“When did you do it?” I ask. “I want to know the exact moment you went back.” He couldn’t risk running into himself and, that night, there were no moments when we were apart. And it all comes back to me. I’d made a dumb joke about him losing people, and he had gone to the bathroom. I remember how I thought he came out a completely different person. Turns out, he had. “The bathroom,” I say.
He nods.
I huff in exasperation. “You weren’t ever going to tell me, were you?”
“There was no reason to, but I’m telling you now,” he says, and I stare at him, fuming. “Look, I didn’t want to hurt your feelings. It was before—”
“So you lied to me? To protect my feelings?”
He shushes me. “I didn’t lie to you. I just didn’t tell you. That’s not the same.”
“It is to me.”
“Keep your voice down, Anna. You don’t want your parents to come in.”
“My parents? Why do you care about my parents? You’ll just disappear and I’ll be the one left here to come up with some way to explain why I’m yelling. Alone. In my bedroom.” I lower my voice anyway and continue in a whisper. “Or, better yet, why don’t you just do it over? That way you won’t have to have this conversation again.”
“I would not do that.” The five words come out one at a time, like he means every one.
“Why not? It’s perfect. Just go outside, come back ten minutes ago and do it all over again. I’ll tackle you and make out with you like I did this time. Not that I’d know there was a ‘this time.’”
I feel the tears start to well up and I fight, with everything I have, to keep them locked behind a wall where they can’t do any permanent damage. If I cry now, he’ll think I’m sad. But I’m not—I’m furious. These are hot, thick tears filled with the kind of anger that make some people punch holes in walls.
“Anna,” he says in a calm voice, “I did it once. I didn’t do it again. Not after I decided to tell you everything. Not after I decided to be with you.”
I nod. “Oh. I see. After you decided.” I think back to those weeks—nearly a month—when I walked into Spanish every day, wondering why he’d stopped looking at me after that night. Wondering why I felt such a strong connection with someone who seemed to hate me. “Well that night you undid, even before you undid it, that was the night I decided I wanted to be with you. But I guess that doesn’t count for anything, does it?”
The room is silent. I stare at him. He looks down at the bedspread.
“I made a mistake,” he finally says. “I did it once. I haven’t done it again. I would never do it again.” I feel my face soften, so I press my lips together to keep from caving in. And to keep these damned tears where they belong.
“I think I need you to leave.”
“What?”
“Leave. Now. Please.” I intentionally use the same words, the same tone of voice, that he used to kick me out of his house two months ago.
“Come on.…Anna.”
“You’re a hypocrite.” I shut my eyes, and for a moment, there is no movement except my trembling. No words except the words that have already been said, still crowding the space in the room. I open my eyes, shoot him a stern look, and say, “Go. Poof.”
I feel the mattress rise back up as he lifts his weight off the bed. I open my eyes, expecting him to be gone, but instead I find him standing there. He looks sad as he closes his eyes, but I don’t move or say a word. I just watch the map on my wall come more sharply into focus as his transparent shape disappears from in front of it.
The May mornings are still cold, but I can run in my lighter clothes now, without the gloves and the wool socks and the beanie. I hardly recognize the man with the gray ponytail, in shorts and a light T-shirt, and when he gives me a friendly wave, I return it with a dim smile. It’s sunny and green and beautiful, but it’s not enough to make up for my dark, angry mood. So my feet connect with the pavement harder than they should, and before I even reach the track I can feel the pain burn my shins from the steady drumbeat of abuse. Later today I’ll pay the price for letting my feet do the screaming I can’t seem to do.
When I arrive at Spanish, I find Bennett sitting at his desk, exactly where he’s supposed to be, and his eyes bore into mine as I walk down the aisle in his direction. I take my seat wearing a frosty expression.
A few minutes later, I feel a tap on my shoulder. Argotta’s back is turned to the class as he writes a series of conjugations on the board, so I reach back, grab the folded slip of paper, and open it.
