The Truth About Forever (17 page)

"It's still a sore subject," Kristy explained, while Monica turned her head, exhaling. "Anyway, I did everything I could to get his attention, but he'd just gotten back from Myers School then, was still dealing with his mom dying and all that. So he had a lot on his mind. At least I told myself that's why he could resist me."

"Myers School?" I said.

Kristy nodded. "Yeah. It's a reform school."

I knew this. Jason had tutored out there, and I'd often ridden along with him, then sat in the car doing homework while he went inside. Delia had said Wes had gotten arrested: I supposed this was the punishment. Maybe he'd even been there those days, as I sat in the car, looking up at the loops of barbed wire along the fence, while cars whizzed by on the highway behind me.

"Okay," Kristy said, tapping her foot to the music, "tell us about the sort-of boyfriend."

"Oh," I said, "we've been dating for a year and a half."

I took a sip of my beer, thinking this would suffice. But they were sitting there, expectant, waiting for more. Oh, well, I thought. Here goes nothing.

"He went away for the summer," I continued, "and a couple of weeks after he left, he decided maybe it was better that we take this break. I was really upset about it. I still am, actually."

"So he found someone else," Kristy said, clarifying.

"No, it's not like that," I said. "He's at Brain Camp."

"Huh?" Monica asked.

"Brain Camp," I repeated. "It's like a smart-kid thing."

"Then he found someone else at Brain Camp," Kristy said.

"No, it's not about someone else."

"Then what is it about?"

It just seemed wrong to be sitting here discussing this. Plus I was embarrassed enough by what had happened, what I'd done to freak him out, so embarrassed I hadn't even told my mother, whom I should have been able to tell anything. I could only imagine what these girls would think.

"Well," I said, "a lot of things."

Another expectant pause.

I took a breath. "Basically, it came down to the fact that I ended an email by saying I loved him, which is, you know, big, and it made him uncomfortable. And he felt that I wasn't focused enough on my job at the library. There's probably more, but that's the main stuff."

They both just looked at me. Then Monica said, "Donneven."

"Wait a second." Kristy sat up against the edge of the couch, as if she needed her full height, small though it was, to say what was coming next. "You've been dating for a year and a half and you can't tell the guy you love him?"

"It's complicated," I said, taking a sip of my beer.

"And," she continued, "he broke up with you because he didn't think you were focused enough on your job performance?"

"The library," I said, "is very important to him."

"Is he ninety years old?"

I looked down at my beer. "You don't understand," I said. "He's been, like, my life for the last year and a half. He's made me a better person."

This quieted her down, at least temporarily. I ran my finger around the rim of my cup.

"How?" she said finally.

"Well," I began, "he's perfect, you know? Great in school, smart, all these achievements. He can do anything. And when I was with him, it was like, good for me. It made me better, too."

"Until…" she said.

"Until," I said, "I let him down. I pushed too hard, I got too attached. He has high standards."

"And you don't," she said.

"Of course I do."

Monica exhaled, shaking her head. "Nuh-
uh
," she said adamantly.

"Sure doesn't seem like it," Kristy said, seconding this. She took a sip of her beer, never taking her eyes off of me.

"Why not?" I asked.

"Listen to yourself," she said. "God! Are you actually going to sit there and say he was justified in dumping you because you dared to get attached to him after a year and a half? Or because you didn't take some stupid job at the library as seriously as he thought you should?"

I knew this was, pretty much, what I'd just said. But somehow it sounded different now, coming from her.

"Look," she said, as I struggled with this, trying to work it out, "I don't know you that well. I'll admit that. But what I see is a girl any guy, especially some library nerd who's off at Cranium Camp—"

"Brain Camp," I muttered.

"—would totally want to hear say she loved him. You're smart, you're gorgeous, you're a good person. I mean, what makes him such a catch, anyway? Who is he to judge?"

"He's Jason," I said, for lack of a better argument.

"Well, he's a fuckhead." She sucked down the rest of her beer. "And if I were you, I'd be glad to be rid of him. Because anyone that can make you feel that bad about yourself is toxic, you know?"

