Alice thought about how many times she’d done the same thing. Helen’s father had died when they were in college, after a long illness, and had she even sent a note? She thought so. The whole thing had just made her uncomfortable, and she didn’t want to do or say the wrong thing, and so saying nothing and staying out of the way seemed better. But it was obviously not better. Alice could already tell how much she would hate people who did the wrong thing when Leonard died, and the people who said nothing at all, even as she would simultaneously forgive those who hadn’t lost a parent or a loved one, because they just didn’t know.
“I get it. How old were you?”
“Twelve,” Kenji said. He shivered in his enormous white T-shirt.
“Fuck,” Alice said. “I am so sorry. It was cancer, right?”
“Yep,” he said. “Lymphoma.”
They walked in silence until they got to the corner. Kenji started to walk toward the door of the deli, but Alice put her hand on his arm. “I’m really sorry that happened. I bet you miss him a lot. My dad is sick, too. And my mom may as well be dead—I know that’s not the same thing, but she left us a long time ago, and so it’s just me and my dad. And it’s scary.”
Kenji immediately pulled her in for a hug. “I didn’t know that your dad was sick.” Alice rested her head against his shoulder. It was bony in the way that so many teenage boys’ bodies were—bodies that didn’t yet know how big they were supposed to be, where they started and stopped. On her sixteenth birthday, her father wasn’t sick at all. Things were getting messy inside her head. It felt like everything was happening at once.
“Were you there? When it happened?” Alice took a step back, and another, until she found herself sitting on a fire hydrant. “I’m sorry if that’s too personal.”
“No, it’s okay,” Kenji said. “It’s actually nice to talk about it. When no one talks about it, it’s kind of like it never happened, even though I know it did. Sometimes I’m like, ‘They do know, right?’？” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was at school. The nurse came and—I’ll never forget it, I was in Mr. Bowman’s English class—and said my mom was there to pick me up. I knew what it was, so I got all my stuff so slowly, you know, like in the period of time before she actually said the words, he was still alive. Like, magical realism. Even though I knew it must have happened already.”
“Man,” Alice said. “I totally understand.” It wasn’t fair, for that to happen to a kid. It happened all the time, of course, but it shouldn’t. There was a girl named Melissa who had gone to Belvedere just for first and second grade, and in second grade, her mom died, and Alice could remember her mom so clearly, and the braids that she gave Melissa every day, these two long, dark brown braids that whipped around when she ran or was on the playground swing. Her father had taken over the braiding, and when she left the school, it was easy to picture her mother still there, wherever they went. It was too much otherwise, too big to even imagine, like learning that the earth could actually explode at any moment. Kenji nudged her toward the door.
“Let’s get your stuff before those kids destroy your house.”
Alice laughed. They hadn’t yet, not once in all her sixteenth birthdays, but there was a first time for everything. By now, Tommy and Lizzie were probably having sex in her bed. Her body was feeling buzzy—whatever Phoebe had given her was kicking in.
“Okay,” Alice said. “But I might need just a teensy bit of help standing up.”
61
It was nearly two when people started to go home. A lot of kids had 1:30 a.m. curfews, which sounded late at first but then seemed early, until Alice was in her late twenties and it seemed late again. Everything was relative, even time. Maybe especially time. Sam was half-asleep, helping to empty bottles in the sink and then clink them into the recycling. Tommy had gone home—he and Lizzie had stumbled out together, as if they were going to go somewhere, when in reality they’d share a cab and each creep into their parents’ apartments, praying no one smelled the beer or smoke or sex on them. So much of being a teenager was pretending that your body hadn’t started to do the things that adult bodies did. It was when children had to learn how to be separate humans, a painful process across the board. By 2:30 the house was empty except for Sam, asleep in Alice’s bed, and Alice, awake at the front window. She picked up the landline and called the phone number on the fridge.