If He Had Been with Me (10 page)

“Why?” he asks. “You’re good.”

“You haven’t read anything I’ve written,” I say. I look back up at him again. He’s acting odd. I can’t remember the last time he teased me or smiled at me like that.

“I read the story you wrote in sixth grade,” he says. “That was good.”

“That was sixth grade.”

Finny shrugs to show me how little that detail matters.

“You should be a writer,” he says. “You’ll find a way to make it.”

“It would be a lot to ask Jamie to support me so I could write,” I say. “I mean we’ll have kids and a house and stuff.” Finny frowns. The television has all but been forgotten. I don’t even know what is on the screen anymore.

“You think you’re going to marry him?” he says. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me now, his eyes narrowed like in the kitchen. I turn my face down again and look at the couch.

“We want to,” I say. “I mean, we know we’re young, but we can’t imagine ever breaking up.” There is a silence after I speak that startles me as much as if he had shouted something in return. I look back up at him. He’s staring at me. He must think I’m crazy for saying I’m going to marry my high school boyfriend. I feel a flush of heat spread across my cheeks.

“You really love him like that?” he says. I nod. “Huh.” He looks back at the TV but keeps talking. “So what will you do? I mean, if you’re not writing?”

“I thought about teaching,” I say. My voice picks up hopefully on the last word. I realize I want his approval. He frowns again but does not look at me.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” he says.

“Why not?” I say too quickly. “I could teach English like Mr. Laughegan.” Finny is shaking his head.

“Teaching is too—” His frown deepens. “Teaching is too
normal
for you, Autumn,” he says. I shrug and look back at the TV too. When he speaks again, it is so quiet I’m not sure at first if he meant for me to hear it.

“Doesn’t sound like you at all,” he mumbles. “Teaching, a house, kids. What happened to the turtlenecks and coffee?”

“That was a dream,” I say. “I have to accept reality.”

Accept
when
things
are
as
good
as
they’re ever going to get
, I mentally add but do not say. It doesn’t matter though. We watch the television without changing the channel or speaking. When he and his mother leave with Kevin an hour later, Finny only says a quick bye over his shoulder. I don’t look up to watch him go.

***

Later in my room, I remember what I wouldn’t want Finny to see in my sock drawer—the old framed photo of us that I hid in the top drawer last year before Jamie came over for the first time. I buried it at the bottom of the drawer and I’ve hardly seen it since that day. Now it’s sitting on top of the dresser, centered as if on display. I look at it hesitantly. My eyes linger over our easy smiles, our arms slung over each other’s shoulders.

I take the photo and bury it again. I close the drawer with both hands. I can’t afford to have him as a friend.

Of course, my black eye causes a stir at school on Monday. I compromise with Jamie by telling the story the way I accidentally told it in the kitchen, allowing everyone to have the wrong impression for half a second. When Alex is there for the explanation, he gives a detailed third-person narration of the accident; it almost sounds poetic the way he describes Jamie and I crashing.

“…and then as they were twirling and twisting through the air, Jamie’s head snapped back just as Autumn was beginning to descend, and they collided with a sound almost like rocks crashing together.” He holds his hands apart and smashes them together to demonstrate, and his audience laughs in appreciation.

By the time the bruise is beginning to fade, everyone has heard the story and no one is asking about it anymore. Now they want to tell me how much better it looks. I have a running update by the hour, yet each classmate thinks that they are the first person to tell me this, just as they all asked me on Tuesday if I picked out the dark purple tiara to match my bruise. I smile and say thanks, but by Friday I am sick of talking about my stupid black eye.

It’s on Friday that I run into Sylvie in the restroom.

I’m washing my hands when I hear a stall door open behind me. I instinctively look up, and I see her standing behind me in the mirror’s reflection. I keep my face blank and look down at my hands as I rinse them. It’s between classes; we are the only two in here.

“Hi, Autumn,” she says. I look up at her reflection warily. I’m not sure what she could want from me; Finny is at school today.

“Hi,” I say. She smiles at me. I’m too surprised to return the courtesy.

“Your eye looks a lot better,” she says.

“Yeah, thanks,” I say. I’m confused and worried this is going to be some kind of trap. In the back of my mind, I wonder if this is how she felt when I spoke to her on the Fourth of July, except back then no one was stealing tables or trying to spread pregnancy rumors. Or hurting Finny. I turn away and pull a sheet of paper towels from the roll. She sighs behind me.

“Look,” she says, “I’m trying to be friendly.” My hands pause their drying for a second.

“Oh,” I say. Even though at school her friends are pretty much publicly recognized as our enemies, the social conventions of the larger world stop me from saying what I really want to say:
Why?

