The Art of Losing(76)

I don’t know how to tell if I’m ready, or if you are, or what our future might be. I don’t know if we’ll be happy or if I’ll be enough to pull you from those dark moods. But I know that I don’t want to take the chance of losing you. Of not loving you. I don’t want to dream of a future without you in it.

Love,

Harley



Then I snuck outside, my heart racing, almost hoping that I would run into him. But I put the pages of my scrawlings in the mailbox and dashed back inside on bare feet without encountering so much as a hint of smoke in the air.

I texted Raf before I could second-guess myself, telling him to check his mailbox.

And then I waited.

I didn’t sleep much that night. I couldn’t close my eyes because they were glued to my phone. But Raf didn’t text me back. I hoped he’d called Elaine or Cajun or gone to another meeting. He’d told me there were places, sober clubs, where you could go to a meeting even in the middle of the night.

I spent the night writing, doing what Dr. Talia suggested, and reliving memories painful and happy, embarrassing and hopeful. And remembering things a little differently, or at least putting some of those memories into perspective.

Eventually, though, I must have fallen asleep because when I woke up early the next morning and immediately checked my phone for a text from Raf, the screen was black. I nearly sobbed when I realized I’d forgotten to charge it. While I waited for it to charge enough to turn on, I opened the door to my bedroom to go to the bathroom, and on the carpet in the hallway was a manila envelope. A sticky note, in my mom’s handwriting, read:



Baby duck—

Found this in the door when I walked Floyd. Didn’t read it. See? We’re both growing.



The seal was in place, and my name was written on the outside in block letters with several outlines and 3-D effects. It looked like it should have been spray-painted onto a brick wall. I pried it open carefully, trying not to shred the envelope.

Inside was a small book, ten pages long, crudely made with sketch paper and staples. The title was Addicted to You.

Raf had illustrated my comic.

The cover was an image of a hand holding a liquor bottle, but inside, instead of alcohol, was a tiny version of Raf, a perfect illustrated replica—from the crooked smile to the Chuck Taylors.

The first page of panels showed me and Raf as kids; we were standing under the willow tree in the nature preserve behind our houses. In a close-up, I was holding a My Little Pony in one hand and Raf’s hand in the other. The caption read: it started with a plastic horse. Raf was telling me that we were going to live there forever. I answered that I was going to need a bed because I wouldn’t sleep on dirt. When Raf asked if I’d sleep on a bed made of dirt, I hit him with a long willow branch, leaving a welt across his arm.

The next page of panels showed our first kiss, on the street in front of our houses. Me, being dared by Allie, followed by me kissing him. The caption above read: we’ve always had bad timing.

I felt my lips curl into a smile.

The next page was about us when we were around twelve and thirteen. One panel showed him playing basketball while I walked Floyd in the background. He was missing the shot because he was looking at me. I hadn’t written that part. My script picked back up when I was following him and Paul down the street, flirting. And then I was sitting on the front steps of the house, waiting for him. He was inside with a beer bottle in one hand, a pill bottle in the other.

Following that was a page of panels about us now. Us sitting together on the garden wall between our houses, smoking. Lying next to each other as fireworks exploded overhead. Sitting in an AA meeting. Fighting outside his back door. I narrated them, as if I was speaking to him from the pages of the comic in each scene.

“Maybe I don’t understand addiction,” I said. Raf had drawn my ski-slope nose a little too upturned, my ponytail a little too curled, but I looked adorable illustrated in his hand. “I never even got addicted to cigarettes,” I continued. “But I know that I can’t picture my life without you now that you’re back in it. So maybe I’m addicted to you.”

The last two pages weren’t from my script. The first showed Raf holding my letter, a small lopsided smile on his face, followed by a close-up. The smile had widened. A caption below narrated: i’ve been told that dating could be bad for my recovery. i’m not supposed to replace drugs and alcohol with a person. Above his head, a thought bubble read: “Too late.” Hearts floated in the air around him like butterflies.

And on the back page of the book was the drawing of me I’d seen in Raf’s book. It took up the entire last page. A note at the bottom said,

I’ll be here when you’re ready. –R

My heart was beating so fast, I could hear it like thunder echoing in my head. The rush of relief that we hadn’t screwed everything up, that we were going to really do this, made me dizzy. I put on a bra and threw my hair into a ponytail. I considered changing into something cuter and then remembered Raf had seen me in this exact outfit of yoga pants and a T-shirt so often that he had drawn me wearing it. So I ran down the stairs and out the back door.

Raf was sitting on the wall, just as he’d said he would be. There were smears of ink on his jeans, his forearms, and across his cheek. When he saw me, my eyes widened like a startled deer and his lips twitched into a small, tentative smile. If this were a romantic comedy, I’d have run into his arms and he’d swing me up gracefully as we kissed. But I wasn’t exactly an agile runner. I would bowl him over trying to leap into his arms.