Page 77 of Backslide
This time, I walk to the door committed to actually leaving. But just before I step into the airy halls of this charming cottagecore house, I turn around to face my friend again.
“Are you disappointed in me?” I ask Sabrina, eyes downcast. “Because I broke up with Alfie?”
“Are you ever getting back together with him?”
I shake my head.
“Then hell no, woman. I hated that dude. And that’s a fact.”
In some ways, it’s the acknowledgment of another lie—at least of omission. The fact that she hated my fiancé and never had the guts to tell me. One of many unspoken truths in a lifelong friendship.
But as the door clicks shut behind me and I start to descend the stairs, step by creaky step, past bud vases of wildflowers perched on windowsills, I feel a bit clearer than when I arrived.
16BOTHBACK IN THE DAY
There are awkward family introductions and school breaks and movies and sushi dinners and parties with friends. There are teenage arguments and petty jealousies—that result in a couple of very short-lived breakups—and failed attempts to teach Nellie baseball. There are Hamptons weekends and her rotator cuff injury—damn that baguette!—and professions of love that flush them both from head to toe.
So, when the time comes for the next stage of their lives, they have a plan. A different path. So they won’t wind up broken like all the rest.
It’s inevitable, everyone tells them.Long distance won’t work.
He has nearly committed to playing Division One baseball at a college in Southern California; she has applied to three colleges there too—a safety, a target, and a reach.
They will go together to the West Coast. To the land of palm trees and neon billboards and an abundance of avocado and lemontrees. They won’t fall victim to crossed calls, tonally confusing voicemails, Jell-O-shot-fueled dorm room temptations, the slow stretching in opposite directions toward separate lives.
They will stay together.
Until one day, a glitch in their plan. A hiccup of gargantuan proportions. One of life’s before and afters.
A stolen base that steals a future. A massively torn ACL, a pop in his knee that sends shockwaves of pain. A trajectory forever altered.
Nellie isn’t at the field watching the game when it happens. She’s at home, studying for her midterms. Midterms that Noah keeps insisting don’t even matter because it’s spring semester of senior year.
He doesn’t understand why she cares. Because academics have never mattered to him. Nothing has mattered—except baseball.
So, he’s mad at her already for not showing up. Even though she tried to explain that she can’t leave a project unfinished. It’s just not how she’s built.
And, maybe, Nellie reasons later, that is part of the reason why Noah’s anger seems directed largely at her after the accident happens—after he is taken to a hospital and the doctors tell him, with kind but unyielding faces, that he’s facing surgery, a long recovery, may never return to the same level of play.
He will miss key years in the development of his game.
If he was further along in his career, this might have been surmountable. But now, in this nascent stage, it’s catastrophic.
And when Nellie tries to tell Noah it will be okay—he is more than baseball. So much more. That he will still have a remarkable life. They can still go to California together and have their adventure, he looks at her like,how dare you. He looks at her like he never has before. Like she doesn’t know him—or maybe anything at all.
Noah sulks and droops, and she exchanges meaningful looks behind his back with his mother and sister, Henny. Her own parentsraise their eyebrows, observing from a distance. He stops returning her calls promptly. Stops making plans to hang out.
And then, one day, he finally agrees to meet up with her—at the foot of their Central Park boulder, since he can’t currently climb—after an unprecedented two-week hiatus in which she tries to be understanding and reason that his world has been rocked. And he breaks down, actual tears streaming from bloodshot eyes she barely recognizes as he asks her not to go. To give up their dream. To make a new one. California will only remind him of what he’s lost.
And she considers what he’s saying, though she has justthatday received the big envelope saying she’s been admitted to her reach school in LA. Her dream school. With the design program she has always imagined.
Nellie feels pulled in all directions. Her heart will break either way.
But she reasons that maybe she could be just as happy here. On the East Coast. At home. Near her father and mother—and everything she knows. Near the grocery salad bars and Tasti D-Lite ice cream shops and Dr. Zizmor subway ads; in muggy summers that smell like rot and crisp autumns that smell like the passage of time.
So, she agrees. “Thank you,” Noah says, burying his face in her neck as Nellie runs a soothing hand over his warm head and neck. Down the back of his hoodie, over his shuddering back.
And she almost says, “You’re welcome”—but is he? To this great sacrifice on the altar of desperation?
