‘Written in his lyrical and clear-eyed style, Jeff Zentner’s Goodbye Days is a gorgeous, heartbreaking, and ultimately life-affirming meditation on grief and forgiveness’ Nicola Yoon
‘One of the most stunningly heartfelt, lump-in-your-throat novels I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading. Hold on to your heart: this book will wreck you, fix you, and most definitely change you’ Becky Albertalli
‘Tender, honest, moving, and lyrical. His characters live and breathe. Zentner is the real thing’ Benjamin Alire Sáenz
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2016
‘Some of the most beautiful writing I’ve ever read’ Jennifer Niven
‘An absolute triumph. One of the best books I’ve read this year. Everyone should read it’ Katherine Webber
‘Lush and sticky with heat and a bittersweet mix of hope and despair; with shades of Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend. It’s feverish’ Harriet Reuter Hapgood
‘The Serpent King is a book you won’t be able to resist or forget. I savoured every syllable and fell in love with every page’ John Corey Whaley
‘Dazzlingly written … A tale to make you weep, and be glad, about big questions and small joys’ Sunday Times
‘A richly textured tale … The universal highs, lows and power shifts in friendship are played out by three compelling characters until tragedy brings loyalty to the fore’ Observer
‘An acute portrayal of small-town secrets and a moving take on faith and friendship’ Telegraph
‘I adored all three of these characters and the way they talked to and loved one another’ New York Times Book Review
‘An intensely moving, enthralling debut’ Metro
‘Zentner explores difficult themes head on while tempering them with the saving grace of enduring friendship’ Publishers Weekly, starred review
‘Zentner writes with understanding and grace – a new voice to savour’ Kirkus, starred review
‘Just a few chapters into Zenter’s debut and I was in love’ Book Riot
‘An unforgettably haunting tale that imprints itself on your heart’ Lovereading, Debut of the Month
‘A promising new voice in YA’ Booklist
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Epub ISBN: 9781448188611
Version 1.0
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by
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20 Vauxhall Bridge Road
London SW1V 2SA
www.andersenpress.co.uk
Published in the United States by Crown Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House, New York
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Text copyright © Jeff Zentner, 2017
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.
ISBN 978 1 78344 551 6
For my beautiful Sara.
My color of the winter clouds at night.
My right blue music.
Death steals everything except our stories.
—JIM HARRISON
DEPENDING ON WHO—sorry, whom—you ask, I may have killed my three best friends.
If you ask Blake Lloyd’s grandma, Nana Betsy, I think she’d say no. That’s because when she first saw me earlier today, she grabbed me in a huge, tearful hug and whispered in my ear: “You are not responsible for this, Carver Briggs. God knows it and so do I.” And Nana Betsy tends to say what she thinks. So there’s that.
If you ask Eli Bauer’s parents, Dr. Pierce Bauer and Dr. Melissa Rubin-Bauer, I expect they’d say maybe. When I saw them today, they each looked me in the eyes and shook my hand. In their faces, I saw more bereavement than anger. I sensed their desolation in the weakness of their handshakes. And I’m guessing part of their fatigue was over whether to hold me accountable in some way for their loss. So they go down as a maybe. Their daughter, Adair? Eli’s twin? We used to be friends. Not like Eli and I were, but friends. I’d say she’s a “definitely” from the way she glowers at me as if she wishes I’d been in the car too. She was doing just that a few minutes ago, while talking with some of our classmates attending the funeral.
Then there’s Judge Frederick Edwards and his ex-wife, Cynthia Edwards. If you ask them if I killed their son, Thur-good Marshall “Mars” Edwards, I expect you’d hear a firm “probably.” When I saw Judge Edwards today, he towered over me, immaculately dressed as always. Neither of us spoke for a while. The air between us felt hard and rough as stone. “It’s good to see you, sir,” I said finally, and extended my sweating hand.
“None of this is good,” he said in his kingly voice, jaw muscles clenching, looking above me. Beyond me. As though he thought if he could persuade himself of my insignificance, he could persuade himself that I had nothing to do with his son’s death. He shook my hand like it was both his duty and his only way of hurting me.
Then there’s me. I would tell you that I definitely killed my three best friends.
Not on purpose. I’m pretty sure no one thinks I did it on purpose; that I slipped under their car in the dead of night and severed the brake lines. No, here’s the cruel irony for the writer I am: I wrote them out of existence. Where are you guys? Text me back. Not a particularly good or creative text message. But they found Mars’s phone (Mars was driving) with a half-composed text responding to me, just as I requested. It looks like that was what he was working on when he slammed into the rear of a stopped semi-trailer truck on the highway at almost seventy miles per hour. The car went under the trailer, shearing off the top.
Am I certain that it was my text message that set into motion the chain of events that culminated in my friends’ deaths? No. But I’m sure enough.
