All We Could Have Been Page 13

  “Honestly, it doesn’t matter. I don’t need to know. You’re here. You’re not with some guy from the drama club tonight, and I’m just gonna assume there’s something in that.”

  “There’s definitely something in this. This is more than what you’ve heard about me. But if you can keep that between us…”

  “Yeah, I really don’t care what anyone at school says. I’m not worried about who thinks what, or what the story people believe is. I just wanted to know. As long as I know,” he says. “But since maybe I wasn’t clear or maybe I hadn’t asked the right way … I’d kind of like … well, I’d be happier if you weren’t involved with some guy from the drama club. For purely selfish reasons.”

  I roll over so I’m almost on top of him. “It’s just a story. It’s a story, and it’s only partly mine to tell, or I’d tell you everything. But it’s nothing but a story. And you’re … this…”

  “You don’t have to say it. As long as we’re both clear.”

  “We’re clear,” I say, kissing him and then settling back into the space between his arm and his body. “I’ve only had one boyfriend. Real boyfriend, anyway. I guess I kind of have a fake boyfriend right now, but there’s only been one guy I’ve kind of liked before.”

  “What happened?” Marcus asks.

  “We had a glorious two weeks. Until someone found out about my brother, and he couldn’t deal with it.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s okay. It wasn’t real anyway. You know, I worried about that with you. I wanted to tell you, because I wanted it to be real. If there was anything, I didn’t want it to be just a story with you.”

  “I’m happy you’re here,” he says. “That’s the only story I need to be true.”

  Still wrapped in the blanket, we stare at his ceiling. The wind shakes the windows, and the chill hints at the edges of the blanket, but we just push closer together.

  It’s weird how someone can take up space beside you and it feels like that space was always empty before. How the space was just waiting. I never felt this kind of emptiness before, because I never knew what it was like for the space to be full. I’m scared of tonight, but he knows my truth now. And he’s still here.

  “Listen, Lexi Lawlor—” Marcus starts.

  “Stewart,” I say.

  “What?”

  “It’s Lexi Stewart. Lawlor is my aunt’s name. My mom’s maiden name. My real name is Lexi Stewart.”

  A name. Just letters assigned to you at birth. But in speaking it, I feel five years of myself shatter. I feel everything else start to fade.

  Letting someone into your life is hard, but you don’t let many people into the all of you. I never have—no one besides my family and the therapist we paid to listen to my secrets, because I needed to get them out of me. But in saying something as simple as a name, I realize what I’ve done. I’ve opened myself to Marcus in a way you can’t take back.

  “Okay, Lexi Stewart,” he says. “I’m going to tell you something I shouldn’t tell you now.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “I don’t know.”

  But he doesn’t tell me. He doesn’t say anything. He merely lifts himself up and kisses me, and then the blanket lands on the floor and we’re tangled in his sheets.

  It makes sense what happens next. The physical act of being with someone—especially the first time—is supposed to be a defining moment. You’re supposed to plan it and think about it endlessly, but I haven’t. Not really. And when it happens, it’s not something I feel needed to be planned. For me, it’s a natural step.

  Marcus knows my name. He has something of me no one else has except the few people who should. My family. Heath. But Marcus is the first person I chose to bring into my story. So the rest just makes sense.

  “Are you sure?” he asks, right before it happens.

  I nod. “Yes.”

  It’s about so much more than sex, though. Sure, that’s a part of it, but it’s also security. Being with him is what it’s like to love someone. It’s forgiveness. This is me realizing who I am. There’s no running away from here anymore. I can’t hide in another girl’s life now. Marcus Cotero knows everything I am. And even though there are still a million pieces we don’t have to the puzzle of each other, it’s too late to go back.

  After, I press myself against his skin, leaning over and bringing the blanket back onto the bed. I pull it tight against us, although I don’t need the warmth of it anymore.

  “Alexia Stewart,” Marcus says, his eyes closed, “you’re beautiful, you know.”

  “You don’t need to flatter me anymore,” I tease. “Besides, you’re not even looking at me.”

