by Ariel Kaplan
He nodded and moved sideways to allow Bethany and me to go through. “Wait,” she said, once we were on the other side. “That’s it?”
“Yep.”
“Seriously? You just tell him you want a burrito and he lets you out?”
“Yep. Come on, I’m hungry.”
We walked the three blocks to Taco Bell in companionable silence. Finally, I said, “I’m sorry, by the way. Again. About the thing with Greg. You were right. I should have told him. I should have let you tell him. I don’t know.”
“I wish you’d just told me you’d been talking to him. You really should have.”
I said, “Yeah. I know.”
She kicked a rock along the sidewalk. I wondered how she was taking notes with her broken finger. I said, “You broke your hand for me.”
She said, “You broke your face for me.”
“To be fair, I actually didn’t mean to.”
“Yeah, well. Me either.”
We walked some more. I wanted to make an excuse, because at the time, everything I’d done had seemed so reasonable. I’d made sure Bethany and Greg were happy, and I was just trying to subsist on Bethany’s romantic bread crumbs, because I thought I could get away with that. I thought maybe it was the best I could do. I thought I could do that and still be a good person.
But the fact was, I hadn’t been a good person with a crappy face. I’d been a bad person with a crappy face. I’d told so many lies. I’d become such a shitty friend just so I could get some tiny scrap of what I wanted. Because what other way was there for me to be loved than from deep inside Bethany’s shadow?
That didn’t make it right, though.
“It’s just,” I said. “You don’t know what it’s like. You don’t know what it’s like when you know—you know—nobody’s ever going to love you.”
Bethany’s face crumpled a little. “You think I don’t know what that’s like? Are you…?” She snuffled and let out a sob or a laugh or both.
“What are you—”
“Aphra. Nobody wanted me around. Nobody ever wanted me around.”
“That isn’t true!”
“It is true. Do you know what it’s like to be eight years old and have nobody want you? My dad left. My mom and my brother barely talked to me. The kids at school called me a weirdo. I had no one, Aphra, no one.”
She pushed the button for the WALK sign at the crosswalk. “I used to, like, hover on the edge of people’s conversations. And then they’d give me this look like What do you want? So I’d leave, because you have to leave, you know? Nobody wanted me around! Do you know what that’s like?”
“Bethany—”
“And then there you were! And you were so obnoxious, and you just started talking and talking and talking, and you didn’t even care if I said anything back! You just kept going, like we were best friends. I thought you’d be gone the next day, but you weren’t. You saved me a seat at lunch.”
“Nobody wanted to sit by me anyway.”
“Stop. You saved me a seat. You wanted me there. You wanted me around. Don’t you get it? Nobody wanted me around before you. So don’t tell me I don’t understand what it’s like when no one loves you. You feel like…like everything inside you is hollow. Like the place where you’re supposed to feel loved or wanted, it’s just empty and it hurts like hell.” She wiped her face on her arm. “I can’t believe we’re talking about this in the Taco Bell parking lot. I’m sorry, too.”
“What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything!”
“Yeah, but maybe I did. What you said on the bus, you were right. I think I lean on you too hard. It’s just, you’re so…”
“Sturdy?”
“Well. Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
We moved out of the way of a mom getting lunch for her four little kids. Bethany said, “Did you really want that burrito?”
“I kind of did,” I said. “Actually.”
“Okay. Except I just remembered I didn’t bring any money.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I’ve got you.”
We went inside and through the line, and I got burritos for me and Officer Barry, and Bethany got three chalupas because apparently beating the shit out of someone burns a lot of calories and she was starving. At our table, I watched her eat the first one and then the second one. My face hurt, which made eating my burrito hard, so I had to cut it with my fork.
“I can’t believe it’s only Monday,” she said.
Monday. That was right, it was. At least there wasn’t practice after school. After therapy, I could go home and lie down for the rest of the night.
“Hey,” I said. “Do you want to, like, come to therapy with me today?”
“What? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Do you want to come?”
“To see Dr. Pascal? What would we talk about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe about how we could, like, I don’t know. Be better friends?”
“You’re my best friend.”
“Not better friends like that. But maybe how we could both, I don’t know. Need each other less. A little less. Or…or we could talk about something else. If you want.”
“Is that even allowed? If I just show up?”
“Sure. I’m the one paying her. Well…I’m not, but it’s my session, so.”
“Okay.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I’ll go today.”
* * *
—
Back at school, I slid into my app design class and did my best not to make eye contact with anyone. We spent the class talking about how to convert apps between platforms, and then when the bell rang Mr. Positano said, “Aphra, stay a minute, please.”
I reluctantly hung back.
“So,” he said once everyone was gone. “I had another look at your Deanna app.”
I nodded. I was tired and my face hurt and I wanted to go home.
“What I concluded was that you did the work, or you tried to. It was just too ambitious a project.”
“Story of my life,” I said.
