Magonia(23)

Last year, Aza signed up for the talent show and came onstage, clicked play on a beatbox MP3, and started doing the strangest whistles over the top of it. I sat in the audience, dying.
Afterward, she said to me, “How’s your Silbo?” and cackled. Turns out Silbo is a whistled language from the Canary Islands. She won that round, though not the talent show. I still don’t know what she was saying. She wouldn’t translate.
I turn left at the cemetery and get in line behind Aza’s parents and Eli, in their beat-up blue car.
I honk: I CAN’T BELIEVE I KEPT FORGETTING YOU WERE DYING.
Aza’s dad is driving. He flashes me a sign, and then he honks his own Morse, actual Morse, carefully done.
FOREVER. He told me he was going to do that. I honk it in repetition, and so does everyone else. They don’t even know what they’re saying. But her dad and I do. Aza’s mom and Eli do too. I can see them in the car, trying not to break down.
Brief pi recitation.
So, back to me showing up at her birthday party when we were five, thinking my Halloween costume would make me invisible. It kind of did. I walked a mile, this really small alligator by the side of the road, and nobody busted me. I was on a mission.
No one liked Aza back then. She’d already resigned herself to it, no friends, mostly stuck inside at recess. Everyone said she was gross and contagious.
I don’t really need other people. Well, I need one other person, and she’s gone and shitshitshit.
I honk my apology list. It’s not much of a list, really. Just one huge thing.
Aza’s family, with input from me, decided to do this graveside, because the whole memorial thing works better if you can scream it, and that’s what we’re all about to be doing.
Crazy wind. All these people surrounding a hole in the ground, like something’s going to come out of it, rather than go in.
We thought her making it to sixteen mattered. Why? What does sixteen even signify? Nothing. It’s this nothing notion. It’s not even a prime number.
I look at everyone from school, Jenny Green and company. The whole last few days have been full of people getting passes to get out of class, at which point they smoke behind the cafeteria. Historically, Aza and I would’ve made fun of them, grieving for someone they didn’t love.
Aza didn’t especially believe in grief. This is inconvenient. I thought I didn’t believe in grief either, but now me and Aza have another divide, another difference. I see Mr. Grimm standing off to the side wearing sunglasses and a hat. He looks as though he’s been crying too.
My moms walk up behind me. Carol sighs in a way that says she was fervently hoping I wouldn’t be wearing what I’m wearing.
“Really?” says Carol. “Couldn’t manage to keep the suit on, huh?”
“You knew he wouldn’t,” says Eve. She even smiles.
“I thought he would,” Carol says. “I even called the costume place. They said the alligator was still right there in the stockroom.”
What Carol doesn’t know is that the costume place has two alligator suits. One my size, and one Aza’s. It was part of her birthday surprise.
“It’s Aza’s funeral,” I say. “She’d have liked it.”
I put the head back on. Eve gives me a little thumbs-up, but I catch Carol looking at me. Just when I’m honestly a little worried, thinking she’s 100 percent not on my side, she says “W? ài n?,” which is “I love you” in Chinese, followed by “Nakupenda,” which is the same thing in Swahili. We learned to say I love you together in what felt like a thousand languages when I was little. That’s the kind of mom Carol is.
“Even though you’re trouble,” Carol says, her voice going a little sobby. “You don’t need to be sorry for what I bet you said you were sorry for.” I’d forgotten I’d told her about the apology lists. “It wasn’t your fault Aza died. You know that, right?”
I look at her from inside my alligator suit. No, I do not know that.
My mom presses her hand to the center of my chest and goes quickly to her chair.
When I first realized that Aza wasn’t going to live as long as me, I told Aza all the classic things people tell people who are dying. I said, “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow,” etcetera etcetera.
Aza was like: “True, except how often, seriously, Jason, do people get hit by buses and die?” Then she cruelly handed me stats. Not that often, as it turns out.
Aza’s mom throws her arms around my alligator self, and I walk Aza’s parents to their seats. Both of them lean hard on me.
The grave they’re going to put Aza in is really small.
091736371787214684409012249534301465495853710507922796
When it’s my turn to talk, I take off the alligator head, and recite a little chunk of pi. Then I say, as fast as possible: “So, you may or may not know that people keep finding more digits of that number. I wanted to give Aza all the digits. I tried that, the first time we met. I found out later that she knew more digits than I did. I was trying to give her something that wouldn’t ever end.”
People look at me. There is a collective adult sympathy noise that makes me want to puke.
“That’s it,” I say. “That’s all. I’m fine. No, don’t worry.”
People make the faces of a comfort army. In my head, I’m frantically pi.
Aza’s family does their thing.
Aza’s Mom: “She was sick, but would I have traded her for someone who wasn’t? If it meant I’d lose the person she was? No.”
Aza’s Dad: <shakes head, can’t talk>