are we still friends? Y/N, I typed quickly as we made our way into the theater. It was an infantile tactic, but I was done playing the responsible one.
The next morning, I got my answer: A single thumbs-up emoji. No explanation, no apology, no acknowledgment of all the other messages. A thumbs. Fucking. Up.
good to know, I wrote, and then deleted the thread—which had been a one-sided parade of blue bubbles, anyway.
That was Sunday, one week to the day after I’d woken up after my date with you, tingling with excitement, feeling like the sun was rising over the earth from inside my body. In just a week, I’d gained my first real boyfriend and lost my first real friend.
Life doesn’t happen in montage, but sometimes it feels that way. A bud can blossom overnight; a fracture can break just as fast. I don’t believe anything happens for a reason anymore, but I have learned one thing about fate:
It’s got a hair trigger.
Act Four
Ethan
Chapter Twenty-Three
April 30
13 days left
THE MOST PATHETIC THING, the thing that makes me cringe now, is how hard I tried. And the biggest punch line is that I didn’t try hard at anything until I met you.
My parents never expected much—apparently my conception itself was such a miracle that just the fact of my being was enough for them—and in elementary and middle school, teachers always seemed to sense that they should call as little attention to me as possible, since I got enough shit for being so tiny and shy, with the kind of cartoon carrot-red hair that earned me nicknames like Ginger Ale, Gingerbread, and Ginger Rogers. The last one was especially insulting, since I knew there was no way those thick-necked third-grade mouth-breathers even knew who she was, but I also knew that admitting I watched old MGM musicals with my geriatric dad would only add to the ridicule, so I kept my mouth shut and my head down, writing revenge scenes in the back pages of my notebooks. I always liked making up dialogue; it came naturally to me, telling people what to say, controlling the words. Bending it to my whims.
But you were impossible to direct off-stage. The whole time in Key West, I kept trying to come up with something that would make you do what I wanted you to do in real life, i.e., kissing me more than once every six weeks; not acting like everything about me annoyed the living shit out of you. While my parents sipped their frozen cocktails at the bar, I composed saccharine sonnets about the sunsets, and how they reminded me of your eyes. At poolside bingo, I used the resort’s Wi-Fi to look up Spanish endearments on my phone. I bought one of those grains of rice with your name on it. During my cousin Candy’s rehearsal dinner, I got drunk and poured my heart out with my thumbs, typing a string of texts under the tablecloth that thankfully didn’t send because of Verizon’s piss-poor roaming. At night I lay awake imagining your unexpected change of heart in my absence, casting you in a silent movie full of loneliness and regret and lots of Holden Caulfield–esque navel-gazing at the Central Park duck pond, culminating in a string of lusty messages I’d get as soon as we touched down at JFK:
i miss you.
i’m sorry i’ve been so distant.
i’m going crazy here.
come back.
come over.
i need you.
i want you.
I replayed our sporadic, frustratingly PG-rated love scenes over and over, writing and rewriting the surrounding scenes. What had I done right in those moments to make you like me? And what had I done wrong to fuck it up?
? ? ?
I wish I could say I maintained even one iota of cool and waited to text you until I got home, but we hadn’t even taxied all the way to the terminal.
hey killer, need to catch up on what i missed while i was poolside in kw. buy u dinner?
Fucking idiot. That was my inner voice talking, the one my child psychologist had (patronizingly and not particularly creatively, I thought) called Angry Ethan, but which I called the Director. It wasn’t a multiple personality, so I wasn’t crazy or anything. I had just gone through a rough patch in middle school that had included a lot of depression and crying and what I later learned was called “passive ideation,” like fantasizing about being run down by a semi truck, or shot with a stray bullet meant for someone else—the classic innocent bystander. Also, my mom had found a draft I’d written of a thoroughly mediocre, amateur-hour play called The Big Sleep, about a kid trying to plan his suicide (it was supposed to be a black comedy, because all he does is plan, he never actually does anything, get it?), and so the therapist had been called and meds had been prescribed, and it all worked out and I was fine. Except for the Director, who still excoriated me on the regular. But I had gotten used to it, and besides, he was usually right.