The Boy Next Story

by Tiffany Schmidt

  I arrived in art to find Huck double-fisting cookies. “Want one? Man, Curtis can bake. It’s some Egyptian recipe of his mom’s and I swear they’re made of magic.” I shook my head at the sandwich baggie he held out, and he spoke around a mouthful. “I love this Knight Lights thing. What did Toby get you?”

  There hadn’t been a good-luck box in my locker, but then again, did I really expect one? Merri had been the adoptee Toby had wanted. I was the one he’d settled for. Plus, he didn’t cook and I was tricky to bake for anyway. And better than any cookies or sparkly pencils like Clara had gotten, Toby had given me his time. I lifted my chin and answered Huck, “A passing grade in math.”

  I hoped it would be true.

  It felt ridiculous to spend six hours in class when the only period I could focus on was the one containing that day’s actual exam. Earth science was Tuesday, history Wednesday, French Thursday, math Friday. Oh, and my final Gatsby paper was Wednesday too. English class discussions had done nothing to change my horror at the ending or to make me feel more inspired to write about it.

  After school on Tuesday I changed out of my uniform and into pj’s, made popcorn, and hurried down to the basement to pull up the movie I’d rented online. It wasn’t cheating since I’d read the book.

  The basement door creaked open. “Roar, you left your history notebook in my car,” called Toby as he started down the stairs. “You’re watching a movie? I thought you’d be in a fortress of flash cards.”

  “I’m seeing if the movie clarifies the book. My final paper’s due tomorrow.”

  “Ahh. I’ve been there.” Toby dropped my notebook on the coffee table and whacked me with a throw pillow. “Move over.”

  “You sure? There’s no spaceships, guns, or magic . . . though it might have a good score? It’s by Craig Armstrong.” Was it weird to admit that I’d looked it up? Should I tell him that now that he’d pointed out how music influenced a movie, I couldn’t stop noticing it?

  “Oh, I’m in! He’s a genius.” He leaned back and loosened his knee brace. “What is it?”

  “The Great Gatsby. Wait.” I turned to face him. “You must’ve read this in Ms. Gregoire’s class last year—can you save me from F. Scott Fitzgerald?”

  “Nope. Sorry. Never read it. She teaches new books every year. Something about the texts having to match the students.”

  “Of course she does.” I slumped back on the couch, hugging a pillow to my chest.

  He snagged one and shoved it behind his head. “Hit play. Maybe we can figure it out together.”

  Two hours later, almost every character was on the screen—the temperatures and tempers were rising in a New York City hotel room. Gatsby was about to reveal his and Daisy’s affair, about to demand that she choose him over her husband. My hands were fidgets in my lap, ready to cover my eyes if it was too painful to watch. Next to me Toby had gotten more and more rigid. His jokes about the parties and fast cars had faded after Gatsby’s green light infatuation with married Daisy was revealed. He’d swallowed audibly when they started to have an affair—sat forward through the euphoric montage of Daisy and Gatsby bliss.

  But now—he snatched up the remote and pressed pause. “This book, it doesn’t have a happy ending, does it? Daisy’s not going to leave Tom. She and Gatsby don’t run off together.”

  I shook my head slowly. That was the ending I wanted too. “Turn it off,” said Toby, though he was the one holding the remote. His face had gone chalky beneath its olive tones. “I don’t want to see the end. I’d rather think it stays in this place where there’s still hope.” He stood and backed away from the couch. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he typed in a text with wide eyes and frantic fingers. He barely paused at the bottom of the stairs to blurt out, “Sorry, Roar. I just—I can’t,” before fleeing up them.

  Hope, like Gatsby’s great hopefulness. Like my own. Except it was all misplaced, and if I pressed play I knew the disasters that would play out on the screen because I’d already read them on the pages. Gatsby had gotten Daisy back, but only for a moment, only in words and dreams. She was about to slip through his hands and choose her husband over his hope. She was about to get behind the wheel of his car and kill a girl. He was about to lie to protect her. He was about to die.

