Our Year of Maybe

by Rachel Lynn Solomon

  Peter’s jaw goes slack, eyeing me like I’m feral. Like I will bite him and give him rabies. Then I will need a medical ID bracelet that says RABID ANIMAL. STAY AWAY!

  Bounce. “I always forget that you’re older than me,” he says. “Probably because you can’t seem to grow up.”

  How long has this venom been inside us? Snakes, both of us.

  “You want to know what the most fucked-up part is?” I fire at him, feeling a tear roll down my cheek, then another. “The pain I’m in? It’s worth it. I’d give you my other kidney if I could. I’ve seen you struggle my whole life, and I’d take all your pain away from you in a heartbeat. You’re selfish, and you’re spoiled, and you drain the energy from everyone around you, but I’d still do it again.”

  His face twists with hurt. “How was I selfish? I was sick!”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about.” A shaky breath. Clenched teeth. “You said we can’t be together? Fine. We’re not together. We’re not anything. I can’t have you in my life anymore.” I try to swallow, but the words are razor blades in my throat. “I just—I hate who I am when I’m with you.”

  And there it is: Aside from this preemptive breakup, it’s not any single thing Peter did to me. No massive transgression, just a hundred little reminders that he’s in charge of us. It’s the walls slowly closing in on me, trapping me in my obsession. It’s that I’ve clung to him so tightly that I’ve lost myself.

  The ugly sentence lingers in the space between us, a poisonous plume of smoke.

  I don’t take it back.

  Because I meant for it to choke him.

  “Sophie—”

  “No. I am not letting you get the last fucking word.”

  I smash the ball right at his feet, and then I pivot and dash toward the door, my shoes squeaking across the gym floor. The janitor has either witnessed a dozen fights like this or is trying very hard not to act like he didn’t just see us crumble to pieces.

  Peter’s shouting my name, or at least I think he is. I want to hope that he is, that the loss of our friendship means something to him. I fly out of the gym and down the hall, wiping at my damp face. The hallways are full of lockers slamming, everyone giddy with a surprise half day. Silver and green streamers and confetti are everywhere. I stomp on all of it, a streamer getting stuck to my shoe. With no energy to shake it off, I trail it all the way out to the parking lot, trying to rub away tears that keep coming.

  Our lives have revolved around Peter always. He is the earth, and I am the moon. There was never enough I could do to get him to love me the way I wanted, to see me as more than just a moon.

  I have never been enough, and he has always been too much.

  CHAPTER 32

  PETER

  NUMBLY, I TRIED MY BEST to clean up the mess we made. I chased after the balls and shoved them back into the closet, but unlike Sophie, I couldn’t race out of the gym. I walked slowly, with leaden feet, because I had no idea where I was going, nowhere I wanted to go, no one expecting me.

  I hate who I am when I’m with you.

  “Peter, school’s out for the day,” Mr. Lozano told me when our paths crossed in the hall. He chuckled. He’d become my favorite teacher, and I couldn’t bear to let him see me like this. “We can’t get rid of you, can we?”

  I tried to laugh, but I might have growled instead. Then my feet remembered what to do, and they carried me out of the school and to the first bus stop I found, where I got on the first bus that arrived.

  Now I’m headed south, past the Space Needle, into downtown.

  I hate who I am when I’m with you.

  It bangs around in my brain, warping the memories of our friendship. Every time she comforted me, was she secretly cursing me as well? For so long, she was my only person. I must have given in to her some of the time. I must have let her have her way. I can’t have been the guy she described, not one hundred percent of the time—otherwise she wouldn’t have loved me.

  It’s a selfishly heartening thought.

  A message from Chase blinks on my phone. Band practice? is all it says. My mind was too all over the place to think to ask Chase about this on Saturday night. I wasn’t sure if I’d be welcome at band practice, or if our breakup was a Fleetwood Mac situation and I’m Lindsey Buckingham.

  Can’t today.

  I shouldn’t be having fun, playing music. But I feel bad about the brevity of the text, so I thumb out another one. Can we talk later this week?

