If He Had Been with Me (2 page)

I walk toward the bus stop with my book bag slung over one shoulder. There are a few kids already there, standing loosely grouped together but not acknowledging each other. I look down at the sidewalk. My boots are spray-painted silver. My hair and fingernails are black. I stop at the corner and stand to the side. We are all quiet.

Our bus stop is at the top of the big hill on Darst Road. Finny and I used to ride our bikes down this hill. I had always been frightened. Finny never was.

I look at the other kids at the corner while pretending that I am not. There are seven of us. Some of them I recognize from middle school or even elementary school; some of them I don’t.

It is my first day of high school.

I go back to looking down and study the shredded hem of my black dress. I cut the lace with fingernail clippers a week ago. My mother says I can dress however I want as long as my grades stay the same. But then, she still hasn’t figured out that I’m not going to be one of the popular girls this year.

On the last day of school, Sasha and I walked to the drugstore and spent an hour picking out dyes. She wanted me to dye my hair red because of my name. I thought that was dorky but I didn’t tell her; since our recent eviction from The Clique, Sasha has been my only girlfriend, my only friend actually.

“Hey,” somebody says. Everyone looks up. Finny is standing with us now, tall, blond, and preppy enough to be in a catalog. Everyone looks away again.

“Hey,” I hear one girl’s voice say. She is standing somewhere behind me and I cannot see her. I should have said hello back to Finny, but I’m too nervous to speak right now.

***

Last night at his house we had what The Mothers called an end-of-summer barbeque. While they were grilling, I sat on the back porch and watched Finny kick a soccer ball against the fence. I was thinking of a short story I started the day before, my first attempt at a gothic romance. I planned on a very tragic ending, and I was working out the details of my heroine’s misfortunes as I watched him play. When they sent us inside to get the paper plates, he spoke to me.

“So why did you dye your hair?” he said.

“I dunno,” I said. If someone had asked me why Finny and I weren’t friends anymore, I would have said that it was an accident. Our mothers would have said that we seemed to have grown apart in the past few years. I don’t know what Finny would have said.

In elementary school, we were accepted as an oddity. In middle school, it was weird that we were friends, and in the beginning, we had to explain ourselves to the others, but then we hardly saw each other, and we had to explain less and less.

By some strange accident, my weirdness became acceptable, and I was one of the popular girls that first semester of eighth grade. We called ourselves The Clique. Every day we ate lunch together and afterward all went to the bathroom to brush our hair. Every week we painted our nails the same color. We had secret nicknames and friendship bracelets. I wasn’t used to being admired or envied or having girlfriends, and even though Finny had always been enough for me Before, I drank it up as if I had been thirsting for it for years.

Finny joined a group of guys who were vaguely geeky but not harassed, and I usually waved to him when I saw him at school. He always waved back.

We were taking different classes. Which meant different homework. After a few weeks, we stopped studying together and I saw him even less. Being one of the popular girls took a lot of time. After school they wanted me to come over and watch movies while we did each other’s hair. On the weekends we went shopping.

When I did see Finny, we didn’t have a lot to talk about anymore. Every moment we spent in silence was like another brick in the wall going up between us.

Somehow we weren’t friends anymore.

It wasn’t a choice. Not really.

***

I’m looking at my silver boots and torn lace when the bus pulls up. Everyone steps forward, heads down. We silently file onto the bus where everyone
is
talking. Even though I had no reason to think Sasha wouldn’t be there, I am relieved when I see her sitting in the middle of the bus. She is wearing a black T-shirt and thick, dark eyeliner.

“Hey,” I say as I slide in next to her, placing my book bag on my lap.

“Hey,” she says. Since I refused to dye my hair red, she dyed hers an unnatural shade instead. We smile at each other. Our transformation is complete. Sort of.

***

I can say
exactly
why Sasha and I weren’t friends with Alexis Myers or any of those girls anymore.

I didn’t try out for cheerleading.

I had planned on it. I wanted to be a cheerleader. I wanted to be popular and date a soccer player—that what’s cool at McClure High instead of football—and everything that went along with staying in The Clique. But I couldn’t make up my own routine and perform it alone for tryouts, so that was that.

