Every You, Every Me (4 page)

The scanner translated the photo into pixels. Then it translated the pixels into zeros and ones. Then it translated the zeros and ones into pixels again, which in turn were assembled into an image on the screen.

I clicked zoom.

And again.

And again.

200 percent.

And again.

And again. And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing.
Nothing.
Because wasn’t that how I felt that day? If you zoom close—if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself—then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can’t see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments. English becomes math.

I zoomed until all that was left was squares. Sixteen. Then six. Then four.

The computer stopped me at four.

These four squares told me the truth. I no longer recognized what part of the photo they came from. They could be leaves. They could be part of my hair. My skin. The antique camera in my hand. The dirt. All I knew was which day they came from. Unmistakably.

Somebody else had been there that day.

Somebody had seen us.

4C

I knew I should have called Jack, should have told him … but I didn’t.
Not yet. I was afraid of him thinking that I was crazy, too.
I wasn’t sure
what he’d do if he saw me drowning. I wasn’t sure he’d save me unless he was also saving himself.
what he’d say.

5

I walked past your house later that night. My mind was still full of pixels, so I tried to pixelate everything I was seeing. Turn the lamps into white squares, the road into gray. Your house, though, defied this.
I know it’s not your house now but it’s still your house.
It insisted on being noticed on its own terms.
You did this to me,
it said. Not in a voice
I wasn’t hearing voices (yet)
but in the way it sat there in the night. There was something missing from it, and I was the cause, I was the one who knew. There were lights on, but I couldn’t tell if that meant anyone was home. You told me how your parents always left lights on when they went away, set on timers to mimic bedtime. I loved it when we reset them, even when your parents were around. Under our control, the lights in the house would go on for three minutes—from 3:01 a.m. to 3:04 a.m.—shining through the neighborhood, casting shadows. Your parents were always asleep. They never knew.
They always slept well, until Jack and I woke them up.

I liked your parents. I always thought that when the story was told, they would see me as the hero. But instead I became the bearer of their sorrows.
“You’re not making this up, are you?”
I showed up, gave them the burden, and left. I missed the burden now. Even if I couldn’t have handled it, I wished the heroic thing would have been to keep
you
it for myself.

It could not have been your parents in the woods that day. Neither of them could have taken the photograph.
Nobody who really knew you could have. They would have tried to stop it. They would have intervened.

They would not have stood and watched and taken pictures.

5A

Do they sleep? I want to know … am I the only one who doesn’t sleep?

5B

I knew you were at the center of it.

This should not have surprised me, since you had always been at the center of things. Nobody would have put you anywhere else. Especially me.

Even now, you refused to be
pixelated, forgotten, silenced,
erased. Not that I wanted to erase you. The opposite. I wanted the opposite.

5C

Ours wasn’t the kind of friendship where I knew the exact day it started. I only knew the exact day it became essential.

     
I have always been aware of how I break.

     
I know what kind of situations will break me.

     
I know what kind of people will do it.

     
I know how much it will hurt.

That day in sixth grade,
remember
? I broke because the humiliations and doubts and anger gained critical mass. I failed a history test because I’d forgotten about it; I had been studying hard all year, and with one bad grade I undid it all. Then I had to run an extra two laps in gym because I was too
“lazy”
slow, and I didn’t think I was going to make it, and I was going to have to stop or die of a lung attack before I finished. The other kids loved that. And then, at lunch, I tried to sit with Tara Jenkins and she told me there was no room, even though there was. The weight of it was too much. I felt myself breaking as I went outside to recess. I found a quiet piece of pavement and started rubbing my hand over it. Catching the gravel in my skin until I was bleeding, until my palm was open and raw.

Then you found me. Later, you’d tell me that you’d seen what Tara had done and had followed me out to see if I was okay.
I was never sure if that was true. I thought it was possible you happened to see what I was doing and were morbidly intrigued.
You came over to me and didn’t tell me I was gross and didn’t ask me what I was doing. Instead you said, “Stop that.” And I did.

I said I hated life. You said you hated life. We decided to hate it together.

We didn’t know anything.

Without you I wouldn’t have been able to contain the hate. I would have used it against myself. You’re the one who helped me control it. My mind spun out to other things.

But it always came back to you.

5D

     
They said you weren’t coming back.

     
I didn’t believe them.

     
I wanted to hear it from you.

6

     
Back to the present.

     
I found you in my locker the next morning.

6A

Not you.

A photograph.

But for a moment, it felt like finding a body.

It felt like finding

what
you I
needed

to be

found.

6B

6C

Not slipped into the locker through one of the airholes or through the crack in the bottom. No: taped up, white envelope. The photographer had broken into my locker and left it there for me.

6D

It brought you back to me.

The way you

said “I love you”

said “I’ll never sleep with you”

said “I will always”

kept a list of all your favorite moments in a composition book and would underline the ones involving me with blue ink

screamed at me not to do it not to do it not to do it

believed that birds talked to you

slapped Jack slapped him slapped him slapped him

refused to eat any jelly beans but the black ones

cried when my cat Chester died more than I cried, even

helped me dig his grave

dug the grave

looked the most beautiful when you didn’t realize how beautiful you looked

the moments I would catch you thinking
always wondering if you were thinking of me, knowing sometimes you were

and sometimes you weren’t

you weren’t

I knew you better than anyone else. I was sure of it.

Anything?

Something?

But I had never seen this photo before.

6E

     
I have never seen this photo before.

     
I have never seen this photo before.

6F

I slammed my locker shut. Some people turned to look at me. I wondered if any of them was the one. If the photographer was watching me. Seeing my reaction. Recording it.

I crashed through the halls, crashed through my mind, crashed through all this mental history, crashed into people, crashed and felt the breaking—

Jack was talking to some of his friends from track. I didn’t want to interrupt but if I didn’t interrupt I knew I’d fall apart, so I tried to calm the crashing, tried to keep myself normal as I walked over and said, “Hey,” and said, “Can I speak to you for a second?” and pulled him away from them because this involved you and I was sure the rest of them had all forgotten you by now and wouldn’t understand why this was so urgent and how things had changed. I led Jack into an empty history classroom and let the door close behind us.

“What’s up?” he asked.

            
Up,
I thought.