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

that’s involved? I mean, if there really
was
a piece of glass on my chair, I’d damn well make sure that I didn’t sit on it twice. If a steamboat
was
sinking, I’d know enough to head to the lifeboat. But a broken heart? At first I gave in to the temptation to think, nah, there was nothing I could do about it. I’d have to keep sitting on glass until someone was nice enough to take the glass away from my seat.
    Then I thought,
To hell with that.
I actually had to think of it in terms of sitting on glass for it to work.
             
    “What’s up with the whole couple thing anyway?” I asked Teddy and Heron at lunch a week or so after Ashley had dumped me.
    “What do you mean?” Teddy asked back.
    “I mean, why is everyone so brainwashed into believing that they have to be in a relationship with one other person? Look at us, Teddy. If anyone were to tell us that the whole girl-boy thing was natural and anything else was unnatural, we’d know they were completely wrong. But have them tell us that every person needs to be with another person in order to be happy, and we nod along like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. But there’s no
reason
for it, is there? It’s not a proven
truth.
It’s just some thing that our culture has come to spin itself around, mostly so we’ll procreate, and we’re the dupes who fall for it over and over and over again.”
    “I thought you were over the breakup,” Teddy said hesitantly.
    “I am,”
I insisted. “Can’t you see that this is more than that?”
    Teddy clearly couldn’t see, because he was looking at me like I was fifty-eight varieties of crazy all at once.
    Heron, however, surprised me.
    “You’re totally right,” she said. “And I’m tired of it, too.”
             
    When I realized I was into girls, it was scary to let go of all the things I was supposed to be and all the things I was supposed to want. It’s like you’re a character in this book that everyone around you is writing, and suddenly you have to say,
I’m sorry, but this role isn’t right for me.
And you have to start writing your own life and doing your own thing. That was hard enough. But that was nothing—nothing, I tell you—compared to the idea that I could let go of the desire to have a girlfriend. Maybe not forever. Maybe forever. Certainly for now. Talk about something that had been
ingrained.
I wasn’t letting go of love or sex or the idea of companionship. I was just rejecting the package in which it was being sold to me. I was going to say it was okay to be alone, when it felt like everyone in the world was saying that it wasn’t okay to be alone, that I had to always want someone else, that the desire had to fuel me.
    I didn’t want to feel like I needed it anymore. Because I didn’t. Really, I didn’t.
             
    Ashley started fooling around with Lily White. She didn’t tell me this, but I could figure it out easily enough. Lily White was more scared of me than ever. And she’d started to smell a little like Ashley’s shampoo.
             
    Betrayal. Lust. Secrecy. Devotion. I think we do these things to feel more alive. When the truth is that alive is alive—you can feel it in anything, if you give it a chance.
             
    I thought more about Miss Lucy.
    I’d never pictured her with anybody else, just her steamboat and her bell. Trying to keep things together, even when the world was constantly throwing glass under her ass.
    “Do you think there was a real Miss Lucy?” I asked Heron.
    “I don’t know,” she said.
    “I want to find out,” I told her.
             
    The trouble I felt coming when I first met Ashley was nothing compared to the trouble I felt when I first realized I didn’t need her or anyone like her. People fall hard for the notion of falling, and saying you want no part of it will only get you sent to the loony bin. C’mon, you’ve seen the movie: As soon as the headstrong girl