I’m numb. Blank. Not yet in the throes of the blazing, ringing pain I’m certain waits for me in the unrolling days ahead. It’s like once when I was chopping onions to help my mom in the kitchen. The knife slipped and I sliced open my hand. There was this pause in my brain as if my body needed to figure out it had been cut. I knew two things right then: (1) I felt only a quick strike and a dull throbbing. But the pain was coming. Oh, was it coming. And (2) I knew that in a second or two, I was about to start raining blood all over my mom’s favorite bamboo cutting board (yes, people can form deep emotional attachments to cutting boards; no, I don’t get it so don’t ask).
So I sit at Blake Lloyd’s funeral and wait for the pain. I wait to start bleeding all over everything.
I’M A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD funeral expert.
The plan was we’d finish our senior year of high school at Nashville Arts Academy. Then Eli would be off to Berklee College of Music to study guitar. Blake to Los Angeles to pursue comedy and screenwriting. Mars hadn’t figured out where he was going. But he knew what he would be doing: comic-book illustration. And I’d be heading to Sewanee or Emory for creative writing.
This was not the plan: for me to be waiting for the funeral of the third member of Sauce Crew to begin. Yesterday was Mars’s funeral. Eli’s the day before.
Blake’s funeral is at his small, white Baptist church—one of about 37,567 small, white Baptist churches in the greater Nashville area. It reeks of graham crackers, glue, and old carpet. There are crayon-drawn pictures of Jesus, resembling a bearded lollipop, handing out blue and green fishes to a multitude of stick figures. The air-conditioning doesn’t work well in the early-August heat and I’m sweating in a navy-blue suit my sister, Georgia, helped me pick out. Or rather, Georgia picked it out herself while I stood there, dazed. I came out of my stupor briefly to express that I thought I was supposed to get a black suit. Georgia gently explained that navy was fine and I could wear it after the funeral. She always forgot to say funerals. Or maybe she didn’t forget.
I sit in the back of the church, forehead resting on the pew in front of me. I watch the tip of my tie sway to and fro and wonder how humans got to a place where we said, “Whoa. Hold on. Before I can take you seriously, you need to hang a brightly colored strip of narrow pointy cloth around your neck.” The carpet is blue and flecked with white. I wonder who designs carpet. Whose life’s calling this is. Who says, “No! No! It’s not right yet! It needs … specks of white! And then my masterpiece is complete!” I mull over this stuff because the world’s reliable absurdity is one of the few things that can distract me, and I welcome distractions right now.
My forehead aches from resting on the hard, smooth wood. I hope I appear to be praying. That seems a church/funeral-appropriate thing to be doing. Plus it saves me from having to make small talk (which I despise under the best of circumstances) with the people making a hushed, sorrowful buzz around me, a swarm of mourning locusts. Isn’t it terrible … What a loss … He was so young … He was so funny … He was … He was … He was. People take shelter under clichés. Language is powerless enough in the face of death. I guess it’s asking too much for people to veer from the tried-and-true under such circumstances.
There’s a huge crowd. Blake’s extended family from East Tennessee. People from Blake’s church. Friends of Nana Betsy’s from work. A bunch of our classmates from Nashville Arts. I’m friendly with most of them, if not friends. A few come by and quickly express sympathies before moving on, but they mostly leave me alone and I’m grateful. That is, I’m grateful if they’re leaving me alone for compassion’s sake and not because Adair has already persuaded them that I’m a killer.
There’s a rustle beside me, the cushion of the pew depressing, a warmth, and then the sunlit perfume of honeysuckle. If any smell stands in defiance of death, it’s honeysuckle.
“Hey, Carver.”
I look up. It’s Jesmyn Holder, Eli’s girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend? They never broke up. They’d been dating for maybe two months. She has dark circles under her eyes. She wears her grief like dust on her face.
“Hey, Jesmyn.”
“Can I sit here?”
“Sure.” Glad there’s at least one future classmate Adair hasn’t gotten to yet.
“I guess I’m already sitting here.”
“I heard someone say once that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than permission.”
“You here alone?” Jesmyn asks. “You were at the other two with a girl.”
“That was my sister, Georgia. She had to work today. Sorry we didn’t really talk at the other two funerals.”
“I wasn’t in a chatty mood.”
“Me neither.” I tug at my collar. “Is it super hot in here?” In general, I’d rather be bitten on the nuts by a Komodo dragon than make small talk. But sometimes you do what you have to do.
“Yeah, but my Filipino genes are fine with it,” Jesmyn says.
We sit quietly for a moment while she surveys the crowd. “I recognize a lot of these people from the other two.”
I lift my head slightly. “Some go to NAA. You still planning on going?”
“Of course. You didn’t think I was going there because of Eli, did you?”
“No. I mean, I don’t know. No.”
“Two girls from NAA got into Juilliard’s piano program last year. That’s a huge percentage. That’s why I decided to go even before I met Eli.”
“I’m glad you’re coming still. I didn’t mean anything.”
“It’s cool. Anyway, this seems like a weird thing to talk about right now.”
“Everything seems weird to talk about right now.”
“Yeah.”
