I wait in the bleachers, in the exact same spot we sat on that first day when Kit was just Kit Lowell to me, an entry in a notebook and someone I cautiously put on the Trust List. A few Notable Encounters. Nothing more. Now it occurs to me that outside of Miney, she’s the first friend I’ve ever made. If she doesn’t come, I will be heartbroken. Not literally, of course. My heart will continue to beat. I think. But there will be a literal and figurative ache.
I close my eyes and remember our first kiss. How she reached up and cupped the back of my neck. That feels like much longer than fourteen days ago. Time has changed shape since I met Kit. Can love be so powerful a force that it can skew the space-time continuum? Does it have the particle and wave heft of something like consciousness? I make a mental note to later think through the implications of applying quantum theory to love, or at least its chemical and hormonal approximations. That could make for a satisfying thesis for my future PhD.
She’s not coming. It’s obvious to me that this past week will turn out to have been just a fruitless series of desperate acts. I watch my classmates spilling out of school, in groups of two or three, their formations intimidatingly organic. Atoms into molecules.
Like usual, I am alone.
My headphones sound a siren call from my bag. I force myself to leave them in there. I will wade through all the noise around me, let it saturate my brain. The distant bell. Car engines revving. The anxiety humming through my body.
It was a long shot and I lost. Kit doesn’t need more friends. Certainly not ones like me.
I direct my attention to the remote possibility that Trey is right. That one day I won’t need Kit. That I will find a way to fill up my life with other people. That there are other girls in the world, and that maybe one of them will also feel like my Goldilocks of a person. Of course, all statistics point to Kit being an outlier. To this never happening again.
I close my eyes and I can’t resist any longer.
I slip on my headphones and start the gentle recitation of pi.
“David?” One hundred and thirty-four digits in, I look up, and there Kit is, standing in front of me, looking exactly the same as she always does. There is no readjustment to a new iteration. That, at least, is a relief. She’s not smiling.
The sky is low and gray and bloated. If this were a novel, it would be described as foreboding.
“Hi,” I say, and take off my headphones. I realize I am woefully underprepared for this moment. I should have written a speech. Or drawn a picture. At least figured out what I wanted to say. It occurs to me now that I never thought Kit might actually show up. “Do you want to sit?”
She nods and plops down next to me on the bench. She shields her eyes from the nonexistent sun with a cupped hand. We sit quietly like that for a few minutes.
“So?” she asks. “You asked me to come here.”
“Do you ever think about how your name doesn’t fit you? I mean, you’re usually Kit in my head, but really I think your name should have a Z in it, because you’re confusing and zigzagged and pop up in surprising places—like my lunch table and these bleachers. I really didn’t think you’d come—and maybe also the number eight, because…never mind, and the letter S too. It’s my favorite. S. So yeah, Z8S-139. Or 139-Z8S. That’s how I think of you sometimes. In my head,” I say, glad that words are at least coming out of my mouth. I’m too nervous to evaluate whether they are the right ones.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Kit says.
I keep going.
“And my name doesn’t fit either. I mean, really: David? Did you know there are approximately 3,786,417 Davids in the United States? My parents couldn’t have gotten me more wrong. I should be a…a…I don’t know what. Something with a Y in it.”
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”
“What I’m trying to say—badly, I guess—is that we each have the way the world sees us, and you were the very first person at this school, maybe the first person pretty much anywhere besides my immediate family, who looked at me and saw more than the weirdo flapping kid that everyone here has known as David, or I guess shithead. You listened to me talk. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. It was like the equivalent of being given a better name.” She nods, and I wonder if she will get up and leave and we are done. Not friends. Not enemies. I tell myself I can count that as a win.
“I still…I mean, are we just not going to talk about what happened? Your kind of weird wasn’t good or charming the other day. It was cruel. You hurt me,” Kit says. “And I don’t really care what your name is. Stop changing the subject.”
“We never started on the subject—” Kit sighs, so I clear my throat. Begin again. “You’re right. I’m so, so sorry. I can try to explain what happened, I mean, with my brain, because I hope you know I would never, ever, ever be intentionally cruel, especially to you. You’re my favorite person. The thing is, I get hyperfocused, and that’s what I was thinking about, the nugget inside, the answer, not what it all meant, actually. Does that make sense?”
