First Love Read online

  “Oh, you probably won’t have to bother,” Robinson said. “Something’s already on that job. But don’t worry. I’m still around to torture you.”

  “Never stop,” I said.

  “I’ll do my best.” Robinson patted the edge of bed, and Leafy hopped up, too, though it was obviously not easy for her. I watched him pet her soft head and ears. He yawned and then moved around in the bed, restless and uncomfortable as he woke up to his sickness and the pain it caused him.

  I ran my finger along the side of his cheek. “Do you want anything?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer me. His eyes closed, and I thought he was falling back to sleep. He’d been sleeping so much lately. As his breathing became more regular, I slowly eased out of the bed and went to the door, ready to check on his parents. Then he said softly, “Yes.”

  “What?”

  “I want more time,” he said. His lashes were dark against his pale skin.

  I bit my lip and felt the sting of tears again. “Okay,” I whispered. “Coming right up.”

  When I was in the hallway, he called me back.

  “Axi,” he said, half-sitting up again. “Listen, okay? First thing: Leafy does not need another treat, no matter how much she thinks she does. So leave the Milk-Bones in the pantry. Second thing: there’s a hole in your shirt, and you should get my mom to sew it. Third thing: like that dumb Mason Jennings song says, there are so many ways to die.”

  I held up a hand. “Whoa, Robinson—”

  He ignored me. “It doesn’t matter what the end looks like—what matters is that it came. Bam, you’re done. But life, Axi? There are degrees of life. You can live it well or half-asleep. You can go sledding down a sand dune, or you can spend your life in front of the TV. And I don’t mean to sound like a stupid after-school special, but you have to keep living the way we did these last weeks. Risk, Axi. That’s the secret. Risk everything.”

  I nodded, trying not to cry again. “Okay. But I might not keep stealing cars.”

  “That’s all right,” he said.

  “What am I going to do—?” I asked. I couldn’t say the final two words of the sentence: without you.

  Robinson smiled. “You should probably try to not fail physics. And you should keep writing.”

  I thought of my journal, the sloppy, haphazard notes in it and all the pages to be filled. At least I’d taken some pictures on our trip. “I’ll write the good parts.”

  “No, you have to write the good and the bad.” Robinson picked at the edge of the blanket. His eyes were so huge and serious. “You can write all about me, and I’ll live forever that way.”

  What could I say? I sank down onto a chair and put my head in my hands.

  “You know, yours was the only book I ever wanted to read. So just write it, Axi. You can do it. You can do anything. I mean, look at you. You’re not GG anymore—you’re so much bigger than her.”

  I laughed bitterly. “I don’t miss her.”

  “I loved her,” Robinson said. “And I loved the sick girl you were when I met you, and I loved the good student and the bad driver. I loved the car thief, the hitchhiker, the quoter of novels I haven’t read, and the hater of Slim Jims… Axi Moore, I’ve loved every you there ever was.”

  I walked over to the bed and laid my head on his chest. “I’ll always be your girl,” I whispered.

  “I know,” he said.

  I watched the way our fingers intertwined, and I thought, What are hands made for but this? For holding. For holding on.

  53

  THE DAYS BLURRED INTO ONE ANOTHER as Robinson began to dream more and speak less. Time had lost meaning for him, but I was overcome by a sense of waiting. Something was coming, something that would be dreadful darkness and that would also be relief.

  We stayed with him in shifts: Lou in the mornings, Joe in the afternoons, Jonathan in the evenings, and me at night. I read to him from Lou’s books: Steinbeck, Whitman, Fitzgerald, Hemingway. She read him The Little Prince.

  One night, in the middle of my watch, I slipped outside into the warm darkness. The crickets were going crazy, and the lightning bugs were like tiny lanterns flashing a kind of insect Morse code.

  Through the window, Robinson looked small and frail under the covers, like a little kid in his childhood bed. Like he ought to be clutching a teddy bear.

  I picked a star and wished as hard as I could that somehow I could protect him from what was on the horizon.

