spencer winces. I know he wasn't trying to hurt her. It's just hard to tell where all of Lizzie's unprotected nerve endings are; they seem to move around a lot. I can't tear my eyes away as he squeezes her tighter and whispers “sorry” so softly I can barely hear it.

She takes a gulp of wine. “What? It's no big deal. Not like I expected anything from her. Besides, what could she possibly give me that would be better than freezing my ass off with my two favorite boys?”

“I don't think anyone has ever said that they prefer me to a pony before,” I say, trying to lighten things up. “I'm not really sure how to take it.”

“Oh, Cal.” Lizzie purses her wine-stained lips and while I don't know exactly what she's thinking, I know that it's something that would make me squirm if she said it out loud. “I am so not even going there.”

I catch Spencer's eye and we dissolve into cold, tired laughter. For the moment, my questions and fears, my doubts and jealousy, fade and all I can think is: this, this, this. This is right.

Four

I wasn't made for standardized tests. Spencer is all over these things, but then all of his life has been about studying lines and regurgitating them at exactly the right time. I'm better at stuff like science because the answers are always the same. If you mix chemical one and chemical two they'll always react the same way even if that means you've created something that will blow up. The point is you
know
that's going to happen. The planets tonight will be just where you left them last night so long as you take into account the Earth's slight rotational shift.

But they can ask virtually anything on those tests and I can't possibly study everything to prepare. And don't get me started on writing essay questions for the English part of it, where the right answer is a totally subjective thing based on what the person reviewing the answers had for breakfast that day or whether they got laid the night before.

In reality there's only one good thing about taking the SATs today, on a Monday no less. It means that we're exactly one week from the official start of baseball practice. My Detroit Tigers' calendar, the one with the pictures of the 1968 World Series team, hangs on the wall. I have all our practice times highlighted in yellow on the little calendar squares. The SAT reminder sits in somber black in today's space, right over that first practice. From then on my calendar is full of baseball, baseball, and baseball.

But I have to get through this version of hell first.

I throw my last-minute study notes in the trunk, crank up the radio, and head over to the school. When I pull into the parking lot, it's filled with a large chunk of the junior class. Half of them, like me, are checking their scribbled notes, trying to memorize things they somehow forgot to learn in the previous sixteen years.

All of them look dazed, and tired, and like they'd rather be anywhere else.

Spencer and Lizzie show up with coffee for me, but still I sleepwalk through the rest of the waiting, and the instructions, and then, somehow, the test.

It's all over before I know it.

“Oh come on, Cal, driver picks the music, right?” Lizzie is framed in the rear-view mirror of my car, her dark hair pulled back with a band that has neon flowers protruding off it and an expression of exasperation on her face.

I rub my eyes and some of the stress leaves my shoulders. I feel like I've finally woken up and the day has begun.

Spencer turns around in the seat next to me and smiles because he loves to torture Lizzie. She's going nuts, right on the verge of totally losing it in a manic fury. But she's right. I'm driving, which should give me the right to choose the music, but that's one of the few areas where the three of us are completely incompatible.

Lizzie has a mental block with most music that came out after 1975. “What's the point of popular music?” she always says. “It's all love, blah, blah, heartbreak, blah, blah, shake your ass. No one writes about anything that matters anymore.”

Spencer thankfully doesn't want to listen to show stuff because he says he gets enough of that in theater. Instead his poison is public radio, which is almost worse. All talk and news. He says that it gives him perspectives he can draw on when he's acting.

For me, music is music. A beat. Something to fill my head. Something to pass the time. I like the usual—indie rock, a bit of grunge, some old '80s stuff, anything that doesn't put me to sleep.

So it's like this every time we drive somewhere. This battle of wills. I try, but it's torture when I'm driving eighty to have to listen to the news or some droning anti-war song that came out before our parents were born.

Right now Spencer is blaring NPR. The mellow voices discuss a war in some country I've never heard of. It's almost enough to numb my exhausted brain and lull me back to sleep, but for some reason, it makes Lizzie more hyper and she's drumming her hands on our headrests like a bored toddler. I take my eyes off the road for a minute to silently plead with Spencer to do something, anything, to make her stop.

