All We Could Have Been Read online

  I look at my phone. My mom has texted four times already.

  “How was it?” she asks when I call home.

  “It was fine.”

  “What have I told you? I don’t like when you say something’s ‘fine.’ It’s important for you to express yourself,” she reminds me. This is the teen version of being told as a toddler to “use your words.”

  “It was scrumdiddlyumptious,” I say, turning on my TV. I need the low buzz of the Game Show Network to keep me company. It’s way too quiet here. There aren’t even birds. Just falling acorns from the one tree near my window, sporadic Beethoven, and all the things I think.

  “You’re being difficult,” my mom replies. “Heath told you that you have to differentiate when it’s appropriate to keep up walls and when you’re just pushing away the people who care.”

  “Heath’s a douchebag.”

  “Alexia,” she says, sighing. “What did you wear today?”

  “Clothes.”

  “What colors?”

  I don’t feel like going through this. I know she’ll take everything I say to her colleagues at the university’s psych department, and they’ll brainstorm new strategies to engage me. They’ll probably even make a spreadsheet. Or a packet. Packets are the worst.

  “Green, Mom.”

  There’s a rustle as she covers the phone and mumbles behind her hand. She’s probably telling my dad I’m at it again. All summer she tried to weed through my clothes to make it harder for me to obsess over my color patterns. She meant well. She thought she was helping, because her friends told her I’d only get over it if she made me face things. But she’d throw things out and I’d go to Goodwill, stashing clothes in random places around the house. At one point I mailed a box of clothes to Aunt Susie. I figured if she has to deal with me for a year, she might as well be prepared.

  “How’s Susie?” my mom asks when she returns. I can picture my dad, stoic at the kitchen table, warning her not to draw attention to it. To let it go. That’s become his mantra. Just pretend we’re all okay. If we lived in the Middle Ages, that could be on my family’s crest.

  “She’s fine.”

  “Alexia,” she warns.

  I flip over and look out the window. I can see Marcus heading down the street toward his apartment, the Spider-Man pop melting down his hands. I should’ve gotten ice cream with him.

  “I don’t know. She seems exhausted.”

  More hand covering and rumbling. “Tell her I’ll call her later,” my mom says. Aunt Susie will probably be getting a lecture about maintaining balance in my life and remaining a “calm and peaceful presence.” That’s Heath’s thing, too.

  “It’s fine, Mom. Really. Before you start in on me or ask for something more than ‘fine,’ I promise, it’s fine. I’m fine. Aunt Susie’s fine. This year will be fine. I swear.”

  “You know we worry about you. We may have agreed to this arrangement, but your part is to keep us involved and informed. We’ve gone over this.”

  My parents blame themselves. They probably lie awake at night trying to figure out why they’re such bad parents and how everything went wrong. It’s not their fault, of course. Not that it changes anything.

  I miss what we were, but we aren’t that anymore, and it’s better to get away from the memories of all we could have been.

  “I love you,” I tell my mom, which causes more hand covering. She’s likely telling my dad I’m getting worse, because what high school senior says “I love you” to her mother without provocation? “Stop whispering. I’m not finished.”

  “I wasn’t whispering,” she lies. “It must be the connection. I’ll have your dad go to the store tomorrow. Maybe it’s time for a new phone.”

  “Don’t try to placate me with fancy electronics. I mean it. I love you. And Dad. Tell him I love him, okay? Tell him I don’t need a new phone. Tell him everything is okay. And do me a favor. Try to believe it.”

  “Alexia—”

  “Mom, you need to chill. It’s going to be fine. I’ll be fine. It’s a hundred and sixty-two days. That’s it. A hundred and sixty-two days and it’s over and I can come home and we can try to figure it all out for real this time, okay?”

  One hundred and sixty-two, I repeat in my head. Actually, one hundred and sixty-one and a few hours.

  “It’s just…”

  My mom doesn’t want to say it. She doesn’t want to remind me that my record is 134 days. She doesn’t want to talk about how bad it’s gotten in the past. How she worries that the next time will push me over the edge. I don’t want to think about those things, either. I know as well as she does how close I am to being deemed forever unfixable.

