Double Exposure

The night of our senior prom, Kyle was standing next to me on the stairs.  I didn’t know that, of course, until we had the pictures developed.  My dad said it was a “double exposure”.  He initially didn’t want to show me, but he thought it would be for the best.  Even if it hurt.  The photo wasn’t particularly special if you didn't know any better.  A little grainy, some bright colored dots floating in the air from the dust.  I promise I’m not crazy.  I know film does weird, but totally explainable, stuff sometimes.

The Kyle in the picture was not a double exposure. 

It was brand new film I watched my mom open and put into the camera, though she came to deny that.  There I was in the photo, standing on the stairs, looking down at my mom, who had some very specific artistic direction she wanted to follow.  My suit was too big on my narrow shoulders and I had too much gel in my hair.  I was smiling the way I did for mom-enforced shots.  The kind she had taken of me and Kyle everytime she took us somewhere.  

Behind me, stooping down to place his head on my padded shoulder, was Kyle’s face.  He was kissing me on the cheek, his lips somewhere between a pucker and a grin.  The way he kissed me when no one was looking.  When we knew no one else was in the gym, or after our parents had gone to sleep.  When I was mad or sad, he would whisper against my neck, something as simple as “Hey,”, and it would send chills down over my entire body.  I pretended to hate it, but he knew I didn’t.  “Hey. Hey, what’s the matter with the baby?” he’d ask until I laughed so hard I forgot. 

The picture did upset me.  But in a way I found hard to describe, that I’m still going to struggle with telling you.  I felt so guilty when I realized the frantic rush of prom and finals had distracted me from the Kyle-shaped void in my life.  The picture was a neon sign in the shape of his silhouette.  Like the chalk on the road that had taken weeks to wash away.

In the photo, Kyle looked just like the last time I saw him.  It was the end of October then and his cheeks were red from the cold.  We had been walking through my neighborhood, admiring the jack-o-lanterns and fake bones scattered across yards that still clung to green life, but were nearly all withered and brown.  A big hole opened up in my stomach, knowing he never made it home that night.

I was mad, too.  The kind of mad that sends fireworks down your nerves.  The anger that would make you try to squeeze blood from a stone and still do it, despite knowing the outcome.  There were so many times in those months since it happened that I tried to picture his face.  And here it was, here he was, hamming it up in my prom picture.  If he were alive, I wouldn’t know whether to choke him or kiss him.

The library had a few books on what my mom would call witchcraft in a blanket term pulled from the Satanic Panic handbook.  There were histories about the Fox Sisters and seances held around wealthy dining tables.  It took me days to find out that none of it was practical, though.  I skipped out on plans with the other seniors.  The computer lab at school let me look up some webpages.  Pixelated images of circles drawn on the floor surrounded by candles.  I ate dinner as quickly as possible to avoid talking to my folks. 

When graduation came, I posed for every photo my mom wanted me to, urged my mom to use the entire roll.  Instead of going to a party, I made her go and get them developed immediately.  I was drawn and pale in my black robes and square hat.  I could see the hope in my eyes and felt it fizzle out when Kyle was nowhere to be found in the pictures. 

I spent the summer trying to make contact.  I got a ouija board and a Polaroid camera with my graduation money.  It all amounted to nothing, though.  I just sat there feeling stupid, my hand on the magnifying glass thing.  He didn’t have anything to say. 

Or maybe I was the problem.  Kyle didn’t appear in any of the black and white tongues that shot out of the camera.  Every once in a while, my door would creak open or a light would dim, and I just knew it was him.  His footsteps would come down the hall and stop, my heart thumping and breaking simultaneously.  But that was the extent of it.

So in the end, I was left with a stupid board game that I ripped in half and a pile of Polaroids of my room, inside my closet, around the house.  All empty.  Even on the stairs, trying to recreate the photo of us from prom night.  No sign of him.  I cried myself to sleep most nights, wondering if he was right there with me and I just couldn’t feel him.  I couldn’t work out what I was doing wrong.  There were times I missed him so bad I couldn’t breathe.  My mom would have to hold me close and rock me like a little kid.

My parents worked out pretty quickly that I hadn’t applied to any colleges.  They were furious when they confronted me about it.  But I had no intention of leaving the house where Kyle’s spirit resided.  And no intention of telling them that was the case.  There was no way I could make them understand.

