It’s late afternoon when Jesmyn pulls up to my car, and the sun sifts through leaves, making them glow green. My head is pounding. I realize it’s not only because of the tension I’m carrying, but also because I’ve barely eaten all day.
We sit there for a moment, the heat pressing down on us like a vise. After a day of ceremony, I can’t seem to even get out of the truck without some.
I rest my arm on the windowsill. “Thanks. For sitting by me during the funeral and driving me to the cemetery. And standing with me at the cemetery. And then driving me here.” I pause. “Sorry if I’m forgetting anything.”
“No problem.” Jesmyn’s voice sounds washed out.
I reach for the door handle but stop. “I never asked how you’re doing.”
She sighs and lays her head on her hands, which rest on the steering wheel. “Shitty. Like you.”
“Yeah.”
She wipes away tears. A few seconds of sniffling pass. Then the slow returning creep of guilt, taking the baton from grief and exhaustion. It resembles that moment when you’re hiking and you step into an icy creek. It takes a second for the frigid water to seep in and soak your socks. Maybe you’ve even managed to pull your foot out of the water already. But then there’s that wet chill spreading around your foot, and you know you’re going to be miserable for the rest of the day.
I’ve allowed myself to assume, because of her kindness, that she doesn’t blame me. What if all her kindness has nothing to do with that and everything to do with trying to persuade herself not to hate me? I can see convincing yourself not to hate someone by investing kindness in them.
I’m too spent. I have no energy for the truth; no place left to put it.
“Anyway, thanks again.” I open the door.
Jesmyn pulls out her phone. “Hey. I don’t have your number. School’s starting in a few weeks, and I need all the friends I can get there.” This sounds like an epiphany coming to her even as she says it.
“Oh. Yeah. I guess I’m not super close with anyone there anymore either.”
We exchange numbers. Maybe this was the ceremony I needed. Some tiny ray of hope.
It’s dawning on me how lonely this school year will be. Sauce Crew was so tight. We were our own universe. No one alive is in the habit of thinking to call me on a Saturday night. But my bigger problem is Adair. She always wielded outsized social influence at NAA—way more than Eli ever did. Way, way more than me. If she never stops hating me, many people are going to follow her lead just to stay in her good graces.
“Well,” Jesmyn says. “At least we’re done with funerals.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
“See you later?”
“Yeah. Later.”
Now comes the hard part. When we can’t lose ourselves in regimented programs for our grief. When we’re alone with ourselves.
But the day’s not over for me yet. Nana Betsy invited me to stop by her house, where they were having a low-key potluck dinner to send the relatives from East Tennessee home with full bellies.
I squint against the dazzling light while I rummage for my keys and consider how blithely bright the day is.
The spinning world and the burning sun don’t care much whether we stay or we go. It’s nothing personal.
“Hey, Lisa,” I say to one of the NAA a cappella members passing in the parking lot on the way to her car.
“Oh. Hey.” She’s suddenly transfixed by her phone. She’s one of the people Adair was talking to before the funeral started. And as far as I know, she never bore me any special ill will before now. Yep. This school year is going to rule.
I’m about to get into my car when I see a youngish bearded man in khakis, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a loosened, skinny tie approaching.
“Excuse me. Sorry, excuse me,” he calls, waving. “You Carver Briggs?”
At least someone wants to talk to me. “Yeah.”
The young man is carrying a notebook and a pen. He has what looks like a digital recorder in his shirt pocket.
He extends his hand. “Darren Coughlin, with the Tennessean. I’ve been covering the accident from the beginning.”
I shake his hand reluctantly. “Oh.” So you’re the one responsible for the article printed a few days ago, telling the world that this was a texting accident and making everyone point at me.
“Hey, I’m really sorry about the circumstances. I’m working on a story about the accident, and Judge Edwards referred me to you. He said you might have some information about it? They were your friends?”
I rub my forehead. This is literally one of the last things on Earth I want to be doing right now. “Can we do this another time? I don’t really want to talk.”
“I get it, and I’m not trying to be insensitive, but the news doesn’t stop for grief, you know? I’d like to get your side before we go to press.”
My side. I suck in a breath. “Um, yeah. Best friends.”
He shakes his head. “So sorry, man. Do you know anything about what might have caused the accident?”
“I thought you already had an idea.”
“Well, seems like it was texting, but do you know who Thurgood—”
“Mars.”
“Excuse me?”
“We called him Mars.”
“Okay, do you know who Mars was texting with?”
My stomach folds around the jagged edges of the question. My sweat cools. Yes, as a matter of fact I do. “I—I’m not sure exactly. It might have been me.”
Darren nods and scribbles notes. “Were you texting him at around the time of the accident?”
