by Jen Brooks
“As jealous as a person can be when their best friend is suddenly everyone else’s best friend.”
“But did you know, even then, that you wanted to be more than friends?”
“In third grade?”
“In third grade.”
“Yeah.” She answers, blushing. I’m seeing Kylie blush more and more these days. “In third grade.”
“You couldn’t possibly know you loved me in third grade.”
“Don’t tell me what I knew and didn’t know. Don’t ask me a question if you’re not gonna take my answer seriously.”
“I take you seriously. It’s just that . . .”
“Why? When did you first know you loved me?” she asks, a daring note in her voice.
“I honestly can’t remember.”
“That’s such a cop-out.”
I am not dodging her question. Although this Kylie isn’t the one I originally fell for, I can’t remember when I first started loving the other Kylie. It could have been third grade. It probably was third grade if I made this Kylie to think she loved me starting then. “I guess I’ll put it this way. You are the kindest person I’ve ever met. More important, you’re kind to me. You’re generous, and loyal, and have a way of making me feel better about myself. You make me a better person because I want to be good enough to deserve you. I love all this about you, and since you’ve been this way your whole life, it makes sense I’ve always loved you. The part where I realized you were hot came later.”
She takes a long sip of her strawberry lemonade. She might be embarrassed. She might not believe me.
“What I don’t get,” I say, “is what you see in me.”
I need to hear her catalogue my specific lovable qualities, to hear there are reasons she loves me besides the fact that I made her do it. Her answer is a little spirit-crushing in its vagueness. “I love everything about you, Jonathan. Just . . . everything.” She says it with a familiar tremble in her voice so full of sincerity. Her pure affection has given me comfort so many times before, so why not today?
My eyes lock on hers. I want to feel the old cliché of drowning in her eyes, but my mood makes me see nothing but shallows. “We’ve been together for so long. Haven’t you wondered what it would be like to go out with someone else?”
Her lips retreat from the lemonade straw, her eyes reflecting the glass below. “Never once have I wanted to go out with someone else, but . . .” Her face darkens. “I’m guessing you have.”
“No, no, no. That’s not what I meant.”
“What else could you mean? We’ve been together forever, and you want to try something new. Is that what’s been bugging you? Is that why you took off after that girl?”
“I didn’t mean I wanted to try something new. I just can’t believe you don’t. I’m not very lovable these days. I’m mopey. I almost never take you on dates anymore. Why aren’t you tired of me? Bored of me?”
“Love doesn’t get tired or bored.”
“Sure it does.”
“Do you know this because you’re tired and bored of me?” Her tone sounds angry, but her eyes glisten, and I wish this conversation had never started.
“Of course I’m not tired or bored with you.” But this is a pseudo-lie. I’m unsatisfied with her because I’ve recently started to question whether a made-up girlfriend is real enough to satisfy me.
“I don’t believe you. What aren’t you telling me?”
I bite my lower lip, deciding whether to feed her more pseudo-lies. Here and now isn’t the place for truth, especially since I don’t actually want to lose her. Perhaps I can’t lose her. Perhaps I created her love to be so strong that no matter what I do, I can’t lose her. I’m the closest I’ve ever come to testing those waters, and I won’t wade in. Not today.
“Kylie.” I reach a hand across the table, and she puts her hand in mine. I’m fairly sure most other girls wouldn’t do that while wondering if they are about to get broken up with. “I know our years together should make me secure about you, but the truth is, they don’t. I’ve been insecure since third grade. Not just about you, about everything. That it all can be taken away. Now that high school’s ending in a couple of months, things are going to change. I’m worrying because I think that’s part of what you do when you’re about to graduate. I look at you and look at me and think about what might happen when we go to college, and I’m insecure.”
“Is that why you were so worried about your scar the other night?”
I do think the other night started all this. She’s smart enough to have made the connection without knowing what the connection is. “Yes.”
“So why the girl in the mall? You shrug that off, but it means something.”
I am on the border of hating myself, but I fill my mouth with more lies and spit them out. “When I saw that girl last night, I wasn’t lying to you, I thought I recognized her. I recognized her from the crash. I had to see if I was right.”
Kylie’s expression says this surprises her, but she’s buying it. “Did you talk to her?”
“For, like, three seconds. I asked if she was on flight 4460.”
“Was she?”
“She didn’t say, but she got annoyed like I was feeding her a pickup line. If she had been on the plane, she would have had a different reaction.”
“What did you do?”
“I said I was sorry and came back to you.”
“So why didn’t you tell me this before? I worried all night over it.”
“I was afraid you’d say I was ridiculous. It was ridiculous to think, after all, that I’d see someone that young from the plane, when it’s a fact that only two other people survived, and they were both a lot older than me.”
“It’s not ridiculous. I never think you’re ridiculous.”
“You tell me I am all the time.”
“Okay. Sometimes you’re ridiculous. Like right now. It’s ridiculous that you’re insecure about me and ridiculous that you’d think I would think you’re ridiculous because you thought you saw someone from the crash.”
Believe it or not, I followed that.
