“Why all the walls, Gray?” she asks. “What’s going on with you?” I turn my body away from her and stare out at the bowl of lights below our dangling feet. I could play dumb. I could lie. But I don’t want to. Not with her.
I look back at Dylan. I have to confess to someone. It’s cracking inside me.
“My family’s falling apart,” I finally say. Dylan’s eyes turn into their listening mode, where they focus on mine and invite me to come inside and stay awhile. I inhale a long breath. I’m not sure I’m prepared to open up this conversation. My hands clench into fists.
“What happened?” she asks.
“My mom’s depressed,” I say. “My dad’s never home. When he is, it’s like he’s sleepwalking. We haven’t spoken in months.” Dylan’s silent next to me. I look over at her with hard eyes. “I’m not asking you to feel sorry for me. It’s just what we’re going through.”
She nods and I take another deep breath. I tell her the truth. I tell her my sister died, my twin sister, about eight months ago, and my mind and heart twist with anger at hearing the words out loud. I thought the pain would get easier, but it always stings, like a snakebite, through my core, down to my bones. I still haven’t accepted her death. It’s easier to imagine she’s just away on a long trip. Traveling the world. That she’ll show up any day and surprise us.
“It hasn’t been good,” I say, and pull down the rim of my hat.
I tell Dylan she died in a car accident. She hit black ice on the way to Flagstaff in a snowstorm and spun out of control. It ripped my family apart, and now I’m the only thing holding us together. I’m the glue, and it’s a weak hold at best.
“You don’t want to be here,” Dylan says. She doesn’t ask. She knows. She can see it in my eyes.
“No. Everything here reminds me of her. It’s like I’m living in a graveyard.”
“What’s her name?”
“Amanda.”
“And you two were really close?” she asks.
“Yeah. She dated one of my best friends in high school for a while—Brandon, the guy you met on Mill Avenue. We hung out all the time.” Most guys would never admit being best friends with their sister, but I tell Dylan she was like a soul mate.
“I don’t remember the month after her death.” I smile to myself. “I think I went to the dark side for a while.”
“Did you miss any school?”
I shake my head and tell her school was the only thing that got me through it. But it’s like I was in a coma the whole time. Six months of my life was a blur. I didn’t play baseball—I couldn’t. My mind was too numb. I ignored all my friends; they just reminded me of her. Then they all graduated and moved on with their lives. The ones that stuck around called for a while, but they eventually stopped.
“And you feel like you need to stay in Phoenix to be close to your parents?”
I nod.
“Were you planning on going to school?”
I tell her I had a scholarship offer to play baseball in New Mexico, before Amanda died. I gave it up to stay home. There’s no way I could pack up my life and leave my parents alone.
“I bet your sister would have wanted you to play,” she says.
She’s right. Amanda would be furious with me. She’d kick my ass to New Mexico. I can imagine her in heaven, complaining about how I’m wasting my life away, and trying to persuade angels to fly down and smack me in the head with their halos until I come to my senses.
“And your mom isn’t coping very well?”
I shake my head and tell her she still cries every day. I can hear her at night. But she doesn’t want to talk about it. We don’t even say Amanda’s name in the house. It just hangs in the air like smoke that hasn’t settled yet.
Dylan asks me all kinds of questions about my sister. What was she like, did she play sports, what her hobbies were. It feels good to talk about Amanda, to lift up the shade of memories. It lets some light in.
We sit in our imaginary dining room for hours, and it’s starting to feel like home. I finally stand up and pull Dylan up next to me. We walk in silence back to her car. As we drive home, all my thoughts filter back to Amanda and the night the police called about the accident. I think about the drive, the longest drive of my life, up to the hospital in Flagstaff where my sister was dying in an intensive care unit. And I always wonder what was going through her head. I wonder if she was scared or in pain or even capable of thought. I wonder what you think about right before you end.
We never got to say goodbye. And a piece of me died with her that day.
Dylan turns down the radio and glances at me.
