The Break-Up Pact

by Emma Lord

When you have a sister, you don’t realize how much of the way you think, the way you exist, is framed not just by your own thoughts, but hers. Don’t realize how much of her colors the way you look at the world until she isn’t in it, and you’re staring at all the same people and places you’ve known your entire life and trying to recognize some new version of them, with the old colors gone.

The moment I realize it’s over Griffin, it stops me in my tracks. Levi takes a breath, and some of the tension goes with it. “I’ve never seen you cry like that.”

But I never wanted Levi back in my life because he thinks I’m broken. I wanted him back because he wanted to be back.

Annie used to pry his drafts out of his hands like they were his actual beating heart. But looking back, I guess I never had to do that. Annie was a writer, too, but she only knew to ask Levi for the stories he’d written down. She didn’t have any idea that most of them, he’d already told me out loud.

Back then it felt like the grief would swallow us whole. It’s different now, more like the waves at our feet—constantly ebbing and flowing, swollen one moment and quiet the next. A tide I can dip my feet into and let myself feel, or a swell that will hit me from behind when I least expect it.

When we were younger, Levi had been so much more expressive than other kids we knew. Like there was a well always on the verge of tipping over inside him. He’d laugh so easily and his eyes would tear up so fast over little things that it felt like his heart was perpetually beating on his sleeve. Somewhere along the way he outgrew it, replaced by the almost-smile, by this tight control Levi seemed to want in his world from the moment he left Benson Beach. Only now that I’m seeing an echo of that younger version of him do I understand that it never really went away.

I don’t recognize a single one of these demanding, searing impulses coursing through me. It’s like my entire life, I’ve only ever had the taste of something described to me, and now I’m finally taking my first juicy, absurdly rich bite.

“It’s that both of you were a little bit lost a few weeks ago. But neither of you pushed. Nudged, occasionally. But mostly just encouraged each other. Tried to make things easier, when you could.”

“Neither of you wants to change the other one or tell the other what to do. You just want each other to be happy. And that’s what love is supposed to look like.”

“I know you think I didn’t put you in the story,” says Levi, his voice low and steady, “but that’s just it. You are the story. I started it for you. Before I wanted to be a writer. Before I wanted anything much at all. I just wanted to watch that look on your face whenever I told it.”