Isla and the Happily Ever After(68)
Author: Stephanie Perkins

Chapter thirty-two

I set the manuscript down on my bed. I’m exhausted.

I remove my wet shoes, my coat, my leggings.

I wash my face.

I brush my teeth.

The manuscript’s paper eyes bore into the back of my head. I stare at it in the mirror’s reflection above my sink. It seems both tragically dead and frighteningly alive. And I have no choice but to climb into bed with it. I fiddle with a stubborn wave of hair. I poke at the pores on my nose. I take a long time turning on my lamp.

I slip into bed. I’m listening for the snow, which is coming down harder, but I can’t hear it. I can only see it streaming through the street light outside.

I pull the manuscript into my lap. I read.

It has a new beginning. It no longer starts with his first day as a wide-eyed, slack-jawed freshman. It starts with an older, wiser, and more embittered Josh. It’s the summer before his senior year. He’s sitting alone, drawing in a café.

And then…I’m there.

I appear like a dream, and Josh is whisked into a surreal, blissful night that makes him forget his troubles. It makes him feel hope for the first time in years. There’s the page that I’ve seen before of him racing home to draw me, but then there’s a new full-page illustration of me with the garden-rose halo. I glow on the page like something sacred. Josh is on his knees at the bottom of the illustration, looking up at me, weeping, his hands clasped. The word Salvation pours from his lips.

My own hands are trembling so hard that I can barely get to the next page.

FRESHMAN, it says. And the story I’m familiar with begins. Most of this section is the same. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s sweet. It’s innocent. But there are some differences. He’s added subtle brushstrokes to draw attention towards areas of the story that I know will have greater meaning later on. Things that he couldn’t have known would be so important when he drew them years ago.

And then there’s me. Again. He’s chronologically added the panels of the first time we spoke, when he saw me reading the Sfar book in the cafeteria. He’s even added a tiny heart above his head while he speaks. And then a broken one when he thinks that I don’t like him.

I touch the broken heart with the tip of my finger.

The story turns familiar again, but this time the panels with Rashmi are less painful. The sadness I feel comes from remembering how much they hurt me the first time. He’s trimmed down her scenes and the excessive one-page panels. She’s still a large part of the story, as she should be, but the focus remains squarely on him. Also as it should be.

Last summer. Kismet. A callback panel signals a return to the beginning of the story, and then it cuts back to him discovering me with Kurt the following night.

New pages appear. Josh with his parents. There’s an increasing distance between them – now self-created, out of spite – as he simultaneously yearns to be closer. He wants them to fight for his attention. He returns to school for his senior year. When I read this in November, these pages were rough sketches. Now they’ve been lovingly inked in. It gives everything a new sense of permanence.

And then I’m reading about his crush on me, and I’m reading about him longing for me at Oktoberfest, and I’m reading about our first date. I’m reading about him falling in love with me. I’m reading about the Treehouse and the college applications and his birthday, and we’re going to Spain, and we’re making love. He draws us beautifully. The emotions on the page are so much bigger than anything he’s drawn before.

And then it’s a two-page spread: a single panel being ripped in half. I’m on one side, and he’s on the other. Our hands grasp at the space between. Almost touching.

My cheeks are wet. I’m not sure how long I’ve been crying.

The pages turn angry and wild, swirled around the election and parents, who are always present yet always absent. He grieves for our loss. He blames himself. He’s depressed, and he doesn’t know how to tell me that we won’t be seeing each other for Thanksgiving. I want to tell Josh-on-the-page that it’s okay, but I can’t. It won’t be okay.

He fights with his parents. They want him to finish at a private school. He wants to take his GED. Neither happens. He sinks deeper into depression, and he won’t leave his room, and he draws me again and again and again. And then he draws my Christmas present. I don’t know if I can handle reading about Christmas, but it’s coming anyway.

I pick a fight. I am cruel. I annihilate him.

He thought we’d be together for ever. Images of New England, a wedding, children, old age crumble into the background of a dark panel in which he’s curled on the ground in the foetal position. He tries to call me. I won’t answer. His devastation turns into fury. New Year’s Eve arrives, and he sits alone in his bedroom watching television. He thinks about our first date, just like I did. Brian calls his house shortly after midnight with the urgent message that I’m waiting for him at Kismet. There’s still time to make it.

I turn the page, fearing what I’ll find next.

Josh chooses not to go. He wants me to suffer in the way that I’ve made him suffer. It’s awful to read, though it’s no less than I deserved. But as the days pass, Josh realizes that he’s made a mistake. And as they continue to pass, it gets harder to call me. He’s afraid that now I will have given up on him for good.

And then…his na**d figure tumbles into space.

A completely black two-page spread. On the following page, no illustration, only my own words written in Josh’s beautiful handwriting: “SPACES…BREAKS…TO CONTEMPLATE THINGS…TO FIGURE OUT WHAT’S IMPORTANT…”

A series of near-identical panels are next, showing an excruciating passage of time. A certain truth is settling in. That one of the most hurtful things I said to him – that he passively campaigned for his own expulsion, because he couldn’t admit to his parents that he’d made a mistake in moving to France – only hurts so much because it’s true. And that the head of school and his ex-girlfriend had been telling him that for years, but it didn’t matter until he heard the words from the person who mattered the most. Me.

But he’s also still angry with me for invalidating his own feelings. He loves me, and I won’t let him. He decides that he has to prove it. He confesses to his parents that leaving home for Paris was a mistake, but that he’s ready for Vermont. He won’t mess it up this time. They say they’d like to believe him, but they’re concerned with his ability to see things through. An offer is put on the table. They’ll send him to Vermont if he can finish the project that means the most to him, the project that will also serve as his official portfolio for admission: this graphic memoir.