Autoboyography
Page 55
“I don’t think he set out for a lot of this to happen,” she says.
I lift my chin to see her. “What do you mean?”
“I think he was intrigued at first. Sometimes you actually can be as charming as you think you are. I think he saw you as a way to rule something out, and then the opposite happened.”
“God, that’s depressing.”
“Is it terrible that I sort of feel sorry for him?” she asks. “I mean, I know it hurts and feels like it will never be okay again, but it will. Someday. You’ll wake up and it will hurt a little less and a little less, until some boy or girl is smiling at you and it makes you stupid all over again.”
It does sound impossible. “My whole book is about him,” I tell her. “He was going to help me edit it, to cut out himself in it, make it someone else. I never sent it to him. That’s out the window now, and I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I quickly learn that just because things feel fine after a conversation like the one Auddy and I have, it doesn’t mean things are normal.
Whatever the hell normal is anymore.
Autumn is back at school on Wednesday, but there’s a shorthand between us that seems to have been elongated. We climb out of my car, and she makes a joke when she points out that my zipper is down; we both turn into awkward robots as I reach for it, zipping it up. I throw my arm around her as we walk down the hall, and she stiffens before leaning into me, and it’s so forced I want to laugh. One look at her face—anxious, hopeful, eager to make everything okay—and I try to pull her into a bear hug, but we are crashed into by a couple of students running down the hall. It’s going to take some time to find our way back into an easy, physical space.
I wonder if it’s because, after the chaos of mutual apologies, the reality has settled in that we had sex. These are the kinds of things we would normally dissect together. If it were anyone else, I could complain to Auddy how it changed everything, but you see the obvious issue there.
I can’t talk to Mom or Dad about it either, because no matter how much they love me, knowing I did something like that would change the way they see me. I know it would. All they know is that Sebastian broke up with me and I’m a basket case.
Mom’s bumper sticker drive is out in full force. In the past three days, I’ve received deliveries in my pillowcase from, ostensibly, Morgan Freeman, Ellen DeGeneres, and Tennessee Williams. For as much as I tease her about it, I can’t deny it helps. I let out a long breath when I walk into the house. I’ll never shy away from her hugs. We don’t always need to speak out loud for them to know what I’m feeling.
The clock ticking down to graduation is both welcome and dreaded—I can’t wait to get out of here, but graduation signals the time when I’ll need to get this book in, and my only strategy right now is to offer Fujita the first twenty pages, tell him that the rest is too personal to share, and hope he understands.
Also contributing to the dreaded column: Auddy and I were stupid and didn’t apply to any of the same schools. So while I’ve been accepted to UCLA, University of Washington, Tufts, and Tulane, Autumn has been accepted at the U of U, Yale, Rice, Northwestern, and the University of Oregon. She’s going to Yale. I’m going to UCLA.
I say it over and over again.
Autumn is going to Yale. I’m going to UCLA.
We almost couldn’t be moving farther apart. It’s a few months away and I’m already dreading the pain of this good-bye. It carves out a hollow pit inside me, like I’m losing more than just a geographical anchor. I’m losing an era. Is that lame? Probably. Everyone seems to be getting deep about finishing high school. And then our parents listen to us and laugh, like we’re still so young and don’t know anything.
Which is probably true. Though, I do know some things.
I know that my feelings for Sebastian don’t seem to dim over the next two weeks. I know that the book I’m writing feels like an enemy, a chore. It has no heart, and no end. I realize now that what I thought was easy—writing a book—really was easy. Reasonably speaking. Anyone can start one. It’s finishing that’s impossible.
Autumn suggests changing the names and the places, but I assure her that didn’t work out so well before. Tanenr can attest to that. She’s quick to offer suggestions: I can rewrite it, she can, or we can work together. She thinks there are a million ways I can make it work without outing Sebastian. I’m not so sure.
Looking back, this book is so basic it’s almost embarrassing: It’s just one guy’s story, the lamest autobiography ever of falling in love. Love fails for a million reasons—distance, infidelity, pride, religion, money, illness. Why is this story any more worthy?
It felt like it was. It felt important. Living in this town is suffocating in so many ways.
But if a tree falls in the woods, maybe it makes no sound.
And if a boy falls for the bishop’s closeted son, maybe it makes no story.
