Page 34 of Fragments of the Lost
“What is it?”
“Someone came looking for him that weekend, at my dorm room.”
I flash to the letter in his book. An image of the girl in the ski gear. The blond braid, highlighted even in the winter.Ashlyn,he’d said.
“Tall, skinny dude,” he says, and I can’t reconcile the image in my head with his words. “I don’t know what he wanted with him. But he showed up while Caleb was gone. Said he wanted to leave a package for him. I said sorry, that I had no idea who he was talking about, because that seemed like the right thing to say. Guy kind of freaked me out a little. And I’m not holding somepackagein my room for anyone else, sorry.”
He hadn’t been answering my calls. I’d imagined Caleb drinking, at a party with girls, living it up. Not dealing with some guy with a package for him. Not coming back with a headache because of some other reason. The whole event that precipitated our breakup was not what I’d thought it had been.
“Anyway,” he says, taking a step closer. “I’ve been meaning to get this to you.” He pulls something from his pocket.
“What is that?” I say.
Terrance holds a white plastic bag, wrapped up in his fist. “He left it behind. I was going to call your brother, but then I saw you yesterday. I just didn’t know what to do with it. I didn’t find it until I was packing to come home for the weekend. I think it was for you.”
“We broke up,” I say, staring at the bag. As if I am no longer entitled to its contents. I don’t reach for it, at first.
“When?” he asks.
“After. Right after.”
“I didn’t know that,” he says. He lifts his hand toward me. “I don’t know if this will make it better or worse.”
I stare at his closed fist. In his hand is the bag from the school gift shop, wrapped up around something small. I take it from his grip, letting it unravel, and I peer inside.
“That’s your name? Your full name?” Terrance asks, and I nod.
“Thank you,” I say, trying not to choke on the words. I’m shaking by the time I shut the door behind him.
Inside is a keychain, with the logo of the school mascot. But that’s not what has me frozen.
In my hand is a gift he had bought me, and never given. We were always on the lookout for my name on magnets or keychains or ornaments. It was an obsession of mine, because I could never find it. And there in my hand, the letters glittering in the light of the foyer, is the wordJessamyn.
I’m trying to imagine if there might’ve been a different sequence of events if he’d brought this out of his pocket that Monday morning when he returned. If the conversation would’ve steered out of dangerous territory. I’m trying to imagine a different string of events than what really happened that day.
—
We were standing in a row of lockers in the student center the Monday morning after his visit, our voices carrying no matter how low we spoke.
“What were you doing, that you were too busy to call?” I wanted to know. We were already there, on the edge. It had gnawed at me all summer, this something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. But it was such a big step, such a big leap to make over nothing. Undoing everything we had become, over nothing more than a feeling.
I wanted a reason. Something to cause the final split. But instead we hovered around it. I wanted to say he had done something, something to give voice to the feeling.
“You don’t trust me,” he said.
“Should I?”
He didn’t answer. The silence was worse than anything he could’ve said.
“If you don’t, then you don’t. Nothing I say or don’t say will change that,” he said. He had adopted this air of condescension, affected a level of maturity I had presumably yet to reach.
It was his tone that pushed me to it. “I guess I don’t then,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest.
He slammed his locker shut, spun the numbers on the lock. “Well, then I guess that settles it.” Like we were in turmoil, and now the pieces were settling after a storm, onto opposite sides of the line.
Except it wasn’t settled yet. He found me after practice that day, forcing the point. Making it a moment impossible to come back from.
“Just say it,” he said. His hands were up in the air, out to the side, as if he were bracing himself.
