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“Yeah, he used to play basketball for North Central.”
“Wow. How’d you meet him?”
“This hideous Support Group.”
“Huh,” Kaitlyn said. “Out of curiosity, how many legs does this guy have?”
“Like, 1.4,” I said, smiling. Basketball players were famous in Indiana, and although Kaitlyn didn’t go to North Central, her social
co
“A ugustus Waters,” she said.
“Um, maybe?”
“Oh, my God. I’ve seen him at parties. The things I would do to that boy. I mean, not now that I know you’re interested in him. But, oh,
sweet holy Lord, I would ride that one-legged pony all the way around the corral.”
“Kaitlyn,” I said.
“Sorry. Do you think you’d have to be on top?”
“Kaitlyn,” I said.
“What were we talking about. Right, you and A ugustus Waters. Maybe . . . are you gay?”
“I don’t think so? I mean, I definitely like him.”
“Does he have ugly hands? Sometimes beautiful people have ugly hands.”
“No, he has kind of amazing hands.”
“Hmm,” she said.
“Hmm,” I said.
A fter a second, Kaitlyn said, “Remember Derek? He broke up with me last week because he’d decided there was something fundamentally
incompatible about us deep down and that we’d only get hurt more if we played it out. He called it preemptive dumping. So maybe you have
this premonition that there is something fundamentally incompatible and you’re preempting the preemption.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I’m just thinking out loud here.”
“Sorry about Derek.”
“Oh, I got over it, darling. It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty minutes to get over that boy.”
I laughed. “Well, thanks, Kaitlyn.”
“In the event you do hook up with him, I expect lascivious details.”
“But of course,” I said, and then Kaitlyn made a kissy sound into the phone and I said, “Bye,” and she hung up.
* * *
I realized while listening to Kaitlyn that I didn’t have a premonition of hurting him. I had a postmonition.
I pulled out my laptop and looked up Caroline Mathers. The physical similarities were striking: same steroidally round face, same nose,
same approximate overall body shape. But her eyes were dark brown (mine are green) and her complexion was much darker—Italian or
something.
Thousands of people—literally thousands—had left condolence messages for her. It was an endless scroll of people who missed her, so
many that it took me an hour of clicking to get past the I’m sorry you’re dead wall posts to the I’m praying for you wall posts. She’d died a year ago of brain cancer. I was able to click through to some of her pictures. A ugustus was in a bunch of the earlier ones: pointing with a thumbs-up to the jagged scar across her bald skull; arm in arm at Memorial Hospital’s playground, with their backs facing the camera; kissing while Caroline held the camera out, so you could only see their noses and closed eyes.
The most recent pictures were all of her before, when she was healthy, uploaded postmortem by friends: a beautiful girl, wide-hipped
and curvy, with long, straight deadblack hair falling over her face. My healthy self looked very little like her healthy self. But our cancer selves might’ve been sisters. No wonder he’d stared at me the first time he saw me.
I kept clicking back to this one wall post, written two months ago, nine months after she died, by one of her friends. We all miss you so
much. It just never ends. It feels like we were all wounded in your battle, Caroline. I miss you. I love you.
A fter a while, Mom and Dad a
of my mind, and for some reason it made me nervous and unhungry.
I kept thinking about my shoulder, which hurt, and also I still had the headache, but maybe only because I’d been thinking about a girl
who’d died of brain cancer. I kept telling myself to compartmentalize, to be here now at the circular table (arguably too large in diameter for three people and definitely too large for two) with this soggy broccoli and a black-bean burger that all the ketchup in the world could not adequately moisten. I told myself that imagining a met in my brain or my shoulder would not affect the invisible reality going on inside of me, and that therefore all such thoughts were wasted moments in a life composed of a definitionally finite set of such moments. I even tried to tell myself to live my best life today.
For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why something a stranger had written on the Internet to a different (and deceased) stranger was
bothering me so much and making me worry that there was something inside my brain—which really did hurt, although I knew from years of
experience that pain is a blunt and nonspecific diagnostic instrument.
Because there had not been an earthquake in Papua New Guinea that day, my parents were all hyperfocused on me, and so I could not
hide this flash flood of anxiety.
“Is everything all right?” asked Mom as I ate.
“Uh-huh,” I said. I took a bite of burger. Swallowed. Tried to say something that a normal person whose brain was not drowning in panic
would say. “Is there broccoli in the burgers?”
“A little,” Dad said. “Pretty exciting that you might go to A msterdam.”
“Yeah,” I said. I tried not to think about the word wounded, which of course is a way of thinking about it.
“Hazel,” Mom said. “Where are you right now?”
“Just thinking, I guess,” I said.
“Twitterpated,” my dad said, smiling.
“I am not a bu
had been a bomb and when she blew up everyone around her was left with embedded shrapnel.
Dad asked me if I was working on anything for school. “I’ve got some very advanced A lgebra homework,” I told him. “So advanced that I
couldn’t possibly explain it to a layperson.”
“A nd how’s your friend Isaac?”
“Blind,” I said.
“You’re being very teenagery today,” Mom said. She seemed a
“Isn’t this what you wanted, Mom? For me to be teenagery?”
“Well, not necessarily this kinda teenagery, but of course your father and I are excited to see you become a young woman, making
friends, going on dates.”
“I’m not going on dates,” I said. “I don’t want to go on dates with anyone. It’s a terrible idea and a huge waste of time and—”
“Honey,” my mom said. “What’s wrong?”
“I’m like. Like. I’m like a grenade, Mom. I’m a grenade and at some point I’m going to blow up and I would like to minimize the
casualties, okay?”
My dad tilted his head a little to the side, like a scolded puppy.
“I’m a grenade,” I said again. “I just want to stay away from people and read books and think and be with you guys because there’s
nothing I can do about hurting you; you’re too invested, so just please let me do that, okay? I’m not depressed. I don’t need to get out more.
A nd I can’t be a regular teenager, because I’m a grenade.”
“Hazel,” Dad said, and then choked up. He cried a lot, my dad.
“I’m going to go to my room and read for a while, okay? I’m fine. I really am fine; I just want to go read for a while.”
I started out trying to read this novel I’d been assigned, but we lived in a tragically thin-walled home, so I could hear much of the
whispered conversation that ensued. My dad saying, “It kills me,” and my mom saying, “That’s exactly what she doesn’t need to hear,” and my dad saying, “I’m sorry but—” and my mom saying, “A re you not grateful?” A nd him saying, “God, of course I’m grateful.” I kept trying to get into this story but I couldn’t stop hearing them.
So I turned on my computer to listen to some music, and with A ugustus’s favorite band, The Hectic Glow, as my sound track, I went