The Truth About You & Me (6 page)

That was the moment I decided, Bennett, that I wanted to be with you, and that even though there was one very good reason we couldn't be something, I could come up with one
million
reasons why we could.

I threw my hair over my shoulders in mock arrogance, smiled at you, and said, “I know, I'm impossible to resist.” I could see that you liked confidence, and I wanted to be that girl, the girl who owned who she was, enjoyed it, played with her girly side. A girl I'd never tried to be anywhere else.

You have this look, Bennett, this very special glowing sort of look when you're trying to rein in your smile but aren't quite able. Your eyes sparkle and you look just plain beautiful.

The silence settled in as we hiked, and it was comfortable, but I wanted to talk more, I wanted to connect.

“What about you? Big plans for the weekend?” I asked.

“Labs,” you said. “I have about three thousand labs to grade.”

“There are only twenty-five students in your class,” I pointed out.

“I have three classes,” you said.

“It's a good thing you're a science instructor,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because your math sucks.” I grinned at you, feeling clever.

I'd never felt clever, you know. I always felt smart, yet somehow never clever, never witty. In high school I felt like one of twelve hundred students, every one of us lost and confused and unsure of ourselves in one way or another.

But you made me different. You made me smart and funny and daring.

“Fair enough,” you said. You paused for a second to whistle at Voldemort because he'd raced too far ahead on the trail. He whirled around and tore back to us, and three feet shy of us, he turned again and jogged back up the trail.

I think Voldemort meant to say we were walking too slowly, but I didn't want to go any faster. I wanted that hike to go on and on and on.

If I had that superpower, the one that could speed up time, I would have used it that day to slow things down. That hike would have gone on for days and days.

“Do you hike a lot?” I asked, because I felt like my lungs were burning, on the edge of exploding, and you were only a little winded.

“Yeah. A few times a week, at least.”

“Where else do you go?”

You glanced up at the sky, a shimmery blue between the trees. “My favorite is High Rock,” you said.

“Where's that?” I asked.

“Mt. Rainier National Forest. Way out past Eatonville and Elbe.”

“What do you like about it?”

We hit a switchback and the trail narrowed, and you paused so that I could walk in front of you. I wondered if you were watching me hike. The back of my neck prickled and I wished I had eyes in the back of my head because I wanted so much to know if you were watching me. I tried to make my hips swing like Katie's did but I don't know if it worked, and since I was hiking, it was really hard and just made me more breathless, so I gave up on that.

“It's hard to explain. I should take you some time,” you said. “You'd love it.”

I was so unbelievably overjoyed and surprised by your invitation that I lost all ability to speak. My jaw flapped open and shut and it's a good thing you were behind me and couldn't see me like that, looking like a fish out of water.

“Yeah, that'd be awesome,” I said.

A few beats of silence stretched out between us and I wondered if you regretted asking me that, like you'd said it but figured I'd decline.

You told me later it had been reflex, something you'd said before you could check yourself, remembered that I wasn't a friend, not really, and that's why the silence stretched out. Because in that moment you realized you shouldn't have invited me.

You also realized you wanted to. I think maybe, for you, that was the moment you acknowledged you wanted something with me, too. Maybe not yet a relationship, maybe not what we became, but
something
.

I glanced back over my shoulder at you, a little bit of hurt squeezing in my chest because I knew, I just
knew
, you were going to say something else, like
But we can't do that, because I'm your professor
.

You didn't say that, though. You just said, “We'd have to go soon. Once the snow stacks up, it closes for the winter.”

“Name the time,” I said. “Because now you have me curious.”

“We could go next weekend,” you said, and part of it sounded a little more like a question than a statement. There was just the tiniest bit of hesitance in it, and I knew you still weren't quite sure what you were doing, even as the words came out. Sometimes, with us, it's like our hearts spoke for us and our brains weren't on board. “Instead of hiking Mt. Peak again,” you added.

My heart sang, Bennett. It climbed out of my chest and soared right up that mountain.

I don't know what you felt in that moment. Excitement, worry, both? You had your career to think about, and you thought you were breaking the school's rule.

Or maybe the rule is only about dating, and hiking surely couldn't be considered that, right? Is that what you told yourself?

“That sounds fantastic. I'm in.”

We chatted as we climbed the mountain, about nothing and everything. And when we got to the top, I was pretty sure that view was even prettier than it had been the week before.

The next week
was agony. Did it feel that way for you?

Did you ever regret inviting me on that hike, Bennett? I don't mean now, when you know how it all ended up, because I know you must regret it now, but back then, when nothing but possibility stretched out before us.

Back when you thought I was eighteen, Bennett. Did you regret it then?

It would just about kill me to think that you regretted it, that you spent all of that week thinking up ways to get out of it, to cancel on me without making a big thing of it. Because that hike—the promise of it—got me through so much that week.

My brother came home that Monday. My Very Perfect Brother. Dad cooked his Very Famous Lasagne, and Mom actually left work early so we could have a Nice Family Dinner, like we did when I was little, when I was the Very Obedient Daughter. I guess maybe I still was that girl, since it's not like I ever made a misstep, ever did anything unexpected, ever colored outside the lines.

Until you, anyway.

Dad made me polish the silver because we had a “guest” coming, even though it was just Trevor. My Ivy League, over-achieving brother, who apparently was supposed to give a rip whether or not he ate with fine china.

