Scene 1
Scene One
“Wait up!” I call. I’m flapping my arms and legs wildly, but he’s so much faster than I am, it feels like I’m not even moving, just staying afloat.
“Hurry up, slowpoke,” he calls, flipping over onto his back and doing the high kicks like those synchronized swimmers in the Olympics.
“No fair,” I say. “You got a head start.”
“Early bird gets the worm!” he says, but it comes out as “worrrr” because he’s flipped over and has a mouthful of water. He’s coughing and choking, and I paddle over, a little alarmed, but when I get there, his cheeks are wide and he spits at me, sending water into my eyes and all over my face.
“Stop!” I yell, and then he’s making a beeline away from me, kicking so forcefully I am lost in his splashes.
“Come and find me,” Rob says, and then disappears beneath the water.
I’ve heard people say that when something really big happens, the whole world stops and you become frozen in time, but that’s not how it happens for me.
Instead, I’m being catapulted through time, yanked by my navel, back, back, back to before any of this began.
The only thing I can think of is that summer at Camp Kwebec.
Of Rob and me splashing around in our bathing suits.
Of the sun and the promise of lemonade and his voice under the water. Come and find me.
I know before my parents tell me. I know the second they walk into my room to wake me.
Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Rob was here last night, asking to be with me, and when I said I didn’t know, I changed the course of things.
Whatever it is, I’m not surprised. I don’t fight them on it the way they expected me to.
I don’t even scream “No” or “Why” or any of the things people usually do in movies.
Instead, I just lie there quietly. I’m already being pulled back to the pool.
So far, in fact, that their words sound muffled and their faces look distorted.
Like I’m watching them from underneath the water.
Rob is gone, they tell me. But not the way he was yesterday. Not at all. This time he’s gone for good.
Car crash. Alcohol. The Cliffs. The words come at me like tiny flashlights piercing the darkness, blinding and brilliant.
I don’t look at my mother’s tear-streaked face or my father’s somber expression. Instead, I look up at my ceiling.
It’s littered with stars, the stick-on kind that glow in the dark, and because it’s five a.m., and therefore not light out, they are shining up there.
Rob and I used to collect them when we were little from the vending machines outside our local grocery store.
My ceiling isn’t extraordinarily high or anything, but we couldn’t reach it just by standing on the bed back then, so we used to jump, with the star sticky-side-up in our palms. We got them all up there that way. There must be hundreds.
Images of Rob come to me in crystal detail. My memory is perfectly clear; it’s the present I’m having trouble with.
I see Rob standing in my driveway, yelling at me to take the training wheels off my bike. Rob and me on our back porch, making s’mores. Rob and me standing in line at the Macy’s counter, trying to sneak fake jewelry into my mom’s purchase.
“We’re going to go over to the Montegs’, to be with his parents,” my mother says. All of a sudden I snap up and awake. Juliet. Who called her? How is she taking this?
“Where is Juliet?” I finally ask. But then I see the way my mother is looking at me, and I realize—she’s gone too. Juliet was in the car with Rob. They’re both dead.
For some reason the force of this sends me sitting up, straight up.
My mom’s sitting there, and my dad’s standing over us.
The clock reads 5:25. I was born at 5:25, and my mom says that for the first ten years of my life it was the time I would always wake up, like it was the time I was meant to reenter the world.
Neither Rob nor Juliet will ever reenter my world. He will never show up on my front steps. He’ll never watch a movie with me or hold me close to him. She’ll never be my friend again. She’ll never forgive me.
I remember thinking in September, at Olivia’s party, that it was like he might as well have died, that death would be easier, because at least I wouldn’t have to see him.
I was wrong. Death is completely different, final in a way I can’t fully grasp.
Rob is nowhere on this planet. Not in Italy with his parents or gone at summer camp or even with Juliet.
He doesn’t exist anymore, and he’s never coming back.
“Do you want to come with us?” I hear my mom ask.
“Can I call Charlie?” I feel like a little kid, asking my parents’ permission to buy an ice cream, but I’m not sure what to do. What is the proper protocol on this? When your best friend and your cousin die, what are you supposed to do?
“Of course,” my mom says. “Whatever you want.”
