I. We start again and so begins a new version. This is about how it goes: A sultry evening teeters on the bottom edge of July. We sit at the red picnic table by the lake. The scarlet heat tattooed between our ribs. This is the month when the waning sun has to fight as it goes down, leaving a smattering of colors, bruising in the sky. The sun, a cooked orange. Lily and her subtle laughter as she swallows cubes of watermelon, seeds peering from gaping pores. Drop dead gorgeous at eighteen. Still is, I would bet, as long as we keep the film rolling and the music playing. As long as it plays in a different direction. But it is still early and we are outside, with the summer gardens and fatty worms wheedling their ripening bodies into leaves and fruit, turning produce into sweet rot.
II. I listen as she goes on about her grades and her new boyfriend. How she cried over multivariable so many times during the spring semester, how she’s so glad it’s over, how she can’t quite describe Jack but he’s beautiful, he’s so in love, he can hold her and break her into pieces and how that’s equally as beautiful. And goddamn if there isn’t anything more handsome than a slender boy with knives for hands. Jack with a new letterman and a breaking temper. She is looking for advice, I know, but she is no protégé and I am no one better, only older. In our new version, however, she will open her mouth and I will give her anything.
III. Lily peels open an orange, rind gaping open, a mouth of white tendrils stringing off the tender flesh; she pulls off a slice of fruit, pops it into her mouth. Somewhere, the thin film of orange has split open, leaving a trickle of juice running down her hand, clear and freshly squeezed. She is quiet, then licks at the sticky trail and smiles sheepishly, lips pressed a thinning pink.
IV. Two months later, during the fall semester, she calls me at night, the line buzzing and alive. He’s leaving for college tomorrow, she says, barely audible. I don’t understand. I’m so sad. Why, when I knew all of this.
And this time, I’ll say anything, anything else instead of: Don’t be, he’ll come back. I’m sure. I bite a piece of my laughter off and hand it to her.
V. She doesn’t talk about him for the longest time, and soon, autumn passes by with its allergies and Werther’s toffee candies and late-night phone calls. So many late submissions piled up from magazines, too many tests and projects and reports, that the California trip, originally so far off, has begun to creep up. The days dwindle, and outside, any light after 5 pm has to squeeze its way through the window cracks. I do things without feeling anything. I fall asleep on my desk two times a week when the air in the dormitory has settled to a fresh cold, neck bruised and sour in the morning. The phone barely rings itself awake and the weather grows very still.
She doesn’t talk about him for the longest time, and I forget.
VI. December. On the 25th, I hurriedly pack, throwing in changes of clothes, my laptop, and a disposable toothbrush, the plastic cellophane wrapper catching artificial light. I send my mother a Happy Christmas text and hope that the gift I’ve ordered has arrived at her door. No response for the moment. Perhaps because it is so early.
Evening. An hour before the ride to the airport pulls by the block. I rap on the door and it opens; behind her figure, the view of a dormitory spilling out in the background. At that time, there is nothing on my mind except for schoolwork and writing. In our older version of events, I cannot remember what it looked like when I last visited, but something is different. I squint. Maybe it is her hair.
Aren’t you supposed to be leaving, she asks; her half-moon smile sharp. She looks at anywhere, everywhere except me—I see that now. You’ll be late.
She is right, I am late, or at least, I will be. The irony, how thick it is. How thick the air is. I swear, in this version, I will notice something else other than her newly trimmed hair and wonder about something else other than where she got the haircut from. I swear, in this version, I will forget about homework. I will see right through her and the new brand of rose blush dusted over the slant of her cheeks. I will ask her about Jack. I will tell her I’m sorry I couldn’t save her from herself.
So it goes.
I have enough time to spare, I say, at least to stop by a friend’s before the holiday. Merry Christmas, kid.
So it goes.
I hold out the gift from behind my back like an apology. I watch myself enter the room, and an hour later, walk out. I manage something unintelligible before rounding the corner, catching one last glimpse of her face, dimmed by the darkness in the hallway. Her body moth-eaten by the lighting or something else.
VII. I am stupid as I walk down the hallway, and here is where the anger bubbles within me, widening and pulsing and alive, the scene winding again and again; this is the moment where things are set and fate has dealt her cards and now it’s too late and I can’t change it anymore.
So it goes.
VIII. And of course, they call me barely two weeks later, when I am still in California, a pathetic attempt to escape the cold. It doesn’t work. The lake she plummets into is still freezing, ice still crisp and cracking by the bank, lips bluing before she realizes she has to kick for air. Before she realizes she is not a scaly fish meant to be gutted open as someone’s dinner, but a girl in water. Fish out of water, girl on land. Lily, mascara running down her pallid face. Lily, the color choked sick out of her cheeks. Lily, her body rubber and slippery. Lily, desperate enough that when she doesn’t belong on this little plot of earth, she throws herself into the next best thing.
She changed her mind, you know, they said, she changed her mind and she tried to come back. And then winter goes but the hand in my heart is still cold.
IX. But in this version of life, sometimes I even imagine she looks behind her, and for a split second, just this once, she doesn’t jump. Maybe she looks at me and feels bad, maybe she suddenly realizes she can’t swim, not at all; I don’t know what holds her back but nor do I care. I imagine I have stopped the roll of film from playing out its very end, smashing the makeshift gears into a wall, fracturing the puppet master’s delicate fingerings at the joints.
She is frozen, unstuck in time. The whirring of machines in the background. She is holding out a last lifeline with that look, an almost withering expression that untangles itself into a plea, her line of sight stretching out into something tangible to hold on to; a line to reel her back. She will not suffer the same kind of hostility from me that she has suffered in death.
Deadening silence. So it goes. I’ll call this closure.
X. That night, we talked about boys and writing, family and the summer. The room cooling and the air sliding off our skin. She tells me about her parents, sipping the word divorce as her lips curl around her glass of water. How she doesn’t understand why her mother stays. How she’s top of the class, but only because she copied answers from Jeanette in exchange for the hard copy edition of Game of Thrones. How she thinks it was worth it because she hates the series, and anyway, it was her father who bought her the set so it doesn’t really matter all that much. How she is seeing somebody but doesn’t know how to describe him. Beautiful and sharp to the touch. Pain and blood all over the place. How summer was the best time of her life, when we savored fruit and love. Love all over the place. Rot and death in the gardens; all over the place. How she’s written a new poem, wants me to take a look at it, wants to get it published, and do I prefer Keats or Auden? Modern or postmodern? Feelings about Eliot? How she wanted nothing more than to be like me, with family and no more love to give than that.
She doesn’t like her own skin, she says it’s sagging with liquor and love. Wishes she could peel it off like webby orange skin, blood running down her open palms.
She hates love more than she hates Game of Thrones.
XI. But in this version of life, I keep her there, in the small dormitory, our legs crisscrossed, sitting on the couch. We talk and I throw the deadbolt on the door and she can’t get out anymore. There is no lake in sight. She is safe and sad and I am just sad.
