If He Had Been with Me (12 page)

Sasha and I are walking to the drug store, even though she could borrow her mother’s car and drive us. It takes up more of the long, hot day if we walk, makes it more like an adventure than just something to do. Against the sound of the cicadas, our sandals smack on the sidewalk as we hike our way toward Main Street. We stop along the way to scratch bug bites on our ankles and make sure our bra straps aren’t showing from under our tank tops. We are talking as we walk, in spite of the clouds of heat that puff down our throats with each breath.

When we get there, we will sigh in the air conditioning and run our fingers through our hair. Perched side by side atop the layer of magazines on the bottom shelf of the massive stand, we will flip through articles about sex and hair. We will even balance the month’s massive bridal book on our knees and look at the white dresses and rings with a sort of reverence. Afterward, we will stroll through the aisles and pick out lip gloss and candy, nail polish and sodas. We’ll walk back to my house then, and in my room we will stretch out on my bed, our bare legs brushing, and read the magazines we bought and eat licorice.

This is the background of our day together, but the real purpose of being together is talking. Sasha and I can talk about nearly anything, and when we talk, we talk for a long time, a whole day even.

There is a sudden lull in our conversation, an unnatural pause after my story about last night’s date with Jamie. I look over at her, but she stares straight ahead down the sidewalk as if there is someone waiting for her there.

“I have to tell you something,” she says, still staring at the invisible person.

“What?” I ask. My mind is already tabulating all the possibilities; I’m the sort of person who tries to figure out the end of the book as she reads it and my conversations are no different.

“I think I’m going to break up with Alex,” she says.

“You can’t,” I say, as five different threads run through my mind and I try to sort through all the thoughts and reactions: jealous that she is so brave, smug that Jamie and I lasted, worried for Alex, surprised—

“I’m going to,” she says. “I’ve already decided really.”

“But why?” I ask, the shock momentarily overshadowing all the other reactions. She shrugs and looks down at the sidewalk to frown. Up ahead, I see the corner where we will wait at the crosswalk. In our impatience with the heat, we will push the button again and again, and even though we know it will not make the green letters appear any faster, we will stare at the sign expectantly.

“I still love Alex,” she says, “in a way. But I don’t feel about him the way I used to. Nothing is romantic anymore. It’s more like we’re old friends.”

“But that’s what long-term relationships are like,” I say. “You can’t just throw him away.”

“I’m not throwing him away,” she says. “But I’m not in love anymore and I need you to support me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I stop walking and we turn to each other. I hug her and she holds me back. We’re both dewy and hot to the touch. “I’m just surprised. And sad.”

And jealous, and smug, and worried.

We let go of each other and continue our walk and our day together.

The breakup happens and there are days of discussion. Jamie is annoyed with Sasha, but I defend her right to end the relationship. The boys are vague in their reports on how Alex is doing. They try to tell us that they don’t talk about Sasha when they hang out, but that is too ridiculous to be true.

In August, Angie gets a new boyfriend, also from Hazelwood High, but this one is, to our amusement, on the football team and rather preppy. Angie warns us about this first, swearing that he is actually very cool and knows all sorts of good music. I wonder what kind of warning he is receiving in turn about us.

We make plans to meet Angie’s Dave on a triple date to the movies. Brooke and Noah ride with us to the mall and we laugh and wonder aloud about Preppy Dave. I’m determined to like him for Angie’s sake, but I worry a bit about the boys.

“This is going to be hilarious,” Jamie says.

“Don’t tease him too much,” I say.

“I’m not going to be mean to him,” Jamie says. He rolls his eyes even though he’s driving and I glance at the road for him. “But we might need to do a tiny bit of hazing, you know, just to make sure this prepster is good enough for Angie. Right, Noah?”

“We can’t have Angie with someone who doesn’t deserve her,” Noah says.

“You will both behave,” Brooke says. I twist around in my seat to watch her glare at Noah. “Or you will both be in trouble.” She turns the glare over at her cousin in the driver’s seat, but he obviously can’t see her so she smacks the back of his head.

