Never Always Sometimes

by Adi Alsaid

  “You look so cute,” Gretchen said, and almost immediately Julia felt like punching her.

  Julia had a quick flash of what this could turn into: her and Gretchen becoming friends, Dave and Gretchen touching more and more, little stolen glances between them that Julia wouldn’t be able to avoid intercepting. Julia would be the third wheel in a friendship that had never needed more than two people.

  Suddenly flushed, Julia went off to find a bathroom to calm herself down. What the fuck was going on? Ridiculing others was her usual coping mechanism, not this mad jealousy. If anything, Julia had expected to make fun of Gretchen today. She thought back to the night of the party, how it had felt when she’d started tearing apart her house. She’d been lying on the grass, telling herself she was in love with Dave. And drunk as she may have been, maybe it was true. Maybe she was in love with Dave.

  Julia found the department store’s bathroom, which was small and clean with a large plant in the corner, lavender in the air. She went up to the sink and splashed some water on her face, letting it drip-dry as she shook her head at the little mantra now running through her head, taking root. No, Julia told herself. It’s not true.

  When she’d managed to convince herself, Julia returned to the dressing area and saw Gretchen and Dave standing close to each other, their fingers interlaced. Julia stared at the sight for a while, scrunching her mouth over to one corner. Fuck. It was true.

  She was in love with Dave.

  JUST LIKE THIS

  JULIA WATCHED THE clock tick. It was a stupid thing to do, she knew, the seconds bleeding out slower when observed. But now that flirting with Marroney was apparently frowned upon, she had nothing else to do in class.

  Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and she pulled it out to read a text from Dave. I just got the best idea of all time. Or of the past four minutes. Hard to tell. Meet me by your locker.

  Julia texted back, Hyperbole foul.

  You’re a hyperbole foul.

  Yeah, she loved Dave. And life had gotten a little bit suckier since the realization sunk in. But in many ways, things were still exactly the same. Sure, every now and then she’d buy a bag of chips just to stomp on it and watch the crumbs explode out. But that was kind of a cool thing that she could envision herself doing for the rest of her life, even when ecstatic and in mutual love with some unknown, future person. Everything else was normal. Dave was her best friend. She was his best friend. Nothing had changed.

  She wasn’t about to spend her class periods lamenting the fact that Dave was dating someone else. Most of the time, she barely even noticed. It was weird that Dave could drive now, because Dave never drove. Aside from that, the bag of chips thing, and the occasional passing bout of sadness or desire to punch Gretchen, Julia was dealing with it pretty damn well.

  “Julia, would you like to come up and solve this equation?”

  Julia looked up to see the class’s eyes on her. Marroney was holding up a piece of chalk like an offering. She considered going up and reciting her slam poem, but thought better of it. “Eh, not really. I wasn’t paying attention and wouldn’t want to embarrass myself.”

  A few people snickered and Marroney sighed. “I guess I’ll thank you for your honesty.”

  “Anytime,” Julia said, resisting the urge to wink.

  Marroney called on someone else and Julia sank back into her chair, fiddling with her phone. A small crack ran along the side of the screen from when she’d thrown it at her bedroom wall the night of the party. She couldn’t help but think of Dave when she saw that sliver of broken glass, so fine it didn’t even sting her finger.

  A few classes later, when the clock finally reached 2:30 and the clanging bell released her from her seat, Julia grabbed her bag and shot out of the classroom. School was starting to weigh more than she could bear. Expecting Dave to be a little late, off smooching with Gretchen, Julia slipped in her earbuds, stepped out of her mocs, and leaned against her locker, watching everyone pass by. When music was playing, Julia felt not as critical of people. At the moment, she couldn’t stand the sight of couples, but everyone else seemed a little less offensive, a little closer to her when, say, Conor Oberst was singing.

  Dave appeared earlier than she’d expected him to, on his own. She kept her earbuds in as he made his way toward her, trying not to think of the light in his eyes, trying not to look at his hands. When he started speaking she couldn’t hear a word of it. Then he plucked out the earbuds.

  “Oww, dude, I hate that feeling,” Julia said, rubbing at her ear and curling the white cord around her phone.

  “Sorry. You feel like scheming?”

  She slipped her phone in her bag. “I don’t know if I’ve got another tree house in me. I nearly hammered my finger off last time.”

  “No, this doesn’t involve any construction. It’s a promposal.”

  Julia stared at him blankly.

  “Get it? It’s the words prom and proposal combined into one. Prom-posal. A proposal for prom.”

  “I understood, I’m just having trouble, you know”—she gestured with her hands—“understanding.”

  “It’s another cliché.”

  “I’m well aware.”

  “It wasn’t on the Nevers, but only because when we were freshmen we couldn’t really envision anyone dating us.” They started walking down the hall toward the parking lot, the habit long ago ingrained into their end of school ritual. “But if we’d had the foresight and the self-esteem, it totally would have been.”

  “Speak for yourself, I’ve always known I’m awesome. People date me all the time.”

  “That’s not that point.” Dave held open the door for her and a few other people. “I’m gonna ask Gretchen to prom and I need your help to make it as over-the-top as possible.”

