This is me trying, p.25
This Is Me Trying, page 25
We fall to the ground in a heap. I feel nothing.
“I didn’t want to ruin it all,” I cry, sobs racking my body. “I wanted to fix it, I thought I could fix it.”
She holds my head closer, pulling me in. I’ve outgrown her. I can’t believe I was ever part of her, inside and now out. A tumor beyond fulguration or ablation.
“I’m sorry,” she says, and the apology vibrates through my back for my chest to absorb.
Bryce is dead. He’s dead.
He’s dead and he’s been dead and I know that, it’s all I think about, so why, why does it still feel like this? Like I’m being told for the first time, like someone shoved their hand through my skin and gripped my heart and squeezed. He’s been dead for what feels like minutes and also my whole life, and yet I still can’t believe it. He’s dead.
chapter forty-eight SANTIAGO
Here’s how it happened.
In my memories, I see the scene in third person, a removed party outside of my own body and role. It’s a few weeks before I’m set to move away, and I want to make a trade in Bryce’s yard as we’re gathering the last of the dead summer leaves. In the middle of the raking, I pull out what was meant to be a gift, and give Bryce my key to Bea’s house. I explain that he can give Bea his key to my house, and I can take her key to his house, not knowing he wouldn’t even make it another year there. Bea loved Abuelo, and I wanted her to have access to an extended family even without me, so it only felt right to transfer the keys around. Bryce and Bea were dating—it made sense for him to have the key to her house instead of mine. And though I never would have admitted it, maybe my biggest motivation was that I loved being around Bryce more than anything in the world—I’d miss it like breathing—and I wanted to bring a key to his home all the way across the country.
I wasn’t nervous for the conversation because Bryce is my best friend, but when the words leave my mouth casually, they enter his ears callously.
Bryce and I never fought before, which sounds like a lie when you’re talking about a friendship as long as ours. Though I’m thoroughly a liar now, I was honest back then. Maybe that’s why I wasn’t prepared for his anger.
He cast my actions in a new light, accusations battering me in a way only my own intrusive thoughts had before. Every bad thing I ever considered about myself spewed out of him in new flavors. I was selfish, I was senseless, I was so focused on my own existence that I hadn’t stopped to consider anyone else’s pain, I thought his life was so perfect. I was jealous of my best friend and wanted to steal something we’d always shared: Bea.
The memory is so worn now that I can’t recall most of the words verbatim, my own self-loathing doing a poor restoration job. But the end is perfectly preserved, crystal clear in both intention and intensity. Bryce was glad I was leaving, and he didn’t want me to talk to him ever again. Or to Bea. I should just leave them alone.
I kept one of those promises, but I’m not sure it counts for anything anymore.
* * *
Dust clings to my shoes as I walk home from the hotel, backdropped by dawn. I didn’t even check out properly, just left after waking, and my lack of self-preservation right now scares me, a test arriving when I hear the first car of the day. My thumb twitches but stays down.
Gravel crunches as the car slows behind me anyway, and I turn, shielding my eyes from the sun to watch as one window rolls down, exposing a familiar face.
“You know how to drive?” I ask.
Olive leans over. “Got my Junior Driver’s License last week.” The door unlocks.
I get inside, a little too exhausted to care about the legality, and yank at my tie, already a loose leash around my throat. “I’m surprised you’re up this early.”
“I’m visiting Bryce.”
“Oh.”
“My dad and Candace hate the cemetery, but Whitney goes a lot. I don’t normally join her.”
Half of me would be content never talking about Bryce again if it meant I stopped feeling this way, but I already know how that’d fail. The other half wonders if I’m even capable of forming a single thought that doesn’t connect back to him somehow; if I’m so stained by this loss that its color will bleed into everything I touch for the rest of my life. I think I loved him too much to ever wash my hands of it. “You don’t like going?”
“I didn’t like the reminder that he’s gone,” they admit. “Something changed my mind though. Recently.” Their gaze flashes to me quick enough that I could let it go, but I’m so tired of secrets—keeping and being kept from them.
“Is that something me?”
“Sort of.” I let them have a moment to consider how they want to say this. “When I told you at Bryce’s birthday that I wasn’t hurt by how you handled our date, I was lying. I knew you didn’t like me, but I wanted to make it work. Me and you. My childhood crush. It was like I was owed it, after everything.”
“I’m flattered, but—”
They hold up their hand, so I shut my mouth.
“Grief tricks you. All the death and finality—I wanted it to mean something. I made all these promises to myself about how I wouldn’t waste my life. I wouldn’t fight with my sister or parents or Candace, or spend hours in my room alone anymore. I’d travel the world, I’d write books, I’d make every moment count and I’d never spend them being afraid or angry or sad.”
“What happened?”
“Life.” They laugh, flicking their turn signal. “When Bryce died, my entire existence boiled down to a before and an after. I thought the after had to be unrecognizable from the before. Someone I loved was dead, from suicide of all things. There was no way the world could just continue on.” Olive blinks away tears. “Whitney and I bickered the morning of the funeral. A week later, I snapped at Candace for asking me to do chores when I was watching a show. I ignored my dad when he needed help in the yard that whole summer.”
