Right?
“You liked me like that back then?” Her confusion is real. But if she didn’t know in elementary school, what happened to us?
I sit up all the way. I need to think clearly.
“But isn’t that why you stopped hanging out with me in middle school? Because you got tired of me wanting to be more than just friends?” That’s what happened. I was there.
“No,” Autumn says. “I had no idea you wanted anything like that.”
It’s the truth. Somehow, some way, she hadn’t known.
“But after I kissed you, you knew?” Because Autumn knows I love her. I read her novel. It was there.
“No,” Autumn says. “I didn’t know why you had kissed me, and it freaked me out. I thought maybe you were experimenting on me.”
Experimenting on her? Am I hallucinating after all? My gaze wanders briefly around my bedroom. Everything else seems normal.
If Autumn didn’t know that I loved her in elementary school or in middle school—no. No. She had to have known.
“But this doesn’t make any sense,” I tell her. “If you didn’t know, then why did you leave me?”
She drops her eyes. Is this it? Have I caught her in a lie? My stomach twists. I’ll love her even if she turns out to be cruel. That’s my curse.
“It just felt so nice not to be the weird girl anymore,” Autumn says. “I liked being popular. We did kinda grow apart that year.”
She’s blushing with embarrassment, and I feel my mouth hanging open.
“I’m not saying it’s not my fault. I’m just saying I didn’t mean for it to happen.”
Oh, Autumn.
Autumn caring what people thought about her was never something I had considered. It seems incongruent with her character. I always defended her in elementary school but not because she’d never shown any sign of being bothered by what the other kids thought or said. Maybe a couple of times, there’d been things that happened that had made her cry, but I’d believed her when she said she was upset about the injustice or the principle of the matter.
When Autumn was finally appreciated by our peers, she seemed to take it as a matter of course, that things had finally settled as they should. She’d never said anything during the early days of middle school about being excited about becoming popular overnight. She’d seemed distracted, not elated.
Autumn is a good actress but not that good. For example, at the moment, she’s trying to hide her embarrassment and failing. Autumn is a good liar. Autumn is not a good liar. It’s true and it’s not true.
“You really didn’t know?” I ask to be sure.
“No. I really, really didn’t,” Autumn says.
I believe her, and it’s more than I can handle. My nervous system decides that in order to keep functioning and engage in conscious thought, it can’t hold me up. I lie on my back and stare up at nothing.
Autumn didn’t know that I loved her.
I’m staring at the blank ceiling above me, but all I see are a thousand memories being rewritten with this new information. It’s like the DNA of my entire relationship with Autumn has mutated. Every time I’d inwardly flinched at how pathetic I must seem to her, she hadn’t known or noticed.
“And all these years I was terrified that you could tell that I still…you know,” I say.
“Still what?”
Because even after all this, she still needs me to spell it out. “Still wanted you.”
“Really?”
I can’t even answer that one.
All my agonies had been caused by figments of my imagination. That night I’d had to call Jack to sober drive Sylvie and me home, I found Autumn eating leftovers on her front porch. She was bummed about her parents and had been quietly patient with my inebriation while I thought I said the most obvious, drunkenly lovestruck things to her. The next morning, I lay in bed, sick as a dog and writhing with mortification.
But it had all been in my brain. None of it had been real. Autumn hadn’t known. Autumn hadn’t heard the love that had screamed so loud inside my mind.
That semester when we were partners in gym, I regretted so many of the things I said after class, and the moments I’d given in to the temptation to touch her seemed especially egregious. I was certain that I was always on the verge of being cast off by Autumn again, because I was doing such a terrible job of hiding my love for her.
But she hadn’t known.
It hadn’t been proof that I’d overstepped her boundaries when she said that Jamie wouldn’t like it if we hung out. Jamie probably would have been a dick about it, and if Autumn had actually loved me back then— What had she been thinking all these years, this girl that I loved and thought that I knew through and through?
“What about Sylvie?” Autumn asks, and I can’t help my laugh. It all seems like such a madcap Shakespearean comedy of mistakes. Is this irony? Maybe Autumn can tell me.
“The only reason I started hanging out with the cheerleaders after soccer practice was because I thought they were still your friends. I thought that maybe I’d have a chance with you then, that maybe I’d be cool enough for you to see me like that. Then when the first day of high school came, you didn’t even say hi to me at the bus stop. And I found out that not only were you not their friend anymore, but you hated them. And then you started going out with Jamie, and Alexis was asking me why I was leading Sylvie on, and I didn’t even know what she was talking about…”
That had been an awful conversation. It was after a soccer game, the first one I’d really gotten to spend time out on the field, and Alexis had pulled me aside as I’d come out of the locker room. I was exhausted and soaking wet. She was going out with Jack by then, and it had kinda freaked me out the way she’d grabbed my arm possessively. She looked furious.
“Why are you doing this to her?” she hissed at me.
“Who?” My brain went to Autumn even though it made no sense.
“Oh. My. God.” Alexis whispered, “Sylvie, you monster.”
My feelings for Alexis after the past four years are like how a lot of people describe their feelings for their siblings. I love her because I have known her for so long, but she drives me crazy, and most of the time, I don’t like her that much.
Alexis was exaggerating that day, but there is always a grain of truth to her wild hyperboles.
I was kinda into Sylvie at that time.
Sylvie talked to me at the bus stop. No one else did. The fact that Sylvie was as pretty as Autumn, though in a different way, provided a welcome distraction. Sylvie felt safe to look at.
When Alexis made her case, I could see her point. And I felt responsible. Besides, I’d seen some guy kissing Autumn on those steps where she’d been hanging out. My plan had failed.
So I asked Sylvie to a movie, and we had fun. Real fun. She was the only other kid I’d ever met who listened to NPR while getting ready for school in the mornings. I liked that she read biographies and kept a shelf of her favorites. She was beautiful. She was nice. She wanted to be with me.
Sylvie has been good for me. I’ve enjoyed almost every minute with her. She has made me a better person in so many little ways. I hope that someday I’ll be able to fully explain this to Sylvie, but for now I say to Autumn, “Don’t think that I never cared about Sylvie, because I did.” I do. “She’s not really what you think.” She’s so much more. “And she needed me to take care of her when you didn’t anymore.” Because she’s like you: complicated. “I loved her, but I loved her differently from the way I’ve always loved you.”
I still love Sylvie, and there’s so much I’m not saying out loud despite not wanting to leave things unsaid.
But there is so much Autumn and I need to talk about besides Sylvie.
“Oh, Finny,” Autumn says. Her voice has so much emotion in it that my heart flutters.