The Me That I Became

by Christopher Harlan

  It’s time to fight for what I want, and one thing that I’ve known with perfect clarity through all of my bullshit is that I want Brandon. I want him more than anything else. I may have crossed a line with him that can’t be uncrossed, but that’s why I’m here. I finally find the D building on this maze of a campus after a few twists and turns, and I park out in the middle of a giant lot that seems miles away from the actual building. I remember this from my undergrad days. I can’t believe I did this all the time. By the time I reach the building I’m practically sweating.

  I looked up his class schedule to make sure I had the right day and time. Brandon’s Introduction to American Literature course is scheduled from 12:15-2:45, and I when I check my phone I see that it’s 2:30. The class is scheduled in one of those giant lecture halls like you see on all TV shows. I find the room and sneak in, quietly, while Brandon is still lecturing. I’m sitting in the back row with a bunch of kids who look like they graduated high school last night. The smell of weed back here is almost overwhelming, and everyone is on their phone. Is this what college was like, and I just forgot? I feel like I went to class with, you know, notebooks and pens and stuff.

  Brandon can’t see me. I’d be a dot to him from this far away, and I slump down in my seat behind this giant of a kid to make sure I stay invisible, but I can hear. Brandon’s voice is powerful, and it carries all the way to the back of the lecture hall. Even in the midst of this drama between us, it’s really sexy to hear him lecturing to a room full of people. I peek out from behind the giant kid to steal a glance. I can just barely make him out, but even at this distance he cuts a striking figure, tall as day.

  Fifteen minutes comes and goes quickly—not that these kids would even notice, they all seem zombified on Instagram and Snapchat, or just texting each other from across the room. This is the future of America, huh? Brandon dismisses the class right on time, and as everyone disperses, a few students stay behind and surround him, talking about whatever you talk to a professor about after a class is over.

  I lay back, trying to be discreet so that he doesn’t see me and get distracted. After his little group vanishes, one by one, he looks up, expecting one last student, only he sees me instead. He looks surprised—very surprised. I know this is a sneak attack, and on some level, I hate forcing a conversation on him when he clearly needs some space, but I also need to know where we stand on things.

  “I don’t know about them, but I, for one, was really into it.” My attempt at humor falls flat, with him not smiling at all, and the smile I’d hoped would be contagious rapidly fading from my face. “Sorry. I needed to see you.”

  “I see that.”

  “Can we talk? Like, really talk. I don’t have it in me to fight again.”

  I know that he doesn’t have any other classes scheduled today, so if he refuses me I know that he really doesn’t want to see me. “Walk with me. I have to stop by my office and pick up some papers that were due today.”

  It’s not much, but it’s not a no. “Yeah, let’s walk.”

  Brandon gathers his stuff, grabbing his briefcase and materials and leading the way out of the lecture hall. He looks really good dressed up. He’s wearing a blazer, dress pants, and a dress shirt. The fact that he looks so good makes this even harder. I wish he’d speak to me the way I’m used to him speaking to me, but he’s hardly making eye contact, and he seems less than thrilled to see me. Outside of the building there are a sea of students transitioning from one class to another, walking in all directions and making a lot of noise. Brandon walks fast, and I have to move my little legs faster than normal just to keep up.

  I follow him to his office, which is two buildings away from the D building. Still not a word to me. He doesn’t ask why I came, or what I want, he just does his business with me following behind him like a puppy. I guess this is my punishment. I don’t care, I didn’t expect this to be easy, so I just follow along as he grabs a stack of papers from his mailbox, briefly speaks to a student who’s waiting for him outside of the building. After all that I follow him through the parking lot to his car.

  “Listen, I don’t even know where to begin, Brandon. Saying that I’m sorry doesn’t really cover it. I know that I shouldn’t have lied to you, I just didn’t know. . .”

  “Didn’t know what?” he asks, sounding annoyed like he did last night, only a little less so.

