If He Had Been with Me (16 page)

I think I have read every book at the library. Every novel, that is. Every novel that I want to read. Or might be willing to give a try. If someone had told me that this was possible ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it. Books are unlimited.

I spin the rack with the sign “New Acquisitions” in bold letters. The air conditioning is too cool and I have goose bumps. My mother is home again. My father is at work. The Fourth of July is tomorrow.

The rack is not new; it creaks as it spins. In two days, we are going to visit a university, all of us—Mother, Aunt Angelina, Finny, and I. I have to find something to read or I will go crazy sitting next to him for four hours with his scent and his profile looking out the window. Perhaps I already am crazy. Jamie says so all the time, and he only knows half of it.

I reach out and take a book that I’ve already looked at twice. Maybe there is something here, something that I can hold on to, that can take me away for a little while.

I had another appointment with Dr. Singh yesterday. He nodded at everything I said and refilled my prescription. I think of my fantasy home where the furniture—tables, chairs, and bed frames—are all piles of books. I wonder if he would nod thoughtfully at that too. Perhaps he would ask me what books mean to me. I would tell him that it means living another life; that I am in love with both my lost best friend and my boyfriend and I need to believe in another life. He would write something down after that.

On the ride back from his office, I asked my mother if she ever thought I would need to go to the hospital, and she started crying. She didn’t pull over or even slow down. She just stared down the road and cried.

“Sorry,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She wasn’t apologizing for crying, but for something bigger, something she had given to me, done to me, withheld from me.

“It’s okay,” I said. It wasn’t her fault.

At the bottom of the rack is a small collection of Japanese haiku. Poetry collections might be good. Poems can be read over again and studied.

Jamie comes up behind me. His chest brushes my back.

“Are you done yet?” he asks.

“No,” I say.

“Okay,” he says, and I can feel my love for him, a small warm place wedged between my stomach and lungs; it flutters and settles again.

“Soon though,” I say. I haven’t turned to look at him yet.

“We have time,” he says. We’re going to a movie. We’ll eat hamburgers in the mall’s food court and Jamie will make fun of me for the way I eat my fries.

Jamie is going to apply to different schools from me. He isn’t even considering the school we’re going to the day after tomorrow. This school is the only one I can afford that has a creative writing program. Jamie has faith that it doesn’t matter at all; he’ll marry me as soon as college is over. We’ve picked out a house a few blocks from mine. It has a yellow front door; that’s why I like it. He likes it because I like it.

I pick up
The
Bell
Jar
. I’ve been too afraid to read it, and partly too annoyed by the cliché to overcome that fear.

“I’m done,” I say.

“Cool,” Jamie says. I turn around. He’s smiling at me. His dark hair is hanging in his blue eyes. I remember seeing him on the steps the first time, how I stared at him as if I couldn’t believe that his face could exist.

“What?” I say.

“You’re pretty today,” he says.

“I wish you would consider going to Springfield,” I say.

“We’ll make it,” Jamie says. “I’ll call you every night before I go to sleep.”

“I’ll miss you,” I say.

“Good, then you won’t leave me for a poet.”

Outside, the hot air surrounds us like a membrane, so thick it seems palpable. My goose bumps vanish.

“And you know, you don’t have to go there,” Jamie says.

“No, I have to,” I say. Jamie still wants me to teach. He wants me to at least get a minor in education. He does not say anything. The car is stifling inside, and Jamie rolls down the windows before starting the engine. Jamie can’t understand my need to major in writing. Or even my need to write. Acceptance is what he has given me, and I know I’m lucky to have that. And I think that’s enough.

There was a moment, after the campus tour, when Finny and I were alone, standing by the fountain. The sun was bleaching everything around us a painful, bright white. When the wind blew, the spray of the fountain cooled us, so we stayed where we were, waiting for The Mothers to stop taking pictures and head back to the hotel. I was looking around at everything, anything that wasn’t him, when he spoke.

“So what do you think?” he said. I shrugged.

“I like it, but I’m not sure if I would be happy here.”

“You would be,” he said. I looked up at him. He was looking at me.

“Why?” I said. He shrugged.

“There are lots of trees,” he said.

