If He Had Been with Me (17 page)

We’re playing badminton, and I just flinched when the plastic feather thingy flew at me. Even though it’s sitting right next to my sneaker, Finny walks over to pick it up. He backs up a few paces and holds up his racket. There are too many pairs of us to be able to use the nets, so we’re scattered in random intervals throughout the gym.

“Try again,” he says. “I’m hitting it to you slowly. It can’t hurt you.” I dutifully raise the racket. With exaggerated movements, Finny tosses it into the air and hits it gently toward me. I bat defensively at it and it bounces off my racket and arches toward the floor. Finny dives, but my poor return is too much for even him. He plucks the white thing off the shiny yellow boards of the gym and looks at me again.

“Okay,” he says. “That was better. This time, try to hit it upward.” He gets into position again, then pauses. “But not straight up,” he adds.

This time when I hit the birdie, it veers off to the left. Finny dashes to the side, and suddenly it’s flying back at me.

“Whoa,” I cry. I swing at it but miss and it falls to the floor. “Sorry,” I say. I bend over and pick it up. It’s kind of like a bouncy ball, I think. I like bouncy balls. If it didn’t have so many plastic feathers sticking out of it, I might like the game better. But then it would be harder to see. I try to imagine seeing the little ball flying in the air. Maybe if it was brightly colored.

“Autumn?” Finny says. I look up at him again. I realize that I’ve just been standing staring at the ball.

“Sorry,” I say for the second time in two minutes. “I zoned out there for a sec.”

“I saw,” Finny says. “So do you want to serve?”

“Sure,” I say. I carefully toss the birdie in the air and watch it fall. I hit it, and it flies up and out. Finny lopes forward and hits it toward me, graceful, high, and slow. It comes straight to me, and without having to take a step, I whack it up again. We manage to pass it back and forth five times before I finally miss it again.

“That was good,” Finny says. Ms. Scope blows her whistle and we walk to her to place our rackets in a pile at her feet. Finny and I walk together, but not side by side. I lag a bit behind him and keep some distance between us.

“Oh,” I say, “Mom said to ask you what you want for your birthday.”

“I don’t care,” he says. “Whatever.”

“I have to have something to tell her,” I say.

“Um, I could use some new sneakers?” Finny says.

“I’ll tell her to get you an ant farm,” I say as we turn around to walk toward the locker room. Finny shrugs.

“Okay,” he says. “You want one too?”

“Yeah,” I say, though the thought hadn’t occurred to me. I could put it on my desk and watch it when I have writer’s block. We’re nearing the doors now. After I change clothes, I’ll go to my literature class and not talk to Finny again until tomorrow, even if I see him from a distance here or at home. “What are you doing for your birthday?” I ask.

“Just the same thing as always, having everybody over on Friday and we’ll eat and watch a movie,” he says.

“Sounds like fun,” I say.

“Do you want to come?” Finny asks. I stop short. Finny turns to me. We’re standing in front of the locker room doors. Our classmates walk around us to get inside.

“I don’t really—” I stumble on my words and have to look away from his face. “I mean, that wouldn’t really work, would it?” I say.

Finny shrugs, but he doesn’t smile. “I just thought I would ask anyway.”

“I mean, I would ask you too, but, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” Finny says.

“But on our actual birthdays, we’ll have dinner with The Mothers, so—” I shrug, unsure of how to finish the thought.

“So it’s fine, we’re good,” he finishes for me.

“Yeah,” I say. “We’re good.”

“Finn, Autumn,” Ms. Scope yells at us. “Do you want to be late?” I realize we’re the last two in the gym. We turn away from each other and go through our separate doors.

“The rose bush you gave me for Christmas is still blooming,” Sasha says. She sits down on the steps next to me and lays her book bag between her knees.

“They do that,” I say. It’s the first week of October. I have a new charm on Jamie’s bracelet and an ant farm on my desk. The weather is cooling off but still warm, and a few trees have started to turn. The novelty of being seniors has worn off a bit. It’s a matter of course now that we’re the oldest and the coolest. All the other students are so young and awkward; how could we not be?

“We should have a party for Halloween this year,” Brooke says. “I mean like actually invite people besides us. My sister could get us some more to drink—”

“Could we wear costumes?” Alex says.

“No,” Sasha and I say. Somewhere in the back of my head, I think of how a few years ago I couldn’t imagine Halloween without a costume.

“Why not?” Brooke asks.

“I’m not wearing a costume,” Jamie says.

“I’m not,” I say. “But my parents are going to some marriage camp therapy retreat thing that weekend so—”

“I’m pregnant,” Angie says. All of our heads swivel together. She’s standing at the top of the steps, just arrived. She wears her book bag on both shoulders, like a child. The pink streaks in her hair have faded and grown out. She stares back at us as if we had just asked her a question.