  “I don’t need to.”

  I always told myself not to fall in love, because the universe wouldn’t let me have that. But as I start to fall asleep beside Marcus, I promise myself this will be different.

  I decide, before I fade into sleep, that I will forgive the universe after all. Maybe it wasn’t trying to hurt me. Maybe it only wanted me to remember. Maybe it just wanted to remind me who I am.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Fake-breaking up with a person you’re fake-dating feels way more complex than it should. I told myself it was the right thing to do, but once I get on the bus and I see Ryan, I feel sick. He sits beside me and holds my hand, and I’m grateful Marcus gets a ride. He knows, but knowing something theoretically is different from seeing it and wondering how complicated it really is.

  “Are you okay?” Ryan asks. “I’ve been worried about you all weekend. I thought about coming to see you yesterday to see how you were. What’s up with your mom?”

  “Nothing. I mean, it’s not important. I’m okay.” I try not to feel guilty. He’s not really your boyfriend. You didn’t do anything wrong, my brain reminds me in a rare instance of not hating me.

  “Well, I’m glad. I really was thinking about you.”

  I certainly wasn’t thinking about him last night when I was lying in Marcus’s bed.

  “Do you have time to talk later?” I ask.

  “What? You don’t want to talk about it here?”

  As if to demonstrate the point, Eric pushes Ryan further into the seat so he’s nearly sitting on top of me. “Hey, listen, I was thinking,” Eric says. “It’s almost Thanksgiving, and you know what that means, right?”

  “No. Unless you’re suddenly a huge fan of turkey dinners,” Ryan says.

  “I’m always a fan of any dinner. It’s like you don’t even know me, man.”

  “So you came over here to tell us about a meal that happens every year?”

  “No. I mean, it’s almost Thanksgiving, which means it’s almost Christmas. And Christmas brings shopping. In particular, it brings massively overpriced electronics at almost reasonable prices.”

  “Do you have a point?”

  “It’s the first year I’ve been able to drive for such things. We need to go. Just think of the shit we can buy.”

  “You have a car and a license. We’re still broke as fuck.”

  Eric looks at me. “You in on this?”

  I shrug. I don’t want to tell them what I’m really doing for Thanksgiving weekend, but Eric isn’t listening anyway. “I’m broker than the both of you. I don’t even have a car or a license.”

  “We’re going,” Eric tells Ryan, and then he leaves with absolutely nothing accomplished by the conversation.

  “So you were saying you wanted to talk?” Ryan asks.

  “We’re starting something new in calculus. What about second period? Auditorium?”

  “Shouldn’t you maybe go for the first day of something new in calculus?”

  “New things mean two weeks of the teacher realizing how hopeless we all are. I won’t miss anything.”

  “Okay, yeah. Second period. I’ll meet you on the stage?”

  I nod but don’t get to say much else, because the bus arrives at school and we’re suddenly caught up in the same group of people we spend every
morning with—Eric, Lauren, Chloe, and Rory. The show’s over, but we’re on to the next play and planning the breakdown of the set, and everyone just moves forward. No one asks why I missed the party.

  I spend all of first period trying to figure out how to tell Ryan. What to tell Ryan. I haven’t told Marcus anything about Ryan, but do I tell Ryan about Marcus? And what loyalty am I supposed to have to my fake boyfriend or my sort-of boyfriend I slept with but haven’t officially decided is a boyfriend?

  “You’re quiet,” Lauren says toward the end of class. “Sorry you couldn’t go to Rory’s on Saturday. It was pretty ridiculous.”

  “I’m glad it was fun. I just had shit to deal with at home.”

  She shrugs. “There will be another party. Is everything okay?”

  I look over at her. I don’t know her well enough to tell her anything, but maybe she has some insight into my mess. “Have you ever been in the middle of something that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but you feel like it’s probably bad for everyone?”

  “That’s a bit vague.”

