Frozen on Exam Day Chapter 09
Nora lost her find after that day. Her SAT scores came in and they were near perfect, high enough to get into any school she
wanted.
Despite this, there was no smile on her face.
Every day, she went to our apartment and stood in front of the sealed freezer door, knocking over and over.
“Wes, open the door. I know you’re in there. Stop messing around and come out, okay? Didn’t we promise we’d go to the same school? I brought study materials. I’ll help you review.”
Her mother came to her in tears and told her I was gone. Nora acted as though she had not heard a word. She showed up again the next day, and this time she stood at the door and pulled out her phone.
“Wes, I’m calling your parents right now. I’ll get them to let you out. Don’t worry. I’m calling. I’m calling right now.”
She held the phone to her ear and waited for a long time. Nobody picked up. She stood in the doorway clutching the phone and cried for the entire afternoon.
Eventually her parents came to take her home. She never went to college. She took a year off, and people said she spent every day locked in her room, sobbing while she scrolled through our old text conversations.
Her parents moved away with her sometime after that. After a while, nobody mentioned her name anymore.
Darren stayed by my side through all of it. He would not let anyone near my casket. He just held my stiff hand and talked to me, talking more than I had ever heard from him.
“Wes, I keep thinking about why I couldn’t have just been better. If I’d been stronger, would that psychic’s words have even mattered? Would Mom and Dad have been so afraid?
“If I’d scored higher, if I’d done more, would you still be alive?”
His knuckles went white around the edge of the casket. “I’m sorry, Wes. Your big brother didn’t protect you.”
I watched him from the void, his face twisted with pain, and I wanted to reach out and put my hand on his shoulder. My fingers passed right through him. I floated beside him and shook my head in silence.
That was not how it was. I had seen him up past midnight memorizing textbook passages, so tired his eyes would not stay open, still mouthing the words over and over. I had seen him wake up before dawn to study vocabulary.
On those freezing winter mornings, he would take his books out to the balcony so he would not wake me up, and when he came back his hands were raw and red from the cold.
I had seen him drag himself to school with a 102-degree fever because he refused to miss a single day. He told me once that he could not afford to fall behind, because the better he did, the easier things would be for me.
I knew he never let himself stop. He understood that as long as he was the one shining, Mom and Dad would teel sate, and I would suffer a little less. He had been carrying my weight on his back this whole time.
He had done more than enough.
Darren could not hear me. He stayed by my side in a daze until after the funeral, and then he took my urn and moved into a monastery in the mountains. He placed the urn in the chapel and spent his days copying scripture by hand.
The priest told him to copy the Psalms. He started writing, but what came out on the page was not scripture.
It was my name, Wesley, over and over, filling every line, large and small, some pressed deep into the paper and some barely there. He wrote it hundreds of times.
In the end, he collapsed to his knees at the altar, hands gripping the edge of the pew, and his voice was so raw it was almost
impossible to hear.
“I want to see Wes. Just once just need to see him one more time.
“I want to ask him if he’s still cold.”
