Please don’t reject me. “Since when do you care about the rules?”
“I don’t want you to get in trouble.”
“I don’t care,” I say.
“I do.”
My heart twists harder, heavier. “Will you at least be around for breakfast? When does your train leave?”
“I’m not sure,” he says.
I close my eyes. How could he not know the answer to that question? What kind of excuse is that?
“I want you to have this,” he says.
I open my eyes again. He’s struggling to remove a manuscript from his bag, and now I can see that it’s the reason why it’d been so bulky. The papers take up the entire thing.
My heart breaks. This is why he wanted to meet me tonight.
Against my better judgment, I hold down the bottom of his bag so that he can pull it out. He clutches the manuscript against his chest before presenting it to me with shaking hands. I don’t know if they shake from nervousness or from the weather.
I take it. There’s a new title. Spaces.
“You were right,” he says. “About…a lot of stuff. I’ve been working really hard on it, and I’d love your opinion. On the changes.”
Please don’t make me read this again. “Um, okay.”
He turns hopeful. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. Sure.” The weight of his work grows heavier in my arms. “Uh, when would you like this back?”
“Oh, no. That’s yours. To keep.”
Silence.
“Okay,” I finally say.
He tucks his hands back inside his coat. “Will you call me as soon as you’re done?”
I’m startled. “You want me to read it now?”
“Yeah. I mean, no. You don’t have to. But I’m leaving tomorrow—”
“No, it’s okay. I can read it now.”
“Yeah?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
“All right. So. You have my number.”
This now ranks as the most awkward conversation that we’ve ever had. It’s way worse than anything before we dated.
I nod. “Yep.”
Josh leans in for a hug. He hesitates, just as I’m leaning in. So he leans in again. The manuscript sits cold and heavy between our bodies. And as he awkwardly pats me on the back, I realize that this is the last time that we will ever touch.
Chapter thirty-two
I set the manuscript down on my bed. I’m exhausted.
I remove my wet shoes, my coat, my leggings.
I wash my face.
I brush my teeth.
The manuscript’s paper eyes bore into the back of my head. I stare at it in the mirror’s reflection above my sink. It seems both tragically dead and frighteningly alive. And I have no choice but to climb into bed with it. I fiddle with a stubborn wave of hair. I poke at the pores on my nose. I take a long time turning on my lamp.
I slip into bed. I’m listening for the snow, which is coming down harder, but I can’t hear it. I can only see it streaming through the street light outside.
I pull the manuscript into my lap. I read.
It has a new beginning. It no longer starts with his first day as a wide-eyed, slack-jawed freshman. It starts with an older, wiser, and more embittered Josh. It’s the summer before his senior year. He’s sitting alone, drawing in a café.
And then…I’m there.
I appear like a dream, and Josh is whisked into a surreal, blissful night that makes him forget his troubles. It makes him feel hope for the first time in years. There’s the page that I’ve seen before of him racing home to draw me, but then there’s a new full-page illustration of me with the garden-rose halo. I glow on the page like something sacred. Josh is on his knees at the bottom of the illustration, looking up at me, weeping, his hands clasped. The word Salvation pours from his lips.
My own hands are trembling so hard that I can barely get to the next page.
FRESHMAN, it says. And the story I’m familiar with begins. Most of this section is the same. It’s funny, it’s sad, it’s sweet. It’s innocent. But there are some differences. He’s added subtle brushstrokes to draw attention towards areas of the story that I know will have greater meaning later on. Things that he couldn’t have known would be so important when he drew them years ago.
And then there’s me. Again. He’s chronologically added the panels of the first time we spoke, when he saw me reading the Sfar book in the cafeteria. He’s even added a tiny heart above his head while he speaks. And then a broken one when he thinks that I don’t like him.
I touch the broken heart with the tip of my finger.
The story turns familiar again, but this time the panels with Rashmi are less painful. The sadness I feel comes from remembering how much they hurt me the first time. He’s trimmed down her scenes and the excessive one-page panels. She’s still a large part of the story, as she should be, but the focus remains squarely on him. Also as it should be.
Last summer. Kismet. A callback panel signals a return to the beginning of the story, and then it cuts back to him discovering me with Kurt the following night.
New pages appear. Josh with his parents. There’s an increasing distance between them – now self-created, out of spite – as he simultaneously yearns to be closer. He wants them to fight for his attention. He returns to school for his senior year. When I read this in November, these pages were rough sketches. Now they’ve been lovingly inked in. It gives everything a new sense of permanence.
And then I’m reading about his crush on me, and I’m reading about him longing for me at Oktoberfest, and I’m reading about our first date. I’m reading about him falling in love with me. I’m reading about the Treehouse and the college applications and his birthday, and we’re going to Spain, and we’re making love. He draws us beautifully. The emotions on the page are so much bigger than anything he’s drawn before.
And then it’s a two-page spread: a single panel being ripped in half. I’m on one side, and he’s on the other. Our hands grasp at the space between. Almost touching.
My cheeks are wet. I’m not sure how long I’ve been crying.
The pages turn angry and wild, swirled around the election and parents, who are always present yet always absent. He grieves for our loss. He blames himself. He’s depressed, and he doesn’t know how to tell me that we won’t be seeing each other for Thanksgiving. I want to tell Josh-on-the-page that it’s okay, but I can’t. It won’t be okay.