  “Okay, let’s say … let’s say there are a couple of people you care about. And you care about them in different ways. But everyone thinks you care about one person a way you don’t, because you care about someone else that way. But you don’t want to hurt the first person by making them feel bad.…”

  Lauren pulls her desk closer to mine. “There’s another guy?”

  I sigh. “It’s complicated.” If I don’t wear a sticker that says HELLO, MY NAME IS SORRY, I can definitely get one that says HELLO, MY NAME IS IT’S COMPLICATED.

  “Does Ryan know?” she asks. I shake my head. “But you want to tell him, except you’re afraid of hurting him, because you do like him. Just not as much as Pablo or whatever.”

  “Pablo?”

  “I don’t know. It sounded random. And better than Guy Two.”

  “I like him differently than I like Pablo.”

  “Does Pablo know about Ryan?”

  “He does. Well, sort of.”

  “It really is complicated.”

  I put my head on my desk, which prompts our teacher, who has not paid attention to us for the last ten minutes, to yell at me.

  “I hate everything,” I tell Lauren.

  “Well, Ryan’s a good guy. He’ll understand. Just tell him. It’s not very nice to keep secrets from people you care about.”

  I ignore my teacher’s yelling and keep my head down until the bell rings. I’m tempted to go home sick, but I don’t think being called out for keeping secrets counts as a legitimate illness.

  Ryan and I don’t talk during our walk from the guidance office to the auditorium. I run through hypothetical conversations in my mind, all of which end in a lot of crying and everyone hating me. I don’t know what Ryan does. He walks next to me. Maybe he’s thinking of his own fears, or maybe he’s just thinking about lunch.

  “What’s up?” he asks when we’re finally inside the auditorium. “You sounded worried.”

  I turn on the light that we used for the balcony scene in the play and lean against the back stage wall. “I’m always worried. That’s my sound.”

  Ryan laughs. “Okay, fine. But you sounded maybe specifically worried? Is that a thing?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, picking at splinters of wood on a piece of a set. It’s a random piece that doesn’t belong to anything we still have, but I guess you can always use spare plywood.

  Ryan sits on the floral couch from our first day back here and puts his feet on a gold coffee table. I imagine a person trying to make a home from all this furniture, decades and aesthetics mixing until there’s so little left of real life that everything becomes spectacle.

  “It’s about us,” I tell him.

  “We’re an us? I thought—”

  “Fine. Fake us. It’s about fake us.” I sink to the floor and pull my legs into my body. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

  Ryan nods and gets up, grabbing a can of soda before returning to the couch. “I see. After our whirlwind week together, you have finally decided it’s too much and that you must instead run away with your lover?”

  I think of Marcus’s skin, warm against me under his blanket.

  “I’m really sorry,” I say, guilt pulling at my brain.

  “Why? We weren’t really a couple.”

  “I know, but I promised. I was supposed to be your normal, and I went and screwed it all up. I wish…”

  He moves over to where I am and hands me his unopened soda. “L, I really don’t care. Unless we can’t be friends anymore. Then I care. Is your secret lover the jealous type?”

  “Marcus,” I say, taking the soda. I don’t open it, but I pick at the pull tab, letting the sound of it hitting the top of the can echo across the empty stage. “You’re right. There’s another guy, and his name’s Marcus. He’s on our bus. Except, well, he doesn’t take the bus.”

  “Ah, I see, then. So you really have left me for a much more interesting man. One who doesn’t require transportation via large orange vehicles.”

  “It’s not … I’m sorry, Ryan.”

  “I’m fucking with you, L. I’m totally on board with you and Marcus. He’s the brooding one, right? Always sits in the back when he does take the bus?”

  “Yeah. I mean, he’s not brooding all the time.”

  “Girls always go for the brooding guy. It’s inevitable.”

  I sigh and rest my head on my knees. “What happens to you, though? I can keep lying to everyone. Marcus knows—”

  “Wait, you told him about me?” His smile disappears, and I recognize that instant fear that turns your entire body cold.

  “No, just that we were kind of together, but not really. He’d heard I had a boyfriend before we … I wanted him to know I didn’t have a boyfriend.”

