I looked down at her hands.
Oh, just a model of the solar system. When she was done, I picked Saturn up off the floor and considered my problem.
There was no way I could live another moment without Aza Ray knowing my name.
Later that first day, Aza had a huge coughing attack and an ambulance came. I saw them loading her in. I tried to get myself loaded in too.
Eve and Carol got summoned to the school, and I got in trouble for being overly intense. Overly intense = Kid Who Occasionally Has an Episode of Frustrated Head-Banging.
So, I’m still the guy who chases the ambulance. This time, at least, I got to go into it with her. Let’s call that lucky.
I’ve never understood why some hospitals won’t let the people you’re with in the door with you. It’s horrible. Twice, I’ve had to pretend to be Aza’s brother. My moms know I have a fake ID that has Ray as my last name.
They don’t have room to judge me, really, if we’re talking obsession. My moms met because Eve lived in the top of a redwood for seven months, in a hammock. Carol was the doctor who had to do the distance assessment of Eve’s mental and physical well-being. Carol was on the ground, and via megaphone, she fell in love with Eve and Eve fell in love back. Neither of them has ever been able to explain it to me. I’ve seen pictures. Eve has braids and leaves and muck in her hair, and she’s tanned to the color of the tree. Carol looks like Carol. Back then, Carol ironed all her clothes, including her jeans, and she totally did not understand what Eve was doing living in a tree.
They’re still in love, as far as I can tell.
And so, me being irrational about Aza? I think my moms actually saw it as karma. They remembered how their parents felt when the two of them met, which was, basically, WHA?!
They looked at me, and Aza, and said the exact same thing. But they couldn’t tell me not to do it.
Other people watch TV. Aza read about cryptography and sailor’s knots. We had an ongoing competition over who could give the other the best “piece of weird” they’d never heard about before. There was a tally, and I was winning, but only by one point.
Last year, Aza signed up for the talent show and came onstage, clicked play on a beatbox MP3, and started doing the strangest whistles over the top of it. I sat in the audience, dying.
Afterward, she said to me, “How’s your Silbo?” and cackled. Turns out Silbo is a whistled language from the Canary Islands. She won that round, though not the talent show. I still don’t know what she was saying. She wouldn’t translate.
I turn left at the cemetery and get in line behind Aza’s parents and Eli, in their beat-up blue car.
I honk: I CAN’T BELIEVE I KEPT FORGETTING YOU WERE DYING.
Aza’s dad is driving. He flashes me a sign, and then he honks his own Morse, actual Morse, carefully done.
FOREVER. He told me he was going to do that. I honk it in repetition, and so does everyone else. They don’t even know what they’re saying. But her dad and I do. Aza’s mom and Eli do too. I can see them in the car, trying not to break down.
Brief pi recitation.
So, back to me showing up at her birthday party when we were five, thinking my Halloween costume would make me invisible. It kind of did. I walked a mile, this really small alligator by the side of the road, and nobody busted me. I was on a mission.
No one liked Aza back then. She’d already resigned herself to it, no friends, mostly stuck inside at recess. Everyone said she was gross and contagious.
I don’t really need other people. Well, I need one other person, and she’s gone and shitshitshit.
I honk my apology list. It’s not much of a list, really. Just one huge thing.
Aza’s family, with input from me, decided to do this graveside, because the whole memorial thing works better if you can scream it, and that’s what we’re all about to be doing.
Crazy wind. All these people surrounding a hole in the ground, like something’s going to come out of it, rather than go in.
We thought her making it to sixteen mattered. Why? What does sixteen even signify? Nothing. It’s this nothing notion. It’s not even a prime number.
I look at everyone from school, Jenny Green and company. The whole last few days have been full of people getting passes to get out of class, at which point they smoke behind the cafeteria. Historically, Aza and I would’ve made fun of them, grieving for someone they didn’t love.
Aza didn’t especially believe in grief. This is inconvenient. I thought I didn’t believe in grief either, but now me and Aza have another divide, another difference. I see Mr. Grimm standing off to the side wearing sunglasses and a hat. He looks as though he’s been crying too.
My moms walk up behind me. Carol sighs in a way that says she was fervently hoping I wouldn’t be wearing what I’m wearing.
“Really?” says Carol. “Couldn’t manage to keep the suit on, huh?”
“You knew he wouldn’t,” says Eve. She even smiles.
“I thought he would,” Carol says. “I even called the costume place. They said the alligator was still right there in the stockroom.”
What Carol doesn’t know is that the costume place has two alligator suits. One my size, and one Aza’s. It was part of her birthday surprise.
“It’s Aza’s funeral,” I say. “She’d have liked it.”
I put the head back on. Eve gives me a little thumbs-up, but I catch Carol looking at me. Just when I’m honestly a little worried, thinking she’s 100 percent not on my side, she says “Wŏ ài nĭ,” which is “I love you” in Chinese, followed by “Nakupenda,” which is the same thing in Swahili. We learned to say I love you together in what felt like a thousand languages when I was little. That’s the kind of mom Carol is.