I pull him along and refuse to dwell on the feel of his hand back in mine. He follows, lets me lead him across hallways and up and down staircases. He isn’t pulling away.
We’re looking for someplace private because there are matters we need to discuss—at least, that’s what I’ve told him. In a small-town school where everybody knows who you are and what your deal is, this kind of solace and discretion is difficult to come by. The hour we have free for our lunch break is going and going, but I keep walking, intent on getting something done before it’s gone.
We stop in front of a door. It leads to the janitor’s closet.
Reed shrugs, brows furrowed, a question. I shrug back. He takes the lead, pulls me into the cramped space. The door thuds and clicks behind us as it closes, and it feels like a finality.
We pause in the darkness for a few moments before it occurs to either of us to look for the light switch.
“Better,” he declares, when he finds it and we can see each other again in the flickering glare.
“Yeah,” I say. I watch him watch me, his expression curious and expectant, and my first instinct is to turn the lights back out. I feel transparent, inside out, the mess and the complexities of my inner workings very suddenly exposed. And yet, the strangest of things, I don’t feel like abandoning what I’ve set out to do.
This morning I woke up and I was seventeen again. As in: The last six years never happened. As in: I was back in high school, and I was somebody completely different. As in: The plot of that TV show Hindsight. As in: When I got to school, disoriented and begrudging, there he was, right where I’d left him, exactly as I knew him. Reed Arias.
He had no idea.
It was jarring, finding Reed at my locker, talking too fast about some mundanity or other that I hadn’t thought about in who knows how long. The English assignment on Animal Farm. Quadratic functions. How much sleep he lost over an art project. “I’ve missed you,” I wanted to say, although I hadn’t even admitted it to myself, but then he was already going on about some IMs we apparently exchanged last night, and why had I disappeared on him?
I didn’t need reminding, but here it was anyway, concrete proof of something that had begun to seem like it had never taken place at all. A lost-and-found sense of normal, and anything but.
My world had been full of him at this age. Reed would never get it, could never fathom that by our early twenties we would each be pretending the other didn’t exist. And that it was just this thing that happened, like the pages of your favorite books yellowing or milk going bad. The kind of thing you didn’t notice until it was too late.
We had science lab first period. He made attempts to distract me from five tables away instead of helping his partner with the water cycle experiment we were supposed to be doing. Whenever I’d look over, he’d already be looking back, his features both soft and certain. His fingers brushed my elbow lightly when he passed me on his way to rinse a graduated cylinder. Soon I will simply evaporate, he sang at one point, my favorite line from a song we both loved, and I knew it was only for me.
In English class he passed me a note. (Impressive, considering he sat on the last row and I sat on the second.) On it he’d written only three words, with no regard for capitalization or punctuation.
boxer deserved better
I flinched as soon as I unfolded it, staring down at a piece of paper I hadn’t looked at in years, lost to one of the overstuffed journals of my youth. I had cut it up and painted over it with watercolor, and here it was again, pure white and whole.
I read it over and over for a long time. Eventually it hit me: I knew what this day was and what it meant for him and me.
At the end of the day Reed would sit with me at the front steps and tell me he’d be going away for the summer, to stay with his grandparents in Portland. He would start to speak again, but my ride home would arrive and I’d be in a hurry, cutting him off with an apology thrown over my shoulder before he could get the words out. “Tell me later!” I would yell from the car window. He would never try again.
This summer he wouldn’t write or reply to my messages. When he came back nothing would be the same. In a few years he would corner me at a party and confess, drunkenly, that he had been about to say how he really felt about me. He would proceed to pass out against the bathroom tile, his spiel lost to his alcohol-induced stupor. I would never hear the rest.
I wouldn’t have seen him since, and I’d be left wondering how it could have gone differently for the rest of my life.
By the end of third period I’d decided it was time for me to find out.
Few things made sense about my situation, and I still didn’t know how I got myself stuck in the past, but I was starting to think that perhaps this wasn’t some random, if slightly unreal, occurrence. Maybe there was some sort of purpose to it.
When the bell rang I booked it out of my seat and accosted Reed by the doorway of his art class. I’d spent the entirety of history class obsessing over the note and what I should do. I’d been through all this—I was done with the mind games and the second-guessing. I was done fucking around.
“We need to talk,” I said. There was a slight panic in my voice that I swallowed down. “I need to tell you something,” I added, more steadily and evenly.
If he thought I was being weird, he didn’t let on. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Which brings us full circle to where we left off: Us, hiding in a dimly-lit closet, surrounded by drying mops and industrial bottles of citrus-scented disinfectant.
