Forever Sixteen (short story)

The last time all five of us were in a room together was a random day in July.

It had been a few weeks since the last time before that—Princess was on vacation, Bryan was taking double shifts and barely had time after his engineering classes, Vince was off somewhere being Vince, and I was going through a breakup. So I was already mentally prepared for it to be a sad summer, at least for me. But the next few weeks brought with them a melancholy that none of us were equipped to handle and couldn’t have seen coming.

That day, though, was exactly fourteen days before Zaire’s birthday. And since everyone had been so busy lately, we decided to all meet at his house to plan how we were going to celebrate. We were thinking of hosting a barbecue in his backyard and wanted to parse out the details in person. Plus, Princess wanted to fill me in on all the details of her time in Turks & Caicos, and the boys just wanted to smoke together.

So we gathered.

I was the last to arrive. I could already hear the loud voices and Princess’ shrill laughter when I approached the back door of Zaire’s house. It was the same entrance I used back when we were kids and his late grandfather would sit in the kitchen near the front door, snoring away in his chair. Zaire, Vince and I would watch TV on the living room sofa for as long as we could until something made Vince snicker loud enough to stir grandpa from his sleep. He always woke up in a rage, so we’d dash downstairs to the basement as soon as his eyes opened and spend the rest of the day down there with no TV. That might be why we eventually picked up smoking—I mean, it was probably inevitable, but there really was nothing else for us to do.

So I was not surprised by the loud smell that hit my nose once Zaire opened the door for me.

I flashed a big grin that dropped when he didn’t return it. He stood in the door with his eyes to the ceiling and his mouth closed, waiting for something. “Well?”

I looked around. “Well?”

“So you gonna come to my house and not tell me happy birthday?”

“Boy if you don’t—” I pushed past him and walked into the house. “Your birthday is in a whole two weeks.”

“And this is my whole house.”

It was true; the silver lining of his grandpa’s death was that he now had the house all to himself. I wasn’t sure if his name was actually on any documents, but it wasn’t like anyone else was coming to claim it. He had a complicated relationship with his parents, which was how he ended up living with his grandpa in the first place, so they weren’t around and weren’t ever going to be.

Zaire locked the back door behind us and continued, “I just want a little respect.”

“And did you ask for this respect from any of the other people down there?”

“No, but I’ve known you the longest so my standards for you are higher.”

I rolled my eyes.

We headed down the stairs to what he often referred to as the “lion’s den,” yet another play off of his zodiac sign. Princess was on the couch playing her Nintendo Switch and Bryan and Vince were sitting at the table over the usual assortment of materials.

“Ahhh! My bitch is here!” Princess shrieked when she saw me and did a little dance on her way over to me. I laughed and hugged her, choking from the tight squeeze of her arm around my neck.

“I missed you too, babe. Now let go.”

She released me and I exhaled. She took my face into her hands and stared into my eyes, searching for an answer before she asked the question. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. “I’m fine.”

“Did you bring weed?” Vince, of course, was the one asking.

I gave him a look and Princess glared at him. But I pulled the pack out of my jeans pocket and placed it in Zaire’s hand.

“Happy birthday,” I gave a sarcastic smile and he beamed, pulling me into a hug that I dramatically pushed away.

“Good,” Vince said to me. “‘Cause if you gonna smoke all our weed ‘cause you’re sad, you better bring your own.”

“Vince, would you shut the fuck up? Like, seriously.” Princess said these words to him maybe every single time we were together. He flashed her the middle finger, which was his usual response.

I walked over to hug Bryan before sitting between him and Vince at the table. “I am not sad.”

The four of them exchanged glances back and forth with each other, and then looked back down at what they were doing. I scoffed.

“No, for real y’all. I’m serious. Fuck him.”

Princess started clapping. “Period!”

“Yeah, ight,” Zaire said. “Let’s see how that goes when he comes back in two months saying he wants to talk.”

Princess giggled at this and I gave her a look of disappointment.