He nods and fiddles with the buttons until he finds something country that we all hate. Without missing a beat, Lizzie smacks him on the back of the head. I would have beaten her to it, but I'm holding onto the wheel for dear life as every truck in Michigan seems to be barreling down on my tail and my ten-year-old Corolla shakes each time one passes.

Lizzie unhooks her seat belt to lean over the console and fiddle with the knobs. Bob Dylan sings about how times are changing in his nasally voice and she leans back with a smug look on her face.

Spencer rolls his eyes, but I can see him smiling out of the corner of my eye. Before I know it, he twists his body, rolls down his window, and sticks his head out of it like a dog and starts singing. That would be fine. Lizzie and I both love listening to him sing. But for some reason he's chosen to sing the score of
The Sound of Music
and between that, which is intended to annoy us as much as possible, and the drone coming out of the speakers, I'm ready to pull over and lock both of my best friends in the trunk.

I still can't take my eyes off the road, but I figure that I'm not going to be a better driver if my ears start bleeding. I reach out a hand and grab for whatever fabric I can feel on Spencer, jacket I think, and yank him back inside.

“Yeats, I swear I'm going to ram this car into a tree if you don't shut up right now,” I yell at him, but I'm not really angry and he knows it.

In fact, he keeps singing. Lizzie joins in, making the yodeling and goat sounds to go with that song about a shepherd
and I start laughing and can't stop. I finally give up and kill the stereo all together and let the two of them serenade me.

Eventually, they stop—they've run out of songs that both of them know and Spencer has to save his voice for Wednesday's show—and the car is blissfully quiet. I don't turn the radio back on, hoping we can talk instead.

“So when do we get to find out where we're heading?” Spencer asks, looking out the window as random bits of highway fly by.

“Soon,” I say. It's a thing we do. One of us will pick some place hours from Maple Grove—a farm that sells pick-
your-own blueberries, a dusty used record store, or an ice cream store that sells bacon-and-egg-flavored ice cream—and we'll drive there for the hell of it. Just to see something new and to do it together.

Today, we're on the way to a place called Mystery Ridge where gravity is supposed to be all messed up. It's an old shack where you can drop a ball and watch it roll uphill. Brooms there stand on end by themselves. At least that what the web page I found says.

“I know,” Lizzie pipes up. “Let's play truth or dare.”

Her words hit me like a jolt of espresso. “No. Not with you, Lizzie, no way.”

“Aw, Cal.” She draws out her words in a way that makes my stomach clench. “Why not?”

I risk moving my eyes to glance at her in the rear-view mirror. “Why not? First, we're in a car.” I don't even want to think of the types of dares she could come up with on a freeway. “Second … how about because last time we played you almost got me arrested.”

Spencer laughs. He's safe because he doesn't have anything he really considers a secret from us and always answers all the “truth” questions. I'm always stuck between choosing to talk about things I don't want to talk about, and doing things that I don't want to do. Lizzie, of course, always takes the dares, which we can never make challenging enough for her.

“See, if you'd just answer the questions, it would be so much easier,” she says. She's right except that the kind of questions Lizzie asks are hard. Really hard. The type of questions that maybe I think about when I'm alone, but certainly not the type that I can answer out loud. Not even to my best friends. Not to Lizzie.

“Probably,” I admit. “Let's try this instead. What do you think you'll be doing in five years? And what about twenty?” Taking the SATs and all this talk about college prep at school has made me think about this kind of stuff lately. And now that I know about Spencer and Lizzie, it feels like everything is changing too quickly.

“Fine.” Lizzie sulks. “But you go first and you aren't allowed to say that you want to be married to some girl you can't even work up the courage to talk to.”

“I'm totally ignoring that,” I say. But really I'm more than happy to skip the topic of girls in general and Ally in particular. “In five years I want to be playing for the Yankees. Or at least their Triple-A team.”

“Ha!” Lizzie says. “You are definitely not a bad-ass New Yorker. Doesn't Florida, or someplace slow like that, have a team? That's more your speed.” She's right, but hey, it's the Yankees and if you're going to dream, you have to dream big.

