If Only I Had Told Her(42)

Before my thoughts can spiral, Alexis comes up to me and throws her arms around my neck as if we still love each other.

“I can’t believe it’s true,” she says, as if only a few hours ago, she wasn’t the one convincing me.

I pat her back with one hand as I scan the space. The feeling of living outside myself lingers. People are gathered in little knots around the room, speaking in low voices. Ricky from the soccer team is putting his hand on the shoulder of a girl who never gave him the time of day before.

“How are you doing?” Alexis asks me.

Jasmine steps closer to Ricky, and I think about Finn telling him to tone it down, we didn’t need to hear all his thoughts on her body.

“Jack?” Alexis asks. She takes a step back, and my gaze pans the room before coming in for her close-up.

“It doesn’t matter,” I hear myself say.

Alexis nods. “Yeah, it really puts everything in perspective, doesn’t it? Remember how I said my life was over when I was wait-listed for WashU? That seems so stupid now.”

“Yeah,” I say, as if she’s responded to what I said. She’s clearly been using the WashU line all night.

All day.

Light from the high basement window filters into the room, illuminating dust motes in the air. This nighttime atmosphere in the afternoon has an absurdity to it that suits this horrible situation. Nothing feels as it should.

Alexis is saying something to me, but all my focus is on trying to figure out how this moment can feel like déjà vu if Finn is dead.

“Yeah?” I say.

Alexis starts to reach for me, then seems to understand that I’m not up for pretending to be a couple. I note how easily she switches modes.

“Why don’t I get you a beer?” she says.

After Alexis hands me a drink and goes off to play hostess elsewhere, I try to find a place to sit down, preferably alone.

My sense of detachment is gone, replaced entirely by a quiet horror. I’ve hung out with Finn and Sylvie so many times in this underground room. Is that the source of this new yet familiar feeling?

A few people greet me warily as I walk past. At least two people whisper, “his best friend,” but I don’t join any groups. I find a beanbag chair in the corner, far enough away from the nearest group that they don’t feel the need to include me. I wipe the condensation off my hand holding the beer and take a sip. Talking with Alexis has brought back a snippet of dialogue from our phone call.

“Sylvie could see he was dead when she came to.”

I try to focus on the golden light. I try to watch the dust motes and think about how, as a kid, I theorized that they were tiny planets and cosmos swirling in and out of existence. I figured our Milky Way was dust motes in some giant’s world, our existence from the big bang onward as brief to those who observed us as the dust motes’ dance seemed to me.

“What do you mean, Lex?”

“I probably shouldn’t explain.”

The girl who let me in upstairs crosses the room, and the dust motes swirl again like tiny, synchronized swimmers of air.

It’s still the day of Finn’s death.

“The electrical burns went all the way up his arm. That’s what killed him, they said. From his hand through his arm to his heart, and that side of his face was—”

If Alexis said that Finn was pronounced dead right after midnight, did he die before midnight? I think again about the paramedics arriving, packaging him up, and delivering him to the hospital without urgency.

“Sylvie told me that when she saw his face, she wished she had died too.”

I scan the room for Sylvie. Alexis said Sylvie, by some miracle, only had a concussion and was allowed to go home. She isn’t here though. I think about finding Alexis and asking her if hosting this party is a better idea than being with her best friend after she almost died, but I know it’s pointless, like everything with Alexis.

I won’t be able to tell Finn he was right. But if he was alive, I’d probably still hook up with Alexis until I leave for college and over Christmas break, if she was up for it.

It seems so obvious now; it matters which people you spend time with, and it matters how you spend your time, because you don’t know how much you have.

I gaze around the room again. People are laughing or crying or talking, and they’re all going to die. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But they will die. Everyone they love will die too, and no one can stop it.

There was a book Finn and I read in class the year we met about a boy who sees an apple change, but he doesn’t understand how it changed, only that it changed somehow, and later you find out that he’s seen in black and white his whole life and was perceiving the red of the apple for the first time.

I’m looking around at all these people in the basement, and it’s like I’m that boy in that book, except I’m seeing everyone as a future corpse.

All these people drinking and milling around, they are simply meat packed around skeletons. The tiniest amount of electricity—just the right amount!—runs through each of us, but it will stop someday. We will rot or be burned, but we will be disposed of in some manner.

We are all dead bodies that haven’t died yet.

The apple was always red; the boy just couldn’t see it.

I take a deep breath and look down at my own chest. I imagine my pink lungs under my white ribs, taking in the air, pushing it out, taking it in, pushing it out. I feel my fleshy heart beating, beating, working to deliver the oxygen from my lungs to my blood. I even feel my arteries pulsing, pushing, working.