I walk to school alone. It is something I’ve never done before, and the streets look different when I’m by myself. They’re wider, for one, and I notice things like broken windows and purple-painted doors and missing bricks on the surface of brownstones. One lawn has a statue of the Virgin Mary I’d never noticed, which seems impossible because it’s practically life-size. There’s a new bar that looks seedier than things in this neighborhood usually do.
Cruz, Charlotte, Isla, and Owen are at the door when I get there. They are standing not exactly together and not exactly apart.
“It’s bad,” Isla says. Her lips are colored red and her eyelashes are so long I think they must be fake.
“What’s bad?” I ask, assuming she might mean me. Charlotte’s hands are wrapped around Cruz’s bicep and she’s pressed against him so tightly not a breath of air could get in between them.
Cruz isn’t looking at me.
“They’re talking about us,” Isla says. “They’ve seen.”
“Maybe I should go,” Owen says. He forgot to kiss me hello, or maybe I forgot to kiss him.
“Hey,” I say, and everyone’s watching us too closely. “Your shirt’s all messed up. You missed a button somewhere along the way.” I let myself touch his chest, at the place where the button-missing occurred. I have the feeling—dreadful, certain, sinking—that it is the last time I’ll be touching him there. He looks surprised at my finger and at his shirt and at being in the morning sun in front of school. He looks surprised at the way the world has been, lately.
“I’ll fix it,” he says. “I’ll catch you guys later, okay?” He leans toward me and then away from me, like a tree in the wind, trying to decide whether to kiss me. It is the moment. If he leans one way it means we are together; if he leans the other, it changes everything. It’s funny, the way one missed kiss can matter so much.
He steps away, and I’m left unkissed.
My friends give me a breath to recover before pointing to the door of the school. It’s our picture from the article.
We all look caught by surprise in the image, which is funny considering how much time we spent readying ourselves for it, how made-up and overly styled and hyperaware we all were that day. But there it is: me, Isla, and Charlotte sitting down, our bodies mostly covered by the back of the bench, our necks craned as we all look over our shoulders, the words Love Was Found Here on display below us. Isla’s mouth looks like a doll’s—all red and surprised, and Charlotte’s lips form a tight line. But in the photograph I have the shadow of a smile—it’s hanging on my lips, which are almost all anyone can see of my face, with my sunglasses taking up the rest of me. Delilah stands behind us, looking up at the sky, at Jack, but when you look closer, her eyes are actually closed, like she is tilting her head to feel the heat of the sun.
We are us but not-us in the photograph.
We are us but not-us here on the sidewalk in front of the school, waiting an impossibly long time to go inside.
Over our faces, written in red Sharpie, the words AT YOUR OWN RISK.
It is worse inside.
Cruz and Charlotte veer left to their first period of class while Isla and I veer right. Isla has a strut. Her hips wag and she keeps flipping her long Devonairre Street hair. I wonder how she does it, how she manages to stay strong while they all watch us.
Then I find out.
“Hide me?” she says, turning to face the wall. She slips a flask out of her pocket. It’s smaller than Jack’s, and probably filled with something sweeter. She drops her head back and takes a shot. “You need some?” she asks, and it’s so early in the morning I still remember a few of my dreams, but I almost take a sip, too. I shake my head and Isla grins.
“You’ll be begging me for some later,” she says.
Isla heads into her homeroom and I reach the door of mine.
Mr. Manning’s lumbering frame blocks the door. He has a stain on his tie and hair in his ears but he’s a good teacher. That’s what I told Delilah when she told her story about the crush she thought he had on her the night Jack died. “You think everyone has a crush on you,” I said. “You think this chair has a crush on you. You think Angelika’s dog has a crush on you.” Delilah shrugged like yeah maybe, and Jack didn’t laugh but he smiled.
I have Mr. Manning for English second period, and I like the way he talks about characters in books like they’re real people. He’s always asking us how we feel about them, instead of what we think about them. It’s a small difference, but it matters to me.
“Ms. Ryder,” he says. “How are you holding up?”
“Oh. Okay. Thank you. Thanks.” I’m surprised by the gentleness of his voice.
“I lost a friend very young, too. I know you and Jack were close.” He is half whispering, like death is a secret.
“What was his name?” I ask, some part of me wanting to know everything there is to know about Mr. Manning’s dead friend.
Mr. Manning takes a step backward, a small shuffle of a step that I wouldn’t normally notice, but he sort of trips when he does it so it’s hard to miss.