• • •
Sebastian’s been in class only once in the past two weeks. Fujita informs us that he’s taking a break to finish up his own school year and will be back in time to see us turn in our papers.
The last day Sebastian was in class, he sat in the front, ducked low over a table with Sabine and Levi, going over their final chapters. His hair fell over his eyes, and he would flip it out unconsciously. His shirt stretched across his back, and I remembered seeing him shirtless, seeing the treasure map of muscle and bone. Being in the same room with him after the breakup was actually painful. I mean, I wonder about that, how I can be sitting there and no one is touching me and still, I hurt. My chest, my limbs, my throat—everything aches.
The whole time, Autumn sat beside me, her spine curled with guilt, and tried to listen to what Fujita was telling us about copyedits. Every time she looked at Sebastian, she’d glance at me, and I could see the question in her eyes: Did you tell him?
But she knows the answer. I’d have to talk to him to tell him anything. We haven’t texted, or e-mailed, or even passed notes in folders. I won’t lie; it’s killing me slowly.
I saw a movie when I was a kid, something that was probably way too mature for me at that age, but there’s one scene that stuck with me so intensely that sometimes it rushes into my thoughts and actually makes me shiver with dread. In it, a woman is walking across the street with her child, and the child runs ahead and gets hit by a car. I don’t even know the plot that comes after this, but the mother starts screaming, tries to walk backward, to undo what just happened. She’s so frantic, so tortured, that for a minute her mind splits and she thinks there’s a way she can take it all back.
I’m not comparing my breakup to the death of a child—I’m not that melodramatic—but that feeling of helplessness, of being totally unable to change your fate, is so dizzying, sometimes it makes me nauseous out of the blue. There’s nothing I can do to fix this.
There’s nothing I can do to get him back.
I’ve told my parents that we crashed and burned, and as much as they try to cheer me up, and as much as Auddy and I work on finding a way back to the easy comfort we had before, that rain cloud follows me everywhere. I’m not hungry. I sleep a ton. I don’t care about this stupid book.
• • •
Three weeks after we broke up and eight days before my novel is due, Sebastian is sitting on my front steps when I get home.
I lift my chin to see her. “What do you mean?”
“I think he was intrigued at first. Sometimes you actually can be as charming as you think you are. I think he saw you as a way to rule something out, and then the opposite happened.”
“God, that’s depressing.”
“Is it terrible that I sort of feel sorry for him?” she asks. “I mean, I know it hurts and feels like it will never be okay again, but it will. Someday. You’ll wake up and it will hurt a little less and a little less, until some boy or girl is smiling at you and it makes you stupid all over again.”
It does sound impossible. “My whole book is about him,” I tell her. “He was going to help me edit it, to cut out himself in it, make it someone else. I never sent it to him. That’s out the window now, and I honestly don’t know what I’m going to do.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I quickly learn that just because things feel fine after a conversation like the one Auddy and I have, it doesn’t mean things are normal.
Whatever the hell normal is anymore.
Autumn is back at school on Wednesday, but there’s a shorthand between us that seems to have been elongated. We climb out of my car, and she makes a joke when she points out that my zipper is down; we both turn into awkward robots as I reach for it, zipping it up. I throw my arm around her as we walk down the hall, and she stiffens before leaning into me, and it’s so forced I want to laugh. One look at her face—anxious, hopeful, eager to make everything okay—and I try to pull her into a bear hug, but we are crashed into by a couple of students running down the hall. It’s going to take some time to find our way back into an easy, physical space.
I wonder if it’s because, after the chaos of mutual apologies, the reality has settled in that we had sex. These are the kinds of things we would normally dissect together. If it were anyone else, I could complain to Auddy how it changed everything, but you see the obvious issue there.
I can’t talk to Mom or Dad about it either, because no matter how much they love me, knowing I did something like that would change the way they see me. I know it would. All they know is that Sebastian broke up with me and I’m a basket case.
Mom’s bumper sticker drive is out in full force. In the past three days, I’ve received deliveries in my pillowcase from, ostensibly, Morgan Freeman, Ellen DeGeneres, and Tennessee Williams. For as much as I tease her about it, I can’t deny it helps. I let out a long breath when I walk into the house. I’ll never shy away from her hugs. We don’t always need to speak out loud for them to know what I’m feeling.
