Stay (23 page)

were both somewhere new and large with each other. Or

maybe it was just so good to see him. It was as good a defini-

tion of love as any—the feeling of
just so good to see you
that

happened to stay.

“I had a great idea,” I said.

I was looking at his mouth. He had a terrific mouth.

“I wonder if it’s the same great idea that I had,” he said.

“You think—“ But I was interrupted. He kissed me then,

finally. A sweet, sweet kiss. A delicious, perfect kiss that made

me think of peaches and summer and days you got to sleep late.

The kiss ended. His arms were looped around my waist. I felt

so happy. “I guess we did have the same great idea,” I said.

We looked at each other and smiled like we just discovered

* 179 *

Deb Caletti

something wonderful, maybe kissing itself, something no one

else ever figured out. It seemed like ours, a terrific secret.

“Think we should tell anyone about this?” he said, reading

my mind.

“No way,” I said.

“Ha, look at you two, sucking face,” Jack said.

If I had managed to get myself most of the way to
There’s a

Reasonable Explanation
after my visit with Annabelle Aurora,

my afternoon with Finn completed that particular voyage.

There’s a Reasonable Explanation
is definitely a place you can

go, a destination. Sometimes it’s a fast trip, a quick, five

minute train ride, and other times it’s that kind of travel that

involves buses and cars and long waits in airports and heavy

bags slung over your shoulder, like the time Dad and I went to

Australia. You somehow get there. Tired, questioning why you

ever left, but still there. You collapse into
There’s a Reasonable

Explanation
like some hotel bed with great sheets. Or even

not great sheets. The arrival is such a relief that the bedspread

could be scratchy and it wouldn’t matter all that much. You’re

just so glad to be there.

After that kiss, I hardly noticed the small voice, the static of

anxiety somewhere way back that said something was wrong.

I felt happy. I felt happy and like I deserved to be that happy

and that the happiness deserved “normal.” I wanted all the best

things for that happiness, the way you want all the best things

for someone you really care about, and normal was the least it

deserved.

* 180 *

Stay

So, I did something normal. I did it to spite
abnormal
, I think.

It was sort of defiant. Same as all those people who said they

wouldn’t give in to terrorists but would just go on doing their

usual thing.

I called Shakti.

Yes, I did. On purpose. I was bursting with happiness, and

when I’d been bursting with happiness before, I would pick

up the phone and call my best friend. I’d been doing that for

years, ever since we met in the sixth grade. This time I made

her promise, I made her swear, and then I spilled it all. Where

we were. What had happened since.
You could have told me!
she

said.
I would never, ever in a million years tell Christian where you

were!
I knew that. I did. And I was so glad to have her know the

truth. It felt terrible to keep my real life from her. But now she

knew, and now my old life and my new one came together. As

it should be.

Normal. 32*

32 And yet, normal, too, is often a destination. A contortionist act, a yoga position. The

kind where you have to put one leg over your head and balance. You can reach it. But I

promise you one thing. You aren’t going to stay that way forever.

* 181 *

Breaking up with Christian was not as easy as it

should have been. Not even for me. There were things about

Christian I would miss.33* His voice. I was sure I would never

meet anyone again with a voice like that, the way it played, up

and down, like music in my ear. But then again, terrible things

had been said in that voice. The way he looked—but then again, a

person could turn ugly. Their actual
look
could change when their

actions were repulsive. The way he made me feel—that strength

and attraction. And then again, those were the things I started to

33 You’re groaning at me here, I know. I would be. I would say, You should have dumped

that asshole and never looked back. But if you’ve gone through a breakup, you know it’s

true, don’t you? Admit it. Even if he was a creep and you are glad you’re out of there,

there’s something you miss. His car, even. His mother. The way he rubbed your neck.

Stay

feel ashamed of. He could make me feel as hideous as he made

me feel beautiful, as small as he made me feel big, as burdened

as he made me feel lucky.

Breaking up could sit in front of you for a while. It was a ring

of fire you had to at last decide to run through. You finally got

tired of standing there and looking at it, feeling the heat, tired

enough to finally just go. Getting burned at last seemed better

than the
waiting
to get burned.

“Did you do it yet, C. P.?” my father asked. It was the same

thing Shakti had been asking me every day. Now that she knew I

intended to break it off with Christian, she’d stopped the gentle

hints and questions:
Does it ever bother you when he . . . I’ve noticed

that Christian always . . .
Instead, she came at me full force. She

was talking to me like the coach of the prize fighter.
You waited

too long already, Champ. You gotta get in there and do it. One fast

punch, no hesitation. Take him down, Champ.
If you heard this

coming out of her, you’d know how funny it was. You’d know

why I cherished that girl.

“I’ll
do it
, Dad.”

“You wait around for it to get easier, and he’ll have that knife

at your throat.”

I should say, too, how hard it was for words like that to actu-

ally reach the part of my brain that truly
gets
it. I was resisting

the idea of any actual danger. It seemed overly dramatic in some

bad-television way. The things you believed could happen if you

watched soap operas, maybe, not if you read books and went to

school and had a regular life. Parts of me, big parts, thought that

Dad was overreacting. He was taking it too far. I tried to convince

* 183 *

Deb Caletti

myself that what Dad said could be true, but it seemed like I was

trying to manufacture fear. The times I
had
felt fear, the day of

the fight about Jake Ritchee, the day he threw the glass—I had

numbed those things in my brain with
compassion
and
under-

standing
, which worked on me the same way drugs and alcohol

worked on other people. I understood Christian. I felt sorry for

him. He was just afraid. Empathy took the edge off, and the truth

is, we need our edge. Our edge is trying to speak to us, and we

are too, too good at shutting it up.

