I liked your parents. I always thought that when the story was told, they would see me as the hero. But instead I became the bearer of their sorrows. “You’re not making this up, are you?” I showed up, gave them the burden, and left. I missed the burden now. Even if I couldn’t have handled it, I wished the heroic thing would have been to keep you it for myself.
It could not have been your parents in the woods that day. Neither of them could have taken the photograph. Nobody who really knew you could have. They would have tried to stop it. They would have intervened.
They would not have stood and watched and taken pictures.
5A
Do they sleep? I want to know … am I the only one who doesn’t sleep?
5B
I knew you were at the center of it.
This should not have surprised me, since you had always been at the center of things. Nobody would have put you anywhere else. Especially me.
Even now, you refused to be pixelated, forgotten, silenced, erased. Not that I wanted to erase you. The opposite. I wanted the opposite.
5C
Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship where I knew the exact day it started. I only knew the exact day it became essential.
I have always been aware of how I break.
I know what kind of situations will break me.
I know what kind of people will do it.
I know how much it will hurt.
That day in sixth grade, remember? I broke because the humiliations and doubts and anger gained critical mass. I failed a history test because I’d forgotten about it; I had been studying hard all year, and with one bad grade I undid it all. Then I had to run an extra two laps in gym because I was too “lazy” slow, and I didn’t think I was going to make it, and I was going to have to stop or die of a lung attack before I finished. The other kids loved that. And then, at lunch, I tried to sit with Tara Jenkins and she told me there was no room, even though there was. The weight of it was too much. I felt myself breaking as I went outside to recess. I found a quiet piece of pavement and started rubbing my hand over it. Catching the gravel in my skin until I was bleeding, until my palm was open and raw.
Then you found me. Later, you’d tell me that you’d seen what Tara had done and had followed me out to see if I was okay. I was never sure if that was true. I thought it was possible you happened to see what I was doing and were morbidly intrigued. You came over to me and didn’t tell me I was gross and didn’t ask me what I was doing. Instead you said, “Stop that.” And I did.
I said I hated life. You said you hated life. We decided to hate it together.
We didn’t know anything.
Without you I wouldn’t have been able to contain the hate. I would have used it against myself. You’re the one who helped me control it. My mind spun out to other things.
But it always came back to you.
5D
They said you weren’t coming back.
I didn’t believe them.
I wanted to hear it from you.
6
Back to the present.
I found you in my locker the next morning.
6A
Not you.
A photograph.
But for a moment, it felt like finding a body.
It felt like finding
what you I needed
to be
found.
6B
6C
Not slipped into the locker through one of the airholes or through the crack in the bottom. No: taped up, white envelope. The photographer had broken into my locker and left it there for me.
6D
It brought you back to me.
The way you
said “I love you”
said “I’ll never sleep with you”
said “I will always”
kept a list of all your favorite moments in a composition book and would underline the ones involving me with blue ink
screamed at me not to do it not to do it not to do it
believed that birds talked to you
slapped Jack slapped him slapped him slapped him
refused to eat any jelly beans but the black ones
cried when my cat Chester died more than I cried, even
helped me dig his grave
dug the grave
looked the most beautiful when you didn’t realize how beautiful you looked
the moments I would catch you thinking always wondering if you were thinking of me, knowing sometimes you were
and sometimes you weren’t
you weren’t
I knew you better than anyone else. I was sure of it.
Anything?
Something?
But I had never seen this photo before.
6E
I have never seen this photo before.
I have never seen this photo before.
6F
I slammed my locker shut. Some people turned to look at me. I wondered if any of them was the one. If the photographer was watching me. Seeing my reaction. Recording it.
I crashed through the halls, crashed through my mind, crashed through all this mental history, crashed into people, crashed and felt the breaking—
Jack was talking to some of his friends from track. I didn’t want to interrupt but if I didn’t interrupt I knew I’d fall apart, so I tried to calm the crashing, tried to keep myself normal as I walked over and said, “Hey,” and said, “Can I speak to you for a second?” and pulled him away from them because this involved you and I was sure the rest of them had all forgotten you by now and wouldn’t understand why this was so urgent and how things had changed. I led Jack into an empty history classroom and let the door close behind us.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Up, I thought.
“This,” I said, looking down at the photo in my hand.
Down, I thought.
And Jack, who always kept so cool, Jack, who had track friends—Jack, who told me all the time to move on—Jack, who you hadn’t really loved like you loved me Jack took one look at the photograph and gave me a glimmer of what I must have looked like. When you say someone looks “haunted,” it doesn’t matter if you’re talking about the ghost or about the person who’s seen the ghost. The expression is the same. It’s a sudden constant death, and the haunting comes from the surprise.