  Still, it’s only twenty-eight days—a February—more. I’ve got to be strong enough to survive a February. Right?

  “I’ve got this, Mom. I promise.”

  I know I’m lying to her. Lying to myself. The trouble is … it’s really easy to believe yourself if you try hard enough.

  Chapter Four

  Tuesdays are blue, which means my color-coding is less obvious to everyone, because jeans are blue. I like Tuesdays; they’re when I feel most like a real person.

  It turns out I have third lunch with Ryan, which makes this Tuesday even better. He invites me to sit with his friends, and one of the hardest parts of each year passes just like that. Only 161 days to go.

  “I am so pissed at Hawthorne,” a girl says as soon as she sits down at the lunch table. Dark hair, somewhat tall and thin, but still mostly average. Yet there’s something about her that draws my attention. Something about how sure she is of herself.

  Two girls follow right behind her, flanking her across the table from where Ryan and I are sitting, and they wait for her to speak. The first girl drops her tray and stabs a straw into her orange-juice carton.

  “Seriously? Fucking Romeo and Juliet? How ridiculously cliché can we get?” she asks.

  “Shakespeare’s good for your portfolio,” Ryan says.

  She rolls her eyes. “I have plenty of Shakespeare in my portfolio. What do you even think I do all summer? God.”

  “Rory, Lexi,” Ryan says, flicking a hand between me and the angry girl. “Lexi’s new.”

  “Hi,” Rory says. She drinks her whole carton of orange juice and crushes it. “Ryan, seriously. This sucks so bad.”

  One of the other girls opens a bag of chips, but she pauses, waiting to see what Rory does. The greasy spud hovers in front of her open mouth. It’s not exactly fear. I can’t explain it, but it’s the kind of suspended animation that occurs when you can’t decide if your friend’s freak-out warrants putting your own basic needs, like hunger, on hold.

  “It’s not always like this,” the other girl—the one sitting on Rory’s right—tells me. She’s prettier than Rory, but for some reason she fades beside her. “Drama’s just a big deal.”

  “Oh yeah. Got it,” I say, pretending to understand.

  “Sorry,” Rory mutters as she spears a french fry on her plastic fork. Chip Girl waits, and as soon as Rory puts the fry in her mouth, Chip Girl breathes a sigh of relief. Her stomach growls as if to confirm that hunger is, in fact, a bigger situation at the moment. The chip makes its final parabolic arc down her gullet.

  “Look at it this way: You’re probably guaranteed Juliet,” Ryan says.

  Rory shakes her head. “It’s not that, and you know it. She’s always going on and on about how ‘theater makes a difference.’” I imagine that Rory’s mocking lilt is nothing like how this Hawthorne person actually sounds, but everyone in our vicinity seems to be on board with it. “This was an opportunity. You know she’s just capitulating.”

  “You need to lay off the SAT vocab,” Chip Girl says.

  Rory glares at her but doesn’t respond. Instead, she turns back to Ryan, addressing me as well by accident. “All summer I was emailing her and she was totally into The Laramie Project or The Vagina Monologues. Something edgy. Something with a purpose. She swore she’d choose something that would matter. And we’re doing fucking Romeo and Juliet?”

  “I don’t know,” I offer, which I probably shouldn’t. It’s not my place, and I don’t know the context. My head voice booms its countdown again, but I shush it and barrel on with my opinion, reason be damned. “It could work. I mean, prejudice, hate, judgment, assumptions. West Side Story tackles all the same key themes—”

  Rory cuts me off. “West Side Story?”

  “Yeah, I mean…” But the glare from the three girls across from me tells me to just keep my mouth shut.

  “We don’t do musicals,” Ryan explains. “It’s a whole different kind of theater.”

  “Sorry,” I mumble, and go back to my lunch. The peas are fluorescent. I wonder if they’re irradiated. That could be good.