  “Oh, right, you and Gretchen.”

  Dave laughed. “Who’d you think I was talking about?”

  “I don’t know. You and Vince Staffert would be cute together. He seems really into you.”

  “You know, I do like being little spoon and he seems like a great big spoon. But that’s a whole other conversation. Are you gonna help me?”

  Julia popped her trunk and they both tossed their bags inside. “Help you? I barely know you.” She reached for her sunglasses in the car’s cup holder, slipping them on even though it was grayer than usual today. Prom was supposed to be the last item crossed off the list, never date your best friend, and maybe it was dumb, but Julia hadn’t really thought about how Gretchen would affect that.

  “Come on. I’ll buy you pizza if you help me scheme.”

  “You think I’m going to whore out my brain for a few slices of pizza?”

  “I absolutely do.”

  “I hate how well you know me,” Julia said. Then she smiled at him, not even forcing it. That much. “Fine. Let’s plan ourselves a promposal.”

  o o o

  Julia and Dave sat side by side at a booth at Fratelli’s, a sheet of paper in front of them. It looked a little like the Nevers list, the same generic ruled notebook paper, both of their handwriting filling up the page, not necessarily sticking to the lines. The last slice of pizza sat uneaten on its tray, the cheese congealing to the stainless steel surface. The restaurant was starting to fill up, and a group by the door was eyeing the four-person booth they had been taking up for over an hour.

  “I really don’t think I can afford that many rose petals,” Dave said.

  “Fine. Then we buy however many you can afford and we stick them in a paper shredder.”

  “That sounds like an awful idea.”

  “How is rose-petal confetti an awful idea?”

  “When you put it that way, it actually doesn’t sound bad.”

  Julia loved this so much that she’d managed to ignore the fact that everything they were plannin
g was for Gretchen. She got to be with Dave, sit with him, laugh, touch his wrist like she meant nothing by it. Moments like these could carry her until it was no longer necessary.

  “What else can we do? This seems a little too low-key.”

  Julia looked at their plan. “We’ve got the scavenger-hunt-esque buildup, the perfect location, the rose-petal confetti. I’m assuming if I try to suggest explosions you’re just gonna shoot me down again?”

  “You know me so well.”

  “What about music? No cheesy moment is complete without the swelling of an orchestra.”

  Dave thought for a while. “I mean, Brett’s got a pretty solid set of speakers I could borrow.”

  “You bring Brett’s crappy Best Buy speakers to this beautiful promposal I’ve planned out and I’ll never speak to you again. That’d be like bringing nail clippers to a gun fight.”

  “Fine, what do you suggest, then? It’s not like I’m personally acquainted with an orchestra.”

  They both turned to look at each other at the same time. She could love him just like this. It was enough for her, to be this close.

  “Are we really?” Dave said, but his eyes weren’t wide with surprise. They were smiling, like he already knew the answer.

  “We absolutely are,” Julia said.

  “How?”

  “What do you mean, how? You’re Dave the tree house builder, boyfriend of cute soccer girl with the blond waves. People at the school would give up their firstborns for you.” Julia took her phone out of her pocket for effect. “Oh, look, there’s a text from Christa Howards, renowned flutist and teen mom. She says she’s in and please don’t change her baby’s name.”

  Dave laughed and looked off into the distance, his mind clearly on Gretchen, on how the night he was planning for her would play out. Julia grabbed the pen they’d been using and squeezed in the word orchestra in between two lines, then drew an arrow to show when the music would start to play, right after Gretchen saw Julia’s car, right before the kiss. Never pine silently, she thought to herself and smiled, because she was doing exactly what they were supposed to be doing. Not doing. Sometimes doing.

  “You know,” she said, “I think we can add more to this list. There are a few clichés we haven’t touched on yet. How do you feel about showing up in a whipped-cream bikini?”

  “That might be a little too over-the-top.”

  “What if the orchestra members are all in whipped-cream bikinis?”

  She could do this the whole day, plan something out with him, pretend that, like the snow fort they’d designed freshman year, it would never come to fruition. It was just her and Dave at the pizza place. No matter how many families crowded nearby, how many kids from school waved to them from other tables, no matter how many times Gretchen’s name was scrawled on the sheet of paper in front of them, it was just her and Dave, like it always had been.

  THE PROMPOSAL

  A WEEK OF planning later, Julia was outside the school with Brett, waiting for the bell to ring. She was clenching a section of white string in her hand, and she stared at it sloping upward from the gray asphalt of the parking lot, swaying slightly in the breeze. She was incredibly proud of this string, despite all the clichés it would lead to, or rather, because of them. Because her tongue was planted firmly in her cheek, because her mom would approve of this, because she’d done all of it for Dave and none of it for Gretchen.

  “It is stupid hot in here,” Brett said from inside the teddy bear costume they’d rented for him.

  “Don’t you dare take off that mask,” Julia said, snapping a few pictures of him on her phone for later blackmail use. “You remember your lines?”

  “How dumb do you think I am? It’s a sentence.”

  “You’ve never really been good with words, Brett.”

  “And you’ve never been good at interacting with humans other than my brother. People change.”

