On what to do in physics lab when your lab partner / best friend / only friend dies.
I’d been dreading the first day of junior year because there’s nothing like an empty chair to remind you that your friend is dead. But I’m not alone. Kinari Hashimoto sits next to me. I know about Kinari because she was the only sophomore who took software development and organic chemistry at the same time. “We can be partners,” she says.
“Oh, thanks,” I say. She introduces me to her friends Anna, YaSong, and Tasmeha. I recognize them because last year for Halloween the group dressed up as web browsers: Firefox, Explorer, Chrome, and Opera, and the only ones cooler were the guys from the board game club who dressed up as resource cards from Settlers of Catan. Not that it matters, but Stephen and I dressed up as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and no one at our nerd school even knew who they were.
Gloss. Our school has a reputation for being cutthroat, but really these are the nicest – if not nerdiest – kids you’ll meet. And I may be one of the few students at the school who hadn’t mastered algebra by fifth grade, but I’m not stupid. Kinari and her friends are being extra nice to me because my only friend died over the summer at a lacrosse scrimmage from some heart problem they never knew he’d always had. She’s okay, though. She’s smart like the rest of them, and as far as lab partners go, she’s gold. I just worry about what I’ll do, who I’ll sit next to, when people stop feeling sorry for me.
On the permanence of things, in scientific terms.
I try to read the physics textbook on the subway home. A colored sidebar explains how ink never disappears: it just fades, because bonds break down over time, and absorbs light at different wavelengths, moving out of our visible spectrum. It’s still there; we just can’t see it.
At home, I stand on my bed with my coat and sneakers still on. Reaching for the top shelf, I pull yearbooks off one by one, claw through the pages at the end. His signature is nowhere. As I sit on my bed, surrounded by yearbooks, I wonder why I was too shy to ask him all those years, wonder why, when he asked me to sign his in eighth grade, I said, “Stephen, what could I possibly write to you that I haven’t already told you in person?”
Gloss. His eighth grade portrait is so goofy: freckles and big front teeth and round glasses. I’d forgotten he wore glasses before high school. But even through the lenses, the clarity of his eyes is striking: they are so honest – the color so sharp – like a piece of copper sparked under the flame of a Bunsen burner. A few other kids on the page had scribbled next to their photos some trite messages about staying in touch. I’d mocked them, but now I’d give anything to have Stephen’s signature on something.
On advice I probably won’t appreciate for another forty years.
When I tell my guidance counselor that the school sucks without Stephen, she tells me to “try to separate what’s actually happening from how you’re feeling about it.”
I tell her I’m trying.
Gloss. The truth is, I wouldn’t even know what that looks like anymore.
On the things your dead best friend forgot to tell you.
At the activities fair, I walk past the Mahjong Club, the Dragon- boat Team, the Ukrainian Club. There are too many excited students doing nerdy things packed into one cafeteria. I was the lacrosse team manager freshman and sophomore year, but only because Stephen was on the team and they got more funding if a girl was team manager. When I stop by their table, Jake asks if I’ll keep stats for them again this year, and I tell him I’ll think about it. Unless I want to end up like Mom’s friend Lisa who’s fifty, single, and claims knitting as her only hobby, I need to join a club. I spot Kinari standing behind a table in prime real estate by the windows overlooking the Hudson River. They’re representing the robotics team. I can tell by the hunk of metal on wheels doing loops in front of their table. Kinari waves me over. “You should sign up for robotics!” she says.
“Nah,” I say. “Not really my thing.”
“Doesn’t matter,” she says, coming out from behind the table, taking me by the wrist. “I can teach you. It’d be fun. Then we could spend time together outside of just physics lab.” I start to pull away, but she says, “Stephen would have wanted us to be friends.”
It takes me until that moment to realize that she knows something I don’t. Stupid, stupid, stupid. “And why,” I ask, “would Stephen have wanted that?”
“Because,” she says like she wasn’t in charge of sending the memo, “I was his girlfriend.”
And then I sign up for the robotics team.
Gloss. Because Stephen would’ve hated it.
Shoshana Akabas teaches in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University where she is working toward her MFA in fiction writing and literary translation. Most recently, her work has appeared in McSweeney’s The Believer, [PANK], The Grief Diaries, and American Short Fiction.