“You don’t understand,” I say around a sob. I’m a little kid. I’m the little kid I never wanted to be. “I have to see my mother every day. Every day I look my future in the fucking face, and you know what it looks like? It’s pretty fucking grim.”
He waits a few beats before saying, “And suicide isn’t?”
I wish he’d stop saying that word.
We’re both breathing hard, sharpening our swords for the next round. Finally, I get an idea. A way to get him to back down.
“I will tell them,” I say through clenched teeth. (I won’t. I can’t.) “But I never want to see you again. And if I find out you told them what I did, or what I’m planning, I’ll—” It’s the worst thing I can threaten him with, but it’s also the only thing. Licking my lips once, I continue: “I’ll tell the families of your other students. They might be interested in knowing what we’ve been doing, don’t you think?”
“You wouldn’t dare. Adina.” He reaches for my wrist, but I snatch it away before he can touch me. “Please.”
He looks ill. Part of me wants to shout just kidding! and take it all back. We could rewind to the night I spilled this secret, and instead of telling him about my plan, I’d sink into his body and keep my Siren lips locked tight, tight.
We are measures, movements, symphonies past that night now, and we both know it. I shake my head as though to show how simple it would be to destroy him. I’m not sure I could do it; it only matters that he believes me. “If I find out my parents know, that’s what I’ll do.”
With this I am reminding him that I am the powerful one, that I can control this even when I can’t.
“I don’t know what else to say,” he says softly.
With more confidence than I feel, I say, “Then I guess this is good-bye.”
He pauses, lets out a very long sigh. Dark half-moons droop beneath his eyes, as though he hasn’t been sleeping well. I haven’t noticed them before. There is also a tear in the fabric of his sweater, near his collarbone, and a patch of irritated skin on his neck, probably from shaving. My final observations are all imperfections.
“Good-bye, Adina.”
My fingers are shaky lacing up my boots, and finally I give up with one half untied. I abandon the three words I can never get back and the only person I’ve said them to, pressing L for lobby and glaring at the faded button between three and five, certain I will never press it again. I wipe my face on the sleeves of my coat. My nose is dripping, and the cold isn’t helping.
My boots crush the snow on the walk down the hill to the bus stop. It’s started up again, flurries dancing in my vision before the cold fuses my eyelids shut. I might get buried out here, become a real-life snowman.
Trudge forward. Keep moving.
On the endless bus ride home, I try to create stories for the other passengers as a way to distract myself, because if I don’t, I am going to turn into a mess on public transportation, which is the last place I want to turn into a mess. The memory of making up stories with Tovah crushes me more than I thought possible.
We will never have that again. I have made certain of it.
These are the stories I create. The girl whose boyfriend’s arms are wrapped around her shoulder while she’s texting someone? She’s cheating on him. She’s going to screw some other guy later. The guy with missing teeth who’s trying to hide his can of beer inside a wrinkled paper bag? He’s a drunk. Probably a drug addict, too. The bus driver with the sunken eyes? She wants any job except this one and has dreams of driving this metal box into a lake . . . and one day I will meet her there.
Thirty
Tovah
ALL THE CITY’S SNOWPEOPLE HAVE amputated limbs and punched-in noses. Muddy slush is piled high on the sides of the road. It’s the coldest spring we’ve had in decades: my last spring break of high school.
“Zack tells us you’re very critical of his art,” Zack’s mom Mikaela says during dinner at his house, and I nudge Zack’s foot with mine under the table. He’s grinning.
“I’m not. I swear. Zack’s really talented.”
Mikaela laughs. She has olive skin and dark eyes. Tess, with her auburn hair and high cheekbones and lanky frame, shares DNA with Zack.
“Critics are a good thing,” Mikaela says. “You don’t want to be with someone who’s going to praise everything you do, you know? You want to be challenged.”
“That’s why I tell Mikaela all her art is horrible,” Tess says.
“Exactly. It’s what keeps our marriage alive. Constant criticism and nitpicking.”
Zack’s parents make me like him even more. Make my like for him slide closer to love.
The house is decorated with Mikaela’s and Zack’s art. They have wildly different styles: Where Zack is abstract, Mikaela is realistic. Where he is sloppy, she is precise. When I got here, Zack tapped a hallway photo of him as a Boy Scout. “See? Proof that I was once a wild outdoorsman.” In the photo and in real life he smiled his gap-toothed smile, which back then was too big for his face but now fits him perfectly.