"He doesn't make me feel bad about myself," I said, knowing even as my lips formed the words this was exactly what he did. Or what I let him do. It was hard to say.

"What you need," Kristy said, "what you
deserve
, is a guy who adores you for what you are. Who doesn't see you as a project, but a
prize
. You know?"

"I'm no prize," I said, shaking my head.

"Yes," she said, and she sounded so sure it startled me: like she could be so positive while hardly knowing me at all. "You
are
. What sucks is how you can't even see it."

I turned my head, looking back out at the clearing. It seemed no matter where I turned, someone was telling me to change.

Kristy reached over and put her hand on mine, holding it there until I had to look up at her. "I'm not picking on you."

"No?" I said.

She shook her head. "Look. We both know life is short, Macy. Too short to waste a single second with anyone who doesn't appreciate and value you. "

"You said the other day life was long," I shot back. "Which is it?"

"It's both," she said, shrugging. "It all depends on how you choose to live it. It's like forever, always changing."

"Nothing can be two opposite things at once," I said. "It's impossible."

"No," she replied, squeezing my hand, "what's impossible is that we actually think it could be anything
other
than that. Look, when I was in the hospital, right after the accident, they thought I was going to die. I was really fucked up, big time."

"Uh-huh," Monica said, looking at her sister.

"Then," Kristy continued, nodding at her, "life was very short, literally. But now that I'm better, it seems so long I have to squint to see even the edges of it. It's all in the view, Macy. That's what I mean about forever, too. For any one of us our forever could end in an hour, or a hundred years from now. You can never know for sure, so you'd better make every second count."

Monica, lighting another cigarette, nodded. "Mmm-hmm," she said.

"What you have to decide," Kristy said to me, leaning forward, "is how you want your life to be. If your forever was ending tomorrow, would this be how you'd want to have spent it?" It seemed like it was a choice I had already made. I'd spent the last year and a half with Jason, shaping my life to fit his, doing what I had to in order to make sure I had a place in his perfect world, where things made sense. But it hadn't worked.

"Listen," Kristy said, "the truth is, nothing is guaranteed. You know that more than anybody." She looked at me hard, making sure I knew what she meant. I did. "So don't be afraid. Be
alive
."

But then, I couldn't imagine, after everything that had happened, how you could live and not constantly be worrying about the dangers all around you. Especially when you'd already gotten the scare of your life.

"It's the same thing," I told her.

"What is?"

"Being afraid and being alive."

"No," she said slowly, and now it was as if she was speaking a language she knew at first I wouldn't understand, the very words, not to mention the concept, being foreign to me. "Macy, no. It's not."

It's not
, I repeated in my head, and looking back later, it seemed to me that was the moment everything really changed. When I said these words, not even aloud, and in doing so made my own wish: that for me this could somehow, someday, really be true.

A little bit later Kristy and Monica headed off to the keg again, but I stayed behind, sitting on the back bumper of the ambulance. I was feeling a bit woozy from the small amount of beer I'd had, not to mention everything Kristy had said. Too much to contemplate even under the best of conditions, now it was close to impossible.

I looked up after a few minutes to see Wes coming toward me from across the clearing. He had a bunch of metal rods under his arm—the rebar he'd been promised, I assumed. I just sat there watching him approach, his slow loping gait, and wondered what it would be like if he was coming to see me, coming to be with me. It wasn't what I thought when I saw Jason; that was more a reassurance. With him in sight, I could always get my bearings. If anything, Wes was the opposite. One look, and I had no idea what I was doing.

"Hey," he said as he got closer, and I made myself look up at him, as if surprised, oh look, there you are. Which worked fine, until he sat down next to me, and again I felt that looseness, something inside me coming undone. He put the rods down beside him. "Where is everybody?"

"The keg," I said, nodding toward it.

"Oh. Right."

