What You Left Behind (10 page)

I shake my head. “No deal.”

“Is it a soccer injury?”

I just look at her, expressionless. “Yup. Soccer injury.”

She rolls her eyes. “I'll get it out of you one of these days.”

“You can
try
.”

We get to the tattoo place, and Joni fills out a bunch of paperwork, chatting with the girl at the front desk about
Sherlock
like they're best friends. I'm beginning to think Joni is best friends with everyone she meets.

Then we're ushered to the back, and Joni's sitting in the chair. The tattoo artist is snapping on rubber gloves and placing the elephant stencil on her shoulder, saying, “Ready?”

Joni nods and grabs my hand and closes her eyes tight as the needle makes contact with her skin.

She squeezes my hand tighter and tighter the longer the needle presses down. “Jesus fuck, that hurts,” she says.

“Are you okay?” I ask, unable to take my eyes away from the elephant slowly forming on her shoulder and the tiny droplets of blood the artist keeps wiping away.

“Yeah, I'm okay. It's a good pain. Addictive.”

I shake my head. “There's no such thing as good pain. You're crazy.” But I keep her hand tight in mine.

She squeezes so hard that my hand starts to go numb, and it's easy to imagine I'm holding Meg's hand instead, talking her through a contraction, wiping her sweaty hair away from her face as she pushes her way through labor. “I'm here,” I tell her. “I know it hurts but it'll be over soon. You're doing great.”

She smiles at me and squeezes my fingers as she follows the doctor's order to push again.

Is it possible to have a flashback to a moment that never happened?

The alternate universe only lasts a second, and then I'm back with Joni, and the tattoo guy is wiping off the last of the excess ink and showing her what it looks like in the mirror. Joni claps with glee, then he covers her shoulder in ointment and a bandage, she pays her bill, and we're back in the car.

“Thanks for coming with me,” she says.

“No problem. It was fun…in a sadistic kind of way.”

“You want to go get some food? I could use a sugar boost after all the bloodletting back there.”

“Works for me.” Really, she could suggest crashing a wedding or shoplifting a mouse from the pet store or going to buy nipple clamps, and I'd probably agree. Tonight, I'm free.

We get grilled cheeses and milk shakes and a giant tub of waffle fries to share and sit along the lakeshore. It's strange, hanging out with a girl who eats junk food. If I'd ever seen Meg eat a waffle fry, I would have collapsed in shock.

Joni tells me more about her family. Her dad and stepmom got married when she was four, and she has one full sister (Stevie, the girl I saw at her house), two stepbrothers (Elijah's the only one who still lives at home), and two half-siblings—the Super Soaker twins. Her real mother died in a boating accident when Joni was two, so she never knew her.

“What's it like having such a big family?” I ask.

“
Loud
.” She shakes her head. “I love my little brother and sister, but they're
intense
, man. Always running around and screaming and demanding attention. I got the job at Whole Foods 'cause I was sick of being stuck in the house with them all the time. I guess I'm not a kid person.”

Not a kid person. Good to know. I make a point of taking a huge sip of milk shake so I don't have to respond.

“What about you?” Joni asks.

I wait a minute for the brain freeze to subside, and then say, “Not really a kid person either.”

“No, I mean what about your family? Your life?”

I figure the best way to approach this conversation is to pretend the last year and a half never happened. Anything post-Meg is off limits. Anything pre-Meg is fair game. It's still being honest—just with some restrictions. I tell Joni about my mom and my nonexistent dad and soccer and UCLA.

“Have you ever thought about trying to find your father?” she asks.

Gee, what a timely inquiry.

I don't know if this information lies in pre-Meg green light or post-Meg red. It's a little of both. I decide to be as honest as I can, without fully
going
there
.

“Yeah. I've thought about it.”

“What would you say to him if you found him?”

What's with all the questions? In all our years of friendship, Dave never once asked me about my dad.

I don't know how to respond. We're getting too close to the danger zone. I shrug. “What would you say to your mother if you could see her again?”

“Well, that's different. My mother didn't
choose
to leave me,” Joni says.

I suck in a breath.

“Oh shit, Ryden. I'm sorry. That's not what I meant.” She puts a hand on my shoulder.

I stare at the setting sun. “I know, I know, you say things you don't mean. It's a fault. You're working on it.”

Joni sighs. “What I meant was what I would say to my mother is different because—”

“Believe me, I know all the different ways someone can leave you,” I bite out.

There's silence as the last of the sun disappears over the horizon.

“Can we go back to having fun now?” Joni asks, her voice more unsure than I've ever heard it.

