Chapter Forty-Nine
FORTY-NINE
There is a particular way of missing someone, the way you can only miss your best humans when you’re fourteen years old, when you go your separate ways outside your houses and your skin feels cold when they turn away. Ted remembers how he had felt it already as they sat there together in the car outside the museum. He remembers feeling frozen, even though the sun was shining.
“I’m not going to win the competition, you’re just going to be disappointed…,” the artist whispered.
He was probably expecting Joar to get angry, but instead his friend just leaned over the steering wheel and pointed calmly to the large white building.
“You’re going to fucking win. But that isn’t the important thing.”
“Then what is?” the artist asked.
“The important thing is that you understand that you belong there,” Joar answered.
The world is full of miracles, but none greater than how far a young person can be carried by someone else’s belief in them.
They sat there together, in the roar of the car’s air-conditioning, with their eyes closed and their chests rocking. And that was their whole childhood. They sat there until Joar muttered:
“Seriously, Ali…”
“It WASN’T me!” she immediately yelled.
“No, no,” the artist giggled then, “because it was me!”
They threw the car doors open and tumbled out, lying on the grass and coughing as if they’d been poisoned. It had started to get really windy, there was a storm brewing, but not even that helped disperse the stench.
“What have you been eating? A corpse?” Joar groaned.
“It’s those cookies Ted always brings with him,” the artist said defensively.
They lay there gasping on the ground next to each other, and it was Ali who turned her head and caught sight of something utterly wonderful: on the lawn outside the museum was a sprinkler. Ten seconds later, they were all soaked.
Those were their last breaths before August, summer no longer felt endless, soon they would be adults. Telling stories is hard, but if someone really wanted to tell the story of those four friends, they could have stopped there by the car outside the museum that day. Because then it would have been a happy ending.
But then Joar reached for his backpack, shaking it to feel the comforting weight of the knife, and to his surprise, he noticed a smell. At first he couldn’t place it, but it smelled good, it smelled… clean. The panic struck him all at once, he tore open the zipper of his backpack, peered down to where the knife should have been, but all he found there was soap.