Just Like You Said It Would Be

by C. K. Kelly Martin

  By then my eyes are streaming and Jocelyn says, “Ohhh.”

  “Yeah, ohhh.” I swipe at my eyes again and fight for control of my voice. “I’m an idiot.”

  “You’re not an idiot,” she insists. “New Year’s makes people do weird things. Get nostalgic and lonely and—”

  She must feel it too, nostalgic and lonely for what her life used to be like, and I instantly want to apologize for being so self-absorbed. “Idiotic,” I cut in, almost trying to make a joke of it. “Maybe if he texts me back I can pretend my phone was stolen or that I got stupid-drunk and didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “Do you think he’ll text back?” she asks gently. “I thought you guys said you wouldn’t do that—stay in touch, I mean.”

  “Yeah,” I agree in a hushed voice. “That’s what we said.” That unless something changed and there was a way for us to be together again being in contact would only make things harder.

  But admitting it rockets me straight back to the reason I texted him in the first place: I can’t stand the thought of never hearing from him again. If what we had was as real to him as it was to me, wouldn’t he feel compelled to answer me?

  “It sucks that distance is the thing that had to keep you apart,” Joss says and I feel her sympathy deep in the centre of my chest. “But long distance relationships suck too. You know how it usually works out for those couples—they break up, same as you already have only it’s usually worse because then it gets messy—someone cheats or loses interest. You didn’t have any of that. You only had the high points.”

  I don’t know about that, we had plenty of drama last summer long before we got to the end of it. But the main thing now is damage control and when I ask Jocelyn for advice she says, “If you text him again and try to explain you’ll probably only make it worse. If I were you I’d leave things alone, then if he does text you back try to follow his lead and be cool about it.”

  That makes sense, except I was never cool when it came to us. If I’d been capable of being cool about him the whole thing probably wouldn’t ever have happened.

  “Thanks,” I say firmly. “Are you okay?” Joss’s been through so much since last spring and it’s not over yet.

  “I’m okay,” she confirms, her tone only marginally wistful. “Taking things one day at a time like always.”

  I bite back a sigh. “One day at a time is good. I sort of went MIA with Yanna’s phone. I guess I should get back to her and Kérane.”

  “Kay. Call me tomorrow, all right?

  “I will. Thanks.” I can’t stop thanking Jocelyn for advice that I don’t intend to follow.

  I hang up Yanna’s cell and lean forward to set it on the counter while I deal with my own phone. There are no messages from him, no new messages from anyone, and I wonder what would happen if I actually called his number right this second, in the early hours of the Irish morning on New Year’s Day. But as much as I need to hear from him, I can’t bear the thought of him sounding disinterested or disappointed to hear from me. That would crush me worse than saying goodbye to him at the end of last August because at least then I knew he cared.

  So I do a lesser thing and text him one last time. No, I really mean that. This is it. My final words to him unless he texts me back.

  I stare at my right hand for a moment before hunching over my phone and getting down to business. Miraculously, my fingers still aren’t shaking as they fly across the keys.

  Did you mean what you said last summer about making things happen if we could?

  I tap send and then, with the message flung out across the miles, immediately shut my phone off to stop myself obsessively checking for a reply that may never come.

  I still have a soggy lump in my throat. I’m still craving him in a hundred different ways. In my head I can hear him singing as clearly as if he were standing next to me with his mouth pressed to my ear, his voice turning me to mush. If it really is over I’ll have lost him twice now, but either way that knowledge will have to wait until at least tomorrow because tonight I’m going back to my friends to try my hardest to celebrate the birth of a brand new year.

  THEN

  Chapter 2

  How far can you see from there?

  It started with my parents’ separation fifteen months ago. They didn’t seem like the kind of couple who would ever split up—they’d never really fought much and as far as I could make out neither of them had cheated—so when they sat me down on the living room sofa one thundery evening last October and broke the news I didn’t know what to say. It felt wrong; it felt like the kind of thing I never should’ve had to worry about.

