“Not by much, mind you,” she continues. “But there’s enough of a difference in the quality of your work for more than one of your professeurs to have mentioned it to me. They’re concerned. Can you guess when they noticed the change?”
I’m not actually here. I’m still in Josh’s room. Yesterday.
We packed his life into cardboard boxes. His mom was angry at him, angry at me, angry at every call. And she received a lot of calls. There was nothing I wanted more than to be away from that awful room, but I wasn’t about to waste our final hours.
Josh took down the drawings from his walls. He laid them in a box – one on top of another, on top of another. He slipped the drawings of me from the Arènes de Lutèce into a separate, protective envelope. Compared with the number of drawings that he had of his friends, there weren’t many of me yet. We’ve only been together for a month.
How has it only been a month?
“A month ago,” the head says. “That’s when you stopped giving your homework the time and attention that it takes to maintain your position at the top of your class.”
She says this as if being school valedictorian is my singular ambition, when, really, it just happened. There are only twenty-four other seniors – twenty-three – and all of them have friends to hang out with and places to go and things to do. I’ve never had anything better to do than study. But for one month…I had something better to do.
Josh slipped the envelope inside his shoulder bag. It went on the plane with him.
Everything happened so fast. In one day, his room went from chaotic, bursting with art and food and life, to barren. We were only given five minutes to say goodbye. His mother left us in that empty space, and I cried again. Josh used his favourite pen to ink four letters onto the back of my fingers: L-O-V-E.
He held my face with both hands. “I love you,” he said. “I love you. I love you.”
I could hardly see him through my tears. “I love you,” I said. “I love you. I love you.”
“Isla,” the head says. “You’re going to meet many boys on this journey. You can’t let them distract you from becoming the woman you are meant to become.”
She’s wrong. There’s only one boy.
And who am I to become without him?
I stare at my fingers. The letters are fading, but the word still burns against my flesh.
Beside his mother’s waiting car, the letters were sharp and dark. We kissed desperately. Mrs. Wasserstein opened the back door and called to him from the inside. “We’re late. Let’s go.”
His hands gripped mine. “Thanksgiving.”
I nodded.
He kissed me again, but this time, it was quick. And then he dropped my hands as if they stung, as if he physically couldn’t hold them any longer, and he rushed into the car. The windows were tinted black. I couldn’t see him, but I watched his window anyway until the car disappeared from view.
The head of school clears her throat. My gaze had drifted towards her window.
“For one month of reckless behaviour? I’m giving you one month of weekday detention. I think you’ll agree that it’s a fair punishment. In addition, this gives you ample time to recommit to your classwork without any…distractions.”
“Josh wasn’t a distraction.”
The head looks me over carefully. “No,” she says, at last. “Perhaps, for you, that was the wrong word. Though I have my concerns about the other way around.”
It’s a cruel jab. How dare she suggest that I care more about Josh than he cares about me? What could she possibly know about our relationship?
I storm out of her office and into detention. For all of my time spent frequenting its threshold, I’ve never actually crossed it. But it looks like any other classroom. There’s only one other student here, a sophomore. He doesn’t look up from keying his desk. Professeur Fontaine – the computer-science teacher with the triangle-shaped head – is on detention duty. “Pick a seat, any seat,” she says. She sounds like a street magician.
I wish I knew where Josh used to sit. I try to conjure his image. A figure with rounded shoulders and a furrowed brow materializes in the back corner. He’s pencilling his life into tidy panels. I step into this shadow, wanting to believe in its reality, and take the desk. The window beside us has a view of the school’s courtyard, but everyone is gone for the day. Only the cobblestones and pigeons remain.
I never got to read those panels.
What if I’m the one who blew it? What if I can’t get into Dartmouth any more? Josh will still get into his college. All he needs is a GED. Perhaps he ruined this year, but I might have ruined our next four. If only I could hear his voice again. He made it back to New York this morning, where his mom granted him this single text: Miss you like crazy. Internet also confiscated. Don’t know when we can talk next. I LOVE YOU.
After detention, I walk straight to the Treehouse. The night air is freezing, and my coat isn’t warm enough. I remember Josh placing his own coat around my shoulders – right here on our first date – and cry for the hundredth time. I wrap myself in the blanket and place my hand on his mural. I press my palm against the house with the ivy window boxes and American flag. I press my palm against it so hard that it hurts.
Here, I think. He is here.