Dad and Mom are So Very Proud of Trevor. Dad brags about him non-stop, while Mom talks to him about numbers and angles and whatever garbage they study in engineering. He's the exalted one, that one I am supposed to follow.

Remember how I told you I was good at math, at science? It's because of Mom. Me and Trevor, numbers just click with us. Good genes or something.

I never wanted to be what Trevor is, but Mom and Dad never saw that, because by the time I realized it they'd already settled on the idea, grown it up like an enormous beanstalk, and how could I chop it down? When I didn't know what other choice I'd even make? That's something a two-year-old does—throws a temper tantrum without knowing what they'd choose instead.

It's hard to know who you want to be when you don't want to be the only thing you're good at.

That was my life. Black and white. And I wanted color. But I knew I'd find myself majoring in something uninteresting—for me that would be engineering, or science, or something in which the path was well worn and easy to navigate.

That's what I thought of that day as I sat in the high backed chair and I stabbed at that spring-mix salad, the lettuce too bitter on my tongue, listening as Trevor talked about his internship at an engineering firm up in Seattle, watching as Dad beamed and Mom hovered, thinking of how I could never be who I wanted to be without disappointing them.

I thought going to Running Start, being in college at sixteen, would be enough to get them off my back, buy me time to figure out what I wanted. But in that moment I finally realized, with horrific HD clarity, that there would never be a break, would never be a time they just decided to step back and let me be me, meandering wherever my path might lead.

See, Bennett, the sad thing about expectations is that if you fail them—by an inch or a mile, it doesn't matter—you disappoint people. And my parents, they don't set the bar low. And my brother, he just kept right on raising it.

I wanted fun, the kind of fun I'd never had. The kind of life and adventure I dreamed you were having. I'd watched enough MTV to know that other teens partied, and cussed, and fell in love and out again. They screwed things up, and they somehow came back together again.

But I'd never experienced any of that.

You only had a handful of Facebook photos but I managed to create a whole world for myself in them, something much like what I figured everyone else had. I imagined playing football or rugby or whatever you were doing in your pictures, the sky a vibrant blue, your cheeks flushed as you wore a jersey with a big number twelve. I'd be terrible at it, of course, but you'd laugh and help me and it would be fun. It wouldn't be competitive, and no one would care if I fumbled.

And then I imagined myself traveling to Paris, the Eiffel Tower in the background, me in the foreground, pretending I was squishing it between my two hands just like you did. We'd be goofy tourists, avoiding all the educational stops my parents would expect.

And I imagined myself in five years, on a barstool next to you, casually holding a longneck bottle, that neon light glowing behind me.

Behind us.

As I listened to my brother talk and my mom murmur “mhmms” now and then to signal she was listening, I let my mind drift back to the mountain, and the memories of our conversation were all that really kept me awake in that moment.

Maybe I'd perfected the art of dreaming with my eyes wide open.

“How does it feel to be one-upped, Trevor?” Mom asked as she speared that piece of asparagus that had been evading her for the last two minutes.

“Huh?” Trevor sipped at his glass of ice water, meeting Mom's eyes, and I saw his ego flash and glimmer in that defensive sort of way it always did, his eyes so easily readable with his dark hair gelled like it was. Because to him, Mom's approval was everything. He'd climb Everest and jump over the moon just to impress her. A few hurdles were nothing.

“Madelyn's in college-level Calculus at sixteen. Didn't you just take that class a few quarters ago?”

“Oh,” he said. “Last year sometime, yeah.” And he blinked, just once, and I knew he didn't like what Mom just said, the insinuations behind it. She didn't push on purpose, like Dad did, and yet it was always interlaced with everything she said.

All I ever wanted was a big brother, someone to watch out for me and show me how I was supposed to live, but all I ever got was a rival. I'm four years younger than Trevor and we still got pitted against each other, stood right up and measured to see who was the favorite that day.

And I wish Mom hadn't done that, hadn't thrust my accomplishments at Trevor that way. Because I knew he'd just go right back to raising that bar higher, making it impossible for me to reach, which meant I'd always be second best.

Were you ever in a pressure cooker, Bennett? Did you ever feel like you'd run through the fun house trying to ignore those twenty different versions of yourself, some tall and thin and some warped and ugly, only to reach the end and realize that there was no escape route, just more mirrors, more versions of yourself?

You were my escape route. My doorway to another world, a reflection that looked more like the me I wanted to be than the one I was forced to be.

“We're really proud of Madelyn,” Dad said, and his voice was kind of raspy or gravelly or whatever, just like always, part of the cigarette habit he thought us kids didn't know about. A vice he couldn't admit, because it didn't match his history as a college ball player, as PE teacher … it was completely at odds with the man he pretended to be.

That's how my family is, you know. Everyone has some secret vice.

My dad smokes and my mom drinks wine every night—just a single glass—but she drinks it out of a coffee mug like maybe we all won't think a thing about it.

It's only one glass, Bennett. Just one. I know because I got curious once and kept track of how much was left in the bottle. But her
hiding
it, her not wanting to admit to that one-glass-a-day habit … my dad hiding his cigarettes in his sock drawer … well, that's just how it is in my house.

You have to be perfect, and if you aren't, well, you better fake it pretty damn well.

I faked it really well, Bennett. Just like that first day after your class, when I spent all afternoon sitting on the couch, thinking of you, and yet my dad thought I was studying because I knew to crack open the books and spread out my worksheets the moment before he pulled into the garage.