If Only I Had Told Her

As I drive to Alexis’s house, a strange thing happens. It’s like I’m watching myself. It’s not an out-of-body experience; I can’t see myself, but I don’t make choices or feel any emotions. Everything I do is automatic and remote.

It isn’t until after I’ve parked that I see that the street is crowded with cars. I’ve parked a few houses down from my normal spot.

I don’t recognize the girl with the tear-streaked face who answers the door and points to the basement before heading to the bathroom. I guess she doesn’t recognize me either.

In the basement there is, indeed, a strange, sad party of sorts going on, with so many more people than I would have thought. There is crying, and there is alcohol and weed mixed in with the crying, even though it’s only noon, even though Alexis’s parents could theoretically come home from work early and catch us all.

I wish I could tell Finn how seeing the foosball table makes me want to fall to my knees and sob, because he would think it was funny and make a joke about the times he kicked my ass on it. But if I could tell Finn anything at all, then it would be a meaningless foosball table. We’d never think of that table again after next year. Now I want to both kiss that foosball table and set it on fire so no one else can touch it since Finn’s gone.

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.

I am alive.

I’ve always been alive.

But today I feel it.

I take another breath and hold it until my body begs for more, and then I let it out so that I can take another.

After a while, someone puts a song on repeat from the one depressing album Finn liked. I think about finding out who so that I can either punch them or hug them. He has that now, no alarms or surprises, like the song says.

Sudden pain strikes my toes, and I look up.

“Oh, sorry.”

It’s the crying girl from upstairs. She steps off my shoe and closer to her friends, who’ve congregated near the beanbag chair. She isn’t crying anymore, but I still don’t recognize her.

“I’ll live,” I say to no one in particular and flinch.

She doesn’t notice my choice of words and turns back to her friends. Jacoby, Melissa, and Seth—I know them. Seth was on the team at least.

“Anyway,” the girl I can’t remember says, “I know that it’s such a small thing, him having that pencil. But it was so nice of him, and it really was a terrific pencil.”

“No, I get it,” Seth says. “Everyone knew Finn was the nicest guy.” They all murmur agreement.

Jacoby adds, “Yeah, he really was.”

I want to ask him how they can talk about Finn being dead so easily, as if he’s been gone forever.

“I should’ve saved that pencil to remind me to be nicer to people,” the girl says somberly.

What right did you have to cry? I want to ask her. Why are you here?

Alexis’s voice cuts through the conversations from across the room. “He loved her so much.”

Is she speaking louder than everyone else, or do I pick her voice from the crowd because of its familiarity?

“They were the longest running couple of our class, right? Yeah.” Alexis nods.

So that’s going to be the story.

I don’t know if Sylvie told Alexis that Finn was breaking up with her last night. Part of the reason I’d been pushing him to do something about it was because whenever Alexis and I hooked up, she asked questions that made me wonder if she knew something was up with Finn and Autumn.

But it doesn’t matter now. Alexis is going with the happy couple story, and that’s what will be repeated. By the time Sylvie is out and about again, that will already be gospel.

“No, he would never,” Alexis is saying.

I take another sip and discover the beer I don’t remember drinking is empty. I get up and walk past Alexis and the group she’s talking to as I head to the recycling bin.

“I mean, I used to be friends with Autumn Davis. Whether she would flirt with him? That’s a different story.”

I suppose I could defend Autumn, but how? By interjecting that Finn had always loved a girl who was not his girlfriend?

Alexis’s stance is starting to make sense to me.

Finn probably did one shitty thing his entire life, and it was cheating on Sylvie the day before he died. What could be gained by anyone knowing that Finn and Sylvie were breaking up that night? It’s probably easier for Sylvie this way.

As I head back to my lonely corner with a new beer, I hear Alexis saying, “Ask anyone. Finn lived for taking care of Sylvie. That’s probably why—”

I try to block her out as I settle back into the beanbag chair. The same knot of people hovers nearby. They aren’t talking about Finn anymore. They’re sharing stories about other people they know who have died, as if their grandparents’ deaths mean anything compared to Finn dying.

In a flash, I figure out who she is, the girl who is no longer crying.

Last week of school, Finn and I were talking in class before the start bell. I asked him to loan me a pencil. When he gave it to me, he told me that he needed it back because it was “Maddie’s pencil.”

I’m not sure what my face did, but he hurried to explain.

“We’ve sat next to each other in trig all year, and most days, she’s lost her pencil by last period. And you know how Ms. Fink is about not being prepared for class. I tried carrying an extra pencil for her, but sometimes I’d loan it out and forget to ask for it back.”

Again, my face must have reacted because he rushed to finish.

“I told her to buy a box of pencils and give one to me, and that would be her pencil in my bookbag that I would never loan to anyone else. She’d lost all those other pencils, but I still have this one, and there’s a fifty-fifty chance that she’ll need it today. If it was anyone but you, I would have lied and said I didn’t have another pencil.”

“Because this is Maddie’s pencil?” I said.

“Exactly,” Finn said.

If it had been anyone else, I would have asked how hot this Maddie person was, because, you know, why else would it have been his problem that she didn’t have a pencil at the end of the day? But this was Finn, so of course he went out of his way to help someone simply because they sat next to each other in class.

Her comment about saving “that pencil” makes sense in another way, because of course he made sure she left with it at the end of the school year. It was her pencil.

Maddie, Jacoby, and Melissa aren’t talking about death anymore. I could interrupt and tell them that Finn did loan out Maddie’s terrific trig pencil to me once. So clearly, if she has the right to cry, then I should have the right to scream. Scream like Autumn had.

Or I could get up and tell Alexis, tell everyone, that Finn didn’t live to take care of Sylvie, he lived as himself, and he was someone who took care of the people around him.

But it isn’t Maddie’s fault that I can’t cry like her or scream like Autumn or even tell all my Finn stories like Alexis, who is busy making sure no one hears about the one shitty thing that Finn ever did.

“Autumn always had a thing for him, but she was like a sister to Finn,” Alexis says.

I would laugh, but I can’t. All I can do is sit here, sip my beer, and listen to people who barely knew Finn talk about him as if they were friends.

Finn isn’t here, and for a moment, I’m envious of him.