36
The morning of the YA Lit final exam I text the student group chat asking if someone can go to the bookstore and grab all the notes from the Michael book board. When I arrive to the classroom fifteen minutes early, the whole class is waiting for me.
“You know you’re all super early for class.”
Noah comes up and gives me a real hug, not some bro hug. “We just wanted to make sure you’re doing okay.”
I start to cry, which has been the norm lately, which causes Lily to run up with a handful of tissues.
“He’s still not talking to you?” Samuel asks.
It’s been a week since Niall came to the apartment, and there’s been radio silence since.
Despite wanting to bump into him and Hughie, I made it a point to avoid all the usual haunts.
I don’t go anywhere in Temple Bar, I go to an inferior Tesco further away from my apartment, and I don’t dare go to either of the donut shops or Doom Slice.
Essentially, I’ve just gone back and forth from home to work.
Wallowed in my apartment, watching a lot of bad television and even worse Christmas movies.
It’s the worst I’ve felt in months, and I’ve blown off my past couple of therapy sessions because I don’t want Dr. Chandler to see me spiraling.
That maybe, deep down, I know she was right about jumping into things with Niall too quickly.
That maybe the whole Hughie incident was almost a repeat of what happened with Michael, swapping Colin with Jackson.
“No.”
“I saw Hughie at the book pub,” Samuel says. He hands me a folded-up piece of paper. “He slipped this to me before I left with the book papers.”
I unfold the paper and it’s a drawing of Niall, him, and I, eating pizza and donuts. There’s a note on the bottom:
Sorry about what happened. I miss you Danny. I hope you aren’t mad at me. ~Hughie
Consider my heart actually fucking broken.
“Maybe you should give it a chance, ya know? Go to the apartment before you leave for Christmas? Don’t give him the option to ignore your texts. Just knock on the door and tell him how you’ve been feeling.”
I glance at Delilah. “Yeah, maybe. I guess it couldn’t really make things that much worse. Worst case scenario is that he continues to block me out.”
“I got lost once as a kid,” Samuel says.
“We were at the Disneyland in Paris. I was like four, maybe five at the time. I saw Goofy way, way far away and I wanted to go see him. Goofy was my favorite. Hell, he still is. A Goofy Movie still holds up to this day. Anyways, my two sisters were being fucking obnoxious—”
“Is this an observation of then Samuel or now Samuel?”
Samuel jokingly shoves Noah. “I mean, you’ve met them. They’re the fucking worst, and they were back then too. So Mum was struggling getting them to calm down. Dad was off doing who knows fucking what. He was always practically useless at family events unless it involved sport. I just, erm…left.”
“How far.” Lily asked.
“Well, it would appear that Goofy started to move and I continued to follow him. And, I guess when I did finally catch him, I turned to have Mum take the photo. Mum wasn’t there. No one was there.”
“That must have been terrifying,” I said.
“It was. I was only separated from them for like twenty minutes. You know, walkie-talkies and speakers installed all around the park. Didn’t take long to reunite us. But Mum was a bit of a mess after it happened, and she was a bit too overprotective of me for a long time.”
“Samuel,” Lily says, “what was the point of this story if not to show how bad the Hughie situation was. No offense Daniel.”
“The point IS that eventually Mum realized that shit happens, and just because it happened once doesn’t mean it would happen again.
She stopped beating herself up over it. What I’m trying to say is that Niall will get there soon, with this whole Hughie situation.
And, if he isn’t open to it now, it doesn’t mean he won’t over time. ”
“Okay, we know Danny feels like shit. So maybe we move the conversation to something else?” Delilah reaches into her bag and produces a stack of pages.
“Oh shit, sorry. We’re supposed to be having some sort of final exam or something today.
Right? Although we got no heads up on what it was going to be on… ”
I had a final exam listed on the syllabus, mainly because the university required it. But, as the class morphed and changed over the semester, what I had envisioned for the final exam was much different now.
“The final exam is a grade based on the skills you’ve demonstrated in this class on interpreting young adult literature, and how you’ve used them in other ways.
All of you didn’t even flinch when I brought in a partially finished manuscript, written by my recently deceased best friend nonetheless.
What you’ve shown and worked on over the past few months not only helped bring this closer to a completed novel, but you understood how the genre works and used it in practice. That’s the final. You all aced it.”
“Yes!” Noah yells, high-fiving Samuel.
Delilah then slaps the stack of paper in front me. “Then I think this should make you feel even better about that grade. We’ve been working a bit of extra credit over the past couple of weeks.”
“And this is…”
Delilah smiles. “This is the last four chapters of the book, plus the epilogue. Obviously, we know it needs to be workshopped. But this is everything we plotted and discussed over the past month.”
“And,” Samuel says, pulling a bottle of wine and plastic cups out of his bag, “since there isn’t a final, we thought we could use the time to read them as a group and give them a final touch.”
* * *
That’s what we did for the next few hours.
We drink wine and take turns reading out loud the final five chapters of Michael’s book.
There’s the passed around copy to read, and the copy Lily uses to mark up with our updates.
We tweak and polish as we go, we gasp at the right moments, we cry at others. And the ending destroys all of us.
It’s truly beautiful what this motley crew of kids, who never knew Michael, created for him.
They took something he loved and he struggled with, and made it whole.
They turned what was a good story and made it a great, on verge of epic, story.
A book that, if it reached the right audience, could be monumental.
I’m sad Michael isn’t here to enjoy the final version. I’m also sad that Hughie isn’t here for this table read. He’s just as much a part of this group as any of us.
He needs to know how the book ends.