Seven Ways to Lose Your Heart (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-One

Kennedy

Getting Annabel back home to Belltown was both the shortest and longest road trip of my entire existence. Luckily for me, Hannah was coming down from a real bad acid trip, and Ben was in the midst of calling a friend to come and get her. I managed to secure us a ride to the bus station. I’d worry about how I was going to get my car later.

Over the twenty-four hours we spent on a multitude of buses, Annabel barely spoke a word to me. I kept waiting for her to yell or cry. Cuss me out for my forgetfulness. But she didn’t, and that was profoundly worse than any yelling. Every hour that went by without us exchanging words was painful, and yet every hour I didn’t figure out a way to fix it seemed like time was slipping through my fingers.

Once we arrived back in town, I borrowed Mrs. Peterson’s car and drove Annabel home. The whole way there I was sweating. It was just like that time I visited Annabel in the hospital when she was sleeping. I just sat there and stared at her, sweating; I wasn’t sure how to fix her. How to help. Anything I could say felt meaningless, and anything I could do just didn’t feel like enough. It was easier to run back then; I could still run now…but I wasn’t that schmuck anymore.

Parked outside her house, I take her hand in mine. “Annabel, please talk to me.”

“About what?” she mumbles as she unclicks her seat belt.

“Anything. Everything. Just talk to me.”

“I really should get going. I’m sure my parents need help with the arrangements.”

“Annabel, come on.”

She sighs. “What do you want from me? I don’t have anything to talk about, and I do have a ton of stuff to do.”

I swallow. “Yeah, okay. Call me later? Tonight?”

“Maybe. I’ll call you when I can,” she says quietly, turning her face from me and staring out the window.

I grip her hand tighter. “Call me tonight, Annabel.”

She nods before pushing open the door.

She doesn’t call me.

…

Three days and I haven’t heard from Annabel. The first day I chalked it up to her wanting her space, and I tried not to freak. The last thing she needed was my blowing up her phone with texts and calls. The second day, I wasn’t as chill. Four calls and countless texts, and the girl still didn’t respond. Yesterday, I wrote the tome of all emails. No reply. But I wasn’t giving up, and I wasn’t walking away. When I got up this morning, the only thing I felt was determination. I was going to get her to talk to me.

I take the steps leading up to her house two at a time. I attempt to pat down my hair. No doubt it looks crazy, as I haven’t showered in two days. Too busy trying not to worry that my relationship with Annabel was ending before it really got a chance to begin. I ring the doorbell several times before I realize no one’s home.

“They’re at the funeral,” an older gentleman from next door calls out.

I mumble a thanks and beeline it to my car. Peeling away from the curb, I gun it to the cemetery. She’ll need me today, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to mess this up, too.

Nearly anyone who’s anyone is at the grave site. Grams was a well-liked broad. It takes me a few moments to locate Annabel in the sea of mourners, but then I spot her bright, fiery red hair. It’s the same color red as the light in the darkroom. Looking at her parents, I wonder where the red hair comes from, as both of them have jet-black hair. Next to the casket is a large picture of Grams as a young girl, and I spot the familiar red that I have come to love so much.

Of course Annabel would get her hair from Grams. She’s like her in so many ways. I take a moment to bow my head, close my eyes, and pray. I thank God for giving us Grams, the woman who helped shape the girl I love. She’s responsible for putting us together, and I owe her so much.

I owe it to Grams to try to get Annabel Lee back. Man, I fucked it all up. Just like I did all those years ago. Why was it so hard for me to just get it together?

Once the service is done, the people slowly start to disperse. There is lots of hugging and crying. All the while, I stand on the outskirts of the crowd, unable to see anything of Annabel’s face. I wait until almost everyone is gone before I go to her.

“Annabel,” I call out.

Her back toward me, Annabel goes stiff at the sound of her name. Slowly, she turns around to face me. Her face is drawn and tired. Dark circles rest under her red and swollen eyes. I want to pull her into my arms. Whisper over and over again that I love her. Let her know I’m here for her. I’m really here this time.

“I can’t do this right now, Kennedy,” she says, her voice breaking.

“I just wanted you to see me. I needed you to know I’m right here, Annabel. You can’t push me away. Not ever,” I promise.

“We’re just too different,” she says, wrapping her arms around herself, attempting to shut me out. “I shouldn’t have been at that festival. I should have been home. That was the plan. You can’t just go around doing whatever you want. There’s an order to things. There has to be an order. And I’m going to college soon, and that means this thing between us is going to be really hard. You would have to work for it. I would have to work for it. And I couldn’t take it, not now, if you didn’t want to. We’re just too different,” she repeats.

Of course she didn’t think I could handle it. A relationship like this, one long-distance, one with Annabel Lee, would take work, and I’d proven how careless I was at the festival.

I could do better. I would do better. I had it in me. I know I did. She was worth it. We were worth it.