Her hand squeezes mine. “Jonathan, if you’re being bothered by the crash, you can talk to me. If you don’t want to talk, at least tell me it’s because you’re bothered by the crash. But telling me nothing just leaves me to make my own guesses, and that’s left me very insecure about you these last couple of days.”
“I’m sorry.”
She holds my hand a minute longer, her thumb caressing my fingers until the waitress comes to clear our mostly-eaten meals and hand over the check. It’s done. This almost-fight. It’s over, and she’s forgiven me. Her unconditional love is my rock, and it’s also my problem.
We gather our things and head out the door, down the street, and up the stairs to the roof of the garage. When we’re in the car and I’ve started the engine, I remember the shirts I bought at the museum.
“Here’s a little something to remember great art by,” I say, and hand her the size medium. She unfolds it and holds it to her front, looking down at the reproduction of Arthur and Guinevere.
“Perfect,” she says, her eyes lighting up. As I move my hand to shift the car into gear, she lays hers on top of mine. “Don’t ever be insecure of me. I love you more than anything.”
Despite the awful things I’ve been thinking about her being not real, her touch still sends shivers up my arm. That’s real. I lean over and kiss her on the mouth. She kisses back. We let the clock’s colon flash for a bit while we make up.
When we separate, she puts her seat belt on and I back out of our spot. She looks out the window as we descend floor by floor through the parking garage, her new shirt folded in her lap.
I think about how I’m going to wear mine tomorrow when I go running with real Kylie.
CHAPTER 10
I TRY
TO REMEMBER THE dream i had last night, but I can’t.
I do remember waking up with a jolt, panting and scared.
I usually roll my eyes when I see this in a movie, some character screaming as they shoot straight to a sitting position in bed. Who does that in real life?
Although I wasn’t exactly screaming when I woke up, and I didn’t bolt upright, a noise in my throat was clawing to get out. I think I might even have been whimpering, but the vision of what scared me dissolved into a blue-and-black nothingness before I could will myself to remember.
I couldn’t go back to sleep.
Now it’s eight o’clock on Sunday morning, and I’m waiting for Kylie at Hargrove State Park. I’m in my artsy T-shirt, though it’s buried under a sweatshirt because the morning is cold. I’m stretching by the entrance, mourning the loss of half a night’s sleep. I’ll be able to run, but I’m not so charming when I’m tired, and that worries me.
A lot is riding on this morning’s outing. I still have no clear sense of the extent of the two Kylies’ thought-sharing and no idea how they’re doing it. If I can push the conversation a little, I might get some insight.
More important, I’m about to have a workout date with the original Kylie Simms. I don’t want her to like me because she’s connected to the other Kylie. I want to use this opportunity to see if she can like me because I’m me.
I rewind to the scene in the stands when I last talked to her. She told me she wanted to be my friend in third grade and left me holding a ten-year-old get-well card in a hand she’d held longer than necessary. I hope that was a good sign and not an isolated incident.
Apparently sleep deprivation and deep thoughts have killed my alertness, because I hear “Hey there” before I even see Kylie approach.
“Morning.”
She sits across from me and puts her water bottle on the ground. “Brrrrrrr,” she says. Wasting no time, she bends one leg and puts the other out straight for a hamstring stretch. “I was thinking we’d do the pond loop.”
That’s a little less than three miles of flat pine-needley terrain. “Sounds good.”
I’ve already done my hamstrings, so I lean back and get my right quad. She gives no sign that a repeat hand holding is in today’s plan, but it’s hard to tell for sure because she’s guarding herself again, putting all her focus on the business of running preparation.
If her brain is still attached to the other Kylie’s, I figure I’ll get a reaction to my museum shirt, so despite the temperature, I pull off my outer layer. A few scars show under the short sleeves, but they’re not my worst scars. Besides, I long ago had to conquer my bare arm fear in order to run on the track team. She doesn’t look at me right away because she’s on her way to stretch her calves against a tree. I stretch my own against another tree.
When the stretching is done and we drop the rest of our overclothes into a pile, I’m relieved that her gaze fixes, not on my arms, but on the Arthur and Guinevere painting. She plays it cool.
“Nice shirt,” she says. “Where’d you get it?”
“Fine Arts Museum.”
“Is it new?”
“It’s been there longer than I’ve been alive.”
“I meant the shirt.”
She’s not quite as skilled as the other Kylie in the language of smart aleck. The other Kylie would have sarcasmed me back. “I got it yesterday.”
She nods. She expected that answer.
Kylie might not understand this cosmic weirdness that’s happening, but it seems she’s rolling with it. Without announcing our intention to start running, we turn toward the pond loop trail and begin.
Our start is in a wide field rimmed by stately oak trees. The park here is big enough to hold soccer tournaments, and there are at least four marked fields with standing goals. No one plays this early on a Sunday, though. The only other people in the park just after eight a.m. are joggers and dog walkers. We are the only people I see not of retirement age.
About a quarter mile across the fields, we enter the trail system. The pond loop diverges only a few yards in, and we follow it into the woods, where it’s quiet and naturey, and squirrels dodge into the fallen leaves at our approach.