We need to talk.
I squeeze the note into a little ball and throw it on the floor in Bennett’s direction.
Argotta turns to face the class, and we spend the next ten minutes talking as a group through each of the conjugations. When he turns around to write out another set of verb infinitives on the board, I feel another tap on my shoulder.
Bennett shoves the crumpled paper at me again.
I’m so sorry. It will NEVER happen again.
I stick the note in my pocket as I rise from my seat, walk to the front of the room, and lift the bathroom pass off the hook. I sprint through the safety of The Donut to the bathroom and splash cold water on my face. Now that I’ve seen him, I don’t know how to be this angry with him. I’m too drawn to him, too completely caught up in everything I’ve come to know about him, to feel this way. I want to understand why he did what he did, and I want to tell him why it hurt me so much, and I want to believe that he’s sorry, so that I don’t need to be this angry with him anymore.
I stare into the mirror for a long time, watching my own reflection until it blurs and morphs and no longer looks like anyone I know, and I breathe and stare and gather my strength. As I walk back to class, I practice what I want to say.
But when class ends, there’s no time to stop and tell him what’s on my mind. As soon as we’re out in the hallway, Bennett leads me upstream, defying the laws of The Donut, moving against the current of hungry bodies making their way to the dining hall. He pushes open the double doors that lead to the quad and stops in his tracks. The bright day has pulled nearly everyone outside, and there’s not a quiet spot to be seen.
Without talking, we both turn back toward the hall, looking for a quiet corner. “Follow me,” he says, as if I have a choice, and he pulls me along, weaving through the remaining groups of people until we’re at a bank of lockers clear on the other side of the school. He stops at locker number 422, which I realize, for the first time, belongs to him. He dials the combination and lifts the metal lock with a click. Unlike my locker, decorated with pictures and schedules and stuffed with books and packs of gum, his is empty and completely devoid of personality. Like his room at Maggie’s—functional but temporary.
He piles our backpacks inside and slams the door. “Can we get out of here?” He grabs my hands and looks around the empty hallway to verify that we’re alone. Before I can comprehend what’s happening, I feel the not-yet-familiar sensation of having my intestines twisted and wrung. I keep my eyes closed, breathe in, and know a moment later from the smell around me, from the sound of the birds calling to each other, that we aren’t in The Donut.
I open my eyes.
It’s early morning, but the weather is already warm in the small harbor, and I spin around and take it in. Everything around me is yellow, blue, or red, a sea of primary colors, surrounded on three sides by hills and by the open sea on the fourth. I see a church topped with a bright green cross. A hillside covered with brightly painted houses, divided into sections by twisted staircases built into the steep mountainside. With the exception of a few fishermen on the dock, we’re alone in this small, beautiful town, with its residents still sleeping before making their way down for coffee and breakfast.
I smile at the ground so he can’t see me—he doesn’t deserve the satisfaction. As incredible as this moment is, he’s not playing fair. “Okay,” I say, with venom seeping into my voice, “I give up. I have no idea where we are
.”
“Somewhere quiet.”
He leads me past the harbor filled with colorful fishing boats toward the boulders jutting out like a pier into the sea. When we reach the shore, he steps up onto the smooth rocks, and I follow him as he hurdles them. He finally sits down in between two giant stones on a shorter one in the middle that creates a narrow bench just wide enough for the two of us to squeeze onto. He looks at me sideways, his face right next to mine, and gives me a hopeful smile. “Still mad?”
I can’t decide if I want to hug him or shove him off the rock.
“Yes, Bennett, I am still mad. What, you’re just going to bring me to an island every time you screw up? You didn’t even ask my permission.”
“I was just looking for a quiet place to talk. And it’s not an island. It’s a fishing village.” He looks more miserable than I think he should. “It’s Vernazza.”
I close my eyes and listen to the sound of the surf hitting the rocks instead of the sound of my heart hitting my rib cage. Vernazza. Italy.
