“See, I want all that. Not the back pain, I guess. But the house and the kids. I want to own a home to raise my family in before I’m thirty.”
“We should be writing this down.” She slipped out of bed and paused. Were they on close enough terms for her to walk naked to her desk without covering herself up? On the one hand, he’d literally just been inside her. On the other, now that she was facing away from him she wasn’t sure she could pick him out of a lineup, if prompted. Before she could decide, a T-shirt appeared in front of her face. It was his.
“Here,” he said.
This was not how this usually went. Usually, the more words that came out of a guy’s face, the more Wren came to regret what they’d just done, and the faster she wanted them gone. The opposite was currently happening, and she found it absolutely frightening.
She slipped the shirt on, just long enough to cover her up, and ripped out a piece of loose-leaf paper from a notebook on her desk. With a pen, she scribbled her name, and his (which helped solidify it in her memory), and began writing.
“OK,” she said. “Another thing you should know about me is that I love football. Have you ever been to a Ravens game?”
They kept at it for over an hour, until the paper was filled with frantic scratches, bouts of wild inspiration, and all their greatest hopes and dreams for the person they would eventually become.
“OK,” Arthur said finally. “I think I feel better about this.”
Wren feigned a gasp. “That means you just enjoyed hollow, meaningless sex. Could it be so?”
“I guess I did. You convinced me of the merits. Is it always like this?”
“No,” she admitted.
“This is the most fun I’ve had in a while,” he said, slipping a hand around hers, his thumb lining her palm. There was something deeply sincere in his voice. An aching loneliness perhaps. A belief that this night was a gift he didn’t really deserve. Wren didn’t mean to think so highly of herself, but she swore she heard it in him. “Thank you.”
She kissed him, for making her feel safe. She’d meant to kick him out hours ago but suddenly found herself unable to let go.
23
A knock at the door.Charlie was here. Wren dabbed at her eyes with a tissue one final time and hoisted herself up. She caught a glimpse of herself in the hallway mirror on the way to open the door and was instantly disgusted with how ridiculous she looked. Like a child cosplaying as a sad adult.
“Why are you dressed like Morticia Addams?” Charlie greeted her playfully. Charlie, for her part, wore athletic pants and a baggy sweatshirt with a thick neck, like she was going to Trader Joe’s on a random Tuesday. It took her just a second to scan her friend’s face and realize that something was deeply wrong.
With some effort, Wren choked out the words: Ferdie was dead.
“Can I see him?” Charlie asked solemnly, right after breaking a powerful, life-affirming hug.
Wren nodded begrudgingly and, for some reason, crossed her hands in front of her waist and bowed her head as she led Charlie through the apartment. Like a morgue directorleading mourners to a viewing. In the living room, she’d lit some incense and two battery-operated candles. It was the best way she could come up with to be respectful without going back into the room itself.
But Charlie looped her arm around Wren’s and practically dragged her in there. Wren hung close to the doorframe when Charlie finally let go to pay her respects.
“Poor guy,” Charlie said, sitting down next to Ferdie on the bed and then immediately standing back up and pinching her nose. “Jesus, he stinks.”
“Well, he’s dead, Charlie. Have some decorum.”
“No, Wren, he literally…” She leaned in and dropped her voice to a whisper. “He smells like…you know.”
“What?”
And then they both heard one. A quiet, wispy puff of wind that could only have come out of a dog’s butt.
“It’s just the gases leaving his body,” Wren said, wafting it casually away from her nose. She didn’t know if that was true, but it sounded true. She’d been smelling it for a little while now, but to be fair, Ferdie always smelled like that. His meds had a way of making him extra gassy. “Let’s be mature adults about this.”
The next one was not quite so ghostly and gentle. Ferdie ripped one. Everyone heard it. It was undeniable. A moment later they were huddled over Charlie’s phone googling “do dead things fart.” They were halfway through scanning an article titled “10 Things I Wish I Knew as a First-Year Embalmer” when Ferdie’s leg started visibly twitching.
“Wait, did you see that?” Wren jumped.
“I think I did.”
Another twitch.
