Culler whistles. “Testy. Are you always this testy?”
“It’s from when I found my dad,” I blurt out, before Milo can say anything back. My hands come back to me then. I take the notebook from Culler and stare hard at the words, like they’d tell me more than what’s on there.
FIND ME / ALL THESE THINGS GONE COLD AND NOW I’M / S.R.
That doesn’t even make any sense. But it will.
It will.
I mean, it has to.
“You found your dad?” Culler asks. I jolt back to this conversation. Milo is glaring at me, but Culler looks really intrigued. “What was that like?”
“Seriously,” Milo says. “Eddie, what are you—”
“I found my dad,” I say, “and Milo found me.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it was…” I shrug and the way Culler is looking at me is like he needs to know and that makes me want to tell him. “I mean, I wasn’t there when it happened.”
“How soon after?”
“I don’t…” I honestly don’t know. “I think he was cold.”
“You think?”
“Eddie,” Milo says again.
“I think he was cold,” I say. “But his hands felt warm to me. But I think he must’ve actually been cold. I don’t know…”
Culler leans forward. “I don’t understand.”
I laugh. I don’t know why I laugh. It’s a shock of sound coming out of my mouth and I feel truly self-conscious, like I’m about to turn myself inside out. I can’t stand the way Milo is looking at me. I’m not looking at him, but I know how he’s looking at me.
“I found him and I…” I rip out tufts of grass with my hand. Plain speaking is the worst. This is the first time I’ve really said it out loud. “… lay next to him and I held his hands.”
Culler stares at me in amazement.
“I don’t know why,” I add hastily, because it sounds sort of … wrong. Weird. Maybe it was, but I can’t change that it was the first thing my head told my body to do before it all shut down. “It’s just—what I did, and now my hands are fucked up. I’m not stupid, I know it’s totally in my head, but…” I shake my head. “Everything after that is sort of tangled up. Like, pieces. I don’t really remember. Milo knows it but…”
He won’t tell me.
Culler turns to Milo and I know what’s coming next. “What’s the other half of the story? That you won’t tell her?”
“It’s none of your business,” Milo says for the hundredth time.
Culler nods at me. “Maybe so, but isn’t it hers?”
I don’t say anything, as much as I agree. It’s mine. It’s mine because it happened to me, but Milo won’t tell me. I stare at him and Milo realizes I’m not going to help him out of this. Or pretend it’s okay. It’s not okay that he won’t tell me.
It’s mine.
“Okay, fine: you were in shock,” Milo says, and it’s like gutting me. He just puts it all out there like that, when I know it was more than just that. “I called 911. That’s it.”
I get up and walk away from them and keep walking because I need to be away from Milo right now. I’m sick and shaky, angry. It’s the scary kind of calm anger that almost always ends up badly if you stick around. They give me space, for a moment. I get to the other side of the school when Milo shows up and says, “Are we going now?”
“ ‘You were in shock,’ ” I say. It comes out as weak when I was hoping it would come out a cuttingly accurate imitation of him. “ ‘I called 911. That’s it.’ That’s it? That’s so it, you can just say it now but you’ve been blowing me off about it since it—”
“Look, I’m sorry,” Milo says. “But you made me do it and I’m not sharing my life with that douchebag and you’re not sharing my life with him, okay?”
“You don’t even know him!”
“And how long have you known him? Since second grade?”
“Jealous?”
That is so pathetic, but it’s all I have.
“Eddie, stop it,” he snaps. “I’m not doing this here.”
“Why not? This is the best place to do it.”
“And that’s another thing,” Milo says, because I guess he just can’t help himself. “This doesn’t seem at all fucked up to you?”
“No. It seems perfectly normal to me.”
“It’s fucked up,” he repeats.
“Why are you even here then?” I ask. “If all this stuff about my dad bothers you this much?”
“Eddie, I’m not here for your dad.”
“I thought he meant something to you.”