  We’re in this together, Robinson used to say. I remembered the first time he’d ever said it to me, at dinnertime in the cancer ward when we’d been handed a tray of brown slop and green peas. “We’re in this together,” Robinson had declared. “Axi, we can do this.” He’d lifted his fork high in the air, like a sword. “We can eat this… this… whatever it is!”

  It was a joke back then; now it was real. We were in this together for just a little bit longer, because what was coming next, Robinson was going to have to go through alone. I would have traded my life for his, but there was no one to offer this to. No one who could make the exchange. No star that would grant my wish.

  At three o’clock that morning, I was dozing, my hand on his, when suddenly he was awake.

  “The motorcycle,” he said, his voice haunted and urgent. “Does it have gas?”

  I was instantly at attention. “Yes,” I said.

  “I think the head gasket’s blown—it’s seeping oil.”

  “Your brother’s looking into it,” I said. Whatever world Robinson was in now, I would play along. “He says not to worry, he’ll take care of it. It’s going to be up and running right away.”

  “What about the clutch cable? It’s worn.”

  “He’ll fix that, too.”

  Then Robinson looked at me for a long time. At some point, he seemed to come back to himself. “Axi,” he whispered.

  “Hi,” I whispered back.

  He gazed around the room at the Bob Dylan poster, the leaning guitars, all the things he’d left behind when he went away to the hospital. His fingers fluttered, and I reached out to grab them.

  I knew what was coming. What I should say.

  There was a stone in my throat, but I swallowed hard. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay to go.” The final stop.

  He brought my hand up to his lips and kissed it, right in the center of my palm. Then he closed my fingers around it, as if the kiss were something I could hold on to forever.

  I climbed into bed with him. He shifted, sighing. “Axi,” he said.

  “I’m right here.”

  I held his head in my arms. I pressed my mouth to his cheek. We are in this together.

  “Axi,” he said again.

  I told him I loved him. He loved me, too, he said—always. And I heard him say my name again. He whispered it over and over until it didn’t sound like my name at all anymore. It was only sound, only rhythm. Almost like a song.

  “Axi.” He sighed. “Axi.”

  And then, finally, he was silent.

  Outside, the song of the crickets seemed to crescendo. I reached into my pocket for the lucky penny I had flipped so long ago in the cancer ward, hoping that it somehow meant Robinson would make it. I’d kept that penny with me every single day after it showed me heads, that he would always be with me.

  Now I held it tight, and then I flipped it high into the air and watched it land. But on what, it didn’t matter. There was no question anymore, no wish—only the answer, and the emptiness it brings.

  epilogue

  54

  IN BUCOLIC KLAMATH FALLS, EARLY FALL is bright and dry. The leaves are already turning brown, letting themselves be blown from their branches into sad little piles on unmown lawns.

  My dad is down in the courtyard, searching for the watch he dropped on his way home from the bar last night. He’s been looking for half an hour already. (If you ask me, I think Critter found it and took it straight to Jack’s Pawn.) Dad keeps looking up at me, sitting here on the apartment’s tiny
balcony, like he thinks that any minute I might vanish into thin air.

  I’m not going anywhere. My first community service session isn’t until tomorrow afternoon. See, when I got back home, the first thing I did was walk to the police station and turn myself in.

  Yup. Once a GG, always a GG.

  I think I knew from the moment we stole the Harley that I was going to have to make amends for our journey. It was the right thing to do. And even though Robinson’s eyes are likely rolling out of his head right now, I think he might have been smiling down on me, too, when the judge handed me my sentence. Grand theft auto is a felony and usually lands people in jail, but miraculously I was only charged with a misdemeanor and was banned from getting a driver’s license until I turn twenty-one, and I’m basically going to do community service until my arms fall off.

  It’s completely worth it to me. After all, the people who “lent” us their cars gave Robinson and me an incredible gift, and I’ll gladly pick up trash for the rest of my life if I have to. In fact, I’m thinking about volunteering for the police department, too.

  “Axi,” my dad calls up, “shouldn’t you be heading to school soon?”