“Hey!” Jamie says. He reaches one hand back and grabs at her knee; the car swerves and we all laugh and scream. Brooke squeals the loudest as Jamie pinches the soft place above her kneecap and we laugh again. Jamie rights the car again and we speed down the road, talking loudly now above the radio and laughing as we trade threats back and forth with the boys.

I feel a pang of guilt knowing that Sasha and Alex are at home while we’re all out without them, but it’s just the way things are now. Maybe someday they’ll both be seeing other people and we could have a quintuple date.

***

Angie, with new pink streaks in her blond hair, is waiting for us at the food court with a tall broad-shouldered boy who has vibrant red hair. She waves enthusiastically when she sees us and tugs on his hand as she points. She is wearing the authentic poodle skirt she bought last spring, and he’s wearing a polo shirt. They couldn’t look more odd together if they were different species. He looks nervous as we approach and that immediately endears him to me.

“Hey,” Angie says. “Everybody, this is Dave. Dave, everybody.”

The boys, in what I know is a tactic to try and throw him off, shake hands with Dave and introduce themselves formally. Noah fakes a British accent. Dave copies their formalities with a straight face but manages to convey the same mocking air as them, and I’m hopeful for him.

We have an hour until the movie starts and so we wander around the mall. When Brooke and I move next to Angie so that we can admire her new hair, the boys suddenly flank Dave. I’m worried again, but they seem to have decided to think of him as some sort of pet. Jamie tells Dave that he also owns a polo shirt. It’s black and has a little man on it riding a horse. Noah, still faking his British accent, says he only wears his polo shirts when he is playing polo, but he would defend to the death the right for any man to wear polo shirts at all times. Dave laughs and tells them that he also owns a pair of ripped jeans; perhaps he can wear them next time they meet and Jamie can wear the polo. Noah thinks it’s a jolly idea.

I had been curious and surprised when I first heard about Dave, but now in person I can see his appeal. He’s bashful and frequently pink-cheeked under his freckles. His smile is crooked and unassuming. By the time we are buying our tickets, I am charmed.

There is something adorable about the way Dave looks with us, one lone khaki-clad sheep in a pack of rebel wolves. Even his expression is sheepish as he talks with us and holds hands with Angie. As we wait in line, she tells us in a whisper that he was worried that we wouldn’t like him since he was different.

“Of course not,” I say. “We aren’t like that at all.”

“I know, that’s what I told him,” she says.

We are juniors and suddenly it is all happening too fast, except it has always been this way, we just hadn’t realized it before. This year and then one more. This year and then one more, and one more and one more.

We are allowed to drive to school now, and Jamie picks me up every morning. It feels strange and wonderful to be responsible for arriving at school, knowing that Jamie could just keep driving forever and we would not be missed until the end of the day, and by then we would be far, far away. But we always go to school.

I have begun to receive mail every afternoon, piles of college brochures and form letters from university deans. Pictures of glossy students tumbled together in front of statues and fountains, playing Frisbee and reclining on blankets surrounded by books. These students walk through perfect autumns and warm summers. “It’s like this every day here,” their smiles say. “Really.”

All of them have an English education major. If the brochure does not list a creative writing minor, I toss it out. If it does, then it joins the orderly and small but growing pile by my desk. The pile has a neat look of efficiency, though it sits and waits and accomplishes nothing.

On The Steps to Nowhere, we compare dreams that are beginning to sound like plans. Jamie says he will major in business. I imagine us living in a Victorian house in Ferguson. He will have to drive to an office in the city every day. Looking at the future, I feel that I am looking into a snow globe at a tiny, perfect house with a little person that is me standing in the yard like a flagpole. One meticulously carved scene that represents the whole world—tiny, perfect, and enclosed.

***

Finny and I have one class together: the section of Honors English that neither his friends nor mine are in. Ours is the last class in the afternoon; theirs is in the morning. It is odd to think of it that way, of us and them. Them in the morning, us in the afternoon, us before the last bell rings.

