Page 42 of The Way I Am Now
“No, I am. Did I just really misread this?”
I don’t know what words to say to explain. I barely understand what’s going through my head right now, but I take his hands and hold them tightly because that’s all I can do. “You didn’t misread anything. It’s just . . . not here. I can’t. Not here,” I repeat, glancing around the room as if the walls are watching us. I feel like they can do that sometimes.
“That’s okay,” he says, so gently, though he must be even more confused than me.
“It happened here,” I try to explain. “You . . . you know what I’m talking about, right?”
I see the wave of recognition pass over his eyes. He squeezes my hands and nods. “Yeah,” he whispers. “Right. Of course.”
“That’s sort of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Oh,” he breathes, straightening his posture. “Okay.”
“No, notthat. Don’t worry.”
“I’m not worried, you know you can talk to me about it.”
I close my eyes and shake my head. “No. I mean, thank you. But no. What I meant is I wanted to talk to you about the . . . theherepart of everything.”
“The here part?” he repeats as if he might understand what that means if he says it out loud. “All right.”
“I know I’m not making any fucking sense and I’m all over the place.”
“It’s okay, I’m following,” he says with a cautious smile. “Mostly.”
“I’m not trying to ignore what just happened. Or almost happened. I don’t want to forget about that. I’mnotforgetting about it, believe me, but—” I pull his hands toward me and lean over to kiss the backs of each of them. “Can we just put a pin in that for a minute? Or whatever that saying is. Because I really did want to talk to you about something.”
“Sure, we can do that. Yeah.”
“Okay.” I inhale and exhale, trying to get some of this tension out of me. In with the good, out with the bad, I tell myself, just like my therapist taught me. “You know I’ve been trying really hard to make things work here.”
He nods.
“But it’s just not,” I finally admit out loud. “And the more I think about it, the more I’m pretty sure it’s not going to. Like, I try to imagine myself here a year from now and I just don’t even see anything.” I pause to clear the thickness those words leave behind in my throat. “I can’t be here anymore. In this house, in this town. Too much has happened. I don’t fit anymore. I haven’t in a long time.”
“Mm-hmm,” he murmurs, nodding encouragingly. “I can understand why you’d feel that way.”
“So, I’ve been thinking about leaving.”
“Leaving?” His eyebrows pull together, and he shakes his head slightly. “What do you mean? Where would you go?”
“Well, what would you think if I applied to your school? Would that be weird for you or—”
“To Tucker?” he interrupts. “Are you kidding? No, that would be . . .” He pauses, searching for a word. “Perfect.”
“Yeah?” I exhale. “Really, you mean that?”
“Really, I mean it. Hundred percent—a thousand percent.”
I try to stop myself from smiling like this, but it’s hard not to when he’s smiling at me like that. “Okay, I’m really glad you said that because I did.”
“You did?”
“And I got in.”
“Wait, you got in?” he says, too loudly for almost midnight.
“And I think I really, really want to go.”