“On a serious note though, Narai,” Bryan said to me, licking the spliff he was almost finished rolling, “it’s okay to feel things. And if the breakup with Ade is affecting you, especially so soon after it happened, it’s okay to admit that. It’s normal to feel hurt and with time, that’ll pass.”

This time, the four of us looked back and forth from each other to him. Vince sucked his teeth. “This nigga a therapist now?”

We all laughed and Bryan shook his head. It was my first real, big, genuine laugh in what felt like days. I was over Ade—I’d been outgrowing the relationship for some time anyway and, like Princess had said, these days he was objectively less attractive than he used to be—but Bryan was right. I was still feeling things, which was to be expected after discovering I was cheated on by the person I’d been dating since high school.

But that’s why I needed today to be about everything but that.

“I’m not pressed over him. It’s summer, anyway, so the last thing I’m thinking about is a man.” I remembered Zaire next to me and squeezed his shoulder. “Except the one with the birthday coming up, of course. I would much rather be talking about that than Ade.”

Zaire clapped his hands once. “Me fucking too. I want my shit to be a movie this year.”

“I wanted that too so I started planning my birthday trip four months ago,” Princess said. “With two weeks to plan, your shit is about to be a commercial.”

Bryan snickered.

“Now wait a second, you can get a lot planned out in two weeks. And he’s not a girl, like us,” I said to Princess. “Men don’t have as much prep to do. They will throw on some designer jeans and show up anywhere there’s bitches and bottles.”

She nodded in agreement.

“Hold on real quick—Princess,” Vince turned toward the couch. She rolled her eyes, preparing for nonsense. “You said that lil’ Turks trip was a movie? ‘Cause I saw the trailer on your Instagram and it was giving bootleg.”

Bryan, Zaire and Vince burst into laughter, cut off by Princess chucking a pillow from the couch at Vince’s head. “Sassy and a fan. Tragic.”

“You know what was really a movie?” Zaire asked. “Remember Isaiah’s sweet sixteen?”

A nostalgic round of ooohs passed through the room. It was probably six or seven years ago, but I could still remember (and almost taste) the bitterness of the white rum we’d smuggled into school that day in Poland Spring bottles to pregame. By the end of that night, Princess’ mom drove us home unconscious in the backseat of her car. It was the most legendary story of my first time getting drunk I could ask for, one of those you-just-had-to-be-there moments.

“Damn, I miss when life was like that,” Princess said. I wanted to say me too, but I missed it for more reasons than I had the emotional capacity to reminisce over today.

“Like what? A sweet sixteen?” Vince asked.

“Hell yeah!” Princess said. “We were so happy for no reason. Not a bill to pay in sight.”

“I feel like a sweet sixteen is the perfect liminal space,” Bryan said. “Before that you’re too young to really be lit, and after that is when you’re supposed to start thinking about life after high school and who you want to be and all. But at sixteen, you don’t have to be anything. Like, if heaven was a place, I feel like it would be a sweet sixteen.”

Vince picked up a lighter from the table and brought it to the spliff hanging from his lips. “Bryan.”

“Hmm?”

“After I light this, I don’t wanna hear another big word.”

Bryan rolled his eyes again at our laughter. Vince lit it and then it started making its rounds. Princess hit it, passed it to me, and then sat with a thoughtful expression on her face for a while.

“What y’all think heaven would be like if it was real?” She asked the room.

“You don’t think heaven is real?”

“No, I mean like…well I mean, I ain’t never died before. So I actually don’t know,” she said. “But I meant real as in physical. Like a place you could go to and come back from.”

We were silent for a while after this, probably too high to ponder the question. It felt too big even for my mind in that moment, but it invited thoughts that were different from the ones about Ade I’d been trying to repress.

“A happy place, probably,” I answered her. Everyone looked at me, listening. “A place where you could never feel sad.”

“Damn, that sounds too good to be true,” Bryan said.

“Everything about heaven sounds too good to be true,” Zaire replied. Bryan nodded at this realization.

“I feel like heaven got the most exotic weed.” Vince took a long pull while saying this, letting the smoke float up to the ceiling. The boys agreed with them.

“Heaven probably got exotic bundles,” Princess giggled.