  A trial separation, they said because I guess even back when things were falling apart between them they weren’t sure being apart would work either. My dad bought a collection of IKEA furniture and moved into a one-bedroom apartment a twenty-minute walk from our house and my mother began spending a lot of evenings with her friends, dissecting what had gone wrong with her marriage. One night I overheard her on the phone, talking about the way two people can become so familiar to each other that it’s a form of mutual blindness. “Neither of you see the other clearly anymore,” she lamented.

  I didn’t want to think of my parents that way—looking at each other like old shoes they couldn’t remember why they’d picked out in the first place—but I acted like I was more or less okay with their split. Mature enough to understand that having separated parents practically came with the package of modern life. I’d always been good at holding myself together. I’d never run away from home. Never missed making the honour roll. Never had sex. Never passed out drunk in a puddle of vomit. Basically, until their break-up I’d been the kind of teenager a parent hardly had to worry about.

  It wasn’t a struggle, more like a natural default. Maybe it had something to do with being an only child when I wasn’t meant to be. Maybe it was just genetics, or that living on a planet that could soon become a permanent disaster-zone of climate upheaval made middle class teenage rebellion seem self-indulgent, unless there was good reason for it.

  It’s not as though I turned into some kind of wild child overnight when my parents split either, but they saw things differently. Both of them disliked my first boyfriend from the start while I appreciated his South American soccer player type looks and had him pegged as a good guy with an innate sense of social justice. In reality, I hardly knew Matias Varela when we started dating but had been listening to him make jokes at the expense of my mean-spirited math teacher since September. Jokes everybody but Mr. Pham had to appreciate because they diffused the tension that came from having an asshole who lived to make fun of people for a math teacher.

  From the few things I did know about Matias I filled in the blanks with my own idea of the person I wanted him to be. Intelligent. Sensitive. Funny. Of all those things, Matias proved to be only the last, and after seven weeks of being his girlfriend, funny wasn’t distraction enough.

  Whenever I’d tried to get to know the real Matias, who I suspected was lurking beneath his sarcasm or fascination with fantasy football, he’d acted like he didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. “I’m not hiding any big secrets,” he’d say. “Maybe I don’t think about things the way you do.” For a while I’d gone on believing that was some kind of camouflage for a deep mind.

  But Matias wasn’t complicated. He wasn’t all that sensitive either and in the end his jokes didn’t seem especially funny. So Matias and I became a short story, together in January and over by March. My first official relationship shouldn’t have been more than a blip, but Matias wouldn’t let go without making things messy. He kept wanting to talk, stopping me in the school halls and calling so frequently that my mom yelled at him over the phone. Not because I’d broken his heart in Shakespearean proportion, I don’t think, more likely that I’d injured his ego.

  My parents were already beginning to drift back together by then and took Matias’s erratic break-up behavior badly. Actually, they seemed to inte
rpret my ever having been with him as a lapse in judgment and warning sign that I was changing into someone they couldn’t trust.

  Considering that we were talking about seven short weeks with someone I’d hardly gotten past first base with, their attitude didn’t seem fair and when my parents told me about their summer reunion plan, I was torn between feeling happy for them and resenting being treated like an appendage. It was May then and my mom and dad had been meeting up at regular intervals for months but weren’t ready to take the leap and start living together again. They planned to take a vacation together first and see how things went, an extended Mediterranean cruise that would last the majority of the summer and include stops in Turkey, Greece, Spain, Belgium, and Russia.

  The minute my parents made the decision, my own summer plans were obliterated at the worst possible time. Only a week earlier Jocelyn’s brother, Ajay, had been arrested for impaired driving causing bodily harm. The trial date was set for mid-July. It was difficult to accept that the same guy I’d regularly sat next to at the Sandhu dinner table had drunkenly plowed into a woman out jogging, toppling her like a bowling pin. But that’s exactly what had happened; there was a strong possibility that the thirty-one-year-old woman he’d hit would never walk again.

