“I know.” Even though I’d scored, I was embarrassed, having narrowly escaped a whiff. I wished I could turn off my brain to everything but soccer when I got on the field—when girls got in my head, it tended to throw off my game. And if I wanted to play for UNC (and I had to play for UNC), I pretty much had to have a flawless season. I hadn’t heard from their recruiter since last year, and I was starting to get nervous about what that meant. This time last year, I’d been so confident it would come easily, like it always had. For my whole life I’d been great at this one thing, and my biggest fear was that, one day, I’d only be good. And then what?
On Saturday I woke up gasping, my upper body damp with sweat. I flung my comforter to the foot of the bed and pulled up my ratty practice T-shirt to wipe my chest and neck. Like so many nights over the past two months, I’d dreamed about Jamie. We were at some outdoor party, or some unspecified holiday barbecue, and she was wearing a light blue dress. I kept trying to talk to her, but every time I got near her, she’d disappear. Then I’d look around, and she’d be standing twenty feet away, talking to some other girl instead of me. Finally I shouted her name, and everyone turned to look at me but Jamie.
Not very subtle, brain, I thought.
I looked at the clock on my nightstand; it was only 7:46. That meant I had seven hours and fourteen minutes to kill until I could pick up Ruby. I wondered at what time I could reasonably text her for her address without seeming like she was the first thing I’d thought of when I woke up. Noon?
There was a crazy part of me that wanted to text Jamie right now, to describe to her my dream. I wanted her to tell me she’d never ignore me like that. I wanted her to tell me she dreamed about me sometimes too. But Jamie wasn’t the type to make bold, impossible promises, and she definitely wasn’t the type to admit to having feelings. It had taken her months to admit that she liked me as more than a friend.
Things between us changed in the spring of our sophomore year. She was sleeping over at my house, like she did almost every Saturday that year, the way we told ourselves all best friends did. We were watching a movie in the usual position: her lying on the floor beneath me lying on the couch. It hadn’t always been that way. The first few times she came over, she sat on the couch with me, like a normal person, but at some point she started insisting she liked the floor better. That way we could both stretch out. I didn’t protest because I liked taking up the whole couch, but also because I liked the way my elevated position let me look at her without her knowing. At the time, the slight tilting of her head, her hand reaching for the bowl of popcorn, her feet rubbing against each other, one sliding over the other until her socks slipped off—it was enough to keep me occupied during the boring parts of whatever movie she’d picked out for us.
I don’t know what it was about that warm, late-May night that made me do it. I still don’t know what made me so brave. We were watching our favorite Lord of the Rings movie, The Return of the King, for the fifth or maybe the twentieth time. Gandalf had placed the crown on Aragorn’s head, and tears were streaming down my face. And then, before I could think about what it would change between us, I reached down and took Jamie’s hand in mine.
We stayed that way for the rest of the movie, and when it was done, she rolled onto her back to look at me. I could barely make out her face in the dark, but it felt like I could feel her heartbeat in my chest too. I slipped off the couch and onto the floor next to her, and then I kissed her.
She kissed me back for what felt like hours but was probably only thirty seconds before pulling away. She said it was too weird.
I could feel the crush of it even now, reliving it. Kissing Jamie had not been weird for me. It had felt like—finally. It had put me into my body, in control of it, my hips pressed into hers and my hand on her waist. The few times I’d kissed boys, in hallway enclaves outside middle school dances when the chaperones weren’t looking, I’d felt so far away from myself. Even with Brian, the eighth-grade boyfriend who was so cute and so nice and so patient with me, kissing had felt like the warm-up to a game I’d never get good at. There was such an enormous gap between what my friends described kissing boys to be like and what I actually felt when I did it, I wondered for a while if some key sensory ending was missing from my mouth. Even when I knew for sure that I liked girls more than I’d ever like boys, I worried.
Then I kissed Jamie.
And then Jamie told me kissing me was too weird. We hardly spoke that whole summer, and it wasn’t until three months later that I got to kiss her again. But then I got to kiss her for eleven months straight. Even after we started sleeping together, kissing her was still my favorite part. It would have been enough for me if that was all there was. Maybe I knew, from the start, that our time was limited, and that’s why I kissed her every chance I got. It all felt too lucky to last.
It was annoying to me now, how grateful I’d felt. Three months was nothing. I would’ve waited for her forever.
I didn’t say any of this when Jamie came over to my house and broke up with me. I said, Okay. I said, If that’s what you want. I said, If you’re done, I should really go study. She cried and, for once in my blubbery life, I didn’t. Not until she was gone and I was upstairs, knocking on my mom’s bedroom door because I realized I didn’t know what else to do. The only person I really wanted to talk to about something as monumental as being dumped by Jamie was Jamie.
I needed to be stronger, and thicker-skinned. I remembered the letter from my dad, now stacked atop its predecessors in my old soccer bag in the closet, and I knew what he’d tell me if I saw him next month, when I told him I didn’t have a girlfriend anymore—the same thing he’d said to me anytime I told him I was sick, or had done badly on a test, or lost a soccer game: “Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.” Then he’d tell me the same long story about his war-hero grandfather, my great-grandfather, who, in his telling, was the tallest, strongest man who ever lived to be two hundred years old. (In my mom’s telling, he was just “a grade-A asshole.”) He died well before I was born, but I’d seen pictures of him looking handsome in his uniform, and on my thirteenth birthday my dad gave me his worn silver army bracelet.
I went to my dresser and pulled the bracelet from the velvet-lined box I stored it in, and slipped it onto my wrist. I didn’t know if it was good luck or not, because I’d always been too afraid to wear it out of the house. Today seemed like a good day to change that.
* * *
—
I knew Ruby’s family had money because she’d gone to the most expensive K-8 in the county and had the kind of smooth, shiny hair even good genes can’t account for. But I hadn’t given the amount of money a lot of thought until I found myself on the way to La Jolla to pick her up—and not just La Jolla, but prime, multimillion, oceanfront La Jolla. Like, the part of the neighborhood where there was a house on the bluff with an elevator that descended to the person’s private beach. Where Bruce Wayne would live, if he lived in San Diego.