History Is All You Left Me(8)

Theo turns to me. “I promise to never bug-spray you, Griff. Do you promise to never bug-spray me?”

“I promise.”

Lying, I mouth to Wade so that Theo sees, to make the situation normal, or to try to.

Theo takes his iced tea from the tray. “Are we all good now?”

“Promise me you guys won’t destroy the squad when you break up,” Wade says. I can tell by his tone he isn’t messing around. This is like seventh grade, when Theo and I kept teasing Wade for getting his name trimmed into his fade, and he laughed for a bit but eventually told us to stop.

“Maybe show some faith in us, dude,” Theo says quietly. “But sure, I promise we’ll be adults if we do break up.”

“You’re sixteen. You’re not an adult,” Wade says.

“I’m counting on us being together for a while,” Theo says.

I take a deep breath and swear I won’t let Wade kill my happy Theo vibes. “I also promise I won’t destroy the squad if we break up either. Can we please go back to looking at books?”

Theo gestures for us to come together, and he wraps an arm around both of us. He fake-whispers to Wade, “We have to do a group hug so Griffin doesn’t feel left out.”

“I hate you both,” Wade says.

We all laugh, and like that it’s over and there are no more secrets, and I keep smiling longer than anyone else because Theo is betting on us being together for a while. Which is good. It’ll give me enough time to come up with the perfect title for his memoir.





TODAY


Monday, November 20th, 2016

I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to go in. Theo, I don’t want to go in, I don’t want to go in to say goodbye to you.

The funeral chapel on Eighty-First and Madison looks like toy blocks stacked on one another and weirdly incomplete because it’s beige, like they forgot to paint it a real color or thought it’d be inappropriate to do so. I can’t believe this is the place your parents chose for your friends and family to say goodbye to you. I don’t have another spot in mind, but wherever it would be, it would have some color.

Doesn’t matter for me, at least. I’m not going in there.

“Coming in, Griffin?”

“No,” I say. “I’m not. I can’t.”

Mom takes the key out of the ignition and stuffs it into her purse. “We’ll sit here until you’re ready.” She stares straight ahead, where mourners with cups of coffee—no one I recognize—enter the chapel as the hourly bell chimes. I’m okay with missing the ten o’clock mass. I’m not going to be singing or praying my grief away anytime soon. Mom holds out her hand and Dad wraps his own around hers, like usual. My parents’ love is straight-up locked down. I’m too numb to feel it right now, but I really owed all my confidence in our own future to them because they’d been together since they were teenagers, too.

Seeing those hands holding each other when I have to imagine yours in mine pisses me off.

I get out of the car and slam the door behind me. The chilly autumn air bites through my jacket and hoodie; breathing in the cold tires out my lungs. The rain isn’t coming down hard, but I’m drenched.

My parents abandon the warmth of their busted Toyota and keep to my right, respecting the compulsion you sometimes found fascinating. They remain silent. No fortune-cookie nonsense. I’m lucky to have parents who know when to go to war with me and when to leave me alone in the battlefield.

You’re waiting inside. Not you, but you.

I owe you a goodbye.

If you were here, I’d be inside already, which . . . well, the weirdness of you talking me into your own funeral isn’t lost on me. You were always a pro at getting me to be brave—to take down the walls that could be taken down, at least. You can’t be faulted for my unbreakable compulsions.

At the door I can sense my parents wanting to reach out. I turn and find a couple of other new faces coming toward us. If I don’t know them, then they don’t know me, and they won’t know why it’s so hard for me to put my hand on this damn knob and turn it to go inside, because they don’t know our history. They might be friends of your parents or neighbors you spoke about but I never met.

The pressure is building, but no one says anything.

I’m pummeling myself to the ground, and I’m drowning without trying to surface, all at once.

I reach for the doorknob. I walk into a space of stale air and grief.

There’s a big cutout of your face at the entrance. Your parents chose that awkward photo from your junior-year class pictures, but not the one we agreed was best, the one that was going to be your author photo on your memoir: where your smile was a little on the shy side, and your blue eyes held a hint of mischief. Maybe it wasn’t the impression they wanted others to have of you. It’s completely lost on me why your parents went ahead and chose it for your funeral. But I won’t say anything. Who knows where Russell’s and Ellen’s heads are these days.

I approach your cutout with my parents shadowing me, offering condolences to God-knows-who. My eyes lock with yours, flat as they may be. I almost talk myself out of it, but I touch the picture, my fingerprints marking your glossy cheek. My fingers trail down to the bronzed card in the bottom center of the frame. I trace each letter: