Instead of getting an exhaustive review of the facts, over the first few weeks of school, Kaitlin just learned the basics—Luke and I started going out the second half of our senior year, we made it through June and July, but by the time August rolled around, we were over. I had a boyfriend for a little while, and then I didn’t. Not exactly a novel story, nothing unusual about it.
But for all of her proficiency with scientific equations and the indisputable answers they produced, Kaitlin was still a sucker for the unpredictable formula for love. It was already October, and our conversations had gone from comparing professors and reading requirements to normal life stuff—toss me a pen, can I borrow a tampon, want to order a pizza for dinner instead of eating in the dining hall? I guessed it was only a matter of time before she wanted to scratch the surface and uncover what was really underneath my seemingly easy answers to her questions about Luke.
“Seriously, what really happened?” Kaitlin finally wanted to know. “There has to be more to it,” she insisted.
Kaitlin and I were lying on our beds attempting to study. It was a Friday night, and we probably should have been looking for a party or hanging out downstairs in the lounge, but it was the first night of our four-day October break weekend, and we’d decided that what we really wanted to do was stay in and enjoy our little vacation. Kaitlin was waiting for Mark’s nightly phone call, and I was trying to get a jump-start on my upcoming geology paper. (I’d thought a class about rocks and crystals would be fun and interesting, but I had quickly discovered I was not a budding geoscientist).
“What do you mean, what really happened?” My mom had instilled in me that repeating a question that someone had just asked showed that you were listening. In this case, however, I was just buying myself time to think of an answer.
“There had to be something. A fight?” Kaitlin stared up at the glow-in-the-dark stars she’d stuck to the ceiling over her bed. I’d thought that an engineering major would make sure the stars accurately reflected actual constellations, but instead, the pale yellow bursts haphazardly dotted the ceiling in no particular formation. “Did he lie to you about something huge? Did you get pissed at something he did?”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Kaitlin turned onto her side to face me. “But we learn from our experiences. I mean, what’s the point of coming back if we can’t take the lessons from our past lives with us?”
A few weeks ago, I would have thought she was nuts, but Kaitlin wasn’t kidding. She really believed all this past life stuff. I’d learned to actually kind of appreciate her offbeat take on life (or afterlife), even if I still couldn’t figure out the mermaid thing. I mean, mermaids don’t actually exist outside of books and Disney movies. So her past life seemed a little convenient and also a little wishful—who wouldn’t want to be a mermaid? They always had great boobs, fabulous hair, and even though they spent ninety-nine percent of their time underwater, their skin never shriveled up.
“Not everything can have a lesson, Kaitlin. Sometimes shit just happens.” I sounded like a bumper sticker.
“Nothing just happens. I’ll help you figure out what you were supposed to learn. Then at least you won’t make the same mistake again in the future.”
When I thought about me and Luke, about how we’d started and where we’d ended, I couldn’t pinpoint just one mistake—a single incident or event that eventually made it impossible for us to stay together. Instead, I remembered moments where each of us had made a choice. And, finally, those choices had led to a moment where one final choice was made, and Luke made it. In the end, I wasn’t given a choice at all.
“See these?” I held up two of the textbooks scattered around me on my bed. “I have enough learning to do this semester.”
Kaitlin shook her head at me. I could practically hear her tsk tsking. I had a feeling she was beginning to think I was a lost cause. “Then you’ll be destined to repeat the same mistakes, over and over and over again.”
What did I learn from my experience? When you throw a notebook in the trash, make sure the subject of said notebook doesn’t get his hands on it. In other words, learn how to use a shredder.
Maybe lesson number two was don’t attend all-school assemblies.
“Just tell me,” Kaitlin insisted. “You’ll feel better, I promise.”
I seriously doubted that reliving that night in August would make me feel anything but completely and totally crappy.
Kaitlin sat up and leaned against the wall beside her bed. She pulled her knees into her chest and hugged them. Now I had her complete attention. “I don’t believe you.”
“What don’t you believe?”
“That it’s history, that it’s old news.” Kaitlin frowned at me. “I think you’re still in love with him. Why else haven’t you gone to see that guy you know over at UMass? Nolan? He’s twenty minutes away. I know he’s texted you.”
“You do?”
Kaitlin rolled her eyes at me. “Just admit it, you’re not over Luke.”
“Talking about it won’t change anything.”
“But it matters, Emily,” she insisted.
“Why?”
“Because maybe he’s your dolphin.” Kaitlin didn’t even crack a smile when she said this. She was totally serious.
She was crazy, but she was also brilliant, and I loved her and her bizarre beliefs that she never gave up on, no matter how ridiculous they made her look. I wished I had that ability.
You know what else I wished? That Luke could hear this conversation. That he could meet my wacky roommate and see the wild tapestries on her walls. That we could exchange a look and both know that, even if Kaitlin’s ideas were completely out there and totally nuts coming from someone who could also explain continuous dynamical systems and discrete geometry, she was pretty awesome. And so were we. And that made me miss him even more.
