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“I wish it didn’t have to be like this,” I whisper. “But I’m glad I got to meet you.”
“Same,” he says.
When I pull away, we’re both crying and it makes us laugh.
“So, tell me about my sister,” he says, reaching up to brush away the tears on my face. “And possibly about your interesting haircut.”
I laugh harder and somehow that makes me cry more, too. Eventually I pull my shit together and tell him about Sasha. I start from the beginning, from the dollar store shoes incident, to all the times she’s saved my ass over the years. I tell him about holidays at the Cades’ massive vacation house in Miami, and how Sasha never liked any of my boyfriends but it was only because she wanted the best for me.
The way he looks at me when I tell him about my hair is like he’s just figured me all out. I realize all these stories I’m telling him are tinted with my own perspective. He’s getting the truth about Sasha, mixed with a piece of me as well. Would Sasha have told them a different way? I run my hands through my hair, smoothing it down even though the breeze messes it up again. I try to talk slower, telling the stories exactly how they were, instead of how I remember them.
We talk until the light posts turn on and the sun starts to dip toward the lake, disappearing beneath the water.
I am euphoric, telling this sort-of-stranger all about Sasha’s life and our friendship. Every time I look into his eyes, it’s like a part of her is still here, still flashing me a grin while we plan another adventure.
I know I’m talking too much, but now that I’ve started, it’s impossible to stop. Even when I finish telling him something, the look in his eyes makes me want to keep going. So I do.
I tell him about the time when we were fourteen and Sasha got a new camcorder and we decided to film our own horror movie in her backyard.
“We wrote the script to have three girls get lost in the woods, which was really just Sasha’s backyard. But since there were only two of us, we stuffed a pair of pants and a hoodie with towels and set the fake body in a chair. We’d only show glimpses of the third girl, who we named Jennifer, and when she talked, it was really just me talking in a really high voice.”
I do the voice and he laughs.
“So I’m holding the camera as we walk through the woods at night, because it’s like a first-person camera view horror film, right? And I say something like, ‘I’m so scared! We’re out in the middle of nowhere, and there’s nothing at all, no civilization, nothing,’ and right then, her dad comes out of the back door and yells, ‘Girls, here’s that flashlight y’all wanted!’ and we were like ‘SHUT UP!’”
I’m laughing so hard at this memory that I lean forward, covering my mouth with my hands. Elijah laughs, too, shaking his head. “I want to see this movie.”
I nod and take deep breaths to regain my composure. “Yeah, totally. I have a copy on my computer. Hey, speaking of …” I heft my backpack onto the bench between us. Crickets chirping in the dark break the silence as I unzip it and pull out my laptop. “My letter told me to bring this. I wonder why?”
His eyes widen. “I completely forgot,” he says, reaching into his pocket. “Sasha knows I don’t have my own computer and could only email her through the library or sometimes at work, so I wondered why she would give me this.”
He holds up a flash drive. The sight of it knocks a sobering knot of reality back into my chest. This whole night wasn’t just a fun social call. It’s Sasha, speaking from beyond the grave.
I take the flash drive and shove it into my computer. “Let’s see what she left for us.”
Chapter Six
The moon hangs over the lake, lighting up the water rippling gently with a passing breeze. Decorative lampposts straight from Narnia dot the cemetery at random places, but other than that, we’re in the dark. Elijah’s black T-shirt and dark hair make his face look like a shadowy phantom next to me, and it’s only now I realize how late it is.
I check the time on my phone; we’ve talked for over four hours. “Technically, the cemetery is closed now,” I say, opening my laptop.
“Shit, are we locked in?” He looks behind us, the tendons in his neck straining.
“Nah. There aren’t any gates. The sign at the front just says it closes at sundown but it’s not like they can lock us in.”
“No groundskeeper here to shoo us off?”
I glance at him just as the computer powers up, blasting both of us in the blue-green glow of my wallpaper. I’ve spent four hours with this guy and I don’t know much about him besides his name and relation to my best friend.
“Where do you live?”
“Austin.” His lips slide to the side of his mouth. “In the shady part.”
“Wow,” I say. “That’s forty miles away.”
I type in my password and my desktop appears.
“Yes, it is,” he says all matter-of-fact. “You spend your whole life living just a few miles away from your own flesh and blood and don’t even know it.”
