People We Meet on Vacation - Emily Henry Page 0,29
different experience at West Linfield High than I had at its sister school. I’m sure it helped that he played sports—basketball, both for the school and in the intramural league at his family’s church—and was handsome, but he’s always insisted the clincher was that he was quiet enough to pass for mysterious rather than weird.
Maybe if my parents hadn’t been so completely encouraging of every facet of my brothers’ and my individualism, I would’ve had better luck. There were kids who dealt with disapproval by adapting, making themselves more palatable, like Prince and Parker had in school, finding the overlap between their personalities and everyone else’s.
And then there were people like me, who labored under the misconception that eventually, My Fellow Children would not only tolerate but ultimately respect me for being myself.
There’s nothing so off-putting to some people as someone who seems not to care whether anyone else approves of them. Maybe it’s resentment: I have bent for the greater good, to follow the rules, so why haven’t you? You should care.
Of course, secretly, I did care. A lot. Probably it would’ve been better if I’d just openly cried at school instead of shrugging off insults and weeping under my pillow later. It would’ve been better if, after the first time I was mocked for the flared overalls my mom had sewn embroidered patches onto, I hadn’t kept wearing them with my chin held high, like I was some kind of eleven-year-old Joan of Arc, willing to die for my denim.
The point was, Alex had known how to play the game, whereas I’d often felt like I’d read the pages of the guidebook backward, while the whole thing was on fire.
When we were together, though, the game didn’t even exist. The rest of the world dissolved until I believed this was how things truly were. Like I’d never been that girl who’d felt entirely alone, misunderstood, and I’d always been this one: known, loved, wholly accepted by Alex Nilsen.
When we met, I hadn’t wanted him to see me as Linfield Poppy—I wasn’t sure how it would change the dynamic of our world for two once we let certain outside elements wriggle their way in. I still remember the night I finally told him about it. The last night of class our junior year, we’d stumbled back to his dorm from a party to find his roommate already gone for the summer. So I borrowed a T-shirt and some blankets from Alex and slept on the spare twin bed in his room.
I hadn’t had a sleepover like that since I was probably eight: the sort where you keep talking, eyes long since shut, until you both drift off midsentence.
We told each other everything, the things we’d never touched. Alex told me about his mom passing away, the months his dad barely changed out of pajamas, the peanut butter sandwiches Alex made for his brothers, and the baby formula he learned to mix.
For two years, he and I’d had so much fun together, but that night it felt like a whole new compartment in my heart opened where before there had been none.
And then he asked me what happened in Linfield, why I was dreading going back for summer, and it should’ve felt embarrassing to air my small grievances after everything he’d just told me, except Alex had a way of never making me feel small or petty.
It was so late it was almost morning, those slippery hours when it feels safest to let your secrets out. So I told him all of it, starting with seventh grade.
The unfortunate braces, the gum Kim Leedles put in my hair, and the resulting bowl cut. The insult added to injury when Kim told my whole class that anyone who talked to me wouldn’t be invited to her birthday party. Which was still a solid five months off, though it promised to be worth the wait, thanks to her pool’s waterslide and the movie theater in her basement.
Then, in ninth grade, once the stigma had finally worn off and my boobs had arrived practically overnight, there was the three-month stretch during which I was a Hot Commodity. Until Jason Stanley kissed me unexpectedly and responded to my disinterest by telling everyone I gave him an unprompted blow job in the janitor’s closet.
The entire soccer team called me Porny Poppy for, like, a year after that. No one wanted to be my friend. Then there was tenth grade, the worst of all.