Little Do We Know(95)

“Earlier this week, I asked Pastor J to send me all the emails he received about my video. I started answering them. They’re still coming in, and I’m not sure I’ll ever be able to reply to all of them, but it’s a start. I’m sleeping better. My appetite is back. And when I close my eyes, images in my head aren’t quite so vivid, you know?” He tapped his finger to his temple. “It’s not so noisy in there anymore.”

I reached for his hand and interlaced his fingers with mine. He kept talking.

“I don’t know what I’m looking for, Em. I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out what happened to me or if it matters. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be the same again, but I know I need to keep talking about it, because it keeps me sane.”

“That’s okay. Talk to him. Talk to a therapist, too. Talk to me. It’s all good, okay?” He didn’t reply, and I could tell there was more he needed to say. “What?” I asked, even though I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

He rocked his head back and forth. “I’ve decided to go away for the summer.”

I sat up, twisting to face him. “Where?”

“Guatemala. On the mission trip with Hannah’s mom.”

I stared at him as his words sank in, but I had no clue how to respond. He’d caught me completely off guard.

“They need someone to run the program full-time, and I said I would do it. I’ll be working with kids, just like you and Hannah did. And I’ll help rebuild homes, fix up libraries, and churches. I’ll be part of a community that needs me.”

But I need you, I wanted to say.

“I’ve thought about this a lot. I’ve talked to my parents. And I’ve decided I have to go. I don’t need to be at Denver until August twentieth, and in the meantime, I’ve got to do something to distract me from…everything.”

He got quiet after that. For a moment, I thought he might ask me to come with him.

If he had, I wasn’t sure how I would have answered. I wanted to spend my summer with Luke, but I didn’t want to spend it in a foreign country on a three-month mission trip. I wanted to drive along the coast in his Jetta, stopping to camp, hiking to hot springs, playing Skee-Ball, sleeping under the stars, and waking up with the sun. I no longer cared about the bugs. I wanted to spend my summer alone with Luke, like we’d planned.

But he didn’t ask.

“Are you breaking up with me?”

He shook his head. “We’ll still have the rest of the year. Prom, graduation—”

“But no road trip.” I glanced over at my bulletin board where I had pinned the Mentos wrapper with his hand-drawn map.

That clock in my head started speeding up, the minute hand moving around the dial faster and faster.

“Please tell me that some small part of you understands this?” he asked.

I wanted to, for his sake. And a small part of me did understand. I’d seen Luke on those newscasts and morning shows, talking about what happened to him in a way that I’m sure moved total strangers to tears. He was good up there. And apparently, he needed it, too. I wished he didn’t. I wished I were enough.

“Part of me understands,” I said. “But every part of me hates this.”

He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and pulled me into him. I let my forehead fall against his chest. “Every part of me hates this, too.”

We sat like that for a long time, neither one of us wanting to be the first to let go.

I thought back to the day we met at the diner three hundred and fifteen days earlier, and I tried to picture every day from that first one on in order, but it was impossible. I wished I’d saved more than his words. I wished I’d somehow mentally captured every second we’d had together and filed it away for safekeeping so I could pull them up for the rest of my life, every time I needed one. I thought back to that night I almost broke up with him, when he told me I was ridiculous; that this was worth the pain of it ending and that he’d never regret a second we’d spent together.

He took my face in his hands and rested his forehead against mine, and I could tell he had something to say but he didn’t know quite how to say it. I made it easier on him.

“I have to let you go, don’t I?” I wasn’t talking about the mission trip. Even though he wasn’t leaving for another forty-nine days, I had to let him go now, not in June. I couldn’t count down the days to the end of us anymore, not if he no longer saw them the way I did, as precious and worth holding on to.

Still, I thought he’d try to talk me out of it like he had that night he drew me the map.

“Yeah.” He practically choked on the word. It was clear from the look on his face that he wasn’t talking about the mission trip either.

And then he leaned in closer and kissed me, but it felt like an act of desperation, like he was doing it to shut both of us up. And I was glad he did, because the words we’d already said hurt way too much as it was.

My throat felt tight, and it was all I could do to hold back the tears.

The kiss went on, but eventually, it changed. It became softer. Sweeter. And it felt like good-bye.

Luke rested his forehead on mine again. “I can’t imagine what my senior year would have been like without you,” he said.

His words felt like good-bye, too.

I pretended they didn’t.