“I feel like it’s probably decorated so nicely,” I said. “Big plants everywhere, lots of windows, colorful art.”

“An endless supply of snacks for when you get the munchies.”

“A place where money doesn’t exist, so you never need any.”

“A place where you always feel beautiful, no matter what.”

“A place with no opps ‘cause they can’t get in.” This from Vince, of course.

“And it probably has all kinds of art supplies, so you could try any hobby you wanted to learn and never get bored.”

“Yeah, I feel like heaven is definitely a place where boredom doesn’t exist.”

“Right, ‘cause there’s so much to do.”

“Or because it’s so peaceful that you don’t always feel the need to be doing anything.”

Bryan had been quiet, listening to us popcorn these ideas back and forth. Then he broke into laughter. “So y’all really think that, like, if you put all that shit in a room together it would be heaven?”

“We could do that.” Zaire said this with a plain expression. Bryan stared at him and then laughed some more.

“What, like, put heaven inside a room?” Princess asked.

Zaire nodded. “Yeah. If we wanted to, we could actually do that.”

“Where?”

“In the shed, out back,” he said. “I’ve already been fixing it up anyway. Once I’m done cleaning everything out, I won’t really be using it for anything other than storage.”

Bryan shook his head. “I don’t know. Niggas was just talking.”

“Okay, yes, but why not actually do it though, Bryan?” Princess sat up on the couch now with her arms clasped in front of her. “It could be fun.”

“Yeah, but it’s not real. It would be for no reason.”

“Well, like we were just saying,” I turned to Bryan, “back in the sweet sixteen days we were happy for no reason. Why do we need a reason now?”

Everyone in the room nodded, collectively warming up to the thought of what we were talking about becoming more than an idea. Vince shrugged his shoulders.

“You got a point. I’m down.”

“Bet. I should be done cleaning out the shed this weekend, so after that we can get started,” Zaire said.

“I can come over and help you if you want,” I said. He nodded at me with a smile.

“We can all help you,” Princess said, and then cut herself off with a gasp. “Wait—we could do that for your birthday!”

“Put a bunch of shit in a room?” Vince raised a brow.

“No, silly. We could prepare the room with everything we want to be in it and then use it for something on his birthday. It could be the celebration for just the five of us before the lit shit.”

“That’s actually a good idea, Princess,” I said. “We could get everything ready over the next two weeks and then use the celebration to kind of christen the space. Maybe do a cake-cutting or something. Or whatever Zaire wants.”

Zaire shrugged. “I’ll handle getting the shed ready and then y’all can handle the rest.”

Princess grinned with excitement. “Leave it up to me and Narai. We’ll bring everyone’s dreams together and put them in our little heaven room and decorate it all nice. It’ll be a vibe. We’ll make it so beautiful.”

And we did make it beautiful. But standing in the shed two months after that conversation, after both the world we lived in and the world we imagined had been turned upside down, I couldn’t feel anything but repulsion toward everything around me.

————————————————————

We never got to light candles here. In fact, the room had never seen fire—we planned to smoke here together as part of the christening that never happened. Everything we were planning to put or do inside the room fell apart, taking with it any semblance of those things that existed outside the room, too. It was supposed to be perfect, utopic. It was supposed to be heaven.

But instead, we had created our own personal hell.

There was no joy left, no creativity, no inspiration, no beauty to be found. All the feelings that were to be held in this space were now gone from all of our lives. The things were left, though, mostly because they were already brought in before tragedy struck. And after, no one had the strength to come back and remove them. No one had the strength to return to the scene of the crime and face what we’d done.

I came here on his birthday. Ten days before his death he was already asking me to wish him a happy birthday, so despite the burning hot tears that wouldn’t stop falling from my eyes and melting down layers of my skin, I came. Because I owed him that respect. Because—even though the concept of a world beyond, whether above or below, was something I’d entirely and permanently given up on believing in or even caring about—if there was some part of him existing somewhere in some way, it would want to be celebrated that day. So I came.