“Alan,” he says. I nod, like that makes sense. I have more questions—when and how and why—but Mr. Manning’s eyes keep drifting to something behind my head and his neck is turning pink. I glance behind me, to see whatever it is he’s seeing.
It’s the photograph. I can see more details now—the glint of the keys around Isla’s neck, the over-the-top brightness of the hearts on my top, the way Charlotte’s braids are uneven, the clench of Delilah’s fists.
Mr. Manning clears his throat. “I remember when Alan passed away, school was just awful. Hard to focus. All I wanted was some time alone.”
“Sure,” I say. The bell rings but Mr. Manning isn’t letting me in the door.
“I bet you’re feeling that way, about Jack. He was a good kid. Had him in my AP class with Delilah. Saw them fall in love right before my eyes. Figured they’d be getting married right after graduation.”
“Sure. I thought that, too.” I try to look around Mr. Manning to see my classmates but he takes up so much of the doorframe that I can only catch sight of a few curious faces. I take a step, to remind him it’s time for class to start, but he shifts and braces his elbows against the frame.
“Anyway, Ms. Ryder, I was thinking you might like a free period. A few free periods even. We were all thinking . . . Some of us thought that might be good. For you. The room next door is open. Maybe you’d like to go there?”
Mr. Manning has stopped looking me in the eye.
“I’m okay being in class,” I say. Mr. Manning wipes his brow. He looks at the photograph behind my head again.
“Delilah and Jack. I never would have put them together. We teachers don’t always know what’s going on with our students.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets and behind him the class is being rowdy. Still he doesn’t move from his place at the door. “I’d never have thought Delilah would fall in love with Jack, but there you go, right?”
“Love works in mysterious ways?” I want the conversation to stop, or shift, or turn into something else entirely.
“Exactly,” Mr. Manning says. “Anyone could fall in love with anyone.”
There’s a siren somewhere outside the building. We listen to it build in volume, then recede. I think of Cruz, even though I shouldn’t. I think of the Bombing. I think of Jack. And we’re both quiet for longer than is comfortable. “I don’t really need a free period,” I say. “I’m okay for class.”
Mr. Manning doesn’t move. His elbows stay pinned to the frame. His feet move a little farther apart so that his legs help create a wall, too. He clears his throat again. And again.
I’m dizzy.
Mr. Manning looks at that photograph one last time, shuffles back into his classroom, and shuts the door.
“Don’t ever be ashamed,” my father told me when I was little and Angelika was trying to talk to me about the Curse. “The second you start to feel shame, you get rid of it.” Even in these last few days I’ve felt nervousness and doubt; I’ve felt sadness and fear. But I haven’t felt shame.
Now I feel a wet, itchy feeling.
Shame.
I go to the empty classroom, and I wait for the moment of silence to come.
It does, of course. It always does.
• • •
In the moment of silence, all I can think of is Cruz.
I think my father wouldn’t mind. This is what he wanted for me. To be in love. To feel like my organs are weightless, like they’ve left my body, even. Like I am hollow except for thoughts of Cruz, which are filling me all the way up. My father wanted me to be in love.
I don’t know that this is love.
Except I do.
I touch the key around my neck, for protection that I don’t believe in. My father used to roll his eyes at that reflex. “That key is just a key,” he’d say. “Nothing magic about it. It doesn’t even open anything.” He always sounded so certain, I’d drop the thing right away. Today I hang on, my mind finally asking the question What if the Curse is real after all?
I try to hear my father’s voice again. A forgotten memory blossoms—my father holding my chin in his hand for the first and only time. “Whatever happens,” he said as we sat on the stoop finishing ice-cream cones and watching the sun go down, “don’t listen to Angelika. Don’t let her persuade you to be afraid. Ignore her. No matter what.”
“Okay,” I said. I was eight and it sounded fine. Easy. “Can I have another cone?”
He gave me another cone, like the extra ice cream sealed the promise.
Some promises are hard to keep.
The Minute of Silence stretches on forever when you’re by yourself, quarantined. The rest of the city, the nation, gets to move on. But I’m stuck in an ugly Spanish classroom, looking at a list of basic verbs, remembering my father and the promises I made, and trying to figure out if they mean more or less now that he’s gone.
It is 10:11 on another Tuesday morning, and my father has been gone for almost seven years, and maybe, maybe I’m in love like I promised him I would be.
I put my head on my desk and listen to the silence ending, the world moving on. I don’t move on, though. I never do.
They won’t let me.