Falling From Grace (2 page)

After what could have been a lifetime or perhaps seventy-two seconds—give or take a minute—he sighed…somewhat reservedly.
 
“Ditto, Grace.”
 

The ground rumbled beneath me, opening up a hungry chasm that awaited my next move.

And then Graham smiled.

So I leapt.
 
“I’m also
in
love with you,” I whispered, just loud enough for him to hear.
 
Maybe too loud.
 
Out of habit, I had closed my eyes when I had begun to speak, but at that moment I needed them to be open, needed to gauge his reaction.
 
I didn’t want to miss anything; I needed to see his face, see his eyes when he heard my confession.

And I didn’t recognize it at all.

He was looking past me, avoiding eye contact as his face held on fast to a blank expression, though I could see a slight puckering between his brows as he struggled with some inner turmoil.
 
I wasn’t used to this, to seeing him so aloof, and it was one of the most terrifying moments in my life.
 
For reasons unknown I began see my life flash before my eyes
—
Graham was in almost every scene, filling them up like the sun fills up a frigid morning with its warmth
—
and those images were slowly being eaten up by hungry flames of doubt that clawed at my heart as it beat slowly, almost painfully in my chest.

He carelessly shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans in some vain attempt to keep them occupied.
 
“Grace…” he sighed.
 

Maybe he muttered it.
 
I don’t remember which because the next few minutes destroyed me to my very core and prevented me from being able to distinguish anything apart from how dark and desolated my world was becoming.
 
The sudden feeling of loss as all the blood in my body started to drain away to some unseen place was causing an acute buzzing to flood my ears.
 
It blocked out everything but the sound of my entire world being knocked off of its foundation—the very thing that kept me from falling into that chasm that waited patiently for me to stumble—and crushing my hopes as it landed on my heart.

“Grace, I…I don’t know how exactly to put this without hurting your feelings…but I don’t feel the same way about you.”

He paused for a minute, the blank expression finally cracking, revealing a very incredulous, very angry scowl upon his face.
 
I was taken aback by the sudden shift in his emotions as he barked, “You should have known better than to be so stupid!
 
We’re in two different leagues, Grace.
 
We run with different crowds—or, at least I do.
 
You’ve been struggling to keep up since the sixth grade and I’ve been weighed down with this friendship for too damn long.
 
You’ve been holding me back, and now you gotta tell me you’re in love with me, like that’s supposed to mean something?
 
What are you thinking?”
 

He shook his head, muttering to himself as he ran his fingers through the crisp spikes of his hair over and over again, frustration wracking him in ways I had never seen before.
 
He slid off of the hood, landing on the sidewalk with very little grace, too upset to care, and started pacing, his hands alternating between jamming themselves into his pockets and running through his disheveled hair.
 

I watched him, unable to say anything, unable to find the strength in me to argue in my defense because I knew that he was right.
 
I
had
been holding him back, and we
were
in different leagues.
 
We always had been.
 
I just didn’t think that any of that had mattered to him before.

After several minutes of pacing, his head bobbed down once with such finality that it made my heart skid to a halt.
 
It was as though he had just won some silent argument he’d had with himself and was agreeing with the outcome, and I knew that whatever that outcome was, it wouldn’t bode well for me.

He lifted harsh eyes to mine, his mouth opening just wide enough to let the words tumble out as quickly as they could, if only to keep from prolonging the inevitable, or perhaps from saying something worse.
 
“This has got to end now.
 
We can’t be friends anymore, Grace.
 
We can’t be anything anymore.”
 

And so my future had been decided, I realized, and he had been the one to make the decision.

I didn’t know what my face read at that point, if it showed anything at all because in that moment I embodied what the proverbial “they” meant when
they
said they felt numb.
 
It’s how you’re supposed to feel after your heart takes an emotional beating and then decides to escape, abandoning you, leaving you to fend for yourself without the aid of love and hope to keep you going.
 

Whatever it was that Graham saw in my face then, it gave him enough reason to pound that final nail into my coffin, sealing it shut from everything that was good, everything that had been us up until that point.

“I didn’t know how to tell you this when school was over—didn’t want to, really—but I got accepted to NC Prep.
 
They’ve got an amazing football team, and the only way I’m going to get scouted is if I’m playing for a ranked school.
 
It’s my one shot out of here, so that means I won’t be going to Heath this year.”
 

He paused to reach into his jacket pocket with a clumsy hand and pulled something out, shoving it towards me with such blatant disgust I could almost taste it.
 
“Here, take it,” he said to me as he pushed it against my hand, never once reacting to the way I flinched at the contact.

Call it being childish, call it just plain stubbornness, but I refused to accept whatever it was he was trying to force into my unwilling grip, clenching my fingers so tight I knew my knuckles were turning white from the effort.
 

My head turned from side to side in utter refusal; I didn’t want parting gifts, as though I was the second runner-up on some game show.
 
This was my life he was destroying, my heart he was breaking
—
couldn’t he see how humiliated I was?
 
How horribly and hideously inadequate he had made me feel now that not only had he reminded me that I wasn’t popular or pretty
—
or even liked
—
but that he’d also reinforced that fact by informing me that he couldn’t even stand to be in the same school as I was?