  “Didn’t know what to say to you when I first met you.”

  “So instead of just introducing yourself, or telling me your favorite flavor of ice cream, you decided to invent a mentally ill brother, and then keep up the lie the entire time we’ve been together?” When he says it like that it sounds horrible. It is horrible, but hearing it laid out like that, from his mouth, makes his anger completely valid. I still haven’t told him about me. Right now, he thinks I just made up a story to get to know him. I should tell him the whole truth, because that would explain that it wasn’t just a frivolous lie, and that I’m not a liar just for its own sake. But is this how I’m going to do it? Confessing all of my darkest secrets in a parking lot in the middle of the afternoon, surrounded by twenty-year-olds going to their next class?

  “Look, I messed up, okay? I realize that. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but that was the only thing I made up. I’m not some pathological liar, Brandon. Everything between us is real. Everything that happened really happened. That was all real.” He keeps messing with his bag, finding things to do to avoid looking at me. I put my hand on his, stopping him from avoiding me, and he finally looks at me. This time his sad eyes are back. I guess he used up his angry eyes last night. “Talk to me. Please. Say something. Anything.”

  “Get in. I need to show you something.”

  He doesn’t explain, just opens up his passenger side door and asks me to get in one more time. I sit down, not sure exactly what’s going on. He gets in and we start driving, and I’m totally confused. “Where are we going?”

  “Somewhere that’ll explain everything I need to explain to you.”

  His words are ominous, and I’m unsure of where we’re headed, but I still trust him. The university fades into the distance as we drive to I don’t know where.

  Chapter Twenty

  We’ve been driving for twenty minutes and part of me thinks he’s just messing with me. The really dark part of my brain starts living some horror movie fantasy—the one where this pleasant drive ends with me in a duffle bag and Brandon having been some serial killer all along. I know that’s not going to happen, but he is acting really strange. I expected him to maybe yell at me, or tell me to get away from him, or even to ignore me, but I never saw an uncomfortable, silent drive to who-knows-where in my future when I left the house this morning.

  We’re a town over, in a quaint little residential part of the neighboring area. I’ve been here before, passing through, but I’ve never stopped. It’s a cute area, lot of stores and public parks, and there are young couples with kids all over the place. I don’t know why we’re here, but Brandon puts on his right-hand signal and pulls to the side in front of an old apartment building and puts the car in park. “We’re here,” he says. “Come with me.”

  I’m still getting the horror movie vibe from the way he says that without even looking at me, and without bothering to explain where we are or what we’re doing here. I get out and wait on the corner for him to come around the other side of the car. He waves at me to follow him into the apartment complex. It’s a nice but nondescript building, about ten floors high, with cool, modern architectural styles on the outside. It looks like the kind of place I might live if I were a few years younger and needed a nice bohemian apartment in an up-and-coming part of town.

  I follow Brandon without question because I trust him. I trust him more than maybe anyone I know. I don’t think he’s actually going to harm me. I think that he has something to tell me or show me, and this is his way of doing it. I owe it to him to see how this is going to unfold. We get in the elevator and he pushes
the button for the sixth floor, still not a word spoken since we got out of the car. The ding signals the opening of the elevator, and we make a sharp left, down a long hallway until we’re standing outside of room 612. I finally decide to ask, “Where are we?”

  “You’ll see in a minute.”

  I’m expecting him to knock on the door, or to ring the bell, but instead he takes a key from his keychain and puts it in the lock. Is this his place? I’ve never seen his apartment before. We always either meet somewhere, or chill at my place. He’s stayed over a few times, but he’s never invited me over or told me about where he lives. That suddenly strikes me as really strange, even though we’ve been dating a little while.

