The Past and Other Things That Should Stay Buried(16)
“About damn time!” July says when I reach the car, where she’s sitting on the trunk with her arms crossed. I guess one upside to being not-dead is that she can’t sweat and ruin her makeup. I’ve barely been outside for ten seconds and drops are already beading on my forehead and running down my spine. “When someone takes off, you’re supposed to follow them.”
Getting that last text from Rafi unbalanced me, and I snap at July without thinking. “Maybe I’m tired of chasing you. Did you ever think of that?”
July slides off the car and gets in my face. “What does that even mean?”
This is usually when I stand down, but not tonight, Satan. “This is our pattern,” I say. “You say something awful, we fight, you run off, and then I have to track you down and apologize when I’m not the one who screwed up!”
“You screw up plenty.”
“Remember sophomore year when you ‘borrowed’ my biology midterm take-home? And then lost it?” My hands are flying as I speak, and in the back of my mind I realize I’ve become my mother, but I have to file that realization away until I can process it later. “You didn’t lose yours, of course, and I had to grovel to Mr. Schwartz for a redo, which he gave me but only after penalizing me a whole letter grade.”
July flares her nostrils and backs off a little. “I remember. So?”
The defensiveness in her tone annoys me even more. “So I was justifiably angry, and you pulled your pissy vanishing act. Only, that time I decided that I wasn’t going to chase you. I was going to wait to see if you came to me. You didn’t. For a week. You cost me an A in biology, and yet, in the end, I was the one who apologized.”
“Cry me a river, build a bridge, and get over it.”
“I got over the test a long time ago,” I say. “And now I’m over being the one who always has to apologize. Christ, July! You died before coming to me to fix our friendship so that you didn’t have to say you were sorry.”
A scraggly man wearing way too many layers for the Florida summer stumbles between me and July on his way toward the road.
“Excuse you,” July says. But the way he’s weaving makes me pretty certain he’s not in the mindset to care. I kind of envy him.
When he’s moved past us, July rounds on me. “First of all: I’ve got nothing to apologize for, so if that’s what you’re waiting on, you can keep on waiting if it gets you off, but you’re going to be disappointed. Second: You think you’re the one who has to chase me? I crawled back from the dead for you!”
I motion at July and say, “I don’t know why this is happening, but I’d believe you returned from the dead for a slice of cake before I’d believe you returned for me.”
July’s eyes fly wide. “Fuck you, Dino.” She storms off toward the road and stops at the sidewalk.
When I catch up to her, I say, “I’m sorry.”
July’s quiet for a moment. Then she says, “I’m not ashamed of loving cake.”
“I know.”
The anger I felt in Monty’s evaporates, unlike the layer of sweat coating my arms and face and chest. Maybe it doesn’t matter who chases whom so long as the friendship survives. The trouble is that I’m not certain ours should. TV makes it seem like the majority of friendships die in fiery explosions of anger and recrimination, but my experience has been that most friendships simply fade. Chris Sanchez was my best friend in fifth grade. I don’t have a single memory of that year without him in it. And then sixth grade came and we weren’t friends anymore. We didn’t have a fight; we were still in the same class together. But the ephemeral ties that had bound us together for that year had disappeared. Maybe July and I hadn’t actually been Best Friends Forever. Maybe we’d only been Best Friends Until Someone Better Comes Along.
“I think Rafi told me he loves me,” I say. It’s a random change of subject, but we’ve nothing left to gain by arguing over who should do the chasing during a fight, and I can’t shake it from my mind. “He wrote ‘heart u,’ which isn’t the same as ‘love you,’ but it’s a baby step toward saying it. And I don’t know if he does. Or if I do. What if he says it and I don’t reciprocate?”
This is the longest I think July’s gone without interrupting me, so I nudge her. “July? You listening?”
“Hush!” she says, and points across the street. Jog is a busy six-lane road during the day, and it’s even worse at night. The drunk guy from before is staggering in the median looking like he’s going to try to cross.
“Stop!” July yells. The man stumbles into the road. A tan truck blares its horn and swerves, barely missing him, but the man looks like he has no idea what’s going on. “We’ve got to help him.” July tugs at my arm, but I pull her away from the road to wait for a gap to open. We dodge the cars and run across to the median, but now the man is in the middle of the street, cars weaving around him.
“Get out of the street, moron!” I call, but he’s still acting like he can’t hear me, so he’s either pretending or is completely smashed.
“I’m going after him,” July says. I grab her arm before she can run into the road and cause a crash. “Let me go!”
The man stumbles. He doesn’t see the accident about to happen. But I do. It’s a tricked-out Honda with an aftermarket exhaust screaming through the night, heading straight for the man. And the driver doesn’t look like he’s going to swerve. I yell and July cries out and the Honda’s driver finally crushes the brakes, but it’s too late. The tires squeal and the brake pads burn, but it’s too damn late. The car slams into the man, who doesn’t even see it coming, and he smashes into the windshield and flies across the hood. July tries to bury her face in my chest, but I disentangle myself from her and run toward the body—because surely he’s a body now and not a man. There’s no way anyone could have survived that.