It wasn’t much of a celebration. I brought the materials to construct his altar, including candles I couldn’t bring myself to light, and cried alone for so long that when I stopped it was no longer his birthday anymore.

Then I laid there on the floor of the shed, angry at time for moving on from observing him. For making his life so short. For refusing to move backwards.

Today, everything was the same as I’d left it. The ten white prayer candles that would remain unlit until I found something to pray to. The scattered items Princess and I had managed to get into the room before it was too late—crayons, paint, canvases and other art supplies; her bundles, never to be touched or even looked at by her again; three pots holding dying plants that would remain dead until I found a reason to water them. There had been even more before: miscellaneous decorations, a sign Vince made that said No Opps Allowed, some weed. Anything no longer here had been destroyed by me the last time I came. I allowed the pain to pass through me while it was still his birthday, but once I rose from the ground and it was yet another meaningless, hopeless day, I wanted nothing more than to fight God.

And if this place was really heaven, it was the closest I could get to Him. So I tore it all down.

I did bring something new that day other than the prayer candles to replace the birthday ones we’d initially brought. On the floor in the center of the back wall sat a big poster displaying what was now my favorite photo of us—the five of us at Isaiah’s house, the day of his sweet sixteen. We sat together on his front steps with red cups in our hands, cheesing with glee at our first explorations of teenage delinquency. The photo was everything this room was supposed to be.

Now, the people in it didn’t even speak. Princess and I tried to be there for each other, but we were the ones most involved in creating and preparing and designing the room that was supposed to celebrate Zaire’s life. Now that it hosted the memorial of his death, we just didn’t have much to say to each other anymore. Nothing we were strong enough to say yet.

Bryan couldn’t even look me in the eye at the funeral. It’s why he’d never stepped foot in this room; before the tragedy he was just neutral and a bit uninterested, and after it he resented this room for jinxing his friend’s life. And, by extension, he resented Princess and I for helping to create it. I couldn’t blame him. We were all struggling with an anger that we had nowhere to place but on each other.

Vince and I, as Zaire’s oldest friends in the group, were the most deeply broken. So deeply that we didn’t speak and didn’t have to; I knew there was no resentment, just an unhealed wound that our silence was the only bandage for. We were similar, Vince and I—cut enough times in life that we knew how to bleed alone in the dark.

Today’s return to the shed was my bloodletting. The room had never seen fire and something needed to burn.

I flicked the lighter in my hand, crouched down, and went from candle to candle. Ten flames were now before me, sending a light up to the poster sitting above them. There was a glimmer from the flames over Zaire’s face in the sweet sixteen picture now, and for the first time since his death I could see the light in his eyes again.

I fell to my knees. It felt good to fall, but I wanted to break. I wanted to throw the candles against the walls until the flames brought everything down on top of me. I wanted a wrecking ball to swing through my mind and crush the idea of a heaven in a room, the worst one I’ve ever had. I wanted to walk into traffic, lay on the road, and be crushed and flattened the way that vehicle did to my friend four days before his birthday. I wanted to understand why the people in charge—God, parents, politicians—never seemed to know how to make things fair.

My forehead touched the floor. I wanted to cry but the well inside me had run dry, at least for today. I decided to lay there and simply wait for death to come.

“Get up.”

I bolted so violently up from the floor that I almost knocked over all the candles. I turned around and saw something that made me face the candles again and close my eyes. I had cursed God so much that he was playing tricks on me now. Maybe I deserved that.

I heard a sing-songy voice: “Narai-aaa, papayaaa…”

Suddenly, the well was full again. Tears flowed from me with a searing thickness. I heard myself mutter the word please, and I wanted to say it again and again. I wanted to cry my pleas for it all to stop: the reality I’d been forced to accept, the false one that was now only making my pain worse, the beating of my broken heart. But my mouth was full of tears and words I couldn’t say to a spirit that couldn’t hear.

I felt my knees buckling again. They were about to give out—they did, in fact, and I was already halfway to the ground when two arms scooped me up by my own, holding me up from behind by my shoulders.

