Always Never Yours

by Emily Wibberley

  Numb, I force myself to nod. “It sounds perfect.”

  * * *

  When I get back to my car, I stupidly check my phone. Force of habit. Six unread messages from Will stare up at me.

  Wait, what??

  I think you might have heard something and gotten the wrong idea . . . Call me, and I’ll explain.

  You can’t just ignore me, Megan. We at least have to talk.

  Fine. You’re acting really immature, but if this is what you want, then fine.

  I scroll through the first couple, then delete the thread without reading the rest. I delete his number, too, just for good measure.

  He and I were supposed to go on our date tonight to the shitty club on Route 46. That won’t be happening, which at least spares me from a night amid sweaty, gyrating teenagers and throbbing techno music. With my weekend now pretty much unscheduled, my first thought is to text Madeleine. It’s a post-breakup ritual to go to her house, bake homemade Pop-Tarts, and break out the middle-school yearbooks to mock the pictures of the boy in question.

  But I hesitate. Madeleine spent the majority of her time with Tyler while I was pursuing Will. I love her, and talking to her would be a comfort, but she’s not the one who knows every detail of the relationship. Instead, I find myself remembering the hours spent with Owen discussing even the most insignificant facets of my interactions with Will.

  Owen. He’s the one who’s been there for me through the whole relationship. It’s only right he help me with its end.

  I drive to his neighborhood on the other end of town. It’s nearing nighttime, and the streets are empty. The couple of people out walking are wrapped in coats and scarves, their breath visible under the streetlights. I crank the heat up in my car to compensate for winter settling in.

  I park under one of the trees on Owen’s street, a couple of houses up from his. Realizing I should probably check if he’s busy before arriving on his doorstep, I pull out my phone and send, hey, testing the waters.

  Hey. You doing okay? he replies a moment later.

  my mom’s getting married, I watch my thumbs type out and send, not fully knowing why.

  It takes Owen longer to respond this time. A couple minutes go by. Is that good or bad? he sends.

  good i guess. dont want her to be alone. I rub my bracelet-free wrist. It crosses my mind that I drove over here to talk about Will. Yet here I am, talking about my mom after one sentence.

  You’re not alone either, Megan. Do you want to come over for dinner? It takes him only a few seconds to reply, which is nearly as surprising as what he’s said.

  i wasnt talking abt me. Once I’ve sent that, I type out a second text. but yes i wud thx.

  I’m reasonably certain you were.

  I let that one lie, but I’m smiling to myself as I step out of the car. im outside, I send, walking up his driveway. He replies a second later.

  Outside where?

  TWENTY

  ROMEO: Thus with a kiss I die.

  V.iii.120

  INSTEAD OF REPLYING, I RING THE DOORBELL. In my billowy floral dress, tights, and a denim jacket, I’m hardly dressed for the weather, and I hug myself while I wait. Running footsteps sound from the other side of the door, followed by Owen’s voice.

  “Sam, what’s the rule about the door?” I hear him yell sternly.

  The footsteps stop, and the voice that answers Owen sounds about ten years old. “No opening it without checking who it is first,” the voice glumly replies. I step back, smoothing my dress, expecting scrutiny through the small peephole. “It’s some girl . . . wearing grandma clothes.” I cross my arms, affronted if not a little amused.

  “She’s pretty,” the voice—Sam—continues, redeeming himself. “Prettier than Cosmo.”

  Ha! I’m going to like Sam.

  “It’s Cosima,” I hear Owen exasperatedly correct him. The door swings open, revealing Owen, his ears their natural shade of red, and a small boy with spiked hair, Owen-y features, and a Minecraft T-shirt. “Very sorry about my brother,” Owen says emphatically, then glances behind me, his lips forming a light smile. “You hang out outside my house often?”

  I stride inside, refusing to be embarrassed. “Hey, this is a nice street. Good lighting, great, um—trees.”

  His grin widens knowingly. “If I’d known how much you liked the trees, I would have invited you over more often.” He leads me toward the kitchen. “You know you’re welcome whenever,” he adds after a moment, his voice gentler this time.

  In the kitchen, he grabs a striped apron and throws it over his head.