At the front of the room, Nana Betsy shambles, weeping, toward Blake’s cedar casket to run her hand along its smoothness once more before the funeral starts. I did that before sitting down. The smell of the cedar. Sharp and clean. It didn’t smell like something that should be buried under the dirt. It was closed. You don’t let people see how someone looks after something like the Accident. So perched atop the casket lid on a wooden stand there’s a photo of Blake. He purposely made it ridiculous. It’s a department-store portrait; Olan Mills or Sears studio or something. He’s wearing a thrift-store sweater from the 1980s and pleated khaki pants. He’s holding a huge, grouchy-looking Persian cat. He didn’t own a cat. He literally borrowed one for the photo. Pure Blake. A genuine and radiant grin covers his round face. His eyes are closed as if he blinked. He thought photos where people were blinking were hilarious.
I couldn’t help but smile when I saw it. Even under the circumstances. All Blake had to do was walk into a room and I started preemptively laughing.
“How come you’re not here with your parents?” Jesmyn asks, drawing me out of my memory.
“They’re in Italy for their twenty-fifth anniversary. They tried to come home, but they had trouble getting tickets and my dad had to deal with a lost passport. They’re coming home tomorrow.”
“That sucks.”
“Why aren’t you sitting with Eli’s parents?”
Jesmyn crosses her legs and picks a piece of lint off her black dress. “I was. But Adair was giving me a supercrusty vibe. And then I saw you sitting here looking really lonely.”
“Maybe this is how I always look.”
She brushes a lock of her reddish-black hair from her face. I smell her shampoo. “Imagine my embarrassment if I came over here to show you kindness and you didn’t need it.”
“Adair won’t be happy with you showing me kindness.”
“Yeah, well. I guess life is about risk.”
I rub my eyes. My exhaustion is beginning to set in. I haven’t slept more than a few hours in the last three days. I turn to Jesmyn. “Have you talked to Eli’s parents or Adair much since the accident?” I realize, even as I ask, that I have no idea where Jesmyn herself stands on the whole blame thing. Lack of sleep has lowered my inhibitions such that I’m asking questions that might lead to answers I’m unready to hear.
She opens her mouth to answer when the service begins. We bow our heads as Blake’s pastor prays and then offers words of comfort from the gospels. It reminds me more of Mars’s huge funeral at New Bethel AME Church than Eli’s small private service at Connelly Brothers’ Funeral Home. Eli’s parents are atheists, and it was the first funeral I’d ever been to that didn’t once mention God. Seventeen years old and the breadth of my funerary experience probably rivals that of people twice my age.
Six members of Nashville Arts’s a cappella choir perform a requiem. They did this at Mars’s and Eli’s funerals too. Tears streak Jesmyn’s face like an atlas of rivers. She holds a wadded-up tissue and dabs her eyes and nose, staring straight ahead. I don’t understand why I’m not crying. I should be. Maybe it’s like how it’s sometimes too cold to snow.
One of Blake’s uncles reads First Thessalonians 4:14–17 in his thick East Tennessee accent. His large hands tremble. His voice wavers. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever.
A fly lands on the pew in front of me and rubs its back legs together. This fly is alive and Blake is dead. The world brims with pulsing, humming life. Except for in the wooden box at the front of the room. There everything lies still. And what caused this stillness was the most banal, routine activity on my part. Texting my friends. The human equivalent of a fly’s rubbing its back legs together. It’s just something we do. It’s not supposed to kill your three best friends.
Nana Betsy limps to the pulpit to deliver the eulogy. She has bad knees. She takes a long while to gather herself before speaking. Her hands are empty, as though she planned to say whatever was in her heart. The look on her face says that there’s too much to choose from.
I try not to breathe too much or too loudly in the silence. My mouth is dry and I have a headache forming at the base of my skull. My throat aches as if I have something caught in it. The precarious wall I’ve built—that we all build to protect others from enduring the spectacle of our grief—is beginning to crumble.
Nana Betsy clears her throat and speaks. “Blake’s life wasn’t always easy. But he lived joyously. He loved his family. He loved his friends. And he was loved by them.”
Down comes the wall and out pours the swirling, gray sea it contained. I put my head in my hands and rest my elbows on my knees. I press the heels of my hands over my eyes, and tears seep hot around the sides. I’m trembling. Jesmyn’s hand is on my shoulder. At least the ache in my throat is gone, as though it were an abscess full of tears that I lanced.
“Blake was funny,” Nana Betsy says. “If you knew him, he made you laugh at some time or another.”
Tears stream down my wrists and dampen my shirt cuffs. They dribble onto the blue carpet with white flecks. I think for a second about all the places I’ve made a small part of me. Now a tiny piece of this church holds my tears. Maybe after I’m dead, they can cut up the carpet and extract my DNA from my tears that have soaked into the carpet and resurrect me. Maybe that’s what the resurrection will be.
“Think of him every time someone makes you laugh. Think of him every time you make someone laugh. Think of him every time you hear someone laugh.”
I draw a deep breath that hitches and shudders as the air enters my lungs. It’s probably too loud, but I don’t care. I sat in the back for a reason. I don’t sense anyone turning to look at me, at least.
“I can’t wait for the day that I see him again and throw my arms around him. Until then, I know he’ll be sitting at our Savior’s feet.” She pauses to compose herself before finishing. “And he’s probably making Jesus laugh too. Thank you all for coming. This would have meant a lot to Blake.”
