Page 63 of Past Present Future

As it turns out, maybe we can’t talk about everything.

When he smiles, I can tell it’s forced. “Are you hungry? I might be hungry. Let’s go get something to eat.”

* * *

The last day of the weekends we spend together is always the worst, a terrible mental countdown reminding me how many hours we have left. Five. Four. Three. Forty-five minutes. Fifteen. As amazing as it is when we’re together, there’s such a fierce ache in my chest the moment he leaves.

We’re some of the lucky ones, really. We’re in the same time zone. We’re not all the way across the country, one of us in a small college town only accessible with a layover in between.

It shouldn’t be this hard.

Just three and a half more years of painful goodbyes. Three and a half more years of trying to quash that fierce ache.

Three and a half more years of watching him walk away, wishing I’d said something different.

18

NEIL

“I’M STEVE,” ZOE’S new boyfriend says when we meet him at a sushi restaurant uptown in mid-February. “And I am not a fuckboy.”

“Why does he sound like he’s introducing himself to a support group?” Adhira wants to know, hooking her thumb toward him.

“Because I want you guys to know that I’m making good relationship decisions now,” Zoe says, and it seems to be true, because Steve is kind and attentive and slightly anxious, often double-checking his jokes with a look at Zoe, as though worried she may not find him funny.

We’ve become something of a group, Skyler and Adhira and Zoe and maybe now Steve, too. And yet ever since coming back from Boston last week, I haven’t felt like myself. My body grows weary with an unfamiliar kind of exhaustion I don’t entirely understand. I get in bed early most nights, unless I have plans with friends, and when I do, I force the smiles, worried that once people glance away and my features droop, they’ll immediately know something’s wrong. That I’ve been faking my excitement.

Boston was a fairy tale, this interlude of not quite real life. I’d felt so good with Rowan—until real life sneaked back in, sank its claws in me.

I should have told her. I should have told her about the letter, and about how I felt during family weekend, and the way I lied about my mom because I was too much of a coward to take off that mask it seems I wear for just as many people over here as I did at home.

And yet I can’t let my burdens become hers, too. Especially with the distance between us, it would only create more anxiety for her when she’s already stressed about her writing.

It’s better this way—for both of us.

When the bill arrives, that heavy feeling drags me even deeper.

Two hundred dollars.

Two hundred dollars for five people, and no one is batting an eye.

I have to work to keep the shock off my face because I have never been to a restaurant with a bill this large. I only ordered miso soup, the cheapest thing on the menu. I’d been surprised when the others ordered not just one but multiple rolls. “They’re small,” Adhira had explained.

“We can just split it five ways?” Zoe suggests, already reaching for her credit card.

“No, I got those dragon rolls—those were expensive.” Skyler grabs the check. “I’ll get it and everyone can Venmo me?”

We all take out our phones, and I send Skyler a silent thank-you.

I’ve always been so aware of money that I’ve wondered whether people who are more comfortable think about it as frequently. But NYU is the first place where that awareness turns into something physiological, capable of nesting in all my body’s hollow places.

Perhaps that is the thing about money—the world never runs out of ways to remind you how little of it you have.

* * *

My life is lived in fragments, pieces of my heart in New York and Seattle and Boston. I am constantly wishing Rowan could hang out with us, and not just to prevent me from feeling like a fifth wheel, although nothing has officially happened with Skyler and Adhira yet. He tells me he’s working up to it, trying to find the right words. And I can’t fault him for that—it took me long enough to find mine.

Adhira and I wind up studying together a few times since we’re in the same class this semester, though she spends a good portion of it asking questions about Skyler that make me certain she has feelings for him, too.

---