What to Say Next(39)



“He died afterward. Not in the car. At the hospital,” I answer, and match his tone. Clinical detachment. Maybe I can do this and not shatter like the Volvo’s windshield. And if I don’t break, I like to think I have a chance of getting better. Or at least closing my eyes at night and not opening them again until morning. Maybe there is a good reason we are doing this. Answers. I could use some answers.

“Let’s not work by time, then. Let’s figure out where the car had to have stopped before there would have been a collision. Would that be okay with you?”

I don’t answer. We are now at the corner, staring at the middle of the intersection. There are no cars around. If I wanted to, I could walk right into the center of the road.

There’s nothing here. Just some trash dancing in the wind.

“We’re missing a bunch of variables, but I think we can make reasonable estimations.”

I am going to throw up. Because it’s replaying right in front of me, as if I were watching it live. The screeching of tires. An explosion of blue. Everything turning black. The smell. Oh God, the smell.

“I’m sorry, I can’t,” I say, and turn around and put my hand over my mouth. I bite back the bile. No, I do not want to throw up in front of David. I will not display my digested burger on the pristine snow. Still, the trembling is getting worse, and the nausea curdles into vertigo. The world starts to spin and the ground begins to undulate, like I’ve stepped into a three-dimensional fun house mirror. I need to get out of here. Now.

“If you want I can do the math without you,” he says, but to my back, because I’m already running, slipping on the wet ground, hurling myself as fast as I can to get away.





After Kit ran away from me, I spent another fifty-five minutes outside in the snow by myself, measuring velocity and rate of acceleration and doing calculations in my head and on my phone, since I didn’t have my notebook to write them down.

Now that I’m home, I need to readjust after all that time alone, after all those words and numbers tumbled and boomeranged in my brain. After watching Kit’s departing back, and wondering why she left me there without so much as a goodbye. I know that if I were someone else, I’d get that elusive subtext that everyone else seems to come preprogrammed with and understand why she suddenly, without warning, found me so disgusting. That’s the only word I can use to describe the look on her face: disgust. Did she know I wanted to kiss her?

I’m not ready for Miney, who greets me at the door as if she is going to hug me. The purple stripe in her hair is blaring. Like a trumpet. No, like car brakes screeching to a halt.

“It’s everywhere,” Miney says, and I notice she’s still in her odd-duck pajamas. Again, she hasn’t left the house. Her eyes are red-rimmed but not crusty. Not pink eye, then. If she had an infection, there would be secretions.

“What’s everywhere?” I ask, but I don’t really care. All I am thinking about is Kit’s hand in mine, how she makes me brave. How did she know I wanted to kiss her? I already know I’m a terrible liar, but it’s not like she asked me outright: Do you want to kiss me?

“Your notebook.”

I have no idea what Miney’s talking about. What does that mean, my notebook is everywhere? A notebook is a fixed object. The laws of physics don’t allow it to be in more than one place at a time. Unless we are talking about the multiverse, but Miney doesn’t understand the concept. I’ve tried explaining it lots of times.

“Someone put it on the Internet,” Miney says, and hands me her phone. Tumblr. The title: “The Retard’s Guide to Mapleview.” My body shakes, just once, as if absorbing a single blow.

“Oh,” I say.

“Oh? That’s it?”

“I thought they stole it for my physics notes. That they would give it right back when they realized it wasn’t going to be helpful. Why would they do this?” I’m not sure why I even bother to ask, because I should know by now I will never understand the answer. Why anyone ever does anything. “My notebook was supposed to be private.”

“Who did this?” she asks.

I don’t answer. It doesn’t matter. My notebook is no longer a tangible thing. It’s like a dead person’s consciousness. There but not there. Everywhere at once.

“Little D, who?” Miney grabs me by the shoulders, forces me to look her in the eye.

“Justin Cho and Gabriel Forsyth.”

“I’ll kill them,” Miney says, which is a nice offer, but I don’t want her to go to jail. Then I wouldn’t be able to talk to her whenever I wanted. We’d have to sit across from each other in a dirty vestibule, converse through bulletproof glass. Miney is a picky eater. She’d hate prison food.

“Maybe people will stop reading as soon as they realize that it’s private,” I say, hopeful. Still stupidly hopeful. I never learn.

“Not likely. Six of my friends sent it to me in the past few minutes.” I picture the word viral, a soiled word, and imagine my book as a pathogen. Multiplying exponentially. Replicating itself like a cancer cell.

I nod. I get it now. As usual, it just takes me a few extra beats. My body reacts first: My hands flap side to side, and my legs shake up and down. I look like a bird readying for flight. I haven’t flapped like this since the sixth grade, when Miney filmed me on her phone and explained that if I ever wanted to have any friends, I needed to stop. And to my amazement, next time I caught myself doing it, I was able to quit; I replaced the motion with silent counting, though by then the damage had already been done. Apparently no one wants to be friends with the kid who used to flap.

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