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Let it stay forgotten.
The thought burst clean through me. Full awareness. I inhaled through the sharp kick of adrenaline. It had never occurred to me that I might not want to rip open every single closed stitch of my lost memories. That I shouldn’t rattle and shake what ought to be left untouched, a pirate’s locked and rusted trunk, long settled at the brackish bottom of my subconscious.
I rubbed my face and looked around. The Day-Glo dial of my alarm clock read half past one. My fingertips found my phone right next to it.
U up? alone? ok to call?
in 5
When Holden phoned a few minutes later, I was more than awake—I was wired. I could tell by the background echo that he was out in the dorm hall, where he often liked to hang out.
“What’s up?”
“It seems stupid now. I had a nightmare. I shouldn’t have texted. I was scared. I’m sorry. And now I feel like such a baby.” Though I was comforted to hear his voice.
“Here I was thinking booty call.” Holden sounded tired but amused. “So are you feeling normal now?” I could tell by the downshift in noise that he’d gone into his room. “You wanna tell me all about it?”
“It’s boring, to tell someone your dream.”
“Try me.”
So I retold it quickly, as if it were nothing. “I was dead but I wasn’t—and my drowned face was being sold as art on a T-shirt.”
“Whoa.” I could almost see Holden’s wry smile. “Awright, to get philosophical for a second, maybe this isn’t so random when you analyze it. I think we all need to think people will miss us if we die. Even people we hardly know. Who doesn’t want to be memorialized on a T-shirt? There’s a little bit of tragic-death rock star in everyone. And you got closer to the mortal edge than most of us. Right?”
I forced a small laugh. “Sure, I guess.”
“So maybe you were just indulging a morbid fascination. Almost like you were attending your own funeral. If that makes sense?”
“Sure.” I leaned back against the headboard. Allowing myself to deflate. “Yes, I mean. Yes, it does.”
“Cool. I think this has been a productive session. I accept Visa or PayPal.”
“Ah, shut up.” But I was grateful for Holden stepping so easily into doing what he did best—smoothing out my world. By now, my eyes had adjusted and I could see the lumpy furniture outlines of my safe-room nest. “Here’s something. I got back my leather jacket and my black boots tonight.”
“The old new look.” Holden cleared his throat. “You know, for a while, Ember, with the way you’d changed and all, I thought you broke up with me because you’d met someone else.”
“No…” That last night with Holden. The flickering apple-scented candle, the warmth of Holden’s body, my dragging knowledge that I didn’t want him enough. And then I made myself ask, although this was a hard one: “I know we’ve been through this, but I wasn’t extra depressed or anything back then, was I, Holden? Maybe about you? Or giving up dance? There wasn’t some part of me that would have wanted to…hurt myself, that night?”
“Don’t even, Emb,” he said. “You got dramatically interrupted, but you never lost yourself that way. I was watching you. From a distance, sure. But I never took my eyes off you.”
“Right.”
“Seriously. I wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.”
“I know.”
Holden didn’t have hard, fast answers. Just assurances. Right now, that would have to be enough.
It was like old times, when we’d loitered on the phone late-night and never seemed to run out of things to say. Holden talked midterms, and his mother’s imperious insistence that he get a second fitting for the blazer she’d bought him for Drew’s engagement party. I told him about the Jake and Smarty date, my flubbed dinner, the Theory of Knowledge quiz tomorrow I was sure to fail.
Eventually I could feel that numb, familiar desire for sleep roll through me.
“Thanks for staying on the line with me, Holden.”
“Anything for you. I’m gonna get going on this conflict res essay, but I’ll put the phone down and keep you on speaker. Just if you want some white noise?”
“Yeah, I’d like that.” We used to do white noise, too. Stay on the line without actually conversing. It wasn’t as aggressive as video chat, and it wasn’t as insistent as IM’ing. It was a peaceful sound that held us together when we weren’t quite ready to let go.
“If I leave my desk, it’s just to take a piss or get coffee in the lounge. How’s that sound?”
“Sounds like thanks.” I stretched out, flipped my pillow, and burrowed into the covers with the phone next to my ear. I listened to the click of Holden’s fingers swift on the keyboard, the dependable clearing of his throat, the whispery turn of a notebook page. If I dreamed at all again tonight, I hoped it would be of Holden’s profile in this moment, serene and focused, patiently waiting for me to close my eyes and breathe the breath of sleep.
17
A Different Kind of Different
The next morning, when I clomped downstairs to the kitchen in my boots and jacket, my parents held their tongues. Which I was glad about. I felt a little bit self-conscious wearing all of it, anyway, like in those early months at Addington when I’d had to use a wheelchair. Gliding down the corridors or wheeling through the garden, I’d wanted to shout to anybody, all the patients, staff, visitors—anybody who spied me—that I was only in this contraption for a little while. That I was temporary damage.
Even with the long denim skirt (that I didn’t love but didn’t actively dislike, either) Mom had given me last Christmas, my boots and jacket made me feel a different kind of different. Not broken. The opposite. I felt braver. I felt like a girl who’d push back.
In homeroom, though, Claude lost no time. He was lounging with Lucia on the windowsill, his chest puffed to flaunt his Georgetown sweatshirt, though most everyone else in the entire senior class would have been cringingly superstitious about wearing their top-choice college in the months before hearing news.
“Check it out,” he said, his smirk firmly in place. “There’s a new sheriff in town. What do you call that look, Emb? Rockabilly goth?”
“Strong show of wit, Claude. By the way, Georgetown called—your sweatshirt got in, but you’re wait-listed.”
