Page 8 of What You Left Me

“We’re going to a party tonight,” I tell her. A surprised look smushes her freckles into the wrinkled creases on her nose.

Martin McGee, I will find you again.

2

If there’s a light switch to be found, I can’t reach it.

I can’t do anything at all.

It isn’t darkness, but it isn’t light. It’s gray without being gray because you can see gray, and this can’t be seen. Or felt. Or tasted or smelled or heard.

It just is.

• • •

My entire uncelebratory dinner at Olive Garden, while Caroline and Jessica reminisced about their high school days and my parents listened with wistful fondness, I tried to remember the last party I attended. Cameron and I did a campus visit together last fall. We had different hosts inside the same dorm, and they invited us to an off-campus thing. We stayed for all of twenty minutes before we were over it.

I trudged back further into the recesses of my memory—the darker places—and I came up with something more relevant. Summer before junior year, I went to a bonfire. I had two sips of lukewarm beer from a red cup and left before eleven. That had to be carefully excavated out of a pile of much more substantial memories with Ryan Hales. Just above the first time we met and below the first time we held hands. And even those I strained to recall, mostly because I get a vinegar taste in my mouth whenever I think of him.

Martin’s party stands for something different. It’s the end of an era while managing to be the beginning too. It’s the last shred of high school cocktailed with whatever we’re heading into now.

• • •

This sounds so impossible, but I know I have my brain. I’m thinking these thoughts right now; I must have my brain. It’s just that I can’t find my body.

It’s not freaking me out. It should be, but it’s not. There’s nowhere to process the freaking out of things.

There is nowhere.

• • •

“Wear shoes you can walk in,” Cameron reminds Aminah as she peruses my closet for a pair that matches her tank top.

“It might surprise you, but I can figure that out on my own,” Aminah claws back.

Cameron opens my backpack and pulls out my yearbook. “All right, Martin McGee, let’s see who you are.” She turns one page back and forth repeatedly, her face twisted into a confused snarl. “He should be right before you.”

“Check the Not Pictured section,” Aminah chimes in, all the while settling on a pair of white sandals identical to ones she already owns. She catches me giving her an odd look. “Yours are in better condition,” she tells me, as if confessing.

“Weird. It says he’s not pictured. What’s that about? Let’s see if he was in any clubs,” Cameron says.

“Or sports,” Aminah adds.

“Right.”

I curl up next to Cameron for investigation, disappointed to discover that Martin McGee does not exist in photo form.

“Why aren’t we checking Instagram?” Aminah asks. “Petra’s talking about a boy. This is a first since—” She stops and picks up a lip gloss, pretending to be bored by her slipup.

Ryan is home from his first year of college, and it’s like everyone can feel it. He’s an invisible weight slipping into any crevice he can find, making even the smallest of talk seem heavy.

“I told Daniel to meet us there,” Aminah says as an answer to a question no one asked, moving the conversation away from her error.

We head toward my front door. My mom is half asleep on the couch.

“Have you looked at your study—” my mom starts to ask.

I close the door before Aminah and Cameron can hear the end of her sentence.