Page 41 of The Way I Used to Be
And then I was weightless. He carried me up the hill and then he laid me down on the grass. He called 911, even.
I decided that night with Mara, I was definitely marrying him. The damage: a fractured left wrist, a sprained ankle, a thousand scrapes and bruises, a broken pinkie, fifteen stitches in my forehead, and one utterly demolished ten-speed bike. And, of course, a severe delusion about the kind of person Kevin truly was.You were very lucky and very, very stupid, I was told over and over and over that day.
“You’re lucky there wasn’t a train coming!” Josh’s voice says, pulling me back into the present. My eyes refocus on his bedroom ceiling. He’s still laughing. I had stopped.
“Am I?” I accidentally say out loud. If there had been a train coming, then I would have been killed or at least seriously and irreparably injured. And 542 days later I would have been lying in either a grave or a hospital somewhere, rotting away or hooked up to machines and not in my bed with Kevin in the next room and me thinking he was the greatest person in the entire world, incapable of hurting me in any way, because, after all, he had saved the day. Maybe if that day never happened, maybe I wouldn’t have become so smitten, so pathetically infatuated. Maybe I wouldn’t have flirted with him over a game of Monopoly earlier that night. And maybe I would’ve screamed when I found him in my bed at 2:48 in the morning, instead of doing nothing at all. And maybe it was essentially all my fault for acting like I liked him, for actually liking him.
“Of course you are,” I hear a dim voice say through the fog in my mind. But now his face has changed to serious. I can’t remember the last thing either of us said.
“I am what?” I ask.
“Lucky!” he says impatiently.
“Oh, right. Yeah, I know.”
“Then why would you even say that? That’s not funny.”
“I know.”
“It’s really not. I hate when you say stuff like that.”
“Okay, I know!” I snap at him.
He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s mad. Mad because I’m always getting upset with him for no reason, saying fucked-up things, or just being generally weird. He doesn’t say anything else. He just rolls away and lies there next to me. Now he’s the one staring at the ceiling and I’m the one on my side, facing him, wanting him to look at me. I put my head on his chest, try to pretend things are okay still, pretend I’m not a freak. Reluctantly, he puts his arm around me. But I can’t take the silence, can’t take the thought of him being mad.
So I whisper, “Tell me another secret.”
But he’s quiet.
After a while, a very painfully silent while, I think maybe he has fallen asleep, so I pretend to be sleeping too. But then I feel him press his face into my hair and breathe. Quietly, almost inaudibly, he whispers, “I love you.” His big secret. I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I can and pretend not to hear—pretend not to care.
After I’m sure he’s really fallen asleep, I sneak out as quietly as possible.
“SO WHAT ARE WEgonna do for your birthday this year, Edy?” Mara asks me at my locker after school the next day.
“I don’t know. Let’s just go out to eat or something,” I tell her as I pack up my things for homework.
“Oh my God, Edy. Look, look, look,” Mara says quietly, barely moving her mouth, smacking me in the arm over and over.
“What?” I turn around. Josh is walking down the hall, headed straight for us. “Oh God,” I mutter under my breath.
“Edy, shut up, and be nice!” Mara says low, just as he approaches earshot. She looks at him with this enormous smile on her face. “Hi!”
He gives her one of those winning smiles of his, and she giggles—giggles.
“Hi!” he returns her greeting with the same level of enthusiasm. Then he turns to me and it’s just a dull, “Hey.”
I don’t know what to do. Two totally opposite worlds are in the process of colliding right at this moment, and I’m stuck in the middle.
“So, Joshua... Miller, right?” Mara says, as if she doesn’t always refer to him by his full name.
“Yeah—well, Josh. And you are?”
“Mara,” she responds.
“Oh, right, Mara. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“You too.”
