Back When You Were Easier to Love (15 page)

By the time
the clapping-thankfully-not-snapping dies down, and by the time Noah gets back to the table, I think I must be crying or maybe something like it, because he says, “Want to get out of here?” and I say, “Yes, please.”

We’re upstairs, but
not out the door yet, when I hear someone yell, “What the hell was that?” and I know it’s Zan.

The Ballad’s busy, busy enough that no one really notices or cares about the yelling, busy enough that Zan has to wedge his way between a bunch of people to get to us, black-and-tan coffee cup in hand. I see the blonde skank right behind him, holding a mug with the string from her tea bag draped over the side. It’s odd to me how they were in such a hurry to find us, but still brought their cups along, like we were really just getting together for drinks.

I don’t know who Zan’s yell was actually directed at. It might have been me. These might be the first words he says to me after all this time. This, all this, might actually be my dream come true.

Noah doesn’t stop walking, out the quaint double doors, into the sweet-smelling, still-warm, perfect-black night. I feel like I’m trapped in a fairy tale.

Zan and the girl follow, too, and now we’re alone. There are lights all around us, of course, from buildings and streetlights and windows, but the darkness still makes me feel that we’re even more alone: that we four are the only people on the planet right now.

Zan kind of gets up into Noah’s face, but it’s not very menacing because when they stand side by side, it’s obvious how much taller and bigger Noah is. I didn’t realize it until now. “So? What the hell is going on?”

“Dude, step back,” says Noah calmly, lightly pushing Zan away. “Isn’t it obvious? We came here supposedly on a college visit, but mainly to find you. Joy needed to see you.”

“You needed to see him, too,” I say. Great. The first time I can manage to open my mouth, and I’m talking to Noah, not Zan. “I mean, we both needed to see you. To . . .” Telling the truth seems pathetic now, with this half-naked Bohemian princess hugging Zan’s waist like she owns him. “We needed to get closure,” I say, and for the first time the lie sounds like the truth.

“Closure? What, were you his
girlfriend
or something?” The girl stretches out the word “girlfriend” so it sounds all second grade. She smiles and yeah, it’s a gorgeous smile. Her teeth glisten, probably naturally even and white.

My teeth look like salt-and-pepper corn in comparison, but I smile, too. I match her tone, two parts condescending, one part pitying. “I still am his girlfriend or something. Why, didn’t he tell you about me?” I was all pumped to be sad. In fact, in the Ballad I’m pretty sure I was crying. But now I’m feeling an emotion best described by words I would never actually say: I am pissed off.

“You are
not
my girlfriend,” says Zan, and he definitely sounds second grade, so he changes his tone to one I’m more familiar with. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

Noah raises his eyebrows. “Oh, really?” Noah looks at the girl, pointedly.

“Ismene is not my girlfriend,” Zan says coolly. Her name sounds like “ease-men,” which, judging from Zan’s expression, she certainly seems to do. “We’re simply in a relationship.”

I can’t stand to look at them, any of them. I stare down to look at nothing, but beneath the window’s glow I end up seeing Zan’s feet. Zan’s feet, in blue flip-flops. They’re probably made from organic plastic or something else socially-conscious, but they look like shoes you could buy for three dollars at Old Navy.

I’ve never seen his toes, and they are especially ugly. They’re too hairy, too long, and the nails are thick and yellowing at the corners. If I had toes like that, I’d keep them covered all the time. If I had toes like that, I wouldn’t—

“We don’t believe in labels,” Ismene says. Because of that stupid window light I can see she is wearing blue mascara.
Why do they always wear blue mascara?
“Alex and I believe in complete emotional freedom.”

I have no idea what the “complete emotional freedom” garbage she’s spouting is all about, but it seems completely irrelevant. “Who’s Alex?” Noah and I ask at the same time.

Ismene laughs. As much as I wish her laugh were an overloud, oversnorty, cringe-worthy sound, it isn’t. It’s a light, gentle laugh—a laugh you want to join in even if you don’t know what’s funny, just so that laugh is with you, not at you. Her grip around Zan’s waist tightens. “These people were your
friends
, Alex? No wonder you never talk about them.”

