Never Always Sometimes

by Adi Alsaid

Then he looked down at Julia, whose eyes were open, fixed on him. He smiled and brought the earphone up, and when she simply closed her eyes again the feeling that something was wrong came back.

A second ago he couldn’t imagine facing her, and now he couldn’t step away. Julia would want him to apologize, right? He’d avoided bringing Gretchen up at all, and maybe that’d been what was off between them.

She had bags under her eyes. Reaching back, she piled her hair together, sticking her pen through the bun to keep it in place. Then she leaned forward, putting her chin in her hand. “I was just saying thanks for the papers. You don’t have to apologize.” “But I want to. I’m sorry.”

“To be sorry you hurt me is not enough for me to forgive you.”

“You made your choice.”

Dave trying to interpret what the slightest touch meant. When Julia turned her back to him, he thought, She feels it, too. Then a second later she asked him to be the big spoon and he wondered what the hell was wrong with him, why he insisted that things weren’t perfect. He pressed himself close and kissed the back of her neck.

He shook away the memory. Was this what it was always like with love? Memories wrapping themselves around acts, no chance of prying them apart? Or was this not normal at all? Was this not how it was supposed to be?

“Don’t do that. That whole, ‘yeah I’m fine’ thing. I know you too well for that shit.” Her leg fell away from his. Dave tried to meet her eyes, but when he saw those intense blue irises he was afraid every single one of his thoughts would be on display.

closed his eyes, as if this doubt were just some dizzy spell that would pass if he gave it a moment or two.

“Gretchen,” he said, not believing he had said it. “Oh.” Dave kept his eyes closed, so he couldn’t tell what Julia was doing, just that less and less of her was making contact with his skin. Her weight shifted around the mattress until it felt like she was sitting on the corner of it.

“You have a good heart, Dave. I wouldn’t love you as much as I do if it weren’t for that.”

but the feeling that something was off hadn’t gone away. If anything, it was more acute, like he was just about to figure out exactly what it meant.

crossing his legs in front of him. “What I’ve been wondering is...” He paused, trying to figure out the right way to phrase it. If there was a right way. If he even knew exactly what he wanted to say. The wind blew stronger outside, and the branches of the jacaranda scraped against his window with a squeak. “Just say it, dammit.” “Calm down, I don’t know what I’m trying to say.”

“You’re thinking you chose wrong, Dave. You can stammer all you want, but that’s what you were going to say.” Dave exhaled, wanting to deny it. Then he looked down at his tangled sheets, the dimples in the pillow where Julia’s head had been just a moment ago. “Tell me it’s not true. Tell me that’s not what you’ve been thinking.” Dave couldn’t say anything, though. He was trying to find the words, but they were like the earphones on his desk, a whole bunch of them tangled together. Even if he managed to unravel them, he didn’t know how much use they could be.

But she took a seat on the bed in front of him and she brought her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around them and tucking them close. She didn’t look away from him. “I don’t think I chose wrong,” Dave finally said, weakly. “I don’t know if I made a choice at all.”

“Things have been a little off. Haven’t they felt that way to you?” Julia leaned down so her forehead was touching her knees. She shook her head that way, slowly, and when she looked up over the ridge of her kneecaps, tears were on the brink of her eyelids, caught on her lashes like divers about to jump. She bit her lip, she put her forehead down again, she shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said finally, managing a smile. “Maybe a little. But this is still new.” “Julia, we’ve been best friends for five years. It’s never once felt off. Why now?”

“The past week has been great, Julia. But there’s something wrong here. I can’t think of things to talk about with you. I don’t know how to act around you. And, yes, Gretchen’s on my mind. Too much for it to not mean anything.” He was not ready to see her face crumple into tears. He’d seen her get sad once or twice. But this? This was uncharted territory. He thought back to the night of the “BEER” party, how hurt she’d looked when he called her a cliché. This was like that, but worse. She hid behind her hands and wept.

“I don’t want to be miserable with you, Dave,” she said, scrunching a tissue in her hand. “I want to be with you. More than anything I’ve ever really wanted. I think things have been a little off, yes. But I also think maybe we can fix that.” Another tear started to scurry down the bridge of her nose and she quickly brushed it away, not giving it a chance to interrupt. “But I don’t want to start getting paranoid about whether you want to be with me or someone else. I don’t want to start analyzing your every action. I don’t want us to start hating each other because we don’t know how to be in a relationship together.” She tossed her scrunched-up tissue in the garbage beneath his desk. “I think this can work between us. I really do. But I’m going to let you decide, because otherwise I’ll always have the doubt. Are we going to try this out, or do you think we shouldn’t?” After a long moment with his eyes closed, his head resting back against his wall, nausea knotting his stomach, Dave let out his breath. When had everything he’d ever wanted changed? “I love you, Julia. But maybe I’m not supposed to love you like this.”