Talk about forever: the next silent minute seemed to go on for that and longer. I had a picture of a school clock in my mind, those final seconds of the hour when the minute hand just trembles, as if willing itself to jump to the twelve. Say something, I told myself, sneaking a glance at Wes. He hardly seemed to be noticing this lapse, instead just watching the crowd in the middle of the clearing, his arms hanging loosely at his sides. Once again I could see the very bottom of the tattoo on his upper arm. Kristy had told me to live, whatever that meant in all its variations, and her words were still resonating. Oh well, I thought, here goes.

"So what is that?" I asked him, forcing the words out, then immediately realized I was looking at him, not at his arm, so this question could concern just about anything. He raised his eyebrows, confused, and I added—face flushing, God help me—"your tattoo, I mean. I've never been able to see what it is."

This full sentence, an inquiry to boot, seemed to me on par with Helen Keller finally signing W-A-T-E-R. I mean, really.

"Oh," he said, pushing up his shirtsleeve. "It's just this design. You saw it that first day you came out to Delia's, right?"

I felt myself nodding, but truthfully I was just staring at the black, thick lines of the design, now fully revealed: the heart in the hand. This one was, of course, smaller, and contained within a circle bordered by a tribal pattern, but otherwise it was the same. The flat palm, fingers extended, the red heart in its center.

"Right," I said. Like the first time I'd seen it, I couldn't help think that it was familiar, something pricking my subconscious, as weird as that sounded. "Does it mean something?"

"Sort of." He looked down at his arm. "It's something my mom used to draw for me when I was a kid."

"Really."

"Yeah. She had this whole thing about the hand and the heart, how they were connected." He ran a finger over the bright red of the heart, then looked at me. "You know, feeling and action are always linked, one can't exist without the other. It's sort of a hippie thing. She was into that stuff."

"I like it," I said. "I mean, the idea of it. It makes sense."

He looked down at the tattoo again. "After she died I started tinkering with it, you know, with the welding. This one has the circle, the one on the road has the barbed wire. They're all different, but with the same basic idea."

"Like a series," I said.

"I guess," he said. "Mostly I'm just trying to get it right, whatever that means."

I looked across the clearing, catching a sudden glimpse of Kristy as she moved through the crowd, blonde head bobbing.

"It's hard to do," I said.

Wes looked at me. "What is?"

I swallowed, not sure why I'd said this out loud. "Get it right."

He must think I'm so stupid, I thought, vowing to keep my mouth shut from now on. But he just picked up one of the rods he'd carried over, turning it in his hands. "Yeah," he said, after a second. "It is."

Kristy was now almost to the keg. I could see her saying something to Monica, her head thrown back as she laughed.

"I'm sorry about your mom," I said to Wes. I didn't even think before saying this, the connotation, what it would or wouldn't convey. It just came out, all on its own.

"I'm sorry about your dad," he replied. We were both looking straight ahead. "I remember him from coaching the Lakeview Zips, when I was a kid. He was great."

I felt something catch in my throat, a sudden surge of sadness that caught me unaware, almost taking my breath away. That was the thing. You never got used to it, the idea of someone being gone. Just when you think it's reconciled, accepted, someone points it out to you and it just hits you all over again, that shocking.

"So," he said suddenly, "why'd you stop?"

"Stop what?" I said.

"Running."

I stared down into my empty cup. "I don't know," I said, even as that winter day flashed in my mind again. "I just wasn't into it anymore."

Across the clearing, I could see Kristy talking to a tall blond guy who was gesturing, telling some kind of elaborate story. She kept having to lean back, dodging his flailing fingers.

"How fast were you?" Wes asked me.

I said, "Not that fast."

"You mean you couldn't… fly?" he said, smiling at me.

Stupid Rachel, I thought. "No," I said, a flush creeping up my neck, "I couldn't fly."

"What was your best time for the mile?"

"Why?" I said.

"Just wondering," he said, turning the rod in his hands. "I mean, I run. So I'm curious."

"I don't remember," I said.

"Oh, come on, tell me," he said, bumping my shoulder with his. I cannot believe this, I thought. "I can take it."

Kristy was glancing over at us now, even as finger guy was still talking. She raised her eyebrow at me, then turned back to face him.