“AND THIS IS THE PART WHERE I EXIT THE ROOM,” Sam says, standing up.
“Good,” Paige says. “It’s about time.”
Sam gives a salute and leaves without closing the door behind him. It used to drive me crazy when he did that, and I’d always yell at him to come back and close it until he did, but this time I don’t get up and I don’t say anything.
Paige gets up and closes the door softly, then turns and smiles at me. “Oh my God, Liv. We really do have so much to talk about.”
ELEVEN
I SIT, STARING at the picture on my nightstand, not knowing what to feel besides relief at finally being alone again. Paige has gone home, we’re all in our rooms, and the house is nighttime quiet, but my mind is not. It’s spinning with everything I’ve heard in the past few hours, trying to catch up and process it all—a task that feels impossible.
After dinner, Paige had taken me through the entire history of me and Matt. She’d told me everything she could remember, and it had made me feel sad, and guilty, and somehow jealous that I didn’t have a single one of these memories for myself, while she had them all.
How he’d come new to our school in the middle of the year from Laguna Beach, with messy hair, an easy smile, and a friendly, humble air about him, which made every girl in our tiny high school automatically interested.
How I’d been interested too but hadn’t wanted to join the crowd vying for his attention, and as luck would have it, I hadn’t needed to. We’d had a class together. Math. He’d joked. I’d laughed. We’d both gotten in trouble. That class, and seeing him, were all I’d talked about that week—looks we’d exchanged, the way he’d hung back to leave so we’d walk out the door at the same time, the way he’d smiled as we parted ways for the next class, and what it had all meant.
Paige had built up the suspense before she’d told me how he’d walked up to me after school on the Friday of that first week and said: “I don’t know if you’ve got a fella, but you wanna go out tonight?”
How I thought the word fella was the most adorable thing I’d ever heard.
How I’d said yes, and he took me out on my first real date because the kids in our town usually don’t do that. We “hang out” instead. At parties, or the beach. But he’d taken me on an actual date where he picked me up, and met my parents, and brought me to Del’s Pizzeria, a little Italian place near the beach, where he fidgeted and didn’t eat a single bite because he was so nervous.
Paige told me how we’d taken a walk out on the pier after that, and sat on the top of a wooden table watching the stars come out over the ocean.
How he’d pointed out all the constellations he knew and told me the stories behind them. How the story of Queen Cassiopeia had been my favorite.
She told me how he’d dropped me off on my doorstep without so much as attempting a kiss, and I’d called Paige and told her every detail, sure that this meant he didn’t like me, and that was the end of it, and I was so sad because after that night, I really liked him.
She told me how she’d said I was wrong because she’d seen the way he looked at me when he thought no one was watching.
She gloated when she told me how she’d been right because he’d called me the next day, and that we were together every day after that, and that first kiss came just a few weeks later at Paige’s house, where a group of us were working on a project and the power went out, and we were alone in the dark for a few moments before it came back on.
How after that I’d told Paige I was already falling in love with him and how every day after that proved true, because we became that couple that just fit. The couple who were so in love you wanted to hate them, but they were so happy, you couldn’t. The first ones on the dance floor at parties or dances. The last to leave.
Ours was a perfect love story, the way Paige told it.
She wove so much detail in, so intricately, there was no way she could be making any of it up. I had to have told her these things in giddy late-night phone calls and chats where we rehashed and analyzed every little detail. And there were pictures to prove it.
Paige had gone to my computer and pulled up all my social media pages, where there was picture after picture of Matt and me together—smiling, laughing, kissing, snowboarding, on the boat, at the beach. We scrolled back through three years’ worth of my pictures and my captions, matched some of the stories up with the chalkboard wall, and all the while I’d tried to feel these memories like I could feel the ones I still have.
But I couldn’t. And sitting here, in the quiet of my room, the only thing I feel is a strange numbness. Like my emotions are trapped beneath a thin layer of something I can’t get through. Being told the story of something is not the same as experiencing it, no matter how touching or detailed it is. And now all I can think is that our perfect love story might already be over if I can’t ever remember what happened for myself. I don’t want it to be over, though, so I push the fear away. Try to repeat to myself what Paige said: that we fell in love once, and that no matter what happened the night of the accident, I’m still that girl who loved him, and he’s still that boy who loves me. And that we’ll find our way back to each other, because that’s what happens when you have such a strong connection.
I’d been convinced enough—or maybe just hopeful enough—to call him, with Paige sitting right there on the bed next to me. Matt had answered before the first ring was even finished, and when I stuttered my hello, and explained that I wanted to see him, all he could say at first was “Really?” like he couldn’t believe it, and then “Thank you, Liv.” The hitch in his voice had put a lump in my throat, and by the time we’d hung up, we’d made plans for the following afternoon. A first date with my boyfriend of two years.
The next morning, I wake up like I have each day since I’ve gotten home: I lie still, reminding myself that this is my room. As soon as I move, my body reminds me of what happened, though each day the pain is a little bit less. I’ve almost become used to the girl in the mirror, so I don’t spend as much time in front of it as I used to. But now that I understand a few of the phrases on my chalkboard wall, courtesy of Paige, I spend more time in front of it, reading them over like some secret code that will unlock it all for me.