Chapter 22
I try to apologize to Sierra, but she finds a way to change the subject every time. Eventually, I give up. I can’t force her to talk when she doesn’t want to.
Unfortunately, I also can’t force her not to talk when she does want to.
“So you’re just gonna, what, mooch off Mom and Dad for the rest of your life?”
“I didn’t say that.” I snort. We’re in the living room watching TV, and she keeps making comments like this. Like in deciding not to become a lawyer, I’ve decided to forgo all ambition, period. “There’s a whole world of possibilities between a doctor or lawyer and a deadbeat.”
“But you don’t have a plan.”
“I have time to make a plan.”
“Mom and Dad are going to get old, you know. They’re going to need someone to take care of them. I’m not going to handle that all on my own just because you’d rather be useless.”
What is this specific shade of sadness? Not quite guilt; not quite regret. Like nostalgia for a future I’ll never get to live. How old did my parents make it to? Did Sierra have to take care of them on her own?
Did she resent me for dying?
Instead of responding, I open my phone. I have a text from Alex. I seem to always have one—the two of us text back and forth nonstop—which grounds me in reality and reminds me that a whole world lies beyond these four walls and my toxic family.
He’s in New York, dragged there by his mom and sister for Black Friday shopping.
Yesterday, he got roped into making tamales. He complained the entire time, but I reminded him that he got to eat homemade tamales.
My family is strictly an order-tamales-from-restaurants family.
My mom doesn’t really cook anything from scratch, least of all something as time-consuming as tamales.
I’m not mad about it, considering the last thing I want right now is to spend hours in the kitchen on an assembly line with Sierra, spreading masa and adding filling and folding.
Our Thanksgiving meal was takeout from my parents’ favorite restaurant because my mom tried to make a turkey once when we were kids, but the whole thing was still frozen by dinnertime, and she refused to ever try again.
Judging from the photo Alex sent, it seems like his mother made every item that could possibly be included in a traditional American Thanksgiving meal as well as a huge Mexican feast, just for the four of them.
His father isn’t around this year. Remembering what Alex told me about him being in and out of their lives, I didn’t probe.
“Who are you texting?” Sierra’s voice pulls my attention back to the present.
“No one,” I say. Her eyes narrow.
“Oh my God, you’re seeing someone.” I start to protest, but she continues, “Please don’t tell me you’re throwing your future away over a boy.”
“Why would your mind even go there? Why not just accept that this is the life I want?” I will never tell her that the discussion that spurred me to switch majors was with a boy. She’d never let me live it down.
“Mom!” she screams at the top of her lungs.
“What? No. Stop. Why are you like this?”
She ignores me. “Joey has a boyfriend!”
Despite the fact that I spend the next couple of days answering my family’s questions about my boyfriend, it takes being back on campus with Alex for it to fully hit me.
I’m his girlfriend.
It’s almost embarrassing, how giddy that makes me.
I’ve been a “girlfriend” only a handful of times before.
In the age of dating apps and situationships and “Let’s not define things too quickly, just see how it goes,” I’ve had people I’ve regularly slept with, regularly went on dates with, and even spent a lot of time with outside the context of sex, but slapping on an actual label rarely happened.
Then there’s the fact that I was in love with my best friend and measured every person I dated against him. Sometimes it felt like the only reason I dated at all was to feel less pathetic, so when my dates shied away from commitment, I wasn’t too put out by it.
Being with Alex feels natural. Comfortable. It’s baffling that I lived an entire life without us ever figuring that out.
Only we did sort of figure it out, didn’t we?
Our night together had been electric, but I convinced myself it was all in my head—our connection, how perfect things felt, how easy, how right.
I’d wanted to run away from the reality of watching the man I loved marry someone else, and I walked outside to find Alex right there waiting for me.
I’d been desperate for connection, and so I imagined I’d found it.
That’s all it was. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
Except maybe it wasn’t just that.
Being in an actual, honest-to-God relationship with Alex is different than I would have imagined.
Aspects of his personality I once hated quickly become some of my favorite things about him.
Once, I thought him arrogant, but now his confidence astounds me.
In many ways, it’s contagious. He makes me feel like anything is possible, like I should never doubt myself.
It’s easy to see how a guy like this became so successful—he saw his own success as an inevitability.
A grating trait when I didn’t like him, but a fascinating one now that I do.
I practically move into Alex’s dorm. There are two weeks of class left before finals, and Alex and I spend every moment we can with each other. When we’re together, he has this intoxicating way of making me feel like he and I are the only two people in the entire world.
One day, curled up in his dorm bed, we watch Before Sunset.
“Let’s go to Paris for Christmas.”
