Chapter 24
Other Days, Other Years
Bea
It’s cancer. I’d been hooking up with the guy she’d always had a thing for while my best friend was sick with cancer. I hate myself.
I should’ve known—worse, I had known something was off, and I hadn’t pushed her to look into it. I’d seen her looking unwell and blamed it all on Stephen. Fucking Stephen, who was the one to help her discover it, who promptly ghosts Merritt after her diagnosis.
Meanwhile, Silas continues to try to get through to me.
I fled his house in a frantic tornado, throwing on my clothes without so much as making eye contact with him again.
He’s called and texted repeatedly in the weeks since, but I don’t know what the fuck to do.
I keep telling myself it was just one night, a half of a hookup.
But I know that’s not fair to him, either.
I miss him acutely, painfully, I feel his absence from my life like he’s always been in it, and yet all I can manage are short, emotionless text replies.
The day of her surgery, I finally cave and call him. The relief I hear in his voice when I do breaks me to pieces.
“I know it’s not the best time or anything,” he eventually says, “but I want to see you again.”
I feel like I’ve been emptied out, all my pulpy bits are scattered. “I can’t, Silas.”
“Bea,” he says, so tremendously gentle I want to scream. “We didn’t do anything wrong. You can’t think she would be angry with you. You can’t think she wouldn’t want you to be happy.”
He has no idea. She is angrier and more despondent than she’s ever been, and dammit, she has every right to be. This isn’t supposed to happen to a twenty-two-year-old. She’s had her heart broken on top of feeling like her body is betraying her. I can’t risk her feeling like I’ve betrayed her, too.
What am I supposed to do? Tell her, Hey, guess what, I ran into Silas Byrd and it turns out we feel cosmically connected?
Sorry he never liked you back in high school, I know that bruised your ego, but you’re over it because we’ve grown up, right?
When am I supposed to work all of that into a conversation?
Before or after she had a panic attack in my arms while gutturally sobbing about how she didn’t want to die?
“I can wait, if you tell me to,” he adds softly. “I don’t mind waiting.”
I am a colossal, gargantuan coward. Everything feels terrifying and unpredictable and out of control.
A twenty-two-year-old can get sick, and the world can screw you over, so logically, this means that even the best friendships can end.
Any relationship can end. I can’t stand the thought of risking it. So, I lie.
“I don’t want you to, Silas,” I say in the kindest way I can manage, willing my voice not to waver. “Honestly, I had a great night, but I think we’re better off just being friends.”
The worst part is, he is still so damn decent after that.
He accepts it with grace. He even sends flowers to Merritt’s hospital room, which she assumes he heard about through her mom sharing with people back home.
The arrangement is signed “From the Byrds,” but I know it had to be from him.
He sends her a nice message after she posts about it online—a picture of her with a buzzed head and a brilliant smile.
By the time she asked me to help her shave her head, she’d fully adopted a brave, determined, inspirational face. She’d handed me the clippers with a little eye roll and said, “Don’t do anything obvious like shave your fucking head after you do mine, please. Don’t be a cliché.”
I only shifted my part around to show her that I’d already shorn off a quarter of it from one side.
“Well, now I have to beat it, you bitch,” she’d said through tears. “I can’t let you rock a side part for nothing.”
And before all of this, when she had asked me again where I’d been that night, something I knew I’d be ashamed of for the rest of my days, I’d told another lie. I’d said I was with Shane.
For months I want to recant it and tell her the truth.
When she starts to get better—at least, when her body starts responding to chemo and her prognosis improves, I try to plot out what to say.
I sit in the infusion center with her and stare at a painting of two girls sitting on a hill above the ocean and mentally rehearse it.
I have to tell you something. I have to admit that I lied, that I did not think it would be a big deal when it happened, but now I have made it into this hugely deceptive thing in my mind.
The day I get the closest to it, as if I conjure him with my very thoughts, Merritt stops scrolling on her phone and suddenly says, “God, it’s sort of annoying how none of the Byrds peaked in high school, isn’t it?”
“What?” I feel the blood leach out of my cheeks.
She turns her phone around to a picture of them all at some sort of family function.
It looks like his nephew’s birthday. Silas’s face is the only one I see.
He is flushed and smiling broadly, probably mid-laugh.
I feel the echo of it against my skin, of his warm, solid body in the dark, then remember where I am and feel nothing but shame.
When it becomes clear that Merritt’s treatment will continue into the fall quarter, I drop out of college. I barely finished my spring courses as it was since I had to complete them in a remote program.
“I think I’m going to enroll in hair school,” I tell Merritt.
She’d been lying back in the infusion chair with her eyes closed, but opens them with a weak smile and croaks, “Good. When mine grows back, you can make it look sick.”
By the time I graduate, Merritt has been in remission for nearly three months, and it feels like our universe already has balance again.
We are both back in Spunes, but I’ve moved into the guesthouse at my parents’, so that’s where we stay most of the time.
It feels like we have our own space—with the best of both worlds.
Our families have circled the wagons. We’re kept fed and forward-moving.
Merritt has a huge trip to Europe planned with her family over the summer and has enrolled in aesthetician school for the fall.
After some resistance, initially, my mom came full circle on cosmetology school and, now that I’ve succeeded, is recruiting her friends to help me build a client list. She’s used a friend of a friend to connect me to a job at a salon in a great location on the edge of town.
It’s sixteen months after her diagnosis, when Merritt is off in France with her cousins, that I see Silas up close and in person again.
It’s August, at this year’s Spunes summer festival.
The day is windy and sunny, the air salty and fresh.
I find myself following the crowd, watching the tail end of our town canoe race.
Sure enough, in the lead, and then first through the finish line: Silas Byrd and Ian Carver.
The sound of Silas’s howling cheer makes my lungs feel buoyant, like they’re bouncing around behind my ribs, joyous and a little uncomfortable.
I find myself clapping and whistling for him from a safely hidden spot among the throng.
I feel such a surge of genuine happiness for him, seeing him thriving even from a distance.
I don’t see him coming toward me until it’s too late, until the crowd is parting around him and Ian and he is coming to a dead stop, his heels sinking in the cold sand.
He’s taken off his shirt in his celebration.
He’s sun-kissed and golden as ever, his chest rising and falling as he catches his breath.
His hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it, some of it tucked behind an ear.
He’d already grown into a man, but now he looks more solid, somehow.
No chain to be found, though. The bald surprise on his face tells me he hadn’t intentionally come my way, but he recovers with one of his patented smiles.
“Well done, Byrd,” I tell him when I rediscover my voice. The crowd is still going, but it feels like we’re alone, like the volume has been turned down around us.
He shocks me by reaching out and grabbing at the shorter hair growing in on the side of my head, looping it around a finger and letting it slip through. It must’ve escaped my ponytail in the wind.
“You, too, Red,” he says.
And then a woman blows past me and leaps into his arms, wrapping her legs around his bare torso like a koala to a eucalyptus tree. She puts her mouth on his. His eyes hold on to mine only briefly, before he kisses her back in earnest.