There’s a quick double knock on my door before my dad walks in.
“Oliver, let’s go get your car,” Dad says.
For the first time in my life, a quiet car ride with my dad is preferable to hanging out with my best friend.
11.
I give up on sleeping around five AM. I take another shower, my third since I got home yesterday afternoon, and pull out my favorite pair of Dickies and the Operation Ivy hoodie I got two summers ago. I reason that maybe wearing some of my favorite clothes will help me fake it ‘til I make it, or some horseshit like that.
Before I got out of bed, I had briefly considered faking sick, but Dad had told me yesterday he’d be working from home today, and the last thing I need is both of my parents breathing down my neck all day. I pull on the sweatshirt just as my phone chirps on my desk.
It’s a text. From Tarryn.
You should take me to breakfast.
I should tell her no. I should climb back into bed and fake an illness that will get me out of school for the rest of my senior year. I wonder what kind of crazy shit I could get my hands on if Mom was still working at the lab. Malaria? Encephalitis? Either one of those sound preferable to breaking bread with Tarryn.
Where?
Is what I reply.
I meet her at a place she chose across town. I have to take the freeway, and I sit in work traffic for a while, but I don’t complain about the drive. Or how no one else we know will be around.
Before I’d left, I’d grabbed the credit card my mom gave me for emergencies out of my night stand. I don’t know why.
Maybe to pay Tarryn off. To keep her from telling anyone. Or to tell me everything.
Maybe I thought I’d get in my car—the sensible hybrid that was a gift from my parents last year, for making good choices, and drive away. I’d go as far as I could before they reported the card and my car stolen.
Maybe I’d exceed the available credit, and Mom and Dad would be so pissed they’d lock me in my room until I left for college. I’d be okay with that. With never seeing any of the people I know again.
I find a spot in the parking lot near the front entrance, and feel at least a little relief that if I need to escape, I have an easy getaway. As soon as the thought pops up, I feel like a weak moron.
I rub my palms down the front of my jeans before pushing through the glass door. The bell above the door rings, and it sounds too damn cheery for the way I feel.
I take two steps into the place and look around. I think I came here once as a kid. My parents weren’t big on diners, but we’d stopped in after a doctor’s appointment or something. It’s a typical diner, vinyl booths that maybe had a little glitter in them back in the day but now they’re old and in need of replacing. I peek over a potted, fake plant.
It’s when I see Tarryn that I wonder if the smell of bacon, maple syrup, and coffee will now be the smell of my nightmares.
I don’t know why, but I’d sort of expected her to look as raggedy as I feel. I maybe thought she’d have worry lines creasing her forehead and some bags under her eyes. Instead, her hair is straight and shiny when she tosses it over her shoulder, and her eyes are bright and maybe even a little sparkly from the makeup above them.
When she sees me, a slow grin spreads across her face. “Oliver!” she calls.
And I go.
I go, because what the fuck else am I going to do?
All of those thoughts about a quick getaway are moot; they should have never entered my mind at all. Because walking out on someone, being rude, making someone feel bad— those are things I was taught never to do. So instead of walking out now, I force one foot in front of the other and make my way to the table, where a beautiful girl wants to have breakfast with me.
I slide into the sticky vinyl seat across from her.
“Hey,” I say, keeping my eyes on the chipped laminate table top.
“Hey,” Tarryn replies. “I would have ordered for you, but I didn’t know what you like.”
My eyes snap up to hers.
“Sorry?” she says, letting those green eyes dart around now. “Is something wrong?”
I work my jaw back and forth, trying to figure out how to say all of the things I’m thinking, wondering. Were you really on top of me? Was I awake at all? How did you not notice I wasn’t into it? Are you the one who helped me up the stairs? Did I say yes? Even once?
“This is … it’s awkward.”
“Awkward how?” Tarryn asks. She’s tapping her spoon on the countertop like I’m trying her patience.
“I just … I don’t remember much.”
Tarryn’s lips form a tight line, and she shakes her head. In disappointment? Disgust? I can’t read it.
Because I don’t know her.
“Look,” I say. “I don’t know what happened the other night. I don’t remember drinking anything. I don’t remember—”
Our server brings Tarryn her waffles, and I order coffee and some toast. And then we sit in silence.
Tarryn and I don’t speak until I’ve fixed my coffee, spread a thin layer of grape jelly over my toast, and she’s digging into her plate of food.
“These waffles are so worth the drive out here.” She cuts a triangular piece and holds her fork out to me. “Crème brulee. Do you want to try?”
“No.” I toss the piece of toast I’ve been pretending to eat back onto my plate. I don’t want toast. Or coffee. Or goddamn waffles. All I want is the truth.
“So, waffles,” I say. “That’s why you wanted me to meet you?”
It’s stupid, but I’d expected more.
Tarryn blots her mouth with her white napkin. It’s a delicate motion that contradicts the way I view her. And for a minute, I sit and wonder if I’ve got it all wrong. If somehow this is my fault, or if I’m misunderstanding everything completely.
She gives a tiny shake of her head that makes her hair swing a little.