“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” she says in a voice that’s always energized. I wait for it.
“I have an idea,” she says.
“Of course you do,” I say.
“Let’s celebrate your sister tomorrow. Take me to all her favorite places. Where she hung out, where she went shopping, where she went out to eat. Let’s honor her for the day. I want to see photos, I want to hear stories. What do you think?”
I stare back at her. “Why?”
“Because you loved her. And you need to spread her legacy.”
I look out the window and consider this. I spent the last eight months avoiding the streets I drove down with my sister. Avoiding the people and places that made all the memories come back in nauseating waves.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I want to. Starting tomorrow morning. Where should we go for breakfast?”
I smile at the memory.
“Tommy’s. It’s in Mesa,” I say. “It’s a dive, but the food is unbelievable. Best biscuits and gravy in the city.”
“I’ll pick you up at eight.”
“Eight in the morning?”
She ignores my concern with sleeping in. “We have a lot of ground to cover. Start making a list.”
When she drops me off, I get out of the car and my head feels lighter. For the first time in years, I feel like there’s life after death.
***
I’m trying to sleep, but too many thoughts are spilling over my mind. I want to catch them and coax them to sleep so I can sleep, but they’re determined to make me think. And I’m thinking about one girl in particular.
What the hell is happening between me and Dylan? Everything is backwards with this girl. Call me close-minded, but usually dates don’t involve celebrating the life of a dead relative. It doesn’t exactly set the mood for romance. Then again, is this even a date?
I’m not a licensed relationship expert, but in my experience when you’re interested in someone things progress in predictable (and usually painful) phases: You check her out and catch her checking you out. You picture her naked, while she likes to refer to the mutual sexual attraction as “chemistry.” Now it’s time for the personality profiling. You make small talk between classes or after school or at work. You attempt to show subtle interest without being too obvious—it’s all about maintaining mysterious indifference. If you come on too strong you’re labeled as desperate, or a stalker. Overeagerness is up there with serial killer status as a way to fend off possible love interest. It’s a careful balance, like a tightrope you need to cross over those first few weeks.
You play it safe. Send witty text messages. Make sure you’ve downloaded your best pictures online: you rock climbing (your adventurous, athletic side), playing Scrabble with Grandma (your easygoing, sensitive side), a group shot of you and your friends (Mr. Popular). There’s only one conclusion to draw from this digital slideshow: You’re a Catch. Once that definitive answer is reached, eventually, you hang out in person and let your oddball shine through. And this is usually when things go bad, or like Amanda and I used to say, when the cheese gets old and moldy.
What I don’t think is normal is anything that defines my relationship with Dylan. I still don’t even have her phone number. Tonight I spent half the time thinking about kissing her. Wondering how she’d react. Wondering when I should try.
r /> I can’t even figure out if she wants me to kiss her. She holds my hand and calls me cute, but girls hold each other’s hands and call each other cute (kind of a turn-on, actually), so what am I? What if she just sees me as a brother type? God, no, please. What if she ropes me into her random plans because she wants a buddy? A sidekick? She doesn’t really flirt with me. She touches me, but she doesn’t stare into my eyes like girls do when they want you to kiss them, with that dreamy, lovesick gaze.
I played the leaning game tonight. It’s this stupid theory I’ve heard, that if she leans her legs or shoulders or head toward you, it’s body language saying she likes you. But this girl doesn’t sit still long enough to confirm anything other than she’s hyper.
I’m at a critical point here where I could miss my opportunity and fall into the dreaded and irreversible Friend Zone, the ultimate dead end. Every guy’s greatest fear and deepest remorse.
But how am I supposed to set the mood when Dylan could win an award for the most awkward dating ideas of all time?
First Trust
Dylan
I pull into his driveway atand before I turn off the engine the front door opens and Gray walks out in his usual T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops. I stick my head out of the car window and frown.
