The Way I Used to Be

I STAND ON THE sidewalk near the tennis courts after school. It feels like I’ve been waiting for hours, but it’s only been seven minutes. I’ll give him three more, and then I walk. I adjusted my hair and makeup in the bathroom before I left. I brushed my teeth. I even wore my new silky floral dress that I got before school started. I run my hands through my hair one more time. Just as I’m considering making a break for it, I see him walking toward me.

“Hey! You’re really here?” he says, greeting me with that smile.

“I said I would be.” I smile back.

“I know, exactly. That’s why I wasn’t sure,” he says with a laugh. “Come on.” He reaches for my hand. My heart stops. He doesn’t seem to notice, as he leads us through the parking lot, that everyone is staring at us. He stops at the blue station wagon that picked him up yesterday and lets me in first. When he gets in the driver’s side, he starts the car and looks at me sweetly. “You look really nice, Eden.”

I mumble “Thanks,” and look out the window so he doesn’t catch me blushing. But that’s when I see these guys—guys I’m sure he’s friends with—staring and pointing and laughing.

“So, where you wanna go?” he asks me, clearly not seeing what I’m seeing. Not living in the world I’m living in.

“Anywhere but here.”

“Okay,” he says with a laugh. “Are you hungry?”

I shrug. I don’t feel like eating after the day I’ve had.

“Okay, movie?”

“Is there anywhere to go where there won’t be other people around?” I try to laugh, even though I’m entirely serious.

“Mostly everywhere has people around these days.” He grins, still expecting an answer. “My parents were doing something tonight so I borrowed my mom’s car just so I could take you somewhere. So come on . . . just name a place, any place, and we’ll go.”

“What are your parents doing?” I ask, an idea forming in my mind.

He looks at me like I might be crazy. “I promise they aren’t doing anything we’d want to do, if you’re looking for ideas.”

“No, I just mean, what if we went to your house? No one’s there, right?”

He looks confused for a moment, but then a wave of clarity passes over his face. “Um, sure. I guess we could. Isn’t there somewhere else you’d rather go, though?” he asks, putting the car in drive.

“Not unless you know of some uninhabited island we could go to and be back by ten for my curfew.”

He just smiles as he pulls away.

Next thing I know, we’re in the middle of his bedroom standing opposite each other. “So,” he says, shuffling through a stack of CDs on his dresser. “Do you want to listen to anything?” He still listens to CDs—that’s unusual. But my mind is racing too fast to follow that thought any further.

“Sure.”

“What do you like?” he asks.

“Anything.”

He selects one of the CDs. It starts quiet and slow. He stares at me. He puts his hands in his pockets. He takes them back out. I shift my weight. “You like this?” he asks. I think he’s talking about the music, but I also wonder if he means this as in being here with him.

The answer is the same either way, so I tell him the truth: “Not sure yet.”

He sits down on his bed and gestures for me to follow. I feel everything inside of me start to race and pulse as I move to the bed. I could never have imagined a year earlier I would be in the bedroom of the guy I so violently had the urge to bludgeon to death that day in the hall. I find myself evaluating every detail of the situation: him, me, the distance between us, the way his comforter feels soft against my legs, and everything smells like clean laundry, the sports posters on his walls, the hardwood floors, the curtains parted just slightly. I try hard to keep breathing as the fear tightens its knot around my heart. His lips are also slightly parted. I wait for him to speak, but he doesn’t. My jaw is clamped so tight my teeth throb.

I study his face closer than I have before. His nose, I thought at first, seemed large, except it’s not actually—aquiline, my brain whispers, flashing back to seventh grade, when I had to look up the word after reading it in Sherlock Holmes—but now I can’t imagine a nose that belongs more perfectly to a face. And his eyes again, the colors seem different every time. I look down at my hands in my lap, my fingers twisting around one another, and I wonder if his mind is racing like mine, if his brain is working in overdrive just to understand my face. Somehow, I think not.