“I have a confession,” she swallows and says. “That’s sort of why I wanted to meet here. You know, before school.”
She sets down her napkin and rubs her hand over it, smoothing out the creases. For a second, I feel a little surge of hope. Maybe she asked me here to apologize. To explain that this was all a joke. That nothing really happened.
“After you left…” she lets her voice trail off and raises an eyebrow.
All of that hope is sucked from the room. It’s instant, how it happens, like when the band is practicing and the power in Clara’s garage trips and the music unexpectedly stops.
“What?” I ask. “What happened when I left?”
Tarryn holds up a palm. “Look, I didn’t tell anyone else, but people saw you, you know. Rushing out and then there was Bryce— ”
“How is everything?” our server interrupts.
“It’s fine, you can bring the check when you get a chance,” Tarryn says, in a thick, sacchariney voice.
But he’s prepared and slides the check across the table, then walks off.
“What are you saying?” I flip the handwritten slip of paper over.
“They know.”
“Who?” I ask.
Tarryn leans in and puckers her mouth. “Everyone.”
I slide the emergency-only credit card out of my wallet.
I could use my own money, but this seems like an emergency.
12.
I park my car in the farthest space from the entrance to school. I reason that if I walk really, really slowly, I might be late and won’t have to see or talk to anyone. I’d tried calling home on the way from the diner to school. I was going to beg Mom to let me come home, but she wouldn’t pick up. And since I left early, and charged the $17.62 worth of waffles to her card, she’d probably call bullshit on me having strep.
Maybe Tarryn has some boyfriend, preferably one who plays lacrosse, or is on the wrestling team, who will come kick my ass before I step foot in school.
I can’t believe I just wished for that.
The first bell rings as I’m half
way up the concrete steps that lead to the school. Everyone starts rushing toward the doors, but I keep my snail’s pace steady. Every few steps, I glance over my shoulder to make sure no one is staring at me. Maybe Tarryn exaggerated. Maybe she overestimates how much people will care about what she does—and they especially won’t care what I do.
My stomach rumbles, protesting that I couldn’t stomach that toast at breakfast. I think I have some chips stashed in my locker.
“Oliver!” Ryan calls. “Hold up.”
I almost make it. So damn close.
I slow my pace even more, which means I’m at a stop and just kicking nervously at the ground a little.
“We’re gonna be late, dude,” I say, jerking my head toward the wall of lockers.
“We need to talk.” He sounds out of breath. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
Shit.
“Can we catch up at lunch?” My stomach churns, this time, not from hunger.
He knows.
Everyone, Tarryn had said.
“I don’t want to do this right now,” I say.
My throat tightens, and I feel like I’m nine years old again. That summer, Mom went on a research trip and had left Dad and me alone. He’d wanted me to do “guy things” with him, and we’d gone to Mount Baldy and hiked. One of the trails had been so steep and so narrow that you had to walk with your back pressed to the rock and sidestep. Dad had kept insisting I should trust him. That I’d be fine. I’d wanted to be brave so fucking badly, but I just … wasn’t. I couldn’t do it. I remember my throat tightening like it is happening now, fighting the tears because I wasn’t going to cry in front of Dad and the rest of the hikers, but I’d ended up turning back.
I start to turn away from Ryan, but he tugs on my arm.
“Don’t smoke. Don’t drink. Don’t fuck,” he says. His words are clipped, like he’s holding back the anger I’ve seen him unleash on crowds when they get out of hand, or disrespect the band.
I just nod, keeping my head down. I feel like I’m standing in the middle of one of those 36-degree mirror rooms, like I’m outside of my body and everything starts to spin.
“It’s pretty simple, Oliver. Just…” He pauses until I look up at him. “Just tell me this shit isn’t true.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes, trying to slow the spin of an Earth that I just as soon let fly off its axis and fling me into a new galaxy.
“And don’t fucking lie, either.”
“It’s complicated,” I say.
“Uncomplicate it. You— ” he leans in before saying, “Tell me you didn’t get drunk and sleep with Tarryn Alridge.”
“I told you. It’s complicated.” I yank my backpack from my locker. I want to apologize, but I don’t even know what to apologize for. Because I don’t remember it. I know what people must be whispering, but I don’t know how to make sense of it all.
So I say the only truth I know. “I don’t want to talk about it.”
I push past him and into the thick sea of people rushing to class. For once, I just want to be lost among them.
To blend in.
To go back in time.
To forget.
(Written on the museum steps. Undelivered)
13.
Days pass. Maybe longer.
I go through the motions. Or, the new motions. I get up. I get dressed. I go to school and avoid Ryan. Tarryn.
Everyone.
Myself.
I pretend I don’t hear their whispers, and keep my head down when Ryan’s laser eyes cut into me full of rage and disappointment.
I shrug off the pats on the back when I walk down the hall at school.
I call in sick to work.
It’s all in there somewhere. The truth, I mean.
The details of that night lurk somewhere in the shadows of my mind, in the place I can't seem to access except in tattered shreds, mostly when I’m too tired to make any sense of the blips of clarity.
