The Next Forever

by Lisa Burstein

  I pictured his phone shaking in his backpack as mine rang in my ear, a vibration like someone trying to wake another person from slumber—from a bad dream. Except it wasn’t him who had to wake up from the nightmare, it was me.

  I probably didn’t have any right to really call it a nightmare if it was self-induced.

  It went to voice mail and I heard his message: This is Joe’s phone. He’s not answering, but you can talk after the beep. If he’s not ignoring your call, he’ll call you back.

  It was Joe in recorded form—smart, funny, confident Joe.

  I didn’t leave a message myself, though. It was strange considering that was how we had gotten together. How after my arrest, he had tried to connect to me via my parentally forbidden phone during the time we were across the street from each other but I had still assumed worlds apart.

  Back then, we weren’t even friends anymore. Not like we had been before sophomore year when everything changed. I thought he was mad at me. He thought I was done with him. We talked, but only because we lived across the street from each other.

  But he had been calling me, checking on me, wanting me to know he hoped I was okay. It was all archived on my phone. When I was finally allowed to have it back, Joe’s messages were waiting.

  Each recorded time he reached out, when I didn’t even know he was there. When in real life he and I were too afraid to really talk to each other.

  That was what I needed to be thinking about. Not why I was here with Trevor and was such a shitty girlfriend.

  Maybe not remembering that when he asked me to move in with him was what made me so shitty.

  Not being able to fly across the dining hall table and kiss his lips off was what made me so shitty.

  Hanging up without leaving a message was also what made me so shitty.

  I called back and said quickly, “Thinking about you,” before hitting end.

  In the months before Joe and I arrived here, we were in the perfect bubble between my arrest and now. Our lives back then were only waking up each day and being with each other. It was beautiful.

  And most importantly, simple.

  I remember the two of us in my backyard on my old, rusty swing set. Joe and I would spend hours on those swings not even swinging, but being held up off the ground. The feeling bringing me back to the day we first kissed and kissed again—that weightless, flittering sensation that being on a swing can give.

  Even though the arrest was behind me, we hung out in my backyard because my parents still liked having me near enough to know I wasn’t fucking shit up.

  Shit being my life.

  With Joe in the picture I finally didn’t feel like I was. I actually thought things were starting to make sense, were starting to fit. I probably should have known that continuing to count on someone else to validate my happiness would backfire on me. But at the time, I was too blissed out to care.

  At least until we’d talked about coming here.

  “I wish we could stay like this forever,” I’d said, because I knew that being outside this perfect bubble would change things. I had reasons for my suspicions. The world had pushed us apart for years when I was too bad-girl for him and he was too all-American-boy for me. When we let the choices we made and the people around us dictate how we felt about each other.

  With no one around, with just the two of us, we only had to worry about pleasing one person. Lucky for me, Joe was easy to please, and when it came to him, I was, too.

  “In your parents’ backyard?” Joe had asked, laughing his laugh that had the power to make my stomach float like it did on the swing.

  Being on the swing, I felt it double.

  “Life goes on, Amy,” he’d said.

  I looked at him, his profile turned pink in the sunset. “That’s what I’m worried about,” I’d mumbled.

  “It doesn’t matter where we are. I’ll be there,” Joe had said, taking my hand.

  “What is this, a love song?” I’d asked, even though I held his hand tightly.

  “I don’t think you want me to sing,” he’d said. “But I can,” he added, leaning into my ear and humming, his breath on my neck, making me shiver.

  I’d wanted to believe him. That no matter where we were, this, us, wouldn’t change. With the two of us connected as the swings below us wobbled, I tried to believe him. Unfortunately, I also knew I’d been wrong about a lot of things; the highest on the list resulted in me being arrested.

  He kissed my neck.

  “But we both know what noise can do,” I’d said.

  We did.

  I did.

  The years he avoided me and I avoided him. The years we wasted that we could have spent like we were now. The years that may have led me to an actual prom night I could have celebrated with him, instead of celebrated in a jail cell.

  “I think we’re beyond that,” he’d said, getting up and pulling me out of my swing. He touched my face, his hand still. Somehow when he was with me, close to me, he could get the shaking in his hands to stop. The shaking that started the day his father left, that he hid any way he could.

  He moved his hand over my cheek like water to my thirst, a blanket to my cold. Before I even knew I was thirsty or cold. He kissed me. His kiss that made me want so much I bit his lip. That could only be a kiss because my parents were a kitchen window away. That could and would turn into more later when he snuck into my room that night.

  The other place we could be where we could forget about the rest of the world.

  “I’m scared,” I’d said into his lips. I didn’t say anything else, knowing I didn’t have to explain it to him. That he would know what I meant.

  That maybe he knew what I meant because he was scared, too.

  “We’ll be together,” he’d said, kissing me again, launching me like the swing, up, up, up. Each kiss pushing me higher and higher.

  And we had been, until I was alone in the bathroom at a party having to make myself bother to leave him a message.

  Having to make myself remember why I’d agreed to come here with him in the first place.

