14 November 2015
Life isn’t fair. That’s what we tell kids when they’re young and learn that there are no rules, or rather that there are but only suckers play by them. We don’t reassure them or give them tools to help them cope with the reality of life; we simply pat them on the back and send them on their way, burdened with the knowledge that nothing they do will ever really matter. It can’t if life’s not fair.
If life were fair, the smartest among us would be the wealthiest and most popular. If life were fair, teachers would make millions, and scientists would be rock stars. If life were fair, we’d all gather around the TV to hear about the latest discovery coming out of CERN rather than to find out which Kardashian is pregnant. If life were fair, Jesse Franklin wouldn’t have killed himself.
Life is not fair. And if life’s not fair, then what’s the point? Why bother with the rules? Why bother with life at all? Maybe that’s the conclusion Jesse came to. Maybe he woke up one morning and decided he simply didn’t want to play a game against people who refused to obey the rules.
• • •
I lay in bed all day Saturday, thinking about Jesse. Sometimes thinking about him made my body too heavy to move. The fragments of Jesse left behind were dense in my pockets and weighted me down, pulling me toward the center. I thought about Jesse and I listened to the sounds of my brother making a mess in the kitchen, and of my mother arguing with Nana, trying to get her ready to go visit my great-uncle Bob, who lives in a VA home in Miami. The sounds eventually quieted, and I knew I was alone. I still didn’t move, not until the shadows grew longer across my bedroom and the bright morning light began to dim.
With great effort, I rose from bed and sat at my desk. Waited for my computer to fire up. I wanted to see Jesse, so I pulled up his SnowFlake page. The Internet is a strange place for the dead. All those digital pieces of you become frozen. You will never again post selfies with friends from the movie theater or while waiting for a concert to begin. Your friends will never tag you in another photo at a drunken party. You’ll never update your page with your thoughts about how shitty South Florida drivers are or about how the lonely asshole in front of you at Target just bought twenty frozen dinners, an economy-size bag of cat food, and the box set of Bones; is using twenty coupons; and is paying in quarters. The Internet version of you becomes enshrined so that pathetic people like me can visit occasionally and try to pretend you’re not really gone. That some small part of you lingers.
I’ve spent so much time on Jesse’s SnowFlake page that I’ve practically memorized it. There’s Jenny Leech’s wall of text about how Jesse touched her life in ways he didn’t even know, despite the extent of their relationship being the one class they shared in tenth grade. Coach VanBuren’s picture of Jesse running a 440 against Dwyer High—Jesse lost that race, but from the picture you couldn’t be faulted for believing that he was about to sail to victory. A hundred variations on, I’ll miss you, dude, from people who probably stopped missing him before he was in the ground. Audrey’s last post was a picture she’d taken on the sly of me and Jesse kissing by her pool. We’d spent the day turning lobster red, drinking iced tea, and laughing. I don’t even remember what was so funny; I only remember thinking I’d suffocate before I stopped laughing.
That kiss wasn’t our last. It was just another one of many, or so I’d thought. I think if I’d known Jesse was going to kill himself, I would have locked my arms around him and never let that kiss end. I would have pulled us into the pool together and died like that, his lips on mine, certain that I loved him and that he loved me.
The last thing I posted on Jesse’s SnowFlake page was a picture of a book I wanted to buy the next time we went to Barnes & Noble. Jesse and I spent hours roaming the stacks, paging through books. It was our favorite place to go. Sometimes I wish I could post something new so the last thing I said to Jesse wasn’t about buying Naked Lunch, which I only wrote because Audrey despises the Beat writers, but his profile is locked. I’ve said everything to Jesse I’ll ever say.