Reed takes a packet of cherry-flavored Airheads out of his pocket and starts chewing. “Grace?” he prods.
I busy myself by fiddling with the hem of my skirt. It would be best, I know, to just rip the band-aid off, to come right out and say it. Thing is, I’ve changed a lot in the six years that came and went and disappeared, but I’m still not as put-together and sure of myself as I’d like to be.
I have to be careful, and I have to do this right. I need more time.
I start by telling (some of) the truth. “I didn’t really have anything urgent to say.” I force it out before I raise my eyes to meet his.
Reed’s expression goes slack. “You must have brought us here for a reason,” he says.
He’s trying to understand—he wants to understand—so I try my best to give him a coherent explanation. “I think I just wanted a real conversation,” I say. “It seems to me like it’s been so long since we’ve been able to just sit down and talk.”
“What are you talking about? We talk every day.”
“This is different. Out there,” I say, motioning to the juvenile madness that’s without a doubt happening around us, “it’s too much. We’re always swamped. I feel like I have no idea what’s really been going on with you lately.”
I’m talking from memory. He was on the swim team and he volunteered at the library. I was associate editor of the school paper, and had Literary Society meetings on Thursdays. Between all of that and our classes, we barely had a moment to ourselves. It’s cathartic, getting it all out in the open. I thought I was improvising, but I realize that I’m not pulling it out of nowhere—I carried it around with me all those years ago. I just never got around to saying it out loud.
I was afraid my feelings were unfounded, that I was being irrational.
“Bear with me,” I plead. “I don’t know how to make you understand this, because I don’t even think I understand it fully myself.”
Reed doesn’t say anything, just listens.
“We always talk about all these things—books and movies—and I love that we agree on them for the most part.” At this he smiles slightly, tentatively, and somehow I can tell he remembers that argument we had once over Perfect Blue. “But I guess it bothers me that I can’t see them from your point of view, and that you can’t see them from mine. Not really.”
“I want to talk about the future,” I go on, and for a second I’ve forgotten that I’ve already lived it. I almost laugh out loud at the thought. “Not ours, although there’s that too, but what you imagine it’ll be like. I want to talk about the last thing that scared you and the last thing that made you feel alive. I want to know if there’s an overlap between these things. I want to hear the things you won’t tell just anybody.”
I move back against the door to create more space between us. It’s futile, of course; there’s hardly any more room in the closet. In a quieter voice, I say, “I wanted to get you alone.”
He studies me for a minute. The longer this goes on, the more certain I become that I’ve blown it.
Maybe I’ve read it wrong all this time. Reed was never in love with me all along. None of what I just said is making sense to him. And I don’t blame him for not getting it, but I wish he’d take a hint.
Then again, I am the one who’s doing the verbal equivalent of walking in circles.
When Reed finally speaks, his voice is even and measured. “Funny you should talk about an overlap,” he says. “Because the last thing that scared me and the last thing that made me feel alive are basically the same thing.”
I ask him what he means.
“It was two things, actually.” He ticks them off with his fingers. “The fervency in your voice when you said you had something important to tell me, and your grip on my arm as we ran across the corridors looking for this place.”
“That scared you?”
“I thought you might have had bad news,” he explains. “But I also had this feeling that it was another thing entirely.” His eyes move over my own quickly, then he looks away. “I mean, I hoped.”
“And was it?”
“Was it what?”
I hesitate. Then, “Did it go the way you hoped?”
Instead of answering the question, Reed says, “For the record, Grace, I’d like to know these kinds of things about you, too.”
I let it sit. I say nothing and suck in a breath when he wordlessly strips off his navy sweater and rummages in his backpack. Shoulders, arms, chest, stomach, back, and all. It’s a sudden, casual show of skin that shouldn’t be new to us, but is now making my insides feel like they’re slowly, slowly igniting all over.
I draw my breath back out when he’s finished changing into one of his swim team shirts. “Practice later,” he says, by way of explanation.
Go, Tridents.
Later I nudge Reed’s knee with my shoe. “Tell me something else.”
“About myself?”
“About anything at all.”
“Okay,” he says, and he has to think for a second. “Ernest Hemingway had four wives in his lifetime. Did you know that?” I shake my head. I didn’t. He continues, “The first was Elizabeth Hadley Richardson—she was called Hadley.
“He wrote that he knew he was going to marry her when they met. They lived in Paris. They traveled the world, but their best days were their simplest. Hemingway would write during the day and come home to her and their little boy at night. They were young and in love, and for a while, it was enough.”