“Did you ever think that maybe it’s not really over?” Kaitlin continued, and when I didn’t answer, she made one final attempt. “But we won’t know until I hear the whole story, right? Start to finish. So start.”
“I wouldn’t even know where to begin.” I snapped the cap onto my yellow Highlighter. It wasn’t like I was making a tremendous amount of progress on the mineralogic problems associated with crystallography anyway.
“Begin at the beginning,” Kaitlin instructed me.
So that’s what I did. I started with my move back to Boston my senior year, and stopped where most stories stop—the happy ending, when Josie arranged for Luke and me to work things out.
“And then everything was great,” I concluded, much like a librarian closing the last page of a children’s book before looking up at her class of adoring, satisfied listeners. “We were happy.”
“Obviously there’s more,” Kaitlin pointed out. “What’s the rest of the story?”
I sucked in my breath and rolled over onto my stomach, hoping a change of position would keep me from dissolving as I thought back to graduation—to when I’d thought we really would have a happy ending, even if the nagging uncertainty of our situation had started to worm its way into my head. Back to when I didn’t know that when you decided to let yourself love someone, it meant you were also setting yourself up to have someone to lose.
“You want the whole story or the abridged version,” I asked. It was almost two o’clock in the morning.
“The whole story,” she told me. “Chapter by chapter.”
I inhaled deeply, like someone about to be submerged underwater for a very long time, and prepared to tell Kaitlin the whole story in painstaking detail. “We graduated a month later.”
“And…” she wanted to know.
I fixed my eyes on the covers of my geology textbooks, the vivid images of purple prismed crystals, craggly silver speckled rocks, and golden molten lava blurring together into a kaleidoscope of indecipherable smudges. I forced myself to blink, bringing my eyes back into focus.
“And then it was summer,” I said. “The be
ginning of the end.”
I took her through the ups and downs of our summer, until I got to the night I found Luke at the ferry.
“And?” Kaitlin inched forward, her arms wrapped around her knees as she pulled them in tight to her chest. “Then what?”
I swallowed the lump in my throat and shrugged. “And then he decided to give up on us.”
“Wow.” Kaitlin sat back against the wall and shook her head. “Just wow. So that’s it? You haven’t talked to him since?”
“Nope.”
“I can’t believe it.” Kaitlin rolled over onto her back and stared at the stars on the ceiling. “After all that,” she mused.
“Yep, after all that.” I closed my eyes and lay there silently, wrung out from retelling the story of our breakup. It had exhausted me, remembering the details, the sequence of events that added up to the end of me and Luke. “We never even said good-bye.”
“What do you mean?” Kaitlin asked.
“I mean, that was it. He just walked away from me. There was never even a good-bye.”
For some reason, that made a difference to me, as if without the finality of a good-bye, there was still a chance—a door that remained open with enough light finding its way through the crack to give me hope.
“Oh, Emily.”
“The thing is, I feel like I didn’t have a choice.”
“Sure you did. You could have run after him. You could have called him the next day. Or the next. Shit, you could call him right now.”
“I think the statute of limitations on that ship has sailed,” I told her, mixing my metaphors. It was too late and I was too tired to care. She got the point. “Besides, he wouldn’t have talked to me. You have no idea how he looked when he turned away. He was done. He was so done with us, with me, all of it. He’d had enough.”
“So if you had a choice now, what would you do?”
“I’d go back to when everything was easy.”
“But that’s not even a choice, Emily. There’s no option to press rewind. The way I see it, you basically have two options. You can either get over it and move on. Or you can do whatever it takes to try to fix it.”
“Both of those sound pretty unpleasant.”
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t be hard. I just said you have options. Whether you pick one is up to you. But don’t complain that you never had one.”
“Here’s my pick; I’m going to close my eyes and sleep for the next twelve hours.”
Kaitlin sat up and grabbed my arm, squeezing over and over again, as if she was trying to pump the energy back into me. “There’s no way you’re going to sleep.”
“Are you kidding me? We’ve been up all night. I just want to pass out.”
“No!” she insisted. “That can’t be the end. I mean, he’s your dolphin!”
I frowned. Was she going to pull out the mermaid/dolphin card now? “Seriously?”
“I don’t mean he’s actually your dolphin. I don’t know what he was before.” She paused, realizing that this line of rationale would not win me over. “I just mean you have to go.”
“Go where?”
“To meet him. Tomorrow—it’s when you both promised. So go!”
“I am not going to meet him in a parking lot. Not that he’d even be there, which means I’m not going to go to a parking lot and stand there by myself looking like an idiot, waiting for someone who will never show up.”
“But you both promised, doesn’t that mean anything?” For someone who had stayed up all night, Kaitlin sure was wide awake.
“That was before everything happened, Kaitlin. I don’t think our promise applies anymore.”
“Don’t you want to know for sure?”
“Oh, I know. Believe me, he made everything perfectly clear.”
“Go. He’ll be there, I just know it. Wouldn’t you hate yourself if he went and you didn’t?”
