If He Had Been with Me

by Laura Nowlin

In September people will tell you that their favorite season is autumn. They will not say this during any other month of the year. People forget September is actually a summer month.

I was a Pretty Girl, but I wasn’t a Popular Girl.

“At least my father’s around for Christmas,”

Sometimes we both love each other a lot and it’s hard to hang up at night, and I wish it could always be like that.

For one thing, this time I’ll ask why, if it’s a chemical imbalance, Dad seems to be causing it.

“Things aren’t always the way they’re supposed to be,”

I am a virgin, and I cannot drive.

“How could two people dying for love be stupid?”

“Try to marry your first love. For the rest of your life, no one will ever treat you as well.”

There will always be something I cannot protect him from.

“You think you deserve to be sad,” he says. There is a moment of silence as we look at each other. “You think it is okay for you to be sad every day. But it is not okay. And you do not deserve it.” I look down at the floor, even though I know he has already seen the tears stinging my eyes. “It is not shameful,” he says. “It is okay.”

Aunt Angelina told us my mother had rescued her from a blizzard or that they had been trapped at the top of a Ferris wheel together and had to climb down the spokes. They saved each other from drowning, met backstage at a Rolling Stones concert, and got shoved into the same locker on the first day of high school and were friends by the time they were rescued by the janitor. My mother said they sat next to each other in math class in eighth grade. Once, she said it was seventh grade.

They are bound to and balanced by each other—the outer chaos of Angelina’s life and my mother’s inner darkness, Angelina’s strength and my mother’s will.

“I love you,” she says. She always will.

because he is there, right there, and he was going to be anyway.

asked my mother if she ever thought I would need to go to the hospital, and she started crying.

for something bigger, something she had given to me, done to me, withheld from me.

obviously.

“I threw up.”

I would want to cry too if I were Angie, but for different reasons.

ThenightFinnykissedmeIdidn’t know what to do.

pretty girl,

“I thought if I broke up with him, no one else would ever love me like that.”

you”

I finally realize that I never, never felt this way about Jamie, even at the best of times.

her,”

“Half as pretty as me? Yeah, I know.”

“Why should I have to pretend that I don’t know I’m pretty when everybody’s telling me all the time?”

Stay in the car. Stay in this moment. Stay with me.

It’s