Love is Hell

by Marr, Melissa

  Paige says she does, but she doesn’t really. “Do you . . . do you have another girlfriend or something?” She stumbles a bit over the word girlfriend: the lovely newness of it. Aaron sighs. He takes her hands in his. “Of course not.”

  She pulls away from him. “You don’t tell me anything about yourself really.”

  “I want to tell you everything, but I can’t. . . . It could hurt people other than myself.”

  “Your family?”

  He nods. “If I tell you and you tell anyone, I’ll have to leave here. As much as it will kill me, I’ll leave and I won’t even be able to say goodbye.”

  “You can trust me,” she says.

  “I . . . I really don’t like to talk about these things.”

  “You don’t have to, then,” she says. “But I just want you to know that you can trust me.”

  He looks at her and nods slowly. “I think maybe I can.”

  Paige’s father calls from downstairs. “Dinner!”

  “I should go anyway,” Aaron says.

  Paige doesn’t know if he means permanently or just for a couple of hours. She grabs his hands. They are dry, almost papery. “Promise me you’ll come back. I want so much to know your story. I want to know everything about you.”

  “I’ll try.” He slips out of Paige’s house through the window.

  “Dinner!” Paige’s father calls again.

  “Coming,” Paige says.

  Paige goes downstairs to the kitchen. They are eating macaroni and cheese, which means it’s Tuesday. Paige’s father has a dish for each of the six days of the week. On Sundays, he orders pizza.

  “I’ve been calling you for about ten minutes. Didn’t you hear me?” Paige’s father asks.

  “Just reading,” Paige says absently.

  “Must be some book,” her father comments.

  As soon as dinner is over, Paige rushes back up to her room, but Aaron isn’t there. She busies herself for several hours with the schoolwork she’s been neglecting, but he still doesn’t come. Eventually, she decides to curl up with a novel in bed, but before she’s even read a chapter, she falls asleep.

  She is still sleeping when she becomes aware of someone whispering in her ear. She reaches for the light, which her father must have turned off.

  “No,” Aaron says, “some stories are easier told in the dark.”

  When he was seventeen, there was a tuberculosis outbreak in his town. His father was the first to get it, and fewer than six weeks later, his father was the first to die. Despite herself, Paige wonders, People still die of TB?

  His whole family—Aaron, his sister, and his mother— got TB, too. “I honestly can’t describe it,” he says. “It was horrible. To see someone you love die slowly and painfully, and then to know that soon, you will die the same way.”

  His sister died about a week after his father. And he and his mother knew that it wouldn’t be long for them, either. “There’s a strange sort of quiet when you’re dying,” he says.

  “It’s as if you’re in a glass room, and the walls keep getting thicker and thicker.”

  Paige tries to take his hand. She wants to touch him, to comfort him. Between her drowsiness and the low light, though, she can’t quite find him. Lacking other options, his mother went to see a gypsy in town. A gypsy? Where in the world was this town? Medieval Europe? “A gypsy?” Paige asks softly.

  “My mother did the best she could,” Aaron says. “It was a different place. A different time.”

  The gypsy gave her a peacock-blue glass jar shaped like an inkwell. She claimed that inside was an elixir from a spring in Mexico and that it would heal them. What choice did they have? They crossed themselves and drank deeply. “Our lungs cleared instantly,” he says. “The glass walls were shattered.”

  But it didn’t just heal them.

  They have lived in fifty different towns. His mother has been married twelve times. She gets a new husband every time the old one starts to suspect. Aaron has had girlfriends.

  “Many,” he says, which makes Paige cringe.

  Aaron has had many girlfriends, but they all eventually outgrow him. He was born in 1876. He will be seventeen years old for the rest of his life. Paige tells him that she doesn’t believe in fantasy stories, that if he didn’t want to go to Homecoming with her, he should have just said so.

  “I would never lie to you.” He finds her hand now.

  Her eyes are growing more accustomed to the moonlight.

