Page 9 of Goodbye Days

When I get home, Georgia greets me at the door with a huge hug, squeezing the breath from me.

“How was your day in the scented candle mines?” My heart’s not remotely in the joke—one of our regulars—but I make it as a halfhearted nod to normalcy.

I feel her half smile on my cheek. “If I pretend that’s still clever, will it cheer you up?”

“Maybe.”

She pulls back and takes my hands. “Hey. You hanging in there?”

“Define ‘hanging in there.’ I’m alive. My heart’s beating.”

“Time’s the only thing that can touch this.”

My sister is only a little older than me, but she’s sometimes wiser than her years. “Then I want to go to sleep and wake up a decade from now.”

We stare at each other for a second. My eyes well with tears. It’s not sadness or exhaustion this time. It’s Georgia’s goodness. I’m a total baby in the presence of unalloyed kindness. I choke up when I see YouTube videos about people donating a kidney to a stranger or saving a starving dog or something.

“I know you miss them,” Georgia says. “I’ll miss them. Even Eli constantly trying to look down my shirt.”

“Once Mars drew a picture of you in a bikini as a present for Eli.”

She rolls her eyes. “Did you at least defend my honor?”

“Of course. I mean, it was a really good picture, though. Mars was good.” I choke up.

Georgia gives an oh-you-poor-thing wince and hugs me again. “There’s some lasagna left.”

“I ate at Blake’s.”

“Mom and Dad called while you were at the funeral. They were checking up on you. Call them.”

“Okay.” I hesitate before spilling. “So—a reporter ambushed me after the funeral.”

Georgia’s face sours. “What? A reporter wanted to talk to you after the funeral of your best friend? Are you shitting me? The hell?”

“Yeah. He was superpushy. Like”—I imitate Darren’s voice—“ ‘Well, Carver, I gotta write about this, and the news doesn’t wait for grief, so if you wanna tell me your side, you better.’ ”

She rears back, folds her arms, and does that pissed-off thing with her lips that absolutely only girls of a certain age can do. “What’s this dipshit’s name?”

I know the look on her face. It’s the look she used to get every time I told her about kids picking on me in middle school, just before she went to “sort things out.” “Please don’t. I guarantee it’d make things worse.”

“For him.” (She isn’t wrong.)

“For me.”

We stand at an impasse. She sniffs at me. “Speaking of news: you kinda stink.”

“I was wearing a suit all day and it was superhot, but whatever.”

“Go shower. You’ll feel better.”

“I’m despondent and I apparently smell like gross balls. How could I possibly ever feel better than I do now?”

Georgia’s right; I’m improved when I get out of the shower, dry off, and flop naked on my bed. I stare at the ceiling for a while. When I tire of that, I dress in a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

I open my blinds, letting the peach-hued dusk cast long shadows in my room. I sit at my desk and open my laptop. Glowing on the screen is the story I’m working on. Any illusion I have of losing myself in that, though, quickly vanishes.

I live in a part of Nashville called West Meade. My street has an unusual characteristic: a train track running behind it on a raised berm. Trains come by every hour or so. In the distance, I hear a train whistle. I watch the setting sunlight strobe between the train cars as they pass behind the 1960s-era houses directly across the street from mine. I pick up my phone to call my parents, but I can’t. I’m not in the mood to talk to anyone.