The Last Time We Say Goodbye (7 page)

The bell rings.

“For Monday,” she says, raising her voice above the shuffle of papers and feet, “write a thousand words about the meaning of one word, and how the word makes you feel, and why.”

Oh, brother. The class gives a group sigh.

“Class dismissed,” she says. “Enjoy the rest of your day of Saint Valentine's.”

“Hey, Lex, wait up.”

Beaker's running to catch me as I flee the classroom. I stop in the hall and wait. She pulls up in front of me, her bright, curly hair
falling wildly around her shoulders and getting stuck in her hoodie as she puts it on. She tugs at it and smiles breathlessly.

“El and I, we're going to have an anti–Valentine's Day party at El's house tonight. It's not a party, really; it's an un-party, just pizza and a couple of slasher movies and maybe a game or two of Settlers of Catan.” She bites her lip and stares up at me hopefully. “Will you come?”

I love Settlers of Catan.

I love pizza.

I even love slasher films.

For all of two seconds I let myself imagine it: me and Beaker and El in our pj's in El's basement, the way things used to be. And maybe I'd tell them. We'd curl up on El's old ratty couch with mugs of hot chocolate, and I'd spill out everything that's been going on: Mom and her theory that Ty's still in our house and how I'm not so sure now that she's wrong, the letter to Ashley so I could ask them what they think I should do with it, and maybe I'd even talk about what happened that night Ty checked out. With Steven. With the text.

But the instant I really let myself picture it, I feel the hole coming on. If just thinking about this stuff makes me feel like I'm going to die, what would saying it out loud do? And then I consider how Beaker tends to laugh when she's nervous. I imagine El's face, that look she gets when someone has said something too ridiculous to be believed. And I think, No. No. I can't tell them. I can't.

“Lex?” Beaker prompts gently.

I shake my head. “I should be home with my mom tonight, you know?”

And that would be true, if my mom wasn't working tonight. So it's not technically a lie.

Beaker's mouth goes into a frustrated line. I can see her considering her options and then deciding there are none. Nothing trumps sad, lonely mother.

“Anyway, why aren't you going out with Antonio?” I ask.

She tucks a curl behind her ear. “Oh. We're not together anymore. He's a skeez.”

“I'm . . . sorry,” I say lamely. I never liked Antonio. He was the kind of guy that always wanted to make out with Beaker, but never seemed to want to talk to her.

He was unworthy.

Beaker waves her hand like she's dismissing the thought of him, makes a
pfft
sound. “Well, love isn't real, like you said, right? And Antonio's hormones decided to react chemically with someone else.”

“That sucks.”

“Yeah, it kind of does,” she says with a bitter laugh. “Are you sure you won't hang out with us? I miss you. We all . . . miss you, Lex. That was boss the way you kind of took down Mrs. Blackburn.”

We all,
she said.

“Is Steven going to be there?” I ask.

“He doesn't have to be,” she answers, which means yes, he's supposed to be, of course he is, he's their friend still even though he's no longer my boyfriend, but she'll uninvite him if it would make me feel more comfortable.

I can't face Steven. But I can't kick him out of the party, either.

“Like I said, I have to keep my mom company tonight,” I say. “Sorry. It sounds fun.”

“Okay, well.” She puts her hand on my shoulder. “Hey, if there's anything I can do . . . If you ever want to talk . . .”

“Right. I have to go,” I say. “I have class.”

She knows that. She has class, too, the same class—AP History—and then third-period calculus, fourth-period physics, fifth-period computer programming, sixth-period calc lab, and then lunch, all of which she and I have together until seventh period, when she takes French and I take German, and then eighth period, when I am a teacher's aide in Mrs. Seidel's chemistry class, and Beaker has a drama class that serves as the first hour of the afternoon rehearsal for the school play.

But she lets go of me, and I back away, and then I walk off before I have to look too long at the disappointment on her face.

FOR DINNER I MICROWAVE
a frozen chicken pot pie and sit watching the news on our tiny kitchen television while I pick at it, until the coverage of all-things-love-related for Valentine's Day becomes too nauseating. I turn off the TV. Outside, snow is falling, the passing of yet another winter storm.

I should shovel the driveway, I think. That would make a nice surprise for Mom when she gets home.

But that would mean going into the garage.

I don't go into the garage.

The phone rings. I pick it up, but there's nobody there—just silence for a moment while I say hello a few times, and then I hang up. It's the old phone in the kitchen, so I can't see the number.

I wonder if it's Steven, checking up on me.

I wish he would have said something, if it was him.

