Lucid

by Gabrielle Castania

  Speaking of him, he and I took a relatively large step in our relationship sometime in March, far more meaningful than the physical steps that other kids our age were taking together. We sat in his basement one evening after school, scanning through college brochures and filling out applications to the ones that could accommodate us both. Thankfully, our fields of study were common enough for our options to be relatively open, and we decided that we didn’t have a preference on where to go – we could stay in Rhodes, or we could go someplace far more exciting. As long as we went together, anything was fine by us.

  He would be attending as a Business major with a minor in Psychology, and I planned to double-major in Fine Arts and Adolescent Education. I’d always planned to study something relating to the arts, but Julian kind of opened my eyes on how limiting a degree only in Fine Arts might be. He assured me that my work was lovely (for their anniversary, I’d given him and Rosetta an oil painting of a photo of them from their teen years, back in their village in Italy), that I didn’t need a degree in art to make it profitable for me. Inspired by the person who had made a significant difference in my life over the years, I decided to follow in Mr. Protoccelli’s footsteps and look into becoming a high school art teacher. If I could help even one kid the way he helped me, it would all be worth it.

  Mr. P was amazingly flattered by the news when I shared it with him, and not only wrote me a letter of recommendation for my applications, but promised to give me his contact info at the end of the year so I could get in touch if I had any questions. While one person I felt close to was excited for me, Ellie didn’t seem quite as jazzed – when I called her to tell her about it, she hung up on me. When I talked to her about it at school the morning after a night of voicemails and unanswered texts, she reminded me that she and I always talked about applying to schools together the way Joey and I had. I suggested she apply at the same places, but she insisted that she “didn’t want to intrude”, and told me she’d be applying by herself before storming off to her next class. I didn’t put much stock in her anger, though. She and I bickered from time to time, and we always managed to get over it. Like always, we moved on from the college fiasco by the time Joey gave us a ride home that night, and we hadn’t spoken of it since.

  Things were finally beginning to look up for me. I had a boyfriend, I had friends, and I wasn’t home enough to care about what was happening with my parents. Few shreds of the awkward, bumbling girl I used to be remained as I transformed into someone new. The butterfly had broken free of her cocoon, abandoning the ugly, lonely shell that held her down for so long, finally ready to spread her wings and fly.

  I thought I had it all, right up until one of the only relics I kept of my old life crumbled beneath the weight of who I’d become.

  Unlike the other parts of who I was, the dreams I shared with Danny were concealed easily enough, so I continued to indulge in him as often as I could. He still didn’t know what was going on in my real life, though; I didn’t see the point in messing up something so pure and innocent with the enormity of who I was becoming.

  He was entirely in the dark about what was going on, or so I thought.

  It all started when I fell asleep wearing a hoodie and a tank top. Danny and I were sitting in the main dining room of The Bistro that night, where we seemed to turn up more and more in recent days, and I was beginning to get a little warm. Without thinking much of it, I removed my jacket, and when I turned back around after draping it over the back of my chair, Danny’s face went white, his smile falling all at once.

  With my eyebrows drawn together in a show of concern, I asked him gently, “What’s wrong?”

  He snapped back quickly enough, offering up a grin I wasn’t entirely sold on. “Oh, no, it’s nothing. Don’t worry.”

  The tone of his voice spoke louder than his words. “Nobody shifts gears that fast,” I prodded. “You always let me vent about what’s on my mind, and you know I’m always more than happy to do the same for you.”

  He wiped the forged smirk from his lips, and the expression he replaced it with pierced into the deepest parts of me. I was almost relieved when he spoke after a long, biting moment of silence, until the words he said registered fully in my mind. “Nice necklace, Ashley.”

  I brought a hand to my chest, paralyzed with fear when I realized that, before I went to bed, I’d forgotten to remove the necklace Joey gave me for my birthday. I wore it every waking second of the day, but removed it before I went to sleep, just to avoid having to explain it to Danny. Five weeks was a good record, but coming home really late the Sunday before the show and slipping right into bed without even removing my jeans was apparently enough to break my winning streak.

  My first instinct was to lie about it. “It’s just a gift from my mum. She, uh, gave it to me for my birthday.”

  Danny took a cloth napkin from our table and used it to grab the pendant without touching my skin, inching toward me so he could examine it better. “It’s from your mother?” I nodded furiously, desperate for him to believe me and drop the subject so I wouldn’t have to explain. Without another word, he flipped it over, and didn’t look at it before asking, “And I suppose your British mother just suddenly picked up Italian, then?”

  It was in that moment that I knew the jig was up. I wasn’t sure exactly what he knew or how he knew it, but he wasn’t as clueless as I’d assumed him to be.

  Defensively, I became angry myself for staving off his anger, wearing it like armor. “It’s just a present,” I said dryly. “Let it go.”

  He did, quite literally, and the pendant fell back against my chest before he even took the time to read the words. “It had to have been given to you by someone who speaks Italian.” He executed a terribly staged, dramatically fake gasp. “Wait a second! We’re in an Italian restaurant; we’re in the same place we show up all the god damn time lately! Maybe the universe has been trying to tell me something, and gosh, what with us ‘being so honest with each other’ and me expecting you to tell me when things happen, maybe I’ve just been too naïve to notice it.”

