Juniper Lemon's Happiness Index Read online

  I decide to take a chance.

  “Brand?”

  “Yeah?”

  His blue eyes are intense, pale with sun.

  “I realized the other day . . .” He waits. I take a breath. “The letter. Camie’s letter. She had it in her bag the night of the accident. The night we were . . .” I lick my lips. “At this party.”

  “Shawn’s party. So?”

  I fight the urge to swallow. Shawn’s party.

  He knows.

  “So,” I press on, with difficulty, “she had only written it that day. I’ve thought about it, and I’m almost certain she meant to give it to somebody there. At Shawn’s.” I watch this sink in and try to analyze Brand’s reaction. As usual, his hooded eyes reveal next to nothing. “And I remembered,” I continue, treading carefully now as if testing my weight on a rickety bridge, “that the letter said she was leaving the guy in high school. That it was . . . someone younger than her.”

  I look him full in the eye now. The moments grow long and I wait, mentally clinging to the ropes on either side of me.

  At last, Brand asks, “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  My throat pinches, but I choke, “You were there.”

  “As were you. Why are you saying it like—” Brand closes his mouth, and after a moment cocks his head to the side. “You don’t remember?”

  A chill rolls over me.

  “Remember what?” My faux support ropes fray.

  “Remember what?” Brand moves his head back as if adjusting his vision. When I don’t answer, he screws up his eyes and says, “Us?”

  My stomach plunges.

  “Relax,” Brand says quickly. “It isn’t like that.” But I must look as unnerved as I feel, because he gets up from his slouch against the dumpster and walks over, leaning down to support me. “You really don’t remember?”

  I shake my head.

  “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Why don’t we just sit down a minute.”

  I let him guide me to the curb.

  “Here.” Brand cracks his lighter and sticks a cigarette between his teeth, and when the end is lit he takes it out and passes it to me. I stare at it.

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “It’ll help,” he insists.

  I look at his earnest face. At the stick in his hand.

  Then I peel my yellow gloves off, wipe my hands along my pants, and take it from him.

  “Just pull a little and hold it a minute.”

  I do. Only, after several moments, when I let the smoke out, my throat burns and I wheeze and cough on a hot, mangled cluster of brimstone.

  “Did you even inhale?” Brand is trying not to laugh.

  The tangle itches and I am coughing too deeply to answer. He can’t keep from grinning.

  “You’re supposed to inhale it,” he laughs. “Into your lungs.”

  I swat at him like a rakish-haired fly and thrust the cigarette back for him to take. Brand half frowns, half smiles at it, then sets it back between his own lips.

  “So,” he says when he blows out a drag, “July Fourth.”

  “July Fourth,” I echo like a demented toast.

  The night I can’t remember.

  “Did you—?” He breaks off as if checking himself. The smoke rises from the cigarette in his lowered hand. “Did you get a concussion that night, or something?”

  “From the accident?” I take a deep breath. My chest raggedly deflates as I let it out again. “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” He searches my eyes. “Are you being coy with me, or do you mean to say that you physically don’t know?”

  “I mean, there are hours that night I have no recollection of—and I don’t know if it’s because I drank too much and blacked out, or from the accident.”

  “Fuck.” Brand eyes the concrete with distaste, as though it were an ugly throw rug. “That fucking sucks.”

  Brand doesn’t even know. He doesn’t see the holes eating away at the universe.

  “Tell me what you do remember.” He taps a bit of ash off. “Maybe I can fill in some of the blanks.”

  “I remember . . .” I close my eyes. “The party was already going when we got there. Music. Cups. People spilled across the sofas, drinking, dancing, making out . . .”

  “That would’ve been us. The music,” Brand adds when I open my eyes.

  “Right. The band. I didn’t see them—they were playing in the yard out back.”

  “You must’ve hung out in the house a while.”

  “Yeah. Camilla led me in—I remember meeting people, shaking hands . . . getting drinks in the kitchen, talking to Shawn . . .”

