Chapter 6
Warm light beats against my closed eyelids.
I’m halfway between a dream and waking. Drowsiness melts the margins of my thoughts. Heat trails up my skin like slow fingers. I groan, my muscles begging to stretch. Something presses repeatedly against my chest.
I blink one eye open.
Diana’s big gold eyes stare back. She paws guiltlessly at my blanket.
“You’re a menace,” I tell her.
She meows, then hops off me, sauntering out of the room.
My room. In the apartment.
I lurch upright, instantly regretting the motion. My head spins. Pieces of last night rattle around like marbles going downhill. Santa Barbara State and pulsing blue lights and a fountain at the heart of campus. Falling…No, pulled into water.
Into another world.
I wait for the dizziness to stop before finding my phone. The battery’s almost dead. The screen is dim as I read the time:
10:02 a.m.
I haven’t slept this late in forever. As it is, I barely sleep at all. But, outside the fuzziness in my head, my body feels good, rested.
Noises from outside my cracked door steal my attention. Before I roll out of bed, something appears in my periphery.
White petals.
They’re scattered all over my pillow and mattress. Slender, soft, oddly familiar. I’ve seen them before. But where? As I search through my memories, I hear Max’s voice a room away:
“Would you please just work?”
I leave behind the mess on my bed.
In the kitchen, Max fights with the waffle maker. A thin veil of acrid smoke hangs in the air. Globs of batter dirty the counter. Two blackened, misshapen circles sit in the sink. Clearly her first failed attempts.
“Can I help?” I offer.
She spins around, a fork pointed at my chest.
I raise my hands, surrendering. “Put down the weapon, Max.”
She blows out a breath to get strands of black hair out of her face. “Where were you?”
“In my room?”
“No.” She slams the fork on the counter. “Last night. What happened to you?”
“Oh, I was—” The words feel loose in my mouth. Cottony, wrong. I do my best to rewind through yesterday, but my memories are bleary. “I was at the party. With you.”
“No, you left me,” Max snaps.
“I did,” I say, more to myself, the images gradually coming into focus.
Those awful lights. The loud music. A boy with plastic shot glasses.
“You didn’t even let me know you were leaving,” Max continues. “We have rules, Auggie.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
A mixture of anger and hurt twists her face. “Then someone found a dead girl—”
The memory hits like a crash of cymbals. “The girl,” I breathe out.
Her pale skin. Long dark hair.
“No one knows what happened. Some assholes claimed she was on something. Her roommate said she’d never do that.” Max shakes her head, whispering, “It’s the Hal situation all over again.”
A chill like water slips down my spine. I remember:
The white sand shore. A bridge lifting from a black sea. The boy with a leaf crown made of cypress. His confident touch, striking grin.
“I saw Cary. And…” My voice trails off. I’m trying to wade through the rush of memories.
“You saw Cary and what?” Max’s foot taps impatiently.
My mouth opens. Nothing comes out. What am I supposed to say?
I saw Cary with the dead girl, and I followed him? Then fell into a fountain that somehow transported me to the underworld? Oh, by the way, that’s a real place. With a lot of weirdly hot, powerful people and a three-headed dog.
No, I can’t tell her about Aides. About what I saw or what happened. If I did, would she even believe me?
Max doesn’t give me a chance to say anything. “Oh my god.” She gasps. “I can’t believe it.”
“Believe what?” I ask anxiously. Does she already know?
Smiling, she says, “You hooked up with Cary.”
The air is knocked from my lungs. “I didn’t,” I wheeze.
She wiggles her eyebrows. “Yes, you did! You rushed out of the party. When I called, you were clearly distracted.” Her finger circles me from neck to belly. “And you’re still wearing the same clothes from last night.”
My eyes lower. She’s right. I’m still in what I wore to the party. What I had on in Aides. While my outfit is wrinkled, there’s no sign of sand or water.
More flashes of Aides streak across my brain:
Cary’s arms wrapped around me. His sweet scent. Calm, black eyes holding my gaze as we drifted deeper and deeper.
“Nothing happened,” I blurt.
“Liar,” Max scolds playfully. “You’re blushing! I didn’t even hear you come home last night.”
I wrinkle my nose. There’s a gap in my memory. Between the river and waking up in my bed. A void I can’t force my way past. How did I get back to the apartment?
Max scrapes a moderately charred waffle off the griddle. She hands it to me on a plate. “I’m glad you’re getting out there. Dating is good for you. Trying is good, Auggie.”
“I didn’t try,” I argue.
I don’t want to sits unsaid, an uncomfortable lump in my throat.
Before I realize it, the tide inside me churns. Tears bite at my eyes. I squeeze my free hand into a fist, forcing the grief back underwater. I hate how it’s so easily triggered. How everything in my life revolves around it.
