The Stranger Across the Room
By: Matthew Black
Tags: Mystery, Fiction, Fantasy, Young Adult Fiction, Writing

It’s been a year now since Ben died, and I never got an answer to that question. Not that it matters anyway, as no one talks about that incident anymore. James sure as hell has never mentioned it again, not after the principal gave that announcement to the whole school, in October of tenth grade, that a fellow student had died.

I’d spent the night before that announcement at Ben’s house, binge-watching Quantum Leap in his basement until around midnight, when his mother all but forced me to go home. “It’s a school night,” she’d said with a smile. “Don’t you kids need sleep?”

Ben had spent the night laughing and sneaking us beer from the fridge, and nothing was wrong with him, really. Which is why it was so surprising when I got to my first period class the next day to find Ben’s seat empty.

I immediately texted him, You’re not dead, are you?, and I swear I meant it as a joke. I figured, at most, that he’d been hungover and missed the bus. Ben wouldn’t skip a full school day unless his appendix was about to burst. But a few hours later they announced he was dead, and I didn’t react at first, and then I realized that nearly everyone in the class was staring at me, anticipating a reaction, and then James looked at me with genuine concern for the first time in years, and the reality of it all finally hit me.

The reality of it all is still hitting me. It’s not as bad as it was those first few days, but nearly every day I’ll walk past a kid on the way to class and the kid will look vaguely like Ben, and for a moment I’ll think there’s been some mistake, some sort of misunderstanding, and this is Ben walking towards me, completely fine. This feeling lasts about a second, maybe two, and then the kid gets a little closer and I realize it isn’t Ben. In fact, he barely looks like Ben at all.

Ben died of natural causes, by the way. It wasn’t an overdose, it wasn’t suicide, it wasn’t murder, it wasn’t any of the other more likely causes of death for a seemingly healthy fifteen-year-old boy. He had some sort of undiagnosed heart condition, and his parents had found him that morning collapsed on his floor, unable to move or speak, but still conscious. They called an ambulance and he died on the way to the hospital.

I think about that ride to the hospital a lot. I try to imagine how his parents reacted when they found him. What did they say to each other? How did they pass the fifteen minutes it took for the ambulance to reach them? I try to imagine how Ben handled it. Did he understand what was happening? Did he understand he was dying?

I think about Ben when I put on my glasses each day. I think about him whenever someone mentions contact lenses. He’d started wearing them during the summer before ninth grade, and I’d been there with him when he’d made the mistake of itching his eye too much, which caused the lens to roll up and dig itself deep into his eyelid where he couldn’t reach it. He started freaking out, and I started freaking out, and then after a couple minutes he accepted that the lens would be stuck in his eyelid forever. Turns out, all he had to do was blink a bunch of times and the lens would re-expand on its own.

I think about him now as I walk home from school. About how in his obituary, his mother had included “writing stories” as one of his hobbies, and how in the six months we’d been friends he had never once mentioned that he liked to write. It explained a few things, like how he was always writing stuff down in class even when there was nothing to take notes on, but it still stings that he never let me in on this. Why wouldn’t he have let me read them?

Because I’m the type of person who’d laugh at him for having a weird lunch box. There doesn’t need to be a better reason than that.

I’m not taking the bus home today because James takes the same bus, and I can only handle so much of him these days. My house is maybe a mile away, and the weather’s cloudy but warm, so walking home is hardly a big deal. I stop by a deli on the way. This place is usually packed at this time, as high school seniors always drive here after school, but today it’s nearly empty. I eat my second lunch of the day at one of the wooden tables outside.

A few minutes pass, and someone else sits at the table beside me. He exists as a blur in my peripheral vision for a few minutes, but when I do turn towards him, I freeze. I watch the kid take a sip of his Arizona Iced Tea, the type Ben would get every single time we’d come here together, and for a moment I can’t talk. My legs have gone numb, my throat’s gone dry, and it takes another few seconds before I can get his name out.

