Little Do We Know(65)

“Addison helped you with this?”

“Mm-hmm.”

I reached into my pocket and pulled out his hand-drawn map. I handed it to him and he held it up to the light. “You drew that two weeks ago. Can you believe that? It seems like it was months ago.”

He turned it over in his hands. “Yeah, it does.”

“Well, I thought we’d better get planning. Prom. Graduation. Road trip.”

“I like the sound of that,” he said, looking up at me.

“Good.” I sat up, folded my legs underneath me, and started pulling books from the stack. “I went to the library. Check it out. We have Northern California Camping.” I held it in the air. Then I reached for another one. “Beach Sleeps: A California Camping Guide.”

Luke smiled. “Sleeping is good.”

“And California Coast Camping.”

“Nice. A for alliteration,” he joked.

“And my personal favorite.” I held it up. “Curious George Goes Camping. I’d figured I’d better start with the basics.”

We spent the next hour going through the books, plotting our trip, stopping to kiss, and breaking for s’mores. I wasn’t sure if it made him feel better, but it gave me what I needed: time alone with him and something to look forward to. He already seemed more like himself.

We were cuddled up on the patio sofa in front of the fire pit, when he kissed the top of my head and said, “There’s something I want to show you.” He reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out his phone. “But I’m afraid you’re going to be mad.”

“What is it?”

“Promise you won’t be mad.”

The last thing I wanted to do was get in a fight with him. “I won’t be mad.”

“It’s about that night I got hurt.” He said it like he was dreading my reaction, and I sighed. I didn’t want to talk about that again. I was trying to move on to camping and s’mores and good things that had nothing at all to do with almost losing him.

“Look,” he said, shaking his head. “I know what you’re thinking. You want me to stop dwelling on what happened. And trust me, I want that, too. But I can’t. I’d love to turn off my brain and make this whole thing go away, but it’s not that easy.” He got quiet. And then he handed me his phone. I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, and he gestured toward it with his chin. “Play it.”

I hit the button, and Luke appeared in the frame. The room around him was dark and his face was in shadow, but I could tell it was him.

“Hi. My name is Luke. To be honest, I’m not really sure why I’m doing this.” He looked off to one side and then back at the camera. “I died eleven days ago.” He said it casually, like it was no big deal. “I was dead for three minutes. Three minutes probably doesn’t seem like a long time, but it is.”

I sat up straight and held the phone in both hands. I never took my eyes off the screen. Luke kept talking, then he suddenly stopped. “Ask me something,” he said.

And then I heard a girl’s voice. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

I’d know that voice anywhere.

In the video, Luke kept talking. The party. Driving to my house. Blacking out behind the wheel. I tried to listen to what he was saying, but I couldn’t get past hearing Hannah’s voice.

Luke talked about the thick, warm water and the room without walls and how he heard Hannah say, “You’re not finished yet,” and suddenly, the water was gone and he was back. He said he didn’t want to be there. He talked about not being afraid of dying. And then the screen went black.

I stared at him. “Why didn’t you tell me any of this?”

“I didn’t know how to.”

“But you knew how to tell Hannah?”

He was quiet. “I can’t explain it, Emory. I feel like I can talk to her. Maybe it’s because she was the one who found me that night.”

“So, if I’d been the one to find you, would you have told me instead?” I waited for him to answer, but he didn’t have to; his face said it all.

“When did you make this video?”

“Last Tuesday?”

I replayed the details of the day in my mind. We’d spent lunch together. He’d sat in the back of the theater after school and watched my Our Town rehearsal, and then we went back to his house for Calletti Spaghetti and everything felt so totally normal, like it had before. I stuck around for a long time afterward. We talked. We kissed. He seemed a little distracted, but not distant. Addison drove me home. I wanted him to sneak out later, climb our ladder, and hang out with me longer, but I knew he wasn’t allowed to drive, so I didn’t even ask. But he’d snuck out and driven over to my house that night anyway. Not to see me—to see Hannah.

“It felt good to talk about it. I know you want to forget the whole thing and move on, but I need to remember. You have no idea what life has been like in my head. This huge thing happened to me two weeks ago, and I swear, it’s like that Groundhog Day movie, repeating over and over again, all day long. But talking about it helped. I felt better yesterday. Last night, I slept for twelve hours! I haven’t slept like that since I got hurt.”

I wanted to be happy for him. I wanted to be understanding. I wanted to let the whole thing with Hannah go, but I couldn’t. It was impossible to wrap my head around it. He’d talked to her about everything. He hadn’t talked to me about any of it.