“I’m so sorry.” I’ve lost count by now of how many times he’s said it. He holds my chin and forces me to look at him, but I pull away. “I should have told you.”
“It’s not that you didn’t tell me earlier.” I look down at the rocks and collect my thoughts again. I can forgive him for not telling me. I can almost understand why he wouldn’t have. What I can’t get past is that he did it in the first place; he stole my free will.
“What is it, then?”
“You have the power to change people’s lives, Bennett. And I don’t mean that in a cheesy, romantic way. You can literally alter my life. That night, you changed it without giving me a choice, and you just can’t do that.”
“You didn’t give Emma a choice. Or Justin a choice,” he says. “We changed their lives, and if I recall, we didn’t get their permission first.”
“That’s totally different.”
“No, it’s not,” he explains. “We have no idea what happened from the time they each woke up that day to the time they got hit by a speeding car. Maybe one of them did or said something especially important, and we just wiped it out. We changed it. But we did that because we thought we were doing the right thing; we wanted to protect them from pain. My reasoning was no different.”
“And I had to beg you to even consider that do-over. What happened to you not changing things, huh? What? The rules only apply when they’re convenient for you?”
“I was protecting you.”
“You can’t protect me. Not all the time.”
“See, that’s the thing. I can. I will. Even if I have to lie to you to do it.”
I can’t look at him. Instead, I look out at the small waves and watch them wash up against the rocks and roll back out again. “I don’t want you to protect me, Bennett, not like that. Just because you’re special doesn’t mean you get to choose what I experience. You don’t get to decide what I know and don’t know. What I get to feel or don’t feel. That isn’t the way it works.”
“Look, Anna, when I changed what happened that night, things were different. I was trying to stay as far away from everyone as possible. I didn’t want this.”
I glare at him.
“I do now,” he says, clarifying things. For a long time after that, we’re silent. “I haven’t done it since,” he finally says. “I’d never do it again.”
He’s looking directly at me, and I can tell he means every word—and I can tell how much he wants this to be over—but I still don’t think he understands how hurt I am that he crossed a line I never thought I needed to define, especially for him.
“Remember when you asked me to make the choice to be with you or not?” I ask. “You told me all your secrets, and you let me decide if I wanted this.”
He looks out toward the water and nods.
“That meant so much to me—the fact that you had me choose. And that’s what makes it so hard to understand how you could have made a choice for me.”
“I made a mistake.”
“And—” I begin, but I feel the words catch deep in my throat. “We lost three weeks. We could have been together three weeks longer.”
He lets out a sigh and his face falls as everything clicks; he took something away from me, but he also took something away from us. When he apologizes again, I finally hear the remorse I’ve been waiting for, and when he wraps his arms around me and pulls me tightly to him, I feel the anger begin to melt away. “It won’t happen again.”
“I know,” I say with a sad nod, and I pull away so he can see my eyes as I say the next words. “Look, Bennett, I’m somehow okay with the fact that you can alter the events of my life—bizarre as that is.” I give him a little smile, the first genuine one he’s seen since I found out what he did. “But this is my life. I’m the only one who decides what comes next.” I hold out my hand. “Deal?”
“Deal,” he says, and he shakes it.
“So, are you going to show me around this place, or what?”
Vernazza is just like he’d described it. We walk away from the harbor toward what looks to be the main part of town, through narrow streets paved with large cobblestones and lined with small shops that haven’t yet opened for the day. Bennett walks up to a door with an Italian flag hanging above a striped awning and pulls it open for me, and I walk in. The bells on the door jingle, and for a moment I think I’m walking into my dad’s bookstore. That is, until I smell the bread, sugary and warm, filling every crevice of the bakery.
The woman behind the counter shuffles over, slides a mountain of twisted rolls onto a platter behind the glass, and looks up at us. “Buon giorno.”
“Buon giorno,” Bennett says. “Cappuccini, per favore.” He holds up two fingers, and she takes her place behind the oversize espresso machine.