The clock ticking down to graduation is both welcome and dreaded—I can’t wait to get out of here, but graduation signals the time when I’ll need to get this book in, and my only strategy right now is to offer Fujita the first twenty pages, tell him that the rest is too personal to share, and hope he understands.
Also contributing to the dreaded column: Auddy and I were stupid and didn’t apply to any of the same schools. So while I’ve been accepted to UCLA, University of Washington, Tufts, and Tulane, Autumn has been accepted at the U of U, Yale, Rice, Northwestern, and the University of Oregon. She’s going to Yale. I’m going to UCLA.
I say it over and over again.
Autumn is going to Yale. I’m going to UCLA.
We almost couldn’t be moving farther apart. It’s a few months away and I’m already dreading the pain of this good-bye. It carves out a hollow pit inside me, like I’m losing more than just a geographical anchor. I’m losing an era. Is that lame? Probably. Everyone seems to be getting deep about finishing high school. And then our parents listen to us and laugh, like we’re still so young and don’t know anything.
Which is probably true. Though, I do know some things.
I know that my feelings for Sebastian don’t seem to dim over the next two weeks. I know that the book I’m writing feels like an enemy, a chore. It has no heart, and no end. I realize now that what I thought was easy—writing a book—really was easy. Reasonably speaking. Anyone can start one. It’s finishing that’s impossible.
Autumn suggests changing the names and the places, but I assure her that didn’t work out so well before. Tanenr can attest to that. She’s quick to offer suggestions: I can rewrite it, she can, or we can work together. She thinks there are a million ways I can make it work without outing Sebastian. I’m not so sure.
Looking back, this book is so basic it’s almost embarrassing: It’s just one guy’s story, the lamest autobiography ever of falling in love. Love fails for a million reasons—distance, infidelity, pride, religion, money, illness. Why is this story any more worthy?
It felt like it was. It felt important. Living in this town is suffocating in so many ways.
But if a tree falls in the woods, maybe it makes no sound.
And if a boy falls for the bishop’s closeted son, maybe it makes no story.
• • •
Sebastian’s been in class only once in the past two weeks. Fujita informs us that he’s taking a break to finish up his own school year and will be back in time to see us turn in our papers.
The last day Sebastian was in class, he sat in the front, ducked low over a table with Sabine and Levi, going over their final chapters. His hair fell over his eyes, and he would flip it out unconsciously. His shirt stretched across his back, and I remembered seeing him shirtless, seeing the treasure map of muscle and bone. Being in the same room with him after the breakup was actually painful. I mean, I wonder about that, how I can be sitting there and no one is touching me and still, I hurt. My chest, my limbs, my throat—everything aches.
The whole time, Autumn sat beside me, her spine curled with guilt, and tried to listen to what Fujita was telling us about copyedits. Every time she looked at Sebastian, she’d glance at me, and I could see the question in her eyes: Did you tell him?
But she knows the answer. I’d have to talk to him to tell him anything. We haven’t texted, or e-mailed, or even passed notes in folders. I won’t lie; it’s killing me slowly.
I saw a movie when I was a kid, something that was probably way too mature for me at that age, but there’s one scene that stuck with me so intensely that sometimes it rushes into my thoughts and actually makes me shiver with dread. In it, a woman is walking across the street with her child, and the child runs ahead and gets hit by a car. I don’t even know the plot that comes after this, but the mother starts screaming, tries to walk backward, to undo what just happened. She’s so frantic, so tortured, that for a minute her mind splits and she thinks there’s a way she can take it all back.
I’m not comparing my breakup to the death of a child—I’m not that melodramatic—but that feeling of helplessness, of being totally unable to change your fate, is so dizzying, sometimes it makes me nauseous out of the blue. There’s nothing I can do to fix this.
There’s nothing I can do to get him back.
I’ve told my parents that we crashed and burned, and as much as they try to cheer me up, and as much as Auddy and I work on finding a way back to the easy comfort we had before, that rain cloud follows me everywhere. I’m not hungry. I sleep a ton. I don’t care about this stupid book.
• • •
Three weeks after we broke up and eight days before my novel is due, Sebastian is sitting on my front steps when I get home.
