Eat Your Heart Out (10 page)

“So yer leaving me?” I asked her, almost afraid to even fill the air around me with that thought.

“Sometimes . . . sometimes at night when yer sleeping I tell myself to get up and leave and never come back.”

This was my nightmare.

“Then I feel like my body is glued to yer sheets. I wish it were different.”

So did I, but it wasn't, like. We both had scars on our hearts that would never heal.

“I am going to stay faithful to ye until the day I die,” she told me.

We sat in together, until the sun set and until the moon went to half. Then we started to kiss.

“Let's move to Canada. Promise me we'll move to Canada,” she whispered.

We had five
months after that.

A lot changed. I gave her a ring, we were goin' to be tryin' for babies, all that.

Ya know, I could fill every page in this book with happy memories of us, what happened when we got engaged, fuck, how she looked in the morning time when she'd just woken up, but I'll spare us that. It's just too fucken' sad.

But if yer curious, like, everything in those next five months unfolded naturally and perfectly. We fell more and more in love with each passing hour, each passing second, really. Every night before I went ta sleep she'd kiss me and tell me that she'd be faithful ta me for the rest of her life. And in tha time we were together, the pain o' my brother, the weight of the war, the sadness that was Northern Ireland, it faded a little each day. She was my soul mate, we were two of a kind, and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we woulda been happy for the rest of our days. An' I know that she loved the shit out of me, almost as much as I loved her.

The last time I kissed her goodbye, she thought I was meetin' Couch at the pub. I still think it was best tha way.

I'd been asked ta do something real small, to just beat up some thug that was botherin' someone's wee brother, and I didn't think nothin' of it. I said, Yeah, of course, and figured I'd be back before night fell.

The irony is that this wasn't even my own doin'. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was walkin' up Victoria Street on my way, and the air smelled of the sea and faintly rusting shipyards of Belfast Lough. It was half four, but it was already dark. Night always falls early on winter's nights in Belfast and morning dawns slowly. The city was bathed in this yellow sulphur light, and I remember thinkin' tha I was cold and wishin' I was snug somewhere with Kate.

And those were my last living thoughts.

The sidewalk around me shook with enormous force, and a wave of searing air rushed over me. It lifted me from my feet, and for a second too long I could see it all around me; building comin' down, people catchin' fire, blood, people screamin', horrible screamin' everywhere. I'm not sure how I landed, I lost all sense of up and down. But soon I was coffin'd in debris, like, and it crushed me, heavy. I opened my mouth to speak, to yell for Kate, but I only found more debris chokin' me. And then my mouth filled with blood.

Ya wanna know the funny part? My side planted the bomb.

I watch her
from up here, I rarely stop watchin' her, she's like a real good
TV
channel I never wanna turn off. She knows I watch her too. We don't have conversations, like. That's not really possible, but she knows I'm listening.

And I know like my tattoo, that useless provo scrolled across my back, Tiocfaidh ár lá.

Our day will come.

My friend Colin died the
summer we all turned seventeen.

It happened on a Tuesday. A Tuesday of all days. What ever happens on a Tuesday? What ever happens on any day? When I heard, I was helping my kid sister, Sarah, fix her bike. She was eleven. I was the last to know.

I'm Louise. I hate that name, but it's not like I picked it. My other option is Sugar Tits, so said Colin. I chose Louise.

I'm blond and grossly skinny, way too skinny. Not even in a model way. Sometimes I'm not bad. Whenever things are going well, I start to feel vain. Then something like this happens and I'm ugly all over again.

There were four of us until Colin died. We made a funny-looking crew. Hedge, short for Tom, is fat and short. You know me. Then there's Seb. He's stupid good-looking, but I'm the only one who thinks so. And Colin, normal height and skinny like me with grey eyes and a new hair colour every three weeks. We called ourselves T.L.C., The Legend Crew. Don't ask me why, it's not like any of us ever did anything legendary.

People always ask why I only hang out with guys. I don't have a reason. The truth is that it's funny who you feel the most like yourself around.

When I heard, it was one of those days in late August when heat radiates off the pavement and you can see it, before your eyes, like little waves of air, I remember them clear as a bell the day I heard, feeling the gravity bend before my eyes.

My sister started crying hysterically. Colin was always her favourite. He was really quiet, but he was cool with little kids. “Kids don't really need to talk,” he said once. “Adults pollute everything with talking.”

You want to know the first thing I thought? Shit, he made it to everybody's birthday party but mine. That's a selfish thing to think, isn't it?, but that's the first thing I thought. Sometimes I can't even believe myself. Jesus.

He died in
the most badass and tragic way. He did a lot of graffiti, huge, crazy, angry murals all over the place. Normally he'd do them really late at night and he'd come wake you up at six in the morning and you'd have to bike over to wherever he'd worked the whole night before. It was really annoying, but you'd forgive him because he'd have this Jack Nicholson smile on his face. And the murals were truly gangster.

Beautiful colours, weird shapes, funny words all sewn together on some wall in the middle of town. It would really piss old people off when they'd see it, but we were the only ones who knew the culprit, so, natch, he never got caught.

Anyway, in the middle of summer, he'd taken to working all night on boxcars at the train tracks. It was dawn when it happened. It was his own stupid fault. He had his earphones in. Fucking idiot. A train came at dawn, and he never even heard it. If he didn't have his ears in, he would have moved. Instead, it was done, just like that.