Max frowns. “I’m not pressing you,” she says quietly, “but when are you really going to give people a chance again?”
I look away.
“You deserve to be happy,” she adds.
I lift my chin, defiant. “Who says I’m not?”
Max kicks my shin on the way to the living room. “The fact that your only friends are me and our cat.”
“She’s great company,” I say, sinking onto the sofa with her. “Unlike you.”
“I can call my mom,” Max offers. She searches the cushions for her phone. “You don’t have to meet with her. She gives great referrals.”
“I don’t need one.” I bite roughly into the waffle. My anger is beginning to eddy. The new version of August pushing at his cage. “I can handle this on my own, Max. I don’t need help.”
A shadow falls over her face. I’ve seen a hundred different varieties of this expression. From my parents, classmates who I used to sit with and talk to, who’d known me for years.
It’s disappointment. As if turning down their solutions to fix my grief offends them. As if I owe them for offering a solution in the first place.
I don’t need anyone to “fix” what I’m feeling. This thing I’ve been experiencing every day since London died. I need them to leave me alone.
For a moment, Max eyes me. Then she lets it go. “I’m going out.” Her face brightens. “Meeting Lake for a brunch study date.”
I blink, confused. “Who?”
“Ha-ha. You’re hilarious.” She tugs the strap of her bag over one shoulder. “I know you think I’m falling too quickly.”
I might. If I knew who she was talking about. The exasperated edge around her mouth says I shouldn’t test her with more questions.
Shrugging, I say, “Have fun.”
Max pauses at the door. “Do you have plans?”
Hope lies belly-up in her voice. She’s hoping I won’t spend my entire morning in bed, in yesterday’s clothes, gazing at my blank walls. It was my first thought.
My only one, truthfully.
“Yeah,” I lie. “Of course.”
I’m staring at a pile of dirt.
Well, not just dirt. Soil. In a garden.
My mom has left her phone lying in one of her flower beds. She video called me “out of the blue.” A big part of me doesn’t believe that. I think Max had something to do with it. I’ve been doing exactly what I told her I wouldn’t: nothing.
Letting the day slowly, painfully drift away.
I study my phone screen. Ribbons of sunlight cascade through a domed glass roof. I imagine being there.
My mom’s greenhouse.
The comfortably warm air. My nose filled with the fragrant perfume of orchids and violets and stargazers. Lemons hanging from a tree in the corner. Dirt beneath my nails.
The greenhouse is a family heirloom. Passed down through generations on my mom’s side. I used to spend almost every day there, even though I’m not half the gardener Mom is.
Through my phone’s speaker, pebbles crunch under boots.
“Sorry!” Mom appears again. Thick curls hidden beneath a colorful headscarf. Deep brown skin drinking in afternoon light. Sweat dewy on her forehead. She smiles. “I had to check on my latest obsession.”
I give her a small grin. “Which is?”
“Agapanthus praecox.”
“English, Mom. Please.”
She studied genetics and plant biology at UC Berkeley. Sometimes, she forgets the rest of us didn’t.
“African lilies,” Mom clarifies. She wipes her brow.
“Sounds pretty.”
“They are.”
Mom walks around the greenhouse. I can see all the new blooms she’s planted. Her delicate touch in every petal and leaf. She was the same way when it came to me. Careful when I was sick or when she wiped my tears after a bad day at school.
But I’m not that August anymore.
She knows that. I can see it in her expression when she looks at me.
“Are you gonna come by the house soon? To visit?”
I hesitate. In the corner of my screen, I stare at my face. The look in my eyes that says, I wish I could and I miss you and I can’t all at once.
“Maybe,” I say through the thickness in my voice.
Mom nods, but I can tell she doesn’t believe me. “I have a box for you,” she says. “I’ll bring it by.”
In her background, the scenery shifts. She’s still strolling leisurely through the greenhouse. I don’t hear what she says next. My eyes home in on what’s behind her: a beautiful burst of tangerine petals.
Marigolds. London’s favorite.
My world tips. I remember his smile whenever I’d slip one behind his ear. The envy of the sun itself. He wanted his prom boutonniere made of them. He never got it.
Instead, my mom made a wreath of marigolds for his casket.
“Auggie?”
Mom’s voice cuts through the waves crashing around my skull. I flinch. Her eyes watch me. Then she looks over her shoulder. Reality unfolds across her face.
“Oh, August.”
“Mom, don’t,” I beg.
“The anniversary is soon.”
She says it like I need the reminder. As if I’ll ever forget the night it happened.
Gingerly, she asks, “Do you want to go by his grave?”
Last year, I was too shattered to do anything other than let grief consume me. My parents came to visit. Max sat with me in the dark. London’s parents tried calling. I didn’t answer.
What could I say to them?
My throat is raw when I say, “Yes. Will you come with me?”