  I sat frozen for long minutes. Toby’s plan was better—to walk away while hope was still an option. But I wanted more than hope. I wanted more than this torturous limbo I’d been living in. I wanted knowledge, and the only way I’d get that was if I asked.

  I stood.

  I paused twice on the stairs to take deep breaths and ground myself in the feel of the carpet beneath my feet and the imperfections of the banister beneath my fingers. I shut my eyes as my hand curled around the knob on our front door, inhaling and holding it until I saw stars. There were still stars when I opened the door and my eyes—only these were hung in the late October sky. The brightest light of all was behind a pair of balcony doors—my own North Star. The lawn was cold and damp beneath my bare feet as I crossed from ours to his. I left footprints on the slate path to his front door. His dad’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I let myself in.

  I didn’t turn on any downstairs lights, so all that blinding white was a study in grays and shadows that would make a haunting charcoal drawing. I paused to mentally frame interesting angles and pieces. Just long enough to calm my breathing before I started up the stairs.

  Toby, I rehearsed under my breath, there’s something I need to tell you. I don’t want you as a tutor. I don’t see you as a chauffeur. I don’t want you to see me as the kid next door or your Knight Light adoptee. I want you to see me as me. I want you to love me.

  Eh, maybe I’d walk that back a bit. Save the declarations for after I saw his face and knew if there was anything worth hoping for.

  I was at his room, raising my hand to knock on the slightly open door when I heard my sister’s voice. “You can’t keep doing this.” Merri was pissed. When she got mad, her words lost their shape, blurred together in a sludge of emotions that trembled in the same way she did. “Toby, we’ve had this conversation. We’ve had it more than once. You can’t just send me texts saying you have feelings for me.”

  “I was going to just come over.” His voice was still as desperate as it’d been when he fled from the movie. “But I didn’t know if you were home.”

  “You’re missing the point!” Merri’s voice was shrill. “That wouldn’t be any better. I don’t want you just showing up in my room.”

  Toby laughed, but it sounded nervous. He wasn’t as oblivious to Merri’s anger as he was pretending to be. “Like you just showed up in my room? And I’ve always been welcome in yours.”

  “Not anymore,” said Merri. “Privilege revoked. Also, Fielding is your friend. Doesn’t that count for anything? You’re hurting me and betraying him. Hello, do you want to tick off a nationally ranked fencer?”

  The last line was so typically Merri. Her anger burnt itself out quickly and she always tried to build jokes from the ashes, like she couldn’t bear to stand in the aftermath and deal with the feelings that were exposed and damaged. “Toby, you know I love you . . .”

  I bit my lip until it throbbed, any pain to distract from the one that was building in my chest. She loved him? Was Merri a true Daisy? A cheating, playing-both-guys Daisy?

  “I love you too.” Toby’s voice soared and my heart crashed.

  “No,” Merri said softly. “That’s not what I mean. I love you, but I’m not and will never be in love with you. And I miss the boy who wasn’t afraid to make me angry. Who didn’t hesitate to call me out when I messed up. You could never lose me as a friend because you made me mad—but you will lose me if you don’t stop trying to be more. I need you to hear me when I say I don’t feel that way. I’m sorry that hurts you. You mean so much to me as a friend, but, Toby, my feelings aren’t going to change and”—her voice quivered—“I hate that you’re trying to force them to.”

  I lowered my forehead to
rest against the hall wall. My heart broke for both of them and for myself as well. There might not be car crashes and bodies in the road, but there was some Gatsbian damage here as well.

  “I wanted that country song,” said Toby, his voice as torn as ripped paper.

  “Which one?” Merri asked.

  Toby laughed and tapped out a few notes on his keyboard. “Any of the ones that start with a scabby-kneed boy and a girl with hair ribbons and end with them sitting on a front-porch swing with their own kids.”

  “I want that too—” I couldn’t see Merri’s face, but I could hear the earnestness in her voice and knew how pinched her forehead would be, how her bottom lip would tremble and her eyes would look enormous as she gazed up at him. “But I want it with us living next door, trading off whose porch we sit on and who supplies the Popsicles. Someday in the very distant future, you’ll be my kids’ Uncle Toby. I’ll be your kids’ Auntie Merri—aka, the fun aunt. I want you in my life, Toby. For forever. But not if you can’t hear or respect my feelings.”

