Georgie, All Along (72)

I hear the smallest, saddest sniffle.

“Hey,” I say, reaching out and catching her elbow, pulling her against my side and getting my arm around her. The first thing I think is that I don’t know what to be mad at: the spray paint can or the rock or maybe Annabel. But when Georgie leans her weight against me, I don’t want to be mad. I don’t want to be anything but focused on her.

“What’s this about?” I ask her, keeping my voice low.

“This is weird, right? It’s weird that I’m crying right now?” She reaches up and swipes a hand across her cheeks. “God, I’m a mess.”

“You’re not a mess. The Y looks good.”

She snorts another laugh, but it’s a wet, sorry-sounding thing.

“I’m not jealous of Bel. I haven’t ever been. What I said before, about her making her mark . . . I don’t want you to think I resented that, or anything.”

“I wouldn’t think that.”

“It’s only that—being here, seeing her initials up there—it sort of reminds me of those last few years I spent here.”

“Yeah?”

She nods against me, then takes a breath through her nose and blows it out noisily.

“Remember that night you made me pizza on the grill?” she says, after a few seconds of silence.

“Sure. You kissed me.”

She groans. “Don’t remind me.”

I duck my head and steal a quick kiss from her now, because I do want to remind her. I want to remind myself how many times I’ve managed to kiss her since.

“That night, you said something about . . . you said you could only see the day you were on. Everything else was a blank, you said.”

Sounds pretty bad when she says it, but there’s no point in denying it. It is what I said, and it’s how it was.

“That’s how it was for me, too. But obviously not always, right? The journal is proof of that. But then we got to high school, and the more Bel filled her life up—the more everyone filled their lives up—the more mine seemed to empty out. I didn’t want to join any clubs, or play a sport. I didn’t want to research colleges, not that I’d done enough to get into any. I didn’t want to talk about what job I should do someday. I wouldn’t have known how to make a mark, even if I’d wanted to.”

I shift, moving Georgie in front of me, holding her back close to my front while we both look at this big rock that I can tell—even in spite of the way its covered in years of paint, the excited scribbles of other kids making their marks over the years—is another big blank to her.

“Knowing what you don’t want isn’t a blank,” I say. “Maybe the problem is, everyone makes it seem like one. Because mostly they only know a few things you can fill up your life with. Sports or clubs or college or jobs. Whatever. There’s other things in life.”

She’s quiet in front of me, her body unmoving. It’s rare for Georgie to be this still, and I can tell she’s thinking. It gives me time to think, too. Back then, I didn’t know what to fill up my life with, either, and I ended up picking trouble. I wonder what it would’ve been like if I could’ve picked something else.

If I could’ve somehow picked Georgie. If I could have had her in my life all along.

“I never thought of it that way.” She tips her head down and presses her lips to where my forearm wraps around her chest, and the gesture is so soft and grateful that I can’t help wanting to give her more.

“I think you probably made all sorts of marks. Probably most of the people around here couldn’t see them, is all. Maybe you couldn’t see them, either.”

She turns in my arms, lifting the brim of her hat and showing me her eyes—everything I felt in that kiss on my arm right there for me to see. I think maybe she’s about to thank me, which isn’t necessary, but instead she presses onto her tiptoes, kisses me hard, and says something that nearly knocks the wind right out of me.

“You’re not trouble, Levi Fanning,” she whispers. “Maybe nobody here could see that.”

Before I can tighten my arms around her, hold everything about what she said close to me, she spins away and marches right up to the rock with the same can of paint in her hand she used for Annabel’s initials.

This time, she doesn’t hesitate. As soon as I get my head together enough to point my phone’s light her way, she lifts her arm and in big, bold, gold letters, she writes her initials: GMM.

Smack in the center of that rock.

She stands back and looks at her handiwork for long seconds, then turns back to me and smiles sheepishly, shrugging. “All done,” she says.

I can tell she’s still thinking about it—figuring out how she feels about this thing she’s attached so much weight to. Not just in the journal, but in her life.

“What’s the M for?” I ask her, and that sheepish smile transforms into something teasing, something playful.

“None of your business, mister,” she says, which means I’ve got to know now.

I bend to snatch a can off the grass, marching right up to that rock myself. I put my initials below hers, smaller, so I don’t mess up the big effect she’s got going here, the way she tried out this way of making her mark. When I step back, I do what I suspect she did. I search for some kind of feeling—the sense of connection I thought I’d experience if I did this thing that my siblings probably did.