“Don’t you see? That’s the best thing about us,” I say. “You’re right; we shouldn’t have to completely change to be with each other. We just have to work to be our best selves. Do I think you need to loosen up a little? Be more vocal about the things you feel? Yes. But that doesn’t mean I want you to change everything you are. I love everything you are.” I’m talking so fast now that my words are starting to run together. “And when it comes to us, I’m in, Annabel. I’m ready to do what it takes. No matter what. I won’t run again. I swear it.”

“Kennedy…” Her voice trails off.

I take two giant steps forward, placing my hands on her cheeks. “I know I need to take some things in life more seriously. I do. I need to believe in myself as much as you do. But you need to believe in yourself as much as I do, too. Sure, you’re complicated, but that doesn’t make you unlovable.”

Annabel’s bottom lip quivers as her face crumples. I pull her into my arms and let her cry into my chest. “Grams isn’t the only one who loves you, Annabel Lee. Why do you think she worked so hard to put us together? Because she knew I loved you before I even did.”

Annabel cries harder, and I hold her tighter. “I just don’t know,” she finally admits when she’s able to pull it together.

“It’s okay not to know right now,” I say, kissing the top of her head. “I just need you to think about it. I dare you to think about it. About us,” I whisper.

Annabel nods. I reach down and interlock my fingers with hers. “You still want to stay here with me? Even though I’m not sure where we stand?” she asks.

“I want to stay with you as long as you’ll let me.”

I spend that entire day with Annabel. I go with her from the graveyard to the small gathering held at her house after. I make sure not to crowd her. I hover around the edges, only swooping in when I think she’s going to fall apart. And when I go to leave, I give her a small, quick kiss on the cheek and tell her to call me when she’s ready to talk.

She doesn’t let me reach the door before she calls out to me.

“What is it? What do you need?” I ask, ready to do whatever she demands.

“I have a dare for you.”

“A dare?” I ask, not sure I heard her correctly.

She nods, taking my hand and bringing it to rest over her heart. “I double-dog dare you to go write. Screw the internships if you don’t want them. It’s your life, and it’s not my job to run it. Go write whatever you want. Don’t write for your editor or for some submission requirement. Go write for yourself.”

And so I write. I write like I’ve never done before. For hours. For days. For nearly a week. What started out as a few pages of nothingness and everything became a novella. I wrote about how Annabel came into my life and showed me what it could be. I wrote about Bean’s Little Catherine and Drake. I told the story of how I lost myself in one girl, only to find I wasn’t myself without her.

…

One night, after the words started to blur together, I took a break and started to unpack my bags from the festival. Tucked inside my duffel was Annabel’s camera. I didn’t hesitate a damn moment. I walked to the community college, and using the skills Annabel taught me, broke into the photography lab.

Her pictures were fucking brilliant. Amazing shots of the bands, our van mates, the mountain, the bar, all our moments effortlessly memorialized.

And then I returned to writing. Every day I didn’t hear from Annabel, I wrote harder and faster, laying out everything I was feeling on the inside for the world to see. Once it felt done, I printed out the pages, bound them together, and sent them to Annabel. I included some of her pictures in my story. I mean it wasn’t Jack Kerouac, but it was one hell of a travel narrative. It was about us, so of course it was awesome. On the first page, I hand-wrote a tiny inscription:

I dare you to love me, Annabel Lee.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Annabel

I’ve never sat still. Not really. At least not until the accident temporarily forced me to. Once I was all healed up, my body that is, I didn’t pause for a second. It was always about what was next. The next test I needed to ace in school. The next club I needed to become president of. Because if I stopped worrying about what was next, I worried there wouldn’t be a next.

Now I fear it.

There’s no grandmother to check on this morning. Mom has suddenly felt the need to busy herself with keeping the twins from killing each other or burning down the house, my bags are packed for school, and there’s nothing for me to do but wait. I’ve never been very good at that, so I sleep. I nap all day. I manage to come out for the occasional meal, mostly because Mom demands it, and then I fall right back into my bed.

I think about asking Mom when her need to parent had returned. Or pulling out my camera to take some pictures. Maybe go for a run. But every time I try to do something, I just feel extremely tired. My limbs are so heavy and so weighed down that I can’t manage it. Anything really.

I don’t know what’s next, and the fear of that scares the shit out of me. It’s paralyzing. And the one person I want to talk to about it is the one person I can’t. Because when it comes to unknown futures, ours is the biggest mystery of all.

I barely hear the noise through my perpetual drowsiness. A sporadic tap against my window. I sluggishly pull myself to a sitting position, squinting in the darkness. Another tap. Someone is throwing rocks at my window. I fall back into bed, pinching the bridge of my nose. Maybe if I don’t acknowledge it, they will go away.

Who throws rocks at windows besides the male protagonist of a Nicholas Sparks book? Kennedy. Kennedy Harrison would throw rocks at a window. My stomach tightens, and for the first time in days, I want to get out of bed. Tears prick at my eyes. Seeing Kennedy is the last thing I need, or maybe it’s the thing I need the most. I’m not sure anymore.