I would’ve fainted from the fear if I wasn’t being held up. When I heard the voice a moment ago I knew I was hallucinating, since the only person who had ever called me like that was gone. It sounded like his voice but obviously wasn’t, so I ignored it. But now, when I was devoid of strength and had no legs to stand on, something was holding me up. I couldn’t have been imagining it because I was too weak to have been doing it myself.

I sensed a warmth on my right side. A hand pulled my hair back from over my ear, and then the voice said my name again. I turned slowly, but it took only half a second before I recognized the golden highlights in his coily curls.

The scream that came out of me must’ve been heard by the dolphins in the Atlantic.

Zaire—whatever the projection in front of me was—rushed over to the floor where I had landed and forced a hand over my mouth. I struggled against it at first and then went limp under the realization of what was happening. There was a hand covering my mouth, a hand attached to an arm coming from the body of something that appeared to be Zaire, and it was physically stopping me from speaking. It was a physical thing with its own power.

Like a person. But it couldn’t have been.

“Will you scream again?” Zaire asked. It sounded more like him every time I heard it. I shook my head no. He gave me this look: lifted his chin, tilted his head a bit to the side, pursed his lips, squinted his eyes. I shook my head again because I recognized this as the confirmation look. It was how he looked at me when he wanted to be sure or wanted me to be sure. It was the “you promise?” look.

He removed his hand from over my mouth. I wanted to scream again, louder this time, but I’d promised.

“Z-zaire?” My voice shook, but I tried to push the word out from my diaphragm.

He smiled. “Man, was I waiting for you to light those candles for a while.”

I looked over at the prayer candles, ten licking flames still sending a glimmer up to his eye. I looked back to his face and found the same sparkle I’d always known.

“What is this?”

He rose to his feet and held out his hand for me. “You wanna stand up?”

“What is this?” I was still seated, sliding away from him on the floor with my arms. “Who are you? Why are you here?”

“Stop.” Zaire closed the gap of space between us. “I’ve always been here.”

Too puzzled to speak, I allowed him to continue.

“I was waiting for you to light the candles. You just needed a flame to see.”

I exhaled, struggling with what was in my line of vision now. “See what?”

Zaire flashed a smile, his signature, that made me both excited and sorrowful. “Me.”

My confusion took some of the weight off of my pain now that they shared space in my mind, so I was able to slowly rise up from the floor to my feet. “I don’t understand. You’re dead, Zaire.”

He shook his head. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

I stared at him blankly. “You have to be more specific or I’m going to faint.”

Zaire chuckled. Then he inched closer to me and dropped his voice to a slow whisper. “I’ve seen everything that happened in this room since the accident.”

This made the nausea in my stomach worse. He was acknowledging the event that resulted in his death, but not the death itself?

“You…you saw me on your birthday?”

Zaire nodded, but his face grew somber. “I’m sorry, Narai. I wanted to be there for you. To pick you up off the floor and hold you and blow out my birthday candles with you. I was standing here the whole time wishing you’d light them. All you really needed was to spark the flame.”

Again, I looked over to the candles. The glimmer in his eye in the photo seemed to have grown larger now.

“Have any of the others been here?”

Zaire shook his head somberly again. “Just you.”

I’d already known this fact, and didn’t need confirmation from a strange spiritual entity, but something about hearing him say it made it sound like the saddest breaking news. I wanted to find words to say to Zaire now that I was really looking at him, something I thought I would never be able to do again and had so many words prepared for the next dimension where I could. But now that we were together in this one, I couldn’t find eloquence.

He looked at me this time with a lighter expression. “But, see, that’s why I wanted you to light the flame. So you could see me and I could tell you that I want you to come with me.”

“Come with you where?”

“Here.”

I looked around us at the broken-down, renovated and then broken-down-again shed. There was pain oozing from the pores of everything in it, from the dead plants to me.

“I am here, Zaire.”

“No, I mean—” He paused, looking for the words. There were none that could adequately contextualize for me the bizarreness I was experiencing. “I mean here. Come with me here, to what this room is.”

I stared at him for a while and then took two more steps back, questioning the true identity of whatever I was communicating with. “To heaven? You want me to die?”