The funeral ends. I stand to serve as pallbearer. They didn’t ask me to be Mars’s or Eli’s pallbearer.
Jesmyn reaches up and touches my hand. “Hey. Do you want a ride to the cemetery?”
I nod, grateful, sagging into myself. Like I’ve awoken from one of those dreams where you cry and soak your pillow. Your grief is animal, formless, unhinged in the il-logic of dreams. You wake up and don’t remember what you were crying about. Or you do, and you were crying because you’ve been offered a chance at redeeming yourself. So when you realize it was a dream, you keep crying because your shot at redemption is another thing you’ve lost. And you’re tired of losing things.
I help carry Blake’s casket to the hearse. It weighs a thousand pounds. I had a science teacher ask us once: “What weighs more? A pound of feathers or a pound of lead?” Everyone said lead. But a few hundred pounds of best friend and casket don’t weigh the same as a few hundred pounds of lead or feathers. It weighs much more.
It’s a short walk from the front of the church to the waiting hearse, but in the sultry afternoon heat, I’m soaked when I get to Jesmyn’s battered Nissan pickup.
“Sorry, my AC doesn’t work,” she says, sweeping piano books off the passenger seat.
“Don’t you die of heat every time you drive anywhere?”
“That’s the best way you could phrase it?”
“Don’t you suffer extreme discomfort but not literal death every time you drive anywhere?” I get in and roll down the window.
We drive without speaking for most of the ride, the muggy air washing over our faces. My cheeks are gritty with dried salt.
When we’re a few blocks from the cemetery, Jesmyn asks, “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I lie. A few seconds pass. “No.”
SAUCE CREW.
Every group of friends needs a name. We were Sauce Crew.
Sophomore year. Close enough to the end of the school year that we’re in a perpetual state of giddiness. It’s a Friday night and we’ve just attended Nashville Arts’s production of Rent. It was great. But on a Friday night in spring—each of us surrounded by our three best friends—it could have been the worst train wreck of a steaming turd (work with me on the mixed metaphor) imaginable and we’d still have been euphoric.
So we’re at McDonald’s stuffing our faces.
“Okay,” Mars says through a mouthful of hamburger, apropos of nothing: “What if you had to classify every animal as either a dog or a cat?”
Eli spews soda out his nose. We were already laughing at the question, and now we’re laughing at Eli mopping Mountain Dew off the Wolves in the Throne Room T-shirt he wore as if it were grafted to his chest.
Blake is gasping for air. “What are you even talking about?”
Mars reaches over to dip a french fry in my ketchup. “No, no, all right. Check it out. Raccoons are dogs. Possums are cats. Squirrels are—”
“Hang on, hang on,” Eli says.
“Dude, Mars,” Blake says, “raccoons are clearly cats. Possums are dogs.”
“No, hang on,” Eli says. “Any animal you can’t train is a cat. You can’t train a raccoon. Cat. You can’t train a possum. Cat.”
“Wait, how do you know you can’t train a possum?” Mars asks.
“You can train a cat,” I say. “I’ve seen YouTube videos of cats using a toilet.”
Now all three are howling, struggling to breathe. Blake is doubled over. “Please tell me when you ditch out on us to write, you’re sitting at home watching cats piss and shit into human toilets and pumping your fist—Yeah! Cat using human toilet!”
“No, but I just come across them. Through life.”
Tears stream down Mars’s face. “‘Through life.’ Blade said ‘through life.’ Oh my God. Oh my God.”
Get it? Carver? Blade? Blake had come up with the nickname. It’s funny because I dress like a guy who wants to be a writer and whose older sister works at Anthropologie and helps dress him. Guys who meet this description don’t generally go by “Blade.”
“Okay, guys. Ferrets. Ferrets are long cats,” Eli says.
“I’ve seen a trained ferret, so you can definitely train a ferret,” Blake says.
“To use a human toilet?” Mars asks.
“I didn’t know there were ferret toilets,” Blake says.
“If it’s true that you can train a ferret, then I take back what I said, because ferrets are definitely cats,” Eli says.
“Okay, seals,” I say.
“Mmmmm, cat,” Mars says, staring off thoughtfully.
Eli looks incredulous. “Wait, what?”
“You can for sure train a seal, bro,” Blake says.
“No, hang on,” Eli says. “I think Mars is implicitly saying seals look like cats to him.”
Mars pounds the table, rattling our trays. “They do. They have catfaces. Also they love fish. Cats love fish. Seals are watercats.”
We’re getting dirty looks from other diners. We couldn’t care less. Remember? Young. Alive. Friday night in spring. A feast of junk food spread before us. Best friends. We feel like lords. Everything seems limitless.
Blake stands and finishes his drink with a rattling slurp. “Gentlemen, I need to”—he makes air quotes—“urinate, as it were. If y’all will excuse me. When I return, I expect to have some resolution of the seal-cat issue.”
Mars slaps me on the back. “Better go with him so you can film it.”