“Take it, Grace,” he demanded as he pried open my fist and pressed the small object against my palm, closing my stiffened fingers around it.
 
I took it numbly, my arm dropping dead at my side in defeat.
 
I didn’t even bother to look at it; I was too busy staring at the stranger standing before my eyes.

“Grace,” he continued, his voice softer now, his gaze drifting downwards toward some unseen object that had no real purpose other than to keep him from having to look at me, from having to see the hurt he had caused me.
 

“I guess I should have told you this a while ago, but I suppose now’s as good a time as any, and I don’t want you to find out from anyone else because I know that that would be worse than finding out like this.
 
See, I’ve been dating Erica Hamilton for the past six months.
 
I didn’t want tell you about it because…well, I guess I kinda already knew how you felt, and didn’t want you to get hurt.”
 

Didn’t want me to get hurt?
 
The rough exhalation that came out of me told him clearly that it was too late for that.

He sighed, as though a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders, and ran his fingers through his hair again, calming it down some, only to cause it to stand up at weird angles when he struggled with what he had to say next.

“Erica and I…well, she and I have gotten pretty serious
—
really serious actually
—
and she thinks that it wouldn’t be right for me to stay friends with you.
 
And now that I know for sure how you feel, I know that she’s right.
 
It’s not right, and it’s not fair to you, or to me.

“She also said that it would be wrong of me to keep some of the stuff you’ve given me
—
like that-” he motioned towards the object that he had forced into my hands “-she said that I needed a clean break from you, to rid my life of everything that you’d ever given me.
 
And so I thought that maybe you’d like that back, instead of me just throwing it away.”

I didn’t want to look down at what was in my hands and affording him my reaction.
 
Instead I simply nodded.
 

Truth was, I was afraid of finding out what he had returned to me.
 
What had I given to him that wasn’t deserving of being thrown away or completely destroyed, like he had just done to my life?
 
He couldn’t be giving me back my heart; that lay in a pile of ashes in my lap.

“I have to get going, Grace.
 
I gotta go pick up Erica at the mall; we’re having dinner with her dad.
 
It’s her birthday today.”
 
He started to walk away then, but suddenly stopped and turned to face me, a wistful smile on his face.

“Um…have a great rest of summer, ‘kay?
 
Maybe I’ll see you around.
 
Or something.”

With a wave, he was gone, back into his house to await my departure.
 
At least he wasn’t just standing there, waiting for me to leave.
 
Or better yet, at least he hadn’t told me to leave.
 
No, he had done me the favor of leaving himself, one last act of kindness from my now former friend.
 
At least, that’s what I told myself.

It was in that moment of comprehension that I knew I had not only lost my best friend, but I had also lost most of my summer as well.
 
All of those moments
,
those memories that I had stored in my mind, that touched my heart in so many different ways, were becoming distorted now, like an over pixilated movie.
 
All of our conversations, our inside jokes, our confidences replayed in my mind, and all of them were now taking on new meaning for me…because all of them were now meaningless to him.

I
was now the inside-joke:
 
His and Erica’s.
 
And whoever else knew about this.
 
Of course, it was a given that everyone else already knew.
 
Why wouldn’t they?
 
I wasn’t popular and they were.
 
Two different leagues, he had said:
 
the reality and the fantasy.
 
But I never wanted to be anything other than Graham’s friend.
 
Even with loving him, I valued his friendship so much more.
 
Now I didn’t even have that.

As I got off of his car and walked towards my house, I started analyzing the past several weeks in my mind.
 
Had we really spent the summer together like my memories had foolishly led me to believe?
 
Every single day, they told me.
 
And that’s how it looked from my end…at least it did on the surface.
 
He would meet me at the small library I worked at every morning, hanging out for a bit before leaving right after lunch for football camp.
 

When we went camping with our dads every other weekend, something that hadn’t changed since the two of us were in middle school, he had never given a sign that he was distracted by a missing girlfriend.
 
It was only afterwards, when we got home that he’d disappear for several hours, leaving our dads and me to unpack and clean out the gear.

We’d watched campy old movies and held a Rocky Horror Picture Show marathon at the beginning of summer break, holding it at the end of the month like always—it was a Grace and Graham tradition to call each other Rocky and Frank all day until one of us forgot, at which point that person got punched in the arm
—
because we were buds, Grace and Graham, best friends since forever.
 
But he said he was busy with football and helping out his dad at the store last month, and so he asked for a rain check.
 
I had never thought to question any of that until then.

I calculated the time in my head as I walked towards my front door and the numbers only added to my grief.
 
The burnt out hollowed shell of a person I was when I entered my room was completely unrecognizable.
 
Everything suddenly hurt and I needed to lie down.

I remained that way for the last two weeks of summer, getting up only to head to work at the library, knowing that there was no chance that I’d run into anyone from school there.
 

My dad, the only other person in my life
—
in my existence really
—
had made several attempts to comfort me in his own little way, but quit trying altogether when he received no encouragement on my part.
 
When he couldn’t get an answer out of me as to what had happened after asking on several separate occasions, he went and spoke to Richard.
 
I knew that his goal was to find out what had transpired outside that day to turn me so inside out, but he wouldn’t get a straight answer from that avenue either.
 
Richard couldn’t tell the truth if it killed him—he was a natural born liar.