Kit shrugs, a gesture that is in my mental Pictorial Dictionary of Ambiguous Gestures, and I don’t know what to do. If I should keep talking or stop.
“I’m sorry. And I hope you can forgive me,” I say, and I turn to look at her. Not her clavicle or her jaw or her left arm. But right in the eyes, where it’s hardest.
“I dunno, I guess,” Kit says, but she’s the one to look away first. “That doesn’t mean, though, that, like, we are suddenly besties again or something.”
“We were best friends?” I ask. Of course she’s mine, excepting Miney, who is family and therefore doesn’t count. Never thought I would count as hers, though.
“I just mean I know I was the one who asked you to start the Accident Project in the first place. I know that. The whole thing was super messed up. I know I didn’t tell you the truth, or at least not the whole truth, but you shouted out my biggest secret—the worst thing that has ever happened to me, the worst thing that will hopefully ever happen to me—to the whole world. Like it was nothing. Like you didn’t give a crap about my feelings.”
“I’m sorry. Not just for the shouting. Or how inappropriate I was. I do stupid things like that sometimes. I am sorry for all that, of course, but what I’m most sorry for is that any of it happened to you in the first place, and that I haven’t said that out loud to you. It’s not fair. The fact that you were driving that car—the inexplicable cruelness of that bad luck—is the only thing in the world that I can think of that can’t be explained by math or quantum theory. See, I don’t usually use words like bad luck, and yet there are some things so totally out of our control that science hasn’t even come up with a label for them. And they suck. And you don’t deserve any of it. The accident wasn’t your fault. Even the math says—”
“Okay,” she says, cutting me off, like it’s some sort of decision, like she’s uninterested in my fault algorithm. Of course, I have no idea what that decision is or if it has anything to do with me at all.
“You couldn’t have braked. There was nothing you could have done,” I say, thinking this is the one last gift I can hand over, even if she’s not sure she wants to hear it. After this, I’m all out. No more food or drawings. It’s me.
“Of course I could have braked. I could have been faster with my foot. There must have been a moment—that’s all I wanted to know. The when. So I could see it differently. Even if it was just in my mind,” she says, looking out into the distance. I follow her gaze but don’t know what she’s staring at. All of Mapleview, I guess.
“No, you really couldn’t have. If you’d braked, then everything would have been worse. Someone else would have died too, Kit. There was a Mini behind you, so if you stopped short, that car would have been crushed from two different sides. Both cars would have been hit. I can show you the model and the simulation I made, if you want.”
“I don’t think so,” Kit says. “I mean, thank you, but there are some things…I just…can’t.”
“This wasn’t your fault. Mathematically or legally. There is nothing you could have done. So instead of trying to watch it happen differently, why don’t you try to not watch it at all?”
She looks up at me, her face full, but I don’t know of what.
“I didn’t meet her. The woman driving the Mini. I don’t even know her name.”
“You saved her life,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says, and nods, but she’s again like water. Her smile is slippery and starts to fall off her face. “Thank you. Again. This was really nice of you.”
“You saved her life,” I repeat, because I don’t think she’s hearing my certainty. That this is a fact.
“You really think so?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. I know so. Math doesn’t lie.”
“People do, though,” Kit says. “All the time.”
“Not me.”
“No, not you,” she says, and her smile firms up a little.
“So we’re friends again?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, we don’t have to sit at the same lunch table—you looked happy back with Annie and Violet—but it would be cool if we still talked sometimes. Like at school during other periods.”
“Of course we can talk,” she says, and I feel my stomach fill with relief. I have not lost everything.
“Just to be clear, I assume that there will be no more kissing?” I ask. She laughs, loud and hard, and it feels as good as it did the very first time I made her laugh. When it comes to Kit’s laughter, I don’t care much about my intentionality.
“We’ll see about that.”
“So…so…there might be?”
She elbows me, a friendly nudge, I think, and I nudge back. I take this to mean a warm no, thank you.
“Right. How about hand-holding? Can we do that?” I ask.
“David?”
“Right. I’ll stop talking. We can just sit here quietly together.”
“That would be a good idea.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.