  He helps her out of bed and moves her so that they are standing side by side in front of her bedroom mirror.

  “Do you see?”

  She shakes her head. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to be seeing and besides, she hasn’t taken her eyes off him.

  “Look in the mirror. I don’t have a reflection. I’m not there.”

  She obeys. Her eyes move from the mirror to him and back again. She runs her hand in front of his face.

  Her hand is reflected. His face is not. It frightens her:

  She looks like she is alone. She looks lonely, and this is something Paige tries never to look.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “I don’t know. It’s just the way it is, the way I am.” He tries to turn it into a sort of a joke.

  “Makes it a bit hard getting ready in the mornings, but I do my best.”

  Then, he takes a Swiss Army knife out of his pocket.

  “What’s the knife for?” Paige squeaks. Her throat always constricts when she is panicking.

  Aaron flips the knife open and moves the blade toward his arm. He punctures his flesh with the blade. For a second, Paige is paralyzed and can do nothing but stare. He carves a J into his arm.

  “Don’t!” Paige finds her voice. “Please don’t! I believe you. You don’t have to prove anything to me.” She tries to stop him, in case the J is merely the beginning of a longer word like “Jealousy” or “Jilted,” but he holds her back.

  “Why would you do that to yourself?” Paige whimpers.

  A second later, the cut begins to heal before her eyes.

  She runs her fingers along his cold, perfect arm, and then she presses her lips to it.

  “I want you to go to your dance, but I can’t be there with you,” he says. “I’ve been to too many before.”

  But never with me, she thinks.

  “You’re different,” he says, “but the dances . . . they’re always the same.”

  She nods. She’s a bit disappointed, but still happy to have been trusted with his story.

  “I really love you,” he says.

  “I really love you, too.”

  They lie down in her bed and after a while, she falls back asleep. When she wakes in the morning, he’s gone.

  If she weren’t so exhausted, she’d probably think the whole night had been a dream. Paige considers not going to the dance at all, but Aaron convinces her to go. “You only have Homecoming once,” he says.

  “Not true in your case,” she points out. “Or mine.

  They’re every year, you know.”

  He laughs a little. “Go,” he says. “I don’t want you to miss things because of me.”

  The truth is she’s more than willing to miss things because of him, but she can’t say that. It would sound needy, clingy, pathetic. Paige hates people like that. “You could still come,” Paige reminds him instead.

  Aaron just shakes his head.

  Paige’s father knocks on the door while she is getting ready. “Come in,” Paige says. Aaron hides behind the side of her bookshelf—Paige isn’t supposed to have boys in her bedroom.

  “You look really beautiful,” her father says. “Who’s the lucky guy?”

  “No one,” Paige says, standing up from her vanity.

  “The boy I wanted to go with couldn’t come, and I wouldn’t settle for anyone else.” She winks at Aaron in the mirror. She can’t see him, but she imagines he can see her. The dance is a dance, which is to say, it’s like every other dance Paige has ever
been to—

  more fun in theory than in execution. Paige’s feet hurt from her shoes, and she wishes she had just spent the night at home curled up with Aaron after all. Toward the end of the evening, Paige runs into April.

  “What happened to your boyfriend?”

  “He couldn’t come.”

  “Guess you should have gone with my brother, then.”

  Paige narrows her eyes. She knows she shouldn’t say anything to April, but she can’t help herself. “Honestly, April, that was never going to happen, so stop embarrassing both of us by bringing it up.”

  When Paige gets home that night, Aaron is waiting for her in her bedroom. He’s wearing a tuxedo. He looks so handsome, she almost wants to die. “I thought we could have our own Homecoming right here,” he says.

  He kisses her and pulls her close to him. Her body trembles.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re real,” she says.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to believe you’re mine.”

  “I think the same thing,” he says.

  “No. I mean, really. You’re just so perfect.”

  Aaron shakes his head. “I’m not. Trust me, I’m not.”

