What to Say Next(3)

“No offense or anything, but would you mind if we didn’t talk?” she asks. I’m pretty sure this is not a question she wants me to answer, but I do anyway. Miney has put the expression no offense on the Be Wary List. Apparently bad things usually follow.

“I’d prefer it, actually. But I’d like to say just one last thing: Your dad shouldn’t have died. That’s really unfair.”

Kit nods, and the commas of her hair shake.

“Yup,” she says. And then we eat the rest of our sandwiches—mine peanut butter and jelly since it’s Monday—in silence.

But good silence.

I think.





I don’t really know why I decide not to sit with Annie and Violet at lunch. I can feel their eyes on me when I pass right by our usual table, which is at the front of the caf, the perfect table because you can see everyone from there. I always sit with them. Always. We are best friends—a three-person squad since middle school—and so I realize I’m making some sort of grand statement by not even waving hello. I just knew as soon as I came in and saw them huddled together talking and laughing and just being so normal, like nothing had changed at all—and yes, I realize that nothing has changed for them, that their families are no more or less screwed up than they were before my life imploded—that I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit down, take out my turkey sandwich, and act like I was the same old reliable Kit. The one who would make a self-deprecating joke about my shirt, which I’m wearing in some weird tribute to my dad, a silly attempt to feel closer to him even though it makes me feel like even more of an outcast and more confused about the whole thing than I was before I put it on. Just the kind of reminder I don’t need. Like I could actually forget, for even a single minute.

I feel stupid. Could that be what grief does to you? It’s like I’m walking around school with an astronaut’s helmet on my head. A dome of dullness as impenetrable as glass. No one here understands what I’m going through. How could they? I don’t even understand it.

It seemed safer somehow to sit over here, in the back, away from my friends, who have clearly already moved on to other important things, like whether Violet’s thighs look fat in her new high-waisted jeans, and away from all the other people who have stopped me in the hall over the past couple of weeks with that faux-concerned look on their faces and said: “Kit, I’m like so, so, so sorry about your daaaad.” Everyone seems to draw out the word dad like they are scared to get beyond that one sentence, to experience the conversational free fall of what to say next that inevitably follows. My mom claims that it’s not our job to make other people feel comfortable—this is about us, not them, she told me just before the funeral—but her way, which is to weep and to throw her arms around sympathetic strangers, is not mine. I have not yet figured out my way.

Actually I’m starting to realize there is no way.

Certainly I’m not going to cry, which seems too easy, too dismissive. I’ve cried over bad grades and being grounded and once, embarrassingly, over a bad haircut. (In my defense, those bangs ended up taking three very long awkward years to grow out.) This? This is too big for woe-is-me silly girl tears. This is too big for everything.

Tears would be a privilege.

I figure sitting next to David Drucker is my best bet, since he’s so quiet you forget he’s even there. He’s weird—he sits with his sketchbook and draws elaborate pictures of fish—and when he does talk, he stares at your mouth, like you might have something in your teeth. Don’t get me wrong: I feel awkward and uncomfortable most of the time, but I’ve learned how to fake it. David, on the other hand, seems to have completely opted out of even trying to act like everyone else.

I’ve never seen him at a party or at a football game or even at one of the nerdy after-school activities he might enjoy, like Math Club or coding. For the record, I’m a huge fan of nerdy after-school activities since they’ll be good for my college applications, though I tend toward the more literary and therefore ever-so-slightly cooler variety. The truth is I’m kind of a big nerd myself.

Who knows? Maybe he’s on to something by tuning the rest of us out. Not a bad high school survival strategy. Showing up every day and doing his homework and rocking those giant noise-canceling headphones—and basically just waiting for high school to be over with.

I may be a little awkward, sometimes a bit too desperate to be liked—but until everything with my dad, I’ve never been quiet. It feels strange to sit at a table with just one other person, for the noise of the caf to be something that I want to block out. This is the opposite of my own previous survival strategy, which was to jump headfirst into the fray.

Oddly enough, David has an older sister, Lauren, who, until she graduated last year, was the most popular girl in school. His opposite in every way. President of her class and homecoming queen. (Somehow she managed to make something that clichéd seem cool again in her hipster ironic way.) Dated Peter Malvern, who every girl, including me, used to worship from afar because he played bass guitar and had the kind of facial hair that most guys our age are incapable of growing. Lauren Drucker is a living legend—smart and cool and beautiful—and if I could reincarnate as anyone else, just start this whole show over again and get to be someone different, I would choose to be her even though we’ve never actually met. No doubt she’d look awesome with bangs.