Alexis and Taylor and Victoria all made it onto the squad, but Sasha didn’t. Officially, we weren’t kicked out of The Clique, but all they talked about at lunch was cheerleading camp and the older girls on the squad who had seemed soooooo nice.

On the last day of school, Alexis and Taylor and Victoria all came to class with their hair in braids. They hadn’t told us that it was going to be a braid day. We always wore our hair in braids on the same day. At lunch when we asked them why they didn’t tell us, they just looked at each other and giggled. I figured they had finally realized the truth I had kept hidden; I was a Pretty Girl, but I wasn’t a Popular Girl. I was different. I was strange. So I decided to give up and be the Weird Girl again, and Sasha followed me.

***

On the bus, Sasha leans toward me and says, “You look cool.”

“So do you,” I say. I turn to face forward and I see a girl walk down the aisle wearing the blue and red uniform. Her blond hair swishes back and forth in a ponytail. I am still feeling the pang of rejection when I see that she is sitting down next to Finny. By the end of the month, they will be going out, and my mother will tell me that Finny met Sylvie Whitehouse on campus while he was at soccer practice and she was there for cheerleading.

“What do you think people will say?” Sasha says. I almost tell her not to be so dorky.

“I dunno,” I say.

For the first few days, Sasha and I eat lunch alone on what I start to call The Steps to Nowhere. The cement steps descend from the front courtyard down a hill to a field of grass and weeds that is used for nothing.

Alexis and the others wear their uniforms and smirk every time they see us, as if our new look is hostile to them. A new girl, Sylvie from St. John’s Catholic School, sits at their table. Nearly all of the freshmen are from Ferguson Middle, but there is a sprinkling of these new Catholic kids whose parents could not afford the higher cost of the private high schools. These kids have been with the same classmates since kindergarten and are lost and awed in the vast sea of McClure High. It is awkward the first few days as everyone tries to figure their places out. Then, slowly, everyone slides into new alliances and a pattern begins to be set that will be followed for the rest of the year, possibly for the rest of high school.

Sasha has met a girl from St. John’s who wears a crucifix and a skull on the same chain. They have gym class together and walk the track side by side for a few days before Sasha invites her to eat with us. Her name is Brooke and she brings her boyfriend Noah and her cousin Jamie with her. The next day, more people show up—so and so’s friend, someone from somebody’s class who seems cool. Soon we have a group hanging out on The Steps to Nowhere. Some leave after a few days, finding other groups; a few stay. By the end of the second week, a group of friends emerges from The Steps to Nowhere.

There are four girls and three boys in our group. Brooke and Noah are already together, and they are devoted to each other. They even look alike, brown hair and freckles, and when they laugh their eyes crinkle.

That leaves me, Sasha, and Angie for Jamie and Alex. Angie, blond and a little bit chubby, still has a crush on some guy from her old school. Alex has pretty eyes, but he is short and the goofy, silly type, still a little immature. I can see by the way she looks at him that Sasha is my competition for Jamie.

I got butterflies in my stomach the first time I saw Jamie’s face; his eyes are green and fringed with impossibly long eyelashes. Above that, his hair is dark, a little curly, and very messy. He is tall, skinny, and pale.

Jamie is animated and funny and he smirks a lot. He reminds me of Puck from
A
Midsummer
Night’s Dream
. Jamie leads the other boys into mischief that the girls sit back and watch from The Steps, giggling. They play football in the field with Brooke’s shoe, toss balls of paper inside open classroom windows, and sing songs in a style mocking the school’s a cappella group. Jamie throws his head back and laughs when his mischief turns out as planned. I watch him and think of Peter Pan telling Wendy that he just has to crow when he is pleased with himself.

Sasha and I each try to hold Jamie’s attention in our own way. Sasha teases him and displays her tomboy cuteness. I am alternately demure and flirtatious. She runs down the steps and participates in the boy’s games. I smile at his jokes and look up at him from under my eyelashes. Sasha holds her hand up for a high five. I cheer for him from the steps. It is a battle, but we never cut each other. Sasha and I know that when it is over we must still be friends.