“You’re missing something,” I inform him. He assumes I’m referring to the fact that he’s hatless today. He shrugs and runs his hand through his hair, which, no matter how hard he attempts to control it, resembles something close to shag carpeting. It’s one of his best features. I kill the engine and spring out of the car. He blinks heavily and informs me I have way too much energy this early in the morning.
“Where are the pictures?” I demand. He looks down at his empty hands.
“You were serious about that?” he asks. I press a stubborn hand against my hip to assure him I was.
I push his shoulder to steer him back toward the house. I follow him downstairs and he turns the hallway corner and flips on his bedroom light. He tells me after Amanda died, he packed away every photo he had of her and shoved them in his closet, where they’ve yet to be touched. He opens his closet and searches deep in the back for his box of memorabilia.
I look around his room. It smells clean, as if it’s recently been vacuumed. His bed’s in the corner and a dark blue comforter is kicked to the side. The pillows are tossed in disarray, and the sheets are untucked and balled up like he’s a restless sleeper, or maybe he doesn’t sleep at all. A few clothes litter the carpet. There are two guitars in one corner with stacks of CDs piled around them. A few sports jerseys and concert posters are tacked on the walls.
His bookshelf catches my eye because it isn’t crammed with books—it’s cluttered with rows of trophies, plaques, and medals. Gray walks over to me with a tinge of embarrassment.
“It’s like my own personal shrine,” he admits. We look at the shiny gold figurines perched on top of miniature wood and marble columns. Tiny heroes. Golden moments. There has to be a hundred of them. I read some of the awards, a few for MVP, some for batting, but most of them are for pitching.
“I didn’t realize it meant so much to you,” I say.
“Maybe it’s time to pack them up,” he says, his voice hard. “I need to move on from high school.”
I know there’s more to it than that. They’re memories of his best times, his glory years. They’re also a reminder of the dreams he’s giving up.
“They don’t make trophies for the right reasons,” I say. I tell him they should award people for owning the greatest sock collection, or giving the best hugs, or being the nicest guy. Gray frowns and informs me no guy would ever want to win an award for being nice.
He sets a brown shoe box down on the bed and I pull off the lid. I wince at the picture sitting on top. It’s a black-and-white headshot of Amanda, with a piece of yarn threaded through a hole punched at the top. He tells me his cousins wore her picture around their neck at her funeral. Amanda looks a lot like Gray, same dark hair, but hers was straight and long. Same wide, entrancing smile.
It’s hard for me to look at her eyes. There’s so much life inside them. I pick up a second picture of Amanda with a piece of yarn threaded through it and hand it to Gray.
“These are perfect,” I say, and pull the yarn over my head. He stares down at the picture and his eyes fog over for a second. I place a photo around his neck before he can argue, and he sighs like he can’t believe he’s going through with this. He grabs an envelope of pictures from the box and I take his free hand.
***
We begin the journey at Tommy’s Café and order their famous biscuits and gravy. We each offer Amanda a bite. Neither of us is a huge coffee drinker, but Amanda was, so in her honor we both slam two cups of liquid crack. Gray’s so jittery, he can’t stop his feet from tapping, and I attempt to play the drum solo of “Wipeout” on the table with my silverware until the waitstaff’s annoyed stares give us the hint that we’re completely obnoxious.
I sit in the booth next to Gray and he walks me through every photo. He shows me pictures from Christmas, when they used to have huge family get-togethers and everyone had to write and perform an original play. He shows me the picture of the winning year—when he, Amanda, and their two cousins wrote the dark comedy “Pulp Christmas,” about a drug-induced family holiday. We look at photos of a garage band he started with his sister—he was on guitar, she was lead vocals and tambourine, and his neighbors were bongo and bass. They called themselves Lucky Dogs and played mostly Adam Sandler covers, Bohemian-style.
Gray tells me one of his favorite stories. During their sophomore year of high school, Amanda went a day without using her arms. When Gray asked her why she was doing it, she said because it “puts life in perspective.” He told her she was being ridiculous. Why would you want to experience having a severe birth defect? She argued you could lose your arms any day. It makes you appreciate what you have.
