How They Met, and Other Stories(11)
Author: David Levithan

It had never occurred to me that a person could know all the right things to say and deploy them to get what she wanted, without having to mean any of it.

Dear Lord, I staggered then. Staggered back. Staggered away from her. Staggered to my car and cried for a good five minutes before I could get my key in the ignition. When I got home, I staggered past my mother, who called out, asking what was wrong. My breathing was staggered. My memory was staggered. And there was no way to get it right again.

I was waiting for her to call and say she’d made a mistake.

That was my own mistake.

I didn’t want to go to school, but when my mother threatened to stay home with me if I didn’t go, I knew I didn’t have a choice.

“Is it some boy?” she asked, unable to keep the hope out of her voice.

“No, I’m just garden-variety suicidal,” I told her.

“Fine,” she replied, annoyed. “Be that way.”

I tried to shut myself down completely, put up my best screensaver personality to coast through the day. I didn’t want to see her. I was desperate to see her. I wanted to hold it together. I wanted to melt down right at her feet and scream, Look what you’ve done to me.

I was going to skip lunch entirely, but Teddy found me and steered me toward his table.

“Spill,” he said.

“I can’t,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Because if I start, I might not stop.”

That’s what it felt like—that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.

“You know what?” I said. “I’m not Miss Lucy at all. I’m the goddamn steamboat.”

“Come again?” Teddy said with his usual shoulder-tilt pout.

“Let’s just say this is not heaven,” I said with a sigh.

Heron, of course, knew exactly what I was talking about.

“It’s just that Mercury’s in retrograde,” she said.

“This has nothing to do with a f**king planet,” I groaned.

“Down, girl,” Teddy sassed. “Down.”

I put my head in my hands and took a deep breath, hearing the air suck against my palms.

I felt Teddy pat my back, then start to rub it. Mmmmmm.

“A little better now?” he asked.

I nodded a little and he moved to my neck.

“Let it go,” he said. “Let it go.”

I tried to. I wanted to block it out.

Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Miss Lucy had a steamboat.

“What are you saying?” Teddy whispered in my ear.

I lifted my head and told him. Then Heron and I explained what it meant.

“So you’ve sat on the glass,” Teddy said.

“Repeatedly.”

“And, let me get this straight, the boys are in the bathroom—”

“The boys don’t really matter right now.”

“There will be other girls,” Heron comforted.

“I don’t want other girls!” I cried.

What I meant then: I only want Ashley.

I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My body missed her. My mind reeled at her absence. I was a f**king wreck. It wasn’t pretty, and as much as I wanted to believe she was doing it to me, I had to begin to admit that I was doing it to myself, too.

Why is self-preservation so much more of a bitch when it’s your mental health that’s involved? I mean, if there really was a piece of glass on my chair, I’d damn well make sure that I didn’t sit on it twice. If a steamboat was sinking, I’d know enough to head to the lifeboat. But a broken heart? At first I gave in to the temptation to think, nah, there was nothing I could do about it. I’d have to keep sitting on glass until someone was nice enough to take the glass away from my seat.

Then I thought, To hell with that. I actually had to think of it in terms of sitting on glass for it to work.

“What’s up with the whole couple thing anyway?” I asked Teddy and Heron at lunch a week or so after Ashley had dumped me.

“What do you mean?” Teddy asked back.

“I mean, why is everyone so brainwashed into believing that they have to be in a relationship with one other person? Look at us, Teddy. If anyone were to tell us that the whole girl-boy thing was natural and anything else was unnatural, we’d know they were completely wrong. But have them tell us that every person needs to be with another person in order to be happy, and we nod along like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But there’s no reason for it, is there? It’s not a proven truth. It’s just some thing that our culture has come to spin itself around, mostly so we’ll procreate, and we’re the dupes who fall for it over and over and over again.”

“I thought you were over the breakup,” Teddy said hesitantly.

“I am,” I insisted. “Can’t you see that this is more than that?”

Teddy clearly couldn’t see, because he was looking at me like I was fifty-eight varieties of crazy all at once.

Heron, however, surprised me.

“You’re totally right,” she said. “And I’m tired of it, too.”

When I realized I was into girls, it was scary to let go of all the things I was supposed to be and all the things I was supposed to want. It’s like you’re a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say, I’m sorry, but this role isn’t right for me. And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing. That was hard enough. But that was nothing—nothing, I tell you—compared to the idea that I could let go of the desire to have a girlfriend. Maybe not forever. Maybe forever. Certainly for now. Talk about something that had been ingrained. I wasn’t letting go of love or sex or the idea of companionship. I was just rejecting the package in which it was being sold to me. I was going to say it was okay to be alone, when it felt like everyone in the world was saying that it wasn’t okay to be alone, that I had to always want someone else, that the desire had to fuel me.

I didn’t want to feel like I needed it anymore. Because I didn’t. Really, I didn’t.

Ashley started fooling around with Lily White. She didn’t tell me this, but I could figure it out easily enough. Lily White was more scared of me than ever. And she’d started to smell a little like Ashley’s shampoo.

Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive—you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.