Chapter 3
Mornings are hard.
I’m not sure what time it is. I don’t have the energy to search for my phone. All I do is watch the day chase shadows off my ceiling.
Shafts of sunlight scatter across my face. I forgot to shut the blinds. My eyes are scratchy, raw like sandpaper. Sleep didn’t come fast enough last night. It didn’t hold me under either.
I’m still caught in a dream. In the sticky web of a memory. The ache of it is soft, tender like a newly formed bruise.
Something vibrates on the mattress. Eventually, I kick away my blanket. My phone screen is painfully bright with a notification—a new message in my family’s group chat.
Dad
GOOD MORNING FAMILY!!!
Mom
Morning started almost four hours ago.
I’ve been up at the greenhouse since dawn.
Dad
Auggie are you up? Thinking about your plan?
Frustration flickers like a flame in my chest. I’m not sure whether it’s from my dad’s dramatic love of emojis while texting or his final question. I pinch the bridge of my nose, calculating a calm response.
My mom answers for me.
Mom
Cooper, it’s too early for that.
We both love you, son. Come visit soon.
She always knows what to say. And when to say nothing at all. I wish I was more like her. Or that I had my dad’s impenetrable resolve to never get stuck in a moment for too long. Life as a nurse gave him that.
Suddenly, a harsh image blurs my vision.
Empty blue eyes. Hal’s crumpled body against the brick wall.
My pulse leaps. I stare at my phone, waiting for one of my parents to comment about what happened yesterday. The message never comes.
I search through the local news headlines. A single article about an incident around State Street Promenade pops up. No mention of Hal specifically, or even Viva Catalina’s. Santa Barbara is more concerned about a festival happening near West Beach this weekend than a dead man found in an alley.
It’s as if it never happened. But it did. I was there.
So was…
I change my search topic. The results populate with hundreds of different Carys, but none of them are a boy with hair dark as wet earth, a face made of stone.
I switch over to social media. It’s a place I rarely go anymore.
I don’t want to accidentally stumble upon an old photo of London on one of my former classmates’ profiles.
Again, I find nothing about Cary.
Defeat sits like an anchor on my chest. “I saw him,” I whisper to myself.
It wasn’t a dream. Or a hallucination. He was there. Then gone before I could blink, like…magic?
Beyond my cracked bedroom door, I hear cabinets being aggressively shut. Max swears. It’s the one thing that finally yanks me from the murky depths of my thoughts and out of bed.
When I walk into the kitchen, Max announces, “It’s trying to kill me!”
I smile at the offending object. “It’s an espresso machine.” Vivienne left it for us.
“That refuses to make my coffee right,” Max snarls.
“Are you pressing the right button?”
“Of course I am.”
“And the coffee button is…?”
Max’s hand winds in an exaggerated circle around the compact and gleaming machine. “One of those,” she huffs.
With practiced ease, I swap her mug filled with watery brown sludge for a clean one. I slip a new coffee pod into the brewing chamber. Max squints as I press the button she clearly missed.
The machine hums quietly before a slow, steady brown stream fills Max’s cup.
“I hate you,” Max whispers, snatching up her mug.
We settle in the living room.
Our apartment is modestly decorated. Vivienne lived here throughout college, then for her graduate program too. You can’t tell because of how new everything looks, from the clean, geometric-patterned area rug to the spotless kitchen appliances. We sit on the unblemished cream sofa.
Max claims her sister was like that growing up as well. Vivienne stays in places, but she never lives there, she told me.
Now Vivienne’s in Seoul. She works in advertising, a profession her parents approve of. Max hasn’t said it, but I’m convinced the Chos are paying half our rent to bribe her into pursuing a career of their choosing.
Diana leaps onto the coffee table. She sniffs around. The moment Max reaches out to pet her, she springs away.
Max hisses after her.
I stare disapprovingly.
“Sorry.” She sips. “I’m a little cranky without my morning caffeine.”
“Cranky is your default,” I say. “With or without coffee.”
“Have you ever been out until one a.m. with a guy who drinks like a fish, then had to sit through an art lecture at eight in the morning?”
“I can’t say I have.”
“It’s brutal.” Max takes another long slurp. Her eyes focus on me. There’s a carefully calculated look on her face that I recognize.
“I’m fine,” I say.
“But you—”
“I’m fine,” I repeat, defensively.
Steam from Max’s mug billows in a mist thin enough that it can’t hide her concern. “Auggie, you had a panic attack.”
“And I said I’m—”
“It’s been so long since that’s happened,” she says, as if I wasn’t speaking.
That you know of, I don’t say.