“Already?” Sasha says.

“I took a test yesterday.”

The bell rings and we stand. We walk in a group toward the doors, but the boys trail behind us. The girls ask questions: what are her symptoms, how is Dave handling it.

“I’m tired and my boobs hurt,” she says. “But that’s all besides being late.” She says Dave seemed pretty freaked out, but he also seemed excited. “It’s almost like he’s kinda proud of himself,” she says in the same strange monotone. She laughs then, and it sounds strangely happy.

“We’re having a Halloween party the weekend my parents will be gone,” I say to Finny. He bounces the Ping Pong ball against the table and hits it slowly.

“Yeah, I heard about that,” he says. The ball bounces and sails past me.

“You did?”

“Yes. You know you were supposed to hit that back to me right?”

“Sorry.” I bend to retrieve the ball and hit it toward him. “The thing is, I have a favor to ask.”

“What?”

“Well, you know I
did
tell Mom and Dad that I wanted to have a little party for Halloween—”

“Mmhmm.” Finny taps the ball smoothly toward me and I dart over to whack it back.

“But, you know, it’s gonna be more than just a little party. And I was worried about your mom.” In spite of my clumsy dashing, we have a steady rhythm going now. Tap puck, tap puck.

“So?”

“So, I figured that if you were there, your mom would assume it couldn’t be all that bad, you know? That she’d let it slide a bit.”

Finny catches the ball in one hand and raises his eyebrows. “You want me to come,” he says.

“Yeah,” I say. I shrug my shoulders without meaning too. “I mean, of course you can bring Sylvie and everybody else too.”

“You know, my mom isn’t as clueless as your mom.”

Ms. Scope blows her whistle, and Finny and I lay our paddles on the table and go to sit on the bleachers. The other half of the class gathers around the six tables.

“Yeah, but that’s because she’s cooler than my mom,” I say. We sit with a foot of space between us on the bottom row.

“That’s true,” he says.

“Will you come?”

Finny shrugs. “Your friends won’t mind?”

“We already discussed it,” I say. It’s an accurate way to describe the argument this proposition caused on the steps this morning, but he doesn’t need to know that.

***

“Look, you guys,” I said, “I’m not having all these people over unless I know Aunt Angelina won’t say anything.”

“And you think having Alexis and Sylvie over will make the party seem tame?” Sasha said.

“Having Finny over will,” I say.

“I don’t see what the big deal is anyway,” Noah says. “I figured he’d be coming. He lives next door.”

“If he comes, they’ll all come,” Jamie says. “They never do anything alone.”

“Neither do we,” Brooke says.

“I do not want to hang out with them,” Jamie says.

“Me neither,” says Sasha.

“How about this,” Alex says. “If they try to come near you, I’ll pelt them with candy corn.”

“You don’t have to,” I say. “I doubt they want to hang out with us either.”

“But you think they’ll come if you ask them?” Jamie asks.

“If I ask Finny, yeah,” I say. “And I’m going to.”

***

Finny bends down and ties his shoe.

“Okay,” he says, “we’ll come.”

“Awesome,” I say. “But I didn’t think it would be hard to convince a big partier like you.”

“I’m not really. Mostly I just stand there. And I’m almost always driving Sylvie home, so I can’t drink.”

“Sounds like fun. So why do you go?”

Finny looks away and shrugs. “Sylvie needs someone to look after her,” he says.

“Oh,” I say. It’s as if someone has opened a window and a cold breeze is fluttering around us. And suddenly it’s unbelievable again that I could invite Finny—and Sylvie!—to the Halloween party with all my friends. Finny and Sylvie were Homecoming King and Queen this year. Up on stage, Finny looked miserable and blushed while they crowned him, and Sylvie beamed at the crowd. They held hands. I can’t have them in my house.

“Well, thanks for the favor. You don’t have to stay the whole time if you want,” I say.

“It’s fine,” Finny says, and I know he can feel it too. We sit in silence for the rest of class.

I open my notebook and turn to a fresh page.

“Okay, remember the rules, no crossing words out, no stopping. Ready?” Mr. Laughegan says. We look at him expectantly. “Your strongest memory. Go!” I bend over my desk and my hand flies across the page.

The
night
Finny
kissed
me
I—

My hand recoils from the page as if burned. This isn’t the right answer. That isn’t my strongest memory. That’s the memory I’ve tried so hard not to have. I can’t possibly remember it well enough to write it down.

“It’s a stream of consciousness, Autumn. Don’t stop.”

I can’t disobey Mr. Laughegan.

The
night
Finny
kissed
me
I
didn’t know what to do.

***

We’d hardly spoken for weeks. All autumn we had drifted and drifted away from each other, and I never knew what to say to him anymore. That last week of school before break in eighth grade, we had even stopped walking to the bus stop together. My mother asked me if we had had a fight.