  When he and I spent our nights together, we were either in my room, the meadow, or the dining room of The Bistro. I could explain away the first two as being places I hid when I needed to escape from the world for a while, but The Bistro had always sort of perplexed me. Once I started seeing Joey, I could ascribe a reason to it, but I always bit my tongue, played it off as a popular local restaurant when Danny asked about it, citing that maybe, I was just hungry when I went to bed. As Joey and I got more serious, Danny and I seemed to show up in the family’s restaurant more and more, and as of late, it had been our setting every single night.

  I swallowed hard, and I know Danny noticed. “I told you before – it’s just a really good restaurant by my house. I came home too late to get something to eat, so I just went to bed. Maybe my sleepy brain just wants pasta.”

  “This place,” he murmured, looking around frantically as though he’d never been there before, drinking in his surroundings and trying to make sense of things, “it has to mean something. Why don’t you just go ahead and be honest, because I’m not too stupid to have put the pieces together already.”

  If he wanted the truth, then he’d have it. “To be honest, it’s Julian’s Italian Bistro, a restaurant by my house. I eat here all the time with my friends.” Okay, maybe it wasn’t the whole truth, but it definitely wasn’t a lie, which I thought should count for something.

  “And what does that have to do with the two of us? Who is Julian?” He narrowed his tired eyes, the usual, tender patience I loved to find there officially gone. “Is he who this is all about?”

  I recoiled before I could stop myself. “Ew, no,” I said in disgust without thinking. “He owns this place, but he’s like, fifty, and he’s definitely not who this is about.”

  Danny’s body tensed as he leaned toward me, replying in almost a whining tone, “Okay, maybe it’s not about him, but you did just admit that it’s about someon
e, which means you’re still lying. You are literally lying to me about lying to me.”

  “What?” I asked, taken aback by his words. “I never said it was about someone.”

  Losing his pressroom rock star grace, he yelped at me, “You said, and I quote, ‘He’s definitely not who this is about’. That absolutely suggests that it’s about someone. Maybe it isn’t about Julian, but it is about someone, which leads me to believe that maybe, you’re not telling me everything like you’re always oh-so eager to say that you do.” He stared me hard in the eye, and I tried my best to meet him with defiant opposition, but the moment his gaze became too hot for me to handle, my eyes dropped to the wood flooring. Seeing him, the stability in my whirlwind of a life, beginning to fall away was unbearable. I knew I brought it all on myself for not telling him about Joey from the get-go, but I’d hoped for some compassion when he found out. “We don’t show up here all the time because it’s quaint. Stop lying and tell me what’s going on.”

  I didn’t dare to look up as I suggested, “Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”

  “What is it with you lately?” he accused, his tone rising to a harsh bark. “I have given you a million chances to come clean about what’s going on, trying to ask you questions that might get you to tell me what’s happening, and you’re just carefully dodging it all.” Now that I knew I had no place to run, knowing that it was time he got answers, he stormed off toward the register and tore one of the framed staff photos from the wall. Before I knew it, he was back at our table, slamming it down in front of me and propping it up so it was facing me. I didn’t have to look to know whose photo he’d chosen. “Do you maybe want to tell me what’s going on now, or do you have a few more excuses you’d like to try on for size?”

  I shook my head, my hair falling into my face. My stomach felt like a vast pit, like everything else in there was removed to make space for the flooding, suffocating dread. I whispered softly to him, still not meeting his eyes, “Don’t do this.”

  “I’m not doing anything, Ashley. I’m undoing all of the things that you did.” He took a step closer to me. “I’ve known since the start. I’ve given you so many chances to be honest with me, and the fact that you’ve been lying so much for so long hurts me more than the lie itself.”

  Finally, I looked up at him. “You knew?”

  “I’ve known about Joey since the night you met him. When I fell asleep, I was in his house, and you and him were slumped on the couch in the basement together.” His voice hushed to a dull, angry roar. “I’ve seen the stuff you hide in your bedroom – the pictures, the necklace, the stolen hoodies, everything – so I can’t ask you about it without seeming like a creep. I’ve heard you carefully construct your words so you think you’re keeping me in the dark. I’ve watched you, over the past several weeks, transform from this lonely girl who just needed someone to hear her and to be there, into one of the people who made you that way in the first place.”

  “Things are different now,” I urged, trying to keep control of my voice and begging it not to crack. “I have all those people now, sure, but I still need you. I still need an anchor to the person I was. I didn’t tell you because I was afraid you would leave.”

  His shoulders dropped. “Ashley, I’ve let it be known since we met that I’m here to listen to you, to help you try to figure things out when you can’t seem to do it yourself. I’m not going to judge you for what you have to say. I wish you’d have told me about it before you fell so far down this rabbit hole so someone could sit you down and make you see what they’re doing.”