My assigned seat is the very middle of the very front row, and were I to stretch and lean forward, my fingertips would brush the edge of the teacher’s desk. Finny’s is the seat behind mine, and it would take even less to touch any part of him.

In this class, we are closer together than when we eat dinner with The Mothers or sit on the same couch while we wait for the evening to be over. Sometimes his knee jabs into my chair as he twists around to reply to a classmate, or sometimes we turn to look into our book bags at the same moment, and even though I do not look, I know our faces are inches apart.

We never greet each other. We take these assigned seats and pull our notebooks and pens out of our bags in silence or talking to the others around us. It is an unspoken agreement not to speak here, just like our unspoken decision to always exchange a few words in front of The Mothers, just like our unspoken apologies for The War last year.

And I’m grateful that he agrees with me that we should not speak here, because no one in this class knew us in elementary school. All they know is that he is Finn Smith, the most popular boy in our grade, and I am Autumn Davis, Jamie Allen’s girlfriend who wears the tiaras, and that is how we would have to speak to each other, as if he was just another classmate and that is all there is between us. The strain of having to speak like that with him, along with all the other unsaid things, would be too much for me, and I don’t know what I would say or do.

One afternoon, I overhear a girl asking Finny if he’s picked out a major for college. This girl has been trying to flirt with him since the first day of school, but he somehow hasn’t noticed. He seems to think that she is just generally friendly. I stare straight ahead but listen behind me. I hear a swishing sound that must be the girl flipping her hair.

“I want to go to medical school,” he says, “so my bachelor’s degree has to be something to lead into that. But I dunno.”

“Wow. That is
so
cool,” the girl says. Based on her tone of voice, I don’t think there was anything Finny could have said that she wouldn’t have found cool.

***

She doesn’t know Finny well enough to understand how cool it actually is that he has found this calling. When we were small, he said that he wanted to be a professional soccer player, but he always said it with a shrug. He loved—loves—playing soccer, but he never felt a
need
to play in the same way I needed to make up stories. Finny’s instincts have always led him to help people, and now he’s found a way that he can help in a very direct and real way.

I envy how Finny has chosen the direction of his life without having had to commit to a destination. He doesn’t know what kind of doctor he wants to be. Aunt Angelina said he’s talked about pediatrics and Doctors Without Borders, but he’s also mentioned an interest in psychiatry.

***

“I guess it’s kinda cool,” Finny says. “I’ll just have to decide on something eventually.”

“Yeah,” the Flirty Girl says. I hear the swish of her hair again. “I don’t know what I want at all.”

I stop myself from turning around and telling her that knowing what you want can be far worse. There isn’t any reason for me to be interested in Finn Smith’s conversations.

Finny’s first soccer game is on a Tuesday afternoon in September, the third week of school. It didn’t seem like a day that would be important.

I hadn’t even planned on going.

Finny and Sylvie weren’t on the bus that afternoon. They stayed at school for his game and her cheerleading practice. I was the only one to get off at our stop. I am alone with the day as I walk down the street toward home. Yesterday, it had been as hot as August, but this morning we had a cool rain that left the air chilled. A few leaves on a few trees are starting to turn yellow or a little red. If the weather lasts the next few days, then more will turn, but before long it will be hot again; September is still a summer month.

The rose bush by the front door looks like a poet’s overly enthusiastic description. It’s literally drooping under the weight of so many full blooms and waiting buds.

I close the door against the chill air and drop my book bag on the floor.

“Mom?”

On the coffee table is a stack of mail. It’s not like her to leave the mail out like this; it should already be opened and filed. Underneath the electric bill, I see a pile of glossy smiles all wearing the same burgundy sweatshirts. “Come to Springfield!” they say. I recognize one of them. All the kids in honors classes got to take a field trip to a college fair. It was just a huge room with booths and student representatives with brochures. One of the girls on this cover was there. She grinned at Jamie and I just like all the other people standing behind booths had. The girl asked me questions and wrote my answers down on a clipboard. I repeated my routine about majoring in English education and taking a minor in creative writing because I could always write in the summer etc., etc. She said she was majoring in creative writing, and I was annoyed at myself for how it made me ache a little. Jamie was impatient to move on to another booth; he tugged on my hand and we moved on.