A rack of postcards near the window catches my eye and I walk over to it and give it a spin, watching the colorful photos of Vernazza and the surrounding towns pass by me. I feel Bennett watching me. I turn around just in time to see him point at a glass jar on the counter. The woman removes two chocolate-dipped biscotti and places them on bright blue plates. Bennett points to me, standing just under the sign that reads 6/£1,000 in a flowing script I assume to be hers. “Will you add six postcards to that too, per favore?”
“Six thousand lire, dear,” she says.
“Can I borrow these?” I hear Bennett ask, but I can’t see what he’s talking about. He balances the biscotti on top of the coffee cups and pushes the door open with his hip, leaving me inside. “Pick six you like. I’ll meet you out at a table.” The bells jingle as the door closes behind him.
When I arrive at the table, Bennett is leaning back in his chair under one of the bright yellow umbrellas, sipping his coffee. I sit down in the chair next to him, and he motions to the stack of postcards. “What did you get?”
I spread them out across the glass-topped table.
“Pick one.”
“Any one?”
“Any one,” he says. “Pick one and give it to me.”
I select the picture of the harbor and the small fishing boats, the first things I saw when we arrived here, and I hand it to Bennett. He pulls two pens out from under the rim of one of the little blue plates and passes one to me.
“Now, you pick another for yourself. I’ll write you a postcard, and you can write one to me.” He leans secretively over his card and begins to write. I look down at the little boats on my postcard, and it hits me for the first time in a while: He doesn’t stay. Someday soon we may not be together the way we are now, and these postcards will be what we’ll turn to when we’re missing each other most. The pressure to live up to a high romantic standard starts to close in, and I compose my thoughts before taking pen to paper. Then I write:
Dear Bennett,
For as long as I can remember, I’ve dreamed of seeing what lies outside the only world I’ve ever known—outside my safe, normal life. And now, here I am, in a small fishing village as far away fro
m home—as far away from “normal”—as I can possibly be. And as amazing as that is, I know one thing for certain—none if it would matter if you weren’t sitting here next to me. You can take me anywhere. Or nowhere. But wherever you are in this world, that’s where I want to be.
I stop and hesitate, looking over at Bennett before I write the next two words. Maybe the word love is too much, but I feel it pushing against my chest, wanting to make its way onto the paper. So I let myself write the words:
Love,
Anna
Before I can chicken out, I slide the postcard over to him. I watch as Bennett completes his thought, flips the card over, picture-side up, and slides it across the table to me. We each pick our notes up off the table and read them at the same time.
Anna,
I’m so sorry I didn’t tell you, but I promise it will never happen again. From here on, you’ll always have a say in your own future.
Love,
Bennett
At least he used the word love too. I place the card back on the table so his words are facedown in the glass, and I force a smile. “Thanks.”
He looks at me, confused, knowing he’s missed the mark but not sure how. I can feel him watching me as I pick up my biscotti and take a bite.
“What?” he asks.
“Nothing.”
“No, you’re disappointed.”
I shrug and swallow my bite. “That’s just…kind of a lame postcard.” I look over at him in a forgiving way. “And besides, you don’t need to keep apologizing.” I thought by now he would have known me better: Once I make up my mind, I don’t look back. “Is that what you really wanted to say?”
“No,” he says. “I know exactly what I want to say. But I don’t need a postcard to do it.”
“Okay, I’m listening.”
“Okay, here goes.” He takes a deep breath, like he’s preparing himself for something epic. “I…You’re…You’re amazing, Anna. And I love your passion to travel the world, but I have to admit, I don’t completely get it. When I look around at this ‘normal’ life you’re so eager to leave, I don’t see boring or predictable—I see friends who love you and a family that would make any sacrifice for your happiness. I see the kind of security I’ve never had and always wanted. I may have given you access to the world I know best, but you and your family have given me a world that doesn’t exist on a map.