The Way I Used to Be Page 11

  I open my mouth. I’m about to say something useless, like I’m sorry, or That really sucks, but thankfully he just keeps talking.

  “The thing is,” he continues, “when he’s sober, he’s great. He really is. Like, we do stuff together and everything, you know, like, he takes me to games and camping and fishing and all that shit. I mean, he’s basically a good dad, but then there’s this thing that, like, controls him. My friends all say they wish he were their father. Of course, I would never let them see him when he’s fucked up. So, they don’t really know shit about it.”

  Somehow, when we had started talking, I was in his arms, and now it’s the opposite.

  “So then that’s why you wanted me to leave earlier, when you thought I was high, because of your dad?”

  “Oh, maybe,” he says, as if he hadn’t realized the connection. “It’s not just you, though. I don’t like being around my friends when they’re doing that stuff either. I don’t even like being around them when they’re drinking. Because you never know what could happen. People do things and say things that are just—things can get out of control so quickly. It just makes me . . . I don’t know, nervous, or something,” he mumbles.

  “I want you to know I don’t do anything like that. I really don’t. I smoke, that’s all—cigarettes. I mean, I don’t even drink.”

  “Sorry I thought that. I guess that’s just the first thing I think of whenever anyone is acting weird. Well, not that you were acting weird. I mean, it’s just that sometimes you seem, I don’t know, distracted. Like you’re not really there or something. And that’s how he gets all the time—he gets this look on his face, you just know he’s somewhere else. That’s how it seems with you a lot of the time.”

  “Oh.”

  “Or like tonight,” he continues. I really didn’t think I needed any more examples of my weirdness, but he keeps talking. “I don’t know—it just seemed familiar, that’s all.”

  “Oh” suddenly seems like the only word I’m capable of speaking.

  “Sorry, I’m probably making it worse. I’m not trying to. I’m just trying to explain. I’m not trying to make you feel bad. I’m sorry, I’ll just stop talking.”

  “No. It’s okay. I know.” I know I act like a complete freak, I just didn’t think it had gotten to three-ring-circus sideshow proportions. Enough to make the person I’ve been fooling around with think I’m on drugs.

  “Okay. Sorry,” he says one more time. He kisses my hand, which is resting on his shoulder, and takes a deep breath. He exhales slowly and says, “You know, I’ve never told anybody about that. Some of my friends I’ve known since first grade, but I could never tell them, and I’ve only known you, what, a couple of weeks?” He laughs a hollow nonlaugh.

  “Why can’t you tell your friends?” I ask.

  “Maybe they’re not really my friends. No, I don’t mean that,” he corrects himself right away, as if he’s committed sacrilege against the divine covenant of popular kids. “It’s just embarrassing is all.”

  “It’s not embarrassing.”

  He shrugs.

  “I’m glad you told me,” I whisper. I open my mouth again, the words almost there, wanting so badly to come out. All that honesty saturating the atmosphere, filling in the gaps that exist between us. It does stuff to my brain, like a drug; it makes me want to tell the truth. I feel dangerously capable.

  “I’m glad too,” he says quietly. “Don’t tell anyone, okay? Please,” he adds, a weakness to his voice I had never heard before.

  He’s in luck, doesn’t know just how well I can keep a secret. “I would never,” I whisper back. “Promise.”

  And so, at 3:45 in the morning, after hours of talking, he reaches up to turn the lamp off and kisses me good night, pulling the afghan tighter around us. As he lays his head back down on my chest he says, “I can hear your heart.”

  It’s a simple, sweet thing to say. I smile a little. But then I feel my heart do something funny—it’s the thump, thump, thumping of the proverbial part of the organ. And around the time the moon and sun are coexisting in the sky, turning the room inside out with that eerie, yet calming, pale glow, I have a terrible thought: I like him. I really, really like him. Like, love-like him. Like, with my metaphorical heart. Like, if I had an x-ray, it would show an arrow lodged right into the center of that bloody, bleeding mass of muscle in my chest. And I know, somehow, that things have changed between us.

