Never Always Sometimes - Adi Alsaid Page 0,50
Christ, will you listen to yourself?” He leaned against the
wall near the couch. “I’m not renouncing our friendship, you crazy
person. I’m just saying they’re not all as awful as we thought.”
Dave could see Julia’s lips form another smirk. “Speak for yourself,”
164 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES
she said loudly, as if daring her voice to break. “These people are
clichés, even more so than I’d imagined. I just thought you were
different.”
“You know what? You’re not different either!” Dave yelled. He
saw Julia flinch, and felt a strange satisfaction that he’d caught her
off guard. When he moved, he accidentally flipped on the switch for
the ceiling fan, and it started whirring noisily, spinning shakily, like it’d been knocked off its usual axis. In any other situation the two of
them would have burst out laughing at the timing, at how wobbly
it moved. But now they were quiet, and the fan was the only sound
in the room, save for the light snoring coming from the couch. “You
think forcing yourself—forcing us— to become outsiders makes us
unique? It doesn’t. Rebellious teenage girl swims against the current?
You know what that sounds like to me? You’re a cliché, Julia.”
The words felt right up until the moment he spoke them, right even
as he spit them out across the room. The venom felt righteous, a lesson
Julia had to learn.
But when her face crumpled up, when the hurt rippled across that
beautiful face he’d all but memorized, Dave wished that there was
some way to undo it all, to skip back a few chapters and rewrite the
scene, find a different way to approach the subject, of Gretchen, some
way to make Julia understand.
“Please leave,” Julia said simply.
He didn’t dare to move. It felt like they were in some other universe,
and if he left her house, the real world wouldn’t ever come back. He
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feared that leaving would make this permanent, but he didn’t know
how to do anything but stand there. He wondered how he could be
so mad at her now, how things could take such a turn so quickly. Julia
said again, “Get out,” like she was already writing it into their history.
So he left.
166 NEVER ALWAYS SOMETIMES
PART 2
JULIA
WITHOUT KNOWING
HOW JULIA HAD felt something so deeply for so long without
knowing it herself was a mystery. As if love was a fugitive harboring in an attic, hidden even from the people residing in the house. Dave liked
Gretchen? Well, Julia loved him. She loved him.
If it didn’t hurt so much, she might have marveled at the way the
mind/heart/psyche/whatever worked. How she’d known without a
doubt that she was in love with Dave and had been for a very long
time only when he told her he’d kissed someone else. How the words
I love you had popped into her head so loud and so clear that she’d wondered if she’d really never said them before. How the realization
seemed to unwind backward through time, suffusing every moment
they’d had together with a love she’d simply failed to notice before. Of course she loved Dave. His humor, his—and she hated to even think
the expression, but, trite as it was, it rang completely true—heart of
gold, the selfless way he did everything he could for her. His sheepish
smile. His hands, big and gentle. How had she loved his hands this
entire time and not known it?
Julia was still in the living room when the front door closed softly.
She’d been expecting Dave to slam it. She stared at the beer in her
hand, didn’t want another sip of it but finished it anyway. Dave didn’t
feel like slamming any doors? That was fine. She did.
She walked to front of the house and opened the door only to
throw it back against its frame, the windows giving a satisfying rumble.
Julia smiled to herself and did it again. There was a crazy freedom
in knowing she could blame anyone else if something actually broke.
She looked around the house, the stains on the carpet, the faint smell
of vomit coming from somewhere not yet discovered, the hole in the
drywall. The party’s damage was done, and nothing she could do
would hide it. Her smile spread wider.
There was no hesitation when she chucked the beer can through the
back window. She thought of this newly discovered love for Dave, her
awful, stupid timing in realizing it, and then her anger basically did all the work for her. Breaking glass looked beautiful in the hazy light of
drunkenness. The crash scared the couple making out in the backyard
and they scurried away. Julia felt a savage pleasure in interrupting them.
Next, Julia tried punching a hole in the wall. The first attempt
went horribly and sent a wave of