***

We’re heading home now. Finny is driving. It surprised me—though it shouldn’t have—when Aunt Angelina shook the keys and asked him if he wanted to take a turn. She offered me the front seat too, so I could stretch my legs out. In the backseat, The Mothers are feeling sentimental. They want to talk about the Christmas the power went out or Finny’s fifth-grade soccer team or the poem about dead fairies I wrote when I was ten.

“Do you guys remember your first day of school?” my mother says.

“No,” I say.

“I do,” Finny says.

“You ran off without Finny,” Aunt Angelina says. “He was still clinging to my skirts in the door and you shot across the kindergarten to the monkey bars.”

“And then you hung upside down and scared me to death,” my mother says.

I don’t just
not
remember it; I don’t
believe
it either. I was terrified of being away from Finny and he was at home wherever we went.

“You guys must have that backward,” I say.

“You were wearing a skirt and everyone could see your underwear,” Mom says.

“You were always the brave one,” Aunt Angelina says.

“It was you,” Finny says. His eyes don’t leave the road. He does not see me glance over.

I don’t remember always being the brave one. I remember being afraid that he would leave me someday. I never would have left him.

***

“What about you?” I had asked him. We were sitting on the edge of the fountain now. The Mothers were still wandering with the camera. I watched them as they walked this way and that.

“I like it too,” he said.

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he said, “and it’s not too far from home.” He paused then, and I looked back up at him. He wasn’t looking at me. “I think maybe I’ll go to New York for med school though.” Finny in New York instead of me. By then, I’ll be married to Jamie and be back in Ferguson. It’s funny how things don’t turn out the way you thought they would.

“Will you wear black turtlenecks and drink coffee for me?” I said.

“I don’t like coffee,” he says. I laugh.

“You know what? Me neither,” I said. We both laughed. The Mothers took a picture of us but we didn’t know. They were far away and we are small, sitting together on the corner of the fountain. I’m looking at the ground; he is looking at me. We look as if we sit there every day, together.

On the way home, I look out the window and watch the trees fly by like road markers telling us how far we have come from where we were.

On August 8th, nothing happens.

Lightning does not strike the Earth. No old woman shows up at the door with a warning. Finny doesn’t see a black dog staring at him as he gets out of his red car. No one says anything prophetic or ironic. I do not awake in darkness to hear the clock strike thirteen.

Did Finny feel something? Was there something nameless that shifted within him? Did that last year feel to him like late afternoon, the sunlight creeping across the floorboards of his room, slowly fading until there is but a thin veil of gray between day and night?

Did I feel something? Did I know?

Like all things that have become history, I now feel as if I always knew it, as if all through this story, it had been lurking in the shadows. The story underneath the story.

On the first day of school, Jamie and I drive past my old bus stop, and the freshmen look like children. A girl with black hair and combat boots shuffles her feet and glares at the ground. I wish her well.

“We’re seniors!” the girls squeal to each other. The boys mimic our squeals and roll their eyes. It’s deathly hot on The Steps to Nowhere, but we will have to sit there before class and during lunch so that all the freshmen know it’s off limits to them. We sit together before the first bell rings and talk about realizing that, in a way, this was our last summer. Next summer, we won’t be children in any sense of the word. We’re almost there, that finish line that has stood before us all our lives. We are almost adults, our lives are about to begin.

I’m in Mr. Laughegan’s creative writing class.

“I told you I’d see you in here again,” he says when I walk into his janitor’s closet classroom. He tells us to write a page on what kind of fruit or vegetable we would be. I would be a kiwi, obviously.

I also have a college credit literature class, two English classes, and no math class. It’s almost more than I can bear.

I do have gym though, a themed class called lifetime sports. It’s supposed to be sports that you’ll be able to play your whole life, like bowling or walking or something. I signed up for it because it sounded easy.

I’m not sure why Finny signed up for it. He’s good at all sports; I can’t imagine why he would want a class with so little activity. I’m already sitting on the bleachers when he comes in the gym. The teacher takes his name and he sits down in front of me. I’m not sure if he saw me.

While Ms. Scope goes over the expectations of the class, what we’ll be doing, and when we’ll do it, I look at the back of Finny’s head. His mother probably thinks he needs a haircut, but I like it when it gets a little long. At the end of her speech, Ms. Scope says we must choose a partner for the semester, someone to play shuffleboard with and keep score in pool. Everyone looks around and whispers, pairing off as quickly as possible so as not to be left behind. Finny turns around and looks me in the eye.