“You don’t understand, man,” I say. “I’m only into cats that way.” Peals of laughter from Mars and Eli.
We’re well into our discussion of whether grasshoppers, jellyfish, and snakes are dogs or cats when we realize it’s been a while since we’ve seen Blake.
“Yo, fam, check it out.” Mars points at the children’s playground adjacent to the McDonald’s. Blake is pitching back and forth on one of those rocking horses mounted on a thick spring. He’s waving furiously at us, like a little kid, and whooping.
“Look at that asshole,” Eli murmurs.
“He shame,” Mars says.
“Wait, what?” I ask. “He shame? That’s not a thing people say. You’re missing like three words in that sentence, including a linking verb.”
“I’m making it a thing. Someone does something stupid? He shame. You do something stupid? You shame.”
I shake my head. “That will never be a thing.”
Eli gathers unopened packets of Blake’s chicken nugget sauce and hands a couple to Mars. “Come on, we gotta blast him.”
I hurry to keep up as they dash outside.
“Blade, you film,” Eli says. I also throw like a guy who wants to be a writer.
Blake rocks, whooping, laughing maniacally, whipping around an invisible cowboy hat and waving at us.
We grin and wave—Eli and Mars waving with one hand, handfuls of sauce packets behind their backs—watching him for a second while I film on my phone.
“Okay,” Mars says under his breath, still grinning and waving furiously. “Count of three. One. Two. Three.”
He and Eli stop waving and lunge forward, hurling sauce packets. Mars has a good arm. His dad used to force him to do all kinds of sports. Eli has this rangy athleticism. He’d have probably been a decent basketball player if he could put down his guitar long enough and if he weren’t so allergic to keeping his long, curly black hair out of his face. A teriyaki and a BBQ each score a direct hit on the horse’s head, causing them to burst open and spray Blake. His joyous whoops turn to cries of indignation. “Awwwww, no way, you assholes! Gross!”
Mars and Eli high-five each other and then awkwardly high-five me. I suck at high fives. They collapse on the ground in hysterics, rolling around.
Blake walks up, arms outstretched, dripping with sauce. Mars and Eli hurry to their feet. Blake starts chasing them in turn, trying to wipe sauce on them. He’s much too slow, even with them breathless from laughter. Finally he gives up and goes to the restroom. He returns, dabbing his shirt with a wet paper towel.
“Y’all are so damn funny. The damn Sauce Crew.”
“We should call ourselves that. Sauce Crew,” Eli says.
“Sauce Crew,” I say somberly, extending my hand, palm down.
“Sauce Crew,” Mars says in his terrible English accent and puts his hand on mine.
“Ssssssssssssauce Crewwwwwwwww,” Eli says, in a boxing announcer voice, and puts his hand on Mars’s.
“Sauce—” Blake starts to put his hand on Eli’s but then playfully slaps him on the cheek and goes for Mars. They both giggle and dodge while trying to keep their hands together. “Sauce Crew,” Blake says, and puts his hand on top of Eli’s.
“Saaaaaaaaaaaaauce Crew!” we shout in unison.
“Did one of you donkey dicks film it at least? I want to put it on my YouTube,” Blake says.
I watch them lower the third member of Sauce Crew into the ground.
I am Sauce Crew now.
IT’S LATE AFTERNOON when Jesmyn pulls up to my car, and the sun sifts through leaves, making them glow green. My head is pounding. I realize it’s not only because of the tension I’m carrying, but also because I’ve barely eaten all day.
We sit there for a moment, the heat pressing down on us like a vise. After a day of ceremony, I can’t seem to even get out of the truck without some.
I rest my arm on the windowsill. “Thanks. For sitting by me during the funeral and driving me to the cemetery. And standing with me at the cemetery. And then driving me here.” I pause. “Sorry if I’m forgetting anything.”
“No problem.” Jesmyn’s voice sounds washed out.
I reach for the door handle but stop. “I never asked how you’re doing.”
She sighs and lays her head on her hands, which rest on the steering wheel. “Shitty. Like you.”
“Yeah.”
She wipes away tears. A few seconds of sniffling pass. Then the slow returning creep of guilt, taking the baton from grief and exhaustion. It resembles that moment when you’re hiking and you step into an icy creek. It takes a second for the frigid water to seep in and soak your socks. Maybe you’ve even managed to pull your foot out of the water already. But then there’s that wet chill spreading around your foot, and you know you’re going to be miserable for the rest of the day.
I’ve allowed myself to assume, because of her kindness, that she doesn’t blame me. What if all her kindness has nothing to do with that and everything to do with trying to persuade herself not to hate me? I can see convincing yourself not to hate someone by investing kindness in them.
I’m too spent. I have no energy for the truth; no place left to put it.
“Anyway, thanks again.” I open the door.
Jesmyn pulls out her phone. “Hey. I don’t have your number. School’s starting in a few weeks, and I need all the friends I can get there.” This sounds like an epiphany coming to her even as she says it.
“Oh. Yeah. I guess I’m not super close with anyone there anymore either.”
We exchange numbers. Maybe this was the ceremony I needed. Some tiny ray of hope.
