The Last Time We Say Goodbye Part 7

But that would mean going into the garage.

I don't go into the garage.

The phone rings. I pick it up, but there's n.o.body there-just silence for a moment while I say h.e.l.lo a few times, and then I hang up. It's the old phone in the kitchen, so I can't see the number.

I wonder if it's Steven, checking up on me.

I wish he would have said something, if it was him.

Not that there's anything left for him to say. Not that I'd know how to respond if he did say anything.

I finish my pot pie. It's not a candlelit Valentine's Day dinner while I'm being serenaded by a string quartet, but as freezer meals go, it's not too bad.

There's a noise in the hallway, the sound of something heavy hitting the floor.

I go to investigate.

A picture has fallen off the wall. I pick it up, turn it over in my hands. The photograph is missing. I search the floor, but it's not there. The back of the frame is fastened, so someone must have removed the photo and then hung the empty frame up again.

That's weird.

I know the missing picture. It's a photo of Dad and Ty, four years ago, pre-Megan, as they were about to head off on Ty's first deer hunting expedition. They were wearing neck-to-toe camo and neon orange caps. They were both smiling, holding up their rifles, but Ty's smile was strained.

He didn't want to go. He'd been dreading it for weeks.

But he went because he thought it would make Dad happy.

I remember the day they came home from that trip. They had a deer, a small scraggly little guy with a tiny rack.

"Uh-oh," I said when I went out to watch them hang it from the rafters in the garage. "Bad day for Bambi."

Ty smiled at my joke, but he was quiet. Dad was proud, talking about the difficulty of the shot that Ty had made, what a clean shot it was, so the animal didn't suffer, but Ty didn't say anything. He didn't have much of an appet.i.te at dinner. He went to bed early that night. When Mom framed this photo and put it up, he never stopped to look at it as he pa.s.sed in the hall.

I feel the beginning of the ache in my chest. The hole.

Then all of a sudden I'm flooded with the sense that I'm not alone. If I turn and look, I'll see a shadowy figure at the end of the hall. I'll see him.

Ty.

The hairs on the back of my neck stand up at the thought. I never knew they would actually do that, before-stand on end like that-but they do. I have goose b.u.mps up and down my arms. My shoulders are so tight it hurts. My mouth is dry. I suck in my bottom lip to wet it.

I won't run this time, I think. I'll face it.

Slowly, I turn.

There's no one there. The hallway is empty.

I let out the breath I was holding, then try to laugh at myself. Delusion, I think. A belief that, though false, has been surrendered to and accepted by the whole mind as a truth. Not a ghost, not a hallucination. A delusion.

I hang the empty frame back in its place on the wall.

14 February Sometimes I miss being kissed.

It seems like such a small thing, a trivial thing, my lips meeting his, but sometimes, like tonight, I lie in bed unsleeping and stare up at the ceiling and remember what that felt like, not just the kissing part but that moment right before, when our faces were so close together, when I could feel his breath and see his eyes up close, the curve of each dark eyelash, the tiny crease where his neck met his jaw. The seconds before he kissed me. The antic.i.p.ation. The rush of his lips on mine.

The average person, or so the internet tells me, spends 20,160 minutes of life kissing.

I wonder what our total was.

G.o.d. V-Day has infiltrated my brain.

The first person I ever kissed on the lips was a boy by the name of Nathan Thaddeus Dillinger II. I was 14, and Nate was the kind of guy whose parents bought him a sports car for his 16th birthday, which he would total (but survive to tell the tale) before he got halfway to 17. He was tall, dark, and handsome, wore designer jeans, and had one of those high-wattage smiles that made the female teachers go easy on him.

Yes, he was hot. Yay for me.

But for all his many qualities, Nate Dillinger was not the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He was failing algebra.

You see where this is going.