  A few minutes later, his okay comes back, but it doesn’t lift the heaviness in my chest as much as I thought it might.

  Hours later, after a half dozen more aimless bus rides throughout the city, I arrive home to find my parents getting dressed up. My mom’s stabbing a pearl through her earlobe and my dad is straightening his tie. One of the nice ones, not one of the joke ones with teeth on them that I imagine all dentists own. Yes, he has more than one.

  “Where are you going?” I ask, dropping my backpack on the living room floor. I collapse onto the couch.

  “We have reservations at the new Maria Hines restaurant,” my mom says to her reflection in the foyer mirror. “It was supposed to be impossible to get a table, but one of your dad’s patients knew the right people and got all of us in.”

  All of us.

  “You and Sophie’s parents?”

  My dad holds up his hands. “Who else?”

  “Can’t you leave them alone for five seconds?”

  “Peter,” my mom says slowly as she turns to face me. “Is something going on?”

  If I were a dog, the hair on my back would be sticking up. I’m sure I’m red-faced still, not yet recovered from the fight with Sophie.

  No, “fight” isn’t the right word.

  Destruction.

  Explosion.

  Wreckage.

  I scratch at the bracelet on my wrist. Suddenly it feels too tight. A shackle more than anything else. “You don’t have to be indebted to Sophie’s parents anymore.”

  My dad frowns. “Indebted? Peter, that’s not what this—”

  “You’ve been sucking up to them nonstop since the transplant! It’s embarrassing.”

  “Peter. I think you should go to your room.” My mom crosses her arms. “And frankly, I’m not sure if you should go out this weekend.”

  I choke out a laugh. “Wait—are you—are you grounding me? Wow. Wow.”

  “It’s our fault for being so lax with you lately,” she says. “Honestly, we’ve spoiled you.”

  “You’ve sheltered me!”

  “I don’t know why this upsets you so much,” my dad says, slightly calmer than my mom. “You love Sophie’s parents.”

  “Sophie and I—” I shout, unsure where I’m going with that. I’m not about to tell them Sophie and I had sex. They used to know everything about me, but this is far too personal. Too private. It barely feels right to say her name out loud, not now. “We—”

  Realization dawns on them at almost the exact same time. My dad’s eyes get wide, and my mom brings a hand to her mouth.

  Oh. Oh no.

  They know. They can tell.

  “Peter,” she says slowly as she lowers herself onto the couch next to me.

  “What? I’m fine.” My throat is scratchy. Raw. I’m not fine. I’m a toxic, terrible friend. Some part of me thought I deserved all those things: the gifts from my parents, Sophie’s attention. Her love, even. I can’t get her words out of my head. I don’t know how to apologize for all those years of taking so much from her, let alone this past year.

  My dad sits down in a chair across from us. “So you and Sophie . . .” He doesn’t even need to finish the sentence.

  I drop my head in my hands and nod. This is a thousand times worse than the sex talk.

  “You used protection?” my mom asks. “You’re such a smart kid, I shouldn’t even have to ask, but . . . I need to know.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Sophie—she’s okay?”

  “I don’t
know.” It’s the truth. “Emotionally, I mean.” I explain as much as I can without completely losing it: Chase, the breakup, the guilt I’ve felt for exploring a life that didn’t always include Sophie. The horrible, horrible things I said to her in the gym. Things I wish I could take back. Things I couldn’t have fully meant because I’m not a cruel person, am I? “I’m not sure we can get back what we used to have,” I finish. And Sophie—Sophie doesn’t want me back. At all.

  I was a fucking idiot to think we could rewind. Go back to being friends, as though our relationship has ever been that simple.

  “Peter,” my mom says, turning sympathetic. “Oh, Peter.” She shuffles closer to me on the couch, and I let her. All I want is a hug from my mom right now, so when she offers one, I lean into it.

  I eye the front door. “Are you still going out with the Orensteins?”

  “We should probably sit this one out,” my dad says as he picks up his phone, making me wonder whether I’ve ended more than one relationship today.

