Maggie
I can’t fall asleep.
Even though I’ve been steadfast in my determination to avoid Carter since he waved at me a few days ago, he always seems to
worm his way into my brain every night as I’m lying in bed.
Lindsey! Right?
It’s actually Maggie! I shout back at him in my mind. Let’s make out once more and then never see each other again, ’kay?
Luckily, every time I’m in one of these missing-Carter moments, I have a surefire antidote for eliminating the feeling: I
remind myself of our last night together. The night before he forgot me.
It was less than two months ago, but it feels like another lifetime.
We ate at the Cheesecake Factory. We considered going somewhere fancier, like this Italian place Vincenzo’s that makes all
their pasta fresh, but we decided a more casual dinner was the more optimistic choice—if we made less of a big deal of our
evening, then maybe it would, in fact, turn out to be not that big a deal. Maybe the next day Carter would wake up seventeen,
and we would still be a couple.
But as I took bites of my Thai chicken salad, it was hard not to think about the distinct possibility that Carter would forget
me by the morning, along with every experience we’d had together.
We didn’t talk about that, though.
Instead, we discussed stupid stuff. Meaningless stuff. Carter wondered aloud about who invented the saltshaker. I told him
it was Edna Shaker, which I knew because I’m related to her, that she’s like fifteen generations back on my dad’s side. Carter
laughed and said he was so honored to know me. We then proceeded to share this made-up fact with our server, a nice bald dude
named Rich, who seemed genuinely astounded.
Like I said, stupid stuff.
After dinner, we got into Toro—Carter’s car—so Carter could drive us to his house. Where we were maybe going to have sex for
the first time.
I say maybe because we’d gone back and forth about the question of sex a lot. Like, on my end, I felt like it might not be
wise to do this incredibly special thing together if Carter was going to forget about it soon after.
Part of me was thinking we should wait until Carter turned seventeen.
But the rest of me knew that might never happen, so why wait?
We’d never really landed on a decision.
And we both knew that night might be our last chance.
“I’m gonna play something for you,” I said as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot. I knew I would lose my nerve if I
didn’t do it right away.
I plugged my phone into Toro’s sound system and scrolled to the track.
I took a deep breath, like I was about to dive underwater, and pushed Play.
As the voice memo recording began, me plunking away at piano keys, messing up, needing to start again, I curled up in an awkward ball in the front seat.
“Oh god,” I said. “I meant to edit that out.”
Carter didn’t seem to mind. The girl on the track who sounded like me started to sing, and I felt even more self-conscious.
This amateur recording featuring my amateur trembling voice singing my amateur, overly sincere lyrics about the person sitting
next to me. I had to close my eyes and disassociate until the song ended.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“You wrote a song about me,” Carter said quietly.
“I did,” I said.
“Thank you.” I couldn’t tell how he felt about it. He was just staring straight ahead as he drove.
“Was that okay?” I’d made a mistake. I should never have played it for him.
“Of course,” he said. “It was really . . . It was really great.”
“But . . . ?”
“But nothing. You’re an incredible musician, Mags. You sounded so good. And I love the song. I think it just made me feel . . .
like, a little sad. About tomorrow.”
I nodded, and then came the tears, as if they’d been patiently waiting in the wings for their cue. “I’m sad too, Coco.”
“You’re so great,” he said, glancing at me for the first time since the song ended.
“So are you,” I said. And then I knew the time had come. It was now or never. “I really think . . . I mean, I know, that . . . I love you, Carter.”
“Oh,” he said. He froze again behind the wheel, and my insides froze too.
“Yeah.” I worried he was about to break up with me.
“Well,” he said, what felt like three hours later. “I think . . . I feel that too. For you.”
“Like . . . love?” I asked.
“Yeah. Like. Yeah. I love you. Too.”
OHMIGOD HE SAID IT BACK TO ME.
I’d been waiting weeks for Carter to say those words. For all the clichéd reasons people want to hear them, yes, but also
for another one:
I thought Carter might have just unstuck himself.
And I was so relieved and overjoyed that I lost myself a bit.
“This is amazing,” I said, my eyes still glassy, my hand on the back of his neck.
“Is it?” Carter turned us onto his block. “I probably won’t even know who you are tomorrow.”
“You might, though. I think you really might.”
“I love the optimism, Mags, but there’s no reason to think this time I will—”
“You said I love you, Carter! And you meant it.” The words spilled out of my mouth like loose change off a dresser.
“Wait,” he said, pulling the car over to the curb in front of his house. “So what? What does that have to do with me making
it to seventeen tomorrow?”
My mind couldn’t scramble fast enough to come up with a legitimate-sounding excuse. “Well,” I said, “I have this theory. But
it’s not—”
“You have a theory?” Carter seemed very annoyed. “You mean about how to fix me? And you didn’t think I might want to know?”
