“Oh, did we ever,” Lys says as Lily Allen’s “Fuck You” comes on.
The three of us have a dance party and by the time we reach your apartment, I have the courage to get out of the car. Your Mustang isn’t in the parking lot, so you’re going to get this when you get home from rehearsal with the band. You guys are playing a show later tonight, a few hours after our planned date, so I know you won’t be able to get too depressed. In some ways, the letter is coming at a perfect time because you can get your sadness and anger out in the best, most healthy way: through your music. I don’t know if you would try to kill yourself again, like you did with Summer. You’re older now, and on meds and in therapy. And it’s not like this is coming out of nowhere. I can’t remember the last time we saw each other and didn’t fight.
“You go to school with him every day,” you said, just a few days ago. “How do I know that you’re not making out in between classes, screwing in his car during lunch?”
This language, it doesn’t rile me up anymore like it used to. I’ve become quite accustomed to you flinging this shit my way. Gideon’s letters burn inside me: Namaste. Come back to me. I haven’t talked to him for the entire month of April. I miss him. I miss the me I am with him.
“I don’t understand why you’re staying with me if that’s the kind of person you think I am,” I say. “Break up with me if you can’t trust me.”
Now I feel like I don’t have the right to be the one doing the breaking. I’m the one who emotionally cheated on you. I don’t get to hurt you like that, then dump you. I deserve to be dumped. I’m waiting to be dumped. (Please dump me.)
“Break up with you,” you snort. “That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“I love you,” I whisper. Then a tiny bit of courage rears up in me. “But I’m fucking tired of fighting with you every day—”
“I hate you.” You say this quietly and when you look over at me, the malice in your face sends a chill down my spine. “I hate you almost as much as I love you.”
I stare at you. There are no words, just this fear spreading through me. You’re so much bigger than me and you have those strong guitar-playing hands. My fingers move to my neck, clutch at my collarbone. I think about the foresight it took to find a baseball bat and bring it to the theater. If no one had stopped you, would you have used it on Gideon? Me?
I don’t know who you are anymore.
Panic blooms in my chest and I think about how I forgot my cell phone at home and how we’re in the middle of an abandoned housing development after dark, since some of the guys from the band are crashing at your apartment. No one would hear me scream.
I inch toward you because that is the only thing that ever calms you—my touch. I reach out and place my palm against your cheek. Bring my lips close to yours. Your eyes are two narrow slits and I don’t know what that means, only that I have to tame you somehow.
“We’re soul mates,” I whisper. “Soul mates don’t hate each other.”
I take your hand and pull you toward the back of the car. I open the door and lie down, pulling you on top of me. This always works—your skin against mine, your breath in my mouth.
“I want you,” I whisper. “Only you. Always.”
After, you drive me home, silent, and when you drop me off, I close the passenger door softly behind me, as though you’re The Giant now and I’m afraid to wake you.
I go into my room, grab a sheet of paper, and start writing:
Gavin—
*
I STAND IN front of the door to your apartment and it hurts to remember the happy look on your face when you brought me here for the first time. Just past this door is the future you’ve been trying to build for us. I’m about to knock it all down. My phone buzzes in my pocket and I feel sick because I know it’s you. I pull it out and look at the text—a picture of you holding up a tiny gift bag from the jewelry store in the mall. I am such an asshole.
Nat honks and when I look back, she and Lys pose with Lady Gaga claw hands and huge, you-can-do-it grins. I give them a thumbs-up. I can do this. I will do this. I tuck my phone back into my pocket and rest my palm against the door for a minute, a year of memories running through me: you serenading me in the hallway at school as you ask me to prom, you kissing me under stars, drenched in moonlight. Birthdays and holidays and shit times and beautiful times. Your songs and your smiles and the way your hands touch me like I’m a priceless treasure. But then I think about you saying I hate you and a year of tears and yelling and punishing kisses and sex for the purpose of forgetting. A year of a hopelessness that’s rooted itself deep inside me. Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes of riding a roller coaster that refuses to stop.
My eyes well up as I tuck the letter under the corner of the welcome mat your mom bought you. Then I run back to the car and Nat turns the stereo up full blast: Taylor Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together.”
“I say this calls for some Pepsi Freezes,” Lys says.
For the rest of the day I feel light as air. I’m single, I keep thinking to myself, over and over. I’m free.
I meant it in my letter when I said I wouldn’t get with Gideon, but a part of me wants to run into his arms and stay there for a good long while. It might be too much to hope that he’ll forgive me for shredding his heart and then ignoring him for the past month just to protect my own. I’m so used to having that now—a boy to hide me from my problems. Except … the boys are the problems.
“Don’t let me get with Gideon,” I tell the girls. “I know I need to be on my own.”
Lys nods. “Chicks before dicks.”
I laugh. “Yeah, I kinda like the sound of that.”
Nat turns up the radio as Beyoncé’s “Sorry” comes on.
Middle fingers up, put them hands high, wave it in his face, tell ’em boy bye …
I don’t hear from you. I thought I would—endless texts or calls I’d have to ignore. But there’s nothing. I feel disappointed. Not that I wanted you to fight to get back together, but I thought our year together warranted some kind of response.
When I get home, I turn off all the lights in my room and light a few candles. The Rent soundtrack is on and I’m putting everything related to us in a box. Letters, gifts (the star necklace, the infinity bracelet). I take pictures of us off my phone. Take them out of frames. Then I lie on my back and close my eyes, dreaming myself to Paris. To Jacques or Raoul, to baguettes and café au lait and picnics along the Seine. I go to Notre Dame and the Louvre and the top of the Eiffel Tower. Then I’m in New York, in a boat in Central Park, at a late-night diner with friends. In a sound booth, calling a show on Broadway.
And only once I’m looking out over all of New York at the top of the Empire State Building, just a speck among the thousands of twinkling lights, do I fall asleep.