History Is All You Left Me(61)
“Why? There’s plenty of room on the bed . . .”
“Once you move every article of clothing you own? I have a thing against Edward Scissorhands.” I’m actually not entirely making excuses for my OCD; that poster is seriously creepy, and so was the movie.
“What is this thing you have against my favorite Johnny Depp movie?”
“I saw it as a kid and it scared the shit out of me. I had a nightmare he came to my school cafeteria in a straitjacket and wanted to cut me,” I confess.
“But he’s in a straitjacket.”
“First off, anyone approaching me in a straitjacket is scary enough. Let’s factor in the fact that Edward has blades for hands, and what you’re left with is ten-year-old Griffin so scared his parents had to give the DVD away to a neighbor because he couldn’t stand having it in the house.” I point at the poster. “And now I’m faced with my enemy again, twenty times bigger than the DVD case.”
“We should watch it again while you’re here.”
“I will leave today if you think that’s going to happen.”
Jackson walks over to this little desk he has in the corner. “How are you going to unlock the door if you’re in a straitjacket?”
“Not funny.”
“You’re right, I’m sorry.” Jackson raises one hand up in surrender. Then he quickly reveals the other from behind his back, holding a pair of scissors and clipping at air. He takes a step toward me and laughs before he can get too close—too close to my raised fist, that is. He puts the scissors back down on the desk. “Truce?”
“Truce.” I put my bag down beside his. “This room is huge.” Twice the size of mine, I would guess.
“Yeah, out of the three bedrooms, my mom let me take the master bedroom. I guess she didn’t see any reason to be in the room meant for two parents. I also think she wanted me to have some victory after the divorce, so big room it is,” Jackson says, opening his window as Chloe comes in and settles herself into her bed.
I walk around, spotting the same photo of you and Jackson on his desk that was in your room where ours used to be. Jackson folds some of his clothes. I help him out until I notice some writing on the wall in the corner of the room. I walk over and it’s faded, but I can make it out: THEODORE + JACK. His name is in your handwriting and yours is in his.
“What’s this?” I don’t mean for my tone to be so accusatory.
Jackson stops balling up some socks. “We did that after our first fight. And yeah, we were fighting about you.”
He tells me the story; it’s the first I’m hearing of this. You and Jackson were hanging out in Venice Beach after classes. You were both mimicking the lifts and flips the other muscular guys were doing, and you were failing spectacularly. In the middle of Jackson’s cartwheel, I called you and you answered. Jackson thought you were going to tell me you’d call me back, but you sat down in the sand and kept talking.
“It bothered me so much,” Jackson said. “But I couldn’t say anything bad about you. I refused to say anything at all after he finally got off the phone twenty minutes later. Theo hated that silence.”
What you don’t understand, Theo, is silence is sometimes better than someone speaking before they’re ready. That is how lies slip out.
“I drove us back here so I could give him back his stuff, and I was going to break up with him. Anika didn’t believe me when I told her that, but I was serious. I didn’t want to keep competing against his past. Theo told me to stop being so silent and tell him what’s wrong. I told him it was you. He grabbed a marker and said he was going to prove his allegiance.”
Jackson closes the shades and turns off the lights. THEODORE + JACK comes alive, glowing ocean blue in the dark. I can only imagine how bright the words will become when it’s actually pitch-black out. I feel something unpleasant stir inside me.
“He had no idea it was an old glow-in-the-dark marker Veronika left behind. He said if I actually cared about him, I would write his name down. I got down there with him and did it.” Jackson stares at your names, his voice softening. “Then he said he loved me. First time. I said it back.”
I don’t say anything. My silence is crushing. You used to tell me about all these fights, fights I used to find happiness in, but you never told me this one ended the way it did; you never told me about this one at all.
“We need to get out of here,” I hear myself say. “If I’m going to be in trouble in California, I’m going to make the most of it. Where can we go? What can we go do? Anything.”
“How about a drive?” Jackson asks, flipping on the light so that your names fade instantly.
“Good battle plan,” I say.
But very little planning actually goes into this mini road trip. Jackson doesn’t swap out his sneakers for sandals to be more Californian (or at least what I understand Californians to be like); he doesn’t pack a cooler with sandwiches and water bottles; and he doesn’t grab suntan lotion in case we end up outside longer than expected. He tells Ms. Lane we’re heading out for a drive, but that’s it. Jackson takes me outside to the connecting garage, where a black Toyota Camry is waiting for him. Jackson gets into the driver’s seat and so I automatically go to the back, sitting in the center, opposite the rearview mirror, where some sort of spy pen is dangling.