“And I knew it was his way of defending her, but I wished more than anything that she had just told me that herself.”
I might even have kept skating.
A FEW NIGHTS later, I wake up with it bursting out of me, the need to tell Will the truth. The need to talk about the night he died. Maybe it’s this thing with my mother, seeing how a lie can infest your life, can make everything about it ugly and wrong.
I don’t want to be like her.
There’s also the fact that Will and I have talked about everything else—about Lacey, work, my family. The only thing—the biggest thing—we haven’t talked about is that night.
When Will picks up the phone, I start at the very beginning. A history of kisses and almost kisses.
“We were outside Cabin 4A, and it was three days before the end of camp. I was twelve, and Lacey had had her first kiss playing seven minutes in heaven a few months before camp. She’d walked out of that coat closet changed.”
She’d talked about it like in one split second she’d gone from plain to desirable, from a duckling to a swan. Still, I’d felt grateful I’d been sick for that party. The thought of a dank closet that smelled of mothballs, with one of the mouth breathers we went to school with, horrified me. I wanted it to happen soon, but I wanted it to be special. I wanted it to be nice.
And then it had happened: I’d been standing alone with Malcolm Denison before crafts, and it had rained earlier that morning, so the air smelled sweet. Then Malcolm had looked at me and I’d known he was going to kiss me.
“It was horrible. It felt like it went on too long.”
“That’s the exact wrong thing to say about a kiss,” Will says.
“It got better,” I say.
“How many more times did you kiss?”
I make a face. “Not Malcolm. I never saw him again after that year. But there were other boys.”
Two, to be precise.
I went out with Chad Branson for three months in sophomore year, and then there was Joshua “Never Call Me Josh” York, who I went to homecoming with, a double date with Lacey and her then boyfriend Fletcher Humphries.
They were nice kisses, but they weren’t the dizzying, heart-stopping affairs I dreamed of. I always felt like I was waiting for something else. Always felt like I was waiting for someone else.
Will.
“I have to tell you something,” I say.
“What is it?”
“I lied to Lacey. About the night you died.”
“What do you mean?”
I swallow over the lump in my throat because it’s hard to get these words out, but I have to do it. I have to tell Will the truth.
“I told her we kissed but we never did.” I’m embarrassed and horrified and angry with myself all over again. “We almost did, but we didn’t.”
“What happened?” Will asks, his voice gentle in the night.
I tell him.
About arriving at Brendan Colbert’s party, where everything was too loud and crowded. About Lacey showing up half an hour later and getting drunk within the first hour.
I tell him about making my way outside, desperate to get some air, to hear myself think again, to get away from the thick haze of body odor and pot and beer.
I slump down on the edge of the sidewalk, my knees close enough to touch my chin. I make it a point to inhale, then exhale, then inhale again.
Maybe I should go home.
I’d come because Will asked me to, but just as I’d predicted, he was nowhere to be found all night. I stand up, rubbing my palms on the back of my jeans, and I’m starting to walk away from Brendan’s house when he calls my name.
“Paulsen!” he says. “Hey, you came!”
I turn around, force a smile. “Yeah, I did.”
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“Oh, I forgot something in my car,” I lie.
“I’ll walk with you,” Will says, but I don’t move. He frowns at me. “What’s wrong?”
“Okay, I didn’t forget anything,” I admit, sheepish. “I was leaving.”
“Why? You’re not having fun?”
“Not really,” I say. “I never really have fun at these things.”
He pulls out his phone, glances at the screen. “It’s only nine-thirty! You can’t leave at nine-thirty!”
I know he’s trying to lift my spirits or whatever, but it’s not working and I don’t really feel like pretending tonight.
“Yeah, I think I’ll just go,” I say. “See you Monday.”
“Hey,” he says, stopping me. “Wanna sit for a minute?”
I hesitate.
“Right out here. Just for a minute,” he says, and there’s something strange about his voice. It’s like he’s about to say something important. My heart picks up pace in my chest.
Was there a reason Will wanted me to come tonight? Could he…could he…? No.
Right?
“Just for a minute,” I say, and then we both sit on the curb, Will’s long legs outstretched into the road while mine are folded into my body.
“You know,” he begins. “You wouldn’t think it to look at me, but I wasn’t always the outgoing life of the party you see before you.”
And it’s not at all what I thought he was going to say, but I laugh anyway. “Yeah, you were. You’ve always been the life of the party.”
“Okay, yeah, I guess I have,” he admits. “But you know, sometimes it feels like I have to be. Like people expect me to be ‘on’ all the time.”
He picks up a small stone on the asphalt and throws it, trying to skip it across the road.
“Sometimes it feels like a show, you know? All of this.” He waves his hand over his face. “I don’t know. Maybe it’s the sobriety talking.”
“You should go in and get a drink,” I tell him.
“Nah,” he says. “I’m not drinking tonight.”
