“I can’t do that,” I say. “I just can’t. I’m not going back there for some… some stupid… whatever it is. It feels like a party. Why do people want to eat and drink after a funeral? It makes no sense to me.”
“Just… to remember him. And have a chance to share memories?”
I shake my head a little and huff out some air.
“I’ll call a car,” he says, letting go of my hand to reach for his phone.
But I grab his hand back and say, “No. I can walk just fine. I just can’t go back to the house and listen politely as people try to console me. Or worse, expect me to console them. I don’t care if it’s rude. I just lost my twin and I’m not in the mood to hear how sorry everyone is for my loss.”
“Oh,” Aiden says, understanding me. Like the idea of ditching the reception never entered his mind. “Well, I’ll walk you to your car and then make excuses for you.”
“You will?” I ask, looking at him again. Like… really looking at him. His blue-green eyes are blurry today. Like the tropical ocean they usually resemble has been muddied with silt. His hair is dark and cropped short everywhere but on top near the front. So that every time he bows his head it tumbles down over his face in loose curls.
His nose is straight, even though I know it was broken once when he was sixteen and Kyle accidentally hit him with a wrench when they were working on their first Jeep together. I went to the hospital with them, holding a cloth over Aiden’s face as Kyle said, “Sorry, dude. Sorry, dude,” over and over again. But he had surgery to fix it a few days later so it’s straight now.
He grins at me, noticing I’m looking at him. His smile is wide and he always shows teeth. Even when he’s angry, he’ll smile and show teeth. Like a dog getting ready to attack.
His jaw is square and clean-shaven. Usually he’s got days’ worth of stubble on that chin. And once, when he was seventeen, he grew a goatee.
That makes me laugh.
“What?” he asks, looking into my eyes.
And then we talk about his goatee. And of course, he has to bring up that time I tried to wax my bikini area the day before we went out to the lake for a long weekend and I couldn’t even wear my bathing suit because I had these god-awful red marks all over my upper thighs.
Pretty soon we’re laughing about the time Aiden shaved Kyle’s head when he passed out drunk one New Year’s Eve and how Kyle got back at him the next year by taking pictures of Aiden with a dildo in his mouth.
Before we know it the sun has set. The backhoe guy is lugging out lights and setting them up around us and every chair but the two we’re sitting in has been collected and stacked onto the back of a little tractor.
Then we’re sad again because we realize we’ve been here for hours, laughing, and smiling, and having a pretty good time. Forgetting that Kyle’s dead body is lying just a few feet away.
“Hey,” Aiden says. “You ready to get out of here?”
I sigh, hesitating. Because I’m not. Not really. Walking away from Kyle’s grave means they’re going to fill it up. And then he’ll really be gone.
“Come on,” Aiden says, standing up and taking my hand. He pulls me to my feet and I slip my shoes off, readying myself for the long walk home.
He takes them from me, holding them in one hand while holding me in the other, and leads me across the cemetery and down the hill to the town.
CHAPTER THREE – AIDEN
We walk through the gates of the cemetery holding hands. It feels wrong in many ways. For one, I had a crush on Kali when I was a kid. I got a little sappy, trying to carry her books home from school and shit like that. So Kyle took me aside in the woods one day and said, “You’re my best friend, but if you ever try to hold my sister’s books again, I’ll punch you in the eye.”
End of Aiden’s crush on Kali. Like, needle-scratching-across-an-old-record kind of full stop.
Except it wasn’t the end. It was just the beginning.
I admit, I jerked off to the image of Kali’s face more times than I can count back when I was a teenager. And yeah, there was that time I saw her naked. She was getting out of the shower and a bunch of us guys were hanging out in Kyle’s living room and I just so happened to be coming up the steps to grab my jacket out of Kyle’s room and there she was with her door cracked open a little, looking through a pile of clothes on her bed.