Not that there's anything left for him to say. Not that I'd know
how to respond if he did say anything.

I finish my pot pie. It's not a candlelit Valentine's Day dinner while I'm being serenaded by a string quartet, but as freezer meals go, it's not too bad.

There's a noise in the hallway, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

I go to investigate.

A picture has fallen off the wall. I pick it up, turn it over in my hands. The photograph is missing. I search the floor, but it's not there. The back of the frame is fastened, so someone must have removed the photo and then hung the empty frame up again.

That's weird.

I know the missing picture. It's a photo of Dad and Ty, four years ago, pre-Megan, as they were about to head off on Ty's first deer hunting expedition. They were wearing neck-to-toe camo and neon orange caps. They were both smiling, holding up their rifles, but Ty's smile was strained.

He didn't want to go. He'd been dreading it for weeks.

But he went because he thought it would make Dad happy.

I remember the day they came home from that trip. They had a deer, a small scraggly little guy with a tiny rack.

“Uh-oh,” I said when I went out to watch them hang it from the rafters in the garage. “Bad day for Bambi.”

Ty smiled at my joke, but he was quiet. Dad was proud, talking about the difficulty of the shot that Ty had made, what a clean shot it was, so the animal didn't suffer, but Ty didn't say anything. He didn't have much of an appetite at dinner. He went to bed early
that night. When Mom framed this photo and put it up, he never stopped to look at it as he passed in the hall.

I feel the beginning of the ache in my chest. The hole.

Then all of a sudden I'm flooded with the sense that I'm not alone. If I turn and look, I'll see a shadowy figure at the end of the hall. I'll see him.

Ty.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the thought. I never knew they would actually do that, before—stand on end like that—but they do. I have goose bumps up and down my arms. My shoulders are so tight it hurts. My mouth is dry. I suck in my bottom lip to wet it.

I won't run this time, I think. I'll face it.

Slowly, I turn.

There's no one there. The hallway is empty.

I let out the breath I was holding, then try to laugh at myself. Delusion, I think. A belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth. Not a ghost, not a hallucination. A delusion.

I hang the empty frame back in its place on the wall.

Sometimes I miss being kissed.

It seems like such a small thing, a trivial thing, my lips meeting his, but sometimes, like tonight, I lie in bed unsleeping and stare up at the ceiling and remember what that felt like, not just the kissing part but that moment right before, when our faces were so close together, when I could feel his breath and see his eyes up close, the curve of each dark eyelash, the tiny crease where his neck met his jaw. The seconds before he kissed me. The anticipation. The rush of his lips on mine.

The average person, or so the internet tells me, spends 20,160 minutes of life kissing.

I wonder what our total was.

God. V-Day has infiltrated my brain.

The first person I ever kissed on the lips was a boy by the name of Nathan Thaddeus Dillinger II. I was 14, and Nate was the kind of guy whose parents bought him a sports car for his 16th birthday, which he
would total (but survive to tell the tale) before he got halfway to 17. He was tall, dark, and handsome, wore designer jeans, and had one of those high-wattage smiles that made the female teachers go easy on him.

Yes, he was hot. Yay for me.

But for all his many qualities, Nate Dillinger was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He was failing algebra.

You see where this is going.

The first kiss happened in a study room of the Williams Branch public library. I was teaching Nate about the systems of equations. We were doing a story problem:

John buys 3 goldfish and 4 betas for $33.00. Marco buys 5 goldfish and 2 betas for $45.00. How much would Celia spend if she bought 6 goldfish and 4 betas?

Our heads were close together, bent over my notebook, where I had just finished writing out the equations

3g + 4b = 33

5g + 2b = 45

when suddenly, without any kind of warning, Nate Dillinger kissed me.

Hmm, I remember thinking as his lips moved over mine. This is not entirely unpleasant.

Then he tried to stick his tongue in my mouth, and I thought something like, Ew, no, gross, and pulled away.

“Sorry,” Nate said, smiling in a very non-sorry way.

“That's okay,” I said, stunned. I mean, he had just stolen my first kiss. I was never going to get it back. That was it.

He took my “that's okay” for permission to do it again, and leaned in. I leaned away.

“Wait, do you even like me?” I asked.

He frowned, confused. “What do you mean?”

“Do you find me, well, I don't know, attractive?”

He shrugged. “You're all right.”

Be still my heart.

“Just all right?” I snorted. “Then why did you kiss me?”

Another shrug. “I was bored.”

He was bored. He stole my first kiss because he was bored.

Oh, the horror.

