I instantly knew what Laura’s words implied, and it made me feel terrible, like I was stuck being just like the little kids on the jungle gym and I’d never really grow up.
I looked at her darkly, and said, “What else should I be? I am a boy. Does she want you to go out with somebody older? Does she want you to go out with a man?”
“That’s a pretty stupid thing to say,” she said, like I was mocking her mom’s wisdom. She winced at me. “Don’t be so sarcastic!”
“I can’t help it,” I said. “I feel sarcastic.” I felt my voice tremble. “Are you leaving me?”
“Yes,” she said.
I just looked at her. Her face was so incredibly beautiful—so hard and cold and incredibly beautiful. And the awful thing was that it was becoming more and more beautiful every second, like it was somehow becoming exponentially more beautiful, to use a math phrase, because isn’t that how things get with a girl when she’s ending everything and you just can’t stop it? And her eyes, which are dark brown, by the way, sort of very liquid dark brown, looked so incredibly hard. I knew her mind was made up about us no longer being together, and nothing I could say would ever make a difference, and I just couldn’t stand it.
“I’ve thought about it a lot,” she said, watching the kids play, so all I could see was the side of her face. Then she turned to me, her beautiful face hard as stone. “I agree with my mom. She can’t understand why we’re together. She says you’re doing nothing with your life. You’re just not an achiever. She said that. I agree with her. You’ll never accomplish anything important. She’s right.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I mean, I didn’t want to put her mom down, but really, how did she know what I would be when I’m older?
Maybe I will accomplish something important.
I probably won’t, that’s true—I mean, there’s certainly no groundwork for that ever happening, and certainly my dad didn’t do much to kind of propel me ever going in that direction, so maybe she was totally right, but it just sounded so mean and petty.
Not that the idea hadn’t already sort of occurred to me.
Like, sure, of course it had, and I’d even seen that book called Rich Dad Poor Dad, all about how only successful dads can raise successful kids, and I must admit the whole theme of it completely bummed me out, because who can really go laying these sort of curses on a kid?
What Laura said hurt so bad I could hardly talk. But what I did manage to say was I thought her mom couldn’t say that for sure about me, because nobody knows what will happen to them later on, and that anyways I thought my life would begin when I was twenty-five.
I know I already told you I said that, but I think it’s important for you to know that it was Laura I was talking to, and she got a little depressed by it, like I said.
At first I thought it was a very clever, relationship-saving thing to say, because it did, at least, suggest that maybe in the future I might have a sort of turnaround. I even wanted to tell her how I’d made plans all about it, hidden plans that I’d never told anybody, about how when I was twenty-five I’d be old enough to be on my own and get out of my nosy neighborhood and live downtown in some big old empty hotel, and that she could even do it with me, and we’d be free to kind of be anonymous and just be ourselves away from anyone who wanted to tell us what to do or be or anything like that. For months I’d really dreamed and hoped about that and made all kinds of plans, especially since I’d met her.
But the truth is, saying the thing about being twenty-five only worked totally against me and buried me even deeper, because she was obviously looking for further reasons to dump me—I could see that she needed them—because her eyes looked hard, like I said, but still had a little sympathy—I could detect just the dimmest little glint of sympathy—but that little glint extinguished completely, and she said, “I can’t wait that long. I need a boy whose life begins right now. I just can’t love you anymore.”
And that was that. That ended it. She walked off. I saw she was crying really hard, but she didn’t turn when I called after her, so what difference did tears make?
What I didn’t understand was a look I saw in her face right before she walked off. It was like maybe she loved me but she wouldn’t give in to it, and it, like, tortured her. I’d never seen anything so terrible, and I swear I didn’t just imagine it. I mean, I could see her face sort of trembling with a struggle, because right under the coldness I saw such warmth and beauty and sadness and humanity, which is what I always saw in her face, and I think it was meant for me.
But it didn’t matter. Her mind was made up. I didn’t say a thing. I just watched her walk away, crying.
I can’t even tell you how my stomach felt. I was losing her forever, and it reminded me of building some incredibly intricate thing, like some big complicated Tinkertoy thing I might have made as a kid, and now it was all falling apart and all I wanted to do was locate the secret crux place where I could reconnect things so it would stay standing, and I’m fumbling around everywhere but I can’t find the secret crux place, because no matter where I