  Ajay had been released on bail, but he and Joss’s entire family were devastated. Although I knew I couldn’t change that, I thought I’d at least be able to be there for her. My parents had markedly different thoughts and fully intended to ship me off to relatives three thousand miles away in Ireland for the summer. So enthusiastic were my mom and dad about their test reunion-vacation that it didn’t even faze them that I’d have to write my June exams a week early to accommodate their holiday schedule.

  I made a solid case for staying in Toronto with Kérane or Yanna but was overruled. “Two and a half months is too long for anyone who isn’t family to be expected to watch over you,” my father said time and time again, flatly denying their plans for me had anything to do with Matias-related distrust.

  “It wouldn’t feel like a long time if I was no trouble,” I’d protested. “I can’t leave Jocelyn here alone for so long with what her family’s going through.”

  I shouldn’t have needed to explain. My parents knew how close Jocelyn and I were—ever since we’d injured ourselves colliding in a seventh grade gym class basketball game and had to sit out the rest of the period together.

  Half Indian Sikh and half French Canadian, Joss had a complexion similar to mine. Both of us were constantly mistaken for Hispanic, when we were actually of mixed ethnicity, in my case half Egyptian and half Irish. Yanna (Filipino, Lebanese and Jamaican) and Ker (German, Chinese, Ukrainian, Indo-Trinidadian) got the “where are you from” question aimed at them even more frequently than Joss and I did. Most people were nothing but nice, but we’d all had to deal with our fair share of people who secretly, or not so secretly, wanted you to be more of one thing and less of another. I'd been accused of acting white because I spoke little Arabic, didn’t wear a hijab (never mind that when my mom had left Egypt nearly half a century ago virtually no one wore a headscarf) or follow Islam.

  But I wasn’t Christian either; I wasn’t any religion, which equally bothered intense Christians. After learning of my dual heritage but lack of affiliation with Islam some of them would assume I was Christian like they were only to turn aloof when they found out they couldn’t consider me saved. Then there were the white people (again, not many, but still…) who seemed taken aback when my mother’s English proved not only to be as good as their own but was spoken in a clipped British accent, or still others who simply preferred to ignore my Egyptian half. On a semi-regular basis strangers reacted with mild surprise when they heard the fair-skinned, middle-aged man next to me was my dad.

  But between Joss, Yanna, Ker and I, at least, fitting into an impossibly narrow cultural identity wasn’t something we had to worry about. And the older I got, the more freeing my background felt—like there was no set in stone manual for being me so I could be whoever I chose. The four of us could make it up as went along.

  It was Jocelyn, though, who was my best friend. From the night of our first sleepover we’d never run out of stuff to say, and things I wouldn’t tell anyone else, I could share with her. Like how although I couldn’t ever remember my parents being in love the way I would’ve wanted to be, to think of them breaking up for good burned a small hole through my heart.

  “They’re not going to do that,” Jocelyn had promised me. “It’s a mid-life crisis thing, that’s all. Being apart is going to wake them up to what a good thing they have going.”

  If only my parents had been as understanding about Joss as she’d been about them. No matter how I begged or agued, my mom and dad didn’t cave. In the end all I could do was make lukewarm peace with the idea of going to Ireland and I almost had when Joss called me up at noon on a Saturday at the end of May—her voice rasping like she’d swallowed a razor blade—and told me she was on her way over. Twenty-three minutes later I was ushering her downstairs so my mother wouldn’t see her red-rimmed eyes. They were painful to look at and as I closed the door behind us I asked what was going on.

  “Mr. Cheng came by our house,” Jocelyn said breathlessly, her eyelashes like dewy black petals and her thick black hair dishevelled. “He tried to push his way in to see Ajay. He kept talking about his baby son and he had a bunch of photos of his wife that he’d taken at the hospital. I saw one. It was horrible.”

