“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t think about it that way.”
“I know you didn’t, bug,” Dad says. He runs his hands through his Nico-hair again, making it stick up in the opposite direction from where it was pointing before. “But maybe you should, next time. People care about you, you know? You can hurt them just by forgetting that.”
“That’s not fair.” I chip at my nail polish, scarring one of the little hearts Maryam gave me.
“It’s how it is, though,” he says. “You scared us. We love you, and you scared us. And that line about nobody noticing if you were gone?”
“I didn’t mean it like—”
“What you meant doesn’t matter,” he says. He’s being firm, but still gentle, and the gentleness stings more than it ought to. “What you said is what matters. Your impact matters more than your intentions, kiddo, and those words were maybe the worst ones you could have said to someone who spent his afternoon worrying about whether you were going to come home.”
“If you were so worried, why didn’t you come in here sooner?” I mumble.
“At first, we figured you just cut class. But then you didn’t get home until the sun was going down. You breezed in through that front door and headed to your room right when we were about to call your cell and tell you to get your ass home. By then we were too upset to come talk to you right away,” he says.
“You mean Pop was too upset?”
“No, I mean we were too upset,” Dad says. I look up at him, surprised. He smiles. “I’m still upset, bug. I’m angry and hurt and surprised. But I understand, too. You’re a good kid, and this is pretty minimal mischief compared to what you could get up to.” I flinch, thinking of all the things he doesn’t know. “But you’ve got to understand how frightening it is to think even for a second that you might be disappearing.” He nudges me with his shoulder. “Just don’t do that to us again, okay? We’re old guys. Our hearts can’t take the strain.”
He’s not old. They’re not old. But they make jokes like that sometimes, and I know Dad is only doing it to make me feel better. I smile weakly and nod, feeling like a little kid. Feeling like an asshole. “What about Pop?” I ask.
“Well, he’s pretty upset too. In some ways that I’m not. He’ll need a little space, I imagine,” Dad says. “Talk to him tomorrow. Apologize. He loves you more than he’s mad at you.” He gives me a squeeze and stands up. “I’m going to go check on him. It’ll be okay, though.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it,” he says in that same painfully gentle voice. “It’ll be okay.”
He kisses the top of my head and walks out of my room, leaving the door open just a crack behind him. I wait until I hear his footsteps disappear down the hall before I close it the rest of the way.
I’m a huge jerk. The other day, when Dad made bag lunches for Nico and me, I could tell that he and Pop were worrying because of the thing with Josh. I could tell, and I even said something to Nico about it—I told him not to hurt Dad’s feelings. And then I turned around and acted like I could do whatever I wanted without making my dads worry about me, even though it’s my classmate who’s missing.
I didn’t even think about it. And I wouldn’t have thought about it at all, if not for Iris. I scroll way back in the group thread, and there it is: three texts from Iris asking where I am, and nobody answering her. No wonder she went to my dads.
I text Roya, needing to talk about it, needing to hear that I’m not a terrible person—but she doesn’t answer. She hasn’t answered any of my messages all day. I mentally start scanning through our previous interactions, trying to figure out what I could have done to make her angry, what I could have done to drive her away and make her ignore me. I feel like I’m standing at the rim of a very deep hole, a hole too deep to climb out of. If I keep just thinking about Roya and my dads and Josh and everything, I’m going to fall in.
I have to do something.
I lean over the edge of my bed and reach under it, far as my arms can get. The lip of my bedframe digs into my armpit hard, and I press into it, savoring the pain for just a moment.
Just before it starts to hurt too much, my fingers find fabric, and I’ve got the bag. I haul it back up onto my bed and tug at the zipper.
Josh’s heart is inside. It’s warm, and it’s just a little soft under my fingertips. It’s heavy, still, heavier than it should be. It beats in my hands, hard brutal spasms, still slow but faster than before. I stare at it, willing it to be surrounded by a living boy.
Nothing happens, of course. That pit yawns wider, the hole I mustn’t fall into, the place where I’ll lose hope and give up and stop trying to bring Josh back.
Maryam is right. I can’t stop trying to fix this thing. No matter what I lose in the process—no matter how scary it is, not knowing how I’ll change—I can’t give up. Because giving up feels like admitting that the dark thing inside me, the thing that can use someone up and kill them by accident, is more powerful than the rest of me. That’s what’s at the bottom of the hole I’m trying to stay out of: the knowledge that the worst part of me is the strongest part of me.
I stand at the edge of the hole, holding that slowly beating heart and wishing I knew how to fix it, and I feel myself starting to fall.
Just before I topple over the edge, Paulie calls me.
“You have perfect timing,” I say in lieu of hello. My voice is shaking. I press the phone between my shoulder and my ear as I slide the heart back into the bag.
“I know,” Paulie says. “I’m pretty much perfect in every way.”
I don’t quite smile, but I can feel the bottom of the hole getting farther away. “You’re also the humblest person I’ve ever met.”
“I’m the best at being humble. No one on this earth is better at being humble than I am,” she says, and I laugh. It feels good to laugh—some of the deflated, constricted feeling in my chest subsides. Paulie is always great that way.
I tell Paulie about what happened with my dads, and with Iris. She’s immediately pissed on my behalf. “What the fuck?” she hisses. “Why would Iris snitch on you?”
“I don’t think she thought she was snitching,” I say tentatively. Paulie doesn’t get angry easily the way Roya does—but unlike Roya, she doesn’t let things go easily either. Once she’s mad, it can be dangerous to get between her and the object of her ire. “I think she was just worried, you know? I mean … we did kind of vanish. And she’s been under a lot of stress lately.”
“Oh, boo-hoo,” Paulie snaps. “We’ve all been under a lot of stress—that doesn’t mean we get to start tattling on each other. What if she feels the need to unburden herself further?”
“Did you just say ‘unburden herself further?’ ”
“Shut up,” Paulie says, but I hear the smile in her voice. “I’ve been studying for the ACTs for like … four hours.”
“You dropped me off at home two hours ago,” I tease.
“Okay, but it feels like four,” she says. “The point is, Iris shouldn’t have done that. I’m sorry about your dads.”