She seems to understand my thoughts anyway.

“Finn asked me to,” she says.

“Okay,” I say. Once again my thoughts do not match my reply; again, I want to ask her why. This time she does not answer my question.

“So…” she says. She wants me to say something. Our eyes meet in the mirror again.

“We can be friendly,” I say.
If
that’s what Finny wants
, I think.

Sylvie smiles. I turn one corner of my mouth up for her. I’m too confused to manage much more. I leave as she turns on the faucet to wash her hands. Neither of us say good-bye.

***

At lunch, as we hunch protectively around our round table, I tell Jamie and everybody about Sylvie in the bathroom. We try to guess what this could mean, but they are as stumped as I am. Of course, since I didn’t tell them that Finn had asked her to be nice to me, it’s probably my fault that no one guessed the answer. Maybe if I had told them the whole truth,
they
would have realized what Sylvie being nice to me meant. I didn’t though, and so it wasn’t until I walked into Mr. Laughegan’s class that it all made sense.

Finny and Sylvie are back together. She’s sitting on his desk facing him, their fingers twined together as they talk. I walk to Mr. Laughegan’s desk and sit down. He’s reading more Dickens,
Dombey
and
Son.
I pick up the book and pretend to read.

Trying to be friendly, she said. That’s the same word he used when I gave him her card on Valentine’s Day; he asked if she had been friendly to me.

I’m surprised when my heart leaps as I realize that he doesn’t like his girlfriend laughing at me or spreading rumors about me.

Sylvie laughs and I can’t help looking at them from the corner of my eye. She looks happy, and I can’t deny that he does too.

And then she kisses him. And I start reading.

On the last day of school, I worry that I will cry when I say good-bye to Mr. Laughegan. I know that if I do, no one, not my friends or Finny’s, will ever let me forget it.

“I’ll see you the year after next in my writing class,” Mr. Laughegan says to me.

“Hopefully,” I say. “I know there is a lot of competition to get in.”

“You’ll be in,” he says quickly. I take it as a promise.

***

The first day of summer, I wake up and stretch in bed, feeling all my muscles and joints. It’s early still, just after seven, but the sun is bright in my window. I sit up and rub my eyes. A story idea has been bouncing around in my head for the past few days; suddenly it feels like the perfect moment to write. I’m not sure where the story begins, but I know what I want to happen.

Like most of my stories, it will end tragically.

I sit down at my desk without eating or brushing my teeth. I hesitate for a moment, then type my first sentence.

The
day
Edward
died, I dropped a vase of tulips while walking up the stairs.

I begin to describe the tulips—red—and the white porcelain vase smashed against the dark wood of the staircase. I’m not sure what the significance of the tulips is—yet. It will come to me.

By ten o’clock, I have a rough draft. Five pages. I’m pleased with myself. The narrator was the accidental murderess; her guilt has left her reeling in near madness, and I close on the first image: the blood red flowers, the broken innocence of the white vase.

***

My mother is reading the newspaper in the kitchen when I skip downstairs. She looks up at me over the rim of the paper.

“In a good mood?” she says.

I nod. “It’s the first day of summer and I’ve already killed someone off,” I say.

“In a story?”

“Mmmhmm.”

“Ah.” She goes back to reading. The phone rings and I pick it up.

“Autumn?” Aunt Angelina’s voice says after I say hello.

“Hey, I’ll get Mom,” I say. My mother looks up.

“No, actually, Autumn, I wanted you.”

“Oh.” My immediate thought is that something has happened to Finny.

“I’m going to tear down my classroom today and my good-for-nothing son canceled on me. Do you think you can help me? I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Oh, sure,” I say. It’s been a long time since I’ve been inside our elementary school. I’m curious, and spending time with Aunt Angelina can be fun.

“Really? Can you be over in fifteen minutes?”

“Easy,” I say. She thanks me and reiterates the promise of making it worth my while.

“What was that?” my mother asks.

“Aunt Angelina needs someone to help her tear down her classroom,” I say.

“Where’s Finny?”

I shrug. It is unlike Finny to cancel on his mother, but I felt odd asking. I have a fear of someone suspecting how often I wonder about Finny. I always try not to show too much interest, just in case.

***

Finny opens the back door when I knock. His face is blank; he doesn’t look startled to see me, and even though I’m sure that I do look surprised, he does not react to my face.

“Oh. Hi,” I say. “I thought you were gone.”

“I’m about to be,” he says. His voice is as sterile as his face. Aunt Angelina comes in the room with a bundle of portfolio books and canvas bags.

“How long will you be?” she says.

“I don’t know,” Finny says. “I’ll come by if I can. Sorry.”