“Where did you get this?” Jack asked. He left it in my hand. He wouldn’t touch it.
“It was in my locker,” I told him. “Someone put it there.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know. Whoever it is knows my combination. They just put it right in.”
“Well, who knows your combination?”
“Ariel’s the only one.”
I’d told you
18—the age I’ll be when I leave this place
two turns left
74—July 4th
one turn right
90—the number of bottles of beer on the wall after nine of them have fallen
“She never told me,” he said. “In case you’re thinking she told someone.”
“She’s all dressed up,” I said.
“I never saw her like that,” he told me. “Nothing like that.”
Even when I held it close, I couldn’t tell if you were happy. Right in front of me, and I couldn’t tell. As if that would have been the biggest clue to when it was.
Up or down? Were you in an up or a down?
“I would remember it,” I said, as much to myself as to Jack. “I would remember her like this.”
He reached for the photo, and I actually hesitated a second before giving it to him. As if he would destroy it. Or keep it for himself.
I wondered what he would tell his track friends about me pulling him away, or
even if they’d ask. I’d always been insecure around him, but now it was amplified. I could never believe we were truly friends. It was as if he’d married into our friendship when he started going out with you. We weren’t friends—we were stepfriends.
But with you gone, he was still the person I felt closest to.
I watched him as he stared at the photo. At you.
“It’s in the woods,” he said finally. “She must’ve gone with someone else into the woods.”
Neither of us.
Someone else.
I felt empty enough for both of us. And I imagined he felt empty enough for both of us. Which left us four times empty and none smarter.
“It’s the same person who took the other pictures,” he guessed. “But we don’t know who that is.”
I nodded.
“Jesus,” he said. “This is completely messed up.”
Are you sure it’s not her? I wanted to ask. But I knew what he would say. That was our difference: There was part of me that wanted to be haunted, because at least that would be feeling something that radiated from you. But he was different: He had closed himself off, except when I came around to bring it all back.
“You have to help me,” I said. Because if I couldn’t talk to you, I could at least talk to him in the same way I would’ve talked to you.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”
But then he didn’t say anything else, and I knew it was up to me to figure out how to begin.
6G
That night, I spent hours staring at the photograph.
But you weren’t telling me anything.
6H
I remembered a time we were going through magazines. There was this one model who looked icy to the touch, in total control. I told you that, and you said, “That’s what makes it a good photograph. You think you know what’s going on in her head. But the truth? No matter how good a photograph is, you can never tell what’s going on in the person’s mind. There’s no way to get from here” (you pointed to the room) “to there” (you pointed to her head).
6I
I was treating the past as if it could be mined for clues, for reasons.
But the past resists that.
It holds too much evidence of too many things.
7
You were the one who taught me how to spy on people. I guess, in many ways, that’s how you met Jack.
It’s not hard for me to remember that part. He’d go running after school, even when it wasn’t track season. You and I would wander, and he kept crossing our path. Unlike most track teamers, who always took the same route, he would change his up as much as we’d change ours. I barely noticed it, but you did.
“It’s that guy again,” you’d say.
Then: “He’s cute, you know.”
No, I don’t know. And you don’t need to tell me.
It wasn’t enough to pass him as we were heading to your house or cutting over to the library. Soon you had to have sightings in the halls, too. Then sighting turned into spying, and spying turned to stalking. You could tell me how many pairs of jeans he owned before you officially knew his name.
“I’m not sure he’s our type,” I told you.
“Our type?” you said back. “I didn’t know we had a type.”
I played along, but tried to get you to spy on other people with me. The teachers who were long past due for a meltdown, or the pompous student council president whose re-election bid was about to go down in flames. Misery—I was scoping out misery for us to witness. Then one day I had to stay late to make up a math quiz, and you walked home alone. This time when he ran by, you said hey. And he said hey back. Leaving me to wonder for the rest of my life what would have happened if I had been there.
I didn’t think he the two of you would last. I continued to play along, but it stopped feeling like play. This is the thing they don’t tell you about being a third wheel—it’s not like you’re the wheel that’s added on. You were one of the original two wheels, but suddenly you’re not so important anymore. The relationship drives fine without you.
“Don’t worry,” you’d tell me. “He’ll never know me like you do.”
But you told him the same thing, didn’t you? He told me this, one night soon after. But by then, I guess it was beside the point.
7A
He was the one who got the next photo. This time it was bigger, and it was in his locker.
