Silence. They all look at me.
“That’s the one you get,” Janna sobs. She reaches for the speaker remote and slams up the music.
“I don’t think you understand how it works,” Simon adds. “Never means never.”
“Talk to your friends about it,” Celia says. “This is where we go to get away from it.”
“I don’t have a lot of other friends,” I admit. “Not like you guys.”
Patrick stands up. “Okay, Sanders. You’re with me. C’mon.” He leads me out of the bedroom, downstairs, and into the kitchen. He opens the fridge and starts pulling out drinks. Juice, soda, sports drink.
“So you’re the bartender here, too?”
“See what’s in the pantry,” he instructs me.
More of everything, not cold.
“What do you want?” Patrick asks.
There’s no way to even begin answering that question. “Uh, world peace?”
He grins. “To drink, doofus. What do you want to drink?”
“Oh. The Sprite, I guess.”
He hands me the cold two-liter of Sprite, two sports drinks, and the juice carton. Then he goes to the pantry and pulls out replacements of each and pops them into the fridge. He grabs a glass from the cupboard and fills it with water, then does a splayed-spider thing with his other hand in the cupboard and comes up with five other glasses, held by the rims.
“Just be chill in the room,” he says as we start walking back. “It’s weird, but this is what we do.”
“I didn’t mean to say anything,” I tell him. “Normally I’m really good at, you know, not talking.”
He nods, like he gets it. “You’re not wrong,” he adds. “Death does suck.”
“Matt says you guys hang out one-on-one from time to time.” Maybe it’s weird to say this, but it just comes out of me. That’s a thing that’s happening today, and I really gotta get a handle on it.
“Oh. Huh.”
“What?”
“Yeah, we don’t really do that,” Patrick says. “We do the group thing mostly. I don’t know why he said that.”
“Oh.”
“The group’s not perfect, I know,” Patrick says.
It seems pretty perfect to me. “It’s great, actually.”
“Yeah. What I said is, it’s not perfect.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning, it’s not a fix for anything. It just helps.” Patrick shakes his head. “We still all have to go through it. And that’s lonely.”
I shrug. “Putting the card in the box, it felt like something was going to come out of it.”
“That’s the thing,” Patrick says. “There is nothing. Just time.”
How much time? I want to ask.
“Pretending to be normal is unbearable sometimes, is all.”
“Janna’s a bit of a mess, clearly, but Matt’s doing just fine.”
Patrick looks at me. “Matt’s not fine,” he says. “I know you can’t tell yet. Just … remember that I said that.”
We push back into the bedroom, carrying drinks for all. Matt, Janna, and Patrick drink the sports drink. Celia chugs half the glass of water, then pours some juice into it. Simon takes juice and tops it off with some of my Sprite.
The thing I like best about this moment is that Patrick clearly knew without asking what everyone would have, and exactly how it would go. We graze on my snacks and I feel like a part of something.
Janna goes to the closet and pulls out the red-and-green box of Apples to Apples. She holds it up and shrugs.
“That’ll do,” Simon says. “If it’s what you want.”
She nods and hands him the box. I’ve heard of it but never played before. It’s a silly game of matching words with emotions, which is pretty freaking ironic for a group that never wants to talk about anything.
So we play the silly game and Janna just cries through it and we all pretend there’s nothing wrong. Because what else can you do but just keep living forward?