It’s dawning on me how lonely this school year will be. Sauce Crew was so tight. We were our own universe. No one alive is in the habit of thinking to call me on a Saturday night. But my bigger problem is Adair. She always wielded outsized social influence at NAA—way more than Eli ever did. Way, way more than me. If she never stops hating me, many people are going to follow her lead just to stay in her good graces.
“Well,” Jesmyn says. “At least we’re done with funerals.”
“That’s something, I guess.”
“See you later?”
“Yeah. Later.”
Now comes the hard part. When we can’t lose ourselves in regimented programs for our grief. When we’re alone with ourselves.
But the day’s not over for me yet. Nana Betsy invited me to stop by her house, where they were having a low-key potluck dinner to send the relatives from East Tennessee home with full bellies.
I squint against the dazzling light while I rummage for my keys and consider how blithely bright the day is.
The spinning world and the burning sun don’t care much whether we stay or we go. It’s nothing personal.
“Hey, Lisa,” I say to one of the NAA a cappella members passing in the parking lot on the way to her car.
“Oh. Hey.” She’s suddenly transfixed by her phone. She’s one of the people Adair was talking to before the funeral started. And as far as I know, she never bore me any special ill will before now. Yep. This school year is going to rule.
I’m about to get into my car when I see a youngish bearded man in khakis, a dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and a loosened, skinny tie approaching.
“Excuse me. Sorry, excuse me,” he calls, waving. “You Carver Briggs?”
At least someone wants to talk to me. “Yeah.”
The young man is carrying a notebook and a pen. He has what looks like a digital recorder in his shirt pocket.
He extends his hand. “Darren Coughlin, with the Tennessean. I’ve been covering the accident from the beginning.”
I shake his hand reluctantly. “Oh.” So you’re the one responsible for the article printed a few days ago, telling the world that this was a texting accident and making everyone point at me.
“Hey, I’m really sorry about the circumstances. I’m working on a story about the accident, and Judge Edwards referred me to you. He said you might have some information about it? They were your friends?”
I rub my forehead. This is literally one of the last things on Earth I want to be doing right now. “Can we do this another time? I don’t really want to talk.”
“I get it, and I’m not trying to be insensitive, but the news doesn’t stop for grief, you know? I’d like to get your side before we go to press.”
My side. I suck in a breath. “Um, yeah. Best friends.”
He shakes his head. “So sorry, man. Do you know anything about what might have caused the accident?”
“I thought you already had an idea.”
“Well, seems like it was texting, but do you know who Thurgood—”
“Mars.”
“Excuse me?”
“We called him Mars.”
“Okay, do you know who Mars was texting with?”
My stomach folds around the jagged edges of the question. My sweat cools. Yes, as a matter of fact I do. “I—I’m not sure exactly. It might have been me.”
Darren nods and scribbles notes. “Were you texting him at around the time of the accident?”
He might be trying not to come across as brusque and uncaring, but he is, and it’s making me jittery. “I—maybe?” My voice is diminishing.
“Are you aware of any criminal investigation into the accident?”
I shudder like a buzzing wasp just landed on my neck. “No. Why?”
He shakes his head nonchalantly. “Curious.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“No, I’d just be surprised if there weren’t an investigation. Three teenagers, texting, you know.”
“Should I be worried?”
Darren keeps scribbling notes. He shrugs. “Probably not.”
“I mean, a couple of cops talked to me right after and I told them that Mars and I were texting that afternoon. But they didn’t, like, arrest me.”
“Yeah, I don’t know.” Darren clicks his pen.
“Could you maybe not write that I might have been texting Mars?” I’m smart enough to know both how futile this request is and how bad it makes me sound, but I sometimes do dumb stuff.
He looks up. “Man, I can’t—”
I chew on a fingernail. He never finishes the sentence.
Darren raises his pad again. “So, what time were you—”
It suddenly occurs to me how little I have to gain by continuing this conversation, and how much I have to lose. “I gotta go. I gotta—”
“Just a couple more questions.”
“No, sorry, I have to be at Blake’s house. His grandma wanted me to come.” I sit down in my car and close the door. I have to roll down the window to breathe in the stifling heat.
Darren rests his hand on the windowsill. “Look, Carver, I’m sorry to be doing this right now. I really am. But this is news. And the news doesn’t wait for people to mourn. So you can either tell me your side of the story or you can wait to read it in the paper. But either way.”
“I don’t read the paper.” I turn the key in the ignition.
He fishes a card from his shirt pocket and hands it to me through the window. “Anyway, man, here’s my card. Drop me a line if you remember something or if the police start asking questions.”
I toss the card on the passenger seat.
“Can I get your number?” Darren asks.
“I’m late.” I roll up the window. Darren gives me a you’re-making-a-mistake look, as though I didn’t know I already had.
Acid bubbles up and scalds the back of my throat as I drive to Blake’s house.
Blake Lloyd is surely the only student in the history of Nashville Arts who secured admission on the strength of his public farting. Okay, not just public farting, but that was by far the most popular part of his oeuvre.