When Jesse’s SnowFlake page loaded, I knew something was wrong. Jenny’s lame memorial was still there, as were all the semi-heartfelt good-byes from barely there acquaintances. But staring at me from inside of Jesse’s pictures was an alien face. My alien face. Someone had Photoshopped the image of me on the floor of the locker room into every photo on Jesse’s SnowFlake page. They hadn’t simply vandalized his photos; they’d vandalized my memories. Whoever had done this had practically gone to Jesse’s grave, dug him up, and desecrated his rotting body.
I collapsed in the chair. I couldn’t take any more. January 29 wasn’t soon enough; I needed the pain to end immediately.
Mom kept sleeping pills in her bathroom. One handful, and I could reunite with Jesse.
Beautiful resolve flowed through me. I imagined it was how Jesse had felt when he decided to hang himself. I wasn’t scared; I wasn’t conflicted. This was what I was meant to do. If nobody else was going to play by the rules, then neither was I.
I flung open my bedroom door and nearly bowled Zooey over. She was standing in the doorway with her fist raised like she was about to knock. I stumbled into her, and we fell into the wall. I babbled an apology and tried to get away, but she was talking too, and rubbing her swollen belly.
“I didn’t think anyone was home.”
Zooey smoothed out her long violet shirt. Her face looked fuller, and sometimes her belly resembled a beer gut rather than a baby, but she glowed as if her entire body were bragging to the world that she was growing a life inside of her. “Charlie’s working at the house with my dad, and he asked me to get him his tools, but I don’t know where they are and I thought you might help?”
I nodded and slid past Zooey into Charlie’s room. Clothes were flung everywhere, the blinds were shut, and it smelled like sweaty feet. It was a miracle Zooey could stand to sleep there. Charlie’s toolbox was in his closet. I handed it to her.
“Thanks.” She turned to leave but stopped and stared at me for a moment. It felt like she knew what I’d been on my way to do. Like it was tattooed on my skin that I was a weakling, a loser, that I was planning to give up and die. “I can give you a ride somewhere if you want.”
Zooey and I didn’t know each other well. She was my brother’s girlfriend. I’d seen her sneak from his room to the bathroom in her underthings, and she was carrying his kid, but it’s not like we were friends. “Where?”
“Wherever you want. I’m not in a hurry.”
If I stayed home, I was going to end up swallowing those pills, but the certainty I’d felt minutes earlier was retreating. I’d loaded Jesse’s SnowFlake page because I needed to feel close to him, and they’d taken that away from me, but the need hadn’t abated. I needed Jesse more than ever.
“Can you drive me to the bookstore?”
“Sure.”
I carried the toolbox for her. “Okay. Yeah. Let’s go.”
• • •
Zooey drove a little blue Volvo that was so old, it still had a tape deck and crank windows. The inside smelled like vanilla or roses—I couldn’t tell which, maybe both—and her music collection included every terrible power ballad in existence. Worse yet, she knew all the words to every song.
“Are you excited about being an uncle?” Zooey asked after a while. She looked at me until the persistent thump of the road dividers told her she was about to get us killed.
“I guess. Are you excited to become a mom?”
I expected Zooey to answer yes immediately, but she didn’t. She kept her hands on the steering wheel and her eyes on the road. “Don’t tell anyone, but I’m fucking scared as hell.”
“Of giving birth or the stuff that comes after?”
“All of it,” Zooey said. “I constantly worry about whether I’m taking enough vitamins or the right kind of vitamins. I worry about whether the pot I smoked before I knew I was pregnant hurt the baby. My older brother has schizophrenia, and I worry it might be genetic and I might pass it to my child. Every action I took in the past and that I’ll take in the future could impact my baby, and that scares the shit out of me.”
Maybe that should have shocked me, but I admired Zooey for admitting those things to me. “You’re going to be a great mother.”
“It helps knowing I won’t have to do it alone. I don’t think I’ve seen Charlie this excited about anything.”
“Listen,” I said. “I love my brother because he’s my brother, but he’s going to be a terrible father.”
I waited for Zooey to yell at me or slap me or tell me I was wrong. Instead she giggled. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones.