I sighed and resisted the urge to say something hurtful. He was a boy, thus biologically engineered for stupidity of this type. We could get past it, I thought. I could still get through this tutoring session and receive the $50 I'd been promised. “Let's get back to John and Marco, okay?” I suggested. “Now, the first thing we want to do is multiply the second equation by -2, so then we have a +4b and a -4b, which will cancel each other out, and then we'll add—”

That's when he tried to kiss me again.

And that's how:

Nate Dillinger + bloody nose = me - $50

Yeah, so my first kiss was no big deal.

My second kiss, the one that matters, didn't happen until last summer.

That day I was supposed to meet the gang at the SouthPointe Pavilions Barnes & Noble to chill for a bit, then go see a movie at the theater next door. As usual, Steven arrived early; he was already there when I showed up. But El had texted that she had one of her headaches (read:
Downton Abbey
marathon) and Beaker had called to report that she and Antonio were “having car trouble” (as in they were busy in the backseat of her car) and she didn't think they'd make it out before the film started.

“It looks like it's just going to be you and me today,” I told Steven when I found him flipping through a
Scientific American
in the magazine section. “The others are flakes.”

“Good,” I remember he said, with a quiet, knowing kind of smile he gets sometimes. “It's been too long since I had you all to myself.”

I laughed, but I was suddenly, inexplicably, nervous at the idea of having Steven “all to myself.” Maybe I could sense that something was going to happen. A change in the equation.

I told myself I was being silly. Steven and I were friends. We'd known each other since we were 12, when we decided that the smart-kid types in our middle school were better off sticking together. Safety in numbers, you know. I thought Steven was cute even back then. But his attractiveness wasn't really about how he looked, because there were periods when he had bad acne and braces and he was skinny as a beanpole. There was just something about him. The way he got excited about stuff like Tolkien and quantum physics and Doctor Who. He still had a sense of wonder that gets shamed out of the majority of the teenage population by the time we turn 18. He still loved things about the world. I found that inherently sexy.

That and I could always tell he liked me. There'd been the paper flower on Valentine's Day, and sometimes I caught him looking at me in a way that went beyond friendly. Interested.

But Steven was too reasonable for romance, I thought. Like me.

We wandered over to the science fiction and fantasy section and bonded over our adoration of
Ender's Game
and discussed how Hollywood hadn't screwed up the film too badly but it would never come close to the experience one gets reading the book, and I relaxed. Everything felt the same between us as it had always been.

Then Steven pulled out
Contact
.

“You should read this,” he said.

“Carl Sagan, as in the astrophysicist?” I squinted at the cover, which had a picture of Jodie Foster on it for some mysterious reason. “He wrote fiction?”

“It's an amazing book,” Steven said. “It shows how the belief in religion and the belief in science are fundamentally alike. We believe, even when we can't prove it, even when we can't see.”

“But in science, there's evidence,” I argued. “There's proof.”

“Read it. You'll see what I mean. You'll like it.”

I put my hand on my hip and smirked up at him. “How do you know what I'd like?”

Looking back, I can see that this could have been construed as a lame attempt at flirting on my part.

And it worked.

“Oh, I think I know you, Lex,” Steven said, the sound of his voice changing from what it had been a minute ago. “I know what you'd like.”

“Okay,” I murmured, and reached for the book, but he didn't release it.

“While we're on the subject, you know what else you'd like?” He cleared his throat and glanced around. We were alone, at least in that
particular section of the bookstore. “You'd like to go out with me. On a non-friend type of outing. A date, I mean.”

Boom. A date.

I sucked in a breath. “Is that a question?” I asked stupidly.

“Yes. I mean, would you consider . . . would you go out with me?”

I stared at him. A dozen reasons why this definitely would not be a good idea marched through my brain: This kind of thing would only complicate matters, make a mess. I hated messes. My life was enough of a mess as it was. I was just starting to feel like I had the ground under me again after my parents' divorce. I needed to focus on school, keep up my perfect grades, get into college, figure out my life's trajectory. I liked Steven—I liked him so much; that was easy to admit; he was one of my favorite people—but if we were together like that, it would make the other members of our group feel awkward. It would ruin our friendship.

We'd end up hurting each other.

“Steven—” I started to brace myself to say all of the hard things.

