by E. Lockhart
She said, “You don’t just fall out of love. Was it something I did? When exactly did you stop being in love?”
She could hear how pitiful she sounded. Her breathing was hysterical and shallow.
“Maybe I wasn’t in love at all,” said Mikey Double L. “Maybe I was in love with the idea of love. Maybe I wanted to be an ideal boyfriend. I wanted to make you happy.”
She said, “You’re leaving me here alone. I have dogs to walk. I can’t leave them when there’s no one to take them out.”
She said, “I thought you loved me, because you said you loved me.”
Mikey said, “I know. I’m sorry.”
Mikey said, “I’m leaving later this afternoon.”
Mikey said, “I hope we can be friends. I don’t want to lose you.”
Mikey said a lot of things, the things people say when they’re ditching someone and want to soften the blow.
Then he said, “I still haven’t ever been in love. It’s not your fault, Adelaide. I don’t think you’ve ever been in love either. We shouldn’t waste our summer here, telling ourselves lies.”
Adelaide tipped over the paint can when he said the word lies. She stood barefoot on a plastic tarp in a puddle of Adriatic Mist and humiliation.
How could Mikey tell her she had never been in love?
How could he say they hadn’t loved each other when they had spoken those words aloud, in the dark and in the bright light of the cafeteria?
He was taking away her first love, taking it away, when it had been the good story, the only good story of her year at Alabaster, a story she thought she would remember her whole life: falling in love with Mikey Double L, simple and pure.
Mikey gathered up his lemonade and his backpack and the sweatshirt he’d taken off. “I’m sorry, Adelaide.”
He walked up her dad’s hall and out the door.
Adelaide ran after him, tracking paint.
She caught him in the yard, pulled him to her, and kissed him.
She kissed him with all her sad soul. She thought:
This kiss will
make him change his mind. It’ll
make him feel
what I know he used to feel.
This is a grand gesture, she thought. He cannot reject me when I am standing in my bare feet, covered in paint, on the lawn, for all the teachers in neighboring buildings to see.
The kiss will draw him in.
Mikey kissed her back, but his kiss felt mechanical. She could tell he wanted it to be over.
Adelaide couldn’t bear to clean up the paint. There were footprints going down her father’s hall and continuing onto the front steps. There were handprints on the door, but she didn’t care. She left the roller lying in the tray and the brushes sitting out, still sticky. She left the jars open. None of it seemed to matter, since Mikey had stopped loving her.
It didn’t matter how many
articles she had read about self-worth.
It didn’t matter that
her parents loved her or that Stacey would stand by her, because
the important person had turned cold, and
that was the person she had showed the most of herself to.
That was the person she got
naked with.
She thought back over the previous week. Were there a thousand clues she’d missed? Mikey had been late to meet her once. He had been slow to reply to a text. He had been busy a couple of nights with studying or working out or prepping for the photography club art show. But he had met her for lunch. He had stopped by her room to kiss her good night, right before curfew. He had held her hand at an end-of-year concert.
Adelaide left Levi’s house, still covered in Adriatic Mist. She walked through campus, past the gym, some dorms, and the dining center, before she got to Wren Hall.
Mikey was probably upstairs in his suite that minute. Going about his Mikey Double L business and feeling relieved and even spectacular to be free of Adelaide Buchwald.
She wanted to see Mikey again, right now.
She wanted to take the
unresolved churning pile of shit that was in her mind,
the shit of being unloved and
rejected and betrayed,
the absolutely ugly shit that was Mikey’s fault,
and she wanted to
dump it in front of his
door. He would open the
door and be shocked. He would say,
Is this really the shit that I have caused to blob up in the mind of the girl I love most in the world? What terrible shit!
He would take up the shit lovingly, literally pick it up in his arms, and he’d say,
Oh, I see it all now. I am the one who caused this shit to be so very shitty.
This shit is all my fault, and
thank you, Adelaide, for showing me this shit, because
it makes me feel quite amorous, actually,
to realize that the shit inside you (that is there because of me) is actually this huge
(because the shit would be about the size of a laundry basket), and he would say,
The shit proves that you are a deep and beautiful person, because
only a deep person would have so much so very, very much shit inside her as a result of me dumping her.
Come here, my love.
Let us run to the lake, where we will strip down and skinny-dip together, washing off the terrible turds of betrayal and unhappiness and never speaking of them again.
We will come out clean and lucky and remade.
I am so glad you showed me this shit.
* * *
—
Of course Adelaide did know that that is not what happens when you show up at someone’s door with a huge armload full of your own shit.
She knew that, but
she went up there anyway.
Mikey’s suitemate answered when she banged on the door. “Double L isn’t here. He went to get lunch with Sloane and Reed.”
“He just ate a sandwich, Aldrich,” Adelaide said.
“I don’t know. The guy could eat again, I guess.”
“And he hasn’t packed.”
“Yeah, he kind of has. Why are you covered in paint?”