“I’m serious,” I said. “Honestly, I don’t even understand what you see in him.”
The bookstore was a twenty-minute drive, and the only way I could have escaped the car would have been to throw open the door and leap into the street. Don’t think I didn’t consider it.
“I knew Charlie in high school. Did you know that?”
“I thought you met in college.”
“We did,” Zooey said, “but we were in the same grade in high school. We didn’t really know each other, but I knew of him. I thought he was a jerk. He ruined homecoming by streaking across the football field with his buddies during the parade.”
I leaned my head against the window. “That’s my brother.”
“Do you know what changed my mind?”
“No,” I said, but I was sure she was going to tell me.
Zooey smiled, maybe at the memory, maybe from gas. “We had college algebra together. Our professor was new, an older woman who had decided to change careers late in life. She was a pretty terrible professor, but she tried hard.
“There were these guys who talked through every class. When Dr. Barnett stuttered, they’d laugh and imitate her. She ignored them, but it was bad. One class, she was reviewing for an exam, and the guys were watching videos on their phones. Like, not even trying to pretend they cared about the class. Dr. Barnett asked them to shut off their phones, but they ignored her.”
I glanced at Zooey. “Let me guess: Charlie told they guys to stop, and that’s how you knew he was an okay guy.”
Zooey laughed so hard, she nearly drove off the road. I clutched the door for dear life. “God, no,” she said. “Charlie was one of the guys cutting up.”
“And that made you decide he was worth dating?”
“It was after class. I’d left my graphing calculator behind, and I went back to get it. I saw Dr. Barnett sitting at her desk, crying. Charlie was still in there. He asked her why she was crying, and she told him she didn’t think she was cut out to be a professor. Your brother told her she was the first teacher who’d ever made him understand math. I don’t know if it was true—she really was a terrible teacher—but he never cut up in class again after that.” Zooey was quiet for a moment, and I didn’t have anything to add. Then she said, “Charlie doesn’t always do what’s right, and he can be insensitive, but he tries, Henry, which is more than I can say for a lot of people.”
“He can try all he wants,” I said. “He’s still going to be a terrible father.”
Zooey glanced at me again, and the entire car swerved to the right, barely remaining on the road. “I need a burger.” Without another word, she detoured into the nearest McDonald’s, bought herself two cheeseburgers, and forced a chocolate milk shake on me despite my protests because, in her words, “Milk shakes make the world seem less shitty.”
When we reached the bookstore, Zooey pulled in front of the doors to drop me off. “I can pick you up later if you want.”
“I’ll find a ride.”
“You’re wrong about Charlie, you know.”
“I wish I were.” I started to open the door, stopped, and said, “When things got tough, my dad left. I needed him, and he abandoned me—walked away and never looked back—and one day Charlie’s going to do that to you and that little parasite you’re carrying.”
Again I waited for Zooey to smack me or scream, but her expression was serene and never wavered. “Can I tell you something, Henry?”
Seeing as I’d just trashed her future kid’s father, I didn’t feel like I could say no. “Sure.”
“When I found out I was pregnant, I wanted to abort. I wanted to finish college and start a career, and I thought a baby would derail my hard work.” Zooey’s voice was soft and soothing. “I made the appointment at Planned Parenthood before I even told your brother.”
“Obviously, you changed your mind.”
“No,” Zooey said, locking her eyes onto mine. “Charlie changed it. He told me our life wouldn’t be easy, that we’d struggle to pay our bills and put food on the table, that we’d argue and fight, and that there was a good chance we’d end up hating each other.”
I rolled my eyes. “How could you resist a pitch like that?”
Zooey smiled. “But he also told me that no matter what happened, we would love our baby like no parents had ever loved a baby in the history of the world. He said he would sell every last thing he owned to give our child the life it deserved.” She stopped speaking for a moment, but I could tell by the way she bit her lip that she wasn’t done. “Even though I agreed to have the baby, I still wasn’t sure until Charlie took the job with my father.”