So, his mom helped her get dressed and brush her teeth. He fed her breakfast, drove her to school, and hauled her bags to her locker. Her friends fed her lunch and carried her books to class. She got out of doing all her homework. Not fair.
She went to track practice after school and ran with the team, but she kept her arms tucked close to her sides. That’s the picture he’s holding as he’s telling me this story—a photo of Amanda running around the track with her arms held tight against her hips. People stared at her, he said, but she was too busy sprinting past them to notice.
“I don’t even want to know how she went to the bathroom,” Gray added. “I never asked.”
She wrote an essay about her experience and published it in their school paper. It won an award for the most creative essay that year. People still talk about it. I tell him I’d love to read it.
We leave Tommy’s and drive out to Scottsdale to visit an art gallery where Amanda worked part-time. We walk in and he points out a piece she made that still hangs in the store, in memory of her. It’s a mosaic. Amanda always found beauty in the most random things, he explains.
“You two have that in common.” He tells me she collected rocks, glass, or anything chipped and tattered that most people overlook. Where most people saw trash, Amanda saw potential and she could somehow string broken pieces together to create something beautiful. He says she sold one of her pieces, when she was fifteen, for four hundred dollars.
“Amanda wanted to go into art therapy,” he explains. “She wanted to work with people with disabilities and open her own art studio. She would have been great at it.”
I smile sadly at the idea of her. It’s hard to accept that you’ve missed out on a person, that all you’ll ever know of them are pieced-together stories. It’s not like missing out on a party or a concert—those are temporary experiences, and you’ll have other opportunities. But this is permanent. It’s like being robbed of something valuable you never had the privilege to own.
“I wish I could have known her” is all I can say.
“You w
ould have loved her,” he says. “It’s scary how well you two would have gotten along.”
We walk across the street to Nella’s Irish Bar and Restaurant and I follow Gray to the back, where there’s a Ms. Pac-Man video game, one of his and Amanda’s favorite and most addictive pastimes. He lays a stack of quarters on the table next to the game and crosses his arms over his chest.
“Another quintessential test of any friendship,” he says, and nods at the screen. “Do you appreciate old school video games?” Instead of answering him, I grab a handful of quarters. It just so happens that I not only appreciate Ms. Pac-Man, but share his obsession. By the time we leave, I have a blister forming on the back of my thumb from playing so long. Gray has to pull me away from the machine when I almost dislocate my shoulder from taking a hard right to escape a ghost. When I make it to level two, he’s impressed. When I make it to level four, he just gawks.
“Okay, I’m seriously turned on,” he says with a smile, and I can feel myself blush.
We head down the street and walk into the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, where Amanda stopped every day for a Vanilla Ice Blended. We each order one and drive out to today’s most sacred destination spot: the Tracks. Gray makes me swear on Pickle’s life that I’ll keep its location a secret.
We pass a warehouse district, and when the road dead ends there’s a rough gravel path, camouflaged inside a sandy field. You wouldn’t know it’s there unless you were looking for it. The gravel road loops around the back of an old concrete factory. We drive down the path, Pickle bouncing angrily underneath us, until we reach the bottom legs of a shallow bridge, built to allow railroad tracks to pass under the city streets. Gray says this is where he spent most of his weekends in high school. I don’t need him to explain why he’d want to hang out under a bridge next to railroad tracks. I get it. It’s an escape. Too much one-on-one time with reality is the fast track to despair. I open up the car door before he has a chance to say “We’re here.”
We crawl up the steep concrete slope to a shaded ledge carved out where the support beams meet the road above. We sit down, perched high off the ground, and look out at the dusty railroad tracks below. Cars speed by overhead to remind us that life keeps moving. But under this dark shelter it’s easy to hold the world over your head so no one can watch you, no one can judge you. No one can say you’re doing it wrong.