The Truth About Keeping Secrets(52)

I didn’t know what to say so I didn’t say anything. Just looked at her face. I saw it as it had been when we were six, doing dumb stuff and playing Ghosts and kickball, and that time one of our neighbour’s dogs got eaten by a coyote so we took it upon ourselves to hunt them. Things were so simple then and so horrible now.

After that I mostly ate lunch in the computer lab, slipping bits of sandwich out of my bag while scrolling mindlessly through Reddit.

But June was always a constant. June stayed.

Ten minutes there. Ten minutes back.

One night I did the math – I’d spent thirty-three hours in her car. That seemed like a lot of hours to me, given that the additional seven hours between seeing her in the morning and in the afternoon were dedicated to her too. Sometimes I worried that I liked to think about her more than I liked to be with her. But then I’d spend those ten minutes with her again, and I realized nothing compared, nothing compared to June in control, eyes flickering, laughing. I couldn’t get enough of her.

I became obsessed with her hands. How they were kind of perpetually moving, twitching, the knuckles on her skinny fingers popping every time she remembered to crack them, which was often. I liked to watch them when she spoke, when she curled them round the occasional vanilla latte, when she ran them through her hair. I loved June’s hands. I loved June’s collarbone. I loved June’s hair. I loved her laugh and her nose and her purple varsity jacket. I loved June’s everything.

I was beginning to think I loved without there needing to be a common noun to follow.

I had sort of convinced myself that us going to the River Styx – her taking me to the River Styx – was indicative of our relationship having blossomed, and that maybe we’d do things like that more often. Truthfully, though, it just seemed like everything had sort of gone back to the way it was. Normal was fine, of course. Normal was more than I’d ever hoped for.

But I wanted more of her. I wanted all of her. And that was a problem.

Apart from that, for a time, I felt like I was actually getting better.

Not actually better. But a little. I’d settled into a comfortable sort of melancholy, watched the apocalypse reach its four-month anniversary, and then its fifth. I actually started to enjoy the support group sessions: Leo made them palatable at first, but the other kids weren’t bad either. The ToD drifted further and further down my recently visited pages until it disappeared completely. The messages, weirdly, seemed to have stopped. Maybe they’d realized that I talked to the police; maybe, if it was a bully, even they realized that they’d gone too far. Either way, I ended up sort of forgetting about it.

I don’t want to make it seem like everything was fixed. Because it absolutely wasn’t. When you tell a story, people tend to get bored of you repeating the same things over and over. And if I were to repeat myself, I’d tell you about all the nights where nothing helped. Where Mom and I didn’t speak. Where I thought maybe if I was dead, then I wouldn’t have to worry about dying any more. Where I went back to the ToD. Where I missed Dad more than I could even say.

My life fragmented into fortnightly support group sessions and ten-minute intervals. Like if you zoomed out on my life, there’d just be these occasional snippets of joy, split up by vast emptiness, and nothing could bring them together. Like I wasn’t really living the rest of the time. The truth was, I wasn’t; I found it impossible to keep happy without stimulus.

But maybe that was just how lives were. Wading through all the shit to get to the good stuff.

And sometimes, when I was really low, I fantasized about June ferrying me home after school and mentioning that she’d finally had enough of whatever plagued her, and then the two of us would decide, you know what, let’s just leave! And we’d drive and drive and never have to go home like some Neverland lost girls and that could just be my new reality, and I’d say but we have school tomorrow, and she’d say what’s school, and then I’d say but I’m grieving, and the universe would say what’s grief, and then we’d spend the rest of forever in the woods, lying in bed and brushing each other’s hair and skinny-dipping in the freshwater.

Gerry had mentioned journaling, or just any kind of writing, as being a good way to keep your feelings in order. I guess what I wrote ended up being like a short story. Or a script. I wasn’t really sure what it was. Gerry said that writing was the quickest path to the soul, which made sense, but I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to get to my soul at all, for fear of what I’d find when I did. Still, it felt good to get the words out of me.

My story was about a girl who’s walking through the woods and finds a metal pipe sticking up from the ground.

She puts an ear to the opening and hears something down there, like someone’s muttering to themselves. She asks if there’s anyone there, and a face – genderless, kind of ghostly – appears. Not all at once, because the opening is too narrow, but she makes out an eye, a nose, a mouth. And the person underground says Oh, thank God you found me, I’m trapped down here. Buried alive. Asks her to help.

The girl says of course she will.

The person underground says they’re hungry, and thirsty, so she drops down food and water.

The person underground says there’s a lock keeping them down there, and maybe if they unlocked it they could get out. The girl sends down a paperclip, a knife, a hairpin. Nothing works.