The first kiss happened in a study room of the Williams Branch public library. I was teaching Nate about the systems of equations. We were doing a story problem: John buys 3 goldfish and 4 betas for $33.00. Marco buys 5 goldfish and 2 betas for $45.00. How much would Celia spend if she bought 6 goldfish and 4 betas?

Our heads were close together, bent over my notebook, where I had just finished writing out the equations 3g + 4b = 33 5g + 2b = 45 when suddenly, without any kind of warning, Nate Dillinger kissed me.

Hmm, I remember thinking as his lips moved over mine. This is not entirely unpleasant.

Then he tried to stick his tongue in my mouth, and I thought something like, Ew, no, gross, and pulled away.

"Sorry," Nate said, smiling in a very non-sorry way.

"That's okay," I said, stunned. I mean, he had just stolen my first kiss. I was never going to get it back. That was it.

He took my "that's okay" for permission to do it again, and leaned in. I leaned away.

"Wait, do you even like me?" I asked.

He frowned, confused. "What do you mean?"

"Do you find me, well, I don't know, attractive?"

He shrugged. "You're all right."

Be still my heart.

"Just all right?" I snorted. "Then why did you kiss me?"

Another shrug. "I was bored."

He was bored. He stole my first kiss because he was bored.

Oh, the horror.

I sighed and resisted the urge to say something hurtful. He was a boy, thus biologically engineered for stupidity of this type. We could get past it, I thought. I could still get through this tutoring session and receive the $50 I'd been promised. "Let's get back to John and Marco, okay?" I suggested. "Now, the first thing we want to do is multiply the second equation by -2, so then we have a +4b and a -4b, which will cancel each other out, and then we'll add-"

That's when he tried to kiss me again.

And that's how: Nate Dillinger + b.l.o.o.d.y nose = me - $50 Yeah, so my first kiss was no big deal.

My second kiss, the one that matters, didn't happen until last summer.

That day I was supposed to meet the gang at the SouthPointe Pavilions Barnes & n.o.ble to chill for a bit, then go see a movie at the theater next door. As usual, Steven arrived early; he was already there when I showed up. But El had texted that she had one of her headaches (read: Downton Abbey marathon) and Beaker had called to report that she and Antonio were "having car trouble" (as in they were busy in the backseat of her car) and she didn't think they'd make it out before the film started.

"It looks like it's just going to be you and me today," I told Steven when I found him flipping through a Scientific American in the magazine section. "The others are flakes."

"Good," I remember he said, with a quiet, knowing kind of smile he gets sometimes. "It's been too long since I had you all to myself."

I laughed, but I was suddenly, inexplicably, nervous at the idea of having Steven "all to myself." Maybe I could sense that something was going to happen. A change in the equation.

I told myself I was being silly. Steven and I were friends. We'd known each other since we were 12, when we decided that the smart-kid types in our middle school were better off sticking together. Safety in numbers, you know. I thought Steven was cute even back then. But his attractiveness wasn't really about how he looked, because there were periods when he had bad acne and braces and he was skinny as a beanpole. There was just something about him. The way he got excited about stuff like Tolkien and quantum physics and Doctor Who. He still had a sense of wonder that gets shamed out of the majority of the teenage population by the time we turn 18. He still loved things about the world. I found that inherently s.e.xy.

That and I could always tell he liked me. There'd been the paper flower on Valentine's Day, and sometimes I caught him looking at me in a way that went beyond friendly. Interested.

But Steven was too reasonable for romance, I thought. Like me.

We wandered over to the science fiction and fantasy section and bonded over our adoration of Ender's Game and discussed how Hollywood hadn't screwed up the film too badly but it would never come close to the experience one gets reading the book, and I relaxed. Everything felt the same between us as it had always been.

Then Steven pulled out Contact.

"You should read this," he said.

"Carl Sagan, as in the astrophysicist?" I squinted at the cover, which had a picture of Jodie Foster on it for some mysterious reason. "He wrote fiction?"