He found me at lunch and pulled me aside. And at first I didn’t get what he was saying, and then I was just sad, because even though it was freaking me out, it had still felt special to have it only happening to me.
“It’s a gravestone,” I said when he showed it to me.
“Yeah, I know.”
“I can’t read it.”
Jack looked at me funny then.
“Do you really not know what it is?” he asked.
I shook my head. I had no idea what he was talking about.
He tried to stare me down.
“Look, Evan, I need to know: Did you put this in my locker?”
“What do you mean?”
“If this is your kind of sick joke, that’s fine. I know things have been messed up. But this crosses the line.”
His accusation stung. At the very least, I thought we had trust.
“Jack,” I said, “I didn’t put it in your locker. I’ve never seen it before.”
“She never told you?”
“Told me what?”
There must have been enough disbelief in my voice, because he relented a little.
“Never mind,” he said.
“No. Tell me.” Even though it was in his locker, the photo was still at least partly mine.
“She never told you?”
“No.” You never told me what you saw in him. Not convincingly.
“This,” he said, pointing at the gravestone, “is where she and I first kissed.”
Did I tell you I didn’t want to know? Or did you choose not to tell me?
Jack looked all messed up now, and I needed him not to be. Being messed up was my thing, not his.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked. “Is this about Miranda?”
I was confused. “Miranda?”
“Look, Ev—you know Miranda Lee?”
I nodded.
“We … well, we might be dating. I mean, I want us to be. And I think we are. We just haven’t, you know, had the conversation yet.”
“Oh.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“Why? I mean, you don’t have to.”
“C’mon, Ev. I was going to tell you. I mean, it’s not anything yet. And it’s not like I’m … I mean, it’s been a while. And Miranda’s really nice.”
She was. Nice.
Part of me was happy for him. Happy happy happy. And part of me was just … surprised. It felt … wrong sudden disloyal mean I didn’t know what it felt.
I didn’t know what to say. So instead I held up the photo of the gravestone and told him, “You have to show me where it is.”
7B
I didn’t want to go after dark, but Jack’s practice schedule left us no choice. There is no such thing as no choice. There is always a choice. The only question is whether it’s a bearable one. The cemetery wasn’t that far from where he lived, so I met him at his house. I stood awkwardly in the doorway as he made excuses to his parents, in the same way he’d made excuses to head out with you.
“Are you two inseparable now?” I asked you.
You laughed. “Don’t you know, Evan? People are always separable.”
I wanted to say I had once thought the two of us were inseparable.
But that would have only proven your point.
We didn’t talk on the way over. All the things I didn’t want to ask him and all the things he didn’t want to tell me added up to an unhelpful silence.
For a second, I pictured the two of you kissing. One time I saw you. It was Gabe Weismann’s party and you’d skipped to the bac
kyard. I had gotten you a drink, even though you hadn’t asked me to. I was looking for you, just to give you the drink. I didn’t see you in the shadows at first. You were kissing. It wasn’t anything more than that. I felt so invisible. Because neither of you was seeing me. You were lost in each other. Not just the sight of each other. The feel. The taste. The contact. I was outside of it.
I wondered if Jack remembered that. I wondered if things like that haunted him now. I wondered what happened to kisses when they were over.
It’s not like I could ask him this.
Finally, as we passed through the cemetery entrance, I said, “Tell me.”
“Tell you what?”
“The story. You and Ariel. The first kiss. That’s what this is about, isn’t it?”
He sighed. I was sure there were moments when he hated me. “It seems like a really long time ago, right?”
I nodded.
“But I remember it. I don’t know if that matters now.”
“Tell me.”
Why was I being so insistent? Mostly because it was making him so uncomfortable. Mostly because I’d never been sure if he’d registered any of it. I always felt it was unfair that even though both of us did what we did, I was the one who took on the suffering afterwards. Do you blame us equally?
“There’s not much to tell you,” he said now, leading me to the gravestone in the picture. “She was having one of her up nights—she was all energy, bouncing around and telling me how happy she was. It felt good, you know? To be the guy making her happy. We’d gone to the movies, and then she said she’d walk me home. When we got to my house, she said she didn’t want it to be over yet. She asked me what was around, and when I told her the cemetery, she said that was perfect. We got in here—just hopped over the wall; it’s not that high. And she started running around, reading all of the inscriptions to me. Beloved wife and mother, that kind of thing. I tried to catch up with her, but when she was in one of those moods, it was impossible to catch up with her. Right? I’d chime in every now and then, but mostly it was her show. Then we got to this one, and she got quiet.”