  The anger is back. The anger I had through most of my early teens, the blind fury I felt toward a world that had cheated me before I was born.

  Later, when I’m not as mad at them and embarrassed they know about Sophie and me, I’ll tell my parents I want to go back to therapy. That all three of us should go.

  But for now I’m angriest at myself most of all.

  I look around my room at all this stuff. That’s what it is: stuff. Did I need the vintage record player? The Yamaha keyboard, when we already have the bajillion-dollar baby grand? The extra bookshelf space for my signed first editions? The chinchilla, because I couldn’t have a hamster or a guinea pig—I had to have something exotic and expensive, something I knew my parents wouldn’t say no to?

  The truth of it is, all those things made me feel better when I was convinced nothing else would. Sophie can’t possibly understand that. Sometimes I even craved the attention, the gifts. This is the real problem: My family never gave in, and I grew to expect it from Sophie, too. Deep down, I’ve always known the balance between us was skewed, and I never did a single fucking thing about it. The night we were together, I wanted so badly to even things out between us and only succeeded in making it all worse.

  I fall onto my bed, running a hand under my shirt, tracing the line of scar that matches Sophie’s, that will tie me to her for years and years to come.

  If this is the point of no return with us, we can’t ever erase ourselves from each other’s lives.

  CHAPTER 33

  SOPHIE

  I WASH MY SHEETS.

  That’s the first thing I do when I get home. I sit cross-legged on the floor in the laundry room, watching them spin and spin.

  I make my bed, struggling with the fitted sheet. I either accidentally shrunk them or am totally inept. Both are also possible. Nothing fits the way it should, and I collapse in a heap on top of my unmade bed, breathing hard, tears backing up behind my eyes.

  I’m still there hours later, when someone knocks on my door. I assume it’s Tabby or my dad, so I’m shocked when my mom peeks inside.

  “Peter’s parents canceled dinner,” she says. “Do you happen to know anything about that?”

  That’s all it takes for me to start crying again.

  Her face breaks open, reveals a concerned mother underneath. One I wasn’t sure I had.

  “Sophie, Sophie, Sophie,” my mom coos in this voice I’ve never heard from her before. “What’s wrong?”

  I can’t pick one thing.

  “Peter” is all I croak out. “I love him so much, Mom. And I wish I didn’t. I hate that I feel this way.”

  “Oh, kiddo,” she says as she rushes over to my unmade bed to hold me like she’d hold Luna. “I know.”

  I shake my head, tears dripping off my nose and onto my sheets below. “Not just as a friend. I love him. I’ve been in love with him for a long time, and he—he doesn’t love me. Not like that.”

  I’ve always felt sort of intimidated by my mom the corporate executive, like we had nothing in common. But the coloring books with Luna showed me another side of her. And I’m starting to think there’s so much more to my mom than I’ll ever know.

  Her face doesn’t register surprise. Has she known this whole time? “It’s the worst feeling when someone you love doesn’t love you back.”

  “You—”

  She nods. She gets what I’m trying to say. “In high school,” she says. “Steve Rosso. He wasn’t Jewish, so your grandparents never would have approved of him, but we sat next to each other in homeroom all four years. Rosso, Roth.” Roth: my mom’s maiden name, which she kept as a middle name when she got married.

  I wipe my face with the back of my hand. “Was he cute?”

  “The cutest. We talked every day, but we were in different circles. I was in the young business leaders group, and Model UN, and art club, and he played basketball and sang in choir. Our friend groups didn’t overlap. But I thought about him constantly. I finally worked up the nerve to ask him to homecoming senior year, and I’ll never forget what he said. ‘As friends? Because I was sort of hoping to go with someone as a date.’ As though it was so very clear I wasn’t even in the datable category.”

  “Mom. Steve Rosso is an ass.”

  She cracks a smile. “That’s very obvious now, but does that stop me from looking him up on Facebook every so often?”

  “What’s he doing?”

  “Seems to be happily married. Three kids. Works in tech.” She shrugs.

