Chapter 4
I plop my tray onto the lunch table in my usual spot between Asha and Lucia. Asha eyes my lunch choices and I know what’s coming next. I smack her hand away before it can get to my plate.
“Hey!” She rubs her hand and pouts. “But you have an extra!” she says, pointing to a glistening pair of garlic breadsticks.
“Correction,” I say. “I have two breadsticks. No extra. These are both essential to my well-being.” I take one in each hand and start alternating bites to rub it in.
Ever since Ruth the lunch lady’s son took my dad’s course at community college, she’s been giving me little bonuses at lunch.
One of the few perks of living in a small town where everyone knows everyone.
“Look, I was attempting to save you from an inevitable carb coma, but you do you, my double-fisting friend.” She flips her hair. “And as the natural-born lady that I am, I won’t even comment on the phallic spectacle that is happening right now.”
“Mmmmmm, phallus,” I say. I caress a breadstick.
“You are disgusting,” Asha says, delighted. Then she knits her brow as she looks at me more closely. “Disgusting and injured. Hatts, what the hell happened to your head?”
I touch my forehead where the still-prominent bump is. “Ugh, it is a story simultaneously embarrassing and boring, and I will give you the rest of this breadstick if you don’t make me tell it.”
“Deal!” Asha says. She plucks the breadstick out of my hand and takes a large bite off the end.
Lucia is rolling her eyes on the other side of me. She has no patience for Asha’s and my antics. She reaches into her backpack and pulls out a stack of flyers. “Hey, can you two help me pass these out after class today?”
Before I can answer, Nolan and Jeff sit down with their trays, debating loudly as usual. From the sound of it, Nolan is once again trying to convince Jeff that the country should more fully embrace soccer because it’s the most exciting sport and Americans are missing out.
“Nothing that ends with a score of zero-zero most of the time is exciting!” Jeff says, throwing his arms out for emphasis.
He has room to do it because Jeff and Nolan have seated themselves one seat apart from each other out of habit.
The seat in the middle, the seat directly across from me, is Mason’s.
I pick up the top flyer on the stack. It’s an invitation to a 5K to benefit the Epilepsy Foundation, and the back is printed with a sign-up form for pledges. This is Lucia’s way of coping. She’s not student council president for nothing. Her default stance is action.
Asha is looking over my shoulder at the flyer. “Did you talk to Mason’s family about this?” she asks Lucia when the boys have both taken a pause from their debate to chew. “Maybe they don’t want a spotlight on the whole thing.”
Lucia gives her a “Don’t you know me at all?” sort of look. “Of course I did. I asked his mom when I brought her all the stuff from Mason’s locker.”
Wait, his locker? How did she get in his locker? Did she have the combination? Or maybe the janitor let her in. This is a lot to take in. I wish I had gotten to clean out his locker. Did she find the Post-its?
The first day of school this year, I found a Post-it slipped through the crack in my locker.
It read, Sloths are three times stronger than humans.
Sloths are my favorite animal, so of course I already knew that fact.
There was no identifying information on the note, but I could recognize Mason’s handwriting anywhere.
The next day I went to his locker and popped in a Post-it of my own, with the fact about sloths that had originally sparked my interest in them: Sloths are blind.
Since then, Post-its had been going back and forth every morning—looking forward to the next one had been helping me get out of bed more than my alarm clock.
Sloths can fall 100 feet without hurting themselves.
It takes sloths a month to digest a leaf.
No one knows how long sloths live. Until that night at the lake, of course. Then the notes stopped.
I want to ask Lucia about the Post-its, but I can’t figure out a way to know if she saw them without drawing attention to them, so I stay quiet.
“I’m just surprised,” Asha is saying. “Because when I talked to Mason’s mom, she seemed pretty, um, denial-y about it. Very chipper.”
“Uh-huh,” Nolan agrees. “I went over there with some tuna debacle my mom made, and his mom’s always been a little … intense, but that day if you’d told me she’d had eight Red Bulls I would’ve been like, yeah, I’m seeing that.”
So everybody’s been over there. To pay their respects, to do the ritual.
Except me. I picture myself standing on their doorstep and Mrs. Leary slamming the door in my face.
Or worse, inviting me in to explain in detail why she’s never liked me and how her son was always too good to even be seen with me.
“Yeah.” Asha is nodding. “She’s brittle. So, Lu, I don’t know, maybe wait a while?”
“I mean, I want to be respectful,” Lucia says, sounding like we just accused her of being the opposite, “but can’t we be respectful and do something?
This sitting around and doing nothing is making me spin out.
He’s slipping away. Don’t you feel that?
Every day it’s harder to remember what he looked like in my mind.
What he sounded like. I don’t want to forget.
” She’s suddenly on the edge of tears, like she’s been holding it together but the slightest breeze might split the seams of her composure wide open. It scares me a little.