  The choice of words set me off. I think it was a lot of misplaced feelings for a lot of other things, but it made me angry all over again. I rose from my seat as well, crossing my arms defiantly. “I’m sorry. What, pray tell, are they doing? What do you think you have all figured out that I seem to have overlooked?”

  “Well, for starters, I think you’re an idiot for even giving all of this a shot.” Seeing me switch to the offensive didn’t shake him like I thought it might, and he remained firm, both in tone and in posture. “Do you remember the hell these people have put you through for the past decade, or do you need me to remind you that you used to literally sob to me about how utterly mean they were? And now you just want to hang out with them and let them shape everything about who you are? You’re desperate enough for friends that you’re willing to be just like them?”

  I shrugged. “Whatever. People change.”

  He snorted a dry, sarcastic laugh. “Yeah, they do, Ashley, but I don’t really think they’re the ones that have.” His words infuriated me to the point that finding my own was proving difficult. I started to reply, stumbling over myself so I could form a counterargument, but he cut me off before I could put the pieces together coherently. “You can stand here and tell me all about how you’re not an entirely different person than when we met. You can try your best to convince me, but really, I think you’re trying to convince yourself, because you’re a smart girl, and I know you know that I am right about this. You have become something we both know you’re not. Nowadays, you’re exactly like those mindless drones you used to cry about.”

  “You do not get to be upset about this,” I finally yelled, clenching my fists into tight, livid little balls. “You don’t get a say in what I do. You’re not me, you’re not my parents, you’re not my boyfriend, and you’re not my friend – you’re a dream. None of this is even real, and fuck me, I guess, for wanting something that is.” Instead of saying anything, he stood down for a moment, his stance and expression unchanged. I should have bitten my tongue, I know, but in my death throes, I said anything I could to try to make him angrier than I was; I’d never really learned to argue constructively. “See, this is why I like Joey better than you. He goes out of his way to make sure I’m taken care of, even if it puts him out in the process, but you’d rather just help me cope with mediocrity! It feels like all you want to do is keep me here, stagnant and miserable! You’d have me sit here and share my feelings so you can tell me it’s going to be okay so you can feel like you’re some white knight hero type, but you’ve been nothing but a hindrance to me ever since we met. All you do is hold me back, and I’m tired of being stuck here, because here absolutely sucks. I want to move forward with my life, and I can’t do that if you’re just going to sit here and weigh me down.”

  His face didn’t change, but he stared at me for a long, tense moment. “Fine, then,” he finally said after what felt like an eternity of angry glaring. “If you think you’ll be better off without me, then I guess I’ll go.”

  In the second it took him to reach out and try to touch my arm so he could shake us both back to our own realities, I saw everything clearly.

  He was holding so much back. I could see it all in his eyes, and if he was going to go, I wanted to hear what he had to say before he did. I might have been upset, but I’d trusted him so thoroughly for what felt like so long, and I wanted to know what he thought. “No,” I almost growled, leaning away from him. “Say your piece. If you think you’re so smart, Danny, cut me down to size.”

  What he said hurt, and I had nobody to thank for it but myself.

  “Ashley, this is ridiculous. I mean, the fact that you actually think these people give a damn about you and who you are as a person is honestly pathetic. You don’t seem to remember, but these ‘friends’ are part of the reason you were depressed enough to need me in the first place. Now, they want to try to make amends with the person they’ve tormented for years just to appease your high-and-mighty boyfriend, and if you’re the kind of person who just accepts that at face value without even pausing to consider that maybe they’re putting on an act, I’m glad you asked me to go, because I want no part in any of that weak-minded bullshit. I thought you were better than this, better than demeaning and humiliating yourself just so you have a bunch of people to pretend to like you in an attempt to staunch your bleeding, but I guess I just thought too highly of you; I guess I was wrong.”
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  With his eyes still locked on mine, he reached out to grab me once again, and I didn’t stop him that time. The instant our skin connected, with one final surge of that tantalizing, familiar electricity, I blinked once again, and everything was gone.

  I still had about a half hour before my alarm went off for school, but I didn’t bother to try going back to sleep. All I could bring myself to do was to lie still and stare vacantly at the ceiling, trying to digest what he said. The new me was trying her best to shrug it off and remain apathetic, but the voice she’d suppressed deep down into her depths wouldn’t shut up about how he was right. I let her scream and shout until my alarm sounded, and I peeled myself out of the covers, shoving her back down into her chains and getting ready to face another day as the person I’d become.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Joey chuckled as I struggled with my hair in the bathroom mirror, the sound almost buried beneath the heavy pounding on the door. “Ashley, come on,” Ellie begged from the other side, where she stood waiting for Joey and I to make our appearance for the first time since she and Josh arrived at my house ten minutes before. “I promise, Danny will still love you if your bangs are doing that weird curlycue thing.”

  It was April 14th, the day that Tragic Magic would be playing in Rhodes, and all my closest friends skipped school so we could get good spots in line. I was teeming with a strange cocktail of excitement, nervousness, and dread. I hadn’t seen, much less spoken to Danny since earlier in the week when he confronted me about Joey. It was bizarre because my dreams were still lucid and still took place in the same spots, just the same as before save for his notable absence.