  “You’re making dinner?” I don’t hide my surprise.

  He stirs something on a pot on the stove. “Yeah, spaghetti. It’s Sam’s favorite.”

  “No, it’s not!” Sam bellows from the other room.

  Owen chuckles, and I realize they’ve had this conversation before. “It’s his favorite of the things I can make,” he explains to me, “which consists of spaghetti and spaghetti.” Sam wanders into the kitchen, and Owen points the spoon at me. “Sam, this is my friend Megan. She’s going to have dinner with us.”

  I face Sam, about to give him a wave hello, but he marches right up to me and sticks his hand out. “Nice to meet you,” he says formally, shaking my hand in a small but impressive death grip.

  “It’s nice to meet you, too,” I reply. “For your information, no grandmas have ever worn my clothes.”

  He squints at me. “You sure about that?”

  “Sam,” Owen warns.

  “It’s okay.” I laugh. “He said I’m prettier than Cosmo, so we’re cool.” I glance at Owen, waiting to see how he’ll contend with that, whether he’ll defend his girlfriend or put his guest down. I consider it a victory when he wordlessly turns back to the stove and spoons pasta onto the plates.

  He carries one into the dining room and places it on the small, scuffed table. Sam clambers into his seat, and I sit down opposite him while Owen returns with the other two plates.

  “You’re in Owen’s play, right?” Sam asks between bites.

  My mouth full, Owen replies for me. “Megan’s the lead. She’s the main character,” he clarifies.

  Sam’s eyes widen, and he looks at me with new respect. “You’re Juliet?”

  “You know Romeo and Juliet?” I ask, intrigued. Apparently, a penchant for theater is an Okita family trait.

  “Owen told me,” Sam answers proudly. “He said it’s about this girl who’s like the coolest, most beautiful girl everyone’s ever seen, and blah blah blah, and she likes some guy, and then everybody dies.”

  I smile at Owen, not overlooking the adjectives in Sam’s summary. “What a deft Shakespearean commentary,” I say, still looking at Owen. Then I raise an eyebrow at Sam. “Do you think I’ll be a good Juliet?”

  Sam shrugs. “Owen says you’re, like, perfect.”

  I turn back to Owen, unable to restrain myself from wondering what else he’s said about . . . my performance. But before I have the chance to ask, he’s leaning over to ruffle his brother’s hair. Sam yelps and swats him away, indignant that Owen’s messing up his gelled spikes.

  “How’d your spelling test go?” Owen asks, withdrawing his hand.

  Sam groans, clearly having already forgotten his brother’s infraction. “Ninety-eight percent,” he mutters resentfully.

  “What word did you get wrong?” Owen sounds playfully admonishing.

  “Lead, the metal!” Sam pounds an emphatic hand on the table.

  Owen laughs. “That one really gives you trouble, huh?”

  “Well, Owen,” I cut in, “lead’s, like, the hardest word ever.”

  The two Okitas face me, Owen’s expression skeptical. “Does that word stump you on your spelling tests, too, Megan?” He’s not quite smirking, but the corner of his mouth is upturned.

 
“Don’t be a smartass,” I shoot back, then notice Sam’s eyes widen. “Sorry,” I tell him. “For your information, Owen”—I turn back to him—“lead is an inhumanly difficult word. Lead, the metal, is spelled like lead, the verb, which is the present tense of a verb of which the past tense is spelled L-E-D, pronounced led, like the metal, lead,” I finish triumphantly.

  Owen’s smiling now, his mouth half-open in an expression of stunned amusement I don’t bother to keep myself from noticing is cute.

  “She gets it,” Sam exclaims, throwing out a hand in my direction.

  “I stand reeducated,” Owen pronounces, then reaches over to jostle his brother’s shoulder. “Hey, buddy, ninety-eight percent is great. Mom’s going to be really proud.”

  Sam straightens up in his seat, and I realize he’s somehow finished all of his spaghetti. “Can I stay up tonight to tell her?”

  “That depends on if you finish your homework. Quietly, and in your room,” Owen tells him.