Fuck it. At least if I see him, I can tell him to go away. He promised to give me space. I manage to pull myself out of bed and trudge over to the window. I take a deep breath, bracing myself for all the things I know I’m going to feel seeing Kennedy. Except it’s not Kennedy. From below, Jason looks at me, smiles, and holds up a stack of board games.

Ten minutes later, Jason is sitting on my bed. Having made him wait outside long enough to throw on some jeans and a T-shirt and brush my teeth, he makes no comments about the general disarray of my usually pristine room. Half-full cups lying all around. Plates littering the floor in desperate need of some alone time with a good dishwasher. He doesn’t even speak. He goes to work setting up Operation, and we play without saying a word.

There’s comfort in this. Ease. The familiarity of it all soothes my nerves. But only for a while. My hands keep slipping as I go to work removing the bones, and the buzzing sets my teeth on edge. Jason reaches over and gently takes the prongs from my hand. “I think we should play something else,” he suggests, clearly noting my frazzled state.

I clear my throat and tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. When was the last time I took a shower? “What? You giving up so soon? I was just about to kick your ass.”

“Of course you were,” he says with a good-natured smile. “You always kicked my ass. Why would today be any different?”

“Because everything is different,” I whisper. Before I know it, tears are streaming down my face. “Grandma is gone. I’m leaving for school. Things with us…”

Jason reaches forward and takes my hand in his. “Things with us are fine.”

“I shouldn’t have broken up with you like that. I at least owed it to you to do it in person.”

“Don’t feel bad about that. We’re still good, Annabel. I’m here, aren’t I?”

I give his hand a squeeze. “You’ve always been here.”

It always came back to that. I wasn’t mad at Kennedy because I’d been so wrapped up in him, both figuratively and literally, because I had missed
that
call. No, that wasn’t it. I knew Grandma’s time was short when I left. We had talked about that. Made our peace. I wasn’t even really mad about the truck. Even if it was completely stupid and reckless. I was angry at what it implied. A recklessness. A carpe diem philosophy that was hard for me to swallow. The fear that one day that belief system would force me out of his life. That one day I would be too much work, and he would leave again.

I couldn’t imagine being strong enough to survive that. I look at the boy sitting across from me, and I know this would be easier. A boy like him. But the tragedy is I wouldn’t feel the things I felt when I was around Kennedy. I wouldn’t feel like I was alive, and surviving that accident didn’t mean a damn thing if I didn’t feel that.

“Have I ever told you thank you for all that? You know, the whole being-there thing?” I ask quietly.

“Have I ever made you feel like you needed to?” he counters. “Knowing you, being in your life, has been my extreme honor.”

“You might just be the most perfect ex-boyfriend in the whole world.” I laugh, shaking my head.

“Ex-boyfriend. Not ex-friend. We can be friends, right?”

“What? And talk about things like that girl from your office?” I tease, raising an eyebrow.

“Sure. Right after we talk about Kennedy Harrison,” he argues, reaching up and tugging on a strand of my hair.

It wasn’t wrong to break up with Jason. He was a good guy, and he deserved to be happy. I owed it to him to let him go, let him find someone who made him feel all the things Kennedy made me feel. Things couldn’t always stay the same. They aren’t meant to. I had lived. I was alive. And that meant uncertainty. It was my job to see the beauty in that. I owed it to my brother and my grandmother.

“Maybe we can just be the type of friends who play board games and talk about everything but our love lives,” I suggest with a laugh.

And so we do. We talk about Grandma and school and the law firm, and even though it’s not exactly the same as it was before, it’s still good.

Later that night, for the first time in days, I find myself unable to sleep. Feeling restless, I creep down to Grandma’s room.

It still looks the same. Frozen in time as if she never left. She’s just off in some other room or at a doctor’s appointment. As much as I may want my life to stand as still as this room, it can’t.

Things change. That’s just the way of it. And change isn’t always bad. Jason and I had morphed into something different. It had been nice talking to him this afternoon, and I was grateful that we both agreed to try to still be there for each other. We would try. That’s all you could do. Try.

As I walk around Grandma’s room, touching everything, wondering how long it would be before the room no longer smelled of her vanilla perfume, I spot an envelope on her desk with my name scrawled across it. My breath catches in my throat, and I momentarily contemplate throwing it away without reading it. Reading it would make her death final. Thinking back on my relationship with Kennedy, I realize death is about the only thing that is final. I never imagined he would walk back into my life.

There was still hope. I tear open the envelope to find a few simple notes hastily written on the back of a Donald Trump flier. I can’t help but chuckle at the fake mustache Grandma drew over his face. Under his picture, these words:

Don’t be a fucking chicken, Annabel.

I spend the rest of the night sitting on my front porch, remembering when I was last out here with Grandma. As I stare at the rising sun, Grandma’s letter in my pocket, I don’t know what comes next. Life offers no guarantees. The only thing I know is what I want. I want to feel alive every second of every minute of every day. And there was only one boy who ever made me feel that.

When I finally make it back inside, my mother hands me a cup of coffee and a package from Kennedy.

Don’t be a fucking chicken, Annabel.

I tear the package open.