“Hmm,” she said.
“Hmm,” I said.
After a second, Kaitlyn said, “Remember Derek? He broke up with me last week
because he’d decided there was something fundamentally incompatible about us deep
down and that we’d only get hurt more if we played it out. He called it
preemptive
dumping. So maybe you have this premonition that there is something fundamentally
incompatible and you’re preempting the preemption.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“I’m just thinking out loud here.”
“Sorry about Derek.”
“Oh, I got over it, darling. It took me a sleeve of Girl Scout Thin Mints and forty
minutes to get over that boy.”
I laughed. “Well, thanks, Kaitlyn.”
“In the event you do hook up with him, I expect lascivious details.”
“But of course,” I said, and then Kaitlyn made a kissy sound into the phone and I
said, “Bye,” and she hung up.
* * *
I realized while listening to Kaitlyn that I didn’t have a premonition of hurting him. I had a
postmonition.
I pulled out my laptop and looked up Caroline Mathers. The physical similarities
were striking: same steroidally round face, same nose, same approximate overall body
shape. But her eyes were dark brown (mine are green) and her complexion was much
darker—Italian or something.
Thousands of people—literally thousands—had left condolence messages for her. It
was an endless scroll of people who missed her, so many that it took me an hour of
clicking to get past the
I’m sorry you’re dead wall posts to the
I’m praying for you wall
posts. She’d died a year ago of brain cancer. I was able to click through to some of her
pictures. Augustus was in a bunch of the earlier ones: pointing with a thumbs-up to the
jagged scar across her bald skull; arm in arm at Memorial Hospital’s playground, with
their backs facing the camera; kissing while Caroline held the camera out, so you could
only see their noses and closed eyes.
The most recent pictures were all of her before, when she was healthy, uploaded
postmortem by friends: a beautiful girl, wide-hipped and curvy, with long, straight
deadblack hair falling over her face. My healthy self looked very little like her healthy
self. But our cancer selves might’ve been sisters. No wonder he’d stared at me the first
time he saw me.
I kept clicking back to this one wall post, written two months ago, nine months after
she died, by one of her friends.
We all miss you so much. It just never ends. It feels like we
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