Growing Pains

Chapter 58 - I want the world to end before I have to become something

A L L O R A

Everyone wanted to know what happened at the pool house. It was all anyone could talk about at school. No one cared about what anyone had done during the winter break. All they wanted to know was what happened at my party. Did Isaac and Edward kiss? Did they just pretend they did? Were they gay or was it just a joke? Did they like each other? Were they dating? Everyone had questions and no one had answers.

I wanted to be the bigger person. Mind my own business. Except my business was whether or not I would get accepted in college, and whether or not I would get a scholarship, and whether or not I was having a heart attack thinking about it, so no, I couldn't be the bigger person, especially not when it came to rumors about a boy I didn't hate, which was the next thing big thing, making out with someone that wasn't me.

I was by my locker when I saw him for the first time since the night of the party. He was coming down the hallway in a nice sweater. I turned to Kylie. For the past few minutes she had been trying to convince Skylar she didn't need to triple-check her homework, because she had already checked it, twice. Kylie and Skylar. Skylar and Kylie. They had been a magic trick over the holidays. Skylar, the handkerchief sliding off the magician's sleeve, and Kylie, the magician.

I closed Skylar's textbook so they would both look at me, "Should I go talk to Edward?"

Kylie frowned, "Did he ever answer your text?"

"No." I had texted him after the party, asking if he had gotten home safe, and he had never answered. For all I knew, he could have crashed his car and never gotten home at all.

"Exactly." Kylie shrugged. "We were right about him. He's either a very good liar or a closeted gay. Either way, he was leading you on. There's nothing else to talk about."

"Maybe he was just busy," Skylar said, putting her books back in her bag.

"Yeah," Kylie said, rolling her eyes. "Busy being a liar."

"I still think I should talk to him," I insisted. "What if all this time, he was just being nice? What if he was never really interested in me?"

"Bitch, he made out with you in a pool, and then drove you to school the next day," Kylie said. "I'm sorry, but he can't be that hot, and considerate, and expect you not to want his hand in marriage. He knew exactly what he was doing. Come on. You're better than this."

I wasn't. I had spent weeks making excuses for him in my head. I thought perhaps I had made him up, the idea of him, finally, a boy who saw me as a person, and not a commodity. Maybe I had it wanted it so bad, I had imagined all of it.

I had spent months trying to vindicate myself as my own, trying to get back control over my own life, over my own body, and all I had really done was give it over to others. I had ended up making myself a commodity before anyone else could. Without realizing it, I had fabricated this illusion of choice, this false sense of control.

Kylie was wrong. I wasn't better than anything. I was going to talk to him. I had to. 

"I thought you were dead," I said when I saw him again later that day. I had meant to say something else, something that would make me sound unbothered about his weeks-long silence, but the only thing that came out was this. I thought you were dead. I was obviously very bothered if I thought a few weeks of not talking meant he was dead.

He had been putting books away in his locker, but stopped when he heard me, and a nice apologetic smile showed up on his lips, and I regretted having said anything at all.

"Yeah, I'm sorry about that," he started. "I didn't mean to ignore your text. It's just that I was getting a lot of them, you know, because of what happened, and I just put my phone away and didn't look at it for weeks. I'm really sorry if you thought I was ignoring you. I wasn't trying to."

"Don't worry about it." I was fading into the background, and he was in full focus, swallowing hard, looking at the books lined in his locker instead of me, hand still on the back of his neck, dark circles under his eyes. Maybe this wasn't about me at all, or maybe I just didn't want it to be.

"How was your winter break?" he asked.

"How were yours?"

"I asked first."

I didn't care, "You look really tired."

"I haven't been sleeping very well."

"Why not?"

He swallowed hard again. I could almost feel the lump in his throat.

"I don't know," he said.

"Did something happen?"

He smiled, "That's what everyone wants to know, isn't it?"

"Is that what this is about?" The party. The pool house. Isaac. "Who cares what people think?"

"I don't."

"Then what are you so scared of?"

I thought he was going to say he wasn't. Thought he was going to change the conversation. Maybe ask me again about my holidays again. But he didn't.

Instead, he shrugged, and said, "I don't know. Life."

I smiled, "We all are."

And he smiled too and said, "Not you."

I could have laughed, "I want the world to end before I have to become something."

He shook his head, "It would be too late. You're already something."

"You know what I mean."

"No," he said. "You really are something. You're you. Not many people can say that. Look at me, I have no idea who I am –"

"Edward, come on –"

"No, it's true. I don't know what I'm doing. Sometimes I go home, and I sit in my bed, and I go through everything I did that day, and everything I said, and I think about whether or not I did a good job at being myself. How ridiculous is that?"

"It's not ridiculous," I said. "And for what it's worth, I think you're doing a great job at being–"

"I have no idea who I am," he said again.

"But you know who you want to be, don't you?"

He looked down at his feet, "Yeah. I mean, I think so. I don't know. I just wanna do the right thing –"

"I know," I stopped him. "And you did nothing wrong."

He smiled like he didn't believe me, and then the bell rang, and he said, "You should go. I don't wanna make you late for class."

I had Germain next. I spent it thinking about him. He knew who he wanted to be, and I wanted the world to end so I didn't have to be anything at all. I had convinced myself I was ahead of the curve, but really I was just walking in circles, coming back to where I started, again and again.

After what happened last year, someone had written the word slut on my locker, and I had left it there. No one had believed it when I said I was drunk. When I said I thought it was Jason and not Bill. I didn't even know Bill. Everyone thought I was just making up excuses to cover up the fact that I had cheated on my boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend. No one even gave me the benefit of the doubt. All they gave me was that word on my locker. And I took it. What was so wrong about it anyway? My right to say no had been taken away from me, and so I had reclaimed my right to say yes, but really, in the end, it was more of a duty. The duty to be who they wanted me to. If I couldn't be Madonna, I had to be a whore.