Real Live Boyfriends

Claude smiled, but his eyes were serious. “He told me a lot about you, too.”

“It’s always bad when my reputation precedes me,” I said, trying to laugh.

“No, no.”

“Don’t you live in New York?” I asked.

His face contorted. “I couldn’t stay there, in the end. I—ah—I thought I could, but when the term started I couldn’t go to any of my classes. You know? I kept skipping and it was wasting my parents’ money and the whole thing was bad, so I’m taking a semester off.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“Um.”

Claude frowned. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Oh. Well.” He looked off into the distance. “I should tell you, then.”

“What?”

He took a deep breath and let it out. Then he said: “My boyfriend died in a bike accident.”

What?

What?

“Your boyfriend?” I said, in shock. “Booth?” The conventional words just came out of my mouth automatically, like the words Nora had said to me in the summer: “I’m so, so sorry,” I said. “For your loss. When did it happen?”

“August.” Sharp lines appeared on either side of Claude’s mouth. “Noel didn’t tell you?”

I shook my head.

Claude looked away as he spoke. His voice was strangled. “Yeah. Booth was on his bike and a car plowed into him.”

Ag.

“Noel was behind him,” said Claude. “He saw the whole thing. They—they told me Booth didn’t suffer.”

A thousand ags.

Noel had seen his friend hit by a car, right in front of him.

In front of him and there’d been nothing he could do.

He’d seen his friend die.

All my problems were minuscule compared with how that would feel. How deeply that must shake a person. Just to have seen that accident, and stood over the body, knowing it was too late.

Not to have been able to save Booth.

Not to have been able to save him for Claude.

Noel wrote me those poems.I miss you

like a limb

like a leg I’ve lost

in a war, maybe

in an accident, maybe

in a tragedy.They hardly move, these clocks.

Watching the hands go round is like

watching someone’s blood drip onto the street

while you wait for an ambulance

and wait

and wait

and the blessed siren does not sound.

The clocks will hardly move

and hardly move

and hardly move

He had told me what happened. In those poems.

And yet he hadn’t told me.

He hadn’t actually told me.

Instead, he had come home from New York wanting to be happy. Wanting me to be the happy girl who would convince him nothing bad had happened. That it didn’t matter about Booth. That he—Noel—was okay.

He kept saying he was fine. He kept wanting me to act like everything was fine.

I put my hand over my mouth. “I’m so sorry,” I repeated to Claude. “I mean, I know I don’t know you, but I’m just so, so sorry. For you and for Booth and for Noel.”

Claude wiped his forehead and took a swig from the water bottle in his hand. “Thank you.”

“Sure.”

“How odd that he didn’t tell you,” said Claude. “I mean, he was calling you every day.”

“Until he stopped.”

“He’s such a strange guy sometimes, Noelie.”