The Way I Used to 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 serious 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.

“No, it’s stupid. You should laugh at me. I’m the reason the town had to put up fences at the end of all the streets in my neighborhood.”

That makes him laugh even harder. Me too.

Then I start thinking about everything that came after.

That was the day I fell in love with Kevin—or what I thought was love, with the person I thought he was. And he knew it too. And he used it to get to me. This was the day I wish I could go back to—the day I need to undo to stop it all from happening. It was so hot, and the air so thick, it felt like my lungs couldn’t even breathe it in. Mara and I were just two twelve-year-olds in our pathetic two-piece bathing suits, which revealed nothing because we basically had nothing, drawing with sidewalk chalk in my driveway, ice-cream-sandwich ice cream dripping down our arms and legs.

We were drawing suns with smiley faces and rainbows and trees and hideous, artless flowers. We played tic-tac-toe a few times, but it was boring because no one ever won. We made a hopscotch court, but the cement was on fire, too hot to hop on. I wrote in big bubbly pink letters, across the driveway:

MARA LUVS CAELIN

I only did it to embarrass her. So then Mara swung her two long braids over her shoulders and hunkered down with a fat lump of pastel blue. In huge block letters she wrote:

EDY LOVES KEVIN

Which caused me to scream at the top of my lungs and throw the stick of white at her, which missed, of course, and shattered into a million tiny slivers that were from then on useless, which was all right because white was always boring anyway. And then I said, “Mara, you should really marry Caelin. Then we’d be sisters and that would be so awesome!”

“Yeah, I guess.” She frowned. “But I think Kevin’s cuter.”

“He is not. Besides, Kevin isn’t my brother, so if you married him, we wouldn’t be sisters.”

“You’re just saying that so you can marry Kevin.”

“Well, I can’t marry my own brother—that would be disgusting!”

“Oh yeah,” she realized, as if those two were our only options in the entire world. Our world was small—way too small—even for twelve-year-olds.

“So, you marry my brother and I’ll marry Kevin and then we’ll be sisters and Kev and Cae will be brothers. It makes sense because everyone already thinks they’re brothers anyway.”

She considered this for a moment, then said, “Yeah, okay.”

Now that we had our lives all figured out, I asked, “You wanna ride bikes?”

“Yeah, okay.”

We tried not to let our feet touch the molten pavement as we ran inside the house to throw on our shorts and flip-flops. Mara’s dad finally left for good that summer. There was a lot of fighting going on at home. So she spent most days at my house even though she was the one with the swimming pool. She agreed to almost anything as long as it kept her out of her house and away from her parents. So, when I said marry my brother, she said okay. When I said let’s ride bikes, she said okay. And when I said let’s ride our bikes as fast as we can down the big scary steep hill at the end of my street so that we could see if there was a train going by on the railroad tracks at the bottom, she said okay.

It was not one of my brightest ideas, I’ll admit. The last thing I remember hearing before plummeting to my near-death was the sound of Mara screaming. The last thing I saw was the rotted gray wood of the railroad ties, flying toward my face at an enormous speed. My skull clunked against the steel rail with a dull thud. And then everything went dark.

When my eyes opened, I was staring up at an impossibly bright sky and my legs were tangled in my bike. My glasses were gone. And I felt water dripping down my face. I raised the arm that was still capable of moving. It was covered in dirt and hundreds of tiny cuts. I touched my head. Red water. Lots of red water. And then I heard my name being called from far, far away. I closed my eyes again.

“What the hell were you two doing?” It was Kevin’s voice, loud, close.

“We wanted to see a train go by.” Mara, innocent.

“Edy, can you hear me?” Kevin, his hands on my face.

“Uh . . .” was all I could moan. I opened my eyes long enough to see him take his T-shirt off and press it against my head. I felt his hands on one of my legs. Which one, I couldn’t even tell.

“Edy, Edy, try to move your leg, okay? If you can move it, it’s not broken. Try,” he demanded.

“Is it? Is it moving?” I think I asked out loud. I didn’t hear an answer.

And then I was weightless. He carried me up the hill and then he laid me down on the grass. He called 911, even.

I decided that night with Mara, I was definitely marrying him. The damage: a fractured left wrist, a sprained ankle, a thousand scrapes and bruises, a broken pinkie, fifteen stitches in my forehead, and one utterly demolished ten-speed bike. And, of course, a severe delusion about the kind of person Kevin truly was. You were very lucky and very, very stupid, I was told over and over and over that day.

“You’re lucky there wasn’t a train coming!” Josh’s voice says, pulling me back into the present. My eyes refocus on his bedroom ceiling. He’s still laughing. I had stopped.

“Am I?” I accidentally say out loud. If there had been a train coming, then I would have been killed or at least seriously and irreparably injured. And 542 days later I would have been lying in either a grave or a hospital somewhere, rotting away or hooked up to machines and not in my bed with Kevin in the next room and me thinking he was the greatest person in the entire world, incapable of hurting me in any way, because, after all, he had saved the day. Maybe if that day never happened, maybe I wouldn’t have become so smitten, so pathetically infatuated. Maybe I wouldn’t have flirted with him over a game of Monopoly earlier that night. And maybe I would’ve screamed when I found him in my bed at 2:48 in the morning, instead of doing nothing at all. And maybe it was essentially all my fault for acting like I liked him, for actually liking him.

“Of course you are,” I hear a dim voice say through the fog in my mind. But now his face has changed to serious. I can’t remember the last thing either of us said.

“I am what?” I ask.

“Lucky!” he says impatiently.

“Oh, right. Yeah, I know.”

“Then why would you even say that? That’s not funny.”

“I know.”

“It’s really not. I hate when you say stuff like that.”

“Okay, I know!” I snap at him.

He doesn’t say anything, but I can tell he’s mad. Mad because I’m always getting upset with him for no reason, saying fucked-up things, or just being generally weird. He doesn’t say anything else. He just rolls away and lies there next to me. Now he’s the one staring at the ceiling and I’m the one on my side, facing him, wanting him to look at me. I put my head on his chest, try to pretend things are okay still, pretend I’m not a freak. Reluctantly, he puts his arm around me. But I can’t take the silence, can’t take the thought of him being mad.

So I whisper, “Tell me another secret.”

But he’s quiet.

After a while, a very painfully silent while, I think maybe he has fallen asleep, so I pretend to be sleeping too. But then I feel him press his face into my hair and breathe. Quietly, almost inaudibly, he whispers, “I love you.” His big secret. I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I can and pretend not to hear—pretend not to care.

After I’m sure he’s really fallen asleep, I sneak out as quietly as possible.