-The Goodbye Scene, Take Two-

They didn't have a real goodbye scene, not while Keith was alive. It had been easier before, when he still looked healthy and very much alive, and Natalie had made that fake ticket and took him to the airport. Neither of them had the energy for theatrics anymore.

Instead, on a Thursday afternoon in the last week of May, Natalie was pulled from school not by her own parents but by Keith's father.

She didn't have to ask and he didn't have to be asked. He simply said, "This morning."

And that was all it took to break Natalie down in the middle of the school office and reduce her to tears that nearly turned into a panic attack and earned her an excused leave from school for the rest of the day.

The real goodbye scene didn't come until after the first day of June, when they buried him. It was an incredibly small funeral: Keith's father, Natalie, Mr. Miles, and Alan Ascher.

This was okay, though. Natalie knew Keith would have hated to have a ton of fake mourners around. It was a short ceremony, anyway. A short funeral for a short life.

But this was not the place where Natalie said goodbye to Keith. It would have been too typical; it wouldn't have fit their most atypical love affair at all. Natalie did kiss her fingertips and then press them to Keith's lips where he lay inside the coffin, transferring one last kiss to him, but she didn't say goodbye.

The obituary ran the day after the funeral. Natalie bought two copies of the newspaper and cut Keith's picture and all-too-short life story out of each.

She took one to copy to the office building where they'd had the picnic, and she tacked it to the first bulletin board she saw.

The other copy went to the diner where they ate a before-dawn breakfast. The waitress who had served them that night wasn't there, so Natalie folded the obituary into the tip and gave it straight to the cook, asking him to give it to the woman who got bowling balls as a tip one night.

Natalie hoped the right people saw them, that they recognized Keith's face in grainy black and white and stopped and thought about the boy who briefly disrupted their lives. She knew she would never stop thinking about it.

Leaving the obituaries didn't feel like enough for a goodbye scene, either. So she did the only other thing she could think to do.

Natalie took Keith's yellow truck out to the spot of their first kiss and the first time they made love. She parked it near the edge, and put the gear in neutral. Then she climbed in the bed of the truck, lying flat on her back with her eyes towards the night sky.

This is where she said goodbye to Keith.

Natalie made a game of it: she would think of everything and let it hurt, those whole five months, from the first day in chemistry when Keith came late and called her partner for the first time to just last week when they had laid quietly in bed together because they knew what was coming and there was nothing to say.

She would let it hurt until the truck came right up to the edge and she had to jump out and stop it before it went over, and then she wouldn't let it hurt anymore.

Keith was, she was sure, the best thing to ever happen to her. And she didn't want it to hurt. So she would say goodbye to Keith and goodbye to the hurt, and then she'd keep his memory inside of her—her own secret to keep forever.

When Natalie was back inside the cab of the truck, the front wheels precariously close to the edge, she sat and took big, gulping breaths. She felt empty, and she was trying to fill herself back up.

She reached for the visor, so she could look in the mirror and remind herself she was real and still alive. It was something she'd had to do at least once a day since Keith died. But when she pulled the visor down, a little square of paper came fluttering down into her lap.

Natalie picked it up and turned it over, and despite the raw empty feeling inside of her, she had to smile at what she found written on it:

Goodbye, partner.