  “ALL RIGHT!” MARA SAYS, as she walks into my bedroom that weekend. “Let’s download. It’s time you start spilling, Edy—I’m supposed to be your best friend, right?”

  I close and lock the door behind her.

  “What do you mean?” I ask as she plops down on my bed and takes her coat off.

  “I mean, do I ever get to see you anymore? You’re spending everywakingminute with Joshua Miller and you haven’t given me any details whatsoever. So, it’s time to spill your guts.”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “What is there to tell?”

  “Tons! Okay, let’s start with where are you going when you’re together every day? Are you going to Joshua Miller’s house?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

  I laugh. “Yes, I’ve even been in Joshua Miller’s bedroom.”

  “No shit. Joshua Miller’s bedroom,” she repeats in awe.

  “Okay, you need to stop calling him Joshua Miller, Mara. It’s weird.”

  “But . . . he’s Joshua Miller, Edy.”

  “I’m aware of that.” I sit down in my desk chair and look at her, so excited for me, and I try really hard not to get excited for me too.

  “So what do you call him? Sweetie? Sexy? Sugar? Greek God?”

  “Yeah, Mara, I call him Greek God.” I laugh, throwing a pillow at her face. “Josh usually does the trick, though.”

  “Josh . . . ,” she repeats, rolling the word around in her mouth. “So, what’s he really like?”

  “I don’t know. He’s nice. He’s just . . . he’s really nice, actually.”

  “And hot, don’t forget,” she adds, like I could ever forget that. “So have you . . . you know? Had sex?” she whispers.

  I nod my head yes.

  “Oh my God! What was it like? What was he like?” she asks awkwardly, scooting to the edge of the bed.

  “No, I’m not discussing this.”

  “Come on, I need to live vicariously through you,” she pleads.

  “Well, what’s going on with you and Cameron?”

  “Nothing.” She sighs. “Not even close. Still just friends.” And suddenly, the way she looks at me, I feel an entire ocean between us, and we’re standing on opposite shores, staring at each other from the farthest ends of the world.

  “So, come on, tell me about your hot boyfriend. Please?” she asks, rather than acknowledging this great distance.

  “He’s not my boyfriend,” I correct her.

  “He doesn’t want to be your boyfriend?” she asks, scrunching her face up. “What, he just wants to sleep with you and—”

  “No. It’s me. I don’t want to be his girlfriend.”

  “Are you insane?” she asks immediately.

  “Maybe.” I laugh.

  “Seriously, though. Are you totally insane?”

  “I just—I don’t know. I don’t like the idea, I guess. I don’t wanna be tied down like that. Obligated. Stuck, you know?”

  “That doesn’t make any sense at all. But okay. As long as he’s not trying to keep you guys a secret or anything scummy like that?”

  “He’s not. I promise. And it’s not scummy to want a little privacy.”

  “Whatever you say, Eeds. I wouldn’t know anything about it, I guess.” She relents, a hint of something like resentment there beneath the surface. But she quickly pushes it back down wherever it came from and grins. “So is it good? Or fun? Or whatever it’s supposed to be.” She laughs, embarrassed. “Is he, you know, nice to you, when you’re together, I mean?”

  I nod yes.

  She smiles.
“He better be.”

  “TELL ME AGAIN,” he says breathlessly, moving his fingers through my hair, “why you can’t just be my girlfriend?”

  “Why?” I groan. God, even if he is nice, he can annoy me.

  “Because,” he mumbles, with his mouth against my neck, “I don’t like thinking about you with other guys, you know. . . .” His voice trails off, swallowed by his kisses.

  “Then don’t.”

  He stops and looks at me in that intense way he sometimes does that terrifies me. “It’s not that easy to just not think about.”

  I don’t answer. I know I’m supposed to tell him he has nothing to worry about, that I’m all his, that there aren’t any other guys. But somehow, I can’t. Instead, I say, “When would I even have time to spend with anyone else? We’re together every night.”

  He grins that grin of his, and I think, for just a moment, he’s going to let it go. But finally, after all these weeks, he begins the conversation I assume must have been on his mind ever since he realized my name was plastered all over the bathrooms.