“Ben?”

The kid turns to me, and I wait for that inevitable moment where it isn’t him and I feel like an idiot, but that moment never comes. Ben smiles and waves to me, as if the last year hadn’t happened. As if we’d just spoken earlier today.

“Hey Dan,” he says.

I get up and walk towards him. I’m crying now, but Ben doesn’t make fun of me for it. He stands up and I hug him as hard as I’ve hugged anyone. I hadn’t let myself cry at all lately and it all comes tumbling out now. For once it feels good though. It feels like I’ll never need to cry again.

Ben pats me on the back and after a while says, “I’m sorry it’s been so long,” and around this point I feel stupid and let go. I have to get a good look at him again before I sit down across the table, just to make sure it’s still Ben.

“What happened?” I ask. “They told me you died. You had some sort of heart attack…”

“No, that was just a misunderstanding,” he says, with a small laugh. “There was a mix-up at the hospital. I was in a coma for a few weeks but I never actually died.”

I should ask more, I know, but I don’t need an hour-long explanation as to where he’s been and what he’s been doing in the time he’s been gone. All I want to do is keep my eyes on him. If I turn my back on him for even a second, he might disappear.

“I gotta tell Ashley about this,” I say, taking out my phone. Ashley had been Ben’s girlfriend for about two months, and then she broke up with him two weeks before his death. Afterwards Ashley and I would hang out a lot, torturing ourselves with stories of how we’ve let Ben down in one way or another. I would tell her about those first few times I tried to bring Ben along to parties, where I would barely say anything in his defense when the other kids — mainly James — would make fun of him. She told me about how she’d started a rumor about him in seventh grade that she’d caught him masturbating on the bus, and how the story had spread around like wildfire.

“I don’t even know why I said that,” Ashley had said to me, the night after the funeral. “And I’m amazed that Ben wanted anything to do with me afterward.”

“I mean, you apologized, right?” I’d said. “It was back in seventh grade. We were all assholes in seventh grade.”

“Ben wasn’t.”

I would tell Ashley that she had nothing to worry about. Ben had talked about Ashley constantly once they’d started getting along, with never a bad thing to say. I would tell Ashley about how before their first real date Ben had spent at least two hours texting me pictures of himself in his bathroom mirror, trying on different shirts, asking for my feedback. His excitement had been contagious; I’d spent that whole evening on my living room couch with TV playing in the background, waiting for the next picture.

That Ben had so easily forgiven her for the rumor never did much to absolve Ashley’s guilt, just like nothing she said to me ever absolved mine. It had taken me weeks after I first talked to Ben to realize he was worth hanging out with, and it took even longer to realize that he was my only real friend. Once, back in eighth grade, I showed James a song I liked, and after listening for ten seconds he wrinkled his nose and said, “Are you serious, Dan?” and I never listened to that song again. I would try to listen to it with headphones, but I would feel stupid listening to it. I couldn’t enjoy it.

Ben, though, would never made me feel stupid for liking things. I hadn’t realized how important that was.

But Ben is back now, and he’s right in front of me. He looks normal, healthy, exactly as I remember him. He smiles self-consciously as I take his picture.

“I know things ended kind of weird between you two,” I say as I send Ashley the photo, “But trust me, she misses you a lot.”

Below the photo I write, Ben’s alive!, and send it to her.

While I do this, Ben finishes his drink and tosses it into a nearby trash can. “You know, we never did finish Quantum Leap,” he says.

I grin. “I haven’t watched another episode since. Not the same watching it alone.”

Ben nods towards the pick-up truck across the parking lot. “See that?” he says. “That’s mine.”

“No way that’s yours.”

“Oh, it is,” Ben says with an excited smile. “Turned sixteen six weeks ago, my parents got me this.”

