The Last Time We Say Goodbye
Page 3
Yeah, well, screw them.
Of course, being angry is pointless. Unproductive. They don’t understand yet. That they are all waiting for that one phone call that will change everything. That every one of them will feel like me eventually. Because someone they love will die. It’s one of life’s cruel certainties.
So with that in mind I try to ignore them, turn up my music, and read. And I don’t look up until we’ve gone the twelve miles to school.
This week I’m rereading A Beautiful Mind, which is a biography of the mathematician John Nash. There was a movie, which had entirely too little math, in my opinion, but was otherwise okay. The book is great stuff. I like thinking about how Nash saw our behavior as mathematical. That was his genius, even if he did go crazy and start to see imaginary people: he understood the connections between numbers and the physical world, between our actions and the invisible equations that govern them.
Take my mother, for instance, and her announcement that my brother is still with us. She’s trying to restructure our universe so that Ty doesn’t disappear. Like the way a fish will thrash its body on the sand when it’s beached, an involuntary reaction, a survival mechanism, in hopes that it might rock its way back into the water.
Mom is trying to find her way back to the water. It makes sense, if I look at it from that angle.
Not that it’s healthy. Not that I know what to do about it.
I don’t for a second believe that Ty is still in our house. He’s gone. The minute the life left him, the minute the neurons in his brain quit firing, he stopped being my brother. He became a collection of dead cells. And is now, thanks to the miracles of the modern embalming process, well on his way to becoming a coffin full of green goo.
I will never see him again.
The thought brings back the hole in my chest. This keeps happening, every few days since the funeral. It feels like a giant gaping cavity opens up between my third and fourth ribs on the left side, an empty space that reveals the vinyl bus seat behind my shoulder blades. It hurts, and my whole body tightens with the pain, my jaw locking and my fists clenching and my breath freezing in my lungs. I always feel like I could die, when it happens. Like I am dying. Then, as suddenly as it comes on, the hole fills in again. I can breathe. I try to swallow, but my mouth has gone bone dry.
The hole is Ty, I think.
The hole is something like grief.
School is largely uneventful. I float through on autopilot, lost in thoughts of John Nash and beached fish and the logistics of how currents of air could have carried the scent of my brother’s cologne from where it sits all dusty by the sink in the basement bathroom through the den, up the stairs, to the kitchen to utterly confuse my mother.
Then I hit what used to be the best class of the day: sixth period, Honors Calculus Lab. I like to call it Nerd Central, the highest concentration of the smartest people in the school you’ll ever be likely to find in a given place.
My home sweet home.
The point of this class is to give the students time to study and do their calculus homework. But because we are nerds, we all finish our homework in the first ten minutes of class. Then we spend the rest of the hour playing cards: poker, war, hearts, rummy, whatever strikes our fancy.
Our teacher, the brilliant and mathtastic Miss Mahoney, sits at her desk at the front of the room and pretends that we’re doing serious scholarly work. Because it’s kind of her free period, too, since the school budget cutbacks eliminated her prep hour.
She has a thing for cat videos on YouTube.
We’ve all got our weaknesses.
So there we are, playing a rousing game of five-card draw. I’m killing it. I have three aces. Which is a lovely math problem all on its own—the probability of getting three aces in one hand is 94/54,145 or (if you want to talk odds) 575 to 1, which is pretty freaking unlikely, when you think about it.
Jill is sitting on my left, twirling a lock of her bright red hair around her finger. I think she means the hair twirling to look like some kind of tell, as if she has an amazing hand, but it probably means just the opposite. Eleanor is sitting on my right, and she has a lousy hand, which I know because she just comes out and says, “I have a lousy hand,” and folds. That’s El—she says what she thinks, no filter.
Which brings us to Steven, who is sitting across from me with a very good hand. How do I know? He’s trying to be all stone-faced, which he fails at in every way. It’s one of the things I used to like so much about Steven—his inability to hide his feelings. You can reliably see what’s going on in his head through those big brown eyes of his. Which at the moment are definitely happy about the cards he’s been dealt.
So yeah, he has a good hand, but three aces good? Probably not.
“I’ll see your bet, and raise you fifty Skittles.” I count and push the candy into the center of the table.
The players suck in a collective breath—that’s a lot of candy.
Steven looks at me dubiously.
“Well?” I say, a challenge, and I think, Just because we broke up doesn’t mean I have to go easy on you. Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you have to go easy on me.
But before he can respond, Miss Mahoney calls my name.
“Alexis, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Singling me out. That can’t be good.
I put my cards facedown on the table and make my reluctant way over to her desk. She’s chewing on her bottom lip, another ominous sign.
“What’s up?” I chirp.
