She quit.
She tried talking to her dad. But he was busy. That hurt even more than her mom’s being mean. He’s never had time for me; he just gives me things. “Do what your mother says” is all he tells me.
When Jack was back during winter break he laughed in her face. “What are you gonna do now, Laurs? Go to loser school?”
After she stopped doing gymnastics, her teammates didn’t want to know her anymore. They thought she was crazy. Mostly they ignored her, except for some nasty comments on social media. Those hurt too. Laura ripped up her photos. They were never my friends.
Her life was hell.
A hell of expectations and obligations she refused to keep up with anymore. And nothing yet to fill the gap.
I read what she did and how she walked away from her old life, but with no idea of how to go on.
She started hating herself.
And then she met me.
Oh, boy.
I guess she was intrigued that I could be nothing and still walk around. I had no parents driving me on, no heavy friends to keep up with.
Maybe that’s why we went out, I thought.
I guess that was my answer I’d wanted so badly.
I can’t say I felt very proud of it.
I was the loser she could learn from.
Learn how to stand people thinking she’s nothing.
Maybe that’s what she saw in me that was more important than whether my family was rich or whether I’d been to the Bahamas. Maybe it helped her a little bit. Maybe that’s what she really liked about me and tried to talk to me about—even though I refused to talk—by bringing up the book and my house and all that crap, that I could somehow stand being a kid from the fifty-cent side and not worry about being anything else. Maybe she even envied it.
I did worry, but she never saw it. I wouldn’t let her.
I couldn’t really gather my thoughts at first. I just sat there looking around her bedroom.
I’d only seen one other girl’s room before in my whole life.
Suzie Perkins’s.
Boy, was her room different.
It had Suzie Perkins written all over it. I mean, it was like the Suzie Perkins explosion. I don’t think she even understood the concept of putting anything away.
But Laura was none of that. Here, it was like everything personal had been forbidden, until whatever remained of herself had to be hidden under her bed in a box.
I understood now why I’d thought so much about Suzie when I was in the basement. I mean, for all her problems and lack of money and pressure from her mom and all that stuff, Suzie was happy. She felt good most of the time, and even felt good about her mom, who had rules and everything, but never just dumped on her about not being perfect. Suzie never had to hide from her real self like Laura did, so she could live up to expectations. Sure, Suzie had been offended when Carol had done the squeezie thing, and maybe she didn’t know what to make of me when I didn’t kiss her, but the thing is that she could get over all that and move on to what came next. She was malleable. You know, adaptable. Healthy.
I knew now why I hadn’t kissed Suzie. I couldn’t have stayed hidden with her. With Suzie I’d have felt everybody looking at me and knowing I was there, because that’s what Suzie was all about. She liked being seen. I don’t think she knew what hiding even was. Suzie was happy for the most part.
Laura wasn’t.
I knew that now.
Her suffering was something I’d been totally blind to, because when you get right down to it, I’d only seen myself when I was with her, and only cared about how I felt and whether she loved me and wanted to go all the way, which I’m sorry to say I often did pressure her pretty hard to do sometimes. Well, actually, I pressured her almost every time we were alone, and especially those times when she wore something short that showed her bellybutton, because that would almost drive me crazy, because I’m not kidding when I say she had the sexiest bellybutton in the world.
But good for her that she never did, I mean go all the way, because I knew now—well, I think I’d always known, but now I actually accepted it—that I didn’t deserve her.
I’d never even tried to find out who she really was.
Not that she gave me much of a chance. She tried to, but she didn’t really know how.
So I couldn’t blame myself too much.
I mean, I was a mess.
So was she, even though I didn’t notice at the time.
What do you get when you add one mess to another mess?
A bigger mess—that’s simple addition.
I couldn’t help her.
Not then.
She’d hidden from herself.
Until she was totally lost.
That’s the most dangerous kind of hiding. Everybody knows you, but you’re not really there, even for yourself.
I’d hidden from the world all my life.
But never from myself.
And even the weird ways she’d treated me, sort of not letting me be around her parents too much, like she thought I was an embarrassment—maybe she was embarrassed about what I might see. She wouldn’t let me in the house and made me wait outside for twenty minutes because she was ashamed I’d see how she was treated, not because I wasn’t good enough.
She always looked at me like she wanted to see something in me that just wasn’t there.
It was love.
I loved what I saw, but not what she hid from me, not what she sort of tried to tell me about when she said she loved my house or wanted to talk about the book. I couldn’t love what I couldn’t see.
Maybe she didn’t think the real Laura could ever be loved.
I had to know.
There was more
