Page 99 of Canadian Boyfriend

I knocked softly and pushed her bedroom door open. She was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She looked up and smiled as she closed a red three-ring binder she’d been reading. She got up and came to me where I was hovering and said, “Read this, then we need to talk.” She handed me the binder, pressed her palm against my chest, and said, “If this was a movie, thiswould be the part where I’d say, ‘I loved you before I knew you.’ And that’s true. But what I hope you’ll see is that it wasn’t actually you. It was an idea of you. I know how much you don’t like people reacting to an idea of you. Please understand that now I love the actual you. And you—you—are so much better than the idea of you.”

And then she pushed me out the door.

Dear Mike,

I’m going home. I’m quitting. I can’t do this anymore. Dancing. New York. Trying to be what people want. The whole thing.

I haven’t told my mother. I’m going to throw myself on her mercy and hope it’s enough.

But I don’t think I should write to you anymore, either. If I’m going to stop deluding myself about what’s possible, I think I should stop on all fronts, you know? And us? We’re not possible. I wish we were. I wish it so hard.

Goodbye. Thanks for listening for so many years.

I’ll miss you to the moon and back,

Rory

22—MOMENTS

MIKE

There are certain indelible moments in a person’s life when everything changes. When it seems like the world starts moving in slow motion. Sometimes they’re good, like getting drafted.

Sometimes they’re devastating, like when we got the news that Sarah’s car had spun out, that she’d been taken to Montreal General and pronounced dead on arrival.

Or like the time Aurora Evans told me she loved me and handed me a red binder that showed me that everything I believed about her—about us—was a lie.

It was full of handwritten pages—old-school, three-ring-punched lined paper, mostly, though some of the pages were bits of scrap paper that had been jammed onto the metal rings. The crinkly noise of the pages turning as I sat on my bed and flipped through them sounded like thunder to my adrenaline-sharpened hearing.

The handwriting was Aurora’s. I recognized it from grocery lists. There was no title, or anything I could use to make sense of what thiswas. So I flipped back to the first page and started reading. There was a date from fourteen years ago, and then: “Dear Mike.”

As I read, the past year rearranged itself like a game of Tetris in my wake. Lies interlocking to form a horrible truth: Aurora had been deceiving me.

I’d let her into my home, my life, my heart, under false pretenses.

It made me want to throw up. I had to take a break halfway through the letters. Stagger to the sink in the en suite. Two lines from the letters wound their way through my consciousness and snagged in a corner of my brain as I splashed cold water on my face.

“Dear Mike… I love you to the moon and back.”

How could shesaythat?

“If this was a movie,” she’d said before she shoved me out of her bedroom, “this would be the part where I’d say, ‘I loved you before I knew you.’”

But this wasn’t a movie, and that was impossible. It wasn’t even me she was writing to.

It wasn’t even me she was writing to.

I whipped my head up and looked at myself in the mirror, water dripping down my face.

I tried to keep that thought in mind as I went back to the bedroom and read the rest of the letters. And yeah, one part of my brain got that. One part of my brain understood that she was a teenager writing what was essentially a diary.

The other, bigger part of my brain was utterly devastated. Betrayed. Angry. Because it didn’t matter who the Mike of the letters was. The fact remained that she’d been playing me this whole time. My heart was broken.

Again.

At least Sarah hadn’t done it on purpose.

Eventually I went downstairs and filled the kettle. Sheappeared in the kitchen, looked me right in the eye, and said, “I should have told you when I figured out who you were.”

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