We Are the Ants(41)

The ride slowed, and our bodies began to separate, but that only made me hold Jesse closer. He kissed me so hard that I cut my lip on his teeth.

Jesse and I disappeared into a world where we two alone existed.

“Honestly,” said Audrey as the ride slowed to a stop, “can you stop dry humping my best friend?”

But we pretended we didn’t hear her, and I wrapped my arms around Jesse’s neck, and he kissed me like the world had fallen out from under our feet. We were two bodies floating in space, brighter than stars.

? ? ?

When the ride ended, Diego left me and Audrey hanging out by the Tilt-A-Whirl while he hunted for a toilet. I didn’t say much, and neither did Audrey. I was pretty sure we were both thinking about Jesse. Audrey picked at the peeling paint on the side of the ride and kept repeating that she was having so much fun. After the hundredth time, I craned my neck to look for Diego.

“How long have you guys been together?” Audrey asked.

I was standing on my tiptoes, looking over the crowd, and her question didn’t register right away, so I said, “Yeah, sure.” Then, “What?”

Audrey had this way of making you feel like the dumbest person in the room. She didn’t do it on purpose, but when she looked at you, you knew her brain worked on a level many times greater than yours. “I’m glad you’re not with Marcus anymore. If he doesn’t roofie someone before graduation, I’ll be shocked.”

“Diego and I aren’t together. He’s straight.”

“Really?”

“Yup.”

Audrey furrowed her brow like she was staring at a math problem that had been marked wrong when she was certain it was correct. The calculations didn’t make sense, and Audrey hated for things to not make sense. “The way you were looking at him on the Gravitron . . .”

“I was thinking about Jesse.”

“Oh. But you like Diego, right?”

I wanted to tell Audrey how conflicted I felt. How I sometimes thought about Diego while jerking off; how, when I tried to recall memories of Jesse, Diego appeared in them instead. Jesse was dead, he’d committed suicide, but I still felt like I was betraying him for liking a guy who wasn’t even capable of liking me back. Audrey was maybe the one person who could have understood, and I wanted to tell her, but I didn’t. “Drop it, okay?”

“Fine. What do you want talk about?”

I spotted Diego walking toward us, but he stopped in front of the bumper cars, and I couldn’t see why. “I don’t know, Audrey.”

“Come on. Don’t be like that.” Everything about her was pleading with me to let it all go. Her eyes and her lips and the way her shoulders slumped.

“We did fine not talking at all for the last year,” I -mumbled.

“Maybe you were fine, but I needed you.”

Diego had clearly run into someone, but I couldn’t see who it was. “I was here. I’m not the one who left.” I just needed that stupid kid with his stupid balloon to get out of the way so I could see who Diego was talking to.

“I was hurting too, you know.”

Standing in the middle of the fair was not where I wanted to have this argument. I didn’t want to have it at all, but Audrey was maddeningly persistent. “Yeah, you were hurting so bad you took a three-month vacation to Switzerland. That must have been horrible for you.”

“Henry—”

A passing family obscured Diego, so I turned my full attention to Audrey. The festering wound split open anew, spewing a geyser of pus. “You didn’t even say good-bye, Audrey. I showed up at your house, and your dad told me you’d gone to stay with family in Switzerland. I thought you’d come back after winter break, but you were gone for three months.” People turned to stare at us, but I couldn’t stop draining the abscess. “Jesse killed himself, and you were the only person I could talk to about it. I needed you, but you didn’t answer my e-mails, my calls, nothing. My boyfriend, your best friend, committed suicide, and you abandoned me. You both abandoned me.”

Tears filled Audrey’s eyes, and I hated myself for causing them. I hated myself for needing her. I wanted to hate her for leaving, but I didn’t, and I hated myself for that too. “You got to see Jesse at his best, but I saw him after he punched a brick wall so hard, he broke his fingers, when he cut his thighs with razor blades, when he put out lit cigarettes on his hands and told you he’d burned himself baking brownies. I was the one who cleaned up his blood and made sure he didn’t drink himself to death. Me, Henry. Not you.”

I didn’t learn about those things until after the funeral. I spent weeks scouring old texts and pictures, looking for the clues I’d missed. Thinking about the times I suspected something was wrong but didn’t push Jesse to talk about it keeps me awake most nights. I failed Jesse. We all failed him. “Why’d you leave, Audrey?”

“I needed space to breathe.”

“So you went skiing?”

Audrey was shaking. I looked for Diego; he was still by the bumper cars. She clenched her fists so tightly, I thought she was going to punch me. “I wasn’t in Switzerland, Henry.”

“What?”

“I don’t have family in Switzerland.” Audrey bit her bottom lip and said, “My parents checked me in to a psychiatric hospital. I spent eight weeks there and then another month with my grandparents in Jersey.”