The Bench Is Still There

There is no twist left to give you. I gave you the twist when I gave you his name. Theo was the killer and Theo was with us and Theo is the reason I am not anywhere anymore, and Mae is not anywhere, and Eli is not anywhere, and Theo is also not anywhere, killed by his own hands on a night he meant for three and got four, and the lake still laps, and the lane still goes pale with gravel in the morning, and the cottage is still there, I am told, still brown, the porch still wrapped halfway around, the door still stuck, and it sits empty on a lane that people don't drive down at night anymore.

I have been trying to find what to leave you with. Stories are supposed to end with something, a meaning, a shape, the thing the dying was for. I don't have that for you. I have only the truth, which is that the golden day was real, the lemonade was cold, Eli's hand on the back of my neck was warm, and Mae's laugh in the grass was the loudest sound on the quad, and Theo stood one step behind her with his patient blue eyes, and we made a plan, and the plan killed us, and the plan was a good plan, a fun plan, a plan any four friends would have made on the first warm day of junior year, and that is the only meaning there is: that the days that look like beginnings can be beginnings of anything, and you do not get to know which.

I want to tell you to look at the tree line. I keep coming back to that, to the shape I saw from the dock and let cross my mind and did not catch. I want to tell you that if I had caught it, if I had said something, the night would have gone another way, but I don't know that's true, and I don't want to lie to you any more than I want to lie to myself, and the truth is probably that I saw a shadow and a shadow is a shadow is a shadow, and the thing that killed us was a person we already knew, and you can stare at the tree line all you want and the tree line will show you deer and shade and pine, and the killer will still be at the firepit with you, pouring the wine, sleeping by your door.

So here is what I leave you. Not a warning; warnings are for things you can avoid. Not a meaning; there isn't one. Just this: the bench outside the science wing is still there, I'm told, and on warm days someone else sits on it, and the sun is the same sun, and the iced coffee spills the same way, and someone else's hair lifts in the same breeze, and someone else's boyfriend crosses the quad with two cans of lemonade, and none of them know us, and they will make their own plans, their own golden plans, and most of them will be fine, most of them will become the long ordinary gray future that plans are for, and some of them will not, and there is no way to tell, sitting on the bench, which kind of plan is yours.

The lake still laps. I have said that a few times now and I'll say it one more, because it is the only thing in this story that is steady, the lake that did not stop for us and will not stop for anyone, that will be cold and dark and mineral-smelling on the morning after every bad night there ever is, indifferent, which is the worst word and the only honest one. The lake does not care. The lake was not watching. The lake is just a lake. And we were just four kids who loved each other, on a road going north, under a sky the color of rinsed glass, and the sky did not warn us either, because the sky never does, and the day was golden, and the day was the last, and I'm done.