Zan is Alex. Zan is Alex who wears shorts and flip-flops and takes his Mocha Java with him everywhere he goes and writes condescending, lame rip-off beat poetry and has ugly toes. Alex is Zan, who once wore his grandpa’s loafers and didn’t believe in drinking coffee because he was Mormon and wrote me love poetry in Estar and I wasn’t cardboard, not then, not back when he was Zan. Back when he was easier to love.

Now he never talks about me.

Alex/Zan snuggles closer to Ismene. “Didn’t you ever wonder why there aren’t any pictures of my high school friends in our room?”

Now he never talks about me and doesn’t keep any pictures of me in their room. In their room. And suddenly I’m thinking gender-neutral housing, and suddenly I can’t breathe again, and suddenly my heart starts pumping and Oh. My.

If this were a teen movie, the camera would be shaking right now. Then, the reaction shots. First my face. Zan’s. Noah’s. Hers. In each frame, realization would cross our faces. Noah would see what I knew. Zan would see what Noah and I both knew. The girl would be clueless still, perhaps as a form of comic relief.

But this is not a teen movie. I never wanted to be part of a teen movie. I wanted this to be my dream-come-true. I know now that test at Mattia’s wasn’t out of a hundred—it was out of ninety-six. Dreams don’t predict diddly-squat. Dreams lead you astray.

Follow dreams and you find yourself beaten down, torn between being mocked and being ignored. This boy I once loved is living with a girl. He’s living with a girl who wears halter tops and lots of earrings and is not me. He’s in a relationship with a girl and she’s living with him, and she’s not me and Oh. My.

I’ve never wished harder for tea to stain teeth.

I’m done with this, all this, this dream-come-true adventure in “closure.” I’m out.

I look up at Alex/Zan, into the eyes I once loved, and I tell him, “You have the most hideous toes I have ever seen.”

And I run.
And I’m not a very graceful runner, or a very fast runner, or even a very good runner, and it shows because before long I am panting, completely out of breath, and I haven’t even made it that far. Noah’s caught up with me, easily, and as I’m heaving, and as my lungs are collapsing, Noah’s right next to me breathing all naturally, the way normal people breathe.

Perfect Noah, who didn’t even want to come here in the first place, who got dragged along by a crazy girl because he was trying to do the Right Thing. He was trying to fix things and now he’s stuck here, with this girl going into cardiac arrest because she apparently has the body of a seventy-five-year-old asthmatic.

We just walk. We just go slow and wait while I get my breath back and we just walk and I think about how nothing is turning out like it’s supposed to turn out and I’m just some person walking and not knowing where I’m going. There is no difference between me and any other lonely person in this world.

I know these streets. These are the streets of my childhood, where the homes have character and gardens and big old trees. You can walk anywhere worth going in this city, and I walk. I walk so long I forget that Noah is right next to me. Noah’s steps have blended into mine and we walk.

Finally Noah says:
“Do you know where we are? Because I don’t.”

“I know where we are,” I say. “This is the neighborhood where I grew up.”

Noah starts talking again before I want him to. “You have a lot of history here.”

I nod, but the only history I can think of is what just went down with Zan. For the moment, it’s the only history worth remembering. “It doesn’t make any sense. When I was here, I didn’t have him. When I wasn’t here, I did have him. Now I’m here and he’s here and I should have everything, but I don’t.”

It isn’t right that the air should feel so good tonight, so soft and comfortable. I know exactly what tonight should feel like: smothering air thick with southern California smog. Air you go inside to avoid breathing. We get that kind of air here, sometimes. We should have it tonight, but of course we don’t. Of course tonight is perfect. “Maybe this puts everything in perspective.”

“Like what?”

“How I don’t have anything. How I don’t have him and I don’t have my home and I don’t have my history. How I’m going to leave here with nothing just like I did last time. Only this time it’s so much worse. This time I know what’s waiting for me.”

I’m crying and I don’t care. “I’m leaving with nothing and I’m coming back to nothing. I mean, let’s face it. I chased a guy. I chased a guy like I never thought I’d do because I thought he made me who I was. And maybe he did, but he’s gone now, and who I am is no one, with nothing, not even a short list.”