“The fact is, if you’d turned it in and told me what was wrong with it, I would have given you at least a B. Why didn’t you come to me in the first place?”
“Because it should have worked. If nobody had messed with it, it would have been fine. And I thought—I thought if you saw how it was giving out porn links and stuff, you’d flunk me. So I just…faked it. I didn’t know what else to do. I guess I panicked.”
“You know that was cheating?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I know.”
He flipped through the pages. “I read through these responses a little more carefully after our talk the other day,” he said. “I probably should have guessed that these couldn’t have been written by a real AI. They were pretty personal. And from what Greg was saying, it sounded like this went on for a while after you turned in the project.”
I said, “Yeah.”
For a second, he actually looked sympathetic. “For what it’s worth,” he said, “I do actually remember what it’s like to be seventeen and screw up.”
I closed my eyes. “I pretended to be my best friend so I could talk online to her boyfriend.”
“That is pretty bad. Why did you do that?”
“My superego overwrote my id,” I said. I shook my head. “Actually, I’m already in therapy once a week talking about this, so if you don’t mind, I’d rather not rehash the whole thing.”
“Fair enough,” he said. “But I also remember what it’s like to be seventeen and screw up and have that screwup turn into an avalanche.” He bent down to catch my eye and smiled. “I believe you’re more than this mistake. As for your project,” he went on, “it just so happens that I’m teaching this class again over the summer, and I may have made an i
nquiry into whether someone could take this class for credit recovery, and the answer may have been yes.”
“Credit recovery?”
“It means you take the class over, and your F gets wiped out and replaced with whatever grade you earn over the summer.”
But I was supposed to be working this summer. At crew camp. I’d been looking forward to it, especially now that Bethany wasn’t mad at me anymore. We stay in these cabins near this beautiful river and it’s really fun and there are s’mores. “But,” I said.
“Does that not seem fair to you?”
“No, it’s extremely fair. I just…I’ll have to figure out how to do it.”
“Well, you’re going to have to think about that.” He smiled. “Let me know what you decide.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay. Thanks, Mr. P.”
* * *
—
When Bethany and I got to Dr. Pascal’s office, I realized she hadn’t heard the story about me getting punched, because she’d been eating her yogurt and she dropped her spoon. “Hey,” I said. “So this is Bethany, she came today.”
I saw Dr. Pascal’s eyes go from my face to Bethany’s messed-up hand and knew immediately what she was thinking.
“She’s not the one who hit me,” I said. “She’s the one who saved me.”
I sat down on the couch, took six mints out of the bowl, and handed three to Bethany, who said to Dr. Pascal, “It’s nice to meet you.”
“It’s nice to meet you, too,” Dr. Pascal said. “I hear you’re a really great friend.”
The summer seemed long without Bethany there for six weeks.
While she was off rowing, I spent my mornings in summer school and most of my afternoons watching Kit while my dad worked on his medieval tax documents, Mom worked on some article about early English novels, and Delia went to her internship.
I hadn’t ultimately needed surgery on my nose, so once my black eyes faded, I was left looking the way I’ve always looked, no better and no worse.
I did, however, move my Russian 101 class up to the summer session, so on Monday and Wednesday evenings, I went off to NOVA to be in a class with about thirty other people who wanted to learn Russian. It was weird being the youngest one there; lots of the students were the same age as my parents or even older. And it turns out that Russian is actually a lot harder than Latin, which had always been pretty easy for me. On my first test, I got a C and thought about dropping the class, but my parents talked me out of it.
I saw Greg when I was at the pool with Kit a couple of times. When Kit skinned his knee one day, Greg was the one who put a Band-Aid on it while I stood awkwardly off to one side. My bikini had been relegated to the dustbin of history (which is to say, I threw it out and hoped everyone else forgot it existed), and I was back in the comfort of my red one-piece.
“Hey,” he said after, when Kit had run off to play Uno with his friends because it was break. “You don’t have to be like that. Like, you don’t have to pretend you don’t know me.”
I made a circle on the concrete with my toe. “I was trying to give you some space,” I said.
He smiled at me as if to say, And yet, here you are.
I said, “Yeah, I know, sorry, I know it’s weird that I keep coming here, but my brother’s friends all go to this pool, and—”
“It’s fine,” he said. “You can go wherever you want.”
“Oh. Okay, yeah. So are you…are you done with that poetry project you were working on?”
“The independent study? Not yet. I think maybe three more weeks. It’s taking longer than I thought it would.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve actually been taking Russian this summer.”
“At NOVA?”
“Yeah, just the 101 class.”
“With Pavlova or Rodin?”
“Rodin. It’s kind of harder than I thought it’d be.”
“Yeah, there’s a big learning curve in the beginning.” He picked up the first-aid kit and stood. “See you.”
“Bye.”
I went back to sit on my chair and work on my Russian conjugations.
Люблo
Лбишь
лбит
I looked up and Greg was standing next to my deck chair. “Hi,” I said. “Again.”
