LEON SPENDS THE WALK TO Rafi’s house ranting about Gwen and Adonis. I’m grateful to him for acting like a buffer between me and Rafi and keeping us from having to discuss what he said.
Rafi loves me.
Rafi loves me.
Rafi loves me.
The last one is the most difficult to parse. In a way, I expected him to say it sooner because Rafi’s full of love and he gives it away so easily. The kids at the community center are a perfect example. He’s their age, but he acts like he’s their big brother. They come from wherever they’ve been, dragging their problems behind them, and he offers them friendship and love and doesn’t ask for anything in return. And they love him back whether he asks them to or not. Most of the time they don’t even deserve him. But Rafi’s declaration is still a surprise, and I’m not sure how I feel about it.
“I mean, who does she think she is?” Leon says for at least the tenth time. Leon’s squat but muscular, and he walks like he’s on his way to kill someone. The first time I met him, I thought he didn’t like me, but Rafi told me he always looks that way. Resting Serial Killer Face, they call it at the center. “She’s got nothing I don’t have.”
“You know it’s not about you, right?” Rafi says.
“How are you gonna say Adonis dumped me, hooked up with Gwen, and then she brought him here to rub it in my face, but it’s not about me?”
Rafi shrugs. “When you love someone and they don’t love you in return, it can feel like everything they do is an attack. But most of the time, they’re as confused as you are.”
“So I’m just supposed to let this happen?”
“Pretty much,” Rafi says.
Leon kicks a rock as we finally turn onto Rafi’s street. “That’s shit advice, Raf.”
“Yeah, well, we don’t get to control how other people feel,” he says. “The only thing we get to control is how we feel. So you can keep on hurting and letting that hurt turn into hate until you get to the point where you can’t even be in the same room with Adonis, or you can take the feelings you had for him and find some way to nurture them into friendship.”
“Why the hell would I want that?”
Rafi glances at me before answering Leon. “Friendship with someone you love isn’t a consolation prize.”
I’m a little anxious when we get to the house. I hope July hasn’t done anything stupid, but it’s July, so I have no idea what I’m going to find.
Jamal’s in my face the second we walk through the door. “Dude, your cousin locked herself in the toilet and won’t come out.”
Yeah, I did not see that coming.
Rafi follows me upstairs. Dafne and Kandis are standing outside the door.
“It wasn’t that bad,” Kandis is saying. “I’ve done worse; trust me.”
I clear my throat. “Hey.”
“Good, you’re here,” Dafne says. But Kandis goes, “We got this,” and I’m not sure what to do.
Rafi, thankfully, does. “Hey, why don’t we give Dino a minute alone with his cousin?” When no one moves, he says, “Or you can go home?” Dafne takes off, but Kandis scowls at me before heading downstairs.
“You good?” Rafi asks. I nod.
As soon as they’re gone, I rap my knuckles on the door. “It’s me. Dino. Open up.”
A few seconds later, the door cracks open. July’s eye peers out to make certain I’m alone before fully opening the door. I’m about to ask what’s going on when she grabs my arm, yanks me into the bathroom, and slams the door shut again.
“What did you do?” I ask, though I’m half-joking.
Rafi’s bathroom is nearly the size of his bedroom, but it’s got the original hardware from the 1920s and it’s always kind of reminded me of a grandma’s bathroom. Not either of my grandmas—they have better taste than this—but somewhere out in the wide world is a grandma with questionable taste and a bathroom exactly like this one.
July sits on the edge of the tub and buries her face in her hands. I expect her to immediately lay into me for assuming she screwed up, even though I wasn’t entirely serious. I sit beside her and wrap my arm around her.
“You must’ve done something right if you won over Kandis. She was looking feistier than a Balrog.”
“Nerd,” July says through her hands.
“Rafi told me he loves me.” I don’t actually want to talk about it—the words haven’t settled into me and I haven’t decided how I feel about them—but at this point, I’d sing July’s favorite song while juggling knives to get her talking. “Specifically, he said he loves me and that I deserve to be loved. Which, thanks for telling me something I already know. Obviously I deserve to be loved. Right? Everyone does.”
“Even serial killers?” July mumbles.
“Maybe not once they’ve started killing people. But definitely before that.”
“What about people who drive slow in the fast lane and don’t use their blinkers?”
“Of course—” I stop. “Nope. Changed my mind. Those people can die lonely and alone.”
July laughs a little. Not much, but I’ll take it. “What’d you say?” she asks. “When Rafi told you he loves you?”
“For real? The guy opens his heart to you and you respond with ‘cool’?”
“He caught me by surprise! What else was I supposed to say?”
“Do you love him?”
I shrug. “I don’t know. I know that I don’t not love him, but I refuse to be the kind of person who says it back when he doesn’t mean it. Rafi deserves it to be real. He deserves better.”
“Better than what?”
“Better than me.”
July peeks between her fingers at me. “No argument here. Seriously, where’d you find that guy? He dances ballet? He writes better than me? He volunteers?”
