How They Met by David Levithan Read Free Book Online Page A

her house.
             
    I didn’t make it past the front door.
    “What are you doing here?” she asked, stepping onto the porch and pulling the door shut behind her. “And what the hell happened to your car?”
    “What do you think I’m doing here?” I said, the tears already coming.
    “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she said, completely bored with the whole thing.
    “Really? What can it be like? Tell me. I’d really like to know.”
    “You see, this is why it was never going to work.”
    “Because I’m upset that you’re dumping me? That’s why it was never going to work?”
    “You were always too into it.”
    “But you said we were a pair! You were into it, too.”
    “Yeah, but not like you. And I wasn’t always telling the truth.”
    It had never occurred to me that a person could know all the right things to say and deploy them to get what she wanted, without having to mean any of it.
    Dear Lord, I staggered then. Staggered back. Staggered away from her. Staggered to my car and cried for a good five minutes before I could get my key in the ignition. When I got home, I staggered past my mother, who called out, asking what was wrong. My breathing was staggered. My memory was staggered. And there was no way to get it right again.
    I was waiting for her to call and say she’d made a mistake.
    That was my own mistake.
             
    I didn’t want to go to school, but when my mother threatened to stay home with me if I didn’t go, I knew I didn’t have a choice.
    “Is it some boy?” she asked, unable to keep the hope out of her voice.
    “No, I’m just garden-variety suicidal,” I told her.
    “Fine,” she replied, annoyed. “Be that way.”
    I tried to shut myself down completely, put up my best screensaver personality to coast through the day. I didn’t want to see her. I was desperate to see her. I wanted to hold it together. I wanted to melt down right at her feet and scream,
Look what you’ve done to me.
    I was going to skip lunch entirely, but Teddy found me and steered me toward his table.
    “Spill,” he said.
    “I can’t,” I told him.
    “Why not?”
    “Because if I start, I might not stop.”
    That’s what it felt like—that if I let a little of the hurt out, it would keep pouring out until I was a deflated balloon of a person, with a big monster of hurt in front of me.
    “You know what?” I said. “I’m not Miss Lucy at all. I’m the goddamn steamboat.”
    “Come again?” Teddy said with his usual shoulder-tilt pout.
    “Let’s just say this is
not
heaven,” I said with a sigh.
    Heron, of course, knew exactly what I was talking about.
    “It’s just that Mercury’s in retrograde,” she said.
    “This has nothing to do with a fucking planet,”
I groaned.
    “Down, girl,” Teddy sassed. “Down.”
    I put my head in my hands and took a deep breath, hearing the air suck against my palms.
    I felt Teddy pat my back, then start to rub it. Mmmmmm.
    “A little better now?” he asked.
    I nodded a little and he moved to my neck.
    “Let it go,” he said. “Let it go.”
    I tried to. I wanted to block it out.
    Miss Lucy had a steamboat. Miss Lucy had a steamboat.
    “What are you saying?” Teddy whispered in my ear.
    I lifted my head and told him. Then Heron and I explained what it meant.
    “So you’ve sat on the glass,” Teddy said.
    “Repeatedly.”
    “And, let me get this straight, the boys are in the bathroom—”
    “The boys don’t really matter right now.”
    “There will be other girls,” Heron comforted.
    “I don’t want other girls!” I cried.
    What I meant then:
I only want Ashley.
             
    I couldn’t stop thinking about her. My body missed her. My mind reeled at her absence. I was a fucking wreck. It wasn’t pretty, and as much as I wanted to believe she was doing it to me, I had to begin to admit that I was doing it to myself, too.
    Why is self-preservation so much more of a bitch when it’s your mental health