“How come?” I ask.
“I’m trying…” He hesitates. “I’m trying to impress someone and I’d rather not make an idiot of myself.”
He cuts his gaze to me now and everything freezes. It’s hard to breathe and my fingers are tingling and this is it. This is the moment I’ve been waiting for all this time.
“You don’t need to,” I blurt out stupidly. “Impress her, I mean.”
He gives me a look I can’t place and it happens so quickly. One split second and I’ve already done it. Leaned forward and kissed that scar next to his lip.
He freezes, gives me the widest eyes I’ve ever seen. “Eden,” he murmurs, and in that moment, everything falls away. The night sky, the thumping bass coming from the house behind us, the umbrella of yellow from the streetlight a few feet away. Everything falls away and I know that this is on me. This is my chance. I can lean in and kiss him and every moment with Will Mason has been leading to this one and he’s looking at me intently, waiting, frozen, and I inch forward so we’re breathing the same air.
Everything falls away.
Everything falls away, except the fear.
The fear that he won’t kiss me back, the fear that he will, the fear that this won’t change anything, the fear that it will. Mostly, the fear that I’ve imagined him. That I’ve imagined him and me and us, and that the real thing will never live up.
“So what did you do?” Will asks now.
“I ran.”
I just got up and left him sitting there on the sidewalk and I heard him call my name again, ask me to wait, but I didn’t. And I couldn’t.
Because even then I hated myself.
I hated myself for not taking a chance. For being too afraid.
So I lied.
I told Lacey what I wished I’d done.
“That was the last time I ever saw you,” I say. The sky was already breaking
, falling open by the time I reached home.
Regret does not even begin to cover it.
“It wasn’t all on you,” Will says.
“What?”
“It takes two to tango, right?”
“But I’m the one who ran away.”
“Yeah, but before that, I mean…I had a million chances and I never did it.”
After a few moments, he asks, “Can I make it right?”
“Make what right?”
“Kiss you,” Will says, his voice a whisper. “Can I kiss you?”
My heart gives out at his words.
“Can I?” he asks again.
I swallow.
“How?”
“Close your eyes,” he says.
I do as he says, my heart drumrolling in my chest.
“I’m closing my eyes too,” he says, and his voice is breathy, impossibly closer. I open my eyes and I’m alone in my room. So I shut them again and stay with Will.
“I’m leaning in now,” he says. “My lips are soft on your eyelids. Your left and then your right.”
My eyelids flutter but remain shut.
“Then I move to your mouth, to each corner of your lips.”
Then he stops speaking, and all I hear is his breath, his breath against mine. And I don’t know how it’s possible when I’m here and he is there, but for one long moment, Will Mason’s lips are on mine.
It ends too soon.
I know when his lips leave mine because I feel it, like a ghost flitting right in front of me. I know when his lips leave mine because suddenly I can breathe again.
I’d balked when Lacey had put it on our list. Number five.
Fall in love.
“I already am,” I’d argued. But even then, it didn’t feel like this.
It didn’t feel like sunshine and music and the collision of everything good.
Now.
Now, Will is here and everything is possible.
My lips are tingling and they don’t stop until I fall back asleep.
I THINK ABOUT it all the next day.
When I hand change to customers, when I’m scanning groceries.
While Will is on in my pocket, listening to everything I do and say, and I feel terrified, like I’m losing my mind. But I also feel light and distracted, like I could blow away at any moment.
At the end of my shift, I cross the parking lot still lost in thought, trying to imagine what my conversation with Will will be like tonight. If it will be any different.
On one hand, it was just a kiss.
On the other, I kissed Will.
Finally.
Finally.
That has to make things different.
I nearly scream when I see Mia sitting on top of my car.
Mia.
Who is supposed to be in DC.
“Mee, what the hell?” I shriek.
She doesn’t even complain about my name for her. Her face is swollen, her hair a mess.
She jumps off the hood of the car and into my face.
“When were you going to tell me?” she spits. “Huh? When were you going to tell me?”
I stumble backward but she keeps coming at me.
“Tell you what?” I ask, shielding my face with my arms.
“That Mom is fucking Sergiy.” She sees me freeze. “Yeah, that.”
The acid in her voice makes it sound like it doesn’t belong to her.
“How did you…”
“Sam told me,” she says, as some of her bravado begins to melt away. Soon she is just my sister again, dressed in too-hot business-casual attire, wiping sweat from her forehead. And crying.
My older sister is crying.
“Sam,” I repeat, like the word is foreign. “That’s impossible. Sam doesn’t know.”
“Yes, she does. She said you told her.”
“I did not!” I exclaim. As if I would ever do that to her.
“Well, she found out somehow,” Mia says, leaning against the side of my car. She looks defeated.
“It wasn’t me,” I assure her, but right as I say the words, the memory of the one actual conversation I’ve had with Sam recently comes to mind. When she was freaking out about the dress.