“That’s not commitment; it’s survival.”
“Your brother gave up his dream for me, Henry.”
The pregnancy was making Zooey crazy. “Charlie doesn’t have any dreams that don’t involve naked cheerleaders and muscle cars.”
Zooey frowned. “Do you really not know?”
“Know what?”
“Charlie was enrolled in the firefighting academy.”
“Bullshit.”
“He gave it up to work with my father because he didn’t want to risk getting hurt and not being around for the baby.” Zooey seemed to be speaking both too slow and too fast. I heard what she said, but I couldn’t process it.
“I guess I don’t really know my brother at all.” I got out of the car and wandered into the bookstore in a daze. Charlie had secretly wanted to be a firefighter—something he’d never mentioned—but he’d given it up for a fetus. The little parasite wasn’t even born yet, and Charlie was already rearranging his life. That’s love. That’s what you do when you love someone. Maybe Jesse hadn’t really loved me at all.
When Jesse and I visited the bookstore together, I’d disappear into the science section, lost in books about quantum mechanics and space travel and theories I hardly understood but that fascinated me anyway. I’d lose track of time and Jesse, and have to go up and down every aisle because he couldn’t stand to remain in the same place. I loved science, but he loved everything. Sometimes I’d find him in home improvement, sometimes in philosophy, sometimes in fiction, his arms straining under the weight of all the books he was considering buying. It was always a surprise to turn a corner and see him standing there, totally immersed in whatever he was curious about that day.
As I wandered among the stacks, I kept hoping I’d stumble upon him reading about the life of Rimbaud or searching the pages of cooking books for a great lemon meringue pie recipe. The most upsetting part isn’t that I never found him; it’s that he was everywhere.
“Henry?”
I dropped the book I was holding. I didn’t even remember taking it off the shelf. Audrey stood at the end of the aisle. She rushed toward me, grabbed the book off the floor, and looked at the cover. “Are you taking up cake decorating?”
“No.”
Audrey and I hadn’t talked much since the fair. “Looking for something in particular?”
I shook my head. “I just needed . . . Forget it.”
“What?”
“I wanted to feel close to Jesse.” I stared at my feet. “It’s stupid.”
“Not really.”
“Whatever,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
Audrey stood aside to let me pass, but before I turned the corner, she said, “Wanna get a cookie?”
I stopped, turned around. “What?”
“A cookie. I can drive us across the street to the mall. If we time it right, we can get some fresh from the oven.”
“I don’t know.”
“You can’t hate me forever, Henry.”
“I can try.”
“But if you come with me, you can hate me and eat cookies. Win-win.”
I rolled my eyes. “Fine.”
Audrey grinned. “It’s a date.”
“It’s a cookie.”
“It’s a cookie date.”
• • •
“So we were making out, and my nose was running a little, but I had it in my mind that if I stopped kissing Jesse, he’d realize I was a loser and never want to kiss me again, so I ignored it and snogged on. I’m pretty sure we made out for hours, but when we turned on the lights, I screamed because Jesse’s face was covered in blood.”
“Gross!” Audrey ate her cookie as we sat outside the entrance of the mall.
“Turns out I’d had a bloody nose. It was smeared over both of our faces.” We’d gotten six cookies to split, and they’d been gooey and delicious at first, but all the sugar was beginning to sour my stomach.
Audrey laughed, and if I closed my eyes, I could imagine Jesse was with us, swapping stories and cracking up at our lame jokes. “Jesse never told me about that.”
“I swore him to secrecy. It’s not the sort of thing I wanted getting around.”
“I won’t tell a soul.” Silence fell, and we both turned our attention to our uneaten cookies. The conversation sputtered along in fits and starts; one second everything was good, the next uncomfortable as the past overwhelmed us. “I’ve missed you, Henry.”