He might be trying not to come across as brusque and uncaring, but he is, and it’s making me jittery. “I—maybe?” My voice is diminishing.
“Are you aware of any criminal investigation into the accident?”
I shudder like a buzzing wasp just landed on my neck. “No. Why?”
He shakes his head nonchalantly. “Curious.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“No, I’d just be surprised if there weren’t an investigation. Three teenagers, texting, you know.”
“Should I be worried?”
Darren keeps scribbling notes. He shrugs. “Probably not.”
“I mean, a couple of cops talked to me right after and I told them that Mars and I were texting that afternoon. But they didn’t, like, arrest me.”
“Yeah, I don’t know.” Darren clicks his pen.
“Could you maybe not write that I might have been texting Mars?” I’m smart enough to know both how futile this request is and how bad it makes me sound, but I sometimes do dumb stuff.
He looks up. “Man, I can’t—”
I chew on a fingernail. He never finishes the sentence.
Darren raises his pad again. “So, what time were you—”
It suddenly occurs to me how little I have to gain by continuing this conversation, and how much I have to lose. “I gotta go. I gotta—”
“Just a couple more questions.”
“No, sorry, I have to be at Blake’s house. His grandma wanted me to come.” I sit down in my car and close the door. I have to roll down the window to breathe in the stifling heat.
Darren rests his hand on the windowsill. “Look, Carver, I’m sorry to be doing this right now. I really am. But this is news. And the news doesn’t wait for people to mourn. So you can either tell me your side of the story or you can wait to read it in the paper. But either way.”
“I don’t read the paper.” I turn the key in the ignition.
He fishes a card from his shirt pocket and hands it to me through the window. “Anyway, man, here’s my card. Drop me a line if you remember something or if the police start asking questions.”
I toss the card on the passenger seat.
“Can I get your number?” Darren asks.
“I’m late.” I roll up the window. Darren gives me a you’re-making-a-mistake look, as though I didn’t know I already had.
Acid bubbles up and scalds the back of my throat as I drive to Blake’s house.
Blake Lloyd is surely the only student in the history of Nashville Arts who secured admission on the strength of his public farting. Okay, not just public farting, but that was by far the most popular part of his oeuvre.
Blake was a minor YouTube celebrity. He made comedy videos—skits, observations, impressions, etc. He’d thicken his accent and country it up. What really got people’s attention, though, was his willingness to embarrass himself publicly. He’d trip himself at the grocery store and take out a display of cereal boxes while his pants fell down (he always cleaned up his messes). He’d step in dog poop barefoot. He’d walk into Green Hills Mall, the snootiest mall in Nashville, shirtless (and he did not look like he worked out).
And then there was the public farting. In movie theaters. During a quiet scene. Puuuurp. Then a pause. Then another one. Longer. Priiiiiiiiiip. He always kept a straight face. One of his most popular videos was one where he rips ass at the library and he hasn’t even gotten the whole thing out yet when the librarian bellows, “EXCUSE YOU.”
In the months before the Accident, though, he had upped the ante to public farting in midconversation. So he’s talking with a prim hobby-shop clerk, acting the perfect young gentleman, and midsentence, he cuts one. The lady tries to be polite, because we all make mistakes, but she can’t help an involuntary grimace. But then he goofs out another—it sounds like a pig’s squeal. Brrrrrrrp. And now she’s certain it’s no mistake.
“Do you need the restroom?” she asks icily.
“Ma’am?” Blake says.
Now this may not seem the sort of portfolio that would get you into a competitive arts school (please note: if you say “competitive arts school” fast, it sounds like “come pet at a fart school”). But Blake was smart. He studied comedy. He listened to people talk about it and pick it apart, analyzing it on podcasts and in essays. He knew his craft and was serious about it. He knew how to intellectualize it and frame what he was doing to make it attractive to the admissions committee. So he wasn’t a bored kid farting in public for laughs on the Internet. He was a performance artist, actively violating the social contract and confronting those in public spaces with the reality of bodily function. He was challenging people, forcing them to question the artificial barriers we construct between ourselves and our bodies. He was subverting expectations. He was sacrificing himself; laying it on the line. He was creating art.
Plus, come on. Farts are always funny. Even to admissions officers.
I get to Nana Betsy’s house and let myself in. There’s a laptop set up as you walk in the front door, and it’s playing Blake’s videos. So amidst the somber hush of conversation, you hear the occasional flatulent toot emanate from the laptop speakers, followed by chuckling from the groups of two or three people alternating standing around the laptop.
The photo of Blake that rested on top of the casket now sits on the coffee table. The house is warm in the way of confined spaces full of people. It smells of potluck food and the aftershave and perfume that men and women get as presents from grandchildren.
