Had I just told him that? I opened my eyes, looked at his face, and then quickly looked back up at the sky, closing my eyes again. “She died last May. On the fifteenth.” He was silent. I wanted to burst into sobs, but I felt like my throat was closed. Like I couldn’t cry if I tried. “How?” Tyler asked. His voice was quiet, shaky. You’d think I was talking about someone he had known.
“Glass,” she said quickly, opening her eyes again but not looking back at me. She took one of her hands- the gloves were gone- and ran it through her hair. “Broken glass. From a window. My window. Our bedroom window. A, um, baseball...broke it.” I felt like someone had cut off my oxygen. The girl laying next to me now, the one with the face and hair and body that I knew so well, that I loved-she was someone completely different from who I thought she was. I would never be able to look at her the same again. Some people could find out about someone with a relative or a close friend that passed away and just feel bad for them. Oh, that’s so sad. How hard that must have been for them. Not me. Because I could look back on my life-the living and traveling in a van, the happy family, then the split, the separation from everything I’d ever known- and I could remember how impossibly painful all that had been. And those people-my parents, even my sister-they were still alive. They were still there. They were still something tangible, someone I could go see, at least from a distance, if I really needed to. Death, though. That was the final loss on Earth. Once they were dead, they were gone. For as long as you lived after their death, you would never see them again. And that, for me, would change everything.
“I’m so sorry,” he said. I had heard the words so many times. From people who meant it, who had also known and loved Dustin, and from people who didn’t really, who had only heard about Dustin because of the story of the tragic death of a young person. But never once had I heard it so sincere. It sounded like what it would sound like if someone who wouldn’t say sorry to me about it because it was just as bad for them-like my brother or Sean-had said it. “That,” I looked at him now, and his eyes were wet, his bottom lip quivering, “That’s unbearable.” He met my eyes now, and I needed to cry, so badly, but no tears came. I looked away from him, up towards the sky again, and nodded. “Yea,” I said, and my voice sounded rough, like I had just been screaming, “it is.” Tyler reached out and took my hand. I opened my eyes and looked at him again as he took our hands and held them in the air between us. He clenched my hand like I was the tree branch and he was the person hanging off of a cliff. He looked up at the sky and I could see the water in his eyes spill over. Normally, his hand holding mine like that would have made my heart speed to a million miles an hour-I would have widened my eyes and looked up at him, meeting his eyes, checking to see if what he was saying with this motion was real. But now...I looked back up at the sky and tears finally came, and I squeezed his hand. “I think,” I said, my eyes brimming over with tears, matching his, and my voice going from scratchy to shaky, “I think that you’re the first person who’s...stated that.” I laughed, quietly, unfunnily, “Said it like it is.” Tyler wrinkled his eyebrows. He didn’t say, “Oh, sorry,” or “I didn’t mean it to come out like that,” he just shook his head and said, “Well. I mean...” He shook his head again, and I watched as he tried to sort out his thoughts, to think of the right words, “Death...” and the word didn’t hurt, this time, didn’t make me cringe, I didn’t wish that he had phrased it differently, like “passing on” or even “kicking the bucket”, it just seemed like he was stating the facts. Nothing personal, nothing painful, just facts. “It’s not something you can get over.” He shook his head again, opening his eyes and meeting mine, “People treat it like it’s a tragedy, but it gets better in time, like you can eventually get over it and everything will go back to normal.” He narrowed his eyes now, not looking away from mine, “But that’s not true. Maybe, in time, it’s less of a grieving and more of a fleeting pain, maybe it’s something that you can live your life with, despite having it on your shoulders, in the back of your mind. But it will always be there. It will always hurt. And not just a little bit. It will always be unbearable.” I blinked at him. I looked back up at the sky, “Wow,” I said, and he replied, “Wow?” I shook my head, looking back at him, “Thank you. I mean...it just seems like no one says that. Everyone...I mean, I’ve heard ‘it’s always going to hurt’ and ‘it’s not something you can just get over’ but...that. I think...I needed that.” Tyler smiled slightly, not joyfully, “I think everyone does.” I blinked again, shocked at his words. Because they were...so true.
My phone rang in my pocket. I looked down and saw “Hawk” flashing on the screen. I sighed, “I gotta go,” I said, looking back at Angela. And I was surprised that, as she looked at me now, she was...still Angela. Maybe...maybe it was because I had really known. All along, ever since that day when she saved me from the creek, when I looked in her eyes later, and ever day after that, and saw that they were never again as focused, as set one particular thing, as they had been when she was saving me. Because something had been there, behind the other emotions I saw in her eyes. They had never been just happy, just scared, just bothered. There had always been whatever she was feeling right then...and something else. Now, it made so much sense. Now, I knew what had been plaguing her. And of course she was still Angela to me, because I had known the whole time that there was something; something huge, something life-changing, something to cause the thick back-lining of pain in her eyes. I just hadn’t known what exactly that something was. Angela glanced at my phone, “Is it that girl?” I nodded, “Sadie, yea.” She furrowed her eyebrows, “Sadie? Then why does your phone say Hawk?” I chuckled, “That’s just what I call her. Her full first name is Sadie Hawkins.” Angela looked at me now, her expression different, out of the serious setting it had taken on when we had been talking about her sister and changing to the type of serious expression that was only skin-deep, the one that said exactly what came out of her mouth then, “You’re not serious.” I laughed and nodded, “Yup. Sappy parents, met at the Sadie Hawkins dance.” Angela closed her eyes and shook her head, and I laughed as she said, “That is truly cruel and unlikely.” I smiled, “Well, um. I gotta go.” She looked back at me, “Yea.” I bit my lip, “I’ll...” She smiled, just slightly, but it sent my heart pounding again. Maybe she was plagued, maybe she was scarred, maybe she would never be the person she had been when her sister was alive. But I hadn’t fallen in love with that person. I had fallen in love with this one. “You’ll see me soon,” she said. I smiled widely and nodded, “Very soon.”
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