“Did you know he was leaving?” Adelaide pushed Aldrich on the arm. “Did you know he was going to Puerto Rico?”
“I’m an innocent bystander, Buchwald,” said Aldrich. That was what he always called her. She had eaten lunch with Aldrich one hundred million times. She had gone to his parents’ country house for a weekend, once, with Mikey and some other people. She had sat in the Nguyen family Jacuzzi and talked to him encouragingly about his crush on Tendai, who would never look at him.
“You’re not an innocent bystander,” said Adelaide. “You should have told me.”
“Whoa. I definitely should not have,” said Aldrich. “That is not my business.”
“Let me in the suite.”
“I don’t think that’s a—”
“Let me in the suite, I said.”
“Fine, go in the suite,” said Aldrich. “Knock yourself out.”
Adelaide stood in Mikey’s room, looking at his trunks, which would stay in storage at Alabaster until the following school year, and his suitcases, which would go home. His fencing equipment. He still had toiletries on his desk, but most of his things were indeed packed. His laptop was open and plugged in.
She had spent so many hours in this tiny space, feeling lucky to be there.
She would never be here again. This was the last moment.
Was there anything of hers, here, to take back? A book, a sweatshirt, even a pack of tissues?
There was nothing.
The Lego sculptures she’d made for Mikey were gone. Th
ey weren’t in the trash either. The little drawings she’d made him weren’t tucked into the mirror like they used to be. And they weren’t in the bedside table drawer, where he sometimes kept them.
She was erased from his room.
Adelaide looked wildly for some mark to leave, some way to etch herself into Mikey’s life. She could leave a painted handprint, but her hands were already dry. She could leave a note, but she couldn’t bear the thought of him catching her writing it while sitting on the bed they’d been together on, only the day before.
Aldrich stood in the doorway, staring at her.
Finally, she snatched up a worn Alabaster Fencing T-shirt and left the suite.
The room Adelaide had shared all term with Stacey S was now an unimaginable mess. Adelaide was already moved into Levi’s for the summer, but Stacey’s belongings were everywhere, some of them halfway shoved into black garbage bags.
Stacey had a short, sharp way of speaking and almost no boobs. Her fashion sense centered on baggy jeans with lots of zippers and electrically bright tight-fitting T-shirts, a deviation from standard Alabaster wear. Her dad was a moneyed white guy from New Jersey who’d discovered yoga in his late twenties and become an instructor. Her mother was a Mexican-born artist who made ceramics. They ran a retreat center—like a B&B, but with kombucha and crystals—about an hour from school. Stacey was going home to work there for the summer, making green smoothies for people in the early mornings and vacuuming the rooms in the middle of the day.
Stacey went to Alabaster because her paternal grandfather had gone there and he paid for it, not because her parents valued that kind of thing.
Stacey looked at Adelaide. “Did something happen to Toby?” she asked.
Toby.
Of course that was what Stacey would think.
“No,” said Adelaide. “Mikey stopped loving me.”
“I was scared that might happen,” said Stacey.
“He told me he never loved me and also told me that I never loved him.” Adelaide started crying again.
“Oh, honey.” Stacey hugged her. “Do you want cream soda? Will that help?”
“I need tissues.” Adelaide sniffed. “And yes, cream soda.”
“I’ll get toilet paper,” offered Stacey. She ran to the bathroom down the hall and came back.
Adelaide pulled a huge amount of paper off the roll and buried her face in it, sitting on Stacey S’s bed. “What did you mean, you were scared it might happen?”
Stacey handed over a cream soda from the mini fridge. “I saw it coming.”
“How?”
“Mikey is like, full of bonhomie. He’s very positive about everything. He says yes to things when he doesn’t really mean yes.”
Adelaide popped open her soda. “I didn’t say ‘Let’s spend the summer together’ until he said ‘Let’s spend the summer together.’ ”
“He’s the guy who says he’ll do a project and doesn’t do it,” said Stacey S. “And he’s the guy who says he’ll be somewhere when he can’t actually be there, because he doesn’t want to disappoint someone. He always says yes, but he doesn’t mean it, and people get jerked around.”
“How do you know?”
“From fencing-team Tyler.”
Adelaide sniffed. “Really? He never did that stuff to me.”
“You were the priority. Mikey always put you above his other obligations.”
That was exactly what Adelaide loved about him.
“He likes the idea of everything being great more than he likes seeing what’s actually in front of him,” Stacey S went on. “That’s what I don’t like about Mikey Double L.”
“I’m not feeling any better from this conversation,” Adelaide told her.
They sat on the floor with garbage bags all around, drinking their cream sodas. Each of them leaned against a twin bed. They played the board game Trouble, that one with a little plastic dome that you press down to roll the dice. Pressing it makes a horrible noise. Each time it popped, the sound felt like a punishment Adelaide deserved
for being pitiful when Mikey dumped her, for
crying and going all blotchy, for wiping her face with Adriatic Mist fingers,
for showing up at the suite and embarrassing herself in front of Aldrich,
for wanting someone who didn’t want her,
for being secretly sad and obsessive about Toby all the time.
