What to Say Next(73)

“David asked me to give this to you,” she says, and hands over a piece of paper that looks ripped from his notebook. I look at her, a question in my eyes: What should I do? She shrugs.

“It never mattered before what I thought of David. It shouldn’t now,” she says, and gives me a go get ’em shoulder punch.

I unfold the paper.





I’ve read all of it before, when his words first found their way onto the Internet from his stolen notebook, but now there is a big X through the entire entry, and written over it, in all caps:


FAVORITE GIRL IN THE WORLD. STILL MY FRIEND?

Please meet me on the bleachers after school. Please. And I’m sorry. Sorrier than any person has ever been sorry in the history of sorry people. I’ll put in one last please for good luck, even though I don’t believe in luck. I believe in science. Sorry. Again.





I wait in the bleachers, in the exact same spot we sat on that first day when Kit was just Kit Lowell to me, an entry in a notebook and someone I cautiously put on the Trust List. A few Notable Encounters. Nothing more. Now it occurs to me that outside of Miney, she’s the first friend I’ve ever made. If she doesn’t come, I will be heartbroken. Not literally, of course. My heart will continue to beat. I think. But there will be a literal and figurative ache.

I close my eyes and remember our first kiss. How she reached up and cupped the back of my neck. That feels like much longer than fourteen days ago. Time has changed shape since I met Kit. Can love be so powerful a force that it can skew the space-time continuum? Does it have the particle and wave heft of something like consciousness? I make a mental note to later think through the implications of applying quantum theory to love, or at least its chemical and hormonal approximations. That could make for a satisfying thesis for my future PhD.

She’s not coming. It’s obvious to me that this past week will turn out to have been just a fruitless series of desperate acts. I watch my classmates spilling out of school, in groups of two or three, their formations intimidatingly organic. Atoms into molecules.

Like usual, I am alone.

My headphones sound a siren call from my bag. I force myself to leave them in there. I will wade through all the noise around me, let it saturate my brain. The distant bell. Car engines revving. The anxiety humming through my body.

It was a long shot and I lost. Kit doesn’t need more friends. Certainly not ones like me.

I direct my attention to the remote possibility that Trey is right. That one day I won’t need Kit. That I will find a way to fill up my life with other people. That there are other girls in the world, and that maybe one of them will also feel like my Goldilocks of a person. Of course, all statistics point to Kit being an outlier. To this never happening again.

I close my eyes and I can’t resist any longer.

I slip on my headphones and start the gentle recitation of pi.

—

“David?” One hundred and thirty-four digits in, I look up, and there Kit is, standing in front of me, looking exactly the same as she always does. There is no readjustment to a new iteration. That, at least, is a relief. She’s not smiling.

The sky is low and gray and bloated. If this were a novel, it would be described as foreboding.

“Hi,” I say, and take off my headphones. I realize I am woefully underprepared for this moment. I should have written a speech. Or drawn a picture. At least figured out what I wanted to say. It occurs to me now that I never thought Kit might actually show up. “Do you want to sit?”

She nods and plops down next to me on the bench. She shields her eyes from the nonexistent sun with a cupped hand. We sit quietly like that for a few minutes.

“So?” she asks. “You asked me to come here.”

“Do you ever think about how your name doesn’t fit you? I mean, you’re usually Kit in my head, but really I think your name should have a Z in it, because you’re confusing and zigzagged and pop up in surprising places—like my lunch table and these bleachers. I really didn’t think you’d come—and maybe also the number eight, because…never mind, and the letter S too. It’s my favorite. S. So yeah, Z8S-139. Or 139-Z8S. That’s how I think of you sometimes. In my head,” I say, glad that words are at least coming out of my mouth. I’m too nervous to evaluate whether they are the right ones.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Kit says.

I keep going.

“And my name doesn’t fit either. I mean, really: David? Did you know there are approximately 3,786,417 Davids in the United States? My parents couldn’t have gotten me more wrong. I should be a…a…I don’t know what. Something with a Y in it.”

“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”

“What I’m trying to say—badly, I guess—is that we each have the way the world sees us, and you were the very first person at this school, maybe the first person pretty much anywhere besides my immediate family, who looked at me and saw more than the weirdo flapping kid that everyone here has known as David, or I guess shithead. You listened to me talk. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. It was like the equivalent of being given a better name.” She nods, and I wonder if she will get up and leave and we are done. Not friends. Not enemies. I tell myself I can count that as a win.