Georgie, All Along (90)

In the bedroom, there’s signs of Georgie’s haste—a bra on my dresser, a pile of stuff she keeps on the chair in the corner mostly on the floor, my old hooded sweatshirt thrown on the end of the unmade bed. I’m used to Georgie leaving things out and around, but it’s habit to move straight to the bed to make it up and manage some of the chaos she’s left behind.

I don’t mean to see it, her notebook open there on top of the sheets, but I also don’t think anything of the fact that I do. I’ve seen Georgie with it dozens of times by now. I’ve been a part of that notebook, even if I’ve never actually looked inside it.

I don’t mean to see it, but I do.

Wide open, packed with her handwriting, taking up every single blank space. Hearts and exclamations everywhere.

My brother’s name filling the page.

*

WHEN SHE GETS home, she’s me an hour ago—buzzing with excitement, greeting Hank in a way that gets him riled up and happy.

“Leviiiiiiiiiiiiiii,” she calls, in that big, expansive way she has, and I both love the sound of it and hate the way I can’t hear it right, hate that I’ve been telling myself for the last half hour that what I saw in the notebook doesn’t matter and hate that deep down, I know I haven’t listened.

She finds me in the kitchen, hands stuck deep in the bowl of mash I’m mixing for the veggie burgers I’m making, trying to execute the exact same plan I had before I saw what I saw—make dinner for us, look at the pictures I know she’s got to show me, hear all about Annabel and what’s happened since I left Georgie sleeping in bed this morning. But when she flings herself against my back, wrapping her hands tight around my waist and pressing her cheek between my shoulder blades, I stiffen the slightest bit, a bracing against the same pain I felt when I looked down and saw Evan’s name everywhere, by Georgie’s side for the best date she could have imagined.

I breathe through it, concentrating on letting go of the tension, and I’m grateful Georgie doesn’t seem to notice. She presses up onto her tiptoes and smacks a kiss on the skin between the collar of my T-shirt and my hairline and says, “I have ten million things to tell you!”

I clear my throat. “Yeah?” My voice sounds gritty, low. It’s not what I want, but it’s what I’ve got to give, this stubborn pain pounding through me, even when I know it doesn’t make any sense. Even when I know it’s unfair, immature.

Even when I know it’s trouble.

But she’s too far in it to hear, too unbounded in her happiness. She squeezes me tight again and says, “Ten million! I have to go shower, though. You don’t want to know why. I’ll shower, and then I’ll tell you everything!”

She kisses me on the back of my neck again, and then she’s gone, Hank following, and he’s got good reason. He knows my mood doesn’t match his anymore. I hear her in there, chatting to him the way she always does, and then she goes quiet, and I go still. I left it there, the notebook, same way I found it, because I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t want to talk about it, but now I don’t know how I’m going to be able to help it.

I step back from the bowl, move to rinse my hands at the sink.

“Levi,” I hear her say a few seconds later.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see her standing at the threshold between the hallway down to my bedroom and the kitchen. I keep my eyes down, as if I need to focus on drying off my hands.

I get up the courage to face her full-on, and she has the notebook in her hand now, closed and resting along her thigh. She’s got a look in her eyes like she’s never been this sorry for someone in her life.

“I figure he’s in there for more than the prom,” I say, because it gets my back up to see her look at me that way right now. “But I want you to know, I didn’t look.”

She blinks at me, something mulish crossing her expression, and it’s at least better than the pity.

“He is,” she says, unapologetic, and that’s good, I know. That’s how it should be. But I’ve known all my life what was good, what should be, and I spent years choosing the wrong thing anyway. I’m back in those years now. Out of place, out of sorts.

“Great,” I say, deadpan.

“Levi.” She takes a step toward me, but I can’t get open to it, can’t do anything but stand here stiff and forbidding.

“That’s all teenage stuff,” she says. “A crush I had. You have to know that. I would have told you, but it didn’t even seem—”

She cuts herself off, probably to stop herself from saying the word important. Two months I’ve been hearing about this notebook, and we both know everything in there is important to her, in one way or another.

And after everything I told her last night, we both know why seeing Evan’s name in there would be important to me.

Maybe I’m out of proportion mad.

But I also think she should’ve told me.

“All the stuff we did,” I say, still wiping at my no longer wet hands. “The movie night. The dock. All that, you wrote about doing with him?”

She shakes her head. “No. No, Levi. He wasn’t the point of it. Bel and I, we—”

She breaks off again, closes her eyes, and takes a steadying breath. When she opens them again, all that earlier mulishness has left her expression.