When My Heart Joins the Thousand(26)

“I never liked riddles much. They’re too ambiguous. A puzzle only has one solution, even if there are many different ways to get there.” I lock a row of colors into place on my Rubik’s Cube. “A raven and a writing desk are similar in any number of ways. They’re both made of matter, for one thing. They’re both heavier than a blade of grass.”

“Sure, but a good riddle has only one right solution, and it seems self-evident once you know it. There’s that moment where things kind of snap into focus.”

I hesitate. “All right. Tell me one.”

“Here’s an easy one. What has hands but can’t clap?”

“A corpse.”

He winces. “A clock. Jeez.”

“Well, my answer fits, too.”

“Yeah, but . . .” He lets out a little sigh. “Okay, here’s a better one. There’s a house with four walls facing south. A bear is circling the house. What color is the bear?”

I twist the cube harder. “How is anyone supposed to answer that. Those two things aren’t even remotely connected. Anyway, there’s no way a house could have four walls all facing south. That’s impossible.”

“Is it?”

“Obviously. Unless—” I frown, thinking. “Unless it’s at the North Pole. Which means . . . it’s probably a polar bear.” Realization clicks into place. “The bear is white.”

“There you go.”

I make a noncommittal sound in my throat. “All right. I see what you mean. But that one was more of a logic problem than a riddle.”

He chuckles quietly. “Maybe.”

It’s strange, how easily we slip back into conversation after everything that’s happened. I’ve missed it.

An image floats up behind my retinas: Stanley sitting on the bench alone, crying. “Stanley . . . do you remember the day you threw your phone into the pond.”

His smile fades. “Yeah. I remember.”

“Why did you do that.” I asked before, once, and he just said he was being stupid and that it didn’t matter. But there must be a reason.

He folds his hands together. “My mom had cancer,” he says. “She had it for a long time. After a while, it spread to her brain. And they couldn’t operate. They—they said that if they took out the tumor, she would probably be a vegetable. No awareness. She didn’t want that.”

There’s a small sharp pain somewhere between my heart and throat, like a fishhook has caught inside me.

“She knew she wouldn’t be around much longer. So she went to Elkland Meadows, and they made her comfortable. That’s what they do there.” The moonlight makes the bruise-colored circles under his eyes darker, the hollows in his cheeks more prominent. “One day, the pain was really bad, and they asked her if she wanted to stay awake or just sleep for whatever time was left. She said she wanted to sleep. So we said good-bye. I threw away my phone because there seemed to be no point in keeping it. I mean, who was I going to call?”

A faint trace of daylight lingers in the sky, but the moon is already out. It slips behind a cloud, then emerges, wreathed in a silvery-white halo. Black-and-pearl-colored dusk shadows stretch across the grass.

“I’m sorry,” I say. They’re the only words I have.

“It’s okay,” he replies.

But it’s not. Words aren’t enough.

I start to reach out. Stop. Then I close the gap between us and take his hand. His fingers twitch, then curl around mine. His hand feels bird-fragile, the bones long and thin, the skin fever-hot. He squeezes my hand lightly.

“You never told me.” The words fall from my numb lips, into the cold air. “Why.”

“It didn’t seem fair to unload all that on you. And I didn’t want to scare you away. I mean . . . you’re kind of my only friend.”

That word again. Feelings stir beneath my skin: uncomfortable feelings, like there are thin wires running into the center of my rib cage and something is tugging at those wires, sending vibrations into my core.

“I guess that’s a weird thing to admit out of the blue, isn’t it? But yeah. I’m kind of a loner. Which is a slightly cooler-sounding way of saying ‘nerd with no social life.’”

I can’t process this. “You talk to other people at your school. Don’t you.”

“Sometimes. But it’s not the same. We talk about what TV shows we like or what music we listen to. We don’t talk like this.”

I don’t respond; I’m struggling to control my breathing.

“I guess I just unloaded. Exactly the way I didn’t want to. God. Sorry.”

He’s always apologizing.

“I’m not even nice to you,” I say.

“Sure you are. More than once, you stayed up with me until four o’clock in the morning because I couldn’t sleep. Remember?”

“It’s not like I had anything better to do.”

“Every time you show me a kindness, you downplay it like this. Why are you so worried about being seen as a nice person?”

“I’m not a nice person.”

“We’ll just have to disagree on that.”

I let his hand slip from mine. My fingers are suddenly cold. “I don’t know how to do this,” I murmur.