He tells me how she learned to become more strong-willed and welcoming of chance. How she lost a suitcase filled with her husband’s manuscripts, and how he was utterly heartbroken. How she never quite fit in with his more glamorous friends from the legendary group of writers known as the Lost Generation. How she read The Sun Also Rises as it was being written and became upset when she didn’t see a shred of herself in it, as though her existence in Hemingway’s life had stopped mattering.
And it’s in this moment, as I listen to him ramble on, that I feel an intense rush of affection for him. There’s something else; I’ve never felt anything like it, and I never will again, I’m sure, but a certain resolve just explodes in my chest. It evolves into a fearlessness, and then into an overwhelming want. It builds and it builds.
It has been building for as long as I’ve ever known.
“Hemingway married three more times,” he’s saying, “but it was never quite the way it had been with Hadley. Later in his life, his memories of her would be poignant, wistful.”
The loss of him plays out in my mind, scenes from another life blurring together like a fever dream. I see us at that party. We had locked ourselves in the bathroom upstairs and despite myself I had suppressed a smile when Reed nearly fell into the tub. He had said, I was going to tell you.
“He wished he could have died,” he tells me now, “before he could love anyone else.”
I cross the minuscule line of demarcation between us and kiss him.
Reed freezes, but he doesn’t break the kiss. And then, gently, he pulls me by the collar so that I’m straddling him.
His hands stray. They move down my skirt, tracing the shape of my thighs, but just when I’m about to ask him what he’s doing, I realize he’s fixing it to give me my modesty. (Even though modesty is kind of the last thing I want, right now, with him.) When he’s done he places his palms flat on the ground, on either side of him. With one hand, I grab at his sleeve to steady myself.
He kisses differently than he moves. I think of him underwater, slick with concentration, bullet-fast, graceful and precise. Or when he’s shelving at the library, serious and methodical, his arms straining with the weight of the thick volumes. Or the way he drives, no-fuss and no-nonsense, his grip tight on the wheel and his gaze straight ahead even as he warns me not to spill my soda anywhere and sings with me to the Cars tape that’s been in his cassette deck forever.
His lips are slow, deliberate, languid against mine. Clumsy, almost, and searching.
I put my fingers in his hair. He sighs into my mouth.
I pull away.
“You taste really sweet,” I say, stupidly. It feels weird on my tongue; I don’t quite have a handle on my words—or my breathing, or anything else, for that matter—yet.
“It’s the Airheads,” Reed says, sounding just as breathless.
I nod. Then I kiss him again, or he kisses me.
This time I take both of his hands and pull them toward me. He’s a quick study, trailing my back before settling firmly on my hips, his fingers ghosting the patch of exposed skin between my skirt and the part of my top that’s ridden up.
I keep my hands clasped gently around his neck. His lips brush against my own one last time, lingering on my bottom lip, then he pulls back. “Look at you,” he says, and he presses his forehead to mine.
This yanks me back to earth, and briefly I wonder if it would be obvious on me, what we’ve been doing. The thought is more amusing than it is mortifying, and I start to laugh.
“What?” His eyes are wide, like he’s afraid he’s ruined everything.
“Nothing,” I say. “It’s funny, this.”
And Reed gets it, because he starts laughing, too. Neither of us have moved an inch; he’s still pinned beneath me like it’s the most normal thing in the world. Before long, we’ve stopped laughing, stopped making any sound, stopped smiling altogether.
My hand is still cupped around his neck. Softly, and unhurried, he turns his head and kisses the inside of my wrist. He says my name. He leans in. His voice is faint, and it is the loveliest thing. “I want to—”
Light, hitting us a tad too abruptly, cutting into his words.
Mrs. Fredericks, the custodian, stands in the doorway. “I never lock this,” she’s muttering to herself. “These kids—” On cue, her eyes land on me, then on him, then on the compromising position we’ve got ourselves in.
Suddenly the obviousness isn’t so funny.
We spring apart. I jump off of Reed, straightening my top and pretending to dust my skirt off. He gets to his feet after me. In my haste, I knock over a pair of mops, which promptly tumble, quite loudly, onto the floor at our feet. Reed winces as he runs a hand through his hair to fix it, and in the sharpness of sunlight I can see just how disheveled I’ve made it. When he’s done I feel the slightest itch to mess it up all over again.
I open my mouth to explain, but then the bell goes off, signaling the end of lunch. The three of us keep silent and avoid eye contact as the ringing stretches on for what seems like eternity.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Mrs. Fredericks says as soon as it’s over. She’s usually so genial, but today she huffs and waves dismissively when we make a move to pick up the fallen mops. “Just go.”