“I hate Florida,” I say and throw out the one thing that will shut her up. “Besides, Yeats is going to be in New York and you can come out and work for a gallery or something and we'll all be together.”

“Okay, so in twenty years you'll be retired on your huge baseball salary with your two World Series rings. What then?” Spencer's optimism is cool, but my mom would be pissed to hear that no one's guesses for me include college.

I'm really getting into the idea of going to college later. In twenty years, I'll be thirty-six. That's a whole other life away and it's kind of like imagining whether we'll have jetpacks and vacations on Mars by then. I've actually been thinking about this, but am almost embarrassed to say what's on my mind. Then I say it anyhow. “I think I'd like to study meteorology.”

Neither of them says anything for a minute, presumably because they're trying to figure out what I'm talk about. Eventually it's Spencer who gets it first. “A weatherman?”

Lizzie starts laughing. “Like on the TV news? The guy who says it will snow and then, when it turns out to be eighty degrees, has to apologize and say that the low pressure system moved or something?”

I search for words that might win them over. I really want Lizzie, in particular, to get it because otherwise she's going to ride me mercilessly. “There's more to it than that. I mean, you can figure out the best flight plans for airplanes or study the chances of hurricanes. There are a lot of options.”

“You can plan ahead, you mean?” Spencer manages to sum up my entire psyche in under a minute. “Yeah, makes sense.”

Before they can analyze me any further, I pass the question along. “We all know where Yeats is going, so you're up, Lizzie.”

She's quiet for a minute. Out of the corner of my eye, I see her lean forward and grip onto Spencer's headrest.

“Well, in five years … ” she begins. I twist my head as much as I can and still watch the road. I'm eager to know where she wants to go from here. Lizzie rarely talks about the future.

“I want to be someplace other than this shithole. I want to be able to paint full time. I'm not really sure how to make that happen.”

“And what about in twenty?” I ask.

This time there's no pause. She stares right into my
eyes in the mirror, deadly serious. “Come on, Cal, do you really think I'll still be alive in twenty years?”

I have to stop myself from jamming on the breaks in the middle of the freeway.

“Liz,” Spencer says, before I can get a word out. “Really?”

“Yeah, really. I mean, what? You see me settling down and having kids and a normal life? I don't even know what a normal life is like.” She doesn't say any of this like she's upset. Just resigned. It must be hell to go through every day thinking that life is never going to get any better. It makes me think of Alice, the “ghost” from The Cave.

I glance over at Spencer, who looks like all the air has been forced out of his lungs.

“Liz. Do you really think that we'd let anything bad happen to you?”

When he says it I feel a crawling up my back that makes me shiver. That's the kind of tempting-fate comment that made my grandmother knock on wood and spit on the ground.

“Seriously, Lizzie,” I say, “you're going to be a beautiful, artsy, bitchy old lady with equally beautiful, misbehaved kids who are afraid of nothing.”

That at least brings a smile to her face.

“You're up, Yeats,” I say, but we all know his plan. His life stretches ahead of him like the freaking yellow brick road complete with lion and wizard.

Lizzie jumps in before he gets a chance to answer. “In five years, Spence will be accepting his second Tony award for best male lead on Broadway. In twenty, he'll be living in California with one of the top movie studio executives and a slew of servants in their gated estate. They'll throw parties where champagne runs out of the faucets and everyone is beautiful, and creative, and insane. But in a good way.”

Spencer laughs, but really, she probably isn't that far off from the truth.

I blink and then swerve a little. The conversation woke me up, but Lizzie's bleakness about her future has worn me out.

“Are you sure you're okay to drive?” Spencer asks.

“I'm fine, Yeats. And it's still better than letting one of you drive.” Spencer drives like my grandmother and Lizzie drives like a demon from hell is chasing her.

Spencer and Lizzie start their usual tug of war over the radio again and I smile at how comforting and familiar
it is. I try to look over at Spencer, but Lizzie is leaning
between us and I catch a whiff of patchouli before I glance up and see 3,507 pounds of gray steel flying towards us over the median.

Despite what I've read, my life doesn't flash before my eyes.

Time doesn't slow down.

I'm not able to process why an SUV is blocking out the clouds.

I don't have time to utter a sound before everything goes dark.