  He inhaled so brokenly that I didn’t care if I exposed myself. I needed to see him, see if he was okay—because Merri’s vision for the future left no room for his own. All that hope he’d been harboring for so long had been drowned. I shifted slightly, silently. Through the crack in the door I saw her standing with hands on her hips. His were shoved in his pockets as he studied her face. Finally, he shut his eyes and sighed. Opening them, he reached out and put a hand on each of her shoulders. Twisting his mouth into a bitter smile, he asked, “Am I supposed to teach my kids to call him ‘Uncle Fielding’? Is he who you see yourself with?”

  “Gah, Toby.” Merri leaned her cheek on his forearm in an attempt to hide the enormous smile blooming there. Her Fielding Face. “It’s only been five weeks.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” said Toby. “Look at your face. I know you too well. And he’s too smart not to realize how extraordinary you are and how lucky he is.”

  “I don’t think Fielding’s the Popsicle type.” Merri giggled the words into his skin and I pressed my forehead so hard against the doorframe that it hurt. “They drip and make messes—you know how he feels about messes.”

  “He’d tolerate them for you.” Toby and Merri stepped back simultaneously.

  “Yeah, I think he would.” She rubbed her arms, then hugged herself. “He makes me so happy. I’m not saying that to hurt you. I’m saying it because I desperately want that for you too. Someone who makes you this happy. That person isn’t me. It’s never going to be.”

  Toby had turned away—from her, from me. He was facing his keyboard when she said, “I’m sorry.”

  He was still facing it when he answered, “Me too. And I won’t . . . I heard you. I’m sorry.”

  She slipped out his balcony and into the night. That should’ve been my cue to leave too. My plans for coming here had been torpedoed, and the only thing I had to offer this scene was more hurt and humiliation. But then his fingers crashed on the keyboard. Not in chaos but in a crescendo of such strong emotions that my eyes immediately filled. This was his soundtrack for this moment.

  It wasn’t a happy song. It was longing, it was wistful, it was coveting. It was ambition and searching and green light yearning. His fingers played the melody like he knew it by heart, like it came from his heart. Like it was his heart breaking in those mournful notes. I slid down the wall and listened. Because no one should be alone in that much pain. Because even if he didn’t ever know I’d been there, I wanted there to be an audience to his talent, an acknowledgment of his hurt.

  The notes trickled to a stop. A new sound filled the air—ripping paper. He tore and tore and tore, and I could only imagine the pile of sheet music at his feet. I stood when the sound stopped, pausing long enough to hear him breathe out, “Goodbye, Merrilee May.” Then I left to say some goodbyes of my own.

  While I’d been huddled on the floor in his hallway listening to his compositions for my sister, I’d realized that I had never, could never, would never be Jay Gatsby. Because Gatsby had had Daisy to lose—he’d had a moment when she was his.

  Toby had never been mine. And he never would be.

  It was time.

  I tiptoed out of his house. Up in my room with the door shut and music on to mask my tears, I copied his lead, tearing up sketch after sketch after sketch of a grin with a slightly crooked tooth, of eyebrows that fanned over the kindest brown eyes. I tore up each dream, each promise I’d made myself, each hope I’d held for the future.

  Then I went back down to the basement and forced myself to watch the end of the movie. Gatsby floating dead in the pool he’d never taken the time to swim in. A funeral with no mourners, because he hadn’t let anyone know him. No one but Nick and Daisy—and he hadn’t been enough for her.

  I wanted to be enough. I wanted to be more than enough for someone.

  Upstairs I deleted the paper I’d started and began again, typing out the quote ringing through my head: “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . .”

  Merri and Toby were both so careless—both so clueless. They weren’t malicious, but that didn’t make our collective hurts any less. We loved and we lived and we rowed side by side like the “boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past” that Fitzgerald used to close his book. But I was putting down my oar. I was changing the constellations I used to navigate.

