You Know Me Well(35)

But I really don’t want to talk about me and how afraid I am.

I let go and I look him hard in the eyes. I don’t know how much, if anything, his parents know about last night and I don’t want to spill his secrets. So instead, since there is no chance of misinterpretation by anyone involved, I grab his face and I kiss him on the cheek.

“Mr. and Mrs. Rissi,” I say. “I really love your son.”

His parents beam, and Mark shakes his head, and I walk to my car.

When I get to my driveway I’m surprised to find the house dark, until I realize my parents are probably on their way to the city to catch the end of the reception after their days at work. I’ll need to let them know I won’t be there.

I turn to find my phone lit up with a text.

A single, short sentence from a number not in my contacts. I reach for it, bring it closer.

Make it up to me.





13





MARK


I don’t want her to go.

There are about twenty minutes total while we’re watching Gilbert Grape that I actually forget what’s happening to me. Ryan has stepped out of the room and it’s just me and Katie and the movie. My mind can relax. My body is comfortable. I am not a wreck.

But the movie ends and my parents come home and even though I don’t want her to leave, Katie jumps away like she’s finished babysitting and, no, she doesn’t need my dad to drive her home. She kisses me on the cheek, tells my mom how great I am, and breezes away. I should be mad, maybe, but really I can’t blame her. If I can’t stand my own presence, how can I expect anyone else to? I’m grateful for the short forgetfulness she gifted me with I’m grateful that there was one person left in the world who knew I had to step out of it for a while.

Now here I am with my parents, and even though we’re in our den and I’m back on the couch, it’s like I’m stuck in the backseat on a long, long car ride, with my mom constantly scrutinizing me in the rearview mirror. I know I’m a mess. I know she notices. She notices everything. Especially messes.

But with my father here, she won’t ask if anything is wrong. Because he’ll tell her to butt out. His rough way of sticking up for me.

“I’m tired,” I say, gathering myself together and making for the stairs.

“It’s not late,” my mother points out.

It is for me, I think.

I hope Katie’s going to her opening. It was sweet of her to placate me instead of forcing me to go with her. I hope I haven’t made her miss it.

I feel like a horrible friend for keeping her for so long, and for wishing she’d come back.

I dig my phone out from the bottom of my hamper, almost nostalgic for the person who wore the dirty clothes I’m throwing aside. I’m only getting the phone so I can wish her good luck.

But before I can do that, there’s another text I have to see.

Are you okay?

How dare he ask me that. How dare he make it that easy. How dare he only ask it once.

I swore I wouldn’t check my phone, and now that I’ve broken that vow it’s like the other ones are null and void. Like any addict, I’ve built my floodgates out of tissue paper. In one strong rush, I am opening my laptop and checking every site or app where Ryan could have posted anything—I want to see how his night was, how his day was, how the story has gone on without me. I am Tom Fucking Sawyer (or is it Huckleberry Fucking Finn?) attending his own funeral, but I’m only fixated on the reaction of a single mourner. Except the mourner hasn’t bothered to show up, because as I’m looking in window after window, there’s not a word from him to be found, no image, no afterlife to be glimpsed. All I get on Facebook is that he’s attending Katie’s opening. It doesn’t say whether or not he’s plussed one.

I click on his list of friends. I type Taylor into the search box. Five people pop up. Two are girls named Taylor. Two are guys whose last names are Taylor. And one is the antichrist.

I know that’s not fair. But it’s not fair to see how pretty he looks in his profile picture, wearing a pink tank top in front of the Golden Gate Bridge, sunglasses tucked in the pocket over his heart, tattoos spelling out sentences that I don’t dare zoom in to read. It’s not fair to click on his profile and find that he plays water polo and has had poetry published in some Bay Area alternative weekly. It’s not fair to see a post from 11:13 last night with a photo of Taylor with his tattooed arm around Ryan, sitting on a lime-green couch with two other guys, a feast spread out on a coffee table in front of them.

I wonder what time Ryan got home last night. If he got home.

Are you okay? No, I am not okay.

I am back on Ryan’s page. There are no photos of Taylor in his timeline, but there are plenty of photos of us. Nothing remotely romantic to the outside eye. But I am seeing them with my inside eye, the one that knows that after the shirtless shot on the beach we went into the woods and kissed against a tree. The project we did on Krakatoa needed to be done in one night because we spent two weeks causing our own explosions instead of working on it. The snapshot of the two of us with our friends Lisa and Aimee after we watched Frozen—I know it looks like I’m leaning into him so I can be in the shot, but really I was leaning on him so I could put my arm around his waist, so I could hold him and feel my head angle into his. My inside eye sees the tenderness. My inside eye has been seeing these things all along.