“That’s amazing,” I say, although this doesn’t really seem like the type of vehicle Ben’s parents would buy for him. His dad had driven a Prius, his mom a minivan. Ben himself would always point to the picture on his wall of a silver Camaro and say, “See that car? That’s gonna be my car. Just wait a little.”

I get into Ben’s truck with him, and he drives out of the parking lot. My phone vibrates, and it’s from Ashley. That’s not funny, was all it said.

I frowned, then chuckled. “She doesn’t believe me,” I say to Ben. She probably thinks I’m sending an old picture. No seriously, I text her. That’s him. I met him today at the deli. He’s really back.

I put the phone in my pocket and turn to Ben. He’s driving the car, focusing everything on the road ahead.

“Is driving hard?” I ask him. “I’m taking Driver’s Ed this summer.”

“It’s okay,” Ben says. “It stresses me out a little. Well, everything stresses me out, but driving especially. Left turns specifically, they’re the worst.”

I can’t stop smiling as he talks, this is so surreal. I’ve imagined this scenario dozens of times, about what I’d say to him if I ever got to see him again.

Feeling a little stupid I say, “I missed you, man. I really did.”

Ben eyes leave the road for a moment, as he nods at me. “I missed you too.”

“I’m sorry I treated you like shit sometimes, I shouldn’t have let James be such a dick to you.”

“Seriously, Dan. Don’t worry about it.” He says this kindly, like he really means it. Of course he means it. Ben has never been the type to hold grudges, and he always thought I was better than I am. Always so quick to forgive. Always so quick to assume the best of me.

Eventually Ben pulls into the driveway of an unfamiliar white house. “We moved,” he says simply, and I accept it.

“Your parents home?”

Ben looks around the empty driveway. “Doesn’t seem like it.”

My phone buzzes, from Ashley again. Are you serious?, she says, and I respond, Yep. 100%. Then I walk behind Ben into his new home.

“Alright, so, my mom still demands everyone take their shoes off before they walk in,” Ben says, and I smile with nostalgia as we take off our shoes and put them to the side. Ben leads me to the basement, which in his old house had always been his hangout spot, giving me a quick tour of the other rooms as he did so. “…Yeah, so that’s the living room, that door over there’s the bathroom, the door to the garage is down that way…” He leads me to the basement, which has all the same posters on the walls as the old one. It even smells like his old basement, a bizarre mix of root beer and fresh rain.

My phone starts ringing. “It’s Ashley,” I say, and Ben nods.

“Alright,” he says, “You want something to drink? There’s a lot of soda upstairs.”

“Yeah, a Coke’s fine,” I say, and as he walks upstairs I answer the phone. “Hey, Ash.”

“Dan.” Accentuating every word, she says, “If this is supposed to be a joke, it is the least funny joke in the fucking world.”

“It’s not,” I say. “I’m serious, it’s really him.”

She sounds like she’s about to cry. She takes a deep breath before saying, in an almost soothing voice, “Ben’s dead, Dan. We were both there at the funeral. We saw his body at the wake.”

I let out a shaky, uncomfortable laugh. “No, that was just a misunderstanding. You should come over, see for yourself. Ben’s fine now, trust me.”

“Dan, that person in the picture you sent me? It’s not Ben. It doesn’t look anything like Ben.”

I pull up the photo I sent her and examine it carefully. Is Ashley playing a joke on me? Because that’s not funny either. She’s talking to me like she’s trying to talk me down from a ledge.

“Of course it’s him.” My voice is trembling. “It looks like him, sounds like him. Who else could it be?”

“Where are you right now?” Ashley says. “Please tell me you didn’t go with him anywhere, the guy looks like he’s sixty.”

“I don’t know what you want me to tell you,” I say. “It’s him, just fucking accept it.”

I hang up the phone. She immediately calls me back. I turn my phone off. Ben walks down the staircase with the drinks in his hand. He’s already poured both sodas into glasses.

“Everything alright?” he asks.

“Everything’s fine,” I say, and take my drink.