I glance at her. She's looking at me with a hopeful grin, holding out a handful of Pixy Stix. I can't help it. I laugh. Joni's really freaking good at knowing exactly how to make me feel better—even when she was the one to make me feel shitty in the first place. “Another peace offering?”

“You could say that.”

I take a blue one. “Where did you get these?”

“From my bag.”

“What else you got in there?”

She holds it out to me. “See for yourself. I have no secrets.”

“Except for the tattoo,” I remind her.

“You know how to make that secret go away, friend.” She points to my eyebrow.

I rifle through her bag. I've never looked through a girl's bag before. Meg didn't carry a purse, just a backpack filled with journals. And Shoshanna and the girls I used to be friends with acted as if their bags contained the secrets of the universe.

Joni's got all sorts of shit in hers. The expected stuff: keys, wallet, phone, lip balm. But she's also carrying a bottle of water, a large Ziploc filled with more candy than most kids score on Halloween, a book (
Tempted
by
Lust: Book 4 of the Bahamas Bikers Series
, which I hold up, eyebrows raised, causing her to just smile and shrug), an extra pair of flip-flops, an old-fashioned compass, and a tiny plastic pinwheel.

I hand the bag back to her and hold my hand out to help her to her feet. “So what's the
Bahamas
Bikers
series about?” I ask as we walk back to the car. “I assume you've read the first three already?”

“It's a romance novel series, Ryden. What do you think it's about?”

I laugh and shake my head. So she reads books about hot guys. Major check in the not-gay column.

A little while later, I pull up in front of Joni's house but don't get out of the car this time. “Say hi to your magic room for me,” I say.

Joni smiles. “Magic room. I like that.” She leans toward me. “I'll see you at work tomorrow?”

She's really close. She smells like fresh air and Pixy Stix and the goopy ointment from her tattoo. She licks her lips, and her mouth is so close to mine I'm surprised her tongue doesn't graze my own lips along the way.

Holy
shit.
Not gay.
Definitely
not gay. My heartbeat speeds up, but I don't know if it's from anticipation or panic. This was
not
supposed
to
happen
. Joni was supposed to be safe, a friend. “Yeah. Tomorrow.”

And then she does it. The thing I knew she was going to do but wouldn't let myself believe. She kisses me. Her lips brush across mine. My body reacts before my brain can catch up. I pull her to me and drink her in. The kiss is frantic and hungry and wild. I'm acting on autopilot, doing exactly what I've done every other time a girl has kissed me.

And then Joni is in my lap. I don't know how she got there. I wasn't paying attention. But she's straddling me, her back pressed up against the steering wheel. She takes my hand out of her hair and guides it down her body. Suddenly, it's like the plug has been pulled on my adrenaline supply, and I'm more awake than I've been all night.

I break away from her, open the car door, and scramble out into the street, leaning forward, my hands on my thighs, supporting my own weight, desperate to catch my breath, desperate to go back in time and erase the last few minutes.

“I can't do this,” I manage to get out. “I can't do this to her.”

“Who?” Joni whispers, still on her knees in the driver's seat. “The girl in the picture?”

I nod, because with all the guilt and regret and pain and goddamn
anger
inside me, that's all I can do.

“I get it,” she says and steps out of the car, righting her clothes and grabbing her bag. “See ya, Ryden.”

I manage to collect myself enough to call after her when she's halfway up her front walk. “Joni.” She pauses for a minute, then turns. Her face is less expressive than I've ever seen it. Does she really not care? “I'm…” But that's all I've got.

She raises a hand in a weak
don't worry about it
gesture and disappears into her house.

“I'm sorry,” I say over and over again to the empty car on the drive home. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.” I don't know if she's listening, but I hope she is. I really need her to know. “For now, for then, for all of it.” I take a deep, agonizing breath and wipe my eyes. “Meg,” I say, the name feeling so familiar yet so foreign on my lips. “I'm sorry. I love you.”

It hurts so much, but I have to say her name. Because if she is listening, I need her to know I'm talking to her. I need her to know how perfect she was, and how I destroyed everything the moment I almost sat in that wad of gum, and how I will never forgive myself as long as I live.

The next morning, Joni's waiting for me when I pull my car into the Whole Foods employee lot. Great.

“I wanted to say,” she says as I get out of the car and clip my name tag to my shirt, “that I like you.”

I groan. “I know, Joni, but—”

“No, wait. I mean, I like you as a person, above anything else. I like you the way I like
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
and anything made from colored sugar and watching the roller bladers in Washington Square Park. And okay, yes, I thought I liked you the way the Bahamas Bikers ‘like' their biker babes, and maybe you liked me that way too. But you're still not over the girl in the picture. And that's fine. Really. But I don't want to not be your friend, okay?” She holds out a Tupperware.

“What's this?” I ask, taking it.