I think of that promise to Bryce again, how easy keeping it seemed in the early aftermath of his death, a way to honor him that required nothing more than betraying my only living best friend from afar. Then I came back here and saw her, and suddenly the difficulty mounted.
“One day I woke up and the after was my life now,” Olive continues. “Which meant that it came with everything life has to offer, fear and anger and sadness included. I could try to live a better life, but it was always going to be a life. They’re inherently imperfect. I think that’s kind of the point.”
We reach a stop sign and they pause, leaning back, hands easy in their lap. “Realizing you weren’t going to like me back reminded me that just because my brother died doesn’t mean I won’t still have my heart broken a million other ways. That’s the price for the good stuff, you know?”
I don’t get it, how they could have worked this out while the rest of us have been fighting for scraps of anything even akin to coping. I spent years playing make believe about my dead best friend being alive, and in some weird attempt at atonement, treated my living best friend like she was dead to me. Bea pushed away everyone who tried to help bind her wounds just so she could exhibit some control over ripping them fresh every day. I thought Whitney had it all figured out, but a heartbroken girl in a prom dress immediately comes to mind, her limp hair sagging alongside her mouth.
“What if the good stuff is covered in the bad?” I ask, realizing that my greatest moments of happiness this year were always wrapped up in something that had touched my grief. Because I am my grief always, even on the good days.
Olive shrugs. “I don’t know. Our grief might all be the same, but it’s still different.”
We reach my street and they unlock the doors before they’ve even properly stopped the car. I go to unbuckle my seat belt, but pause. “I shouldn’t have led you on by saying yes to that date. I’m really sorry.”
They smile, and it looks sincere. “I’ve been through worse.”
* * *
I crawl into bed, suit and dust and all, and scratch my forehead. The urge to scratch it again the same way, in the same spot, rises to the surface so naturally, it’s like breathing. And the same burn that would fill my chest if I stopped breathing fills my head when I don’t do it.
I’m taunting the universe, and I will be punished for it. Olive is going to wreck their car on the way to the cemetery. Abuelo is going to have a heart attack while I’m at work. Bea is going to step wrong going down the stairs and break her neck on the fall. Pa isn’t going to look both ways as he crosses a bar’s parking lot, and he’ll be mowed down by a drunk driver.
They wash over me, vivid and horrid, and my entire body itches. But I don’t scratch.
I shut my eyes and tuck my hands under my back, painfully aware that I’m here and I’m alive and this is real, and I do not run from it.
chapter forty-nine BEATRIZ
Mom hasn’t left me alone since I came home from prom. She happens to clean the hall when I shower. She needs my help cooking dinner. She calls off work because she’s tired. I’ve decided this treatment is fair. It reminds me of right after Bryce died. But there’s something different this time, something I’m still absorbing.
In my lowest moment, when the world felt like it was crumbling down on me again, I came home. I put myself in front of someone who loves me.
I don’t know what to do with this.
The closest thing Mom gives me to alone time is letting me stay inside to do homework while she tends to the front yard’s weeds. We have Monday off for teachers’ conferences, so I can defer reality for one more day.
A knock at the door startles Lottie as I pet her while doing calc proofs. Mom must’ve accidentally locked herself out.
But I find Dustin standing on my porch instead. With his hands tucked in his back pockets, he smiles easily at me. “Hey. Your mom said you’re studying. Mind if I come inside?”
“Santiago isn’t here,” I say.
“I know.”
“Oh.” I stare at Dustin for a beat. He maintains his smile. “Right, sorry. Uh, come on in.”
I’m aware he’s seen me naked, but seeing me without makeup right now feels more intimate. When I sit back down on the couch, he joins me.
I tolerate the silence for ten seconds. “I don’t mean to be rude, but why exactly are you here?”
He wipes his palms on his jeans. “Courtney and I broke up yesterday.” I wait for him to go on. He doesn’t.
“I’m … sorry?”
“Thanks,” he says, amused by my attempt. “It needed to happen before we made each other as miserable in college as we have in high school.” My face must show surprise, though I don’t feel it. “I don’t mean to be blunt or overstep here, but I wanted to ask about what happened between the two of us last year.”
I should’ve seen this coming. Many lessons have been thrown at me this year. The most oddly specific one that I’ve been hit with over and over again is that sleeping with someone and trying to pretend you didn’t only works for so long. “Okay.”
He takes a deep breath. “I’m not asking because I’m expecting anything here, I promise. Ending things with Courtney after so long just has me thinking about a lot of stuff, and I never understood why you picked me.”
I know what he’s asking. “You weren’t the first one after Bryce.”
“Really?”
I nod, somewhat relieved to know Whitney never told him about us. “But you…” The words are so hard to get out. “I half lied to Santiago about why I did it when I told him about it.”
“I wasn’t sure if he knew,” he says. “What was the half lie?”
“I told him I did it because I wanted the whole school to know.”
He blows out a breath. “I guess I sorta fucked that up for you, huh?”
“Yeah, if only you’d been more of a gossip.”
“I’ll work on it.”
