Before You Knew My Name by Jacqueline Bublitz (books to read for teens txt) 📕

now, ‘whether through shock, which is what happened to me, or strangulation’—he looks straight at Ruby when he says this—‘everything short circuits pretty quickly. Our most human characteristics are the first to go, apparently. Sense of self, awareness of time. Memory centres, language. Essentially, you reduce, getting more and more primal as things shut down. In that way, I’d say we might know when we’re in the process of dying. But by the time we get to death itself, we don’t know that we were ever alive.’

‘Although studies have shown,’ Sue picks up the thread, ‘that some people experience a surge of brain activity at the point of death. The complete opposite of an unconscious state. There was a moment, in the car with Lisa, where she came to, opened her eyes, looked straight at me. It was like she came back, like she was completely fine. And then, in a second, she was gone.’

‘You never told me that part,’ Lennie says softly, reaching over and squeezing Sue’s hand.

‘About what happened before they got me out of the car? No, I suppose I haven’t. I don’t, as you might imagine, like going over the specifics. At any rate,’ Sue dabs at her eyes with the corner of a napkin, ‘I don’t want to get too fanciful about it. An unexpected burst of brain activity right before death seems to be quite common. A last human flare sent out into the world, if you will.’

Ruby soon understands that emotions move like water when Death Club gets going; sometimes there is a steady stream of words and ideas, sometimes a touched nerve blocks the flow. Even then, with a little pressure, something true and honest cracks through. Sue’s soft smile for Lennie now, Josh’s sheepish grin when the latter suggests the story of his accident seems to have gotten a little more dramatic tonight. Then, it’s like everyone is propelled by the same questions and anxieties, the same need to move past their current limitations. Ruby has never participated in a conversation that feels so raw and honest. Her friends back home are great, they’re funny and kind and smart, but they mostly talk about work and weekends. They plan parties, and group holidays to Thailand, and when they meet on someone’s couch, or in the dark corner of a city bar, they talk about everyday, ordinary things. Sometimes they argue about each other’s political leanings, or attend a march for this, against that. But for the most part, her Australian friends have an unspoken agreement to glide across the surface of things. None more so than Ash.

‘We don’t have to talk about everything,’ he once said.

As if the little she said was too much.

Ever since her seemingly unfounded panic the morning after the vigil, Ruby has been careful with Ash. While they still text most days, the majority of their messages have become generic, polite in the way of people who are busy thinking more about what they don’t say than what they do. After holding back so much from Ash—from everyone back home—it is exhilarating for Ruby to find herself in the middle of such rich, meaningful conversation, something she would have never thought possible with people she barely knows. Though, to be sure, this evening has given Ruby a chance to get to know her table-mates better, to catch pieces of them in the light, in a way she wasn’t afforded at brunch. For instance, she quickly comes to understand that Sue, with her cropped white hair and jutting cheekbones, projects a quiet, enviable confidence, whether choosing a wine, or setting down an opinion. She has travelled the world on her own, doesn’t find Ruby’s current isolation odd at all, and is only concerned for what she suggests might be a tendency toward aimlessness in her new acquaintance.

‘Don’t confuse liking your own company with doing nothing,’ she advises, when Ruby admits she is neither working nor studying while in New York. ‘You’re a designer by trade, yes? Well, in this day and age, there’s no excuse for not working from your own bed, if you have to.’

Ruby cannot imagine offering such unsolicited advice to someone she’s just met, yet she finds herself grateful for Sue’s polite scolding, considers laying out her whole list of problems, just to see what the older woman might say. (It’s Death Club, not Confession, she has to remind herself more than once when it comes to Sue.)

Josh, on the other hand, throws out statements like grenades. Sweeps up the damage himself if he sees he has gone too far. ‘Sorry,’ he says more than once as the night progresses, not sounding sorry at all. ‘That didn’t come out the way I meant it to.’

‘I write like I speak, but I don’t speak like I write,’ he will explain later. ‘Which is how I get myself in trouble sometimes.’

In addition to having firm opinions on almost everything, Josh is, Ruby can consciously acknowledge this now, undeniably handsome. He was born in Minnesota; Midwestern is the term Lennie would use for his physique, possessed as he is of thick limbs and a wide chest, his body calling to mind farms and machines, and long summers spent outdoors. To Ruby, who sees every man in relation to Ash, Josh is solid, sturdy, a rock compared to Ash’s cool, narrow river. Out of shape, Josh would say, if he knew of her assessment. Knowing, as Ruby does not, that before the accident he was thirty pounds lighter, easily buttoning himself into fancy suits or sliding into the beds of beautiful women, one of whom he married. He has not made peace with this new, heavier body, mourns the impression he used to make when he walked into a room, the way his wife would light up just to look at him. Ruby could have thrown herself across the table at Josh for all he would notice a woman checking him out these days: who wants to be appreciated