I remember the last one she was there for. The day of London’s funeral. When I stood in front of the church’s doors. When my body trembled like a leaf clinging to a branch as autumn’s winds swept in. When I could not make my feet, heavy as stone, move to enter.
He is in there, I said through the hot ache of my tears, my raw throat.
My parents didn’t understand my hesitation. It was my last chance to see him. But that’s not how I wanted to say goodbye. To a corpse in a casket made up to look like the boy I loved. That’s not how we were supposed to end.
Max didn’t need an explanation. She slotted into my side, like we were one. I couldn’t breathe, so she did for both of us. She guided me back to the car. She never made me go inside.
There have been other moments since. I never tell her about those.
I hated that she saw me like that at the funeral, so weak. I hate that it happened again yesterday.
“It was nothing.” For emphasis, I force my mouth into a wide grin.
Doubt pulls at Max’s features. “What are you doing later?”
“Picked up Kennedy’s afternoon shift,” I say.
I need the money. The distraction too. Work keeps me busy. It prevents me from staring at the shadows, hoping that London will come back.
Miracles are for people who believe in wishes on birthday candles and throwing coins in a fountain. I don’t believe in either.
“Is Angela even opening today?” Max checks her phone.
I shrug. “I’d assume so.”
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about death, it’s that the world doesn’t stop for it. Especially not businesses.
“Okay, what about after your shift?” Max asks.
“Why?”
“We’re going to a party,” she says. “On campus.”
Absently, my fingers reach for the threaded bracelet on my wrist. A memory tries to pull me under. I scramble to find words to remind Max why I can’t go to UC Santa Barbara’s campus. Why I’ve avoided it for so long.
After reading my face, she hastily amends, “SB State campus. It’s a dorm party.”
My breath finds a normal rhythm. “Max,” I start, uninterested.
“We have to go. Lake will be there.”
A bright pink blush fills the apples of her cheeks.
“What kind of name is Lake, anyway?” I say with a sigh.
“Says the boy named August.” Her lips purse. “I really like her. We have a cosmic connection.”
I roll my eyes. Leave it to Maxine Cho to have a crush-bordering-on-marriage a week into college.
“Auggie—” She places her mug on the coffee table. Her body twists to face me. “It’s one party.”
“It’s never one with you.”
“After yesterday, we need this. You need this.”
Max smiles innocently. I could say no just like I did last night when Junie invited me out. I could spend another night curled in my bed, watching my blank walls as one day ends only for another to rip me off my feet like the tide.
But I can’t let her go alone. Max hasn’t spent much time on campus. Besides Lake, who else would she know? What if something happens? She’s all I have other than my parents.
I exhale a long-suffering breath. “Okay. But we’re not staying long.”
She nods. “Two hours.”
“One.”
Her lips slope downward. “One? That’s not enough time to get Lake a drink, flirt with her, map out our future together—”
“Make it enough.”
I stand. My shift starts soon. I still need to shower and catch the bus.
On the way to my bedroom, I yell, “One hour, Max, that’s all!”
Santa Barbara State is a sprawling campus. Not near the size of UC Santa Barbara. But it’s just as nice.
The property line stretches from the edge of Shoreline Drive where the ocean growls to a few miles shy of downtown. Milk-white buildings with tiled roofs as red as tongues pop up everywhere. Palm trees and thick-trunked eucalyptuses rise from the grounds.
I follow Max past the library. Along the winding path of academic centers. We cross the footbridge high above Loma Alta Drive toward the west campus, where the dorms are.
Noises hit me before we reach the second floor. Voices straining above the music’s hammering bass. The clink of beer bottles. Laughter echoing off the walls.
The smell is next. A cloud of sour sweat and citrus-sharp alcohol and cast-off furniture no one has ever bothered to clean.
“Don’t make that face,” Max warns.
“What face?”
“We’re here to have a good time, Auggie.”
“No. You’re here to talk to a girl,” I remind her.
“Which is a good time,” she says airily, smiling over her shoulder. “And if I’m having a good time, then you are too.”
“That’s not true,” I counter.
“It is if you believe it!”
The dorm is one of those suites. Two bedrooms are opposite each other, doors thrown open with students spilling out. The living room is overcrowded with people. I’m not sure how anyone else will fit inside. Somehow, we do.
The lights are off. Strips of blinking LEDs on the ceiling illuminate all the faces. They look alien under the blue-and-green glow. In a corner, a group of girls talk with drinks in hand. I notice the one in the middle—short, curvy, and muscled, hair bright like afternoon sun.
Without Max telling me, I know who she is.
Max waves at Lake. Her next destination is obvious.