  “I don’t know. I’m still pretty iffy about how to talk to non-Daveians. ‘Iffy,’ by the way, means unsure, suspect.”

  The school bell interrupted Brett’s comeback. “Okay, get in position.” She called Dave’s cell phone as she pulled the string taut. One end was tied to Gretchen’s car door, the other led to a tree at the park down the hill. Julia had skipped her last two periods to set it up, and now she was hiding behind Brett’s truck to make sure Gretchen would follow it. Dave’s handwritten signs hung along the length of the string. Meanwhile, Brett waddled in his bear suit to the halfway marker, a single rose in his hand.

  “I still think we should have gone for the walkie-talkies,” Julia said as soon as Dave answered. “It feels lame this way.”

  “Walkie-talkies are expensive, shitty, two-way cell phones. You guys all set?”

  “Yup,” Julia said, eyeing the crowd just now coming through the double doors of the school for Gretchen’s blond waves.

  “Okay, I’ll see you at the harbor. You sure it’s okay for me to take the car?”

  Julia looked across the lot at her formerly white Mazda. She’d joked about Dave’s newfound popularity, but it was incredible what a couple of text messages had achieved, how quickly the word spread, the number of people that had shown up to write on her car. She didn’t credit herself, or the tree house. This was all Dave. As much as she wanted to keep him to herself, Julia loved knowing that this was for him. He deserved to be liked this much, this widely. “If you don’t take it, the three thousand ‘you should go to prom with Dave’ messages will be kind of pointless.”

  Dave laughed. “This is so ridiculous. We are outdoing ourselves.”

  “We are outcliché-ing ourselves. Ooh, I see her.” Julia hung up without another word, and pulled the string up higher. Paper arrows pointing down the line dangled, and kids—those not involved in the plan—were starting to point. Gretchen was reading a book as she walked, and part of Julia kind of wished that she would get in her car without noticing and drive off, dragging the string behind her. Then Gretchen looked up and noticed the string and the first sign, which read, FOLLOW ME!

  Julia never thought she’d want to be in Gretchen the soccer girl’s shoes. Or cleats, whatever. But that’s exactly what she wanted: to be acting out this cliché-riddled promposal that would eventually lead to Dave. Swallowing down the thought that she was doing all of this for him, not Gretchen, Julia waited for her to take the string in her hand. When it was clear Gretchen would follow, Julia turned to go into the high school, where the band kids would be waiting to load their instruments into Brett’s truck. Jealousy would have to wait.

  THE FIRST ROSE

  Brett in the teddy bear suit sitting motionless, the rose in his hand. If Julia were being honest with herself, the bear suit was not really crucial to the whole operation. It just made it a little cheesier, and therefore better. And how many chances was she going to get to convince Brett to pretend he was a teddy bear? She didn’t know what she was planning to do with the pictures of him in it, especially now that Brett felt like more of a friend than like Dave’s meathead brother. At the very least, she could jokingly torture him for a few months. Once Gretchen approached, Brett would hand her the rose and tell her that there were eleven more waiting for her around town, then go back to being motionless until she was out of sight. After that, he’d run back to the school and help load his truck.

  THE SECOND ROSE

  At the park, after following the arrows and Dave’s signs, which were sweet to the point that they’d made Julia want to buy a bag of chips for stomping, Gretchen would find that the string disappeared into the branches of a tree. Maybe out of a twisted desire to pretend they were for her, or maybe simply out of masochism, Julia had insisted on having Dave share whatever inside jokes he had with Gretchen, to repeat whatever small details they could use for the promposal. It’d been strange to hear all that he already knew about the girl, stran
ge to see how he’d smiled when he related the simplest things, like the fact that she loved climbing trees. Yeah, no shit, anyone with a halfway decent childhood loved climbing trees.

  Julia pictured Gretchen deftly maneuvering her way up the branches, and despite herself, she wanted the rose to still be there, with the tiny message still tucked into the folds of its petals, the cryptic clue easy enough to be understood, hard enough to be thoughtful. They’d placed the rose on one of the highest climbable branches, high enough that Gretchen would be able to poke her head above the leaves and look out at San Luis Obispo stretching out below her. What a strange kind of love it was, to be rooting against yourself.

  THE THIRD ROSE

  “We’ve got a problem,” Brett said. “The cellist is demanding to ride with her cello, but I’ve got sixteen other instruments and music stands to take, and there’s no way I’m letting her ride back there. I can’t get any more tickets. Endangering the life of a cellist is, like, six points off your license.”

  Right now, if she’d figured out the clue, Gretchen would be arriving to the ice cream shop owned by a friend of Dave’s dad. The flavor of the week was rose. When Julia had come up with that part of the plan, she’d been simultaneously proud of herself and deeply ashamed that her brain could even think in such cheesy terms. Though how happy Dave had looked made her lean on the side of the former.

  “Shit.” Julia had no time to deal with finicky cellists. “Tell her she can ride in the truck, but she has to lie down flat with the cello on top.”

  Brett’s hair was mussed with sweat from the bear mask, and he was still wearing the rest of the costume. “That’s insane.”

  “Just do it, Brett. I have to get the cupcake.”