  “What happened?” I wrapped my fingers around Jocelyn’s arm and didn’t let go. Melanie Cheng was the woman Ajay had left crumpled in the street. None of us were ever going to forget her name. Every time I heard it the words felt like a slap. “Did he get to Ajay?”

  She shook her head quickly. “My dad shoved him outside. Mr. Cheng swung at him and pushed him down on the sidewalk, the photos scattered in the wind. He was scrambling around, picking them up and my father shouted, ‘Just go. I won’t call the police if you leave now.”

  “Did he go?”

  Joss sniffled into her hand. “He was crying when he went, I think. From the doorway I could hear him breathing hard.”

  I dropped Jocelyn’s arm, folded both of mine around her shoulders and crushed her into a hug.

  After a few seconds she whispered, “I just want this not to have happened, you know? To go back to the way it was before.”

  Heavy words twisted in my throat. A confession that wouldn’t change anything so why say it? Because she should know, I thought stubbornly. You know you should say something.

  My cheek pressed against Jocelyn’s, two sides of me battled silently, the same side as always winning. The side that said what Ajay did to Melanie Cheng had nothing to do with me and that the before Jocelyn was referring to was the pathway to where this would happen eventually. After all, I’d heard Joss complain her parents were too easy on Ajay countless times over the years. Before the accident they’d rarely said more than a sarcastic word about his late nights out and weekend hangovers. Then he went away to university where Jocelyn suspected he was living it up worse than ever.

  According to her, Ajay was severely bullied all year when he was thirteen—beaten, humiliated and tormented on a near daily basis. In the end his parents had put Ajay into a different school and sent him to a highly recommended therapist, afraid of what he might do if they didn’t throw all their weight into helping him. And it worked, I guess. Ajay had plenty of friends by the time Joss and I started hanging out. It seemed his parents’ gratitude for his change in popularity had blinded them to other problems.

  “I know,” I whispered back, releasing her. “And, you know, maybe Melanie Cheng will make a full recovery. Even the doctors can’t say for sure yet.”

  “Maybe, maybe.” Behind Joss’s brown eyes sprawled mountains of tiredness.

  Neither of us said what we were both thinking, that even in the best case scenario Ajay would still have to serve time. He was going to plead guilty; prison was a done deal. />
  “Can we walk or something?” Joss asked, clearing her throat. “It feels claustrophobic in here. Every time I see your parents I feel like they must be judging me by association.”

  “They’re not,” I insisted. “They’ve known you too long for that.”

  Jocelyn rubbed her eyes and, unconvinced, pressed her lips together so firmly that they disappeared inside her mouth. “Come on then,” I urged, pulling her forward. “We’re going.”

  Outside we huddled together like old women with exhaustingly ancient secrets, trekking towards the midtown coffee place that was Joss’s new favourite. It was funny, Jocelyn’s parents didn’t like the idea of her drinking coffee—as though it was this overly adult thing to do—but before the accident they’d only registered the most minor disapproval when Ajay woke up with a splitting headache after a night out.

  The coffee shop didn’t have a single empty seat and irritation surged through me. Did everyone need to be here as badly as we did? Why couldn’t the universe cooperate and let Joss have the minute distraction of a semi-comfortable wooden chair inside a coffee shop?

  We took our sweet coffees to go, wandering into a drugstore for no other reason than to kill the minutes she would’ve spent thinking about Ajay and Melanie Cheng someplace else. In the makeup aisle I pulled out lipstick after lipstick, smearing the colours onto my hand and holding them up for her approval.

  “You do realize every one you pick up looks exactly like the shades you already own,” she said, reaching into her purse to fiddle with her phone.

  “I can’t help it. I’m the same me every time I look at lipstick.”

  “Yeah.” Joss chewed her coffee cup. “Sorry. I’m just not in the mood.” We both heard her phone beep and her hair fell forward as she turned her attention back towards it, her spine slumping. “I have to go. Family meeting.”