I’d spent weeks hating myself, being sorry, wishing I could change everything. I was already well acquainted to the feeling.
“He won’t show up.”
“But you don’t know that for sure. Besides, if you get there and he isn’t waiting for you, then you know it’s really over. For good. You’ll have closure.”
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, Kaitlin was right. There was a part of me—a stupid, ridiculous, delusional part of me—that still hoped.
“That’s what you want, right?” she asked. “At least then you can move on, Emily. Because right now, from what I’ve seen, you haven’t gotten past it.”
I shrugged.
“You really have nothing to lose,” she reminded me, as if that would help, pointing out that I’d already lost everything that I used to think mattered so much. It didn’t exactly make me want to go through it all again.
“Come on.” Kaitlin nudged me. “Go.”
“I’ve been up all night. I probably look like shit.” I sat up and glanced across the room at the mirror on the wall above Kaitlin’s dresser. “No, I do look like shit. Besides, how would I even get there?” I asked.
She handed me her phone, which was open to a page with the Peter Pan Bus Lines schedule. “Look, there’s a bus leaving for Boston in forty-five minutes. Take a quick shower, get dressed, throw on some makeup, and go.”
“You think so?” I asked, actually warming up to the idea. What if Luke went, if for no other reason than because he’d promised he would. “But it will cost me, like, forty dollars to get from the bus station to Friendly’s.”
“Call your brother.”
Really, I was going to put my future in the hands of TJ?
“Get in the shower. I’ll text TJ for you.” Kaitlin held out her hand and waited for me to give her my phone.
“Make him promise not to tell my parents. I don’t want them to know I’m going home,” I told her as I typed in my password and handed the phone over. “And don’t make me sound desperate, or TJ will never let me live this down.”
Long-Distance Relationship Tip #59:
Tackle the challenges of your long-distance relationship head on.
Yes, car owners have insurance for these types of situations,
but relationships don’t require coverage for accidental damage.
Even if they should. Be careful.
It was nuts. And, contrary to what Kaitlin said, forty-five minutes was not enough time to shower, put on makeup, and still make it down the hill to the bus terminal. Which was why Kaitlin had tossed all of my makeup into my backpack, and I was now trying to apply mascara while balancing a handheld mirror on my lap as the bus careened down the Mass Pike toward Boston. What should be a two hour trip by car was going to take almost three hours on the bus, which was plenty of time to put on make-up, but too much time to think about what might happen when I arrived.
Kaitlin had convinced me that I needed closure, but it wouldn’t come cheap. After spending forty-six dollars on a round trip bus ticket, and handing over another twenty to TJ (Kaitlin couldn’t convince him to pick me up at the bus station for any less than that), I was going to be out over sixty dollars. And there was no guarantee Luke would even be waiting for me.
“I’m not even going to ask,” TJ said when I opened the car door and slid into the passenger seat. “Just put the money in the console and we’ll be on our way.”
TJ wasn’t kidding. He didn’t ask a single question—not why my roommate was the one asking for the favor, or why it was so important that I get to Friendly’s by two o’clock. For all he knew, I was just having a really bad craving for a strawberry Fribble.
“You didn’t tell mom or dad you were picking me up, did you?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Nope. Leave another twenty and I’ll even pretend I don’t know who you are.”
“You wiped me out. I only have ten bucks left.”
We drove along in silence, although I had a feeling TJ was trying to figure out how to get the last of my cash.
TJ pulled the car into the Friendly’s parking lo
t five minutes ahead of schedule. I scanned the spots for Luke’s car. Even though I’d spent the entire bus ride preparing for this moment, my throat started to ache. His car wasn’t there.
“Look at that,” TJ pointed out. “We made it with five minutes to spare. That’s probably deserving of a tip, right?”
I ignored his effort to bilk me out of more money, and instead reached for the door handle to let myself out. “Unless I text something different, meet me back here in an hour.”
“Wait a minute. Your roommate never said anything about taking you back to the bus. This was strictly a drop-off. I have places to go, people to see.”
“Give me a break, TJ, you do not.”
“Do so. I’m meeting my friends in exactly fifteen minutes, and if you don’t get out of the car, I’ll be late.”
“So how am I supposed to get back to the bus station?”
TJ shrugged. “I don’t know. You’ll figure it out, I’m sure. You are the brains in the family, right?”
He didn’t wait for my answer. He barely waited for me to close the door before taking off and leaving me in the parking lot.
• • •
I waited. For thirty minutes, I stood in the Friendly’s parking lot listening to the traffic on Route 9 go by. I watched the leaves on the trees in the parking lot prepare to turn colors, a few of them tearing off in the wind and blowing away while I shifted from foot to foot and wished for a bench to sit on. And eventually, I had to admit that he wasn’t coming, no matter how official our promise had been. Luke didn’t need closure. He just needed to be done with me. For good.
I said it in my head, and I repeated it aloud to the bushes lining the sidewalk to the front door.
Luke isn’t coming.