  Sam hops off his chair and brings his dish into the kitchen. While he’s out of the room, I gesture to where his spotless plate was. “How did he . . . ?” I whisper to Owen.

  “He inhales it. I don’t know. It’s insane,” he replies, taking a bite of his own nearly finished dinner.

  Sam stomps into the doorway. “You guys aren’t going to go kiss now, right?” he asks, like the question’s a bomb he’s been waiting to drop since I got here.

  I laugh and dart a glance at Owen, who just points a finger into the hall. “I’m not going to dignify that with a response,” he says, doing an impressive job of covering any embarrassment he might be feeling. “Homework. Now.” Sam trudges into the hallway wearing a mischievous smirk he definitely didn’t learn from Owen.

  I spin a forkful of spaghetti. “Sounds like you do this kind of thing often,” I say to Owen. “Sweep girls off their feet with the perfect-brother routine, then take them to your room for some kissing.”

  Owen scoffs, obviously playing dumb. “What perfect-brother routine?”

  “Oh, please,” I say through pasta. “The home-cooked dinner, the helping with his homework. Girls love that.”

  He feigns surprise. “I had no idea. I’ve had the perfect chick magnet right here the entire time.” He picks up my plate, ever the gentleman, and brings both of our dishes into the kitchen. I walk over to help him. Usually now is when I’d nettle him about Cosima or keep teasing him about Sam’s “kissing” remark, but for some indiscernible reason, I don’t. Instead, we wash dishes in silence for a couple minutes before he speaks up. “Hey, uh, how are you . . .”

  “Since your asshole friend cheated on me?” I supply.

  “Former asshole friend,” he quickly corrects, and I have to smile, knowing I was right when I figured he’d be the one who could lift my spirits.

  “I’m okay,” I say, and for the first time today I feel it’s true. “I sent him a breakup text this afternoon. More than he deserves. Honestly, I’m happier eating spaghetti with you—and Sam, of course—than going to Club Trying-Too-Hard with him.” He laughs, and I shrug. “It’s for the best. I have a thousand lines to memorize by Monday, and I’m way behind because of the Senior Showcase.”

  Owen pauses. He takes the towel out of my hand. “You want to stay? I could help,” he offers, his voice casual but something searching in his eyes.

  I meet them. “It’s the Capulet Manor scene. Don’t tell Sam, but there’s definitely some, uh—kissing involved.” Hm. I’ve never known myself to be the kind of girl to stumble over the word kissing.

  “I’m no Tyler, but I think I’ll get the job done.” He flashes me a smile, but his phrasing leaves me wordless. He doesn’t mean . . . No. He’s talking about the lines. Definitely the lines. Like he doesn’t know what he’s just done to me, he points his thumb over his shoulder. “I have to check on Sam. He plays Minecraft if I leave him unsupervised. You want to wait for me in my bedroom?” He looks coy.

  And god help me, I blush. “You—your bedroom?”

  “Well, where else would we do it?” He walks past me, brushing his shoulder against mine in a move I know is intentional. “Read lines, I mean,” he clarifies with a cocked eyebrow.

  Wait a second. I follow him into the hall. “I don’t believe this,” I say to his back. His—since when?—well-shouldered, strokeable back.

  “Believe what?” he says over his shoulder.

  “You’re Megan-ing me!”

  He throws his head back and laughs. It echoes in the narrow hallway. “Am I?”

  I grab his arm and spin him to face me. “You definitely are. This is terrible!” How does he expect me to decipher what’s for real and what’s for fun?

  He’s grinning, but his voice holds none of the teasing it did before. “Now you know how the rest of us feel. We mere mortals never dare to hope your insinuations are anything but a pastime.”

  “Wow, you’re such a writer sometimes.” I don’t know what else to say.

  He pushes back his hair. “You never told me how fun it is,” he says, the humor returning to his voice. He leans a shoulder on the wall pointedly, his eyes inviting—demanding—a reply.

  This will not stand. I do the Megan-ing around here! I put a hand on my hip and level him a goading stare. “You think this is fun? You haven’t seen anything yet.”

  Now his eyes widen, jumping to his door and back. “I have to check on Sam.” His voice comes out low and furtive. “I’ll only be a second.”

