When I Am Through with You
Stephanie Kuehn
For Tessa, whose heart belongs to the wild
Long had I loved you; why I know not.
—Vladimir Nabokov, “Beneficence”
BEFORE
1.
I DIDN’T PICK Rose, by the way, if that’s what you’re wondering. I didn’t choose anything about her. No doubt that says more about me than it does about her, but she was the one who approached me at the school theater that morning, sometime in the early fall of our sophomore year. I used to study every day before classes in the theater lobby, on that dusty stone floor amid the mottled mix of shadow and sun falling through the plate-glass windows.
She knew I sat there, I guess. She knew a lot of things about me before we even met. In fact, the first words she ever spoke to me were, “Where were you yesterday?”
I’d looked up, startled, from the messy stack of papers surrounding me, to see a girl with bright eyes and brown skin and very short hair staring back at me. “I was sick,” I told her and not all that nicely, if we’re being honest. Something in her tone felt like an accusation. Like I’d done her wrong by not meeting her expectations.
“And now you’re not sick?” she asked, and she bounced on her feet a bit. She was a small girl, I realized, all bones and empty space.
I scowled at her question. “Why do you care?”
“I care, because you’re the only one who’s ever here this early, and you’ve missed four days this semester already. When you’re gone, I’m alone. Who knows what might happen?”
Do you see how that might sound? How I might interpret her words to mean she relied on my presence to keep her safe?
“I get migraines,” I told her, which was true, but not the only truth.
At this the girl shrugged. She flopped beside me and chewed her nails, watching while I did my homework. I was frantic, really. Forty minutes to first period and my essay on Lord of the Flies remained unfinished. I was attempting to say something pithy about anarchy and fascism really being two sides of the same coin—both because I believed I was clever and because I believed my cleverness made me who I was.
“I’m Rose,” she said after a moment.
“I know.” I didn’t bother looking up this time. Brash, pixie-like Rosemarie Augustine was the new girl, relatively speaking. Her parents were the ones who’d taken over the historic Eel River Inn, and the whole Augustine family had moved up to Teyber from San Francisco three months prior. In our sleepy, dead-end Humboldt County town with a population of fewer than 2,500, it would’ve been hard not to know who she was, even if we hadn’t yet been formally introduced.
“Aren’t you going to tell me your name?” she asked. “It’s Ben Gibson, I know, but the rules of proper discourse require you to tell me.”
“I’m Ben Gibson,” I told her.
“You’re a sophomore like me, right? And your birthday is in April and you live with your mother.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you have a girlfriend, Ben?”
I still didn’t look up. “I have homework to do.”
“This book’s shit, you know.” She reached into my lap to tap the cover of my school-loaned paperback—it was the one with the drawing of a crown of leaves tied to a boy I supposed was Ralph but longed to believe was Jack. “It doesn’t say anything about humanity. All it does is give boys an excuse to be assholes when it suits them.”
“Okay,” I said because I liked the book. I liked to imagine what it would be like to be trapped on that island, far from home, desperate and competing for survival—although I knew I’d never have the charisma or strength to lead anyone anywhere, not even into darkness. Besides, if boys really were assholes when it suited them, didn’t that mean the book was right?
“Do you have a girlfriend?” Rose asked again.
“No,” I said.
“Well, now you do.”
—
So that’s how we met. And while I wasn’t sure whether to take her seriously, I figured if Rose wanted me to be her boyfriend, then that’s what I would be. Fighting the force of other people’s wills might be something I fantasized about, but it wasn’t anything I ever did in real life. What would be the point? It wasn’t until I found Rose leaning against my locker after school that I realized just how serious she was.
“Take me somewhere,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because that’s what boyfriends do.”
True as that might’ve been, I couldn’t imagine where I might take her. I’d never been a boyfriend. Plus, my house wasn’t an option.
I hedged. “Well, where do you want to go?”
“No,” she said firmly. “You decide.”
“But I don’t like deciding.”
“You don’t like it or you’re not good at it?”
“Both.”
“Fine.” She grabbed my hand. Yanked me through the crowded hallway in a way that was less pixie and more bull shark. “I’ll choose. But let’s get out of here. This place is making me sick.”
—
I’m not sure what else to say about Rose. If you know me at all, then I doubt that’s surprising. I suppose I could tell you more about how we got to know each other. How she took me to the inn that afternoon, where we sat outside in the shade of the redwood trees, and I told her how much I liked her shoes—they were made of this bright camel-brown leather and were shinier than anything I’d ever seen. Rose smiled when I said this, pleasing me that I’d pleased her. Plus, she was pretty like her shoes—shiny and rare and right in front of me; I was entranced, watching feverishly as her lips moved and her legs crossed while she rambled on about life with her French-Peruvian parents and dour-faced twin brother, who, she hinted, in a provocative voice, had serious issues of some mysterious nature.
I could tell you how she pined daily for the city she’d left behind. The people. The music. The food. The culture. Being able to see a first-run movie every now and then. Owning the inn might’ve been her parents’ dream, but Rose thought for sure she was going to leave this place someday. The town of Teyber was just a way station on her march to Somewhere, and I supposed I was, too. Rose had plans for college. Graduate school. To be special. Be the best. That’s one way we were different. From my vantage point, there was no hope for escape; I’d reached my zenith, a dim, low-slung, fatherless arc, and had long stopped believing in more.