Zaire outstretched his arms. “Do I look dead to you?”

“Zaire…” The room was starting to spin. I placed my hands over my temples and slid down the wall, back to the floor again. This felt like being drunk for the first time again, but without any of the excitement.

Zaire followed me down to the floor, crouching in front of me. I couldn’t look at him—couldn’t stand to behold the paradoxical complexity of what he was and couldn’t hold my own head up with my neck—but he lifted my chin with a finger so I met his serious gaze.

“Narai, you know I would never let anything bad happen to you, right?” He paused for confirmation that I simply couldn’t give. “I love you so much; more than you ever knew. I could never let you step into harm’s way. That’s why I want you to come with me.”

He rose again to his feet and stepped closer to the candles, staring down at our photo on the poster before he continued. “I wasn’t surprised that the others never came. It’s not their time yet, so they’re not ready. They’re all too steeped into the real world to handle interacting with another one. But you, Narai, have one foot in that world and one foot in this one. That’s why you keep coming back here.”

“So you want me to have both feet in yours instead?” I looked at him like he was being as ridiculous as he sounded.

“I want you to have peace.” He turned around to face me and I stood up, still wanting to keep a safe distance.

“So that’s what it’s like here? Peaceful?”

“You know what it’s like,” Zaire said. “You created it.”

The irony in this pushed me to silence. This room had only ever been a site of my suffering. But I could vaguely remember what I knew he was referring to: all the things we talked about that day in his basement, all the sights and sounds and feels of our projected utopia. None of us got a chance to experience any of that, save for the one person who was taken away from us. It seemed, somehow, that he’d been having a better time than we were, and I didn’t know how to feel about that.

“What did you mean by that, Zaire?”

“What?”

“When you said you love me more than I ever knew,” I said. My mouth was still open and I drew a deep breath in, and then pushed the question out with the air. “How much do you love me?”

He only blinked at me at first. Standing near but far, looking into me but through me, present but not really. Then a smile landed softly onto his face like a feather; a smile so breathtaking that I forgot the question in my mind about whether he was ‘real.’ Nothing I’d experienced in my whole life felt realer than what happened next.

“Let me show you.”

Zaire and I stepped into each other and collided. Fireworks popped from our lips as we kissed and flew up to the ceiling, blowing through the roof of the shed. The floor shook beneath our feet like they contained little earthquakes. The candles fell one-by-one, each sending the shed into a bigger and brighter blaze. Zaire pulled me in closer, his arms anchoring me in place as bombs burst around us, and it was then I knew that I could stand in the center of a tornado as long as he was there to keep me grounded.

So we kissed, and everything around us exploded, and I was not afraid.

When I opened my eyes again, Zaire was gone. The shed was still standing unscathed. I spun around and around looking for him, growing afraid of the bottomless sorrow I would fall into if everything I just experienced had truly been produced by my imagination.

“Zaire? Zaire, are you here?” Nothing. I spun again, facing the poster and candles, where ten flames were still burning. “Am I here? Did it work?”

I was becoming painfully aware of my sole presence in the space and it made me want to leave. I leaned down and blew out each of the ten candles, watching the glimmer disappear as the last one went out. Taking one last long look at the photo that I wished I could live inside of forever, I turned around.

There he was.

“Are you happy?”

Just seconds ago, my answer, the feeling inside of me, would’ve been different. But seeing Zaire in his flesh and glory and feeling a new sense of weightlessness in my own body, I knew that I meant it with every fiber of my being: “Yes.”

We smiled at each other.

“Then, yeah. It worked.”

I spun around the room again, looking for differences or clues or glowing sparkles. I couldn’t find any external evidence that something was different, but I felt it within me. Something was different about my insides—they didn’t contain anything new, but they’d let go of something that was there before and let the fire turn it to dust. My feet were planted on the floor, but there was no gravity here.

“What is this place?”

If Zaire was an angel here then I was no different; and yet, standing there in the window’s light, he appeared to possess a beauty so palpable that it could only come from a world foreign to my own. When he smiled at me I felt the warmth of a smaller sun.

“A better one.”