Of course, being angry is pointless. Unproductive. They don’t understand yet. That they are all waiting for that one phone call that will change everything. That every one of them will feel like me eventually. Because someone they love will die. It’s one of life’s cruel certainties.
So with that in mind I try to ignore them, turn up my music, and read. And I don’t look up until we’ve gone the twelve miles to school.
This week I’m rereading A Beautiful Mind, which is a biography of the mathematician John Nash. There was a movie, which had entirely too little math, in my opinion, but was otherwise okay. The book is great stuff. I like thinking about how Nash saw our behavior as mathematical. That was his genius, even if he did go crazy and start to see imaginary people: he understood the connections between numbers and the physical world, between our actions and the invisible equations that govern them.
Take my mother, for instance, and her announcement that my brother is still with us. She’s trying to restructure our universe so that Ty doesn’t disappear. Like the way a fish will thrash its body on the sand when it’s beached, an involuntary reaction, a survival mechanism, in hopes that it might rock its way back into the water.
Mom is trying to find her way back to the water. It makes sense, if I look at it from that angle.
Not that it’s healthy. Not that I know what to do about it.
I don’t for a second believe that Ty is still in our house. He’s gone. The minute the life left him, the minute the neurons in his brain quit firing, he stopped being my brother. He became a collection of dead cells. And is now, thanks to the miracles of the modern embalming process, well on his way to becoming a coffin full of green goo.
I will never see him again.
The thought brings back the hole in my chest. This keeps happening, every few days since the funeral. It feels like a giant gaping cavity opens up between my third and fourth ribs on the left side, an empty space that reveals the vinyl bus seat behind my shoulder blades. It hurts, and my whole body tightens with the pain, my jaw locking and my fists clenching and my breath freezing in my lungs. I always feel like I could die, when it happens. Like I am dying. Then, as suddenly as it comes on, the hole fills in again. I can breathe. I try to swallow, but my mouth has gone bone dry.
The hole is Ty, I think.
The hole is something like grief.
School is largely uneventful. I float through on autopilot, lost in thoughts of John Nash and beached fish and the logistics of how currents of air could have carried the scent of my brother’s cologne from where it sits all dusty by the sink in the basement bathroom through the den, up the stairs, to the kitchen to utterly confuse my mother.
Then I hit what used to be the best class of the day: sixth period, Honors Calculus Lab. I like to call it Nerd Central, the highest concentration of the smartest people in the school you’ll ever be likely to find in a given place.
My home sweet home.
The point of this class is to give the students time to study and do their calculus homework. But because we are nerds, we all finish our homework in the first ten minutes of class. Then we spend the rest of the hour playing cards: poker, war, hearts, rummy, whatever strikes our fancy.
Our teacher, the brilliant and mathtastic Miss Mahoney, sits at her desk at the front of the room and pretends that we’re doing serious scholarly work. Because it’s kind of her free period, too, since the school budget cutbacks eliminated her prep hour.
She has a thing for cat videos on YouTube.
We’ve all got our weaknesses.
So there we are, playing a rousing game of five-card draw. I’m killing it. I have three aces. Which is a lovely math problem all on its own—the probability of getting three aces in one hand is 94/54,145 or (if you want to talk odds) 575 to 1, which is pretty freaking unlikely, when you think about it.
Jill is sitting on my left, twirling a lock of her bright red hair around her finger. I think she means the hair twirling to look like some kind of tell, as if she has an amazing hand, but it probably means just the opposite. Eleanor is sitting on my right, and she has a lousy hand, which I know because she just comes out and says, “I have a lousy hand,” and folds. That’s El—she says what she thinks, no filter.
Which brings us to Steven, who is sitting across from me with a very good hand. How do I know? He’s trying to be all stone-faced, which he fails at in every way. It’s one of the things I used to like so much about Steven—his inability to hide his feelings. You can reliably see what’s going on in his head through those big brown eyes of his. Which at the moment are definitely happy about the cards he’s been dealt.
So yeah, he has a good hand, but three aces good? Probably not.
“I’ll see your bet, and raise you fifty Skittles.” I count and push the candy into the center of the table.
The players suck in a collective breath—that’s a lot of candy.
Steven looks at me dubiously.
“Well?” I say, a challenge, and I think, Just because we broke up doesn’t mean I have to go easy on you. Just because something bad happened doesn’t mean you have to go easy on me.
But before he can respond, Miss Mahoney calls my name.
“Alexis, can I talk to you for a minute?”
Singling me out. That can’t be good.
I put my cards facedown on the table and make my reluctant way over to her desk. She’s chewing on her bottom lip, another ominous sign.
“What’s up?” I chirp.