Blake was a minor YouTube celebrity. He made comedy videos—skits, observations, impressions, etc. He’d thicken his accent and country it up. What really got people’s attention, though, was his willingness to embarrass himself publicly. He’d trip himself at the grocery store and take out a display of cereal boxes while his pants fell down (he always cleaned up his messes). He’d step in dog poop barefoot. He’d walk into Green Hills Mall, the snootiest mall in Nashville, shirtless (and he did not look like he worked out).
And then there was the public farting. In movie theaters. During a quiet scene. Puuuurp. Then a pause. Then another one. Longer. Priiiiiiiiiip. He always kept a straight face. One of his most popular videos was one where he rips ass at the library and he hasn’t even gotten the whole thing out yet when the librarian bellows, “EXCUSE YOU.”
In the months before the Accident, though, he had upped the ante to public farting in midconversation. So he’s talking with a prim hobby-shop clerk, acting the perfect young gentleman, and midsentence, he cuts one. The lady tries to be polite, because we all make mistakes, but she can’t help an involuntary grimace. But then he goofs out another—it sounds like a pig’s squeal. Brrrrrrrp. And now she’s certain it’s no mistake.
“Do you need the restroom?” she asks icily.
“Ma’am?” Blake says.
Now this may not seem the sort of portfolio that would get you into a competitive arts school (please note: if you say “competitive arts school” fast, it sounds like “come pet at a fart school”). But Blake was smart. He studied comedy. He listened to people talk about it and pick it apart, analyzing it on podcasts and in essays. He knew his craft and was serious about it. He knew how to intellectualize it and frame what he was doing to make it attractive to the admissions committee. So he wasn’t a bored kid farting in public for laughs on the Internet. He was a performance artist, actively violating the social contract and confronting those in public spaces with the reality of bodily function. He was challenging people, forcing them to question the artificial barriers we construct between ourselves and our bodies. He was subverting expectations. He was sacrificing himself; laying it on the line. He was creating art.
Plus, come on. Farts are always funny. Even to admissions officers.
I get to Nana Betsy’s house and let myself in. There’s a laptop set up as you walk in the front door, and it’s playing Blake’s videos. So amidst the somber hush of conversation, you hear the occasional flatulent toot emanate from the laptop speakers, followed by chuckling from the groups of two or three people alternating standing around the laptop.
The photo of Blake that rested on top of the casket now sits on the coffee table. The house is warm in the way of confined spaces full of people. It smells of potluck food and the aftershave and perfume that men and women get as presents from grandchildren.
I pause in the living room for a second, unsure of what to do. Nobody acknowledges my presence. A gust of guilt buffets me, so powerful it makes my leg bones feel like they’re resonating to some low frequency. You filled this house with mourners. You created this occasion. I have that feeling when you think everyone is staring at you even though you can see they aren’t.
I spot Nana Betsy in the kitchen, talking with her brothers. Our eyes meet and she motions for me to come in. I enter the kitchen and Nana Betsy, without interrupting her conversation, points me to the adjacent dining room, where steaming slow cookers, casserole dishes, and disposable aluminum pans crowd the table. Cold grocery-store fried chicken. Squash casserole topped with Ritz crackers. Turnip greens with chunks of pork. Little smoked sausages swimming in BBQ sauce. Mac and cheese with the top baked brown.
It’s strange that this is the best we can do. We don’t even have a special ceremonial mac and cheese to mark someone’s passing from this world. We only have the normal stuff that your mom feeds you on any given day when someone you love hasn’t died.
I pile food precariously on a paper plate, grab a clear plastic fork and a red Solo cup of sweet tea, and find a corner of the living room. The couch and most of the chairs are taken, so I sit on an ottoman and eat, trying to make myself invisible, carefully balancing my cup on the carpet. I have to force down each bite through a constricted throat. Hungry as I am, my body is telling me I’m unworthy. Replaying my conversation with Darren in my mind every few minutes also doesn’t help.
People bump into each other, interacting. Fish in an aquarium. The men wear wrinkled, ill-fitting sport coats and sloppily tied ties. They look uncomfortable, like beagles wearing sweaters.
I finish and I’m about to stand when Nana Betsy shuffles in. A woman rises from the rocking chair, and she and Nana Betsy share a long hug and kiss on the cheek. Nana Betsy bids her farewell and tells her to take a plate of food for the road. Then Nana Betsy drags the rocker beside me and sits with a soft groan. She looks bone weary. Her eyes normally dance. Not today.
“How you doing, Blade?”
Nana Betsy was the only person on Earth outside of Sauce Crew who called me Blade. The nickname tickled her to no end.
“I’ve been better.”
“I hear you,” she says.
“Blake’s funeral was beautiful.” I’m saying it without conviction. I’m not even fooling myself. A beautiful funeral for your best friend is a species of drinking a delicious poison, or being bitten by a majestic tiger.
Nana Betsy sees right through me. “Oh, baloney,” she says gently. “A beautiful funeral would have been Blake making everyone laugh once more. One his mama was at.”
I hadn’t wanted to ask about that. But Nana Betsy says it with a certain yearning, something she wants off her chest but she needs someone to ask her about it.
