I say, my voice shaking. I take a deep breath. “I don’t care about being weird, as long as I’m moving forward, away from sad.”
Josh’s side rocks into mine softly. “My grandpa died three years ago. My mom doesn’t have other family, and she was really broken up about her dad. She stayed in bed for weeks. And my other mom still had to go to work, and when she wasn’t, she was trying to be there for Mom. It was a rough time. I didn’t know how to make toast or wash laundry before that. You’re going to think I was such a lazy shit.” He smiles guiltily. “I didn’t know how to start the dishwasher, like, I couldn’t have identified where the buttons were for a million dollars. I learned so that I could help out. I should have known how sad you were . . . are.”
We just sit there, the length of his side pressed to the length of mine, and he doesn’t seem afraid of me and the sadness I’m hiding; nor is he telling me I need to stop grieving.
“Can I ask you a question?” he says. There are flecks of green like sea glass in his blue eyes. I nod. “It’s okay if you don’t want to answer. How did you get over it? Becca told me you said you stayed in bed for weeks after. Then all of a sudden you got up and made yourself better.” Phantom arms squeeze my chest. Becca spilled what I confided in her to Josh. He squints like he’s attempting to read the answer on my face. “How did you do it?”
The air in the room is forced out by the size of Josh’s question. Without knowing it, Josh is asking what started after. Ben’s death ended before. I couldn’t have been the same after he died if I’d wanted to be. Josh is asking what got me out of bed a month later. It was the truth inside an origami crane pressed between the secret pages of my journal.
Josh deserves the truth. But the words are giant and heavy, and they’d flop uncontainably to the floor, smashing this happy, ordinary house to bits. How do words have power like that? How can they open and drain you of all the I-hope-I-get-an-A, I-have-to-make-my-birthday-wish-list-for-Dad, and I-wonder-if-I-should-become-a-vegan thoughts that I was used to?
How did they fill me with questions I’ve never entertained before, bizarre ones, like what will happen if I let that spider crawl over my hand rather than smack it dead on the wall? Or if the boys can jump from Duncan’s roof into the pool, why can’t I? Or maybe I was never as odd or alone as I thought for feeling what I did. Those words made me new with nerve and mischief until I wasn’t myself anymore. I can’t explain this to Josh without sharing the secret in the paper crane.
Duncan appears beside us. The skipper hat is slanted on his head, covering most of one eye. “Here’s to Josh, the only guy in the room who isn’t wasted,” he slurs.
Josh claps him on his back, an easy smile pulled onto his face. “Hey bro, you really had them going.” Duncan plants his feet, swaying counterclockwise, eyes unfocused and expression mean. He’s a second away from saying something snide and stupid. “You hungry?” Josh keeps his tone light, sensing what I do. “I have that lobster mac-and-cheese you go ape for.” He mouths, “Sorry” to me over his shoulder and leads drunken Duncan away.
Becca’s still surrounded by junior girls, and she’s rearranging the friendship bracelets stacked on her wrist and—I guess—sharing the origins of each because she reaches the tangerine and gold and points to me, grinning. I brush its mate around my wrist. She bought them at a boutique that first morning she took me shopping. It was surreal, after all those years zipping by without so much as a text, having Becca confide her deepest, darkest secrets to me over lunch. She acted like we’d been separated by continents, cell-phone-less—no one’s fault we stopped talking—rather than three houses away, an invisible wall that she put up between us. Becca sees me looking and waves me over to join them, the juniors looking over expectantly, studying me as they would an exotic species of monkey introduced into the indigenous fauna.
I make for the staircase. Willa is here, and if there’s anywhere I belong, it’s with her. Before, after, whenever. I reach the