“Don’t thank me until I show up,” I warn her. “This is all really confusing.”
“I know,” she says.
It’s my life.
I have to go. But then I turn back one last time to look at her, and I see how she’s on the border between hope and devastation. It’s that visible to me. And even though the alarms are loud and clear in my head, I feel I can’t leave her like this. I want to push her a little closer to hope and a little farther from devastation.
“The thing is,” I say, “I didn’t really feel it was him that day. Not completely. And ever since then, it’s like he wasn’t there. He has no memory of it. There are a million possible explanations for that, but there it is.”
“There it is,” she echoes. There’s no bragging in her voice. No trickery.
It can’t be real, but it’s real to her.
Fact. Feeling.
I shake my head.
“Tomorrow,” she says.
Now it’s my turn to echo. “Tomorrow,” I tell her, committing myself to something I feel like I became committed to a long time ago. Tomorrow. A word I’ve used for as long as I knew what it meant.
But now…now it feels like it means something different.
Now it feels like it means something slightly new.
—
I don’t text Justin. I don’t call him.
No, I go straight to his house and pound on the door.
His parents are still at work. I know he’s the only one home. It takes him a couple of minutes, but he opens the door. He’s surprised to see me.
“We weren’t supposed to be doing something, were we?” he asks.
“No,” I tell him. “I just need to talk to you for a second.”
“Um…okay. Do you want to come in?”
“Sure.”
He takes me into the den, where his warfare game is paused. I have to move the controller to clear a seat next to him.
“What’s up?” he asks.
“It’s about last week. I need to talk to you about it.”
He looks confused. Or maybe just impatient.
“What about last week?”
“When we went to the beach. Do you remember that?”
“Of course I remember that.”
“What songs played as we drove there?”
He looks at me like I’ve just asked him about rocket science. “How the fuck am I supposed to remember what songs were playing?”