“How did you—? Did you snoop in his room?”
“It was Roxy!” She sits up completely now. “Did you expect me not to?”
“Yes!”
“I’m beginning to doubt how well you actually know me.”
“Knowing the worst about you doesn’t mean I can’t hope for the best.” I can’t rewind time and keep July from violating Rafi’s privacy, so I sigh and let it go.
July wrinkles her nose and raises her eyebrows, making a face that basically says she doesn’t care either way. “You should talk to him.”
“And tell him what?”
“The truth is a good place to start.”
“Except I don’t know what the truth is.”
“Yes you do,” July says. “You’re just afraid to say it. Like always.”
I purse my lips. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Tell your parents you hate the idea of becoming a mortician yet?”
“No, but—”
July throws on a self-satisfied smirk. “Exactly. And you never will because you’re incapable of dealing with shit. All you have to do is be honest with Rafi.”
I didn’t want to discuss him in the first place and only brought him up to get July to talk, and since I’ve accomplished my goal, I decide to change the subject. “So, are you going to tell me what happened, or are we going to hide in the bathroom for the rest of the night?”
July tenses. Her back and shoulders go rigid and I worry that I pushed too soon.
“I farted.”
I scoot to the side a little.
July slaps my arm. “Not now!”
“Oh.”
The tension leaves her body, and she deflates. “Outside,” she says. “I was talking to everyone—I might have told them about the time you were playing Robin Hood and you fell off the stage during the rescue scene and gave yourself a concussion—”
“Really?”
She ignores me. “And then this blast of gas tore out of me. It was so loud.”
“Was it more like a high-pitched squeak? You know, the kind that sneaks out and goes on forever? Or did it come out in blasts like the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun?”
July’s mouth goes tight, and she stares at me like she’s seriously considering the many painful ways she can murder me. But she says, “Like a sad, never-ending trumpet,” and I bust up laughing.
“You always did like to toot your own horn.”
And then July loses it too, and we’re laughing together, really laughing. Tears are running down my eyes and my face is hot, and July would look the same way if she had tears or a working circulatory system.
“That was a terrible joke, Dino.” She manages to get control of herself. “The smell was the worst, though. It was like—”
“You’re literally rotting from the inside out?” I finish, holding the stitch in my side from laughing.
July nods. “I’m dead, aren’t I?”
“You’re not dead.”
“You were right, though; I’m not alive, either. This is a real thing that’s happening.” She holds up her thumb. “This wasn’t some fluke, was it? More of my skin might come off. And I couldn’t have farted seeing as I don’t have a stomach. That was decomposition gasses forcing their way out of me.”
Finally, I see the full realization of her situation reflected in her eyes, and I wish I didn’t. July didn’t deserve to die, but she doesn’t deserve this either. “Come on,” I say. “We’ll figure out what’s happening to you. I promise.”
“Everyone heard it,” July says. “Everyone smelled it. I’ve never been so embarrassed in my life, and the only way you’re getting me out of this bathroom is through the window.”
Seeing as the only window is over the tub and about six-inches square, I doubt that plan’s workable. “Sixth grade,” I say.
“You’ll have to be more specific. A lot of shit went down in sixth grade, most of which I’ve tried to forget.”
“Pumpkin Pie July?”
July’s hand flies to her mouth and her eyes shoot wide open. “You swore you’d never mention that.”
“I’m not,” I say. “But that was way worse than this, and you survived it.”
“Barely.”
“So what if you farted in front of them?”
“It was the unholiest of smells, Dino.”
I shrug. “I held Kandis’s hair on New Year’s Eve while she sat in the bushes and puked ramen for an hour and tried to convince me that watching movies with Nicholas Cage in them contributes to swimming pool drowning deaths.”
“Obviously,” July mutters.
“Besides, they don’t know you. To them, you’re my random cousin whom they’ll never see again.”
“What if this doesn’t end?”
“The gas?”
She motions at herself. “Me. Being not-dead.”
“Oh. I don’t know.” She deserves a better answer, but the only thing I’ve learned for certain since July sat up on the gurney earlier tonight is that she is definitely still decomposing. So if this is a miracle, it’s a pretty crappy one.
July stands and walks to the sink and looks at herself in the mirror. I wish I knew what she saw in her reflection. Mirrors are liars. They never show us what’s truly there. They show us what we expect to see. I have no idea what July or Rafi see when they look at me, but when I look into a mirror, I see a boy who’s not quite enough. Not quite tall enough, not quite muscular enough, not quite tan enough, not quite good-looking enough. And I wonder, now, what July sees reflected.
“You wanted to figure this shit out,” she says. “And I should’ve listened to you.”
“It’s not important—”
“Yeah, I think it is.”
“Why?”
July stares into the mirror for another second, and then turns around. “I can’t stay like this. We have to find a way to end it.”
“Or fix it?”
“I don’t think we can fix it. I think all we can do is end it.”