When I asked her if what was bothering her was Mom and Sergiy.
If she’d noticed anything weird between them.
“Shit.” The word catapults out of me and I press my thumbs to my temples to stop the instant throbbing.
I whirl back to Mia. “When did she tell you?”
“Last night.”
“So you came home?”
“Yes, I came home,” she says, as if answering me is beneath her. “I leave for a second and everything turns to crap.”
“You’ve been gone for a year, Mia,” I point out. It’s not like she just left this summer.
“Exactly,” she says. “Anyway, I hated it in DC.”
“You…what?” I ask, dazed.
“It was different than I thought it would be. It was…I don’t know. The whole time I was there, I just wanted to be home,” she says, and her voice cracks like she’s about to start crying all over again.
“But you love political stuff. The youth UN thing was your dream.”
Mia shrugs. “I don’t know,” she says. “Things change.” She looks at the ground. “I want to do something I love, you know? Why can’t I do something I love like Sam does? I get so jealous when I watch her skate sometimes.”
“Me too,” I admit.
Not because I wish I could skate like that, but because she’s good at the thing she loves to do. And she loves the thing she’s good at. And she found it on, like, the first try. Maybe it found her.
I get into my car and Mia hops into the passenger side.
“Mom and Dad are going to kill you when they find out,” I point out.
I’m pulling out of the parking lot when she says, “I’ve spoken to Mom.”
“And?”
“And she knows that we know.”
“What did she…say?” I ask, afraid to know the answer, to hear how the conversation I should have had with her went.
“I don’t know. She cried.”
I try to picture it, Mia making Mom cry.
“I think she’s going to tell Dad,” she says, leaning back against the headrest, and it makes my stomach turn, imagining Dad’s shock, his devastation.
“I mean, Serg,” I say. “Of all people.”
“He’s not exactly a troll,” Mia says.
I gasp. “He’s, like, entirely muscle, and then he wears all those low-cut black shirts. The tight pants!”
“I didn’t say I was in love with him. Relax!” she protests.
“Yeah, but he’s…” Ugh. I shudder. Granted, I was not completely repulsed by Sergiy until I knew what we now know, but I have never, ever thought him in any way desirable.
There’s a pause and then I ask the question I’ve been afraid to ask, the question that has held me back from doing anything about what I saw all this time.
“Was it a one-time thing? Does she love him?”
“She said it was a mistake. It started right before Dad’s TIA. She said mostly it was flirting and then it went too far.” Mia is staring out the windshield as she speaks. “But she loves Dad, and she and Serg already ended it.”
My mouth feels swollen at Mia’s words.
“Do you believe her?” I ask.
Mia shrugs. “Do you?”
“I want to,” I say, and I feel tiny and young.
When we get home, Mom is there already. She hurries to the front door to meet us and I swear her face falls when she sees it’s us. Like she was hoping it was somebody else.
Her face is puffy, eyes swollen like she
’s been crying for hours.
Mia doesn’t say anything, just stalks past her, and I do the same.
Mia goes into her room and I follow her, stand in the doorway for several minutes while she opens her curtains and windows. Then Sam appears behind me; she sits on the bed with her iPad and doesn’t say anything. Mia sits on her bed now too, with a space between her and Sam. I think about sitting there in between them, letting the sadness seep into my skin the way it seems to be filling my sisters.
Everything they ever believed about Mom is gone.
Everything is broken.
I stand there for a while, but the sadness is too much and the need to speak to Will rises in me like the need to scratch something.
I leave Mia’s room and go into mine.
I call him.
“What do you need me to do?” he asks when I explain to him what’s happened.
“Nothing,” I say. “Just…be with me.”
An hour passes and there’s no sign of Dad.
Then another hour, then another.
I fall asleep with Will on the phone beside me.
When I wake up the next day, I hurry downstairs, expecting to see them eating breakfast side by side, making corny jokes and flirting like they always are.
But not today.
Today the dining table is empty.
Neither of my parents is downstairs.
I hurry to check the garage, and half of it is empty.
Dad never came home last night.
He’s gone.
I CALL IN sick to work. I spend the rest of the day yo-yoing between hating my mother’s guts and hating my own.
Why did I ever say anything to Sam?
I should never have said anything to her.
It was an accident, but it’s an accident that has imploded my family. After all these years, my sisters and I finally look the same again. Our faces are long and drawn, heaviness weighing down our shoulders.
Without Dad, Mom is a mess. She doesn’t leave her room. She barely eats, despite Mia’s efforts to make her.
Without Dad, we are all a mess.
He calls me that night, the second night he’s away. I quickly get off the phone with Will to speak to him.
“Hey, Eden-Bunny,” he says, his voice thick and far away, unrecognizable. It was his nickname for me when I was little, and it makes me want to cry, how long ago that time feels.
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