The Futures(9)

But how would I know that? She doesn’t complain or wax nostalgic. She doesn’t tolerate moping—not in herself and certainly not in us. She was too busy shaping us into the best versions of ourselves. That was her job, and she was good at it. I turned out right. I fit smoothly into the world around me. My teachers liked me. I fell into a comfortable position within the social hierarchy: near the top of the pyramid, but not so high as to wind up a target of scheming usurpers. I never had a problem getting a date. I checked every box there was to check: friends, boys, sports, school.

It’s only now I see the red flags along the way. Cracks in the armor. I remember a writing assignment in English class, the year before I left for boarding school. Our class filed outside, notebooks in hand, and sat down on the grassy hill behind the gym. Our teacher told us to describe the scene around us in any way we wanted—to be creative, to free-associate. I never liked English as a subject. I never got what was so great about it. Still, I was surprised to find a bright red C on my essay and a note from the teacher asking me to come see him. He inquired, eyes full of concern, whether I’d understood the purpose of this assignment. I’d always done okay in his class before, even though I hated it. I could string together insightful statements about Hamlet, Lord of the Flies, you name it. But somehow, I couldn’t manage such an open-ended task. I struggled to fill those two pages. I had described the sights, the sounds, the smells. What else was I supposed to do? My stomach roiled with humiliation. What else did he want me to say?

But that was just one essay. One bad grade evened out by many good ones. The next year, I went away to boarding school, and I had never been happier. I started dating Rob. I played volleyball in the fall and lacrosse in the spring. I snuck cigarettes in the woods on Friday nights and sipped spiked hot chocolate at football games on Saturday mornings. I got straight As. Rob was recruited to play soccer at Harvard, and I was going to Yale. We agreed to try long distance, although I think both of us knew it wouldn’t last. And it didn’t matter, because on the very first day of school, I met Evan.

*

Three weeks after I found that photograph of my mother, I left for a semester abroad. She had been the one to persuade me to go. I’d lamented the idea of leaving, of missing Evan, of missing Abby and my other friends. “Don’t be silly,” my mother said. “They’ll be there when you get back.” She framed it as a decision to be made for practical reasons. When else would I get the chance to live in Paris? Why wouldn’t I take advantage of this opportunity? She was right, of course, but I had different reasons for going. Sophomore year had been a difficult one, a bad year capped by a particularly bad incident. I needed a change. I sent in my application the first week of the new school year.

That January, I flew to Paris on a red-eye and took a bleary taxi ride to a crooked street in the 11th arrondissement. That old picture of my mother at Wellesley came with me in my suitcase, and I tacked it to the wall above my narrow bed in my homestay. My host was young and gamine, with bad teeth and great hair. She was a costume designer for the national theater. She hosted students in her spare bedroom to make extra money, she explained, so that she could spend her summers traveling with her boyfriend. Her hours ran long and late, and I rarely saw her, but the apartment always smelled like her—strong coffee and clove cigarettes.

Except during our weekly Skype dates, I didn’t think about Evan much. I was too consumed by what was in front of me: the bottles of wine on the banks of the Seine, the afternoons in the Luxembourg Gardens, the yeasty scent of the bakeries when we rambled home from the clubs at dawn. I sank into it, like a deep bath, and I felt myself letting go of something for the first time. Evan and I planned that he would meet me in Paris after the semester ended. But when that day arrived, on the Metro ride to the airport, I felt sweaty and nervous. What if, these past months, I had changed—or he had changed—so much that we wouldn’t have anything to say to each other? I scanned the crowds at baggage claim, anxious not to miss him; he didn’t have a phone that worked in Europe. We’d spent time apart before, the previous two summers, when he’d gone back to Canada and I’d gone back to Boston. But this stretch was different. I’d learned to live in another country. He’d learned to live without me. Suddenly our plan—traveling through Europe for two months before senior year—struck me as foolish. What if he arrived and everything was all wrong? What if it was over?

Then I spotted him, towering above the rest of the crowd, in a ball cap and T-shirt. He saw me and smiled. I’d forgotten what it felt like to be wrapped in his arms, to feel the vibration of his laughter in his chest. Things did feel different. Evan felt like an old friend, an old lover, one whose reappearance in my life was sweeter for giving me a link between past and present. I was known; I was remembered, even far from home.

We flew back to Boston in August, pausing for a night, and then we got on a plane to British Columbia. It was my first time out there, my first time meeting his parents after more than two years of dating. His hometown was tiny, like a grain of sand on the map. That first night, in Evan’s childhood bedroom beneath the slanted rafters, in the modest house tucked among the tall pine trees, I realized that I had never experienced so much quiet in my life.

“Have fun, kids!” His mother saluted us with her thermos as his parents drove to work the next morning. She leaned through the window as they backed out of the driveway. “Oh, and Julia, my bike’s out back if you want to borrow it.”