  “So, I’m just curious . . . ,” he says, playing with a strand of my hair.

  “About?”

  “Who else did you, uh . . .” He trails off again.

  “What?”

  “Who else have you, you know, been with?” he finally finishes.

  “Why?” I ask, and not in a nice way.

  “I don’t know,” he mumbles.

  “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Good.” Because I didn’t want to have to think about it, let alone talk about it. I didn’t want to even acknowledge the fact that there had been someone else.

  “But . . . ,” he begins again, “I still wanna know.”

  “Just pretend you’re the first, okay?” That’s what I’m doing, after all.

  “That’s not what I meant. It’s not like it bothers me or anything. I was just—”

  “It bothers me.” Goddamn it, my stupid mouth—it needs to be wired shut. I roll away from him so that I’m on my own side of the bed. I feel my underwear down by my legs. I put them on under the sheets.

  “What? Why? It’s not like I haven’t been with other girls.”

  “Yeah, I guess.” It’s definitely not the same thing, though. I clamp my teeth down on the insides of my cheeks—need to stop myself from saying anything else. I taste blood, I bite harder.

  “No big deal or anything, I just wondered is all.” He pauses a beat, two, three, four, then inhales and says, “So . . . was it more than one person?”

  “Seriously, Josh! I really, really don’t want to talk about this!”

  “All right.” Pause. “I’ll tell you mine. . . .”

  “No, don’t. I don’t care, okay? It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t want to know.” Of course, I already knew his, because he was never exactly a low-profile type. Until me. “And I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Really, I mean it.”

  “I just—sometimes I feel like I don’t know anything about you. It’s weird.”

  “You do too.” But I know that’s not the complete truth.

  He just sighs.

  “All right, ask me anything else, really, anything else and I’ll tell you, okay?”

  “God, it must’ve been pretty bad, huh?” I turn my head to look at him; there’s no other way to tell him how incapable I am of discussing this. “What? I’m just saying the guy’s a fucking asshole. Whoever he is.”

  “Why?” I smirk. “Because of all the nasty things written about me on the bathroom walls?”

  “You know about that?” he asks quietly. “Eden, you know that I don’t believe any of those things, right? I mean, I know the truth.”

  Truth. Truth! Truth? He doesn’t know shit about the truth. I open my mouth, and I almost tell him that. “Never mind,” I mumble instead.

  “What now? I’m just trying to—” I pull away from him. “Oh, come on. I’m just trying to tell you I wouldn’t do that. I think that’s really shitty.”

  It was a shitty thing to do. He’s right about that. I don’t say anything though. We need to drop this immediately. I think he finally gets it too, because he’s quiet for once. Quiet for a long time.

  I stare up at the ceiling of his bedroom. His house is soundless like always—parents sleeping or somewhere else, I don’t know which. I turn to look at him, lying there, still facing me.

  “Tell me a secret,” he whispers. I always get the sense he knows I have a secret. A deep, dark one. “You know, something that I don’t know about you—a secret.”

  “Right.” I grin, trying to erase what just happened. “Because you don’t know anything about me . . .” I’m only halfheartedly mocking him.

  “I know,” he says, pulling me closer, covering my mouth with his, “that’s why I want you to tell me something.” I wonder what he would say if I told him. What he would do. If I told him my deep, dark, black-hole secret, the one that had the potential to swallow up the entire universe.

  “Okay, my middle name is Marie.” That’s a lie. My middle name is Anne. “Now you?”

  “That’s not a secret. I meant something real.” Kiss. “Matthew.”

  “What?”

  “Matthew,” he repeats. “Joshua Matthew Miller.”

  “Oh.” Kiss. “That’s nice.” Kiss. “Tell me something else.”

  “No, it’s your turn, Eden Marie McCrorey.” He smiles that crooked smile of his and lays his head down on my chest, waiting for me to be honest, to share some tidbit of truth with him, a detail, anything. I should’ve told him then that Marie wasn’t really my middle name. He seemed to like saying it, though, like he thought that small scrap of information made him know me a little better, made him like me just a little more.