“It’s fine, kiddo, get going.”

“Bye,” Finny says. He sidesteps me and leaves out the back door. His step is quick on the stairs. I look up at Aunt Angelina. I wasn’t intending to ask, but it must be plain on my face. She knows I know Finny well enough to see when something is wrong.

“He didn’t say,” she says, “but it’s something with Sylvie.”

“Oh,” I say. I hope that my face and voice give no more away. Aunt Angelina hands me some of her things and we go outside. I glance at the spot where Finny parks in the driveway, even though I know he won’t be there. We don’t talk as we load up the trunk and pull out of the driveway. It’s a short ride to the school; less than a minute later, we are only a few blocks away.

“So Finny tells me you’re thinking of teaching,” Aunt Angelina says to me. I shrug and then nod.

“Gotta do something practical,” I say. “I think it could be fun.”

“It is,” she says. She pauses as she makes a left-hand turn down the side street next to the school. “But it takes a lot of dedication.” I don’t say anything. She parks the car and turns off the engine. “You have time to decide though,” she says.

We unload the car and walk through the side door of the school where Finny and I grew up. It’s an old building from the 1920s, dark brick, high ceilings, long, narrow windows on every wall. Whenever I see or hear the word “school,” this building is the picture that comes to my mind.

As I cross the threshold, I think how I don’t have as much time to decide as I once did. When I was a student here, anything in the world seemed possible. It hadn’t seemed like a dream to move far away and write books; it had seemed like a plan. At ten, I hadn’t thought wanting to be a writer was impractical; wanting to be a pirate princess was impractical and I had put that dream aside.

But I’m older now, and I realize that a career of nothing but writing stories all day is as likely as marrying my dream pirate prince. I’ve done the research; getting published is nearly impossible, and of those few who make it, only a fraction can live off their work. If it was just about me, I could wait tables in the day and write all night and be happy.

But there is Jamie now, and he wants to buy a house and raise children with me. He says I’m perfect. He says I’m all he wants. I can’t disappoint him.

Aunt Angelina unlocks the door to her classroom and we step inside. I realize now why she wanted me and not my mother. The room is even more disorganized and lively than Aunt Angelina’s home. There is a half-finished mural on the wall that was a quarter-finished when we graduated four years ago. Prints from both famous and obscure artists line every other wall and cover the entire ceiling. The window ledges are lined with sculptures and various three-dimensional arts. On her desk is an asymmetrically shaped vase filled with flowers made of newspaper. I know from asking years ago that the newspaper is from the day Finny was born. On the wall behind her desk is the only framed art—a drawing we did together in third grade of a landscape littered with unicorns, soccer balls, explosions, and puppies.

The soccer balls and explosions are much better drawn than the unicorns or puppies; Finny was always better at drawing than me. I loved art class anyway though. Every year, Aunt Angelina made her seating chart so that we sat together at the smallest table in the corner that was only big enough for two. Most of our other teachers thought Finny and I were too focused on each other; they wanted us to make other friends and often sat us on opposite sides of the room. It never worked.

“If you could start wrapping up the sculptures at the window,” Aunt Angelina says, “I need to clean out this desk.” She sighs and eyes the mounds of paper spilling over the surface. We’ll be here awhile.

At the window, I can see the hill I used to sit on and read while Finny played kickball or soccer with the boys. I didn’t mind that he played with them for that half hour; I always wanted to read at recess, and we would be together after school anyway.

Sometimes I put down my book and watched him play, and I would try to send mental messages to him.
Look
up
now
, I would think, or,
That
was
a
good
kick
. I was convinced that he could hear, because sometimes he would look up at me watching him and smile. I never mentioned our secret telepathic conversations though. I knew that if we spoke about it out loud the magic would stop working.

Aunt Angelina turns on the radio. I wrap the sculptures up in tissue paper and fill the canvas bags with them. Aunt Angelina hums along with the music. I think about the story I started this morning. I’m proud of it. I’ll print it off tonight and give it to Jamie tomorrow.

Only the top of the desk is cleared off by the time I’m done; the drawers are all open and files are spilling out. Without being asked, I begin to take the posters down off the wall, making a blue ball of sticky-tack that gets larger and larger as the minutes pass. I go one wall at a time, standing on a chair when they get too high for me. Aunt Angelina sighs just as I am almost done.

“Autumn,” she says, “I would have been here all day. Thank you.”

“No problem,” I say. “It’s kind of fun being here.”

“You should go see Mrs. Morgansen before we go. She still asks about you.”

