The Way I Used to Be (The Way I Used to Be, #1)

by Amber Smith

He has no way of knowing how sometimes it physically hurts to smile. How a smile can sometimes feel like the biggest lie I’ve ever told.

“You’re lucky there wasn’t a train coming!” Josh’s voice says, pulling me back into the present. My eyes refocus on his bedroom ceiling. He’s still laughing. I had stopped. “Am I?” I accidentally say out loud. If there had been a train coming, then I would have been killed or at least seriously and irreparably injured. And 542 days later I would have been lying in either a grave or a hospital somewhere, rotting away or hooked up to machines and not in my bed with Kevin in the next room and me thinking he was the greatest person in the entire world, incapable of hurting me in any way, because, after all, he had saved the day. Maybe if that day never happened, maybe I wouldn’t have become so smitten, so pathetically infatuated. Maybe I wouldn’t have flirted with him over a game of Monopoly earlier that night. And maybe I would’ve screamed when I found him in my bed at 2:48 in the morning, instead of doing nothing at all. And maybe it was essentially all my fault for acting like I liked him, for actually liking him. “Of course you are,” I hear a dim voice say through the fog in my mind. But now his face has changed to serious. I can’t remember the last thing either of us said.

After a while, a very painfully silent while, I think maybe he has fallen asleep, so I pretend to be sleeping too. But then I feel him press his face into my hair and breathe. Quietly, almost inaudibly,

he whispers, “I love you.” His big secret. I squeeze my eyes shut as tight as I can and pretend not to hear—pretend not to care.

I say nothing. I do nothing. I feel nothing. “Edy, please,” he says quietly, almost sadly. “Please, Edy.” I can hear him breathing on the other side of the door, breathing oddly, like, unevenly. But no, it’s not just him breathing, I realize slowly. He’s crying. And I kneel there on the other side of the door that might as well be the other side of the galaxy, feeling so empty, so dead inside. He tries the knob one more time and then I hear nothing. Until the front door closes, then the rumble of his car starts in the driveway.

His hands, his arms, can hold the pieces in place temporarily, maybe even for a long time, but he can never truly put them back together. That’s not his job. He’s not the hero and he’s not the enemy and he’s not a god. He’s just a boy. And I’m just a girl, a girl who needs to pick up her own pieces and put them back together herself.

All these maybes swimming around my head make me think that “maybe” could just be another word for hope.