Gone, Gone, Gone(50)

He looks so heartbroken, and I don’t know what to do.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper. But sorry is all I can be for him right now.

I’m not even doing this for Lio, but for me.

And it sucks.

Cody has to sleep a lot, but he says it’s okay, I can stay, he won’t wake up. He’s a heavy sleeper now. He never used to be.

But he did always sleep, so much. Whenever he was upset, he’d sleep. It was like crying or something.

Until he stopped sleeping and stopped crying. At least I still do one of the two. So does Lio.

I call him. It’s two in the morning, and I’m supposed to be in the guest dorms. I shouldn’t be in this room. I promised the night nurse that I was leaving any minute. I shouldn’t have left Maryland. It doesn’t feel right not to be there now.

Lio shouldn’t pick up. He should be asleep. He should be too scared to talk on the phone even if he is awake, because he’s Lio, and he can’t have gotten better all by himself, he can’t have fixed himself.

And then I hear rustling around and his phone click on.

He fixed himself.

“Hello?” His voice is so tiny and crackly.

Everything I wanted to say to him is gone. I don’t even know what it was, because right now all I know is Lio needs me. He needs me. I can feel it. It’s somewhere in my stomach.

Cody’s crying in his sleep. Shit.

“What’s going on?” I ask Lio, quietly. “What’s wrong?”

“’M throwing up.”

“Ohhhh.” My stomach really does hurt. “Oh. You drank too much.”

“Drank. Too. Much.”


“Where are you?”

“The bathroom. The floooooor.”

“At home?”

“Mom’s.”

“That’s what I meant, yeah.”

I listen to him throw up for a minute. God. He sounds like he’s about to bring up his pancreas.

“Breathe,” I tell him, when I hear him come back to the phone. “Poor thing. Breathe.”

“’M so good at throwing up, put it on a resume.”

It’s hard not to roll my eyes at him sometimes, I swear. “Poor little cancerboy.”

“Kissed someone.”

“Yeah?” I sigh. “I’m not really surprised.”

“Was stupid. All of it so stupid. Did you kiss Cody?”

“He kissed me. Didn’t kiss back.”

He exhales. “I suck.”

Oh. “No, it’s okay. I . . . I kind of like screwing up a little less than you. For once.” Because I’m not angry either.

Because it’s not as if he started this. This whole time, he has been the one reaching out, offering out that shattered heart to me with both hands, like in that ring he wears. And I kicked my feet against the ground and went I don’t knoooooooow, Lio, I don’t knooooow, and what was I expecting to happen? Did I think he’d wait?

But he did. I don’t ever want to give him a reason to stop.

My stomach feels warm all of a sudden.

He waited for me.

He says, “I called your brother.”

“What?”

“I was sad and I called your brother.”

“You’re not going to kill yourself. Don’t say that.”

“It’s his day off. I called him at your house.”

I breathe. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Don’t kill yourself, Lio.’”

“Don’t do it.”

“I’m not gonna. I promised. You know what, Craig? This is love in the time of shit,” he says, and then he’s throwing up again.

“Yeah,” I say. “But love love love love love love.”

I kneel next to Cody and wipe the tears off his cheeks. “Don’t cry,” I whisper to him. “I will always love you. I promise.”

Because I can give him that, but I can never get back to the place where it will mean anything to him. I kiss his cheek to close the door.

Once I’m in the guest dorms, the internet finally decides to tell me, at 3 a.m., that a man was shot six hours ago in Ashland, Virginia.

He was in a parking lot outside a restaurant.

It couldn’t have been me or Lio or Cody, because we’re all out of town. And none of us would have been in Virginia, anyway. It really couldn’t have been Lio, logically. It could not have been Lio.

But

it could have been Lio.

And I can’t get that thought out of my brain no matter what I do. It could have been Lio. We fought and we hung up and what if it had been Lio?

I still don’t believe it could have been me. I don’t know if I ever will. I don’t know if that stupid heartbeat in my head is ever going to shut up enough for me to realize that I’m human even though I am some big bad invincible teenager me me me. But Lio, Lio is human, Lio is a stupid imperfect human with stupid hair who gets drunk and stupid like a heart-aching fifteen-year-old and it could have been him and that is enough reason to be concerned.

This guy who was shot was thirty-seven, but twenty-two years ago he might have been someone’s Lio.

It could have been Lio.

There could have been a sniper in New York tonight.