Slowly, yet at the same time suddenly, because it happens in only a matter of days, I pull ahead of Sasha. She makes a valiant effort for a few lunches, but it becomes obvious that Jamie is now courting me. He sits next to me on the steps. He offers me the rest of his French fries. He tickles me. He smiles up at me on the steps while he and the boys are playing shoe-ball, and my stomach flutters.
Jamie.
Jamie. James.
Jamie.

One Monday afternoon on The Steps to Nowhere, Jamie takes my hand in his, as if it has long been settled that it is his hand to take whenever he pleases, and everyone acts as if this is normal. I hold his hand and look down at the concrete steps to try to stop from grinning and giving away my feelings. Inside, I feel like I am trembling; on the outside, I stay as casual as he is. Of course we’re together, of course. Of course.

That day, Alexis and the others look at me with interest when Jamie and I walk down the hall past them, then turn away as if they couldn’t care less. But they have to have noticed. He is undeniably gorgeous. Jamie is a dark-haired Adonis, a gothic prince. And he is now mine.

Jamie wants to go farther and I tell him that I’m not ready. We’ve been together since the third week of school, but it’s only early November and I’m surprised that we’re having this discussion already. A few days ago on the phone, he said that he loved me; I said I wasn’t ready to say that back, and now, lying next to him and staring at the ceiling, I’m wondering if this is why he said it.

“Okay then,” he says, and takes my hand in his.

We’re both fully clothed still, and dressed in the eccentric uniform adopted by our group. We’re not goths or hipsters, just odd. The girls dye their hair unnatural colors and the boys make an effort to look like they just rolled out of bed. We all wear boots and bite our fingernails. I know that we’re just conforming in a different way, but this is not something that I have said out loud. What binds our group together is the shared statement that we are different—and therefore somehow better—than all of the “normal” kids at school. Especially better than the popular kids.

Now that I’ve actually been to high school, I have no desire to be one of those girls with the ponytails and the pleated skirts. I am thrilled to finally be allowed to be myself, even if it is still under certain confines. With my new friends, being weird is a good thing, as long as it’s the same weird as them.

“Your house is so weird,” Jamie says.

I turn and look at him. This is the first time he has seen my house on the inside. My mom is at The Office’s Fall Festival with my father. Jamie was sick the night of my birthday party, and Mom still hasn’t convinced me to have him over for dinner.

“What do you mean?” I say.

“It’s so perfect,” he says. “Even your room.” It is not a compliment.

I look around at the lavender walls and white wicker furniture. I shrug.

“My mom decorated it,” I say, a half lie. She decorated the rest of the house and it is perfect, just like her. Everything coordinates; everything is arranged precisely so. It could be in a design magazine with my mother sitting at the kitchen table with a vase of white tulips, not a hair out of place as she pretends to read the paper. We did my room together. In the magazine, I would be in a cheerleader’s uniform. I would be smiling.

“You should get some posters or something,” Jamie says. I roll on my side and lay my head on his shoulder. I think to myself that he is handsome in that traditional tall-and-dark way. He says he wants to pierce his eyebrow and I’ve been trying to convince him not to.

“Yeah, I’ll probably do that,” I say. I really like Jamie, even if I’m not sure that I love him yet. He’s smart and quirky and he’s the leader of our group. As long as I am with him, I can never be evicted again. He rests his hand on the back of my head and twines his fingers in my hair.

“I love you, Autumn,” he says. Downstairs, the back door slams. We both sit up. “Is your mom home?” he says. I’m not supposed to be alone with Jamie in the house, especially since my parents haven’t met him. I’m still surprised that he was able to convince me to let him come over. I look at the clock. They still aren’t supposed to be home for hours. I shake my head.

“It’s probably Finny,” I say.