  The door opens to a fully furnished apartment. It’s small, but nice. “Come in,” he says, and I follow him inside. I hear the door close behind me as I take a few more steps inside. The first thing I notice as I scan the room is that it has a decidedly female touch to it. It doesn’t exactly scream bachelor pad. There aren’t piles of clothes lying around, or dirty dishes filling the sink. Even the décor is obviously more female than male to me—everything from the patterns on the upholstery, to the type of art hanging on the walls.

  I turn around and he’s standing behind me, his face drawn and pale, his eyes sad. I’m going through a thousand scenarios in my head, but nothing is making sense. I really wish he’d stop all this and start talking to me. Whatever he needs to tell me he needs to tell me now or I’m going to. . .

  “Why don’t you have a look around,” he tells me.

  “Brandon, I know that I’m not in a position right now to say anything bad, but you’re being super weird, and I . . .”

  “It’s over there that I want you to see. In the bedroom on the right. Trust me. I don’t mean to be weird. I just need to show you so that you understand.”

  His words are cryptic, but his tone is sincere, and I can give him another few minutes of this odd experiment to see what’s going on. I turn around and walk down the hallway and into the bedroom. I step inside, Brandon following me in and hitting the light switch so that we can see. He opens the shades, letting in enough sunlight for me to see. It’s a woman’s bedroom, clearly well-kept, and very clean. I walk over to the side of the bed and stand by the edge. On the nightstand next to me there’s a picture frame. When I look over I see a family—two older parents, a younger girl who looks like she’s in her twenties, and Brandon. It’s then that I realize where I am. Oh my God, this. . .

  “This is where it happened,” he says. “Right there.” He’s pointing at the bed and he looks more emotional than he did when we first came in. “This is where she died.”

  “This is your sister, Alexa’s apartment, isn’t it?” He nods his head, and all of a sudden, I don’t need him to say anything else. I don’t know how I know what he’s going to tell me, but before he even speaks to me I give him a hug. I feel his body shaking as he sobs, and then he stops himself, as if he’s embarrassed. I know the rest of this story without it even being told. “How did she do it?”

  He pulls away from me so that he can talk, and then he sits on the bed, next to the picture of his family. “The time she was successful it was pills. A whole bottle. She waited until she knew I’d be out for a while. I still remember saying goodbye to her. I didn’t realize that I was saying goodbye forever.” He starts sobbing again, almost uncontrollably. I’m not sure what to do except to hold him, even though he’s so much bigger than me. The wail he lets out is something so painful that I suddenly forget everything that happened between us, and I forget all of my own pain. All I want to do is comfort him right now.

  “Hey, hey, hey,” I say, holding him as tightly as I can. “You don’t have to tell me about this if it’s too painful. I understand.”

  “No,” he says, getting his composure back for a second. “You don’t. Not entirely.” He sits up and gets a tissue from the bedside. We sit in silence for what seems like a minute, and when he’s gotten himself together he starts to tell me everything. “I realized this morning that I wasn’t really angry with you last night. I mean, I was—I still am on some level, at least that you would lie to me like that.”

  “Brandon, I. . .”

  “Let me finish. I’m a little angry about your lie, but really what the whole situation did was remind me of my own guilt. And I have a lot of it.”

  “Guilt about what?”

  “For starters, I lied to you, too. When I met you, I told you I was buying that stupid book for my sister. God, how fucked up was that? I think in my own crazy mind I was actually telling you the truth. My twisted version of it, anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ever since Alexa died I’ve been collecting books. Self-help, books on mental illness, even fiction that deals with the subject. Anywhere I go where there’s a bookstore I pick one up and read it, cover to cover.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “I don’t even know. Maybe it’s my way of learning from my own mistakes. Learning about the disease that took my sister from me. Trying to learn what I could have done to help her. Maybe I just like torturing myself, I don’t know.” As I listen to him I literally feel his pain. I start to imagine him, sad and lonely after his sister’s suicide, collecting books and reading them in his place. It makes me want to cry. “Like keeping this place. Just another form of torture.”

  “You pay the rent on this apartment?” I ask.