“Maybe,” I say. I feel shy about going to see my favorite teacher. I’m not sure where the feeling comes from. I take the last poster off the wall and slide it into the portfolio book. The ball of sticky-tack is nearly as big as my fist now. I throw it toward the ground, but instead of bouncing, it sticks to the linoleum with a thud.

“Darn,” I mumble. I bend to pick it up and set in on the nearest table.

“Okay,” Aunt Angelina says. She drops a stack of books and papers onto the top of the desk. Her trashcan is over flowing. “If you can get the posters off the ceiling, I’ll clean out the cupboards and we can start loading up the car.”

“Cool,” I say. I jump up on one of the tables and start plucking tacks out of the ceiling. A familiar song comes on the oldies station and we both start singing. I start to sway to the music and I grin.

“I always wanted to do this,” I say.

“Do what?” Aunt Angelina says.

“Dance on these tables. Every time I was in here I imagined it.”

She smiles and reaches over to turn up the music. We start to sing again, and the next song is another favorite. I dance around the table with my arms above my head as I pluck each poster from its place. I even come up with a special shimmy-move for when I need to bend down to set the posters on the table.

It isn’t until the radio switches to a slow song that I hear his soft laugh behind me.

“Ah, there’s my long-lost son,” Aunt Angelina says.

“Sorry I’m late.” Finny looks at us from the doorway, his hands in his pockets, his head cocked to the side, and the corners of his mouth twitching upward. I want to glare at him for laughing at me, but I’m too relieved that he looks happy again.

“I could hear you guys all the way down the hall,” he says.

“Autumn is fulfilling a childhood dream,” Aunt Angelina says.

“Yeah, I remember,” Finny says. He crosses the threshold and looks from my face to hers. “What can I do?” he says.

“Put that ridiculous height of yours to use and take down the posters Autumn can’t reach from the tables,” she says. Finny is well over six feet now. Soccer and track kept him from becoming scrawny as he stretched out over the winter; he’s as slender and lightly muscled as before. Aunt Angelina likes to complain about how much he eats.

My dancing is done now. The three of us work quietly as the radio continues to blare. Even with his height, Finny needs a chair to reach the high ceiling. I move to another table and he gets all the posters in between. With two of us, we finish before her again.

“Done,” Finny says. He drags the chair across the floor and back to its place. I stay standing on the table, not quite willing to give up the dream yet.

“Go say hi to Mrs. Morgansen,” Aunt Angelina says. “I saw her car pull up a few minutes ago.”

“Okay,” Finny says. He looks over at me. I shrug an assent and jump off the table flat-footed. My sneakers smack against the linoleum loudly.

We walk side by side out into the hall. The radio fades behind us as we walk, and when we reach the stairs, the building suddenly is eerily quiet; all my memories of this place are much louder. The wooden banister is smooth and familiar beneath my hand; I dreamed of dancing on the art tables and sliding down these banisters and climbing to the tops of the bookshelves in the library. I loved it here, so much that I didn’t even realize I loved it. Even though I looked forward to summer, I cried every last day of school. I didn’t cry yesterday.

And of course the other kids thought I was weird for liking school, but that was just another quirk among many that Finny had to defend me for.

I cautiously look over at him, wondering what he’s thinking, if his memories are as happy as mine. By all means, I should have felt like an outcast here, a pariah, and Finny should have been the popular boy he is now. I wasn’t, because of him, and he wasn’t, because of me.

Finny looks to the side and catches me staring. I face forward again. He doesn’t say anything.

At the door of Mrs. Morgansen’s room, he knocks and smiles softly into the window. Through the wood, I hear a startled gasp. I step to the side as Finny opens the door.

“Phineas!” I hear her familiar voice cry before I see her. “I hoped that I would see you today.”

“Of course,” Finny says. Her pleasure causes the faintest of blushes to spread across his cheeks. Our favorite teacher leans forward and hugs him to her through the threshold and I see her for the first time in years. She looks just a bit older, like she’s moving from middle-aged to the edge of elderly. Still, I instantly recognize the brooch on her blouse and the smell of her perfume. She sees me as she pulls away. I feel something sharp in me during the half second of confusion in her eyes, then her smile widens.

“And you brought
Autumn
,” she says. Her arms are quickly transferred to me, and relief washes through my body; I had feared that she would recoil from this teenaged tiara and ripped jeans me, that her affection for me would be reserved for the pretty little girl I had been.

“Come and sit,” she says. She leads us into her classroom, half torn down, half familiar. She pulls out a chair and motions for us to sit down. The desks and chairs feel just a tiny bit too small. “Now tell me what you’ve been up to,” she says. Mrs. Morgansen looks at us expectantly. Finny and I glance at each other, the same way we do when we are cornered by The Mothers.