I should remember to tell my mother that, if I ever want to talk to her again.
“I should call her,” I say suddenly, mid terrible horror movie number two.
Josey reaches up and takes the phone off their nightstand and throws it at me. “Yep.”
“What do I even say?”
“That you're at a friend's house and you're not dead.”
So I do, but I call her cell phone instead of our landline knowing there's a better chance that will go to voicemail and I won't have to talk to her. It does. She'll still hear it if she's worried. She'll probably be leaning out the window looking for smoke signals if she's worried. She'll check her phone.
I cuddle into my pile of blankets and fall asleep around eleven, earlier than I normally do. The TV and the lights are still on, but when I wake up in the middle of the night they're both off. I'm not sure what woke me up. Maybe just rolling over. Maybe the soft voices I hear.
“I thought I knew how everything was going to go,” she's saying.
“You don't mean just about college, do you,” he says. I can't see either of them. Maybe the vague outline of her leaning against the wall, but I'm not sure if I'm imagining it, and I'm too invested in eavesdropping at this point to risk turning my head for a better look and being discovered.
“I used to think we were perfect,” Josey says. “That all these monogamous people forcing themselves to fit into this mold were so stupid, and we had it all figured out. And now we break up and I start looking at my life and thinking, okay, maybe he would have driven you crazy. Maybe you would have broken up in a year anyway.”
“So it has nothing to do with the poly thing.”
“Of course not. But you knew that.”
“Yeah. I just didn't want to think it was about me, I guess.”
She pauses, and I hear her shift around a little. “Breaking up wasn't about you,” she says. “That was about...I don't know. The shock of everything.”
“Yeah.”
“Still being broken up is about you. Or...about us, I guess. It's not the poly thing, it's not Taylor. What's with Taylor is easy.”
And she's right. She says it, and I feel it. That it was hard at first and that the surrounding circumstances are so complicated have stopped me from seeing that what we have, the way the two of us feel, the way the two of us talk, is maybe the easiest relationship I've ever had. Definitely easier than Theo, who I still want to impress, still want to charm. More than Aanya, who isn't pushing me away nearly as hard as I've been pulling. More than my mother, who never thought—and neither did I—that she'd have to deal with a version of me that wasn't a tiny version of herself.
God, I really thought I was going to keep being just like her.
I thought I knew how everything was going to go.
“What we have isn't easy,” she says. “And I thought that it was, and that we could keep floating along forever, being happy and stupid and...I don't know, frivolous.”
“So what's the problem?”
“That...I don't know. That I think that I'm growing up faster than you. That I used to think I knew what I wanted with going to Cambridge and getting married and now I don't know if I want any of that, let alone what I can even have. And now I don't know where I'm going to be next year, or where you're going to be, and who else we're going to meet or who we're going to grow into. And what if it ends up being even harder than it is now?”
“Then it will be harder than it is now,” he says. “So we work.”
“But what if we decide we don't want to work?”
“When have you ever not wanted to work.”
She laughs a little. “You don't.”
“It's different with you.”
“But what if it stops being different with me,” she says.
“So basically we're staying broken up because someday we might break up again?”
“I just don't know what the point is of being with someone when I'm this...transitional. When I don't have anything planned. How am I supposed to know if I'll even be in love with you next week? God, this is the kind of shit people are supposed to say when they're talking about breaking up, not getting back together.”
“Josey,” he says. “You can say any kind of shit to me at any time. You know that.”
“I do know that,” she says, somehow even softer.
“And that won't change,” he says. “So later if it turns out I annoy the shit out of you and I want to break up, you'll tell me, or if you change into someone I'm not in love with, I'll tell you. You can't just not have plans for the future and at the same time be planning for us to turn into people who forget how to talk to each other.”
“I'm just scared,” she says.
I hear him roll over. “Tell me,” he says.
They talk and talk about everything they've missed the past few months, and I lie awake filled with excitement and fear and anticipation, trying not to vibrate like a live wire.
The next morning, we're all three under-slept and messy, and Theo says to me, “So do we have a game plan for today? How we're going to brave the masses?”
“Yeah,” I say, because I