  Ryan exhales, the sound of it louder than the echo of the aluminum pull tab against the can. “I don’t want anyone else to know about me. As long as you promise not to tell anyone, we’re good.”

  “That’s your story. I don’t have that right.”

  “Well then, you don’t need to keep lying about us. People break up. I suppose I can fake some sporadic jealousy of Marcus?”

  “Are you sure, though? I can keep pretending. I lasted a week. I’m so sorry. I don’t want you—”

  He rubs my knee, like you would with a sibling. It hurts when I realize how much he reminds me of Scott.

  “How do we tell people?” I ask, looking down, hurting from the memory of my brother and everything he’ll never be.

  “I guess we just have to do it officially somehow?”

  “Is there a form we fill out? Maybe a notary that’s needed?”

  “From what I’ve gathered, I’m pretty sure it requires the sacrifice of your firstborn or something.”

  “Probably,” I say.

  He adjusts until he’s sitting beside me, and then he wraps his arm around my shoulders, pulling me into him. “Are you really okay, though?” he asks. “Do you want to talk about what happened Saturday?”

  “No, it’s nothing.”

  “Are you sure? We were all worried.”

  “Were you?”

  He nods. “Of course. You’re our friend.”

  I wonder how true that is. How much they really worried. I can’t imagine they sat around Rory’s cast party talking about me. Wondering what happened to me. Maybe Ryan did. Maybe even Rory or Lauren asked. But I feel like most people didn’t care. Or if they did, I have a feeling it wasn’t pure concern that drove them.

  “I’m fine,” I say, because it’s not Ryan’s fault that people are people. “Are you sure we’re okay, though?”

  “Yeah, we’re okay. Still friends?”

  “Always.”

  The bell rings, forcing us to leave. It’s anticlimactic, but I guess there’s no real drama associated with a fake breakup.

  I still feel like something’s missing between us, though, which bugs me. It bothers me all day—in th
e rest of my classes, at lunch, and at drama after school when we start breaking down the set as we brainstorm show ideas for winter. I know it’s partly because Ryan’s friends with someone else—a girl who’s only a part of me, but there’s more than that. When people come up and talk to me or when I hear them comforting Ryan about our breakup, I wonder if there’s a place for Lexi Stewart in this group. I wonder if the only reason I belong is because this version of me is someone they can like. I can’t help wondering if the place I have is so tenuous that it would explode if the real me touched it.

  “Lexi Lawlor, you’re a heartbreaker,” Eric yells across the auditorium. “My buddy’s wasting away from the pain. He can’t even think about dinner right now.”

  “That’s because he already ate the rest of the concessions,” Lauren yells back. She turns to me. “Don’t worry—I get it. Ryan will be okay. You did the right thing.”

  “Ignore him,” Ryan yells, and I kind of wish we could continue discussing my relationships in closer proximity, rather than shouting about them for the entire drama club to hear. “I told him we’re friends. Right, L?”

  I nod and Eric looks at me, shaking his head. Rueful? I don’t think that’s an accurate description of Eric, but I think it’s probably a good summation of my existence.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  When I get home from drama, I go to Marcus’s apartment first.

  “Hey,” I say when he opens the door. “I broke up with the guy I wasn’t dating.”

  “There’s a story.”

  “No kidding.”

  He stands awkwardly in the doorframe, his hands in his pockets, and moves from side to side. “So…”

  “So…”

  “Does that mean you’re on the market?” he asks.

  “Ew. You make me sound like a sandwich.”

  Marcus shrugs. “I like sandwiches.”

  “Do you want to come over?”

  “Are you asking as a friend or as a girlfriend?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Nah. I’m just trying to ask you out, and I suck at it.”

  He grabs a coat and his keys, taking my hand once we’re outside, and then he awkwardly kisses me. He misses my lips by half an inch, but it’s kind of cute in how nonsensical it is. I slept with him yesterday, and here we are, trying to figure out what words to use to define ourselves and forgetting how to kiss.