  Paige looks over Aaron’s shoulder and sees what should be hers and Aaron’s reflection in the bedroom mirror.

  The sight disturbs her. Aaron, of course, has no reflection, and it looks as if her arms are wrapped around air.

  .

  "April thinks you don’t really have a boyfriend,”

  Polly reports to Paige the Monday after the dance.

  Aaron is absent that day, so Paige is giving Polly a ride home. Paige laughs. “She’s just pissed because I wouldn’t go to the dance with her freak brother.”

  Polly laughs, too. “But seriously, Paige, you’re being so secretive about this whole thing. Why is it all such a secret?”

  “It just is.”

  Polly shakes her head. “My older sister had a boyfriend like this once.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like not wanting to meet her friends or ever take her out in public and stuff like that. And it turned out he was hurting her.”

  “Aaron’s not like that.”

  “Neither was my sister’s boyfriend at first!”

  “Listen, Polly, you don’t know what you’re even talking about.”

  “Then make me understand. Honestly, I’m worried about you.”

  It’s an odd thing, but Polly’s concern is sort of flattering to Paige. No one’s been that interested in her in years.

  And she has been dying to talk about Aaron with someone.

  So, she swears Polly to secrecy and tells his story.

  Polly is quiet for a long time, and then she does something horrible: she laughs. “Oh, Paige,” she says, “I think he’s playing with you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, seriously! Seriously! A gypsy? It sounds like something from a book. I think he’s telling you a story.

  He probably tells this to every girl he meets. I think he’s just—”

  “SHUT UP! You don’t know anything about it. About him. You just don’t want me to be happy!”

  “Paige, don’t be hurt—”

  Paige stops the car several blocks from Polly’s house.

  “Get out.”

  By the time she pulls into her driveway, Paige’s hands are shaking and she’s out of breath. She needs to see Aaron and touch him, remind herself that he’s real. When she gets into her house, he is waiting for her in her bedroom. He had let himself in through her window.

  “What is it?” he asks.

  “I had a fight with my friend.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says, stroking her hair.

  “Why weren’t you in school today?” Paige asks.

  “My mother’s sick.”

  “I thought your kind couldn’t get sick.”

  “Physically, yes,” he says with a tired sigh. “Mentally, though . . .”

  “I wish I could help you,” Paige says.

  “You are helping me.”

  Paige looks into his violet-silver eyes. She decides that she doesn’t care if he is lying to her. It’s a beautiful lie. He’s a beautiful lie.

  That night, Paige has a nightmare:

  She is in the school library. She is standing in the new books row. And across the room, she sees someone kissing Aaron—it’s Ms. Penn! And then, Polly is kissing him, too. And then April is taking off his shirt. And then all the girls she eats lunch with have their hands all over him.

  Even Paige’s own mother is kissing Aaron, as disgusting as that sounds. Paige calls his name, but he doesn’t seem to hear her at first. He turns to the side to see who is calling him and that’s when she realizes it isn’t Aaron at all.

  It’s just a cardboard cutout version of him. It’s flat and shiny: a life-size paper doll.

  .

  The next day at school, everywhere she goes, she’s not sure, but she thinks she hears people (and especially girls) talking about Aaron and looking at her. She only catches every other word or so, but what she hears sounds something like this: new boy . . . library . . .

  Aaron . . . immortal . . . page . . .

  Paige can barely breathe or walk or speak. It can only be one thing: Polly has told everyone their story, his secret. She doesn’t want to contemplate what this might mean. She goes to find him in their usual spot in the library.

  He’s not there, but Ms. Penn is.

  “Don’t forget about the book club tomorrow. I know for a fact lots of people are coming, and you still have time to finish The Im—”

  “I don’t give a crap about your stupid book club!”

  “Paige, is something wrong?”

  Paige pushes past Ms. Penn and runs out of the library.

  She sneaks out of school and drives back to her house.