"It's an amazing book," Steven said. "It shows how the belief in religion and the belief in science are fundamentally alike. We believe, even when we can't prove it, even when we can't see."

"But in science, there's evidence," I argued. "There's proof."

"Read it. You'll see what I mean. You'll like it."

I put my hand on my hip and smirked up at him. "How do you know what I'd like?"

Looking back, I can see that this could have been construed as a lame attempt at flirting on my part.

And it worked.

"Oh, I think I know you, Lex," Steven said, the sound of his voice changing from what it had been a minute ago. "I know what you'd like."

"Okay," I murmured, and reached for the book, but he didn't release it.

"While we're on the subject, you know what else you'd like?" He cleared his throat and glanced around. We were alone, at least in that particular section of the bookstore. "You'd like to go out with me. On a non-friend type of outing. A date, I mean."

Boom. A date.

I sucked in a breath. "Is that a question?" I asked stupidly.

"Yes. I mean, would you consider . . . would you go out with me?"

I stared at him. A dozen reasons why this definitely would not be a good idea marched through my brain: This kind of thing would only complicate matters, make a mess. I hated messes. My life was enough of a mess as it was. I was just starting to feel like I had the ground under me again after my parents' divorce. I needed to focus on school, keep up my perfect grades, get into college, figure out my life's trajectory. I liked Steven-I liked him so much; that was easy to admit; he was one of my favorite people-but if we were together like that, it would make the other members of our group feel awkward. It would ruin our friends.h.i.+p.

We'd end up hurting each other.

"Steven-" I started to brace myself to say all of the hard things.

"Wait," he said. "Hear me out." He extracted the book gently out of my hand and returned it to its place on the shelf, then took my other hand in his. "I know a romantic relations.h.i.+p could be considered risky at this stage. We have a year left of high school before we go our presumably separate ways. I know the purpose of romantic engagement, on a biological level, is for procreation, and neither one of us wants that, of course. But . . ." He glanced down at our joined hands. "That's not all there is to it. There's the social aspect, of learning to interact with someone, as a partner, which could be useful for our future experience. And it's been proven that romantic companions.h.i.+p is good for your health: it promotes the release of endorphins, relaxation, a sense of greater security, and . . ."

We were both blus.h.i.+ng by this point. We're so similar, I thought. When we get nervous, we both start talking like idiot savants.

"You're babbling," I observed.

"I know." He sighed and then kept talking. "I think we could be good together, Lex. I promise I wouldn't pressure you, about . . . anything, and I won't have any kind of expectations about what's going to happen a year from now. I just want to find out what we could be like. An experiment, of sorts."

I bit my lip. He was making it sound reasonable. Logical. Tempting. That and he was gazing at me with those unbelievably warm brown eyes of his, and his expression said: PLEASE SAY YES.

"So the experiment would be whether or not there's chemistry between us," I said.

He let go of one of my hands to push his gla.s.ses back up on his nose, and smiled. "Exactly. A simple experiment in chemistry."

Which made sense. There was nothing Steven loved more in the world than chemistry.

"So this would entail you and me going on dates," he continued, moving onto the logistics of how it would happen. "Maybe once or twice a week, or more than that, if you want. Whatever you prefer, really . . . We could-"

"Yes." The word was out of my mouth before I could talk myself out of it. "I'll go out with you. Yes."

"Excellent," he said, looking so thrilled I thought he might start dancing right there in the bookstore. "You won't regret it."

And that's how it started.

He held my hand during the movie. I sat in the flickering dark stunned by the idea that it had happened so easily, after all this time knowing each other. He asked me to think of him romantically, and I said I would. Just like that.

"This isn't too weird for you, is it?" he whispered after a while.

"No." I squeezed his hand. "This is good."

And it was.

After the movie he drove me across Lincoln to the Oven, an Indian restaurant downtown. He opened the door for me, pulled my chair out as we were being seated, and insisted on paying for dinner.

That was a little weird.