to know the answer. But now I do.”
Joe looked at me for just a second and had to flick his eyes away to some far corner of the sky. “No, nobody set me up to do that. But I will tell you that if what happened . . . your parents . . . if that hadn’t happened, I probably never would have gotten the nerve.” He paused, then looked at me briefly again. “I know that’s messed up. But I wanted to. I’d wanted to for a while.”
But inside, I started to feel so mad. If he’d just had the guts to ask me out when he first wanted to, maybe this part would have been long over by the time the accident happened. And maybe we could have been strong enough together—why wouldn’t we have been?—to survive those first hellish months afterward.
“You should have gotten up the nerve,” I finally said, trying to spin it with a smile.
“I know. I just kept telling myself I had time.”
“Life is short, Joe.”
A painful look crossed his face. After a few long seconds, he simply said, “You’ll be late for work, and I should get going.”
He bent toward me and tilted his head a bit to glance at me sideways, almost in admiration. Again, that halfway moment when something could happen. That now familiar feeling of More! More!
Suddenly, I was just so sick of it.
When Joe started to wrap his loose, lazy hug around me to say good-bye, I turned my face up and kissed him square on the mouth. Too quickly, like I’d smacked him. His lips weren’t ready and felt stiff, formal. They weren’t the lips I remembered, but then again, there had been other lips since. Was it that hard to keep track?
Joe turned red and sputtered, “Whoa.”
Then he smiled. So maybe these lips would stick around.
“I’ll see you soon,” I just said, then walked as fast as I could into work.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Two weeks went by. Fortunately, I had midterms to study for and my other college applications to start, and didn’t have time to be obsessed with much else. For instance, Joe sending me a text message every afternoon with a proposed superhero identity for one of the teachers.
margulis = algeBrawn!
(Mr. Margulis in the math department was huge and a former bodybuilder.)
It seemed like his way of keeping the status quo, of reserving his spot for something.
At Ashland, Eve set out a straw cornucopia filled with turkey-shaped chocolates on the front desk, and I strung up a HAPPY THANKS GIVING banner on the wall. I used the wrong kind of tape and the next day it fell down and got chewed up by a dog. Eve didn’t say a thing about it; she just went out and bought another. So it was, now that she knew about my family. She had become less bossy but less friendly, too; we never went to lunch or even talked about ourselves anymore.
“The first holiday season since the accident will be a tough one, Laurel,” said Suzie. We were down to once-weekly visits. “Let’s talk about strategies.”
So we talked, about trying yoga and me possibly going to some weekend camp for grieving teens. She asked me to start a list in my journal titled “Thanksgiving: Things I’m Thankful For,” and encouraged me to write anything that came to mind over the next few weeks.
I hadn’t told her about my visit to Mr. Kaufman or about smack-kissing Joe. The truth was, I was getting tired of talking about myself. Suzie knew it too. Our sessions were starting to end early, because we’d reach the point of me just shrugging and giving her one-word answers, and she’d say, “That’s enough for today.”
laurel
wilmington, nc now. 2 gigs but I think everyone’s going to stick around for a couple of weeks bcuz of the holiday. they have to bunk down at friends’ houses but fortunately i can swing the comfort inn for myself. swanky, i know. i found that if you open a minibar beer bottle the right way, without bending the cap, you can fill it back up with water and you won’t get charged for it.
david
The email caught me unexpectedly on a Saturday, when I was just doing a quick check before heading out to meet Joe at the library.
I started pulling together some phrases in my head to answer him with. Something witty and cute. A joke about minibars? Or beer bottles filled with cloudy hotel water?
But when I read it again,