Toni didn’t say anything, so Audrey did. “You don’t have to hold it out like that, Mom. It doesn’t have rabies.”
Mrs. Fasseau ignored her. She jutted her chin at Toni but wouldn’t meet her eyes. She hadn’t looked Toni in the eye in years. “Is it a gift for your father? Because he has better taste than to wear this, I’m afraid.”
Toni shook her head. She didn’t know, she told me, what made her say what she did—whether it was her mom insulting the thing she loved, or whether she just wanted to see how her mom would answer—but whatever the reason was, Toni stood straight up and told her mom, “No. It’s for me. I’m wearing it for Easter.”
Her mom didn’t even blink. “You’re planning on wearing this to church, hmm? In front of everyone we know? In front of God?”
The fact that Toni didn’t make a snarky comeback to that—that she didn’t even mention having thought of one—was how I knew Toni was really, really, really upset. Religion was not a topic of discussion in the Fasseaus’ house. For Toni’s mother to accuse Toni of doing anything in front of “God” was so hypocritical as to be automatically funny in any other circumstances. Later, Toni would tell me she couldn’t remember her mother ever uttering the word God before that afternoon. She was pretty sure her mother thought of “God” and “everyone we know” as one and the same.
Toni’s mother strode across the kitchen to the junk drawer and pulled out a pair of scissors. Toni could already see what she was going to do, and Audrey was saying, “No, Mom, don’t,” but it was too late. Mrs. Fasseau sliced the tie neatly into two, letting the wide bottom part fall into the sink. Then she strode out of the kitchen without looking back while Audrey shouted after her, “Nice one, Mom! Are you going to pay her back, at least?”
“It was just a tie,” Toni kept saying that night in the car. “Just a stupid tie. It didn’t mean anything.”
“I know,” I said.
“My mom’s reading all of this, like, I don’t know—stuff into it. It’s so presumptive. She’s acting like the tie was a symbol. Like she can cut off whatever it’s a symbol of. When it’s just a tie, you know? It’s just some stupid fabric somebody stitched together in a sweatshop in, like, Bangladesh or something. It’s just that it was a really nice tie. I didn’t actually care if I wore it to church or not, you know? I just liked it. I didn’t even use her credit card to buy it. I used my birthday money from my grandmother. She didn’t ask how I got it, though. She didn’t care.”
I care, I wanted to say. I care about everything about you, I wanted to say.
“I’m sorry,” I said instead.
Then I said, “I love you.”
TONI
I couldn’t believe she actually said it. Out loud.
I’d wanted to say it for months, but...what if she didn’t say it back? What if she laughed at me? What if she thought I wasn’t taking this relationship seriously? What if she wasn’t taking this relationship seriously?
“I love you, too,” I said.
It didn’t make me want to cry any less. It didn’t mean that when I fell asleep that night, I wouldn’t still be thinking about my mom standing there with the scissors in her hand.
But it meant I’d have something else to think about, too. Something that made me feel like I wasn’t completely worthless.
Actually, if I was being completely honest, what Gretchen just said made me feel like I was the king of the stupid planet. Not the whole planet, I mean, not, like, Earth, but my own personal planet. Mine and Gretchen’s.
Gretchen was the beginning and end of everything. She was all I’d ever need. I’d been searching my whole life for something, but until now I didn’t know what that something was.
Gretchen saying “I love you” proved that I wasn’t making this all up in my head. That maybe this fantasy I’d been living in for the past five months wasn’t just a fantasy. Maybe it was my actual life.
And as for my mom cutting up the stupid tie, as though she was trying to show what would happen if I crossed that invisible line, the one between girl and boy, the line that might not even actually exist—and here we were all pretending this was as simple as whether I wore a stupid tie to stupid church in front of her stupid friends (and God, we mustn’t forget God, obviously)—as for that...
Today, my mom cut up a stupid tie an hour before the world’s most perfect girl told me she loved me.
“I love you, too,” I said again.
We kissed. It was our best kiss ever. My best kiss ever.
We couldn’t stay in the car much longer. Gretchen’s parents would be getting worried. She hadn’t even brought her phone out with her. She’d just come outside to find me, shivering in her sweatshirt, tapping on the window. She’d come because she knew I needed her.
I would always need her.
As I watched her walk back to the house, I knew something between us had changed that night. Something that had been intangible had become solid. Something unspoken was now resolute.