Every You, Every Me by David Levithan Read Free Book Online Page B

him. He was even more skittish than before. You made him afraid. Did you realize how afraid you made him?
    “I understand why we’re doing this,” he said, “and I’m okay with you checking to see if she, you know, mentions someone else. But I don’t want to read it. Any of it. And I don’t want you to tell me. Because we don’t know what she wrote there. And if she said anything about me that I’m not ready to hear—well, I don’t know if I’ll ever be ready to hear it. I need to remember it the way I’m remembering it now. If that’s all a lie, I don’t want to know it.”
    I looked at him. How helpless he was.
    “She loved you,” I said. “You know that, right? She loved you.”
    And that’s what did it. That’s what made the tears finally come to his eyes.
    “You can’t know that for sure,” he said quietly.
    “Yeah, I can. There are only a few things I know for sure, and that’s one of them. There’s not going to be anything in the journals that disputes that. I’m sure there were times when she was mad at you. And there were definitely times she was out of her head. But on the base level, she loved you.”
    It was hard to say these things. I knew he wouldn’t say them back. I had to trust my belief that you loved me, too. In a different way. We were never in love. But we loved each other.
    As he wiped his eyes, looking mad at himself for letting something out, I reached under the bed and found the box. It was surprisingly light as I pulled it out. Then I took a look inside and saw why.
    It was empty.

9H
    My mind became a brief history of empty boxes.
    The big cardboard ones I’d find as a kid and turn into a fort. Or a house, drawing in windows on the sides. I would cut out the windows and ruin it.
    Boxes that sweaters would come in. Boxes from department stores that I would keep in the bottom of my closet until they could be filled with some kind of collection.
    Coffins.
    The Cracker Jack box when I was all done, when the prize had been revealed to be something plastic, something worthless.
    An empty sandbox, looking like it was waiting for sand.
    A mailbox always looks like it’s full of envelopes. But you never know for sure. Most of the time when you open it, it sounds hollow.
    What did Pandora do with her box after she’d unleashed despair into the world? Did she keep it on her mantel, as a reminder of what she’d done?

9I
    I threw the empty box aside. I crawled under your bed, looking for another box. Looking for something, for the prize. And when I didn’t find it, I was suddenly so angry at everything. I started ripping at things. Your room was not supposed to be neat. I pulled at the sheets until the mattress was bare. I attacked the drawers by the handles. Jack was yelling at me to stop. He was asking me what I was doing. I was sick of emptiness, tired of order. I opened the drawers one by one, looking for those journals, looking for any word from you.
    “Evan!” Jack was shouting. He grabbed at my arms, but I pushed him off. I was just like you.
    I reached the bottom drawer of your desk. I reached for the bottom drawer of your desk. I pulled it open.
    You know what I found there, don’t you?

9J

9K

9L

9M

9N
    I turned them over. There were dates and captions on the back. Months ago. Before. It wasn’t your handwriting.
    11/11 tracks
11/11 underneath
11/11 Sparrow
11/14 self-portrait
    As quickly as I’d started trashing the place, I stopped. Jack was back in action now, first staring at me, then staring at the pictures in my hand.
    “It’s the guy,” Jack said. “That’s him.”
    I turned over the photo. “It says it’s Sparrow.” I held up the abstract fourth picture. “This is the self-portrait.”
    “Well, that’s a big help.”
    I studied the captions. “It looks like a girl’s handwriting,” I said.
    “Still, there’s a guy. Right here.”
    I didn’t see what Jack was so bothered by. “I really don’t think that’s a self-portrait,” I