  …

  JOE

  I took out my phone: two missed calls from Amy and a message. I would call her back, but not here. This sounded less like a library than a bowling alley did.

  It was odd that she’d called twice, but I also knew she second-guessed herself a lot. To be honest, it was one of the things I loved about her. If she felt like something wasn’t right, she went back and kept trying until it was. I knew she’d called again just to leave the message, and I also knew it would probably say, Sorry I hung up before.

  I watched Emily at the fridge across the room. I didn’t really like talking to Emily about Amy. Amy was mine.

  Finally, mine.

  Or at least she had been.

  Not in a weird, possessive way, but in a how could I not have known that this was what I always needed way. I didn’t want to share her and because of the arrest I hadn’t had to. She didn’t want to be friends with the girls she used to be friends with anymore. She was afraid of other guys because of the ones from her past who only wanted to use her, so she chose me.

  She chose me.

  I hoped Emily, regardless of how semi-naked she was, wouldn’t change that.

  Living across the street from Amy meant that after we got together I could sneak in to her bedroom whenever I wanted, and I did want.

  I would carry a ladder from my garage to her open and waiting-for-me window. The heavy, metal, clunking one my mother never used but made me hoist up every fall to do the gutters. I would lay it against Amy’s house so lightly, so quietly, hoping not to wake her parents, the rest of the neighborhood, but most importantly her.

  I would climb up to her window and push the screen out to be in her room—right across the street from my room. Once inside, I would sit on her bed and touch her face, waiting for her to wake up. Loving the way her lips pouted like she was angry. The way her chest moved up and down, up and down so gently,
her hair growing over her pillow like dark ivy.

  She was Amy.

  The one I’d known since she was six. The one I’d loved since she was ten. The one I hoped I would love until she was one hundred and ten.

  That is, once we both got through the confusion that the freedom and choices of college seemed to be causing for both of us.

  Sleeping in her bed, she was my Amy without the voices in her head that plagued her and made her think she was anything less than the amazingness she was—funny, smart, and so caring.

  When she would finally wake up, the look of fear I saw at first was quickly transformed to recognition and then to love.

  Then to a kiss.

  “Joe,” she would say, her breath minty with toothpaste.

  “It’s me,” I would say. The bed would always squeak while I tried to get comfortable.

  She would say, “Shhh my mom has ears like a Doberman in heat.”

  I would say, “I think your dad sees my ladder every morning.”

  She would laugh and kiss me again.

  AJ, her parrot, brought in from his aviary for the night, would twitter in his cage. And repeat, Joe, Joe, Joe and make kissing noises.

  We would laugh.

  Amy would say, “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  I would say, “How can I with you across the street?” and growl into her neck.

  She would laugh harder. The kind of laugh that made her body fold in on itself as she said, “You’re crazy.”

  I would say, “For you.”

  She would say, “No, just crazy.”

  AJ would repeat crazy, crazy, crazy and fly around his cage.

  In those moments I would know what Amy meant when she said she wished we could stay here forever.

  Except my forever was under her blankets, body to body, breathing like one, sweating and kissing and reaching for each other in the night, kissing her shoulder and her kissing mine.

  And after, her head on my chest, perfectly fit in the crook of my neck, my arms around her in a tight, constant orbit.

  When did that become not enough anymore for either of us?

  Chapter Six

  AMY

  I found Trevor leaning against the wall, alone. In addition to thinking about Joe while I was in the bathroom, I was also thinking about what I could say to Trevor when I saw him again.

  I didn’t do well with being caught off guard, especially with guys, especially especially with hot guys. It wasn’t surprising that being around Trevor made me feel like a mute, drooling freak.

  It could have been that I was out of practice from having spent so much time with Joe, or it could have been that I really was a mute, drooling freak. Regardless, my plan was not to be caught with nothing to say again. I’m glad I didn’t have a pen with me, because I was not beyond writing stuff down on my hand to remember it for later. Anything not to feel like when Trevor looked at me he only saw the words duh and bathroom floating above my head.

  I watched him for a moment, his back tight on the wall—leather to plaster—like the wall was leaning on him. He was so sure of himself, so strong, he probably could have held up the wall.

  I took a deep breath, got my line ready, and walked over.

  “Where’s your date?” I stood next to him and leaned like he was leaning. See, I’m just as confident and sure of myself as you are.

  When he didn’t respond, I lifted one eyebrow.

  “You mean Pete?” he asked, staring into the heart of the room. “Funny,” he said, even though he seemed like he thought it was anything but.

  I didn’t know what to say, again, so I smiled with what anyone around me would probably have referred to as the smile of a deranged homeless woman—wide, unflinching, my teeth desperately holding up my lips so they didn’t collapse into screams.

  “You’ll do anything to deny that you’re my date, huh?” Trevor asked, swishing the beer around in his cup.

  “I’m not your date,” I said, faster than I probably needed to. “I don’t have to deny it.” It was easy to say the words, but I couldn’t swallow and my face felt like I was walking on the surface of the sun. I knew it probably wasn’t working, but I was hoping to show him I wasn’t the kind of girl who said yes to everything.