“We were just—”
“Go on,” she repeats, her voice still raised, but not unkind. “Before I get you sent to the principal’s office, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Reed says, as he lifts his backpack off the ground and slings it over one shoulder. His movements are all fluidity and briskness once more. “Thank you.”
“We’re sorry!” I add as we leave.
Reed is handing me my knapsack, then he’s taking me by the hand and we’re flinging ourselves across hallways and staircases like we did earlier. I remember how he followed behind me without so much as a word, holding on like it was for dear life so we wouldn’t be separated. Unguarded and open. Patient when he had every reason not to be. Almost as if he had all the time in the world for me.
“I don’t know about you, but I’ve never felt more alive,” Reed tells me, when we’re alone again.
“That scared the shit out of me!” I sputter at the same time.
We have a good laugh over this.
“Grace?”
“Yeah?”
“There’s something different about you,” he says after a while. “I hadn’t noticed.”
He asks me to meet him in the library after school. I say yes.
I find him in the periodicals section, arranging back issues of National Geographic dating as far back as the fifties. He’s back in the sweater—it’s always so cold here—and he appears to have ditched his contacts for the horn-rimmed glasses I always loved. When he sees me he leans against the shelf and gives me that tentative half-smile. “Hi,” he says.
My legs are wobbly and my arms are shivering, but I don’t think it’s the AC. “Hi.”
“I’m leaving for the summer,” he begins.
The first time around, I had asked where he was off to. I had complained about wasting away in town. Instead of “I’ll miss you,” I had said, “I think I’ll survive without you.”
Today I don’t do any of that.
Today, I say the only thing that really matters.
“I love you,” I tell him.
It hangs in the air between us. Reed removes his glasses, wipes them on his sweater, and puts them back on, like the routine will somehow help him make sense of things. But he and I both know it won’t, so I make things easy for him.
“I didn’t want there to be any confusion,” I say. “In case what happened this afternoon wasn’t enough of an indication.”
“Right.” He says it with mock-seriousness, but there’s nothing timid or unsure about the way he’s grinning now. “Of course. It’s important to clarify these things.”
When Reed doesn’t say anything more, I throw my hands up in pretend exasperation. “That’s it?” I demand. “Come on, Reed. Help me out here.”
“Well, what do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know. Something honest.”
“What,” and he tugs at his hair like he does when he’s embarrassed, “like the fact that you beat me to it? That I was planning out this whole stupid speech in my head and you managed to say it all for me in the simplest, most obvious way? That I think the world—and probably the rest of the Milky Way, and all the other galaxies—of you?” He slumps and slides down the shelf until he’s on the floor looking up at me. “I do.”
I plant myself next to him and put my head on his shoulder. “Was that the speech?”
“No.”
“Good. Who confesses their love and makes anguished declarations in a library?”
“You did. Like just now.”
I raise my head to look him in the eye. “Yours was better.”
His eyes are on my mouth. I take in the very little space once again surrounding us and feel my cheeks go hot. He moves closer still, like he’s going to kiss me, but then he stops as soon as our noses touch.
“Just so you know,” he says in my ear, hushed and low, “I’m not about to engage in displays of affection with you, public or otherwise, when I’m on duty at the library.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to.” I don’t mean for it to come out snippy, but it does. I’m actually disappointed.
“But,” Reed continues, ignoring me, “I’m off in ten minutes. And I get to lock up.”
He pulls the keys from his pocket and waves them in my face. I roll my eyes, but I make a mental note to text my mom that I’ll be home a little late.
Just a little.
Despite his new self-imposed rule, Reed sneaks a quick peck on my forehead. “So, I have a question,” he says when he pulls away.
“Yeah? What is it?”
He stands to get back to work on the magazines and extends a hand to help me up. “You got me curious when you were talking about us in the closet,” he says. “What do you think the future will be like?”
I start arranging some of the National Geographics myself. I pick up a copy from 1995 with Jane Goodall on the cover and put it where it belongs.
There’s the smallest part of me that aches to share all of it with him, and not just the part where we drifted. How I left college with a degree in American literature and wound up working at a thrift store in another town, putting off sending out applications for the jobs I actually wanted because I was secretly afraid of my life moving so fast that I wouldn’t be able to keep up. How, last I heard, he was in Portland, or was it Taipei, or was it Geneva, teaching little kids to swim or maybe writing a novel or maybe getting married. How hoverboards and self-lacing sneakers became a reality, but not quite in the way we thought they would. How a lot of things, really, didn’t go quite the way we thought they would.
But I don’t tell him any of it.
The library lights dimming around us, we tidy up the last of the magazines and find ourselves once again on the floor. I settle in close next to him. Neither of us is going anywhere just yet.
“Let’s find out together,” I say.