“Do you know where she is?”
She blinks away tears. She folds her hands on her lap, prayer-like. “No,” she says softly. “I don’t hear from Mitzi but once every couple years. When whatever man she’s taken up with leaves her high and dry again and she needs money to feed her habit. She’ll call from some motel in Las Vegas or Phoenix on a disposable cell phone. I have no number for her. No address. No way to reach her. On top of everything else, I guess I’ll have to hire someone to track her down so’s I can tell her Blake is gone.”
“Man.” What do you say to that?
“Thing is, she’ll be devastated even though she’s never been interested in being a mother to him.”
A weighty silence. A blessed fart from the laptop. Nana Betsy laughs through her tears. “I miss him so much. I don’t know how to live without him. I’m not even sure how I’ll weed the tomato garden with my knees bad as they are. Blake always did it for me.” She produces a handkerchief and wipes her eyes. “I loved him as my own.”
It’s several seconds before I can speak; I’m swallowing the sobs trying to claw their way out of my throat. “I don’t think I’ll ever laugh again.”
Nana Betsy leans over and hugs me. She smells like dried roses and warm polyester. She doesn’t seem to have a single sharp edge. We hug and rock side to side for a second or two.
“I better keep making the rounds,” Nana Betsy says. “You’re a good friend. Please don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Oh, my mom and dad wanted me to tell you again they’re sorry they couldn’t come. They tried to make it home from Italy, but they couldn’t in time.”
“You tell them I understand completely. Bye, Blade.”
“Bye, Nana Betsy.”
Before I leave, I take a last look around. I remember the occasions Blake and I sat in this living room planning his next video. Playing video games. Watching a movie or some sketch-comedy show.
I wonder if the actions we take and the words we speak are like throwing pebbles into a pond; they send ripples that extend farther out from the center until finally they break on the bank or disappear.
I wonder if somewhere in the universe, there’s still a ripple that’s Blake and I sitting in this living room, laughing ourselves silly. Maybe it’ll break on some bank somewhere in the vast sky beyond our sight. Maybe it’ll disappear.
Or maybe it’ll keep traveling on for eternity.
WHEN I GET home, Georgia greets me at the door with a huge hug, squeezing the breath from me.
“How was your day in the scented candle mines?” My heart’s not remotely in the joke—one of our regulars—but I make it as a halfhearted nod to normalcy.
I feel her half smile on my cheek. “If I pretend that’s still clever, will it cheer you up?”
“Maybe.”
She pulls back and takes my hands. “Hey. You hanging in there?”
“Define ‘hanging in there.’ I’m alive. My heart’s beating.”
“Time’s the only thing that can touch this.”
My sister is only a little older than me, but she’s sometimes wiser than her years. “Then I want to go to sleep and wake up a decade from now.”
We stare at each other for a second. My eyes well with tears. It’s not sadness or exhaustion this time. It’s Georgia’s goodness. I’m a total baby in the presence of unalloyed kindness. I choke up when I see YouTube videos about people donating a kidney to a stranger or saving a starving dog or something.
“I know you miss them,” Georgia says. “I’ll miss them. Even Eli constantly trying to look down my shirt.”
“Once Mars drew a picture of you in a bikini as a present for Eli.”
She rolls her eyes. “Did you at least defend my honor?”
“Of course. I mean, it was a really good picture, though. Mars was good.” I choke up.
Georgia gives an oh-you-poor-thing wince and hugs me again. “There’s some lasagna left.”
“I ate at Blake’s.”
“Mom and Dad called while you were at the funeral. They were checking up on you. Call them.”
“Okay.” I hesitate before spilling. “So—a reporter ambushed me after the funeral.”
Georgia’s face sours. “What? A reporter wanted to talk to you after the funeral of your best friend? Are you shitting me? The hell?”
“Yeah. He was superpushy. Like”—I imitate Darren’s voice—“‘Well, Carver, I gotta write about this, and the news doesn’t wait for grief, so if you wanna tell me your side, you better.’”
She rears back, folds her arms, and does that pissed-off thing with her lips that absolutely only girls of a certain age can do. “What’s this dipshit’s name?”
I know the look on her face. It’s the look she used to get every time I told her about kids picking on me in middle school, just before she went to “sort things out.” “Please don’t. I guarantee it’d make things worse.”
“For him.” (She isn’t wrong.)
“For me.”
We stand at an impasse. She sniffs at me. “Speaking of news: you kinda stink.”
“I was wearing a suit all day and it was superhot, but whatever.”
“Go shower. You’ll feel better.”
“I’m despondent and I apparently smell like gross balls. How could I possibly ever feel better than I do now?”
Georgia’s right; I’m improved when I get out of the shower, dry off, and flop naked on my bed. I stare at the ceiling for a while. When I tire of that, I dress in a pair of khakis and a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
I open my blinds, letting the peach-hued dusk cast long shadows in my room. I sit at my desk and open my laptop. Glowing on the screen is the story I’m working on. Any illusion I have of losing myself in that, though, quickly vanishes.