  If I stayed stuck in the past, it would destroy me. It was time to move on. It was time to let go.

  21

  The windshield wipers dragged against the glass with a rubber scrape. It was an in-between rain, and Toby had spent the whole drive adjusting their speed. Having never been in the driver’s seat, I wasn’t sure if it was actually that complicated, or if it was easier for him to focus on them than on my sister seated beside him.

  Merri was chattering about classes. Making bio and Latin and, ugh, math sound like they were gossip. I wanted to shake her for being oblivious to all the tension in the car, until I really looked at her—her stiff posture and knotted fingers—and realized she wasn’t. She was overcompensating.

  All three of us had matching puffy eyes ringed with dark circles—though I was the only one who knew the whole story.

  Merri’s fingers fluttered like nervous birds. “And that, Mayday, is why—”

  “Can you not call me ‘Mayday’ anymore?” Toby’s voice was rough.

  I’d always hated their stupid exclusive nicknames, but watching the color drain from Merri’s face made my stomach flip. I wanted to reach forward and hug her. I’d heard her crying last night. I’d been psyching myself up to comfort/join her, but Lilly beat me to it. Since Lilly didn’t have her own Toby heartbreak going on, she was the better choice. But that didn’t make it any easier to be the odd man out. The one sobbing alone in her bedroom.

  I watched Merri’s mouth form the word “Why” twice before she managed to whisper it.

  “Because it feels prophetic now. I don’t need to be reminded how I crashed and burned.” Toby bashed his hand down on the blinker before pulling his car to an abrupt halt in Eliza’s driveway. He reached for the horn as she came out the door.

  I wasn’t sure which one of them broke my heart more, but both halves of the front seat were curled into themselves with pain and betrayal. I dug into my backpack and pulled out a notebook and pen as Eliza opened the car door. “Good morning.”

  Toby hmm’d in response and Merri’s “Happy Halloween” was a pathetic, spiritless thing. Eliza turned to me in confusion and I passed over the note I’d scrawled: Friendship armageden went down last night.

  I was sure I’d spelled “Armageddon” wrong but trusted Eliza was smart enough to figure it out and come up with a plan to fix this. It’s not like she wasn’t prepared. One morning back in September, I’d grabbed her
arm so she couldn’t follow Toby and Merri and Fielding to their lockers. “Why do you hate Toby?”

  The question had made me nervous—I hadn’t wanted to know anything negative or critical about him, but I’d asked on a morning full of giggles and him smiling like each of Merri’s playful pokes was the best present he’d ever received. I’d thought maybe if I knew Eliza’s reason, I could adopt it for my own and it would hurt less to be around him.

  “I don’t hate him,” Eliza had said. “I hate that one of these days he’s going to make some big declaration or ultimatum and Merri’s going to be hurt when she has to reject him. I hate the inevitability of that outcome and his refusal to acknowledge that his feelings are unrequited.”

  My stomach had twisted. “You don’t think she could learn to like him back? They’re best friends. Isn’t that the foundation for a good relationship?”

  Eliza had shaken her head. “First, I’m her best friend. Also, their friendship dynamic would be toxic in a relationship. What happens when they fight? Merri pouts, Toby forgives—or grovels if he’s at fault. She asks, she receives. There’s a power imbalance. She’s never going to care as much as he does. He’s never going to say no to her. Someday he’ll resent her for it. They’d make each other worse people, not better.”

  At the time, I’d laughed. “That’s your idea of romance? Someone who will say no to you?” But her comment about making each other worse people had been looping in my head—it had made it into last night’s paper too. Gatsby, for all the ways he’d changed himself for Daisy, hadn’t become a better person. Not a happier one. Daisy’s fleeting attention, Daisy’s affair—those weren’t love. And his one-sided adoration wasn’t either. He hadn’t seen past his idealized obsession to notice her flaws.

  I added a quick upside-down sketch of a nuclear cloud to the notebook. Eliza closed it with a grimace. She added her silent sigh to a car that was full of them, then leaned forward between the seats. “Yesterday was my half-birthday,” she began.