We share a smile. “But that wasn’t the only reason,” I go on. The moment turns serious again. “I think … I don’t know, I think I wanted to prove something to myself. That it didn’t all start and end with him.”
Dustin nods at this. “I don’t know what the four of you had together, but it seemed pretty special.”
“We were just kids,” I say. It’s an excuse, a dismissal, and a plea.
“We still are,” he says softly.
“I’m sorry about Courtney,” I repeat, meaning it more this time.
“Thanks. You’re the only other person I’ve ever been with,” he admits, needlessly embarrassed. “I haven’t even kissed anyone but the two of you. And I always wondered if I did something wrong by not talking to you about what happened afterward. But then Courtney wanted me back and … it was a cycle, I think? If she wanted me, I was wanted. If she didn’t, I felt like no one would. You sort of challenged that for me, until I realized it was a one-time thing.”
“It wasn’t really about you,” I offer, and his eyes say he understands this too. Just as much as picking him wasn’t about him, not pursuing him after wasn’t either. “I’m sorry for involving you.”
“I was a willing participant,” he says, grinning a little.
“You’re a good person,” I add, because I know what it feels like to classify yourself as the problem. His grin deepens into something sweeter, and I’m glad that he doesn’t thank me again.
We’re graduating soon. Though Dustin and I have never been close, it sinks in my stomach that we won’t be in school together anymore. Whitney, Olive, Abby. Courtney and Rick. All those familiar faces, for better or for worse. This was never going to be my life forever.
Dustin slaps his hands on his thighs. “Well, I should probably get out of your hair.” He pauses and looks at my freshly shaved head. Mom helped me last night. “Sorry.”
I laugh. “I’ll walk you out.”
I think that’ll be it for our conversation, but he turns around at the door. “I don’t know what happened with you and Santiago at prom, but I heard yelling. Are you okay?”
I wonder how many times someone has to get asked that question before they give an honest answer. For me, it’s whatever number this time is. “Not really. But I’m trying to be.”
He nods. “That’s what counts.”
Dustin and Mom exchange pleasantries as he walks past her to his car. Once he’s driven away, Mom approaches, but before she gets the words out of her mouth, I speak.
“I need to go talk to someone.”
* * *
I’ve been standing outside of Candace’s house for ten minutes now. It’s the first time I’ve left my home without makeup in years.
I know Whitney isn’t here because she and Abby are cramming in their final Good Samaritan hours helping with the teachers’ conferences. Olive is with them because they may be the only Greensville student in existence who plans to finish their hours before senior year. And Phil’s at work, his car absent from the driveway. This has to happen now.
My feet just haven’t gotten the memo.
I jolt when the front door opens. My heart pounding in my chest, I watch Candace make her way down the front yard double-fisting trash bags. I’m convinced she hasn’t noticed me until she looks up and doesn’t flinch.
“I was going to let you come inside at your own pace, but Whitney forgot to take this out earlier, and it’s stinking up my kitchen.” Candace lets the bags drop in a noisy thump. “She isn’t home.” The way she says it tells me she knows what we were to each other once upon a time.
I borrow Dustin’s boldness. “I’m actually here to see you.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” I swallow, but my throat stays dry.
It’s been haunting me for almost three years now. I didn’t want to accept anything about Bryce’s death. The role I played in it, the fog of life that followed. The gnawing in my chest I struggle to believe I’ll ever escape.
I never understood one thing, though. And now is the only time I think I’ll ever be brave enough to ask.
“Why have you never confronted me about knowing Bryce was depressed?” I ask. “You told my mom that I was.”
A week after his death. Mom sobbing in the living room while I sat motionless on the couch before her. Questions I didn’t have answers to pouring out with her tears. But Bryce was dead. Why the fuck did anything as trivial as my feelings matter?
And then there was Candace, driving away from our house to go plan her son’s funeral, a copy of the letter I never got to read for myself folded neatly in her pocket. I only know what it said about me, which was enough.
Candace picks up the bags and walks past me. I watch as she drops them in the bins and wipes her hands together. “We don’t have to do this.” It’s both a warning and a request, her voice tender on the edge of raw.
“Yes we do,” I say. My voice is splitting at the seams too, but I can’t walk away now.
She sighs and pulls off her glasses. Wiping the lenses with the bottom of her silk blouse, she considers the sky instead of me. I wonder if, without the thick glass clearing her vision, she could almost pretend I’m him.
“His letter wasn’t for anyone but us.” Her tone is bored, but tension underlies the words. She’s forcing the monotony to keep the tears at bay. I’m familiar with the strategy. “Your mother needed to know that you were struggling too. The rest of it—”
“You could’ve told people. Blamed me.”
She shakes her head. “If you wanted everyone to know, you could’ve told them yourself.”
“This isn’t about me.”
“Isn’t it?” she says.
I find the the courage to say what we both know I’m getting at. “You should hate me.”
“You were a child.”
“That’s not a denial.”
She exhales in frustration. “This is a ridiculous conversation. Go home, Beatriz.” She turns to leave.
“I could’ve stopped it.”
I tried to yell, but it came out too quiet. Candace freezes in place all the same.