  Everyone complains some more about Hawthorne, who I deduce is the teacher-director of the drama club, but I stop listening. Lunch is only twenty-seven minutes. Twenty-seven minutes of 161 days and it’s all over. I can survive this. They’re so wrapped up in the play that they don’t care about me or what I’m carrying. They won’t even notice me as long as I don’t talk about musicals.

  “Hey, I’ll walk you to class,” Ryan says when the first bell rings to wrap up lunch.

  “Lexi,” Rory says as I stand. “I’m sorry we were awful. It was just a lot to take in. Maybe it sounds silly, but this play … all our plays … they’re kind of it for me. This is what I’ve got.”

  I nod, thinking of all the things that are worse than what play your school performs during the fall of your junior year.

  “Well, it’s good to care about things.”

  “What’s your thing?” Ryan asks after we drop off our trays and head into the hall. I don’t know if his class is near mine or if he’s ju
st being nice.

  He reminds me of how, when I was a kid, I imagined boys would be when I was older. He’s quiet without being too serious. Sweet without it coming across like he expects something in return. Probably the kind of guy the real me thought would be a boyfriend, when I still believed in things like love. He also reminds me a little of my brother—or at least the way I used to picture how Scott would be.

  “What?” I ask.

  “You said it’s good to care about things. What’s your thing?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  It used to be trips to the comic-book store, and sitting around talking about books with my family, and summer bike rides with Scott. But all those things belong to another version of me. Right now the only thing I care about is not answering these questions.

  In eighth grade, when I lived with my cousin Alicia in her apartment in New Jersey, I tried to make painting my thing. I wasn’t any good at it, but I had a lot to work through, and Heath had told my parents that Alicia, with her urban garden and handmade hemp clothes and therapeutic painting, would be good for me. She was, too. It wasn’t her fault there’s such a thing as the internet.

  “You must have a thing,” Ryan insists.

  “What’s yours?” I ask, turning the question back on him.

  “I can’t tell you. You’ll laugh.”

  We stop at my locker and I grab my books. “I won’t laugh.”

  He looks down the hall at the flowing tide of people.

  No one notices anyone else. Everyone lives in their own little existence and believe their own version of life. We may flicker in and out of each other’s experiences from time to time, but mostly the world only exists as we see it. I often wonder, since everyone’s generally so oblivious, why people always get so caught up in my story when they find out. Why can’t I be just another nameless face in the crowd?

  “I make lawn ornaments,” Ryan says.

  Despite my promise, I sort of laugh. Not a full laugh, but the beginning of one. “What?”

  “You said you wouldn’t laugh,” he reminds me.

  I close my locker and turn around. We’re quickly swept back into the mass of students. “Sorry. Just taken aback. A bit … random?”

  “I know. But see … my parents are really into gardening. And I’m not. I’m not only not into it, I downright suck at it. Like, literally kill any plant I touch. So they always tried to get me into this gardening thing they liked when I was a kid. And, yes, I know it’s ridiculous that this was what my weekends were. But, I don’t know, it was kind of nice having a family thing, you know? Even if I was bad at it.”

  I used to like family things, too. Even the ones no one else would think were meaningful or important. The way my dad refused to grill corn on the cob because he thought it tasted better boiled, so we’d always have to wait for him to bring out a pot of corn floating in steaming water, while the burgers burned. The way my mom made a big deal about school picture day and made scrapbooks of all our milestones. If you visited my parents now, it would look like their children disappeared five years ago. They kept nothing of either of us.

  “You still here?” Ryan asks as we get to my classroom. I nod, and we duck into the little alcove between the rooms and the blocks of lockers. There are several of these throughout the school, usually where couples go far beyond the rules of appropriate PDA.

  “Yeah. Sorry. Lawn ornaments.”

  “So, well, I started making these gnomes and frogs and silly decorations for my parents’ garden, and eventually it became a thing. My mom is really into them. My dad kind of likes them, too, although he also says they’re girlie. I think he wishes I played sports or something instead.” He pauses. “Not that he’s … Well, he is, kind of, but he’s more worried about me than him, you know? Like, he doesn’t really care. I mean, the dude gardens for fun. But I got beat up a lot until … well, kind of recently. So he thinks if I acted more … not like I do … it would fix that somehow. He means well. He’s just old.”

