Page 66 of The Last to Let Go
“What?” she interrupts, her face draining of all color.
“Remember his friend Mark?” She nods, then sits down in the chair she just turned over. “Well, they’re doing a job together and he’ll only be gone a few days—it was a last-minute thing,” I lie.
“When will he be back?”
“I don’t know. Soon. A few days. A week, tops.” Or at least, that’s how long I figure he might need to cool off and realize he can’t just leave us like this.
“Are you sure?”
“Sure about what?”
“Are you sure that he’s really coming back?”
“Yeah, of course.”
She opens her mouth but then shuts it. Then she stands without a word, walks to her room, and closes the door behind her.
CONTRAPASSO
OUR ENGLISH TEACHER FURIOUSLYscrawls a word out on the whiteboard at the front of the room, her letters in all caps:CONTRAPASSO.
“Who knows what this means?” she asks, turning around, searching for recognition. “Come on, who’s taking Latin?” Radio silence. “Has anyone bothered to readInfernoover break? Anyone at all?”
I look at Dani. We bothered to read it. We read it out loud together as we sat on her bedroom floor with our legs crossed over each other’s; we took turns as we lay in her bed with our feet touching.
She could answer this question. So could I. But we don’t.
“It means ‘punishment,’?” some guy shouts out, not bothering to raise his hand.
“Yes, but more specifically than that?” she asks, a glimmer of life lighting up her face momentarily.
He shrugs in response.
The teacher looks annoyed. It’s Monday—the first Monday after winter break—everyone looks annoyed. It’s cold, gloomy, and gray, and no one gives a damn about Dante. “All right, are your brains still on vacation? Someone look this up,” she demands.
I see a few students flip idly through the pages of our textbook. Our teacher lets out a long sigh and starts writing more words on the board.
“It comes from the wordscontraandpatior. Anyone? It translates to ‘suffer the opposite.’ And it’s one of the major rules in Dante’s Hell. What does it mean, though?” she asks.
I roll it around in my head a few times. It means me looking across the room at Dani. It means having her ignore me. It means me telling her to leave me alone when I meant to sayI love you, when what I really meant wasDon’t leave me alone like everyone else—I have this hole inside of me that’s getting so big I think it might swallow me up. But I didn’t tell her that, either. I yelled, I scared her away, and then I ignored her phone calls. So now I’m suffering the opposite.
I wonder if that’s what Dante had in mind.
Probably not.
When the bell rings, Dani bolts out of her seat, like she did in AP Psych, and like she did in AP American History, where it felt as though we were having our own private civil war from opposite sides of the room.
“Dani! Will you please talk to me?” I ask, catching up with her in the hall.
“I wanted to talk to you,” she finally says, turning to give me the coldest glare I’ve ever seen. “That’s kind of why I was calling you all weekend. Because I wanted to talk. I don’t anymore, in case you couldn’t tell.”
Tyler joins up with us as our hallway spills into the main thoroughfare that leads to the cafeteria.
“Hey, Brooke,” he says, wincing—clearly, he’s heard all about our fight. Dani walks ahead of us, faster, until she disappears into the crowd.
I turn to Tyler, at a loss. “I don’t know what to do.”
“You better figure it out, this shit’s bad for my complexion.”
