There’s a knock on the bathroom door, and he comes to, realizing he has no idea how long he’s been standing there getting pelted by water.
“You okay in there?”
“Uh, yeah. Peachy!”
“There’s cinnamon toast up, getting soggy.”
“Okay!”
Aaron finishes up. He tries to focus. But every time he does, he returns to the photo of Tillie, playing in his mind.
So he unfocuses again.
Across town, Winnie and Frank Stanley sit on a couch in their living room, motionless.
Winnie feels like the police cut her midsection open and pulled out her organs one at a time with their news, saving her heart for last. She isn’t sure a time will come when she’ll be able to get up from this couch. She may live here now.
Frank is silent. No surprise there.
For his part, Frank holds his breath. He ignores the devastation lodged in his torso, the wreckage that is his throat and neck, and he refuses to breathe. He has to get out of here. As soon as he can.
Britt is in her room, staring at her phone, which isn’t on. Maybe if she keeps staring, the world will rewind to before the police came. Before this thing. Which doesn’t make sense. She wants her dad to come in and tell her it isn’t true. It’s just a bad joke. A prank. She wants her mom to make it go away.
Nobody comes by. She keeps staring at the blank screen.
On the subway, Aaron sits next to Topher Flaherty, who goes on and on about Nimbus and Rage, the Flower, and some rave he went to that interests Aaron not in the least. Sarah gets on at Eighty-Sixth and sits on the other side of him.
“Hey, did you do Spanish?” she asks.
Aaron shakes his head, forcing his brain to forget what she said yesterday about him in Rent.
“Shit,” she says. “What, were you, like, gaming all night?”
He scratches his nose. “Something like that.”
“Maybe Ms. Higuera won’t check today.”
“I hope she wears something floral, is all I know.”
Sarah laughs. “I think there’s a decent chance of that.”
“Maybe it’s the trend in old people? To have big orange and pink lilies instead of breasts?”
Sarah laughs again. “Probably.”
“I’m considering a line of clothing for boys, pants where the crotch is a huge tulip.”
“Put your tulips on my crotch,” Topher says, and Sarah and Aaron stare at him like, Did you just say that?
As they get closer to 242nd, the row across from Aaron fills up with Fieldstonians, kids he likes. Vonte Mendoza. Emily Claiborne. Jebeze. And he smiles, feeling a little at home for the moment, and utterly free of the hollowness in his gut. When it’s gone, it’s kind of hard to imagine it was ever there in the first place.
Getting off the subway and waiting for the shuttle bus to school is always kind of sobering, because almost all the other students take a private bus from Manhattan. His dad can’t swing it financially. The kids are too nice to openly look down on a scholarship kid, but he feels the separation nonetheless. He’s a subway kid.
The streets of the Van Cortlandt Park area and its elevated subway tracks covered in graffiti and its pizzerias and smoke shops quickly morph into the quiet, tree-lined suburban streets of Riverdale, and then here he is: another day at one of the most expensive private schools in the country.
One time over the summer after ninth grade, when he was out at his mom’s place on Cape Cod—Sandwich, not a Hyannis mansion or anything like that—she paged through his yearbook and shook her head.
“All the kids look like models. How do you even cope?”
“Um,” Aaron said, screwing up his face.
“Oh, honey,” his mom replied. “You’re nice-looking, too. I just mean. These kids are all so gorgeous!”
“I know you think you just made it better, but you kind of didn’t,” he said, and she dismissed him with a wave of her hand.
As he walks the quad toward the main building, this disparity morphs and multiplies in the fun-house mirror of his brain. The only reason they live in a nice apartment on Seventy-Eighth and Riverside overlooking the Hudson River is that his grandmother willed it to his dad when she died, back when Aaron was ten. The only reason he’s at the most expensive private school in the country is that his dad pulled strings and got him a nearly full scholarship. He’s not fabulous, he doesn’t really belong there, and he’s not good enough, and he’s an idiot dork moron geek loser sad clown bad bad bad.
Walking to homeroom, he passes the Avenue Q sign and sees no cast list, still, which sucks. Then he spies a sign-up sheet for the talent show two weeks from Saturday. He stops and stares at it. He cracks up and rolls his eyes. Right. You people can’t even be bothered to listen to one song when I send it to you. I’m not wasting my—
A second thought trips over the first. But they didn’t even hear it. There were so few clicks, so it’s not like people rejected it. They just didn’t listen.
And then, as he stands there, staring at the Sharpie hanging from a string attached to the bottom of the sign-up sheet with a blue thumbtack, he has a fantasy. He’s onstage, performing “Walking Alone.” The rapt attention as he gets to the chorus: Taking walks all alone, because I can’t be with you … and his eyes meet Evan Hanson’s, and they have a moment, a thing where the curtain rises between two people and there’s that heart shimmy that happens when someone sees him, really sees him, and he hears Evan’s voice: You, Aaron Boroff. You have layers. You’re so much more than they know. Is the you in the song … me? Could it be, please? And Aaron smiles dopily, because he knows it’s just a fantasy but it’s a scrumptious fantasy nonetheless, and that’s enough to make him add his name to the list.
Molly Tobin’s mom cancels her Pilates class to hang with her.
“You okay, darling?” her mom asks, sitting at Molly’s bedside.
Molly stares at her with red-rimmed eyes. There’s oblivious and then there’s oblivious.
The girl she got suspended for making fun of, her old best friend from sixth grade, just jumped off a bridge. Committed suicide. She’s dead.
Safe to say Molly is not exactly okay.
A few blocks north, at Browning School, a boy sits on the stage in the theater, in the dark, stunned. He was going to text her. Today. Why oh why did he have to wait? Why?
When his buddy Mike sent the link—Is this her???—Amir Rahimi was in English class.
Mike had been there when Amir met Tillie. All Mike knows is the few details Amir shared: that she fell for Amir and then he jetted.
Amir’s story is more than that. Way more.
And yes, it was her. He clicked on the link and promptly ran out of class. He made it to within five feet of the bathroom before spewing vomit all over the floor. Then he looked both ways, saw he was alone in the hallway, and ran off to the theater, where he could be alone with his overwhelming shock and shame.
He had been intending to make things right. He had just been waiting for the right time. For the jitteriness to subside. So he could be real with her. Why couldn’t she have given him one more day?
Sometimes ghosting isn’t ghosting, he thinks, sitting there, his forehead resting in his palms. Sometimes what seems like an aggressive move to get rid of someone, actively ignore them, is something else entirely.