“Wait,” he said. “Hear me out.” He extracted the book gently out of my hand and returned it to its place on the shelf, then took my other hand in his. “I know a romantic relationship could be considered risky at this stage. We have a year left of high school before we go our presumably separate ways. I know the purpose of romantic engagement, on a biological level, is for procreation, and neither one of us wants that, of course. But . . .” He glanced down at our joined hands. “That's not all there is to it. There's the social aspect, of learning to interact with someone, as a partner, which could be useful for our future experience. And
it's been proven that romantic companionship is good for your health: it promotes the release of endorphins, relaxation, a sense of greater security, and . . .”

We were both blushing by this point. We're so similar, I thought. When we get nervous, we both start talking like idiot savants.

“You're babbling,” I observed.

“I know.” He sighed and then kept talking. “I think we could be good together, Lex. I promise I wouldn't pressure you, about . . . anything, and I won't have any kind of expectations about what's going to happen a year from now. I just want to find out what we could be like. An experiment, of sorts.”

I bit my lip. He was making it sound reasonable. Logical. Tempting. That and he was gazing at me with those unbelievably warm brown eyes of his, and his expression said:

PLEASE SAY YES.

“So the experiment would be whether or not there's chemistry between us,” I said.

He let go of one of my hands to push his glasses back up on his nose, and smiled. “Exactly. A simple experiment in chemistry.”

Which made sense. There was nothing Steven loved more in the world than chemistry.

“So this would entail you and me going on dates,” he continued, moving onto the logistics of how it would happen. “Maybe once or twice a week, or more than that, if you want. Whatever you prefer, really . . . We could—”

“Yes.” The word was out of my mouth before I could talk myself out of it. “I'll go out with you. Yes.”

“Excellent,” he said, looking so thrilled I thought he might start dancing right there in the bookstore. “You won't regret it.”

And that's how it started.

He held my hand during the movie. I sat in the flickering dark stunned by the idea that it had happened so easily, after all this time knowing each other. He asked me to think of him romantically, and I said I would. Just like that.

“This isn't too weird for you, is it?” he whispered after a while.

“No.” I squeezed his hand. “This is good.”

And it was.

After the movie he drove me across Lincoln to the Oven, an Indian restaurant downtown. He opened the door for me, pulled my chair out as we were being seated, and insisted on paying for dinner.

That was a little weird.

Then he drove me home and walked me to the front door. And at the porch, he stopped.

“Can I kiss you?” he asked hoarsely. There was so much in his expression, and I could read it all. He liked me. He really liked me. He didn't want to mess this up. He thought it might be too soon, but he wanted to kiss me. He wanted to know that I felt what he felt. It was a real part of the experiment, this kiss. It was:

Does me + Steven + dating = chemistry?

That's what kissing is supposedly for, on a biological level. It's a taste test, to see if you'd be a good match.

“Yes,” I said, and stepped closer to him. “You can kiss me.”

Slowly he lowered his head until his lips almost touched mine. He smiled, and I felt light-headed with how much I found I wanted this.
I dragged my bottom lip between my teeth to wet it and smiled too. Breathless. Waiting.

“Okay,” he whispered, his breath hot against my cheek. “Here we go.”

His mouth came down on mine gently, without pressure, and I don't have words to describe what it was like outside of warm and wonderful and alive, and none of those words even come close. After a minute our mouths opened and my tongue touched his, and the furthest thing from my mind would have been the words ew or no or gross. He tasted like red curry and sweet tea. Electricity zinged down my body and pooled low in my belly and I thought, Wow. So this is how it feels. All this time, I'd wondered. I was almost 18 years old and I'd never felt so connected with another person.

I curled my hand around the solidness of his shoulder and pulled him closer. He made a small rough noise deep in his chest and changed the angle, and our glasses banged against each other. We broke away from each other, laughing.

“That was . . . ,” he started.

“Spectacular,” I breathed.

“Spectacular,” he repeated, his brown eyes sparkling. Because the results of our experiment were conclusive:

Me + Steven + dating = spontaneous combustion

He tucked a strand of my hair behind my ear, his thumb lingering on my cheek. I shivered. I wanted to kiss him again.

“Good night, Lex,” he said, and then he turned abruptly and jogged back to his car. He sat there for a few minutes without driving off, and I wondered what he was doing until my phone buzzed with a series of rapid-fire texts. Which read:

There are some things I didn't get to say before.

You are an amazing girl, Lex. You're smart and funny and kind and beautiful. You're the whole package.

Thanks for saying yes.

I'll see you tomorrow?

I texted back that yes, I would love to see him tomorrow. We grinned at each other through the glass of his car window, and he drove away, and I went inside.

It was June 20.

I'd get six months with Steven, six months to the day, 183 days of kisses, before the equation would change again.