  “I used to play clarinet in band.” True, although not really a secret, per se.

  He lifts his head and grins at me. “You did not.”

  “Yes, I did, I swear,” I tell him, putting my hand over my heart. “You can even check the yearbook. But wait—don’t—because I looked like a real dork last year.”

  He laughs, still looking at me like he doesn’t quite believe me. “For real?”

  “I was even in this book club thing last year,” I offer.

  “You don’t seem like a book club kind of girl to me,” he says, eyeing me suspiciously.

  “I don’t?” I ask, pretending to be surprised. “I even started the book club with Miss Sullivan.” I laugh.

  A smile spreads across his face as he decides I’m telling the truth. “That’s cute,” he finally says, grinning wider. “That’s really cute.”

  “No, it’s not,” I mumble.

  “No, it’s not. It’s kind of hot actually.” Then he kisses me seriously, deeply—the kind of kisses that lead somewhere. But he stops and looks at me, his eyes so soft. “You’re really beautiful, Eden,” he whispers.

  I don’t ordinarily like to hear things like that—nice things—but maybe it’s the tone of his voice or the look on his face. I smile. Not on purpose, but it’s just that my face won’t let me not smile.

  “You know, I already had sex with you,” I try to joke, “so you don’t have to say stuff like that.”

  “Stop, I mean it.” And then he leans in and kisses my lips, so sweetly. Sometimes he uses his words like weapons to chip away at my icy exterior and sometimes he can break through to the slightly defrosted layer beneath. But then again, sometimes he just hits solid iceberg. For instance, he knows what he’s doing when next he says, “And you should smile more too.”

  I look away, embarrassed. He has no way of knowing how sometimes it physically hurts to smile. How a smile can sometimes feel like the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

  “No, I love your smile,” he says, with his fingers on my lips, which only makes my smile widen.

  Only it doesn’t hurt this time.

  “Eden Marie McCrorey . . . ,” he begins, like he’s giving some big lecture about me, “always so se
rious and gloomy . . .”—my eulogy maybe—“but then you have this great smile nobody ever gets to see. Wait, are you blushing?” he teases. “I can’t believe it. I made Eden Marie McCrorey blush.”

  “No, I’m not!” I laugh, placing my hands over my cheeks.

  He takes my hands in his, though, and gently moves them away from my face. “You know what I think?” he asks me.

  “What do you think?” I echo.

  “I think . . .” He pauses. “You’re not so tough—you’re not really so hard,” he says seriously, his smile fading, “are you?”

  My heart starts racing as he looks deeper into me. Because he’s right. Tough girls don’t blush. Tough girls don’t turn to jelly when a cute boy tells them they’re beautiful. And I’m terrified he’ll see through the tough iceberg layer, and he’ll discover not a soft, sweet girl, but an ugly fucking disaster underneath.

  He brushes the hair out of my face and runs his index finger along the two-inch scar above my left eyebrow. “How’d you get this?” he asks. “I’ve been wondering, but every time I notice we’re—eh-hem—busy.” He smirks. “And then I always forget to ask.”

  I touch my head. I grin, remembering the sheer absurdity of the accident.

  “What?” he asks. “It must be something embarrassing. . . .”

  “It happened when I was twelve. I fell off my bike, had to get fifteen stitches.”

  “Fifteen? That’s a lot. Just from falling off your bike?”

  “Well, not exactly. Me and Mara, we were riding our bikes down that big hill, you know, the one at the end of my street?”

  “Mm-hmm,” he murmurs, listening to me like I’m saying the most interesting things he’s ever heard in his life, paying such close attention to every word out of my mouth.

  “And there’re those train tracks at the bottom, right?” I continue.

  “Oh no.”

  “Well, I guess at some point I kind of flipped over my handlebars and rolled the rest of the way down the hill, that’s what Mara said, anyway. I don’t really remember, think I blacked out. My face smashing into the tracks broke my fall, though.”

  “That’s terrible!” he says, even though he’s laughing really hard.