more than she needs to, and he nods. He seems happy that she won’t come.
Tessa wants all her friends there. Maggie says no, she doesn’t feel like it, sorry. She can’t tell them Aaron has claimed the place, that he has pissed across the entire school. After all, he’s more important than she is.
In the end, her friends drag her. She tries to hide her face and then she hates him for smiling at the crowd, for seeming more youthful than she is. He plays basketball better than she expected. Everything about him, already perfect, has somehow improved. His wife and children hug him effusively after the game. The whole night Maggie’s mouth tastes like chalk.
More abuses pile up. West Fargo announces it will host a talent show. Her friends, confused as to why she’s become a rain cloud, force her to participate. They practice the dance to “Thriller” for weeks. The costumes are shredded-up clothes from Savers Thrift. The makeup is frightening, clever, and sexy. When she knows how good it will be, she asks Aaron to come. He doesn’t pretend to think it over. He just says it would be too hard. They end up winning and he isn’t there to see that she is worth more than maybe he decided.
There are things he does to her that he doesn’t do on purpose, which are worse because they mean the universe is spinning as though she doesn’t exist. He has a writer come to the class who decides to read a Pablo Neruda sonnet. It’s the same sonnet shared by Aaron and Maggie during their relationship. Sonnet 17. She wants to swallow poison and die but sits there instead. She looks at Aaron, who mouths, I’m sorry. He tells her later he had no idea that the writer was going to recite this sonnet. Aaron used to print it out and give it to her in cute little ways. Or he would text part of it to her. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul.
Then there are all the things she has to live with, the pain memory. She told him, back when it all began, how she loved the way he smelled. So he sprayed his cologne in her Twilight book. At night she goes home and buries her nose in the pages of the book. She smells it as she tries to fall asleep.
All around her, her friends get ready for graduation. They drink beer and make out and plan the yearbook and talk about college and even the most nervous ones imagine all the ways in which they will reinvent themselves. They buy extra-long jersey-cotton twin bedding months before they even know which city they will live in.
On the evening of Maggie’s eighteenth birthday, after a night out at the Shooting Star casino in Mahnomen, a little over an hour from home, Sammy confronts Maggie. Melani is also with them, but she is gambling, and Sammy and Maggie are in the hot tub, drinking. Sammy says she has been suspecting something for a while, that she has seen Knodel’s name in Maggie’s call logs, that it was weird the way they acted around each other. How he would send Sammy to the school store and Maggie would stay back with him. They are both hammered when Maggie finally admits it. Holy shit, says Sammy. Holy shit.
There’s an hour of digesting, then more drinking, and then come the questions. About the minutiae and how it was kept under wraps. Sammy can’t believe her best friend had this whole double life from which she herself was excluded. Sammy acts as if it’s a big, subversive, weird thing, but Maggie’s grief is still not given the attention it craves. Sammy says that Maggie has to get her shit together. That life is passing her by. Sammy is just a kid, Maggie realizes, who can’t give her advice. Sammy is doing kid things and Maggie has lost her vampire lover.
As for the senior prom—by March, which was when her life ended, it was too late. By March everybody already had a date.
The last day of school is a wash for most seniors. Nerds come to guarantee their perfect attendance. But for Maggie it’s the last possible day she’s assured of seeing the love of her life.
She walks to his room immediately after her last class of the day. She’s quivering and he’s sitting there, like any other