I'd Give Anything(34)

His name said out loud was like someone sticking a pin into me.

“And he’s still Gray,” she said.

I shook my head. “He’s not the Gray I knew.”

Kirsten put her hand on the side of my face and swiveled my head to face her. “No. He is,” she said, firmly.

“What?” I said. “Are you taking his side?”

“There aren’t sides, Zinny. This isn’t a war with good guys and bad guys.”

“So what is it? What is the name for this situation?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. The thing is he’s still Gray. He’s still funny and smart and brave and nice. He’s our friend. He’s all the things he always was. Except now we know this one other thing about him. It doesn’t change the other stuff or cancel it out. It’s just an addition.”

I sat there, my hands pressed together, holding each other tight, like someone praying. But I wasn’t praying. I was wrestling with what Kirsten had just said. And I can’t tell which I was trying harder to do: understand what she’d said or push it away.

Before I could figure it out, Kirsten said something else: “He’s still Gray. And he’s scared and sad and hates himself for doing this to you. And—listen to me. Are you listening?”

He’s still Gray.

My hands released each other, and I spread them open on my lap, palms down, and I nodded.

Kirsten said, “And he’s right on the edge of hating himself in general. Gray, the best guy in the world, who sticks up for everyone, hating who he is. Think about that.”

It was like there were automatic garage doors inside my head and as Kirsten said this, they all slid slowly open and light came in. Light and Gray. Grays. One Gray after the next. Laughing. And debating in class. And scraping the cheese off his pizza because he doesn’t like cheese but the rest of us do. Gray always laughing with—never at—CJ. And helping Kirsten with math. Gray giving other guys on the team the credit when people congratulate him on a game. Gray listening to me tell a story, giving me his full attention and never interrupting. His face going all thoughtful when he reads something I’ve written or looks at one of my watercolors. Gray’s voice on the phone at night with me, telling me the kind of person he wants to be when he grows up, noble and strong and interesting, telling me I will be extraordinary and brilliant because—just look at you, Zinny—I already am.

Gray Marsden had never hurt me on purpose. He never would.

I’d wanted to keep him forever. I’d wanted us to live in our house and share our secrets and raise our astonishing, beautiful children together. And now I can’t, ever, ever, and that terrible truth will never stop hurting me.

But what I said next to Kirsten was true, too: “No one is allowed to hate Gray. Especially not Gray. That can’t happen.”

She gave me a long hug. “My Zinny.”

“I wanted to be in love with him forever,” I said, so sadly.

Kirsten grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “I know.”

“And now I’ll have to be just his friend, and he’ll go off and be in love with someone else someday.”

“I know. But you will, too.”

“I can’t even imagine it,” I said. Tears burned in my eyes again, but I rubbed them away. “But I hope so. I hope it for both of us.”

Tonight, I’ll sneak out of my house and leave a note for Gray on his windshield, asking if I can come see him tomorrow night.

I am tired and sad and may never be in love with anyone again. But it seems that I am still Zinny.





November 6, 1997




2:22 A.M.



I dreaded seeing Gray. I was scared he would look different to me, like a stranger. I was scared he would look exactly the same to me and I would want him like always and would fall to pieces because I couldn’t have him. I was scared that I would look into his eyes and see him seeing me as ugly or repulsive, as someone he couldn’t believe he had ever touched. I was so very, very scared that when I heard him coming across his yard to the spot behind his detached garage where we always met, I started shaking and not from cold. My teeth were actually chattering, their clicking sounds so loud in my ears that I was afraid I’d wake up Gray’s dad and little brother, Jimmy, and maybe the entire neighborhood.

Then, there he was, tall and broad and moon-stained, a bundle of blankets in his arms, the two Black Watch plaid ones I’d seen a hundred times at least. I waited for pain to run me over, but instead I felt my muscles unknotting, the ones at the base of my scalp and little ones in my temples and forehead that I don’t even usually realize I have.

Just being near Gray, even before I fell in love with him, has always made me feel this sense of not calm, exactly (because God knows the guy excites me. Or did. Or does. Does), but something I don’t even know the name of. Well-being? Comfort? Or maybe reassurance. You know the song “Let It Be” by the Beatles? Whenever I hear it, instantly, from the opening notes, I’m aware of a solid rightness at the heart of life, and I don’t so much think the words “Everything is going to be all right” as feel them in the center of my chest and down the length of my spine.

Gray is “Let It Be” in human form.

But I didn’t expect him to still be, not now, after everything, and, really, it wasn’t quite the same. Now, what Gray’s presence said to me was something more like: “Maybe, just maybe, if we’re patient and lucky, everything is going to be all right.” Still, it was surprising.