“What else was I going to say? Okay, fine, Eddie, you go off with this—how old is he again? This twenty-something pretentious art fuck who looks at you like—” He stops. “No—you’re right, it’s about your dad. You’re right. I’m sorry.”
“So…” I pause. “It’s only about my dad when it’s not about you.”
It’s so quiet between us.
“He did mean something to me. I liked your dad,” Milo says. “I loved your dad. He was great. He treated me like a member of your family. I was never an imposition. And when my dad moved out, he took me aside one day and told me if I needed anything just to ask. I miss him too. A lot.”
I try to remember this man Milo is talking about. For a second, something inside of me—I remember my dad, taking a moment to smile at both me and my mom before going off to do whatever he did. He’d just pause and appreciate …
And then Milo ruins it: “But if he left messages for you to torture yourself with … I think less of him.”
I can’t believe he just said that.
“Then maybe you should go back to Branford,” I say.
“I’m not leaving without you.”
“Well, I’m not going with you. So.”
He laughs bitterly. “Wow. You like him, don’t you?”
“I—”
“You like him,” he repeats.
He’s hurt. I look away.
“Milo—”
“It’s fine,” he says, shrugging. “I’m just saying.”
“Well, what do you want me to say? You still make me feel alone,” I say. “And you’re not honest with me—”
“I’m not honest with you?” Milo asks, but the way he asks it is the worst. Like it’s a question that doesn’t mean anything, and the answer only vaguely interests him.
“You keep things from me. You won’t tell me about that night…”
“Did you ever—” He makes a frustrated noise and buries his face in his hands, and when he lowers his hands, he is so sad. I hate seeing that on him. “Did you ever think that maybe it’s hard for me?” he asks. “Eddie, I can’t stand to think of you the way I found you that night. I think half the time you forget it happened to me too.”
And that makes me cry. I brush the tears away, frantic, and he reaches for me and I move back from him and I look at him, but I can’t stand to look at him. I can’t do this with him. It’s too hard.
“Don’t—you’re right. I’m sorry. But you should go back,” I say, walking away from him. “I don’t want you here…”
“Eddie—”
“No, go back, Milo. I can’t—I’ll be fine.”
I walk around the school and lean against it, covering my face with my hands, crying stupid, until I hear Milo’s car start up and leave. I wipe at my eyes and try to calm down enough to find Culler, but when I look up, he’s there, his camera resting against his chest.
“That sounded intense,” he says.
“You were listening?”
“I didn’t catch all the words,” he says. “But it sounded intense. And now he’s gone, so I don’t think I’m wrong…?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“That’s fine.”
“I don’t have a ride home.”
“Yes, you do.”
Culler reaches forward and runs his thumbs over the top of my hands, like they don’t belong to me, and I feel different parts of my heart separating into pieces, like the piece that’s with Milo in his car, the piece that knows why I stayed here and let him go, the piece that likes Culler touching me, and the piece that remembers the last and first time he kissed me. So many pieces.
I let him take a photograph of my hands.
I don’t know why.
Culler asks me back to his apartment. My thoughts are so far from home and this is maybe the strangest day of my life, so I say, yes, of course.
“I have two roommates,” Culler says. “Stella is cool—she’s a musician. But Topher is kind of…” He trails off. “He’s a photographer. He thinks he’s better than me because he goes to school for it.” I don’t really get it and Culler smiles a little. “You know how they say don’t bring up politics and religion at the dinner table?” I nod. “Well, those are the topics people change the subject to when Topher and I get into it about photography.”
“I’m really glad I’m not an artist,” I say.
“No, you’re a work of art.”
If anyone else said that to me, I think I’d roll my eyes, but Culler saying it to me means me committing it to memory and locking it inside so I’ll always have it.
It takes a while to get back to Haverfield. By the time we do, the city he lives in is cast in a late-afternoon glow. His apartment building is a surprisingly nice place. For some reason, I pictured something a lot more starving artist, but I guess he must do okay.