“And what did he say?” Mark asks.
“He said that I was missing the point. Finding each other was not the point. What really mattered, according to Lars, was that she knew.”
I lean forward. “Knew what?”
“How much he loved her. How he still thought of her. He had this fantasy that she’d be going about her life somewhere in Berlin or Madrid or Oslo. She’d be walking her kids home from school, or buying bread, or heading home from the office and she would see that line scrawled across a brick wall, or a wood fence, or a billboard over a train track. A love letter. She would think of him. She’d remember her younger self. It might change her life. Or it might not.”
We’re quiet. Our soup arrives. Steam rises and we take our first cautious sips.
“The moral,” she says, “in case you haven’t come to it yourself, is that sometimes it’s enough just to put something out into the world.”
“So I’m supposed to send this text.”
She nods.
“You must send that text.”
He takes another sip, sets the bowl back down, and stares into it, brow furrowed.
“But Taylor,” he says. “There’s no way Ryan will ever choose me over Taylor.”
“You can imagine what might happen after you press send,” Violet says. “But you don’t get to control it. And it could surprise you.”
He looks at me, waiting.
“As your SAT tutor and your friend, I feel that I have an investment in your future,” I say. “And I think you have to gamble in order to win.”
9
MARK
It feels great for about three seconds.
Katie and Violet are excited that I’ve done it, I can tell. And that makes me happy, to have pleased them.
Then the bottom falls out.
What.
Have.
I.
Done?
If Apple really wants us to become addicted to their products, if they really want them to be the zenith of user-friendliness, why in Job’s name isn’t there an unsend button? How hard would it be to enable us to take it all back, to erase the mistake before it’s seen?
What.
Was.
I.
Thinking?
What kind of spell did Violet cast that made me write what I just sent?
I will fight for you.
From what strange place did that rise up? How could I think, for even a moment, that this was something Ryan would want to receive?
What a Foolish Frederick I am.
Violet’s still proud of me—she’s completely unattuned to my rising panic. But Katie can tell something’s wrong.
“What is it?” she asks. “What did you say?”
I pass her my phone. She takes one look at the message and says, “Goodness.” Then she passes the phone to Violet, who reads the message and returns it to me.
“Is it true?” Violet asks.
“Is what true?”
“Would you really fight for him?”
I nod. But the nod isn’t enough, so I add, “I would fight for him.” And that’s still not enough, so I go on. “In fact, I would tear through rubble with my bare hands to get to him. I would lift cars. I would wrestle down anyone who said we shouldn’t be together. Because if you want to know the truth—if you really want to know the truth—none of that could be nearly as hard as being in love with him and not able to tell anyone about it. Including him. I have this thing inside me, and it’s angry and it’s scared and it’s uncertain and most of all it’s so completely in love with him, and it would do anything to keep him, even if it means things staying the way they are now.”
I cannot believe I am telling them this. Why am I telling them this?
Before I can stop myself, I push further.
“I can’t let him fall in love with someone else. I can’t let it happen. Not like that. I am so mad at him and I am so in love with him, and it hurts to be realizing it like this. Would I fight for him? I have been fighting for him for years. And I’m losing. No matter what I do, I’m losing. But I have to fight anyway.”
I want to laugh, because right now, sitting across from me with such matching concern, Katie and Violet look like a perfect couple. Exactly what I don’t have. Which makes me do the opposite of laugh.
“You’ve never told him,” Violet says. It’s not a question. It’s obvious.
“I tell him all the time—I just make sure it’s never when he’s listening. I say it when he’s in the other room, or when he’s asleep, or when the music’s really loud. Sometimes he asks me what I just said. And I tell him never mind. Or I make up something else, something that isn’t ‘I love you.’”
I know talking about a problem is supposed to make you feel better about it, but talking about this only manages to make it feel more present. All my words, all this talk, is balanced out by the silence of my phone.
No reply.
No reply.
No reply.
Unsend.
“You can’t keep it inside,” Violet offers.
“Or maybe I can’t keep it at all,” I tell her. “Maybe it was never really mine in the first place.”
You can be naked with someone and remain unknowable. You can be someone’s secret without ever really knowing what the full secret is. You can know he’s even more scared than you are, but that doesn’t make you any less scared yourself.
We would draw lines, and then we would cross them. Underwear was going to stay on. We were going to mess around but not have sex. We were only going to have sex once, to see what it was like. We were not going to make it a big deal. We were not going to let it affect our friendship. We were not going to tell a soul.