All We Can Do Is Wait(48)

There was only one other person in the chapel, an older man sitting in the second row of chairs, bent over, head down, possibly praying, possibly asleep. Scott and Alexa found two chairs toward the back, sat down, and stared at the big round blue stained glass window at the front of the room. They sat there without talking for a minute, some respectable observance of silence that the place seemed owed.

Alexa couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in any kind of church. Maybe the Quaker-style meetings at her school counted, though they were held in the assembly hall, not some sacred space. Her parents had never taken her, except when there were weddings, though oftentimes in Theo and Linda’s circle, those weddings were outdoors at country clubs or on private estates with sprawling views of some body of water. Only a couple of funerals. Churches had been rare in Alexa’s life, and she realized now that they did hold some kind of soothing power, like they were a confirmation that the stakes of the world are really high and really scary, in a way that the drab fluorescent and linoleum of downstairs did not.

She let out a sigh and crossed her arms. “You know what I’m most scared of?” she said to Scott, who turned in his chair and looked at her seriously, his round brown eyes kind and expectant.

“No, what?”

“That I’m going to have to figure out who I am a lot sooner than normal. If they’re gone, I mean. Like . . . I’m supposed to get a few more years before I have to do that, right? To be young and screw things up and try lots of different things. In college, or wherever. Maybe not college. Somewhere else. But now . . . I mean, if you don’t have parents to, like, bounce off of, what do you do? Maybe you just have to get your shit together and be a grown-up. Just like that. I mean, it’s not like Jason will. So, one of us has to.”

“Why won’t Jason?”

“Because he won’t. Because that’s not who he is. Last summer . . . Last summer, my friend died? His friend too. They were friends.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Yeah, me too. But when he died . . . Jason just, like, shut down. Like the light went out, and he was gone. We’d gotten close again, I thought, over the summer. Something was different. It was good. But then Kyle died, and . . . I guess I was wrong. I was wrong. So today? I mean, I didn’t really expect anything of him. But it makes me think about how if my parents are, y’know . . . I might just have me. I might be it.”

Scott nodded. Alexa felt dumb, burdening the moment with this selfish stuff about her future, when Scott’s girlfriend could be dead, with no future waiting for her whatsoever.

“Sorry,” she started to say, but Scott interrupted.

“No, no, I’m sorry. I get it. I was just . . . I know what you mean. I guess for me I never really thought I’d have any of that time to figure myself out or whatever. My life feels sorta planned already. Stay in Boston for college. Work at my parents’ store. Take over the store when they retire. And that’s that. My family doesn’t really get out. They’ve all stayed around here. I have cousins who live in Maryland, but it’s this, like, big deal that they moved, and everyone kind of hates them for it.”

Scott sat back in his chair, pulled his hood up. “With Aimee, at least it was like I was leaving my life for a little bit, every time I was with her. I knew she’d go away to college and stuff, and that we were young and probably wouldn’t be together forever . . . It’s just weird, y’know? To feel like someone’s outgrowing you, and that they were always going to.”

Alexa wasn’t sure what to say, thinking how sad it was for Aimee, for her parents, for Scott, to have everything cut so short. Maybe cut short. If she was dead. She might not be. It was still possible that she was fine, only missing.

Alexa would never say this to Scott, of course, but something about his story, the simplicity and tragic romance of a dead girlfriend, of a great love cut short, made her feel jealous. It was so complicated with her parents. The feeling was, of course, compounded by the fact of Kyle, this inspiring—and, yes, magical—being she had known (“It’s like you think I’m an actual fairy,” he’d said to her once) until he was swiftly taken away. Maybe Kyle was like Aimee in that way: short-lived, a bright star burned out quickly.

But Alexa couldn’t really find anything literary in it, not really. All this shitty sadness and hurt that had consumed her life for the past year. She’d never imagined that she, of all people, would feel so stuck, so mired in the swamp of a life that had begun to feel so heavy, so full of painful and horrible things. And she was only seventeen. She realized how exhausted she was, how she felt so little of herself anymore.

So much of her time was spent being sad about Kyle, or angry at Jason, or worrying about her parents, before the accident even. Where had she gone? She felt a little panicked, sitting there in the quiet chapel, trying to place herself, to locate the curious, ambitious, focused Alexa who had existed at some point, who had been real, she was sure of it. Her teachers seemed to have known her, this old Alexa. Her parents too. And Alexa had records of her, this person who was a person, who didn’t just react other to people. There were journals full of that Alexa, papers and plans and all kinds of things.

And yet she felt mostly gone, as the present Alexa sat in the chapel, listening to Scott talk about his girlfriend, feeling jealous in ways she didn’t want to admit to herself.