The Last Time We Met

19

I opened my eyes in my dark bedroom, frustrated. My visions of Theodore seemed stuck on that one night. Happy reunion, dancing, looking up at the stars. He mentioned the Spanish flu, which was the most relevant to what I needed to know, and then moved on with the most foreboding thought of all time.

The worst part was that I'd had the same thought about Cedric: we would be together forever.

We'd been Facetiming every day, and almost every night as I lay in bed I thought about how badly I wanted to hold him. The tears came easily in the dark. I tried not to cry when his face appeared on my screen. I avoided talking about COVID or his mother's job. Sometimes he talked about it, and the last time I lied and said I had to go to the bathroom so I could have a panic attack without him worrying.

Getting up, I dropped the postcard back into the cigar box and paced a bit. Maybe the postcard was only good for that particular span of memories. I dug through the box, pulling out Theodore's photographs and looking at each one. Most of them were taken after the San Francisco earthquake, and I didn't especially care to go further back. Maybe the photograph of who I thought was Theodore, sitting on a bed.

I glanced at the clock before placing it down beside the cigar box and sighing.

Since school had closed two weeks ago, I had yet to leave my house. The internet was full of helpful tips on what to do with lots of free time. Eli had been spending his time making TikTok videos and sending me so many links that I finally had to download the app to appease him. Scrolling through sucked up hours of my life.

Meanwhile, Cedric's dad was Marie Kondo'ing their house and Cedric spent a lot of time pretending he was sorting through his cassettes to see which ones he was going to get rid of, but really he was just reorganizing them. First alphabetically by band name, then by color, then by release year. He posted the pictures on Instagram, though I'd already seen them from all our video calls.

As if he knew I'd been thinking of him, my phone buzzed on the desk. I flicked it open and Cedric's face appeared.

"I'm making you a mix tape," he said, without preamble.

"Really?" I grinned for a brief moment, before I realized, "I don't think I have a cassette player."

"Damnit, James."

All my music was records. I sat down on my bed and flopped back. "This sucks."

"You know what? I'll send you a cassette player. I have, like, five of them. And Dad's gonna make me throw them out. Or four of them. Maybe I can convince him to let me keep one of the Walkmans and the radio. I don't know."

"Oh, you're gonna send it to me? Like in the mail?" I rolled onto my stomach.

"Yeah."

"Are you allowed to go to the post office? You know, with the shelter-in-place order?"

"Dude, didn't you hear? The governor extended that until May first. So, yeah, they can't keep me from going to the post office. I mean, they won't know what's in the package. It could be super essential."

Cedric said something else, but my mind was stuck on May first. That was a whole month from now. A month of staring at my own walls? I didn't think I could do it.

"We're gonna have to go to the grocery store," I mused.

"I can't believe you haven't gone out yet. FYI, the grocery store is crazy. They're only letting a certain number of people in at a time, and the aisles are all one-way. No toilet paper... yesterday there wasn't any yeast. Apparently everybody's baking bread."