Here So Far Away(73)

I waited in his roooooom.

His robe was open when he came in, his wrist wrapped in a tensor bandage and swinging by his side like a club, and when he screamed, he found that note he hadn’t been able to hit in the shower. “Jesus,” he said, collapsing on the end of the bed. “Where did you come from?”

“Sometimes it’s all a big surprise.”

Thank god he had boxers on. He pulled his robe closed and took a good look at me. “Nice face,” he said.

“Nice wrist. Is it broken?”

“Just sprained.”

“Thought you had a stomach thing.”

“I did. And this. I came to see you when you were suspended, but your parents wouldn’t let me in, so I had this idea that I could get to your bedroom window from the garage roof.”

“God, how did we not hear you?”

“I did a trial run on our garage roof.” He picked up an old duffel bag from the floor and started rifling in it. “I wanted to bring you something. Two somethings.”

“Aren’t we fighting?”

“We had a fight.” Something One—small, hard, and plastic—sailed across the bed and hit me in the shoulder. Han Solo. I’d given him to Bill in seventh grade, after Han and I had grown apart. “Peace offering,” Bill said. This was followed by a baggie filled with five brown-and-green-flecked cookies. “Birthday gift.”

“Gee, thanks. Pot?”

“I’m not sure. Doug was clearing out his stash a few weeks ago. The cookie part is stale, but the other part should still work. Go ahead.”

“Not right now.”

“Why not? Did you drive over?”

“No, I walked, but . . .”

How could I get high, sitting in Bill’s room next to his gently bubbling fish tank, like it was an ordinary Saturday night?

“I actually came to talk to you,” I said. “It’s kind of serious.”

I took a breath, located that lower gear inside myself, and looked into Bill’s anxious face. Which is when I decided that getting high next to Bill’s gently bubbling fish tank was exactly what I needed that Saturday night. If it gave me the courage to say what had to be said, great. If it only gave me a few hours outside of my own head—well, that’d do too.

As a wise man once said, if you can’t make it better, you can at least make it blurry.

“How long before these kick in?” I asked, when we’d downed cookie number four. We were alternating between cookie bites and grapes, and the grapes felt like they were expanding in my stomach.

“Beats me.”

I stroked Han’s tiny black vest. “He was my one true love. Course, I was kinda confused about whether I wanted to be him or do him.”

“Is that what you wanted to talk about?”

“Sort of.”

“You’ll find someone who’s not plastic.”

“What if I don’t?”

Or worse. What if I thought I found someone again, and I was wrong—again?

“See, I don’t think you’re a person who doesn’t find it,” he said. “You’re a person who people fall in love with at first sight. Maybe it passes for some of them, but not all. Not me. You’re like an infection that keeps coming back. Are you crying?”

“A bit.”

“Fuck. I meant in a nonsexual way, right? No offense, but it’s all no-man’s-land under that sweater.”

He scooched over. Then he scooched a little closer, a little closer still, and when he put his arms around me, I needed that, more than anything, more than oxygen. No one had hugged me after Francis died. No one except Francis had hugged me for a very long time. It wasn’t just being held; I needed to hold someone. To feel Bill’s curls and neck scruff against my cheek, his sinewy teenage boy undercarriage beneath the Dorito layer, his heartbeat, his breathing. I needed to feel someone I loved alive in my grip.

“There, there,” he said. “There, there, there.”

That was the moment to tell him. I meant to. I’d gone over there to unleash it all because screw Francis. My grades were down, my body was shriveled, and nobody was there to sniff out my lies or squeeze me when I needed it most. If it hadn’t been for Francis, I might have made up with Lisa. I’d definitely have been a better friend to Bill, and I wouldn’t let Francis lose me the one friend I had left.

I couldn’t do it, though. Confessing was supposed to make it all real, bring it out of the shadows, and shine a holy cleansing light. It always had with Lisa. But Bill didn’t want to spend hours dissecting the last year like a fetal pig. I could tell by the way he patted my hair and kept rubbing my face on the cuff of his robe. He’d never seen me full-on cry before and just wanted me to stop—which I did, because being with my buddy again made me feel human for the first time since they pulled Francis’s car from the ravine. For now, that was enough.

“Look,” Bill said. “The grapes are breathing.”

“No, they aren’t.” I looked at the grapes. “Ugch, they are.”

“And the guppies are going dwoop-dwoop.”

I put my hand up. “Stop saying things. You say things and then they happen.”

When did he get so annoying, with all the breathing and the blinking and the arm hair? He’d started swatting at something that I’m pretty sure wasn’t there.