But then it was Christmas Eve. My mother and I came over, and I sat down next to him on the couch, and there weren’t the other popular girls or our different classes or the way the kids at school thought our friendship was strange. There was only our family together and the tree and our presents and we watched
It’s a Wonderful Life
together while The Mothers made dinner.

We didn’t talk about how things had been different, because suddenly everything was the same again. On Christmas morning, we laughed and threw balled up wrapping paper at each other. It was unseasonably warm that afternoon; we went into the backyard and for the hundredth time he tried to teach me to play soccer. The next day, he came over and we made a fort in the attic. We lay on our backs and looked at the sunlight bleeding through the ripped quilt above our heads, and I told Finny the plot of the novel I was going to write, about a kidnapped princess whose ship sinks and she has to start a new life among the natives of the island she washes up on.

For a week, we were us again, and I forgot to call Alexis back, and Finny shone his flashlight in my window at night. We made popcorn and watched movies. We took silly pictures of each other with his mother’s camera. I made paper snowflakes and he hung them in the windows.

It had been like rushing down a swift river. I had been swept away from Finny and into popularity without the chance to come up for air. But now I was breathing again, and I thought we could find a way to stay friends. I don’t know what he thought.

We had one week. And then it was New Year’s Eve. My parents were going out, and I was going to stay with Finny and Aunt Angelina until they came home. After dinner, Finny and I baked a cake with his mother, and while it was in the oven, we sat at the kitchen table and made increasingly silly lists of resolutions, that we would befriend ducks and build jet packs, meet five dead celebrities, and eat an uncut pizza starting from the middle.

“Here’s a real one,” Finny said. “Let’s build a tree house this summer.”

“Okay,” I said. “Can I paint it?”

“Sure.”

“Any color I want?”

“Yeah.”

“Even if it’s pink?”

“If that’s what you want.” Finny added it on the bottom of the list, drew a dash, and added a notation on color schemes. “I missed you,” he said, his head still down. My throat tightened. He looked up. We stared. I don’t know what my face looked like. His cheeks were pink, and I remember thinking that his eyes looked different, darker somehow. And something else. Something had changed in the weeks we had been apart, but I couldn’t place it.

“Finny, Autumn, it’s almost time,” Aunt Angelina called. Finny broke our gaze first, and went to grab wooden spoons and pots for us to bang.

When the moment came, we ran down the lawn together, and the neighbors were setting off fireworks and we stood on the sidewalk and whooped and banged and watched. Finny was louder than I had ever seen him be before. He yelled and his voice cracked; he raised the pot above his head and it clanged like a gong. It unsettled me slightly, like his eyes. He didn’t seem the same anymore.

“Okay, come on guys,” Aunt Angelina said. We turned and, still breathing hard, began to trudge up the lawn behind her. She had almost reached the porch when Finny grabbed my arm.

“Wait,” Finny said. I stopped and looked at him. He swallowed and stared at me.

“What?” I said. I saw him lean in, but I thought I must be confused. He couldn’t be about to kiss me. Then he turned his face to the side, his nose brushed along my cheek, and Finny’s lips were on mine. Warm. His lips moved gently against mine once; there was only enough time for my eyelids to instinctively flutter closed and open again. He pulled away slowly, his eyes never leaving my face. His hand was still on my arm, his fingers clenched around me. My stomach had tied itself into a knot.

“What are you doing?” I said, even though Finny wasn’t doing anything now. He was just looking at me with an expression I’d never seen before. His fingers dug deeper into my arm. We took a breath.

“Kids?” Aunt Angelina called from the doorway. “Come on. Cake’s done.”

I gently tugged my arm and his hand dropped. I took a step away from him. Our eyes never wavered.

“Kids?”

I turned and ran up the lawn. He followed me, and I imagined him grabbing me and pinning me to the ground.

Finny, my Finny, kissed me. It was horrible. It was strange and wonderful. It felt like I was watching a meteor shower and did not know if it meant the stars were falling and the sky was breaking apart.

When I got back home, I closed my blinds and buried my face in my pillow. My tears were hot in my eyes and it was hard to breathe.

“What are you doing?” I said. “What are you doing?” I whispered it to him again and again until I had cried myself to sleep.

The next morning while The Mothers made our New Year’s brunch, Finny and I sat on the couch with three feet between us and did not talk. We stared straight ahead.

There were four round bruises on my arm where his hand had clasped me. He had never hurt me before.

And we weren’t friends anymore.

***

It’s not fair I wasn’t ready It’s not my fault. Did you kiss me because you wanted to kiss a girl or did you kiss me because What was I supposed to do I wasn’t ready I wasn’t ready I didn’t know

“Time,” Mr. Laughegan says. I drop my pen and it rolls off my desk and onto the floor. “All right. Now read over what you wrote. Is there a story there?”