We Didn't Make It After All

Chapter One

Ezra Parker was ephemeral, just fleeting enough to become a memory. How entropic is memory, its ability to change mundane experiences into hazy, dreamlike spring days, so mystical and songlike that I question if they ever happened. In those days with Ezra, I found everything I could have ever wanted—and the heartache that I once cherished as elements of fiction became my temporary truth. Inevitably, I realized that the world is filled with people carrying knives, though with the purest of intentions.

We fall in love not with people, Narnie, but with moments, he would say. Love is nothing more than a drug, an intoxicant, and eventually all intoxicants wear off, don't they?

A cautionary tale, gentle in even his cruelty—but there was something about him that made even the most stubborn of hearts surrender to his nuances.

"Ezra Parker?" repeated the elderly woman behind the registration desk at Holden High. A new semester was beginning after the end of an awfully torrid summer—and here I was, two spots behind him in line, waiting to receive my schedule. "You must be new if you're a Parker," she continued, scavenging the stack of files surrounding her. "We haven't registered anybody with that name, hon. Are you sure your parents finished the paperwork?"

He looked directly ahead. 

She glanced sheepishly at her coworker before facing Ezra once again. "Why don't we call your family, hon?"

"I can't do that, Ms. Liebson." 

The woman, Ms. Liebson, scrunched her face in confusion. "Are you sure? Are they at work or something? I am sure we can find at least one person of contact," she trailed off—but when she made the call moments later to his home, a dated voicemail greeted her on the other end of the line.

"I heard his parents are dead," Anita Karki whispered to her friend, Lolita Akbar, just a step behind me. "But apparently he still pays their phone carrier just to hear his Mama's voice."

"Who is your guardian, Ezra?" Ms. Liebson asked him, her expression softening.

"I—uh..."

"You haven't got anybody? No relatives or anything?"

He looked down at his feet.

Ms. Liebson narrowed her eyes at us before referring him to the headmaster's office. As he brushed past me in that crowded hour, I wanted to ask him a million questions, but he left in a haste, leaving behind a trail of his presence in the air, a similarly brooding demeanor and his subtle smile.

I saw him again two days later as I was trying out for cheerleading on the two acres of sparse land behind Holden High. With Coach Washington hosting football tryouts alongside us, the majority of the space had been sanctioned off for the footballers with large orange cones. Ezra was sitting on the bleachers in his football gear, his head tucked into the pages of Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning.

Every day in that hour, before Coach Washington blew his whistle to signal the beginning of tryouts, he would sit there just like that: with his head buried in the pages of dilapidated library books: de Beauvoir after Frankl, and then Seneca. Stranded in the world of fiction and its many mysteries, he paid no heed to the chaos we created for him to see—but I saw him. His shy glances. His periodic sighs. His quickening blinks as his body was cast in darkness by a floating cloud—the conviction with which he carried himself.

Maybe he was asking for it: for me to be captivated. I even picked up Hermann Hesse one evening after seeing Siddhartha poking out of his duffel bag. It was then that he approached me, with that same unwavering conviction. "Good choice," he said, motioning towards the battered copy of Siddhartha perched between my fingers. "Narnie, right? Have you seen Coach Washington?"

I looked up at him dumbly, pathetically—longingly. "Yeah."

"Yeah?"

I quickly shook my head. "Wait, no."

Amused, he raised an eyebrow. "No?"

"No, sorry," I said again.

He thanked me, leaving without another word.

I thought about him for days.

Beyond his arresting glance and the fading birthmark beneath his eye, his passion was his intrigue—and boys like him were inevitably the subject of great fascination, because Sol Flores captivated him before I could. I jogged into the field one day to find that he had company on his forth step on the bleachers. As I walked past the two, I was overcome by the sound of their quiet conversation. By chance then, our eyes met again.

He bit into the apple on his hand, winking innocently, and my cheeks burnt to a crisp.

No, this is not a love story. It is a story of loss.