She was scared that Toby would relapse again.
That her mother was broken.
She was scared of the summer looming, the campus lonely.
“You’re too good for Mikey Double L,” said Stacey S.
“That’s a thing you say when someone gets dumped,” Adelaide told her. “It’s a thing everyone says.”
“But it’s true.”
“It’s like he always knew we were only going out until the end of the school year.”
“The school schedule is a major defining factor in relationships,” said Stacey. “Remember how I went out with Catelyn One until Thanksgiving? But then you leave school, you eat some turkey, you feel disgusting, you watch movies with your relatives, your house fills with the smell of turkey soup, you feel more disgusting, you hate everybody, and then you think, I should be happy to go back to school and see my lovely girlfriend, but now I don’t even want a girlfriend. Life is all soup and movies and feeling like crap. You realize the girlfriend isn’t going to make you feel even one jot better with Christmas break around the corner, because you’ll only even see her for three weeks, so you just break up with her by text, and it’s such a relief. That never would have happened if we hadn’t been sent home Wednesday to Sunday for a holiday about the colonial enterprise, screwing over the Wampanoag, gluttony, and waste.”
“But didn’t you already like Katelyn Two?”
“I liked Katelyn Two, but I liked Katelyn Two before I started going out with Catelyn One,” said Stacey S. “I wouldn’t have broken up with Catelyn One because of Katelyn Two. I broke up with Catelyn One because of Thanksgiving break, and I started going out with Katelyn Two the night before winter break, because somehow the last night of a term, everyone feels nostalgic, and you appreciate each other more, and you think, Now we’re all going off into the cold to engage in hot chocolate and peppermint sticks and relatives and what if I never see this cute Katelyn Two ever again? What if she gets hit by a bus? What if I get hit by a bus? And so I kissed her because of winter break and then we went out until right before Valentine’s Day, because that whole holiday, and the dumb dance they had in the Great Hall, put too much pressure on our relationship. That’s why she dumped me five days before. I fully think that if there had been no Valentine’s Day, I would be still going out with Katelyn Two. Damn it.”
“You’re too good for her,” Adelaide told her.
“Yeah, but I still think about her.”
“Valentine’s Day isn’t a school schedule thing.”
“Well, you know what I mean.”
Stacey hadn’t had a girlfriend since Katelyn Two broke up with her.
“Am I ever going to not feel wrecked?” Adelaide said. “I feel like
ever since Mikey broke up with me at twelve-forty-five,
and now for possibly the rest of my life, there is an
invisible membrane
between the rest of the world and me, and it’s an
ugly, slimy, viscous membrane,
like on an egg yolk but tougher, and
I won’t be able to poke through it.
I will be stuck looking through the membrane to the life outside, in a terrible
egg yolk of misery.”
“A membrane?”
“Yes!” Adelaide cried. “I am an
egg yolk of misery inside a
membrane,
and the na
me of the
membrane
is Mikey broke up with me.”
“You are losing it,” said Stacey S.
The morning after they went swimming, Jack showed up at the dog run. He was holding a paper bag stained with grease.
“Diner breakfast,” he said. “Leftovers. I thought your dogs would like it.”
Adelaide couldn’t believe he’d showed up. After she’d taken the call from Mikey. She looked in the bag. “You had four leftover pieces of bacon?”
“Fine. I’m lying. I ordered it specifically. For you. It’s to-go bacon, not leftover bacon.”
The dogs were interested in the bag. EllaBella sat, docile and well-behaved. Everyone else circled expectantly, whining.
Adelaide took a bite of bacon. “I have to make sure it’s not poison.”
Jack laughed.
She distributed the bacon in small bits. The dogs took it from her hands with gentle mouths.
“Thank you,” she said to Jack, after Rabbit had eaten the paper bag. “Cold bacon is a good present.”
“I try to keep it classy.”
* * *
The morning after they went swimming, Jack showed up at the dog run. He was holding a paper bag stained with grease.
“Diner breakfast,” he said. “Leftovers. I thought your dogs would like it.”
“That’s sweet,” said Adelaide.
She was thinking about Mikey Double L. How she’d wanted to talk to him on the phone more than she wanted to talk to Jack, even after the day of swimming they’d had. How she missed him. His voice in her ear, saying he was nervous to fly alone, worried about his Spanish, having done a terrible job packing—he had texted her. She was still the one he reached out to.
She held Jack’s bag of greasy bacon as the dogs circled her. He had seemed so impossibly beautiful yesterday, but he seemed ordinary now. Just a cute-ish boy, with an unusual walk and a lazy way about him. Nothing beside Mikey’s energy and industry.
Mikey needed her. Had missed her. And Adelaide would always love him.
* * *