But Asha thrives in the real. She often refers to herself as “the provocateur,” and she does have a tendency to get people to emotional places.
So she also gets a lot of practice with the calming back down part.
She touches my arm and gives me a look, and I immediately switch seats with her.
Then she takes both of Lucia’s hands in hers and brings them up close to her face. Lucia’s eyes are brimming.
“We are never going to forget him. You hear me?” This is a rhetorical question, because even though it is hushed, the conviction in her voice gives each syllable diamond clarity.
It feels like the rest of the cafeteria, the rest of the world, has fallen away as we huddle together in this intensity bubble of Asha’s. “Never ever. Not for one second.”
“Okay,” Lucia whispers. “Good.”
“He’s still ours. He’ll always be a member of the Beaver Bunch.” Then Asha relaxes her hypnotizing posture a bit. We all exhale.
“Yes. He’s ours,” Lucia says. She clears her throat.
Then she reaches into her incredibly well-organized bag and produces a pack of travel tissues.
She pulls one out for herself, and passes the rest of the pack across the table to Jeff.
He blows his nose hard. This is a perfect example of what I love about their coupleness.
Lucia’s pain makes Jeff cry, and in return she is there ready with a tissue for him before a single tear has a chance to fall.
This is the first I’ve seen of my friends’ sensitive underbellies about Mason. We’ve all been brave-facing it alone, even though we’re basically going through the same thing. Does it make me feel better or worse now to know that they’re suffering, too? A little of both, I think.
“Where do you think he is now?” I ask suddenly.
Part of my solitary denial has been to studiously not think too much about the Mason encounters I’ve been having except when I’m actually having them, but if one of my friends saw him, too?
That would mean he was real and I’m not mentally unraveling.
I realize how badly I want him to be real, to just have a little bit more of him.
“Like, are you asking if we believe in an afterlife?” Nolan responds, his mouth now full of spaghetti.
“I guess.”
Nolan swallows, eager. He’s clearly been giving it some thought.
“If you subscribe to the idea of a multiverse, then when we die we just go to a different dimensional reality for ourselves. As in, Mason could be eating lunch right here in another dimension.” He runs his fingers through his curly blond mop of hair as he talks and it gets even wilder.
The resulting mad scientist look seems to lend legitimacy to his theory.
“I can’t tell if that’s comforting or creepy,” says Lucia, the color in her face returning to normal.
“Kudos, Nolan. Not everyone can find their spiritual path in a comic book movie,” says Asha, smiling.
“Multiple comic book movies,” says Nolan, pointing a correcting finger at her. Oh man, he sounds just like my brother.
“I’m going with reincarnation,” Jeff says now, like we get to order our eternal destination from a menu. “It’s almost like being a shape-shifter. I bet Mason got reborn as a baby shark.”
Asha tilts her head. “Could be. Who knows how his energy persists.” I scan the others for any sign that they’ve had a similar experience to mine, but it seems like to them this is all theoretical.
Then Asha pulls one knee up under her chin and hugs it, considering. “Maybe we should have a séance.”
The idea of Mason being controlled in some sort of occult ceremony makes me shiver. “Ew, gross,” I say, scrambling in my head for a way to change the subject so Asha doesn’t get too enthusiastic about this.
“C’mon. It would be just like in the movies! Worst-case scenario we have a fun night of eerie mystery, but best case? Best case we actually get some sort of message from him.”
“That would be so freaking cool.” Jeff looks entranced.
“No, people, no way are we doing that. Mason would not be about that sort of thing. Plus—” I know this is a little risky in terms of revealing my odd close encounters, but I say it anyway.
“If Mason is still around, I would want him to visit on his own terms. I wouldn’t want to force it.
Maybe he can come to us organically if we let him, if we pay attention.
” The faces looking back at me have confused eyebrows.
I try to cover. “You know, like in our hearts and thoughts.”
Lucia reaches across the table and touches my hand. “I get it,” she says. “He lives on through us.”
Maybe more than you realize, I think. Who knows, he might be here at school somewhere right now. Maybe he’ll sit down in his seat in a second. But out loud I just say, “Yeah.”
Lucia looks hopeful again. “And if he’s okay, then we can be okay, too.”
I’m not sure how big an “if” that is.
“We’re so okay that we’re going to run a 5K for the Epilepsy Foundation,” says Asha now. “We’ll let the adults take care of their own business. Give me some flyers for this excellent cause. I don’t know why I wasn’t more supportive from the start. You’re an inspiration, Miss Lucia Spataro.”
“I know,” says Lucia, showing a little attitude because she knows Asha will appreciate it. “And I’m not even done. Next on my list is a boating safety drive.”
“How about starting a Doofus Foundation?” says Jeff now. “’Cause one thing’s for sure. He was a total and complete doofus.” We all smile and nod like that was the most reverent and loving thing Jeff could have said. And it sort of was.
I stretch out my legs and touch Mason’s seat with my toe.