We go slow, maybe nine-minute miles, so neither of us is struggling for breath. Her gait is smoother than mine, her arms low, whereas my hands tend to curl up at an odd angle. It’s not much different from running with girlfriend Kylie, except for the fact that real Kylie is not as sure of my pace or ability as I am of hers. She’s running a little more slowly than my girlfriend usually does, but it could be because she’s tired from yesterday’s workout. Technically our coaches don’t expect either of us to be running today. Her coach might not be thrilled that she’s doing distance at all, since she won’t be running anything longer than a two-hundred in the big meets.
“Wanna do some intervals?” I ask. Usually girlfriend Kylie likes to do a mile or so of intervals in a distance run.
“Intervals?” she puffs.
“Unless you’re too tired from the pacer chasers yesterday,” I puff back, chancing my first push, to see what Kylie will reveal.
“How do you know I did pacer chasers?”
I jump over a root. Puff. Puff. “I saw you do them.”
“Were you stalking me at practice?”
“Uh-uh,” I say in my firmest denial voice. “I’ve never been to your track practice.”
“Then how do you know what pacer chasers are, and how do you know I did them yesterday?”
“The same way you knew I got this T-shirt yesterday.”
She doesn’t deny it, just keeps thumping down the trail beside me. I guess it’s a clue. Experiences beyond writing assignments are passing between the Kylies. At the next junction we stay on the pond loop by going left and up a small rise. The wind picks up, stirring the bare branches and making the occasional trunk creak. “Okay,” she says.
“Okay what?”
“Thirty seconds.” She raises her wrist and pushes a button on her stopwatch. “Go.”
We pick up the pace considerably. Kylie is in her element, ponytail swishing, arms pumping. Her stride is smooth and open. I’m not an awkward runner, but next to her I feel like one.
“Stop,” she says, and punches her stopwatch. We slow to a recovery jog and wind around a turn to find a straight stretch of trail. “Sixty?”
“Sure.”
She presses her watch, and we’re off again, this time for sixty seconds. We keep alternating between thirty seconds and sixty seconds for about ten minutes, and by the end all we can do is walk-jog. We’re both breathing heavily, so we go a few minutes real slow before we recover enough to get back to normal jogging. We’ve rounded the pond, and for the first time I notice all the little green things around us. The growth of early spring.
“Didn’t you tell me you don’t go running?” she asks.
I admit, I do a mental victory pump because my athleticism has impressed her. “I believe I said you wouldn’t see me running in town.”
“Meaning you travel to exotic places, or you wear your invisibility cloak?”
Touché. So she speaks smart aleck after all. “Would you believe I’ve been running with you a hundred times?”
She ducks to avoid a low-hanging branch. “Back to that awkward place where we acknowledge that something weird’s going on but don’t talk about what it is.”
“You’re right,” I say. “Enough of awkward. Let’s just run.”
“No. I want to know how you’ve been running with me a hundred times.”
Obviously I can’t tell her. That will lead us down a path that has the truth of my world-making at the end. It’s way premature to go there, so I backtrack. “I only asked if you’d believe we’d been running together before. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
Kylie flashes me a sideways You’re so full of it
look, narrow eyes and all, but thankfully doesn’t push me for another answer. As much as I want her to tell me what wonkiness has been happening in her head, she apparently won’t, unless I confess as well. Until I’m ready to do that, I’ll have to settle for hints and clues and hope she keeps wanting to spend time together.
It does not escape me that the last poem girlfriend Kylie wrote was a romantic one about running through the woods together, and here we are. Now that the intervals are over and the pace has slowed, we find a new rhythm. The synchronicity of our steps and the way we jump roots together and hold wayward branches back for the other creates an energy that wasn’t there at the start of the run. We laugh at two ridiculous squirrels circling a tree trunk. I yield to her over a footbridge that we have to take single file. She grabs ahold of my arm to save me when I stumble over a rock.
The run takes on a different kind of awkwardness. It becomes slightly more than friendly. I hear it in the strain of her voice, and to be honest, my voice as well, as we test each other with small talk about the path and the weather. I feel it in the inch or two closer to each other that we’re traveling now. There’s a chemistry building, and although I want to believe she’s attracted to me, I can’t help but worry.
Because what happens with me and girlfriend Kylie is romantic, this Kylie must be getting a bunch of romantic crossover in the same way she’s getting poetry and info about art museum dates. That means whatever she feels right now probably has nothing to do with my questionable charm and more to do with girlfriend Kylie’s feelings. The crossover must have her wondering what she’s doing here with the biggest loner at Pennington High. I can’t imagine what it’s like to be her around me. Confused? Embarrassed? The teeniest bit happy?
My greatest fear: Even if I manage to purge the bits coming from girlfriend Kylie, I won’t be sure of this Kylie because her feelings didn’t start in a natural way. Do I want her to fall for me? Of course I do. She’s the real Kylie, the one I wanted badly enough to create a world around. Maybe if I launch a campaign of Jonathan Aubrey awesomeness at her, and we get to know each other as well as I know my girlfriend, it won’t matter how things started.