/ Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither / Living nor dead, and I knew nothing, / Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
Me: That’s my favorite part. I get that. Not being able to speak. Not feeling alive or dead.
Ethan: Me too.
Me: Maybe if you slept more…
Ethan: Ha! You must be so psyched to go.
Me: I am. Beyond.
Ethan: Good. Eat a slice of deep dish pizza for me.
Me: Will do. Can we meet next week to make up the assignment?
Ethan: Course. Monday after school?
Me: Sure. You’ll probably have the whole thing memorized by then.
Ethan: Already do.
Would a drug addict take the time to memorize poetry? Theo has to be wrong. Ethan is not on drugs. Ethan is an insomniac and maybe damaged, whatever that means. Except I do know what that means, because who’s kidding who? I am damaged too.
CHAPTER 26
I can’t eat lunch. Too nervous. In just a few hours I’m meeting Caleb for our first date, though it’s not really a date, and I’m not sure it can even be called a first, since we talk online all the time. Last night, we IM’d so late, I fell asleep with my computer on my lap and woke to his words dinging on my screen. Three things, he said: (1) good morning. (2) I have keyboard marks on my face. slept on the “sdfgh.” (3) you leave in 24 hours, and I’m going to miss you.
“I’m not buying that Caleb is SN,” says Agnes, when I refuse her fries for the fifth time on grounds that I’m worried I might throw up. “I mean, Dri is right, he’s weird like that, but I dunno. He’s not, you know, shy. He’s like the most direct guy I’ve ever met.”
“But I told him where I worked and then he showed up there. I totally saw him texting at Gem’s party at the exact same time we were writing. And whenever I talk to him, he does this weird phone shake thing, to say like, ‘I’ll write you,’ and then a second later he always does. And he quoted me back to me. It has to be him,” I say.
“It’s definitely him,” Dri says. “And I’m impressed that you made the first move. Ballsy.” Dri is not looking at us. She’s staring at Liam, who is sitting on the other side of the cafeteria, nowhere near Gem. “You think they broke up?”
“No idea,” I say, and shrug. “Nor do I care.”
“You may have actually brought down Gemiam.”
“Gemiam?”
“Gem and Liam. Gemiam.”
I roll my eyes at Dri.
“I want to talk about Jessaleb. I just feel like I would have heard if his sister had died,” Agnes says, and my stomach clenches.
“You said he never really talked about her.” Dri multitasks: she talks to us and watches the Liam show at the same time. I’d worry about her being too obvious, except Liam is clueless. I just hope Gem won’t notice. “And there were rumors.”
“I mean, yeah, I had heard she was a total cutter, and she had a major eating disorder, so who knows. But I thought her parents sent her off to some mental hospital on the East Coast, not that she, you know, offed herself or anything like that,” Agnes says. Her tone is so casual, as if we’re talking about a character in a book, and not someone’s actual life. Whether a real person, in the real world, is alive or dead. It strikes me how callous we all are, how comfortable we are belittling other people’s problems: Total cutter. Major eating disorder. So easy for us to say.
I wish I had never mentioned his sister. Now I feel like I’ve betrayed Caleb, spilled secrets that weren’t mine to spill. I’m glad I’ve never said anything about his mom.
“Maybe he meant it metaphorically? Like it felt like his sister died,” Dri offers, but I shake my head. Caleb wasn’t at all vague. “Or maybe he just said it to connect with you, you know, about your mom?”
I take Agnes’s french fry, nibble it slowly and deliberately. I will ask Caleb later, if I have the nerve. I’ve never really wished anyone dead before, but it would be so not cool if he made the whole thing up. No, Caleb has lost someone close to him. We are a select crew, the dead family club, and I think I can tell who is for real. He counts the days, you know, since, just like me.