All We Can Do Is Wait(71)

She smiled at Scott, did a little what can you do? with her hands. She took a step toward him, gave him another hug. He hugged her back, grateful for the comfort. “I’m so sorry about Aimee,” Alexa said. Scott had lost someone today, someone very important to him. That was something big. Something Alexa knew too much about. “You’ll be O.K.,” she whispered—to him, to herself. “You’ll be O.K.”

“Thanks,” Scott said. He hugged her for another second and then let go, wiping his eyes with his palms. “Thanks.”

“If you need anything . . .” Alexa started to say, but Scott shook his head.

“No, I’ll be fine. I’ll be fine.” He smiled at her. Alexa turned around and grabbed his coat from the chair and handed it to him.

“Thanks,” Scott said again. “Thank you.” He hesitated for a second. Then waved. “Well. I’m gonna go. Bye, Alexa.”

She waved back. “Bye, Scott.”

“Your parents are gonna be O.K.”

“Yeah. I know.”

Scott turned to leave, got halfway toward the door, then turned back to Alexa. “Oh, and tell your brother bye for me.”

“I will.”

And then Scott was gone, walking through the sliding doors as he pulled on his coat. Alexa was all but alone in the waiting room then, feeling a swell of sadness rise up in her. She looked at her phone. It was ten thirty. Nine hours since the accident, almost ten. She’d know something soon, she was convinced. Either way.

She got out her phone, opened Twitter, and scrolled through. She stopped when she saw a picture of Aimee. The Globe had tweeted out a story: “Eighteen-Year-Old Killed in Tobin Collapse Was Promising Drama Student.” Alexa considered clicking on it, but thought better of it and put her phone back in her pocket.

She thought about Kyle’s headline, from two days after he died: “Bourne Teenager Dead in Drunk Driving Accident.”

It said nothing about who he was, about what—or whom—he’d loved, about where he had wanted to go in life. Alexa’s parents, if they died, would have long obituaries. At least her mother would. But Kyle had just gotten the standard paragraph write-up, with information about the memorial service at the Elsings’ and the private family service in Bourne, plus one follow-up article about the police cracking down on holiday weekend DUIs and underage drinking. She worried that was all Kyle would be remembered as, as time went on. That kid who died one summer. A sad cautionary tale whose name would slowly fade.

Alexa worried that the older she got and the more places her life took her, she’d forget about Kyle, a boy she knew once, when she was very young, who had died when he was very young too. The thought of that made her want to stay rooted in place forever, to preserve Kyle in her mind.

Kyle had helped open up the whole experience of that now faraway summer—guiding Alexa toward a heady sense of independence, a sense of being removed from the cloistered and ordered and intense life she lived back in Boston. It made her feel like she was growing up, evolving at an almost dizzying pace. But a good kind of dizzying. Roller coaster dizzying.

She felt it when she talked to Kyle, she felt it when her brother would join them in hanging out. And she felt it when she was with the other kids from Grey’s.

Laurie was cool and easygoing and a little wild. On a few nights throughout the summer, Laurie invited people back to the place she shared with her cousin, Jacqui. Alexa had been too nervous to go the first time, shyly lying that she had to be home for a family thing. But the next time Laurie had a party, a week or so after the Fourth of July, Alexa felt emboldened enough by her new self that she agreed to go. Kyle had a closing shift that night, so he said he’d see her there after, meaning Alexa would have to go alone. Which scared her, but some new part of her knew that she could do it.

She got a ride with Davey and Courtney, a short drive to the little bungalow that Laurie and Jacqui had rented for the summer, a rundown kind of a thing on Governor Prence Road, already a half dozen cars parked outside. There was a fuzzy thump of music coming from the house, and Alexa found herself wondering how soon it would be before the neighbors complained. But she tried to push that anxious, scolding thought out of her head as she entered the house, immediately greeted by a billow of weed smell and a shrieking Laurie, who said, “Oh my God, you caaaaaame!”

Pretty much everyone there was from work. Amelia was even there, perking up when she saw Alexa, maybe thinking she had brought Jason with her. Maybe Alexa should have, but it hadn’t occurred to her, in all the rush of excitement of even deciding to go, to invite him. Her manager Nate gave her a wave from across the living room, looking a little sheepish to be at a party with his younger employees, but also glazed and happy from beer and, probably, more.

“You wanna draaaank?” Laurie yelled in her scratchy, robust Laurie way.

“Sure,” Alexa said. “Whatever you got.”

“O.K., I’m gonna make you this rum thing, it’s really good, I promise, and it’s strong.”

And indeed it was strong. Laurie reappeared from the little back kitchen a minute or two later with a red Solo cup, full to the top. Alexa took a sip and it burned, but not in a bad way.

“Oh my God, cheeeers!” Laurie said, sloshing her cup into Alexa’s and wrapping an arm around her. “This is fun. We’re gonna have fun.”