  I had a backbone. Sure, I didn’t always, but if the arrest gave me anything, it was that. It wasn’t made of jelly and I didn’t want to slide down the wall and sit in a lump on the floor and close my eyes and wish myself into my backyard with Joe.

  Even though of course, I really did.

  I was afraid if I didn’t pretend otherwise, Trevor would keep asking me things he wanted me to say yes to. And eventually one would involve unzipping his jeans.

  “I kind of feel like the more you reject it, the more you wish it could be true.”

  “It has nothing to do with wishing,” I said, remembering that I had been holding a practically full beer all that time. “It can’t be true.” I took a drink. It had gone warm and flat.

  “Because of the boyfriend?” Trevor asked. I could feel him watching my profile, his eyes trying to make contact.

  “What else?” I said, moving nothing but my lips.

  He nodded. “It’s interesting you didn’t say, Who else?”

  “What, are you studying rhetoric or something?” The music was still so loud my throat was starting to hurt from shouting. I took another drink of warm beer. It made me gag.

  “No, I study people,” he said. “I don’t need a class to do it.”

  “Lucky me,” I said, realizing that all along, this was really what he had been doing. It might have felt like his eyes were stapled to me because he couldn’t look away, because I was just that irresistible, but really it had more to do with the fact that he was trying to figure me out. Figure out why I’d even agreed to go to the party with him if I had such a serious boyfriend.

  Just like I was. The belief that it was because Joe had asked me to move in with him was becoming a flimsier and flimsier excuse.

  I looked at Trevor’s boots. They were scuffed like he’d kicked the crap out of someone with white paint all over him.

  “I’ve seen you watching me,” he said. “I like being watched, especially by a girl like you.”

  “Oh, a bad girl?” I joked.

  He sighed and I saw something change in his eyes, almost like they were melting from the ice they had been. “Someone who doesn’t need to wear a paper hat.” He looked down, suddenly vulnerable. I understood what he was saying. He meant someone who was better off than he was.

  Why did everybody always seem to care about that?

  Maybe because they had to and I never did.

  “I’ve never worn a paper hat, but I’ve worn a hairnet,” I said, suddenly seeing the part of him he’d tried so hard to hide with his leather jacket and too-long bangs. The part he was trying to hide with his bad boy.

  “That definitely sucks, but you haven’t had to wear one here.”

  “Yet.” I laughed.

  “You like slumming, bad girl?” he asked, leaning closer.

  I could see that whatever part of him he’d exposed to me, he’d buttoned up just as quickly with slick words.

  I had been watching him. I couldn’t help it and he couldn’t help but notice it and Joe couldn’t help but not notice it.

  But I was starting to realize that maybe it wasn’t me watching him, it was the old Amy, the one I thought I’d left behind when I said yes to Joe. It was like she was locked in a tiny room inside me and she was knocking, screaming from the inside of it.

  I was also starting to realize that leaving her behind really had nothing to do with Joe. It was just easier to blame that on him. It had been my choice, to be healthy and to let go of her. To finally stop being afraid of being myself, but she was crafty. She knew better than to let me actually be happy. It would mean she would be gone forever.

  Trevor put his hand just next to me. Not touching but so close to touching my waist. It was like he wanted me to know he was
adhering to my boundaries while at the same time making it obvious he wanted to break them down—wanted me to tell him to break them down. It made me wonder if he had asked me to come to the party just to see what he could get away with. I knew most guys lived by this mantra, but I guess I’d forgotten, because Joe wasn’t one of those guys.

  I took a long drink, finishing my beer. My stomach filling with liquid, my cheeks filling with heat, I almost spit the whole thing out it was so warm.

  “Want another?” he asked, his hand still there.

  “I don’t think I should,” I said, even though I’d practically drunk the plastic insides along with the cup when I was slugging it down.

  “You don’t think you should, or you don’t want to? Those are two different things.”

  He was right. So right that with those words he had completely described this weird two-sided being I felt like I had turned into. Did I want to be this good girl I’d become for Joe, or did I think I wanted to be her? Was that why I couldn’t just say yes to moving in with him? Or was it really because I was afraid to finally leave my bad-girl shield behind and just be the real me with someone?

  With someone who had actually seen her and loved her.

  With Joe.

  “I don’t want to,” I said, the first thing it felt like I had actually been sure of that night. If I had another beer, it was bound to put me on the path of doing things I didn’t want to do, things that after my other beer wouldn’t be nearly as easy to say no to.

  We were interrupted by the sound of hoots and hollers. Two girls were dancing with each other in the center of the room—tight jeans, tighter T-shirts, their bodies slithering like the worms that come out on the sidewalk after a rainstorm. Guys stood around them chanting, “Kiss, kiss, kiss.”

  “Give me a break,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  “What?” Trevor said. “They’re just having fun.”

  “They’re trying to,” I said. “It’s the guys around them I’m talking about.”