  I nod, and I wonder how Ryan got to be this open. This trusting. I’ve said what feels like ten complete sentences to him since we met, yet he talks to me like he can count on me somehow. If he only knew … But I don’t tell him, because I really like how he makes me feel. He makes me feel whole. Worthwhile. Valid.

  “Anyway,” he continues, “my mom got really into it, and she called all these places, and on Saturdays I go to local craft fairs and sell them. I’ve been doing it since I was a freshman, but only my parents and, like, five of my friends know. We make sure we don’t go anywhere too local, of course. Rory and Eric and them are cool, but, you know, it’s not exactly school newspaper–worthy. And, I don’t know … I guess I just don’t want to have to explain things to people. I just want them to leave me alone as much as possible.”

  The second bell rings, ending Ryan’s story, and he runs off, waving, trying to make it to his class on time. I settle into my physics class, where students finish the conversations they’ve been having since lunch and I hate myself as soon as it begins to grow quiet.

  I have one responsibility. All I need to do is blend in. Act normal, don’t draw attention, and survive 161 days at Westbrook High. What I don’t need to do is become friendly with nice boys who make lawn ornaments, or encourage them to tell me their secrets.

  What I don’t need to do is believe that it’s ever going to stop hurting.

  Chapter Five

  I make a point of staying quiet the next few days. Ryan doesn’t seem to notice that I limit all my responses to one or two words or a head movement in the affirmative or negative when possible.

  Lunch has become part of my routine. Rory—full name Rory Winters—dominates most conversations, which is actually ideal. On my way to lunch today, I stop in the bathroom first, and while I’m peeing I hear my name.

  “No. Lexi Lawlor,” someone says. I lean forward and peer through the door to see who it is. It’s Chloe Parker, previously of Chip Girl fame, and she’s with Rory. Lauren Baruch, their other friend, isn’t with them. She’s probably already at lunch with Ryan.

  “Don’t start, Chloe,” Rory says.

  “Seriously, though. Yellow? What’s her deal, anyway?”

  Wednesday is black, Thursday is brown, and Friday is yellow. Saturday is pink and Sunday is gray, but Fridays and Saturdays are the hardest. People notice most on those days.

  I wish I knew how to stop it, but it’s the only thing I know. It’s the only control I have, and I have to tell myself it’s okay. I try not to feel ashamed or hurt that people are already talking about it.

  In Chloe’s voice, though, I hear my mom and Heath and everyone else who’s had something to say about it. When you stand out or set yourself apart, people can’t ignore you, and that’s when they pay attention. If you want to stay off their radar, you have to make an effort to blend in and follow the rules, Alexia. And I want to, but when I stand in my bedroom and try to mix the colors, I can’t breathe. The last time I tried it, I got to the front lawn before lying down on the grass and nearly chewing a hole in my forearm.

  Heath’s tried to help me get over it. He says it’s “attention-seeking behavior,” which is sort of the exact opposite of my goal, but his theory is that a part of me wants to be noticed. He thinks there’s a part of me looking for someone to see past the other things, and I’m doing everything I can to draw attention away from it by making the clothes “the focal point.” I don’t know if he’s right. I don’t know what my brain is doing. I just know the idea of wearing something else makes me feel sick, and even though it means everyone stares at me, I can’t seem to stop.

  “She’s fine,” Rory tells Chloe. “You’re just jealous because Ryan seems really into her.”

  “Ryan doesn’t even know her,” Chloe argues.

  “And neither do you.”

  Rory takes out her purse and starts fixing her makeup. I don’t think there’s much difference between my need for my clothes to match and her need to make sure her eyeliner is perfect between every class. We all have our demons.

  “You just feel bad for her because she lives at Castle Estates,” Chloe snaps. “You like befriending the poor girl. You think it makes you look good.”