But this isn’t what I want. What I want is for today to unfold the way it was supposed to. For us to be at school. Today we are supposed to be having a dress rehearsal for the play. Rob and Juliet are supposed to be on the stage, and Len and I are supposed to be up there, adjusting lightbulbs.
Len.
I can feel something slashing through the grief, gnawing its way closer and closer until it’s right at my chest, reaching for my heart. It’s guilt, so much of it that it catches in my throat and makes it difficult to breathe.
I should never have agreed to that date with Len. I should have said yes to Rob. I should have pulled him straight inside and made him get into the shower and comforted him and told him I was there. He was drunk and hurting. How could I have turned my back on him?
I grope for the phone on my nightstand and furiously punch in Charlie’s number. She picks up on the first ring.
This is something I love about her. She always has her phone on.
Never on silent or vibrate or even quiet.
Always on full blare. One time we got kicked out of seeing some chick flick because her phone kept blaring—Jake kept calling—and she wouldn’t shut it off.
She’s available. No matter the time of night or morning, and for a second I am more grateful for that than I’ve ever been for anything else in my whole life.
“Hey, baby,” she says, like she isn’t sleeping. Like she isn’t even tired.
“Can you come over?”
“Duh,” she says. “You think I’d abandon you to the wiles of driving? Not a chance.”
“Can you come over sooner?” I ask. My mom touches my leg underneath the covers, and I blink back tears. The sound of Charlie’s voice and my mom’s touch all at once like that feel like too much. “Please.”
“Yeah,” she says, and I can see her nodding, already out of bed. “What happened?”
“Just come over.”
Charlie and I became friends in the sandbox the first day of first grade, but we met before then.
We didn’t know this until last year, though.
We were looking through old photo albums at her house, and there was a picture of us as toddlers dressed in swimsuits at the beach with our moms. There are other people there too.
This girl Asara Dool, who moved before high school, and a few more, so it’s clear this wasn’t a playdate for the two of us, but there we are, in a picture together.
Charlie had a second copy made and gave it to me in a frame last year.
She had written on the back in gold Sharpie one word: evidence.
I think about that now. About her dress hanging in my closet and my earrings in her drawer and the Swedish Fish on my desk and the million little pieces that remind us that we’ve been friends since before we can even remember, that she was there before I even knew who she was.
“She’s coming over,” I tell my mom when I hang up. I say it firmly, deliberately, like it’s somehow going to change things. Like all that needs to happen is that Charlie needs to know.
I look at my dad. He’s been quiet, his hand on his forehead and his arm across his chest. Usually when things get tense he makes a joke.
My mom says she can always count on him to lighten the mood, even when she doesn’t want it lightened, but today there is absolutely nothing to say to make things better.
Our phone rings, and for a second I think it’s Charlie, but I haven’t even put down the receiver.
Time is doing something funny. Doubling back on itself so that it’s hard to tell when things have occurred.
It feels like my parents have been sitting on my bed for years, like there was never a time before I knew Rob was dead.
Which would mean—and I can’t even believe I’m thinking this—that there was never a time he was alive.
At the same time, I expect him to come waltzing through my door. To suggest we skip the last day and go see a movie.
My mom stands up, and for the first time I realize she is dressed.
Fully dressed. She has on black pants and a cream sweater and even pearls, which she never wears.
I imagine her getting dressed this morning, choosing an outfit that would be able to take her through whatever today might bring.
She doesn’t look like herself, and I know she put these clothes on after she heard.
That she took the time to look presentable, that she needed to pull herself together in order to stare down the pain she was about to cause me.
Before she came in here and told me that Rob was dead.
“I’ll get that,” she says, and she looks at my dad. She puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes, and he stands up.
“I’ll come with you,” he says.
My mom looks from me to my dad, and I can tell she’s nervous about leaving me alone.
“I’m just going to get dressed,” I say. “Then I’ll come downstairs.”
My mom looks relieved, but not much, and she kisses me once on the cheek before she disappears with my dad down the hallway.
When I’m alone, it starts to sink in, to bear down on me from all directions so that it feels like I’m suffocating, drowning.
I once read somewhere that if you are in a burning building, you should drop to your hands and knees because the air is cleaner down there, or something.
I do that now. I’m on the ground in my room, coughing and sputtering, when Charlie steps inside.
“Oh, God,” she says, in my doorway, and then she’s on the ground next to me, gathering me into her arms.