  I toss my hair over my shoulder and strut past the Yûjirô portrait into Owen’s room. “I’ll be waiting,” I reply.

  His room is dark and as orderly as I remember. My hand shakes as I flip on the lights. I force my racing heart to slow down, reminding myself I have no idea what’s going to happen when Owen comes in here. I know better than anyone that flirtatious remarks, winks, and nudges don’t need to go any further. And how much further do I think they’re going to go with Owen? He has a girlfriend. He has a girlfriend.

  I walk around the room, wondering where I should be when he comes in, and my eyes fall on his notebook, half-open on his desk. He’s never shown it to me, but he’s never told me not to read it either. I know I shouldn’t. I’d be crossing a line, invading his privacy, and violating his trust. I pause in front of the notebook, willing myself to walk away.

  But Owen’s writing about Rosaline. About me. Part of me—all of me—has to know how he sees her.

  The sound of Owen’s and Sam’s muffled voices drifts down the hall, and before I know it, I’ve picked up the notebook. The open page is covered mostly in illegible and crossed-out half sentences, but I can make out a few lines jammed in between the others.

  It’s a monologue for Rosaline, and she’s . . . a force of nature. She’s fierce and honest, her words passionate and heartbreaking. But she isn’t tragic, not the way Owen writes her.

  “I don’t know how far we’re taking this but—” I hear his voice from the doorway. I turn, holding the notebook, and his face goes rigid. He crosses the room in a split second. “That’s nowhere close to ready.” He grabs the notebook from my hands, his voice hard.

  “Why? What you’ve written is good,” I protest. It is good. It’s ringing in my ears, everything he’s written about Rosaline.

  “It’s not good enough.” He closes the cover and shoves the notebook in a drawer. The subtle shift in his voice weakens my resistance. For the first time, I didn’t mean to make him blush.

  “When do you think I’ll get to read it?” I ask, gentler.

  He won’t meet my eyes. “I don’t know. I haven’t exactly made a lot of progress.”

  “You need more Rosaline insights from the expert?” I want to help him. He’s drifting into the shy version of Owen, one I haven’t seen in a long time. One it hurts to see.

  He smiles slightly. “No. You’ve been great.”

  “W
hat then? Is Rosaline just not interesting enough?” I thought he’d written a Rosaline worthy of the page, but I’m beginning to wonder if he disagrees. “You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” I continue, an involuntary edge entering my voice. “There’s a reason she never comes on stage.”

  “No.” He shakes his head, intensity in his eyes when they return to mine. “There’s not a reason except that this play is Romeo and Juliet’s. Rosaline could be the central character of her own story. Just because Romeo didn’t want her doesn’t mean no one else will.” He gestures to the drawer. “You read what I wrote. Isn’t it obvious how I feel about her?”

  There’s a pressing current of passion in his voice, passion I don’t think was solely pulled from defending his play’s premise. I drop my eyes, feeling my neck grow hot. Not wanting to argue with him, to convince him that no, Rosaline is in fact nothing more than the castoff she is in Shakespeare’s pages, I mutter, “It sounds like you know exactly what to write.”

  “Maybe I do.” Owen’s answer sounds somehow far away, and when I dare to glance up at him, he has that pensive, concentrated look. The look I now recognize as the same one he wore the very first time I admitted he was cute. I hadn’t thought anything of it at the time.

  “You said you had a thousand lines to memorize,” he says suddenly, breaking my reverie, the distance gone from his expression. He bites the corner of his lip in a way that is entirely unfair and holds out a worn copy of Romeo and Juliet.

  I nod and take the play from him, careful not to brush his hand. Folding the book back against its spine, I find the right scene. For a moment, the words dance in front of me. Not because I don’t know these lines, but because I can’t get Rosaline out of my head. I need to be Juliet. Just for an hour. Please can’t I be her for just an hour?

  Deep breath in, deep breath out. I let my posture soften, then turn to face my Romeo. He’s leaning against his desk, hair falling across his forehead, his hands still ink-stained even after washing the dishes. I offer him my hand, and he stares at it, uncomprehending.