The Noah I know is going to say that I do have something, that I have everything I need: that I have my health and my family and my friends. But the Noah I know doesn’t exist. The Noah I know probably never existed, because the real Noah, the Noah who is here now, says, “Why did you take me here?”

“To help me find Zan.” It’s the obvious, embarrassing answer.

“No, not here,” he says, motioning vaguely in the distance. “I mean specifically
here.
”

We’ve passed the row of apartments where I lived as a little kid, the white brick buildings with conifers standing tall and skinny, like tied-up Christmas trees. The building we’re in front of now looks the same as it did back then, except it has a different name. “I don’t think it’s an ice factory anymore.”

“This used to be an ice factory?” Noah stares at the bland stucco wall. “I never thought about that. About ice coming from factories. About where you’d even have an ice factory.”

“When I was a kid, I mean a really little kid, my dad used to take me on walks here at night. Usually when I couldn’t sleep. We’d take plastic cups from the shelf in the kitchen, and he would carry me on his shoulders. The outdoor drinking fountain had such cold water—pure, melted ice that sent shivers up and down my tongue. We would fill our cups to the top and drink and talk until it was so late it felt like morning.” I sigh. “I don’t know why I just told you that.”

“Maybe we’re finally getting to know each other,” says Noah. “The way I’ve wanted to get to know you for a long time.” He stops walking, so I stop walking, too. He puts his hand on my shoulder, and it’s so different than when Zan put his hand on my shoulder. Zan’s touch was heavy on my skin, making me tremble under the weight and passion of it. But Noah’s hand feels like the last strokes of a paintbrush—just that gentle, just that fleeting.

When I look at him, all I feel is guilt. He’s wanted to know me—tried to know me—and until I needed him, I shut him out completely. The same way I shut out everyone else outside of my circle of friends, outside of Zan.

“Zan’s poem, that wasn’t true about Haven being a cardboard world, was it?”

Noah’s brows wrinkle, and his hand slides off my shoulder. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we always felt like we were so different from the other kids in Haven. So much smarter, so much more sophisticated, so much . . . better. I just never put it into words the way Zan did tonight.”

“Zan’s an idiot.”

“Yeah, I know. But I feel like maybe I . . . I was an idiot, too. I thought I was special, that I was the one person he thought was real. Everyone was cardboard but me. Then I find out he resented me as much as I resented everybody else in Haven. He was a jerk, but so was I.”

“You weren’t a jerk. You were just new in town. Looking for an identity. Finding friends. That’s what every new kid at Haven goes through. I should know—I’m a Husky Ambassador.” It’s cheesy, but it makes us both smile.

“Want to go past my old elementary school?” The building isn’t close enough to see yet, but it already smells like it did every day when I walked this path to school: shoe-scuffing blacktop and whiteboard markers and hot lunch. I know it’s not possible, not really. But that doesn’t stop the scent from spreading inside me, as strong as ever. “It’s not far—just down that street.”

“I’d like that,” he says, and he sounds so happy about it, like of all the things we could possibly do, that would be his favorite. Zan never sounded like that about anything.

“Did Zan really ask you to keep me away from him?” I don’t want to know the answer, but I have to.

Noah nods slowly. “He said you were obsessed. Which you were. But that was partly his fault. He left in all the wrong ways.”

Zan didn’t want me to find him. Part of me always knew that. But back then only the creases of my mind knew it. Now my whole body can feel it. With every pump from my ice-blood heart, I can feel how much he doesn’t want me.

The school looks smaller than I remember it. The outside lights cast shadows over the peeling paint and the faded foursquare. “This is the new part,” I tell him. “They built it when I was a fifth grader.” We pass a net dangling from a basketball hoop by one lonely string. “The new part isn’t very new anymore.”

Noah shrugs. “It was new a long time ago.”

The big plastic playset is so much shorter than it used to be. I pull myself to the top of the twisty slide, sitting on the eroded plastic planks at its base. Noah walks over to the Mini Zip Line.

“That’s what everybody wanted to play on,” I tell him.