I pause in the living room for a second, unsure of what to do. Nobody acknowledges my presence. A gust of guilt buffets me, so powerful it makes my leg bones feel like they’re resonating to some low frequency. You filled this house with mourners. You created this occasion. I have that feeling when you think everyone is staring at you even though you can see they aren’t.
I spot Nana Betsy in the kitchen, talking with her brothers. Our eyes meet and she motions for me to come in. I enter the kitchen and Nana Betsy, without interrupting her conversation, points me to the adjacent dining room, where steaming slow cookers, casserole dishes, and disposable aluminum pans crowd the table. Cold grocery-store fried chicken. Squash casserole topped with Ritz crackers. Turnip greens with chunks of pork. Little smoked sausages swimming in BBQ sauce. Mac and cheese with the top baked brown.
It’s strange that this is the best we can do. We don’t even have a special ceremonial mac and cheese to mark someone’s passing from this world. We only have the normal stuff that your mom feeds you on any given day when someone you love hasn’t died.
I pile food precariously on a paper plate, grab a clear plastic fork and a red Solo cup of sweet tea, and find a corner of the living room. The couch and most of the chairs are taken, so I sit on an ottoman and eat, trying to make myself invisible, carefully balancing my cup on the carpet. I have to force down each bite through a constricted throat. Hungry as I am, my body is telling me I’m unworthy. Replaying my conversation with Darren in my mind every few minutes also doesn’t help.
People bump into each other, interacting. Fish in an aquarium. The men wear wrinkled, ill-fitting sport coats and sloppily tied ties. They look uncomfortable, like beagles wearing sweaters.
I finish and I’m about to stand when Nana Betsy shuffles in. A woman rises from the rocking chair, and she and Nana Betsy share a long hug and kiss on the cheek. Nana Betsy bids her farewell and tells her to take a plate of food for the road. Then Nana Betsy drags the rocker beside me and sits with a soft groan. She looks bone weary. Her eyes normally dance. Not today.
“How you doing, Blade?”
Nana Betsy was the only person on Earth outside of Sauce Crew who called me Blade. The nickname tickled her to no end.
“I’ve been better.”
“I hear you,” she says.
“Blake’s funeral was beautiful.” I’m saying it without conviction. I’m not even fooling myself. A beautiful funeral for your best friend is a species of drinking a delicious poison, or being bitten by a majestic tiger.
Nana Betsy sees right through me. “Oh, baloney,” she says gently. “A beautiful funeral would have been Blake making everyone laugh once more. One his mama was at.”
I hadn’t wanted to ask about that. But Nana Betsy says it with a certain yearning, something she wants off her chest but she needs someone to ask her about it.
“Do you know where she is?”
She blinks away tears. She folds her hands on her lap, prayer-like. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t hear from Mitzi but once every couple years. When whatever man she’s taken up with leaves her high and dry again and she needs money to feed her habit. She’ll call from some motel in Las Vegas or Phoenix on a disposable cell phone. I have no number for her. No address. No way to reach her. On top of everything else, I guess I’ll have to hire someone to track her down so’s I can tell her Blake is gone.”
“Man.” What do you say to that?
“Thing is, she’ll be devastated even though she’s never been interested in being a mother to him.”
A weighty silence. A blessed fart from the laptop. Nana Betsy laughs through her tears. “I miss him so much. I don’t know how to live without him. I’m not even sure how I’ll weed the tomato garden with my knees bad as they are. Blake always did it for me.” She produces a handkerchief and wipes her eyes. “I loved him as my own.”
It’s several seconds before I can speak; I’m swallowing the sobs trying to claw their way out of my throat. “I don’t think I’ll ever laugh again.”
Nana Betsy leans over and hugs me. She smells like dried roses and warm polyester. She doesn’t seem to have a single sharp edge. We hug and rock side to side for a second or two.
“I better keep making the rounds,” Nana Betsy says. “You’re a good friend. Please don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Oh, my mom and dad wanted me to tell you again they’re sorry they couldn’t come. They tried to make it home from Italy, but they couldn’t in time.”
“You tell them I understand completely. Bye, Blade.”
“Bye, Nana Betsy.”
Before I leave, I take a last look around. I remember the occasions Blake and I sat in this living room planning his next video. Playing video games. Watching a movie or some sketch-comedy show.
I wonder if the actions we take and the words we speak are like throwing pebbles into a pond; they send ripples that extend farther out from the center until finally they break on the bank or disappear.
I wonder if somewhere in the universe, there’s still a ripple that’s Blake and I sitting in this living room, laughing ourselves silly. Maybe it’ll break on some bank somewhere in the vast sky beyond our sight. Maybe it’ll disappear.
Or maybe it’ll keep traveling on for eternity.