Chapter 14 #4
We’d stared at each other for three seconds before folding in laughter. From then on, anytime something didn’t go our way, we’d go back to that. Whenever we remembered something embarrassing, we’d reframe it that way, too. “Well, I guess we were just being girls.”
First time we got drunk to the point of getting sick. The next morning, we groaned, “We were being girls.”
Looking at pictures from our senior trip to Cabo at a foam party. The sleazy, worryingly older man we let buy our drinks for the night. “Well. At least we were being girls—together,” with a wince.
During her final week, talking about memory after memory this way. Her too-frail voice and her tremulous smile, my head on her bony shoulder. “I’m happy we were girls together,” she whispered. “I had the time of my life.”
I’m crying before I realize it’s coming, choking on the tears.
I bury my face in my hands. Silas turns me and gathers me into his chest, and a sound creaks out of my rib cage.
It’s the kind of ugly cry that seizes your whole body, that only allows you a thick breath before it bears down on you again.
“I’m sorry I—I’m getting snot all over you,” I cry.
“I don’t give a fuck,” he says, squeezing me tighter for emphasis. “Let it all out.”
I do for a few minutes. And as the jagged feelings soften up, I let myself settle back into the memory that brought it on.
Silas and Ian working in tandem to get my bumper reattached and in good enough shape to drive back to Spunes.
Merritt hopped in Ian’s car, and Silas drove mine so I could brood, except he spent the ride home cheering me up instead.
I wonder if I went through more memories like that if I’d see him in that light more, too.
More of a friend to me than I’d realized, all along.
I think we’re getting close to the time for the best Milky Way views, so I try to keep the conversation going to stay awake, parting from him in increments as we talk.
I ask him about his friendship with Ian and if there was some sort of falling-out there.
He denies it and tells me it was more that they naturally grew apart, even while Ian was dating his sister, but I can still tell that it hurt him in a way.
He asks me if I remember an elementary school field trip to the tide pools not far from here.
I’m surprised he remembers me at all from back then. I’d been shy and quiet in the extreme.
“It might’ve been the first time I really noticed you, but I definitely noticed you,” he says.
“Some kid from your grade had taken a hermit crab out of its shell before a chaperone made him put it back in the water. You kept sneaking off and going back to that pool to bring it different-sized shells. It was something my mom would’ve done.
I was worried about sticking with my cool, frosted-tipped buddies, but I spent the bus ride home wishing I’d helped you. ”
“Fourth grade,” I say. “I remember that.” The year after is when I met Merritt. And even though he’d graduated to middle school by then, that was the same year she met him.
“Do you happen to remember the first time you met Merritt?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“She rode the same bus route as you. It was the first day of school, and she was brand new. She got up to get off and she’d started her period.
She was only ten, which is on the early side to start, and she had no warning or anything, so yeah .
. . very first day, and she was brand spanking new and had bled through her brand-new shorts.
I guess you jumped up and gave her your flannel like it was nothing.
You were her hero that day. You don’t remember that at all? ”
“Vaguely. Maybe a little,” he says.
She’d fallen for him in an innocent way right then and there, I think. It’d been a moment, just one small kindness, but it was also why she always swore there was more to Silas than what he let everyone else see.
The teenagers start cheering, whistling, and clapping in the distance.
“Look at that,” Silas says.
I scoot farther down the truck bed to get a better angle and gasp when I take in the night sky. Shades of blues and purples, innumerable freckles of stars, and the Milky Way running through the middle like a fissure in the universe, a faint orange glow seeping through.
There. That’s where whatever souls are made of go. Nothing involving pearly gates or wings or malevolent, all-knowing beings. But someplace that defies my understanding, still.
We try to capture it on our phones, but the pictures come up woefully short of the real thing. I shut my eyes and try to sear it into my brain instead. I hate that this night has to end at all. This has been better than any date I’ve been on in years—if not ever, in spite of the crying.
“You ready?” Silas asks. I know he’s asking if I’m ready to go home, but it feels like too big a question. Ready to move into a new chapter of life. Ready to confront the reality of carrying grief for forever. Ready to open myself to new possibilities.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”