  “I’ll be down in a minute,” I reply. Ugh. I’d forgotten about my mandatory physics tutoring session, which starts in an hour. Turns out you can’t pass a class when you ditch the last three weeks of it and stop being able to understand the supposedly important laws of physics.

  Those laws don’t explain why Robinson had to die. They don’t explain how I’ll keep going without him. So I’m pretty sure I don’t care that much about understanding how “the entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases.”

  But then, like a contrarian voice from the heavens, something from class pops right into my mind: a body in motion tends to stay in motion; a body at rest tends to stay at rest. That’s the definition of inertia, a word that would have made Robinson roll his eyes.

  I am in motion. I will stay in motion. Maybe one of those magical forces of the physical universe will kick in and keep me going, no matter how much pain I feel.

  Or not.

  I wrap my arms around myself, inhaling the scent of Robinson that lingers on his flannel shirt, which I’m wearing. And my tears well up and start to spill out all over again. I’m just really, really tired.

  “Hey, Axi, check this out!” my dad calls. I lean over the balcony and he points to a part of the withering rosebush in the yard—one solitary flower still miraculously in bloom. I smile weakly. I was hoping he’d finally found his watch.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  I shrug. I mean, how am I supposed to answer that question? I saw Dr. Suzuki last week, and my cancer is still in remission. My five-year survival rate? Almost 93 percent.

  So technically, yes, I’m okay. Technically.

  But as I sit here letting the sun warm my face, I know that there’s a part of me that’s missing. It’s as if the doctors had sliced something essential out. A vital part that I was sure I needed to keep me breathing. Not just existing. Even now, sometimes I think I hear Robinson’s laughter, and for a moment my heart lifts. But when I turn my head to look, it’s never him. It’s the wind, or the call of a bird, or a hallucination of my own mad dream.

  I think it was love at first sight for both of us; it just took us a little while to figure it out. That was understandable, considering we were being stuck with needles, shot through with radioactive particles, possibly poisoned by the horrific substances the hospital tried to pass off as food, and then, when we got discharged, running away and stealing cars together.

  So we had other things on our minds.

  Of course, sometimes I think maybe we did know our feelings right away, but we couldn’t admit them to ourselves. Like we secretly thought, Okay, cancer is scary, but love is terrifying.

  And it is. But it’s also exhilarating and bewildering and miraculous.

  Right before Robinson and I left on our trip, I’d written a paper on the French essayist Michel de Montaigne. (“Ooooh, faaaahncy,” Robinson had teased.) “The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to oneself,” Montaigne wrote. And while Montaigne was a very smart man, I’m sure, in this particular instance he’s full of shit.

  The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to someone else. The way Robinson and I belonged to each other. We held on as tight as we could, as long as we could. It wasn’t enough.

  And yet it has to be.

  At night when the stars come out, I look up and remember Robinson at the window of the hospital in La Junta, me standing so close to him that it took my breath away. I think about what I didn’t say then, which is this: the stars we see aren’t even real stars. We see the light that they gave off millions of years ago but that is only now reaching our eyes. We don’t see a star as much as a memory.

  “Remember the me before this,” a pale, sick Robinson said to me. “Remember the me with the guitar.”

  And since memory is all I have now—unless you count a glass orb, a key chain, a shirt, and a penny that once was lucky—I tried to do what he asked.

  “Write about us,” Robinson urged. “Tell our story.”

  And I did it; I told our story. You hold it in your hands.

  I just wish I could have done it better. How can you, through my plain and simple words, possibly experience the joy I felt when Robinson jumped into that Los Angeles pool, sledded on the golden sand of the Great Dunes, or kissed me in an ancient temple? How can you understand what Robinson meant to me? His laugh was like a peal of bells. He really did consider Slim Jims to be their own food group. When he played the guitar and sang, whether it was in the cancer ward or in Tompkins Square Park, everyone stopped to listen. He was magic.

  “Axi!” my dad shouts from below. “I found it!” He’s holding up his Timex and grinning like it’s a winning lottery ticket.