He looked over my shoulder and pulled the pencil out of my hand, changing Люблo to Любл. “There,” he said. “ ‘I love.’ ”
“Oh. What did I write?”
“Nothing, it wasn’t a word.”
I shouldn’t say this. I shouldn’t say this. “I miss talking to you.”
“Yeah. Me too.” He shaded his eyes with his hand. “A lot. Actually. I kind of hate you for that.” He rubbed his temple like he was thinking of what to say next. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”
The answer was so hard. I didn’t have a good one. “I…I guess I was being selfish and selfless at the same time, and it just kind of turned into a mess. I don’t have an excuse.” I closed my eyes. “I’ve made so many mistakes.”
Some kids were doing cannonballs off the diving board, and the girl in the chair was yelling at them to go one at a time.
Greg said, “You said ‘Я вас любилa.’ ”
I loved you. I closed my eyes and nodded. “Yeah, I did.”
“любилa. You loved. Past tense. So not anymore.”
I didn’t answer. He said, “Aphra.”
“I’m trying to decide what answer doesn’t make things worse.”
“The truth,” he said, “wouldn’t make things worse.”
I opened my eyes. “It isn’t ‘любилa.’ ” I sighed. “Not ‘I loved.’ ‘I love.’ I’d give you the future tense, too, but we haven’t learned it yet.”
“любить,” he said. I will love.
I swallowed and said, “I should probably write that down, thanks.”
Greg sat down on the edge of the chair next to mine. He said, “You were wearing this red shirt.”
“What?”
“That day, in health class. It said This shirt normalizes menstruation.” He laughed. “I thought it was so gross.”
I remembered the shirt. Mostly I wore it to annoy Delia. “What day are we talking about?”
His face colored a little. “The day I gave you the Heimlich. You probably don’t even remember.”
“No,” I said. “No, I remember.”
He looked away. “I never put my arms around a girl before that.”
I stared at him, not speaking. He said, “You were wearing that stupid shirt, and you told off that guy, what was his name?”
“Kieran.” Only I actually hadn’t told him off. Greg had.
“Kieran, right. I thought you were going to put him through a wall, but then I thought, This is what a girl feels like.”
My own arms were wrapped around myself. “Sorry if I traumatized you,” I said.
“Would you shut up?”
I pressed my lips together and looked away.
“Anyway, I guess I had a crush on you after that. For a while.”
“A. A while.”
His eyes met mine. “A while,” he repeated. He got up and said, “If I don’t go up in the stand, Shannon’s going to kill me.”
“Okay,” I said. “Bye.”
“I don’t forgive you.”
“Okay,” I said. “I deserve that.”
“I’m still really, really mad.”
“Yeah.”
“I probably won’t ever forgive you.”
I nodded.
“Fuck it,” he said, and he stepped forward and put a hand on either side of my face and leaned down and kissed me.
It wasn’t slow or soft. It was so unanticipated that I hadn’t even been able to prepare myself
for it. I just thought, Greg D’Agostino is on my mouth, and kind of froze up, and then I thought, Greg D’Agostino is on my mouth, and then I realized I was missing out on my chance to kiss him back, and then I stopped thinking at all.
It didn’t matter that I’d barely ever kissed anyone. It turned out I did know how to kiss him back, and I did.
With all the times I’d fantasized about this moment, I realized that kissing him was nothing like I thought it’d be.
It was so much realer. And so much better.
It was also a little shorter. He pulled back and stood up.
“Sorry,” he said. “Won’t happen again.”
I touched my mouth and nodded. He sounded like he meant it, which meant he probably did.
“I’m going,” he said.
I nodded again, and he turned to go. Finally finding my voice, I called out, “Greg!”
He turned around, like he’d been hoping I’d call him back. I smiled and said, “До свидания.” See you later.
He said, “До свидания.”
* * *
—
Bethany came home from camp the next week, tanned and looking like she could crack walnuts with her biceps.
“Wow,” I said when I saw her. “Your arms are bigger than mine now.”
“I know, right? I’m a beast.”
“So how was West Vagina?”
“Good,” she said. “Really good, actually.” She grinned wickedly. “Surprisingly humid, though.”
I laughed pretty hard.
We were sitting on the front steps of Bethany’s house enjoying a random August cold snap. The pool where Greg worked was probably empty, but I hadn’t seen him since the kiss. I kind of didn’t want to, at least not yet. This way, I just got to remember that it happened, and I didn’t have to worry about what came next. He kissed me, me, Aphra, my own self, knowing who I was and what I’d done and that I didn’t deserve for him to kiss me. That seemed like enough for right now.
I couldn’t quite understand why he’d done it. I felt like love was something you had to earn, and I hadn’t earned it, not at all. I’d unearned it. And I mean, it wasn’t love, it was just a kiss, I got that. But still, I wondered about it. There was probably a name for something like that.