I told them I was depressed.  They sent me to a shrink.  A guy with a bad comb-over and an office that smelled like mothballs.  Even without telling him about my endeavors to reach Kyle (I really didn’t want to be institutionalized), he confirmed what I had been telling them all along.  Grief hung around my neck and weighed me down, he said.  He said I needed to get more sunshine, more exercise.  He gave me pills that put a sealed dome over my brain.  I still felt so much, but those emotions never made it past the glass.  Mom stood at the sink every morning and made sure I took them.  Checked under my tongue and told me it was good for me.  At least I didn’t cry my eyes out anymore.  The nudged cabinets and flickering lights went away, too.

The prom picture went in a drawer with the others of me and Kyle.  The therapist suggested this as an “out of sight, out of mind” tactic.  He instructed me to look at it one last time and appreciate that a quirk of photography had given us one last snapshot together. The therapist, in his monotone, said to say, "I know this isn't real," out loud.  I'd bite my tongue off before I'd say that. But for my parents' sake, I hid us away in the drawer and didn't look while they were home.

All of the pictures were crystal clear in my head, so it didn’t do any good for me.  They went as far back as kindergarten.  Even the most recent felt like I was a little kid.  The me that I saw in the mirror now wasn’t that happy boy anymore, hugging his friend tight, so tight he'd never be able to go anywhere.  My life would forever be separated into with him and without him.  I was a skeleton, tired of being upright.  I felt like the double exposure, both things at once, the eaten apple core and the ripe fruit it was just moments before. 

My dad made me get a job.  He said he had lost friends, too.  In much worse ways in the war.  But you didn’t see him moping around.  So instead of laying in bed, I stood in a drive-thru for 8 hours at a time, letting my mind wander.  In this half-asleep haze, just setting my body through the motions of being a living boy, I stumbled through life until I looked up and realized it was fall.  My coworkers tried to make friends with me, but I kept them all at arm’s length.  They invited me to their party, said I didn’t have to dress up if I didn’t want to.  I said my parents needed me back home.  The truth was this: I was the living dead. How could anyone be friends with a mindless monster?

I thought stupid things sometimes. 

Like would it be better to check out?  Become the actually dead dead?  There were a couple different ways I could do it.  Maybe Kyle would be waiting for me, so ecstatic I had figured it all out.  We could go on and haunt the world until the end of time. 

Wouldn’t that be nice? 

Autumn and Halloween just made me think about him more.  His one year anniversary was coming up.  How many costumes had we cooked up?  How many wrappers were flayed and picked clean over the 12 Halloweens we had had together?  Wasn’t it Megan’s Halloween party in 10th grade when we finally got drunk enough to admit how we felt?  Didn’t we wander out into the dark, impervious to the chill, and shove each other into piles of leaves?  Weren’t there still Halloween decorations everywhere when we drove out to the cemetery after his service?  Didn’t red and orange leaves fall down into the hole that they lowered him into?  It was so hard to remember what was real anymore.

When I got home from work, reeking of old oil and a few days without a shower, my parents were gone.  They had left a bowl full of candy on the porch that was mostly picked through.  I kicked it out into the yard, so angry at being alive.  I went in the house and slammed the door.  I went upstairs and pulled the pictures out of their drawer, feeling like I was disturbing a holy relic.  Hot tears fell onto the prom picture and I hurriedly swiped them away.  With no one in the house, I yelled out loud.  I begged him to give me some kind of sign.

I sat in the silence so long it hurt my ears.  I looked out my window and saw parents steering their kids away from our porch.

I felt bad and went back out to pick up the candy that I had scattered out into the yard.  A shadow came down the driveway.  “Sorry, just one second,” I said.  “I dropped the bowl.”  I waited for a kid or their parent to say something, but there was no reply.  I looked up and didn’t see anyone.

I sat down on the porch and watched the sky.  The moon was caught in the branches of a tree that had already shed its leaves.  I knew it was something Kyle would have appreciated.  I missed him.  I missed him every day, but in that moment, truly alone and without anyone to monitor my moods, I felt his absence like one might miss a vital organ.  “I’m sorry,” I said to the night.  To him, if he was listening.  I knew what I wanted to do and felt so disgusted by it.  I buried my face in my hands and tried to push the tears back into my eyes.  I took a shuddering breath and let it out as slowly as I could.  

I had to give up.  On Kyle and ever seeing him again.  One day I'd wake up and it wouldn't hurt so bad.  One day I'd realize I hadn't thought of him in a while.  And I would sit and reminisce.  

The hair on the back of my neck bristled and chills ran down my back.

“Hey,” a familiar voice whispered from behind me. “What’s the matter with the baby?”