I screw my eyes shut and rest my head on the top of my desk.
The stairs.
My hand was stretched out, feeling the wallpaper.
“I’m so tired,” I said.
“Too tired?” Tarryn asked. She giggled.
She giggled and tugged at the bottom of my shirt.
Falling. Not down the stairs.
Falling. Softness. A bed.
“Too tired for what?” I asked.
Her hand was on my chest. Under my shirt. On my chest.
I felt like there were cinder blocks on my eyes. Weighing them down. I had to work hard to try to force them back open. But moving bricks with my eyelashes doesn’t work.
It’s blackness and laughter and no.
(Written on Paloma’s townhouse front steps. Undelivered.)
14.
I alphabetized the books in my locker.
Seriously.
It’s lunch time. I should be sitting in the cafeteria with Ryan, or maybe going off-campus to grab a burrito or something, but, instead, I’m standing in the empty hall of school, alphabetizing my books.
I tried color-coding them, but I couldn’t decide whether the orange of my econ book or the shade of my hardback copy of The Crucible faded into the red of my history book better. So alphabetical order it is.
I could go to the cafeteria. But I’m not hungry. I want to be. I want to feel something normal right now. And even if I were starving, no one’s talking to me. Ryan won’t even look at me. I don’t know if he will again. I don’t know what the rest of the band thinks of me, the ones that don’t go to school here. Obviously Ryan’s told them all. And they hate me. They have to.
Maybe even Topher, and he’s not even straight-edge. He’s not straight-edge, but he’s loyal to the band— and I’m not in the band anymore. I don’t think.
The people who don’t hate me all think I deserve some kind of accolades for hooking up with the girl everyone wants.
I slam the door of my locker just as I hear Tarryn’s voice again.
“Hey, Ollie,” she says. I can’t get over how normal her voice sounds. Like what had happened didn’t affect her. As if it didn’t change her like it did me. “Can I talk to you?”
As if it didn’t ruin her.
I shove my hands deep into the pockets of my jeans and glance around the empty hall.
“What’s—I—I have to go,” I say. I don’t want another repeat of our breakfast the other day.
This is how I’m going to spend the rest of my senior year.
Running away.
15.
English is my last class of the day. I’m almost finished. It’s almost over.
It’s almost over.
It’s a record skipping in my brain. I repeat the phrase again and again in my head until the bell rings. Once class has officially started, I breathe a little easier. In class, no one is going to whisper shit about what a badass I am like they do in the halls. I don’t have to risk running into Tarryn, or Ryan’s dagger stares. Lately, I feel safer in the confines of my classroom than most places. But, even then, nothing feels safe anymore, my own brain included.
It’s almost over.
I only have to give myself this same pep talk for the next three weeks until graduation.
“Who am I?” Mrs. Driscoll calls from the front of the classroom. She sits on the front edge of her desk and taps her fingers on the heavily lacquered wooden top.
The guy next to me, Travis Mitchell suggests he’s the “baddest mofo up in here,” and there’s lots of mumbling and muffled laughter in response.
Somehow, I don’t think that’s the reply our English teacher was looking for.
“Who am I is the question I want you all to answer in your final essay assignment. I want you to dig deep, explore not only your ancestry, but the internal elements— the things that make you unique, the things that have happened to shape your life and turn you into this near-adult who is on the precipice of a bold, bright future.” She pauses, and, for a mome
nt, there’s no noise other than the buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights in the classroom.
Even Travis Mitchell and the other dickheads in school are getting a little softer and more sentimental the closer we get to graduation.
I might feel that way. Except all I want to do now is walk away from this place. I want to go to Berkley and never look back.
Mrs. Driscoll continues, “Don’t just tell me who you are, tell me who you still hope to become. Beyond prom king or valedictorian. I want to hear about what’s inside of you now that is going to help you become the future you.”
Everyone around me is furiously taking notes about word count and format, but I sit and stare at my blank notebook, wondering how I’m going to fill multiple pages on a topic that I now know nothing about.
Who am I?
I used to think I fucking knew.
The bell rings, and I haul ass to my car. I’ve got to get home and do a little homework before I go to work for a couple of hours. I slip into the driver's seat of my car, and strangely, I can breathe easier in the stifling heat of my Prius than I could in the air conditioned classroom I just left.
I start my car just as there’s a knock on my passenger’s side window.
“Ol, hang on,” Ryan says from behind the glass.
I roll down the window and lean over the center console toward Ryan.
“What’s up?” I ask. It’s weird to feel like you have to gauge the situation when your best friend says hello to you.
“You got a second?” he asks.
“Yeah, sure,” I say a little too enthusiastically. A little too hopeful that everything can go back to the way that it was.
“I parked behind you.” Ryan motions to his truck. “Thought you could grab your bass and amp.”
“Oh. Cool.” Except it comes out sounding sad and disappointed, and really, the opposite of cool.
I roll up the window as Ryan walks across the parking lot toward his truck. I fidget with the door handle a little before getting out of my car and following him.
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