“You want to?” he says.

“Sure,” I say. I think about standing at the bus stop with him that first day of freshman year, too awkward to even say hello back to him. We couldn’t have been partners that year, or maybe even last year. He’s still the most popular boy in our school, and I’m still the girlfriend of the misfits’ leader, but since we’re the only seniors in the class, we can be gym partners; it won’t look like it means anything.

Ms. Scope writes down every pair and tells us we are free for the rest of the period to shoot baskets or sit on the bleachers. Everyone else gets up or climbs higher to gossip in the corners. Finny and I stay sitting. He turns to me again. I’m not allowed to wear a tiara in gym, and I feel strangely exposed to him.

“So we’re seniors,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

Angie and Preppy Dave had sex the second weekend after school started.

“Where did you do it?” Sasha asks her. It’s lunchtime and the boys are flinging themselves around in the field, punching shoulders and calling names. The concrete step is warm through my jeans. I remember sitting exactly like this and listening to Brooke tell her story.

“We were in his car,” Angie says. “We didn’t plan on it,” she tells us. “It just kinda happened.” She doesn’t look upset though; she looks beautiful. There is a flush in her pale cheeks, and her eyes are bright.

“Really?” I say. I don’t understand how sex can happen by accident. After Jamie and I have been kissing for a long time, I tell him that we should stop, because that’s what the girl is supposed to say at some point. But I’ve never said that we should stop because I thought we actually needed to. I’ve never forgotten that we’re in his car, that the moment isn’t right.

“It hurt like hell, right?” Brooke says.

“Actually,” Angie says, “I threw up.”

“Oh my God,” I say. She looks at my face and laughs.

“Was he…you know, done?” Brooke says.

“Yeah,” Angie says. “But it
was
, like, right afterward.”

“You threw up in his car?” Sasha says. Angie shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “I rolled over onto my stomach, opened the door, and threw up in the driveway.”

“Oh,” I say. I can’t think of anything to say to this, but Sasha can.

“Wait, if you weren’t planning on it, did you use anything?”

“Well, no,” Angie says. “But it was just the once, and next time we’ll get some condoms, or, I don’t know, something.”

“It only takes once,” Brooke says.

“Mmmhmm,” Sasha says. “And you guys need to sit down and
talk
about birth control options before there can be a next time.”

“Guys,” Angie says. She sighs. “Don’t ruin this for me.”

I frown again. If being in the backseat of a car and vomiting in the driveway didn’t already ruin it, I’m not sure what we could do that would. I don’t understand how Angie could be happy with such a cliché place to lose her virginity. I don’t understand why Dave didn’t come to his senses when he remembered that there was no birth control. Brooke puts her arm around Angie.

“Sorry,” she says. “We’re happy for you, really.”

“Yeah,” Sasha says.

“Good,” Angie says, “’cause I can’t stop smiling and—” She sighs again. “I love him so much that every time I think of him holding me afterward, I just want to die.”

I would want to die too if I was Angie, but for different reasons. I don’t understand how something like this happens.

On the way home from school, I tell Jamie Angie’s story. He listens quietly and stares straight at the road.

“I mean, I guess I’m happy for her if she’s happy,” I say. “But doesn’t that sound horrible?”

“I dunno,” Jamie says. “I think it’d be cute if you threw up.”

“What?” Jamie looks calm.

He shrugs and smiles. “I’d hold your hair back for you and take care of you.”

“I won’t throw up,” I say.

“And you won’t do it in a car. I know, don’t worry.” Jamie pulls into my driveway.

“Well, not the first time,” I say.

“We’ll get a hotel room,” Jamie says. He glances over at me now. “A really nice one. And we’ll dress up and have an expensive meal first.”

“That sounds—” I pause “—nice.” I unbuckle my seat belt and turn toward him. Jamie kisses me, and I realize that, during that dinner, he will give me a charm for my bracelet, something subtle that only he and I will understand. It’s romantic, and I wish I hadn’t already thought of it so that it could be a surprise. I try my hardest to forget.