She wanted the comfort of the room slowly darkening as the day went on without her. Burying her head beneath her sheets, she imagined the folds of the cloth as caverns, imagined that she was underground, if only to give herself something to think about to ease the pain. For hours, she didn’t move. She tried to empty her mind of Dave, though she had no idea how. She’d been thinking about him for years. This hurt. In a way she couldn’t shake, in a place she couldn’t pinpoint, this hurt more than anything Julia had ever experienced.

DAVE SETTLED INTO his bench at the harbor. He’d skipped school for the second day in a row because he thought staring out at the cool waters of Morro Bay might be comforting. The bubble tea he’d bought an hour ago was on the ground by his feet, almost full. He’d made a mess of everything, and it served him right to sit there and feel every little bit of guilt that came his way.

For days now, music had been playing almost nonstop. Whenever she was forced to hit pause, the air around her was fraught with tension. No one else seemed to notice it. In fact, everyone else seemed to be drunk with happiness.

Music was her solace and her refuge, and rather than trying to cheer herself up, she found herself playing the saddest music she owned. Songs about breakups and their messy aftermaths offered the most consolation.

I will get lonely and gasp for air, and send your name off from my lips like a signal flare,

People were always belittling teenage heartbreak. But heartbreak was hear...

She and Dave had clung to each other for so long and now she was alone.

Then she opened the e-mail and saw that it was long, and tears immediately formed in her eyes. Her mom was only wordy when she was apologizing. Julia skimmed the e-mail, looking only for that “no” she knew was in there. When she found it she wiped the tears from her eyes and slipped her phone into her bag, listening harder to the music. This was all she could handle right now. Just the world inside her earphones.

“This is my free period. I like coming up here to do my grading. I’ve heard that I have you to thank for this place.”

“Oh, just the end of the year, you know,” she said with a shrug, hoping that was enough to get him to go. A couple weeks ago she would have done anything to keep him there and have more to tell Dave about afterward. But now she couldn’t see the point in laughing about it on her own. Music kept playing in one ear, a sad soundtrack that she wanted to envelop her.

Then the smiled faded and she found a knot rising in her throat because he cared enough to ask, though she’d pretty much made his life hell for a few weeks.

Dave felt like he’d just disappeared from her life, and as for her mom, Julia wasn’t even sure she had ever been there.

Sinking into the pillows around her, Julia let loose. She covered her face with her palm, tasting tears, struggling to breathe normally. “Song for Zula” by Phosphorescent was playing through the earphone she still had in. It was a fitting song; it made her heaving gasps for breath feel justified.

Her mom would probably make fun of him like Julia had, but her mom was kind of an asshole, and Julia was done wanting to be like her.

“No,” she said finally, chuckling to keep something else from taking over again. “I’m not okay. I guess I wasn’t hiding it too well.”

“Dave. Your friend.” “Yeah, my friend.” She sighed and brought her knees up to her chest, hugging them close for comfort. “The gist of it is, I’m in love with him and it’s not going to work out.”

“It’s always hard to tell whether you kids are bored or in love. I guess it’s about fifty-fifty, but I can’t ever tell. I figure that most of the time I’m over-romanticizing, since I was your age when I met my fiancée.” Julia felt a flush of embarrassment that she hadn’t even paused to consider Marroney’s personal life when she did all those things to “seduce” him.

Julia hadn’t ever felt nauseated by sadness before.

“I don’t know how you can be best friends with someone for so long, be in love with each other, and have things fall apart so quickly.”

“Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more more or less than we are anything.” He massaged his mustache for a second. “We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely. Just like things are rarely always true or never true, we aren’t ever exactly one thing or another. We are more or less.

We match up with lots of people, more or less.”

“The equation might not balance out, even if you and Dave are more or less a match.” He gave her a smile, then turned back to his papers. “Think about it.”

By lunch, though she kept trying to organize her thoughts, she knew exactly what she was going to do.

Before she could second-guess what she was doing, she found herself walking right behind Gretchen. She needed to say what she had to say before she lost her conviction to do what was right. When Gretchen turned around, Julia knew right away that she was getting exactly as much (or as little) sleep as Julia was. “He’s yours,” Julia said, unable to stop herself. Despite the pain at the sound of the words, there was an enormous relief. “I don’t want to give him up. But I know him better than anyone else. I could have had him, once. I almost did for a little while. But you have him now. No matter how I feel, he wants you.”