She nodded. “For next time, I want you to think about talking about Julia. Not about the accident. Just about her. What she was like. How you met, the kind of things you did together. Would you be willing to do that?”
“I guess.”
After that we talked about the usual stuff we do when Laurie says we’re “wrapping up”—do I want to drink, what do I do when I want to drink, a review of my “coping skills,” blah blah blah. I swear I could tell Laurie I’d just murdered someone and she’d still make me review what I’ve “learned.”
Here’s the thing about that: how often I want to drink doesn’t seem to be a big deal to her. How can it not be?
Look at what I did, at what my drinking cost . . . how can I even think about it at all?
But I do.
I also told her a little about lunch. I don’t know why, because she said she thought I should try to “strike up a conversation” with Corn Syrup. Yeah, okay, great idea.
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Laurie really doesn’t get how high school works, but that’s how adults are. They think school is so easy and life there is so great. I’d like to see them go back.
Laurie wouldn’t last a day.
57
99 days
Well, J, it’s Friday night. Are you ready to hear my exciting plans?
My parents have asked me to join them while they watch some special on the History Channel. So I’m here in the living room, lying on the floor and working on homework. You know, I haven’t actually done homework in ages. You and I had, what, two study halls last year? I don’t remember ever opening a book in either of them. I remember you painting your fi ngernails and mine. I remember talking about Kevin and your mom and my parents. I remember making plans for after school, for the weekend. It was so great when your mom gave you a car (even with the lecture about how much she sacrificed for you) and we didn’t have to take the bus everywhere.
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Remember when we decided what we were going to do once we were done with high school? We’d bailed on lunch to smoke in the third-floor bathroom, and I drank a ton of those little bottles you kept in your locker because Mom and Dad had actually fought that morning and it was all horrible silence until Mom started to cry. Then Dad put his arms around her and it was like I wasn’t even there even though we were all in the kitchen, and worse than the rare fight was the all-too-regular sight of them so wrapped up in each other that they forgot I was there.
We decided the day after we graduated we were going to move to Millertown—out of Lawrenceville, fi nally! —
and get an apartment. You were going to help out with Kevin’s band, and I was . . . whoa. Deja vu.
It’s . . . J, it’s so strong I feel almost sick. Have you ever felt memory like this? It’s like I’m there with you smiling and waving at me, your fingernails painted pink and red and blue and green. I might have been drunk then, fl oat-ing through life, but it was real. I was real. You were real.
This crap—lying on the floor, this stupid homework, all of it—it feels like nothing. It is nothing.
Me again.
Mom and Dad have finally let me out of their sight to go to bed. It was pretty obvious something was wrong 59
with me because I couldn’t stand another moment of their stupid show about some stupid guy who built churches, and I got up and—well, I got up and just stood there, shaking. I stood there because I wanted a drink and hated myself for it. I hated myself for wanting it because it took me back to that night, to that quiet road, to the way I lay shivering in the ambulance, cold even though I shouldn’t have been, surrounded by people hovering over me but without the one person I most wanted to see.
My parents talked and talked, said all the things I suppose Laurie and Pinewood taught them to say. The truth, J, the truth I know you already know, is that their talking isn’t what stopped me. Pinewood isn’t what keeps me from drinking either. It never has been. The reason I don’t drink is because of what happened to you. What I did.
I tried once, the morning after you died. I rolled out of bed, rested against the fl oor until I felt strong enough to stand. I found a bottle in my bottom dresser drawer.
I went to pick it up and saw your face, heard you crying and me promising everything would be all right. I opened the bottle, and you stared at me, eyes open and glitter dusted across your cheekbones. I took a sip, and I could 60
see out the ambulance window. You were lying on the ground, your hands open wide, holding on to nothing.
There were people standing over you, looking down at you, and I knew you’d never see them.
I couldn’t swallow. I opened up the attic window, gagging, then grabbed the bottle and tossed it as far as I could. That afternoon my parents started talking about Pinewood. They started talking about it more when I said, “Fine. Whatever. I don’t care.”
I thought about killing myself the day after your funeral. I was in my room, behind the locked attic door staring at the picture we had taken the time we skipped school and went to Adventure Park. Remember that? You talked that guy into letting us in for free and we rode on all the rides and bought a picture of ourselves smiling with someone in a squirrel suit. I knew Dad kept a bottle of sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom he shares with Mom, for the times he’s overseas and has to sleep because he has an early meeting about whatever merger his company is working on. They wouldn’t have noticed till it was too late.
You know why I didn’t do it? It wasn’t because I didn’t want to. I did. God, I did. I didn’t because living with