  “What’d you drink?”

  “Jungle juice.”

  Brand winces.

  “And that was just to start.”

  “What else?”

  My shoulders fall in exhale. “We did shots—not Camie. She was gonna drive so I could try stuff and she didn’t drink anything. But the rest of us—Shawn and some others, a bunch of their friends—we all threw back a few. Rum. Vodka. Tequila. Then Camie cut me off and said I needed to walk around and let it digest.”

  “Did you?”

  “Sort of. We went around talking to people. I remember realizing I was buzzed, and thinking how fun and floaty it was—how I could joke with all these people I’d never met before, how fun dancing was, how I didn’t care what anybody thought . . . the music was so good! I heard Queen and—”

  Suddenly it dawns on me: “Don’t Stop Me Now.” “Another One Bites the Dust.”

  “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

  “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  Brand smiles. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  “I remember wanting to go see the band, but we ran into Camie’s friend Melissa. God, I don’t even remember what we talked about . . .

  “I think she had me try her drink, something fruity, and I liked it, and I ended up drinking the rest . . . Oh, and there was this big graduation toast. Camie wouldn’t let me do another shot, so I just had Coke. After that . . .” I trail off, finishing with a shrug.

  “You don’t remember the request?”

  “Request?” I tense.

  “Yeah.” Brand takes another drag, blows it out. “You came up to us not long after the toast. You’d heard us playing Queen. You wanted ‘Bicycle Race.’” He leans forward, watching me to see if any of this is sounding familiar.

  “‘Bicycle Race,’” I repeat.

  “You don’t remember.”

  I shake my head.

  “Well.” Brand drops the cigarette on the ground and crushes it under his shoe. “You asked for the song, and you got it. We started playing, and . . . and then”—the corner of his mouth twitches up—“halfway through, you get up on the platform and tell us—or me, more specifically—Nope, nope, WRONG, you’re doing it all wrong—”

  My stomach cinches. “Please tell me you’re joking.” His smirk twists higher.

  “It was the dialogue you were mad about. ‘You say black, I say white’?”

  I nod.

  “You said my intonation was terrible, and you could do a much better Freddie Mercury, and—well, that was about the time your sister spotted you . . .”

  I now am hanging on his every word. This footage of Camilla is new to me. Precious. It should be in my memory, but isn’t.

  I listen, fixing it in my head with everything I’ve got.

  “I had thought she was going to apologize for you, but she didn’t. She got right up on the deck and took the mike and said, looking at us, but talking to the crowd, If Juniper says she can sing better than this guy, I believe her. Whaddya say? SING-OFF?”

  I feel myself redden and hold my face. “She did not.” But even before Brand affirms it, I know it is just the sort of thing Camilla would’ve
encouraged. “So what happened?”

  “What else?” A wolfish grin breaks out across Brand’s face. “We sang! It was this fucking badass, Bicycle battle. We did the whole back and forth: ‘You say black, I say white / You say bark—’”

  “‘I say bite.’”

  “Exactly. And the crowd LOVED it! You were fucking ridiculous.”

  I peer from a crack between my fingers. “Good fucking ridiculous?”

  “Fucking great fucking ridiculous. After ‘Bicycle’ we did ‘Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy,’ ‘We Are the Champions’—”

  “‘Bohemian Rhapsody’?” My heartstrings pull taut.

  “Yeah, of course we—wait. You remember?”

  I bite my lip, suddenly ill again. When I can’t open my mouth to answer, I reach an unsteady hand inside my raincoat. I take my phone from a pocket, but can’t bring myself to pull up the file.

  Brand looks from me to the phone’s black screen. “You okay?”

  Ropes are snapping. My cool dangles by a thread.

  “In one week,” I say, and I can’t help it; a wry, bitter smile twists my lips, “I’ve gone from elite choir and lunches with my best friend to fucking Booster Club and daily dumpster dives with the weirdest guy in school, who by the way INSISTS on a deodorant only marginally less suffocating than this elephant armpit of fermented chili, bullshat essays, and pizza crusts. I think I’m pretty far from okay.”

