I think he knew as soon as he saw my face. “Ollie,” he breathed, holding out his arms. I launched myself into them like this wasn’t weird, and we hadn’t spent the last few weeks pretending each other didn’t exist. As soon as I felt his hands on my back I burst into sobs. “Oh, Ollie, no. I’m so sorry.”
He led me, crying and coughing and shaking, straight through to his room without even bringing me past his parents to say hi. Mom and Dad would’ve disowned me if they’d known I’d been so rude, but at that moment I honestly couldn’t have cared less. He left me there for a minute or two while he went down and explained to his parents, then he came back upstairs and sat with me in silence.
When I finally calmed down enough to speak, Will and I had been sitting on his bed for about fifteen minutes. He hadn’t tried to push me into talking, at any point. He’d just sat, his shoulder pressing against mine, with his hands in his lap.
“I just don’t know what to do,” I said. “What do you do when this happens? My parents are acting like everything’s fine, and they wanted to go get dinner, and Mom put on home movies—”
“Movies?”
“Movies of Aunt Linda! Isn’t that the most fucked-up thing you’ve ever heard?”
Will clasped his hands together soberly. “That’s pretty ridiculous.”
“It just doesn’t feel real, Will. Everything is really distant, and blurry, and it’s like I’m dreaming but I don’t think I am. Am I? I’m definitely not dreaming, right?”
“You’re definitely not dreaming,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s fine. But also, it’s not okay, because she’s dead, and that’s real. That’s real life. It’s real life from now on, too. For every day, from now until forever, she’s still going to be dead when I wake up every morning. How do I do this? I don’t know what to do.”
I was crying again now, and Will put his arm around me to pull me into him. Not in a romantic way, just comforting. The way I’d really wanted my parents to comfort me.
“What do I do?” I asked again. Like Will somehow had a magical solution to all of this.
“Whatever you need to,” he said quietly.
I rested my head on his shoulder. I hadn’t realized how heavy it felt until then. My jaw was aching, too. From crying? Had I been gritting my teeth? I used to do that a lot when I was younger, until I’d chipped a tooth and the dentist made me sleep with a mouth guard. “It was just out of nowhere, you know? I mean, it wasn’t totally unexpected, but I thought we’d have more warning. I thought she’d start looking really, really sick, and we’d know it was coming. I can’t even remember the last conversation we had. I think it was about spoiled milk.”
I sobbed all the way through the last sentence, so hard I could barely stammer the words out.
“It’s not fair,” Will said.
“No, it’s not fair.”
“No.”
And in the weirdest way, even though I felt like I was being buried alive by grief, it was the tiniest bit more bearable now. Just having Will back me up, and agree with me, and not try to make me look at the bright side, or remember the nice times, made me feel less like I was alone in this. Even though Will barely knew Aunt Linda, I felt like he was right there with me in the darkness. Waiting with me for as long as I needed to be there.
Eventually, I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and sat up. “I’m sorry. I just came over here out of nowhere, and you probably have a ton of homework, and you haven’t even had dinner—”
“It’s—”
“I should’ve at least texted, or—”
“Ollie.” He grabbed my hand, and I looked down at it, startled. “It’s fine. I’m glad you came. You can stay as long as you want.”
I nodded, and gently took my hand away. “Thank you. I should get home, though.”
He walked me through to the living room, where his parents were watching Inception. They’d reached the scene where everyone was banging around upside down in the corridor, but they paused it when they noticed us.
“Hi, Ollie,” Mrs. Tavares said. “Will told me about your aunt. I’m so sorry to hear. Please let us know if there’s anything we can do.”
Mr. Tavares nodded and gave me a tight smile. “It’s good to see you again, Ollie. I thought after Thanksgiving we might start seeing your face around here more often.”
I had a sudden flashback to Mr. Tavares practically walking in on Will and me. I forced a fake laugh.
“Oh, and Will,” he said mildly. “I know tonight was a bit of a special situation, but please remember our rule about not closing bedroom doors.”
Will blinked at his dad like he’d spontaneously combusted or something. Swallowing, he gave a stiff nod, and walked me to my car.
The whole way, he stared into the distance without a word.
“You okay?” I asked.
“We don’t have a rule about not closing bedroom doors for friends. Only for girls. Me and the guys hang out with the door closed all the time.”
Oh. Uh-oh. “I’m sorry …”
He shook his head. “Don’t be. It’s not your fault. I’ll just … see if he brings it up again.”
His words were reassuring, but his face said otherwise. Will did not want to go back inside that house.
I hesitated at the car. Part of me wanted to hang around to make sure Will wasn’t having an internal breakdown, but if we stayed out here for too long wouldn’t that look even more suspicious? What if his dad felt the urge to come out here and tell us to wrap it up? “Okay. Well could you please text me in a bit, then? To let me know if he does bring it up again or not?”
Will nodded. “Sure. And you text me later to let me know you’re okay, all right?”
Oh. Of course. For the briefest moment I’d forgotten about Aunt Linda. Then it came flooding back, fresh as if I’d only just found out. But I was not going to cry. Not now. It could wait approximately eight seconds. “Yeah. All right.”
All right.
20
Home felt like a graveyard.
I was given the rest of the week off from school, which was a relief because I had developed a startling habit of crying without warning. Sure, I cried about Aunt Linda, but then I also cried at a dog adoption advertisement on TV, sobbed because I realized I’d be missing a math quiz on Thursday when I hated math, and bawled for about twenty minutes drinking orange juice one morning because it made me think of how Saint Nick used to give oranges to poor children and how some people never get oranges while I’d taken them for granted my whole life.
I wasn’t the only one crying, either. It’s what Mom did most of the day now. She’d gotten over that initial, way-too-optimistic reaction quite quickly. I didn’t like seeing my mom cry, but it was less unsettling than her unnaturally loud laughter on that first day. Dad was less of a crier, but he didn’t smile once. We were somber through the funeral preparations, and through the funeral itself on Friday, and while we went through the motions of living, trying to figure out what that looked like now.