Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan Page A

weight? And yet, there’s the need to swim.”
    “Life goes on,” I offered.
    “Yeah, but you see, Life goes on is a redundancy. Life is defined by its going on.”
    She walked over to a bench, and I sat down next to her. The tourists weren’t going down here so much, so it was almost like we had the whole area to ourselves. The Staten Island Ferry shuttled back and forth as we watched, so empty that it was almost like it was traveling just so we could see it and mark the time by its passage.
    “Have you talked to people about this?” Claire asked me. “I mean, about what happened? I’ve tried, but it never works. I don’t know what I want from it, but I’m never satisfied. I can’ttalk to my mom about it. And even my friends are strange to talk to, because they’re all caught up in their own versions, and every time I bring it up, they make it about them. I even tried talking to this girl in my class, Marisol, who was with me that day, but it was like that was all we had in common, and she didn’t really want to talk about it.”
    I almost forgot she’d asked me a question. Then she paused, and I said, “Oh. Me? I haven’t really talked to anyone. I mean, most of my friends were already back at school. And even the ones who were here—I just wasn’t in the mood. I mean, what’s the point?”
    This wasn’t really a question meant to be answered, but Claire looked out to the water and gave it a shot.
    “I think the point is to realize you’re not alone.”
    If you were quiet, you could hear the waves. In Manhattan, you forget you’re surrounded by water, because you so rarely see it or hear it or feel its pull. But right at the edge, the air gains the current and the undertow. The water is black, but it carries any light that crosses it.
    I don’t know if it was because I was leaving the next day. I don’t know if it was because I knew her without really knowing her. But for whatever reason, I followed her then. If you’d asked me if I wanted to talk, I would have said no, I didn’t want to talk. But she didn’t ask. And suddenly I was talking.
    “It doesn’t feel like ‘alone,’ though,” I said. Not looking at her, looking at the ferry as it receded from Manhattan. “Solitary, maybe. I don’t know. I just didn’t want to deal with people.Even when I was around people, I didn’t want to deal with them.”
    “And when did it stop?” Claire asked.
    I looked at her. “What do you mean?”
    “I mean, when did you start dealing again?”
    “Right now? This minute? I don’t know.”
    It almost sounded like a line, as bad as Do you come here often? But Claire didn’t seem cynical about it, or even find it strange. She just kept talking.
    “Do you know what I want to know?” she said. “I want to know why this is such a part of me. I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me. I keep looking for the lesson.”
    “The lesson?” I asked.
    “I don’t mean that God made this happen to teach us something. Or to teach me something. How monstrously selfish would that be? I just mean that if we go through this thing and it changes us so much, you have to hope that it changes us for the better, right? If goodness can’t come from bad things, it makes bad things unbearable.”
    I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t believe in good coming from bad. If it happened, that was great. But I couldn’t believe in it.
    “And the worst thing,” she continued, “is that there are moments when I look around at everybody, at the way we’ve been acting since that day, and I wonder if maybe we needed to be hurt. I don’t mean that I wanted it to happen, or that it shouldhave happened. But I think we were walking around like we were invincible. And maybe that’s a bad way to live your life. Because you’re not invincible. Nobody is. And maybe now that we’ve learned that, we’ll be better.”
    “Or we’ll bomb the shit out of Afghanistan,” I