  Brand stares at me with an unreadable expression. I think he’s relieved to see anger instead of tears.

  He says, “You’re a fan of the Axe, then.”

  I laugh.

  Then I cry.

  ∞

  When my shoulders start to heave and my breathing is racked with sobs, Brand informs me I am making a scene and pulls me back into the building. I don’t know where he’s leading me; I am watching my feet and trying very hard to keep from letting anyone who might be around see me 1) upset and 2) hanging out with Brandon Box Cutter Sayers.

  We turn one corner, then another, and eventually go through a door and up some stairs I don’t recognize. At the top Brand fumbles something out of a pocket—keys, I discern from the jingle—and then there is the sound of teeth fitting and the turn and he pushes in, pulling me by the arm.

  “Sit,” he commands when we stop moving.

  I find a beanbag chair at my feet and sink into it.

  Wait.

  Beanbag?

  I look up from the floor. Brand has brought me to a long room with windows on adjacent sides, one looking out at the track and football field, the other into a tall room with rising rows of chairs and music stands. When I spot the filing cabinets and some instruments wedged in a corner, it’s clear this must be the music loft: a dusty old storage space between the band and choir rooms.

  Also known as Band Geeks’ Paradise.

  I sit up, suddenly wary of what might have been in this beanbag before me.

  “Shit, Lemon.” Brand is lifting stacks of papers as he moves from shelf to shelf, checking for something. “I’d offer you a hanky, but I left my gentleman’s coat in the other decade.”

  My breathing is still somewhat haggard, but I manage to wipe my eyes with my wrists. Brand belatedly finds what he is looking for—a box of tissues—and offers it to me.

  “Thanks,” I tell him. Only, through the snot and grief, it comes out tanks. I take one and blow my nose.

  “Feeling better?”

  I stare at him, snot rag in hand. I know what I must look like right now, and “better” is a galaxy far far away.

  “Here.” Brand crosses to a shelf and pulls a slender case down by the handle: an electric guitar. I guess it must be his, ’cause he undoes the latches, lifts the instrument, and takes a plastic sack out from under it.

  “Is that—?”

  Brand takes a handful of its contents for himself, then lowers the open bag to me.

  “Gummy bears?” I ask, identifying the colored globs.

  “Yeah?” he says. “What’d you think I was offering you?”

  “Gummy bears?” I repeat, still not over the fact.

  Brand stares at me. I stare at him. Then, already broken and unable to censor myself, I laugh. My breath is still wobbly, so it comes out in dashes and stutters.

  “What?” Brand demands.

  “You ARE a suh. A suh-uh. Softie.”

  He frowns.

  “I woul-uh . . . would’ve expected Warheads. Sour Patch Kids, at least.”

  “Fuck off,” Brand retorts. “I’m trying to be a gentleman here.”

  “I mean, Jesus. Flamin’ Hah. Hot Cheetos . . .”

  He folds his arms, sulky. But after a moment his face relaxes. “Since you’ve recovered your yap enough to criticize me,” he says, evenly setting the gummy bears on the floor and dropping into the beanbag beside mine, “why don’t you tell me why it is you’ve been crying?”

  Now I can’t meet his eye. “Do I need a re-reason?”

  “Not necessarily.” He drums his fingers along his jeans, and when I don’t answer: “But you were doing pretty well until you brought out your phone.”

  When I look up, Brand is watching me.

  I know I don’t have to answer him. I know if I say nothing he will drop it, and probably never bring it up again. But we are alone in this foreign time and space—this dimension that is Band Geeks’ Paradise after school—and something in his eyes tells me that this is a sacred place: If I leave a secret here, here is where it will stay.

  I take my phone from my pocket.

  “I haven’t shown this to anyone,” I say, looking him hard in the face. He nods, silent as I hesitate with my thumb on the screen. After a moment I inhale, unlock it, and scroll through storage until a video is highlighted. A video received in a text July 5, 2:39 a.m.