“So,” he begins. “You’re Caelin McCrorey’s sister? Or something, right?”

“Yeah, so?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Just conversation. We played together. He was a cool guy. I mean, I didn’t actually know that he’s your brother. I asked around about you. That’s all anyone really could tell me—you’re a mystery.” He grins, raising his eyebrows.

I don’t know what I’m supposed to say to that, though. I’m not such a mystery? Not so hard to unravel? And what about me being a slut all of a sudden, hadn’t he heard that one?

He smiles out of the corner of his mouth and asks me, “What—you don’t wanna talk?”

“Not about my brother.”

He makes a sound like phffsh and I can’t tell if it’s a laugh or just an exhale, but then he adds quietly, “Yeah, me neither.” He has this gravelly, running-words-together way of speaking, like he’s not thinking much about how he sounds. Not like Kevin. Kevin always enunciates his words so that they come out smooth and hard and precise and borderline loud. His voice is different. But everything about him is different. This is going to be okay. I’m going to be okay. He smiles again, and reaches out to touch my cheek, so lightly. I think my heart stops. Nodding his head toward the space between us, he says, “Why are you way over there?”

I slide toward him slowly. He leans in. I close my eyes. It’s too intense, too frightening to watch. I feel his lips press against mine. He’s kissing me. I try to let him, try not to think of the last time a boy’s mouth was on my mouth. I try to kiss back like this isn’t my first kiss. Because I have never been kissed, not really.

I force myself to kiss him back, kiss him back with everything I have in me. Because I can. I can. I can do this. Before I even know how he does it, he’s somehow managed to lower me down onto the bed and I’m on my back. He drapes his leg over mine, nimbly shifting his weight; his body slides in right next to mine. But just when I start to feel like this might really be okay, like this might actually have the potential to feel something other than terrifying, I feel his fingers trail down my neck. My stomach clenches because I can’t forget the fact of the matter, that the last time a boy had his hands on my neck he was choking me.

Normal, be normal, I tell myself. This is different.

But his hand on my thigh—I go rigid. Can’t get the thing out of my mind because he could—so what if he has chocolate eyes or an aquiline nose or a magnetic smile—technically, he could do it, could do anything he wanted, and I wouldn’t be strong enough to stop him and no one would even know because we’re here all alone and how the hell did I get here again? What was I thinking? His hand moves farther up my thigh; my dress slides up even more. I want to push him off me, I want to run. My heart is just pounding, banging, slamming behind my ribs. He pulls his mouth away and looks at my face. I try not to look scared. But I freeze.

“What’s wrong?” he asks quietly. “You want me to stop?”

I can’t say yes, but I can’t say no, either. I close my eyes, trying to find the words. But the instant I do, I’m back there. With Kevin. Kevin holding my arms down against the bed. And his hands, his fingers like dull knives slowly carving their way down to the bone. The more I tried to get away, the more he had me. I couldn’t believe how strong he was. How weak I was.

I open my eyes. I’m barely breathing. Too much time has passed. It’s something worse than silence, this quiet. I know I need to say something, but I don’t know what. So I just look up at the ceiling and breathe the words, “I have to go,” too quietly for him to even hear.

“What?”

“I don’t know,” I whisper. Because I don’t know—I don’t know anything right now.

“No—I—I know,” he breathes. But as I raise my head to look at his face, he doesn’t look like he knows or understands—he looks as confused as I am. His fingers move through my hair as he leans in to kiss me again.

“I really, um—” I start to say, pushing my hands against his chest. “I have to go.” But my hands do nothing. They can’t move him. They can’t even budge him an inch. “I have to go!” I shout this time. His eyes widen as he shifts his weight off me. I sit up fast and move to the edge of the bed.

He catches my arm and pulls me back. “Wait—”

“What—” My voice is too sharp, but I can’t help it. My instincts tell me that I should start screaming, start hitting him. That I should saw-cut-gnaw the arm he’s holding off my own body if it means getting away. But then again, my instincts are kind of fucked up now, so I adjust my tone and try again, more calmly. “What?”

