Chapter 36
Katie
On Sunday morning, Danny and I went to a spin class in Montauk. The workout had been Danny’s idea—something for us to do together
to help shake off whatever had been so wrong with me since Friday night.
And so—lights down, music up—I pedaled, and I pedaled, and I pedaled. I pedaled in hopes that chasing a blurred neon sign
for forty-five minutes straight might restore me to factory settings, might turn me back into whoever I was eight weeks ago,
but my legs were lead and my arms were limp and my eyes were wet, and I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t keep up with the choreography—with
the taps or the sprints or the bullshit or the beat.
The cooldown began. A slow song came on, and the lights rose—a dull and filtered blue, and I barely had to slow my feet. Danny
was tipping back the last of his ten-dollar water bottle, and we were clicking out of the pedals and slipping out of our shoes,
and I was just trying to keep it together. I was just trying not to cry. That was when I heard my name.
“Katie?”
I turned around and swallowed. Glossy black hair, the longest eyelashes you’ve ever seen, a little beauty mark just to the
left of her lip . . . and a sash over her shoulder. Bride.
My brother’s girlfriend was here.
Ingrid Miller-Pham was here.
And she was engaged.
Ingrid rubbed her collarbone. A necklace lay there, simple and gold. There had been a charm on it: 99. Mikey’s uniform number. It was gone now, but I had not forgotten it, or where it used to fall.
“Ingrid,” I said. “Wow. Hi.”
She smiled, wiping her forehead as I counted the carats in her ring. A pink diamond. Absolutely precious. Simple, dainty,
sweet. The last time I saw Ingrid, she was vomiting into a piece of cardstock with my dead brother’s face on it.
She’d had to fly home for the funeral. She’d been a freshman at USC then and stayed the summer for an internship. It was no
secret her parents had wanted her as far away as possible. Who could’ve blamed them?
Danny toweled off his face and put his arm around me. “You a friend of Katie’s?”
“Yeah,” she said. “We grew up together.”
I pushed my hair behind my ears. My fingers were trembling. I was horribly thirsty, and my skin was prickly. Maybe even a
little numb.
“How are you?” I said.
“I’m good. I’m going to be a doctor. Well, eventually. I’m in med school, at NYU. I’m”—she gestured toward the sash—“getting
married. I’m here for my bachelorette. My friends are making me wear this.” Another gesture. This one, behind her. A pack
of high-ponytailed girls, flushed, laughing, refilling their water bottles. “They think it’s ironic.”
I smiled. “That’s . . . that’s great.”
Ingrid nodded. She wiped a fat, wet tear from her eye. She was sweating, but I saw it. I knew what it was.
I opened my mouth to say something, anything, but nothing came out.
She fingered the necklace again. There was a part of me that wanted to reach out and touch it.
To feel the links for myself—to remember, Oh, my brother had loved somebody.
There was so much more to his story than what my parents had kept alive.
Than what I remembered too. That he wasn’t just
the next Tom Seaver, or the next Nolan Ryan, or the reason I had no fucking choice where I went to college. But that would’ve
been crazy. That would’ve been a crazy thing to do.
She touched it again.
“Call me,” she said. “My number’s the same. If you ever wanted to talk, I would really like that. Tyler mentioned you live
in the city too. Maybe we could all get coffee.”
Danny, at this, glanced up from his phone. His eyebrow raised, but he said nothing.
“Y-you talk to Tyler?” I said.
“Every once in a while, yeah.”
I nodded, tracing the links of my own necklace now. Ingrid smiled again, and then she turned to walk away, and then she disappeared
into the swarm, and then into her brand-new life.
Danny was still looking at me. “Who was that? Why does she know Tyler?”
“We all went to the same high school. It was nothing. We barely knew each other then.”
He looked at me again. This was my chance, wasn’t it? To do things a little differently. What if I let him in? What if I told
him everything? My brother is dead, and Tyler was his best friend, and I know the way his mouth tastes, the way his heart beats, the way his
voice changes when he’s drifting off to sleep.
“Are you fucking this guy, Katie? Is that what’s going on? Is that why you’ve been acting so weird all weekend?”
I jolted. I did not belong to him. We weren’t even exclusive—I was texting a couple of other guys when we first met. I’d just
been too distracted to keep up with the rest. I wanted to fight back, tell him so much. Tell him to go fuck himself. Tell
him how quickly I could find another side character to shove inside of me.
Instead, I mustered up a laugh.
Instead, I scrunched my eyes closed and asked if we could please stop to get some Advil for my latest headache on the way
home.