  I tap the file open.

  ∞

  The camera wobbles before settling on the girl in the passenger seat.

  The person aiming it—the driver—tries not to laugh. “That’s a pretty mean air guitar you’ve got there, Juni.”

  “Electric air guitar.” The passenger blows a lock of straw-colored hair from her face, still jamming. “Or would it be air electric guitar?” Giggles. “Another thing I could probably do better than that haircut kid.”

  The driver cackles. “Oh my sister. You are going to enjoy this tomorrow.”

  “Shhhh, shhh shhh! Here comes the air piano! Dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum, dum EYE see a li-ttle sil-hou-ETTE-o of a man scaraMOUCH scaraMOUCH will you do the fan—GREEN light—”

  “Ohp! Yes it is.”

  The camera shifts as the hand holding it turns the wheel. An intersection curves away and then the view resettles, the night outside the windows slowing to a crawl. Streetlamps pass in occasional whitening glares, but not much else.

  There are no other cars on the road.

  “Juni, you are legend. Turn to me so I can see you in your full rock-out glory.”

  The blonde swats at the camera. “Shhhh! DoDO DOdo DOdo DOdo. Easy CO—Camilla!” She gapes at the camera, then up at the driver holding it. “Are you recording this?”

  “What if I am?”

  “Camilla Alexis Lemon.” The passenger folds her arms. “This is a vehicle in motion, which you are operating. Put that phone away.”

  A snort. “Yes, MOM. As soon as you finish your solo. We’re coming to a red light anyway.”

  The star sticks her tongue out as the car rolls to a stop. She shakes her finger in time with a blasting string of NO!s and the driver laughs.

  “I love you, Juni.”

  But the passenger doesn’t hear her; she is dragging out a high-pitched eeeeeeeee, dancing, rifting on her air guitar to the tune of, “DOO doo doo doo doo doo, DOO doo doo doo doo doo . . .” while the camera shakes and shakes in silent laughter.
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br />   “So you THINK you can—Camie!”

  “What?”

  “Drive!”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sending it.”

  “Yeesh. If we get pulled over, let me do the talking.”

  A fresh spray of laughter. As the image blurs away from the passenger, a swell of light blooms from the other direction.

  “God, that was classic. Tomorrow you’re gonn—”

  ∞

  The screen goes black.

  Brand raises his eyes from it to me in slow horror.

  “That isn’t,” he says. “That’s not when—?”

  “That was the end of the video. She managed to hit SEND before the other car hit us. I know, because they recovered her phone in pieces.”

  “Jesus,” says Brand. “Fuck.”

  “Camilla didn’t even drink anything. But she was hit by some guy who did because she wasn’t watching for the other guy; she was filming me.”

  I feel warm drops on my arms and realize I’m still crying. Not sobbing anymore—just tearing. I ball my fists and squeeze to oblivion. Brand looks away, either out of privacy or at a loss for what to say. I don’t blame him. I wouldn’t know what to say, either.

  I wipe my face again and blink a few times. Brand shifts and reaches like he might put his hand on my back, but thinks better of it. Instead of saying “I’m sorry,” or telling me it isn’t my fault, he says, “And you’ve just carried that around on your phone this whole time?”

  I nod. His expression tightens.

  “Why?”

  “It’s the last I have of her.”

  That sits in the stale storage air a minute. Brand gazes ahead, seeing something that isn’t there. “That’s fucked up,” he says quietly. “You should delete it.”

  “How can I? It’s the last time she told me she loved me.”

  And I don’t even remember it.

  Brand’s mouth shrinks into a line. He looks as though he’s balancing something sharp on his tongue. He starts to say it. Stops again. Pulls his lips in and gets up instead, crosses the room. At his guitar case he stops, twisting on his heels like he can’t quite decide something, and finally he pulls the lid of a compartment hidden beneath his instrument.