“No, I couldn’t tell you because . . . Because then maybe it wouldn’t work right. Like, you saying those words would have to happen on its own! Not because I told you about it. You know?”
“Not really!” Carter ran his hands through his hair. “What in the actual fuck, Maggie? You think if I said I love you it would break the spell or something? Like my life is a Disney movie? Why would you even think that?”
I couldn’t tell him why I thought that. Or I could, but I didn’t want to. “It’s . . . I don’t know. I learned some stuff from
Lincoln.”
“You were talking to Lincoln about this?”
“Only a little!”
“Jesus, Maggie.”
“The night before you first looped, you dumped some girl, okay? Apparently she said ‘I love you’ and you—you didn’t say it
back. Your response was, ‘Oh wow. That’s really awkward because I actually want to break up.’”
Carter pressed his index fingers against his closed eyelids and groaned. “And you think that caused all this?”
“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly questioning everything. “Maybe that’s insane.”
“So you’ve just been waiting for me to . . . Did you even mean those words when you said them? Or was this just all part of
the plan?”
“Of course I did!” I shouted. He needed to know how much I cared. “I love you, Carter. I really love you. I just felt scared
to say it. And I didn’t want . . .”
“Me to say it just because you did? ’Cause then the magical spell wouldn’t break?”
I grimaced and shrugged.
“Who was I dating?” Carter asked.
“What?”
“Who was the girl I broke up with?”
I was prepared for this question, on the off chance I messed up—LIKE I JUST DID—and it needed to be answered. “Layla Banerjee.”
“Layla Banerjee? I’ve known her since kindergarten. We were dating?”
“Apparently,” I said.
Carter shook his head and exhaled. “How could you know all this and not tell me any of it? I feel kinda . . . I don’t know.
It’s hard to think that this is love if you were lying to me about all of this.”
“No, please don’t think that. I’m sorry.” I wanted to throw up. What was supposed to be a Magical Night Together was rapidly
turning into a devastating one. “I messed up. I thought I was doing the right thing.” I put my hand on Carter’s cheek and
looked into his eyes, a streetlight shining on us through the windshield.
He seemed so disappointed.
I turned toward the window and sobbed.
“It’s okay,” Carter said. “Don’t . . . I don’t want you to feel sad about this. If what you’re saying is right, then . . .
then I’ll be seventeen tomorrow, and we can figure all this out.”
“And if I’m wrong . . . ?” I asked, staring out into the night, the dark shadows draped on his family’s front lawn.
“Then we’re screwed either way, I guess. On the bright side, I won’t remember we had this argument.”
His joke wasn’t funny. It was excruciating.
“So what?” I asked, turning back to Carter. “Are we even gonna keep hanging out tonight? Or we’re just gonna be mad at each
other and then that’ll be it? We see if you still know me in the morning?”
“I dunno,” Carter said, tapping the steering wheel with his hand. “I guess we could still hang out. You mean, like . . . to have sex?”
“Oh wow. Doesn’t get more romantic than that.”
“Well, maybe having sex is part of breaking the spell, right? So we probably should.”
It was like a smack in the face. “No,” I said.
“But it could be true, right?” Carter asked. “Not that I would have any idea. Just my whole fucking life we’re talking about.”
“I said I was sorry! I made a mistake. I should’ve told you sooner.”
“Yeah, you should’ve.”
I saw tears forming in Carter’s eyes, and I wished he would just let them fall. Instead, he turned and looked out his window.
I looked out mine.
We sat like that for a while. I’m not sure how long.
Eventually I felt Carter’s hand clumsily grab for mine.
I grabbed back, and we looked at each other.
“I’m pretty scared,” he said, and somehow this demolished my heart eighty times more than when we’d been yelling at each other.
“I am too.”
We kept sitting there in his car. And then he kissed me. And I kissed him back.
We made out for a while.
Gently. Quietly. Sadly.
We didn’t have sex.
Carter drove me home around nine thirty.
“I really do love you,” I said.
He just nodded back at me, his mouth wobbling somewhere in between a smile and a frown.
We shared one last long kiss over the gearshift.
Neither of us said goodbye.
I walked into my house. I cried.
He drove away.
And the next morning, Carter was a sixteen-year-old boy walking down the school hallway with no idea who I was.
So that’s what I’m thinking about now as I lie here in bed, duvet tangled around my legs, battling the urge to kiss that tree-hanger
who seemed to only sort of know who I am.
I cannot go back to that pain.
Must move forward.
I will go to Shana’s party tomorrow night. I will meet this Chord guy.
I will have some good, old-fashioned Carter-free fun.
I will. I will.
I will.
I must.