Five Feet Apart(43)

I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back. “Yep! Lucky number eighteen.”

“Will!” she says, stomping her foot, upset. “I don’t have a present for you!”

Can she get any cuter?

I tap her leg with the pool cue, but for once I’m not kidding. There’s something I actually want. “How ’bout a promise, then? To stick around for the next one?”

She looks surprised, and then nods. “I promise.”

She takes me to the gym, and the motion-activated lights flicker on as she pulls the other end of the pool cue past the exercise gear and to a door in the far corner that I never bothered to explore before.

Looking both ways, she flicks open the lid to a keypad and punches in a code.

“So you pretty much have the run of the place, huh?” I ask as the door unlocks with a click, a green light shining through the keypad.

She smirks, giving me a look as she closes the lid. “One of the perks of being the teacher’s pet.”

I laugh. Well played.

The warmth of the pool deck hits me as we open the door, my laugh echoing around the open space. The room is dim, except for the lights in the pool, shining bright as the water ripples around them. We take off our shoes and sit on the edge. The water is cool at first despite the heat of the room, but slowly warms up as we move our feet back and forth.

A comfortable silence settles over us, and I look over at her, a pool cue’s length away.

“So, what do you think happens when we die?”

She shakes her head, smirking. “That’s not very sexy first-date talk.”

I laugh, shrugging. “Come on, Stella. We’re terminal. You have to have thought about it.”

“Well, it is on my to-do list.”

Of course it is.

She looks down at the water, moving her feet in circles. “There’s one theory I like that says in order to understand death, we have to look at birth.”

She fidgets with the ribbon in her hair as she talks.

“So, while we’re in the womb, we’re living that existence, right? We have no idea that our next existence is just an inch away.”

She shrugs and looks at me. “Maybe death is the same. Maybe it’s just the next life. An inch away.”

The next life just an inch away. I frown and think it over. “So, if the beginning is death and death is also the end, then what’s the real beginning?”

She raises her thick eyebrows at me, not amused by my riddle. “Okay then, Dr. Seuss. Why don’t you tell me what you think.”

I shrug and lean back. “It’s the big sleep, baby. Peace out. Blink. Done and done.”

She shakes her head. “No way. There’s no way that Abby just ‘blinked’ out. I refuse to believe it.”

I’m silent, watching her, wanting to ask the burning question I’ve held on to since I figured out Abby died. “What happened?” I ask. “To Abby?”

Her legs stop circling in the pool, the water still swirling around her calves, but she tells me. “She was cliff diving in Arizona and she landed wrong when she hit the water. Broke her neck and drowned. They said she didn’t feel any pain.” She meets my gaze, her expression troubled. “How could they know, Will? How could they know if she felt pain? She was always there for me when I was in pain, and I wasn’t there to do the same.”

I shake my head. I have to fight all my instincts, which tell me to reach out and take her hand. I don’t know what to say. There’s just no way to know. She looks back at the water, her eyes glazed over, her mind far away, on the top of a cliff in Arizona.

“I was supposed to be there. But I got sick, just like I always do.” She exhales slowly, with effort, her eyes unblinking, focused on a point at the bottom of the pool. “I keep imagining it, over and over, wanting to know what she felt or thought. Because I can’t know that, she never stops dying for me. I see it over and over and over again.”

I shake my head, tapping her leg with the pool cue. She blinks, looking over at me, her eyes clearing. “Stella, if you had been there, you still wouldn’t know.”

“But she died alone, Will,” she says, which is something that I can’t deny.

“But we all die alone, don’t we? The people we love can’t go with us.” I think about Hope and Jason. Then my mom. I wonder if she’ll be more upset to lose me, or to lose to the disease.

Stella swirls her legs in the water. “Do you think drowning hurts? Is it scary?”

I shrug. “That’s how we’re going to go, isn’t it? We drown. Just without the water. Our own fluids will do the dirty work.”

I see her shiver out of the corner of my eye, and give her a look. “I thought you weren’t afraid to die?”

She sighs loudly, looking over at me exasperatedly. “I’m not afraid of being dead. But the actual dying part. You know, what it feels like?” When I stay silent, she keeps talking. “You’re not afraid of any of it?”

I swallow my usual instinct to be sarcastic. I want to be real with her. “I think about that very last breath. Sucking for air. Pulling and pulling and getting nothing. I think about my chest muscles ripping and burning, absolutely useless. No air. No nothing. Just black.” I look at the water, rippling around my feet, the detailed image in my head familiar and sinking into the pit of my stomach. I shudder, shrugging and smiling at her. “But, hey. That’s only on Mondays. Otherwise, I don’t dwell on it.”