The statement stopped me because I knew she was waiting for me to say it back. To tell her that I missed her, and I had, but it used to be me and Audrey and Jesse, and we were still incomplete.
“What was it like?” I asked.
“What was what like?”
“The hospital?”
Audrey stood and walked toward the parking lot, stopping when she reached the curb. Her shoes dragged on the ground like her feet were too heavy to lift properly. I brushed the crumbs off my lap and followed. I wasn’t sure whether she was going to answer, but I gave her the space to decide. “It was lonely,” she said. “But it was like this whole other world where you didn’t exist and my parents didn’t exist and Jesse wasn’t dead. Nothing seemed real there. Time was blurry, and maybe that was because of the meds they had me on, but I think it was just me. I needed a pocket of space to curl up in and wait out the pain of losing my best friend.”
I leaned to the side, bumped Audrey’s shoulder with my arm to let her know I was there. “I thought you left because you blamed me.”
“I did,” Audrey said. “I mean, I didn’t leave because of that, but I did blame you for a while.”
“Oh.”
Audrey looked at me. The golden hour of the setting sun cast Audrey’s skin in bronze. “Jesse loved you so much, Henry, but he was terrified of never being good enough for you. You told him constantly how perfect he was, but Jesse wasn’t perfect, and he was worried that if you ever saw his flaws, you’d leave him.”
Those words hurt more than being kicked in the testicles in the locker room. “I knew Jesse wasn’t perfect. He exaggerated everything. If he were on the phone with someone for an hour, he’d say it’d been five. If he bought one shirt, he’d tell me he bought twenty. And he had terrible taste in books. He said his favorite book was The Catcher in the Rye, but he had a copy of Twilight under his bed with pages so battered, he must’ve read it a hundred times.”
Audrey leaned her head against my arm, and I didn’t move away. “I know, and I don’t blame you now. I just . . . I had to leave.”
“You didn’t have to leave me.”
“I know.”
“How come you never told me about Jesse hurting himself?”
Audrey sighed and sat on the brick wall of the decorative fountain near the bus stop. I sat beside her. The water gurgled behind us, and wishes glittered at the bottom of the pool. She looked fragile right then in a way I’d never seen her look before. I felt I had the power to break her in that moment, to destroy her utterly. A few months ago I might have done it, but it didn’t seem important anymore. I think Audrey Dorn was punishing herself worse than I ever could.
“Jesse was mine.” Tears rolled down Audrey’s cheeks, but I doubted she was aware of them. “He was mine before he was yours, but he’d never given me all of himself. Then you came along and got everything I ever wanted.”
“You didn’t just love Jesse,” I said. “You were in love with him, weren’t you?”
Audrey sniffled. She dug a tissue out of her purse and wiped her nose. “I hated when Jesse hurt, when he cried, and when he cut himself, but he only showed those parts of himself to me. Oh, I rationalized that I didn’t tell you because Jesse made me swear not to or because I didn’t seriously believe he’d really hurt himself, but deep down I knew it was because I wanted something of Jesse that belonged only to me.”
If Audrey had admitted that immediately after Jesse died, I never would have forgiven her. But the year between us had given me the distance I needed to understand. I even envied a little that she knew Jesse in a way I never did or would.
“Don’t hate me,” she said.
“I think I would have done the same thing.”
“Jesse’s parents hate me. They blame me.”
“I don’t hate you, Audrey.”
Though we weren’t touching, I still felt the tension she’d been holding all those months drain from her body, and I realized how difficult it was for Audrey to admit the truth to me without knowing if I’d ever forgive her. Only, there was nothing to forgive. Audrey may not have told me about Jesse’s troubles, but I had willfully ignored their signs. I’d let myself believe the lies because it was easier than digging for the truth.
“I don’t hate you either, Henry.”
I stood and put my hands in my pockets as the last of the day’s light retreated below the horizon. “Then that makes one of us.”