“Chocolate pudding. One of Dad's specialties.”

I sigh. I don't know if I can be friends with Joni after what happened last night. But I don't have the energy to actively avoid her either. “Thanks,” I say.

“So we're good?” she asks, hopeful.

“You mean it?
Just
friends? Nothing else? You're okay with that?”

She nods.

“Then we're good.”

“Woohoo!” She does a cartwheel, right there in the parking lot.

• • •

During my break, I eat chocolate pudding and open to the next entry in Meg's journal. I didn't read any yesterday because I was pretty sure I couldn't handle it after everything.

January 19.

I have a feeling Hope will be born soon. I know I'm not due for a couple more months, but I don't think she's going to wait that long. Theoretically, the longer she stays inside me, the healthier she'll be. But does that count for a pregnancy like this one too? Where the baby is trapped inside a rotting body? What if I'm poisoning her? I know I'm going to die, but what if I die before she can get out safely? What if she dies too and all of this will have been for nothing?

My heart is in my throat.

Meg knew she was going to die? She never once told me that. The only thing she ever said was that she hoped
Hope
would be okay—when it came to herself, her confidence never wavered.

Everything
is
going
to
be
fine.
That was her go-to line. She was
so
sure
.

But now it seems she wasn't. She wasn't sure at all. And I never would have known that if Mabel hadn't given me this journal.

What changed for Meg between that day in August when she sat us all down and said she was keeping the baby and January 19, the day she wrote this entry?
When
did it change?

And what the hell else was she lying to me about?

Fuck the read-the-journal-slowly plan. I need to find out what else is in here. I sit on my bedroom floor and read as quickly as I can while still paying attention to what the words actually say. Jesus. There's a
lot
more about how Meg hadn't been feeling well and how she didn't think she had much time left. She even went to her doctor by herself one day without her parents or me or anyone knowing to get checked out. She took a fucking
cab
—a weak, sick, pregnant, seventeen-year-old girl taking a
cab
to a secret doctor's appointment so she could find out how long she had to live. Goddammit, Meg. Why didn't you tell me?

The doctor told her there was no real way to know for sure, but it looked to him like she didn't have much time left. Weeks. The cancer was everywhere. Her organs were going to fail. He wanted to do an emergency C-section, get the baby out of her, give her body a final chance to bounce back. A Hail Mary pass, he called it.

She said no. It was too soon for the baby to be born. She'd accepted her fate; she just needed to hold out as long as she could—for the baby.

I throw the book against the wall and pace the room.

Why
the
hell
would
she
do
this? Why wouldn't she give herself every possible chance?

It wasn't a pro-life thing—Meg was always going on about women's rights and equal pay and gender inequalities and “the old, white jackasses in Washington who think having a penis gives them the right to govern vaginas.” She was pro-choice. And she certainly made her choice, didn't she?

I pick the book off the floor and flip to the next entry, searching through her scribble for some kind of meaning, some hint, some answer.

By the time I reach the end of the journal, one word has jumped out at me more than any of the thousands of others, the very last word on the very last line: legacy.

Hope's been kicking a lot lately. It hurts when it happens, like I'm being beaten up from the inside out. But it's okay. Actually, it's the only thing that's okay lately. I can't look at my parents or Mabel, because all I see is anguish. They know I'm dying. They know it and they hate me for it. And Ryden…Ryden's still in denial. It's even harder to be around him. With him, I have to pretend. He still has hope, and I'm not going to take that away from him. It hurts to smile, but I will not stop. I will not take away his hope. I love him too much. And it makes me want to cry.

But then Hope kicks and I feel better, because she's okay, she's healthy. My little legacy.

That's it. There's nothing else in the book. Except the checklist.

Legacy.

Is that why Meg insisted on keeping the baby? Because she wanted something to
leave
behind
? She could have written a book or donated her college fund to a charity or planted a goddamn tree. No, she had to do the one thing that guaranteed she would even
need
to leave something behind in the first place, the one thing that would ensure her thirty percent chance of survival plummeted down to a big fat zero.

I sink to my floor, the journal clutched in my hands.

Somewhere deep in my brain, sirens are going off, warning signals. Of what, I have no clue. But I go back to the beginning and start to reread.

When I get to the conversation about naming Hope, the one that sat funny in my gut the first and second and third time around, it's like the words and letters unscramble themselves before my eyes, forming a clear message.

I
know
you, Meg. I know you have a reason for everything.

But
this
baby
will
have
a
mom
and
a
dad.

Both of those sentences came from me. Absolute, undeniable, written-down proof that I'm an idiot. I
knew
Meg didn't do anything without a well-thought-out reason. Of course she'd thought of all the possible outcomes and likelihoods. She knew
from
the
moment
she
found
out
she
was
pregnant
she was probably going to die but still decided having the baby was more important.