“Nothing, just—what’s going on, why do you have to go?” I look down at his hand, still holding on to my arm, and he lets go. “I thought we were going to—”

“Thought we were going to what?” I interrupt, feeling my eyes widen.

“Nothing—not that!” he says quickly. “I thought we were going to go out—go do something. I just thought we had time. I’m just confused. One second you’re into it, the next you’re leaving? I mean, did I do something?” he asks, talking fast.

I watch him closely. I don’t even know how to answer him. Did he do something? Or is this just normal? Is this just what people do? My thoughts are spinning. I don’t know what I feel, or think, or want.

“You’re the one who wanted to come here,” he says, but not in an unkind way, like he’s truly reminding me of that fact.

“I changed my mind, okay?”

“Okay,” he says, like it really is okay.

We both sit there next to each other at the end of his bed. I straighten out my dress. He adjusts his shirt. And then it’s that horrible silence again. I look out his bedroom window. The sun is beginning to set. “I think I should go.”

“Right here’s good,” I tell him as we approach the corner of my street. He stops the car and looks around, confused.

“Where’s your house?”

“Just over there. This is fine.”

He pulls in close to the curb and turns the headlights off. “So, are we cool?” he asks.

“Yeah. I think so.”

He nods. “Okay. Well, even though I don’t really consider this an actual date, since we didn’t technically go anywhere . . . can I still kiss you good night?” he asks with that smile.

I look around quickly to make sure there’s no one around. When I turn my head back, he’s already there, leaning in. He kisses me, just once, softly.

“Tomorrow night,” he begins, “you know, we have that big away game. But after, there’s gonna be this party. Do you wanna go?”

“I don’t think so.” I can imagine all his friends pointing and whispering, those pretty girls from the bathroom laughing. Josh, a witness. Or worse, a participant.

“Why not?” he asks, offended. This is, after all, a highly coveted invitation; I am being given a chance to rub elbows with kings and queens of proms and homecomings past and future. And I, just a lowly mortal peasant, have the gall to turn him down.

“Because I don’t”—how to say it, though—“I don’t want to be your girlfriend.”

He rolls his eyes, shakes his head, stifles a laugh.

Apparently, not that way.

He looks straight ahead for a few seconds, then turns to me in the passenger seat. “Ohh-kaay,” he says slowly, the way he did that day in the hall a year earlier, when I was still just invisible Mousegirl. “I didn’t ask you to be my girlfriend; I just asked if you wanted to go to this party.”

“Well, I don’t.” There’s this authority in my voice I never knew I possessed.

“Fine.” He tries to act nonchalant. I keep my eyes on the dashboard. The clock changes from 6:51 to 6:52. “So, this is it then?” he asks.

I shrug. “Maybe. Maybe not.” So cool. So calm. So collected. How am I doing it?

“I’m sorry, I don’t—I don’t get you. What exactly are we doing, then?” he asks, an edge of irritation in his voice.

“I don’t know. Couldn’t we just get together sometimes—just, you know, keep it casual?” I ask him, the words flowing from my mouth like they actually belong to me.

He looks skeptical as he takes a few moments to consider. “I think that’s probably the strangest thing a girl has ever said to me. You really don’t want to go to this thing with me tomorrow night?” he asks again, unable to understand. “It wouldn’t have to mean anything.”

“Look, I’m not going to argue about it. If you don’t want to see me again, that’s fine, okay? But if you do, then this is the way it’s going to be. The way it is, I mean.”

He inhales through his nose, exhales slowly through his mouth. I sigh loudly. Feign impatience, fingers tickling the handle, ready to open the door and bolt. “I don’t know,” he finally says, hesitantly.

I leave without another word. I know he’s watching me as I walk toward my house. I make sure I don’t turn around until I hear the engine fade into the silence surrounding me. I look—nothing but two red taillights glowing in the distance.