  “Good for you!” I call down. As if he’s the kid and I’m the mom.

  I feel like I owe my dad, running off the way I did. He almost drank himself to death, worrying and missing me. I’m trying to make up for the fact that I barely got back in time to save him.

  I only wish I could have saved Robinson, too.

  But I know Robinson didn’t want me to be broken after his death. He wanted me whole, well, and writing. About us.

  “Make sure to throw in a lot of words I wouldn’t understand,” he’d said—using the last bits of his energy to tease me. “And a lot of fancy metaphors and stuff.”

  I just nodded. I’d do anything he wanted.

  Loving Robinson made everything seem brighter and more beautiful. And if life has faded a little since he’s been gone, it’s still a lot more vivid than it used to be. Now the sun dazzles. That vermilion rose flings its perfume into the air. And the breeze soothes me, if I let it.

  Most days I think of him and smile, even if I have to cry my eyes out first. He never stopped believing he was lucky. Maybe not lucky enough to survive, but lucky simply to have lived.

  He was my light, my heart, my beautiful scalawag. And I was—I am—his GG.

  OSCAR JAMES ROBINSON

  JUNE 21, 1996–JULY 6, 2013

  Missing me one place, search another.

  I stop somewhere waiting for you.

  —Walt Whitman

  About the Authors

  JAMES PATTERSON has created more enduring fictional characters than any other novelist writing today. He is the author of the Alex Cross novels, the most popular detective series of the past twenty-five years, including Kiss the Girls and Along Came a Spider. James Patterson also writes the bestselling Women’s Murder Club novels, set in San Francisco, and the top-selling New York detective series of all time, featuring Detective Michael Bennett. He has also had more New York Times bestsellers than any other writer, ever, according to Guinness World Records. Since his first novel won the Edgar Award in 1977, James Patterson’s books have sold more than 280 million copies.

  Jam
es Patterson has also written numerous #1 bestsellers for young readers, including the Maximum Ride, Witch & Wizard, and Middle School series. In total, these books have spent more than 220 weeks on national bestseller lists. In 2010, James Patterson was named Author of the Year at the Children’s Choice Book Awards.

  His lifelong passion for books and reading led James Patterson to create the innovative website ReadKiddoRead.com, giving adults an invaluable tool to find the books that get kids reading for life. He writes full-time and lives in Florida with his family.

  EMILY RAYMOND is the ghostwriter of numerous young adult novels, including a #1 New York Times bestseller. She lives with her family in Portland, Oregon.

  JamesPatterson.com

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  Books by James Patterson

  FEATURING ALEX CROSS

  Cross My Heart • Alex Cross, Run • Merry Christmas, Alex Cross • Kill Alex Cross • Cross Fire • I, Alex Cross • Alex Cross’s Trial (with Richard DiLallo) • Cross Country • Double Cross • Cross (also published as Alex Cross) • Mary, Mary • London Bridges • The Big Bad Wolf • Four Blind Mice • Violets Are Blue • Roses Are Red • Pop Goes the Weasel • Cat & Mouse • Jack & Jill • Kiss the Girls • Along Came a Spider

  THE WOMEN’S MURDER CLUB

  12th of Never (with Maxine Paetro) • 11th Hour (with Maxine Paetro) • 10th Anniversary (with Maxine Paetro) • The 9th Judgment (with Maxine Paetro) • The 8th Confession (with Maxine Paetro) • 7th Heaven (with Maxine Paetro) • The 6th Target (with Maxine Paetro) • The 5th Horseman (with Maxine Paetro) • 4th of July (with Maxine Paetro) • 3rd Degree (with Andrew Gross) • 2nd Chance (with Andrew Gross) • 1st to Die

  FEATURING MICHAEL BENNETT

  Gone (with Michael Ledwidge) • I, Michael Bennett (with Michael Ledwidge) • Tick Tock (with Michael Ledwidge) • Worst Case (with Michael Ledwidge) • Run for Your Life (with Michael Ledwidge) • Step on a Crack (with Michael Ledwidge)