  “For the past four years. Not alone, though, I could never afford the rent on two places. My parents send me a check every month on the first of the month. We haven’t actually spoken since the funeral.”

  “What?” I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I thought my family was screwed up. Here I was, pissing and moaning over my own situation, assuming that Brandon was from this perfect family because he’s such a great person, but I guess you never really know someone’s situation. “Your parents haven’t spoken to you in four years?”

  “The last thing they said to me at the funeral was, ‘I can’t believe you let this happen.’”

  Holy shit. I want to wrap my arms around him again and make him feel better, but I don’t have magic hands like him. I don’t have electricity that cures things in my hands like he does. I just have poison. “Brandon, I don’t even know what to say right now.”

  “I know I’m throwing a lot at you, and I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be weird, but when I saw you show up today I knew that there was no way to just blurt this all out over coffee. I had to show you, and I had to apologize to you.”

  “Apologize to me? Brandon, no.”

  “I get it, you lied. I’m not mad about that. I’m mad at myself. You were just trying to start up a conversation that related to me. Your lie was innocent. Mine was worse. Much worse. You invented a person in your lie—I resurrected the dead.”

  I’m not even sure where to go with all of this. There’s so much to unpack here—about Brandon and me, about him and his family, about his own feelings of guilt. I don’t even know if I’m equipped to help him, but I know that I’m going to try. “Why do you keep this place?”

  “To remember her. To remember my own mistakes as a brother. To repent.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I wouldn’t expect you to, Talia. I’m glad that you don’t. The kind of guilt that comes with a loved one taking their own life is indescribable. Literally. There are no words, no metaphors, no series of sentences I could string together to make you understand what it does to a person to know that they couldn’t stop a loved one from killing themselves. So, I guess part of me thinks that I deserve to be punished, to be reminded of what could have been. I need to pay for my sins.”

  It’s crazy to hear him talking like this. His guilt is so bad that he’s behaving in weird and terrible ways just to make sure his wounds never heal. This was the last thing I would have expected when we were driving over here. But I need to be here for him as much as I can. I start to think of comforting words, if those even exis
t. I run through a series of sentences in my head, all of them variations on a theme—it’s not your fault, you couldn’t have stopped this, don’t feel guilty. Generic and stupid. Lines you’d read in one of the books he collects. Useless frippery. I know what needs to be said, only this time I don’t hesitate at all.

  “When I was twenty-three I tried to kill myself.”

  There.

  I’ve never said that out loud. It’s never been spoken about. It’s my real dirty little secret.

  “What?” He looks at me with complete disbelief in his eyes. “What are you talking about?”

  Now it’s time for the truth. The whole truth. Whatever happens to him and me from here doesn’t matter. Maybe we’re too messed up to be together. Maybe we’re the answers to each other’s worst nightmares. I have no idea. All I know is that deep in my heart I love Brandon, and more than wanting him to know that, he needs to know that he’s not alone.

  “At my mom’s house, no less. That’s when things started to go really bad for us. She wasn’t ever that bad or that cruel when I was growing up, she just never understood me—never understood the kind of. . . issues that I suffer from. In fairness, it was more of a cry for help attempt. If I’d truly wanted to die I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you right now, I’d be in the ground like my Nana.”

  “Talia. . . why? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “That I suffer from depression? That I have anxiety so bad sometimes that I can’t leave the house? Because I was ashamed. Because I didn’t want you to think I was some crazy girl. Because I don’t really know how to accept who I am.”

  Now it’s his turn to look at me sympathetically. I have to laugh at the irony of this situation. It’s a dark laugh. “Why are you smiling?”

  “Not because I’m happy, or because this is funny, but just think about how strange this is. We met over a book about mental health that we each wanted to read. We both lied to each other right from the start because we were embarrassed about our pasts, but we probably are the two people in the world most equipped to understand what the other has gone through on some level. Think about how crazy that is.”