The Way I Used to Be (31 page)

Instead, I flip to the ninth-grade section to visit the ghost of that girl I used to be. And there she is, right between Maureen Malinowski and Sean Michaels. Glasses and all. A stupid innocent smile plastered on her stupid innocent face. That picture was taken on the very first day—the first day of high school—the day I thought her life was about to begin. How could she have known her stupid, pathetic, flat-chested days were numbered?

I envy her, that awkward, not-quite-ugly-not-quite-pretty girl. Wish I could start over. Be her again. I look deeply into her eyes as if she holds some special secret, a way to get back to her. But her eyes are just pixels. She only comes in two dimensions. She doesn't know shit. I start out grinning, grinning because of the irony, and then I snicker a few times, shaking my head back and forth. Then I'm laughing, laughing because of the absurdity, and then I have to use both hands to cover my mouth because I'm laughing so hard. And then I have to use both my hands to cover my eyes, because they're crying, crying because of the atrocity of it all, of regret and time and lies and not being able to do anything about any of it.

Only now I can't remember, damn it, where the lies ended and I began. It's all blurred. Everything suddenly seems to have become so messy, so gray, so undefined and terrifying. All I know is that things went terribly awry, this wasn't the plan. The plan was to get better, to feel better, by any means. But I don't feel better, I feel empty, empty and broken, still.

And alone. More alone than ever before.

I feel these forbidden thoughts creep in sometimes without warning. Slow thoughts that always start quietly, like whispers you're not even sure you're hearing. And then they get louder and louder until they become every sound in the entire world. Thoughts that can't be undone.

Would anyone care?

Would anyone even fucking notice?

What if one day I just wasn't here anymore?

What if one day it all just stopped?

What if? What if? What if?

“EDY?” VANESSA SAYS
, pushing my bedroom door open. “I asked you ten times, very nicely, to go out and shovel.” It started snowing Wednesday night. And then on Thursday school is canceled, work is canceled—life is canceled, trapping me in the house with Vanessa and Conner all weekend. There's a driving ban for the entire county, and everyone's cars are buried under two and a half feet of snow that is only getting deeper and deeper with every hour that passes.

I really just want to ignore her, because she has in fact interrupted me about twenty times already, not ten, to bother me about shoveling. What the hell are snow days for, anyway? What would be so wrong with just sitting at my desk pretending to do homework while I drown in the sheer rightness of a day off?

I take my headphones out of my ears and look up at her like I didn't hear. “Huh?”

“What are you working on?” she asks, trying to smile at me.

“Homework. English,” I lie.

“Well, do you think you could take a break? Your father shouldn't be out there this long.”

“Then why doesn't he just come in?” I counter.

“Edy, I'm asking you,” she tells me firmly.

“Yeah, but it doesn't even make sense to be shoveling during the snowstorm. Doesn't it make more sense to just shovel after it stops? None of our neighbors are out there shoveling right now. Why do we always have to do this?”

“No, why do
you
always have to do this?” She points her finger at me. Then I watch as she takes a deep breath, like she does when she's trying to calm herself. Watch as she takes one deliberate step backward. I wonder if she's afraid she might slap me. “What I'm saying is,” she begins again, more restrained, “why can't you just do what I've asked? You know, why do you have to challenge everything I say, Eden? I don't understand.”

“I'm not challen—”

“There you go again,” she accuses, waving her hand at me. She starts getting that look in her eye. The one that gives its victim the sense that everything wrong with the world—war, famine, global warming—is her fault. “This is exactly what I'm talking about.”

“I'm not challenging anything. God. I'm just pointing out the obvious. Why should we have to shovel all day long, instead of just once?”

She throws her arms up and walks away, muttering to herself, “I can't take it anymore. I can't. I just can't.”

“Fine,” I call after her, tossing my book down against the desk. “I'll go out there even though it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard of!”

By the time I shovel to the bottom of the driveway, the cold has infiltrated my core, but it's invigorating somehow. I look out, squinting my eyes so that my vision blurs beyond the identical houses and cars and streets and trees, until I am the center of this frozen nowhere suburb-scape.

I refocus my eyes and turn around to look at the house. At the rate the snow is falling, it looks like I never even started shoveling. The cars are still blocked in, and my extremities now feel like they are about to fall off. And somehow, this satisfies Vanessa. “Thank you,” she says when I come inside with icicles dripping from my eyelashes.

“It doesn't even look like I did anything.”

“That's really not the point, is it?” She smiles, licks her index finger, and turns the page of her magazine.

“Isn't it?” I ask, hanging my coat up on the hook by the door.

“Isn't what?” she says absently.

“The point,” I reply, “of shoveling?”

“Oh. Well . . .” She places her finger on a word and looks up from the magazine, stares into space for a moment, squinting her eyes like she's thinking of something to say to me. I stand there, in actual suspense, waiting. But then her eyes refocus on the dingy wallpaper, and she swats her hands in front of her face, like she's shooing some annoying insect. She goes back to her magazine, never finishing.

I send myself to my room, lock myself in, crack the window, and light a cigarette. I've never smoked in my house before. I was always afraid they would smell it and they would be disappointed in me yet again. Nobody was noticing anything, though. She couldn't even be bothered to finish a sentence.

After dinner Vanessa knocks on my door, asks if I want to help decorate the tree. I don't answer. I close my eyes and cover my ears and will her to just please walk away. She doesn't ask a second time.

