“No, Rick. He was really, really upset. I… I almost changed my mind.”
She starts really crying, shaking and sobbing. I’ve never heard her cry like this, not even when her dad left. I hold her tightly and try to keep from crying myself. It’s not easy. If Sarah were trapped on railroad tracks, I’d break all my fingers for her too.
She slips down to lie across my lap and words start pouring out of her along with the tears. “And… and… and it made me think that if Rick felt that bad breaking up, when he didn’t even really love me, how did poor Scott feel? But I couldn’t tell you that… I couldn’t… because I’m on your side…”
I feel strangely hollow except for how much Sarah means to me, how much I depend on her, and in a way that makes me feel good, not weak or dependent or pathetic. I reach out and feel her hair lying across her face. I tuck it behind her ear.
“I was so happy for you back then,” she says between sobs. “I wasn’t even jealous. I sometimes wondered why I wasn’t but I wasn’t. Maybe if I wanted Scott but he was yours and I was happy for you and I just hoped I’d find someone like that someday. I even… I even hoped my dad would help me like yours did… but… but…”
Sarah stops talking and struggles to breathe. I hold her and try to think about how much I love her and not about how much her dad doesn’t.
I wish these weren’t all one-way conversations. I need someone I trust to tell me if I’m going crazy. Thank God I have Sarah back, but everything else is quicksand. Jesus, Dad, I’m bobbing, even now with the weight of Sarah on my lap I still can’t tell exactly which direction is up. I never thought there was anything psychological to that but the more I lose my grip on what’s going on around me the more I can’t stay steady.
Scott said seeing me cry in that classroom back then was like waking from a dream, wondering how he could have ever believed what he had before. That’s how I feel now. He was my best friend, closer than Sarah, as impossible as that seems, maybe because of that extra spark we had… How could I have thought this one stupid thing was more true than everything else? How could I have been so goddamn paranoid I immediately thought the worst and never questioned it again?
They weren’t standing all around us; they were hiding in cabinets and he didn’t know. He didn’t know…
He must have told me, through the bathroom door, or later when he tried to talk past the Sarah-Faith blockade. I don’t remember but he must have and I wouldn’t listen. He says now he doesn’t think it matters but it does because he’s right; I didn’t care if anyone saw us. It never occurred to me that people might look in the window—it’s easy for me to forget about things like windows—I never thought we were hiding. It’s just obnoxious to do in the middle of the cafeteria.
It’s so clear now I can’t even remember what it was like to not see it. When someone tricks you, like taping a sign on your back or sneaking up behind you to dump water on you, or tricking you into a room to kiss in front of a secret audience… all those things hurt because they mean the people doing it don’t give a shit about you. Not just indifferent, but cruel.
But when I ran away crying, he didn’t waste a single word on them. He ran out the door after me, trying to explain that he wasn’t one of them. Not an asshole. He loved me, he cared about me, and two and a half years later he’s ready to pummel those same guys just for playing keep-away with my phone, enough that Jason needed to get between them.
I’ve always been so worried that everything around me is just one big setup… In my head Scott became an asshole like the rest of them and I shut him out until you told him to leave me alone.
I was grateful for that, but you knew him, too… Did you know I was overreacting? That my freak-out would end and then you’d help me understand that the problem wasn’t just that Scott was only thirteen but that I was only thirteen too? And when I grew up I’d see people can’t be defined by just one thing? Were you waiting for the right time, but months turned to years and then…? If you were really here now, would we be having this conversation for real, now that I’m ready?
Thank God for Sarah. For asking me to imagine how Scott felt. I wish I had asked it myself… that I were a better person…
I want to think about it now, about what it meant to him to lose not just me but also his friends who turned out to be assholes, plus Sarah and Faith when they chose my side… but it’s too much to hold all at once. And if that’s not bad enough, this isn’t the person I’ve become, it’s apparently the person I’ve always been.
I don’t know how long it takes, maybe half an hour, before Sarah quiets, sprawled across my lap, her breathing steady. She takes a deep breath, holds it, and lets it go.
“Wow,” she says.