She was so insistent Hope have my last name because she knew all along that Hope
wouldn't
have both a mom and dad. All that “everything is going to be fine” talk was total bullshit. She was lying to me the entire time.

I read through the rest of the journal, this newfound knowledge coloring every word.

Mabel

Alan

Ryden

This checklist
means
something, dammit. I'm even more sure of that now that I know Meg was keeping secrets from me. Lying to me. And I need to find out what.

• • •

I pull up to Alan's. I texted him on my way over, and clearly he didn't have any hot Saturday night plans because he's waiting for me outside. “Hey,” I say, getting out of the car.

“What's up?” he asks.

I pull Hope's car seat out of the car, hand it to Alan, and keep moving straight toward his front door.

“Dude, what's going on?” he asks, keeping up with my pace.

“I need to look through your room. Is that cool?” I stop on the stoop and turn to face him.

He stares at me, looking completely freaked. But he holds the door open. “Be my guest.”

I know he said there were no journals here, but I need to see for myself. I go straight to his room—I'd been here a couple of times before with Meg, back when she was still strong and barely pregnant. It looks exactly like you'd expect: twin bed covered in a neat blue comforter, books stacked, clothes put away, and hip-hop and Korean movie posters covering almost every inch of wall. There's also a poster of Grace Park in a bikini that is hot as fuck.

I check his bookshelves first. Nothing. Nightstand, dresser…clear. All there is under the bed is a big drawer filled with winter clothes. I rummage through them, but nothing is hidden in the piles. There are a few notebooks lined up spine out on the shelf over his desk, but they're all three-subject books and filled with Alan's class notes. Not a journal in sight.

Alan stands in the doorway, Hope in his arms. She's out of her car seat, awake, blowing little spit bubbles between her lips. She's as happy in his arms as she is in my mom's. The kid loves literally everyone except me.

“I need to check the rest of your house.”

Alan wordlessly steps out of the way.

I don't know what I'm doing. I've never been in most parts of his house before. But I can't stop. I'm desperate. I go room to room, looking through bookshelves and under beds and in dresser drawers and in closets. Some part of me knows there's no way Meg would have hidden one of her journals in Alan's dad's underwear drawer, but another part of me says to look
everywhere
.

When I get to the kitchen, I run into Alan's mother. I haven't actually gotten farther than the driveway all the times I stopped by to drop off or pick up Hope this week, so I haven't seen her in a while. “Mrs. Kang,” I say, stopping short.

She looks more surprised to see me than I am to see her. Which makes sense. She lives here. It's not that far off that she'd be in her own kitchen. But I'm probably the last person she expected to burst through her kitchen door, red-faced and ransacking her house for my own personal version of the Holy Grail.

“Hello, Ryden! How lovely to see you. Did Alan tell you how much we love having little Hopie spend time with us? She's such a doll.”

Hopie?
“Yes,” I say, trying to calm down. “Thank you so much for taking her in. I really appreciate it.”

“Of course! Any time.” Her face suddenly loses its glow. “We all miss Meg so very much. It's been quite a comfort to have little Hope around. Don't you agree, Alan?”

I turn to find Alan and Hope standing behind me. “Yeah. I do.”

“Mrs. Kang, sorry if this is a weird question, but have you seen any of Meg's journals lying around your house anywhere?”

Her eyebrows crinkle a little. “You mean those notebooks she was always writing in?”

“Yeah.”

She thinks for a minute. “No, I haven't seen any. Not in quite a while.”

I nod. “Okay. Well, thanks anyway.”

Alan walks me back to my car.

“Yeah, so…sorry about all that,” I say.

“You going to explain now?”

I take Hope from him, and she immediately starts to whine. “I just thought…I don't know what I thought.” I snap Hope's car seat into the base and buckle her in. “I read some stuff in Meg's journal…” I trail off. Suddenly I'm really tired. I close Hope's door and let all my weight collapse against the side of the car.

I feel Alan's eyes on me. “No offense, man, but you're kind of a mess.”

I don't say anything. Disagreement takes energy.

“Maybe it's time to let this whole thing go, Ryden. I mean, really, even if she did leave two other journals somewhere—”

“She did.” I lift my head sharply and look at him. “I thought you agreed it was something she would do.”

“I said it was something she
would
do, not that she actually succeeded in doing it. But even if she did, and even if you do find them, what do you expect to happen? She's still going to be gone, man. You're driving yourself crazy. It's not worth it.”

I push off from the side of the car and plant myself in the driver's seat, looking back at Hope through the rearview mirror. “That's where you're wrong.”