‘We leave in ten weeks.’
‘Calm down,’ she says, as though I’m the one who’s sounding unreasonable. Maybe I am sounding unreasonable, but that’s because I spent the last dollar of my savings buying a seven-stop around-the-world ticket: Singapore, Berlin, Rome, London, Helsinki, New York. ‘We bought insurance and got our passports. We bought travel guides and those little pillows for the plane.’
She bites the right side of her lip and I try very hard, very unsuccessfully, not to think about kissing her.
‘You said you loved me.’
‘I do love you,’ she says, and then she starts italicising love into all its depressing definitions. ‘I just don’t think I’m in love with you. I tried, though. I tried really hard.’
These must be the most depressing words in the history of love. I tried really hard to love you.
I should ask her to leave. I should remind her that we had a deal, a pact, a solid agreement when we bought those tickets that she would not break up with me again. I should say, ‘You know what? I don’t want to go with you. I don’t want to travel the lands where Dickens wrote, where Karen Russell and Junot Díaz and Balli Kaur Jaswal are still writing, with a girl who’s trying really hard to love me.’
But fuck it, I’m an optimist and I would like to see those homelands with her, so what I say is, ‘If you change your mind, you know where I live.’ In my defence, we’ve been on and off since Year 9 and she’s dumped me and come back before. More than once, actually, so history’s given me some reason to hope.
We’re lying in the self-help section, a room at the back of the shop that’s the size of a small cupboard. It’s just big enough for two people to lie side by side with no space to spare.
There’s no other way for her to leave than to climb over the top of me, so we do this weird fumbling dance as she gets up – a soft untangling wrestle. She hovers over the top of me for a second or two, hair tickling my skin, and then she leans forward and kisses me. It’s a long kiss, a good kiss, and while it’s happening I let myself hope that maybe, just maybe, it’s a kiss so great that it changes her mind.
But after it’s done she stands, straightens her skirt, and gives me a small, sad wave. ‘Goodbye, Henry,’ she says. And then she leaves me here, lying on the floor of the self-help section – a dead man. One with a non-refundable, non-exchangeable ticket to the world.
Eventually, I crawl out of the self-help section and make my way towards the fiction couch: the long, blue velvet day bed that sits in front of the classics. I hardly ever sleep upstairs anymore. I like the rustle and dust of the bookshop at night.
I lie here thinking about Amy. I retrace last week, running back through the hours, trying to work out what changed between us. But I’m the same person I was seven days ago. I’m the same person I was the week before and the week before that. I’m the same person I was all the way back to the morning we met.
Amy came from a private school across the river. She moved to our side of town after her dad’s accounting firm downsized and he had to shift jobs. They lived in one of the new apartment blocks that had gone up on Green Street, not far from our school.
From Amy’s new bedroom she could hear traffic and the flush of next-door’s toilet. From her old bedroom, she could hear birds. These things I learnt before we dated, in snippets of conversations that happened on the way home from parties, in English, in detention, in the library, when she stopped by the bookshop on Sunday afternoons.
The first day I met Amy I knew surface things – she had long red hair, green eyes and fair skin. She smelt flowery. She wore long socks. She sat at an empty table and waited for people to sit next to her. They did.
I sat in front of her in our first English class together and listened to the conversation between her and Aaliyah. ‘Who’s that?’ I heard Amy ask. ‘Henry,’ Aaliyah told her. ‘Funny. Smart. Cute.’
I waved above my head without turning around.
‘And eavesdropper,’ Amy added, gently kicking the back of my chair.
We didn’t officially get together till the middle of Year 12, but the first time we kissed was in Year 9. It happened after our English class had been studying Ray Bradbury’s short stories. We’d read ‘The Last Night of the World’ and the idea caught on in our year that we should all spend a night pretending it was our last and do the things we’d do if an apocalypse were heading our way.
The principal heard what we were planning and told us we couldn’t do it. An apocalypse sounded dangerous. Our plans went underground.
Flyers appeared in lockers with the end set for the 12th of December, the last day of school. There’d be a party that night at Justin Kent’s house. Make plans, the flyers told us. The end is near.
I stayed up late on the night before the end, trying to write the perfect letter to Amy, a letter that’d convince her to spend the last night with me. I walked into school with it in my top pocket, knowing I probably wouldn’t give it to her, but hoping that I might.
I had a brilliant best friend called Rachel back then, who I don’t have anymore for reasons I don’t completely understand, and my plan was to spend the last night with her unless some miracle happened and Amy became a possibility.
No one listened in class that day. There were small signs all over the place that things were coming to an end. Signs that the teachers overlooked but we saw. In our homeroom, someone had turned all the notices on the board upside down. Someone had carved THE END into the back of the boys’ toilet door. I opened my locker to find a piece of paper with one day to go written on it and I realised that no one had bothered working out the finer details of when the world would actually end. Midnight? Sunrise?
I was thinking about that when I turned and saw Amy standing next to me. The note was in my pocket but I couldn’t give it to her. Instead I held up the paper – one day to go – and asked her what she was planning on doing with the time she had left.
She stared at me for a while, and eventually said, ‘I thought you might ask me to spend it with you.’ There were several people in the corridor listening when she said it, and no one, me included, could quite believe my luck.
Amy and I decided the end should be when the sun came up – 5.50 in the morning according to the Weather Channel. We met at the bookshop at 5.50 in the afternoon, to make it an even twelve hours. From there we walked to Shanghai Dumplings for dinner. Around 9 we went to Justin’s party and when it got too loud we walked to the Benito building and took the elevator to the top – the highest place in Gracetown.
We sat on my jacket and watched the lights and Amy told me about her flat, the smallness of the rooms, the birdsong she’d left behind. It’d be years before she told me about her dad and his lost job and how terrible it had been to hear him crying. That night, she only hinted at her family’s worries. I offered her the bookshop, if she ever needed space. If she sat in the reading garden there might be birds. And the sounds of turning pages are surprisingly comforting, I told her.
She kissed me then, and even though we didn’t date until years later, something started in that moment. Every so often, when she was alone at the end of a party, we’d kiss again. Girls knew, even if Amy was with some other guy at the time, that I belonged to her.
Then one night in Year 12, we became something permanent. Amy came to the bookshop. It was late. We were closed. I was studying at the counter. She’d been dating a guy called Ewan who went to school in her old neighbourhood, but that afternoon he’d broken up with her. She needed someone she could rely on to her take to the formal. So there she was at the bookshop door, tapping on the glass at midnight, calling my name.
Rachel