I Hope This Doesn’t Find You

by Ann Liang

The compliment goes down my throat like syrup, warming me up from within. It’s embarrassing how tight I latch on to these little pieces of validation, how much I want to be liked, to make everyone happy. Sometimes I think I would give them one of my own arms if they asked very nicely.

Omg is this fucking play about me?

of course, my blazer isn’t there. I left it inside my locker, all the way on the other side of campus. Because that’s my life now, apparently. Just when I’m contemplating whether I should dig myself a ditch, Julius says, “My bag. My blazer’s inside.”

“Show me,” Julius says. “No—” My voice comes out small, shaky. “Don’t—” His long fingers wrap around my wrist, pulling it down, and then the words are there, exposed, starkly visible to the both of us. Shame stings my skin like acid, roils deep inside my gut.

But then my attention goes to his face, and I stifle a gasp. His entire left eye is swollen shut, the skin around it a vivid purplish-blue. The bruise wasn’t there yesterday afternoon.

He holds his hand out for the phone, but as I pass it over, my gaze falls on his knuckles. They’re split open and raw red. My first impression is that it must be from scrubbing the shed yesterday, but that can’t be right. He’d been wearing those ridiculous gloves for the very purpose of protecting his skin. And this looks more unnatural, more deliberate, as if he’d slammed his fist into something hard . . . Like Danny’s face.

“Oh, I know you. You’re the other captain, right? My little brother talks about you all the time.”

“That . . . wasn’t your first time kissing someone,” he says. A half question. “Of course not.” It was only my second kiss, but I’m enjoying this, proving his assumptions wrong. And I don’t want to give him any reason to think that what happened just now was special, that it meant something when it didn’t. It shouldn’t. “Who?” he asks. A full question now. I lean over the railing, my head turned away from him. “Why do you care?” “I don’t,” he says heatedly. “But I want to know.”

really can’t stand it when people are angry at me. Like, I know it might be simple for others, but I can’t focus on anything else. I can’t just forget about it and go on with my own life. It’s like there’s something hard wedged inside my chest. I’ll always feel guilty. I’ll always want to make amends.”

Oh Sadie we are so alike it hurts me

“Forget it,” I mumble. “You won’t understand.” “I’m trying to.”

“How do you . . . remember all that?” I ask. “I have all your emails memorized word for word,” he says, then instantly looks like he regrets having spoken.

It’s not the end of the world. And maybe there’s some tiny grain of truth in it. Maybe I’ll grow up and change my mind a decade later. Except for now, this is my whole world.

“Screw the others,” he says fiercely. The heat in his voice shocks me. Burns me to the core. “I don’t care about them. I only care about—” He cuts himself off.

SAY IT!

“And Sadie is the light of my life,” Julius says, his lip curling, even though there’s an odd note to his tone. Something that could be confused for sincerity. “The sun in my sky, the source of all my joy. She’s the reason I wake up every morning excited to go to my classes. Not a day goes by where I’m not grateful that she exists, that she’s there, that I get to talk to her and pass her in the halls and listen to her laugh.”

That came WAY TOO real ily julius!