“Are you serious?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. I’ve told Jamie of my sordid past, of the popularity and the ponytails. I told it as a tale of escape. How I narrowly missed becoming one of
them.
He knows too that my mom is best friends with Finny’s. I told him that we played together when we were little. There had been an old picture of Finny and I on my dresser that somehow survived our separation in middle school; for nearly two years, I only spoke to Finny when I had too, but it never occurred to me to take the picture of us down until this morning when I was getting ready for Jamie to come over. I hid it in the top drawer of my dresser under my socks.

Everyone knows who Finny is now, except they don’t call him that. Everyone at school calls him “Finn.” He was the only freshman to make varsity soccer. He and some of his formerly geeky male friends have now been absorbed into The Clique, but they don’t call themselves that anymore. Having a name for your group is way immature now. It’s strange that only a few months ago I considered these girls my best friends, and even stranger that Finny is becoming friends with them.

We were barely able to avoid having each other over for our birthdays. In middle school, it might not have been as big a deal, except my parties were all girls and his all boys. This year, our mothers thought that if we were having a mixed group, then we should invite the other too. What they didn’t understand was that this year, Phineas and I are separated by something far greater than just growing apart. We move on completely different planes of existence and bringing one into the other’s realm would cause a shifting in reality that would upset the entire structure of the universe. Finny was popular now. I was a misfit who had found other misfits to fit with.

They didn’t talk about this in front of both of us; my mother argued with me about it, and when I told her it was absolutely impossible that he come, my mother sighed and said, “What is it with you two this year?” so I knew he was having the same argument with Aunt Angelina.

“Why would Finn Smith be in your house?” Jamie says.

“He’s probably getting something,” I say.

“Like what?” he says. I shrug. I don’t know how to explain. “Let’s go see.” I don’t argue with him, even though my stomach drops.

Jamie hangs back in the hallway as I look into the kitchen. Finny is crouched in front of the open refrigerator, his blond head hidden from me.

“Hi,” I say. He looks over his shoulder at me. Until middle school, we were always the same height. Somehow during those years, he shot up past me and is now six foot. It is strange to see him looking up at me.

“Oh, hi,” he says. He stands up and faces me from across the room. He blushes lightly. “Sorry, the back door was unlocked but I didn’t think anyone was home.”

“I didn’t go with them,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “Do you have eggs?”

“Um, yeah.” I cross the room and open the refrigerator door again. Finny steps aside for me. Before I bend over, I see his eyes focus outside the room, and I know he has seen Jamie lurking in the hallway. “How many do you need?” I say.

“I dunno,” he says. “Mom just said to see if you had any eggs.” I stand up and hand him the whole carton. “Thanks,” he says.

“No problem,” I say.

“See ya,” Finny says.

“Bye.” I stay where I am and listen to him clatter down the back steps before I go into the hall again.

“Wow,” Jamie says. “You guys know each other.”

“I told you we did,” I say.

“Yeah, but that was weird,” he says. I shrug again and walk back toward the stairs. “Does he do that a lot?”

“He lives next door,” I say.

“Yeah but—never mind.” We don’t say anything until we are back in my room. I lie down on my flowered bedspread first and he scoots in next to me. We kiss for a long time, and after a while, I push his hands away and we lie together in silence. I wonder if this is what it feels like to be in love. I’m not sure. Suddenly Jamie speaks.

“It’s almost like you were supposed to be one of them,” he says. “But somehow you’re not.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“I don’t know,” he says. “Your room and him.”

“Well, I’m not,” I say. I start to kiss him again. I’m kissing him to make him stop thinking about it. The room once again is silent except for our breathing.

I’m thinking about it though. I’m thinking about going with Aunt Angelina to pick up Finny after soccer practice. I’m thinking about the cheerleaders asking me if he is my boyfriend. I’m thinking about sitting next to Finny on the bus the first day of school.

We could have ended up together, I realize as Jamie begins to grind his pelvis against mine. He would have told me that he loved me by now, but he wouldn’t have asked about sex. Not yet.

I can see all of this as if it has already happened, as if it was what happened. I know that it is accurate down to the smallest detail, because even with everything that did happen, I still know Finny, and I know what would have happened.

“I love you,” I say to Jamie.