  She hopes that he will be in her room waiting for her, but he’s not. Paige gets down on her knees and prays. “Please God let me see him. . . . Please God let me see him. . . . Please God let me see him. . . .”

  She knows she doesn’t deserve him (maybe she never did), but she wants to apologize at least.

  .

  Paige hasn’t slept at all. She shouldn’t go to school, but she does on the off chance that he might be there.

  At lunch, she goes to the library to look for him. The place is unusually noisy and crowded. Oh, right, Paige thinks. Ms. Penn’s crappy book club. She spots Polly, April, and all the girls from their lunch table. Seeing them sitting there makes Paige momentarily forget Aaron. Seeing them with those stupid black books on their stupid skinny laps stirs something almost violent in her. She hates seeing them in the library. What a joke! Like any of them even read anything that’s not for school! The library is her place. And she hates slutty Ms. Penn with her slutty tight sweaters for actually going out of the way to coax these jerks here.

  Ms. Penn waves Paige over as if nothing had happened between them yesterday. “Paige, I’m so glad you came. . . .”

  Paige tells Ms. Penn that she isn’t there for the book club, but rather, to meet someone.

  “I’m sorry. I’ll try to make it to the end, if I can,” Paige says. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees April whispering to Polly. She doesn’t have to hear to know that they are talking about her and Aaron.

  Paige walks to the new books row. It’s empty just like it had been the day before. She rests her hand on the shelf where she had returned The Immortals that first day she met him. Somehow, she believes that if she does the same things from the day she met him, she might just be able to conjure him again. But it doesn’t work. She can’t do the same things anyway, as the library’s copy of that particular book has been checked out. Paige sinks to the ground and rests her head on her knees.

  The only sound in the library is Ms. Penn’s book club, of course. She wishes they would leave.

  She tries to tune them out, but it’s impossible. They’re so damn noisy.

  “Oh, I know,
” she hears one of them saying, “the saddest part was when he was telling about his father getting pneumonia.”

  “No, the saddest part was when he had to leave because everyone knew his secret,”

  another chimes in.

  “No, the saddest part was how lonely she was after he left. . . .”

  “Yeah, but didn’t you think she was kind of pathetic actually? I mean, why would he have even picked someone like her? No one even notices her.”

  “That’s the point, I think. . . .”

  Paige can barely breathe; her pulse races; she feels as if her heart might break. Or stop beating. The nerve of these girls—they’re not even discussing the book. They’re just gossiping about her!

  Paige rises from the ground and runs back to where the book club is meeting. Ms. Penn sees her first. “Paige, join us,” she says.

  “STOP TALKING ABOUT ME!” Paige yells.

  A few of the girls laugh.

  Ms. Penn clears her throat. She stands. “No one was talking about you, Paige.”

  “Yes, you were! I heard you! I’m not deaf!”

  Ms. Penn walks over to Paige. “No, we weren’t. We were just talking about the book.”

  She holds out the library’s copy of The Immortals for Paige to see. “We were just talking about the merits of the main character, Aaron.”

  Paige looks around the book club circle. All the girls stare back at her. Finally, Polly speaks. “I think Paige misunderstood ’cause her boyfriend’s name is also Aaron.”

  “Oh . . .” says Ms. Penn, and then she laughs, relieved.

  “That makes sense!” she says. “Of course, I highly doubt your Aaron is a violet-grayeyed, hundred-fifty-year-old in a seventeen-year-old’s body, right, Paige?”

  The girls laugh their hyena laughs.

  “Stop,” Paige whispers.

  But no one seems to hear.

  “STOP!”

  No one ever hears.

  “STOP MAKING FUN OF ME!”

  They are silent. They are scared. Paige has just crossed the line from amusing freak to could-possibly-have-a-gun, and she doesn’t even care.

  Polly speaks softly. “Wait, I get it. I think I . . . I only started reading the night before and I’m not quite done— sorry, Ms. Penn—but I think I just put it together. That guy you were seeing . . . He borrowed his story from this book, didn’t he?”