I feel split up. Half of me thinks if he had to go, at least he went doing what he loved best. But then one morning in the middle of work after I'd been up all night thinking, I thought about how much it would have hurt to go like that. Sure, it was short, but it must have really hurt. After I realized that, I lost it, snot everywhere, and my boss at the deli counter let me leave early even though I never told him what happened.

Maybe he knew. It's funny how word spreads when a kid dies.

I couldn't bring myself to go see the mural. The boys did. When I asked him how it looked, they said, “Cool,” and that's all. So I figured I'd leave it at that.

Like I said, it's fucked up when a kid dies.

The funeral was
held at some church in the middle of town. Colin would have hated it. It was filled with people he didn't even know, and even if he had known them, he still would have fucking hated it.

We, the only people he did know and usually didn't hate, weren't involved at all. Seb and Hedge asked his parents if they could be pallbearers, because my dad told them that'd be the thing to do, but they couldn't get a straight answer. A little later, I asked if I could read a poem I'd written about something cheesy, like summer turning to winter, and all they said was, “Thanks for the sentiment.”

I can't blame them, though. Just imagine how you'd be if your kid died. I'm surprised they didn't come into the church with guns and shoot everybody just to make some sense out of the fucked-up fact that we'd all lived, for no reason, when their kid had died. That would be true vigilante justice and I don't even think they'd deserve jail for it.

The funeral felt really long, like it stretched out for hours, days, weeks, months, years, like it covered miles, countries, continents, oceans, and equators. The heaviness that sits on a bunch of people who are mourning the death of a young person weighs trillions of pounds and crushes your bones. I just got tattooed on my ankle and it says,
Inside each man there is a poet who died young.
Colin died when he was still the poet, but after he died, that poet died in me, that poet died in us all. We felt the poems dying that day. Growing up is realizing that everything about life is unfair, and the most unfair part is that it ends. Life kicked the childhood out of me that day. Once you're gone, you really can't go back.

The reverend talked some shit about the loons on the lake at his cottage, about Jesus, about how Colin loved boating and how the peace he found on the water would be the same peace he found in the Hereafter. That was so ridiculous I laughed out loud until my mom slapped me to shut up. His dad owned a boat that he used to invite girls from our high school onto when he was drunk at Colin's birthday parties. The last time Colin had been on the boat he puked all over me because he'd pounded a bottle of peach schnapps twenty minutes earlier. He hated that fucking boat. But no one remembers the truth when you're dead.

I couldn't get out of the church fast enough.

“Colin's got the right idea,” Hedge whispered to me when we were walking out, like kids following leaders, in the funeral procession.

“What?” I whispered as quietly as I could, like if anyone heard me speak they would think I was so disrespectful that they'd kick me out of town forever and I'd have to live in a cardboard box on the desolate border between here and the next Bumfuck, Nowhere, town.

“The only way to stay immortal is to die young,” he said, way too loud. “That way, people remember you for what you could have been, not for what you ended up as. I want to be forever young too.”

What is there to say to somebody when he believes something as crazy as that?

I found Seb. My first thoughts upon seeing him were, yet again, selfish. Fuck, he looked good in a suit.

“Do you feel different?” Seb asked me. His eyes looked so damn blue right then.

I shrugged. What a ridiculous question.
Of course I felt different.
Then I motioned for the boys to meet me in the parking lot. Sitting on some random car, I took a dime out of my purse and rolled us a fat joint.

We knew we were smoking to Colin, but who was ready to say it?

The weed wasn't very good.

A few minutes later, Hedge had to leave because his mom found us smoking the joint and screamed at him, “This is a time for families!”

So then it was just Seb and me.

“Want to come to my place?” he asked.

We ended up in his bedroom. He pushed me up against his wall and he kissed me. He'd kissed me before, always at parties when he was drunk or high, but this time, it felt different. He meant it this time. He tasted like those white tic tacs, kind of vanilla and kind of mint. Pure delicious. I knew then he'd planned it.

“Let me move in you,” he whispered in my ear.

And before I knew it we were having sex, real sex, for my first time ever.

When he finished, I'll be honest, not that long after we started, he kissed me, really tender, like boys always kiss girls in movies and rarely in real life.

“I love you, Louise,” he said before we had to put our clothes on because his parents got home. I felt so pretty when he said that. I started crying and then I couldn't stop.

Seb let me sit on the handlebars of his bike and drove me home the long way. It would have been awkward sticking around his house with his parents home. I could hear his mom crying too when we snuck out the back window. So instead, we drove through town dressed all in black, like morbid Amish people during a parade. All I needed was a bonnet.

Later that night, I wondered if he made love to me because he wanted to feel closer to Colin. Then I thought, maybe we'll get married because we have this in common. No one else is going to know Colin, not how we did, and by pledging ourselves to each other for eternity, we would, in some ways, be staying close to Colin forever.

Funny how history works.

Four days later
it was my birthday party. I didn't feel like a big celebration, but the boys told me I was being weak if I didn't do something. I knew the score; they just wanted to get shitfaced for a reason. What kind of a friend would I be if I denied them an opportunity to get drunk? Reasons were usually so few and far between.

We sat on the rocks near the water where we would always meet every Saturday night for the remainder of our adolescent lives. Hedge smoked me on a joint, and Seb told me that he got me something but he'd forgotten it at home.

“Tell me now.”

“No, shut up.”

“Tell me now or I'll leave and never come back.” God, I can be a real selfish bitch sometimes.