As I sit on my bedroom floor smoking cigarettes—listening to the sound of the TV under my door, and the rustling of Christmas ornaments being unwrapped and unpacked—I have this intense longing to call Mara. To make up with her, and just say whatever words I need to say to put things back in place. But I know the only way to do that is to apologize to Steve first. I shake my head as I reluctantly dial his number.

It only rings once before he picks up.

“Steve, hey. It's Eden.”

“I know” is all he says.

I pause, consider hanging up.

“Look, I'm sorry about the party,” I finally tell him.

Silence.

“Sorry if I was jerk,” I try. “I was messed up. Sorry.”

Finally he sighs into the phone. “It's okay. You know, I get it.”

“Thanks, Steve. Well, I'll talk to you—”

“So, what's goin' on?” he interrupts before I can say good-bye. “I mean, what've you been up to—all this crazy snow?” he asks awkwardly.

He wants to keep me on the phone.

“Not much,” I answer, suddenly realizing I kind of want to be kept on the phone.

“Yeah, me neither.”

Silence.

“Well, what are you doing now?” I ask him.

I RING THE DOORBELL
at Steve's house. I don't know yet what it is I really want from him. I only know that I couldn't stand to be in my house another minute.

“Hey!” He answers the door with that warm, shy smile that never fails to make me feel bad for not being nicer to him. I look at him and wish, for just a second, that I could be the kind of girl who could like him, really like him. Sometimes I wonder how hard it would be to pretend. “Come in, come in,” he tells me.

I take my coat and my boots off in the entryway of his house. Everything's neat and clean and quiet. The house is laid out the exact same way as Josh's house was, just in reverse. But, then again, most of the houses in our neighborhood are exactly the same. There are only about three or four different versions.

“Can you believe we actually got a snow day?” he says. “It looks like they're probably going to close tomorrow too, my father said. He just called from work. He said the roads aren't cleared yet at all, so . . .” He drifts off. “Anyway, I'm so glad you called. We can go up to my room. I'll show you my photo stuff. I mean, if you're really interested.”

“Yeah, definitely,” I lie.

I follow him up the stairs to his room the way I used to follow Josh up the stairs to his room. Then down the familiar hallway, a familiar floor under my feet.

“So this is it,” he says, holding his arms out as we stand in the middle of his bedroom. Except all I can see is Josh's bedroom when I look around.

And instantly Josh is there, again, in my mind, taking up all the space, consuming all the thoughts, making my heart go wild. I can hardly breathe. I find myself, for once, not wishing that I were the one who was different, that I were someone else, but that
Steve
were someone else. That Steve was Josh. That Josh was here instead of Steve, but feeling the way Steve feels about me.

But that's not what's real. That's not what's happening. In fact, nothing is happening.

And I realize, abruptly, that is the problem. I need something to happen. Need to make something happen. Anything. Now.

I close his door behind us and turn around to face him. “What—” Steve asks, looking at me, alarmed, confused, as I walk toward him. “What are you doing?”

“Come here,” I say, reaching out for him.

“What?” he says slowly.

“It's okay, just come here.” Cautiously, his hands reach out to meet mine, but he still looks uncertain. And then something passes over his face—he just got it. He moves in to kiss me, but stops, like he needs permission. “It's okay, I promise,” I whisper. So I close my eyes, focus everything in my mind and my body on pretending that the boy I'm kissing is Josh, and that I am some better version of myself—the girl I used to be, the one that Josh once felt the need to say “I love you” to.

I kiss him, pull him toward me. He kisses back. I pour myself into it, but I don't feel any different. I need more to happen. More, damn it. I back him up to his bed and he pulls me on top of him. But this isn't enough. I start to move my hands down his chest and stomach, but he grabs my hands as my fingers touch his belt. He stops kissing me altogether. “Wait, wait, wait. Edy,” he whispers, holding my hands in his. “What are we doing?” he asks, with his eyes darting back and forth between mine, searching melodramatically.

“It's okay, I promise. I really, really want this to happen.” But that's such a lie. I feel like I'm close to pleading.

“Well, me too,” he whispers, “but let's go slow. We have time, right?” He smiles.

I nod, but I barely even understand him. Time? Time for what? This is urgent. There's no time at all. We need to do this right now. He doesn't get it—he doesn't get anything!

He kisses me and touches my hair and my face like he means it; in fact, he doesn't touch me anywhere else at all. It feels like this goes on forever. And with every second that passes, the less I can pretend, the more real this becomes, the less like Josh I can make him. I get a sick, churning sensation in my stomach. Because I'm using him, using him bad.

Between kisses he whispers all kinds of things to me, in my ear, like, romantic, sweet things. “I've never known anybody like you, Edy. You just don't care what people think—that's so amazing, that's so cool.”

But the more he talks, the more I'm just thinking of ways I can get out of this.
How can I get out, how can I get out?
I repeat in my mind, over and over.

“You're so pretty and interesting . . . and smart—”

“Steve, please.” I have to stop him there. “I am not.” Smart girls don't get themselves into mess after mess after mess.

“Ye—” he starts again, but I stop him.

“I'm not any of those things, okay?” I tell him, more firmly.

“Yes, you are.” Pulling me closer, he doesn't seem nervous anymore, not scared. “I've liked you since we were in ninth grade, with the Columbus project, and then the library thing, remember?”

“Lunch-Break,” I mumble absently, maneuvering myself so that my back is facing him. At least this way I don't have to look him in the eye while I calculate my exit strategy. He reaches his arms around me from behind, his hands crisscrossing over my stomach. My skin wants to crawl off my body.