I blink at him incredulously.
“You want to book a trip halfway across the world for”—I glance at the date in the corner of his laptop—“three weeks from now?”
He shrugs. “Why not? Imagine the two of us wandering down cobblestone streets together like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Say yes.”
I have to force myself to hold back my laugh. So his I can have anything I want attitude isn’t something that came with the money; it was always there. Good to know.
“I can’t afford to fly to Paris,” I point out. “And neither can you. Maybe next year. We can save up. And I’ll need to get a passport.”
His eyes light up, and he nods like it’s a done deal. “Next year it is.”
Only then do I realize what I’ve said. Next year? We haven’t even been together a month. What’s that arbitrary rule of thumb—don’t make plans further out than the time you’ve been together? Something like that. I just passed that timeline and left it weeping in the dust.
Alex continues, unaware of my internal panic. “We should study abroad together.”
My first instinct is to protest—with my major, I don’t have room in my course load to study abroad, and besides, studying abroad costs money. Money I’m not sure my scholarship will cover. And then I remember: I don’t have a major.
That’s one problem solved, leaving just the other. Admittedly, it’s the bigger of the two, because a lack of money is nearly always the most difficult problem to solve. But there’s time, and I don’t have enough information to know how big the problem is, so I let myself dream.
I have always wanted to travel.
I quickly realize that if I’m going to do it, I’ll do it for myself, not because my boyfriend wants to. I won’t go to Paris just because Alex wants to see me wandering down cobblestone streets or whatever. I’m not going to tailor my life to fit his dreams.
“What if I don’t want to study abroad in Paris? What if I’d rather go to… London? Or Mexico City? Or Tokyo? Or Istanbul?”
If I expected him to be disappointed by my response, I’m sorely mistaken. If anything, his eyes shine even more. He pauses the movie and opens a new tab in his browser.
“What are you doing?”
“Going to our study-abroad page and seeing what programs we have. If you’re dead set against Paris, we might as well see what our other options are.”
“I didn’t say that I’m against Paris.” I laugh. “I just—I want to keep my options open.”
I realize the possible double meaning of my words after I’ve spoken them, and I fear that he’ll read into it, think that in saying I want to keep my options open about studying abroad, I’m implying that I want to keep my options open about him and our relationship.
But Alex must not be as much of an overthinker as I am because he doesn’t even blink.
“A smart decision. And even more reason to look into our options.”
“Oh, our options, is it? Your goal of a Parisian excursion is forgotten so easily? Are you going to follow me to Istanbul?”
“I’d follow you anywhere.”
Maybe that’s a bit much. Didn’t I once read that intense words of affection and grandiose plans so early in a relationship can be a red flag? Maybe I did, but I can’t remember the details, nor can I make myself care.
The truth is, while the thought of tailoring my life to fit his doesn’t sound appealing, the thought that he’d shift his plans to accommodate my wishes… well, I don’t dislike it.
Alex misreads my silence as hesitation. “Unless you don’t want to be followed. Which I get. I can do long-distance for a semester. You do Istanbul, I’ll do… Sofia. Or Athens.”
“You’re only saying those cities because they’re close to Istanbul,” I say with a laugh.
“You caught me. I just love the idea of traveling. Seeing the world. I want to go everywhere. I’d love to do it with you, but if you want time alone to ‘eat, pray, love,’ and find yourself, that’s okay. We can always travel together later.”
“What if I study abroad and discover that I hate traveling?”
“I doubt that’ll happen.” Alex shakes his head. “Hating travel is like hating adventure.”
“Maybe I hate adventure.”
“You love adventure,” he counters. To my look of disbelief, he says, “You changed the plan you’ve had for your life since you were a child—a plan that was safe and reliable—and started over from scratch. Sounds adventurous to me.”
“Changing majors is hardly an adventure.”
“I think a dive into the unknown is the very definition of adventure. Opening yourself up to new possibilities.” When I don’t say anything, he adds, “You really mean to tell me that you signed up for archaeology—the career of Indiana Jones—and you’re not adventurous? Nonsense.”
I focus on the screen to hide how much his words please me. It’s a dangerous thing to like the way you look through someone else’s eyes. It makes you want to tailor yourself to better fit the image of you they’ve conjured up.
“Okay, maybe we can both do Istanbul. What are our options?”
As we scroll through the choices, debating the pros and cons of each one, I realize this is exactly how I want to spend this life.
Seeing the world with someone who makes me happy, who pushes me to be a braver, more adventurous person.
Who helps me explore new possibilities. That’s what my second life is about.
New possibilities for joy, for adventure, for love.
And that’s when it hits me like a slap to the face:
I’m in love with Alex Aquino.