This brochure is about Springfield’s creative writing major instead of their teaching program. The girl must have taken down my information wrong. I flip through the pages. It isn’t very long.

My mother comes into the foyer, all smiles.

“Hi, honey,” she says. I fold the brochure in half and kick off my shoes.

“Hi,” I say.

“I thought you would stay late at school for Finny’s game.”

“Why would I do that?” I say.

“Angelina can’t go because of a teacher’s meeting. I’m going. I thought you knew.”

“Do I have to go?” I ask. I want to be alone in my room right now.

“I thought you’d want to.”

“It’s not like he’ll care if I’m there or not,” I say. I look back at the brochure in my hand. The crease has cut the girl’s face in half.

“Autumn,” my mother says, “why do you always say things like that?” Her voice is a sigh.

I shrug. I could read the brochure at the game. And it’s not like I
don’t
want to see Finny. Sometimes it’s nice to watch him and not have to worry about it looking like I’m staring at him.

“Fine. I’ll go,” I say. I stick the brochure in my back pocket.

***

It’s five minutes before the game starts and I’ve read the brochure twice. Just because something seems impossible doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try.

My mother and I are sitting on the top row of metal bleachers, facing the muddy soccer field. A chilly breeze ruffles my hair. The soccer teams are stretching while the referees trudge across the field.

It’s not that I want to be a writer and not a teacher, because I already am a writer. What I want is to be a published author, to have a few readers, to be able to hope that somewhere out there, someone loved my book. When I tell this to adults, they tell me about how they knew someone once who wanted something like that and what that person actually ended up doing.

A whistle blows and Finny leads the soccer team onto the field. He plays defense. A long time ago, he explained to me that this means it’s his job to protect one side of the field. He’s naturally good at protecting. I fold the brochure and stick it in my back pocket. Finny has that determined look on his face that he always gets at the start of a game. It’s the same face he made as a child, the same furrow in his brow that I know so well. He bounces on his heels as he stands on the field with the other starters, another familiar habit.

Finny said that teaching seemed too normal for me.

Isn’t this what all the children’s books and movies are always about? How even if the task seems impossible or you’re too small or you don’t have the right kind of whatever, you’re still supposed to try? Until you get to high school and suddenly you’re supposed to choose a safe path. A path that won’t take you too far from home. A path that isn’t too risky. A path that has health insurance and a 401(k).

Finny has the ball. Four players from the other team circle around him. They’re trying to take the ball from him and failing.

I can’t keep pretending that writing a few weeks out of the summer will be enough. I can’t risk looking back on my life and knowing that I did not try to get published as hard as I could have tried.

One of the players surrounding Finny slips in the mud and slides into him. Finny is running too fast to stop; he trips and flips head over heels. Next to me, my mother gasps. I realize it looks like he landed on his neck.

My heart stops.

I am ten years old again, and I cannot imagine life without him.

“I’m okay,” I hear Finny shout, but from this far away, his voice is quiet; if it were not a voice that I knew so well, then I wouldn’t have heard it. The coaches and refs run across the field and crowd around him. I can’t see him anymore, but I can imagine the race of his breathing and I can guess at the pounding of his heart under his ribs. I know the scars on his knees and the cowlick on the back of his head. I’ve tried to pretend I don’t, but I can’t pretend anymore.

I know what I am feeling. I know that it is real, and in this moment, there is nothing else in me but this knowledge.

I’m in love with Finny.

The crowd moves away and I see Finny stand cautiously. He looks up at the bleachers, and I know when he finds my mother and me, because he raises his hand in a wave, letting us know that he is okay.

I’ve loved him my whole life, and somewhere along the way, that love didn’t change but grew. It grew to fill the parts of me that I did not have when I was a child. It grew with every new longing in my body and desire in my heart until there was not a piece of me that did not love him. And when I look at him, there is no other feeling in me.

A whistle blows and the game continues. I take out the brochure again, but now I am only pretending to read it.