The thing is, though, a person keeps being who they are.

They keep doing whatever it is they’ve always done. And this is a

huge help when you’re trying to break up.

I was in Fred Meyer, buying some poster board for a senior

year A.P. English assignment. The visual aid part of my presenta-

tion. I threw a sandwich in the cart, too. A mascara. Some lotion

I like that was on sale. Stuff for my poster. I was cruising around

the music aisle, just seeing if there was something I couldn’t live

without.

I looked up and there was Christian. I had one of those stupid

moments where the thought flash was that I knew him from some-

where, and then, of course, all his familiarity came rushing in.

“Clara,” he said. “There you are.”

“What are you doing here?” I thought he was over at his

friend Evan’s house. Group project. Evan and some girl.

“We’re finished.”

My heart dropped. I thought he meant him and me. It was

surprising how bad it felt when it was his idea. But then I realized

he just meant they were done with their project. He was looking

* 184 *

Stay

down into my basket. Looking in a way he thought there might

be something incriminating in there. Like what? Condoms? A

lacy black thong? Something other than roast beef on a kaiser and

colored pencils?

And then things came together in my mind. I realized what

was happening. I had told him when we last talked that I had

planned on coming here after school.

He was checking on me. He was making sure I was doing

what I had said I was going to. I knew that as sure as I’d known

anything before.

“You’re checking on me,” I said. I couldn’t believe it. I really

couldn’t. I had seen him looking at my phone before, true. I’d

actually caught him with it in his hand. I wondered sometimes

if he’d looked at my e-mail. I’d go downstairs or something, and

come back to find the computer screen changed. But he had actu-

ally come to
Fred Meyer
. This seemed somehow more damning

than if he’d checked up on me at a Starbucks or some restaurant.

It was freaking
Fred Meyer
. Where they sold weed whackers and

groceries and tube socks in fat packages and knockoffs of knock-

offs of designer clothes.

“You said you’d be here after school.”

“And I
am
here.”

We were standing by the rows of CDs, by the videos, the

cameras behind glass cases. A guy in a yellow Fred Meyer vest

was watching us. I used to love those shoulders of Christian’s,

that mouth, the way his hair fell over his eye. Funny, but I

realized that most of the time I didn’t even hear his accent

anymore.

* 185 *

Deb Caletti

“What are you buying?”

“I’m going to the hardware department to buy some rope to

hang myself because I can’t stand this anymore,” I said. It was a

terrible thing to say. Awful, but I couldn’t stop myself. “I’m done.

Christian, we’re done. This is over.”

He stood there staring at me. He was wearing a plaid shirt I

had given him last Christmas. I loved that shirt. I had unbuttoned

that shirt countless times. “Clara, you can’t do this. No. Please.”

“We’re finished,” I said.

He was right by the seasonal aisle, the place where time

speeds past in candy minutes, Halloween to Christmas,

Christmas to Valentine’s Day, Valentine’s Day to Easter. And

then he turned and fled. I watched the automatic doors shut

behind him. I watched them open again, letting in a mom

with a toddler girl in a grocery cart. I looked over at the Fred

Meyer guy in the yellow vest. He was not much older than

me. Wheat-Thin thin, with glasses and pink-white skin. He

shrugged at me, as if to say
That’s how it goes
, though I guessed

these were scenes he usually only saw in those on demand

independent films. Music was playing. An old Culture Club

song from the eighties. “Karma Chameleon” in cheery,
buy-

me!
instrumentals.

I had done it. I’d walked through the ring of fire. I had bro-

ken up with Christian. I wanted to feel some relief, but instead

I only felt some sick twist of emotion in my chest and some

ache in my throat that was too big to swallow. I thought about

calling Shakti or my dad, but I felt too stunned. My hands

were shaking. Instead, I went to the housewares department.

* 186 *

Stay

I walked in the aisles of sheets. I stuck my arms deep down in

the folds of the cool cotton blankets.

It felt different right away. There was silence from him at first.

For an entire day. I got scared. My dad made me soup. Shakti

offered to come over, but I said no. Nick, too. He said he was

making me a CD with breakup songs on his iPod. Annie said she

was taking me shopping that weekend. We’d buy
new life
shoes.

But I couldn’t think of soup or music or shoes. I could only hear

how loud that silence was and wonder what was happening in it.

I was worried about Christian. I thought about texting his friends

to make sure he was okay, but I knew I shouldn’t. He suddenly

seemed a million miles away, like some astronaut that got his

cord to the spaceship severed, and now he was floating God knew

where in the blackness.

I heard from him two days later. I’d been wishing he would

call, praying to whoever might be listening that he would, just to

know that he was all right. Once he actually did call, though? I

was wishing as badly that he’d go away and stay away. You can

want someone gone and still care. You just want to care from a

great distance.

I answered. He was sobbing. Pleading. I used my softest