you mess with it. It doesn’t go poof. It just lies there, and it’s a dead person, and you have to bury it, and god, burying things by yourself is practically a crime these days. There’s hazmat teams at every funeral. It’s the law, for like three years now. Plus, it’s not that big a town. Everyone knows everyone, and you try stabbing the kid you used to play softball with in the heart. I couldn’t do it. They’re still the same kids. They still play softball. We’re the ones who’ve stopped.
Sometimes, when I’m sitting up on the hill by the Greenbaum mausoleum, I think about Emmy. I wonder if she’s still going to State in the fall.
Probably not, I guess.
I dated this guy for a while during junior year. His name was Noah. He was okay, I guess. He was super tall, played center for basketball, one of the few sports we still played back then. Indoors, right? I remember when the soccer teams moved indoors. It was horrible, your shoes squeak on the floor because it’s shellacked within an inch of its life. The way itused to be, soccer was the only thing I really liked to do. Run around in the grass, in the sun. There’s something really satisfying about kicking the ball perfectly so it just flies up, the feeling of nailing it just on the right part of your foot. I’ve played since I was like four. Every league. And then, finally, they just called it off. Too dangerous, not enough girls anymore. You can’t just go running around outside like that now. You could fall down. Get cut. Scrape your knee. So now instead of running drills I have to read The Land Beyond the Forest for the millionth time and stay inside. God, I’m turning into one of those snotty brainy hipster chicks.
Oh, right, Noah. See, the soccer girls date basketball boys. We’re the second tier. Baseballers are somewhere below us, and then there’s like archery and modern dance circling the drain. And then all the people who cry into their lockers because they can’t hit a ball. Football and cheerleaders are up at the top, still, even though it’s not exactly 1957 and not exactly the Midwest where they still play football. But some things stick. I think maybe it’s because all the TV shows still have regular high school. It’s a network thing. No one wants to show vampires integrating, dating chess geeks, whatever would be jam-packed with soap opera hilarity. TV is strictly pre. So we keep acting like what we did in sixth grade matters, even though no one actually plays football or cheers at all. It’s like we all froze how we were three or four years ago and we’ll never get any older.
Anyway, I remember Noah drank like two jumbo bottles of Diet Coke every day. He’d bring his bottle into class and park it next to his desk. When we kissed, he always tasted like Coke. Everyone thought we were sleeping together, but really, we weren’t. It’s not that I didn’t think I was ready or whatever. Sex just doesn’t really seem like that big a deal anymore. I guess it should. My dad says it definitely qualifies as immoral conduct. I just don’t think about it, though. Like, what does it matter if Alexis let the yearbook editor go down on her in the darkroom if she found out like not even a week later that the Hep A vac she got for the senior trip to Spain was tainted and now she freaks out if the teacher drops chalk because she has to count the pieces of dust? It’s just not that important. Plus, this couple Noah and I hung with sometimes, Dylan and Bethany, turned while they were doing it, just, not even any warning, straight from third base to teeth out in zero point five. We broke up a little after that. Just didn’t see much point. I don’t watch TV anymore, either.
But lately, I’ve been seeing him around. He turned during midterms. I think he even dated Emmy for a while, which, fine. I get it. They had a lot in common. I just didn’t really want to know. Anyway, it wasn’t any big plan. One minute I barely thought about him anymore and the next we’re sitting on the swing set in Narragansett Park way past midnight, kicking the gravel and talking about how he still drinks Diet Coke, it