“Jason, you start,” Zadie says, squeezing his knee next to hers. She sits up straighter, waiting for the game to begin.
Jason sighs. “Okay, my question is for my moronic midfielder. What happened in the Freeland game?’
“What the hell? That’s your question?” Holden laughs. The question is a reference to something that happened on the pitch at some point, a reference that only Holden and Jason understand.
The game devolves from there. A series of inane questions about bad hair choices and embarrassing moments and the whole time I watch, I feel the same way I felt the night it was happening: just the tiniest bit devastated.
The six of them could have really talked, told each other the truth. It’s not that they don’t tell each other the truth usually, but Zadie has the sense that there are always pieces missing when sheand her friends talk. Hidden meanings and half-serious jokes, and then there are the things they just don’t tell each other.
“What’s Zadie thinking?” Marcus asks me.
I hesitate a second, because a question like that would have changed this night for Other Zadie. It’s only Marcus, but I take the opportunity to tell him, anyway.
“She feels lonely,” I say. “And she misses her dad. She hates that she wants to talk about it so much because bad things happen all the time and it’s been half a year, and shouldn’t she be back to normal by now? At the start of junior year, I loved talking to Jason because he made me laugh and he was sweet. He cared about all the things I cared about when my dad was alive: school and movies and friends and homework. In the weeks after Dad died, being with Jason made me feel like myself, the version of me from before. We never actually talked about my dad, which was fine. We started hanging out just a few weeks after his death, and I didn’twantto talk about it. But as time went on, I’d see things that reminded me of Dad, remember things he said and want to share them with Jason or even just with my friends, but for some reason I always felt like I couldn’t.”
I don’t know at what point I switched from talking about Other Zadie—her—to talking about me.
“And it’s not Jason’s fault,” I tell Marcus hurriedly. “I know if I brought up my dad, he would listen. My friends would listen. But part of being Zadie, part of being me, is that I don’t just fall in a heap and, like, cry. I get shit done. I ran for student council at the worst point in my life. I take care of my mom and never let her down. I’mgood, you know?”
“Yeah,” Marcus says. He’s looking at me, but I refuse to turn and meet his gaze.
“I just wish someone—anyone—had been like, ‘It’s okay to fall apart.’ Even if it was a lie. Even if it was just for a few moments.”
I feel utterly stupid, blathering on like this.
And this is why I don’t like the memory.
The Zadie in front of me is clearly hurting.
She needs something, but I don’t know what.
Still, it tells me about Zadie, about me. It doesn’t tell me anything about me and Jason.
“Zadie,” Marcus says in a soft voice. “It is okay to do whatever you need to when you lose someone you love.”
I sniff. “No, it’s not, but it’s nice when people say it.”
I feel Marcus starting to argue, but luckily that overpowering suctioning feeling is starting. We are being pulled out of this memory, out of this picture of Zadie and Jason and their friends. I feel relieved as pieces of Marcus disappear, as pieces of me vanish, one by one. Relieved and confused.
I’m wondering why we were ever here to begin with.
***
I’m somber the next day. That lonely feeling of having to keep everything bottled up inside lingers, but it comes with the weirdly grateful realization that having Marcus there made reexperiencing New Year’s bearable.
I continue visiting Jason every morning, and later in the week, I finally get an appointment with my doctor for after school.
Dr.Carruthers is an older woman with a thin build and kind eyes, and when I explain to her that I’ve been getting migraines for a few weeks, she’s concerned but in a calm, motherly way.
“My best guess is that it’s the whiplash from the accident causing these headaches,” she says. “The good news is that there are a couple of different options we can try here.”
Dr.Carruthers ends up prescribing a medication that she says is great to take as soon as a migraine attack begins.
When I get home, I’m so lost in my thoughts that, at first, I hardly notice my mother sitting in the living room, frowning and pointing the remote control at the television we never use. When I do notice, I freeze.
“Mom?” My heart plummets because something is wrong. Something has to be wrong.
But when she glances up, she looks normal. Tired, but normal. It’s been ages, years, since I saw her sitting in the living room. It had to be even before Dad left, before any of us knew how much life was going to change.
