A few days later, the sun is soaking through the walls and the daffodils are out and the birds are singing and inside my stomach it feels like horses are running, which I assume is just the biological thing that happens when your chemicals combine with someone else’s. Stuart had asked me to meet him outside on the benches after school, because apparently he lives near there, and he figured we could walk into town.
I was wearing my favorite outfit besides my debate pantsuit, a dress my mom bought for me for church two years ago, a light blue cotton thing with a V neck, and I had let my hair go without the dryer this morning so it hung loose and curly near my shoulders. I didn’t know if I looked hot, but after an imaginary conversation with Maddie, I decided I didn’t care. I remembered her looking at herself in the mirror and saying, According to whom?
I had just finished my calculus homework, and Stuart walked up right as I closed the textbook. He was wearing his usual black and sunglasses. He walked quickly.
“Sammie!” he said. “Hi!”
I stood, shoving my work into my bag. “Hey.”
When he was close enough to touch, he stopped. He took off his sunglasses, and I could tell he was looking at my dress. I followed his eyes, hoping I hadn’t spilled something on it. When we met each other’s gaze again, he seemed nervous.
“It’s been a while,” he said.
“A week,” I said.
He smiled. I smiled back.
“What do you want to do?” he asked.
“Walk somewhere?”
“Yeah.”
And then we couldn’t shut up. We walked close, arms touching sometimes, first along the footpaths, then in town, Stuart waving occasionally to people he knew. He asked questions one after the other, like a nice reporter. What schools did you face? Where did you stay? Had you been to Boston before?
When I told him about the loss (leaving out some possibly pertinent details), I could see him wince. He put his hand briefly around my shoulders and squeezed, which sent a confusing combination to my gut: a punch that would happen whenever I thought about the loss, along with a fluttering that happened whenever any part of Stuart’s body got within six inches of my body.
“That sounds terrible,” he said, and told me about how on the last night of his run of Hamlet, he forgot an entire soliloquy. “On the last night! I’d done it a thousand times!”
“I didn’t hear about that,” I said, trying to remember if I actually hadn’t.
“Yeah, because no one noticed.”
“No?” I asked.
“Nope! And even if they did, they wouldn’t have cared.”
“You just went on with the show?”
“Yep, and no one was the wiser. But I’ll remember it forever. Because I failed.”
“Yeah. I’ll remember the debate tournament forever, too.” I think, I remember adding silently.
Stuart and I moved out of the way for two Dartmouth students skateboarding down the sidewalk. “Maybe we depend too much on other people for what we think of as success,” Stuart offered. “Like, maybe we share too much. Maybe that’s why good things lose their good feeling because we give it all away.”
“As in, success can’t just be when people notice you.”
“Right. That’s the funny thing about caring about stuff as much as we do,” he said. “We have to get used to the idea that no one cares as much as us, because guess what, they don’t. Succeed, fail, whatever, no one is going to give you a pat on the back for spending all hours of the day studying, or researching, or giving up everything to write. So we’ve got to just do it for ourselves.”
By the time his speech was over, Stuart was standing in the middle of the sidewalk. He could never seem to walk and talk at the same time, especially if he was passionate about the subject. It was cute.
Then I realized he was contradicting himself. “But you did get a pat on the back!” I said. “You’re published!”
He stopped walking again, and this time he was more serious. “But what if I hadn’t been published?”
“You…” I swallowed. “Yeah, all you would have to fall back on is whatever you liked about what you did.”
“Exactly. And I would probably be working twice as hard now,” he muttered.
“I know what you mean,” I replied. I thought of Mom and Dad, and that awful phrase, recognize your limitations. Maybe what he was saying went the other way, too. All the limitations Mom and Dad were talking about were just the limitations put on me by other people. I was going for my own goals.
We continued walking, quiet. Heavy stuff, I guess.