“Am I stupid for still trying?” she asks me, not even looking up. “I’ve already been accepted at Oberlin, and I’m going no matter what.”
“Kat, are you actually able to not try?” I ask, and she cracks up. “Exactly.”
“Ugh, I know! I’m such a nerd. Maybe in college I can become, like, a super chill slacker. I would kill to be chill.”
“I’m pretty sure the killing negates the chilling,” I say, and she laughs harder. It’s so easy to make your best friend laugh, but I don’t mind—especially now. I’ll take easy laughs where I can get them.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” she asks. “I thought maybe we could go to the downtown library to find books for our humanities projects.”
“I definitely can, but we’d have to go after practice lets out,” I say.
“Ugh,” Kat says. “My least favorite time of year! T&F gets so much of you.”
“Don’t call it T&F,” I say, which makes her giggle.
“Are you going to Sofia’s party on Friday?” she asks, after eating handful after handful of Doritos.
“I hadn’t planned on it,” I say, which isn’t a lie because you can’t plan to do something you didn’t even know about. Sofia—and Mariana, too—were such a big part of high school before we switched tables this year. Why is Kat still included when it’s like, if I’m not seen, I’m forgotten?
“You should come! I’m sure Sofia will be super happy to see you. It’ll be—well, it’ll be like every single other party, but aren’t you the one who wants to soak in and savor senior year like a big weirdo?”
“Ha ha,” I say. “I don’t know. I have early morning stuff on Saturday, so I’ll probably sit it out. But text me if anything exciting happens.”
I realize it’s fully my choice to stay home on Friday, but when everyone’s photos and stories pop up on Instagram I still feel a tug of resentment that I’m not included. I wonder if people ask Kat about me when I’m not around the way they ask me about her. But I’m afraid I’m the one who blends into the background when she’s there, or when Logan was. Maybe I’m easy to forget.
After my run on Saturday morning, I head to Griffith Park for my volunteer day with Tree People. Technically, it’s a volunteer day for all of Magnolia Park, but I drove myself and manage to keep to myself even when I see a small crowd of kids—they look like freshmen and sophomores—wearing our blue and gold. Yes, of course I’m here to do something good for the environment, but I’m doing it for my own reasons.
There are signs featuring the leafy Tree People logo near the check-in area for people to take selfies with, but even though I was hoping I’d have an easy way to document the work I’m trying to do this year, a selfie isn’t what I had in mind. It reminds me too much of what Kat would do if she were here.
A woman who doesn’t look too much older than any of us—well, not including the freshmen—introduces herself as Darien, our team leader, and walks through what we’ll be doing this morning. I honestly expected to just plant trees, but Darien lets us know that at this point in the season, all the trees have already been planted. We’re here to take care of them.
“James?”
Before I can make myself look less visible, a girl from track wanders over to me. I push myself to say hello and look friendly though distant.
“You’re friends with Kat Rydell, right?” she asks me.
I guess I didn’t fully pull off distant. “Why?”
“Oh, she’s just really cool,” she says with a shrug.
“Yeah,” I say. “I am friends with her.”
“That’s awesome. Oh, we have a bunch of Vitamin-waters,” she tells me. “If you want to work with our team. It’ll be super fun.”
Since Darien told us we have to work in groups of three or four, I guess I have to agree to this. Last month, I cleaned up litter in Johnny Carson Park, which let me accomplish something while working on my own, headphones in, nonrunning playlist pounding in my ears. Then I felt guilty because I spent half a sunny day surrounded by greenery listening to Chance the Rapper’s latest mixtape, and it hardly felt like giving back. So the next weekend I stood at the midpoint of a 5K run to hold out little cups of water to runners who needed them. Their runners’ high was contagious, though, and I left feeling great again and also eager to start signing up to run non–school affiliated races. Last weekend I ended up sitting alone while assembling purses full of supplies for a women’s shelter. It was quiet work and gave me plenty of time to think: about the women who needed these supplies, about how I didn’t know what on earth my future would hold now that my fifteen-year plan was trash, about how there must be something I could do to make my life feel the same as it used to.
It could be a good thing to not be left alone with my own thoughts right now.
We haul buckets of mulch from one side of the park to another, which is a fairly easy assignment. I had no idea that so many actions you could take to help were simple. But it turns out that something like carrying a bucket is one small part of helping the planet, and I feel almost guilty that none of this had ever occurred to me before.
Once the new mulch is in place, we have to scrape off the old mulch from the newly growing little trees. I assume we’ll use shovels, but instead it’s our hands, and before long there are lots of shrieks from anyone who makes contact with a bug. Somehow, I manage to contain myself, even though it’s a bit more nature than I expected to encounter.
“What are we supposed to do again?” the track sophomore—I’m fairly sure her name is Olivia—asks me, and even though I’m just as new to this as she is, I recite back Darien’s words about rebuilding the berm around the growing tree. Before today I didn’t know that a berm was basically a donut made of soil, but I find that I’m able to explain to Olivia how it’ll help bring water toward the tree’s roots. Being a senior is like this all the time. It’s hard for me to think of anything else besides my future I’m expected to figure out, but underclassmen look to seniors as wizened elders with so much to pass down. If I keep talking about berm and mulch, maybe no one will realize I might not actually know anything about life.
We work until Darien dismisses us just a little after noon, and I notice as I walk to the car that my sweatpants are covered in dust and soil. Is it possible to take off your pants to drive home and have no one notice? I’m not sure on that, so I choose trashing the driver’s seat over potential public pantslessness.
By the time I’m home, showered, and in dirt-free clothes, there are five texts from Kat asking me to join her to go on some art walk somewhere on the Eastside. (She can be astoundingly vague for someone who uses so many words.) Dad’s at the shop, so I text him that I’m going and walk over to Kat’s house. I know, of course, that one reason I feel Kat’s absence more on the weekends is that, last year, we were both in relationships and so I spent plenty of time with Logan. I didn’t miss her so much when she was with Matty. But I’m still convinced she didn’t give quite so much of her time up to him, the way she seems to disappear into Quinn.