  Bonding with my mom like this—I’m surprised to find I like it.

  “I don’t know who I am without Peter,” I say. “Probably because I’ve never been without Peter.”

  “Do you think it’s time to try? I’m not saying you’re done being friends or that you can’t go back to him. Just that independence isn’t a bad thing.”

  “You mean ‘loneliness.’ ”

  She frowns. “No. Independence. That’s different. You with the dance team girls—you have fun, don’t you?”

  I nod.

  “That’s independence.” She straightens out a rumpled part of my sheets. “You and Peter are nothing like me and Steve. You two have always been complicated, so wrapped up in each other. Your dad and I worried so much about you when you were younger. We didn’t know if he’d get better and what that would mean for you if he didn’t. . . . It makes us sound like awful people, but we were so concerned. For him, and for you.”

  “I know.”

  “He’s a wonderful boy, Soph. Don’t get me wrong. But . . . is it possible—not intentionally—that he’s holding you back?”

  I think again about how I am with Montana and Liz. How I want more nights like that one in the hotel, more book signings with Liz and more choreography with Montana. Those moments are when I’ve felt fully myself.

  With Peter this year, I’ve been chasing something I can never quite catch.

  “I don’t want to lose him completely,” I say finally.

  For a moment I’m worried she’ll reassure me. She’ll tell me I won’t lose him, that he’ll come back to me eventually. That the two of us will be okay.

  But I’m not sure we will be, not now, and I’m relieved by her response.

  “You are going to stop feeling this way. I can promise you that. I wish I could tell you when, but this kind of unrequited love doesn’t last forever, kiddo. It just can’t.” She smiles sadly, running a hand through my hair. “Our hearts wouldn’t be able to take it.”

  CHAPTER 34

  PETER

  THE REST OF THE WORLD should stop or at least slow down after Sophie and I shatter, but of course it doesn’t. It goes on, in the most infuriating way.

  On Tuesday—how is it only Tuesday?—I bus to school and stay quiet in class and eat lunch alone in the band room. In English, Chase and I exchange pleasantries and awkward silence, but I can’t bear to talk to him outside of school. Not yet, not until the hurricane in my brain has calmed down. Eleanor Kang has succ
umbed to the flu, but I can’t even bring myself to enjoy playing piano in band. It suddenly feels like a massive responsibility to be in charge of an instrument like that.

  Wednesday is the same robotic pattern, and it’s not until I get home Thursday that I realize I can’t keep feeling sorry for myself. I need to do something.

  The first task is my room. There’s so much in here I haven’t used in years. I make a stack of books to donate, and after significant deliberation, part with a few of my records, too. Mark stays, of course. I love that little guy too much, and he’s the only one who isn’t mad at me right now.

  Summer’s only a few months away. I was anticipating a lazy, languid one, but it turns out there are a lot of transplant organizations that could use volunteers. I send a few e-mails, along with an extremely sparse résumé. The most impressive accomplishment on it is my GPA. I’ve got to fill that up. Maybe a job, too—make some money of my own.

  After I send one last e-mail, I close my laptop and migrate over to my Yamaha. All day I’ve had a melody stuck in my head, and I’ve got to play it out. I might even write some lyrics.

  It takes all my courage to meet Chase on Friday. The place I picked, a coffee-slash-chocolate shop along Green Lake, is nearly empty on a Friday night after services, except for a couple college students huddled over textbooks.

  I grab a corner table and stare down at our message history. Yesterday I texted him a location and a time and he responded with k. That single letter kills me a little. There’s no worse letter in the English language than k.

  When Chase arrives a few minutes past eight thirty—the time we agreed on—he’s wearing a gray jacket I’ve never seen before. Probably because I’ve only known him in winter. It makes me ache for other seasons we haven’t spent together. I imagine the two of us on the beach in West Seattle, daring each other to dip a toe into the chilly water. Bonfires, ice cream, sunsets.

  I was hoping—expecting—he’d look wrecked by the past week, but he looks as good as ever, no bags beneath his eyes, no lost expression on his face.