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I studied myself the way I’d done my whole life, searching for what others saw when they looked at me. I wanted them to see perfection. I ached for it in the deep, dark core of me: to be so good I left other people in the dust. It wasn’t an endearing thing to admit, so I’d never told anyone, save a therapist, once.
The words cleaved me in half. Mrs. Rush, my favorite teacher—the one I felt surely saw me, recognized I was special—couldn’t remember I existed.
I let her hug me, ruffle my hair, but I never forgot it. I never forgave her. Most of all, I never absolved myself of the sin of being so utterly forgettable.
In the blazing glory of late August, rows of red crepe myrtles formed a sea of crimson everywhere, the ocean of color interrupted only by gnarled magnolia trees, twisted arms reaching out with scattered white blooms, clinging late into their season. Crimson and white. Blood and spirit, like the Duquette motto: Mutantur nos et vos, corpus et animam meam. We will change you, body and soul.
He got to his feet, too, taking a step toward me. When I pulled back, he grinned, a glint in his eyes. “I understand,” he said slowly, drawing the words out, “that you’d do anything to win. You’re kind of a sociopath.”
Time, making fools of us all.
I kissed him and drowned in it. If we were being self-destructive tonight, Coop had nothing on me.
Nothing, I answered fiercely. I’d done nothing. I had to rebury the memory alongside the others. There was nothing to be had from it but ruin and rot.
I’m scared college was the last time I was really alive, the way you’re supposed to be, and I’ll never get it back.” “Of course college felt extreme,” Coop said. “You had infinite freedom and almost no responsibility. Nothing was fixed—you had your whole life ahead of you, and it could go anywhere. You had best friends you spent every minute with, so you were never alone. And you were in love. Real love.”
“Senior year, Heather found out. You remember what she was like. Everyone always had to do the right thing. Or whatever she thought that was.
She could feel them pulling away, and feared, as the person at the bottom, that she didn’t have the power to draw them back. What would she have if she no longer had them? The anxiety notched, forming a pit of dread in her stomach. She was certain, on her worst nights, that she would lose them and be alone again. She wanted assurances. She wanted to be close. She wanted to know where they went and what they did all those times they didn’t invite her.
Memories are powerful things. But—and this is important, my therapist said—so are the dark spaces. The things you choose, consciously or not, to repress. Always, they’re the things you need protection from. The too much: too terrifying, too shameful, too devastating. The things that, if allowed, would threaten the very core of who you’re supposed to be. It turns out the real you is a quilt, made up of the light and the dark. The life you’ve lived in sunshine and your shadow life, stretching underneath the surface of your mind like a deep underwater world, exerting invisible power. You are a
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Until the day they’re not.
It was a poem by Mary Oliver. I scanned until I came to the last line, a question: Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Halfway there, I caught a man out of the corner of my eye, his pale face stark against the night. He was a few feet behind me, tracking my steps. When I sped up, he sped up. When I turned, he turned. A wild, terrible knowing seized me then, a charge under my skin, the kind of tension a girl learns to read without anyone teaching her.
A woman who wanted was an ugly thing. I knew it made me childish and vulnerable. My whole life had taught me that lesson. But still. For one moment, laid out on the grass, all my ruined, pointless, pent-up wanting was too great to contain— I threw open the doors to my heart. The pain flooded in. I’d wanted so many things and lost them all. This was the cost. I lay on the grass and sobbed. The stars looked on, cold and unblinking.
