31. Sloane #2
“A guy like Sorensen.” He whistles low, appraising a car.
“First-round money, Greenwich, the whole family-photo thing. And he picks up the theater girl in the thrift-store coat with no people.” He says it gently, because he figured out a long time ago that gentle cuts deeper on me than loud ever did.
“Come on. Guys like that don’t keep girls like you.
They slum it a semester, they get the story for the reunion, they trade up by Christmas.
You had to know the shape of it walking in. ”
I stop, because the leaving-fast thing is right there and he knows that one too. I plant my feet on the path and turn and look at him the way you look at a man you’ve already survived, which is a look he hates, because it files him under past.
“You think he made you somebody.” Quiet now, matching me, because Evan can do quiet when quiet is winning. “He didn’t. You’re exactly what you were when I had you. He just hadn’t found the floor of you yet.”
“You’d know about floors.” I hold his eyes and keep my voice low, because low is the only weapon that doesn’t cut my own hand. “You put enough people on them.”
His jaw works.
“You waited outside a library on a Tuesday in December,” I add, “for a girl with no people. That’s not nothing, Evan. That’s a hobby.” Taking the warm off him is the only win on the table, so I take it, and I go.
“It won’t last,” he calls after me, louder now, because loud is what’s left when you’ve lost the other thing. “You’ll see. Girls like you always run it into the ground.”
He’s right that it won’t last. He’s wrong about every reason he’s got for thinking so.
But the hook’s already in — girls like you — and I carry it the eleven blocks home, because that’s what I do with things.
I carry them without setting them down, so I never have to find out, out loud, how much they weigh.
Bella comes into the shop two days later, the last Saturday before break, when half of Haven is buying paperbacks for people they don’t know how to talk to.
I know who she is the way you know the understudy who wanted your part — Beau’s, before me, the one who used to post herself in the good seats at Corbin in a jersey with his number and her own last name stitched underneath. I get my face ready for the Evan version of this.
She doesn’t reach for it. She picks a Didion off the table, turns it over, sets it back down. “You work here.”
“I do.”
“Huh.” She looks around the shop like she’s pricing it, then back at me, and there is nothing in her face I can use. “I almost didn’t come in. Then I figured, no, I want to see it. The girl.” A small, tired breath that lands nowhere near an insult. “You’re not what I had in my head.”
“People rarely are.” I keep the pencil moving in the Didion’s flyleaf so my hands have a job. “Was there a book, or…”
“He never looked at me like that.” She says it flat, a fact she’s done being surprised by. “Two years, on and off. I’d have killed for the way he looked at you in the bar back in October. The whole room could see it. I saw it from the door, and I wasn’t even looking.”
“I don’t know what you want me to do with that.”
“Nothing. I’m not here to do the thing scorned exes do.
” She wanders down the poetry shelf, trailing a finger along the spines, and I notice she handles them gently, which I didn’t expect and don’t want to have noticed.
“You want to know what I thought, watching it happen? I thought, that one’s going to run.
I’d have put my rent on it.” She turns and looks at me, and it isn’t cruel, which is the part I’m not braced for.
“A girl gets looked at like that and goes still in the face instead of soft — she’s already counting the exits.
I know the look. I’ve worn it in a mirror. ”
The pencil stops. I make it start again. “You don’t know me.”
“No. But I know the thing that’s on your face right now.
” She lifts one shoulder. “Nobody gets loved that wide open and survives it if they’re built to bolt.
It’s too much air. You go find a wall to put at your back, just so something’s solid behind you.
I used to think I lost him to someone prettier.
Then I watched him look at you and worked out I never had him to lose — he was always going to do that at somebody. Turned out to be you.”
“You came into a bookshop on a Saturday to tell me he loved me.” I set the pencil down on the counter. “That’s a strange errand.”
“I came to see whether you knew what you were holding.” She meets it without a flinch. “And you’ve got the face of a girl who’s decided she doesn’t. I wore that face for two years and I called it being realistic.”
“And what is it, really.”
“The word the scared ones use for quitting before the part where it could hurt.” Another shrug, and there’s the old hurt in it now, just a flicker, quickly folded away. “I should know. I held the title.”
“Why are you being kind to me?” It’s out before I can stop it, which is rare, and I hear the flat vowel try to climb into the word and I catch it right at the line.
“I’m not being kind. Kind would be telling you you dodged something.” She gathers her two books against her chest. “You didn’t dodge it. You walked out of it on your own two feet, which is a different thing entirely, and you’re the only one in this whole story who can’t tell the two apart.”
I ring her up. My hands are steady. I’m very good at steady hands while the floor does something underneath them.
“He benched himself, by the way.” She slides her card over.
“That’s the part nobody at the rink can square.
Boy fights for every loose puck in the building, and he just went quiet and let you walk.
So I figured it had to be you who got out first. Nothing else explains a guy like that going dark.
” She takes the bag and pauses at the door, and for one second Bella, who I have spent four months filing under enemy, looks at me like the only other person in town reading off the same page I am.
“For what it’s worth, I hope I called it wrong.
The running. He’s an idiot. But he’s the good kind, and somebody ought to get to keep him.
” The bell does its half-step flat behind her, and she’s gone into the snow.
I stand at the counter with the drawer open and finally do the thing I have spent all week refusing to do, which is put the two of them down side-by-side.
Evan says Beau would never keep a girl like me.
Bella says I’d never let myself be kept.
They despise me for opposite reasons and they’ve built me opposite cages, and the trouble with two opposite cages is that they cannot both be the true one.
There is exactly one version of this where they are both wrong, and I can see it from here, with a stranger’s change going warm in my hand, clear as a lit exit sign over the door: it’s the one where I stop walking toward the door.
I close the drawer. I’m not ready for that version. I just know now that it’s there, which is worse, because you cannot un-see a door once somebody’s shown you it was unlocked the whole time.