Never Always Sometimes - Adi Alsaid Page 0,82

seat

at his desk chair, composing herself. Dave could only watch.

“I don’t want to be miserable with you, Dave,” she said, scrunching a

tissue in her hand. “I want to be with you. More than anything I’ve ever really wanted. I think things have been a little off, yes. But I also think maybe we can fix that.” Another tear started to scurry down the bridge

of her nose and she quickly brushed it away, not giving it a chance to

interrupt. “But I don’t want to start getting paranoid about whether

you want to be with me or someone else. I don’t want to start analyzing

your every action. I don’t want us to start hating each other because

we don’t know how to be in a relationship together.” She tossed her

scrunched-up tissue in the garbage beneath his desk. “I think this can

work between us. I really do. But I’m going to let you decide, because

otherwise I’ll always have the doubt. Are we going to try this out, or

do you think we shouldn’t?”

After a long moment with his eyes closed, his head resting back

against his wall, nausea knotting his stomach, Dave let out his breath.

When had everything he’d ever wanted changed? “I love you, Julia. But

maybe I’m not supposed to love you like this.”

DAVE & JULIA 275

WITHOUT HIM

JULIA WAS ON her side, staring at the map on her wall. The dads

came by and tried to convince her to come watch a movie with them

downstairs, but she couldn’t bring herself to step away from the bed.

She wanted the comfort of the room slowly darkening as the day went

on without her. Burying her head beneath her sheets, she imagined

the folds of the cloth as caverns, imagined that she was underground,

if only to give herself something to think about to ease the pain. For

hours, she didn’t move. She tried to empty her mind of Dave, though

she had no idea how. She’d been thinking about him for years.

This hurt. In a way she couldn’t shake, in a place she couldn’t

pinpoint, this hurt more than anything Julia had ever experienced.

MESS

DAVE SETTLED INTO his bench at the harbor. He’d skipped school

for the second day in a row because he thought staring out at the cool

waters of Morro Bay might be comforting. The bubble tea he’d bought

an hour ago was on the ground by his feet, almost full. He’d made a

mess of everything, and it served him right to sit there and feel every

little bit of guilt that came his way.

MORE OR LESS

ANYTIME SHE COULD get away with it at school, Julia lived within

the world of her headphones. For days now, music had been playing

almost nonstop. Whenever she was forced to hit pause, the air around

her was fraught with tension. No one else seemed to notice it. In fact,

everyone else seemed to be drunk with happiness. That sense during

school Julia had had only a couple months ago that everything had

been dipped in butter, that time had slowed down to a torturous crawl,

it had disappeared. The end of the year was in sight and everyone but

Julia was giddy for it.

She waited in her car in the parking lot until the bell for first period liberated her from seeing Dave, and even then she’d still be late, waiting until she knew he would be seated dutifully in class. If she saw blond

locks anywhere on campus, she turned the other direction. During

lunch, she steered clear of the tree house, choosing to sneak bites of

her sandwich by the graphic novels in the library, or leaving campus a

couple of steps behind the throng of seniors who were known by their

first names at the pizza shop.

Music was her solace and her refuge, and rather than trying to cheer

herself up, she found herself playing the saddest music she owned.

Songs about breakups and their messy aftermaths offered the most

consolation. When John Darnielle would sing to her, something like,

I will get lonely and gasp for air, and send your name off from my lips like a signal flare, she’d think to herself: Goddamn right. People were always belittling teenage heartbreak. But heartbreak was heartbreak

was heartbreak.

What was almost as bad was the increasingly obvious fact that she

had no other friends. She and Dave had clung to each other for so

long and now she was alone. She ate by herself. She drove home by

herself. Her phone’s battery life seemed eternal thanks to inactivity.

At night, when she felt like crying, Julia watched the Travel Channel,

wrote her mom e-mails, asking when she was going to come. When

she reread them, they sounded desperate. Even as she wrote